#I have like 3 other unanswered about sheith in my inbox

[squeakyleftsneaker]

You survived, gj🫡✨️ Thoroughly enjoyed your descent into hell. Once again, just straight up ignore the fandom (even this message if needs be). Fandom is not what it used to be thanks to the hell shippers of this fandom, particularly the kl*ncers. The Lance stans are insufferable, and their hatred of any ship that isn't KL is well known. It's thanks to them that any ship in general they Personally Do Not Like gets labeled Literal Pedophilia/Basically Incest. Watching Voltron in its heyday was exhausting. Their hatred of Shiro and Allura are well documented, shoving them into Space Dad and Space Mom roles. They hated how close he was to Keith and would spam LOVE THOSE bROTheRs on every social media site to make people who never watched believe they were actually related and have that gutjerk reaction of disgust. They made a whole ass fuss over Adam because he was their ticket for getting Shiro out of the picture. That fuss is partially what led S8 to being delayed and rewritten, and the entire reason for that shit epilogue wedding. They celebrated Allura dying so Lance could be with his ~One True Love~ a heavily fanonized Keith to go with their langsty altean prince true black paladin bisexual king self insert.

SO I let this sit in my inbox for a lot longer than I care to admit. Mostly because I at the time didn't have a great picture for how this all played out, and to be honest I still don't.

I did kind of want to discuss this just bc I was having a somewhat related discussion about a totally different work of fiction (one I may talk about later on here though I am still not quite sure what to do with this blog) and It got me thinking about this message again. Now that I've read the whole dissertation about it, I am kind of intrigued by the mechanisms by which Klance as a ship became so popular.

This may have been the fact that I basically inhaled the whole show over the course of a month, but I never actually picked up on a significant focus on Lance and Keith's relationship in text, though I've been made aware that some of the marketing for the show did lean into it.

This is, however, not super related to what I did want to talk about which is more related to shipping and how we read fiction and interact with it in fandom. I don't think I'm UNIQUE in these observations, no observation ever is, but I do think that having now gotten a slightly better idea of what the show was (and wasn't) I feel comfortable at least getting a sanity check on it.

I, on a personal level, completely understand how someone, in particular someone young, would feel suspicious and RIGHTFULLY uncomfortable with a relationship between two adults with a large age gap who met when one of them WAS a young teenager. That is, IRL, a pretty clear red flag. I get it. I really do. I don't think you, if you're a teenager yourself, should "get over" that feeling of discomfort.

With that being said, I think it's also possible to see why other people in the fandom are, rightfully as well, very suspicious of a group of people who say they're endorsing pedophilia or incest. It's not NEW in queer spaces. It's, in fact, pretty much what ALL queer spaces and queer people put up with. That's what so much anti-queer language and extremely homophobic tradition uses as a bludgeon to devalue queer relationships, queer stories, queer spaces.

Particularly in media, queer stories that weren't allowed to just be queer in and of themselves have historically OFTEN been rejected through the lens of "they're like siblings" or "but it's such a huge age gap," and I think that it is an unintentional, but still real, reinforcement of that language and that policing of morality in fandom that have in general been used to denigrate queer people and queer people desiring to see themselves in media, to be represented, and to take works of fiction that are emotionally significant to them and read themselves into them.

So, yeah. Idk. I can see how particularly young people would be uncomfortable on a personal level with the idea of shipping Shiro with Keith or like. Any paladin. I get that. But I also totally and completely get how that same language and rhetoric around pedophilia and incest being applied to a canonically queer character is like. Very much reminiscent and rooted in a lot of homophobia within fandom. These are in tension with each other.

It is also true that there is a tension in that Shiro and Allura are both very much not white (yay), Shiro is our main character that is canonically queer, and to reduce them to "Space Mom," and "Space Dad," relegating them to non-romantic, background roles feels a little disappointing! Even if that's not the intended effect!

Perhaps more importantly though, they're not rooted in the text itself (which is where we get to the later part of this ask). I don't know a lot about Lance fans as a Culture [TM}, and I will probably not be entirely incorrect in saying that there's all kinds of flavors of insufferable fans (I am one myself), but I do think that this sort of thing naturally arises in a text that doesn't have a whole lot to interpret.

I've written before that Voltron lacks depth. Which means that if you're a fan, if you want to interact with the text, if you want to really discuss the characters, you run out of textual material very quickly. You have to read stuff into it. You HAVE to do a healthy amount of DIY characterization. And Lance is a very natural character to do this with because he IS our point of view character very loosely (though the show does a poor job with this). So I get how that arises, I get how the show itself encourages ~fanon~ over canon because there's so little in canon to talk about.

Sure, in canon for the first 2 seasons and in season 6, the relationship between Keith and Shiro is pretty narratively central. But the writers also totally drop it for ages on end and fail to explore it. I don't feel uncomfortable saying that pretty much every potential ship in the show requires a very substantial amount of eisegesis.

No ship is more textually supported romantically than the others. Not even really the only canon one between paladins, because Lance and Allura have very little reason to be together (deep sigh. Oh writers, oh writers what am I to do with this).

It's very natural for fandom to do fandom things. That's totally fine imo. But I think it's always worth remembering when interacting with others that fanon is. Not textual. You're playing in a sandbox, not doing sand castle archaeology. HOWEVER when showrunners and marketing teams interact with fandom, they reinforce the idea that fandom should influence canon. Choose your own adventure, but for a work of fiction. This is. Something that impacts pretty much all long-running works of fiction. Even if an author doesn't intend for it to happen, if you see it you're impacted by it. It's an inevitability of serialized works. You can see the fingerprints of "Give The People What They Want" all over later iterations of Star Wars.

Ultimately I think Voltron ended up as a perfect petri dish medium for The People [TM] to get what they wanted. Because there was very little in way of canon, because of the compressed timeline of production meaning that there wasn't a lot of time to THINK, and because they kept feeding into it.

But it's still fiction! It's always important to remember that fiction is, and always will be, NOT REAL! You can explore things in fiction that aren't possible in real life. Shiro and Keith or Keith and Lance or Lance and Allura or Shiro and Adam or Shiro and his rando husband who I'm sure he divorced in like a year all could've worked in some alternate reality (not to Slav it up) where the writing had had teeth and substance. And if exploring those hypotheticals makes you personally uncomfortable I get that! I don't read fanfiction (dear reader I am lazy) but if I did I would ESPECIALLY avoid reading Zuko/Katara fics because I feel really uncomfortable with the power dynamic of colonialism present there. That SAID, I don't think that that's a ship that shouldn't exist.

I don't think that shipping that, that wanting to explore that, that being curious about how that could've played out is BAD. It rarely is. And shutting out people looking to explore those dynamics is a great way to breed resentment, and a great way to reinforce the rhetoric of people who want nothing more than to shut Those Freaks up. Be wary of the language you use. Do not echo the language of homophobes. Particularly when it comes to your textual interpretation of a work with ultimately SUPREMELY LITTLE interpersonal depth.

Therefore I SHALL be writing a 500,000 word Shiro/Slav fic because you know what character DOES pull the drama out of Shiro? THAT'S RIGHT BABY! Because I need to be exceedingly clear here duh and obviously I am not gonna write that shit I am nowhere near funny enough for that

It's all made up, dawg! What you make up does matter, but how you handle it matters just as much, if not more! Voltron accidentally created a pro-colonial clusterfuck where none of the characters really know each other, but I'm sure you can see how the same exact elements of the show could've done something genuinely interesting and unique!

Fiction is, at its core, a place to explore things that aren't real. You can have some things that make you uncomfortable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are fundamentally immoral. And I would caution greatly against shutting down exploration and creativity.