…. new thing to have feels about: how patient Yondu is with Groot when the little tree keeps fetching the wrong thing from his quarters. Rocket too, of course, but Rocket has a lot of experience by this point with baby-Groot-wrangling. Yondu doesn’t even know him, and their lives are literally on the line here, but he’s still patient with him ‘cause he gets that Groot is just a kid and doesn’t understand what they want him to do.
“Remember, boy. At the end of all this, I get the stone. You cross me, we’ll kill you all.”
A threat? Mmmmmmaybe. But I’m not convinced. Look at Yondu’s face when he says it
That’s not an “I’m gonna kill you.” face in my opinion. That’s an “I’m going to HAVE to kill you, so think of something clever and get away.” face.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Michael Rooker knew exactly how GOTG2 was going to end and was just playing his role appropriately
(I mean….in the first movie, Yondu’s a pretty shallow character on the page. It’s really Rooker who makes him interesting.)
Come away little light, come away to the laughter,
Show yourself so we might live.
Come away little light, come away to the laughter, To the ones appointed to see this through.
We are coming for you.
We are coming for you.
A few more thoughts on Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (yeah, I have a lot of them): while I totally get the rush of “galaxy’s best dad!/Yondu did nothing wrong in his life!” posts and fanart (I do! honestly! Michael Rooker did an amazing job) that’s just… not the story I think the movie is telling, or the story I really want it to be telling. James Gunn is at it too, what with him basically saying “Well, Peter wasn’t a great son either!” in that Q&A he did…
…Yondu was an absolutely abusive parent, yeah? He loved Peter a lot in his own equally-abused way, but he was. Peter even says it, when Yondu demands a prize for basic decency in the first movie “Normal people don’t even think about eating anybody else, let alone that person having to be grateful for it!” He doesn’t know Yondu was never planning to seriously hurt him, he just knows that he pretty much grew up under the constant threat of violence (no matter how ordinary that apparently seems to be for Ravagers.) There were presumably some nice moments every now and again, since Peter does have a clear, maybe rather begrudging affection for him, but yeah, the point: at the beginning of the Guardians films Yondu’s not even deserving of a World’s Okayest Dad mug, let alone a World’s Greatest Dad one.
But that’s why his storyline in GOTG2 is so satisfying, and hits all the tropes I love in a redemption arc, because it’s entirely about Yondu realising just how utterly, utterly he fucked up (with both Peter and the other kids he unwittingly delivered to their deaths) and setting out to try and make up for it, even if that means dying basically unmourned (as Stakar told him) and unloved. When he’s with the others on Ego’s planet, it’s obvious from his words to Rocket that he doesn’t intend to leave it at all, but rather stay and try to regain some remnants of his honour by helping to kill the thing that killed his adopted son’s siblings.
And I love the “[Ego] may have been your father but he wasn’t your daddy” line, I think everyone does, but those would have been terribly disappointing and selfish last words. I don’t think Yondu was talking about himself, it’s just a simple affirmation to make Peter feel better, what matters is the apology he makes afterwards. “I’m sorry I didn’t do none of it right, I was lucky you were my boy.” Not a plea for forgiveness, just a flat-out statement really: Peter deserved better than him. All he can do is die to keep Peter alive and hold his face when he cries and hope that that’s enough.
…..And that’s just, such a much more interesting story than “he was secretly good all along.”
There’s one bit of GOTG2 that I’m pretty sure wasn’t intended to be chilling but it totally is: when Drax and Peter are joking about what Mantis’s antennae are for and she says “I think they are something to do with my empathic abilities” but she thinks that rather than knowing it, because she’s so much Not A Person under Ego she doesn’t even know what her own body does.
I really want to know more about the Ravagers. The movie hinted at so many things, but (understandably) it didn’t really have time to go into them. Is Stakar like, the overseer of all 100 ships? What’re the other points of their pirate code? Why are those particular funeral rites so important? I WANT TO KNOW THE LORE, dammit.
Also, I saw people speculate on another forum that if the Ravagers were going around freeing Kree slaves like Yondu maybe they started off as a band of anti-slavery rebels, and I really like that idea.
