Favorite Characters: Peter Quill (Guardians of the Galaxy)

If we’re ranking guardians, Peter is #3 at best, but that’s to be understood.  He’s the protagonist, after all, and in any ragtag-band-of-misfits ensemble, being the protagonist requires at least a degree of Everyman-ness that supporting characters like a machine-gun-toting raccoon and a sentient tree don’t have to deal with.  As such, he’s not the most interesting of the bunch and his character beats are perhaps the most familiar.  That’s okay, though – for what he is, he’s incredibly well-done and rootable (a few Peter-related spoilers.)

As a quippy outlaw in space, Peter is cut from similar cloth as the likes of Han Solo and Mal Reynolds.  He’s a junker who rolls with a fairly unsavory crew from time to time, and he’s not above double-crossing when it suits him.  He’s always out to make a score and his desires can really get in the way of his conscious, but when the chips are really down, he can be counted on to do the right thing.  Like other quippy outlaws in space before him, when he gets it in his mind to help, there’s nothing he won’t do to make it happen, risking his life to a startling degree for the sake of others (one could potentially argue that even taking on Ronan is a bit self-serving, since Ronan can use the orb to destroy the entire galaxy and Peter kind of lives there, but that doesn’t mean he has to be the one to stop Ronan.  I’m definitely putting this in the “score one for character growth” column.)

What sets Peter apart from other characters like him, however, is his background.  While Han and Mal are products of the interplanetary society around them, Peter wasn’t born to this.  He’s from Earth, abducted by aliens as a child (the crew he now occasionally rolls with/double-crosses) and coming of age as the only person he knows who’s like him; I’m assuming that pretty much all the humanoid folks we see are just that, humanoid rather than human.  As such, he still carries around the memories of his home planet.  He turns Footloose into a legendary piece of Earth mythology, because who’s there to tell anyone otherwise, and he clings to the battered old mix tape his mother made for him when he was a kid.  I love the moment when he and the others are arrested in the first film and he gets so angry at a guard for listening to his tape, because he’s so jealously possessive of “Hooked on a Feeling” and the very, very few other things he has to remind him of Earth.  “That song belongs to me!” he yells, an amazingly poignant remark about the franchise’s nostalgia-laden soundtrack.

But unlike, say, John Crichton (in general, more of a fugitive than an outlaw, but he still fits the pattern,) while Peter isn’t from the galaxy in which the movie is set, he hasn’t just arrived there, either.  This isn’t a story about grownup Peter getting abducted and flailing to adjust to the strangeness around him.  It’s one about grownup Peter who’s had years to get his flailing and adjusting out of the way, who guards his small pieces of home but who’s largely assimilated to his new culture.  He interacts with everyone as a person first, not an alien curiosity – as unique as Groot apparently is (he flummoxes the Nova Corps people,) Peter doesn’t make anything unusual of Groot until he starts twigging that “I am Groot” is the extent of the tree’s vocabulary.  He’s comfortable with spaceships and other non-Earth tech, and he has no qualms about hooking up with alien women (though, if there are tentacles involved, he’ll need a good incentive.)  This gives a nice mix of a character, someone who’s lost and at home, rooted in the past and looking to the future.  It speaks to how adaptable he is, and it also shows why he’s the natural choice to be the one to rally his fellow “losers” to help protect the galaxy that’s taken him in.