Peter Quill and the Importance of Being Deluded

Peter Quill: I come from Earth, a planet of outlaws. My name is Peter Quill. There's one other name you may know me by. Star-Lord.

I am writing this post with Redbone's Come And Get Your Love playing in the background. It has been a month since I had watched GoTG, twice, and I haven't gotten over it yet, From the moment Peter Quill plugs the headset and tunes in to that groovy soundtrack, you feel that GoTG is going a direction where none of Marvel's other movies have tread before. By the time the end credits roll your feeling would have been validated.

Guardians is breezy, funny, and never takes itself seriously, it tells the story of a ragtag bunch who get together to find an orb, in their pursuit they end up being hunted by Ronan the Accuser who intends to use the orb for world-dominating purpose. While the trope of a bunch of misfits who get together to stop a powerful villain has been done to death in movies across all genres, where Guardians scores above the rest is in its treatment. Despite being lighthearted with many a comic moments, there is a sense of destiny instilled within its protagonist, Peter Quill, who calls himself Star-Lord--the cheesy monicker dismissed with chuckles by the characters on screen and the audience alike at first.

It is this sense of delusion within our hero, of him believing that he is destined to be a Lord of the Stars that's gotten me hooked on to GoTG from the time I first watched it. Delusions of grandeur is sometimes necessary, despite how often we’ve been told to snap out of it. It is the drug that we every once in a while inject ourselves with to escape the drudgery of the present to go on to a utopian future. We spend our lives being taught the cold, hard facts. That we might end up going through the same ol’ rigmarole, that our lives won’t be any different, that it is all a Big Nothing, that love, with all its promise and intensity, eventually fades away.

Maybe they’re right. But we ought to every once in a while build castles in the air, that we dance alone in our room with the lights off and the music on while believing that we are destined to do something with our lives. That we got a purpose—no matter how small—to fulfil it, that every roadblock is just a brick that builds us to be the person we dream to be one day.

There’s no harm to dream about things that we know would never happen, but heck, just dream, they could take away your hope and drill down the bitter truth inside your head that things will just stay the same, what they cannot take away from you is your dream. So, dream with your eyes wide open, hold on to that tiny fragment of delusion, and who knows, some day you might get to lord over your stars after all.