Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized gotg2 spoilers, guardians of the galaxy, this whole thing! is a Good!, yondu udonta 0 Comments

laylainalaska:

sarah531:

A few more thoughts on Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (yeah, I have a lot of them): while I totally get the rush of “galaxy’s best dad!/Yondu did nothing wrong in his life!” posts and fanart (I do! honestly! Michael Rooker did an amazing job) that’s just… not the story I think the movie is telling, or the story I really want it to be telling. James Gunn is at it too, what with him basically saying “Well, Peter wasn’t a great son either!” in that Q&A he did…

…Yondu was an absolutely abusive parent, yeah? He loved Peter a lot in his own equally-abused way, but he was. Peter even says it, when Yondu demands a prize for basic decency in the first movie “Normal people don’t even think about eating anybody else, let alone that person having to be grateful for it!” He doesn’t know Yondu was never planning to seriously hurt him, he just knows that he pretty much grew up under the constant threat of violence (no matter how ordinary that apparently seems to be for Ravagers.) There were presumably some nice moments every now and again, since Peter does have a clear, maybe rather begrudging affection for him, but yeah, the point: at the beginning of the Guardians films Yondu’s not even deserving of a World’s Okayest Dad mug, let alone a World’s Greatest Dad one.

But that’s why his storyline in GOTG2 is so satisfying, and hits all the tropes I love in a redemption arc, because it’s entirely about Yondu realising just how utterly, utterly he fucked up (with both Peter and the other kids he unwittingly delivered to their deaths) and setting out to try and make up for it, even if that means dying basically unmourned (as Stakar told him) and unloved. When he’s with the others on Ego’s planet, it’s obvious from his words to Rocket that he doesn’t intend to leave it at all, but rather stay and try to regain some remnants of his honour by helping to kill the thing that killed his adopted son’s siblings.

And I love the “[Ego] may have been your father but he wasn’t your daddy” line, I think everyone does, but those would have been terribly disappointing and selfish last words. I don’t think Yondu was talking about himself, it’s just a simple affirmation to make Peter feel better, what matters is the apology he makes afterwards. “I’m sorry I didn’t do none of it right, I was lucky you were my boy.” Not a plea for forgiveness, just a flat-out statement really: Peter deserved better than him. All he can do is die to keep Peter alive and hold his face when he cries and hope that that’s enough.

…..And that’s just, such a much more interesting story than “he was secretly good all along.”

YES, I agree with this (well, except one point of disagreement which I’ll get to shortly). I absolutely adore Yondu, and I will soak up fics and fanart about Yondu and bb!Peter all day, but the guy was a pretty terrible parent. Mainly because he had no idea how to be one, having had a horribly abusive childhood himself, plus not having set out to be one in the slightest; Peter was a completely accidental acquisition, and I doubt if Yondu had the first clue what to do with an 8-year-old on a space pirate ship.

But it must have been especially terrible for a child like Peter, who had lived with Meredith Quill for the first eight years of his life. There’s every reason to think that the first eight years of Peter’s life were incredibly warm, loving, and gentle, and then he was plunged from that into what must have been a living nightmare for him. The way Yondu repeats the “my crew were going to eat you” story verbatim twice in the first movie probably means that Peter grew up hearing this CONSTANTLY. The sheltered, gentle kid who got into a fight over some other kids mistreating an animal would’ve been, at the VERY least, yelled at, ignored, deprived of affection, threatened with death, and forced to steal things for a gang of pirates under what were probably fairly dangerous conditions. Considering what Yondu’s gang is like, and the casual way Yondu cuffs him in the head on the ship for being “sentimental,” there were probably beatings and physical fights mixed in.

Also, while I think Peter clear back in the first movie (and presumably before) loves and respects Yondu, his conscious feelings towards the guy are very mixed leaning towards “fuck you and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.” I mean, he pretty much screws Yondu over for the orb, he describes Yondu picking him up from Earth (not at all inaccurately) as an abduction, and most of his interactions with Yondu in the first movie lean in a decidedly “screw you” sort of direction. It isn’t until near the end of GotG2 that he figures out, consciously at least, that Yondu didn’t keep him around for purely utilitarian reasons.

Now, all of that being said, there obviously was more to it than a nonstop stream of abuse. He’s got good memories of Yondu too (he’s grinning and happy in the flashback where Yondu is teaching him to shoot). The entire crew eventually ended up with the impression that Yondu was soft on him, which obviously means Yondu wasn’t nearly as subtle as he presumably tried to be. And I also feel like Peter’s interactions with Yondu in the first movie, despite the “screw you” vibe, are laced with veiled affection and respect. The troll doll in the orb container is one part middle finger and one part snarky gift (it goes with Yondu’s collection of toys – and he obviously keeps it around – and it must be one of the few things Peter had left from Earth; and Yondu’s affectionate “you sarcastic little shit” grin means that he presumably took it in both spirits it was intended). Peter describes Yondu to Gamora at the end as “the only family I’ve got” (or “the closest thing to family”, I forget exactly how it’s phrased). And like I was saying in that other piece of meta I posted earlier, Peter jumped out of that pod into deep space without a second thought, trusting Yondu to save him, which says an awful lot about how he thinks of the guy on a subconscious level.

Basically, his relationship with Yondu is incredibly complicated, and that’s why I love it so much. I think it matters, on a meta level, that Yondu wasn’t intentionally abusive. He simply treated Peter as he had undoubtedly been treated himself as a child (probably quite a lot better, actually, given all that “Kree slave” implies). He’s also in serious denial about his actual feelings for Peter (he might not really figure it out until the second movie). If he’d deliberately set out to be a dad, I assume he’d have been better at it, or at least would’ve tried to be, but Peter was a complete accident, this orphan kid that he suddenly found himself responsible for. So it took Yondu awhile to even figure out that the kid mattered, that somehow Peter had wormed his way into his heart when he wasn’t looking.

However, while it matters on a meta level that Yondu didn’t mean to be a crappy parent, I think the reasons don’t matter nearly as much to Peter. The damage is real. From Peter’s perspective, Yondu tore him away from a loving family and raised him to be a pirate, where affection was doled out in scraps and liberally punctuated with terror.

It’s pretty obvious in the first movie that Peter is one love-starved person, and Yondu is more than a little responsible for that. And Peter resents him a lot, and that’s an entirely fair reaction.

But at the same time, they were stuck with each other in that way family is. And they were family, and they loved each other. Which goes back to the point that the movie actually comes right out and makes in the text, that family fights and family hurts each other and family might not be friends, but they’re family. Family is there for each other. And you definitely get the sense of that kind of relationship between them in the first film, with Peter’s leap of faith into the void and Yondu not only helping him against the Kree but reacting with affectionate amusement to being screwed out of his reward again. They might not like each other a lot of the time, especially on Peter’s end, but they do love each other, whether they’re willing to admit it or not.

I do disagree with the OP’s statement that Yondu wasn’t talking about himself with the “He may have been your father but he wasn’t your daddy” line. IMHO he was absolutely talking about himself, and there’s nothing selfish about it at all, because he was saying that for Peter, because Peter needed to hear it, needed to have that unspoken family connection between them acknowledged out loud. After what just happened with Ego, Peter needed to hear that the person he grew up with, the person who was the source of all of the affection (however scarce) and mentoring (however rough) that he received from the age of eight onward, the person he looked up to (in however conflicted a way), loved him and accepted him and thought of him as a son.

Yondu wasn’t a perfect parent and in a lot of ways that’s kind of the point. I would say “he did his best” but actually, he kind of didn’t, and he knows that. But he loved Peter, and he literally gave everything he had to make it as right, at the end, as he could. And especially contrasted with Ego … Ego was only interested in what he could get out of Peter. He wanted Peter to be a miniature copy of himself, and when that didn’t work, he just wanted Peter to be a battery. In however many ways, large and small, Yondu might have failed as a parent, at the end he really didn’t care what Peter was, what Peter became – all that mattered was that his kid was in danger and he wanted Peter to live. That’s being a parent. That’s what Peter had with his mom. And eventually, even though it was an incredibly rough road to get there, Peter understands that, in whatever flawed a way, he had it with Yondu too.

I really love that one of the points the movie makes is that you don’t have to be perfect as a parent to have your kids still turn out okay. You can be incredibly flawed and messed up with absolutely no clue what you’re doing, and you can do a whole of things wrong, and still have things turn out all right in the end. And you can have a shitty childhood and get through it and be okay as an adult, and learn to see that your parents were struggling through stuff too. It doesn’t make the bad stuff go away, but you can get to a better place if you (the parent) are willing to take a hard enough look at yourself to figure out where you fucked up and try to make it better. That’s what makes Yondu a hero in the end, that he decided to change and do better. And he did. He didn’t demand or even expect Peter’s love or forgiveness in return. He probably didn’t think he’d get it. He just wanted his kid to be okay and was willing to give his life to make that happen.

… I should also add, a side note, one thing I really love about this fandom is that, even in the sweetest of Peter kidfic, no one ever tries to vilify either Peter – for resenting Yondu as an adult – or Yondu, for the various ways in which he fucked up with Peter. All of the Peter & Yondu dad-son fic that I’ve run across so far, all the way across the spectrum from adorable fluff to painful emotional ambiguity, is fair to both of them, and that’s such a rare thing in fandom that I’m happily wallowing around in it. I really, really appreciate that, however conflicted their relationship in canon, the fandom lavishes a lot of love on both of them. Based on most of my previous fandoms, that is really rare and I love this fandom for it. <33333

^ Some good thoughts.

And it actually got me to remembering, when I caught the first Guardians on DVD, I definitely remember thinking a bit smugly “Well THAT’S inconsistent characterization” when adult Peter is happily mistreating those small lizardy things in the first “Hooked On A Feeling” scene, having just come from the point where eight-year-old Peter tells his mother he got beaten up protecting a frog. But of course, it’s not. It’s the consequence of that sweet little kid going through adolescence being raised by callous space pirates.

And yet….lizard-kicking aside, Peter has senses of right and wrong and justice. Almost all of those things are from Meredith, obviously, and yet… they didn’t go anywhere. Those things have to be nurtured as a kid grows up, so by process of elimination it had to be Yondu who kept Peter’s moral compass somehow just about right, even though it was probably mostly stuff along the lines of “Hey kid. That guy over there is a slave trader, you go and stand guard while I KILL HIM.” That’s I guess fairly remarkable in its own way, considering…..everything about Yondu and his own backstory.

(And I too, love that the fandom loves him without making excuses for his behaviour. The only other time I’ve seen that happen is with Anakin Skywalker.)