A father's "love": the role of offspring in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

It's been a long time since I've regularly been on this blog, so I'm going to try to get back to that. I'm starting today with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. There will be spoilers for this and future MCU movies, so please read at your own risk.

The problem with fathers

The second installment in the Guardians of the Galaxy series was, if I'm being honest, full of a lot of cliches. Honestly, the whole idea of the Guardians and thier backstories is built on the idea that family is not about blood relations. That theme runs through a lot of the GOTG storylines, when I look back on it all now. For example: Thanos, despite being an adopted father to Gamora and Nebula, is their "legal" parent, I suppose (the quotations are there because he did sort of kidnap them, despite the fact that he raised them and they seemed to remain relatively loyal for most of their lives). However, neither of the girls is happy having him as a father; they are not really comfortable with the things that their father does, and it's certainly not a good family situation--with all of the mutilation and competition, it's basically abusive. This story runs through every film that features Nebula and Gamora, so we've seen it before, and we'll see it again.

Yet, in this sequel, history seems to repeat itself a little bit when Peter's father enters the scene. Ego is also an extremely powerful being in the cosmos, and he, too, has a strained relationship with his offspring. He also expects a lot from them: he plans to find one who has the powers he needs to be able to take over the universe. (See, sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it?) However, unlike Thanos, he conceives the children himself and then abandons their mothers. He wants a child because he wants a world-conquering minion, not a family.

Thus, Ego has a problem with children who aren't capable of giving him what he wants--another thing he shares with Thanos. Thanos expects his daughters to be weapons of destruction, and when Nebula continually proves to be a substandard fighter (according to his standards, anyways), he destroys pieces of her and replaces them with other tech. Ego, on the other hand, can't tolerate a child who doesn't share his powers; as each child failed to meet his expectations, he had them killed and tossed their corpses away unceremoniously.

So what does this pattern imply?

No room for love in universal domination?

Perhaps it means that those who are ambitious and heartless enough to attempt to master the universe just don't have the capacity to care for their own children. After all, both of these father figures have no mercy for children who won't go along with their plans.

Look at how both of these conflicts end:

1. Peter refuses to use his powers to help his father, and instead attempts to stop him before he can become too powerful. When his father realizes that this is the case, he's willing to go to great lengths to destroy not only his son, but everyone else who dared to help him.

2. In Avengers: Infinity War we finally get an end to the conflict between Gamora and her father, but it's not the one we'd like. She always appeared to be the prized child, but he has almost no hesitation in giving up her life for the sake of achieving his grand plan.

But wait! We know for a fact that--no matter how disturbing this thought is--Thanos had to actually love Gamora to be able to make his sacrifice of her life worthwhile.

How is this love?

So what we see in that situation is that there is some kind of love, but it hardly seems like the kind of love anyone would want in their own lives. It's almost as though she is a prized possession, because he clearly loves himself more than her if he is willing to kill her to fulfill his own wishes.

Likewise, Ego admits to Peter that the tumor that took his mother's life was Ego's way of making sure that he never had to live with the pain of being separated from Meredith. WHAT?! How is this love? He cares more about his own pain than all of the pain and suffering he caused her and their child. This is selfishness, not love!

Had I noticed the parallels in these stories sooner, I might have clued into Thanos' plan before he'd put it into action. See, in both cases, we are presented with hugely powerful intergalactic beings who want to conquer the universe, although they both seem to believe that they have good intentions in doing so. They think that the world needs them, needs to be under their control. They see more value in their own power and in their own lives than in the lives of all other life, which is why they are willing to wipe out massive populations in order to achieve their goals. It's no surprise, then, to realize that even their own offspring hold little real value to them, aside from being tools for meeting those ends.

Their character arcs are almost the same, but the one difference is that Gamora was blind to how selfish her father really was because there was a part of her that believed that he truly loved her. Ego's name implied a lot about his character. Whether that helped Peter to see through him at all, I can't say, but I do think that Peter had enough distance and perspective to understand what his father was really like. Gamora, on the other hand, had been cared for and led to believe for most of her life that she meant more to Thanos than anything else. What she didn't see was that he cared more about himself than he did about any of the lives he claimed to be "saving."

A sign of pure villainy

The father-child relationships that play out in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (even indirectly) are used almost as a road sign to point towards the absolute evil embodied by the villains of the franchise. While Yondu takes on the role of the caregiver and protector who is willing to risk his own life, multiple times, for the child (now grown man) he cares about, the two "real" fathers have no qualms over hurting or even killing their own children. It seems that the writers want us to be able to identify these men as the greatest threats (in terms of how much damage they can do, as well as how despicable they are) in the MCU, and so they make them the most selfless and heartless characters imaginable by showing us how easy it is for them to give up those whom they supposedly love most in the world.

It's almost a cheap shortcut to making us hate them. Yet, we must also realize that people who are supposed to love like family should never treat us the way these fathers treat their children. Parents are meant to be like Yondu, ready to give anything and everything for us, always there when we need them, and looking out for our interests above their own. Thus, while the role of the offspring in this movie, in terms of plot, is to highlight the threat that the villains pose, they serve a moral purpose as well by reminding us that we don't need to kill ourselves looking for love in all the wrong places. Instead, we can follow their example by finding "families" of our own--ones that provide us with the love we deserve.