When Avengers: Infinity War comes to theaters later this month, we’ll see moments that Marvel Cinematic Universe fans have been awaiting for years. Yes, we’re finally getting the payoff for that Thanos teaser during the credits for the first Avengers movie back in 2012.
However, even more importantly, we’re going to see what happens when Earth’s Mightiest Heroes meet the Guardians of the Galaxy.
We’re already predicting that they won’t get along right away with the other heroes but will ultimately manage to pull it together just in time for it to matter most because that’s how every comic book team-up goes.
Remember when the Avengers spent most of their first movie fighting each other? If it weren’t for that shield, Thor would have given Captain America a head full of Mjölnir, and then who would keep the group’s language in check?
Despite the two groups being on the same side of the war, it’s alright to have a preference between them. We’re partial to Star-Lord, Gamora, and their pals, and we’re not alone.
The internet has created countless memes outlining all the ways the MCU’s cosmic team beat out the Avengers in terms of ability, entertainment value, and their unique mix of awesome.
Here are the 17 Memes That Show The Guardians Of The Galaxy Are Better Than The Avengers.
What else do you need, really?
The Avenger’s roster is impressive, sure. We’re not going to pretend it isn’t. However, Rocket from the Guardians of the Galaxy somehow makes them all seem a little normal, if not downright boring.
They have the actual Norse god of thunder, an android who can phase through walls, and the Hulk.
However, the moment we heard that we were going to see a movie with a wisecracking raccoon who loves to shoot things, we were fully in.
It also helps that Rocket is an interesting character who has had a solid arc over the past two Guardians films. He’s not just a trash panda with jokes.
He’s a better “person” overall than he was at the start of the first movie. And if you’d told us five years ago that one of the MCU’s best developed characters would be a CGI raccoon, we would have called you crazy.
The eyes have it
Part of what makes a character effective is how well the audience stays with a character after they do questionable things.
That’s true of Batman and even the MCU’s Tony “Iron Man” Stark, who seem to spend most of their time daring audiences not to like them. And they meet varying levels of success.
This meme points out the two ways of reacting to characters who forcibly remove other people’s body parts.
Loki yanks out a dude’s eye back in The Avengers, and Star-Lord makes off with a guy’s leg during the prison break in Guardians of the Galaxy.
It helps that Quill only stole the limb because Rocket told him it was part of his plan. The fact that it was all just for the raccoon’s amusement kind of lets Peter off the hook.
Seriously, where is Hawkeye?
We’ve seen loads of promotional material for Infinity War, and it all has one thing in common. While we’ve seen all of the Guardians and most of the Avengers, Hawkeye is conspicuously absent in most of it.
We’re not sure why. He was one of the best parts of Age of Ultron, and he is definitely in this movie. He has a new haircut and everything.
However, we can think of a few reasons for him not to make the cut in trailers.
One is that the movie already has the Sorcerer Supreme, Thanos, and Spider-Man’s impressive new suit in it.
So a guy with a bow and arrow isn’t super impressive next to those. It’s also possible that he’s just not in the movie much. We’d assume he dies in this one, but we already know he’s in Avengers 4.
Go ahead and cancel Father’s Day
For six years, all we’ve heard about is how scary and powerful Thanos was going to be once he finally became active in the MCU. The hype has been real, and Infinity War has a lot to pay off.
The trailers are only enforcing this by showing the Mad Titan easily taking down Spider-Man and Iron Man and going hand-to-hand with Captain America.
Steve Rogers’ job description includes doing things that are physically impossible, like stopping helicopters from flying away and punching holes in submarines.
Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gamora and Nebula, however, have a different perspective on the baddie. Sure, they’re afraid of him.
However, as his adopted daughters, they also can’t help but imagine him doing dad things, too. That is, when he wasn’t torturing them and forcing them to fight.
Maybe he just got lucky
The Avengers have faced powerful foes in both their solo and collaborative outings, but this meme makes a solid point. One man with minimal resources managed to break up the superhero varsity team in a single movie.
Captain America: Civil War villain Zemo concisely sums up his strategy at the end of the movie, just before he gets Iron Man and Steve Rogers fighting.
“An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again,” he says. “But one which crumbles from within? That’s dead forever.”
It’s a smart strategy that makes him one of the most effective villains in all of the MCU. And while the Guardians of the Galaxy don’t always get along, their general selfishness and roguery has reached a sort of stability during their time together.
They argue, but every family does. Also, we don’t see Drax and Groot throwing down anytime soon.
Casts change, alright?
This version of the well used Civil War meme gets a little meta. Remember when Terrence Howard played Rhodie in the first Iron Man?
We do now that we think about it, but the character has been Don Cheadle for so long that we just kind of forgot about it.
Because of how movies work, actors are going to come and go. It’s not like comics, where artists can just keep using the same versions of characters for as long as they feel like drawing them.
They’ll continue to do so until an inevitable company-wide relaunch, after which the new version of Green Goblin will be a pirate or something.
Beside all that, this meme gives a funny (if hyperbolic) picture of the Avengers as generally kind of hapless.
‘I am cute’
No matter which side of this debate you fall on, you have to admit that Groot somehow stole Guardians of the Galaxy despite being a huge tree-man that only says five different words in the whole movie.
It was basically impossible not to like him, which made it tough to handle when he turned himself into a giant roll cage and smashed to bits so that the rest of the team could live.
However, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, taking him out only made him more powerful.
We don’t mean in the sense that he’s omnipresent and provides a powerful symbol of honor and sacrifice to those he leaves behind. We just mean that the next version was even cuter.
Officially, according to Guardians director James Gunn, Groot and Baby Groot are different characters. However, they are Groot, and that makes them the best.
Captain America: Word Cop
This meme puts two humorous character traits against each other and comes out with a clear winner.
The opponents are Steve Rogers’ overwhelming wholesomeness, which leads him to call his teammates on their potty mouths, and Drax’s inability to comprehend metaphors.
The Guardian wins because even Cap’s own team made fun of him for being such a goody-goody, and it was really embarrassing for him.
However, you can’t really fight Drax’s quirk because he’ll either get increasingly confused and frustrate you or he’ll eventually realize you’re making fun of him and relieve you of your spine.
It doesn’t sound like a good time for anyone either way. So people have just learned to drop the figurative language around Drax and change the subject.
No, really. He needs it.
One of Guardians of the Galaxy member Rocket’s favorite gags is picking on handicapped people. It’s mean-spirited, but it’s still funny, somehow. It probably helps that he’s small, fuzzy, and has the voice of Bradley Cooper.
Rocket is, himself, dealing with his own issues of his body not really being his, since he says the scientists who created him tore him apart and rebuilt him until he was “some little monster.”
That’s probably where his cruel digs at the disabled come from, which makes it a little sad but still doesn’t make us feel better about laughing at them.
He had Peter steal that guy’s leg, and in Vol. 2, he asks Groot to leave a Ravager’s stolen electronic eye behind because he thinks it will be funny when its owner wakes up and can’t find it.
We’re sure he’d be interested in “disarming” poor Bucky.
Guardians of the Galaxy win the war of escalation
We really can’t overstate how much MCU fans love Groot in any form.
After the mid-credit scene from the first Guardians of the Galaxy introduced us to dancing Baby Groot, we realized that the rest of the franchises were going to have to step it up to capture their hearts.
That even extends to properties outside of the MCU. When we found out we were going to see an ‘80s-era Wolverine in X-Men: Apocalypse, we were pumped. It wasn’t surprising, but it was still pretty exciting.
Trailers for Marvel’s Civil War gave us our first look at the new Spider-Man, and the internet lost its mind. But then Baby Groot debuted in the Guardians Vol. 2 teaser, and it was like Comic Con plus a cat video.
We love Wolverine and Spider-Man, but Groot’s a tough act to top. Look at his little face.
Not even the worst thing Tony had done
If we were going to call out all the questionable stuff members of both the Avengers and the Guardians had pulled over the past decade, we’d be here all day. So for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just call out one thing that seems particularly egregious.
In Civil War, Tony Stark travels to Brooklyn to recruit 15-year-old Peter Parker to help him catch Bucky.
We were happy to get Spider-Man into the MCU, but Iron Man’s methods were questionable at best. They’d be dodgy even if we weren’t talking about someone who can’t even get a driver’s license yet. However, we are, so what the heck, Tony?
Luckily, nothing too bad comes of this until Homecoming. However, this meme’s General Ross makes some good points.
He’s just trying to help
Despite the differences between Team Iron Man and Team Cap in Civil War, fans of both sides can agree on one thing: Steve Rogers is out of touch with our modern technology and culture, and it’s hilarious.
This was a solid source of humor ever since Nick Fury defrosted Rogers. He was too busy fighting HYDRA after that to catch up on things like Star Wars and The Beatles.
If you don’t understand this reference, it’s to the first Avengers, in which Iron Man sends Cap to check out the status of a rotor on a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. That was the best he could offer.
In the first Guardians, Star-Lord builds a solid gag around giving the Nova Corps an obscene gesture. The two jokes work well together, but Steve is still the butt of the joke.
Beware Avengers 4 spoilers
Odds are that by the time Avengers 4 happens, that team and the Guardians of the Galaxy will be the best of friends. Or they at least won’t completely hate each other, which is usually all that we can ask from superfolks with egos as powerful as their armor suits and dangerous vine abilities.
Evangeline Lilly isn’t appearing in Infinity War. Instead, the MCU is starting Hope van Dyne’s superhero career in Ant-Man and the Wasp in July.
However, she’ll join the rest of the team in Avengers 4 next year, and this meme suggests one way that might play out.
Honestly, we’re pretty sure Wasp would win this fight. We’d almost guarantee it. However, watching Chris Pratt flail around like this would still be the highlight.
It is kind of weird how that lines up
It’s alright not to pick a favorite between these two groups. We’d understand completely, and that’s especially true once you realize that, as this meme points out, their members are basically the same.
At the same time, however, when you see these individuals put next to each other like this, it actually becomes pretty easy to make the hard choices.
Even if you like both the Guardians and the Avengers, it’s not hard to prefer Groot over the Hulk and Rocket over Iron Man. We will give Thor a slight edge over Drax, though, since Ragnarok was just non-stop delightful.
Even as much as we like Steve Rogers, we have to take Star-Lord in this match-up if only because he has way better taste in music.
Again, where on Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is Hawkeye?
It really never gets old
We’ve already mentioned Drax’s hidden superpower of being the most literal-minded person in the room.
However, it’s one of our favorite parts of the Guardians of the Galaxy series. We love the strange combination of his earnestness and his propensity for horrifying violence.
The best part of this part of the Destroyer’s personality is that it doesn’t discriminate. It’s just how his brain works — or doesn’t, maybe — so he’s just as likely to annoy his enemies as his teammates.
In this meme, he’s offering his take on the eponymous Age of Ultron villain’s reference to the classic song from Pinocchio.
Considering that this version of the evil android shares some personality traits with its creator, Tony Stark, we don’t really know what his reaction would be.
He could go the straight bad-guy route. However, it would probably actually be snarky and contain at least one more pop-culture reference.
Shut up, Andy Dwyer
Both Doctor Strange portrayer Benedict Cumberbatch and Tony Stark actor Robert Downey Jr. have played iconic detective Sherlock Holmes in different versions of the story.
We’d kind of forgotten that since they’re both pretty firmly ingrained with the MCU now, but this meme brings it all back.
We almost wouldn’t be surprised if this joke were in some version of the Infinity War script. However, cutesy references aren’t really the MCU’s thing– well, other than all those Star Wars gags that keep showing up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and every other Marvel Studios project since parent company Disney also bought Lucasfilm.
If this were the Arrowverse, however, this would definitely happen. The CW’s DC offerings waste no opportunity for metahumor, including once scene in which Ray Palmer (Superman Returns’ Brandon Routh) comments that Supergirl looks like his cousin.
Guardians of the most turf
The Netflix series about the Defenders, the movies about the Avengers, and the two Guardians movies effectively split the MCU into three orders of magnitude.
They are “street-level,” global, and cosmic. They overlap a little when plot and fan service demand it, but they’re mostly separate.
If you’re going to compare responsibility and coverage, the Guardians of the Galaxy are the clear winners.
They’ve saved countless planets and lives on multiple occasions, which is both the right thing to do and an excuse for Rocket to jack up their fees for freelance work.
The Avengers stopped Ultron from dropping Sokovia on Earth and causing an extinction-level event, which saved billions. That’s no small feat, to be fair.
However, in return, the world governments turned against them and forced them to submit to registration. So the Guardians win in the “credit where it’s due” fight, too.
What do you think? Are the Guardians of the Galaxy better than The Avengers? Let us know in the comments!
