Most @ask-a-ravager canon gives these two an age-gap. But for the purposes of this pic, let’s put that aside!Yondu was a child slave: paraded about to prospective owners and generally treated like a tool or a toy.
Kraglin was an urchin on Knowhere, complete with pimples, greasy hair, and the galaxy’s mankiest mullet.
If they were the same age, they might’ve passed once or twice. Maybe they caught each other’s eye for a second – but no more.
FUCK YOU VERY MUCH WHY DO YOU HURT ME THIS WAY
…
I SHALL ADOPT THEM BOTH NOPE NO FURTHER DISCUSSION
It started off as a Sad Pic so I had to give Kraglin a mullet to cheer myself up!
I just love that before Kraglin’s nose and chin managed to grow to prominence and even out his face some, his forehead was so large and round that he looked like a weird adorable balloon zit of a child. (And of course his mullet enhances the effect. Beautiful. Beautiful.)
This sounds terrible but I am 100% serious and HERE for gawky weird baby Krags who has never in his entire life appeared to be in proportion to his whole damn self except maybe once for a week in his teens, during which his entire face was boiling with the absolute worst acne.
I just. He is an adorable. That is all.
I TOO ADORE GIRAFFE COLT KRAGGLES OKAY
He was one of those kids who grew in stages. First his arms, so he looked like a gibbon. Then his legs, so he gained the appearance of a mayfly. His hands and feet followed at a slower pace, as did his head. If only he’d been born on Terra, he could’ve done an excellent Slenderman cosplay.
Yondu meanwhile, would probably be weirdly lean from young. I’m not really sure how muscle gain works for children, but if he had any puppy fat to begin with (I for one am firmly in the chubby-toddler-yondu camp) it was probably stripped pretty fast by the demands of a physical training regimen. If we’re playing with the idea that battle slaves ever got training, that is, rather than just being disposable canon fodder.
…FUN THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
I love this vision of small Kraglin, particularly if I also envision him with his little belly full of organs visible the entire time. Like a daddy long legs of a child–very long limbs and a little rounded head and torso.
If he’d been raised outside of Kree slavery, I like to think that Yondu would naturally have been a chubby kid with muscle under it. But when I went looking for pictures of smol Rooker to see if I could corroborate this, the farthest I got was Rooker cuddling a huge and more than slightly manky opossum. So that was not productive.
Awkward teen Yondu, though… Oh man. Can we say “soul patch”?
(Of course, canon Yondu I totally agree with you on–I’m betting that if they got training and a period of growing with an eye towards not totally crippling them by their twenties as skilled soldiers, they were probably kept.. not hungry, exactly, but not well fed either.)
A note: if you’re going “they got picked up as canon fodder, Yondu got the arrow post escape and/or the Kree didn’t think the arrow capabilities were worth paying for or paying attention to” route, with tiny Yondu subject to hard physical work at a very early age? Like, the kind of hard physical labor that would have him perpetually physically exhausted and worn off his little feet?
Yondu should have the mother of all fucking arthritis from a pretty early age, and in general his body should be basically ruined for whatever he was doing a LOT as a little kid. There’s a reason we moderate the activity demanded out of children, and it’s because if you push babies physically before they’re done growing and the growth plates fuse, you can permanently damage their joints and bones in a way that makes them painful and unusable as adults. This is especially especially true of repetitive movements and stresses, which are helpfully what tends to comprise most work tasks.
This is why it is a bad idea to ride a two year old horse and a worse idea to ride a yearling, no matter how big that yearling is physically. You will wind up with a horse that is permanently lame its whole life if you ride it as a yearling, when if you’d just waited you could have had twenty years of good work out of it. It’s why a Malinois pup I know who was encouraged to do flyball box turns, which involve hitting the box in basically the same motion as a swimmer’s turn at full speed, before a year old… Well, she wound up with elbow dysplasia before she was two and couldn’t be used to do any kind of physical sport without going lame. It’s why I, a child who perpetually carried 20+ pound backpack loads around, have back pain at 27. Weight bearing work, repetitive work, and anything that strains joints is the worst for this.
I would be very surprised indeed if a Yondu whose masters weren’t aiming to keep him up and killing for a significant amount of time at maturity wasn’t a goddamn mess of chronic joint pain from a very early age indeed. Depends how much his life as a worker was worth to his Kree masters, I suspect.
It probably helps a LOT that Yondu’s arrow doesn’t require much physical movement, but this sort of thing can also fuck up a child’s vocal cords–@coffee-mage-sans-caffeine knows more than me about that one.
This shit should also apply to Kraglin for DAMN sure and probably also Nebula and Gamora, who are very likely indeed to have artificial skeletons or artificial joints for precisely this reason.