#also there's no lore we hardly know anything about altea and even voltron and the lions

[winterpinetrees]

This post is inspired by the “who’s even left of the Noldor” post I reblogged yesterday.

What’s up with purposeful destruction of cultures as a plot point in speculative fiction? Because now that I’m thinking of it, so many fantasy and sci-fi settings have a last survivor of a long lost race or a destroyed planet or lost precursors. Sometimes those precursors were just lost to history, but there’s also a whole lot of genocide and attempted genocide.

The first thing that comes to mind is Voltron, where Altea is destroyed as an act of war 10,000 years (an absurd amount) before the story and a huge amount of the plot centers around what’s left. (Not much, as it turns out. The Alteans left behind some mechs, 2.5 people, lost lore, and exactly one oppressed settlement discovered in season six). There’s the MCU, where the Skrulls are a poorly managed metaphor after the destruction of their planet scatters them across the universe, and the Nine Realms side of the franchise has three separate planet destroying incidents that are either attempted or successful. Plot and directorial inconsistencies reduce the asgardian population from a massive city to a fishing village, and no one cares. Superman is one of the last Kryptonians. Adora is the last of the First Ones. Aang is the last airbender. These are all children’s stories.

Why? Why do we tell our stories like this? Why are our protagonists othered in such a specific way that they have no one to turn to but ancient lore and a final recording? Why are the precursors all dead, and yet their inventions are better than anything modern civilizations can ever make? Why is destroying an entire civilization always the way that war goes? Why is there hardly ever a diaspora or cultural memory of the lost civilization?

Is American society built so solidly on a foundation of colonialism, genocide, and worshipping the good old days that we not only can’t imagine worlds without it, but consistently imagine worlds where that annihilation of culture and identity is more successful? Because in the real world, groups of people don’t just disappear, no matter how much others want them to.

I know there are exceptions, deconstructions, and works that don’t fit this idea. Superman specifically is old enough to have helped define the trope, and has specific cultural background. I’ve just been thinking about universes defined by what they are missing.

[leaflessart]

i didnt watch s7 and im not going to lol