A boy taken off Earth by space pirates the night his mother died, who grew up into their least reliable employee and then into somebody's leader by accident.
Peter Quill is eight years old in 1988 when his mother dies of cancer, and he runs out of the hospital straight into a Ravager ship. He spends the next twenty-six years being told what he is by people who are wrong about it. He is not a legendary outlaw. He is not really a leader. He is a man carrying a Walkman with a tape of his mother’s songs on it, doing an impression of somebody he once saw in a film.
What makes the Guardians films work is that this is treated as a real problem rather than a joke about arrested development. Every mistake in the run is his, and the biggest one costs the universe half of everything, and the films do not let him off it.
He is also the only person in this catalogue whose defining relationship is with the man who kidnapped him. Yondu Udonta had been paid to deliver Quill to his father, worked out what his father actually wanted him for, and kept the boy instead. He does not explain this to anyone until it is far too late to matter.
Show detailsThe punch
On Titan, the plan is working. The gauntlet is coming off. Quill learns that Gamora is dead, hits Thanos, and the hold breaks.
It is the most consequential character decision in the Infinity Saga and it is not a failure of courage or of intelligence. It is grief, arriving at the worst possible moment, in a man who has never once managed to put a feeling down.