darrelsandoval

[mullettaegi]

i know the galra had ten thousand years and unlimited resources to build up their defences and offences, to create an insane amount of weapons, to do evil experiments, and rule far across the universe, but HOW does it go from voltron being the defender of the universe, the most powerful weapon in the universe, something that zarkon has been hunting after for ten thousand years, something that made sendak (a very strong galra commander who would not let anyone stand in his way, according to himself) gasp and RUN.

yes he didnt fully run away but he retreated; he watched his battle cruiser get blown to fucking pieces, and remember this is the first time the paladins formed voltron. there was no sword. it was like their second or third time flying in their lions, and the only one that has had consistent flight simulations and training for however long is lance, and even then i think we saw him struggle to strategise a battle plan when going after the yellow lion with hunk because we heard him say he would cover hunk, we saw him carry that out but then get overwhelmed by the galra fighters in the air and take off after them.

hes a damn good pilot, and they all are, especially in the lions, but this is on a next level to what they could've been training for at the garrison.

so, this takes me to my point, why in the fucking world was voltron so fucking nerfed in the later seasons. like yes i dont want an easy win for voltron every battle, yknow, its about them working together as a team, its about voltron not always being the solution (aka when its better for them to split off into lions while they strategise), its about them actually coming up with strategies instead of just going in voltron first and hoping for the best.

its been a while since i watched the later seasons but rn im mostly thinking of atlas. like it just doesnt really make sense to me tbh? to build the atlas, yes, its essentially a replacement for the castleship, a place for a team to watch voltron from the sky, provide back up, but then to have it form into a voltron-esque robot ??? i just dont think thats where they should have taken it.

im glad for the castle of lions to take an important role in some episodes, where again the answer lies outside of JUST voltron, but it doesnt really make sense to build another giant robot.

it kind of takes away the development the paladins are supposed to go through as well, to work together better and stronger as a team thus opening up more weapons from voltron and learning how to fight in different ways.

idk i think the entire thing was kinda over-thought at the end as they were trying to keep the show going, but missing some of the other storylines they could've gone down, (black paladin lance, lotor redemption arc (which he did seemingly have but all along they planned to throw that in the bin), the team coming together as friends more often developing their bond as voltron but also as people, the team seeing their families again, not killing off shiro's FUCKING CANON BOYFRIEND IN A STUPID FUCKING SHITTY WAY ADAM DIDNT DESERVE TO DIE YALL ARE JUST COWARDS, and also the team kinda reflecting back to how they were jn the beginning and realizing they have grown (i say the team but i mostly mean lance and hunk because the writers just did not give two shits about them they really didnt get the chance to become fully thought out characters, they just had some insecurities and interests that were ignored until convenient then ignored again)).

[sol1056]

vld S3/S4 story structure: braided, reset, and broken

And we have the last of these three, why did I ever say I’d explain this. Someday I’ll learn, I swear. Part 1 is story structure and how doing it wrong can mess things up, and Part 2 is about VLD’s story structure in S3/S4 specifically. 

Behind the cut: braiding elements vs a full-on story reset, the broken structure hiding in S4, and some easy ways (no seriously, real easy) to fix it.

S3′s braiding vs resets

With both Shiro and Zarkon on-screen again, we have a structural reset, and we’d just need to make sure we come out of it having learned something. Character development especially needs to be clear (and really obvious that it couldn’t have happened any other way), or readers will get irritated that their time was wasted. Truth is, a reset’s not automatically bad. It’s just not the most graceful way to do it.

(but if you do the ‘he woke up and it was a dream’ bit, that is absolutely a bad reset and will piss people off)

After the Shiro-return and Keith-leader elements, we get ‘Zarkon returns’. But if we see Zarkon as being undefeated -- y’know, he just took a short nap in the middle -- that means the original ‘defeat Zarkon’ element never ended.

It did get suspended, though, and that’s a really... bizarre thing, in terms of how VLD presented it. From the start, the goal has been explicitly ‘defeat Zarkon’. Not ‘defeat Zarkon et al’, nor even ‘defeat the evil empire’. That tight focus is the root of S3′s early aimlessness, since Zarkon -- the main goal for two seasons -- is gone. Add in S3E1's title, ‘changing of the guard’, and it’s reasonable to infer the ‘defeat Zarkon’ arc has ended. 

One key about braiding is shifting the element across the story, in gentle nuances as it’s explored. Take ‘become a team’: we could say this overarching element is actually composed of three contiguous parts -- ‘shiro as leader’ in S1/S2, ‘keith as leader’ in S3, and ‘shiro as leader’ in S4. Despite positional shifts, the braided element itself is intact. 

In the same way, if it’s not ‘defeat Zarkon’ but ‘overthrow the Galra’, then we have ‘defeat Zarkon’ in S1/S2, and ‘defeat Lotor’ in S3/S4, again keeping the braided element intact. 

I’m gonna add a caveat to that, though. What we’re talking about here is when a role shift becomes a plot point. Allura is a protagonist from the start, as is Keith. But Allura’s growth is part of the structure (via a plot-point) when she moves from princess to paladin, just as Keith does when he goes from paladin to leader to blade.  

Similarly, the character role behind ‘overthrow the Galra’ is ‘antagonist’. Zarkon moves from ‘tyrant’ to ‘main antagonist’ when he takes an active role blocking the protagonists, and the same for Lotor. In other words, if Lotor is not an antagonist, then this braided element is truncated for the duration of Zarkon’s long nap. 

That might not make sense right now, but just keep it in the back of your head in the next section. Hopefully you’ll see where I’m going with that.  

S4′s broken structure

Continuing from the previous post, by S4, we’ve got a lot of tangles. Taking the explicit order of events in the story, the structure might be:

   <shiro v2> OR </here is shiro>        <can Keith co-lead>         <zarkon returns> #6          <black lion refuses> #7            [ open/close: backstory, pidge, etc]          </black lion accepts> #8            <keith leaves> #9            [ open/close: matt, allies, voltron show]            <finale battle> </lotor threatens>            </finale battle>

We have a new event element of #7 ‘Black refuses Shiro’, and its resolution overlaps closely with #9 ‘Keith leaves team’. The writing implies a cause-and-effect: “Keith isn’t here, please accept me", which means #8 ‘Black accepts’ doesn’t trigger #9 ‘Keith leaves’ -- but is instead triggered by Keith’s implicit absence. In other words, Black doesn’t wait for Keith to make it official. 

That said, I’m tempted to say #8 ‘black accepts’ is not resolving #7 ‘black refuses’ -- but instead is a new event, an opening of ‘black accepts’. This  depends on whether the ‘Shiro returns’ character is returning or new; if the same Shiro, then it’d make no sense to end this #8 probationary acceptance, switch Keith back to Black as part of closing #9, and then switch Black back to Shiro again, to close out #7.

I mean, I guess you could do that. But I think it’d take a damn good writer, and even then some readers will want to pry open your version of Black and ask some serious questions. Characterization is the key --remember what I said about stakes driving the hard choices, which in turn drive the plot points, which in turn become the story structure. 

If Black has no consistent motivation, then plot’s driving, not character. If Black is a character, too, then closing the element becomes even more important because that demonstrates growth or change in the character.

The other tangle is that ‘defeat Zarkon’ re-emerges before ‘defeat Lotor’ is resolved. We could say it’s a parallel: where Shiro returns and shuts Keith down, Zarkon returns and shuts Lotor down. The problem is that stories are fundamentally about protagonists -- so while this is a lovely parallel, Lotor is not a protagonist. He cannot be both the continuation of the antagonist and a parallel protagonist.

However! Let’s say the story was super-clear that we’re dealing with a Shiro v2, who is also explicitly a Haggar puppet -- then the parallel might work (or at least, be less failey). As Zarkon shuts down Lotor, Hagar (via Shiro) shuts down Keith. I still find it awkward, and it’d require groundwork (and a lot less being coy), but given the other reflections between Lotor and Keith, it could work.

Well, it’s still kinda ehhhh... Between Lotor’s abrupt fall from grace -- out of sight, mind, or influence of any of the protagonists -- along with Zarkon’s complete disinterest in his former agenda (”lion, what lion”) -- I can’t get past the sense that it just doesn’t work. The protagonists never actually protagged; the resolution of the ‘Lotor threatens’ element was basically as deux ex machina as Thace or Allura’s magic.  

fixing the antagonist issues

There are two ways to address the disjointed sense of Zarkon playing the protagonist’s role in taking out Lotor. One way is to let the protagonists actually protag, and strike a severe enough blow to Lotor. 

Cut that military propaganda filler episode, and give the protagonists something resembling a victory. Lotor goes down, the team prepares to strike a final blow on the empire, and Zarkon rises in time to rebuff the heroes (in another echo of S1, but fine). With the event element (’lotor threatens’) thus ended, Lotor’s re-appearance marks a new character element (’lotor plays nice’).

This might be the oldest Char in the book, but hey, some people still fall for it -- and you can reverse it just as easily. Lotor and team break up, closing out the ‘lotor plays nice’ element, and wham, Lotor reappears as an obstacle. You still get the same result, but without the dissatisfaction of seeing an antagonist beaten while the protagonists were busy filing their nails.

The other way is to make Lotor clearly a contagonist, rather than an antagonist. It’s an archetype from Dramatica, with these core behaviors:

hinders (if unwittingly) rather than helps the protagonist

not directly opposed to the protagonist’s goals (unlike the antagonist).

may ally with the protagonist in the overall conflict, but still gets in the way, prompts the protagonist down the wrong path, etc.

(Frex, done right, Loki is a far more interesting contagonist than antagonist.)

The reason I don’t see the story trying this is because while Zarkon's napping, there’s no active antagonist on the screen other than Lotor. If there's any one thing that gives S3/S4 its strangely disjointed and choppy structure, it’s having a contagonist play antagonist for, oh, most of S3. 

That’s the biggest reason for a sense the story had stalled: the protagonists weren’t actually fighting an antagonist. And that means no headway on the ‘defeat the antagonist’ goal. 

However, if we’d had Haggar as a defined and active antagonist, we’d be having a different conversation. Rather than appear randomly to goad Lotor into being a proper antagonist, if Haggar had instead said, ‘kid, wave to the people while I crush these puny rebels’, we’d have an interesting contagonist clashing with Voltron -- and we’d have a sense of forward movement, with Haggar as a legitimate stand-in for Zarkon. 

On top of that, the parallels of Zarkon-to-Lotor and Shiro-to-Keith would be much more stark, and feel less like an antagonist did the dirty work on behalf of the protagonists. We could still have Keith fascinated, but the whole ‘lotor threatens’ element wouldn’t even exist, and S3/S4 might outline like this:

<where is shiro>   [ open/close: keith as leader, new roles, comet, etc ] <shiro v2>   <can keith co-lead>       <black lion refuses>       <black lion probation>           <keith leaves>           [ open/close: matt, allies, etc]           <finale battle>           </finale battle>

If contagonist is Lotor’s character role, then he’s not a plot device, and isn’t part of this structure. For that matter, even being stripped of resources, friends, and whatnot, he’s still a contagonist. He should have a structure to his own part, and an impact on the structure we see above, but not as a true antagonist. More importantly, he wouldn’t have the story-burden of carrying that braided element of ‘defeat the empire’. 

That element would instead rest on Haggar, as one-half of interchangeable faces of the evil empire. Again, characters, not plot devices; even then the switch might not be an element of structure, unless it comes with a radical shift in strategy. 

In which case, resolving the elements becomes quite straightforward:

           <keith returns>          </black lion probation>        </black lion + keith>          </keith as co-leader>    </shiro v2>  </can keith lead> </shiro found>

[autumncrows]

Voltron season 2 thoughts!!!! (part one: things i wasn’t happy with)

overall, it was so good!!!! i missed these kids so hecking much!!!

things i didn’t like

the whole keith,,,allura thing like yikes

platonically there were some great moments!!! but like : |||

yeah uh what the fuck happened to allura’s character as a whole tho. like remember that post that was like ‘’hunk’s the mom and allura is the angry soldier aunt’’ kinda thing? why were there so many scenes of her being forced into these heteronormative bullshit caregiver type roles??? i just didnt like. 

okay again tho like she and keith are so much alike!!! both rash and hotheaded and would do anything to protect the ones they love and have this idea of ‘the greater good’ they’re working for and keith got so much development and was fleshed out SO WELL and allura got stuck left behind five billion times

also hunk got done so dirty y’all

like every time i thought we might get something real about him there was the obligatory food mention 

not that the chef part of him (or even his love for food!) is a bad thing!! but why is it ALWAYS so hyperfocused on??

AND THE TREETECH SCENE LIKE WHO THE FRALKC THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE HUNK LICK A FUCKING PIECE OF TECH INSTEAD OF GEEKING OUT W PIDGE???? like c’mon he may not have had the same connection as pidge, but he for sure as fuck would’ve been able to understand the general concepts behind everything

i’m actually gettin real sad thinking about this like wow why do they hate my perfect boy so much he’s done no wrong ever

like the only real scene i can remember was when lance was hyping up all his friends?? SO GOOD. v sad but ,, good. my son. 

okay also Keith complimenting hunk on his quick thinking and skill nd stuff i died how pure

except speaking of!! i didn’t actually really love the way that whole galra reveal went down 

there’s no actual reveal we just understand everyone else found out?? 

and allura’s conflict about galra vs paladins and where keith lands know would’ve been really cool to see

esp in regard to the other characters offering to talk w her about it?? I defs thought that scene with coran before the final battle might have been something like that because he’s obviously seen a time where alfor and the galra were united AND experienced the same loss and anger towards zarkon/galra now that he could’ve really offered a nuanced perspective -- giving us more allura/coran mentorship at the same time! ugh 

and who the actual fcuk made keith’s dad texan??? nd white????? i’m just

the mall scene where lance (LANCE!!) and pidge are literally in an e a r t h store and there’s not one instance of,,, homesickness???

like tbh lance missing his family was one of the only explicitly redeeming characteristics the writers gave us last season and this was a PERFECT set up. i could not stress PERFECT anymore. i just. i’m. sldkfjsldoire. instead he got a cow. 

sidenote where the heck did the cow go?? and was it named after one of the Blade members?????? 

AND A NOTHER THING!! sorry but in regards to lances family! 

what a wasted opportunity to not have lance (who misses his family the MOST) offer a bit of comfort/consolling to keith (who is trying hard to reconcile trusting and lowkey leading this new family of his with the one he never knew but might be evil???) ugh 

tbh this would be a good direction for them to lean into in the coming seasons bc how well does this lend itself to lance coming out as bi and mentioning his heritage y’know?? like having this part of you that you’re not sure how to tell anyone about but you’ve known its there and not being able to put a name to it and taking a long exhausting journey of self discovery and and and !!

lance in general being made to hit on literally every female 

especially allura pls stop this i’m begging you

the only way this could’ve been handled would have been in like a exasperated over the top sorry i was so insufferable before this kind of way

like there’s a perfect set up for a pickup line but lance doesn’t take it right away and then clues in and puts on a voice and makes it just like,,, silly!! because it came off as ridiculous anyways and there was no purpose or development there so why not just satirize it and have them share a grin to let everyone know there’s no intent behind it and they’re all in on the joke!! ughjkdfgr

that OR, #LETLANCEFLIRTWITHBOYS for fucks sake

if half of lance’s lines were directed to dudes this season the writers could’ve still emphasized this part of his character as much as i guess they thought they needed to but lance could’ve also progressed as a person a minuscule amount????? i’m tired

UM the hug scene and lance; what the fuck. everybody else gets a significant ‘this might be the last time we’re alive together’ goodbye and lance kisses a mouse. and cries. and does not once hug his best friend.......okay. 

also i get they were on a bit of a time limit but like, the way they kept just...telling us things instead of giving us the scenes??? it bugged me idk. like when allura is saying she thinks they’re all a family of themselves now like the only one to show that was lance??? one he thinks he doesn’t belong in btw. and i guess that scene before the fight when they’re discussing all the stuff they’ve done so far but she wasn’t really there so. idk idk it happened more than once tho that we were just to assume the team got updated/reunited/had a point of connection but we didnt get to actually see it y’know?

okay actually i’m gonna make a separate post for what i did like to keep the positivity and negativity separate. what did you guys think???