sciatrix | Entries tagged with fandom: gotg

...so here's a little snippet of something I was working on about six months ago, which I think I might like to revisit.

See, you have two characters here with these wildly different approaches to touch: Mantis, who is a touch empath and also a lot more fragile than Nebula, is someone I rather think has been raised to be rather careful and delicate about who she touches and when (and this will be especially true, given that she lives with Gamora who is quietly horrified by the concept of someone knowing your feelings by touching you). By contrast, you have Nebula, who was raised to be a weapon, doesn't seem to have much interaction with touching outside of combat, and has a very, very high pain tolerance coupled to a very intense desire for emotional intimacy and basically no idea how to go about getting it.

( It struck me that this might spark a bit of a conflict. )

…a thing I’m chewing over is how the hell I integrate Meredith onto the Eclector, particularly long-term, without adding her in to play the role of Wendy to the Lost Boys.

I always hated Wendy. She never got to have any fun of her own, and she was always having to do all the scut work: mending and teaching and mentoring and being Pretty–a thing I hated as a child–and doing all the the things that make life a lot better to live, really, except that the Lost Boys never fucking bothered to get off their asses to do them.

And at the same time, in a lot of ways the Meredith I’m writing is a hell of a lot more experienced emotionally and socially than the remaining Ravager crew around her; she’s unwilling to put up with the level of filth around herself that they are. She’s unwilling to put up with the lack of respect that they might be. She’s generally much more clear about her boundaries and better at being aware of emotional undercurrents without having to translate them through a fog of toxic masculinity first.

I can see the lines of Wendy forming. And normally I’d be going “fine, let her be as irresponsible as anyone else then!” It’s not like I have problems writing things like Nebula, Queen of the Emotional Dumpster Fire, or Mantis, Occasional Exploding Doormat.

Except unlike Wendy, Meredith is an actual parent aboard the Eclector with her kid, determined to make sure her kid… gets to be a kid and does kid things. Like his homework. And some of those things she’s doing for Peter are going to appeal heavily to Yondu, who is still new to his command and pretty exasperated with the level of mathematical literacy (for example) on his crew–and Meredith has worksheets! And experience tutoring! And knows formal ways to teach math! That aren’t just intuitive and hard to explain!

If I was Yondu, I’d want that skill on my crew. I’d want the skills of an experienced household runner, someone who knows how to make money stretch; I’d want the skills also of an experienced negotiator, someone who is as good at surviving in a non-combat capacity as he is. Someone taught Peter how to sweet-talk his way through the universe, and I don’t actually think it was Yondu–the man uses flirting to put people off balance, not necessarily to actually charm them, and I’m pretty sure Meredith was more effective than that. I can see him trying to convince her to do that work on his ship, because I can see him noticing that the effects would be good.

And on the gripping hand… well, she’s sure as hell not motivated to parent anyone who isn’t an actual child. And she’s wary of the dynamic she can see herself falling into, where righteously demanding that you don’t leave bottles of fucking piss lying around and basic standards of hygiene suddenly morph into Meredith being responsible for convincing the entire crew to act like goddamn adults.

I suppose I’m trying to lay out the dilemma that hits a lot of women working and living in male-dominated spaces, myself included: how much of the rope do you drop regarding shit like “keeping basic spaces clean,” and how much of the work do you throw a fit over? Where do you draw the line, and how much work do you let yourself do unacknowledged simply because it clearly needs to be done, and no one else is doing it… and everyone is automatically assigning it to you?

Yondu sits up and groans. Last he remembered, Quill and Kraglin and the rest of ‘em had got the vigil done, he remembers that much; and they’d ejected him into the incinerator like was all good and proper, burning his body so it can’t go walking in the night, and then what happened…

…horror seeps into his bones as he remembers. He’d. He’d heard the Horns. Someone had done something, something they oughtn’t, and they musta told Stakar and–

Yondu clutches his head in panic and tries to breathe through his mouth.

He’d brought the whole damn fleet to flash the colors–

Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’d always sort of hoped that death was just endless oblivion, a sleep from which you never woke. Sounded restful.

It’s much worse than he’d imagined, finding out he was wrong. Fuck. He has a vague memory of hearing the Horns, of turning in dreamlike elation to follow, and–

That’s it. There’s no memory there. Which means that all he has to dwell on left is the memory of Stakar’s uncharacteristic and wholly undeserved forgiveness. Yondu clutches at his head, curling into a ball with shame and horror. This? This is when he relents and listens to me?

Over my dead body?

No, look, imagine Yondu and Nebula just…. sitting there and Yondu listening and waiting for Nebula to talk. Nebula’s angry, sure, but she actually doesn’t say much unless she’s actively attacking or has been asked–she’s really different from Rocket that way. But Yondu does, in fact, know how to sit and listen; you can see him doing it to Rocket and you can see him doing it with Groot, all through that movie.

Imagine Yondu and Nebula, sitting and tinkering on cybernetics in a workship in comfortable silence until Nebula opens her mouth and talks, and Yondu just sits and listens, nods occasionally. Maybe asks a question now and again or a comment, but mostly just…. listens to her. Gives her his attention, without her having to kill anyone for it or fight for it. I think that would be huge for Nebula, who is so used to having to fight and fight hard for her very right to exist, let alone get any kind of positive attention from anyone at all.

(I actually headcanon that Nebula initially intended to warn Gamora about what had happened and then got to thinking about how Gamora treated her and how Gamora always had to be the best and goddammit never once do you think about me or love me you just gotta be off being better than everyone else, even now you’ve discovered morality–and, ah, worked herself into a rage as she piloted, since she took a good bit longer than Rocket and co. did. The Nebula in my head is not always great at managing her own emotional triggers once they get away from her.)

I can go either way on Nebula and Rocket's relationships with Yondu, shipping or familial. Like, because fandom is fandom and tends to relate all relationships via shipping, I happily read shipfic of stuff that I don’t necessarily actually prefer to read in a romantic/sexual context as a way of rolling around in an author’s reading of a relationship, and e.g.

ladypolaris's recent Kraglin/Yondu/Rocket fic was kind of fucking amazing in a way that was totally unexpected for me and write-like-an-american has I think successfully sold Kraglin/Yondu/Nebula in the past (although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone write dyadic Yondu/Nebula or Rocket/Yondu). And while I teeeeeeeeend to prefer rolling around in interactions between Kraglin and Nebula as friends, because male/female friendships are my Jam, I’m also totally happy to roll around in Kragula.

At bottom, I figure that romances are about the relationships and dynamics between two characters, and most slashfics fall under the umbrella of romances on at least some level. I’m–flails, sex isn’t actually the most important thing to me in that respect; the important thing is the interplay between the characters and the personalities and the way they regard each other.

ngl also Yondu and Nebula interacting also casts shades on Yondu and Gamora’s interactions that deepen them even further, and I’m here for that for sure; I remember

sholio wistfully requesting Gamora and Yondu talking a while back and I’m totally curious how the two of them relate to each other, especially if their main points of connection are Peter and Nebula. Gamora is different from both Yondu and Nebula in that she appears to have a strong abstract moral compass while also not necessarily being as careful about how she treats people in the specific that she’s associated with.

In some ways to me she’s much more dangerous than Nebula or Yondu because if she decides for intellectualized reasons you need killing–well, that’s it, it’s over and done with; Gamora is ruled by practicality and her own will and beliefs. (At least, as I read her!) Her relationship with Peter is I think really unusual for her in that she’s trusting him and allowing softer sides of herself to come out, and we see a lot of that in Guardians because of course Peter’s always around–but I think Yondu would twig very quickly just how ruthless Gamora can actually be, and I think that adding a positive relationship between Nebula and Yondu might make him even warier of Gamora, not necessarily more attached to her.

Which could also be a really interesting story, because I honestly and truly believe that both Gamora and Peter are good for each other and balance each other out, and I also believe that Gamora is at heart a good person (or, at least, trying to be, which is almost the same thing). She just has some blind spots about the way she’s treating and compartmentalizing people, and she tends to get caught up in her abstract, relatively rigid plans–and Peter is all about being affectionate to everyone (within reason) and reacting on the fly and dancing and enjoying yourself, which is something neither daughter of Thanos has a ton of experience with.

Adapted from a conversation with jdrewz here.

Man, I was just thinking this morning that I wish we had gotten more Yondu and Nebula interaction. Because a) the way he totally forgives her immediately without a beat is just, wow, but also more importantly b)…

Nebula does the same thing that Rocket does re pretending she doesn’t have actual feelings, just pissiness. She’s just more inclined to project physical threat than use emotional weapons and verbal needling than Rocket, I suspect partly because she’s actually even less emotionally intuitive than he is, and partly because her position as Thanos’ daughter and, I suspect, his blunter weapon gave her a lot of reputation along those lines to lean on.

But she spends that entire movie pretending she wants to kill Gamora more than anything, as well as the first one. She couches every request to be released in terms of tactical intelligence, irritation, and disgust at the lack of efficiency, not affection. Yet when you look at her actual actions given the intel she has to work with, literally everything she actually does with the exception of coming after Gamora to win is something that serves to protect the team as much as she can. For example, she has no way of knowing the Ravagers probably weren’t going to kill Rocket, Groot released her very late in the conversation and she almost certainly saw an opportunity to seize control and nabbed it.

When Rocket is almost murdered again by Taserface, Nebula steps in again and makes sure he’s kept alive at least until he can be surrendered for the bounty. There’s no evidence that Nebula has any reason to care about Rocket, so as far as I can tell she’s only looking after him for Gamora’s sake. She is angry about the constant fighting, and she’s the person who angrily says that the Guardians must not care about each other since they bicker so much. Nebula has some strong feelings about friendship and camraderie and protection despite also having, as far as we can tell from canon, basically zero experience having any of her own except in the context of growing up with Gamora.

Who doesn’t appear to believe that Nebula is redeemable in any way, by the way, judging by the way she treats Nebula and her planned place to deposit her in prison–something I read as sentiment on one level, in that she doesn’t want Nebula dead and will go to some lengths to keep that from happening, but on the other hand something that says she doesn’t trust Nebula as a person to be capable of anything but genocide. Gamora has nothing to say to Nebula that isn’t an insult, and yet Nebula continues, doggedly, to do everything in her power to keep Gamora’s team safe while she focuses on that goal of winning.

(You can compare and contrast that with Yondu’s relationship with Stakar, by the way, because that’s also pretty much how Stakar treats Yondu–you did the bad thing, I cast you out because you did, and I don’t believe you are ever trustworthy again–despite Yondu wanting desperately to atone and make things right and, I think, never having been heard out properly to begin with. But that is a rant for another day.)

Bring that over to Yondu. He clearly has very good insight into people who mask their affection and their desire to connect with violence, threats, and attacks; after all, as he says to Rocket, you’re me. He has an extremely good reason to be angry and mistrustful of Nebula, but in fact he sizes her up about as quickly as he sizes up Rocket and the next time he sees her he grins, settles in, and exchanges a quick joke as if they’re old friends.

I firmly believe that if Yondu had lived, at some point he would probably have tried to mentor Nebula in the same way that he tried to mentor Rocket about fixing that, and that he liked Nebula for who and what she was and what she was trying to do. I think he recognized the ways Nebula is trying despite a hell of a shitty childhood, and I think he saw himself in her. And I just–I think that would have been good for all of them. I think there’s something really healing in the idea of Yondu sort of adult-parenting Nebula and Rocket into how emotions actually work and how they can keep themselves safe without unsolicited attacks or threats to test the waters, especially a Yondu who is still learning himself as he goes along, but who has exactly the right kind of experience to tell them what they’re doing and why.

Sevi007 said:

"You know, I’m a really peaceful, pacifistic person and consider myself rather forgiving and patient…

But everyone who reads my tags under every last post that has Ego the living planet in it will probably disagree with all of the above. Um."

I don’t know, at some point peacefulness and pacifism have to have a limit or else you run into other moral questions about inaction and tolerating injustice. If there is no limit past which pacifism is no longer viable, that raises questions about whether the moral desire to remain clean of anger or violence cancels out the sin of allowing evil to proceed unmolested.

And if you look at Ego’s actions actually are, he kind of personifies evil deeds borne of entitlement. Let’s start with raping a woman–because what he did with Meredith, having sex with her for a reason she didn’t have the opportunity to give informed consent to, that is actually rape. He did that a lot–almost certainly many times for each of the skulls on that cairn of bones.

Then let’s talk about the fact that he did this multiple times for the sole purpose of impregnating women, probably not with their informed consent re becoming pregnant at that time. Whatever you think of pregnancy and parenthood, it’s a major life decision and ideally should only be embarked upon with eyes open and a thoughtful choice. Add on that he did that having zero intention of helping to parent or even financially support the resulting offspring that he chose to “put inside” those women. Peter’s mom clearly loved him and didn’t resent him for suddenly making her life a lot more difficult, but that’s…. Not how every woman who unexpectedly has a child in very stressful and precarious situation responds, so he’s also deliberately leaving children in situations that are poorly equipped to look after them.

Then we can talk about how he did all this explicitly planning to abduct these children from their actual parents, the adults looking after them, once the hard work of raising a child was over. He did it but planning to steal the wills and, effectively, life force of any and all of these children at the equivalent of age eight if he could–assuming that of course they had skills useful to him. If they didn’t, he simply killed them. He didn’t bother to return them to whoever might have missed them; easier to murder a child and discard it, absorbing it into your cavernous body.

And then we return to the reason he did all of it in the first place, his Glorious Purpose: replacing all life with extensions of himself like a kind of pan-universal cancer. It’s no wonder he killed Meredith with a brain cancer, because Ego is himself as much a form of cancer as anything else. There are in fact independent cancers in nature that spread from affected individual to individual, in at least three species I know of: and at least one of them, that lives mostly in feral dogs, is at least a thousand years old. Ego is simply the same thing on a larger scale, except worse: Ego is sapient. Ego had a choice about who he was and what he intended to become, and he chose that.

If Ego does not break the line at which one can no longer tolerate peace or pacifism and must act to stand against him, those words are meaningless. He is never shown or even implied to take the personhood or consequences to anyone else into his account when he considers any potential action.

Ego is a fundamentally irredeemable character. He makes an excellent villain, but the sheer scale of the harm he perpetuates in the service of his ultimate goal of universal genocide makes him nothing more and nothing less than pure, absolute evil. And he’s all the better as a villain because his evil explicitly stems from the same fundamental petty self-centered entitlement as all the little evils we encounter around us, every day.

...this is a weird, weird thought for me.

I blame the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel--found family and xenobiology are already sources of great temptation for me, and then they added abusive family dynamics that sounded just about right and sisters who are trying to cope with a legacy of a shitty, shitty parenting and bad communication caused in part by trying to deal with that, and they gave me Nebula to play with, and I just want to read all of the fic with those sisters dealing with each other.

It doesn't exist, so I guess I might have to write it. And, well, there's a Kragdu discord going that's supportive enough, I guess, and my partner is egging me on the whole time, so maybe I can do that thing. I have not yet found what I really want, which is a Guardians of the Galaxy comm modeled after Star Trek's excellent

where_no_woman. Curses.

That being said, I Don't Write Fiction. I can write, sure, but I've never written fiction seriously--it's scary, and I get intimidated, and I feel like Not A Real Fan, and mostly I just want to bury my head in the sand and hide until all the fiction goes away. Bleh.

And I'm really tired because I'm trying to do all the things at once, which is about usual for me. But. Practice makes perfect, I guess?