Remember back in CA:CW how Bucky reacted with surprise and horror when he realized that the guy under the Spider-Man mask was a kid?
Notice how Peter Quill didn’t react that way in the slightest? Didn’t even flinch from holding a gun on him?
I loved that. Heck, I don’t even know if it was intentional, but even if it wasn’t, it was such a neat little bit of characterization. Because Peter Quill grew up in a world where kids are combatants from the time they’re big enough to physically hold a gun. For him, it wouldn’t seem odd to discover that the person attacking him is only 16 or so. It certainly wouldn’t be a reason to go easy on him. No one went easy on him, after all.
As the soundtrack violins go mournfully OTT and Gamora’s body lies
lifeless in the snow, Thanos displays grief and tears for the first
time. Yep, Gamora’s death wasn’t even about her: it was about Thanos.
Thanos’s triumph, Thanos’s tears, Thanos’s sadness. A classic fridging.
It even involved ice.
My article about my Infinity War anger is up! It comes on the same day the Russos explained some new things about Gamora’s fate. But I still stand by it.
Ugh, all this “lol everyone who died is staying dead!” stuff from the Russo brothers is starting to piss me off. I have nothing against them personally I suppose, but…
In all honesty I’m gearing myself up for Gamora to be really thoroughly dead, not returning ever except in flashbacks etc. Then at least I’ll be less disappointed when GOTG3 rolls around either with her appearing just in flashbacks, or as a movie set post-IW. I am so disillusioned with the MCU right now, it’s unbelievable.
Oh absolutely Peter Quill makes a mistake in this movie by allowing rage to overtake him at the last possible moment, but he doesn’t really make any more mistakes than any other MCU hero made in this movie/the leadup to it. And what happened might well have happened anyway without him making said mistake? So no, he’s not the other villain of the movie, AV Club! Jeez! And also a slight ‘ugh’.
I’ve become very protective of Peter since GOTG2. He’s an abused kid who grew up with nothing, lost so much, and has to live out the rest of his life knowing he was essentially the product of a megalomaniac god’s creepy breeding program. Now he realises that Thanos has sacrificed Gamora in almost the exact same way his father sacrificed his mother? Of course he’s going to react like that! It wasn’t done out of malice, just pure in-the-moment rage for everything that’d been taken from him.
(And yeah, I doubt that the plan would have worked even if Peter hadn’t snapped. Mantis is strong but Thanos is nigh-on indestructible.)
My main issue here is that no one but Peter and Thanos are allowed to be sad about this. Like, I can understand Peter’s actions. What I can’t understand is Drax, who earlier this same movie blew the plan against Thanos because he wanted immediate revenge, not behaving similarly. What I can’t understand is Mantis, who demonstribly doesn’t just read emotions but feels them, not getting even slightly emotional when Thanos is apparently just so dang sad–like, never mind that she’s known Gamora for four years. What I understand least of all is Nebula, who for the first time on screen (thanks to @inbarfink for pointing this out) saw Gamora stand up to Thanos for her, figuring out what happened and then just dryly expositing about it.
And it comes down to this bullshit I already ranted about way back when I finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 6, where only men who can claim some measure of “ownership” over women get to be sad when something bad happens to said women. Women don’t get close friends. They get parents and lovers and maybe folks who pine over them, and that’s it.
Peter’s rage in this movie is bad. But it’s not bad for the reasons everyone says it is.
Ah, see I agree with you to be honest. From a Doylist perspective (weee! I love using that word) everything about Gamora’s death is terrible writing. But from a Watsonian perspective re: Peter, his all-consuming rage makes perfect sense. (It just took terrible writing to get to that perfect sense.)
It suddenly occurred to me how they could have so easily fixed all this. Keep Peter’s meltdown secondary to the other goings-on and give the big moment of destruction to Nebula.
Oh absolutely Peter Quill makes a mistake in this movie by allowing rage to overtake him at the last possible moment, but he doesn’t really make any more mistakes than any other MCU hero made in this movie/the leadup to it. And what happened might well have happened anyway without him making said mistake? So no, he’s not the other villain of the movie, AV Club! Jeez! And also a slight ‘ugh’.
I’ve become very protective of Peter since GOTG2. He’s an abused kid who grew up with nothing, lost so much, and has to live out the rest of his life knowing he was essentially the product of a megalomaniac god’s creepy breeding program. Now he realises that Thanos has sacrificed Gamora in almost the exact same way his father sacrificed his mother? Of course he’s going to react like that! It wasn’t done out of malice, just pure in-the-moment rage for everything that’d been taken from him.
(And yeah, I doubt that the plan would have worked even if Peter hadn’t snapped. Mantis is strong but Thanos is nigh-on indestructible.)
My main issue here is that no one but Peter and Thanos are allowed to be sad about this. Like, I can understand Peter’s actions. What I can’t understand is Drax, who earlier this same movie blew the plan against Thanos because he wanted immediate revenge, not behaving similarly. What I can’t understand is Mantis, who demonstribly doesn’t just read emotions but feels them, not getting even slightly emotional when Thanos is apparently just so dang sad–like, never mind that she’s known Gamora for four years. What I understand least of all is Nebula, who for the first time on screen (thanks to @inbarfink for pointing this out) saw Gamora stand up to Thanos for her, figuring out what happened and then just dryly expositing about it.
And it comes down to this bullshit I already ranted about way back when I finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 6, where only men who can claim some measure of “ownership” over women get to be sad when something bad happens to said women. Women don’t get close friends. They get parents and lovers and maybe folks who pine over them, and that’s it.
Peter’s rage in this movie is bad. But it’s not bad for the reasons everyone says it is.
Ah, see I agree with you to be honest. From a Doylist perspective (weee! I love using that word) everything about Gamora’s death is terrible writing. But from a Watsonian perspective re: Peter, his all-consuming rage makes perfect sense. (It just took terrible writing to get to that perfect sense.)
I do think Peter Quill’s trauma tends to be a bit overlooked in fandom. When you realise how long the list of traumatic things is, and how many of those things are discomfortingly realistic I guess, it kind of… jumps out at you. (trigger warnings: child abuse , child murder and some discussion of rape. spoiler warnings: Infinity War.)
Peter was born to Meredith, a human woman, and in GOTG Vol 2 he learns his father was a god called Ego. Ego not only killed millions of Peter’s half-siblings throughout the past millennia, he also killed Meredith when he realised he’d grown to love her too much. (Remind you of anything?) Peter had to watch his mother die of the cancer neither of them knew Ego had given her.
The circumstances of Peter’s conception are… I think it’d be fair to say they’re the sort of thing that would haunt you. Meredith had a consenting romantic relationship with Ego and got pregnant with Peter, but Ego neglected to tell her what he really was (beyond “a spaceman”), what he planned to do with her planet, or what he planned to do with her child. Especially considering how young Meredith was – in the opening scene of GOTG Vol 2 the script gives her age as 18; she might have been even younger when she first encountered Ego – she was utterly taken advantage of by him. I honestly don’t know if you’d call it rape by deception, but it seems to be not a million miles off. Meredith’s trauma feeds into Peter’s, too. Had something terrible not happened to her, his mother, he wouldn’t exist. It’s a horrible thing to think about.
Peter grew up a bullied kid, being picked on by schoolmates even as his mother was dying in hospital. Watching a parent slowly die of cancer is horrible at any age, and Peter was only eight.
Peter’s too scared to hold his mother’s hand as she dies, something that haunts him well into adulthood.
Immediately after Meredith dies, Peter is thrown into a world of cutthroat pirates and mercenaries. He can’t go home again, can’t see his grandparents again, and has to learn to steal to earn his keep. He grew up in a secure, safe place and now all that security has gone.
Yondu loved Peter, true, but up until the last few minutes of his life he was an awful father. He may have thought that “beating the crap out of [Peter] to teach him to fight” was thoughtful parenting, especially considering his own background, but honestly… it’s abuse.
Peter loved Yondu too, despite this, and then had to watch him freeze to death in the depths of space to save him.
Ego not only killed Peter’s mother and millions of half-siblings that he’ll never know, he tortures Peter as well. At the same time he starts using Peter as “a battery”, he’s killing people all over the galaxy. In addition to whatever pain being used as a battery causes, Peter might have seen or even felt all those people die.
After Ego turns to dust in his hands, Peter closes his eyes and accepts his own death, and would have met it if Yondu hadn’t saved him.
The fact that out of millions of Ego kids, Peter was the only one
who displayed the correct powers and was allowed to survive, that’s got
to lead to some unbelievable survivor’s guilt. He’s essentially the last survivor of a horrible sort-of-eugenics program.
Finally, after all that, Peter embarks on a romantic relationship with Gamora. She dies (or, I fucking hope, ‘dies’) at the hands of her own megalomaniacal god-like father, because he decided he loved her so much that she was a worthy sacrifice. Just like Ego had done with Meredith, after he abused and hurt her and Peter couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop it this time either.
Y’know after Vol 2, there was a brief wave of people saying “God, Peter’s been through so much, it’s amazing he hasn’t completely snapped.” That one scene in Infinity War which people are calling him a villain or a man-child over? That was him snapping.
A morning reblog to observe how many times I used the word ‘horrible’ in here when other words would have sufficed. Bad writing! But not inaccurate.
I do think Peter Quill’s trauma tends to be a bit overlooked in fandom. When you realise how long the list of traumatic things is, and how many of those things are discomfortingly realistic I guess, it kind of… jumps out at you. (trigger warnings: child abuse , child murder and some discussion of rape. spoiler warnings: Infinity War.)
Peter was born to Meredith, a human woman, and in GOTG Vol 2 he learns his father was a god called Ego. Ego not only killed millions of Peter’s half-siblings throughout the past millennia, he also killed Meredith when he realised he’d grown to love her too much. (Remind you of anything?) Peter had to watch his mother die of the cancer neither of them knew Ego had given her.
The circumstances of Peter’s conception are… I think it’d be fair to say they’re the sort of thing that would haunt you. Meredith had a consenting romantic relationship with Ego and got pregnant with Peter, but Ego neglected to tell her what he really was (beyond “a spaceman”), what he planned to do with her planet, or what he planned to do with her child. Especially considering how young Meredith was – in the opening scene of GOTG Vol 2 the script gives her age as 18; she might have been even younger when she first encountered Ego – she was utterly taken advantage of by him. I honestly don’t know if you’d call it rape by deception, but it seems to be not a million miles off. Meredith’s trauma feeds into Peter’s, too. Had something terrible not happened to her, his mother, he wouldn’t exist. It’s a horrible thing to think about.
Peter grew up a bullied kid, being picked on by schoolmates even as his mother was dying in hospital. Watching a parent slowly die of cancer is horrible at any age, and Peter was only eight.
Peter’s too scared to hold his mother’s hand as she dies, something that haunts him well into adulthood.
Immediately after Meredith dies, Peter is thrown into a world of cutthroat pirates and mercenaries. He can’t go home again, can’t see his grandparents again, and has to learn to steal to earn his keep. He grew up in a secure, safe place and now all that security has gone.
Yondu loved Peter, true, but up until the last few minutes of his life he was an awful father. He may have thought that “beating the crap out of [Peter] to teach him to fight” was thoughtful parenting, especially considering his own background, but honestly… it’s abuse.
Peter loved Yondu too, despite this, and then had to watch him freeze to death in the depths of space to save him.
Ego not only killed Peter’s mother and millions of half-siblings that he’ll never know, he tortures Peter as well. At the same time he starts using Peter as “a battery”, he’s killing people all over the galaxy. In addition to whatever pain being used as a battery causes, Peter might have seen or even felt all those people die.
After Ego turns to dust in his hands, Peter closes his eyes and accepts his own death, and would have met it if Yondu hadn’t saved him.
The fact that out of millions of Ego kids, Peter was the only one
who displayed the correct powers and was allowed to survive, that’s got
to lead to some unbelievable survivor’s guilt. He’s essentially the last survivor of a horrible sort-of-eugenics program.
Finally, after all that, Peter embarks on a romantic relationship with Gamora. She dies (or, I fucking hope, ‘dies’) at the hands of her own megalomaniacal god-like father, because he decided he loved her so much that she was a worthy sacrifice. Just like Ego had done with Meredith, after he abused and hurt her and Peter couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop it this time either.
Y’know after Vol 2, there was a brief wave of people saying “God, Peter’s been through so much, it’s amazing he hasn’t completely snapped.” That one scene in Infinity War which people are calling him a villain or a man-child over? That was him snapping.
Oh absolutely Peter Quill makes a mistake in this movie by allowing rage to overtake him at the last possible moment, but he doesn’t really make any more mistakes than any other MCU hero made in this movie/the leadup to it. And what happened might well have happened anyway without him making said mistake? So no, he’s not the other villain of the movie, AV Club! Jeez! And also a slight ‘ugh’.
I’ve become very protective of Peter since GOTG2. He’s an abused kid who grew up with nothing, lost so much, and has to live out the rest of his life knowing he was essentially the product of a megalomaniac god’s creepy breeding program. Now he realises that Thanos has sacrificed Gamora in almost the exact same way his father sacrificed his mother? Of course he’s going to react like that! It wasn’t done out of malice, just pure in-the-moment rage for everything that’d been taken from him.
(And yeah, I doubt that the plan would have worked even if Peter hadn’t snapped. Mantis is strong but Thanos is nigh-on indestructible.)
Oh absolutely Peter Quill makes a mistake in this movie by allowing rage to overtake him at the last possible moment, but he doesn’t really make any more mistakes than any other MCU hero made in this movie/the leadup to it. And what happened might well have happened anyway without him making said mistake? So no, he’s not the other villain of the movie, AV Club! Jeez! And also a slight ‘ugh’.
