This James Gunn tweet (from here) has me thinking. Is the sort of abusive behaviour we see from Yondu’s Ravagers common across the whole culture or just from that particular exiled faction?
(ALSO: All other discussion. Have at it.)
My guess would be that the Stakar/Aleta/etc. factions aren’t THAT much better about it. Yondu’s group was probably unusually dysfunctional because he was stuck with the rejects and the ones who were drawn to a life outside Stakar’s slightly-more-ethical organization, but they ARE still space pirates. And it’s very different coming into that life as an adult who already had a rough past and a well-honed ability to defend yourself, and coming in as a young child. I don’t think growing up on any of their ships would result in a healthy, non-abusive upbringing.
(my 2 cents, etc; feel free to disagree)
I mean, even Groot’s current upbringing with the Guardians involves a lot of casual child endangerment, and the og Ravagers have been described bts as even more anti-heroic, so. My thought is that the Captains might individually be pretty good to children, better at emotions, AND their sway over their crew is probably less fragile than Yondu’s, but the crew members in general are probably still pretty chequered characters, and nobody would have much sense of what a ‘normal’ childhood should be like. I do think Peter would have been significantly better off if Yondu had still been part of the fleet, but it wouldn’t have been ideal regardless.
Yeah, that’s what I’m mainly thinking – not maliciousness so much as casual child endangerment + very little idea of what a “normal” childhood is like. With maybe a side order of a) having some genuinely awful people in the crew (while I don’t think Stakar, Aleta, etc.’s crews are quite AS awful as Yondu’s, they’re still pirates) and b) having a lot of people around who aren’t really used to kids and therefore would get impatient, perhaps violently so, with kids doing normal kid things.
… I mean, imagine having an 8-year-old raised by a band of mercenaries on Earth, even. They might try, and even do their best, but most of them would be people who would be inured to violence and probably had pretty shitty childhoods themselves, plus it would be an inherently dangerous place to keep a kid because of what they did for a living.
S’funny you should mention that last point because I ended up basing a lot of my Ravager headcanons on what historical pirates were reportedly like (uh, maybe toned down a bit though). Apparently it wasn’t entirely unusual for pirate captains to keep boys from seized ships and let them tag along as part of the crew. After all, they were… yep… small enough to be good for thieving. But they were paid, and were treated about as well as could be expected, as far as I can tell.
So I wonder if Peter’s childhood was like that, maybe a bit better – he does include Yondu in his fond memories montage, after all, and like people have pointed out in the past he’s not actually afraid of Yondu the way you’d expect –
– but on the other hand, piracy was a nasty hard life filled with nasty hard people, so.
