#I STG IF ANYONE REBLOGS THIS IM GONNA STAB THEM

[bladesmcna]

Time for me to meta about everything the Keith video touched on.  PSA it’s a long read. It’s just over 2k words. Also psa DO NOT REBLOG.

I’d like to start off this with a song lyric that I feel really resonates with keith. 

Have you ever felt like nobody was there? Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere? Have you ever felt like you could disappear? Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

I’m going to start from the beginning of Keith’s life because frankly, that’s where all of his problems started. Keith has never canonically mentioned his father other than in the blade episode so there’s not much to go on there. BUT now that he’s mentioned his mother leaving him we can infer that Keith has abandonment issues. He blames the way he is now on the fact that his mother left him. His biggest question is WHY she left him. What did he do wrong? Why didn’t she love him? It’s all these questions that he’s asked himself for years now. 

The next point I’d like to move on to is the abandonment issues that came along as a result of his mother leaving him. Now while I hc that his father died ( the show could prove me wrong but whatever ) and then Keith was shipped off to the Garrison instead of going into foster care that’s another issue of Keith being alone. His father left him by himself, no other family to contact. Instead they shipped him off to the Garrison where he tried to bust his ass to make something out of himself. He needed to prove to himself that even with all the shit he’s gone through that he could be more than his parents deaths. 

I’d also like to point out how Keith is never taught any coping mechanisms on how to deal with loss or anger or anything that could make him uncomfortable. He’s literally been shown to lose his cool and get angry the second he feels uncomfortable. Why? Because he doesn’t have any other way of dealing with. It’s not like he wants to get angry all the time he just doesn’t know how to control it. He gets worked up and then can’t stop himself until it’s too late and then whenever someone such as Shiro or Lance call him out and ask him to calm down he’s calm almost immediately, why? Because he never intends to get that angry in the first place. After being called out about it it’s just another slap in the face that he can’t control himself or his emotions because he never had someone there to teach him. 

This is where I wanna bring Shiro into the picture. They obviously knew each other through the Garrison ( my ships aside here ) they were most likely friends before Shiro went off to Kerberos. So not only had Keith finally made a friend, but he then had to watch them go off into space and then be reported missing. There’s another instance of loss in his life and he doesn’t know how to cop so what happens? He drops out because of disciplinary issues. Aka he couldn’t keep his temper in check because again, he bottled his feelings until the point where he was a human catalyst and exploded. 

After dropping out Keith had basically no where to go so he found himself in an old shack. Where he got to stew on his feelings alone for a few months. This is when the realization that everything in his life as amounted to nothing hits him. His parents are both gone, his one and only friend is presumed dead in space and he dropped out of a top flight school where he was at the top of his class only to end up ALONE. Out of the 3 canonically relevant people he’d ever been close to in his life, all of three of them had left him. That’s when the depression hits him harder than before. He struggles waking up every day he struggles taking care of himself. His hair grows out he forgets how to interact with people. He doesn’t know how to function as a person anymore. 

After awhile it was too much for him. He feels like he never deserved a chance to be born with in the first place because whatever high being there is out there ( I personally don’t think Keith is religious ) gave him this sort of life even after he busted his ass to try and become someone. Yet there he was, thrown out in the dirt once again. 

Another thing I’d like to touch on is how Keith actually views himself because that’s super important to me and how I write him. 

Keith doesn’t view himself in a good light at all for all the reasons I’ve already listed. Keith doesn’t see himself as the ‘number one pilot’ the rest of the team might see him for. He’s flawed. He can’t deal with most social situations without getting aggressive or awkward because honestly he’s had more interaction with people in the first two episodes of voltron than nearly his entire life prior to him finding Shiro again. So of course he’s awkward and quiet unless provoked. ( which honestly isn’t a hard thing to do BUT i digress ) He also has a hard time grasping a lot of social concepts that many people think are second nature. ( insert the i say vol you say tron example here ) The reason why he’s so hung up on the whole i say voltron deal is because to him, it makes more logical sense to just say voltron than to say something that, while yes it’s supposed to be humorous, just doesn’t make any sense to him. Keith isn’t one for humor that isn’t direct/blunt because a lot of the time his brain can’t wrap itself around the concept. 

I also want to touch on his the relationships he holds with the paladins themselves and how he views their input. 

I’d like to start this off with the beginning of season three whenever they were all deciding who was going to pilot the black lion. Their aggression towards him confessing that Shiro kept being like ‘i want you to lead voltron’ but having never mentioned it to anyone else, not even to coran or allura is like a huge kick in the face to the little confidence he had in himself.  One because he hates being rejected because that’s all he’s ever been his entire life. Two, is because he thought the team thought more highly of him than just the loner and yet there they were calling him out and making him feel like he was at the bottom of the barrel. The only talent any of them ever acknowledge is his piloting skills. Nothing else about him shines, he’s just a good pilot to them. 

Moving on to whenever they all actually go in the black lion. Keith was the LAST to attempt and honestly he probably only attempted because everyone else was pressuring him to. He had to try right? Except he never wanted to lead voltron in the first place. He doesn’t have the skill set to lead he doesn’t have the qualities of a leader. Even after the black lion responds to him he wants to deny it, he wants to let someone else do it because he can’t have such a big responsibility placed on him whenever he knows he’s going to fail. 

That’s when everyone starts to congratulate him and he feels like he’s just been kicked in the teeth. He knows their true feelings, he knows that know of them really value his ability to pilot over him and yet there they were being like ‘oh you’re going to be a great leader.’ Yet he wasn’t. He almost got Allura killed. They wanted him to lead so he did, and he failed. 

Once again he’d failed. He failed his mother’s love, his fathers legacy, and how he’d failed Shiro. That only made the depression worse. 

Moving back all the way to season 1 I want to talk about the famous ‘bonding moment’ that was humorously touched in the show. 

The reason ( I feel at least ) Keith is so upset about Lance not remembering it is because for the first time since Shiro, Keith had found someone that had seen him in a good light. Someone that had complimented him. Even after all the headassery that Lance had started with Keith he thought they made a good team, and this good team work is shown time and time again throughout the show and yet the fact that Lance forgets it just solidifies to Keith that nothing he does is worth remembering. 

This is the time where I put my little blurb about Lance and Keith and their interactions

So Lance starts basically everything in the rivalry between the two of them. Literally within the first five minutes of meeting Keith, Lance is already shoving his superiority down his throat. At first Keith didn’t understand why Lance was like this and why Lance kept pushing it on him. ( he even finds it somewhat annoying and like Lance has a problem ) Yet as time goes on the rivalry turns into a more competitive nature that Keith starts to play back with. At first Keith really just wanted Lance to get off his case, and now it’s like their rivalry has brought them closer together by the time season 3 rolls around. 

My last few little blurbs before I close off this novel of a meta

Keith deals with anxiety and depression that’s almost without a doubt 100% canon in my eyes. The way he acts and the way he carries himself and how he speaks and the way he words things and all this stuff is clearly a sign that he’s struggling with it and he doesn’t know how to control it, yet he also doesn’t want to admit that he has a problem because he doesn’t want to fail everyone on the team yet again. 

Keith also values everyone on his team way more than what he lets on. He protects Allura from the arusian that comes to the castle asking why the lion goddess is mad. He catches Pidge from being thrown and all the times he’s thrown his sword to protect Lance and everything else he’s done. He wants to protect the team because they’ve become almost like his first real family. Yet he’s also terrified that this new family will drop him too, just like everyone else. 

Keith struggles with his galra side. He struggles taking in the fact that he’s not what he thought he was his entire life and that just makes him not know who he is even more. Sometimes whenever he looks in the mirror he doesn’t see himself, but instead Zarkon or Lotor because that’s where part of him is from. He hates the term ‘galra keith’ because it’s like the fact once everyone knows that he’s galra he’s instantly not himself anymore but instead this evil abomination that’s wiped out entire systems with his army.  Him being Galra is just the nail in the coffin that once again, he’s a huge disappointment to everyone.

He fears rejection big time. Because all anyone has ever done from the get go is reject him. His mother rejected him by leaving, he rejected himself from the garrison. Lance rejects him by throwing all of his flaws in his face. He can’t catch a break. He tries so hard to prove to everyone that he’s more than the broken parts of him that he hides away. He wants to try and prove to everyone ( including himself ) that he can be more than just some socially awkward teenager. 

In closing I’d like to bring up the song lyric I put at the top of this post 

Have you ever felt like nobody was there? Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere? Have you ever felt like you could disappear? Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

This is basically how Keith views himself. He honestly thinks he’s replaceable. They could find someone else in the galaxy with his piloting skills. They could find a new red paladin that wasn’t the loner emo brooding hot head. He feels like everyone on the team has forgotten that hey, he’s a person with feelings too. Not just some teenage kid who gets angry all the time for the hell of it. He feels like if he died, he’d die alone. If he died no one would care because he never really amounted to anything in life. He never changed anyone’s life or impacted others the way some have done for him. If he died no one would miss him because he doesn’t even have a family on earth to go back to. He thinks that if he died, everyone would just keep on living and forget about him. 

And being forgotten is his biggest fear.