I think it’s interesting that Rocket felt so isolated about his issues even within the Guardians, when Gamora especially could relate to a lot of the traumas of his backstory – and I guess the central reason for it, and the central divide among them, is having been loved and then lost that love verses having started out totally without assigned value. Gamora and Peter and Drax all understand loss, and have lived to various degrees in a world without the affection and security they once knew, whereas what binds Yondu and Rocket together is having been born without love, and then not knowing what to do with it whenever they receive it. It makes me wonder where Nebula falls, because it seems to me that the movies group her more with the latter two, but we don’t really know if she remembers life before Thanos.
I don’t think she does, for what it’s worth. The way Gamora conceptualizes her world is “there are good people, like the people I was with before Thanos, and there are evil people, like the people I was surrounded by as Thanos made me who and what I am.” (I’m genuinely not sure where Gamora places herself in this, and I suspect that most days neither is she.)
Whereas Nebula’s wistful, fucked up, “I just wanted a sister” outburst tells me that Nebula wasn’t remembering a time before Thanos that was her “real” family, like Gamora clearly does. We never hear Nebula ever claim Thanos is not her father, or make a mistake that blood parents are inherently better than adopted ones (which is exactly the error judgement Gamora makes about Ego and Yondu). The only time we hear Nebula talk about family, she’s talking about clearly believing Gamora should have been her sister, wanting Gamora to be her sister and having thought of her that way and been hurt and tired when it didn’t work out.
I don’t think Nebula had anything good before Thanos, not that she can remember. She certainly doesn’t have one whit of the tendency to carry cherished memories of dead “real” parents and family as opposed to current adoptive versions that both Peter and Gamora absolutely do.
Seconding this, and I can see Nebula feeling way more connected to Yondu and Rocket due to their similar backgrounds here. Also Mantis. She’s got no cherished dead mom to cling to either.
Yeah, the similarities and differences between Nebula and Mantis and their backgrounds are going to be fascinating. I mean, Ego pretended to be affable, though Mantis is clearly terrified of him, and I’m not sure she had fully extricated her sense of how the world worked from his bombast, but he didn’t seem to try to pretend to be her father. She got to observe that behaviour from the sidelines. Thanos – I don’t think he ever tried to represent himself as Good, but he clearly imposed some mockery of family dynamics on the children he had kidnapped and abused. And I think Mantis was there while Ego was killing children, unable to do anything, and that’s gonna be an interesting parallel to Gamora and Nebula actually being forced to kill for Thanos.
The only thing about Nebula not having a family ever is that she seemed to have a sense of ‘sister’ as an ideal, as opposed to the warped concept of Thanos as her ‘Dad’. So maybe she had a life before, perhaps sans parents, where she got to witness and wish for sisterhood, or maybe Gamora looked after her at first, and was her first standard for the idea, before seeming to ruin it. Nebula also craved that love, whereas Yondu and Rocket both desperately long for it and are repelled by it at the same time. I can see her being an orphan or street kid, maybe – a half-way between the two things where life was rough; she had a sort of place but no family, and then she lost even that.
There’s a thing I really love in @sarah531‘s Smile re: Mantis growing up, with Mantis having been raised as Ego’s child when it suited him and as simply a pet or a tool when it didn’t, and I think that’s very in character for both of them. (I honestly headcanon actual!larval!Mantis in part because Ego is so astonishingly self-centred that I genuinely cannot see him caring for a toddler or younger without accidentally killing it from lack of touch or food.) I think Ego probably pretends to be a lot of things, whatever makes him feel the best at any moment, and Mantis has observed enough horrible things over the years to be absolutely terrified of him. She was absolutely there when Ego was killing.
I do think Nebula got some way to observe the concept of sisters growing up, but I have no earthly idea where or how. The age difference between the two is fascinating, also: Gamora acts like the “elder” sibling in the way the two interact (Nebula looks up to Gamora, feels she should have been protected by Gamora instead of feeling the other way around), and yet Nebula is the one who seems to have had less socialization beyond Thanos. I sometimes think that Thanos stole Nebula first, possibly from an earlier age, and then decided that there was an error there and opted to take an older child when he destroyed the Zen Whoberi. Which would have a) had Gamora coming in with memories of her recently-lost family and Nebula already present for Gamora to lump in with the rest of her captors, b) an age difference and probably developmental difference such that a lonely Nebula might have had her own wistful, hopeful expectations of an older sibling, and c) time for Gamora to have spent significant time with her own family before being taken by Thanos without magnifying the age difference between herself and Nebula too much.