Peter Quill
Peter Quill is a humanoid alien, the captain of the Benatar and the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy. He is introduced in the W-Series What-If episode "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?".
Background
Quill's mother recorded a mixtape for him before her death, and he has carried it ever since. He wired the Benatar's speakers into the power grid so completely that cutting the music would cut life support, a modification Rocket calls the worst engineering in three galaxies and has never undone.
Personality
Quill runs on volume and refuses to stop, which Rocket rates as the worst thing about him and the reason the crew is still breathing. Feeling arrives sideways: grief as an itemized invoice, affection as an argument, none of it fooling anybody aboard.
Series History
W-Series
What If
The What-If episodes are alternate timelines and do not affect the main continuity.
In "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?", Quill is singing along to his own music when Rocket's conduit reroute opens a rift under the Benatar and takes the engineering bay with him inside it. Over the two weeks that follow he sleeps barely four hours a night and burns through fuel, favors and contacts across three sectors. The search delivers him to a refugee ship of Asgardians, whose gatekeeper finally locates Rocket on a world of talking mammals, on a porch beside a lynx.
He comes down the ramp onto the Pawthorne Mansion lawn with red eyes and a casual walk, and what he says is that Rocket owes him half a ship. Then he lifts him off the ground anyway. He reads the pack the way he reads a crew and corrects Luther's account of the two weeks: Rocket never needed keeping, only somebody who would not leave. Then he offers Rocket a whole planet where nobody would look at his back and see a project. He means it, and he takes the refusal well.
Key Relationships
Rocket
Quill and Rocket bicker as a way of being family, and neither says anything sincere without a joke wrapped around it. His certainty that he will find Rocket matches Rocket's that he will be found, and the offer of a life in Zootopia is the most unguarded thing he does.