[wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night] Ego didn’t keep Mantis around because she could make him sleep, at least not entirely, he kept her around because she’d be able to manipulate the emotions of the kids he brought to the planet and make them more compliant…..
gotg2 spoilers
Oh no
The post I just reblogged about Stakar and Yondu’s surrogate father/son relationship echoing Yondu and Peter’s made me realize that Yondu’s “They were the only family I had” to Rocket in the cell in GotG 2 (talking about the Ravagers casting him out) is a possibly intentional echo of Peter’s “He’s the only family I have” about Yondu at the end of the first movie (speaking to Gamora, after he’s just burned all his bridges with the Ravagers as far as he knows). Two space pirates losing their space pirate families, except one was due to his fatal flaw, and the other was because of doing the right thing …
And let’s not even start on Yondu telling Peter “We’re Ravagers! We have a code!” in their first scene in GotG1. After what happened to him, it must have been even more important to him to bring up Peter “properly”, by space pirate standards. Trying to prevent Peter from suffering the same fate, and maybe on some unconscious level, trying to make Stakar proud even after Stakar won’t have anything to do with him anymore. Or at least modeling the kind of mentor relationship he had at one time with Stakar.
Why’s everyone so sad about what happened to Yondu at the end of Guardians vol 2. It says right here in the book of the film that he, his husband Kraglin and the rest of the Ravagers went off into space to have more space pirate adventures.
Is this the junior novelisation by any chance? Man the kids who read it before going to see the movie are gonna get a shock
Rocket: “Why would you want to save the galaxy?”
Peter: “Because I’m one of the idiots who lives in it!”
Rocket: “A space suit and an Aero-Rig, I only have one of each. I…”
Yondu: “I ain’t done nothin right my whole life rat. You need to give me this.”
Peter and Yondu, both right before they are off to do something very selfless, very stupid, and very heroic, are very, very much alike.
(I think you did right with Peter, Yondu. Not perfect, but right.)
! the more I think about this the more I like it, because both are taking something selfish and turning it into something selfless. Peter wants to save the galaxy because he lives in it, because he wants to stay alive, but of course it’s something more than that, it’s a willingness to stand up and do the difficult thing. Yondu wants to save Peter because the this he’s talking about is a shot at redemption, a chance to make up for all his failures, but also because he loves Peter and the thought of outliving him is unbearable.
That’s what they have in common, weaponised selfishness as a force for good…
And the ending always
Comes at last
Endings always
Come too fast
They come too fast
And they pass too slowI love you
And that’s all,
it’s really all I know (*~*)Thanks for teaching me to care about Marvel again James Gunn~
I so dearly love how the Awesome Mix 2 is used in GOTG2 but I know so little about music I can’t really articulate it? s’just like… it takes all these familiar songs and recontextualizes them and makes them sound like the movie’s Greek chorus, not to mention giving Meredith (who made the mix in canon, obviously) more of a place in the story?
Like, the cheerful (but deceptive) sweetness at the beginning of the movie – Brandy wears a braided chain/made of finest silver from the north of Spain – becomes the accusatory shout of I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain! at the end, and it sounds like Meredith condemning her ex-lover from beyond the grave. And then in amongst the gleeful violence of the Come A Little Bit Closer scene you listen to the lyrics and realise it’s a song about a guy who assumes a woman belongs to him, more shades of Ego there –
And other people have brought up how Mr Blue Sky at the beginning seems almost to foreshadow Yondu’s fate (I’ll remember you this way…), and I’m positive that was intentional considering where his story ends up – “I’m sorry I didn’t do none of it right”/Mr Blue, you did it right…
(hey you with the pretty face/welcome to the human race?)
But I think I love most of all how the chorus of The Chain turns into a battle cry during the final battle, all these characters screaming IF YOU DON’T LOVE ME NOW, THEN YOU’LL NEVER LOVE ME AGAIN, and it relates to all of them – Peter and Ego, Gamora and Nebula, Yondu and Peter, Rocket and the whole team. It’s like a sudden WHAM of what the movie’s been about all along: these incredibly broken people trying to prove to each other and (mostly) themselves that they’re worthy of love.
I just really utterly adore this wacky dayglo jukebox musical, I guess.
Pretty sure I already reblogged this once, but @xparrot‘s tags:
#okay one I only wish I could be this inarticulate about music#and two#after listening to ‘the chain’ on repeat for the last 15 minutes#i stg at least 50% of my love for this movie#is because i have always wanted a climactic shounen battle to that song#and just hadn’t realized how much#until there it was
made me think about what a shounen anime feeling this movie has. Among people I know who’ve seen it, the reactions seem to be really mixed – people either loved it or found the stylistic mix of ridiculous humor and ~FEELS~ too hard to get into. But I think there’s definitely a correlation between people who really liked it and are also anime fans; I think anime prepares you to deal with the movie’s blend of utterly OTT ridiculousness and visually gorgeous fight sequences and ~power of friendship~ feelsiness.
(And yes, the paired Chain sequences are def. among my favorite parts of the movie – that whole thing with Ego’s “What could possibly be more important than this?” and Peter thinking about the people he loves and gaining control of the planet’s power is just so well done and the music is so well used and it’s just so EVERYTHING I want from a climactic battle sequence …)
PSA: Yondu Udonta didn’t know he was trafficking children to their deaths when he started that shit. This is confirmed by James Gunn himself.
Honestly, given Yondu’s backstory, I’m hard pressed to think Yondu – for all of his clear faults – would be the kind of character whom would willingly and knowingly sacrifice the lives of children so that they could be used as tools/batteries for a “"higher purpose”“ like Ego’s.
Heck, it’s in the movie itself, a couple of times. In Yondu’s very first scene he yells at Stakar “I told you, I didn’t know what was going on!” and even if you don’t believe him, later you get Ego saying “To ease his conscience, I told him none of the children would be hurt.” (And Ego doesn’t lie. He omits the truth a lot… but I don’t think he ever actually lies.)
I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2 again today and noticed a bunch more things on the rewatch.
- First of all I was expecting to be bored at least some of the time (I mean, I just saw it a little over a week ago), but I never, ever was, not even once. This movie uses every minute so well. (Unlike the first one, where most of the Ronon and Thanos scenes dragged horribly even the first time, and were completely skippable on a rewatch.)
- I love how the end of the movie recontextualizes some of the earlier scenes. For example, Mantis’s misery and fear is so obvious when she first meets the gang, and in most of her scenes afterwards. The first time you watch it, her anxiety is easily read as nervousness around strangers. The second time, though, it’s such a gut-punch to see her standing behind Ego, wringing her hands, and knowing why.
- Drax mistaking Yondu for Peter’s actual father is another of those fantastically recontextualized scenes. The first time, it’s funny, just a tossed-off joke. The second time, though … right in the feels. Because Drax, for the most part, doesn’t get the whole concept of people pretending to be something other than what they are. He watches Yondu and Peter interact with each other and he totally gets the actual relationship in a way even they don’t.
- Speaking of which, there is some really brilliant editing in this movie. This time around, I noticed how it cut from Ego’s “I’m your dad, Peter” right to the first installment of Yondu’s storyline (which also involved interacting with his parental stand-in, Stakar). And none of the significance of this is clear if you don’t know the characters’ emotional context! You basically can only pick it up after having seen the movie once.
- The pacing on all the emotional arcs is so, so good. I didn’t even really notice, the first time around, how strong the Peter-Rocket arc is, from their fighting in the beginning, through Rocket not wanting to leave him on the planet, to their little moment of connection at the end.
- I still can’t get over how this movie has eight major characters (not counting Ego; let’s not count Ego) and every single one of them has a) an emotional arc of their own, b) at least one strong platonic relationship arc with a beginning, middle, and end, and c) at least one scene in which they get to be awesome and do something important. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Even the noncombatants. Even the baby!
- The first time around, I didn’t really notice how brutal Gamora and Nebula’s fight is. @sheronm pointed out how incredibly OTT Gamora picking up the ship cannon is (in a way female characters rarely get to be) but the whole fight is like that: brutal, dirty, vicious, and not sexualized in the slightest. Speaking of which …
- The only shirtless scenes in the whole movie are guys (Peter on the ship, and Yondu at the brothel). The closest the movie comes to a romance arc is Peter and Gamora flirting and dancing. I still adore how Mantis and Drax make it explicitly clear that they aren’t into each other in a sexual/romantic way, and yet the most important relationship either of them has in the movie is with each other, and he’s willing to die to save her in the end. The movie doesn’t completely ignore romantic love (the Peter/Gamora relationship is still important), and it is true that there are a few sexist jokes (like Peter hitting on the Sovereign queen – though he apologizes for it, which is a rare thing). But overwhelmingly, this is a movie that never dismisses its female characters to “love interest” or sexualizes them any more than the male characters are.
- When I saw this movie the first time, I thought the soundtrack and use of music was better in the first movie, but now that I’ve seen them both back to back, I was so, so wrong. They both have great music, they both have some great musical scenes, but I think it’s mostly that the first movie has a faster, more actiony soundtrack, while the second movie has a slower, gentler, more emotional soundtrack that I didn’t fully appreciate at first. But in the first movie, the music is mostly a (well-done!) melodic accompaniment to the action, while in the second movie, the songs are very carefully fit to the scenes in which they occur – whether the important thing is the peppy/awful contrast (“Come a Little Bit Closer” over the murder montage), or the whole point is that the song is so terribly, cheesily on point (“Brandy”), or sometimes because the song fits the emotional tone of the scene in the best fanvid kind of way (“Father & Son”, or the repeated use of “The Chain” for the characters being separated and then coming all back together in Peter’s love-epiphany/Power of Friendship™ moment at the end).
It’s just sooo goooood. I really didn’t expect a bombastic, ridiculous musical comedy in space to genuinely be one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages.
I so dearly love how the Awesome Mix 2 is used in GOTG2 but I know so little about music I can’t really articulate it? s’just like… it takes all these familiar songs and recontextualizes them and makes them sound like the movie’s Greek chorus, not to mention giving Meredith (who made the mix in canon, obviously) more of a place in the story?
Like, the cheerful (but deceptive) sweetness at the beginning of the movie – Brandy wears a braided chain/made of finest silver from the north of Spain – becomes the accusatory shout of I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain! at the end, and it sounds like Meredith condemning her ex-lover from beyond the grave. And then in amongst the gleeful violence of the Come A Little Bit Closer scene you listen to the lyrics and realise it’s a song about a guy who assumes a woman belongs to him, more shades of Ego there –
And other people have brought up how Mr Blue Sky at the beginning seems almost to foreshadow Yondu’s fate (I’ll remember you this way…), and I’m positive that was intentional considering where his story ends up – “I’m sorry I didn’t do none of it right”/Mr Blue, you did it right…
(hey you with the pretty face/welcome to the human race?)
But I think I love most of all how the chorus of The Chain turns into a battle cry during the final battle, all these characters screaming IF YOU DON’T LOVE ME NOW, THEN YOU’LL NEVER LOVE ME AGAIN, and it relates to all of them – Peter and Ego, Gamora and Nebula, Yondu and Peter, Rocket and the whole team. It’s like a sudden WHAM of what the movie’s been about all along: these incredibly broken people trying to prove to each other and (mostly) themselves that they’re worthy of love.
I just really utterly adore this wacky dayglo jukebox musical, I guess.