#VLD had an incredible lack of empathy for victims

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

I really don’t get why people keep saying Allura was SO awful or horrible to Keith after learning about his heritage. She just gave him the cold shoulder for an episode or two, and it’s not like they brought this up later in the show as a way for her to hold some other grudge against him. People are just blowing it up as something bigger than it actually was. And like many people have said, her liking or “suddenly” being nice to Lotor wasn’t bc oH he’s Altean (1/2)

Continued anon message: “There were several moments between their first close encounter and him revealing his heritage which prove that trust was developing before then, but I guess people just overlook those (2/2)”

Hi, anon! Thanks for the note! Yeah, haha, this topic of “is Allura racist?” is an interesting one because for me, it boils down to looking at the show’s design decisions and details. And those design decisions came from real human beings who aren’t any more objective than the rest of us. So as a content creator myself (who feels incredibly human and and whose stories and portrayals are also imperfect by virtue of their imperfect creator), I have to recognize that it’s impossible to create a totally woke, unproblematic creative product—and it’s also impossible to ensure that everyone around the world interprets everything in exactly the same way, no matter how well-intentioned the project.

That said, I do think a lot of fans are victims of how this show may have manipulated/gaslit them to feel, not just about Allura but also about other characters and events as well—and that there are benefits to analyzing what went wrong with VLD.

My hope is that, as content creators and fans, maybe we can learn from VLD’s narrative mistakes or even better understand how two fans can have totally opposing interpretations over the same creative work. In the case of VLD, as I’ve mentioned before, the show uses a screwy and imbalanced narrative lens when portraying victims. To add to that, the show design also consistently undermines details foundational to the show universe (such as using an unreliable narrator to express what the show actually accepts as objective fact or history). This is important, because the way in which something is told/shown ultimately manipulates audience emotion for or against something. This gets into how propaganda and subliminal messaging work at a technical level. And when the narrative lens is handled in a biased way that undermines other story elements, audience reaction/interpretation gets messy, no matter what the stated events/facts are in the story. We are attuned to pick up on cognitive dissonances (inconsistent patterns) as part of our human survival instinct.

I’m not convinced that VLD dev team wielded the Power of the Narrative Lens very well—if it had, season 2′s portrayal of the conflict with Keith and Allura would have looked different.

In an s2 with a more balanced narrative lens, we likely would have seen at least flashes of Allura’s memory, showing some s3 backstory of Allura’s fear upon realizing that previously faithful Galran allies were killing multiple civilizations upon an order from their own kind...and coming for Altea next. Or maybe there would have been something/someone else involving Allura’s traumatic experiences so that the audience could have an empathetic, emotionally connective moment with her. We would have, in equal parts, still seen Keith’s plight as the suffering saint trying to figure out what being half-Galra means. And we would have seen the other paladins trying to resolve the conflict and understand how to recalibrate together as a team and a family.

Instead, in provided canon, we see Hunk (of all people, why Hunk?) make racist microaggressions at Keith, further alienating Keith without any recourse. And for Allura, the visual lens shows her making a cold glare at Keith without further explanation. It’s a very alienating moment. In season 2, you feel that coldness from Allura because the show’s visual lens aligns you to Keith’s gaze for several agonizing seconds, and the narrative bias of the animation is to show Keith as the singular victim in this situation. It is a very targeted, lonely, and disquieting moment for Keith. The other paladins and their reactions to Allura and Keith even feed into this. It’s not until s3 that we get an emotional glimpse into the omnicide of an entire solar system—and even then, that history focuses more on the motives of the instigators rather than showing the brutality experienced by victims. By that point, we’ve blown way past the s2 issue, which creates another layer of cognitive dissonance: that the situation doesn’t feel totally...resolved, somehow, even though plot-wise it actually is.

So I think there are indicators that the dev team’s own biases and agendas informed, at times for the worse, the very lens through which we consume the VLD story. I don’t think the dev team was aware what tackling genocide while visually portraying Allura’s trauma as antagonistic and alienating would result in? And I think this oversight gets into why some fans feel a certain way about literally anything in this show, haha. So I feel like we’re all victims of a show with amazing potential and incredibly fascinating elements but just…poor execution. 

One other thing I have to give faith on when I have a disagreement with another show fan—it’s a 78-episode show. How often are people holistically watching and critically reviewing this show in order to catch every little detail? I’m pretty sure I can’t remember all the details either, even though I re-watched the show not that long ago. So there’s a whole other layer here, where fans have a separation from the source content itself. So take those emotional negative “impressions” people developed while watching s2 or any other moment where Allura has been less than the ideal woman (oof, fandom is so forgiving with men but so unforgiving with women), and then suddenly muddy those memories with 2 years of not re-watching the show holistically. Typically, the brain is better at storing negative reactions than positive ones. So if someone had a negative reaction to Allura’s actions with Keith in s2 or elsewhere, without an empathetic moment to balance it out, then that negativity is going to stick, and every detail to the contrary is going to fade out.

I know for me, I’ve really had to fight the memory problem because after over a year, for example, I was building up impressions about VLD history that actually were missing some important details from s3. And that was kind of a shock to me. So I do think selective memory plays a part in adding to a biased dissonance one might feel from the actual story.

Ultimately, this whole unnecessary fandom split on “is Allura racist?” is one reason why I feel that VLD—for all of its good things that I genuinely love so much—had a lot of troubling issues. Despite all the canonical good that Allura ends up doing and how she overcomes trauma to champion genuine peace for all, there’s subliminal messaging against her because of how the visual and narrative spins  or hides things. And that issue has nothing to do with the characters but everything to do with the development team and how the show was written/directed. And that, I think, informs ongoing fandom perceptions of Allura and creates just some really painful and unnecessary messes, to the point of creating an overall inaccurate take like “Allura is racist” when in fact, she’s just traumatized from very real and significant abuses and overcomes that, even.

It really makes me, as a writer, try to look at my own stories and attempt to understand “why” I portray certain things as I do while writing—and if that lens portrayal is really the best one for the effect/message I want. Because the way in which a story is conveyed can really play mind games with the audience, and that might not be the right effect for a story that isn’t another Inception or Crying of Lot 49, lol.

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

VLD and Its Doomed Zonerva: A Copy of The Mummy (1999)?

Villainous romances and tales of ancient curses are nothing new. But as I watched the 1999 movie, The Mummy, I was struck by how excessively similar VLD’s environment and doomed Zarkon/Honerva setup was to Imhotep/Anck-Su-Namun’s. It makes me wonder if VLD creators didn’t take inspiration for Zonerva from this very movie, and here’s why:

They wanted to be together at the full expense of the universe.

What makes Zonerva unique from most doomed romances is that their love isn’t just about dying for the other or betraying colleagues—Zarkon’s love for Honerva ultimate leads him to betray the entire universe and jeopardize the ongoing existence of all things, just to be with her again. He just desperately wants his wife back.

Zarkon’s choice to widen the rift mirrors how Imhotep chooses to kill Egypt’s Pharaoh. Murdering such a king holds huge significance, because Pharoah was considered “god” to his people—the intermediary between the gods of heaven and the people of earth. Imhotep, as High Priest, is therefore willing to create an unbreachable rift between heaven and earth, just to be with Anck-Su-Namun—to betray his own station as High Priest, spiritually kill his own people, and defy all cosmic order on heaven and earth for the sake of one woman.

(Sound familiar?)

Anck-Su-Namun, like Honerva, approves of this plan. She is more than willing to risk her own life in pursuit of what she wants, just as Honerva is willing to risk everything for what she wants as well. Anck-Su-Namun fully believes that Imhotep can resurrect her through his powers—and Honerva encourages Zarkon to go into the rift to save her.

But their words are not empty pleas. Anck-Su-Namun and Honerva both genuinely knew the power at their disposal, through their loves. Ancient Egypt believed in deep religious magic in the same way VLD universe is marked by the properties of “quintessence,” or as Honerva says, ”Life itself.” Ancient Egyptians simply called this “ka” instead (not to be confused with “ba,” or a person’s soul). Anck-Su-Namun and Imhotep believe they can manipulate “ka” to preserve their souls, just as Honerva and Zarkon believe they can manipulate quintessence to defy all natural order.

It is additionally curious that not just Imhotep, but Anck-Su-Namun herself spurns the Pharaoh and is the first to stab him, later saying that she is no longer a temple for this “god.” In a metaphorical sense, Honerva likewise rejects Alfor’s cosmic wisdom regarding quintessence and defies him both in his absence and when he confronts her. In doing so, Honerva separates herself from the one who stands as Altea’s king and the alchemical representative of the Life Givers and the One Who Came Before (the intermediary between the mundane and magical).

But the cost of defying cosmic order is too great for Imhotep and Anck-Su-Namun, who like Zonerva, die in their pursuit. For all of their abilities to manipulate ka/quintessence, they cannot override that cosmic order.

Their deaths, however, are only the beginning.  

The very forces they sought to control in life (Ka/quintessence) are the very forces that then rule them in death/undeath. Imhotep is "bound by sacred law” to carry out the ten plagues of Egypt by virtue of the curse leveled against him. The terrible manner through which his ka/life force is taken away is precisely what gives him power to rise as the undead and wreak havoc on the world, even allowing him the opportunity to raise Anck-Su-Namun back from the dead with him.

In so many ways, this mimics how Zarkon is brought back by the properties of the rift itself, with an enhanced purpose beyond simply saving his wife. Post!rift Zarkon had his "humanity" stripped from him by quintessence, inspiring him to do terrible things even beyond what he would have done in life. He’s a corrupted, out-of-control version of himself, bound by the whispering fancies of quintessence to pursue power, domination, and immortality.

He, like Imhotep, also requires live sacrifices to exist as the undead, stealing others’ ka/quintessence to forever regenerate.

But while the curse itself gives Imhotep/Zarkon full regeneration, Anck-Su-Namun/Honerva does not have that. In the first movie, Anck-Su-Namun’s consciousness returns to a mummified body, and she requires an additional sacrifice that she cannot obtain herself, in order to be made whole. Imhotep fails to obtain this for her, and then she fails herself to kill her sacrifice, and so she never fully regenerates a whole body.

Likewise, Honerva is brought back by quintessence as the undead, but she is missing a huge part of herself. Zarkon fails to help resurrect her memory, and so she lingers once again in a strange purgatory, a victim to the whims of quintessence and cosmic order.

(As a side note, the Egyptian city of Hamunaptra shares many characteristics with Oriande. The fact that these places are hidden from view, contain deep magic of a past civilization, and stand as the seats of power/resurrection for both Honerva and Anck-Su-Namun is interesting.)

Fast forward to The Mummy Returns (2001). The similarities to s8 grow even more haunting:

This sequel reveals that Evelyn is the reincarnation of the Pharoah’s daughter. This adds more weight to Anck-Su-Namun’s desperate attempt in the first movie to kill Evie and take her life force. It mimics the way that Honerva was willing to force obedience and sacrifice more of Alfor’s people in order to achieve being alive again with her family.

And that’s something even stranger—that somehow, it’s not just Evie who’s affected by memories of a past life. A reincarnation of Anck-Su-Namun now exists, and she is recalling more and more about who she once was.

In doing so, the sequel really fleshes out more of Anck-Su-Namun’s personality and turns her into a major-character big bad, just like Honerva in s8. Anck-Su-Namun is both beautiful and underhanded, a warrior, with a ruthless lack of empathy for others. She threatens with a smile to kill Evie’s young son if he does not obey her. Her general personality and her behavior toward disobedience mimics s8 Honerva, down to even the fact that she threatens to kill child!Lotor when he refuses to accept her. Such behavior cuts straight to the heart of Honerva’s aesthetic—the undead, willing to do anything to get her original vision of happiness back, even at the expense of the happiness she could have in her new life.

Somehow, this reincarnation of Anck-Su-Namun has also managed to accrue quite the operation for digging up Imhotep’s dead body and securing their stability/earthly rulership via the powers of The Scorpion King. There are significant religious implications via Egyptian god Anubis as to the power she seeks—and precisely why so many carry out her orders. This falls in line with how Honerva uses religious tones to convince the Altean colony to martyr themselves for her.

In the Mummy 2, Acnk-Su-Namun's reincarnation spends incredible effort and energy to find the body of her lover, tearing up landscape and everything in her way to do it, just like how Honerva tears up the universal threads to get to the one where she can find Zarkon/her ideal reality.

But they always face resistance. Imhotep and Anck-Su-Namun are always plagued by the remnants of the Medjai who seek to keep them from destroying the world and living forever. The Medjai have several similarities in behavior to the Blade of Marmora, just as Evie, Ardeth, and O’Connell express collective characteristics of Lotor and Allura (and Jonathon to Coran/Lance/team Voltron?) in their attempts to stop total universal destruction.

In the very end, Anck-Su-Namun obtains her full memory within her renewed body. But when her and Imhotep's plots are foiled again, she has a breakdown. All of what she had been struggling toward for thousands of years is suddenly taken from her. This woman, whose spirit has felt only unrest, her reincarnation committing great acts of violence and crime to achieve her dream of love and power—is faced with the reality that her dream is impossible. In an attempt to preserve herself, she turns her back on Imhotep, to his deep pain and shock.

This mirrors, in many ways, the negative breakdown Honerva has to realizing that her ideal alternate-reality is not the way she wants it—as well as Alternate reality!Zarkon’s pain at realizing that his wife is a monster.

Both Anck-Su-Namun and Honerva achieve exactly what they want to some extent. But it is not their ideal vision, and so they reject everything. Their love for Imhotep and Zarkon, when ultimately tested at wit’s end, shrivels, and they guarantee their own destruction.

Conclusion

Voltron: Legendary Defender’s Zonerva is actually Space Mummy. The excessive similarities suggest the show writers may have taken inspiration from The Mummy movies.

(Also, both Zarkon and Imhotep are scared of kitties.)

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