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cosette_giry You know, I'm the kind of gal who thinks you shouldn't spend weeks and months ranting about what you hate and if you can't do something constructive with it, focus on what you like. It took me some time to realize that, but I came to that point.
But ya know - sometimes, there are some things that are just bad. Like (as it says on the tin) the last season of Voltron.
And look - my sympathy for a writing group for a show or a film goes up to a certain point - but I consider that point to have been reached. Yes, you have a right to tell the story you want to tell, and you don't have to bend to the fandom's whims. No, you can't satisfy everyone. Yes, factions of the fandom have treated you and the cast like crap because their ship wasn't happening, and you don't owe them shit.
So yeah, for me, the extent to which I can have sympathy, in the case of whoever is responsible for season 8? It's been exceeded.
More under the cut for those who don't want to get spoiled.
But ya know - sometimes, there are some things that are just bad. Like (as it says on the tin) the last season of Voltron.
And look - my sympathy for a writing group for a show or a film goes up to a certain point - but I consider that point to have been reached. Yes, you have a right to tell the story you want to tell, and you don't have to bend to the fandom's whims. No, you can't satisfy everyone. Yes, factions of the fandom have treated you and the cast like crap because their ship wasn't happening, and you don't owe them shit.
So yeah, for me, the extent to which I can have sympathy, in the case of whoever is responsible for season 8? It's been exceeded.
More under the cut for those who don't want to get spoiled.
I could honestly write PAGES AND PAGES about it. Because in the end, apart from Keith, Hunk and Pidge (and even then, I have quite a few things to say about that), EVERYONE else deserved better. Allura deserved better. Lance deserved better. Lotor deserved better (as well as writers who actually know how to write that type of character). Shiro deserved better. And Romelle deserved to be more than a plot device who isn't even a good character to start with.
I will start by redirecting everyone to this meta - because while it is a theory until we get an official confirmation, it's a theory that is just too detailed and well-explained to be bogus. As my good friend Ben said (minus the caps): "This some MK Ultra Deep Throat Pepe Silvia Whitewater KGB Shit."
I'm probably just going to break down by character to make sure I don't forget anything, and explain how they start out, what'd you expect with their character development, and what we actually got. Starting with Allura - because boy did they do her bad. I'd even say she got it worse than Lotor. However, if you want to get even deeper with the issues with Allura, Lotor and Lance's arcs, I will redirect you to this meta by my bud felixazrael on Tumblr, since she explained it way better than I ever would.
Actually, big thanks to my fellow fandom friends - talking (well, more like yelling in unison) about season 8 and VLD in general helped me gather my thoughts for this.
Allura
So, Allura is pretty much how you'd imagine Galadriel to be like when she was younger, in case you were all too lazy to read The Silmarillon. She's your typical Altean space elf princess who went all Sleeping Beauty for ten thousand years (approximately the amount of sleep I need right now), to avoid being killed off with her entire race and her home planet. She is forced to take over her father's legacy and his leadership position, as she and a group of untrained teenagers are the galaxy's only hope against the Galra Empire, who are like your typical Orc army but purple to make it fancier. She has to deal with the loneliness that comes with how nobody really understands her - of course, the Paladins like her, but there is obviously a distance as she is an alien princess and they're, well, teenagers from Earth who didn't even suspect the existence of life in the rest of the galaxy before. Add that to daddy issues, having to face the genocide of her people, and all the trauma that comes with it, while being forced to stand tall in front of a galaxy whose freedom is threatened every second - you get Allura.
What you'd expect: So, in the first few seasons (until, let's say, season 5, unless you want to stretch it to season 6 even though that's where the issues kind of started), Allura got a fairly typical Heroine's Journey (note that I'm talking about Valerie Frankel's Heroine's Journey, not Maureen Murdock's). For those of you who don't know about that, you can find out more about it here. Psyche and Persephone are the typical go-to references to understand the structure (you could add Esther to the mix if you want a Biblical reference), and as for more modern instances, you can think of Rey from Star Wars (who followed the structure pretty closely until now even if her arc is far from done), Eowyn and Luthien from the Middle-Earth legendarium, Eliza in The Wild Swans tale, Marie/Clara in The Nutcracker, Beauty/Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Moana from the animated feature of the same name, Diana Prince/Wonder Woman in the eponymous 2017 movie, heck, even Buffy Summers herself.
To illustrate what it entails, just look at the chart below, because I'll be referring to that to explain my point.
I will start by redirecting everyone to this meta - because while it is a theory until we get an official confirmation, it's a theory that is just too detailed and well-explained to be bogus. As my good friend Ben said (minus the caps): "This some MK Ultra Deep Throat Pepe Silvia Whitewater KGB Shit."
I'm probably just going to break down by character to make sure I don't forget anything, and explain how they start out, what'd you expect with their character development, and what we actually got. Starting with Allura - because boy did they do her bad. I'd even say she got it worse than Lotor. However, if you want to get even deeper with the issues with Allura, Lotor and Lance's arcs, I will redirect you to this meta by my bud felixazrael on Tumblr, since she explained it way better than I ever would.
Actually, big thanks to my fellow fandom friends - talking (well, more like yelling in unison) about season 8 and VLD in general helped me gather my thoughts for this.
Allura
So, Allura is pretty much how you'd imagine Galadriel to be like when she was younger, in case you were all too lazy to read The Silmarillon. She's your typical Altean space elf princess who went all Sleeping Beauty for ten thousand years (approximately the amount of sleep I need right now), to avoid being killed off with her entire race and her home planet. She is forced to take over her father's legacy and his leadership position, as she and a group of untrained teenagers are the galaxy's only hope against the Galra Empire, who are like your typical Orc army but purple to make it fancier. She has to deal with the loneliness that comes with how nobody really understands her - of course, the Paladins like her, but there is obviously a distance as she is an alien princess and they're, well, teenagers from Earth who didn't even suspect the existence of life in the rest of the galaxy before. Add that to daddy issues, having to face the genocide of her people, and all the trauma that comes with it, while being forced to stand tall in front of a galaxy whose freedom is threatened every second - you get Allura.
What you'd expect: So, in the first few seasons (until, let's say, season 5, unless you want to stretch it to season 6 even though that's where the issues kind of started), Allura got a fairly typical Heroine's Journey (note that I'm talking about Valerie Frankel's Heroine's Journey, not Maureen Murdock's). For those of you who don't know about that, you can find out more about it here. Psyche and Persephone are the typical go-to references to understand the structure (you could add Esther to the mix if you want a Biblical reference), and as for more modern instances, you can think of Rey from Star Wars (who followed the structure pretty closely until now even if her arc is far from done), Eowyn and Luthien from the Middle-Earth legendarium, Eliza in The Wild Swans tale, Marie/Clara in The Nutcracker, Beauty/Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Moana from the animated feature of the same name, Diana Prince/Wonder Woman in the eponymous 2017 movie, heck, even Buffy Summers herself.
To illustrate what it entails, just look at the chart below, because I'll be referring to that to explain my point.
The Heroine's main antagonist is either male (when she's a warrior type of heroine, usually, like Buffy with the Master or Wonder Woman with Ares), either female - and a female antagonist is usually an Evil Mother figure. In Allura's case, her nemesis would be Haggar/Honerva, because the Evil Mother has to be, to a certain extent, a distorted mirror image of the Heroine. And Haggar and Allura have a lot in common: both are Altean alchemists with tremendous power, but how they decide to use it is what makes all the difference. Obviously, there has to be a confrontation between the Evil Mother and the Heroine, culminating in the Heroine becoming the New Mother - this time a much more benevolent figure than her predecessor. But before we get to that, we need to talk about the Father, and the Animus - who are the main male figures here.
The Father is Alfor, obviously - and Allura gets to experience his powerlessness in several ways: by his failure to save Altea save herself and Coran, by being forced to deactivate his virtual memory in order to stop a virus from infecting the Castle of Lions (the only remaining memory she had of him), and by discovering Alfor, like it or not, had a hand in what happened to Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar. Those are all moments where, obviously, Allura is brought to realize that she doesn't have her father to back her up anymore, and that she cannot even look up to him as he made mistakes himself - she's on her own.
And that's when the Animus comes in - and you guessed it, it's not Keith, it's not Shiro, it's sure as heck not Lance... it's Lotor.
So, before you start fighting in the comments about Kallura/Shallura/Allurance/Lotura, lemme explain what an Animus is.
Long story short, all the ships above would have been feasible - IF they followed certain steps. There are certain rules to respect when it comes to a Heroine's Journey, and because of today's media influences us today, some people who will add in a romance might inadvertently turn into a male-centered story - and that's not what you want. So, the Animus, in a Heroine's Journey, is also a mirror to the Heroine, but in a different way than the Evil Mother.
The Animus, as you may have guessed it already, is the Heroine's love interest, as well as a representation of the Heroine's darker aspects. They may be referred to as the Light Youth and the Dark Youth. Think Beauty/Belle and the Beast, Buffy and Angel/Spike, Rey and Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, Sophie and Howl from Howl's Moving Castle - you get the picture, He looks at first like the Heroine's complete opposite, and he's, let's say, inaccessible for certain reasons. He's a beast, or he is believed to be one, or he has mood swings, or he has or provides the heroines with strange desires no father nor mother would dare to talk about.
Allura and Lotor seem like complete opposites at first - she's the princess of Altea, and the last survivor of her race along with Coran (at least at first). He may be the prince of the Galra Empire, but he is essentially a paria among his own people for being of mixed race (half-Galra, half-Altean). Allura is prejudiced against Galra for, well, obvious reasons, and that tends to lead her to, well, not being very objective at times when it comes to them. She starts getting over it by the discovery Keith is half-Galra himself, and with Voltron eventually collaborating with the Blades of Mamora, but there's still a lot of work to do - and Lotor gives her that opportunity to grow.
The way Lotor is designed is also meant to appeal to a female audience - he's elegant, he looks dangerous, but he has a certain charm to him and he's capable of being tender with the woman he loves,which implies he's good in bed, I'm sorry, I do not make the rules.
Usually, the way the story evolves between the Heroine and the Animus is that they both evolve, up to a point where they have both matured and become adults, in a way, which allows them to stand on equal footing. With that comes trials and tribulations - Lotor has his own conflict with Haggar, there's the whole matter with the colony - and you got a big beautiful the mess the Heroine (in this case Allura) must fix in order to complete her coming-of-age story, saving the Animus from the destiny that has been traced in front of him.
So yeah, by following the typical Heroine's Journey and the development we got in the series... Lotura would have been the logical endgame, ending with, as the meta I've linked above put it, with Allura and Lotor becoming "greater than nature" figures.
Alas, that was not meant to be.
What we got: The change of tone was... utterly bizarre, to say the least, as if the writers were struck by amnesia when it came to storytelling and they didn't know what to do anymore.
When it came to Allura, it's like that in whatever involved her, she was more often than not playing second fiddle. And like it or not, this is an ensemble type of TV series - but in most ensembles, you'll always have one, two or three that will stick up more than the others. In VLD's case, you had Keith, you had Pidge in the first few seasons (until she finds her brother and her father, basically), and you had Allura. Lance and Hunk, in that scenario, still get an arc - but it's not as central as the others. I'm not counting Shiro for a reason - but I'll talk more about all of them later.
Allura being put on a backseat in season 7 wasn't too glaring - she got a lot of attention in the last few seasons, and since the Paladins were going back to Earth, well, obviously, she wasn't going to play too big of a role. In season 8, however, she wasn't the center of her own story anymore. She was, instead, a supporting character in Lance's story.
And look guys, I love Lance. I really do. I wanted him to get the character arc he deserved, because he's a guy with huge potential that's held back by his own insecurities, which he tries to cover up with bashfulness. But Allurance... was basically the worst decision you could make for both of their arcs, considering what had previously been done with their arcs. But I'll come back to that later.
So, keeping in mind what I said above about what "should" have happened... you understand the change of tone is pretty huge, right?
And the ending she got... like, I think what they were trying to go for was something bittersweet (ROFLMAO). But yeah, in the word "bittersweet", there's the word "sweet", right? Which means that you get a sad ending, sure, but you're still, like, happy in a way?
If you want to go with a famous example of a bittersweet ending... take Casablanca. Yeah, you're sad Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa don't end up together, but at the same time, given the time period and the circumstances, you know that it just wasn't meant to be, and that in the end, they'll still find a meaning to their life: Rick joins the fight against the Nazis and gets out of his apparent bitter apathy, and Ilsa, despite it all, is still married to a man who's heroic and honorable and who loves her, despite it all, and deep down, despite her conflicted feelings for Rick, she loves him as well.
Here, however... your idea for a bittersweet ending is to kill off your space elf princess who also happens to be your token WoC (because yeah, that's what it is), because somehow, SHE as well as the Evil Mother figure (Honerva) must pay for the mistakes Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar did, WHILE IT'S THE REASON WHY ALLURA'S LIFE IS SO MISERABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Allura's life is just self-sacrifice, being constantly proved that she's wrong, being constantly told she's in authority while it's in fact bollocks and she's ultimately just there to look pretty and be inspirational because being a leader is the job of a big strong man like Shiro or Ketih, and after being teased for several seasons she has a grandiose destiny awaiting her, she becomes this show's Sokka's Magical Space Waifu and then, she dies. Because reasons, and to give her boyfriend some man pain for the rest of his life, since he just becomes a farmer pining for his Lost Lenore until the day he dies - while with EVERYTHING we know about his character, it's basically the worst you could do for him. (But again, for what "doesn't work" with Allurance here, I'm keeping that for the part about Lance specifically.)
Some people will even say that her deciding to sacrifice herself looks like a suicide, and frankly, I can see why: she lost her family, her planet, the Castle of Lions, she impulsively leaves the man she loves to die instead of giving him a fair trial, heck, she even gives up on her crown and her princess title. And in a Heroine's Journey, it's normal, since the Heroine is called to symbolically give up on her childhood in order to gain something even greater (think of Marie giving up on all her dolls and her toys to the Rat King in order to keep the Nutcracker alive). But Allura gains nothing in the end: on the contrary, she becomes Lance's prize for, um, being a decent human being, even if he kept hitting on her in the previous seasons and she was CLEARLY not interested. So in the end, it's like Allura can't even live with herself anymore since no one, not even her rebound boyfriend, can truly understand her, and will only ever see her as a pretty little thing who has to be protected - and she may even be lead to think that, in fact, that's what she is - and everything that went wrong in her life is actually her own failure.
Like, how--
How--
HOW IS THIS A SATISFYING ENDING IN ANY WAY? HOW CAN YOU BE THAT TONE DEAF? HOW--
*deep breath*
But this isn't even the best part. IT SURE AIN'T, BITCHES. IT JUST GETS EVEN BETTER FROM HERE.
Lotor
As we explained above, Lotor is the son of Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar - but since Honerva took her Quintessence bath that ended up having her become Haggar while she was still pregnant, Lotor ended up becoming essentially a Quintessence baby. That means that by the time of the events of the TV series, since the guy is not immortal but ages WAAAAAAY slower than your average Galra, he looks like a young man while he's in fact ten thousand years old. He's had a lonely childhood, with two absentee parents who are essentially coded as drug addicts.
Lotor is not your average Galra - he's cunning, won't be afraid to crush anyone posing a direct threat to him or to use morally ambiguous solutions to his problems (which makes perfect sense, considering his background), but he makes his distaste for needless violence and death quite obvious and always searches the most peaceful alternative to any problem he might have. He surrounds himself with female generals who are like him, biracial and discriminated by their own for being biracial. He feels closer to his Altean heritage, which is natural for someone who's been rejected by a certain group his entire life, and that means seemingly seeing Honerva and Haggar as two separate people - although it's kind of unclear whether he really thinks it or he's just in a state of denial.
That reaches its height when Lotor befriends the inhabitants of a certain planet - only for Zarkon to find out and destroy the planet in front of his very eyes. From then on, while he still uses his position in the Galra empire to get what he wants, he's pretty much rejected anything, on an emotional level, that links him to anything Galra - to the point associating him with Zarkon is understandably a Berserk Button for him.
Makes sense so far? Okay.
What you'd expect: So, as I've explained above, while Lotor has an arc of his own - basically, where he stands in the grand scheme of things, and the conflict he has with his parents - he is, in a sense, a supporting character in Allura's story, as he is the love interest/Animus. You all already know what being an Animus usually entails in a story, so we won't talk about it again.
Controversial opinion time: the colony in itself is not a bad plot point: simply, in Heroine's Journeys, there is often a point where, for one reason or another, the Heroine rejects the Animus, as she is afraid of the Dark Side it represents and as she reverts to what society expects of her, even if she realizes in the end it's making her miserable. We wouldn't get all the details right away, obviously, and the whole matter would be framed at first in a way that makes him look bad. But as the story would progress, not only would we learn that things are not as they seem - but now, Lotor is in a position of vulnerability, more than ever, to not only deserve redemption, but also because the atonement his parental figures refuse to undertake are now thrusted unto him unfairly. It would have then been Allura's duty to change the status quo, by bringing justice, defeating the Evil Mother and ascending as the New Mother, this time a benevolent and just figure. That would have allowed for the Heroine/Light Youth and the Animus/Dark Youth to stand as equals, and earn something far greater than what they had before, becoming greater than nature figures.
What we got: As much as Allura's story changes tone completely, Lotor's arc feels... unfinished. And the meta I've linked at the beginning about the crazy editing season 8 may have got provides an excellent explanation why. We're never told what Lotor's deal with the colony was, and the explanation we're left with is: "Hey, guess he was just evil all along, lol!"
And... it's not a good explanation. At all. And it's not even me being a silly girl being upset the pretty boy is just an asshole. I think my LENGTHY explanation above made that quite clear. It's a little something called lazy writing, actually. But the colony is basically a can of worms that has been opened and no one bothered to explain, while there are quite a few questions I still have about it:
The only reason I can think of right now is "shock value"... which in my book, is not good.
And why bother spending so much time on giving him a sympathetic backstory, where you explicitly present him as a child growing up in a dysfunctional home and who just desperately craved love and attention? Not only that, but not only they can't be bothered giving him a redemption, but his own mother, who by all accounts did far worse horrors, actually gets one? And if you're going to make a metaphor for a family where the parents are drug addicts and how it affects their son's development, why treat it in such an insensitive matter? Jeez, this isn't the Reagan era where we kids had actual episodes back in the 80s dedicated to anti-drug PSAs - we're in 2018, in a post-AIDS crisis era, and the latter is understandably still a very sore subject for so many people.
What did he deserve, in the end, according to the execs? He deserved to have his rotting corpse retrieved by his crazed mother, so she could use it to power a magic robot (and we, like, SEE THE CORPSE. IN A KIDS' SHOW. CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS OVER YOUR DAUGHTERS NOT DATING THE NICE GUY BUT ROTTING CORPSES ARE A-OKAY). And once Mom gets to go to this show's version of the afterlife, she has her boy welcoming her as if nothing happened, and everything is peachy.
And to top it all up? The Paladins face no real consequences about how it ended up for him. How, you may ask? Simply, the reason why the Galaxy is in such an uproar when the Paladins get out of the rift two years later is all due thanks to how they hastily disposed of Lotor - aka THE NEW GALRA EMPEROR, WHO VIEWED THEM AS FRIENDS, AND WHO WAS THE BEST ALLY THEY COULD DREAM OF, CONSIDERING THEY HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THE GALRA, SINCE, LIKE, THE FIRST EPISODE.
Yes, Lotor deserved a fair trial, even if his actions on the colony were just done For The Evulz. At the risk of slam-dunking Godwin's law, if Nuremberg got to happen, so did a trial for Lotor. If they got that, perhaps the fight for control within the Galra Empire, the undoing of everything Voltron had accomplished to free planets, and even Earth getting sacked would have been avoided - and for all those things, you could easily make a point that it's all the Paladins' fault. Long story short, this is a good summary of why you should never, ever, ever, EVER let a bunch of inexperienced teenagers decide of galactic politics.
And the Paladins never get to face the consequences of their own mistakes. They can never do anything wrong, not even learn from their mistakes and become better thanks to that experience, because they've got the Hero tag on them, and are therefore bulletproof. There's not even a reaction from them when they see Lotor's corpse - it doesn't matter, because in the end, they've won anyway.
Lance
Lance is to VLD what Sokka is to Avatar: the Last Airbender. He's the Everyman of the gang, one the male viewers can easily identifty to. And that is fine in itself: self-insert characters, whether they're male or female, have been a thing in fiction since forever, for better and, sadly, for worse. Lance, like Sokka, starts off as an insecure guy with low self-esteem who tries to hide it by attempting to look suave and experienced - badly. And that's why he hits on Allura - not so much because he loves her for who she is, but because she's the prettiest girl in the room, and the prettiest girl in the room falling in love with him would boost his self-esteem - or so he believes. Nevertheless, you can tell it's not his real personality, and that it's mostly there to protect himself from the "bigger fish" surrounding him.
Lance wants everyone to believe he's a Casanova - but in fact, he's actually a big dork - but in a good way, except he doesn't really see it as a good thing. When he's comfortable, and he feels secure enough to be himself, he's actually a lot more sensitive than he seems - and it makes sense, since he wouldn't try to protect himself in the first place. He's a caring person, in fact, and when pushed in the right direction, his first impulse will always be to save others before saving himself - but those qualities haven't really got the opportunity to fully develop - yet, because like every teenage boy in a coming-of-age story, Lance needs to mature.
What you'd expect: Lance would have to grow up, basically. Being a Paladin of Voltron would be part of that development, of course, but he'd also realize that in order to be happy with himself and who he is, he can't determine that by having the creme of the creme surrounding him - it'd be by having someone who genuinely cares for him and loves him for who he is, and he the same.
Because Lance's biggest motivation is to be helpful - which is a guy trait to the max. And that's part of the reason why he and Allura are ill-matched, in this context - because Allura doesn't need the kind of support Lance can provide her, mainly because they're both individuals with very different experiences. And eventually, even with dating the prettiest girl in the room, Lance would feel unsatisfied - because he wants to be there for Allura, but he can't really do that either.
So, who would be the right match for Lance, then?
Pidge and Lance are already friends to start with. They have the same interests, a similar background with a family they're very attached to, with close sibling relationships. Pidge is also basically space!Hermione Grainger: a genius nerdy girl who's a bit too blunt for her own sake, sometimes takes things a bit too seriously, and who will fiercely defend the people she loves no matter what - the spitting image of Colleen Holt, basically. Lance is Pidge's opposite on many aspects, but in a way that, like Allura and Lotor, they complete each other: Lance is just as ready to do anything to protect the people he loves, but he has more of an easy-going point of view on life. He can brighten up Pidge, while Pidge can bring his feet back on Earth. And most importantly - they're equals, and they're capable of truly maturing together and bringing out the best in each other - and give them the opportunity to become heroes, despite their humble background, as well as giving them a family of their own - one of the things they cherish the most from life.
Because here's the thing: in order for Lance to truly grow, he needs what he needs, not what he wants.
What we got: Ooooooh boy did they do Lance dirty, and in such a bizarre way.
So, remember how I said Allura went from getting a Heroine's Journey to becoming a supporting character/love interest in Lance's story? Lance is given everything he wants on a silver platter, without having to work for it - well, yeah, he bugged Allura when she was clearly annoyed by his advances until she finally got interested for... no reason at all, she just does, because he's so... so... well, I mean, he deserves her, right?
But Allura nopes out of becoming Mrs. Lance and decides to pay the price for stuff she isn't even responsible for, because it'll be super edgy if we have Lance deal with man pain for the rest of his life while he becomes a farmer pining for his long Lost Lenore, aka the head cheerleader in space high school. He transmits to as many people her message of... live fast, die young (I guess), but he got a nice facial tattoo in remembrance.
Like, this is LANCE we're talking about. LANCE, who's all about family, helping others, mattering to other people... He didn't deserve that. AT ALL.
Romelle
Oh, Romelle. What can I fucking say about you...
For the record... I thought Romelle's Deus Ex Machina side made her pretty shady. Now, I did believe she was telling the truth - from a certain point of you, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say. Won't give too much of an intro here, since Romelle appeared to be a walking mystery box along with the Colony in season 6... but obviously, we got something else entirely.
I will say that the producers compared her a few times to Usagi/Sailor Moon: an ordinary girl who's called to do something extraordinary, which is pretty much every Magical Girl's origin story (except Gigi, but she was one of the earliest Magical Girls before the usual tropes really settled in). And Romelle is A LOT like Usagi... but without all the characteristics that make Usagi likeable despite her ditziness. I'll talk more about that aspect later on.
What you'd expect: As I said, I did believe Romelle was saying the truth from her POV. So, continuing on that POV... I'm going to sum up the situation real quick.
Let's suppose the Alteans who left for the second colony knew when they arrived what they were getting into, and that all those experiments were to help defend the colony in case the Galra Empire found out about them - and you can guess that after seeing an entire planet destroyed, Lotor would be EVEN MORE careful with the last remaining Alteans in the universe. Let's say they were developing new technology for defense that involved using Quintessence - just to make sure they'd have a fighting chance against Haggar, who is, after all, a powerful Altean alchemist. Some could handle it, and some couldn't, which ended up with them draining them of their energy. And that might be one of the reasons why Lotor eventually seeked Allura and Oriande - in order to heal those people who were put in stasis for their survival.
Of course, Lotor not letting the colony know what they were up to might be seen as shady - but you could defend that decision from a military point of view. And while it's ruthless, it makes sense Lotor would go for it - and heck, in season 6, he even admits himself he wasn't that comfortable with it either!
Bandor (Romelle's brother) is one of those who failed. Let's say the whole experience traumatized him enough that he decided to run away, steal a pod, and warn his sister - which he does, but the few words he tells Romelle are enough to have her panic and imagine a thousand wild scenarios (I mean, I'd freak the fuck out too). And keep in mind that the theory of Alteans getting drained of their energy comes from Keith - who, impulsive as always as well as biased, immediately assumes that and takes it as truth.
What would be the next logical step? Since Haggar knows about the colony thanks to Kuron, it would be easy peasy for her to show up as Honerva and convince the Alteans that she's on their side and to work for her - heck, even recruit Romelle so she can keep an eye on Voltron by promising her that her brother will be healed. So, by making her an antagonist, yes, but a sympathetic one, since Romelle is of course convinced she's doing the right thing.
And of course, there is a possibility that Romelle was lying - basically, take the same scenario, but have Haggar using her to spill the beans about the colony to Voltron while changing the truth, again in exchange for Bandor's life.
What we got: Basically, after serving her purpose in season 6... Romelle is put on a bus. Her job was to cockblock Allura and Lotor, and show that "Lol, Lotor was evil all along! Bet you didn't see that coming, lol!"
Remember when I said she's like Usagi, but without the likeable traits? Without the likable traits, you end up with a ditz, who's just a pain in the ass and who has to be dragged around and not do anything useful. That's Romelle in season 7 and 8 in a nutshell. But isn't she adorable? And funny? And cute?
No, dear producers. She's just annoying. That's what it is.
Shiro
Of all the Paladins, Shiro is the most adult one - well, he is actually an adult. Considering VLD is basically a coming-of-age story for the Paladins, Shiro is the kind of character who wouldn't really get an arc, since he's meant to be a mentor figure, albeit a lot less goofy than Coran. The initial idea was for Shiro to die, and stay dead - and the mentor figure dying is a common thing in coming-of-age stories. But since Shiro was extremely popular, the producers decided to bring him back - and we got Kuron, Shiro's Evil Clone controlled by Haggar to spy on the Paladins. That aspect is probably one of the things that got the least butchered by the last season - but it still has its problems.
Wouldn't Kuron and Haggar, like... take advantage of the golden opportunity that is Lotor's presence and have the Paladins mistrust each other because of Lotor's presence? Have a divide between those who are fine with him being an ally and those who aren't? Spreading false rumors about him or a Paladin?
YOU HAD A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY, RIGHT THERE, AND--
Ahem. Anyway, I have nothing to say about how Keith and Shiro's dynamic was developed - it was really one of the best aspects of the show, and I mean it. But after season 6, when Allura "frees" Shiro from the Black Lion and allows him to live in Kuron's body, Shiro takes a backseat. Which makes sense, but you kind of wonder why he's still there, why so much screen time is given to him since he doesn't do much...
And then there's his sexuality. Now, just so we're clear, I'm a-okay with Shiro being gay, obviously, but as so many people have said before me, it's tacked on af. His ex Adam has exactly thirty seconds of screen time before being killed off off-screen, and in the end, he ends up giving up the Garrison while the very reason why he and Adam split was because Shiro was too dedicated to the Garrison, and he marries a random guy we've never seen before the epilogue.
Look, if we look at it realistically, that Shiro would meet a guy after the war and eventually marry him is entirely possible. But, I don't know, considering there were so many filler episodes in season 8, was it really that hard to introduce that new boyfriend for us? Or did you really need to Hide Your Gays once again?
Pidge
Pidge is clearly the writers' favorite - well, Lauren Montgomery's favorite, to be more precise. And I'll be honest - Pidge was my favorite in the first few seasons as well.
Her arc was to find her disappeared father and brother, and that's fine and dandy too, and works with the characterization she was given and that I've explained above. Because ironically, despite her going undercover as a boy, Pidge has... very typically feminine traits - in a good way, of course.
The problem is, from the beginning of the series to the end... Pidge is pretty much the same. She reunites with her family, which is fine, but we don't see her mature, go from girl to woman, and she stays in a strange state of eternal childhood instead. And it's... bizarre, considering how she's supposedly a favorite. It's like after finding Matt and Sam Holt, they didn't know what to do with her anymore. Pairing her off with Lance would have given them both some wriggle-room to grow, but... we got Allurance instead. Heh. I guess her favorite status got her a semi-decent ending at least, compared to the others.
Keith
Keith had so much potential. And the show showed us his potential at every opportunity they had, too. But Keith... he's a loner. He keeps getting hyped as this "great leader you guys!" while he honestly doesn't do much to prove it. Sure, he's good at coming up with strategies, but Keith is impulsive and brash from the beginning to the end and we don't really see anything that shows that he's changing. He gets everything handed to him on a silver platter, without the proper development that comes with it, and he's granted a role that should have been normally given to Lotor... because he's one of the Heroes, I guess? Just like how the Paladins can get away with fucking up galactic politics?
His uniting the Galra speech made me laugh my ass off, since it was pretty much word-for-word the same speech as Lotor in season 3. I guess it's bad when Lotor says it but a-okay when it's Keith.
And I don't even hate Keith, guys - if I'm sounding harsh, it's because of the wasted potential. Because I wanted it to be great. Like I wanted VLD to get the ending it deserved, I guess.
Hunk
I... don't have much to say about Hunk. As much as I complained about the other characters' butchered arcs or lack thereof, I don't really mind Hunk's being pretty straightforward and simple?
Hunk is basically Chewbacca who starts out as the Cowardly Lion. He eventually goes from someone who gets scared of danger pretty easily to someone who's brave, selfless, and is willing to put his life in danger for strangers, just because they are way more endangered than he is. And he's genuinely kind, too - ultimately, he's more interested in bringing joy in other people's lives than fighting. And his way of bringing joy is by cooking food.
How can you not love Hunk, seriously?
So yeah, because his arc is very, very simple, it's hard to mess up. So I'd say that Hunk was the least affected of all the Paladins here.
Acxa (and a bit about Ezor and Zethrid)
So, Honerva gets a redemption arc but not Lotor because... reasons. Acxa switching sides is something I've seen coming for a long time. And for those of you who said back in season 7 that Keith and Acxa getting paired off made no sense... rewatch the show. They meet in season 2, and whenever the Paladins meet the generals, Acxa and Keith ALWAYS fight each other or interact with each other one way or another, and the show makes a point of showing that.
Acxa is there to remind us that Lotor sucks, he really sucks you guys, please join the Anti-Lotor fanclub, I'm president and Romelle is vice-president, we make friendship bracelets and shame Allura behind her back because she's such a stupid girl.
Oh, please excuse me, I didn't realize my Salty Switch was turned on.
*closes Salty Switch *
And you thought Kacxa came out of nowhere? Well, it gets better! Keith ends up with Veronica instead. Because reasons. Or maybe that's just the producers' way of dissing the Klance fandom. I don't know, bitch.
As for Ezor and Zethrid - they're fun characters. But not only they're WAY more bloodthirsty than Lotor ever was, but they also get the most tacked-on redemption arc and switch sides because... reasons, and I guess they get a free pass because they're the Token Lesbian Couple. And I expected Ezor and Zethrid to eventually switch sides - but jeez, do it properly for the love of God.
So. IN CONCLUSION, YOUR HONOR, SINCE I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO PROPERLY END THIS MESS, THIS MASSACRE OF GOOD STORYTELLING, THIS--
The Father is Alfor, obviously - and Allura gets to experience his powerlessness in several ways: by his failure to save Altea save herself and Coran, by being forced to deactivate his virtual memory in order to stop a virus from infecting the Castle of Lions (the only remaining memory she had of him), and by discovering Alfor, like it or not, had a hand in what happened to Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar. Those are all moments where, obviously, Allura is brought to realize that she doesn't have her father to back her up anymore, and that she cannot even look up to him as he made mistakes himself - she's on her own.
And that's when the Animus comes in - and you guessed it, it's not Keith, it's not Shiro, it's sure as heck not Lance... it's Lotor.
So, before you start fighting in the comments about Kallura/Shallura/Allurance/Lotura, lemme explain what an Animus is.
Long story short, all the ships above would have been feasible - IF they followed certain steps. There are certain rules to respect when it comes to a Heroine's Journey, and because of today's media influences us today, some people who will add in a romance might inadvertently turn into a male-centered story - and that's not what you want. So, the Animus, in a Heroine's Journey, is also a mirror to the Heroine, but in a different way than the Evil Mother.
The Animus, as you may have guessed it already, is the Heroine's love interest, as well as a representation of the Heroine's darker aspects. They may be referred to as the Light Youth and the Dark Youth. Think Beauty/Belle and the Beast, Buffy and Angel/Spike, Rey and Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, Sophie and Howl from Howl's Moving Castle - you get the picture, He looks at first like the Heroine's complete opposite, and he's, let's say, inaccessible for certain reasons. He's a beast, or he is believed to be one, or he has mood swings, or he has or provides the heroines with strange desires no father nor mother would dare to talk about.
Allura and Lotor seem like complete opposites at first - she's the princess of Altea, and the last survivor of her race along with Coran (at least at first). He may be the prince of the Galra Empire, but he is essentially a paria among his own people for being of mixed race (half-Galra, half-Altean). Allura is prejudiced against Galra for, well, obvious reasons, and that tends to lead her to, well, not being very objective at times when it comes to them. She starts getting over it by the discovery Keith is half-Galra himself, and with Voltron eventually collaborating with the Blades of Mamora, but there's still a lot of work to do - and Lotor gives her that opportunity to grow.
The way Lotor is designed is also meant to appeal to a female audience - he's elegant, he looks dangerous, but he has a certain charm to him and he's capable of being tender with the woman he loves,
Usually, the way the story evolves between the Heroine and the Animus is that they both evolve, up to a point where they have both matured and become adults, in a way, which allows them to stand on equal footing. With that comes trials and tribulations - Lotor has his own conflict with Haggar, there's the whole matter with the colony - and you got a big beautiful the mess the Heroine (in this case Allura) must fix in order to complete her coming-of-age story, saving the Animus from the destiny that has been traced in front of him.
So yeah, by following the typical Heroine's Journey and the development we got in the series... Lotura would have been the logical endgame, ending with, as the meta I've linked above put it, with Allura and Lotor becoming "greater than nature" figures.
Alas, that was not meant to be.
What we got: The change of tone was... utterly bizarre, to say the least, as if the writers were struck by amnesia when it came to storytelling and they didn't know what to do anymore.
When it came to Allura, it's like that in whatever involved her, she was more often than not playing second fiddle. And like it or not, this is an ensemble type of TV series - but in most ensembles, you'll always have one, two or three that will stick up more than the others. In VLD's case, you had Keith, you had Pidge in the first few seasons (until she finds her brother and her father, basically), and you had Allura. Lance and Hunk, in that scenario, still get an arc - but it's not as central as the others. I'm not counting Shiro for a reason - but I'll talk more about all of them later.
Allura being put on a backseat in season 7 wasn't too glaring - she got a lot of attention in the last few seasons, and since the Paladins were going back to Earth, well, obviously, she wasn't going to play too big of a role. In season 8, however, she wasn't the center of her own story anymore. She was, instead, a supporting character in Lance's story.
And look guys, I love Lance. I really do. I wanted him to get the character arc he deserved, because he's a guy with huge potential that's held back by his own insecurities, which he tries to cover up with bashfulness. But Allurance... was basically the worst decision you could make for both of their arcs, considering what had previously been done with their arcs. But I'll come back to that later.
So, keeping in mind what I said above about what "should" have happened... you understand the change of tone is pretty huge, right?
And the ending she got... like, I think what they were trying to go for was something bittersweet (ROFLMAO). But yeah, in the word "bittersweet", there's the word "sweet", right? Which means that you get a sad ending, sure, but you're still, like, happy in a way?
If you want to go with a famous example of a bittersweet ending... take Casablanca. Yeah, you're sad Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa don't end up together, but at the same time, given the time period and the circumstances, you know that it just wasn't meant to be, and that in the end, they'll still find a meaning to their life: Rick joins the fight against the Nazis and gets out of his apparent bitter apathy, and Ilsa, despite it all, is still married to a man who's heroic and honorable and who loves her, despite it all, and deep down, despite her conflicted feelings for Rick, she loves him as well.
Here, however... your idea for a bittersweet ending is to kill off your space elf princess who also happens to be your token WoC (because yeah, that's what it is), because somehow, SHE as well as the Evil Mother figure (Honerva) must pay for the mistakes Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar did, WHILE IT'S THE REASON WHY ALLURA'S LIFE IS SO MISERABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Allura's life is just self-sacrifice, being constantly proved that she's wrong, being constantly told she's in authority while it's in fact bollocks and she's ultimately just there to look pretty and be inspirational because being a leader is the job of a big strong man like Shiro or Ketih, and after being teased for several seasons she has a grandiose destiny awaiting her, she becomes this show's Sokka's Magical Space Waifu and then, she dies. Because reasons, and to give her boyfriend some man pain for the rest of his life, since he just becomes a farmer pining for his Lost Lenore until the day he dies - while with EVERYTHING we know about his character, it's basically the worst you could do for him. (But again, for what "doesn't work" with Allurance here, I'm keeping that for the part about Lance specifically.)
Some people will even say that her deciding to sacrifice herself looks like a suicide, and frankly, I can see why: she lost her family, her planet, the Castle of Lions, she impulsively leaves the man she loves to die instead of giving him a fair trial, heck, she even gives up on her crown and her princess title. And in a Heroine's Journey, it's normal, since the Heroine is called to symbolically give up on her childhood in order to gain something even greater (think of Marie giving up on all her dolls and her toys to the Rat King in order to keep the Nutcracker alive). But Allura gains nothing in the end: on the contrary, she becomes Lance's prize for, um, being a decent human being, even if he kept hitting on her in the previous seasons and she was CLEARLY not interested. So in the end, it's like Allura can't even live with herself anymore since no one, not even her rebound boyfriend, can truly understand her, and will only ever see her as a pretty little thing who has to be protected - and she may even be lead to think that, in fact, that's what she is - and everything that went wrong in her life is actually her own failure.
Like, how--
How--
HOW IS THIS A SATISFYING ENDING IN ANY WAY? HOW CAN YOU BE THAT TONE DEAF? HOW--
*deep breath*
But this isn't even the best part. IT SURE AIN'T, BITCHES. IT JUST GETS EVEN BETTER FROM HERE.
Lotor
As we explained above, Lotor is the son of Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar - but since Honerva took her Quintessence bath that ended up having her become Haggar while she was still pregnant, Lotor ended up becoming essentially a Quintessence baby. That means that by the time of the events of the TV series, since the guy is not immortal but ages WAAAAAAY slower than your average Galra, he looks like a young man while he's in fact ten thousand years old. He's had a lonely childhood, with two absentee parents who are essentially coded as drug addicts.
Lotor is not your average Galra - he's cunning, won't be afraid to crush anyone posing a direct threat to him or to use morally ambiguous solutions to his problems (which makes perfect sense, considering his background), but he makes his distaste for needless violence and death quite obvious and always searches the most peaceful alternative to any problem he might have. He surrounds himself with female generals who are like him, biracial and discriminated by their own for being biracial. He feels closer to his Altean heritage, which is natural for someone who's been rejected by a certain group his entire life, and that means seemingly seeing Honerva and Haggar as two separate people - although it's kind of unclear whether he really thinks it or he's just in a state of denial.
That reaches its height when Lotor befriends the inhabitants of a certain planet - only for Zarkon to find out and destroy the planet in front of his very eyes. From then on, while he still uses his position in the Galra empire to get what he wants, he's pretty much rejected anything, on an emotional level, that links him to anything Galra - to the point associating him with Zarkon is understandably a Berserk Button for him.
Makes sense so far? Okay.
What you'd expect: So, as I've explained above, while Lotor has an arc of his own - basically, where he stands in the grand scheme of things, and the conflict he has with his parents - he is, in a sense, a supporting character in Allura's story, as he is the love interest/Animus. You all already know what being an Animus usually entails in a story, so we won't talk about it again.
Controversial opinion time: the colony in itself is not a bad plot point: simply, in Heroine's Journeys, there is often a point where, for one reason or another, the Heroine rejects the Animus, as she is afraid of the Dark Side it represents and as she reverts to what society expects of her, even if she realizes in the end it's making her miserable. We wouldn't get all the details right away, obviously, and the whole matter would be framed at first in a way that makes him look bad. But as the story would progress, not only would we learn that things are not as they seem - but now, Lotor is in a position of vulnerability, more than ever, to not only deserve redemption, but also because the atonement his parental figures refuse to undertake are now thrusted unto him unfairly. It would have then been Allura's duty to change the status quo, by bringing justice, defeating the Evil Mother and ascending as the New Mother, this time a benevolent and just figure. That would have allowed for the Heroine/Light Youth and the Animus/Dark Youth to stand as equals, and earn something far greater than what they had before, becoming greater than nature figures.
What we got: As much as Allura's story changes tone completely, Lotor's arc feels... unfinished. And the meta I've linked at the beginning about the crazy editing season 8 may have got provides an excellent explanation why. We're never told what Lotor's deal with the colony was, and the explanation we're left with is: "Hey, guess he was just evil all along, lol!"
And... it's not a good explanation. At all. And it's not even me being a silly girl being upset the pretty boy is just an asshole. I think my LENGTHY explanation above made that quite clear. It's a little something called lazy writing, actually. But the colony is basically a can of worms that has been opened and no one bothered to explain, while there are quite a few questions I still have about it:
- Why is Lotor harvesting specifically Alteans for their Quintessence? Aren't they, like, an endangered species?
- Why would he need their Quintessence anyway? Doesn't he know that it's the exact thing that made Zarkon and Haggar who they are and why he had such a miserable life afterwards?
- Why would you present him as someone who hates needless deaths only to prove that wrong afterwards?
The only reason I can think of right now is "shock value"... which in my book, is not good.
And why bother spending so much time on giving him a sympathetic backstory, where you explicitly present him as a child growing up in a dysfunctional home and who just desperately craved love and attention? Not only that, but not only they can't be bothered giving him a redemption, but his own mother, who by all accounts did far worse horrors, actually gets one? And if you're going to make a metaphor for a family where the parents are drug addicts and how it affects their son's development, why treat it in such an insensitive matter? Jeez, this isn't the Reagan era where we kids had actual episodes back in the 80s dedicated to anti-drug PSAs - we're in 2018, in a post-AIDS crisis era, and the latter is understandably still a very sore subject for so many people.
What did he deserve, in the end, according to the execs? He deserved to have his rotting corpse retrieved by his crazed mother, so she could use it to power a magic robot (and we, like, SEE THE CORPSE. IN A KIDS' SHOW. CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS OVER YOUR DAUGHTERS NOT DATING THE NICE GUY BUT ROTTING CORPSES ARE A-OKAY). And once Mom gets to go to this show's version of the afterlife, she has her boy welcoming her as if nothing happened, and everything is peachy.
And to top it all up? The Paladins face no real consequences about how it ended up for him. How, you may ask? Simply, the reason why the Galaxy is in such an uproar when the Paladins get out of the rift two years later is all due thanks to how they hastily disposed of Lotor - aka THE NEW GALRA EMPEROR, WHO VIEWED THEM AS FRIENDS, AND WHO WAS THE BEST ALLY THEY COULD DREAM OF, CONSIDERING THEY HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THE GALRA, SINCE, LIKE, THE FIRST EPISODE.
Yes, Lotor deserved a fair trial, even if his actions on the colony were just done For The Evulz. At the risk of slam-dunking Godwin's law, if Nuremberg got to happen, so did a trial for Lotor. If they got that, perhaps the fight for control within the Galra Empire, the undoing of everything Voltron had accomplished to free planets, and even Earth getting sacked would have been avoided - and for all those things, you could easily make a point that it's all the Paladins' fault. Long story short, this is a good summary of why you should never, ever, ever, EVER let a bunch of inexperienced teenagers decide of galactic politics.
And the Paladins never get to face the consequences of their own mistakes. They can never do anything wrong, not even learn from their mistakes and become better thanks to that experience, because they've got the Hero tag on them, and are therefore bulletproof. There's not even a reaction from them when they see Lotor's corpse - it doesn't matter, because in the end, they've won anyway.
In fact, I'm just going to let SpongeBob sum up the situation for you.
Lance
Lance is to VLD what Sokka is to Avatar: the Last Airbender. He's the Everyman of the gang, one the male viewers can easily identifty to. And that is fine in itself: self-insert characters, whether they're male or female, have been a thing in fiction since forever, for better and, sadly, for worse. Lance, like Sokka, starts off as an insecure guy with low self-esteem who tries to hide it by attempting to look suave and experienced - badly. And that's why he hits on Allura - not so much because he loves her for who she is, but because she's the prettiest girl in the room, and the prettiest girl in the room falling in love with him would boost his self-esteem - or so he believes. Nevertheless, you can tell it's not his real personality, and that it's mostly there to protect himself from the "bigger fish" surrounding him.
Lance wants everyone to believe he's a Casanova - but in fact, he's actually a big dork - but in a good way, except he doesn't really see it as a good thing. When he's comfortable, and he feels secure enough to be himself, he's actually a lot more sensitive than he seems - and it makes sense, since he wouldn't try to protect himself in the first place. He's a caring person, in fact, and when pushed in the right direction, his first impulse will always be to save others before saving himself - but those qualities haven't really got the opportunity to fully develop - yet, because like every teenage boy in a coming-of-age story, Lance needs to mature.
What you'd expect: Lance would have to grow up, basically. Being a Paladin of Voltron would be part of that development, of course, but he'd also realize that in order to be happy with himself and who he is, he can't determine that by having the creme of the creme surrounding him - it'd be by having someone who genuinely cares for him and loves him for who he is, and he the same.
Because Lance's biggest motivation is to be helpful - which is a guy trait to the max. And that's part of the reason why he and Allura are ill-matched, in this context - because Allura doesn't need the kind of support Lance can provide her, mainly because they're both individuals with very different experiences. And eventually, even with dating the prettiest girl in the room, Lance would feel unsatisfied - because he wants to be there for Allura, but he can't really do that either.
So, who would be the right match for Lance, then?
Pidge and Lance are already friends to start with. They have the same interests, a similar background with a family they're very attached to, with close sibling relationships. Pidge is also basically space!Hermione Grainger: a genius nerdy girl who's a bit too blunt for her own sake, sometimes takes things a bit too seriously, and who will fiercely defend the people she loves no matter what - the spitting image of Colleen Holt, basically. Lance is Pidge's opposite on many aspects, but in a way that, like Allura and Lotor, they complete each other: Lance is just as ready to do anything to protect the people he loves, but he has more of an easy-going point of view on life. He can brighten up Pidge, while Pidge can bring his feet back on Earth. And most importantly - they're equals, and they're capable of truly maturing together and bringing out the best in each other - and give them the opportunity to become heroes, despite their humble background, as well as giving them a family of their own - one of the things they cherish the most from life.
Because here's the thing: in order for Lance to truly grow, he needs what he needs, not what he wants.
What we got: Ooooooh boy did they do Lance dirty, and in such a bizarre way.
So, remember how I said Allura went from getting a Heroine's Journey to becoming a supporting character/love interest in Lance's story? Lance is given everything he wants on a silver platter, without having to work for it - well, yeah, he bugged Allura when she was clearly annoyed by his advances until she finally got interested for... no reason at all, she just does, because he's so... so... well, I mean, he deserves her, right?
But Allura nopes out of becoming Mrs. Lance and decides to pay the price for stuff she isn't even responsible for, because it'll be super edgy if we have Lance deal with man pain for the rest of his life while he becomes a farmer pining for his long Lost Lenore, aka the head cheerleader in space high school. He transmits to as many people her message of... live fast, die young (I guess), but he got a nice facial tattoo in remembrance.
Like, this is LANCE we're talking about. LANCE, who's all about family, helping others, mattering to other people... He didn't deserve that. AT ALL.
Romelle
Oh, Romelle. What can I fucking say about you...
For the record... I thought Romelle's Deus Ex Machina side made her pretty shady. Now, I did believe she was telling the truth - from a certain point of you, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say. Won't give too much of an intro here, since Romelle appeared to be a walking mystery box along with the Colony in season 6... but obviously, we got something else entirely.
I will say that the producers compared her a few times to Usagi/Sailor Moon: an ordinary girl who's called to do something extraordinary, which is pretty much every Magical Girl's origin story (except Gigi, but she was one of the earliest Magical Girls before the usual tropes really settled in). And Romelle is A LOT like Usagi... but without all the characteristics that make Usagi likeable despite her ditziness. I'll talk more about that aspect later on.
What you'd expect: As I said, I did believe Romelle was saying the truth from her POV. So, continuing on that POV... I'm going to sum up the situation real quick.
Let's suppose the Alteans who left for the second colony knew when they arrived what they were getting into, and that all those experiments were to help defend the colony in case the Galra Empire found out about them - and you can guess that after seeing an entire planet destroyed, Lotor would be EVEN MORE careful with the last remaining Alteans in the universe. Let's say they were developing new technology for defense that involved using Quintessence - just to make sure they'd have a fighting chance against Haggar, who is, after all, a powerful Altean alchemist. Some could handle it, and some couldn't, which ended up with them draining them of their energy. And that might be one of the reasons why Lotor eventually seeked Allura and Oriande - in order to heal those people who were put in stasis for their survival.
Of course, Lotor not letting the colony know what they were up to might be seen as shady - but you could defend that decision from a military point of view. And while it's ruthless, it makes sense Lotor would go for it - and heck, in season 6, he even admits himself he wasn't that comfortable with it either!
Bandor (Romelle's brother) is one of those who failed. Let's say the whole experience traumatized him enough that he decided to run away, steal a pod, and warn his sister - which he does, but the few words he tells Romelle are enough to have her panic and imagine a thousand wild scenarios (I mean, I'd freak the fuck out too). And keep in mind that the theory of Alteans getting drained of their energy comes from Keith - who, impulsive as always as well as biased, immediately assumes that and takes it as truth.
What would be the next logical step? Since Haggar knows about the colony thanks to Kuron, it would be easy peasy for her to show up as Honerva and convince the Alteans that she's on their side and to work for her - heck, even recruit Romelle so she can keep an eye on Voltron by promising her that her brother will be healed. So, by making her an antagonist, yes, but a sympathetic one, since Romelle is of course convinced she's doing the right thing.
And of course, there is a possibility that Romelle was lying - basically, take the same scenario, but have Haggar using her to spill the beans about the colony to Voltron while changing the truth, again in exchange for Bandor's life.
What we got: Basically, after serving her purpose in season 6... Romelle is put on a bus. Her job was to cockblock Allura and Lotor, and show that "Lol, Lotor was evil all along! Bet you didn't see that coming, lol!"
Remember when I said she's like Usagi, but without the likeable traits? Without the likable traits, you end up with a ditz, who's just a pain in the ass and who has to be dragged around and not do anything useful. That's Romelle in season 7 and 8 in a nutshell. But isn't she adorable? And funny? And cute?
No, dear producers. She's just annoying. That's what it is.
Shiro
Of all the Paladins, Shiro is the most adult one - well, he is actually an adult. Considering VLD is basically a coming-of-age story for the Paladins, Shiro is the kind of character who wouldn't really get an arc, since he's meant to be a mentor figure, albeit a lot less goofy than Coran. The initial idea was for Shiro to die, and stay dead - and the mentor figure dying is a common thing in coming-of-age stories. But since Shiro was extremely popular, the producers decided to bring him back - and we got Kuron, Shiro's Evil Clone controlled by Haggar to spy on the Paladins. That aspect is probably one of the things that got the least butchered by the last season - but it still has its problems.
Wouldn't Kuron and Haggar, like... take advantage of the golden opportunity that is Lotor's presence and have the Paladins mistrust each other because of Lotor's presence? Have a divide between those who are fine with him being an ally and those who aren't? Spreading false rumors about him or a Paladin?
YOU HAD A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY, RIGHT THERE, AND--
Ahem. Anyway, I have nothing to say about how Keith and Shiro's dynamic was developed - it was really one of the best aspects of the show, and I mean it. But after season 6, when Allura "frees" Shiro from the Black Lion and allows him to live in Kuron's body, Shiro takes a backseat. Which makes sense, but you kind of wonder why he's still there, why so much screen time is given to him since he doesn't do much...
And then there's his sexuality. Now, just so we're clear, I'm a-okay with Shiro being gay, obviously, but as so many people have said before me, it's tacked on af. His ex Adam has exactly thirty seconds of screen time before being killed off off-screen, and in the end, he ends up giving up the Garrison while the very reason why he and Adam split was because Shiro was too dedicated to the Garrison, and he marries a random guy we've never seen before the epilogue.
Look, if we look at it realistically, that Shiro would meet a guy after the war and eventually marry him is entirely possible. But, I don't know, considering there were so many filler episodes in season 8, was it really that hard to introduce that new boyfriend for us? Or did you really need to Hide Your Gays once again?
Pidge
Pidge is clearly the writers' favorite - well, Lauren Montgomery's favorite, to be more precise. And I'll be honest - Pidge was my favorite in the first few seasons as well.
Her arc was to find her disappeared father and brother, and that's fine and dandy too, and works with the characterization she was given and that I've explained above. Because ironically, despite her going undercover as a boy, Pidge has... very typically feminine traits - in a good way, of course.
The problem is, from the beginning of the series to the end... Pidge is pretty much the same. She reunites with her family, which is fine, but we don't see her mature, go from girl to woman, and she stays in a strange state of eternal childhood instead. And it's... bizarre, considering how she's supposedly a favorite. It's like after finding Matt and Sam Holt, they didn't know what to do with her anymore. Pairing her off with Lance would have given them both some wriggle-room to grow, but... we got Allurance instead. Heh. I guess her favorite status got her a semi-decent ending at least, compared to the others.
Keith
Keith had so much potential. And the show showed us his potential at every opportunity they had, too. But Keith... he's a loner. He keeps getting hyped as this "great leader you guys!" while he honestly doesn't do much to prove it. Sure, he's good at coming up with strategies, but Keith is impulsive and brash from the beginning to the end and we don't really see anything that shows that he's changing. He gets everything handed to him on a silver platter, without the proper development that comes with it, and he's granted a role that should have been normally given to Lotor... because he's one of the Heroes, I guess? Just like how the Paladins can get away with fucking up galactic politics?
His uniting the Galra speech made me laugh my ass off, since it was pretty much word-for-word the same speech as Lotor in season 3. I guess it's bad when Lotor says it but a-okay when it's Keith.
And I don't even hate Keith, guys - if I'm sounding harsh, it's because of the wasted potential. Because I wanted it to be great. Like I wanted VLD to get the ending it deserved, I guess.
Hunk
I... don't have much to say about Hunk. As much as I complained about the other characters' butchered arcs or lack thereof, I don't really mind Hunk's being pretty straightforward and simple?
Hunk is basically Chewbacca who starts out as the Cowardly Lion. He eventually goes from someone who gets scared of danger pretty easily to someone who's brave, selfless, and is willing to put his life in danger for strangers, just because they are way more endangered than he is. And he's genuinely kind, too - ultimately, he's more interested in bringing joy in other people's lives than fighting. And his way of bringing joy is by cooking food.
How can you not love Hunk, seriously?
So yeah, because his arc is very, very simple, it's hard to mess up. So I'd say that Hunk was the least affected of all the Paladins here.
Acxa (and a bit about Ezor and Zethrid)
So, Honerva gets a redemption arc but not Lotor because... reasons. Acxa switching sides is something I've seen coming for a long time. And for those of you who said back in season 7 that Keith and Acxa getting paired off made no sense... rewatch the show. They meet in season 2, and whenever the Paladins meet the generals, Acxa and Keith ALWAYS fight each other or interact with each other one way or another, and the show makes a point of showing that.
Acxa is there to remind us that Lotor sucks, he really sucks you guys, please join the Anti-Lotor fanclub, I'm president and Romelle is vice-president, we make friendship bracelets and shame Allura behind her back because she's such a stupid girl.
Oh, please excuse me, I didn't realize my Salty Switch was turned on.
*closes Salty Switch *
And you thought Kacxa came out of nowhere? Well, it gets better! Keith ends up with Veronica instead. Because reasons. Or maybe that's just the producers' way of dissing the Klance fandom. I don't know, bitch.
As for Ezor and Zethrid - they're fun characters. But not only they're WAY more bloodthirsty than Lotor ever was, but they also get the most tacked-on redemption arc and switch sides because... reasons, and I guess they get a free pass because they're the Token Lesbian Couple. And I expected Ezor and Zethrid to eventually switch sides - but jeez, do it properly for the love of God.
So. IN CONCLUSION, YOUR HONOR, SINCE I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO PROPERLY END THIS MESS, THIS MASSACRE OF GOOD STORYTELLING, THIS--
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Date: 2018-12-28 07:30 pm (UTC)I agree with the bulk of this, really. Especially about Pidge, because my God, if Montgomery managed to cock up the arc for her supposed fave where her growth basically stops mid-way into the show, what hope did anyone else have?
(BTW: *points at self* total Plance shipper. SOOOOOO here for this. I t6hink it's pretty telling that at the end of season 7 that the ship practically exploded while the one they'd been hinting at from the beginning barely made a dent in anyone's radar--and I suspect it only made it into fandommetrics that one week because of Klanti crosstagging. But I digress)
It's funny, but I thought that this season, Lance was basically a prop for Allura's (very long and somewhat our of character) story. She was the one who got the powerups and figure out how to deal with Honerva and Lance was there reminding me waaaaaaaaaaay to much of Brittany Murphy's character from 8 Mile who only existed to cheer on Eminem.
I think we may be coming at the same point from two different angles, because either way, the ship did nothing for either of them as characters and the fact that I'm finding more reasonable, sane people bringing up that they see this as a rebound illustrates that the writers sold this as well as I sold MINIs for the year that I did sales there, which is not well at all. At least I got the better customer serveys. ;)
I figured the Keith/Veronica this was just an off-hand joke and nothing to take seriously. Because Veronica and Axca had way more chemistry in their scenes than Allurance has had in 78 fucking episodes.
Hunk had a whole bunch of stupid ass fat jokes that got old by the end of S1. That would've been the one thing about his story that I'd say would need to go. I imagine if he'd been a white kid that they'd gone full Peter Griffin with that.
But, I don't know, considering there were so many filler episodes in season 8, was it really that hard to introduce that new boyfriend for us? Or did you really need to Hide Your Gays once again?
1)Yeah, why were there so many filler plots this season? In the last fucking season, with so much shit to wrap up, like IDK....literally everything outlined above? Day 47 was nice and fun and so was Clear Day, but there were two perfectly good wasted opportunity to maybe give Lotor that much needed redemption--or give Shiro and Keith one actual scene together. Or showing some reason why Allura cares about Lance since TPTB were going all in on that. Or...
2)It absolutely was a reaction to fan outrage. The Twitter post with the main Shiro artist adding him in was posted around Sept 10, less than a month after S7. the show was pushed back an entire month for that. and while I accept it for what it is as a stepping stone to better rep, the salty part of me wishes they just hadn't bothered if they were gonna be this lazy about it.
This is the first time I've seen a fandom be this vocal about a show's inclusion of gay rep for the fact that it didn't go far enough rather than shitting bricks that it had even happened at all, so...I guess that's progress to celebrate. Maybe the next incarnation of Voltron will take that with a bit more consideration.
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Date: 2018-12-31 12:32 am (UTC)And that's the thing with Pidge, Allura, and even Romelle, to an extent: Pidge is the favorite and she's the "Cool Girl" who doesn't need to change and whose development stops apparently because she's cool already, but that means she never gets out of childhood - failing the number 1 requirement in a coming-of-age story. Her reuniting her family was the opportunity for that, but it all happened mid-series and did Pidge really learn something from it? Did she become wiser, more mature? Not really.
Allura gets slut-shamed by the writers for falling in love with the hot guy who's pretty much the living embodiment of the male love interest in a female-centered narrative/fantasy, who turns out to be evil because... he's evil, and for the sake of shock value, and she ends up with the local Nice Guy because she finally gave into his incessant teasing of her while she showed clear signs she was not interested and Lance just didn't catch the signals (but you know, it was played off as a joke and boys will be boys). So as someone on Tumblr said... it's like Allura's arc was meant to be this grandiose adventure where the logical end is that she becomes a greater than nature figure/goddess, but instead, it ends up being a mockery of the kind of narrative girls will turn to, and it coerces them into enjoying "sensible" male-centered narrative instead.
And Romelle... well, once she does her part in showing that Lotor is EVUL just because he's EVUL and Allura is just a silly little girl who was fooled by him, she's pretty much just a ditz with pigtails and a pink outfit, because of course someone who will dress like that and wear pigtails is going to be a ditz.
So yeah. I'm not kidding when I say that the female-centered narrative Allura got was shifted drastically.
And as you said, weirdly enough, Lance actually didn't get to do much, apart from parading around with Allura to show off his Magical Space Waifu and even saying lines as cringey as "I'm good at winning prizes". And boy were the Paladins dumb when it came to Honerva. It took them a few episodes to figure out she was their new Big Boss to defeat, and it took them another few episodes to figure out how to defeat her. Epic fail.
But yeah, Pidgance and Lotura were both the best options to allow all four characters to really grow and bring out the best in each other. But nope.
And I guess my issue with Keith and Veronica is that they REALLY came out of nowhere - moreso than Allurance. I actually caught the cues with Keith and Acxa throughout the seasons, but I won't tell you to rewatch the show to get to actually see them because, well, LOL.
But man, Shiro's endgame reminds me of how I'd say Korrasami wasn't that well-developed and me being accused of being homophobic for it - while my point was pretty much SPEND LESS TIME ON FRIGGIN MAKO AND MAKE KORRA AND ASAMI GAYER FFS. They actually managed to do a worse job than what was done with Korrasami. I'm not sure whether I should be pissed or saltily amused about it.
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Date: 2018-12-31 03:58 pm (UTC)I really have to question the decision to trump Pidge's story so damn quick in the series. You'd think with her being LM's fave that she would've gotten the best arc of everyone, but honestly, hers was a bigger disappointment than even Hunk's...at least we got a clear progression of where he was and how he overcame that...somehing we never see from any other Paladin, including Keith, whose biggest development moments all happen offscreen and away from the group.
And Korrasami at least had the excuse of being the first to pioneer this, four years ago when the only other kid-friendly (....ish) gay content was Glee and maybe a few stories on Degrassi. It made big waves, but I know when I eventually got around to watching LoK I was a bit underwhelmed. But back then, that was all there was. Between everything on TV today, no matter how rare m/m depictions are on TV, the Shiro kiss will be a curious footnote at best . I'm glad to read posts from people who now feel emboldened enough to speak and not settle for crumbs in a year that gave us a lesbian wedding between two characters that we're SHOWN to have a relationship.
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Date: 2018-12-31 06:57 pm (UTC)Well, the first openly lesbian relationship was Willow and Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - and that was around 15 years before LoK did it (okay, Tara died, which is not cool, but hey). Willow and Tara were by no means perfect when it came to representation, but it was still groundbreaking for its time. Buffy in general was, but it wouldn't be that much today - and Joss Whedon didn't exactly evolve either in his feminist points of view. So it's nothing new, and 15 years later, you'd expect them to do more. But nope lmao.