#at the very least she deserved to commit some actual goddamn war crimes instead of the Teehee It Was My Uncle Actually

[sunshine-in-a-bottle]

Everything to do with Edelgard's route is incredibly frustrating to me.

She has no agency. She's not starting this war for herself, she's being held at gunpoint by TWSITD and the best she can do is try to put literally any of the conflict on her own terms. It puts her in this constant in-between of "its her fault" and "its not her fault". You can never say how many things she's done have been her own choice.

Her most prominent captors are male, and it feels incredibly sexist to have this compelling female character who's influence is actually not hers, but The Men Behind Her, but also allow her to take the fall for all these decisions as if she had been to one to make them. She's villainized for what she can't control. She doesn't even get to take responsibility. She goes "oh my fake uncle did that. Sad." They couldn't commit to her making morally grey choices, but they sure can have her be disdainful of the people who suffered from those choices, as if they want to have their cake and eat it too. pick one.

And Yet More Possible Sexism. Hubert waits for Edelgard to make decisions, and if he doesn't like them, he'll secretly do what he wanted to do instead and claim its for her own good. As her most loyal friend, he should know how little agency she already has, how valuable it must be to her to be allowed to make her own decisions, and yet he still makes these choices for her.

Edelgard claims that the Truth of Fodlan is passed down from Emperor to Emperor, but we have no way of knowing if that evidence was doctored, edited, or biased when the earliest part of her life was dedicated to surviving a coup and then enduring torture from the people who have every reason to lie to her. When did she learn this info? She wasn't emperor when it was given to her. Is it an oral telling or is it written down? If its recorded, how safe is that location, and who was its original writer?

The Abyss DLC makes a good point about the way information can be edited and altered depending on who's in power and what propaganda you want to push through its library. To take a historical account at face value without examining these possible biases is a good way to spread misinformation, and Edelgard, under TWSITD's thumb, is hardly in a good place to recover info that hasn't been influenced by her captors.

I think the fact that Edelgard doesn't have all the information is probably the worst part of her route. Her endgame narrative is not one of true freedom. She's plugging in the narrative she has, coloring it with her trauma and her deepest wishes beyond all else. This route is not triumphant. You do not win a better future.

Her end card also is deeply disconcerting.

Just. The other routes don't have all these peasants looking distressed or unsettled. The destruction of two countries who fought to be allowed to be independent now being forced to abandon their culture in favor of once again joining the empire they had left in the first place. The emphasis on Hubert being the one drawing your in the background, having control, in a way that literally none of the other (male) lords have. Edelgard doesn't even get to be the true focus in her own goddamn mural. What is this.

What is the point of having this amazing, morally grey female character who takes up the focus of the entire game if you're going to constantly undermine literally everything she does by waving your hands and saying "well TWSITD did that actually. Hubert did that actually. She didn't actually want to do any of this, and if she did it wasn't that bad, and all of her info is dubiously sourced. She'll sound vaguely bitchy though if you want to feel like hating her."

Just. Stop doing this.

[sage-nebula]

Keith and/or Lotor for the character ask meme

Keith:

First impression:

“That’s him. I found him. I found The Boy™.” instant attachment to him. He didn’t even have to breathe a word for me to know that he was The One.

Impression now:

He easily ties as the best character on the show (with the other best character being Lotor), and is still too good to have to put up with Team Voltron.

Favorite moment:

It’s really hard to pick just one, but I think it’s a tie between him inspiring the team and forming Voltron for the first time in 3x03, him swinging Voltron out of the way of Acxa’s attack by instinct and intuition alone in 3x06, or the way he tackled Lotor (arms around Lotor’s waist) to knock him out of the way of the explosion in 5x04.

Idea for a story:

My WIPs folder currently includes:

- A Paradigm Shift fic where Acxa bonds with the Red Lion for the first time. (This is an Acxa-centric story, but Keith is there.)

- A Paradigm Shift fic where Lotor tries to pull the “that witch is not my mother” bit and Keith doesn’t let him get away with it, because the harder Lotor denies it now, the more it’ll hurt later when he’s forced to accept it, and Keith believes in ripping the bandaid off fast and sooner rather than later. (The document name for this one is “an unstoppable force meets another unstoppable force who has decided to act like an immovable object.”)

- A Dual Blades fic where Kolivan sends Lotor and Keith on a “mission” that’s actually just an excuse to let them have fun on Lotor’s birthday (though Keith never figures this out and thinks the mission is real, but Lotor recognizes it for what it is).

- A Paradigm Shift AU that shows how The Narti Incident™ would be adapted in that reality (hint: Narti actually gets to retain full agency and doesn’t die because, shocker, it is possible to treat her like a character and not just a plot device whatever LM and JDS think). Again, this isn’t really Keith-centric, but he’s there.

- What was meant to be my Big Bang fic, but is now going to be posted whenever it’s finished.

- A Keitor soulmate AU where people feel warmer and warmer the closer they get to their soulmate.

- A Dual Blades fic where Lotor trolls Kolivan about the “rumors” of his “relationship” with Sendak. Again, not Keith centric, but he is there.

- Keith’s first origin story in Paradigm Shift (he has two).

- A Dual Blades fic (which I came up with before season five) where Acxa, Zethrid, and Ezor are sentenced to death for treason when they turn themselves over to the Empire, and Lotor and Keith decide to go by themselves to Empire Central Command to rescue them.

- A There’s No Better Team (a.k.a. my Pokémon AU) fic where Keith first meets Lotor by investigating the Quintessence Foundation, which was founded by Lotor’s mother, Honerva.

- Ezor’s origin story in Paradigm Shift. Again, not Keith-centric, but he’s there and actually plays a very important role.

- An origin story I began writing for Keith before canon came and ruined everything.

- Chapter two of To Burn, to Shine.

- A modern Keitor AU I’m writing for my best friend and that I personally think is hilarious and hope everyone else will, too.

- A Paradigm Shift fic where Keith decides to do something for Lotor shortly after their relationship becomes romantic.

As you can see, I’m pretty busy.

The rest of these (and my answers for Lotor) are going under a cut because this is long enough as it is, haha.

Unpopular opinion:

Oh boy. Well, let’s see:

- I think Keith is the Once and Future Black Paladin, that it makes perfect sense that he was able to bond with the Black Lion, that he exhibited the desired qualities from Day One, that he worked hard for what he has and that he deserves it all. He’s an excellent leader.

- I think his ending—that he’s leading the Blade of Marmora as a relief organization, and that he’s working with the half-galra girls at that—is a great one. Keith’s doing what matters to him, he’s clearly happy, and people need to stop letting shipping biases cloud their view of that.

- I think people who scream about him “stealing screentime” didn’t watch the same show I did (for six seasons at least), because Keith was almost completely out of the picture from seasons four through six. We didn’t get to actually see him develop because of that, and that’s a goddamn shame.

- I think he’s demiromantic asexual.

- I don’t think he deserves nearly the amount of hate he gets.

- I hate how so many people only care about using him as a support prop for their fave, usually in the form of making him a trophy boyfriend.

- I still think he exhibits symptoms of C-PTSD from some sort of past childhood trauma.

- I hate that so many people in the fandom seem to want to accept the opinion / headcanon that Keith’s human heritage is white just so they can have a “reason” to hate him, instead of recognizing that JDS and LM possibly whitewashing a historically East Asian character is super problematic and that we should refuse to let them do that and see him as East Asian anyway. (And for the record, even if his human heritage was white, he’s still biracial because he’s half-galra. But nonetheless, IMO his human heritage is Japanese, because I’m not letting JDS and LM whitewash him like the cretins they are, and certainly not letting them get away with doing so by weaseling. They can either come out and admit they were racist in this way too, or it’s not getting recognized.) 

Favorite relationship:

If we’re talking canon, then probably his relationship with Kolivan. I hate that we got to see so little of it, but I love Uncle Wolf Kolivan and the way that Kolivan watched out and tried to guide Keith within the Blade. 

If I’m allowed to talk Paradigm Shift, though, then it’s a hard tie between his relationship with Acxa and his relationship with Lotor. Acxa and Keith are siblings in bond though not in blood; they’ve got a fire-forged relationship and trust in and care for one another implicitly. On the other hand, Keith and Lotor are true loves that built those feelings up over decaphoebs of friendship, camaraderie, and support, so there’s that, too.

Favorite headcanon:

As mentioned, I see Keith’s father as Japanese-American and I’m never letting that go. I think that in canon, Keith has C-PTSD from childhood trauma experienced in his foster homes. (In Paradigm Shift, he has it from his time on Revender.) He loves spacecrafts of all types, but for the longest time just doesn’t know the technical terms and thus makes up terms for them, and in Paradigm Shift ends up pretending for the longest time that he just hasn’t learned them to annoy Zethrid (it’s friendly teasing). 

Lotor:

First impression:

I honestly felt my heart stop and fill with love the second I heard the words, “Throk! You wish to challenge me?” and everything that came after just cemented that fact. I was cheering, “Lotor! Lotor! Lotor!” with the rest of the arena by the end of that very first clip.

Impression now:

He is the prince and emperor of my heart, and he deserved so, so, so much better than what this trash show and trashier fandom gave him. (Because while he does have his fans in the fandom, fandom at large just treats him so terribly. It makes me so sad.)

Favorite moment:

Oh, any number of things. The speech in the stadium, the way he easily outwitted Team Voltron in 3x04, the way he flew alongside the surface of a sun to escape Empire hounds, the entire fight against Zarkon, the moment he was crowned emperor … Lotor’s amazing in every scene he’s in.

Idea for a story:

See this section in Keith’s above, haha. Lotor features in like … all of those.

Unpopular opinion:

Probably that I don’t think he’s evil, I don’t think he’s deserving of hate, and honestly I think that the Paladins (sans Keith, because he was not involved in this mess) deserved to get their asses handed to him the moment they decided to commit war crimes in 5x02 and treat him like an object to be traded over to his abusive dictator father for execution for their own personal gain. Pidge and Lance especially are far more selfish and vile than Lotor ever was in his entire run on the show. Yes, I know about the colony (and I still think that was massively OoC and done purely to create a “justified reason” for Team Voltron to turn against him—i.e. that plot point wasn’t written to serve Lotor’s character, but rather was written to serve the plot the EPs wanted to write), but even so, that doesn’t change the fact that Lance wanted Lotor put to death due to feelings of jealousy and possessiveness over Allura, and Pidge wanted Lotor put to death just to get her dad back, and outright stated that “we have Voltron, we can do anything” is a pretty dangerous mindset for someone in possession of a highly dangerous weapon. And trust me, Shireplica, Allura, and Hunk didn’t come out looking much better in that episode.

Fuck Team Voltron. I’m Team Sincline all the way.

Favorite relationship:

To be entirely honest, they barely gave Lotor a chance to have enjoyable relationships on-screen. I felt that his relationship with Allura was too rushed to feel natural, and also I didn’t like how he was constantly worshiping the shared altean heritage while treating his galra heritage like something to be ashamed of, so that kind of soured it for me as well. And while I LOVE Team Sincline, we barely got to see him with his girls before Team Sincline was ripped apart for a nonsense reason (i.e. killing off Narti without a second thought). So in canon it’s hard to say.

In Paradigm Shift, I obviously adore his relationship with Keith, but I also really enjoy his relationships with Acxa and Narti. Lotor met Acxa at the same time he met Keith, and though it took Acxa a little longer to trust him (you’ll see why when I write Keith’s second origin story—they discuss it), ultimately she’s a confidant as well, and she’s the one he trusts most to not be biased when it comes to matters concerning him. (For instance, if ever there was a situation where Lotor was going to do something that could possibly strip him of his identity or corrupt him somehow, Acxa is the one he’d go to and say, “If this fails, you’ll have to kill me,” because he knows she would do it if he asked and there was no other way, whereas Keith would outright refuse. They’ve got kind of a platonic Roy and Riza thing going on.) As for Narti, Lotor and she commiserate over what it’s like to have a shitty, abusive father (Narti smiles for what’s possibly the first time in her life when Lotor makes a joke about how “you could say [he] has just a bit of experience with the subject” and then denies it when Lotor asks if that’s a smile he sees), and Lotor is the one who gave Narti the ability to see constantly by giving her Kova. Additionally, it’s fun to write moments like in To Burn, To Shine where Narti teases him in her own way, by insisting on calling him by his title instead of just his name. They’ve got a soft relationship in that sense.

Favorite headcanon:

I don’t know about favorite, but here’s a selection: Lotor really enjoys playing games—all sorts of games, really, all sorts of types, but especially strategy games. He has a scar on his lower lip from his own fang from when he was biting down on his lip to prevent himself crying out during one of Dayak’s “lessons” and accidentally bit right through it. He was born with a quintessence addiction due to Honerva overdosing on it when he was in the womb, and went through severe withdrawals as an newborn as a result. He’s also been affected in the sense that he’s far more sensitive to quintessence now, at higher risk for addiction and thus painful withdrawals, and so he’s very averse to ingesting any of it now (especially since Dayak did used to make him drink some as a child, no matter how much he insisted he didn’t want to, because Zarkon ordered it). I’m also very attached to Erebus, the baby vrensyr (dragon-esque alien creature) I give him in Paradigm Shift. They’re good companions.