Anyway, obviously I need to adjust the end of UD. Meredith goes to heaven; Yondu goes to Disney World, as is right and fitting.
ORRRRRR Meredith has always wanted to go to Disney World, decides there’s no reason why being dead should be an obstacle to that (now that Ego is out of the way and Peter’s doing fine), and takes Yondu with her because she wants to show him Earth. :D Or maybe just because she’s worried about what sort of trouble an unsupervised poltergeist could get up to on the Quadrant in her absence.
(For the record, “Meredith and Yondu haunt Disneyworld” is a fic I would read in a hot minute.)
I like to imagine them trying the rides and phasing out the back of their seats whenever they go too fast.
Oh gosh, someone please write it!
(I went to Disneyland Paris last month and I’m still on a high.)
Wait, Meredith Quill was eighteen in the GOTG2 opening scene? Still a teenager. So she was still a teenager when she became an (unmarried, in the 80s) mother, too, damn. And that means she’d have been, what, 26 when she died?
That makes everything even sadder, and also makes Ego’s interest in her even creepier than it previously was. Eighteen is only just out of childhood. She never stood a chance. Goddamn.
[This bit of the script is from the “Reunion Tour” featurette on the blu-ray, although I suppose you can take it with a pinch of salt, Laura Haddock would’ve been in her thirties while filming the movie after all.]
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.
