female awesome meme: [5/5] female antagonists
➳ nebula (guardians of the galaxy)so, after I murder my sister, I will buy a warship with every conceivable instrument of death, I will hunt my father like a dog and I will tear him apart, slowly. piece by piece until he knows some sort of resemblance of the profound and unceasing pain I knew every single day.
watched GOTG2 again tonight (as is probably fairly obvious) and y’know the music that plays when Yondu dies? That’s the same music which plays when Peter and Ego are playing catch, I think. Except in the Ego scene, it’s kinda… soft and stately and seductive, and in Yondu’s scene it’s more raw and sad and triumphant.
James Gunn keeps reiterating that the Awesome Mixes 1 and 2 are Meredith “communicating” with Peter even after his death, and I really love that. I love how in certain moments, Meredith’s song choices frame her as a sort of narrator or Greek Chorus from beyond the grave. And also I keep looking at the actual lyrics of those songs, and…
…so many of them are about men taking advantage of women, or treating them badly. Brandy is obviously the centerpiece here, but loads of the others also sound like men like Ego would nod approvingly along with them-
Fooled Around And Fell In Love perfectly sums up the Meredith/Ego relationship:
I must have been through about a million girls
I’d love ‘em then I’d leave ’em alone
I didn’t care how much they cried, no sir
Their tears left me cold as a stone
But then I fooled around and fell in love
(…and the ‘a million’ is absolutely literal in this case…)
I’m Not In Love sounds almost like what Ego, intent on his planet-destroying mission, must have been thinking after he met Meredith:
I like to see you
But then again
That doesn’t mean you mean that much to me
Wham Bam Shang-a-Lang could almost be Ego justifying leaving Meredith to himself:
But careful now don’t get caught in your dreams
Look out baby this is not what it seems
(No kidding)
Come A Little Bit Closer, that fabulous murdersong, is about a woman who ‘belongs’ to an apparently dangerous man:
In a little café just the other side of the border
She was just sitting there givin’ me looks that made my mouth water
So I started walking her way
She belonged to bad man, José
Escape (The Pina Colada Song) is about a man cheating on his wife (although granted she was cheating on him too)
I was tired of my lady, we’d been together too long
Like a worn out recording of a favorite song
Brandy, well, the whole of GOTG2 deconstructs Brandy, but I like this lyric:
Brandy wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the North of Spain
A locket that bears the name
Of the man that Brandy loves
Because it ties in so well to this bit from The Chain:
And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain
Speaking of The Chain, I know you can’t hear this bit in the actual movie, but it sounds just like Meredith condemning and raging at her ex-lover, the man who killed her:
Running in the shadows
Damn your love, damn your lies
…Of course, when Meredith was making the Awesome Mixes, she didn’t know what Ego really was. She dies thinking he’ll come back for Peter and everything will be fine. But you sort of wonder… maybe somewhere really deep down, she suspected something wasn’t right. Maybe her communications were, of sorts, a warning.
An idea that won’t leave my head: in some far-off uncharted corner of the Marvel world, Emily Lyman cheats on her abusive husband with a strange man who claims to be an alien. Maybe he can help her leave Norman, she thinks, but he doesn’t. Through what seems like no fault of his own, he leaves her alone and pregnant. Luckily, Norman never suspects that the baby isn’t his.
Emily gives birth, names the child Harry and promises she’ll do the best she can for him. But, when Harry is still an infant, she’s stricken down with cancer. She dies in despair, but clinging to a shred of hope that Harry’s real father will reappear one day and take Harry away from Norman. But Ego – for it was Ego – is of course far from the man Emily thought he was. He never loved Emily and won’t love her son.
By the time Yondu comes to pick the eight-year-old Harry up, he already knows in his gut that something’s terribly wrong with Ego’s planet. He looks at Harry, looks at Norman, looks back on his memories of the last couple of kids he delivered, and thinks “fuck this”.
Suddenly, Harry Osborn is a space pirate under Yondu. A couple of years later he gains a brother called Peter. (He likes that name. He had a childhood friend with that name.) What’s going to happen next? What has the universe got in store for him? Harry doesn’t know, but he’s kind of glad about the way things turned out.
Gunn Details Relevance of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’s Music
“Volume 1 and Volume 2 have been Meredith’s song choices, her communication to Peter,” [Gunn] explained. “In Volume 3, the song choices will be Yondu communicating to Peter.”
*drowns in a puddle of tears*
