That’s some sentimental bullshit, old man.
Rocket’s got a point
guardians of the galaxy
That image set I reblogged earlier (no, I wasn’t using this heart anyway, it’s fine) made me think about how Yondu really is happy in that final scene – not that he wants to die, but he’s okay with it; he’s content – and the way it bookends his first appearance in GotG2, when he’s surrounded by people having fun and yet, he clearly isn’t happy. He doesn’t have the same kind of relatively straightforward, “I was lonely and now I have people to be with” arc that Peter and most of the others do, because he clearly does enjoy what he’s doing when he first shows up in the movies – he likes being a space pirate! he likes making money! In spite of that little voice telling him he fucked up and blew it, in spite of not really having anyone around him he can trust, he’s still a space pirate at the top of his game, with a ship of his own and a crew that he rules with an iron fist.
But I just can’t help thinking about the contrast between his first and last scenes in GotG2, and how well they bookend his entire arc in the movie. That first scene when he’s theoretically got it all and yet we see him moody and unfulfilled and isolated, lost in his own head – versus that final scene, when he’s lost everything he had at the start and knows he’s about to die, and yet he smiles at Peter and looks really, truly happy for perhaps the first time in the whole movie.
(Peter makes him smile like that at the end of the first movie, too, with the troll doll.)
So let’s get this straight, at the end of GOTG2 Peter has, in the space of (at most) a few days:
- met his father and put a lot of hope in him only to have him turn out to be evil
- learned his father killed his mother, the person he loved most in the world
- been physically tortured and mind-controlled by his father
- learned he once had thousands upon thousands of half-siblings, all of whom are dead
- seen his father crush his mother’s last gift to him just to spite him
- seen all his friends nearly die
- very possibly seen, via being hooked into Ego’s planet, millions of people across the galaxy being killed via Ego’s Expansion
- almost died (and was accepting of it)
- watched his adopted father, a person he loved despite their strange relationship, die painfully in the void of space to save him
how. is the poor man still walking around
A little Yondu fin theory because I can
When he loses his actual crest fin, the big prototype fin is the first one he has as a replacement. It doesn’t work perfectly and over the years its condition deteriorates. So he starts working on a replacement. It works better but it’s smaller, which he doesn’t really like, but it’s better than a defective fin. He keeps the old one in his drawer and forgets about it.
But when they escape after the mutiny, Rocket is able to not only rewire it and install it, but he actually fixes some of its previous issues and makes it better. The big fin isn’t the same as his natural crest, but it’s as close as he’s going to get. Dying with that fin is a strange but comforting honor. When they burn his body, he still wears it, and it burns with him.
But Rocket, who fixed up the arrow, managed to replicate the fin as well, and that’s what we see Kraglin wearing in the credits scene. I think eventually Krags might ask Rocket to find a way to permanently attach it to him, to honor Yondu.
How much you wanna bet that somewhere someone has already superimposed the Mischievous Raccoon headline over a screenshot of Rocket
GotG2 (and a little GotG1) Onion Headlines: Part 1 / Part 2