* I think that for quite a long time they were as close as Vanessa remembers them being, to the point of very nearly thinking of themselves as the same person -- at that age one almost doesn't have an opinion about someone who's just been there, being part of you, for your entire life.
* I think that from quite an early age Mina was pretty good at getting Vanessa to take responsibility whenever they got into trouble.
* I think that the crack between them, or at least the beginning of Mina's ability to think critically about Vanessa, came before the Hedge Maze Incident, and involved Mina realizing that Vanessa was a wee tiny bit fixated on Malcolm (and Mina has almost always known a bit more about him than most people would suspect). It didn't make her stop loving and needing Vanessa, because nothing could, but it was a loss of innocence to some degree.
* I think Mina fell in love, in a more or less adult fashion, with her somewhat after that.
* I think Mina HATES Vanessa for trying to put her in the same position her (Mina's) mother was in all those years. Mina really really despises her mother, actually, because she was pathetically devoted to Malcolm and just put up with everything -- including Claire being VERY VERY KIND to her all the time -- and Mina quite accurately feels that the entire world was conspiring to make sure she herself followed in exactly the same footsteps. And as visibly miserable as Vanessa was about Mina's getting engaged, she accepted it as the way things were naturally bound to go. (And by that point, I'm fairly sure Mina could FEEL Vanessa defining her as something she wasn't, or wasn't entirely, in order to define herself against it. Because that is a thing one can feel when someone is doing it.)
I'm not sure how much of this was conscious at the time, but it was definitely subtext.
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* I think that for quite a long time they were as close as Vanessa remembers them being, to the point of very nearly thinking of themselves as the same person -- at that age one almost doesn't have an opinion about someone who's just been there, being part of you, for your entire life.
* I think that from quite an early age Mina was pretty good at getting Vanessa to take responsibility whenever they got into trouble.
* I think that the crack between them, or at least the beginning of Mina's ability to think critically about Vanessa, came before the Hedge Maze Incident, and involved Mina realizing that Vanessa was a wee tiny bit fixated on Malcolm (and Mina has almost always known a bit more about him than most people would suspect). It didn't make her stop loving and needing Vanessa, because nothing could, but it was a loss of innocence to some degree.
* I think Mina fell in love, in a more or less adult fashion, with her somewhat after that.
* I think Mina HATES Vanessa for trying to put her in the same position her (Mina's) mother was in all those years. Mina really really despises her mother, actually, because she was pathetically devoted to Malcolm and just put up with everything -- including Claire being VERY VERY KIND to her all the time -- and Mina quite accurately feels that the entire world was conspiring to make sure she herself followed in exactly the same footsteps. And as visibly miserable as Vanessa was about Mina's getting engaged, she accepted it as the way things were naturally bound to go. (And by that point, I'm fairly sure Mina could FEEL Vanessa defining her as something she wasn't, or wasn't entirely, in order to define herself against it. Because that is a thing one can feel when someone is doing it.)
I'm not sure how much of this was conscious at the time, but it was definitely subtext.