#“she looks cold. this gun will keep her warm.” HUNK logic

[rachelfoleyisntdead]

You could remake re2r Leon A/B with Rachel as Leon and HUNK as Ada and I stg it's the same fuckin vibes and goes the same way.

[ganymedesclock]

Character Analysis: Keith

[ Shiro ] [ Lance ] [ Hunk ] [ Pidge ] [ Allura ] [ Coran ]

The last of the official paladins, and the last main character introduced on Earth. Some words on everyone’s favorite space changeling.

Official bios state that Keith was orphaned at a young age, but as of season 2, there are a lot of mysteries about his early life. What we do have, is that he was at least old enough to clearly remember his father when that individual left, and use of language in Keith’s dream in s2e9 would tell us that this person would seem to have disappeared, not that he died.

The rest of Keith’s history before the Garrison can be inferred from what is not mentioned, rather than what is- logically as a child without parents or guardians, Keith would be placed in the foster care system. However, he wouldn’t continue to be an orphan if he were simply adopted to a family and stayed there.

Family is something very meaningful to Keith. Seemingly, the closest thing to a familial presence he has right now is the team- mostly Shiro, who he’s had the most experience with. If there were other people at the Garrison that Keith connected with- it would seem that Commander Iverson thought very highly of him- he lost contact with them upon being expelled.

It’s very likely that Keith thus moved around the system fairly frequently. Possibly, moving around the US itself- while Keith’s father has a noticeable southern accent, this is not a trait Keith obviously shares- even though he presumably learned how to speak from his father. This might suggest he’s lived in many places, and over time the accent he might’ve inherited from his father would’ve faded away.

Connect and disconnect

The implications of Keith’s history and his living situation at the beginning of the series point heavily to someone for whom isolation has been a major piece of his life. Not being alone in the sense of bereft of people, but bereft of meaningful connections. And in fact, when Voltron is confronted by the idea of losing one of their number- Pidge threatening to leave the team- it is Keith who is outraged by the very idea, and- considering how he folds in afterwards- very hurt by it.

But not every disappearance is equal to Keith. There’s a very specific context Keith reacts to, and the trial of marmora unabashedly frames this as his greatest fear: 

Keith is afraid of people choosing to leave him. Of no longer wanting him around. And what’s especially noticeable about it is that as much as the idea terrifies him, and as diligent as Keith can otherwise be in the pursuit of his goals- when faced with rejection, Keith is often very resigned in response. He’s terrified of it, he’ll fight it if he thinks that he can- but if that doesn’t work or he doesn’t feel like he can fight the situation in the first place- an ordinarily very driven individual will often just sort of roll over and take it.

This doesn’t just tell us that Keith is afraid of losing people. It tells us that in his experience, he has often been completely helpless to stop people from walking out of his life- to the point that confronted with a novel situation, there’s something of a pall of futility over his responses. That Keith’s first obvious loss (his father) is stated to have happened when he was very young, and may have been preceded by losing his mother even younger, would tell us that this was a very formative context.

Especially because Keith’s memory of his father is an incredibly gentle person- seeming to genuinely care about Keith and want to keep him safe, to the point that during the dream, there is the implication that Keith’s father is trying to personally protect him from the oncoming juggernaut of the Empire. What Keith remembers of his father is soft and reassuring, which suggests that his disappearance was one keenly felt.

The fact that this has repeated throughout Keith’s life is a particular misfortune in that it seems the main explanation Keith believes about why people leave him is that it’s his fault. This is the main difference between when he responds with fury (towards Pidge) and passive surrender (towards Allura)- Pidge’s reason for leaving has nothing to do with Keith and everything to do with finding her family- which she prioritizes over Voltron. Allura’s reason for turning a cold shoulder- a much more subdued reaction- has to do with Keith, specifically, and Keith’s response is basically to fold up into a ball and refuse to engage the subject.

This is also rather painfully illustrated in Ark of Taujeer. While both Keith and Allura prepare to leave the team when they suspect they’re endangering everyone- Allura doesn’t pack her bags. Keith does. Clearly suggesting that unlike Allura, who wants to test if the fleet comes after her and is confident in her ability to escape if it’s true- Keith fully expected to leave the team permanently. He even suggests as much when they’re talking about what they’re going to do if the fleet does come: Keith asks if they could really go back knowing Zarkon is tracking them.

A very likely history of being shuffled from house to house, and losing the chance to have any kind of stable foundation- has left Keith with a deep held idea that if he is a burden on the team they will leave him. As seen in practice, comparing Keith’s vision of Shiro during the trial to how Shiro actually responds- this is not a fear built by the team. It’s a fear that predates them.

The survivalist’s instinct

Another thing that Keith’s unsteady relationship with stability has done is that it has allowed for the cultivation of one of his main virtues as the Red Paladin- the concept of “fly by feel”. Effectively, thrown into any situation, Keith shuts his horizons to a kind of tunnel vision- feet to the ground, goal in front of him- run for it. He is excellent at reacting quickly and staying focused- but, as can be observed by his interactions with Lance in the Balmera, complex strategy is not Keith’s forte in the heat of the moment.

Conversely, in a situation where there are only seconds to spare and you have to respond now or lose everything, Keith excels. This is why, for example, he’s the one to send in if you have to navigate a chaotic asteroid field with hair-trigger reflexes. When he sets his attention on chasing a single goal, he can be very effective at identifying what he needs and pulling it off very specifically, and when in a situation where he does have time to strategize, we can see that he’s actually on par with Lance (creating a diversion to distract the Garrison guards by rigging explosives and detonating them when Lance reached the same conclusion that a distraction was what they’d need to sneak in)

Another, noteworthy side of this is, since Keith has a very do-or-die attitude about how he makes decisions, his solutions tend to not be the most finessed. Or necessarily noble. “We’re facing a bunch of guns and there is no quick way out of this situation but we have a hostage.” He’s inclined to suggesting- and sometimes acting on- what’s the pragmatic approach over what’s the ideal approach. 

What we see from Keith in his shack is that even at his worst, he has what can be summarized as a stubborn determination to keep going, and has cultivated a lot of small skills in general categories (s2e2, Shiro and Keith are at a kind of roughly established campsite with a fire, and considering the extent of Shiro’s injuries at the time, it’s safe to say Keith did the vast majority of that). Living in a shed in the desert without running water was relatively easy for Keith- to the point that he reflects on it as a peaceful, comfortable time.

It tells us that in terms of surroundings, Keith is easy to please- but also that as much as isolation has colored his history, he’s used to being his own line of defense. It’s very easy to mistake Keith as the stereotypical hotshot “lancer” character in an ensemble piece who’s too cool for friendship and teamwork but gets by on natural talent- when in fact Keith welcomes the opportunity to work with people. He’s just overwhelmingly used to being alone- to not having other people he can rely on, and so his reflex is to respond to problems as best as he can on his own.

Effectively- Keith is out of practice with teamwork and having other people around him, and this has been an adjustment for him- though not a joyless one.

Oh god how do I people skills

The other other side to Keith’s personal history of isolation, and I think simply a degree of how Keith is, is that when Keith really opens up to someone, he’s very clumsy about it. Particularly with unexpected intimacy or warm sentiments from other people, he tends to freeze up or get a kind of deer-in-the-headlights look.

On the one hand, this is something he’s been yearning for basically his entire life. We can see that when he’s not caught off-guard by them, such gestures mean the world to him. On the other, when, say, suddenly swiped into a hug by Hunk, as much as Keith enjoys it, his initial response is to go stiff and sort of cautiously joke about it afterwards. 

I think that Keith is very aware that he’s not the best at socializing, and a little defensive about it. He is, sometimes, reluctant to engage for fear of how it will be received- we can see that if he isn’t sure how to proceed with a particularly uncomfortable conversation, as I mentioned before- he tends to fold inwards.

So it creates this very contradictory picture of Keith. At his most comfortable, Keith is sentimental, cares deeply about the people who’ve established to him- a little clingy, even, but someone who can even lighten up and be fun, crack jokes and carry a conversation.

Other times, he can come across very standoffish, partially out of awkwardness, but partially because he’s so used to being in his own space that much of his idea of how to be close to others is to hover in the general area- do whatever you’d do alone, but with other people there. There’s also the fact that Keith is fairly introverted- it’s easy for him to get sucked into and spend a long time caught up in his own thoughts.

(It’s telling that Shiro, who knows Keith the best at this point, has learned to identify Keith being unusually quiet as a sign that it’s time to check on him)

At the same time, Keith is smart. He’s not oblivious. He knows that it’s hard for him to get nuances of socialization- that he really hasn’t had a lot of friends in his time and it’s very obvious, and that despite having quite a sense of his own sarcasm he can miss others’ inflections, and that furthers, I think, a kind of defensive attitude. Rejection is a very sensitive topic to Keith and a bit like Pidge, he’s kind of shored up his defenses against the idea even when it isn’t exactly forthcoming.

Hidden sides

Both of the arm pilots arguably have a relationship with hiding. With Pidge, it’s a matter of deliberate obfuscation- she will use her own illusions, consciously and actively, to penetrate others. You can’t hide anything from her, but she can hide from you.

What’s interesting about Keith is that there’s a lot of hidden things for Keith- but these things are hidden from him about himself.

It’s made very clear in s1e1, and seems to be at play again in s1e10, that Keith is personally tuned into some kind of esoteric awareness that the rest of the team does not have. He was able to know Shiro was coming before the pod arrived, and during his year in the desert, he was “called” to the location of the Blue Lion. We also actively see him intuit the location of Red.

However... when Keith tries to explain what he’s found, what he knows, which has yielded a lot of accurate information, one of the first things he can say about something he’s clearly sunk a huge amount of effort into trying to understand is “I can’t explain it, really.”

Keith and Pidge both, to a degree, have a narrative about looking for family, and looking for answers. But unlike Pidge, who’s so certain of herself and her tools, Keith doesn’t really know what his tools are. He doesn’t even know what questions to ask. All he has is this powerful, insistent sense something is out there or going to happen.

And part of this is the other lasting effect of Keith’s separation from his own history- the part that doesn’t really have anything to do with isolation. It’s that Keith is missing huge pieces of context integral to understanding who he is.

Weapons in the series are used, heavily, to inform about the character. The bayard literally takes a shape tailored to the wielder. And the most tangible piece of Keith’s history that he has, besides himself- is a weapon that until very recently has been dormant, not in its true form- and even that dormant form has its main identifying mark hidden from view.

This is a reflection of Keith’s relationship with himself. On the one hand- his pragmatism has made him utilize everything he has with him, because nothing else will be forthcoming. He knows it’s there- it always has been. But he doesn’t understand it, and that context is holding him back from his potential. He can be more, and do more- but only with an understanding that he’s been cheated of.

And this, I think, reflects one of Keith’s struggles. Because the arm pilots are both the side of Voltron that engages with the world- the active, information-gathering. But Pidge’s tools are specific, external, and unbiased in every regard except what direction she points them in and how she sets her net.

Keith’s are all internal, nebulous, and incredibly undefined, to the point that Keith doesn’t realize they’re there or know to utilize them. If he could reliably tap into the same source that let him know Shiro was headed towards Earth, then team Voltron could find Shiro now. If he doesn’t need specific contact with that individual, he might even be able to help Pidge find the Holts. This is a tremendous potential resource.

But he’s held back, because no one has been there to explain this to him. Because Keith, arguably- is still in the state of the wrapped-up knife. He doesn’t know his true form and true potential. Hints of it maybe. 

Stability and loyalty

Another point of similarity between Keith and Pidge is that they are not driven by purely academic pursuits. For both of them, their real driving quest is comfort. Pidge’s family has been the center of her world, and she wants that back. Keith- arguably has never really had a stable center bigger than himself. Even Shiro, seemingly one of the most powerful stabilizing presences in Keith’s life since the loss of his father (since those are the two figures the trial picks to challenge him)- Shiro’s presence has been inconsistent by no fault of his own.

(thanks, Galra empire)

So at present- I think that Keith is very conflicted. On the one hand, part of him really wants to hope that Voltron is an enduring thing. That maybe he’s finally got somewhere to think of as home, something like a family. And on the other hand- that’s terrifying, because they’re in the middle of a war zone and an entire intergalactic space empire and the gaping unknowns in his own history seem to be actively trying to tear that away from him.

This incredibly conflicting sentiment can lead to some even more contradictory behavior out of Keith- how he’s the one who didn’t want to go after Allura, but also was the one who personally bull-rushed Zarkon to try and protect the rest of the team and repeatedly refused to listen to Coran telling him how outmatched he was.

I’ve talked before about Zarkon’s comment that Keith “fights like a galra”, especially considering s2e6 and Morvok’s men who resolutely set themselves to die for the cause and are executed by the imperfect Blazing Sword.

Zarkon isn’t praising Keith for being vicious, he’s praising the fact that to a degree- Keith is committing to being a sacrifice. It doesn’t matter if he’s safe, it doesn’t matter if he has no chance of beating Zarkon- what matters is that as long as they’re fighting Zarkon can’t get to the downed Black Lion.

Keith is also, as people have pointed out, the one person who insistently repeats that the Black Bayard is Shiro’s every time he brings it up. And that solo brawl between him and Zarkon is a much louder declaration of that- you have no business going anywhere near the Black Lion.

As rocky as it is for Keith to connect with people, once he does, he is nothing if not incredibly tenacious on that person’s behalf.

Prodigy or problem

Interestingly, despite how much Keith is talked up as the best pilot of the class, I’ve mentioned his prodigy status very little here. While I think it does affect him to some degree...

Mostly, he knows he’s smart, but at the same time is confronted with knowing that some things (such as socialization) that others consider “obvious” are completely in the dark to him, and he’s kind of defensive about that

...to a large degree I don’t know if Keith really registers himself as someone who is talented in the way that Shiro and Pidge do- with high expectations being a strong element of their background. Because again, with Keith’s history of being often shuffled around, it’s very likely that rather than “prodigy, full of potential” what he’s been most likely getting is “problem child, probably not going to amount to much”

Keith is not especially temperamental- but his desire to cut to a working solution as quickly as possible, combined with a general difficulty expressing himself, means that his frustrations are usually not answered. What basically boils down to a moderately short temper is exacerbated by a stormy internal landscape and a tendency to be stewing in one uncomfortable thought or another.

Basically, Keith seems super explosive, but overwhelmingly, this is an artificially induced state and is usually a testament to the fact that if something is bothering him, he will almost never speak up about it directly on his own. (Because he’s very scared of being “too needy” and alienating people). But it’s very likely, in a context where people have rarely been in touch with him for a long period of time, that Keith comes across as an emotional hurricane.

Effectively, Keith’s is a fire that tends to smolder in the underbrush a long time before it ever burns the forest down- and in the past, it seems like Shiro was the main person to actually check under the surface and see what’s burning in the depths.

But the image Keith has most likely internalized of himself is not the awesome pilot that Lance and Iverson both seem to look to him as- but the “discipline issue”. And that builds another level of frustration, because if he explodes, he’s just proving everyone right, and he seems to disappoint people a lot from his perspective. Even the awareness that he is talented, that he does have things to be good at- those high expectations that Pidge and Shiro have both matched most of their lives would seem very out of reach for Keith, much more so after he lost Shiro and then was expelled from the Garrison, probably the only people that have ever told him that.

Because when confronted with the idea that someone was jealous of him, Keith’s response is pretty much utter bafflement. And when Keith and Lance are actually interacting in close quarters- Keith picks up the rivalry in about as much earnestness as Lance does, which would suggest that Keith might well see Lance as someone to be jealous of just as much as Lance envies Keith.

And why wouldn’t he? People like Lance. Lance is the person who plants himself in the middle of social environments and makes five friends in the time Keith is still sort of hovering hopefully in someone’s general vicinity. Lance, who has a huge family and a really clear idea of home as a specific place and people to come back to.

This, I think, is a very significant angle to Keith realizing he has galra heritage that is often not explored- is the idea that this is not a transformation narrative, it’s a narrative of self-discovery. It’s Keith putting a name to a problem he’s already been dealing with, and this fits with what I said before- that when Allura was angry with him, Keith’s whole reaction suggested that he felt like he deserved it.

Because the revelation that Keith has alien heritage and history basically would just cement a lot of Keith’s fears all along. That maybe the reason why he’s never had a good lasting connection is because he doesn’t even belong here, because he’s fundamentally unlike the people around him- and that difference carries with it a very bad impression. As much as the series is showing us a more multifaceted view of the galra as a species, their first and strongest impression is Zarkon and his empire.

This is why Keith hasn’t immediately jumped on the chance for those answers Kolivan promised if he succeeded the trial- is so far, the first one that’s come forwards has offered him no reassurance or comfort. 

No Subterfuge At All

It’s worth mentioning, as much as I talked about how Keith and Pidge are similar, that in contrast to Pidge who was able to fabricate her own identity, Keith is a bad liar.

Keith is an awful liar.

Thematically this ties very much into the fact that Keith has an incredibly intuitive sense of truth. When his channels are open he can just know something is going to happen or that something is important. But this relationship is so visceral, and he has no real sense of knowing how people hide something- that basically the only way Keith can hide something is if he actively and entirely removes himself from a situation, or just manages to avoid anyone asking about it.

Because as soon as someone does... well, look at how fast Allura was able to unravel why he was around the pods in s2e6.

That scene in particular actually shows us entirely outside of not having a poker face, Keith is someone who if he is trying to bluff about something he will in fact progressively shoot himself in the foot the longer he’s still talking.

In summary

Having been isolated most of his life, Keith is deeply insecure of, but also needy about interpersonal relationships. He’s very introverted, which can make him self-sufficient, but it also can cause him to stew over time in worries or doubts until something sets that off. Unlike Shiro and Pidge, he likely does not see himself nearly so much as promising or a prodigy.

Much of Keith’s sense of self is on shaky ground or underdeveloped due to being bereft of huge pieces of information about himself and how he operates.