But He Wasn't Your Daddy

Submission 20,719

Part of a series on Guardians of the Galaxy. [View Related Entries]

He may have been your father, boy.But he wasn't yOur daddy.

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About

"But He Wasn't Your Daddy" is a memorable quote uttered by the character Yondu in the 2017 Marvel superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Online, memers use the meme as an image edit to convey influence between pieces of culture.

Origin

On May 10th, 2017, Disney released the film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in theaters in the United States.^[1] In the film, the character Yondu saves the character Star Lord (portrayed by Michael Rooker and Chris Pratt, respectively) from an exploding planet, killing Star Lord's biological father. As they fly away, Yondu says, "He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn't your daddy."

Months later, October 10th, YouTuber Peter Francis published the clip, receiving more than 1.8 million views in less than four years (shown below).

Spread

The earliest available image macro of the scene comes from Steemit.com^[2] user kinsatron21, who posted a reaction image of a person crying in response to the scene on June 17th, 2017 (shown below, left).

Later that year, on December 10th, Redditor ^[3] Flash_205 posted a variation of the image on the /r/raimimemes subreddit. The meme features the characters Peter Parker from the MCU version of Spider-man and Uncle Ben from the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-man film trilogy (shown below, center).

The meme remained popular for the next few years, appearing in a variety of forms. On July 20th, 2020, for example, Redditor jain_harsh21 posted a It's All Ohio variation in the /r/marvelmemes^[4] subreddit. The post received more than 23,000 upvotes (92% upvoted) and 115 comments in less than one year (shown below, right).