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truetgirl · 2 years

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Another day, another self-indulgent mini-essay for pride! Today our subject is:

Nicolina (AKA Nico Minoru and Karolina Dean from the Runaways comics)!

Another pick that will come as precisely zero surprise to anyone who has heard me talk about my favorite fictional characters and stories for longer than like 2 seconds. Back in the first pride post series I did I actually discussed each of them as individual characters, and I believe I book-ended the month with them, if memory serves.

What makes these two worth it is the joy of seeing that slow, sometimes painful, but always worthwhile journey of self discovery. Over the course of fifteen years (between they first debuted and when they finally got together) of real-world time, two or three years their time, they grew together, lived together, fought and bled together, and all the while they loved each other. But not always romantically. Well, at least not for Nico.

See, Karolina knew she liked girls from the start. Moreover, she knew she liked Nico right from the start.

These are the fourth and fifth panels she appears in. She has had 3 lines before this moment. She ignores Chase coming on to her, rushes over to Nico the moment she sees her, and starts awkwardly stealth-flirting. This incredibly clear setup for her crush on Nico is like the second thing we ever learn about her, after her name. I wish to take this moment to remind you that this was published in 2003.

Now, this being a comic book, some shit goes down that pretty well back-burners the implied gay crush. Not the least of these was Nico and Alex’s budding relationship at the time. Karolina’s journey of understanding and accepting her sexuality is still going on, but we’re left with an obscured, narrow view of it for a while. The most we got is her clearly self-loathing and brief attempt to force herself to like that one kid that turned out to be a vampire. Yeah, that one, the one that she unintentionally killed with sunlight-blood when she tried to let him kill her.

Then came Alex’s big turn when they went to face their parents. A turn that led Nico to declaring that she was done with boys. Karolina’s reaction to which pretty clearly showed us that she was still into this girl.

Cut to 8 issues into the second volume and things have changed a fair bit. Karolina’s still not in the best place mentally, but she’s doing about as fucking well as could be expected of a teenage girl who was recently suicidal and then had to fight her supervillain parents before leaving them for dead along with a turncoat friend. She’s not as timid anymore, she seems to be a little surer and bolder about being gay (doing stuff like chewing out Chase for using gay as an insult), even if she was still closeted.

Nico, for her part, has become a leader in Alex’s stead. It’s a chaotic and fraught dynamic, and she never really fills the role the same clear and authoritative way that Alex eventually had, but these kids would go to pieces without her. And she’s bearing this responsibility, even if it’s only implied, while dealing with all the same tragedy as the rest of them. Hell, probably feeling it even more keenly because of how close she and Alex had been. Part of what’s getting her through her days is her friendship with Karolina, which has gotten very close indeed in the time since the showdown with their parents.

This closeness, Karolina’s budding confidence and absurdness, Nico swearing off boys... It all feels like it should be leading to something, right? “But surely not,” thought I, reading this comic published in 2005 in the school library, “Even now, in the enlightened age of 2013, queer stuff barely happens in popular media. No way this old comic is gonna-”

“Well, I’ll be damned." Also, yeah, Nico thought that last bit was her helping the situation. Girl has a looooooong way to go.

Heartbreak of that scene aside, Karolina almost immediately gets swept up by Xavin and taken out into space (the details of which I still want to see first hand, dammit). She has a lot to deal with, emotionally. Between her parents, Alex, her depression, angst about her sexuality, and now Nico’s rejection and this new alien person to whom she is apparently betrothed? Yeah, she’s got a lot on her plate.

Meanwhile, Nico, in the immediate aftermath of everything that has happened, and now this scene being her seemingly last memory of her best friend, is left crushingly alone. She believes, and honestly has pretty decent grounds to believe, that she just drove Karolina as far away as it is possible to go. She’s isolated, and she can hardly even begin to process how badly she must have just hurt her best friend by reacting so severely.

So she spirals. She becomes self destructive in her personal life, especially her love life. Every relationship she has, of which there were quite a few, blows up in her face because she’s not really emotionally engaging with them. In fact, she’s pushing them away, so terrified she is at the prospect of either hurting anyone or being hurt like that again.

Even once Karolina and Xavin come home, a development at which Nico is clearly overjoyed, nothing is as it once was. She and Karolina have both grown into more complicated people than they were before. For one thing, Karolina and Xavin are still together, and they’ve clearly been through a lot together that, for the first time, Nico can’t even begin to relate to. Where once she and Karolina understood implicitly what the other had been through, having lived it together. Now they both had new experiences the other knew nothing of.

Even still, they fell back into one another. Into needing each other, loving one another, being a safe place for the other to go and a support in times of need:

live Victor reaction in the last one like damn dude you ok there?

For a long time it was just. Like this. When Xavin took Karolina’s place to go and be tried for her parents crimes, it was Nico that she confided in about how badly it messed her up. When Nico needed someone she didn’t have to keep the leadership mask on with, she went to Karolina.

I’ll admit I’m not the best versed in what they got up to while their little family was scattered across the Marvel universe, because I was very upset to see them separated so I didn’t go looking into it. But when they got back together, and when the girls started to get back into their old dynamic, I was hopeful. Not hopeful that this ship would happen, I’d long since given up hope by the time the 2017 run rolled in, what with Karolina being in a relationship and Nico still never having been confirmed to like girls. But I appreciated just seeing them together again. Then this happened:

Can you say reversal? Suddenly, after a couple years of growth, Karolina is completely assured in who she is. She’s doing well for herself, what between college, a girlfriend with whom things seem to be going well, and a much healthier level of self esteem helped along by therapy. Nico, meanwhile, is once again showing the bad habits she developed while trying to cope with her various interpersonal traumas. Once more she’s pushing a personal dynamic to any limit she can find, hoping that this time it’ll go well and not blow up in her face.

Even as the two of them continue to be friends again, there’s an awkwardness between them after this. Their relationship is at its lowest point, I would say, since Karolina first tried to kiss Nico. Nico is her usual brand of hot mess who is nonetheless the natural leader of this fucked up little family, and Karolina, while she is better, is by no means perfect.

In fact, it’s during this time that she and her girlfriend start to drift apart. Karolina is trying to spin too many plates now that her friends are together and part of her life again, and it basically means she never sees her girlfriend, Julie, basically at all these days. Karolina doesn’t want to hurt her, I’d go so far as to call it the last thing she wants, but life’s a real screaming bitch sometimes. It’s honestly a really sad breakup to watch, when the time comes, just because it’s so mundane and real. Julie did nothing wrong, and she was perfectly graceful about the whole thing, and Karolina never wanted to them to grow apart like they did, but they did, and it obviously hurt them both.

But, pain or no pain, life goes on. After a few more comic plot shenanigans and a frank conversation about with Nico about the people they’ve lost and what it’s done to them, then comes the big one: Nico volunteers to go with Karolina to this big formal party she’s attending for charity, a party Julie was originally going to go to with her, and this is where we shift to Nico’s perspective, gained from years of slow, agonizingly hard-won character growth, on certain past events...

I was not kidding about how hard this event and her reaction to Karolina clearly stuck in her mind.

This leads into what is both one of the most salient moments of Nico’s development and characterization as well as a perfect glimpse into their friendship and what it’s meant to them over the years:

They’ve always seen each other. They’ve always known they loved each other. Karolina just realized and interpreted it a lot faster. But that time helped both of them to grow. It helped Karolina accept who she was and learn what it meant to be a partner, be part of someone’s life, and how to love herself enough to forgive herself for the things she could never have controlled. It gave Nico the space and time she dearly needed to process her feelings and her trauma, bumpy and hazardous a road as that has always been for her. And now, finally, they figured it out together. They’ve grown into beautiful, wonderful people together, and their shared experiences mean they understand one another in ways nobody else really can. What makes them compelling is, to cut this incredibly long and rambling story short, growth.

#kelly things #kelly's pride posts #pride month #Nico Minoru #Karolina Dean #nicolina #runaways

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