Self-indulgent Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 headcanon that I will cling to no matter what anyone says:
Black Cat’s girlfriend in Paris is Gwen Stacy.
spoilers
DR STRANGE: And now, the six saddened superheroes of Infinity War in their rendition of “The Cell Block Thanos.”
[Drumbeat]
THOR: Axe-
TONY: Blood-
OKOYE: Splat-
GROOT: I am Groot!
GAMORA: Guardians-
WANDA: Vision-
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He only has himself to blame! And since you’ve been there, and since you’ve seen it, I bet that you wanna do the same!
THOR: You know how people have these little habits that get you down? Like Loki. Loki liked to fake his own death. Seriously? Dude. So we’re escaping the ruins of Asgard, and Thanos kills half our people and I’m really freaking out, and then Loki does the noble thing for once in his life. Not faking! Dying! So I say to Thanos, “I’ll kill you for what you’ve done.” And I get my axe from Nidavellir and I make one warning blow… into his heart.
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He only has himself to blame!
TONY: I met Peter Parker about two years ago and he was a superhero and we hit it off right away. Kid tags along on the spaceship even though I told him not to, pulls some great moves, saves some people. And then I saw him die at Thanos’s hand. “I don’t want to go” he told me. He’s going, my ass! Once the Time Stone business is sorted, I’m gonna beat Thanos into the ground even harder than before. You know, some guys just can’t hold their blood in.
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He took a franchise in its
prime! He got the Gauntlet! He overwrought it! It’ll be murder but not a
crime!OKOYE: Now, I’m standing in Wakanda following the commands of my King, minding my own business, when in storms a hundred aliens in a murderous rage. “You’re all gonna die!” they say. They were crazy. And they kept screaming “You’re all gonna die!” And then they ran into my spear. They ran into my spear ten times.
ALL:
And since you’ve been there, and since you’ve seen it, I bet that you wanna do the same!GROOT: I am Groot? I am Groot. I am Groot I am Groot I am Groot. I am Grooooooot.
THOR: Yeah, but are you all dead permanently?
GROOT: We…are…Groot.
ALL: [slower] He has it coming….
GAMORA: My sister Nebula and I grew up together as Thanos’s daughters. But I ran away and joined the Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s six of us, me, Peter, Drax, Rocket, Groot, Mantis, maybe Nebula’s the seventh, who knows. But I was determined to stop Thanos finding the Infinity Stones, by any means necessary. I go with him to Vormir and I burst out laughing when it turns out he has to kill someone he loves to get the Soul Stone. I was in such a state of shock I completely blacked out, I can’t remember a thing. It wasn’t until later, when I noticed the blood on the ground, I even knew I was dead.
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He’s had it coming all along! That purple dickhead! He soon will be dead! How could you tell us that we were wrong?
WANDA: I loved my Vision more than I can possibly say. He had the Mind Stone in his head. Sensitive. A robot. But Thanos was trying to find him, he was constantly trying to find him and along the way he found the Space, Soul, Reality, Power, and Time stones. In the end I lost my love on the battlefield of Wakanda. I saw him as alive… and Thanos saw him dead!
ALL: We’re feeling glum, glum, glum, glum…
….He has it coming! He has it coming! He took a franchise in its
prime! He got the Gauntlet! He overwrought it! It’ll be murder but not a
crime! He has it coming! He has it coming! He’s had it coming all along! Cos if he used us!? And he abused us?! How could you tell us that we were wrong?![Fade out]
I am so tempted to call a karaoke night so I can perform this you don’t even know, and my head is swollen and my throat is sore and my joints are not moving real good right now and I don’t even care
I don’t sing so good either but I don’t care about that at the best of times
Jesus fuck if not for the fact that all of my musical training is in piano and violin, and not in voice, I would be filming the FUCK out of this. (I think this is literally the first time in my entire life I have actually understood the appeal of filk.)
Awww thanks guys :D
DR STRANGE: And now, the six saddened superheroes of Infinity War in their rendition of “The Cell Block Thanos.”
[Drumbeat]
THOR: Axe-
TONY: Blood-
OKOYE: Splat-
GROOT: I am Groot!
GAMORA: Guardians-
WANDA: Vision-
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He only has himself to blame! And since you’ve been there, and since you’ve seen it, I bet that you wanna do the same!
THOR: You know how people have these little habits that get you down? Like Loki. Loki liked to fake his own death. Seriously? Dude. So we’re escaping the ruins of Asgard, and Thanos kills half our people and I’m really freaking out, and then Loki does the noble thing for once in his life. Not faking! Dying! So I say to Thanos, “I’ll kill you for what you’ve done.” And I get my axe from Nidavellir and I make one warning blow… into his heart.
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He only has himself to blame!
TONY: I met Peter Parker about two years ago and he was a superhero and we hit it off right away. Kid tags along on the spaceship even though I told him not to, pulls some great moves, saves some people. And then I saw him die at Thanos’s hand. “I don’t want to go” he told me. He’s going, my ass! Once the Time Stone business is sorted, I’m gonna beat Thanos into the ground even harder than before. You know, some guys just can’t hold their blood in.
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He took a franchise in its
prime! He got the Gauntlet! He overwrought it! It’ll be murder but not a
crime!
OKOYE: Now, I’m standing in Wakanda following the commands of my King, minding my own business, when in storms a hundred aliens in a murderous rage. “You’re all gonna die!” they say. They were crazy. And they kept screaming “You’re all gonna die!” And then they ran into my spear. They ran into my spear ten times.
ALL:
And since you’ve been there, and since you’ve seen it, I bet that you wanna do the same!
GROOT: I am Groot? I am Groot. I am Groot I am Groot I am Groot. I am Grooooooot.
THOR: Yeah, but are you all dead permanently?
GROOT: We…are…Groot.
ALL: [slower] He has it coming….
GAMORA: My sister Nebula and I grew up together as Thanos’s daughters. But I ran away and joined the Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s six of us, me, Peter, Drax, Rocket, Groot, Mantis, maybe Nebula’s the seventh, who knows. But I was determined to stop Thanos finding the Infinity Stones, by any means necessary. I go with him to Vormir and I burst out laughing when it turns out he has to kill someone he loves to get the Soul Stone. I was in such a state of shock I completely blacked out, I can’t remember a thing. It wasn’t until later, when I noticed the blood on the ground, I even knew I was dead.
ALL: He has it coming! He has it coming! He’s had it coming all along! That purple dickhead! He soon will be dead! How could you tell us that we were wrong?
WANDA: I loved my Vision more than I can possibly say. He had the Mind Stone in his head. Sensitive. A robot. But Thanos was trying to find him, he was constantly trying to find him and along the way he found the Space, Soul, Reality, Power, and Time stones. In the end I lost my love on the battlefield of Wakanda. I saw him as alive… and Thanos saw him dead!
ALL: We’re feeling glum, glum, glum, glum…
….He has it coming! He has it coming! He took a franchise in its
prime! He got the Gauntlet! He overwrought it! It’ll be murder but not a
crime! He has it coming! He has it coming! He’s had it coming all along! Cos if he used us!? And he abused us?! How could you tell us that we were wrong?!
[Fade out]
(more infinity war spoilers)
Oh absolutely Peter Quill makes a mistake in this movie by allowing rage to overtake him at the last possible moment, but he doesn’t really make any more mistakes than any other MCU hero made in this movie/the leadup to it. And what happened might well have happened anyway without him making said mistake? So no, he’s not the other villain of the movie, AV Club! Jeez! And also a slight ‘ugh’.
I’ve become very protective of Peter since GOTG2. He’s an abused kid who grew up with nothing, lost so much, and has to live out the rest of his life knowing he was essentially the product of a megalomaniac god’s creepy breeding program. Now he realises that Thanos has sacrificed Gamora in almost the exact same way his father sacrificed his mother? Of course he’s going to react like that! It wasn’t done out of malice, just pure in-the-moment rage for everything that’d been taken from him.
(And yeah, I doubt that the plan would have worked even if Peter hadn’t snapped. Mantis is strong but Thanos is nigh-on indestructible.)
My main issue here is that no one but Peter and Thanos are allowed to be sad about this. Like, I can understand Peter’s actions. What I can’t understand is Drax, who earlier this same movie blew the plan against Thanos because he wanted immediate revenge, not behaving similarly. What I can’t understand is Mantis, who demonstribly doesn’t just read emotions but feels them, not getting even slightly emotional when Thanos is apparently just so dang sad–like, never mind that she’s known Gamora for four years. What I understand least of all is Nebula, who for the first time on screen (thanks to @inbarfink for pointing this out) saw Gamora stand up to Thanos for her, figuring out what happened and then just dryly expositing about it.
And it comes down to this bullshit I already ranted about way back when I finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 6, where only men who can claim some measure of “ownership” over women get to be sad when something bad happens to said women. Women don’t get close friends. They get parents and lovers and maybe folks who pine over them, and that’s it.
Peter’s rage in this movie is bad. But it’s not bad for the reasons everyone says it is.
Ah, see I agree with you to be honest. From a Doylist perspective (weee! I love using that word) everything about Gamora’s death is terrible writing. But from a Watsonian perspective re: Peter, his all-consuming rage makes perfect sense. (It just took terrible writing to get to that perfect sense.)
I do think Peter Quill’s trauma tends to be a bit overlooked in fandom. When you realise how long the list of traumatic things is, and how many of those things are discomfortingly realistic I guess, it kind of… jumps out at you. (trigger warnings: child abuse , child murder and some discussion of rape. spoiler warnings: Infinity War.)
- Peter was born to Meredith, a human woman, and in GOTG Vol 2 he learns his father was a god called Ego. Ego not only killed millions of Peter’s half-siblings throughout the past millennia, he also killed Meredith when he realised he’d grown to love her too much. (Remind you of anything?) Peter had to watch his mother die of the cancer neither of them knew Ego had given her.
- The circumstances of Peter’s conception are… I think it’d be fair to say they’re the sort of thing that would haunt you. Meredith had a consenting romantic relationship with Ego and got pregnant with Peter, but Ego neglected to tell her what he really was (beyond “a spaceman”), what he planned to do with her planet, or what he planned to do with her child. Especially considering how young Meredith was – in the opening scene of GOTG Vol 2 the script gives her age as 18; she might have been even younger when she first encountered Ego – she was utterly taken advantage of by him. I honestly don’t know if you’d call it rape by deception, but it seems to be not a million miles off. Meredith’s trauma feeds into Peter’s, too. Had something terrible not happened to her, his mother, he wouldn’t exist. It’s a horrible thing to think about.
- Peter grew up a bullied kid, being picked on by schoolmates even as his mother was dying in hospital. Watching a parent slowly die of cancer is horrible at any age, and Peter was only eight.
- Peter’s too scared to hold his mother’s hand as she dies, something that haunts him well into adulthood.
- Immediately after Meredith dies, Peter is thrown into a world of cutthroat pirates and mercenaries. He can’t go home again, can’t see his grandparents again, and has to learn to steal to earn his keep. He grew up in a secure, safe place and now all that security has gone.
- Yondu loved Peter, true, but up until the last few minutes of his life he was an awful father. He may have thought that “beating the crap out of [Peter] to teach him to fight” was thoughtful parenting, especially considering his own background, but honestly… it’s abuse.
- Peter loved Yondu too, despite this, and then had to watch him freeze to death in the depths of space to save him.
- Ego not only killed Peter’s mother and millions of half-siblings that he’ll never know, he tortures Peter as well. At the same time he starts using Peter as “a battery”, he’s killing people all over the galaxy. In addition to whatever pain being used as a battery causes, Peter might have seen or even felt all those people die.
- After Ego turns to dust in his hands, Peter closes his eyes and accepts his own death, and would have met it if Yondu hadn’t saved him.
- The fact that out of millions of Ego kids, Peter was the only one
who displayed the correct powers and was allowed to survive, that’s got
to lead to some unbelievable survivor’s guilt. He’s essentially the last survivor of a horrible sort-of-eugenics program.- Finally, after all that, Peter embarks on a romantic relationship with Gamora. She dies (or, I fucking hope, ‘dies’) at the hands of her own megalomaniacal god-like father, because he decided he loved her so much that she was a worthy sacrifice. Just like Ego had done with Meredith, after he abused and hurt her and Peter couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop it this time either.
Y’know after Vol 2, there was a brief wave of people saying “God, Peter’s been through so much, it’s amazing he hasn’t completely snapped.” That one scene in Infinity War which people are calling him a villain or a man-child over? That was him snapping.
A morning reblog to observe how many times I used the word ‘horrible’ in here when other words would have sufficed. Bad writing! But not inaccurate.
I do think Peter Quill’s trauma tends to be a bit overlooked in fandom. When you realise how long the list of traumatic things is, and how many of those things are discomfortingly realistic I guess, it kind of… jumps out at you. (trigger warnings: child abuse , child murder and some discussion of rape. spoiler warnings: Infinity War.)
- Peter was born to Meredith, a human woman, and in GOTG Vol 2 he learns his father was a god called Ego. Ego not only killed millions of Peter’s half-siblings throughout the past millennia, he also killed Meredith when he realised he’d grown to love her too much. (Remind you of anything?) Peter had to watch his mother die of the cancer neither of them knew Ego had given her.
- The circumstances of Peter’s conception are… I think it’d be fair to say they’re the sort of thing that would haunt you. Meredith had a consenting romantic relationship with Ego and got pregnant with Peter, but Ego neglected to tell her what he really was (beyond “a spaceman”), what he planned to do with her planet, or what he planned to do with her child. Especially considering how young Meredith was – in the opening scene of GOTG Vol 2 the script gives her age as 18; she might have been even younger when she first encountered Ego – she was utterly taken advantage of by him. I honestly don’t know if you’d call it rape by deception, but it seems to be not a million miles off. Meredith’s trauma feeds into Peter’s, too. Had something terrible not happened to her, his mother, he wouldn’t exist. It’s a horrible thing to think about.
- Peter grew up a bullied kid, being picked on by schoolmates even as his mother was dying in hospital. Watching a parent slowly die of cancer is horrible at any age, and Peter was only eight.
- Peter’s too scared to hold his mother’s hand as she dies, something that haunts him well into adulthood.
- Immediately after Meredith dies, Peter is thrown into a world of cutthroat pirates and mercenaries. He can’t go home again, can’t see his grandparents again, and has to learn to steal to earn his keep. He grew up in a secure, safe place and now all that security has gone.
- Yondu loved Peter, true, but up until the last few minutes of his life he was an awful father. He may have thought that “beating the crap out of [Peter] to teach him to fight” was thoughtful parenting, especially considering his own background, but honestly… it’s abuse.
- Peter loved Yondu too, despite this, and then had to watch him freeze to death in the depths of space to save him.
- Ego not only killed Peter’s mother and millions of half-siblings that he’ll never know, he tortures Peter as well. At the same time he starts using Peter as “a battery”, he’s killing people all over the galaxy. In addition to whatever pain being used as a battery causes, Peter might have seen or even felt all those people die.
- After Ego turns to dust in his hands, Peter closes his eyes and accepts his own death, and would have met it if Yondu hadn’t saved him.
-
The fact that out of millions of Ego kids, Peter was the only one
who displayed the correct powers and was allowed to survive, that’s got
to lead to some unbelievable survivor’s guilt. He’s essentially the last survivor of a horrible sort-of-eugenics program. - Finally, after all that, Peter embarks on a romantic relationship with Gamora. She dies (or, I fucking hope, ‘dies’) at the hands of her own megalomaniacal god-like father, because he decided he loved her so much that she was a worthy sacrifice. Just like Ego had done with Meredith, after he abused and hurt her and Peter couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop it this time either.
Y’know after Vol 2, there was a brief wave of people saying “God, Peter’s been through so much, it’s amazing he hasn’t completely snapped.” That one scene in Infinity War which people are calling him a villain or a man-child over? That was him snapping.
(more infinity war spoilers)
Oh absolutely Peter Quill makes a mistake in this movie by allowing rage to overtake him at the last possible moment, but he doesn’t really make any more mistakes than any other MCU hero made in this movie/the leadup to it. And what happened might well have happened anyway without him making said mistake? So no, he’s not the other villain of the movie, AV Club! Jeez! And also a slight ‘ugh’.
I’ve become very protective of Peter since GOTG2. He’s an abused kid who grew up with nothing, lost so much, and has to live out the rest of his life knowing he was essentially the product of a megalomaniac god’s creepy breeding program. Now he realises that Thanos has sacrificed Gamora in almost the exact same way his father sacrificed his mother? Of course he’s going to react like that! It wasn’t done out of malice, just pure in-the-moment rage for everything that’d been taken from him.
(And yeah, I doubt that the plan would have worked even if Peter hadn’t snapped. Mantis is strong but Thanos is nigh-on indestructible.)
