#I would love to hear your thoughts and rebuttals on this anaylsis

[viewlumia]

Nothing will be more weirder than the Ninjago fandom acting like Cole was in love with Nya throughout Rebooted.

Through the entire Love Triangle ordeal, he never actually acts for Nya, instead only reacting to Jay. Observe:

Blackout

In the previous episode, The Art of the Silent Fist, there was a scene between Cole and Nya. Throughout that episode, Nya was struggling with her newfound feelings towards Cole (given to her by a machine I might add but that's a conversation for another day). Nya talks to Cole in that scene and it ends with them holding hands and Cole jokingly saying "Don't tell Jay."

Why am I bringing this up? Because I honestly have trouble looking at that through a romantic lense. I often see people use this as evidence even though it doesn't match up with how the show would later indicate romance (they looked at each other so they're in love now! Chemistry, what's that!) More importantly, Nya never actually articulates her feelings for Cole in this scene. This is crucial when getting to Blackout. In Blackout, after Pixal blurts out that Cole is a perfect match for Nya, not Jay, who entered the room at the time, his first instinct is to attack Cole as soon as he saw him! From the POV of Cole, this looks like his friend calling him names and a whole lot of other things seemingly out of nowhere, he never actually heard about the "Perfect Match" results and that combined with the previously mentioned scene leaves us with a Cole who isn't in love with Nya and is only focused on Jay.

The Curse of The Golden Master

In this clip, after the ninja head into the sewer like a certain other group of color coded ninja, Jay gets into another spat with Cole after Cole dared to *checks note* look out for Nya's safety. This causes the two to get into an argument and ignore Nya falling from the broken ladder.

Now this scene on it's own doesn't mean much, but when paired with the other episodes mentioned, it starts to paint a bigger picture. This scene is a tipping point for Cole, going from someone clueless about his situation and fighting with Jay to letting this petty, near one-sided rivalry get in the way of the task at hand.

This scene is honestly the perfect representation of the Love Triangle in Rebooted: it was never really about Nya, she was just a stepping stone to get to Jay yelling at Cole over a situation he has no idea he's even in. Cole isn't out of the woodwork either as he begins to ignore Nya solely so he can insult Jay, but hey, it can't get any worse right?

Codename: Arcturus

It got worse.

In Codename: Arcturus, we see Jay, Cole, and Nya at the movie theater to "prove who Nya should go out with." Now, you may ask "doesn't that sequence end with both Jay and Cole asking who Nya will date and her kidnapping a cleaning robot?" yes, it does! But the important thing here is that it wasn't even Nya's idea in the first place ("Hey, it wasn't my idea to go on a double date to decide between you two.") Interesting thing of note, this is the only episode in the entire season where it's actually shown Cole fighting for Nya's affection, but even then it's not really about her, it's about getting back at Jay more than anything.

I know someone will come in wondering about "authorial intent," the intent in question being that Cole could be a potential love interest for Nya moving forward, but while I can see the intent, I can also acknowledge that what actually landed on the page and later the screen does not match the intent at all. Instead of Cole falling in love with Nya and getting into a spat with Jay that way, we got Cole treating Nya like a stepping stone to get back at Jay, disregarding her feelings in the process.

TL;DR: Kai should've knocked Jay and Cole upside the head for being weird about his sister