The reason fandom talked about Nicky first and foremost isn’t just because Nicky is a white guy and because the crusades are an easier topic or less morally complex than the current war on terror; we already know who the bad guys are and it’s not the people being invaded for oil. It’s how we frame the victims of that invasion.
When we talk about Nicky’s role in the Crusades, and his morality and his redemption, it’s much, much harder ignore his motivations and craft a redemption arc for him because the consequences of his involvement is Joe. Joe who draws, and laughs, and waxes poetry, and growls happily when he sees Andy. Joe who potentially lost his home and must have felt the blunt horror of seeing his city go up in flames. Joe is the living, breathing reminder of who the horror of the Crusades happened to.
Joe was a character crafted for us to love and relate to, so the reality of how he was one of the victims of the war that Nicky fought in isn’t something fandom could collectively ignore, at least not without diminishing his character. Fandom is good at spinning gold out of straw and correcting things that the production overlooks or gets wrong, and this was a huge, glaring mistake that needed correcting because otherwise Nicky and Joe as a couple wouldn’t work. Joe falling in love with someone who committed atrocious crimes against his home and his people and never redeemed or reconciled with that horror isn’t the ship we were promised.
But when we talk about Nile and the Marines and the American war machine, the victims of American colonialism are not given the same dignity. They never have; for 20 years, American and Western audiences have been desensitised to the horrors of civilian deaths in Iraq, through the simultaneous erasure and exploitation of civilian casualties. Through dehumanising, detached reportage, the Iraqi deaths on the other side of the world have never mattered as much as the trauma of the soldiers who had to kill them. In the movie, they are similarly unnamed and mostly unspeaking backdrops to Nile’s origin story; we are deliberately told not to care about them, not to focus too much on Nile’s actions and the movie’s choices for her, not to think too deeply about the implications of the US Military industry complex and analyse why a civilian might be hostile to an American Marine.
Greg Rucka explicitly said that the movie was a chance to correct some things in the comics that he wasn’t particularly proud of - the movie gave the team a lot more open affection with eachother, it changed Andy’s male-gazey framing, it significantly changed Quynh’s backstory and the circumstances of her drowning, it got rid of Nicky’s crusader t-shirt and overall tightened the pacing. Nile’s backstory, on the other hand, remained the same - she is now a Good Soldier, she is caring, a sympathetic force of violent colonialism, who hands out candy to kids and learns the local language.
How the movie changed several things from the comics and improved upon them, but left Nile’s backstory as a Marine intact without examining it closely, is symbolic of how the American movie industry in general is fundamentally unable to reconcile with its own role in military propaganda.
And so we get an action film that, on the one hand, deliberately and openly subverts several of the toxic heteronormative, misogynist, and hypermasculine tropes inherent to the genre; openly affectionate and loving found family dynamics, morally complex and fleshed out characters, a stunningly revolutionary queer couple, non-sexualised women and amazing mentorship between female leads. All the while that, at the same time, still plays squarely into the tropes of American military complex, a narrative of the War on Terror that’s been produced and regurgitated hundreds of times by Hollywood, where the emotional centre is of the invading army, and brown bodies in an occupied land on the other side of the world are simply story fodder for the American hero.
The same writing decisions and creative process that gave us Nicky and Joe meeting during the first crusades, an inability to pinpoint Joe’s home city, and conflicting historical timeline on Andy’s age/name choices also gave us Nile as The Good Invading Soldier - it comes from a lack of research, lack of cultural context, lack of historical knowledge, lack of care of the implications of those writing choices.
One of central ideas of pivoting the conversations in decolonial theory isn’t to focus on the colonising force but to focus on the colonised subjects. We talk about Nicky because Joe, the living reminder of the Crusades, is front and centre to his own story. We only just started talking about Nile because the victims of American colonialism are still the constant backdrops in the fiction of their colonisers.
