【A Male Friend Who Spins it Around】

Hey. There are A Male Friend Who Spins it Aroundmajor spoilers ahead, in case the headline didn't make that clear. You should probably turn back if you haven't seen Avengers: Infinity War yet.

There's an Avengers: Infinity Wartakeaway where the real villain is Star-Lord, not Thanos. I'm here to tell you: That take is wrong.

Star-Lord did some dumb shit on Titan, no question. After the combined efforts of three Avengers, three Guardians of the Galaxy, and Nebula left Thanos ensnared and -- at last! -- vulnerable, Peter Quill screwed it all up.

Before I tell you why Quill isn't the bad guy here, let me set the scene. We're deep into Infinity Warnow. Doctor Strange, Iron Man, and Spider-Man have linked up with Star-Lord, Mantis, Drax, and Nebula on the surface of Thanos's home planet, Titan.

They've all realized they share the same goal, and together, they hatch a plan to ambush the big, purple baddie. If they can pull it off, they'll have a shot at ripping away the Infinity Gauntlet, which at that point possesses the power of four Infinity Stones. Strange has a fifth one, the Time Stone, and he's using it as bait to lure in the big guy.

Before Thanos attacks, Strange uses his cosmic artifact to leap ahead into the future and explore different possibilities. When he returns to the present, he shares an alarming fact: Of the 14,000,605 possible futures he looked at, only one resulted in a victory for our heroes.

Then, Thanos shows up and all hell breaks loose. It's maybe the best fight scene in all of Avengers: Infinity War, with all the heroes getting increasingly creative about combining their powers and working together.

It works: After several minutes of brutal fighting, they get Thanos pinned long enough for Mantis to get on his shoulders and use her powers to put him into a waking sleep. He's conscious, and able to talk (with great difficulty), but he's completely subdued.

As Iron Man and Spidey work together to pull off the Gauntlet, Star-Lord saunters up to the Mad Titan, both to gloat and to ask an important (to him) question: Where is Gamora?

Earlier in the movie, Thanos spirited away his green-skinned daughter, who is also Quill's lover and a fellow Guardian of the Galaxy. She eventually leads her adoptive father to the only unaccounted-for Infinity Stone, the Soul Stone. But to obtain the artifact, he must pay a terrible price: Sacrifice that which he loves.

He kills Gamora then and there, tossing her over the edge of a steep drop, and promptly blacks out and has a sort of vision. He then wakes up a short time later down one daughter, but with the newly acquired Soul Stone in his hand.

Back to Titan. Thanos, now pinned by our heroes and struggling to free himself, has Quill screaming in his face. He wants answers. So Thanos gives him one. Gamora is dead, he says. I killed her.

The revelation is too much for the stricken Quill. Grief takes over and he starts space pistol-whipping the purple brute, unfortunately catching Mantis's hand in the process. The act breaks her already tenuous hold on Thanos. He frees himself and regains the Gauntlet that Spider-Man almostmanaged to slip off.

You know how the rest of it goes. Thanos heads to Earth, gets the last stone, and half the universe fades from existence, including many of our favorite heroes. And yes, from a certain point of view, it is all Quill's fault.

But! Let's not forget: The battle on Titan played out exactly the way Strange wanted. He knew from looking into the future that there was only one path to victory, and that path included losing the battle on Titan and him forking over his Time Stone.

Out of the many futures he saw, it's very verylikely that in at least a few of them, Quill kept his chill. We can't know for sure, of course, but the probability is high. We doknow, however, that of the 14,000,605 possible futures, 14,000,604 of them were wrong. Strange did what he did to ensure the one "happy ending" came to pass.

So is Star-Lord a brash hothead who too frequently lets emotion get in the way of sound thinking? Yes, absolutely. But is it really fair to blame the guy for inadvertently enabling Thanos to complete his mission of wiping out half the universe? Hell no.

Everything that happened on Titan and beyond is part of Strange's grand design. He's gone now, faded to dust like so many of the other key heroes. But he knew exactly what he was doing when he let Quill work through his anger and, subsequently, sacrificed everything.

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