-Martinex slowly shifting his weight as he squares up in front of Yondu in the first gif
-Martinex holding eye contact even as he’s starting to walk away in the last gif
-Yondu trying to hide his face inside his own collar – that is some terrible hurt-child body language and it kills me.
-Tullk wandering around in the bg looking at them
-Yondu has to look up in stages
-the forward sway as Martinex leaves. You can see him open his mouth there, too. I don’t know if he was about to speak or if his face is just going even more slack with misery.
this scene is just Suffering.
Ohhhhh, Yondu trying to hide his face inside his collar suddenly reminded me of his character poster, where he’s almost doing just that:
So I suddenly got the urge to find out why the heck Ego kept calling Meredith his “river lily” and associated the woman so much with it (because I’m hellbent on the fact that he would probably never pay so much attention to someone else’s needs that he would remember her favorite flower – he would probably rather remember his own and associate it with her).
And the one thing I came up with is looking up the meaning of the lily itself, and ho boy, that actually fits quite a bit:
(Several meanings following, I picked those most common apparently)
“…Greek lore associates lily meaning with birth and it is a symbol for motherhood…”
“…As the flowers most often associated with funerals, lilies symbolize that the soul of the departed has received restored innocence after death….”
“…If there’s one flower that’s bursting with symbolism, it’s the lily. Amiability, purity, love, fertility, femininity, unity and transience; it represents all of them….”
That describes literally Meredith’s role in these movies.
For one, we see her as Peter’s mother, the one person he loved the most. That’s her biggest role – and on one side, it’s filled with love (for Peter and from Peter) and on the other side, it has this twisted meaning because Ego literally used her to create an offspring that would carry his light and help him with the expansion. So her biggest title is that of a mother.
And the second one is her dying, moving on, and only her soul (the soul of the departed) is what stays with Peter. We don’t see her after that in the movie, apart from flashbacks. Furthermore, her “innocence” was literally taken away from her by Ego in more than one way (metaphorically if she still was a virgin before meeting him and literally because he made her indirectly a pawn in his world-domination plans).
Her second title is that of a soul whose innocence only was restored after death.
Okay, whatever the real meaning of river lily would have been – I rather like this coincidence already.
What is it about a cute song describing a girl wanting to dance with a guy for a night that goes so well with a jailbreak scene featuring a blue man with a magic arrow killing everyone and a raccoon with guns shooting up the rest?
aha you see I examined this song when I was writing some Meredith meta and I think the answer is:
the girl in the song also wants to break free!
The narrator of the song sees this girl in a cafe and they begin mutually flirting. (”She was just sittin’ there giving me looks that made my mouth water”). But the narrator also knows that the girl “belonged to bad man Jose” and well… the use of the word belonged to in the context of a romantic relationship is rarely gonna be a good one. So this girl dances with/kisses the narrator, and tells him twice “I’m all alone, and the night is so long.” Her relationship with Jose the Bad Man isn’t a fulfilling one, clearly.
“Then the music stopped/When I looked the cafe was empty/Then I heard Jose say/Man, you know you’re in trouble plenty” Jose turns up and is pissed at the narrator for taking “his” girl. He’s also sufficiently scary enough, it seems, to clear out the whole cafe when he’s looking for a fight. The narrator flees, but
as he does he hears the girl repeating the “Come a little bit closer/I’m all alone and the night is so long” verse to Jose. Which could read as her trying to convince him to not go after the narrator and beat him up/kill him.
So it’s sort of a song about someone (the girl) romantically cheating, I guess. But if Jose really is as bad as he comes across, she’s probably not at all happy in her relationship (if he’s violent to other men, is he also violent to her?) and is looking for an out in the form of another man, which she doesn’t get.
And the song sort of forms a thematic link between Yondu, Ego and Meredith! Meredith, of course, is the one who put the song on the Awesome Mix, so it must have been one of her favourite songs. And yet like so many of the songs on the Awesome Mix, it’s a song about a woman who is in some way in the claws of a dangerous, unfaithful, or otherwise objectionable man.
Just like Meredith herself…
All that, and “I’m all alone and the night is so long” perfectly sums up Yondu’s state of mind at that point. His friends are dead, his crew has mutinied, his son is in danger and if he goes to fight Ego he’ll probably die. Luckily, unlike the girl in the song, he may not be quite as alone as he thinks.
DAMN it’s a well chosen song. The whole of the Awesome Mix Vol 2 is just friggin’ amazing.
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 Smilere: 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.
WOULD I yes i would babey!!!!!!!!!!!!!! last time i did this i got people in my askbox telling me i was crazy and wrong so lets hope that doesnt happen again lol, but anyways without further ado:
reasons why phil thinks guardians of the galaxy does a good job deconstructing toxic masculinity:
i mean, okay, first of all, we’re gonna have to define exactly what i mean by toxic masculinity, because that’s a very broad term. technically, if one really wanted to, the story and world of gotg is well-built and well-written enough that one could go in and really pick apart all the different potential nuances latent within it, in the context of exploring themes of toxic masculinity.
i am not going to do that here, because i need to go downstairs and do the dishes soon. what im going to do is 2 things:
1) a disclaimer: i at no point in this post am putting words into james gunn/the creators of the film’s mouths, or assuming that this was their intention. this is my interpretation of the film(s).
2) the toxic masculinity im referring to here is a variety of things, but most notably (a) on a more superficial level, the pushed narrative that men must be aggressive, violent, and “tough” – that to show emotion or sentiment is weakness, and that to be openly emotionally vulnerable makes you ~less of a man~, and (b) on a slightly deeper level, a more glamorized version of toxic masculinity that promotes casual sexism thinly veiled by a suave, smooth-talking persona, an insidious layer of entitlement and arrogance that is deeply entrenched within a cultural idea of being a desirable Man, and a brand of charm, selfishness and self-importance that is historically romanticized in hollywood’s male heroes.
