#iskaen

[ptw30]

So I'd been feeling like a loser weirdo lately because I am *still* hurting over what DW did to VLD in general and Shiro in particular, to the point where it haunts my dreams sometimes and can I just say it's kind of a relief to come here and find I'm not the only one? A sad kind of relief, but still.

I can’t find the post now, unfortunately, but Voltron: Legendary Defender presented itself in Seasons 1 and 2 as a “safe space” for many marginalized persons in society. Then in Seasons 3-8, it literally flipped its script, discounted those very people, and then pretended that it was trying to empower them. Your response is neither irrational or unfounded. You were told you were safe in VLD and then found your fears turned against you. That’s traumatizing. 

I still get a message or ask similar to yours every so often. I do recommend that if VLD is bothering you to this extent, please do consider seeing a professional. It’s a mark of strength to ask for help, and though I’m honored that you came to me to share your feeling, I can offer very little else other than Tangled isn’t bad in Season 2. It’s got a few issues that don’t sit well with me, and I wasn’t a fan of Season 1...but the end of Season 2 was pretty good. 

I absolutely adored Kuroko no Basuke before VLD, and it is (almost) perfect, especially if you love shipping characters. 

Take care! *hugs*

[headspacedad]

Why do you think Haggar needed a clone to spy on Voltron? What could she possibly do to a clone that she couldn't have done to the original? I suppose Ulaz could theoretically have disabled the webcam function when he uploaded coordinates to Shiro's arm, but I doubt anything of Haggar's would be that simple.

You know, that’s a very good question and I honestly don’t know that we’re going to get any answer at all for it.  But -

if I was writing it, here’s how I’d tie up some of the loose  ends of things.

Because honestly - not only 1. how did Haggar know that Shiro was going to become a paladin of Voltron (or does she just keep spare body parts of all her many many experiments lying around ‘just in case’?) to make a clone in the first place but 2. why did she make so darn many of him because even given the fact that some were ‘failures’ roughly eight hundred clones is a bit - excessive (and only viable as hidden spies just so often, certainly not eight hundred times)?  So what the heck was going on with that?

I think Haggar getting a spy into the Voltron team via the clone was her being an opportunist.  Which I love her for.  But I don’t think it was her original plan at all - and very possibly not her end game either.

Let’s start here.

Haggar says he could have been their greatest weapon.  She says this while calling him Champion.  It indicates, to me at least, that his ‘ultimate weapon’ status was something she’d latched onto before he became the Black Paladin, back when he was still the Champion.  She had plans for him then.  He’s in possession of a very high tech Galra arm that can go up against ‘upgrades’ that came after it but even more his hand jacks him in to all kinds of Galra information and security systems.  That’s - awfully weird to give a slave you’re not going to do anything else with.

Next point is that there’s no way Haggar could have known Shiro was going to find the Blue lion (or be on the team that did), rocket off to a castle that had been hidden for ten thousand years, wake up the only person in the universe that knew where the lions were, have just the right number of people with him for the team and then, to top it all off, become the Black Paladin himself and form Voltron.  I don’t care how much you cover possibilities when you plan there is no sensible or believable way she could have planned for that.  Even having the Red Lion in hand and suspecting where the Blue one was, still predicting Shiro’s roll in it all is - pretty wild at best and excessive at worst.  I can’t imagine it would occur to her to try to put a slave, even an ultimate weapon, in the seat of one of the lions Zarkon was coveting to the point of insanity.  That he did and it happened and he became the Black Paladin of a successful Voltron and took down a huge chunk of the Empire and her Emperor had to have been way out of left field.

Which leads us to point three.  Because it was a good possibility she knew about Shiro’s condition but there’s no way she could have predicted how he would die.  Yes, he did have a disease that was going to run a timer on him but there are a lot of things that could have happened to him and Team Voltron and him dying but the team surviving is plausible but pretty wiggly to try to predict, especially assuming that his team would be aware when he died if it happened.  Because chances are nine out of ten getting killed while with your team is something someone would witness or you’d at least leave a body behind for.    I’ve seen speculation that Shiro’s body was pulled loose and Haggar got it and all and while that’s interesting, it doesn’t look like canon went that way.  So unless Haggar is going to predict incredibly well that he’s going to die when no one sees it and his body is going to poof so there’s no evidence - her coming up with a clone to replace him might make sense but she wouldn’t be betting on it.  Dead people usually leave bodies behind.  She might have kept a clone or two on hold ‘just in case’ but I can’t see Haggar putting all her eggs in that basket.

And lastly - she created an army of clones.  You don’t send an army of clones to fill a single spot and you don’t let the rest of the clones wander around where they might give up the trick by being spotted.  But she had close to eight hundred of those suckers on ice.  (I keep saying eight hundred because there was a post drifting around that someone had counted them all and I’m just going to go with that number but even if it was only four hundred that’s still way too many clones for a one man job)

So we’ve got a role Haggar had planned for Shiro way back when he was a gladiator, that she created an entire army of clones of him for and chances are high the empty spot he left behind when he ‘died’ that she filled with a clone was just her being an opportunist. 

Granted - it was an amazing opportunity and she’s far too smart not to take it.  I am going to guess that she could do things with the clone - like take him over and see through his eyes and use him as a stand in for her with the White Lion - that she couldn’t do with the actual Shiro.  Now the obvious answer for why she couldn’t do it with the actual Shiro is ‘because plot’ but if we’re going to fill in the writer’s blanks for them we can point out that taking over Shiro or at least spying with him in season one and two would have been the sensible thing for her to do and she never did.  Haggar is, above all things, pretty darn sensible.  So we’re going to have to assume that she simply couldn’t.  Having access to a clone, grown from scratch and upgraded with a new arm that does more but looks the same, Haggar probably had more tinker time and a more specific purpose so the clone, and his arm, was probably outfitted as a unknowing spy from the start.  You’ll remember that all those clones in the tubes had both arms and were based off Shiro’s younger form.  One could speculate that she could have gone straight up ‘white tuft Shiro’ if simply replacing him had been her plan all along but she’s got younger version Shiro in there and obviously did ‘touch up’ (God, that’s horrible and its never even alluded to in canon) on the clone who eventually joined Team Voltron.  She’d apparently been releasing clones singularly into the wild for some unknown time before then as well, so news of there only being four lions had obviously gotten around by then (remember Keith yelling it at the allies at dinner, so it wasn’t exactly a well guarded secret).

Anyway, indication is that the clone that joined the team was an opportunity and not one that Haggar had originally intended to use the clones for, just one she fixed up and put on the path when she saw the opening - and she tinkered with him to make him spy accessible for her purposes before she released him in ways she hadn’t with the original Shiro because her plans had been different when she’d been working on the original Shiro.

So - what was Haggar building an army of Shiros for (beyond fulfilling every fans’ dream)?

Let’s look at the way Shiro fights.  He’s all over the place, isn’t he?  He’ll use whatever weapon he has at hand.  He’s incredibly graceful yet powerful and when he’s pissed he’s downright brutal.  He tends to only have a passing acquaintance with gravity during fights and he’s incredibly adaptable and agile.  He’s excellent at analyzing an opponents weak spots and he’s very skilled with Galra tech.

What else fights that way?

I give you the theory that, originally, Haggar was preparing to build an army of grasshopper robeasts and she was going to power them with Shiros.  Things weren’t entirely in place.  She was still working on getting the komar right and then she was going to have to figure out how to make it mobile and she was potentially still working out the schematics of making the robeast fluid enough but she had a lot of the pieces in place and Haggar plays for the long game.  She figured out the komar and Lotor showed her how to create the kind of robeast/ship she needed.  Losing her cloning facility with her pilots for the thing was probably a pretty hard hit - but, lucky lucky, opportunist that she is - she was given an entire Altean colony and plenty of time to exploit it. 

Shiro could have been her greatest weapon.  And if you think the Altean in the robeast ship was terrifying in a fight, I’d be even more so thinking of a several hundred Shiros in an army of those robeast-ships. 

[braincoins]

Re: Shiro & Allura bodyswap: have you seen Farscape? Because there's an episode where almost exactly this happens ("Listen, I want to apologize for -" "Eh, it's ok. You've been in my shoes; I've been in your pants...") :D Also, I would not mind at all if you were to continue this. Just sayin' ;)

I’ve seen bits of Farscape, but not that part! And if I can come up with something else I want to do with it, I surely will ^_^

[arsonforcharlie]

iskaen replied to your photoset: i made this sweatervest and i look very good in it

Beautiful! I especially love how the blue in the vest picks up the blue in your hair :)

thanks! that was deffo on purpose and not at all a lucky coincidence

[maychorian]

For your anon - lacerate by againstmygreeleaf? (on Ao3)

Oh, I think this might be it!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11834685/chapters/26760555

Nonny, try chapter 5.

[ao3feed-voltronlegendarydefender]

Some Days

read it on the AO3 at Some Days

by iskaen

For Nov(emeto)ber 2018 day 1: the boy who cried (wolf) sick

Words: 1778, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Voltron: Legendary Defender

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: Shiro (Voltron), Slav (Voltron)

Additional Tags: Sickfic, Vomiting, Sick Slav, Hypochondria, Hurt/Comfort, Shiro does not get paid enough for this

read it on the AO3 at Some Days

[ptw30]

I would *like* to think there's some kind of logjam/power struggle going on behind the scenes at DreamWorks between old-school and modern understandings of media, and that's why we haven't heard anything about anything out of them since VLD imploded. There isn't a shred of evidence for it, afaik; but it's currently the only way my brain can justify holding out hope for a reboot.

Unless you know someone in DreamWorks, it’s hard to say what’s actually happening behind the scenes. Bob Koplar said back in December in the Let’s Voltron Podcast that WEP and DreamWorks were in talks to continue Voltron - which at the time seemed insane to me. DreamWorks’ most-watched show…doesn’t already have a sequel in the works? Say what?

But I’m thinking now the massive drop-off between Season 2 and Season 5 stalled any sequel potential, and the backlash from Season 7 and 8 only further urged DreamWorks to put the brakes on a sequel. 

However, I think the major issue - how would DreamWorks’ continue the show? Not that they can’t so far as what’s the storyline going to be? Like you said, it could be a battle in the back-end, but…also, tapping into my day job now, the customer experience actually means a lot to companies. 

Today, customers don’t depend upon advertising/marketing as their main source of information. In today’s digital landscape, most viewers depend upon other social media and other fans’ recommendations. Rotten Tomatoes,  IMDb, even Tumblr, which has created a community of like-minded individuals - they serve as a potential viewer’s first stop before ever turning on a show - and potential return viewers first stop, too, where they seek the advice/recs of influencers.  

And what will potential new/returning viewers see when they google “DreamWorks Voltron Legendary Defender”?

If you’re like me and like to see how a show ends, to make sure it’s worth it, what will you see? 

Okay, y’know what, though? Maybe you didn’t decide to check ratings since you have a different favorite channel for interaction. So instead, you googled “Voltron.” What do you see?

Uh…not good. Hey, wait. Let me check Twitter. 

First tweet that shows up is an awesome cosplay of Allura and Lotor (who don’t end up together, so now I’m tainted going in thinking they will be) - but the very second tweet - 

…so in every single channel where new/returning viewers can interact with each other and get information about VLD has a negative message right at the top. Even the VLD Wikipedia page discusses the terrible treatment of queer, women, disabled and non-white characters. 

Before DreamWorks can announce a new sequel to VLD, they need to clean up this mess first - either by addressing the issues or creating a sequel that will address the issues. And considering how DreamWorks has been operating - She-Ra had finished four, 13-episode seasons before it premiered and wrapped up production in May. Fast and the Furious has only shown a 10-second clip, and Mitch Iverson seems to indicate he’s moving on already from writing. So…there’s a chance F&F might finish production quickly after premiering, too. 

When did Voltron finish production? Three months before its final season premiere. 

Sounds like even if VLD does have a sequel in the works - it might be awhile before we hear anything. If it follows a similar tactic to She-Ra and F&F - and Bob was actually on the level about working with DreamWorks last December - then we’re a year, year-and-a-out from a premiere and at least six-months away from an announcement. 

At least. 

Watch them announce something tomorrow.  

[ptw30]

I just wish DreamWorks would say *something* so I'd know whether to keep hoping or move on. I can't mourn Voltron (and let's be honest, I mostly mean Shiro) until I know for sure it's dead. (Not being dramatic here; I've been legitimately bouncing between stages of grief since last August. Over a story I loved. Fight me.) Shit hurts.

…so I’ve only been in one fight. I was in the second grade and took on three kids. I held my own, but I wouldn’t say I won. 

My point - don’t worry. No need for the “Fight me.” I would lose anyway, and if you scroll through my blog, you’ll see I’m still very much invested. When I find a show/series I love(d), it takes me a bit to move on. And most of the time, it’s unintentional. I just watch something, and it whisks me into a new fandom.

As for Voltron, DreamWorks shouldn’t just kill it. That doesn’t mean it won’t take DW years to produce something new - like YJ - and that doesn’t mean you will like whatever DreamWorks has or will produce. But I can’t imagine that DreamWorks will just dump their one-time flagship show, especially since they are still producing new merchandise for it. That means there is a call for it.   

(Also, comics were announced, but Lion Forge quickly back-pedaled on release date and plot. So it’s hard to say what the comics will actually entail cuz right now, we just know there will be a fourth volume. That’s it.)

However, if you feel that you cannot move on and are having symptoms of grief, please speak to a professional. :) That’s super important, especially after the traumatic events of the later season.  

And to end this is on a fun note, here. Have a pouty Shiro, who wants to be in a new series, wielding the Black Bayard and flying the Black Lion again.

[braincoins]

*reads post* 1. I suggest making Krolia half-Galra, which would make Keith a quarter Galra at most. This way, you can have Krolia and stay true to your intended storyline 2. Krolia's appearances can be in flashback, she may have died before the story starts and her memory lays the foundation for the final part of Keith's arc. 3. Rename the cow, but have Lance suggest Kaltenecker, until someone points out the cow's a girl.

Krolia being ½ Galra does make a lot more sense. @claudysummer on that same wavelength!

I’m still not sure if I want her to be Keith’s mom though, just because of the focus on found family as opposed to literally finding your biological family. I do want to keep her in V:LotD, just maybe not as related to Keith.

Also, that’s an excellent suggestion about cow naming!! I think I’ll go with that! :D Thank you!

Thinking about this though, I realized that, if Keith’s not ½ Galra, where’d he get the BoM blade? So I’ve been running this through, see what y’all think of this:

Keith just has a knife, not a BoM blade. When they go to the BoM HQ to meet Kolivan after Ulaz’s sacrifice, there are blades hanging on the wall. These are the blades of fallen BoM members. Blade members earn an existing blade through their actions: the blade will call to them when they’re ready. (They can’t make more blades; as we find out in Space Mall, the planet where luxite comes from was destroyed. Well, okay, the guy just says it hasn’t existed in deca-phoebs but we’ll go with destroyed because it’s quicker. ANYWAY)

A blade calls to Keith. At first he thinks he’s just imagining it, then he thinks one of the BoM are messing with him and he picks a fight. (This is in lieu of what happens in canon where they find the blade on him when he shows up.) He says he’s feeling something weird, from this area over here, and accuses them of messing with him as an excuse to start the fight. 

Kolivan says to let the boy up and tells him to close his eyes and follow that feeling. Keith follows it to one of the blades on the wall. Kolivan shares a look with the others and they decide to put Keith through their test because they can’t believe the blade called to him. 

The test goes as we’ve always seen, but when Keith awakens the blade, it’s not because he’s part Galra at all - Keith can just be entirely 100% human in this version - but because this specific blade responded to him. And the BoM are shocked, most of them confused, because all the Blades are Galra. They’ve always all been Galra.

And Kolivan points out that well, yeah, they’ve always been Galra because they started this secret society in response to their own people’s misdeeds. But there’s nothing in the history of the Blades - or the blades (the knives themselves) - to say that a non-Galra couldn’t be one. 

So, basically Keith bonds with the BoM in the same way that Pidge bonds with the Olkari, that Lance bonds with the mermaids, that Hunk bonds with the Balmerans. (That Shiro bonds with the Alteans… or at least Allura… *cough*) It’s not because he’s Galra to any degree - he just has a similar mindset, a similar outlook, that same passionate dedication to the cause.

The only other problem with Keith not being any part Galra is that one scene in season 1 where he puts his hand on the panel and it works - a scene that, frankly, still doesn’t make sense in canon because he’s wearing a glove. He and Lance dropped in RIGHT ON TOP of a sentry bot; they can just use its hand.

@iskaen this next part’s for you

And, frankly, I’m kind of thinking that Pidge can use a severed sentry hand to sort of reverse-engineer how to get into Galra computer systems. She can sort of program it into Shiro’s prosthetic so that it “mimics” the sentry bot hand. 

Thus in “Collection and Extraction”, Shiro’s hand mimics a sentry hand and that’s why he - and, through him, Pidge - can get into the system, but it’s a two-way street: the system is collecting data through Shiro’s arm. Pidge accounted for that, up to a point, but she’s busy trying to get through the security wall they encountered. Eventually, the Galra system gets past the “mask” and correctly identifies Shiro, thus triggering the alarm.