**Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War if that is still a movie anyone hasn’t seen.**
Avengers: Infinity War understandably elicited some strong reactions from fans of Marvel’s cinematic universe, but one character in particular caught a lot of blame for the heart-wrenching finale, besides Thanos. Shortly after the movie’s debut, fans across the internet began poking fun at Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord/Peter Quill for being the one to officially ruin the plan to stop Thanos, a plan that otherwise seemed to be working.
You remember the moment: Iron Man, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and some of the Guardians of the Galaxy incapacitate Thanos, thanks to Mantis’s abilities. They’re in the process of pulling the Infinity Gauntlet off of his hand, and making the movie a whole heck of a lot shorter, when it’s revealed that Thanos killed Gamora, launching Peter Quill into a very ill-advised game of punch-face that disrupts Mantis’s hold on Thanos. He’s just able to snatch the Infinity Gauntlet back from Spider-Man by his fingertips, further cementing how close our heroes came to success and making it painfully clear what Quill just did.
But not everyone was ready to assign blame. The Russo brothers directing team was quick to come to the character’s defense, and so was Chris Pratt himself. The Russos pointed out that plenty of other characters (Thor, for one) could easily share blame, while Pratt brought up everything the character has been through as an explanation for his “very human” reaction. He also jokingly pointed out that Thanos is the one most to blame, which is obviously true, but that doesn’t mean no one else is responsible for their actions.
Star-Lord, in that moment, has a choice. He knows that punching Thanos in the face repeatedly will probably cause their plan to crumble. He knows that taking the Infinity Gauntlet would allow them to actually defeat Thanos, which is what Gamora would probably want, and would probably make him feel a lot better than dissolving into dust did. But he disregards all this and chooses to give in to a violent macho outburst that gets half the universe killed. Could Thor have aimed for Thanos’s head, or to cut off his arm, at the end of the movie? Sure, but setting aside the fact that the head suggestion was just Thanos jeering, and he was probably never in any danger from Thor in the first place with his full collection of Infinity Stones, I don’t think Thor knew that the course of action he was taking would result in a loss. Star-Lord knew.
The whole movie was about characters making tough choices, and a lot of them helped Thanos get closer to his goal because of their emotional reactions. Loki chose to give up the tesseract/Space Stone to save Thor, although it’s likely Thanos could have killed Thor and taken the stone from Loki anyway. Gamora chose to give up the Soul Stone to stop Nebula’s torture. Scarlet Witch chose to protect Vision rather than give him up to destroy the Mind Stone, before eventually doing what was necessary. It’s true that Star-Lord himself did make the right decision when it came to Gamora’s request that he kill her rather than give up the Soul Stone, but I find it hard to believe anyone involved thought Thanos would actually let him do it after seeing what he was capable of.
All those emotionally driven decisions, though, were made with the best intentions. The same can’t really be said of Star-Lord knowingly losing the fight because he was angry. There have been other defenses, too, including that the reaction was in character for Peter Quill, but that’s only an excuse if the complaint had been about bad writing. And look, I’ve heard the one about Doctor Strange’s proclamation that only one out of over 14 million sequences of events would result in eventual victory, and this must be part of that one sequence. I’d be willing to bet that many of those other millions of scenarios also involve Peter Quill ruining everything in exactly the same way, with no Avengers 4 coming along to bail him out.
I’m not saying we need to condemn Peter Quill and stop watching Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I don’t like the character any less because of all this. (I probably still like him a lot more than people who are understandably more weary of the manchild protagonist template, which is also worth its own critique.) People make mistakes—especially fictional characters. They wouldn’t be interesting otherwise. Other Marvel heroes have made plenty of mistakes, for which they also deserve blame. But we should be able to talk about how Quill’s reaction was very much the wrong way to deal with his emotions, or at the very least acknowledge that with some jokes about how everything is his fault.
(image: Marvel Entertainment)
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