I like Allison and Zaid’s dynamic in Kill Six Billion Demons a lot.
It begins with Zaid getting kidnapped and Allison swearing to rescue him. But as the comic goes on, it becomes clear that it’s not because Zaid was Allison’s One True Love or anything. In the first pages of the comic they don’t look very in love, Allison is being unsure if she wants sex or not and Zaid is being impatient and pushy about her making up her mind, and some of Allison’s sorority sisters call Zaid a creep.
But Allison swears to rescue him anyways. Why? Because she’s gone through some awful stuff in Throne, and Zaid doesn’t deserve to be stuck there, alone.
And when they do reunite. It was kinda adorable actually? It wasn’t anything big and grand and sweeping. No massive declarations of love. It was just two normal people caught in a crazy situation who see the one other person who’d Get It. Cio dismisses English as a complicated language too troublesome for her to learn (and she’s very not wrong) but Allison and Zaid just immediately begin talking in it. And when Allison falls into her depressive spell in Jadis’ temple, Zaid is the one to go after her and try to talk sense in her, who says he’ll wait for her. She went through all the effort of training to rescue him from this crazy and senseless world, he’ll return the favor.
They don’t feel romantic to me. But I like their relationship as it is so much better. It’s ‘I went through this awful thing so I can’t leave someone like me to go through it alone’ and I love it. Or that’s how I ended up reading it anyways. I appreciate their friendship and trying to come for each other a lot.