A Thought about Nia, Jay, and Jon
To be clear, I am on team "it's complicated" here. Nia didn't feel like she had much choice: her family was threatened. And she's right to say "I didn't want to do this, and I wouldn't have if my family wasn't at stake." Nonetheless, she committed a massive violent betrayal, both colonial and personal, against Jay and never really apologized for it, and he's right to hate her for it. I wouldn't forgive her either, in his place. And Jon... okay Jon's just kind of generally traumatized and clinging to anyone who's ever treated him like a friend and not like Superman's son.
People with more experience than I have a lot more relevant thoughts about why Jay has every right to feel furious about being colonized and why it's heartbreaking that nobody else seems to comprehend the weight of what he's lost. And I think it's fairly obvious why Jon has no sense of how bad the colonization is. But Nia, I think, has something a little more complex going on.
Because Nia's whole life has been a struggle between human and alien. If you're homo sapiens on this planet, you are privileged, you belong here, you make all the rules and have all the power. And if you are any other type of sapient being, you don't have any of that going for you, and have no choice but to hide, or submit, or fight back.
I wonder if, on some subconscious level that Nia isn't clearly aware of, she doesn't think of Jay as being a vulnerable minority. Specifically because he is human. So she apologizes to Jon. The alien she wronged. The one who, in her subconscious, is more vulnerable than Jay. And doesn't apologize to Jay, because she still thinks of him on some level as an oppressor.
Now, obviously this subconscious assumption is all sorts of incorrect. Yvette would be the first to tell Nia that, even, if Nia knew she thought this way enough to actually say it out loud. But I don't think Nia knows she has this unconscious bias. And until she realizes it, and does the work to start unpacking it, there is absolutely no hope for her to ever, ever, ever reconcile with Jay. Because otherwise she can't explain why she turned on Waller to save Jon, but not to save Jay. -Diana
