I think it’s overlooked sometimes how political Guardians of the Galaxy 2 actually got.
Thor Ragnarok and Black Panther are both about an evil thing, colonization, taking something not yours to take and fashioning it to your own needs. But Guardians 2 forms the first part perhaps of Marvel’s anti-colonization trilogy. Ego is the ultimate colonizer, having no purpose in his life other than taking things and making them into more of himself. To this end he’s become the ultimate eugenicist, too. Every time he creates offspring – potential second versions of him, not even people in his eyes – he tests them and if they’re not what he wants he kills them. He’s a slaver (he owns Mantis in every way that matters) a killer, a manipulator, an absolute monster behind a smiling face.
There’s a running theme in GOTG 2 about the evils of treating people as things.
The Sovereign do this too – they’re gold in colour, but they’re essentially white supremacists. (The slight satire of them also being basically really hardcore video gamers, who sit behind drones and make mass murder into a competition, was not lost on me either.) And Yondu, Rocket, Gamora and Nebula are all where they are because they were treated as things – slaves, experiments, disposables. The movie explores their traumas, and makes it clear that they’re justified in their rages.
GOTG 2 does with Ego what Infinity War somehow didn’t manage to do with Thanos, and completely and utterly kill the monster at the end of its story. Peter is granted by Ego all the power he could possibly want, as well as the promise of the family he’s always craved. But once he discovers that it’s all built on bones, he rejects it utterly, even at what he thinks is the cost of his own life. Ego’s not given an ounce of mercy or sympathy, not even from Peter, his own son.
Essentially GOTG2 follows almost an identical path to Thor: Ragnarok – a god (alright, demigod in Peter’s case) discovers that the powers granted to him came from a place of evil, and rejects them in favour of something better. Those two films and Black Panther form an epic “dismantle oppressive systems, even if they benefit you” triple-bill.
Say, Thanos, I recall you telling your adopted space daughter (who you routinely abused, by the way) that her home planet of Zehoberei was now thriving because you killed half its population – including her birth mother – because ‘balance was restored’.
Do you know what I think about that?
I think it’s nothing more than a
BIG
FAT
LIE!!!
So apparently her planet prospered to the point everyone spontaneously died? Troll-logic yourself out of that one, you insane oversized prune.
Actually in the Gamora comic it’s stated that another race came in and destroyed the rest of her people. Thanos then let her kill the royal family of that race that ordered the death of her people as a birthday present.
“as a birthday present”
Would that race have been able to kill the rest of the Zehoberi people, if they hadn’t been half dead already because of Thanos? Maybe not….
My point exactly. The war against Thanos would have severely weakened Zehoberei’s defense forces even BEFORE Thanos halved them. Add that to the infrastructure loss, societal collapse, and mass panic caused by, oh I don’t know, HAVING HALF OF THEIR POPULATION MURDERED RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES, Zehoberei would never be able to recover even on its own. The second invaders were just a catalyst for their damnation.
just moving along like everyone else 