Ego had a lot of damn kids and Peter was the last one, so I have to wonder did Yondu deliver all his kids (which is kind of implied) or did like ego pick some up or hire someone else who may have brought his kids to him in really bad condition or what?
And if you have the head canon Yondu delivered every singe child, I can kind of see where stakar was coming from banishing him. Yondu would have to know pretty soon those kids were dead but he just kept doing it anyway
I just think about this a lot.
I mean did ego pay Yondu so well because the other people he hired kept killing his kids before he could see if they carried his gene? Did he just get tired of doing the dirty work of collecting them?
How many damn kids did Yondu throw under the bus before enough was enough for him and he just adopts one of ego’s brats?
Gunn has said he delivered hundreds at least, though i don’t think even that was all of them. Pretty sure ego said he brought ‘some’ of his children, not all.
I believe him when he says he didn’t know, just because of how it’s framed in the story, but I think he was probably suppressing suspicion for a variety of reasons. I think if he and Ego had a very transactional relationship he might not have expected to see the kids around after delivering, and knowing Ego was a celestial might have made it easier to believe he was surrounding himself with hundreds of children. Gods go by different rules, after all, especially lonely ones.
Stakar had plenty of reason to banish him nonetheless, though. Even if the kids had lived, that’s still hundreds of families with their children stolen from them.
Yeah, I agree with this – Gunn said Yondu delivered hundreds, but I think Ego’s dialogue suggests there were millions (thousands at least) and that this has been going on for a really long time. I don’t think Yondu was his only supplier. I also don’t think Yondu kept delivering them after he knew they were being killed (he basically says as much to Peter, as well as telling Stakar he didn’t know, and I think those are the two people he wouldn’t outright lie to, at least in those particular moments, about that particular topic).
Buuuuut I agree that he probably suspected and rationalized for a long time before he finally did the right thing. Basically, I think Stakar and Yondu are both telling the truth in their confrontation about it:
Yondu: I told you, I didn’t know!
Stakar: You didn’t want to know because it made you rich!I don’t think either of them is being dishonest here. Yondu didn’t know … but he should have, and he knows it, and Stakar knows it.
On the other hand, while Stakar was a) right to banish him, and b) right to call him on his bullshit, I also think Stakar’s assessment of Yondu in that scene isn’t completely accurate (and isn’t supposed to be): Yondu didn’t just rationalize it because of the money, but because of the realization that he’d done something truly horrible and didn’t want to believe it. And that, I think, is what Stakar didn’t actually know until the end of the movie: that Yondu knew it was wrong. I mean, look at how Yondu approaches him on Contraxia – his main argument for wanting back into the Ravagers is economic (”I want a seat at the table”). Stakar never knew that Yondu understood the cost of what he’d done in ethical (not just economic) terms, because Yondu would never admit it.
I’m obviously just basing this on the bits and pieces that we got in the movie (and mostly their argument on Contraxia). But I actually think that if Yondu had just told Stakar that he knew he’d done something morally bankrupt and was trying to do better, he would’ve been forgiven. Maybe not immediately, but eventually.
Instead, Yondu got utterly screwed over, not by Stakar, but by his own emotional damage from the way he grew up. I doubt if the idea even occurred to him that it might make a difference to tell Stakar that he knew what he did was wrong. He certainly doesn’t do it on Contraxia. I think their argument on Contraxia is probably the way the entire thing went down 25 years ago: Yondu tries denial, he tries submitting to Stakar’s authority, but he never, ever tries admitting that he did something wrong and asking if he can make up for it … because, as a slave, there’s no way he would have learned to do that. The only conflict-resolution strategies he knows are the ones a slave would know: fight, submit, or deny.
… and yes, the one thing he can’t do with Stakar is exactly what he does at the end of the movie with Peter: he says he’s sorry and was wrong. It might be the first time in his life he’s ever openly admitted that to anyone, because there’s no reason why he would ever have thought it’d make a difference. And he probably doesn’t think it’ll make a difference with Peter either, which might be why (well, part of why) he can finally do it: he’s not trying to get Peter to forgive him, he just wants Peter to know he’s sorry, because he loves him and doesn’t want to die with that unsaid.
GAH. ;_____;
Incidentally, I know Word of God says hundreds, but I’m not entirely sure if I buy it from a logistical standpoint – dozens, sure, but … hundreds? He’d have to have been delivering kids pretty much as his main activity, as opposed to having that as a sideline for his general space-pirating, which makes more sense to me. The only way it works is if Yondu (and Stakar, et al) are a lot older than they look, and this has been going on for centuries. Of course, with aliens, that’s entirely possible.
Holy frick how did Yondu deliver hundreds? Was he doing it ever since he’d gained freedom from Stakar??? That’s disturbing and kinda far-fetched admittedly.
I agree that they’d have to be older than they seemed, but if their lifespans are so lengthy, the time in which Yondu was enslaved would come across as a little… I don’t know, not less significant but it would be dodgy. It also makes Yondu’s trafficking feel very bloated – if he was literally delivering kids over 10 or 50 years, for instance, and he just stayed in denial for that long?
I always thought Ego had other contacts delivering children for as long as life outside of Ego existed.
Yeah, I find the “hundreds” kind of hard to accept, too – not that he did it, but in terms of his personal timeline. He didn’t necessarily have to do them one at a time (he could’ve scooped up dozens of them on just a few trips). But it still makes it his main activity in a way that doesn’t quite seem to fit with everything else about him.
However, it’s not movie canon, just behind-the-scenes interview stuff, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be accepted as headcanon. ;)
… tbh though, I think that Yondu being (possibly) hundreds of years old doesn’t mean that the first 20 years would’ve been any less damaging or cast less of a shadow over his longer life. His years as a slave pretty much encompassed all the critical periods of his life growing up – that is, all the social-learning time when kids learn how to trust and work with others and so forth – so having it be, say, 1/16th of his life rather than ¼ doesn’t make that much difference to the whole … at least I don’t think so.
He does read somewhat differently as a character if you think of him as being that much older, though – and especially when he picked Peter up, which would’ve made him probably in his 30s if we go off the actor’s age, but about the same age he is now (relatively speaking) if his people are a lot longer-lived than they look. Personally I prefer to headcanon him on the younger end of his possible age range … basically around Rooker’s actual age.
I’m not sure I really buy the ‘hundreds’ bit either. (Sorry, Gunn.)
….uh, unless some alien mothers had massive litters of tiny alien babies I guess, all scooped up in the same spaceship and quickly dropped off by Yondu to Ego? I suppose it’s possible…
