That image set I reblogged earlier (no, I wasn’t using this heart anyway, it’s fine) made me think about how Yondu really is happy in that final scene – not that he wants to die, but he’s okay with it; he’s content – and the way it bookends his first appearance in GotG2, when he’s surrounded by people having fun and yet, he clearly isn’t happy. He doesn’t have the same kind of relatively straightforward, “I was lonely and now I have people to be with” arc that Peter and most of the others do, because he clearly does enjoy what he’s doing when he first shows up in the movies – he likes being a space pirate! he likes making money! In spite of that little voice telling him he fucked up and blew it, in spite of not really having anyone around him he can trust, he’s still a space pirate at the top of his game, with a ship of his own and a crew that he rules with an iron fist.
But I just can’t help thinking about the contrast between his first and last scenes in GotG2, and how well they bookend his entire arc in the movie. That first scene when he’s theoretically got it all and yet we see him moody and unfulfilled and isolated, lost in his own head – versus that final scene, when he’s lost everything he had at the start and knows he’s about to die, and yet he smiles at Peter and looks really, truly happy for perhaps the first time in the whole movie.
(Peter makes him smile like that at the end of the first movie, too, with the troll doll.)