Favorite Characters: Gamora (Guardians of the Galaxy)

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.

Relationship Spotlight: Gamora & Peter Quill (Guardians of the Galaxy)

I think seeing Vol. 2 helped me get enough context to understand Peter and Gamora a little better, especially from her point of view – while I wouldn’t call them John and Aeryn, there is a bit of a similar idea at play there.  Before, it felt a little too been-there-done-that, but I’m starting to see it now.

On first glance, I wasn’t overly impressed by Gamora and Peter.  It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, the quippy minor rogue/burgeoning hero and the stone cold warrior women.  He’s jokey, she’s all business, he makes small flirting overtures, she threatens to snap his neck, but all the while they grow ever closer – that sort of thing.  By the end of the first movie, he hasn’t romanced her, but he has earned her respect and (relative) trust.

Looking back on it, it’s actually noteworthy how few overtly-romantic beats there are between them in the film.  Peter saves Gamora, a couple times (a complaint I have with the first film is that I wish Gamora had more solid victories of her own,) they have a kinda-moment with Peter’s cassette player (although, at its heart, that scene is about introducing Gamora to Peter’s world through his music,) and Peter’s initial reaction to meeting her – before she robs him, mind you – is to come on to her.  But really, through much of the movie, their teamwork/arguing/getting to know each other isn’t all that different specifically from what Peter does with any of the other Guardians.  Instead, it’s mostly by virtue of the fact that Peter’s the clear lead and Gamora is the only female Guardian that we know this storyline is inevitable for them.

It’s in the second film that they get a bit more John-and-Aeryn with the proceedings.  By this time, the team has been traveling and working together for a while, and they’ve all started to figure each other out a little more.  And that’s where we start to see what’s going on – or, more accurately, not quite going on – with Gamora and Peter.  It’s here that the “quippy hero”-“warrior woman” dynamic gets fleshed out more distinctly.  We see that their relationship has progressed but stopped short of what they both likely want it to be.  Although they support one another through hard personal stuff, whenever Peter tries to broach the subject of where they’re headed, Gamora throws up road blocks.  It’s deep understandable, since she was raised by a genocidal war lord who destroyed her planet and then brought her up to be his living weapon.  She has trust issues, to put it lightly, and she’s learned to bury her emotions as a survival tactic.  As a result, even though on some level she wants to let Peter in, she can’t bring herself to do it.

On Peter’s side, he keeps trying to get her to take down her walls, but he gets tired of always being the one to put himself out there.  Sometimes that makes him angry with her, and sometimes it makes him pull back just as she’s ready to move forward.  And so, they’ve been on this staggered path where they never quite get ahead.  Both need to make concessions – Gamora to trust more, Peter to be patient with her – and both are trying in their own way (that the other doesn’t always see,) but it’s not until the chips are really down that they’re able to make much headway, to get past their own hindrances and start moving towards each other.

Relationship Spotlight: Nebula & Gamora (Guardians of the Galaxy)

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot in Guardians of the Galaxy that just feels different – than other Marvel titles as well as other space operas.  Yes, it has Marvel sensibilities and a feel not unlike Star Wars or Firefly, but it also has a tree creature that grows on command, a super-genius raccoon, and a spaceship that looks like it’s made of stone.  The relationship between Gamora and Nebula isn’t as wildly different as any of the aforementioned bits, but it too is something that really feels unlike a lot of what you see (spoilers for Gamora and Nebula.)

Both Gamora and Nebula were taken/“adopted” by the warlord Thanos, cybernetically augmented, and raised to be assassins for him.  In Gamora’s case, we know that Thanos destroyed her world and her people when she was only a child; not as much is told about Nebula, but it’s to be assumed that her capture was equal parts violent and traumatic.  In a way, they remind me a little of a combination between the wives and the War Boys on Mad Max:  Fury Road, with Thanos standing in for Immortan Joe.  They appear to have been working alongside each other and doing Thanos’s bidding for a number of years, somewhat contentiously (even though both hate Thanos, he seems to play favorites to pit them against each other.)  When he loans them out to Ronan, however, is when their paths diverge.

Now, there are familiar elements within this.  Gamora betraying Thanos and Ronan to steal the orb and keep it out of their genocidal hands has shades of Black Widow, a former baddie coming over to the side of good.  The resulting rift between the sisters, with them on different sides and having to fight one another (reluctantly on Gamora’s part,) looks a bit like Thor and Loki.  But when these separate elements are at play within the same characters, we’re given dynamics that feel distinct from either in-universe similarity.  Gamora and Nebula were raised together, yes, but by the warlord who kidnapped them and murdered their families.  If they’re expected to feel any loyalty to each other, it’s only inasmuch as it would be inconvenient to Thanos for them to be too much at odds.  And yet, he doesn’t want them to be too close, either – he prefers any antagonism they feel to be directed at each other instead of him.

But that’s the thing:  they do care about each other, at least a little.  Gamora doesn’t think twice about leaving Nebula behind when she goes rogue, but when they come up against each other in Ronan’s resulting mission to take the orb back from Gamora, Gamora repeatedly tries to reason with her sister and only fights her once it’s clear her only options are fight or die.  And while Nebula tries very hard to kill Gamora – repeatedly – she too feels as much for Gamora as she’s probably able to at this point.  Being more of a multitasker, she tries to kill Gamora and talk her around at the same time, but there is the smallest part of her that doesn’t want it to go down the way it is.  As she tells Gamora, “Of our siblings, I hated you least.”

So it’s this really odd, really damaged relationship where both were raised in really frakked-up circumstances and not encouraged to care about anyone, and they don’t like each other all that much, but there’s still this pull between them.  At the end of the first movie, Nebula cuts off her cybernetic hand and leaps onto a passing spacecraft rather than kill or join Gamora, and I’m rabidly curious to find out what happens next for the sisters.  I feel like we’ve only seen the smallest spark of hope for them, but that might be enough.