#and is trying to let us know via awful late retcons that make no sense

[takaraphoenix]

It is so funny to me that ever since the bad retcon movie spoiler news have been spreading, my notifications have been EXPLODING with people digging up like every single KainShin post I ever made or reblogged; to like or reblog, not to clown on.

A few years back, I had to see like 75% of shippers leave my ship in my biggest fandom because one of them got a canon love interest and that discouraged them from shipping the non canon ship. Just like that.

Meanwhile, here the author really very badly retcons the ship into being related and all reactions I have seen so far are either FUCK CANON or THIS ONLY MAKES IT HOTTER.

Genuinely can not express how much I love you guys.

Like, yeah there are certainly people who will abandon the ship, and I'm deeply sorry that Gosho made it so you can no longer enjoy this ship and I do respect the choice; bad canon writing decisions have made me turn my back on ships in the past too.

But I haven't sailed this non-canon-and-never-will-be-canon ship for 20 years to have canon get in the way now.

I just FULLY do not care about this late ass, bad retcon. Doesn't exist to me, the same way Kaito and Shinichi's heterosexuality and Shin/Ran doesn't exist to me.

Fandom exists to have fun with the characters and the world, to play around and cherry pick what you like about canon and only keep the bits that spark joy. That is how I have treated fandom for over twenty years now and that is how I will continue treating fandom.

[sol1056]

doing the math retcon thing

Okay, let me just put this out there: the VLD writers suck at telling time. They suck at showing its passage, they suck at considering how things change over time, and they suck at even just simple clues like “two days later” or “a month has passed”. 

Plus, they even suck at being consistent. Characters will go from vargas to hours to seconds to ticks to whatever, with no allowance for who, what, or why. From what I can tell, just about anyone will use earth-time categories unless the writers want to leave it open just how much time has elapsed (or will elapse), or they want a character to ‘calculate’ to impress us. Or confuse us. Finger-counting is more of an art, my ass.

But time matters, and the only way I can forgive some of the more egregious fails (or, being kind, confusion) on the writers’ parts is to treat that “we’ve been asleep for 10,000 years!” as only working if an Altean ‘year’ lasts two weeks. Ergo, those 10,000 years are more like ~350 earth years.

Behind the cut: a few examples of time-references that don’t add up.

in-story mentions of long-duration time periods

1. It took ‘centuries’ to build up the Blade of Marmora. 

So they’re actually quite recent, then? Why not ‘millennia’? And if that recent, relatively, why only now have they gotten around to doing anything?

2. The only planet that produces luxite (for the BoM knives) was destroyed ‘decafeebs’ ago. 

If my guess is right that the BoM are using blades that react only to galra genetics, and we know the Galra planet was destroyed before the final Alfor/Zarkon battle, it seems really odd to say ‘decafeebs’ (decades?) instead of millennia. The phrase ‘decafeebs ago’ definitely makes it sound like it wasn’t immediately recent, but it was within living memory.  

3. At/around the Alfor/Zarkon falling-out, Kova is twenty-eight decafeebs old. 

This points to decafeebs being ‘decades’, which puts Kova’s age (at quintessence-caused rejuvenation) to be 280 years old. Especially since 2,800 years old is probably pushing it, given the implied Altean lifespans.

3. Throk says, “we’ve been with Zarkon since the beginning”. 

Are all Galrans so incredibly long-lived? Are Throk and the other generals also 10,000 years old? Is that why they don’t see their emperor as an ancient artifact resurrected by magic, but just another long-lived leader?

4. Sal’s employee -- with voice and visuals that signal an elderly person -- says she began working for Sal when she was ‘just a little girl’. 

Either she’s of a race with a mayfly’s timespan compared to Sal, or her timespan is equivalent to a human’s and it’s Sal’s race (the galra) who are especially long-lived. 

5. A weaker point, but throwing it in here anyway: “this shop’s been in my family since before the empire began”. 

There are two cases where that kind of boast are common. One is when the empire is genuinely long-lived, thus comparing yourself to that thing is actually impressive. The other is if it’s within living memory, like a consulting company that ‘got its start with Y2K’. In the latter, it’s most often making fun of the ‘established such-and-such year’ pretentiousness.

6. Ulaz says “we” when he speaks of the Galra empire bringing stability.

Not “my ancestors” or “previous generations” or even “the Galra” but “we”. There’s a sense of possession, as if Ulaz feels personally responsible for the Galran misjudgment, and it echoes Throk’s comment. If Zarkon’s takeover is within living memory for a lot of these people, then yes, it would be a mistake they’d personally made. 

It would also mean when Ulaz speaks of “centuries” and Kollivan speaks of “surviving this long”, the human analogy would be a revolutionary movement that’s fought for years, maybe a decade or two at most. Long enough to plant sleeper agents, but not so long that it must question whether victory is even achievable.

7. Has technology really been at a near-complete standstill for 10,000 (earth) years? 

Coran says the castle was already 600 years old when it got planted on Arus. If we assume he’s slightly “later in life” for an Altean, let’s say the average Altean lifespan is 800 earth years. That means twelve to thirteen generations between the castle going dark and waking up again. The rough average length for ‘a generation’ on earth is about 25 years (from birth to next generation’s birth), so 12.5 generations would be a little over 300 years, comparatively. 

earth comparisons in terms of technology development

Set aside our modern post-industrial span in which technology has increased exponentially. The last long stretch of slow, steady technological improvement was the early modern (about 1450 to 1850), when globalism created a need for improved sailing and warfaring technologies as part of the race for empire. 

However, these changes were not so fast that older technologies were immediately obsolete, unlike today (where a decade-old flip phone is likely to not even work at all, as opposed to working but not well). Frex, in 1866, France attacked Korea, whose defense was armed almost entirely by muskets of design and technology (and sometimes the musket itself) almost 300 years old. 

Most of those muskets were captured during the Imjin War in the 1590s, and dated from the last fifty years of Japan’s warring states period. In Japan, similar early-firearm muskets -- and we’re not talking the fancy stuff, we’re talking the most basic of muzzle-loading, serpentine-using firearms -- were brought out of family storage to see active use again on the battlefields of the Boshin War, also mid-1860s. 

This isn’t a case of Amazons using bows, arrows, and slings to fight off a WWI-era army. This is a case of successfully using much-older technology as one-half of a near-level playing field. If I look at warfare accounts from about 1750s to late 1800s, there are plenty of cases of modern-equipped armies held off (if not routed) by armies with older technology, until the massive post-industrial leaps that allowed WWI to wreck total havoc. 

My point is, the general stretch between the design of the older vs the design of the newer seems to sit around 200-300 years. Thus, if quintessence is technologically analogous to gunpowder, then its advances could be reasonably as choppy. Slower progress, rather than the rapid-fire every-year-something-new we’ve been experiencing in the West since the mid-90s. 

That’s the only way I can see a castle aged 10,600 years still having anywhere near the capability of defending against (let alone successfully attacking) a superior fighting force that’s presumably 10,000 years younger. 

by the way, about the time frames

I know I keep switching between human-equivalent (ie the length of a generation) when it’s possible the Galran lifespan is maybe 10,000 years, maybe more, who knows. So I’m trying to go by human lifespan as analogy, but keep in mind that if the average Galran lives for, say, 20,000 earth years, then a lot of this goes out the window. In that case, we should be treating the Galran empire (from the Galran perspective) as still in the conquer-and-establish phase, rather than the sit-back-and-rule phase.

what this means for the villains 

Right now, an awful lot hangs on the audience just swallowing that for 9,999 years, Zarkon focused on conquering, with no attempt to advance in any technological manner. He’s only just getting around to creating any kind of mecha-armor, and Haggar only just finally managed to come up with a new way to obtain quintessence. 

At 300 (human) years, the empire would be reaching stability and maturity, but not necessarily at its end. The Byzantine, Holy Roman, and Kanem empires all lasted between 700-800 years, as did the Zhou dynasty. The Ethiopian, Khmer, and Ottoman empires, and the Joseon Dynasty, each ruled for 600-700 years. Those long-lived empires and dynasties would clock in at about 24-32 generations, roughly, which is well beyond my estimate of about 13 (human-equivalent) generations of Galran rule. 

In other words, Zarkon's empire could be reaching its peak, with a) have a central core that works in direct contact with the emperor, b) a bureaucracy that hasn’t yet matured into stultification, and c) has not become static, corrupt, and rotting from the inside-out. At the same time, this also means the villains haven’t been lazy or incompetent, so much as focused on establishing and stabilizing their territory. The latest advances are therefore ‘we finally had the resources freed-up to try this’ rather than ‘it took us thirty-two generations to even come up with this concept, let alone do it’. 

It also means that another complaint of mine -- that Zarkon had never put his attention to creating an alternate Voltron -- is knocked aside. Voltron would be within living memory (or parental memory) of a fair number of Galra, then, and something they’d identify with the fallen Altean race, rather than a generic symbol of peace and goodwill. The PR value of ‘we have our own Voltron’ (and people unable to tell the difference) only works if you’re dealing with a people whose only knowledge is via fairy tales and legends. 

This is not to say I think Zarkon shouldn’t have tried, anyway, ‘cause done right, that’s a powerful PR element, and would’ve made for some interesting conflicts, when the ‘real’ Voltron showed up. (Who does the average Galran believe?) But then again, Zarkon doesn’t seem to care much about PR. 

it still doesn’t add up, though  

This is where official books with diagrams, schematics, and translations would come in awfully handy. 

Are the Galra naturally so long-lived as to have a lifespan that’s possibly twelve times the lifespan of their nearest neighbors, the Alteans? Was Zarkon barely into adulthood when Alfor was nearing the end of his life? 

Is it possible that Haggar was not actually dying of quintessence poisoning but old age? Could this have baffled and terrified Zarkon, who'd taken for granted that she’d be around for thousands of more ‘years’? 

Are we really to believe that an empire that’s lasted ten thousand years has no young generation of leaders with no memory of Voltron nor the Alteans nor the Galran homeworld? Or that it took 700+ years for any Galra to realize this was a bad idea and maybe deserved a rebellion? Or that the empire hasn’t deal with, and suppressed, thousands of tiny rebellions on a regular basis such that a multi-planet rebellion just requires the same treatment on a larger scale?

Frankly, most of the Galran plans, approaches, bureaucracy, culture, and attitudes only hang together if the empire is still in its relative infancy. Like, maybe thirty years under one leader, still new enough that there’s no guarantee any heir will be able to hold it together. 

in conclusion: the writers suck at time

Time is a huge part of being able to determine context. And it says something when even the voice actors can’t answer a simple question about how much time has passed. 

What the hell is up with the secrecy around the timeline? If revealing the chronology will somehow destroy the story, it raises a serious question of whether the story hangs together. Remember, this is fiction, not real life. It has to make sense. And if the writers aren’t clearing up their timeline obfuscation because it’d mean revealing the story’s plot holes, that’s a bad sign.