Disney's Renegade Nell Is a Feast for the Queer Tomboy Imagination

This show feels like it sprang directly from my childhood heart.

Slight spoilers below for Disney+’s Renegade Nell

When my family left the movie theater at the mall in 1991, after spending 90 minutes soaking in the magic of The Little Mermaid, my parents said I was uncharacteristically quiet. My sister, who has a voice like an angel, was already singing the parts of the songs she could remember from the movie, and usually I'd be trying to harmonize with her, or telling her more words that I remembered, or talking over her with some jokes. My dad asked me what I thought about the music (great), about Ariel (so so great), about Prince Eric — and that's when my mom turned around to look in the back seat and declared loudly, for all the world to hear, that I was blushing. I, Heather Anne Hogan, a girl who, up until that point, seemed incapable of getting embarrassed, was blushing. My mom was thrilled. Absolutely beside herself with joy. She gasped. She squealed. She said that I, finally, had a crush on a boy! And I let her go on thinking it because I didn't want to talk about what I was really noodling on. 

I'd never had a crush on a boy, and I still didn't have a crush on a boy. I didn't like Prince Eric. I wanted to be Prince Eric. Short floppy hair, loose collared shirt, pants tucked into tall leather boots, the sword, the swagger, the smile. And best of all, Ariel was in love with him. I wanted to be the kind of guy Ariel would fall in love with, only I wanted to be a girl. It was something I kind of knew, in the shadows of my braingrapes, but I hadn't put the pieces together until I saw The Little Mermaid. 

It was something I couldn't talk to my mom about because her two main life terrors were that I was never going to like boys, and also that I wanted to be a boy. She was right about the first thing and wrong about the second thing. I loved being a girl, and I couldn't wait to be a woman. Being born a girl was like hitting the jackpot, like being inducted into a club that included Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Princess Diana, Bessie Coleman, Mary Anning, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Nellie Bly, Billie Jean King, Wilma Rudolph, Babe Didrickson, and the whole entire University of Georgia women's basketball team, just for being born! Women were beautiful and powerful and resilient and soft and tough and sweet and hilarious and beautiful beautiful beautiful. Nothing made me more hopeful than being a girl who was going to become a woman. I just wanted to dress like a boy and play sports like a boy and have girls fall in love with me like a boy. To have girls go on boat rides with me in enchanted lagoons maybe, while crabs and crickets sang about how we should probably just go on and kiss. 

I decided right then and there that the best way to make my dreams come true was to become a tomboy swashbuckler. 

I have to assume I was successful, at least in spirit, based solely on the number of my friends who sent me the trailer for Sally Wainwright's new eight-episode Disney+ series, Renegade Nell, with the exact same message: "This show looks like it was made for you." And boy, were they all so very correct. It was absolute feast for my childhood imagination. 

Renegade Nell is one part epic adventure about a woman who dresses like the swank British soldiers Austen heroines are always falling in love with on their trips to town. Like Prince Eric, but with a slightly overlarge coat and a feathered tricorn hat. It's part historical drama, a Disneyfied interpretation of the Jacobite uprisings that took place in England in the early 1700s. It's part fantasy: Nelly Jackson gets her supernatural powers from a fairy named Billy Blind, who's just as confused as she is about why the universe has thrown them together, and who lives by his own moral code, but is as loyal as all the godmothers of yore. It's part fairy tale, a legendary battle of Light Magic vs. Dark Magic. And it's part family comedy, as Nell learns that she's happier and stronger when she's with her sisters and the allies they make along their way. 

What Renegade Nell is not is a love story, which is wildly refreshing, especially because the series also manages to tip its pirate hat to Gentleman Jack fans with some delightful B-story gayness. Early on, Nell does a highway robbery to a fancy carriage full of rich tofts because her father's been murdered by the son of her landlord and she's been blamed, so she and her sisters are on the run. Inside the carriage with her boring family is Miss Polly Honeycombe, a young Marianne Dashwood-y Lady who's keen on adventure and desperate for a novel-worthy love story.

She's immediately smitten with our Nell, thinking she's a he, that Nell is surely short for Nelson. Later on, when she's thrown back into Nell's path, she finds out she's a she, and it doesn't bother her one bit. She continues to pine and swoon and make heart eyes at Nell, before finally giving into her lust and kissing Nell full on the mouth in the sunrise with a full orchestra cheering her on. Nell is unbothered, doesn't even flinch; she's on a mission to save Queen Anne and can’t be deterred by some smooching. She doesn’t not like it.

Also, though, if you're a person who's been ping-ponging around the queer internet for any length of time, you will not be able to help yourself in comparing Nell's nemesis, Sofia Wilmot, to any Katie McGarth character you've encountered in your own gay journey. I don't know if it's the chin or the eyes or the voice or the hair or the eyebrows or all of it or what, but even Sapphic TV Scholar and renowned Supergirl recapper

Valerie Anne

agrees with me about the McGrath-y-ness of Sofia, the Morgana Pendragon of it all, so just prepare yourself to be pulled in that general shipping direction, by your muscle memory.

If Nell looks familiar to you, but you can't quite place her, it's because she's played by Louisa Harland, who you know best as Orla McCool from Derry Girls, and she is an absolute star. She was born to play a tomboy swashbuckler. The way she walks, the way she sits, the way she talks: it's like a Georgian butch dream come true. She'll have you hooting with giggles as much as she’ll have you cheering for blood when she's fist-punching and sword-slashing and knocking speeding bullets away with her bare hands. There's a cockiness to her that even the most powerful Marvel superheroes don't possess, except maybe Tony Stark. She is so freaking cool! 

Renegade Nell is also a feast for your actual eyeballs. The costumes and sets are a lush cacophony of color. There are endless landscapes, castles, towns, and taverns that could serve as glorious backdrops for your own D&D adventures. And the action sequences had me cheering like I was at a live sporting event. 

I wish when I was 12 years old I could have seen a Little Mermaid / Renegade Nell double feature. I wish I could have heard Miss Polly Honeycombe say, “Nell Jackson’s eyes do not burn like the fires of hell, like previously reported. They are like stars casting their celestial light, to guide lost souls.” To know she wasn’t talking about some dumb boring prince — but a pants-wearing, sword-wielding, highwaywoman.