Warrior Nun: How Avatrice Was Saved

#WarriorNunSaved

[Warning: This essay contains spoilers for Warrior Nun seasons 1 and 2. I also recommend reading my essay about Ava and Beatrice “Warrior Nun: How to Tell a Love Story” before reading this one. Thank you!]

Avatrice almost didn’t happen.

The romantic pairing of Ava and Beatrice is one of the best parts about Warrior Nun. As someone who is often wary of just how well a romance on TV will be written, Ava and Beatrice’s was like a breath of fresh air. Their relationship delivered strong, positive representation to the small screen, prioritizing the way their characters and story arcs bounced off one another to create the perfect love story. I am of the belief that Ava and Beatrice’s love story is one of the best put to television, which I find often struggles to tell love stories as engaging as theirs. While Ava and Beatrice are a testament to how queer love stories should be written, I would go further and say theirs is how all love stories should be written. It should be about character, and theirs was in all the best ways.

But it almost didn’t happen.

While Alba Baptista’s Ava and Kristina Tonteri-Young’s Beatrice are one of the strongest pairings in television, their romance was almost axed by Netflix. During the Warrior Nun fandom’s first online fan convention, dubbed the OCS Conclave, many creators for the series and within the fandom held panels about the series and efforts to save it. I was also there as a guest speaker and talked about my many essays here on Frayed Branches and my articles for Screen Rant about Warrior Nun (and I am incredibly grateful to have gotten the opportunity to speak there!). One guest was David Hayter. Best known for voicing Solid Snake in the Metal Gear video game franchise, Hayter is also a writer for Warrior Nun. He was interviewed during the OCS Conclave, where he let slip that the pairing of Ava and Beatrice, commonly referred to by the fandom as “Avatrice,” almost didn’t happen.

But it wasn’t because Avatrice wasn’t the plan. In fact, it’s obvious as early as Season 1 that Ava and Beatrice were going to find some kind of romantic connection in the future. Key scenes that illustrate this include Beatrice stroking Ava’s hair and face after she was able to phase through a 20-foot wall at ArqTech, and during their talk together just before they prepare Ava to enter Adriel’s tomb. Avatrice was what everyone on the team was aiming for when crafting Ava and Beatrice’s initial friendship. But it wasn’t something Netflix was aiming for. According to Hayter, Netflix didn’t want there to be anything romantic whatsoever in Warrior Nun Season 2. While it’s unclear if this only applied to Ava and Beatrice, or if it stretched to every possible romance the series could include is unclear. But what was clear was that Netflix’s plans didn’t mesh with the creative vision for the show that series creator Simon Barry, Hayter, and the rest of the Warrior Nun crew were fighting for.

So, in order to save Avatrice and preserve the love story they wanted to tell, the Warrior Nun team created fake scripts that omitted or altered romantic scenes between Ava and Beatrice. They did this without notifying Netflix, presenting Ava and Beatrice’s relationship as nothing more than a friendship while secretly setting them up for a romance. But Warrior Nun Season 2 had to be discrete. Which is probably why, despite the strength of their relationship building over the course of the season, it isn’t until the season finale that Ava finally kisses Beatrice, later telling her she loves her. The only way to keep something so important a secret would be to keep the rabbit in the hat until the very last second. Which is what Warrior Nun decided to do.

It’s unknown if Ava and Beatrice’s relationship would have progressed faster without Netflix interfering. Perhaps there would have been more scenes directly addressing their feelings for one another beyond the subtlety throughout Season 2 and the overt main events in the season finale. However, while it would have been interesting to see more explicitly romantic scenes involving Ava and Beatrice, their expertly-crafted relationship building up despite Netflix’s limitations underscores the talent and drive of the creatives behind Warrior Nun. Ava and Beatrice’s relationship is an important element of the series, both for Warrior Nun’s story and the show’s fans. It was key not to have it suffer due to Netflix not wanting the relationship to move forward. By embracing it anyway, it highlighted the importance of Ava and Beatrice’s relationship from a creative perspective, and how vital it was for Warrior Nun to have Avatrice. How vital it for the team behind Warrior Nun to save Avatrice.

So vital, in fact, that fans of the show saved them too.

As I was in the middle of writing this rather short essay, Warrior Nun creator Simon Barry announced that, thanks to the marvelous worldwide fan efforts to save the series, Warrior Nun would be returning. To quote Barry, “#WarriorNun will return and is going to be more EPIC than you could imagine.” The clapboard emoji leads me to believe this means Warrior Nun will be returning as either Season 3 or a follow-up film to the TV show. It’s unclear as of writing where the continuation of the series will wind up (which doesn’t seem to be Netflix based on their aversion to Avatrice). Nonetheless, fans of Warrior Nun have completed their months-long mission to save the series. It will be coming back thanks to the efforts of thousands of people across the world.

The worldwide importance of Warrior Nun will also be felt in the return of Ava and Beatrice. Avatrice is an important pairing not just because of Ava and Beatrice’s positive representation for queer romance on TV. Their relationship also has some of the strongest romantic writing produced in a television series. While the action is exciting, the story is engaging, and the characters are complex, the heart of Warrior Nun is the romance between Ava and Beatrice. Their romance may not be the central storyline of the series, which deals mostly with alternate realities and the intersection between religion and science. However, character is always just as important as plot in a good story. And, in the case of Warrior Nun, Ava and Beatrice compliment one another’s like no other romantic couple on TV could.

Avatrice has been saved a second time. And I can’t wait to see how their relationship develops in the next installment of this incredible story.

***

It’s 10:26 PM on Wednesday, June 28th as I type this. I’ve been awake since 6:30 this morning, when I jumped out of bed and started writing about how Warrior Nun has been saved. Today has felt like a lifetime in the best possible way.

I started writing about Warrior Nun back in January of this year. Blown away by the incredibly positive responses on Twitter to my first article about the show for Screen Rant, I decided to sit down and watch the series. I’m always thinking of the little details I liked or disliked about the media I consume. As a creator myself—author of four fiction books and two poetry collections, creator of an ongoing experimental YouTube series and serialized Wattpad story—it helps for me to write down what stands out to me about what I watch or read or listen to or play. I always jot down the best and worst of media, because all of it inspires me in my own work.

But Warrior Nun stood out to me in a way no other media really has. This series with a (seemingly) small, (seemingly) niche fanbase has a depth and nuance to it that I wasn’t anticipating. Every major character in the show is fascinating, carrying their own struggles, storylines, and personas that I wanted to analyze. The show has tight pacing, never wasting a single precious second of the audience’s time. Everything feels important, and falls to the wayside once its purpose is done instead of hanging around to fill up screen time. It is a series that creatives should study hard, because it’s the perfect balance of thematic depth, complex characters, intriguing plots, and fun, all rolled into one.

My introduction to Warrior Nun felt like the perfect storm. I’d recently resolved to bring back my once-dead blog, Frayed Branches, as a place to write essays analyzing the media I was always consuming for inspiration. In hopes that doing so would help me improve in my own work. It wasn’t even a month into this new format that I wrote “Warrior Nun: Dodging the Puppykicker,” my first Warrior Nun essay, analyzing the villains of Season 1 and their complexities. My first few essays, including “Puppykicker,” received overwhelming support from the Warrior Nun fandom. And the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. And the more I write, the more the show influences me.

Since January, I’ve written a total of 14 essays on Frayed Branches (including this one) and 16 articles on Screen Rant (Morning edit: 17 now) about Warrior Nun. Every time I return to this series, I can feel its multi-layered approach to characters, storylines, and themes influencing my own writing. The influence of Warrior Nun is in my upcoming third poetry collection. In the words of my fifth fiction book. In my serialized story, Vanish. But not only that. My essays have become pieces of the Warrior Nun campaign themselves. Messages shouted from the tops of mountains, demanding this series be recognized for how incredible it is! Messages that you have spread, because it’s the same message you were shouting before I did. If anything, I joined your chorus.

(I think it’s no coincidence that I revamped Frayed Branches before I even knew what Warrior Nun was and now write essays about the show almost every week in this new format. I also think it’s wild that I planned June’s last essay to be about how the show’s creators saved Avatrice over three weeks ago. And then, they’re saved again right before the essay goes up. What strings will the Hand of Fate pull next?)

With the tens of thousands of words I’ve written about Warrior Nun over the last six months, I feel so incredibly grateful for every supportive comment. Every like. Every retweet. Every view. Every Frayed Branches subscription. Everything else I’m forgetting because it’s late and I haven’t slept much since Sunday. I appreciate all the thank you’s you send me for every essay. But there would be no essays about Warrior Nun without you.

Thank you all so much for introducing me to Warrior Nun. Thank you for reading and sharing my essays. Thank you for inspiring me to analyze this series, coming back week after week to write about it. Thank you for the massive amount of comments, so many that I don’t even know how to respond. Thank you for letting me steal an hour of time at the OCS Conclave at the start of the month. Thank you for understanding why there’s one less essay than I planned this month (it’s because I got my days mixed up). And thank you, all of you, for saving Warrior Nun.

And thank you, Simon Barry, the cast, the crew, and everyone who created Warrior Nun. I would not feel the spark of creativity I do now without your hard work and dedication to this amazing TV series. And this fandom would not exist without you.

I’m glad I’ve been able to help save Warrior Nun with you all. As I tweeted out earlier today (well, yesterday for you), I’m far from done writing about this show. I have four more character essays planned, followed by a trilogy of multi-part essays analyzing three major themes present throughout Warrior Nun. And somewhere within it all, I’ll be writing a fanfiction starring Ava and Beatrice after an alternate ending to Season 1. Only time will tell how I will juggle this with another poetry collection, another fiction book, The Lunaris Fulcrum, Vanish, and my jobs. But who really needs sleep these days?

It’s 11:15 PM now. To think that, when we wake up tomorrow, this will be just as real as it is today. I’m still having trouble processing it. But when I finally have, I know it will feel so euphoric.

We saved Warrior Nun.

- Nick

***

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