emission.

The H$_2$/Br$\gamma$ ratio can be used to disentangle shock/collisionally excited H$_2$ from fluorescence excitation. This is because the shocks and collisional excitation affect primarily the H$_2$ gas, leaving the ratio of H$_2$/Br$\gamma$ above unity, whereas fluorescence acts on both the molecular and ionised gas leading to a ratio below unity. Using the absolute flux ratio, we find that the H$_2$/Br$\gamma$ ratio never exceeds 0.5 at an angular resolution of 1$\arcsec$ in the stapler nebula, agreeing with the findings of Yeh et al. (2015). This indicates that the excited nIR H$_2$ is primarily excited by the ultraviolet (UV) radiation from R136 acting on the surfaces of the molecular gas, with the filamentary Br$\gamma$ arising from the same source. The KN clouds therefore must lie in front of us given the morphology of the clumped H$_2$ emission, and lack of background stars. We note that it is possible that shock excited emission is prevalent on smaller scales (a few tenths of a parsec, or $\lesssim$0.5$\arcsec$ at the distance to 30 Doradus) caused by outflows from massive protostars residing within the KN molecular clouds, but our current angular resolution limitations in the nIR narrowband images ($\sim$1$\arcsec$) prevent us from examining the same 