meredith quill’s subconscious

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James Gunn keeps reiterating that the Awesome Mixes 1 and 2 are Meredith “communicating” with Peter even after his death, and I really love that. I love how in certain moments, Meredith’s song choices frame her as a sort of narrator or Greek Chorus from beyond the grave. And also I keep looking at the actual lyrics of those songs, and…

…so many of them are about men taking advantage of women, or treating them badly. Brandy is obviously the centerpiece here, but loads of the others also sound like men like Ego would nod approvingly along with them-

Fooled Around And Fell In Love perfectly sums up the Meredith/Ego relationship:

I must have been through about a million girls
I’d love ‘em then I’d leave ’em alone
I didn’t care how much they cried, no sir
Their tears left me cold as a stone
But then I fooled around and fell in love

(…and the ‘a million’ is absolutely literal in this case…)

I’m Not In Love sounds almost like what Ego, intent on his planet-destroying mission, must have been thinking after he met Meredith:

I like to see you
But then again
That doesn’t mean you mean that much to me

Wham Bam Shang-a-Lang could almost be Ego justifying leaving Meredith to himself:

But careful now don’t get caught in your dreams

Look out baby this is not what it seems 

(No kidding)

Come A Little Bit Closer, that fabulous murdersong, is about a woman who ‘belongs’ to an apparently dangerous man:

In a little café just the other side of the border
She was just sitting there givin’ me looks that made my mouth water
So I started walking her way
She belonged to bad man, José

Escape (The Pina Colada Song) is about a man cheating on his wife (although granted she was cheating on him too)

I was tired of my lady, we’d been together too long
Like a worn out recording of a favorite song

Brandy, well, the whole of GOTG2 deconstructs Brandy, but I like this lyric:

Brandy wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the North of Spain
A locket that bears the name
Of the man that Brandy loves

Because it ties in so well to this bit from The Chain:

And if you don’t love me now

You will never love me again

I can still hear you saying

You would never break the chain

Speaking of The Chain, I know you can’t hear this bit in the actual movie, but it sounds just like Meredith condemning and raging at her ex-lover, the man who killed her:

Running in the shadows
Damn your love, damn your lies

…Of course, when Meredith was making the Awesome Mixes, she didn’t know what Ego really was. She dies thinking he’ll come back for Peter and everything will be fine. But you sort of wonder… maybe somewhere really deep down, she suspected something wasn’t right. Maybe her communications were, of sorts, a warning.