i don’t think i’ve ever seen it discussed, and maybe i’m just behind on things because i don’t engage with the MCU fandom often, but entertain me on this:
a lot of people have peter quill returning to earth and basically the only people who ever remember him are his grandparents (who we know are alive circa 2014).
and that’s...i mean, it’s great and heartwarming and all, but there is a bigger way that this could play out
(yes, before i get into this, i will say that thousands of children disappear every year without being found and only a few make national news, and when it does the slant is racial, to say the least, but let’s approach this more from a “this is a comic book movie universe” perspective)
but entertain me on this notion; peter quill was a cute 8/9 year old boy from missouri whose mother tragically died of brain cancer at a young age and he vanished without a trace that night.
it's incredibly likely that this made the news. it was a sensational story.
it’s similarly likely that it was JonBenet Ramsey style tabloid fodder, at least in the American South/Midwest for years and years afterwards.
so imagine that american superheroes who were alive at the time (hawkeye, iron man, scott lang, etc.) have probably heard the name peter quill before. they were probably similarly aged enough to have heard it as a cautionary tale. the more morbid among them probably speculated what happened.
i’m just saying that there’s a world of possibility for peter’s return to earth in that he wasn’t just forgotten to the annals of time. there could be netflix documentaries about him, there could be wild conspiracies that he was abducted by aliens, or maybe he was never real -- all of the horrible shit we make up when bad things happen to children, people said that about peter quill in the late 80s. i wanna see more of that, i’m interested in how it plays out.
