#also wow in a surprise to no one.... June latches on to a character that doesnt have as much screentime compared to

[vinlynce]

Misc Sabito aus bc I am totally normal and don't constantly spin aus in my brain like a wind turbine . -Upper Rank 5? Demon au? Dunno how or why hes there but I imagine it's during the infinity castle arc. Since upper 6 and upper 4 get replaced, why not bridge the gap? Yeah thats It I just wanted to make a demon design :thumbsup: who needs plot that make sense when you can have rule of cool. and also fun -Personal Sabito lives au so I can spin him around on a pencil end . Probably going to draw more for this one bc i've been concocting. Giyuu is his Tsuguko even if Sabito says he may as well be the actual Water Hashira instead of him... While Giyuu says he could never be the Water Hashira. Rest the souls of anyone who gets in between bickering matches from them about that topic. I have a comic in mind for how and why this timeline splits off from the official story so I'll probably sketch that out when I get the time.

[xanderuwu]

for whom it may concern; here’s a letter

i wrote this long fucking rant about voltron, enjoy (click here to view on google docs)

My name is Alexander, I’m 23, and here is my sob story. I’m a bisexual trans man who grew up in a tiny village where people believed that being LGBT+ was just as bad as being a child molester. I spent the first 20 years of my life hiding my truth because of the fear & shame that was ingrained in me as a child; I was disgusted by myself. I have never gone a week in my‬ ‪life without contemplating suicide - I’ve tried to kill myself 9 times, the first time was when I was 8.‬

‪One of the main things that kept me afloat during my childhood & teen years were stories in any medium; film, TV, books, I swallowed them whole & they kept me sane. But they never made me feel goof about myself or my life. I didn’t experience the impact of good representation until I saw the first season of Glee in 2009 when I was 14 (that show went downhill as it went on too, wow). One of the main characters on Glee was gay & had an arc in the first season where he came out to his father, & his father … embraced him.‬

‪… I remember crying in bed, watching the coming out scene over & over in shitty quality on the Youtube app on my old iPod. I had never seen anything like it. Sure, I’d seen LGBT+ people in media before, but they were always either stereotype-ridden jokes, or they led miserable lives & never got a happy ending. & in so so so many cases … they died. Or their partner died. Or they got AIDS. Or they were framed as disgusting degenerates.‬

‪I’d never seen a parent accept & embrace their gay child. I had never seen a gay character who “made it” with loving friends & family. It gave me courage, it made me hopeful.‬

‪Hope is the most powerful powerful tool we have when it comes to suicide prevention within the LGBT+ community. Every day, thousands of people toe the line between life & death, & THAT is why our representation is so important. Yes, it helps normalize LGBT+ people to the cisgender & heterosexual audiences, but you have no idea how much hope & joy can blossom in the hearts of vulnerable LGBT+ people from good representation that shows LGBT+ characters being embraced & loved, finding partners, falling in love, getting that happy gay ending we so rarely get to see in media. I’m certain that that gay kid from fucking Glee of all things, saved me from the brink a few times.‬

‪In December of 2014, when The Legend of Korra made Korra & Asami the romantic endgame, I cried. Cried for all the LGBT+ kids who would, perhaps for the first time, feel good about themselves. I also cried for the child in myself who still struggles with the shackles secured around his feet from a childhood of isolation & self-hatred, because he needed it too. & then we got record-breaking amounts of well-rounded LGBT+ representation on Steven Universe, a show that not only features same-gender romances, but also explores gender & challenges toxic masculinity. & last year, Disney Channel, the fucking DISNEY CHANNEL, had a character on Andi Mack come out as gay! Freakin’ DISNEY, man! & Korra was on Nickelodeon, Steven Universe is on Cartoon Network - those are all huge traditional television broadcasters where shows have to be assessed by a whole lot of boards in order to make sure they’re suitable to broadcast.‬

‪Netflix, on the other hand, has more freedom. Many of their live-action shows have had explicit LGBT+ representation. Watching as more & more mainstream TV shows & films with prominent LGBT+ characters get released makes me believe in the change, from when i was a kid in the early 00’s to now.‬

‪I first encountered Voltron: Legendary Defender in the form of gifs, fanart, & screencaps on Tumblr. The first thing that caught my attention was Allura’s design; she’s gorgeous & I’m weak. I found out that she was from the Voltron reboot which, not gonna lie, sounded kinda dumb to me at first. I watched Voltron: Defender of the Universe as a kid, not because i’m old enough to have been a child in the 80s, but because we were a family with six mouths to feed & no disposable income that could be spent on cable TV. So we got public service television, & they ran a lot of cartoons from the 80s because they were cheap to license I guess.

Anyways, I was obsessed with VDOTU (we’re using abbreviations now because this is getting stupidly long & typing is hard) as a wee lad, Allura was my favourite character because she had long hair & a pink uniform - as I said, I’m weak for pretty people. So in late June of 2016 I watched the first season of VLD & I was so pleasantly surprised. VLD is animated by Studio Mir; one of my favourite animation studios, & the show has writers & producers who have also worked on Korra, so that, in addition to the show being distributed by Netflix, made the possibility of clear-cut LGBT+ characters & storylines seem more plausible. ‬

‪I loved the first season of VLD. I very quickly latched onto Keith & Allura, but as I kept watching I found myself adoring the whole team. Having Pidge be a girl was cool, & I was so excited when I found out that she was voiced by a gay actress! & whoever came up with the idea of making Allura, Hunk, & Lance brown deserves a high-five. ‬

‪(We’re getting to the real meaty LGBT+ rep rant soon, just stick with me here because I wanna talk about some other gripes I have with this show first).‬

‪So, we had a show with a diverse main cast of characters, good writing & pacing, a good balance between character & plot, & gorgeous animation. I was excited to see the second season.‬

‪However, the second season was when some of the show’s main flaws popped up for the first time. That nice balance between character & plot from the first season seemed to have driven right off its tracks and straight into a bio-hazardous lake. In the first season, each character got a fair amount of attention, but in season two Hunk & Lance were just … barely there? Keith is my favourite character & I liked the Blade of Marmora stuff, but Keith’s amount of screentime came at the expense of other characters, especially Hunk & Lance. Having Keith’s entire arc in season two pretty much only involve himself & Shiro did every character a disservice. & the reveal that Keith was Galra was so underwhelming. We only saw two characters react to Keith’s alien heritage. The episode with Keith & Hunk in the Weblum was lovely, but we haven’t really gotten team bonding episodes like that since season three so :/ And oh God, the whole subplot of Allura, a black-coded character, being “racist” against the Galra is a WHOLE other mess that I don’t think I can adequately explain. Just, why. ‬

‪Season three was good, the balance between character & plot seemed to be getting back on track & the lion switch-up made for some good character development, especially for Lance & Allura. Episode four was a mess though like y'all could’ve been just a liiittle more sensitive with that kind of stuff. Also it is embarrassingly obvious that in the first two seasons, Allura was portrayed as being around Shiro’s age & the two of them shared moments that seemed to be hinting at a future romance - until, suddenly in season three Allura is at the same maturity level as the other paladins? What, is it because that was when you decided to have Shiro be gay because you weren’t allowed to kill him after season two, & so instead of doing Shiro/Allura you started pairing Allura with Lance? That’s just absolutely stellar mate.‬

‪Season four - character/plot balance swings off the rails once more & to this day it hasn’t been recovered. This was the season where y'all’s plot became way too fucking convoluted & too damn big! The plot takes so much room, OF COURSE character development suffers! Season five had the same problem, & whoops Allura has a new love interest! It’s Lotor, a grown-ass man! Great! Totes loved it!‬

‪Season six had some good moments but again, y'all’s plot left no fucking breathing room for the characters! Also, Lance’s crush on Allura is suddenly True Love now? At this point you need a fucking Excel sheet to keep track of the plot & subplots. Lotor was an asshole all along & betrayed Allura? BITCH WE BEEN KNEW! Lotor’s betrayal could be seen from miles away. Bad.‬

‪SEASON FUCKING SEVEN HERE WE GO.‬

‪You ruined Keith’s entire character. Plain and simple. Keith & Shiro’s backstory was the highlight of the entire season. And in those flashbacks we see Shiro’s BOYFRIEND! Shiro is GAY! Shiro being gay & having a partner was revealed at San Diego Comic Con in July, & fans were so fucking happy. Remember at the start of this monstrosity of a letter where I talked about LGBT+ representation in media igniting hope? That was what you saw from fans after SDCC; pure joy & hope. It was amazing, people cried because they were so happy! & the showrunners said we’d learn more about Adam & get to meet him, shit I was so hyped!

Was Shiro, the character who has struggled the most in the show, going to get a … happy ending? As a gay character? With his partner of the same gender?‬

‪…‬

‪Y'know,‬

‪There’s still probably hundreds of thousands of LGBT+ kids who are growing up in a similar environment to where I grew up. They feel the same way I felt. That … indescribable loneliness that pierces through your bones, the self-hatred & hopelessness that weighs too much, you are the deer and the headlights is every person whose approval & love you need most. ‬

‪& then you see someone like you in a story, & they are happy, they aren’t alone, because people like us aren’t destined to be tragedies.‬

‪It gives you hope.

‪VLD could’ve given that to people y'know? And maybe that’s the saddest part, that instead they chose to kill the man Shiro loved, & thus put their only remaining confirmed LGBT+ character through even more suffering. ‬

VLD killed 50% of their confirmed LGBT+ characters. ‬

‪Imagine if they’d killed 50% of their female characters.‬

They killed Adam to show the gravity of the situation, to show that with war comes death. But LGBT+ viewers don’t need that reminder. We die every day. We know war, we know that war walks hand in hand with death.‬

‪And we didn’t even really have any feelings about Adam aside from “Shiro’s boyfriend!!!” We only got a tiny snippet of his & Shiro’s relationship. From a basic storytelling standpoint, killing someone like Colleen or Sam Holt would have been so much more effective because we know a lot more about Pidge’s relationship with her parents than we know about Adam & Shiro.‬ Adam’s death fell flat because we never knew him or his & Shiro’s relationship.

‪So why did they decide that the gay characters had to lose? VLD could have made something beautiful, something that would help people. But you didn’t.‬

‪Why didn’t they?‬

‪And why, in the same season, did they suddenly make Allura show signs of returning Lance’s feelings, despite her having shown zero romantic interest in him for over a third of the series? Why did they push Keith & Acxa together, two characters who had never spoken before this season? ‬

‪They take away the prospect of a same-gender romance, & then shove some half-assed straight relationships in our faces? It’s as if they’re doing this to be intentionally cruel.

‪Even if Adam somehow returns, that doesn’t repair the anxiety & hurt they caused their LGBT+ fans. With this season, VLD gave us the same age-old tale we’ve been told since we could understand words.‬

‪Happy endings belong to straight people. Gay people are doomed to live through tragedy after tragedy until we die young.‬

‪I believed in this show. I honestly thought the slow-burn romance would be Keith & Lance. Already in season one they had the “bonding moment” that was a textbook example of how to convey romance through visual storytelling. In that scene, Lance said “We are a good team” to Keith, & that was supposedly just bros being bros? But in season six, Lance says the exact same phrase to Allura as a flirty line, so what’s the deal here?

Are Allura and Lance the slow burn? Allura had never shown interest in Lance before now, when she suddenly noticed that Lance is … nice? What … is this? Honest to God, what is happening? VLD really decided to do the guy-likes-girl-girl-doesn’t-reciprocate-but-if-guy-keeps-trying-she’ll-like-him-back-eventually thing? Ah yes, If you flirt with a girl & she ignores your advances, you shouldn’t stop & move on, you should keep pushing, that’s how VLD staff want people to treat women I guess.‬

‪Keith & Axca … looked at each other three times & now they’re in love. Very good slow burn, I cried, 11/10.‬

‪Had the straight romances at least been well-developed I might’ve been slightly less angry. But no, you killed the man Shiro loved & then presented us with some gourmet heterosexual nonsense - no really, where are your Michelin stars because this hetero bullshit is top notch, truly.‬

‪I’m not saying this as a bitter shipper. I’m saying this as someone who invested so much time into your show, only to be severely let down. VLD has had some incredible episodes, but season four & onward was a massive display of incompetent storytelling. It’s as if seasons one through three were created by a different team!

Not to mention the showrunners themselves, who have consistently been dismissive of valid concerns from fans, & when given chances to confirm that Keith & Lance’s relationship was strictly platonic, they instead remained vague, instilling hope in fans - giving people false hope to string them along so they’ll keep watching your show is cruel.‬

‪There are so many other things I could say here, but I’m running out of time.‬

‪Y'all could’ve done extraordinary things with this show & these characters. You could have made something amazing, your show could have been remembered as a trailblazer. But instead, it’ll only be remembered as a clusterfuck & as an example of what not to do, for future creators to learn from.‬

‪I don’t know how or why y'all ended up turning your show into a damn mess. I don’t really care. I just wish you hadn’t exploited the fragile hopes of LGBT+ people.‬

The only thing that can save y’all now is if season eight makes me physically shit hundred dollar bills so I can buy a fucking boat, sail to the middle of the ocean, and just scream for a good six years or so.

Thanks.‬