#they are fucking awful and Yondu is a legit Bad Person

[bougiebutchbitch]

YOU GET IT YOU GET IT YOU GET IT YOU GET IT -

Guys, I wanna gush about Yondu and Peter because fuck it. Do you know how long it’s been since Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2? Four years. Do you know what that movie managed to do? It managed to w r e c k me, and I’m still not over it four years after the fact. I’m not into the MCU anymore, but some of the stories an characters have stayed with me and I still revisit them often because of how beautiful they were. 

Tony Stark will always have a big place in my heart. Thor will always give me warm fuzzy feels. But Peter and Yondu? FUCK ME. 

They’re not my favorite characters - or at least, they’re not meant to be. I barely remember the first GotG and I’ve watched it like three times, but it just doesn’t stick. I wasn’t that into the Guardians subplot in Infinity War. But GotG Vol.2….. It’s something special. 

Yondu and Peter have one of the best, most touching, most complex, most interesting relationships of the whole MCU, and that’s what makes it stick out. Tumblr often loves for relationships to be simple. You’ve got the abusers and the victims, and you should cut abusers out of your life forever and be better for it. Past trauma doesn’t justify projecting it onto your family members, hurting a child can never be forgiven, etc, etc.

And Yondu and Peter’s relationship yeets that simplistic worldview out of the viewport, and my heart with it. Yondu is a piece of trash, sure, 100% true. Yondu beat Peter up. Kidnapped him. Scarred him for life. Made him grow up in the worst environment possible and hurt him in the hopes to toughen him up so he’d survive. Yondu hurt Peter horribly because he was perpetrating a cycle of abuse and neglect he didn’t have the tools to break - we’re talking about a man raised and used as a battle slave from infancy to adulthood - and Stakar was too late to balance that out with his mentorship. So Yondu was messed up, and while he learned to love Peter he didn’t have the means to express it meaningfully, and so he messed Peter up.

Yondu wasn’t what Peter needed, Yondu did abuse Peter, and Peter was right to get away from the Ravagers and to find healing and love and family elsewhere. But it wasn’t the end of the story. And in real life too, it doesn’t need to be the end of the story.

Because Yondu is and has always been aware that he was a terrible parent, and a terrible person, and that Peter is in fact better off without him. And Yondu is sorry, and he wants to make things right while also being painfully aware that he doesn’t deserve to. (And he doesn’t. Nobody ‘deserves’ the forgiveness of the people they’ve hurt.) But he still tries to protect Peter. And he still dies for Peter, which is the single greatest act of love. And even more than that - he goofs around with Peter. He makes himself soft for him - the one unforgiveable sin in the eyes of his crew, the thing that provoked a mutiny and almost got him killed. He loves Peter so much that he can’t help trying to do better by him, even when he doesn’t want to. 

And so they throw insults at each other and they bicker relentlessly, but Peter desperately wants Yondu’s approval, and Yondu desperately want Peter to like him. Peter gets childishly defensive about being shit at handling his Celestial powers (”I made a ball.” “A ball?!” “It was all I could think of!”), and Yondu gets stupidly proud to be compared to someone Peter thinks is cool, and Peter beats Ego’s ass because of Yondu’s advice - and his love for his new family and for Yondu. 

They want the other to want them. And they want to make it work.

And so you don’t get to say “Yondu was toxic and awful and didn’t deserve to ever talk to Peter again!!!!!!!!” any more than “he loved his kid so much, best dad ever <3″ They hurt each other and betrayed each other and stole from each other and tried to kill each other - and they still worked to make sense of the pieces. It’s just a giant mess of feelings and wounds and scars and past hurts and forgiveness and it’s so good.