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.
meredith quill
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.
Being doing some research for a fanfic and it’s slowly starting to dawn on me how really, spectacularly shitty life must have been for Meredith Quill after she gave birth to Peter. It’s 1980. Here’s a baby, she’s not married, and she can’t produce the father. Can’t give the address or maybe even the last name of the father. The social stigma must’ve been huge. Meredith probably got off better than a lot of people – she was white, seems to have had a fairly supportive family (at least eventually) and maybe even had a bit of wealth, we don’t know – but man, there must have been so many nasty whispers and cruel jibes.
Oh my goodness yes. And the best thing she has to say about his father is that he’s ‘from the stars’.
Ego actually mentions having visited a few times (”I returned to see her three times”), and she’s out and about driving with him the one time we see her healthy and hale. She’s apparently living in a fairly ruralish area, so compound that with the point that “Jason” is an out-of-towner, and therefore in a lot of small town, automatically suspicious.
Peter also says “She told everyone that my father was from the stars, but she had a brain tumor, so everyone thought she was delusional.” At the same time, before Nova Prime checked his health scans over, he had had no idea that his father wasn’t some random Terran. This is actually a pretty interesting statement given that Peter a) knows damn well that aliens exist, having not been back to Earth for a good twenty years at this point, and b) was abducted by said aliens, although he might or might not assume he had been specifically targeted by Yondu (probably not), as well as c) Yondu’s abduction and this
If Meredith has money, I think it’s by leaning significantly on her parents, especially when Peter was small. It’s very clear from Peter’s comment that literally everyone around her thought she was mentally ill for quite a while, particularly if she had been claiming Ego as “from the stars” for some time before her diagnosis.
She and Peter were clearly close, so close, and I have to think that in part that was because he and Meredith literally had no one to socialize with where they lived aside from his extended family. At best, the town probably treated her as a pitiable lunatic fucked over by some out of town asshole; at worst… well, uh, probably the same thing, only without the pity and with some scorn for her bad judgement or loose morality.
All of this. And also, it’s occurred to me… not only did Ego take advantage of Meredith in every way possible… he also ensured she would never be believed if she told anyone. The brain tumour took care of that. He took everything from her – her body, her health, her reputation, her credibility. Abuse on a cosmic scale. Godddddd.
I’m conflicted
marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches:
Because on the one hand, if there’s not a scene in Infinity War where Peter finally visits Meredith’s grave, I’ll be upset, but on the other hand, if there is a scene in Infinity War where Peter finally visits Meredith’s grave, I’ll be upset.
Do you see my problem?
marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches:
[insp]
Beautiful.
Because while this quote may work with many pieces of fiction, Meredith as a character is such a central part of this series, even though she isn’t alive through most of it.
thank you! :)
Despite the fact that we never really get to know much about Meredith beyond “she was cool and a good mum and loved music” I really like her as a person. And I love how much Peter’s life revolves around her and how much the narrative screams out at every turn that her death was desperately unfair.
You know, something that I would have really loved to see in Vol. 2 during the fight with Ego – we see Peter’s friends getting fried by whatever Ego had threatened to crush or kill them with, but… what I would have loved to see was that statue of
Meredith crumbling.
That statute
really bothered me a whole damn lot, because after everything we have seen and heard of Ego, after his “collection room” where he shows Peter all the women he has impregnated, it feels like that statue was less of a memorial for a beloved person and more of a trophy for Ego.It crumbling to dust, perhaps a smile on the statue’s lips as it does, would have been a signal to me that just like the rest of Peter’s family, Meredith was “freed” of that the moment Peter took control of the celestial powers.
God I would have *loved* that. That would’ve been perfect.
….This reminded me of one of my biggest hopes for Infinity War, actually, which is that Peter gets to return to his childhood home and see his grandparents and maybe get some photographs of Meredith off them. That way (especially now that the Walkman’s gone) he’ll at least get back an image of her that was actually *her*.