#was it morally correct to give up all of ions power and let the fighting resume?

[covertblizzard]

Does this count as being pacifist?

[tarotofbadkitties]

Kishotenketsu meta

I’ve been giving Voltron: Legendary Defender a fair amount of thought since it aired because the end of it was simply perplexing. One thing I was particularly struggling with was the fact that there was something familiar in its construction, but it felt off. After settling down from the more...inflammatory statements in the interviews from the executive producers, there was one thing that really stuck in my head, and that was the amount of inspiration they drew from Beast King: Golion. I couldn’t help but feel like something was off with the ending of that, so I decided to look into eastern story structure to see if it made any more sense from the perspective of its intended audience, and it turns out it did. I’m going to posit that Voltron: Legendary Defender lifted a similar story structure and the way the EPs intended to end the show makes a lot more sense when you consider it from that perspective. What I found was a common structure in Chinese, Japanese and Korean narratives called kishotenketsu.

To start with, I need to explain a bit how kishotenketsu works. Kishotenketsu is a four act structure. The first act (ki) is the introduction. Next the next act (sho) furthers the development of the introduction without introducing any major twists or turns. The third act (ten) is the twist or complication. Finally (ketsu) is the resolution, and what happens here is that the connection between the ki and the ten is made clear.

To a western observer, the ten can appear to come out of nowhere until the ketsu makes it clear how it ties in, but someone familiar with this story structure will be expecting this twist to come and aware that there will be reconciliation. For a show to have 8 seasons, it makes a lot of sense for it to have four acts, with every two seasons, representing one of its four acts, so I’m going to take us through Voltron: Legendary Defender in that way.

The first two seasons of Voltron: Legendary Defender are the Ki. We meet the characters, the setting is established, the players are put on the board and we find that there is a war. Right from the outset of the show it’s made clear that things look very different inside the empire than how they look from outside. Altough from the paladin’s perspective, the Galra are all power-mad conquestors, we see behind the scenes that the general on Arus, Prorok, has very little interest in taking over anything and is pretty chill. Zarkon becomes furious with his failure, and threatens him with being turned into a robeast if he fails, eventually making good on that threat. We’re also introduced to the Blade of Marmora, finding out they rescued Shiro and that Keith is half Galra, providing more shades of gray to the Galra as a people. In regards to providing ambiguity about Allura, we have the situation when the native Arusians presume that Allura is a goddess of some sort and she doesn’t correct them and allows them to worship her, and secondarily we have Allura saying that their first attempt should be diplomacy not attack, but following that up with generally not engaging in diplomacy . We also have this act’s bottle episode, the Depths. This episode has the mermaids, and it presents us with a strange situation where we have a brainwashed queen who sacrifices some of her citizens to keep the rest of them safe, at the behest of an evil creature that is also controlling her.

Next up, seasons 3 and 4 make up Sho, which is kicked off with the aftermath of Zarkon’s defeat in the season 2 finale. Sho accomplishes its stated purpose of furthering our knowledge of the paladins and the world without throwing in any substantial twists. Lotor is described differently than Zarkon when we meet him in the arena, but when the paladins encounter him he’s an antagonist all the same. Like they fought Zarkin and tried to dismantle his plans, the paladins do the same with Lotor. They try to liberate planets, Lotor takes them back, he tries to carry out plans, they try to stop him, it’s business as usual. The same sorts of themes we were introduced in seasons 1 and 2 are deepened here. Voltron continues their attempts to establish, they continue to fight against the Galra empire and we continue to be shown ambiguity within the empire behind the scenes. In earlier seasons, this ambiguity in relation to the Galra took the form of the Blade, in this case the ambiguity is Lotor and his generals. They are half Galra, like Keith, and we see that Lotor orders them not to kill anyone on Puig, and we’re informed that he consistently lets people he has ‘conquered’ rule themselves. It becomes clear with his conflicts with Throk, his conflict with Zarkon, and the secrets he keeps with Haggar that the Galra empire is by no means a monolithic entity, and that there are different points of view, methods of interacting with other beings and moral systems at play within it. The bottle episode for this arc also presents an ambiguity in relation to Allura. The bottle episode is Hole in the Sky, and in this episode, in an alternate reality we encounter the society created by Allura’s counterpart, a despotic empress. When we’re presented with this woman’s very ethically challenged solution to the war, which is brainwashing and enslaving enemies, we’re shown that our version of Allura is not quite as different as we might hope when she’s only fully opposed when they’re attempting to do this to her friends, not so much by the idea itself. Another significant ambiguity in regards to Allura that we’re introduced to is that she has kept from the paladins that Zarkon is the former black paladin and that she knew him personally. The ending to this arc, and thus beginning of the next one, is Lotor shocking the hell out of everyone by firing an ion cannon at central command to save everyone at Naxzela and asking for permission to board the Castle of Lions.

And now, here comes the part where we appropriately get lost, Ketsu. The twist. I’ve established so far that the main things each arc establishes is that the Galra are not all evil, that Allura is not all good, and that by extention the paladins are not always right. Seasons 5 and 6 did a very effective job of making quite a few people in the fandom upset because it takes everything we thought we understood and turns it on its head. An interesting thing when I was mapping this out for this meta, was finding that it wasn’t so much one bit twist (well there is one,) but also throughout this arc there are a string of significant escalating twists. The first one is that, rather than having a diplomatic interaction with Lotor, as early seasons would lead you to expect, they immediately take him prisoner and leave him in a cell for an undetermined amount of time. The second is the decision to cuff Lotor and trade him for Sam. Yet another twist, Shiro secretly arms Lotor. And another, Lotor can activate the fucking black bayard. And another, he defeats Zarkon singlehandedly. It’s also shocking when they refuse to take him to the Kral Zera. It’s shocking yet again when Shiro absconds with the black lion and does so himself. It’s shocking when the Blade plans to bomb the whole thing. It’s shocking to see Sendak return as a puppet of Haggar’s. It’s shocking when Keith meets his mother in the Blade. It’s shocking that they actually team up with Lotor and find Oriande. It’s shocking Lotor has marks of the chosen. It’s an unexpected twist when Lotor and Allura build a super weapon together, also that they become romantically involved. It’s shocking to find out there’s a colony of living Alteans that Lotor has assembled. It’s shocking the show pretends Shiro wouldn’t turn Keith into pudding within twenty seconds of them starting a duel. It’s shocking when Keith tells Shiro that he loves him. It’s shocking there’s eleventy Shiro clones (and I wasn’t even allowed to marry one of them). It’s shocking when Romelle claims that he was sacrificing Alteans for power, and shocking that Allura doesn’t even attempt to discuss the matter. It’s shocking that Honerva beat up Oriande and kidnaps Lotor. Then it’s shocking that when he makes it back to her she compares him to his father and does her damnedest to murder him and leave him in the rift.

I would argue that everything that happens in this arc twists what came before it, with the major one occurring in the season 6 finale, when they defeat Lotor. Up until that point, they hadn’t really killed anyone. They fought a lot of people, destroyed a lot of monsters and sentries, and maybe did or maybe didn’t kill an unknown number of foot soldiers. The choice to dress Galra foot soldiers and sentries identically down to the helmets makes it impossible to get any sense of how many soldiers they’ve killed, if any. Every situation where it looks like they’re going to have to, like the mermaid queen or the king of Olkarion, it turns out they’re not really going to have to kill a person. Even in regards to Zarkon, they thought they killed him at the end of season 2, but they hadn’t actually, and when he is killed it’s Lotor that does so, not one of the paladins. They’ve also been coming into situations where people were dealing with ongoing oppression or were under attack, and they were rescuing them and being considered heroes. There are always hints that maybe it’s not all it seems, it felt a little weird when Allura didn’t tell the Arusians that she was not their lion goddess, her comfort with the society in the alternate Altea was uncomfortable, Lotor’s points about her bigotry felt pretty salient and it was hard to tell if they made things better or worse for the Balmerans and Puigians.

Sure the first two arcs showed some contradictions or moral ambiguities in Allura, but they were nothing compared to the venality we start to see in seasons 5 and 6. It felt like a stranger when she was locking up someone who asked for asylum, offering up an ally for execution by a sworn enemy, refusing the chance to put an ally on the Galra throne and end the war, going along with someone she just said was untrustworthy to build a weapon to use to access unlimited energy. That behavior was suspicious enough that she was causing conflict with the team and there was active dissention. Keith was peacing out to (avoid her) stay with the blade, Shiro was fully insubordinating on more than one occasion and she and Shiro were arguing in a way they never had before. In particular, it’s important that Shiro stops listening to her to show that she’s showing another side, because Shiro is presented as being a consummate professional soldier. A common argument made is that the reason for his unusual behavior is Haggar’s control, but I would argue that it’s his own choices up until the point when she takes him over at the end of the season. We know Shiro cares about doing the right thing, and has a strong belief in the potential goodness of members of the Galra race that comes from Ulaz rescuing him from Haggar. It’s a different side to his behavior, but I would argue that there isn’t an actual twist until he’s fully taken over and we get the clone reveal.

For that matter, we get twists in this arc for the other paladins as well. Previously Hunk has been seen as easily scared and cowed, but here we get Hunk being the one to take on Dayak’s teachings and getting enough of a backbone that Galra soldiers Vrepit Sa him. Pidge had seemed nice enough, if distracted by concern about her family members, but we see Pidge willing to be outright cruel and selfish over it in her willingness to have Lotor executed on even the off-chance it could get back her father, not even being willing to come up with a backup plan besides having Lotor killed when Shiro points out the high likelihood of a double cross. She made it clear there was more at play than her father being a priority when she established that it wasn’t just that Sam’s life mattered more to her than Lotor, but that she would still consider it worthwhile for Lotor to die even if it was a trick and she didn’t get Sam back. Lance also showed a twist in which we saw that his insecurity could become a lethal thing when it was an excuse to act controlling towards Allura, cause confusion by running off, or antagonize Lotor. Being a jerk towards Lotor was all well and good (not really it was toxic masculine bullshit but whatever) until Lotor was the one thing between them and the indefinite continuation of the war with the Galra, starting off with a civil war within the largest military force the universe has ever known. Though one would hope that Lance’s insecure jealousy didn’t run that deep, when push came to shove he didn’t speak up and egged on the conflict preferring to continue the war in exchange of being rid of romantic competition. So with Shiro taken off of the board, Hunk being overruled, Keith’s impulsiveness careening them towards disaster, Pidge’s tribalism precluding her caring about anyone she doesn’t already know and love, Lance’s jealousy all for being rid of a rival, and finally Allura’s racism ruling the day, they make the impulsive decision to kill Lotor and leave him in the rift.

Now where that is supposed to take us is Ketsu, the reconciliation. Here’s where we have problems. The ending to Voltron: Legendary Defender was confounding, and on top of that it was clear there were very heavy changes made to it last minute, some at the behest of the EPs, but others at the behest of the Powers that Be. I have a pretty good idea of what was supposed to happen, and by extension, why it didn’t. The logical conclusion to the the three arcs set before us is that the paladins are the villains. Specifically, Allura is the big bad, and they are her henchmen just following orders. Now wait? WHAT? Now you’re throwing us a twist, Kitty? But I’m not. What do seasons 1-6 establish about Allura?

We get a really strange lack of anyone saying anything about Lotor’s execution after it happens. Several characters make vague charges of betrayal or untrustworthiness, but nobody expresses any regret or misgivings or mourns him or grieves at all. Nobody acknowledges that they created a power vacuum and directly caused the civil war that wiped out nearly all of their allies. When they’re confronted by Zethrid and Ezor, rather than answering for what they did, Acxa comes out of nowhere to attack them before the paladins can answer what happened to Lotor in a very strange moment that they weren’t in direct danger. I think that what was removed was characters directly confronting the paladins with their complicity in the events that befell everyone. I also agree with other meta that though they think they might have killed Lotor at this point, in the original version it became clear that they hadn’t and he joined with them to take on Honerva. There was plenty of playing god to be had on the show outside his actions, so he was just as deserving of a chance to try to redeem himself as the paladins, if not more so. I think the reason that was cut because putting them on an even level and establishing the paladins were wrong sends them inexorably towards sharing his fate of redemption by death and the Powers that Be were not having it with the paladins being placed in the position of villain who must be defeated to end the story.

They establish that she has good intentions, of ending the war and uniting people under her reign. They establish that she is blinded by prejudice, with several clear examples of Galra not aligned with the goals of Zarkon and those who align with his evil presented to her, none of which fundamentally change her opinion of them as a group. They establish she is blinded by prejudice in the other direction in regards to Alteans, whether we’re talking about her father, the alternate universe Alteans or Lotor himself once she finds that out about him. There are also very heavy parallels drawn to another Altean alchemist, Honerva. They both fall in love with Galra emperors, they both seek and obtain the secrets of Oriande, they both are attempting to make the world a better place by way of quintessence when a moral compromise leads to a personal downfall, and they are both presented as having versions that are kind and versions that are despotic empresses. What is Haggar’s big twist in the third arc? Why she becomes Honerva again. When Allura is revealed to have a much more cruel side willing to sacrifice others for her aims, Honerva is revealed to have a side that is not monstrous and is emotionally connected to her family and in a larger sense to her Altean identity. Those parallel tracks suggest parallel fates.

And the reconciliation gives us the parallel fates for Allura and Honerva, but what it fails to do is reconcile Lotor or the rest of the team. Without even having to look this bit up, one thing I know from watching a lot of Chinese cinema is there is a very strong belief in the villain getting theirs in the end. And by getting theirs, I mean death. Not metaphorical or theoretical or emotional death, but bleed out and stop breathing very literal death. What I would like to posit to you all was that what reconciles the first three acts was indeed intended to be the deaths of all of the paladins. Not just because Monsantos wanted to be super edgy, but structurally because it made sense with them being the villains. The sin they were guilty of, above all else, was pride. These paladins and Lotor, like the paladins of old and Honerva were prideful enough to think that, in spite of the risk to the other inhabitants of the universe they were warned about, they still sought that forbidden power in order to use it to enact their vision of peace and prosperity on the universe.

Honerva knew about the rift creatures, Lotor knew about the risk to the lives of the Alteans in his research, and Allura was aware of the potential of Voltron (and Sincline) as tools of conquest, but they all carried on with these projects nonetheless. None of the three described their goals in those terms, but like the alternate universe Alteans, it still ultimately came down to being about their own personal visions and ambitions, and using this destructive power to obtain that. Quintessence is power that exists to give life and it’s natural. It was never intended to be sucked out of things, and that’s apparent in what’s left of a planet when a Komar gets done with it. I think what season 8 was intending to do was clarify the similarity in the goals of the characters, and the folly in the execution of these goals. Every single one of the characters ultimately gave in to their worst tendencies in the third arc. Hunk’s timidity kept him for standing up for what’s right when it most counted and people around him were acting irrationally. Pidge’s tribalist ‘as long as my family is okay I could care less what happens to anyone else’ attitude kept her from caring enough about Lotor’s welfare to protest his execution either time the issue was before her. Lance’s toxic romantic obsession with Allura kept him from thinking logically about the situation and insisting they slow down and get all the facts. Keith’s impulsiveness and quickness to anger kept him from making sure Romelle was correct and using his leadership position to demand everyone halt and make a decision for the coalition that is for the greater good. Ultimately Allura was put in a battle between choosing love or war and she fell back on her prejudices and chose to plunge the universe into war.

It was the combined, not separate actions of the paladins that caused the Galra civil war that destroyed the Blade of Marmora, nearly the entire coalition, decimated the Galra empire, and ended trillions of lives. Ultimately the only fitting redemption for that would be the deaths of all of them for the purpose of restoring life and balance to the universe, with the chance to reincarnate with that karma cleansed. Structurally and thematically it fits, I don’t think they were bullshitting about it on Afterbuzz. Honestly, I didn’t when I first heard it, because they mentioned specific plans for the timing of it. Also, the comparisons to Sailor Moon. It was not an uncommon ending to a season of Sailor Moon at all for all of the senshi to heroically sacrifice their lives to give their princess the power she needed to cleanse the hearts of the evil the faced and save the universe. And I agree (partially) with the meta already in the fandom on the season 8 changes that the images we saw of the paladins After The War were part of larger sequences of the paladins living their lives after all of this. Where my opinion differs is that I think those were new incarnations of the paladins.