Fictional Women Around the World: Naru

When the character Naru debuted in the 2022 film Prey, she was historic in a lot of ways. Clever, strong and smart, she (and her dog) had what it took to face down a Predator when no one else did.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and Samantha and allcome stuff. Never
told you protection of iHeartRadio and welcome to another sub
sub sub sub sub segment. Fictional women around the world's
only four subs. You think, I don't think, so, okay,

(00:29):
it's like sub We have a lot of segments. We
have a lot of segments, and this is one and
it's one of my favorite ones, to be honest, uh,
And today we are talking about one of my favorites.
But as I warned Samantha before this, this is a
spoiler warning. We are talking about the new Predator movies

(00:55):
and I'm just going to tell you that I personally
did not anticipate what happened in the new Killer of
Killers they animated Predator movie, and it's kind of a
big deal. So if you don't want to know, then

(01:16):
I would say skip this. Also, none of these are
sponsors that we're gonna be talking about. And you can
see the episode we did on Pray the movie which
is Predator movie, because today we are talking about Nanu
from who is the main protagonist of that movie. So

(01:38):
Predator bad Lands just came out in theaters. I haven't
seen it yet, but I have been spoiled on it.
We're not gonna be talking about We're not gonna be
talking about that actually, but that's out in theaters and
Predator Killer of Killers is on streaming, And if you

(01:58):
go back and listen to our episode we did on Prey,
I was speculating about what would happen in the next ones.
I was way off. It was so far off. I oh,
I mean, I couldn't hide it. I wasn't even I
was in a different galaxy than what they did. And

(02:22):
so I really wanted to come back and talk about
this fictional character of Nadho. I love that. I love Pray.
I love that movie so much, and I watched it
every November. For some reason, it feels like a November
movie to me. It is very beautiful movie. It's also
kind of I think maybe why it feels like a
November movie is it's got the like colonization. Yeah, I

(02:44):
was gonna say, like the Native Americans and yeah yeah,
which again you can see that episode for more detail.
But they are painted. The colonizers are painted rightfully in
a bad light. I just want to put out there.
So when we're talking about Nadu Naan, who was played

(03:06):
by Amber mid Thunder, and she is a woman member
of the Kamanchi tribe in It takes place in seventeen nineteen,
and she was first introduced in Dan Tratchenberg's twenty twenty
two film Prey, which is part of the Predator franchise.
I actually loved the Predator franchise, and doing this research

(03:28):
was really fun because I hadn't thought about I hadn't
thought about some of the ways that it's so up
until this point, which Dan Trachenberg has done the last
three It was a very like macho guy finding a
pretty macho predator, and then you get into Pray and

(03:52):
that's just not what it is anymore, and you get
into bad Lands and I read I read an article
about it and the title was going woke. Didn't go
broke because it made a lot, It made a lot
of money, and they were like, but the whole plot
is that maybe the whole warrior thing isn't as much

(04:15):
as it's built up to be the for the Predator.
But anyway, anyway, So this movie Prey was historic in
a lot of ways, including the fact that it has
an option to watch it in the Comanche language, which
was kind of a first and including a cast of
largely Indigenous people. It also was the first film in

(04:38):
the franchise to center a woman protagonist. So despite being
a very capable warrior, Nadru's family doesn't want her to
be a hunter like her brother Tabe. And this is
a very important note. I say her family because most
indigenous tribes were much They didn't think lesser of women
or lock them out of any skill, as opposed to

(05:01):
a lot of our Western society. It was that her
family specifically didn't want her to do it. They didn't
want her to be a hunter. But everyone else, almost
everyone else, sees her skills, so I do think that's
worth pointing out. She is very vocal about what she wants,
which is to be a hunter, but she is consistently

(05:24):
shot down and comments multiple times that everybody underestimates her
and that's what makes her so dangerous. When asked why
she wants to hunt, she says, because you all think
I can't. She was very determined. She worked hard with
her dog on her hunting skills. If you listen to
the episode on Prey, you know that dog is from Atlanta,
is named Coco and caused a lot of chaos on set. Yeah,

(05:49):
every time I watch the movie, I'm just thinking how
they everybody filming was like cocoa please through. Yeah, I
love it. Nard She's very creative in her weaponry too,
which is something I really love. She attaches a rope
to her tomahawk. One day while out hunting, she sees

(06:11):
a cloaked ship and believes it to be a sign
of her right of passage into hunting her kutamea. After
one of their people goes missing, a search party is
sent out and Nadhu follows them, determined to be part
of the effort. Her brother convinses the group that it's
worth keeping her around because she's a healer, she has
all these other skills. They find the person they're searching

(06:34):
for and Nadho heals him. They set up traps and
they schedule watches for the night for the lion that
they believed had killed the member of their party. Meanwhile,
Nardu is not She's seeing these odd signs, strange footprints,
animals killed in odd methods, like a snake just peeled

(06:57):
in half. So she's on edge and she does end
up fighting the lion. It's a really cool scene and
at the time, witnesses an odd flash of red and
falls from the tree that she was in, losing consciousness.
When she wakes up, her mother basically tells her that
there's a not the life for you, and her brother

(07:20):
is appointed war chief. No one really believed what not
who had seen, so she set out herself with her
dog Saudie to find the creature hunting them. On the way,
she encountered dead animals and eventually sees a bear getting
killed by a semi invisible force. She flees and meets

(07:42):
up with a search party that are looking for her. However,
they do not believe her and they start to drag
her back to their home, and on the way they
are attacked by a feral predator which side note, I
learned so much terminology about the specific types of predators,

(08:03):
but this is a fairal predator who kills pretty much
everybody except for Nanu, who is able to free herself
and flee because they had actually tied her up to
take her home until she was caught in a bear
trap and the predator ignores her. He sees her and

(08:24):
ignores her, but she is caught and caged by French colonizers,
and this is when Nanu observes that the predator also didn't.
He didn't view her as a threat. That's why he left.
That's not how he hunts. As she says, her brother
is also captured and they are used as bait for
the predator. But again she's like, this is not He's

(08:45):
not into bait. He wants the thrill of the hunt. Yes,
and he sees them as not a threat, leaves them be.
Naru escapes and frees her dog, Tabe and not who fought.
They fight the predator and not who notices several pieces

(09:06):
of the predator's fighting style and also how his bone
helmet works. However, the predator does kill Tabe. Nadho catches
one of the colonizers who had imprisoned her and her
brother and uses him as bait, masking her own presence
from the predator with some of her medicinal knowledge. It

(09:28):
dropped her temperature. It was this flower that dropped her temperature.
The predator kills her bait, and in the following skirmish
she was able to steal. Yeah, she gets this bone
mass that she knows is really a part of how
he hunts. She prepared a lot of traps and engaged
him in battle, cutting off his arm and eventually killing him.

(09:49):
She carried his head back to her people and was
named the new or chief of the tribe. Here comes
your spoiler. You can hop right out if you don't

(10:10):
want to hear it. And then she was captured by
the predators and cryo freezed for centuries, presumably for gladiatorial combat.
So essentially, any person who has killed a predator they

(10:33):
have captured and froze and they want them to fight
it out. And the plot of Killer of Killers is
it's an anthology. And so you see how each of
these people killed a predator which they have a name

(10:56):
and I can't pronounce it, but predators and want them
to fight to the death. That's not fair, I know,
because they're the quote strongest of prey. So in the
like finale of that movie, all of the competitors come

(11:20):
to the realization that we have to fight together if
we're going to get out of this. So that was
the plot, which is another thing. People were like, it's
so woke. Now I'm like, well, they're working together woke,
like kill each other like what we According to them,
it's a larger conversation. I'm not going to get into
but according to them, it was like the whole point

(11:43):
of Predators. You know, you kill everybody. But anyway, n
Who is only in it as a cameo. She is
not one of the ones who participates in this gladatory
of battle, but it's shown that she's there, and so
I think it's setting up that she's going to be

(12:05):
in the next one. And the director has said he
wants to continue her story, and really she was supposed
to be in the new one, bad Lands, but he
wanted to which, by the way, bad Lands is it's
from a idea that he had from Empire Strike's Back
where Chewbaka would carry Cee three po on his back,

(12:28):
which if you have seen any images from that maybe
at all, that's kind of what it is. And he said,
I wished I could have seen a whole movie where
it was just to Boca's like that, and so that's
where the idea came from. But non who was supposed
to be in the sequel, But I think he's doing

(12:50):
a bigger thing because you know who else was in
Cryo Freeze, Arnold Swarzaiger's character. Really Listen when I say
this blew my mind. I was. I couldn't believe it.
Oh my gosh. So that's where she is right now.
I'm going to assume that she's going to have a story.

(13:13):
Her story is going to be continued in one way
or another. But yeah, that's it makes me. I'm like
sad because she she defeated this predator and then they
were like, you know what, Let's make her fight in
a gladatorial battle in the future on a different planet,

(13:35):
all right, let her be the warrior that she's supposed
to be. Yeah, exactly, damn exactly. Yeah, and she is.
I mean, it's really cool, Like watching it again last night,
which I was telling Samantha, I stayda really late last
night watching these movies. Uh, she's just she's cool. She's

(13:58):
the way she uh throws her weapon and she has
like this kick move off trees that I love. She's
just a really adaptive, observant, smart character. And even though
she's gas lit when she's saying, hey, I believe there's
something out there, she knows that there's something out there,

(14:22):
and she takes the steps to defeat the enemy and
she's a quick learner. A lot of the time, when
someone defeats predator, it's because they're smart. It's not because
of how strong they are. Necessarily is because they figure
out how the predator hunts, and then they adapt and

(14:43):
are able to get the upper hand, which is what
she did, and which is what all of them are about.
But a killer of killers. It's three stories, and every
one of them is pretty much that. How they figured
out the heat signature thing that they can't see unless

(15:04):
but unless without the heat signature. I did want to
bring this up because I didn't mention it when we
did the Prey episode. But at one point in the movie,
she whistles at night, which was a controversial moment because
whistling at night for a lot of indigenous people is
akin to summoning an evil spirit. So there was some

(15:25):
stuff written about that when that happened. But some argue
that this was on purpose and that the predator is
a demon and she that's They did work with the
Kamanchi tribe, So I don't know. I just wanted to
mention that because that was a point. I'm pretty sure

(15:46):
they must have known what that meant and put it
in there purposefully. But that's really widely known. Like just
like Appalachia folklore is based on that as well. Yeah, yeah,
I just I just remembered that. I don't think we

(16:07):
talked about that in our Prey episode, but I wanted
to put that out there also. Yes, as i've there's
been a lot of articles about Predator going woke, too woke,
and essentially that this idea of usually Maho dude fighting

(16:27):
a Maho alien, that's what the heart of it has been,
and now it's now it's changing. And not to spoil
too much of bad Lands, but I guess the main
character in that is sort of a runt. He's seen

(16:48):
as a runt in his family and kind of shamed
for that, and in the end he finds found family.
He goes against his family, finds a found family, including

(17:11):
an android, which directly connects it to Alien. So that's
really interesting. But yeah, yeah, I love this movie. I
know I said it when we did the Prey episode,
but I watched Predator at my sixteenth birthday party. I

(17:35):
don't know what was going on, but I have loved
these movies for a while, and I when I saw Pray,
I just thought, this is I'm so happy this exists,
and it's just a really beautiful imagery. Wise, it's a
really beautiful movie. And the director said purposely he wanted

(17:58):
something people have and seen before, and that's why he
wanted an indigenous woman because it had been previously to
that pretty much all men. Yeah, so I love it.
I love it too. It is a really good movie.

(18:20):
I oh, well, I did it. Your Households scared me.
It scared me. Sowhat. I did like it though. It
was fun, But I'm excited to see how her story goes.
I was shocked when I saw her cryopes. Was not

(18:43):
expecting that. Was not expecting that at all. Uh can
you imagine how disorienting that would be to wake up?
And yeah, it's a lot of a lot of things. Yeah,
it's worrying think about that. Yes, for sure, for sure.
But I'm we'll re visit once that once the story continues.

(19:04):
But in the meantime, listeners, please write in if you
have any thoughts about this or any suggestions for people
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You can find us on Blue Sky at mom Stuff podcast,
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(19:25):
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