sciatrix

...so here's a little snippet of something I was working on about six months ago, which I think I might like to revisit.

See, you have two characters here with these wildly different approaches to touch: Mantis, who is a touch empath and also a lot more fragile than Nebula, is someone I rather think has been raised to be rather careful and delicate about who she touches and when (and this will be especially true, given that she lives with Gamora who is quietly horrified by the concept of someone knowing your feelings by touching you). By contrast, you have Nebula, who was raised to be a weapon, doesn't seem to have much interaction with touching outside of combat, and has a very, very high pain tolerance coupled to a very intense desire for emotional intimacy and basically no idea how to go about getting it.

( It struck me that this might spark a bit of a conflict. )

No, look, imagine Yondu and Nebula just…. sitting there and Yondu listening and waiting for Nebula to talk. Nebula’s angry, sure, but she actually doesn’t say much unless she’s actively attacking or has been asked–she’s really different from Rocket that way. But Yondu does, in fact, know how to sit and listen; you can see him doing it to Rocket and you can see him doing it with Groot, all through that movie.

Imagine Yondu and Nebula, sitting and tinkering on cybernetics in a workship in comfortable silence until Nebula opens her mouth and talks, and Yondu just sits and listens, nods occasionally. Maybe asks a question now and again or a comment, but mostly just…. listens to her. Gives her his attention, without her having to kill anyone for it or fight for it. I think that would be huge for Nebula, who is so used to having to fight and fight hard for her very right to exist, let alone get any kind of positive attention from anyone at all.

(I actually headcanon that Nebula initially intended to warn Gamora about what had happened and then got to thinking about how Gamora treated her and how Gamora always had to be the best and goddammit never once do you think about me or love me you just gotta be off being better than everyone else, even now you’ve discovered morality–and, ah, worked herself into a rage as she piloted, since she took a good bit longer than Rocket and co. did. The Nebula in my head is not always great at managing her own emotional triggers once they get away from her.)

I can go either way on Nebula and Rocket's relationships with Yondu, shipping or familial. Like, because fandom is fandom and tends to relate all relationships via shipping, I happily read shipfic of stuff that I don’t necessarily actually prefer to read in a romantic/sexual context as a way of rolling around in an author’s reading of a relationship, and e.g.

ladypolaris's recent Kraglin/Yondu/Rocket fic was kind of fucking amazing in a way that was totally unexpected for me and write-like-an-american has I think successfully sold Kraglin/Yondu/Nebula in the past (although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone write dyadic Yondu/Nebula or Rocket/Yondu). And while I teeeeeeeeend to prefer rolling around in interactions between Kraglin and Nebula as friends, because male/female friendships are my Jam, I’m also totally happy to roll around in Kragula.

At bottom, I figure that romances are about the relationships and dynamics between two characters, and most slashfics fall under the umbrella of romances on at least some level. I’m–flails, sex isn’t actually the most important thing to me in that respect; the important thing is the interplay between the characters and the personalities and the way they regard each other.

ngl also Yondu and Nebula interacting also casts shades on Yondu and Gamora’s interactions that deepen them even further, and I’m here for that for sure; I remember

sholio wistfully requesting Gamora and Yondu talking a while back and I’m totally curious how the two of them relate to each other, especially if their main points of connection are Peter and Nebula. Gamora is different from both Yondu and Nebula in that she appears to have a strong abstract moral compass while also not necessarily being as careful about how she treats people in the specific that she’s associated with.

In some ways to me she’s much more dangerous than Nebula or Yondu because if she decides for intellectualized reasons you need killing–well, that’s it, it’s over and done with; Gamora is ruled by practicality and her own will and beliefs. (At least, as I read her!) Her relationship with Peter is I think really unusual for her in that she’s trusting him and allowing softer sides of herself to come out, and we see a lot of that in Guardians because of course Peter’s always around–but I think Yondu would twig very quickly just how ruthless Gamora can actually be, and I think that adding a positive relationship between Nebula and Yondu might make him even warier of Gamora, not necessarily more attached to her.

Which could also be a really interesting story, because I honestly and truly believe that both Gamora and Peter are good for each other and balance each other out, and I also believe that Gamora is at heart a good person (or, at least, trying to be, which is almost the same thing). She just has some blind spots about the way she’s treating and compartmentalizing people, and she tends to get caught up in her abstract, relatively rigid plans–and Peter is all about being affectionate to everyone (within reason) and reacting on the fly and dancing and enjoying yourself, which is something neither daughter of Thanos has a ton of experience with.

Adapted from a conversation with jdrewz here.

Man, I was just thinking this morning that I wish we had gotten more Yondu and Nebula interaction. Because a) the way he totally forgives her immediately without a beat is just, wow, but also more importantly b)…

Nebula does the same thing that Rocket does re pretending she doesn’t have actual feelings, just pissiness. She’s just more inclined to project physical threat than use emotional weapons and verbal needling than Rocket, I suspect partly because she’s actually even less emotionally intuitive than he is, and partly because her position as Thanos’ daughter and, I suspect, his blunter weapon gave her a lot of reputation along those lines to lean on.

But she spends that entire movie pretending she wants to kill Gamora more than anything, as well as the first one. She couches every request to be released in terms of tactical intelligence, irritation, and disgust at the lack of efficiency, not affection. Yet when you look at her actual actions given the intel she has to work with, literally everything she actually does with the exception of coming after Gamora to win is something that serves to protect the team as much as she can. For example, she has no way of knowing the Ravagers probably weren’t going to kill Rocket, Groot released her very late in the conversation and she almost certainly saw an opportunity to seize control and nabbed it.

When Rocket is almost murdered again by Taserface, Nebula steps in again and makes sure he’s kept alive at least until he can be surrendered for the bounty. There’s no evidence that Nebula has any reason to care about Rocket, so as far as I can tell she’s only looking after him for Gamora’s sake. She is angry about the constant fighting, and she’s the person who angrily says that the Guardians must not care about each other since they bicker so much. Nebula has some strong feelings about friendship and camraderie and protection despite also having, as far as we can tell from canon, basically zero experience having any of her own except in the context of growing up with Gamora.

Who doesn’t appear to believe that Nebula is redeemable in any way, by the way, judging by the way she treats Nebula and her planned place to deposit her in prison–something I read as sentiment on one level, in that she doesn’t want Nebula dead and will go to some lengths to keep that from happening, but on the other hand something that says she doesn’t trust Nebula as a person to be capable of anything but genocide. Gamora has nothing to say to Nebula that isn’t an insult, and yet Nebula continues, doggedly, to do everything in her power to keep Gamora’s team safe while she focuses on that goal of winning.

(You can compare and contrast that with Yondu’s relationship with Stakar, by the way, because that’s also pretty much how Stakar treats Yondu–you did the bad thing, I cast you out because you did, and I don’t believe you are ever trustworthy again–despite Yondu wanting desperately to atone and make things right and, I think, never having been heard out properly to begin with. But that is a rant for another day.)

Bring that over to Yondu. He clearly has very good insight into people who mask their affection and their desire to connect with violence, threats, and attacks; after all, as he says to Rocket, you’re me. He has an extremely good reason to be angry and mistrustful of Nebula, but in fact he sizes her up about as quickly as he sizes up Rocket and the next time he sees her he grins, settles in, and exchanges a quick joke as if they’re old friends.

I firmly believe that if Yondu had lived, at some point he would probably have tried to mentor Nebula in the same way that he tried to mentor Rocket about fixing that, and that he liked Nebula for who and what she was and what she was trying to do. I think he recognized the ways Nebula is trying despite a hell of a shitty childhood, and I think he saw himself in her. And I just–I think that would have been good for all of them. I think there’s something really healing in the idea of Yondu sort of adult-parenting Nebula and Rocket into how emotions actually work and how they can keep themselves safe without unsolicited attacks or threats to test the waters, especially a Yondu who is still learning himself as he goes along, but who has exactly the right kind of experience to tell them what they’re doing and why.

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Entries tagged with character: nebula

revisiting a lot of my old mantis/nebula meta has gotten me thinking

imagine yondu adopting Nebula, given the time

nebula: in need of world's okayest dadding?

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