So I know the exact type of illness Lily had wasn’t specified, but guys, what of it was generic? And what if one day, Cole just innocently starts coughing
1. When he’s overwhelmed/freaking out to the point his hands shake, the ground around him starts to shake as well without him realizing. The fastest way to stop this is if he or someone else holds his hands still.
2. He’s been trained in several “official” forms of dance (contemporary, ballet, waltz, etc.)
3. He developed a general fear of heights after The Fall, and it’s impacted him enough that things he used to enjoy, such as rock climbing, are now anxiety inducing. Because of his job as a ninja, he had to essentially Suck It Up™️, but that didn’t stop it from hindering both himself and the others/mission.
4. ^ because of this, when his thoughts/troubles got to much for him, instead of climbing mountains, he turned to food as a form of comfort. His friends/Wu do eventually help him through his fear of heights so it doesn’t affect him as much, but the fear never truly 100% goes away.
5. Post ghost form he had a habit of walking face first into walls/people. Even now when he’s tired he’ll still sometimes do it.
6. I think it’s safe to assume Cole in canon has at least some self confidence issues at this point. When the self doubt gets really bad, his powers will reflect the worst case scenario he’s envisioned (ex: he assumes his power won’t be enough for something and when he goes in for the earth punch, its like getting hit w a pillow)
7. Will fight a child for the last slice of cake at a birthday party (the ninja were invited as a surprise for the birthday boy. The child cole fought was, in fact, said birthday boy)
8. Cole’s habit of talking to himself grows to the point that he essentially rubber duckies himself when problem solving anything. He will do this in front of the other ninja and will just straight up not hear them when they try to help him with the issue. But also they have watched this mam have a full on back and forth conversation about a show he didn’t like before.
9. While caring for baby Wu, he gained the habit of going to check on him when he had trouble sleeping at night, tucking him in and sitting with him for a bit. After Wu returns to his actual age the habit never really goes away, but Cole is embarrassed about it so he tries to be extra super ninja sneaky when he pulls the covers up over Wu’s shoulders after his blanket had fallen a bit. Wu knows he does this but pretends to be asleep, after all why stop a kind gesture if it brings comfort to both involved.
10. Because of his lava arms, Cole (and Lloyd) are the only ones that don’t get easily burned by Kai’s fire. They’re usually the ones in charge of holding him back/cooling him down if physical touch is needed.
Surprise Jay headcanon jumpscare:
Since there are toys of the ninja, Jay goes out of his way to purchase all the misprint/goofy looking dolls of them all and proudly displays his growing collection much to everyone’s annoyance (especially Kai. They NEVER get his face right)
Given all the context provided to us by various flashbacks throughout the series, I think Cole’s true potential scene has a lot more complexity to it than at first glance.
The first time you watch it, it’s pretty standard. He had a difficult relationship with his dad, but after making amends he was able to let go of the thing holding him back and move forward. It’s a simple but sweet story, and it’s a wholesome lil episode overall.
But THEN we watch all his flashbacks in seasons 8, 13, and the Core shorts, providing us SO much more information about his family history. And when we consider the fact that Lily’s death played a major role in his and his father’s strained relationship, his true potential starts to take on a new dimension. Let me explain.
First, the flashback from Core. For those of you who haven’t seen Core, there’s a scene where Cole is feeling overwhelmed so he tries to, as he puts it, “find balance”, and ends up conjuring a fond memory of his mom in order to calm down.
This is such a short sequence, barely even 30 seconds long, but also tells us a LOT.
Given his age and appearance, we can assume that Cole is pretty young here. Considering how his mom is up and about and seemingly pretty healthy in this memory, this also likely takes place sometime before she got sick
We can also conclude that dancing was a significant part of not just Lou and Lily’s relationship, but their household overall. And given Cole’s little smile as he watches them dance, he seems to have genuinely enjoyed it as well. This evidence is corroborated by other instances throughout the series where Cole is more than happy to dance or whistle, maybe even sing if he feels comfortable enough to do so. So he does genuinely enjoy this sort of thing
This would suggest that Cole didn’t always have the belligerent attitude towards performing arts like he did in “The Royal Blacksmiths”, nor does he carry such an attitude after that episode. As early as season 2 we see him dancing as he fights bad guys and whistling as he helps repair the Bounty. He’s had instances of stagefright, yes (the Snake Jaguar incident is the first one that comes to mind), but after making amends with his father he’s never shown a dislike for that sorta thing. It’s not the dancing he hates, it’s the fear of judgment
(On a related note, Cole’s insecurity about other people’s approval seems to be reflected in his arc during the Ice Chapter, where he became paranoid that everyone hated him for losing the Traveler’s Tea and went to extreme lengths to fix his mistake. Or how, in the Character Encyclopedia, it mentions that Cole gets easily distracted by tiny mistakes, and how he tends to fatalize over all his screwups until they end up distracting him. Needless to say, Cole is afraid of letting people down. Residual anxiety from the Triple Tiger Sashay Incident, perhaps? Which, if you really want to be punched in the gut, could also come from Cole being insecure about his inability to save his mother.)
Now let’s look at the next flashback in the chronological order: the bedroom scene from season 13.
This scene doesn’t tell us quite as much, but we do get clued into a few details regarding Cole’s relationship with his mother
In the beginning of the scene, Lou is leading Cole down a hallway and into Lily’s room. And when Cole finally sees her, he is wary at first, even turning to his father for confirmation and reassurance. Then, at Lou’s encouragement, he approaches her with excitement and relief. Given his reaction, he probably hasn’t seen her in a while. Either because he wasn’t able to enter her room since she’s been so sick, or because she’s spent all of her time in either a hospital, hospice center, or some other kind of care facility
Let’s go back to that thing about Lou, actually. This quick and quiet interaction between him and Cole suggests that on some level, they do have a functioning and loving relationship at this point. Lou is at this point attentive to his son’s emotional needs. Keep this in mind going forward
“I want you to promise me, Cole, that you will always stand up to those who are cruel and unjust.” This right here is where we see Cole’s motivation for becoming a ninja. He’d gotten into a fight at school in an attempt to stop a bully, and instead of berating her son for fighting, she told him that she was proud of him for doing the right thing even if he got in trouble
This does seem to fall in line with what other few details we have about her character - she’s a strong, powerful warrior who was capable of defeating Grief Bringer on her own, and seems to be a somewhat pragmatic, no-nonsense individual who says it like it is - a trait Cole seems to have inherited from her. (Example - when Cole said he didn’t want her to be sick anymore, she replied with, “I know. But we don’t always get what we want.”)
Note that he’s still pretty young in this scene. While it’s hard to tell specific age, he’s probably anywhere between 7 and 10. I’d hazard to guess that this memory occurred relatively early on in his mother’s illness
Next up: the flashback in season 8, wherein we see the extended version of Cole’s first encounter with Wu
One important thing to note here is that he said he ‘just’ lost someone, meaning that Lily’s death must have happened fairly recently, even though we first see her illness back when Cole was much younger
This means that Lily’s illness wasn’t a quick thing. It likely lasted for a significant chunk of his childhood, watching his mom slowly spiral into a sickness he can’t protect or save her from, with him and his father growing increasingly estranged as it happens
Lou is never home, always out performing. Cole interprets this as his father not caring, but we can easily interpret this as Lou’s own attempts to cope. Remember that Lou was once quite supportive and very in-tune with his son’s emotional needs? By now, Lou has become a far more distant, estranged, borderline neglectful person in Cole’s life due to his inability to grieve in a healthy way
Let’s bring back that point in the previous flashback about Lily being a pragmatic, no-nonsense person. “With her gone, I guess it’s up to me to be the responsible one.” In the wake of his mother’s death and father’s increasing absence, Cole had to step up and take responsibility. He was trying to take up the space in their family she had once filled.
By the time Cole’s true potential episode comes up, I would argue his mother’s death is still relatively recent. And all of the interactions between Lou and Cole really have an extra lil flavor when you take that into consideration
So what does all this add up to? Well…
What’s the main conflict between Lou and Cole in “The Royal Blacksmiths”? Lou wants Cole to become a performer, a dancer like him. When discovering Cole’s a ninja he says, “…I’m not going to wait around to watch you make a mockery of our family’s legacy.”
We already know that dancing was a major part of their family dynamic, and in particular Lou and Lily’s dynamic. To Lou, performance is a family matter.
While we don’t have any hard evidence of this, the Triple Tiger Sashay Incident doesn’t strike me as something Lily was present for. If that’s true, then she’d probably already fallen ill by that point (meaning Lily’s illness began at least by the time Cole was 7). And if THAT’s true, then we can conclude the following:
Lou, confronted with the impending reality of his wife’s death, began clinging to dance and performance as a coping mechanism and likely projected this onto his son. He clung to it as a way to hold onto her, and started to go a bit overboard with it. Hence why he began pushing Cole too far.
Remember, Cole did and still does enjoy dancing. But Lou’s actions, all the pressure and judgment, pushed Cole away from something he loved doing. Something that, as we know from the Core shorts, he canonically associates with his mother.
In a way, being a dancer was Lou’s coping mechanism, and being a ninja was Cole’s. Both of them consumed with something that reminded them of Lily. When Cole and Lou make amends, there’s so much more weight behind it than just Lou apologizing for pushing Cole too hard. It’s about Lou recognizing how unhealthy his own coping mechanisms have been, and how his own grief has hurt his son. And it’s about Cole remembering that when he’s not facing pressure and judgment, he actually DOES love dancing.
Over time, as the series progresses, he sheds his serious and responsible persona and begins to loosen up a bit - he’s healing. Now that he and his father have made amends and laid to rest all the contention between them, they’re both able to heal and move forward.
It’s like Jay said - “I think I know why Cole is so closed-off. It’s because twinkle-toes here couldn’t deliver the goods. Is that why you ran away?”
He may not be in denial like his father, but he can be a bit closed-off sometimes, and is quick to running from his grief instead of facing it. That’s why he never vocalized his frustrations with Jay over the love triangle until season 4, just committing to the pettiness of the rivalry instead of being open about his feelings. And it’s exactly what he did when Zane died, too - he left the team and ran off to be a lumberjack.
With this in mind, I’d be willing to bet that his distaste for dancing not only came from his father’s pressure, but also an attempt to run away from his problems again. This time, by shutting out something that reminds him of his family.
His relationship with his father was holding him back, yes - just as much as his grief for his mother.
Now, let’s fast-forward a few seasons to the Day of the Departed special. Cole’s ghostly curse has caused him to begin fading from existence, and while he sets out on a quest to remedy the situation, his father waits back home, worried about his absence.
“Cole? Cole? Where are you? My son was going to meet me before the show to light a lantern.”
And since Day of the Departed lanterns are lit to commemorate the dead, I am 200% sure that lantern Lou’d been holding was going to be for Lily. He and his son were going to meet up and remember her together. That detail may have been pretty insignificant to the plot, but it feels kinda huge to Cole as a character. I really doubt this is something he and his dad would’ve done back in season 1, showing that both of them are finally able to confront the truth of Lily’s death in a healthy and supportive way. Not only that, but it suggests a closeness between them that simply hadn’t been there pre-reconciliation. Not only have Cole and Lou healed in their own rights, but their relationship has healed as well.
Anyway, this was all a very long-winded way of saying that I love Cole Ninjago, and the more I learn about his past the more I want to CRY.
So theres this theory circulating that Cole is red-green colorblind, right? Due to that one joke in MotM where he mistook the Skull of Hazadur as glowing red instead of green. And ive also seen a lot of people speculate that it came as a result of the green scar over his eye that was left behind when he passed through the Rift of Return. So basically the theory goes that from season 7 onward, Cole cant distinguish reds and greens. Which is funny, when you consider that he has a red teammate and a green teammate.
And Crystalized suggests that the ninja color-code themselves in part bc they cant tell each other apart otherwise, so Cole perceiving Kai and Lloyd’s gis as the same color presents four different possibilities:
Cole is the only person on the team capable of telling who’s who without relying on the color of their gi, and is disappointed by everyone else’s incompetence
Cole straight up hasnt noticed. He just thinks Lloyd decided to copy Kai and dress like him as younger brothers are prone to do. A bit inconvenient in combat but hey, he can learn to work with this
Once the team discovered his colorblindness, Kai and Lloyd did their best to make their gis noticeably distinct so Cole wouldn’t get confused. Then everyone else caught on and liked the idea of personalized gi styles and decided to follow suit, which is why everyone’s gis begin to look less uniform and identical later in the series as opposed to, like, their team look in seasons 4-6
Cole can’t actually tell Kai and Lloyd apart but is just really, really good at guessing.
When the author describes a character’s appearance way too late and you have to quickly redesign the image you already have for them in your head:
This is why if you want people to know your character has long raven-black hair with red streaks and eyes like limpid tears, you need to make sure you say so in your first paragraph. Christ. Imagine someone thinking your character’s a prep.
Holy shit I’m dying.
That. That literally explains the opening paragraph of My Immortal I was making a joke but this person came out here with receipts holy hell
