well that’s giving me some fresh Yondu and also Peter feels
Ooof. Yeah.
All of this tends to make me think that Stakar has a quasi-clerical role as well as a practical leadership role, because that is a very metaphysical threat, Stakar, and I don’t expect to hear it coming out of anyone who isn’t actually the equivalent of a Space Pope.
Or maybe I just like the idea of Space Pope Stakar.
Six of one, half dozen of the other…
Ohhhh man, I had always seen this as a form of Yondu being excommunicated, but I never quite put it together with Stakar basically being the person who made the rules (or at least we can assume he did; if he’s not the actual founder of the Ravagers, he’s obviously the person who establishes How Things Work for the Ravagers now). It’s actually WORSE than being excommunicated by the Space Pope; it’s basically Space Jesus telling you that you’re not getting saved because you, personally, don’t deserve it.
Yeah, I tend to go “Stakar wasn’t born Stakar Ogord, you pick up the name Ogord when you assume the Admiralcy” because I tend to default to assuming that Stakar himself is not actually a god of the Ravagers himself. (Although whether that’s a safe assumption with Thor and Loki and Ego and Frigga wandering around… well, that’s a separate topic.)
The idea that he and Yondu and the rest of the original Ravager crew were young(ish) together and used to be a single crew tends to suggest that, for me. If the Ravagers have been existing as a unit long enough to have developed a basic culture and a dedicated religion, but the founder/demigod/god of that religion has been around this whole time, I’d expect his non-god crew to act a lot less informal and a lot more wary of him. I also wouldn’t expect him to, for example, be rolling around with a personal crew that does not appear to be eldritch or divine in any way, apparently “stealin’ some shit” at least occasionally.
(That doesn’t mean Ravagers are born into Ravaging, either; I tend to think of Ravager religion as being a bit more like Roman state religions or subcultures with their own specific god or gods that co-exist with other religions, even within the Ravagers. That’s a pretty common way to run things in polytheistic cultures.)
Also, to be honest, having an entire religion spring up around one’s band of marauders in that way takes a hell of a long time, and I tend to imagine that Stakar didn’t exactly found all that infrastructure and culture and history all on his own. Y’know? I tend to take very little from Stakar’s comic backstory, because tbh it makes very, very little sense even internally as far as I can tell, and when you add it to the concept of Ravagers as we see them in the MCU it loses whatever coherency it might have had. So it’s easy for me to handwave it as “if you become Space Pope, you lose all clan ties you might have had and all formal family connections, and the religion becomes your surname,” because hey, why not?
(Also, y’know, I’m ex-Catholic–the point of priests not having kids was supposed to be to keep them as free of those nepotistic ties as possible, giving up those clan affiliations in an effort to create a priesthood that could function as a truly neutral arbiter. It didn’t work all that well, but that’s the idea. There have also been groups that have used name changes in a similar way historically, and that’s the reasoning in my head for the name thing.)
But yeah, basically, that’s one hell of a statement to make coming from someone who has apparently actually excommunicated you over your actions. And especially someone who is angrily reiterating that your death is going to be alone and exiled, in all eternity, while actually having the theological power to at least theoretically do it.
It’s definitely interesting to speculate on, since we know so little about it in canon. I kinda slide back and forth on my own headcanon for him. My original assumption was that Stakar founded the Ravagers – that the original Ravagers were just Stakar and his friends, and it expanded and snowballed and they all got their own ships and then they recruited new captains and suddenly he’s the head of an empire. I mean, we don’t know how long-lived these guys are; it could be that all of the ones we’ve seen from the original group (Stakar, Yondu, etc) are from people with lifespans several hundred years long. I definitely agree that using the comics backstory for these people doesn’t quite work – while I can see why people do it, due to having so little canon to go on, the MCU characters are SO different that it doesn’t usually work for me. But because we know so little about them, there’s also nothing to say that the Ravagers might not have been founded by Stakar and his friends a couple hundred years ago. (Probably not more than that; I don’t think Yondu’s that much older than the actor who plays him. But he could have at least a few decades on him.)
I also don’t actually think it’s far-fetched that someone could found an entire religion complete with its own mythology and symbolism in one (long) generation, especially if it was based on a substrate of something that was there before, e.g. look at Scientology or the Mormons or any number of cults. Like, I could see Stakar taking whatever religion he grew up with and putting his own spin on it and basically ending up as the head of his own semi-accidental cult as a way of gluing all these different people together.
That being said … my headcanon on this is super flexible. I think it’s plausible (or at least, not impossible) that Stakar is the original Ravager. But I think everything you suggest is at least equally plausible – either that he’s part of a dynasty, or that he was a scrappy Ravager kid who came up through the ranks and ended up as the latest Ogord in a long line of them. idk. I can go pretty much any direction on that. (Basically all that you said above makes a lot of sense to me; it’s just that I can just as happily go with my original interpretation as well.)
Whatever headcanon you go with, though, that doesn’t undermine the emotional impact of that scene, because it’s obviously something they both believe in.
