(Spoilers for gotg vol. 2 ahead! Tread carefully!)
I want to talk about something I noticed the second time I watched the movie. Let’s talk about this moment right here.
The breaking of Peter’s mask.
We learned in the first movie when he saves Gamora that Peter’s mask allows him to survive in the vacuum of space. He’d be just fine flying around out there as long as he had a way to propel himself around, such as his jet boot attachments or one of Rocket’s Aero-Rigs.
The first time I saw vol. 2, this moment held no serious significance to me other than Peter losing a piece of what makes him Star-Lord. His mask is iconic, it’s safe to assume that he’s had it for most if not all of his adult life, and I imagine it’s one of a kind as well, or at least hard to find.
The second time around watching vol. 2, everyone watching knows that by the end of the movie, Yondu is dead. Here’s why I want to point out this 3 second moment. If Peter’s mask hadn’t been broken, he could have used it to exit Ego’s atmosphere safely and Yondu could have used the space suit Rocket gave him. Even when the Aero-Rig stopped working, they would have been perfectly safe floating there until Kraglin and the rest of the Guardians could get close enough to pick them up. They both would have made it off the exploding planet alive, if not for this moment right here.
There was literally been no other way for both of them to make it. Rocket only had the one space suit left, and we saw they only had 6 at the start of the movie to begin with. Drax used one when he went out on the cable and blasted the last Sovereign ship before the Milano crashed on Berhert, and once Nebula and the Ravagers captured Rocket and Groot, the Milano is left on Berhert still in pieces. Taking into account the damage to the Milano after it crashed, those last 5 space suits probably were destroyed.
During the fight with Ego, it’s shown that both Rocket and Peter already had an Aero-Rig on. They probably haven’t taken them off since the fight with the Abilisk. Rocket was never relieved of his utility belt during his capture on the Eclector, and we never see him put anything into the pockets, so my guess is that he always kept spare Aero-Rigs and space suits in that pocket in case of emergencies. Better safe than sorry right? He probably always had one or two sets, if not enough for the original 4 guardians and himself. The set that he gave Yondu would have been Peter’s if Yondu hadn’t been there.
On a related note, do you think Rocket stays up at night, lamenting the fact that he hadn’t made more suits and rigs? Cursing himself for the fact that he only grabbed one set of spares. If only he had had 2 sets, instead of just 1. He could have saved both of his friends, instead of handing the last set to Yondu and knowing someone wasn’t going to make it back, and seeing the look on Yondu’s face, and knowing that it wouldn’t be him.
I’d like to think that at some point, Rocket tells Peter about what Yondu said to him before he went after Peter.
“Nah I ain’t done nothin’ right my whole damn life, Rat… Ya need t’gimme this…”
And Peter just nods, because he’ll never forget what Yondu told him either.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t do none of it right. I’m damn lucky you’re my boy.”
Rocket didn’t know Yondu like Peter did, but that didn’t stop him from missing him and wishing that somehow, Yondu could have saved Peter and himself.
Interesting word choices: Yondu, a career thief, chastising Rocket for stealing batteries “you don’t need”.
I don’t think Yondu steals for fun, though. Yondu steals for money. For him, it’s a job. (And for a former child slave, he’s probably very serious about doing the job right, the first time, because of financial security and Consequences and all that endlessly unpackable stuff …)
Rocket, on the other hand, steals purely for the lulz, and Yondu might really be annoyed about that from a professional standpoint. It’s a risk you don’t need to take, for batteries you probably can’t even fence! It’s dumb! He’d smack Peter upside the head for pulling that kind of unprofessional shit (and probably did).
Also, on some level I guess Rocket could be said to be stealing /from/ the team – risking their client satisfaction (and their lives) for something he may or may not have cut them in on – and we know Ravagers don’t do that to each other.
otoh, Yondu certainly aims to steal more than he or his crew could ever practically need – the orb payout, split, say, 200 ways for the crew, would have left them all more than comfortable, and Peter in vol1 is already slinging around more money than the amount Rocket thinks would make him and Groot rich.
Also, Drax becomes complicit in Rocket’s theft as soon as Rocket shows him the stolen batteries. Drax could have intervened or prevented Rocket from keeping the batteries — instead, he just laughs. I guess this ties in with Rocket’s later reply to Yondu “That was mostly Drax” — he’s, at least partly, rationalising that, if Drax didn’t prevent him from stealing, then the theft must be okay…
Yes. Although I think he certainly knows that he could get away with things with Drax that he could never get past Peter or Gamora in a million years.
I think it’s interesting that Rocket felt so isolated about his issues even within the Guardians, when Gamora especially could relate to a lot of the traumas of his backstory – and I guess the central reason for it, and the central divide among them, is having been loved and then lost that love verses having started out totally without assigned value. Gamora and Peter and Drax all understand loss, and have lived to various degrees in a world without the affection and security they once knew, whereas what binds Yondu and Rocket together is having been born without love, and then not knowing what to do with it whenever they receive it. It makes me wonder where Nebula falls, because it seems to me that the movies group her more with the latter two, but we don’t really know if she remembers life before Thanos.
I don’t think she does, for what it’s worth. The way Gamora conceptualizes her world is “there are good people, like the people I was with before Thanos, and there are evil people, like the people I was surrounded by as Thanos made me who and what I am.” (I’m genuinely not sure where Gamora places herself in this, and I suspect that most days neither is she.)
Whereas Nebula’s wistful, fucked up, “I just wanted a sister” outburst tells me that Nebula wasn’t remembering a time before Thanos that was her “real” family, like Gamora clearly does. We never hear Nebula ever claim Thanos is not her father, or make a mistake that blood parents are inherently better than adopted ones (which is exactly the error judgement Gamora makes about Ego and Yondu). The only time we hear Nebula talk about family, she’s talking about clearly believing Gamora should have been her sister, wanting Gamora to be her sister and having thought of her that way and been hurt and tired when it didn’t work out.
I don’t think Nebula had anything good before Thanos, not that she can remember. She certainly doesn’t have one whit of the tendency to carry cherished memories of dead “real” parents and family as opposed to current adoptive versions that both Peter and Gamora absolutely do.
Seconding this, and I can see Nebula feeling way more connected to Yondu and Rocket due to their similar backgrounds here. Also Mantis. She’s got no cherished dead mom to cling to either.
Yeah, the similarities and differences between Nebula and Mantis and their backgrounds are going to be fascinating. I mean, Ego pretended to be affable, though Mantis is clearly terrified of him, and I’m not sure she had fully extricated her sense of how the world worked from his bombast, but he didn’t seem to try to pretend to be her father. She got to observe that behaviour from the sidelines. Thanos – I don’t think he ever tried to represent himself as Good, but he clearly imposed some mockery of family dynamics on the children he had kidnapped and abused. And I think Mantis was there while Ego was killing children, unable to do anything, and that’s gonna be an interesting parallel to Gamora and Nebula actually being forced to kill for Thanos.
The only thing about Nebula not having a family ever is that she seemed to have a sense of ‘sister’ as an ideal, as opposed to the warped concept of Thanos as her ‘Dad’. So maybe she had a life before, perhaps sans parents, where she got to witness and wish for sisterhood, or maybe Gamora looked after her at first, and was her first standard for the idea, before seeming to ruin it. Nebula also craved that love, whereas Yondu and Rocket both desperately long for it and are repelled by it at the same time. I can see her being an orphan or street kid, maybe – a half-way between the two things where life was rough; she had a sort of place but no family, and then she lost even that.
There’s a thing I really love in @sarah531‘s Smilere: Mantis growing up, with Mantis having been raised as Ego’s child when it suited him and as simply a pet or a tool when it didn’t, and I think that’s very in character for both of them. (I honestly headcanon actual!larval!Mantis in part because Ego is so astonishingly self-centred that I genuinely cannot see him caring for a toddler or younger without accidentally killing it from lack of touch or food.) I think Ego probably pretends to be a lot of things, whatever makes him feel the best at any moment, and Mantis has observed enough horrible things over the years to be absolutely terrified of him. She was absolutely there when Ego was killing.
I do think Nebula got some way to observe the concept of sisters growing up, but I have no earthly idea where or how. The age difference between the two is fascinating, also: Gamora acts like the “elder” sibling in the way the two interact (Nebula looks up to Gamora, feels she should have been protected by Gamora instead of feeling the other way around), and yet Nebula is the one who seems to have had less socialization beyond Thanos. I sometimes think that Thanos stole Nebula first, possibly from an earlier age, and then decided that there was an error there and opted to take an older child when he destroyed the Zen Whoberi. Which would have a) had Gamora coming in with memories of her recently-lost family and Nebula already present for Gamora to lump in with the rest of her captors, b) an age difference and probably developmental difference such that a lonely Nebula might have had her own wistful, hopeful expectations of an older sibling, and c) time for Gamora to have spent significant time with her own family before being taken by Thanos without magnifying the age difference between herself and Nebula too much.
I was watching Vol 2 today and a bit that’s always kind of nagged me finally clicked.
When Rocket describes Ego as a little guy and holds up his fingers as about an inch, and then clarifies that he’s sure he would be much larger if he got closer…
This is actually a measured phenomenon. During early development, human brains learn how to interpret the world around them through a variety of different physical and chemical stimuli. Eyesight, for example, is cells in the backs of our eyes being stimulated by different wavelengths, and our brain putting that together to “see” the world based on those stimuli. While growing, creatures learn how sizes relate to distance, they even learn how to expect to see the world around them. Illusions that rely on corners to create the illusion don’t work the same in people who grow up in a culture that uses round houses. Learning how the size of something relates to the distance of that object is one of those things.
There is a case study taught in introduction to sensation and perception psychology classes, where a man studied a remote forest-dwelling tribe. He took a member of that tribe out of the forest and at one point, they came across a large field with a herd of buffalo in the distance, and the researcher pointed them out as an animal that people hunt. The man looked, and then asked why, because they were only the size of ants. Over time, the man was able to learn how distance perception worked.
So I realized.
Rocket had to teach himself size perception as it relates to distance because he spent his formative years in cages and laboratory rooms. He had to fucking teach himself VISUAL PERCEPTION and has to do the manual calculations in his head of how big something is based on how far away he guesses it is, and vice versa, calculating distance based on size.
We get a glimpse into that manual conversion when he’s explaining it out loud. He might not realize how automatic it is for other people, or maybe he just trusts his family to understand, I’m not sure. But it gets thrown back in his face, and the wall goes right back up.
This is too painful, make it stop.
Well, damn.
Man, Rocket is so well done in terms of the cognitive and biomechanical downsides of being–well, a tiny little monster who didn’t ask to be made.
