While
I’ve always liked Gamora, it took a while for me to warm up to her to the same
extent that I did the other Guardians.
She’s the most serious and most reserved of the team, so a) it takes a little
more time to get to know her and b) she’s not as instantly crowd-pleasing as a
character like Rocket or Groot. She fits
well into the “stoic female badass” category with the likes of Aeryn Sun, Zoë
Washburne, and, to borrow from elsewhere in the MCU, Black Widow, but to me,
she at felt first a little more distant as a character, and I'm not quite sure
why (a few Gamora-related spoilers.)
Kidnapped/“raised”
by Thanos, the guy who killed her entire race, Gamora, like her adopted sister
and fellow captive Nebula, was brought up to be a living weapon. Though not as technologically enhanced as her
sister, Gamora is no less deadly, and she fights with ruthless efficiency. However, she enters the first Guardians movie prepared to blow up that
part of her life, betraying Thanos by intercepting the Orb. Knowing the Orb’s capabilities, as well as
the atrocities Thanos has promised to Ronan in exchange for it, Gamora can’t be
a part of that machine anymore, and she claws her way out.
Initially,
the plan is merely to sell the Orb to a third party and then use the money to
disappear, but when Gamora gets tangled up with the other Guardians and things
get dicey with Ronan and the Orb, she ultimately decides to step up and take a
stand against Ronan and Thanos’s brands of destruction. She risks her life more than once in order to
thwart the Kree terrorist and her warlord “adopted father,” but she does it – I
don’t want to say “willingly,” because it’s not that exactly. It’s not that she’s energetically rolling her
sleeves up about being the hero and doing the right thing. It’s more that these are horrors too great,
and, when faced with them, Gamora doesn’t see any choice other than the right
one.
All the
Guardians make up an unlikely team, but of all of them, Gamora is probably the
most on the periphery. Although they all
have trust issues and clash when working together, she doesn’t make a lot of
the same overtures to get to know the others; even in the second film, when
they’ve been together for a while, she still only puts herself out there a tiny
bit. This is an understandable facet of
her personality, though. She’s very
guarded in general, always on the ready for an attack, which lends itself to
being more serious, and on a much bigger note, she was raised by the genocidal
maniac who kidnapped her after killing her entire race. Growing up in a time bomb like that, she
learned not to give away her vulnerabilities, to present herself as hardened,
to bury her feelings. I like seeing her
uncomfortable dynamic with Peter in the second movie because you see how Gamora
is basically, slowly, attempting to learn
emotional openness as a second language.
She knows what Peter wants from her, but she doesn’t yet know how to
provide that, and it’s frustrating for both of them.
Interestingly,
Gamora is at her most open, I think, with Nebula. Even though Nebula is even more guarded than
Gamora is and spends a lot of her screentime in both movies trying to kill
Gamora, she’s the only one who knows what it was like – the only one who
experienced childhood under Thanos’s corrupting control and constant
threats. With Nebula, Gamora is better
able to drop the aloofness and show what she’s really feeling. But over time, as she grows more able to
trust Peter and the others, I hope she’ll learn to let her guard down more.
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