I think it’s interesting that Rocket felt so isolated about his issues even within the Guardians, when Gamora especially could relate to a lot of the traumas of his backstory – and I guess the central reason for it, and the central divide among them, is having been loved and then lost that love verses having started out totally without assigned value. Gamora and Peter and Drax all understand loss, and have lived to various degrees in a world without the affection and security they once knew, whereas what binds Yondu and Rocket together is having been born without love, and then not knowing what to do with it whenever they receive it. It makes me wonder where Nebula falls, because it seems to me that the movies group her more with the latter two, but we don’t really know if she remembers life before Thanos.
I don’t think she does, for what it’s worth. The way Gamora conceptualizes her world is “there are good people, like the people I was with before Thanos, and there are evil people, like the people I was surrounded by as Thanos made me who and what I am.” (I’m genuinely not sure where Gamora places herself in this, and I suspect that most days neither is she.)
Whereas Nebula’s wistful, fucked up, “I just wanted a sister” outburst tells me that Nebula wasn’t remembering a time before Thanos that was her “real” family, like Gamora clearly does. We never hear Nebula ever claim Thanos is not her father, or make a mistake that blood parents are inherently better than adopted ones (which is exactly the error judgement Gamora makes about Ego and Yondu). The only time we hear Nebula talk about family, she’s talking about clearly believing Gamora should have been her sister, wanting Gamora to be her sister and having thought of her that way and been hurt and tired when it didn’t work out.
I don’t think Nebula had anything good before Thanos, not that she can remember. She certainly doesn’t have one whit of the tendency to carry cherished memories of dead “real” parents and family as opposed to current adoptive versions that both Peter and Gamora absolutely do.
Seconding this, and I can see Nebula feeling way more connected to Yondu and Rocket due to their similar backgrounds here. Also Mantis. She’s got no cherished dead mom to cling to either.
Yeah, the similarities and differences between Nebula and Mantis and their backgrounds are going to be fascinating. I mean, Ego pretended to be affable, though Mantis is clearly terrified of him, and I’m not sure she had fully extricated her sense of how the world worked from his bombast, but he didn’t seem to try to pretend to be her father. She got to observe that behaviour from the sidelines. Thanos – I don’t think he ever tried to represent himself as Good, but he clearly imposed some mockery of family dynamics on the children he had kidnapped and abused. And I think Mantis was there while Ego was killing children, unable to do anything, and that’s gonna be an interesting parallel to Gamora and Nebula actually being forced to kill for Thanos.
The only thing about Nebula not having a family ever is that she seemed to have a sense of ‘sister’ as an ideal, as opposed to the warped concept of Thanos as her ‘Dad’. So maybe she had a life before, perhaps sans parents, where she got to witness and wish for sisterhood, or maybe Gamora looked after her at first, and was her first standard for the idea, before seeming to ruin it. Nebula also craved that love, whereas Yondu and Rocket both desperately long for it and are repelled by it at the same time. I can see her being an orphan or street kid, maybe – a half-way between the two things where life was rough; she had a sort of place but no family, and then she lost even that.
There’s a thing I really love in @sarah531‘s Smile re: Mantis growing up, with Mantis having been raised as Ego’s child when it suited him and as simply a pet or a tool when it didn’t, and I think that’s very in character for both of them. (I honestly headcanon actual!larval!Mantis in part because Ego is so astonishingly self-centred that I genuinely cannot see him caring for a toddler or younger without accidentally killing it from lack of touch or food.) I think Ego probably pretends to be a lot of things, whatever makes him feel the best at any moment, and Mantis has observed enough horrible things over the years to be absolutely terrified of him. She was absolutely there when Ego was killing.
I do think Nebula got some way to observe the concept of sisters growing up, but I have no earthly idea where or how. The age difference between the two is fascinating, also: Gamora acts like the “elder” sibling in the way the two interact (Nebula looks up to Gamora, feels she should have been protected by Gamora instead of feeling the other way around), and yet Nebula is the one who seems to have had less socialization beyond Thanos. I sometimes think that Thanos stole Nebula first, possibly from an earlier age, and then decided that there was an error there and opted to take an older child when he destroyed the Zen Whoberi. Which would have a) had Gamora coming in with memories of her recently-lost family and Nebula already present for Gamora to lump in with the rest of her captors, b) an age difference and probably developmental difference such that a lonely Nebula might have had her own wistful, hopeful expectations of an older sibling, and c) time for Gamora to have spent significant time with her own family before being taken by Thanos without magnifying the age difference between herself and Nebula too much.
ego
Being doing some research for a fanfic and it’s slowly starting to dawn on me how really, spectacularly shitty life must have been for Meredith Quill after she gave birth to Peter. It’s 1980. Here’s a baby, she’s not married, and she can’t produce the father. Can’t give the address or maybe even the last name of the father. The social stigma must’ve been huge. Meredith probably got off better than a lot of people – she was white, seems to have had a fairly supportive family (at least eventually) and maybe even had a bit of wealth, we don’t know – but man, there must have been so many nasty whispers and cruel jibes.
Oh my goodness yes. And the best thing she has to say about his father is that he’s ‘from the stars’.
Ego actually mentions having visited a few times (”I returned to see her three times”), and she’s out and about driving with him the one time we see her healthy and hale. She’s apparently living in a fairly ruralish area, so compound that with the point that “Jason” is an out-of-towner, and therefore in a lot of small town, automatically suspicious.
Peter also says “She told everyone that my father was from the stars, but she had a brain tumor, so everyone thought she was delusional.” At the same time, before Nova Prime checked his health scans over, he had had no idea that his father wasn’t some random Terran. This is actually a pretty interesting statement given that Peter a) knows damn well that aliens exist, having not been back to Earth for a good twenty years at this point, and b) was abducted by said aliens, although he might or might not assume he had been specifically targeted by Yondu (probably not), as well as c) Yondu’s abduction and this
If Meredith has money, I think it’s by leaning significantly on her parents, especially when Peter was small. It’s very clear from Peter’s comment that literally everyone around her thought she was mentally ill for quite a while, particularly if she had been claiming Ego as “from the stars” for some time before her diagnosis.
She and Peter were clearly close, so close, and I have to think that in part that was because he and Meredith literally had no one to socialize with where they lived aside from his extended family. At best, the town probably treated her as a pitiable lunatic fucked over by some out of town asshole; at worst… well, uh, probably the same thing, only without the pity and with some scorn for her bad judgement or loose morality.
All of this. And also, it’s occurred to me… not only did Ego take advantage of Meredith in every way possible… he also ensured she would never be believed if she told anyone. The brain tumour took care of that. He took everything from her – her body, her health, her reputation, her credibility. Abuse on a cosmic scale. Godddddd.
You know, something that I would have really loved to see in Vol. 2 during the fight with Ego – we see Peter’s friends getting fried by whatever Ego had threatened to crush or kill them with, but… what I would have loved to see was that statue of
Meredith crumbling.
That statute
really bothered me a whole damn lot, because after everything we have seen and heard of Ego, after his “collection room” where he shows Peter all the women he has impregnated, it feels like that statue was less of a memorial for a beloved person and more of a trophy for Ego.It crumbling to dust, perhaps a smile on the statue’s lips as it does, would have been a signal to me that just like the rest of Peter’s family, Meredith was “freed” of that the moment Peter took control of the celestial powers.
God I would have *loved* that. That would’ve been perfect.
….This reminded me of one of my biggest hopes for Infinity War, actually, which is that Peter gets to return to his childhood home and see his grandparents and maybe get some photographs of Meredith off them. That way (especially now that the Walkman’s gone) he’ll at least get back an image of her that was actually *her*.
Screencapping GOTG2 it occurred to me, you know how Mantis always stands in the same position whenever Ego is around, her hands always clasped at the front like she’s terrified…
(bear in mind I’m not an expert in body language or anything…) She probably is terrified too, of course, she does the same thing when Ego’s not even there-
but also… she’s lived her whole life with only Ego for company, and both of them know her sleep-inducing powers are transmitted by touch. We the audience know she’s capable of knocking him out if she really tries, if she can touch him for long enough. What’s the odds that, at some point, he demanded of her that she always kept her hands where he could see them?
Wait, Meredith Quill was eighteen in the GOTG2 opening scene? Still a teenager. So she was still a teenager when she became an (unmarried, in the 80s) mother, too, damn. And that means she’d have been, what, 26 when she died?
That makes everything even sadder, and also makes Ego’s interest in her even creepier than it previously was. Eighteen is only just out of childhood. She never stood a chance. Goddamn.
[This bit of the script is from the “Reunion Tour” featurette on the blu-ray, although I suppose you can take it with a pinch of salt, Laura Haddock would’ve been in her thirties while filming the movie after all.]