I’m screencapping GOTG 1 (if you can’t tell from my earlier post) and I noticed – when Yondu shows up after the infinity stone dance-off/near-death experience, he looks completely worried and freaked out and relieved, juuuuust for a second, before the mask goes back up.
From worried-daddy to a-hole-captain in two seconds flat. Yondu got some nice acting skills, I gotta give him that.
(Also, can you imagine? We saw what the vortex looked inside. How terrifying must that have looked from outside, seeing Peter fucking diving for that stone and then getting swallowed up? Most likely screaming – because we hear Peter yell at the beginning before the music and Gamora’s yelling sets in – in pain? Yondu may have fucked up parenting a whole lot, but he has a heart, and he loves Peter, and just how down right freaking out he must have been in those terribly long seconds, I can only imagine.)
OH man I hope he didn’t see the part where Peter’s body just… looks like it’s coming apart and turning to dust. That freaks *me* out and I know it’s just CGI! I can’t imagine a parent seeing that, even when knowing their child is a half-god…
For a while now I’ve harboured A Theory about this scene and it’s this: Yondu wouldn’t have killed Peter, no matter what he said next. (We all figure that, right?)
But he would have killed Gamora. What’s she to him? That would’ve neatly solved a lot of Yondu’s problems right there and then: 1) Be seen to severely punish Peter without actually killing him 2) Satisfy the bloodlust of the other Ravagers and 3) Guarantee the crew a huge payday, since Gamora almost certainly has ‘dead or alive’ bounties on her, therefore establishing himself as an efficient leader even if a slightly soft one. Yondu might’ve even been smart enough to spin it in such a way that Peter would then on be “pardoned” for his betrayal since he ended up bringing them such a payout. Win-win.
Except obviously Peter would’ve hated him forever. But from Yondu’s perspective, at least he would be alive.
Guess I should be glad I was a skinny kid.
Otherwise, you’d have delivered me to this maniac.#actually the thing I love best about this scene#(well besides EVERYTHING)#is that this is when I first realized#that Peter’s not afraid of Yondu AT ALL#which I think is important for what his childhood was like?#Peter’s got a lot of justifiable resentment about it#but he didn’t grow up afraid of Yondu#he backtalks him without even really thinking about it#he doesn’t have the ‘flinch’ reaction that abused children have#(e.g. how Mantis is with Ego is a TEXTBOOK example of it)#Yondu might’ve done a lot wrong#but Peter grew up confident and self-assured#and that doesn’t happen by accident (via laylainalaska)
Seriously: compare his body language around Yondu with Mantis’ around Ego, or Gamora’s around Thanos, for that matter. Peter is frequently irritated and resentful with Yondu, but there is none of the wary watchfulness that both of them display–you get the sense that neither woman would like to turn their back on their ‘parent’, let alone let their guard down.
Whereas Peter rolls his eyes at Yondu, pushes back at him, visibly blows him off. Doesn’t even seem to blink when Yondu is literally threatening to kill him until he comes up with a good reason not to.
Literally the only thing I think I’ve ever seen phase Peter around Yondu is the moment where he pawns the troll doll off on Yondu instead of the Stone, and that’s the moment when he explictly says he believes that Yondu will hate him forever now.
No, seriously: I genuinely believe that Peter and Yondu never communicated between vol 1 and vol 2, and that Peter truly believed he’d severed their relationship forever over that trick and was quietly grieving at the same time as he was trying to process his (justified, again) resentments. You can actually see him grieving at Gamora in the end of vol 1, and she just totally fails to get it; to her, Yondu is clearly taking the role of Thanos in her head.
YES, THIS.
I agree that Yondu and Peter probably didn’t have contact between the two movies. Which makes it all the more tragilarious that Yondu had a tracker on Peter’s ship and could have found him anytime he wanted, but he didn’t because he was trying to let Peter make his own choices and waiting for Peter to come to him … while Peter was (almost certainly) pining for a call from Yondu to let him know that Yondu did not, in fact, hate his guts and plan to kill him on sight. (JUST COMMUNICATE, YOU FREAKIN’ LUNKHEADS.)
Anyway, I love your point about Gamora thinking of Peter’s relationship with Yondu through the lens of her own experiences with Thanos. I’ve occasionally seen meta and fic taking for granted that Gamora’s comment to Peter after Yondu takes the orb is objectively accurate, that she’s an unbiased observer of their relationship, but she’s really, really not. She’s trying to comfort and reassure Peter like she wishes someone had reassured her about Thanos (it doesn’t matter, he’s no kin of yours, you don’t owe him anything) but she misreads the situation completely. Not that her reasons aren’t valid – not only is she drawing on her own experience with Thanos, but the one time she saw Peter and Yondu interact, Yondu was threatening to kill him! But she doesn’t have the whole picture.
Is it the common reading that Gamora was trying to say that Yondu wasn’t Peter’s real family at the end of 1, then? I always took it as her saying that he wasn’t Peter’s only family; that he had the Guardians now even if he’d lost Yondu for good. But all the meta I’ve ever seen on it takes the former approach, so maybe I’ve completely missed the point for years ^^;
It’s really interesting to me that part of the communication gap between Peter and Yondu seems to be that Yondu expects Peter to be able to read between the lines more than he actually does? And it’s not without basis – there are lots of things Peter seems to know instinctively that he doesn’t know consciously. He’s not actually surprised to learn that the ‘eat you’ thing was a joke, he’s just angry about how inappropriate it was. He’s not even surprised to learn that Yondu didn’t keep him for the reasons he said he did; he’s just indignant about being lied to about it in a way which hurt him. He is surprised – awed, even – when Yondu admits to being his dad, but even that isn’t shock – it’s not something which had never occurred to him; it’s something he hadn’t dared to allow himself to hope for. That’s the pattern with them – Peter isn’t afraid of Yondu but he is badly hurt by the way Yondu treats him, whereas Yondu expects him to understand why. It kind of reflects how situational the abuse in that relationship is – I don’t think Yondu would be dad of the year under any circumstances, but if he hadn’t been surrounded by a volatile crew who jumped all over indicators of softness he would have done better, and so I suspect he was inconsistent with bb Peter in a way which was deeply confusing. I don’t think adult Peter ever got far enough away to contextualise that confusion, so it still defined their relationship.
I always took it as her saying that he wasn’t Peter’s only family; that he had the Guardians now even if he’d lost Yondu for good.
I’m on the fence about that!
I originally understood that line like you did: that she was saying he had a new family in addition to the old one. But after running across the alternate interpretation, I went back and rewatched that scene from that perspective, and it does sound more like the other meaning. (Actually to some extent I think it sounds more like she’s talking about Peter’s mom than the Guardians, tbh, because she’s speaking in past tense; you’d think that if she meant his current team she’d have used present tense.) So yeah, I really don’t know. I think there are multiple plausible interpretations of that line, and “you have a new family: us” is not necessarily wrong.
Re: Peter and Yondu – I had to go hunt through my meta tag to find this, because I have THOUGHTS on this, and I remembered writing them down somewhere, and I found it! I think the big issue isn’t exactly Yondu is unfairly expecting Peter to read between the lines, it’s that he doesn’t quite realize that Peter can’t, because Peter is a touchy-feely talker who wants to talk about Feelings, and Yondu really, really isn’t. They’re working from two entirely different models of communication, where Yondu’s way of relating to people is very “show it, don’t talk about it”, and Peter, meanwhile, wants to talk about things, and doesn’t quite realize that if Yondu doesn’t say he cares, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t. Rocket, on the other hand, gets Yondu in a way that Peter never quite did. Look how fast, in the prison cell, Rocket picks up on how Yondu feels about Peter in one conversation (”Small and good for thievin’.” “Uh-huh.”) while Peter couldn’t do it in 25 years.
… I mean, that’s obviously not the only thing going on; Yondu DOES fail his responsibility to a small child who depended on him (and he knows it!) and, as you mentioned above, he can’t admit to how he feels about Peter even if he wanted to, because he’s leading a pack of hardened killers who will jump on any hint of weakness. But I also think he doesn’t quite realize the extent to which Peter (socialized by equally touchy-feely Meredith Quill up to the age of eight) fails to notice what Yondu might have thought were fairly obvious tells that he cares about him.
I mean, Peter worked for years as a grifter; not only is Yondu used to people who don’t come out and say what they mean, he’s not unreasonable to expect Peter to be able to read other people and their motives and their lies, since subterfuge was literally Peter’s job for a considerable period. And Yondu’s too! I think Yondu would actually be able to read Peter better if he were less open. But probably Peter got stuck in that childhood mode with Yondu – and also Peter’s just not as good at being a slick manipulative scoundrel as he thinks he is, alas.
I’m not 100% on whether I think Yondu understood that Peter took the ‘eat you’ joke seriously, but if he didn’t, Peter’s whole rant to him about it in volume one must have been completely, hilariously baffling. Like, they’re right at the edge of everything falling apart, Yondu makes his stupid dad joke to let Peter know they’re still playing the game, and that’s the thing Peter chooses to rant about for five minutes???
AUGH this all so good you guys! Love this depth.
:clutches heart harder:
I’ve had this little snippet of a GOTG fic in my head for ages now, but I don’t know what to do with it. Originally it was gonna be the opening for a missing-moment type fic provisionally almost titled “Wait, What Happened To Yondu Inbetween Him Waving Goodbye To Rocket And Picking Up Peter, Oh God I Bet Ego Was Physically And Mentally Beating The Shit Out Of Him Wasn’t He.” But I don’t know if that will see the light of day for a while. I really hope it does though:
The snow was falling so thick and heavily that it had cast the whole world in a sort of white resin. Contraxia was like that: it was bleak, and it was dangerous.
Two figures, a man and a boy, were making their way upwards through the blizzard. One of them was struggling, but the other one didn’t stop to help him. In fact, he walked faster.
Eventually, they reached their destination. It was a tree, once green and lush and now withered and dying and covered in snow.
“S’the last living tree on Contraxia,” said Yondu, “fer now.”
“So?” said Peter. The long walk in the cold had frozen his body, but it hadn’t killed his spirit.
“Hey! Don’t give me sass, boy. You wanna be a Ravager, you learn our traditions! Y’hear? This’s the only bitta real life left on this planet from before the Kree invaded and enslaved its people and killed the rest. You pay it yer damn respects!”
Peter had no idea how to pay respects to a tree, or what Yondu would even qualify as “respect”. He eventually settled for a slight nod and a slumped position.
“Some of ‘em were my people,” Yondu said. He wasn’t actually paying all that much attention to Peter’s posture. “The ones who said hell no, you ain’t getting our kids, and died or got taken anyway. Thass where parenty affection gets ya, kid. A slave collar.”
Something uncomfortable was making its way into Peter’s brain, and he didn’t want to say it. But ultimately he figured he had nothing to lose. For all he knew he could die of the cold halfway down the mountain.
“That’s me then, right? You gonna slap a collar on me?”
Yondu’s face changed completely. It was like his whole being temporarily just collapsed in on itself.
“You think you a slave, boy?”
When Peter had been a child he had had nightmares about monsters with red eyes watching him from the shadows. It was those fearful things he thought of as Yondu grabbed his shoulders and glared at him.
“Thass what you think?” the man yelled.
What Peter wanted to say was, well you’re clearly not my parent, and there’s precious few other damn options for this relationship. But he didn’t say that. He was nine years old and his mother was dead. “No,” he whispered. “I just – I just wondered.”
“You wonder some fucking stupid things, boy!”
Yondu let go of him and turned his back on the tree. He started walking away.
“All that work you do on the ship? You get paid at the end of the month same’as everyone else,” he said, his voice a snarl. “Hell, I told you that when you came aboard, but I guess you were too busy cryin’ like a whelp to realise.” A pause. “And you free to leave anytime you like. You remember that. Ain’t you lucky?”
A few seconds later he was just a shadow in the snow. A few seconds after that, Peter followed him.
The last living tree on Contraxia lasted a few more years, and then it died and sank into the mountain.
