#ninjago tsunamiduo

[curiositythecryptid]

Hello, back again another fic promo post!

It just took breaking a Dancy Pants machine, elemental merging and stopping the apocalypse for the nth time. Are all engagements this eventful? or, Diversity win! Nya gets a serving of the trauma salad. Cole is surprisingly experienced in the particular field.

This one is vaguely a sequel to four truths of the disembodied, if you've ever read that one! It took me a while to get around to posting this one on Tumblr bc I have some things I wanted to say about it.

Author's notes below the cut!

One very common Nya take I've seen in my year of fandom experience is that Nya still has the facial markings from her time as the Endless Sea, usually blue or glowing blue at some point, or that her hair is still water or turns into water when she uses her powers.

Those headcanons and fanart are really cool, I have to admit they lend themselves to excellent visuals, but the mechanics of them (as well as the mechanics of [shudders] Crystallized in general) always bugged me just enough to keep me thinking.

Let's start with Crystallized. To defeat Wojira, Nya merged with the ocean, opened herself up completely to her powers. In order to bring her back, they had to take her powers away, but they did so in a way that we already know (from Kai's experience) is not permanent. So, she does, and awfully quickly, get her powers back.

But wait. Isn't that separation from her powers is what brought her back to life to begin with? I like to give the show the benefit of the doubt, but still... Crystallized writing, amiright?

So anyway. I'm all for, after such a sudden burst of power being essentially fixed with some duct-tape and hardy faith, Nya having some kind of permanent mark and consequence from it all. It's just that, I think the situation was too dire and too powerfully magical for the consequence to only be a change in design. I need the functionality of her powers to be affected too, or, as I present in this fic, for her power to affect and represent her mental state in an actually risky way.

This isn't a jab at anyone who does otherwise, neither is this supposed to say no one has ever done this, I just really liked my concept and needed to ramble a little about it.

The other thing is: We have a lot of fics about Ninjago characters dealing with trauma from past seasons, and especially, a lot of fics about Jay dealing with Skybound trauma. Sometimes supported by Nya, or Cole, to deal with it. And I do love me some angst.

But while there seems to be a general, vague acknowledgement of how Nya died in a wedding gown, so I see Jaya art that banks on her not wearing a wedding gown if she gets married, but still... I feel like Nya's Skybound trauma is under-explored sometimes, especially compared to Jay's. And she went through a lot that season.

She was ignored, dehumanized, reduced to a face, forced into an outfit she didn't want, had to play into that role to appease to her kidnapper, forced to marry someone creepy, got possessed, used as a human shield and then died.

So yea. I don't think she's like. Fully Okay and Healthy about all that.

Sure, having a cool, strong woman character is fun, but a woman feeling hurt and needing a support network and showing any of the traits women have been associated with and shamed for throughout history shouldn't reduce how seriously she deserves to be taken.

I think we mostly get the idea! We're on a pretty smart website full of pretty smart writers and artists. But there might be someone in the fandom who hasn't yet, so I'm putting this out there anyway.

Thank you if you stuck around this far on this blatant ramble post, and I hope you liked the fic!