Cocoina

Cocoina is the femslash ship between Coco and Nina from the Crash Bandicoot fandom.

Canon
They first appear together in Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto’s Rampage. Nina’s role in this game is relatively small, as she appears for the sole purpose to capture Coco and the Professor. Even though both characters appear in Crash Twinsanity—the game where Nina is properly introduced—they do not interact with each other. It is until Crash Tag Team Racing than any hints of their toxic relationship is made apparent. In this game, whenever the player interacts with Coco, she makes it very apparent that she does not like Nina at all. The bandicoot will often call Nina names and try to assert herself above the other girl. Nina, however, does not show any signs or even recognition of Coco’s rivalry towards her.

Crash of the Titans is the first game to have both of them interact, and the first where Nina starts to show signs of her detest for Coco. As soon as Uka Uka has her replace her uncle, Dr. Cortex, she immediately has Coco (who was captured by Cortex at the start of the game) put to work on building the Doominator. Coco retorts by claiming Crash will come to rescue her and even says that Nina’s hair looks dumb. In response, Nina has a mind-control device placed on her to “shut her up”. In the final act of the game, Nina tells Coco to shut up because she finds her annoying, to which the bandicoot responds by sticking her tongue out at her.

While Coco and Nina have not interacted in another mainline title afterwards, hints of their relationship have popped up and been referenced since. In Crash: Mind Over Mutant, when the bandicoots discover the true nature of the NV’s, Coco reluctantly suggests talking to Nina for help. In response to this, Aku Aku says that the NV she had been wearing gave her brain damage. During the 100% epilogue of Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, Coco is shown beating Nina in a live e-sport event, to which Nina is unhappy about. In the profile cards released for Crash: On The Run!, under both Coco and Nina’s “Hates” heading, they list each other.

Behind the Scenes
Following the cancellation of a planned Crash Bandicoot TV series on Netflix, design documents for the show were released revealing plans for episodes and character profiles. Among these, Coco and Nina were described as having a relationship of “acrimonious girlfriends”, suggesting that they would have utterly hated each other even if they were forced to work together.

Fanon
Even though Coco and Nina have a fierce rivalry in-game, they are a surprisingly popular femslash couple among fans. In fact, there is argument to be made that it is the most popular femslash ship for either character. Even so, it is more common to see this pairing depicted how it is in games: bitter and spiteful. On DeviantArt, there are over 1000 search results for “coco and nina”, but as is the case with many Crash ships only a small handful are categorized under the cocoxnina tag. There are also on over twenty works written on Archive of Our Own of the pairing, of which thirteen are of the femslash ship, most of which are stories written by Clocksmith.

It is also common to see people use Evil/Dark Coco, an unused character from Crash Twinsanity that was later recycled as a skin for Coco in Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, in place of Coco herself.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

DEVIANTART