Well, that's not much of a spoiler, because I think it was in a preview, but that was one thing that felt real, the way Gamora, in the middle of a fight, notices Baby Groot standing there waving at her (another feels-true thing: they honestly don't give a shit how busy you are, sometimes they just wave or do some other thing for attention), tells him to get out of the way for his own safety, and then adds "Hi," in acknowledgement of his waving. I don't know if parents quite feel that compulsion, but it is very much an avuncular response. It's like you aren't quite sure if it's a good idea to humor the kid or yell at it, but you don't want to be the one to inhibit it or give it a complex, and really, discipline isn't your job, so you say "hi".

I thought there was a lot of stuff that rang true to my experience, considerable as it is with children to whom one has an attachment but no direct responsibility (six each of younger siblings, younger cousins, nieces and nephews), particularly the endearing willingness to fetch things, and the utter stupidity in execution of requests, and of course, the total absorption in entertainment media to the exclusion of whatever else is going on around them. And the viciousness towards anything on their own scale that annoys them.

Obvious symptoms of sequelitis I noticed: Starlord gets an MP3 player full of his favorite era of music, almost certainly in reaction to all the snark about where he found a tape deck in space, and how his cassette still works after all these years (remember when cassette was almost an everyday word? ).

• The film cuts back on action (both the motion and character development variety) in favor of character exposition. Because things have to be saved for the whole, overall MCU story, they can't change the status quo in solo films anymore. After all, if they show up in the next Avengers movie, we can't have people wondering where their favorite Guardian went, if they didn't catch the sequel, or if they didn't watch any of the GoG branch of the MCU, needing two movies worth of background material to catch them up. So the characters are pretty much in exactly the same place we left them at the end of GoG 1, but with a different ship and 2-3 new people. Peter & Gamora haven't advanced their relationship, Rocket & Drax are basically still who they are, and so on. But it wasn't a drag and didn't feel like treading water, the way a semi-serialized TV show does around the 19th episode of a season. Instead, we got to see more of Starlord's feelings concerning his background, and his relationship with Gamora, and she got to deal with her upbringing as well, and Drax got to have some emotional stuff, and Yondu got a whole arc on the side which made his death mean something. And there was Rocket & Groot to laugh at so you don't get bored.

• Is this going to be Michael Rooker's typecasting now? Initial villain, brought back to be redeemed through his relationship to the franchise's breakout star, before kicking ass and dying? There are worse ways to earn a living I suppose, even with all the time in the makeup chair.

• I still don't care: no matter how many genre shows and movies try to make this claim, a random assemblage of friends who have adventures is not a family. Family is a group of people related by blood and/or marriage. Period. You can hate them, they can be the scum of the earth and unworthy of your love or loyalty, and that's fine. But friends are friends, and there is nothing wrong with being friends. You don't get to go around calling them a family just because you love them the most. Just say you love them the most. Words have to mean something, you can just go around sticking labels that have a purpose on things they don't go with, just because you don't like the hand you were dealt. If it was up to me, Captain America & Thor would be the Defenders, and Daredevil & Luke Cage would be the Avengers, because the names fit their functions betterbut I'm not going to call them that, because no know would know what I am talking about. "Family" is not a word you use so you don't have to say you love someone, it is a term describing real relationships. The whole significance of family is that it is a relationship that exists outside of preferences or affection or free association. If you want to give that same level of loyalty to a friend, just be a good friend, don't change the name of your relationship based on feelings. A real friend should understand that about you, and if you want to use the term so other people get your feelings, that's just posturing. And speaking of friendship, when did that become a bad thing? How did "platonic" go from a label used to describe what the eponymous philosopher considered the highest form of love, to a qualifier denigrating a relationship as somehow second rate. As far as I am concerned, anyone who describes his or her relationship to another person using the word "friendzone" is wrong, because they are not even a friend. The implication of the term is that the person in question is being cheated out of his sexual due. If you whine about being nice to women who don't reciprocate sexually,you are not actually being nice!You're being a manipulative & selfish cunt, who only values the person in question as a masturbatory aid. An actual nice person would be happy that the other person enjoyed or appreciated the efforts. If anyone but your spouse "owes" you sex, you're a piece of shit, for thinking of coital intimacy as a thing to be traded. Even with a hooker. They're still people, and the fact that they are so messed up that they offer or solicit such a degradation of their persons only makes them deserving of pity or aid, not confirmation of whatever deficiency of self-esteem put them on such a life path. And now it feels like this has got out of hand, but I think it comes back to people not appreciating love outside of the context of sexual affection, and how it relates to and differs from familial bonds. Drax and Starlord and Rocket and Groot don't have families, and Gamora's is pretty horrible. It does not make them family. I can lose my hand and be given a telepathically-bonded monkey slave in compensation, but that does not mean I can call it my REAL hand, even if it is a significant improvement. Arbitrarily labeling Drax or Groot your REAL family doesn't change the fact that your actual father is a super-villain from whom you need to guard the galaxy, and the notion that you can add or subtract people from your family on a whim actually undercuts the stakes of the conflict between Gamora and Nebula or Thanos and Starlord and his father, the evil planet. If a screenwriter can just say "Rocket is part of that family" what is the significance of making familial ties to the villains?

• Are we supposed to know what the Ravagers are? I though Yondu was just a space crook, but there's a whole organization of them, with rules against trading children? And that's kind of a silly rule. In the first place, Yondu was simply picking up the kids and bringing them to meet their father so he can teach them about their true heritage. He stopped as soon as he found out it wasn't working out well for the kids (ironically stopping with the one kid who would NOT have met the fate of the others). That's like accusing a child custody lawyer of human trafficking if his client turns out to be a bad parent or Medea or something. And the no children rule seems a bit of a strange and arbitrary line to draw for an organization that commits crimes and has membership of like a dozen different species. Do all aliens have the same understanding of children? Even on earth, there are species that eat their young, or ignore them, or die to defend them. That's a pretty wide spectrum of possible relationships, so it stands to reason that there would be some species for whom kids are not what Earth children are. What about one where they are larva, and don't become sentient beings until they undergo an adolescent metamorphosis? Is dealing in THOSE kids bad? What about species that freely trade their offspring as commodities? Can't a ravager buy some of them? Since they don't give a damn about the specifics of Yondu's transgression, only that he broke this one rule and is out of the club forever, and not eligible for a funeral ceremony, it would seem not so.

• This movie didn't add anything to the infinity stones bit that I recall. So far there is the stone from the tesseract cube with which the Red Skull was messing around, and which Howard Stark recovered from the ocean floor, and then Loki stole in Avengers, and Solveig used to open the portal for the invaders in NYC (1). Then there was the one from Loki's scepter that Strucker used to give Wanda & her brother powers, which ended up in Vision's forehead (2). The black stuff in Thor 2 which got into Jane, and then Malekith took, and then Thor & Loki took back, and Sif and the fat god took to the space museum. (3) Then there was the round thing Starlord stole in GoG which had a stone in it, that the blue guy put in the hammer (4). I don't think that Iron or Ant man had anything to do with them in their own movies, and I seem to recall thinking something in "Dr. Strange" made me go "Aha!" (was that what he and Thor were talking about doing in the credit scene? ) So (5)?
  I remember back in college, there was an arcade game where you fought using Marvel characters, like Mortal Kombat or something, and the story involved collecting gems for a gauntlet, and Thanos was the boss. The gauntlet suggests five gems, but I thought you got one for each opponent you beat, so maybe eight or so? Are we there yet? I know the next Avengers movie is called Infinity War.

• Am I the only one who thinks cross-species relationships are gross? Even Sarek & Amanda from Star Trek. Ain't right. Leave Gamora alone, Peter, she's the brains of the outfit, and she probably agrees with me.