History ComicBook / Blackbird2018

* NiceShoes: Nina sets out to search for Clive by his taste in very expensive Monarch sneakers.

* YouGottaHaveBlueHair: Nina's hair is dyed blue.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/blackbird_8.jpg]]

* TearJerker: Gloriana's confrontation with Nina in her throne room is one hell of a tearjerker. After the Verdugo Earthquake, Gloriana basically sold her soul to bring Nina back to life and to prevent her young daughters from following her into the hellish life of the paragons. Now, ten years later, one of those daughters has been dragged literally kicking and screaming into that world and must soon fight in a magical war in which she will be badly outmatched and in which, thanks to the other daughter's actions, her Cabal might well lose. Meanwhile, said other daughter- whom she rescued from death itself- is standing before her screaming her head off, laying out in excruciating detail how Gloriana's selfless actions have deprived her of everything that gave her life meaning, and is firing off spell after spell in an attempt to kill her own mother because she is utterly terrified of her and thinks of her as a monster.
** And what is Gloriana's response to her daughter's attempts to kill her, and to the collapse of all of her hopes for her daughters' futures? She tries unsuccessfully one last time to hit the reset button by erasing her daughter's memory, with one final plea: "Be ''happy''!"

Nina Rodriguez discovered magic was real after the big earthquake ten years ago, but no one has ever believed her about it except for what she's read online. Then one night, while she and her sister Marisa are arguing, a giant otherworldly beast kidnaps Marisa. When Nina sets out to rescue her sister, she has to confront the ruthless magical cabals of Los Angeles and confront her past, and she finds out that her life wasn't what she thought it was.

----

* ParentalFavouritism: Nina's mother favoured her older sister Marisa over her. [[spoiler:It turns out that Nina was always the favourite child, and her mother tried to keep her in the dark about the magical world to protect her. In fact, when the condition was imposed upon Gloria that the moment either of her daughters became aware of the existence of the paragons one of them would be forcibly initiated as a paragon, Gloria chose Marisa specifically to keep Nina out of it. Nina retorts that she would have preferred to have her mother present instead.]]

* ParentalFavouritism: Nina's mother favoured her older sister Marisa over her. [[spoiler:It turns out that Nina was always the favourite child, and her mother tried to keep her in the dark about the magical world to protect her. In fact, when Gloria was faced with the choice of having to initiate one of her daughters, she chose Marisa specifically to keep Nina out of it. Nina retorts that she would have preferred to have her mother present instead.]]

* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: The more Nina learns about the Paragon cabals, the more they sound like warring Mexican drug cartels. A superficially glamourous, heavily secretive world of warring cliques that treats everyone not a part of it with utter contempt, hoards power for itself, and runs through the distribution of a heavily guarded, crystalline substance that requires an unknown (but hinted to be ghastly) process to accumulate. According to the police detective, these cabals are responsible for more than four hundred innocent deaths in the past year ''alone'' (it is all but stated that if you belong to this society, sooner or later you ''will'' become a murderer) — and ten years of it has turned Nina's warm, caring mother into a cold, ruthlessly unemotional figure who seems to think that constantly gaslighting her daughter — and obviously ruining her life in the process — is actually doing her a favor, and that letting her daughter in on the paragons' existence would actually be far worse than setting her up to potentially die without a family, homeless and alone. (And she may even be right!) Basically, there are no good guys in this world, and the longer you are a part of it the worse you become. The contrast between Nina's memories of her mother and how she acts in person are, to say the least, jarring.