Black Panther: Why T’Challa and Nakia are the best Marvel couple

Black Panther delivers one of the freshest and subtlest Marvel romances to date, and it’s not even about them falling in love.

Heads up! This article contains spoilers for Black Panther.

It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly makes a romance subplot work. A good one can give a movie a strong emotional core; suffering through a bad one is like an all-you-can-eat buffet of those chalky candy hearts. There’s no question as to which side of the spectrum T’Challa and Nakia fall on in Black Panther.

So many things went right with them. The actors had great chemistry. The writing was strong but not overbearing. Each character was interesting on their own, while also bringing out the best in each other. Not to mention the fact that T’Challa was adorkable with Nakia from the very beginning.

But plenty of romance subplots can claim those same traits, and still feel like an annoying departure from the real story. So what makes Black Panther different?

Mainly, the fact that the movie doesn’t try to cram an entire falling-in-love arc into a single movie. It’s a challenge to portray two people meeting for the first time and then convincingly falling in love by the end of a single movie; shrinking that kind of emotional complexity into a subplot is nearly impossible.

It’s not the genesis of a relationship

Instead, when we enter the narrative Nakia and T’Challa have already been in a relationship, and broke it off some time before the movie begins. When they meet again for the first time on screen they’re both carrying a relationship’s worth of history with them, and you can see that in the way the characters interact. Or, uh, fail to. But it’s hard to blame T’Challa for freezing; I too would absolutely cease to function when coming face to face with Lupita Nyong’o.

Making  T’Challa and Nakia exes is a stroke of genius to quickly establish emotional tension (the core of any good romance), but it gets even better. We don’t have to suffer through the tiresome bickering and airing of grievances that so many “getting back with the ex” relationships rely on. Instead, T’Challa and Nakia broke up simply because their lives went in different directions. Nakia wanted to help people in a way that she wouldn’t be able to do as his queen, and T’Challa respected that.

It’s always awesome to see a female character choose her own ambitions over a relationship that would hold her back, but what makes this such a fine vintage of romantic perfection is the fact that Nakia and T’Challa are still so totally in love. You can see it in the way they’re not afraid to challenge each other, as well as the gentle, longing stares. Their relationship steps onto the screen already living and breathing. (Also, Okoye pointedly telling them to stop flirting while on a mission is totally priceless.)

Black Panther doesn’t try to sell us on two characters going from zero to true love in the course of a two-hour movie. Instead, this is a story exploring how two people who love each other can reach a point where both of their dreams and responsibilities are compatible, rather than keeping them apart. It was such a beautiful, mature and utterly believable romance.

Next: Black Panther is a big hit at the box office

Then again, W’Kabi kneeling in surrender after Okoye tells him she’d straight-up murder him for her country was basically peak romance for me. Can we get a spin-off movie solely about their marriage, please?