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twixtandshout · 3 years ago

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Tagged by @pidgeonpostal! And not tagging anyone else because I have SOILED the original template (soiled it!!) in deference to my [brushes off skirt] mostly clean public-facing appearance.

...I’ve been making a lot of Spongebob memes lately for someone who has not seen Spongebob.

How many works do you have on AO3?

71!

What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

...306,834. Jesus.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Uh. Many! I do a lot of one-offs (and/or start long things I never finish) in many different places. My top three fandoms by fics written are RWBY (29), Undertale (25), Gravity Falls/Transcendence AU (4).

Bet you can’t tell where my hyperfixations have fallen.

I’ve also got some Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog fics back on my ff.net account, or I think I still do, anyway, but let’s never go back there pls

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Sweeter Than Honey (Undertale): Taking a Completely unsurprising first place, with over 600 more kudos than the runner-up, the haphazard Underswap fic featuring a post-college self-insert I wrote just after high school! I shake my head some at how overblown and ridiculous the gap between this and all my other stuff is (c’mon, guys, I’ve written way better fics), but this is also the fic which prompted me (and at least one other person!) to start using they/them pronouns. I’ve gotten a lot of really sweet comments about how seen and appreciated it’s made people feel, so I can’t get down too far about it.

2. To Be A Hero (BNHA): I don’t count myself as part of the BNHA fandom, for a number of reasons, but for something that’s arguably the main motivation for the entire plot, Midoriya’s quirklessness is something I’ve never thought has been handled well. This fic marked the first time I (somewhat tentatively) claimed the disability label (thanks again to Sweeter Than for prompting that realization) to hold that lens over canon. It also really shot up my chart, dang! It’s the only thing here I’d consider “recent.”

3. Three-Sentence Shipping (Undertale): Self-explanatory.

4. Brothers Beyond Bonedaries (Undertale): Ah, the way-overcomplicated AU³ I got nowhere close to finishing. One of the things I really like about Undertale is the interface screw, how Toby Fox uses the medium of the video game to pull off crazy things and enhance his game, but most of the fic written for the fandom seems dedicated to explaining it away, grounding it, rather than taking it to the next step and messing with the medium of fanfiction when you keep the story going. I tried to do something cool like that here, playing with questions like narrator and authorship and breaking the fourth wall, even taking the “final boss” fight to a “totally separate” fic reached through the first by link – but, well, then I never finished it, which probably didn’t make anything less confusing for the poor folks who missed the intent.

5. Spirit and Such (Gravity Falls: Transcendence AU): A whole fic written to line out a particular image I had, which, naturally, never made it to the page. I consider it a bit of a cautionary tale for myself when it comes to writing (near-)original content; there’s a lot I look back on and cringe. I still love the characters, though – well, the important ones – and I think just stepping away from the tried-and-true Mizar formula nets it a star sticker here.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

>w>; I try, but a lot of the time I just don’t have anything to say? Like, oh, you liked it? Neat. There’s not much to respond to in comments like that, and then I’m weighing falling down on an ~obligation~ to respond to every message in my inbox vs annoying people with copy-paste fluff responses all down the page. Plus I know I make more of an effort to comment on things that didn’t get the attention I feel they deserve, so if I’m driving up my own comment count with nonsense, am I preventing myself from being in a position to receive more comments later? And then if I do comment, am I being too effusive or running people’s ears off explaining things they don’t actually need to know? Sometimes people just want to express interest or admiration and don’t necessarily want a whole peek and guided tour behind the curtain.

Can you tell I have anxiety? x3;

Anyway, I do respond when I can. And I keep most of the comments I’ve gotten to go back and reread.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hm, hmm. Lots of stuff in the TQ Nonsense series would probably qualify! I’m thinking of Unfixable, Wolfsong, and Ethanol. And there’s Bursting Through A Blood-Red Sky (I Can Live, I Can Breathe), of course, but that was always intended to have a fix-it epilogue. It’s just that I wrote it in a couple of hours day-of, stared at it, and decided I didn’t wanna just then. But now that’s As Long As You’re Still Burning Bright (I’m Still Awake), and that’s probably the best romance I’ve written, so that one worked out.

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?

Now and then! When the urge strikes. Uhhh, I’ve got a series of Doctor Who x Undertale crossovers I actually made a whole dang verse for that never made it to print. Get a couple great comments on that every few months or so. I think the World Trigger x Undertale crossover is probably weirder, though, by virtue of WT being a very small fandom. My enthusiasm kinda sputtered out on that one.

Mostly I just daydream crossovers with whatever happens to catch my eye at any given moment. I have a lot!!!! Though odds are out on whether I manage to remember any of them once the initial thought’s passed, lol.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Gotten a couple eyebrow-raising comments, but I think mostly I’m just too small a writer to draw that kind of attention.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t? think so? Think my tastes are a little niche for most people to bother ^^;

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I had someone apologize once for any language mistakes in their comment cause they had to run it through a translator! That’s not what you asked (the answer is no), but it’s very flattering to think that someone liked my fic enough to read and comment despite the language barrier.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! :D @pidgeonpostal was gracious enough to agree to co-write Five Nights at Denny’s with me off an idea about shoes. This has fulfilled a long-held dream of mine (collabing with someone, not the shoes) and also introduced me to some lovely people.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Who has time for just one? ;3c Honestly, I care more about the characters and how the relationship – any relationship – between them changes them than I do about ~A Ship~ as a solid, bounded noun-object. I’ve got characters I like more and less and feelings about who does and doesn’t have chemistry in which directions with whom, but finding anything that agrees with those preferences is hard, harder when you take alloromanticism into account. I’ll play in any sandbox with cool toys, especially if other folks have already built sick sandcastles there.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

[kicks every single unfinished fic further under the bed] What nooo no WIPs here, everything on my account is either finished or does not exist

I’ve got a couple extra chapters of Sweeter Than floating around unposted, but 1. that fic’s a mess 2. high school Twixt and post-college Twixt are different people and trying to contort myself into three other me-shapes just cause people Like this fic is not something I’m super interested in 3. it’s headed for an emotional dip and I’d rather leave it where it is than post two chapters, stall out again, and leave folks with a bad end.

As for other fics... it’s looking more and more likely that v7 of my Yellow Brick Road AU will never actually make it out. >w>; I’ve got some really great ideas, but not enough to make me feel like I know what I’m doing, and that’s a big roadblock. Plus trying to engage with RT’s Atlas-Mantle worldbuilding in any serious capacity is... a headache. I can’t recommend the Happy Huntress Cinematic Universe enough, but it leaves some pretty big shoes to follow! And I’ve got small feet. <w<;

What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue’s fun, probably as an extension of characterization. I love tearing into what makes people tick, especially against the backdrop of their environment, the story they’re in, and the people they’re up against. Voice is a double-edged sword; I’ve been told my writing is really recognizable and individual, but on the other hand, I’ve been growing frustrated with with the limits of my narrative ability. There’s a strong rhythm I keep when I write (you might notice it here, even) but that leaves me feeling predictable and stale. I’m not sure I’m great at setting as a matter of course, but I’m pretty good at describing setpieces where the need comes up; that comes from my background in poetry, as does the fun I have with sublimating and abstracting complex imagery. And I think I bring some needed nuance to the universal. For good or ill, I don’t do what “everyone else” is doing.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Well, writing, for one thing. If I don’t know how something’s going to go and don’t have the urge to write it, it isn’t getting done, which means there’s a billion things that will never see the page and a few hundred more that are never getting finished. I lose momentum easily and have a hard time getting started, and I put way too much standing on finding a foothold with other people; as critical as I am of my work, I have high expectations for the stuff that passes muster, and it never seems to measure up. I’m also really uncreative. Yeah, I can mix up elements and extrapolate events, but coming up with things wholesale is really hard, which is why I avoid it wherever possible and steal/reskin stuff from other places instead.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Something along the lines of “Hoo boy, I am Not qualified for this but hopefully it’s decent anyway.” Maria’s Spanish lines haven’t been a big deal – I’ve used it sparingly and, as a Latin language, it should be easy for English-speaking audiences to pick up on the gist – but I’ve had a harder time with Tai’s Chinese, both because I have Even Less background there and because it is, of course, an entirely different language system. If I write it out in English or Romanized italics, am I colonizing it or changing the meaning? If I write it out in the presumed-original characters (presumed because it’s Google Translate and who knows if I’m even barking in the right forest), am I confusing or alienating my presumed-majority-English-speaking audience? Where should I put the translations? Should I put the translations? And for Frisk’s sign language, thinking back, are the brackets I used instead of quotes alienating/infantilizing? I like that different characters give the text between a different feel, but I’m not an ASL speaker – and I’m pretty sure the word is “speaker,” which would only reinforce that that demographic would rather I didn’t do that. It’s important for all these characters, I think, that they use non-English language where it makes sense; it’s part of who they are. But as a white monolingual English-speaker, I don’t think I can really weigh in.

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

Thaaaat’d be Pokémon, followed closely with Sonic the Hedgehog. Whether those fics are still on my ff.net account or not (pretty sure I’ve purged them, but you never know) I’ve still got a couple saved to a folder on my current laptop, ostensibly so I can look back and see how far I’ve come and more practically to allow for the possibility of furthering group cohesion through public shaming.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I still like the idea behind The Man Who Is Atlas, and Burning Bright (Still Awake) gets props for being my current fic, though it’s currently in that spot where I’m excited to get new chapters posted but also quietly marking everything up in red pen. I think Harbinger gets the crown here, at least for now.

#answerin' stuff

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dragonofyang · 5 years ago

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On Love and Lions Part 1: An Analysis on Love in VLD

“I have always believed that unity is where true power comes from, and true unity can only be born of love.” --Gyrgan, Paladin of the Yellow Lion

Voltron: Legendary Defender is a cartoon on Netflix that–with the final season available to watch on Netflix–has extremely regressive and harmful messages. The S8 on Netflix carries lessons about how war is good, that men shouldn’t respect the wishes and desires of women, that violence and abuse mean even victims aren’t deserving of forgiveness. Everything about that is 100% antithetical to what VLD was about throughout the prior seasons and each harmful message is another nail in the coffin of the original narratives of peace, respect, and fundamentally how everyone is deserving of love and forgiveness, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

In fact, the theme of love in VLD is something we at Team Purple Lion wish to discuss. It’s arguably the most absolutely fundamental theme of the show. Love destroys the universe, and love saves it over and over again. And love would have rebuilt the universe, but thanks to the edits ordered by the trademark holder, the universe that should have been born from love was instead born from one girl sacrificing her life because she saw no better option. She didn’t even get to tell her only remaining father figure goodbye. What kind of message is that? In the original final season, prior to the executive meddling, we should have seen how love was such a powerful force in the universe that it could not just repair this reality, but all realities. And it’s not just romantic love, but six types of love.

Now, for those of you more familiar with our work, we’ve discussed some pretty big concepts in VLD and how they’re addressed, and there will be even more in future episodes of our reconstruction Rise and Atone. VLD engages not just with its own predecessors in the Voltron franchise, but Beast King GoLion, Labyrinth, Frankenstein, and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey is all but the story bible for Allura’s arc. The concepts we are about to discuss date back to Ancient Greece, and while love can be more than these concepts, it’s important that we have a framework through which we can discuss and analyze love as it appears in VLD without getting lost in all the examples.

In American culture, “love” is not very well-differentiated between kinds because we only use one word: “love”. While we use it across all sorts of contexts, we have to add modifiers when we don’t mean romantic love or familial love, which are the most commonly-acknowledged forms of love. VLD, being written and edited by primarily Americans living in America, also encounters this issue, but it does not focus solely on romantic love, which can complicate how to interpret love in the show. We, however, would like to argue that not only is it all love, but it doesn’t all have to be good love, familial love, or romantic love. At the end of the day the plot is driven by love in its many forms. Love is so baked into the story that it’s quite difficult to extricate, dare I even say impossible, and that ultimately is part of why we were able to reconstruct so much of what was lost in S8.

The Ancient Greeks had many words for love, but we feel it’s important to discuss the dialogue that VLD engages in with various forms of love, using the Ancient Greeks’ framework as a guide. The model gives us concrete definitions of different kinds of love, and can help us as an audience understand the various forms of love that are present in VLD. It’s important that we define the different ways we can observe love being portrayed because much of VLD relies on the writing adage of “show, don’t tell”.

So without any further ado, let’s dig into what, precisely, is love.

As stated earlier, we’ll be using terminology coined by the Ancient Greeks, specifically six categories of love that we feel are most prevalent in the show. We’ve also deduced our own examples of these forms of love when they’re taken too far or flat-out discarded, which will be discussed in a companion article.

The six forms of love are as follows:

Eros: the most famous kind of love, an intense (and often sexual) passion for another being and seeing the beauty within them. This is the love that most closely aligns with romantic love as we understand it in a modern American context.

Philia: an affection and loyalty between friends, notable for its platonic nature, it is the love that arises between friends, and can be found among family, but the modern equivalent would be the found family trope.

Storge: this is the intrinsic empathy between individuals, primarily the attachment of parents to children. This form of love was primarily used to describe familial relationships, and the patience one sometimes needs when around blood relatives.

Philautia: put simply, this is self-love in its purest form. It is acknowledging your needs, wants, and happiness without apology. The Ancient Greeks considered Philautia to be a basic human need.

Xenia: while many might not consider this to be a form of love, it is hospitality, or as we define it, love between a host and their guests. Specifically, this would be the care a host gives to their guests in both physical (food, gifts, etc.) and non-physical (respecting rights, protection, etc.). Hospitality is massively important because if you are good to someone while they are in your home, they will be equally good to you if you visit theirs.

Agape: this is a Greco-Christian term, ultimately, and is a little more difficult to understand because it can be confused with other forms of love. At its core, though, it is a pure and unconditional love such as that between spouses, families, or God and man. It shouldn’t be confused for other forms of love such as Philia because unlike the other forms of love, which only focus on one aspect of humanity, Agape is the unconditional and universal love for everyone. It’s sexless, unlike Eros. At its core, it’s the love born of goodwill to all people, regardless of circumstance.

While these are only six categories, there are many ways of interpreting love, especially since there are so many avenues to see love–in good and bad forms–in VLD. These categories are also not inherently hierarchical, and are not presented in any particular order. Agape is the main exception, being more convoluted in its nature, and thus is discussed at the end. It also narratively serves as part of the culmination to the plot, so it carries a greater weight in relation to the alpha plot of the whole story.

Now, let’s examine how they present in VLD. As an official reminder, please remember that all analysis of VLD is done from a ship-neutral stance and we are not proposing any endgame romances. The sole purpose of this article is to discuss observable portrayals of love in its various forms, and to analyze both the text and the metatextual messages resulting from them.

Eros: Passionate Love

Eros… arguably this is the most contentious form of love presented in VLD, if only because of all the ship wars that occurred in the fandom. Eros drives the shipping communities of fandoms across the world, because it often stems from on-screen chemistry or the potential of the fleeting seconds where a spark flies but does not catch in canon. The beauty of Eros is that it ripples quietly through fiction, or it can be a tsunami ready to devour the story. It’s the quiet whisper of two women sharing a private moment, to the shouted declarations in the heat of battle. Eros thrums through fandoms in a desperate tempo for seeing a love as passionate as you can feel in characters who may never share more than a glance.

Plato actually had quite the influence on the word “Eros”, because “Eros” or erotic love, was largely regarded as a type of madness brought upon a person by seeing someone whose beauty strikes your heart with an arrow (Cupid’s arrows, anyone?). Eros is the love that drives you to despair if the object of your affections is cruel or uninterested, and it burns like a fire. “Falling in love at first sight” is the key concept here, and you can see it reproduced in fandoms across the world, though many cultures have their own names and terms for it. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott define “Eros” in A Greek-English Lexicon as “love, mostly of the sexual passion”. Plato, however, redefined the word to include a nonphysical aspect. He discusses it in Symposium and says that while (physical) Eros can be felt for a person initially, with contemplation you can and will fall in love with a person’s inner beauty, which for Plato was the ideal, since he specifically emphasized the lack of importance of physical attraction. In fact, Jung–who coined the Anima and Animus–has a similar approach, with an emphasis on unity within the self by accepting your internal Eros which manifests as your feminine Anima/masculine Animus.

In the text of VLD, Eros is remarkably subdued. This is partially due to its rating. Being a Y7-FV show, VLD can’t really have explicitly sexual content. Sure the implication can exist, but a lot of times sex has to be carried through metaphor if a story is to address it at all. Take the juniberry as an example. It’s a three-petal flower of a deep rose and softer pink, delicately topping a green stem, with a yellow pistil. In much of literary history, flowers represent female sexuality and beauty, and they are common representations of youth across genders.

Now, in strictly biological terms, flowers as a sexual symbol is a 1:1 accuracy in analysis, because the flower is the reproductive organ of a plant. I’d like to analyze the juniberry from a biological perspective, because understanding the anatomy of a flower can help us understand its role in literature as a metaphor for sex. The whole point of the flower is to be able to spread pollen across individual plants, whether by wind or by pollinators such as bats or bees, and breed to produce more plants. The actual reproductive organs of flowers are called the stamen and pistil, respectively. The stamen produces pollen, while the pistil collects pollen in its ovule to fertilize and create seeds. A stamen is a very slender filament, topped with what’s called an “anther”, which is where the pollen is actually released. The pistil, meanwhile, has a thicker base with a long body, usually topped with a few tendril-like structures called “stigma”.

Diagram by the Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants [ID: A simple cross-section diagram of a flower. Three petals are visible on the far side, with reproductive organs drawn in the center. There is also a stalk and sepals at the bottom. Along the sides of the cross-section there are labels. On the left, a category called “Stamen” is labeled, with “Anther” and “Filament�� pointing to two parts of the thinner reproductive organ. “Receptacle” marks the base of the flower, and “Peduncle (flower stalk)” marks out the stem. On the right, we have the label “Petal” and three labels under the category “Pistil”: “Stigma”, pointing to the top portion, “Style” pointing to the stem-like feature, and “Ovary” pointing to the rounded bottom. The label “Sepal” marks the leaf-like structure just under the petals. End ID.]

Now, when we look at the juniberries we see in canon, we can see that at no point are any drawn with stamens. They all have a single pistil growing from the center, and they’re topped with three stigma, meaning that all juniberries drawn on-screen are female juniberries.

Juniberries are a quintessential symbol of Altea, and they represent home to Allura, as well as what she’s lost. However, they also represent how Allura’s relationship to her own femininity is not some mystical thing determined by forces beyond her. Colleen gifts Allura a juniberry that was selectively bred from flowers she had available, and it’s identical in every way (that we can see) to the juniberries native to Altea. The message, though it’s subtle, is quite clear: Allura is in control of her femininity and can define herself however she pleases (“highlands poppy” versus “juniberry”). After the sexual undertones that threaded her relationship with Lotor, this is a very important message to convey, especially since a patriarchal story would punish Allura for the metaphorical sex in physical ways, such as how the season 8 on Netflix does.

Allura isn’t simply a vessel for male desire, nor is she a strong female character who doesn’t need a man. Her story is about finding agency separate from male expectations, without forsaking her own femininity in the process. Like the juniberry, she is feminine, but she is able to define herself, and the dark entity masquerading as Lotor reminds her of that with their conversation about calling the juniberry a “highlands poppy”. That’s what makes Lotor so dangerous to a traditional patriarchal values system: he reminds Allura that she has a choice.

It’s important to note that during their interactions Lotor never gives Allura a choice in the sense that he, a man, is allowing her one; he simply steps back and encourages her to make the choices to which she is entitled and to act on her emotions and desires. She is an agent of her own free will, and Lotor, being first her Shadow, challenges her to be smarter, quicker on the battlefield, and then as her Animus he challenges her to look inward and become in-tune to her own inner wants and needs. The other Paladins can offer some aid in that, but none of them strike her anxieties or hopes the way that Lotor can, being the crown prince and heir to her sworn enemy, and being half-Altean and half-Galra. He is, in a fundamentally physical way, the union of two races that were at war before Altea’s destruction, and to a survivor of that war, that forces Allura to question the beliefs she held in the beginning of the story. The stakes of success and failure are much higher with Lotor in the picture, and it’s easier to focus literary tension on two characters than five or six, so as a result of that persistent tension, we as the audience are given plenty of chemistry between two characters to spur Eros.

As we discussed last year in “Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away”, Keith was meant to have a gay relationship with another Paladin. We refuse to write conjecture on what his endgame romance was meant to be, however it is important to discuss Keith’s Eros in a metatextual sense. For example, let’s look at Keith and Shiro. Keith is a legacy character that dates all the way back to 1984 Defender of the Universe. His romantic subplot was relegated to excised footage and extremely subtextual if it managed to squeak past the axe. Shiro was able to be queer, however, due to the fact that he’s a DreamWorks-owned character who is new to the franchise, meaning that there isn’t a legacy that needed to be upheld.

Keith’s queerness, however, still acts as a spur to fuel the potential for Eros, and helps build tension between him and his fellow male Paladins. And I specify male Paladins because during season 2, Keith and Allura go off in a pod by themselves to see if Zarkon is tracking either of them. During the scenes with Keith and Allura together, it’s important to note the background music is remarkably flat and lacking in romantic cues. In prior iterations of Voltron, Keith and Allura are implied as endgame (DOTU), have the beginnings of an on-screen romance (VForce), or straight up just fuck on the page (such as in the comics). It stands to reason that this scene should at least imply some form of passionate chemistry here, but largely it’s two friends confiding in one another and trying to find reassurance as they confess their fears. Keith doesn’t have a moment to admire Allura’s beauty the way we see Lance and Matt do, and Allura doesn’t blush like how she does with Lotor or Lance. Without markers for any kind of Eros, the scene is a quiet moment of contemplation away from the stress, only to be broken by Shiro telling them to get back because the Galra Empire found the Castleship again.

So then where do we see passionate chemistry for Keith? At the risk of starting the ship-war again, his chemistry largely exists with Shiro and Lance. Shiro, narratively, functions as his Mentor, someone to guide and believe in him, who then gives up his position of leadership (sort of) so that Keith can grow. Bringing Shiro back prematurely makes it harder to see, but in a traditional Hero’s Journey, the Mentor figure teaches not-quite-enough to the Hero before disappearing, and the Hero grows on their own and becomes their own person. Naturally, this makes Keith and Shiro have tension, especially since Shiro was brought back prematurely due to marketing, so their relationship dynamic had to change to accommodate Shiro’s return. Lance, however, constantly baits and teases Keith, and Keith frequently rises to it and they argue. They butt heads and don’t have that sense of camaraderie that Keith and Shiro do, so right off the bat there is more obvious tension between the two of them. Eventually, Lance and Keith learn to trust each other, and in season 8 we finally see them settle their rivalry as they prepare to face Honerva. So while Keith’s dynamic with Shiro is more focused on camaraderie and growth, Keith’s dynamic with Lance is more focused on pushing each other to be better warriors and teammates.

Philia: Friendly Love

In VLD, we’re shown that friends can be found anywhere if you’re willing to put down the blasters and try to make them. We’re also shown that just because you’re on the same side of the battlefield, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re best buddies. Commander Lahn pledges his loyalty to Lotor after his base is saved by Voltron, and Keith and Lance butt heads so often you’d think one would sooner drop the other into a black hole. However, we should never discount the power of friendship, or rather, we should never discount the value of platonic relationships. This includes everything from friendship, to the found family trope, to the mystical bond the Paladins have with their Lions. Philia is the companion’s love, firmly rooted in platonic–and often intellectual–admiration.

Philia, as defined in A Greek-English Lexicon by Liddell and Scott, is “an affectionate regard or friendship, usually between equals”. Where Eros is the fiery passion between sexually-attracted adults, Philia is the platonic love between people who respect and trust each other. This is the love that flows like water, endlessly filling and refilling your emotional needs with good company, good advice, and generally just a good presence. Friendships are the ports we anchor ourselves at when the seas become too rough, and in VLD, where space is the most dangerous frontier and most of the universe is your enemy, friends are more important than ever for our Heroes and Heroines.

[ID: A screenshot of S4E1 “Code of Honor” with Allura, Lance, Coran, Shiro, Pidge, and Hunk sharing a group hug with Keith. Coran, Hunk, Pidge, and Allura are all crying, while Keith, Shiro, and Lance are smiling. End ID.]

Everywhere you look in VLD, you’re sure to find some kind of camaraderie between friends. Lance, Pidge, and Hunk make the Garrison Trio (or as I like to call them, The Planck Constant), and they get into shenanigans together. In fact, it’s entirely likely that had Lance and Hunk not decided to follow Pidge up to the roof, they never would’ve found Shiro, and subsequently Blue Lion. Later, when Voltron has allied with Lotor as the new Galra Emperor, they reprogram a sentry to become the eternally-fantastic Funbot. If you want a prime example of the fun that could be had between friends, those three are quintessential to the definition of Philia. They’re the first Youths you meet in the story, and it’s through their eyes we watch as a far-off intergalactic war comes to Earth at last. The show has us follow them as the audience, and we watch as they meet up with Keith, save Shiro, and then find themselves going from Earth to Kerberos in less than five minutes, and then by the end of their day, they’ve awoken Allura and Coran and are on Arus, thousands of lightyears away from their home.

We see the Paladins go from a rowdy group of teenagers with Shiro as the head to a group of five Heroes and Heroines capable of saving the universe. Lance helps Pidge get all the GAC coins she needs for a video game, and he’s always got the team’s back with his sniper rifle. Hunk always is ready to lend a hand, even when he’s scared of flying Yellow, but when the Taujeerans are in danger of falling into the acid as their planet breaks apart, he’s right there holding them up while the team gets the arc ship ready for takeoff. Our Paladins are the embodiment of the power of friendship, trust, and perseverance, and it’s that tenacity and dedication that should have carried our six Paladins to victory and brought the Purple Paladin back into the light he thought had forsaken him. Black, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, and White, together in a bond of pure platonic love. There’s an old phrase I’m sure you’re all familiar with: “blood is thicker than water”. The power of Philia and found family in VLD challenges that notion in the original S8 when Lotor is offered his vindication. “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

Pick any two of our main protagonists and you’re sure to find a thread of Philia connecting them, because when you fight together as one, you inevitably become closer as the trust builds between you. In fanfic terminology, this is the root of the found family trope: strangers and friends finding themselves in a gripping adventure together, and discovering that they’re stronger together than they could be apart, and coming to see these people as more than colleagues or acquaintances. They become your family and people to defend, and the people you trust to have your back when it’s time to face down an enemy together.

That’s part of why Keith leaving for the Blade of Marmora is so fractious. He’s growing into a leadership role and obviously accustomed to it, but with Shiro’s premature return, there’s some growing pains as the incumbent leader and the former leader unintentionally butt heads. Keith needs to be in Black Lion without Shiro to complete his growth, but without a way to easily integrate him back into the team without messing with the legacy, Keith has to go. And like with any good friend, when you have to say goodbye, it’s a bittersweet affair. The team doesn’t want him to go, but in-canon he feels he can do more good with the Blade, but the meta reason is that his Hero’s Journey has been arrested. But, like with any good friend, the team is able to reunite with him at a later date and he integrates back into the group. They are wiser to the world, harder, but they are together again. And they need that unity when it’s time to face Honerva and go into battle for not just their universe, but all realities.

Storge: Familial Love

In English, we have many concepts of love, but generally we only treat the single word of “love” as a word for “love”. As a result, we tend to use other words to modify the type of love we mean, which can get things kind of sticky if you talk about X type of love but don’t specify that it’s X type and not Y type. With familial love, it can be relatively understood without being specified, but as you can see by my explication here, I still have to modify the word “love” with an adjective to describe the next kind of love I will be discussing. Storge, the familial love.

A Greek-English Lexicon defines Storge as “love, affection, especially of parents and children”. Storge, unlike Philia, is not a platonic admiration for a companion in the family, however it does denote respect. Storge is also not the idealized unconditional love of Agape (which we will discuss toward the end of this essay). Storge is the instinctive love for those in your family, especially between parents and children. I also argue the key aspect of Storge is that your family–for all the times you want to tear out your hair–will love you for the rest of their lives. And you’ll love them, because they’re people who have your best interests at heart, even if they don’t always express that well.

Coran, Coran, the gorgeous man himself is Allura’s second father figure (after Alfor), but he’s the only father figure for Allura in the show that’s alive. Coran’s protectiveness of Allura is well-documented. He was furious when she got captured saving Shiro, he warns her to be careful healing the Balmera, he worries for her in Blue, but at no point does he actually prevent her from making her choices. He wants her to have a full life, a happy life, or at least as happy as one can be when you’re one of the only survivors of a war. He’s a father through and through, and even if Allura is Alfor’s daughter by blood, Coran is the one who supports her during the most difficult stage of not just her life but the universe’s life. He loves her, he consistently reminds people to respect her and to think of what’s best for her. Not just as a princess of Altea or the heart of Voltron, but as a daughter. Alfor was her father, but he died before he saw her face the trials in the plot. Coran, however, he gets to see her grow into a woman even greater than what Alfor could have ever imagined. The audience might find him a little frustrating (such as in S8E1 “Launch Date”), and Allura takes his protectiveness in stride, but at the end of the day Coran is a gorgeous man with his heart in the right place, even if his execution is a little off the mark on occasion.

The Holt parents are also good examples of Storge. We see Colleen and Sam fight to tell Earth about what’s been going on, as well as finding their children. Colleen herself is a solid mama bear that anyone would want to have fighting for them in their corner, and we can see she gives no fucks about protocol when she’s told she can’t stay on Garrison grounds with her husband.

[ID: Colleen Holt glaring, her husband Sam behind her looking equally annoyed. She glares at Admiral Sanda (off-screen) as they argue. The subtitle reads, “You’ll get me the clearance.” End ID.]

While Colleen doesn’t hesitate to ground Pidge for running away to space, the fact of the matter is that she and Sam fought like absolute hell to protect their kids in the ways they had available to them. Storge is the love parents have for their children and these two human characters are the perfect examples of it, even if Pidge chafes a bit under being grounded. Sam and Colleen’s love for Pidge and Matt and Coran’s love for Allura are the perfect avenues to explore how Storge is love, even if it’s frustrating, but they also serve as an excellent foil for how that love can be horribly twisted.

Philautia: Self-Love

In S1E1 of VLD, when our human protagonists meet Allura, Sendak is barreling through open space to their location and hellbent on capturing the Blue Lion. Allura is able to talk to Alfor–or rather, his hologram–to seek guidance in the upcoming battle, and he says, “You must be willing to sacrifice everything to assemble the lions and correct my error.”

With VLD, there’s this idea of sacrifice, of giving your life for the greater good, but when discussing acts of love, we also need to talk about acts of love for yourself. We see many instances of characters sacrificing themselves for the greater good, the belief that their death will bring an eventual victory to the Paladins of Voltron and free the universe. Allura throws Shiro into an escape pod so he doesn’t have to suffer the abuse again, but in the process becomes a prisoner herself. Ulaz gives up his life to save the Paladins and keep the Blade of Marmora base secret. Thace sacrifices himself so that Galra Central Command can go offline and the plan can move forward. Keith nearly kills himself trying to break through Haggar’s barrier at the battle of Naxzella before Lotor intervenes and destroys the ship with a blast from his Sincline ship. Sacrifice is a massive part of the show, and needless sacrifices are always undone, but what message do continuous sacrifices leave us with as the audience? It leaves us with Alfor’s lesson: you must sacrifice everything to correct my mistake.

When you’re writing, one of the most basic things you must do to drive a plot forward is change something significant. In the beginning of a story, Character A might think Character B is wrong and has no idea of what it takes to do something, but then Character B later on needs to surprise Character A by proving they can do that thing or that they don’t need to. It forces Character A and the audience to rethink their initial assumptions, and it encourages tension and dialogue between characters that otherwise might not exist. It’s an internal motivation, and one that audiences will pretty much always find more gripping and compelling than a simple monster-of-the-week scenario. VLD is no different. “All Galra are bad/Altea is good” leads to meeting the Blade of Marmora and Alteans who took over their universe. The challenge to a character’s worldview is what makes turning these initial ideas on their head so satisfying.

So what could challenge the idea that you have to sacrifice everything? Especially to correct the mistakes of someone else?

Love. Not for others, not for family, not even for the greater good.

But for yourself.

To quote Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Philautia is the love in which you put yourself first, not because it’s selfish, but because it’s self-care. Self-love is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an appreciation of one’s own worth or virtue” and Philautia has been recognized for millennia as a basic human need by the likes of Maslow and the Ancient Greeks. Recognizing your own needs and worth is a fundamentally radical decision, especially if you are in a position where you’re expected to prioritize the needs of others before your own.

S1E1 of VLD offers us pretty much every worldview that gets challenged later on in the series, except for Alfor’s. We see Alteans can be equally cruel, that Galra are not all evil. Voltron is a great protector, but it is also a great weapon, and Keith even calls it an alien warship in the very beginning, highlighting the danger Blue–and consequently Voltron itself–poses by merely existing. Philautia is not the exertion or prioritization of your desires, but the assertion of your needs. It can easily swing too far into selfishness and vanity, but making yourself heard is never a bad decision, and for those who are marginalized, women, trans people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, nonwhite people, it is an act of defiance. The sins of people in positions of power are not the burden for their victims to bear. If protesting is too much or too burdensome, simply taking the time to care for oneself is enough, because you can’t pour water out of an empty cup. Alfor’s plea to Allura was always meant to be overturned with the finale, especially since she’s facing down the antithesis of everything she believed in season 1. Honerva is selfish, manipulative, abusive, and an Altean woman. Alfor would ask Allura to give up everything she has left to destroy Honerva, but in the original and unedited season 8 Allura would have taken that plea and turned it on its head.

VLD’s Princess Allura is the first and only iteration to be a nonwhite girl and voiced by a black woman. Having her sacrifice herself is an extremely harmful message to little girls of color everywhere because it’s not the burden of girls of color to save the world. Their duty is to love themselves and know they’re able to be as brave and kind and intelligent as they’d like. Princess Allura’s arc is about a girl learning to not shoulder the burden of violence, but instead choosing to relieve herself and choose healing and creation, and in turn, her reward would be the literal universe at her fingertips.

And Allura isn’t the only character to learn to love themselves. Lance, as well, learns to become comfortable with himself. At first he’s comfortable and cocky and immature in Blue Lion, but then as the seasons progress and he finds Red to be more of a challenge, he learns he has to follow through with his actions and decisions. He learns that to fly Red, he can’t hesitate and just has to roll with the punches. He dubs himself “the sharpshooter” of the group, and at first he gets laughed at, but then he saves Slav from being trapped in prison once more by firing and making a near-impossible shot. He doesn’t have to forge ahead and fight recklessly, he simply has to see an opportunity and take it.

All our other Paladins learn to become more comfortable with themselves, as well. Hunk becomes more confident in being the voice of reason, and becomes an A+ diplomat in the process. Pidge is able to open up and be honest with her team about her secrets and fears, and in return is blessed not just with that weight off her shoulders, but the knowledge that her team is her family just as much as Sam and Matt are. Keith, too, learns that he doesn’t have to go it alone all the time. He’s able to relax and trust his team, and rather than burdening himself with doing everything, he’s able to rely on the skillsets of the other Paladins and make them a stronger team by focusing his attention on directing them, as opposed to commanding them.

Another interesting example of Philautia is Lotor himself, who at no point is uncomfortable with his mixed heritage, even when he’s called a “half-breed” or when one of his parents blames half of his heritage for his failings. The main reason that it’s not as blatant is because by the time the story begins, he’s been at peace with his heritage and his place in the Galra Empire for a long time, and thus does not play a significant role until he has his breakdown at the end of season 6.

This form of love is quite possibly the most frustrating, if only because so much of its payoff was in season 8. We should see Allura not give up her life in the name of sacrifice, but rather choose to become a goddess in the name of love. We should see Lance become unshakably confident in his abilities when it’s time to face the biggest bad guy of the series. The final season was meant to be a season won through love, and self-love is quintessential to that victory, because it gives viewers the message that your acceptance of yourself is vital to the world. It’s an important lesson for little girls everywhere to know that their worth doesn’t lie in how much of themselves they can give away, but how much of themselves they cultivate and grow, because if you trust in yourself and choose love, then you’ll be as powerful and strong as Princess Allura. It’s possible to be the brave and chivalrous Paladin while also being the princess who likes the occasional sparkly thing.

The lesson of Philautia in VLD is one of embracing your limits of what you can give, and reminding the world that you matter, because loving yourself is the greatest act of defiance when you’re faced with an enemy who wants nothing more than for you to make yourself smaller, weaker, more amicable if it would please them. It’s the reminder to be gentle with yourself, no matter what battles you face, because caring for yourself is just as–if not more–important.

Xenia: Love for the Stranger

Hospitality is a massive part of many cultures, I personally had a relative (who has since passed) who would always have an open door for the poor families in their neighborhood and the stove would always have something cooking. My own mother will cook especially for you if you need her to. There’s a reason “Southern hospitality” is famous. Good food, good company, and ultimately safety are what sets Xenia among the categories of love as defined by the Ancient Greeks. In VLD, this form of love is very sparse in comparison to love such as Philia, however it’s extremely important that our heroes engage in it. To quote Coran, “70 percent of diplomacy is appearance. Then 29 percent is manners, decorum, formalities and chit-chat” (“Changing of the Guard”). The remaining one percent, which Allura notes, is actual diplomacy and fighting for freedom. That’s essentially what hosting, good and proper hosting, is. It’s taking someone into your home and providing them with material comforts and necessities such as food, as well as non-physical ones like safety or protection, or extending and respecting their rights.

A good host will anticipate their guests’ needs because they have a love for their fellow strangers, and they show that love by providing for them. Xenia is the love of the stranger who has taken up space in your home and respecting their need to do so, but it’s also a reciprocal love. By extending your hospitality to a person, they will be more inclined to do the same for you and yours in the future. In Greece it was a complicated dance of gift-giving and receiving, spurred by the belief that one would incur the wrath of a god in disguise. While offending the gods was a big fear, it’s important to remember that good hosting and good guesting will create a deep bond between both parties because you’re respecting one another. Respect your wayward traveler and welcome them into your home, and they will entertain you with tales from far away lands, and in the future you will find a place at their table. Respect your host and the space they provide you, and you’ll receive gifts and care fit for a god. This giving and receiving encourages goodwill between strangers, and providing care to someone you don’t know is an act of love in its own right.

There’s a rule in American food language: “never return an empty dish”. This rule is especially prevalent in the US South and Midwest regions, but the general idea is that when you meet someone new (i.e. a new neighbor) you bring them a dish of something to welcome them and introduce yourself. You make small-talk, help them get acquainted with the area, wish them well, and then go on your merry way. Then, once your new neighbor has settled, eaten the food you gave them, and had time to make something new, they come knocking on your door and return that dish to you with a new food in it.

That’s a facet of what Xenia can encompass, and we see Xenia acted out in three key ways in VLD: Allura recruiting people for the Voltron Coalition, Lotor hosting the Paladins during their alliance, and Hunk showing his care for others through cooking.

Allura, for all her charms, isn’t that great of a diplomat, especially in the beginning of the story. When she meets the Arusians, she accidentally informs them that their dance of apology isn’t enough, which then makes them think they need to sacrifice themselves on a pyre. She thankfully recovers and lets them continue the dance, and then invites them into the Castle of Lions later. With the leaders of the rebel planets, she has a good presence and is rather suave with her guests, however when attention moves off her and onto the Paladins, and when the question of Voltron comes up, it’s extremely difficult for her to take control of the situation again. The loss of Shiro was fresh, and she really didn’t have a good answer that would reveal they couldn’t form Voltron, so she struggled with taking control back. This isn’t an indictment on Allura, but it is meant to point out how Xenia is not easy to learn. As we follow the Paladins, however, Allura gains confidence in her ability to speak publicly, and as they gather more allies it becomes easier for her to encourage alliances. She goes from panicking and trying to keep Arusians from dying to being able to communicate with allies and command a room. Xenia doesn’t come as naturally to Allura as it does to Hunk, and Lotor has had millennia of practice, but the important thing about Xenia is that you extend your hand and make the effort, even if it’s a little clumsy, because in the end you’re caring about strangers and welcoming them into your home and telling them they have a place at your table.

However, where Allura falls short in Xenia, we see both Hunk and Lotor shine. Let’s examine Lotor’s expertise, first.

Lotor is ten thousand years old, and it’s implied he’s spent much of that time playing the political game of the Galra Empire, as well as learning about other planets. It’s canon that he has a thirst for knowledge, and so couple his curiosity with his need to survive a very blood-driven political environment and you have a golden host forged in fire. It’s difficult to surprise Lotor, since he’s pretty much always two steps ahead of everyone. When he forges an alliance with the Voltron Coalition after his victory at the Kral Zera, Lotor has banners hung that bear the same symbol that Zarkon and Alfor fought under, which also adorns the shield on Green’s back. He specifically sought to recall the good times between the Galra and Alteans, and personally greeted the Paladins on his flagship. He encourages the Paladins to explore and use whatever resources they need, because as their host, Lotor–and by extension the entire Galra Empire–is now at their disposal. He’s the ever-perfect host, inviting his lower-ranked guests to make themselves comfortable, and acknowledging Allura’s rank as princess and personally escorting her along. In a lot of other high fantasy or sci-fi stories, showing the heroes around would get palmed off to a servant of some sort, especially if the host is duplicitous. However, Lotor affords our Heroes and Heroines quite a bit of respect compared to what other characters in his place might do, even going so far as to offer his own personal time to the princess when he has an empire to claim still. Given the canon politics, Lotor logically should have been in constant communication with various officers and securing their loyalty to him, but instead he takes time to approach his new allies and make them feel welcome in the headquarters of their former-enemy.

So while Lotor is arguably the best example of good hosting I’ve ever seen in a show (without it turning out to be some sort of ploy), Hunk’s style of Xenia is equally good if in a different way. While Lotor is shown to essentially be a master of decorum, Hunk is a master in the kitchen and the art of making room for everyone at the table. Hunk has only been in space for a few months to a few years (depending on when in the series we’re talking), he hasn’t had the millennia to research planets and learn all their customs, or train in diplomacy to make up for any lack of education. He’s just a guy from Earth who likes to cook and who especially likes to cook for others. In all prior iterations of Voltron, Hunk has always been “the food guy” or “the slightly dumb, but lovable one”. It’s not particularly flattering, and VLD even pokes fun at how flat his character is historically in “The Voltron Show!” by adding fart gag noises. In VLD, however, we see that Hunk is intelligent and brave, if anxious, and he’s more at home in a home than he is in a Lion. Hunk is a good Paladin, but he is quite possibly the best diplomat in the whole show.

A large part of Hunk’s diplomacy lies in listening. When he’s out in the field, he’s quite possibly the best listener out of the entire team. When there are guests on the Castleship, or when the Alteans are on the IGF-Atlas, he doesn’t just listen, he welcomes them. In scenes from season 8, we really get to see this shine, because as Hunk says in “Day Forty-Seven”, “food has a way of reminding people of moments in time.” Bringing good memories with food can go a long way to putting stress and anger behind people.

Every person has a dish that, when prepared, makes them relax and think of happy memories. In Hunk’s kitchen, everyone eats, and nobody is unwelcome. Whether you’re Commander Lahn and working with Hunk to save your planet from devastating radiation, or you’re an Altean who just wants what’s best for your people, Hunk will meet you halfway and try to see things from your perspective, and offer you a cookie because he feels like it. Hunk’s Xenia is not wrapped up in protocol or etiquette. His Xenia is found just across the kitchen table, with a plate of warm food and a friendly conversation, ready to listen to your troubles and offer a hug, if not a solution.

Agape: Unconditional Love

Now that we have discussed the five prior categories of love as defined by the Ancient Greeks, let’s examine Agape, which can be difficult to conceptualize. “Agape” originates a Greek term, however it wasn’t used very often until Christianity came into the picture, and thus it encompasses far more than even xenia does, because while Xenia is love in the form of courtesy to travelers, Agape’s prevalent definition stems purely from the idea that God loves everyone unconditionally. In fact, “agape” is the term used in the Bible to describe the unconditional love of God, but when you translate it to English, the word simply becomes “love”, losing the weight that it carries in Greek.

The idea of unconditional and divine love is not unique to Christianity or the Ancient Greeks. Throw a rock in any direction and I’m sure you’ll find a culture with a similar concept to Agape. The key aspects of unconditional love is that it is sexless–meaning attraction is unnecessary to feel Agape–and that it is founded in goodwill for others. It feels cheap to throw the quote “love thine enemy” around in this section, because that discounts the importance of Philautia as we discussed it earlier in this essay, but at the end of the day that’s what Agape means. The Bible–which influences much of the definition of this kind of love–would have people forgive the ones who do them wrong, but forgiveness does not mean forgetting, and loving someone doesn’t require forgiving them either.

In VLD, a man loved a woman so much he tricked his closest friends and allies into opening a rift in an effort to save her life. In the process, they both died and revived, cursed with immortality and a thirst for destruction. Zarkon was a man who loved Honerva so much that he doomed the known universe to 10,000 years of his tyranny. Honerva, when she regained her memories, sought vengeance against Voltron for not just losing her son, but also because she blames everyone around her for being the reason why her own son rejected her time and time again. Honerva is the antithesis to Allura in pretty much every way, and in the edited season 8, Lotor is condemned to a cycle of abuse because he’s never offered an opportunity to speak, just like how he was violently silenced by his mother when he disobeyed his father on the colony planet in “Shadows”. Honerva, however, is not.

[ID: A screenshot of S8, featuring from left to right: Lance, Keith, Allura, “Shiro”, Pidge, and Hunk. They face Honerva, who is facing away from the audience so we see the back of her head and suit. Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

[ID: A shot of “Allura”’s hand grasping Honerva’s wrist and vice versa. Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

Allura being a paragon of growing into Philautia gives other characters the ability to do the same, but as @leakinghate notes in “Seek Truth in Darkness”, that is not Allura’s hand, just as that is not Shiro next to Allura in the prior screenshot. Allura is not the one who was most wronged by Honerva. She was asleep and hidden from the universe. Lotor, however, was subjected to centuries of abuse by the hands of his parents.

Agape is a complicated love, one that requires a person to be able to love everyone unconditionally, but love does not necessarily mean “forgive and forget”. It’s important that Allura impart the enlightenment she gained on her Heroine’s Journey, because this is the point where she can be at peace and claim her cosmic reward, but she cannot do so without the person who was most wronged being able to face his oppressor: Lotor.

[ID: A close-up shot of Lotor glaring at the audience, with the subtitle text reading, “maybe I will take pity on you when the time comes.” Screenshot from “Seek Truth in Darkness”. End ID.]

As @leakinghate pointed out, Allura is the one to use her abilities to restore Honerva’s sense of self, but Lotor being present makes this confrontation all the more poignant and intense. This is the opportunity for us to see Agape in its full glory, but with the edits to the final season it’s a pale shadow of what could have been. The universe is about to be reborn because Allura and Lotor stay behind to repair the rift in all realities. We need that Philautia that Allura is able to embody, but we also need Agape. We’re shown countless times throughout the show that good and evil are not so clearly delineated, and that there are shades of gray everywhere. Lotor has been hurt so much by the one person alive who should have loved him unconditionally.

And rather than continue the cycle of abuse and take vengeance, he chooses to let go. We should have seen him take his power back, not in a godly or violent sense, but his power over his fate. He is not his father. And he is not his mother. He is more. By confronting her in this rift of all realities, we see the foreshadowing of season 6 come into full swing and while we are missing much of that original sequence between him and his mother, it’s important to realize that regardless of the content that was removed post-production, he takes pity on his mother in a sense. She’s a flawed person who made bad decisions. He does not owe her forgiveness, and he does not owe her love, but in her finally letting go of not just him but all the spirits of the original Paladins, Lotor himself is able to be free to love in the way he was denied: unconditionally.

The universe needs people who love themselves enough to choose a path of peace, and it needs to be made with the unconditional love of a parent, a friend, a lover, a god. It needs the eternal goodwill of its new creators because the people of the new universe will fuck up. They’ll make mistakes and hurt each other and Weblums will eat planets and the circle of life will continue. But being able to look at the fucked-up universe and say “I love you” is a power that not many have. It takes courage to look at the universe that has wronged you, wronged billions, hurt the found family that’s accepted you, and still find a way to love it.

The new universe is made of love just as the old one was. It’s made with passion, for friends, for family, for strangers, and for yourself. It’s made by people with love and hope and the intent to make the world they live in a little better every day. And that, ultimately, is the true love that spurs the story of VLD forward.

Stay tuned for a companion meta soon, in which we will discuss these forms of love and how they can be twisted and taken to unhealthy extremes.

Works Cited

Dos Santos, Joaquim and Montgomery, Lauren. Voltron: Legendary Defender. Netflix.

LeakingHate, et. al. “Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away in VLD”. Team Purple Lion. 12 Mar 2019. Web. https://www.teampurplelion.com/gay-romance-cut-voltron/

LeakingHate, et. al. “Seek Truth in Darkness”. Team Purple Lion. 2 Mar 2019. Web. https://www.teampurplelion.com/seek-truth-in-darkness/ Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Eros”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3De%29%2Frws

Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Philia”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dfili%2Fa

Liddell, Henry and Scott, Robert. “Storge”. A Greek-English Lexicon. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dstorgh%2F

“Self-love”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-love

Payne, Will. “Botany for the Beginner”. Australian Plants Online. 2006. http://anpsa.org.au/APOL2006/aug06-s1.html

Potter, Ben. “The Odyssey: Be Our Guest With Xenia”. Classical Wisdom Weekly. 19 April 2013. Web. https://classicalwisdom.com/culture/literature/the-odyssey-be-our-guest-with-xenia/

@leakinghate @crystal-rebellion @felixazrael @voltronisruiningmylife

#TeamPurpleLion #Team Purple Lion #vld #freevlds8 #voltron

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b-listbadboy · 5 years ago

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Castlevania Season 3 was disappointing

(Spoilers for Castlevania Season 3, if you haven’t seen it yet it’s out now on Netflix. I suggest watching that first before reading this review)

I won’t say it was an awful season by any stretch of the imagination but man was it a drag to get through.

Almost nothing of significance happens for the majority of the season and the things that did happen felt extremely off and weird. 10 episodes, 25 to 30 minutes each, and every single one except for the fucking TWO LAST EPISODES were spent dicking around with a mystery that had little to do with anything from season 2 beyond a really out there twist that I’m sort of iffy on. Top that off with a lackluster arguably stupid ending to leave us off on a needless cliffhanger, and that’s the magic remedy that will leave me feeling pretty damn frustrated.

The best parts, in my opinion, were with Isaac’s massive undead crusade he was waging throughout his journey for revenge, and Trevor and Syph’s interactions with each other as well as with the little villagers. Isaac’s arc going from a servant of Dracula to slowing evolving into the master of the damned felt genuine, intriguing, and badass! I really wish he was the next main villain instead as it makes sense thematically. He carries out Dracula’s nihilistic views of humanity in a similar but now more direct way and that can lead into something really intriguing. However, for some reason, this season left him and his whole journey on a back burner, and virtually everything else that is implemented into main villain role fell flat on its face execution wise.

For example; The new vampires of this season are Camilla’s three other empress sisters, and while they do have a plethora of personality at the very least, that kind of comes at a cost of the main threat being extremely diluted. We go from this hurting sympathetic undead overlord with the power of an anchent GOD, to a couple of wicked sassy sisters who just wanna eat people forever? It’s a bit lame of a progression from what we once had, we know Vampires like to eat people that’s nothing new or exciting. There’s no real twist to it besides it being “led by women in the dark ages” and granted that makes sense here since it IS the dark ages, but come on we literally just had arguably the BEST adaptation of friggin’ Dracula! This shouldn’t be all they got moving forward from that.

Now, I have ZERO issue with the main antagonists being female or even two of the four sisters (not by blood don’t worry) being a lesbian couple. I hate that I have to emphasize this, hell I often defend Cinder Fall in RWBY more than anyone in the fandom at all despite her issues as a complex and sometimes flat out badly written character. However, The four of them in this season have the most basic of plans that it seems arbitrary status quote fluff at best. It felt like just because it’s Castlevania, we HAVE to have the vampires as the villains. Even though in the games the Belmont’s were literally fighting werewolves, dragons, skeletons, and the GRIMM REAPER??

Therefore, the sense of urgency and tense calculating plans of ‘survival vs extinction’ is completely gone. And yknow in a way, I can kinda initially SEE that working in a sort of “Empire Strikes Back” esque plot. Yknow, with Alucard and the gang go around cleaning up Dracula’s leftover horde only for Isaac or even Camilla to have this huge vengeful comeback of dominance? But there’s no one exactly “striking back” or even taking any kind of immediate initiative after Dracula’s death. It’s been MONTHS after the whole event and no one seems like they really care about that world changing event from the last two season’s. Everything is fine and dandy, no one has a single worry in the world! How enthralling...I miss Godbrand 😑

Besides the plan the four empresses have as well as Issac’s revenge, which I hope will both be more explored in season 4, no one really has any goal to warrant THAT kind of length of a season. This is more of a Netflix problem that I have with most of their shows and it’s one of the reasons why I don’t like watching them. Almost every singe show Netflix produces now, feels the need to overstuff itself with needless filler that gets us really nowhere until the very end where it SUDDENLY all comes together. But because of the nature of binge watching and considering how Netflix wants to desperately keep their subscriptions in fear of intimidating competition, they make these shows 12 episodes long with HALF HOUR OR MORE amount of filler content that’s supposed to satisfy us cause it’s “cute”?! No, stop this shit! Granted, Castlevania wasn’t nearly AS bad as the live action shows, but honestly, what exactly was shown to us that couldn’t have been reduced to like 5 solidly paced episodes focused on one or two plot lines ONLY like before? It worked perfectly back then, why change what ain’t broke?

As much as I don’t like the immediate rush of Trevor and Syph’s out of nowhere sexual relationship, I didn’t overall mind it too much since they still somewhat felt consistent. Their characteristics play off very nicely with one another and it’s pretty easy to see the chemistry between the two....HOWEVER I’M STILL GONNA COMPLAIN ABOUT IT SO HERE WE GO!

I get that they were setting them up as an endgame ship of the series, there’s no denying that, but they start fucking for what feels like (to the audience) two days after and I think that’s a bit ridiculous! Even if Alucard states that it’s been at the very least a month worth of time since the events of Season 2, there’s no real physical signs showing that statement to be true. Hell, Trevor’s beard and hair remains the same despite a HUGE passage of time where it would naturally grow out to indicate said time passing by. But both him, Syph, Alucard, and damn near everyone else looks the exact same as last season. So for all I know it could have been like a week since Season 2 and that to me doesn’t feel exactly earned. The Season 2 finale didn’t explicitly leave off Trevor and Syph officially a couple, they felt more like partners in crime more than anything else. Not to say that there wasn’t any chemistry there to develope INTO a relationship GRADUALLY, but going from a little spark of interest to the immediate jump of them sleeping together naked all comfortably as if they’re a goddamn married couple is a STRETCH! Even Trevor himself thinks so too so don’t jump down my throat about not being immediately swooned by the shipping fanservice given to us. I don’t dislike them as a couple at all, in fact I think their dynamic is cute! However, I would have also liked to have this couple feel natural and earned. They most certainly do not feel earned this way, at least to me.

Oh god, then there’s this out of nowhere sexual tension between Alucard and his new two recruits from another region hinted at in the previous season? Mind you, Alucard was doing literally NOTHING throughout the entirety of Season 3. Yep, literally the ONE DUDE WHO BASICALLY KILLED DRACULA gets about fuck all story progression afterwards out of the three. But what they DO give him are these two new vampire hunting student’s who look identical to one another (no racial they just literally look like fraternal twins) so I assumed they were either siblings or a couple, which makes it REALLY WEIRD WHEN THEY BOTH FUCK ALUCARD OUT OF NOWHERE?! I’m NOT making this shit up I promise! What makes even less sense is that it was really just a ploy for them to steal the Belmont knowledge of killing vampires to show to their people who have been enslaved. Which of course ends with them being killed so it really makes this entire conflict in his character damn near pointless besides “sad vibes check”, but here’s the thing...why didn’t they just keep doing training with Alucard?? There were virtually no downsides to having him teach you how to kill Vampires to save your village from being enslaved, he was teaching you both very well and gave you like the eternal knowledge of how to kill literally EVERY MONSTER and even let you live in the castle FOR FREE, food and wine included! What was the turning point for them to want to kill him all of the sudden? Cause he’s a vampire?? THEY FUCKING KNEW THAT ALREADY!!! Why was is suddenly not a problem at first but then coincidentally a problem now? If they wanted to use this to somehow depict this notion of “Oh my dad/Dracula was right humans are the worst” mindset, trust me, it was better conveyed with Isaac. These twins side plot not only made no sense, but also felt unjustified for Alucard to be an emo boi. I get that it’s supposed to be symbolic of him going through the same issues that both of his parents went through, but none of that really showed how bad human’s are. Just that those two twins didn’t think things through apparently. So the point of Alucard having this odd character convenience shift feels by the numbers cliché, and most importantly CHEAP.

It really makes no sense to me why they’re adding so much of this filler for such a long time, especially with some of this filler being oddly sexual. I don’t mind honest depiction of sex between consenting adults of course, but it just felt so misplaced and awkward at parts where it showed itself. I felt like I was reading a mediocre fanfic of Castlevania instead of the actual show itself! Granted, Season 2 had somewhat of a similar dilemma but the lull in between was still showing the character specifically doing things to further the story along. Towards the end, it gave us a way more satisfactory closure of that saga with Dracula that felt natural and well earned. This season however, felt like they were scrambling with different ideas here and there and didn’t know which to go with. Alucard training new recruits in his castle, Trevor and Syph figuring out an estranged (and BORING/GENERIC) cult of Dracula’s plan, Camilla setting up an army with her fellow sisterhood of evil vampires to gain ultimate power, Hector surviving captivity by using his wit and charm, Isaac raising up the dead for revenge on his deceased master, a new character introducing an all new world to the lore of Castlevania as we know it, all of these interesting concepts and ideas that could easily make up for a good season alone! And instead of focusing on one or two ideas to develope into something natural, they ended up saying “FUCK IT! Fucking I dunno what to- WE’RE DOING ALL OF IT I DUNNO!” and mixed the whole thing in a blender of different flavors that don’t necessarily blend together well enough for a tasty satisfactory meal. It just ends up being a mesh of okay at best, and gross at worst.

IN CONCLUSION, Castlevania Season 3 had a rocky start, an okay middle, and a kind of cool end. There was definitely some cool and exciting ideas implemented in here, but not enough to warrant that lengthy amount of time that Netflix seems to love to give to most of their TV shows. Sometimes less is more, and all that shiny cool glitter isn’t necessarily going to turn out to be gold. I’ll give this season a 5/10. It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen but it certainly could’ve been a lot better.

P.S. “Who Do Ya Voodoo” from Dead Island is Isaac’s new theme song, you can’t convince me otherwise.

#castlevania #season 3 spoilers #spoilers #unpopular opinion #review #netflix castlevania #critique

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anemcia · 4 years ago

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Anonymous said to anemcia: “🧂”

WELCOME TO THE SALTY SPITOON: HOW TOUGH ARE YA? // SHIPS AND TROPES THAT SUCK

SHIP: GOKU / CHI-CHI RATING: 🧂 🧂 🧂 🧂 🧂 🧂 (6/10)

This one is kinda in a weird spot for me, because althought it’s canon and I typically enjoy the content, I’ve never been fond of the way it was written out between them. “Oh, I’m sorry Goku? You’re telling ME, the girl you haven’t seen in YEARS, you forgot about the arbitrary promise of marriage when you assumed it was a food??? TIME TO GUILT YOU INTO IT.”

She coulda left it alone, maybe taken a step back to realize, “Hmm, well I guess forcing him to commit to this empty promise was a mistake.” and instead decides to double down on her selfish ambitions. Hell, Goku arguably had the same amount of chemistry with Suno and he could have made it work with her too. All it would require is a small montage of returning to her village, reuniting, and marrying off.

Whatever the case, I guess things improved when they finally started to catch up with one another-- EVEN IF IT WAS ONLY AFTER GOKU GAVE HER THE ANSWER SHE WANTED TO HEAR. For all it’s short comings, I enjoy the art and I like their sense of progression, but I’ll keep it 100% real with you folks. I just wish it could have been written a whole lot better than what it actually turned out to be. Fanfiction can only fill in the gaps, but it won’t undo the damage it’s caused for Chi-Chi’s image in the fandom.

There is a reason why she’s considered the most annoying / bitchy, after all, and it isn’t unfounded either.

#��🌼》𝑯𝒂𝒓𝒗𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒅 [Answered memes]#//thanks anon i appreciate it

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comradesummers · 5 years ago

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3, 17, 27?

Hi, thank you for asking!

Top 5 underrated TV shows

Idk what really qualifies as underrated, but I’ll try my best.

1. Legends of Tomorrow

Like, outside of the cult following, people don’t give it credit for being one of the most creative and batshit crazy shows on TV. I think what really gets missed in the conversation about Legends, even when the show is brought up, is that it’s not just a weird, kooky show. I genuinely believe LoT is doing something that no other show on TV is doing rn. Like it may be silly, and not take itself too seriously, but it’s actually super creative, it tries new things, it takes risks that shows that take themselves more seriously don’t have the luxury of taking. It’s out there doing something genuinely different from the regular serialized drama format that’s overtaking television, and that’s unique and important and we should appreciate it more.

2. Every show for or about women that’s ever been referred to as a “guilty pleasure” by men, including but not limited to: BtVS, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Sex and the City (I haven’t even seen it, but I know that it changed television as we know it, and men still dismiss it as meaningless fluff), Gilmore Girls, and too many other shows to list here. All of them are underrated by assholes who think they’re too good for girl things.

3. Blackadder

Y’know, the concept of something being underrated is super weird, because like the question becomes: underrated by who? I mean, if you’re in the know about British comedies or whatever, then of course you know that Blackadder is one of the funniest and most innovative shows ever. But with everyone else I’ve talked to in real life, I’ve had to explain that Mr. Bean and Dr. House dress up in period costumes, and hang out with different important historical figures in British history, and it’s really funny and great (except for maybe the first season).

4. Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23

And then on the other hand, I’m pretty sure a lot of people on Tumblr know what this show is, and know it’s hilarious, but I would still probably consider it underrated and pretty unknown outside of certain circles.

5. Sense8

Again, I’m not sure it’s underrated on Tumblr but more people need to see it, so I’m counting it. I like Sense8 for the same reason I like Legends: it took risks, and did things other shows weren’t doing, albeit on a much larger and more unruly budget, which is probably why it got cancelled. But it really was a great, if short lived show, and I wish it had gone on for longer.

Top 5 “deserved better” characters

1. Kendra Young

Yeah, so I think there are two reasons that Kendra’s death makes me so angry. The first being just how much potential was wasted with her death. Yeah, they made her do a goofy accent, but she was still a really interesting character. Her worldview was completely entrenched in that of the Council. She was raised by them, and had never rebelled like Giles had. She would have made an amazing contrast to Buffy and the gang, but I also think there’s a really great story there about her coming to terms with just how exploited by those assholes she had been. Also, her dynamic with Buffy was already fascinating, and I think they had really good chemistry (I ship it).

The other reason her death makes me so angry is that she is the most obvious example of the horrendous treatment of people of color on BtVS. It really is unacceptable how white that show is, and once the writers finally did create an interesting and powerful (if admittedly pretty stereotypical) woman of color, they killed her off after three episodes. Kendra deserved better just like every other non-white character on BtVS deserved better.

2. Meg Manning and Paker Lee

(Yeah, I’m cheating, it’s a tie.) So one of the main issues that I have with Veronica Mars is that there just aren’t that many women on the show. With the exception of Veronica herself, most of the main characters are men, and most of Veronica’s important relationships, be they romantic, familial, or platonic, are with men.

The female characters we do have either have very little screentime, in spite of their considerable awesomeness (Mac and Jackie). Or, in the case of Meg and Parker, are used and disposed of according to the needs of the plot, often to create drama in Veronica’s love life. Meg surviving the bus crash, only to be killed off once she’d given birth, basically because she was no longer relevant to the Duncan/Veronica story is super icky and gross. And Parker getting dismissed as nothing more than road bump in LoVe’s story by both the show and the fandom drives me a little crazy, especially considering how she was introduced to the show.

Also, while we’re at it, every single ‘feminist’ character in season 3 deserved better from Rob Thomas.

3. Tara Maclay

She deserved to live, and we the viewers deserved better than Bury Your Gays.

4. Martha Jones

I mean, Martha Jones deserved better from the fandom more than anything else. And I’m adding her to the list because I’m one of the many people who owes Martha and Freema Agyeman an apology. I was like 12 when I watched Doctor Who for the first time, and I totally bought into the racist sexist bullshit (she’s boring, why is she in love with the Doctor, etc.). To be fair, I also bought into a lot of sexist bullshit when it came to Rose, so I hated her too, but obviously Martha got the shorter end of the stick, because of racism, and she deserved so, so much better.

5. Donna Noble

Fuck the amnesia bullshit and erasing her character development. Why did they have to do this to her? What possible purpose did it serve? Why not just give her a reason to leave and go home like every other companion? Wtf was the point? Was it just so that the doctor would have manpain about it?

Nevermind, I think I just answered my own question.

Top 5 brotps

Ok, not including any relationships I view as purely familial (Dawn and Buffy, Giles and Buffy, Tara and Dawn, Holt and anybody, etc.). Friendships only.

1. Buffy and Willow

Buffy and Willow love each other so much, and they hurt each other a lot too. This relationship isn’t simple and sweet, it starts out that way, but it becomes difficult, and they both do things to one another that I don’t think either one of them ever fully forgives the other for. But even still, at their worst, they love each other so deeply and so completely. This relationship is at the core of the show, I think. It’s arguably the first relationship the show establishes, and the one it spends most time on. The ups and downs are painful, but they feel real (even when they involve things like bringing someone back from the dead without their consent or whatever). And through it all, they never stop loving each other. As flawed as it may be, I think it’s also one of the most complex, interesting, and important relationships between two women ever on television. And that’s worth celebrating.

2. Jane and Petra

So I’ve been on a bit of a Jane the Virgin kick lately, and I’ll be honest, I can’t decide if this is a brotp or an otp. But I love Petramos too, so let’s go with brotp.

In any case, these two were pretty much my endgame for the show. I really didn’t care who Jane ended up with (unless it was Petra, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen), and I got sick of her love triangle real quick (to be fair, I just really can’t stand love triangles, which is why I didn’t give the show a shot for a long time). As for Petra, I just really wanted her to have a healthy relationship with someone, and Jane seemed to be the only person who seemed interested in having a healthy relationship with her.

Plus their dynamic is just amazing and hilarious. My favorite scenes in the show are always when they’re on screen together. The way they grudgingly grow to care about and love each other is genuinely sweet and well developed. And I love how even when they do become friends, their basic moral divide never changes. They still disagree very strongly about certain things, but they love each other regardless. And btw, the scene where they say “I love you” to each other for the first time might be my favorite “I love you” scene ever, platonic or otherwise.

I just love them so much.

3. Gurl Group (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

This is another show about romance where I’m far more invested in the female friendship than I am in any of the romances, but to be fair, I think CxG kind of wants you to do that anyway.

Regardless, I love everyone in this Gurl Group, individually and together. And their individual relationships are already fascinating. Like, Rebecca and Valencia’s frienship is pure enemies to lovers friends bliss and I love it. Rebecca and Paula’s relationship is the heart of the show, and like Buffy and Willow, this relationship is often difficult and complicated, but the love is always there. And we never had enough scenes of Heather and Valencia interacting. Every scene where they were together was pure comedic gold. And the group together as a whole was just so powerful and amazing to behold.

4. Amy and Rosa

They do not have enough scenes together. This relationship deserves the same amount of care and development as Jake and Charles get. Melissa and Stephanie have great chemistry. And like, their characters are so different, so the contrast is always so funny. But they also love each other, and support each other, and it’s so much fun to watch. I need 10000% more Amy/Rosa content.

5. Buffy and Veronica

This one’s probably also cheating because it’s a crossover and all, but I’m just kind of obsessed with the idea of them meeting, sparks flying, enemies to lovers friends, the works. They would just have such a fantastic dynamic. Like, think of all the verbal sparring that we would be blessed with. Think of all the drama and angst of them coming to understand and respect each other. If there is one crossover that I would will into existence if I could, it would definitely be this one.

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vegalocity · 6 years ago

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So kind of a weird question but how do you come up with some of your crossover ships? Is it something you think up on purpose (like, 'I like this character so I wanna cross them over with a different one' and think on it til you find a good match) or does it just sort of hit you out of no where sometimes?

I wouldn’t call it wierd! I do admit a lot of my crossovers can be kind of out of left feild at times, so wanting to know the thought process makes sense.

It’s actually a pretty wierd/long answer so it’s under a cut.

TL;DR The Ships i particularly care about are always incidental to the crossover story i have in mind, and the stories themselves come out through strings between franchises on a worldbuilding level i either made myself because of some wierd psychological block i made as a child or simply considering how the world of one series would work in relation to one of arguably a different genre.

And also i’m super weak to Sci Fantasy as a genre and since no one writes those damn stories i have to crossover sci fis and fantasies to make it happen.

It’s pretty heavily rooted in how I used to view shows and engage with fandom. See back when the gender binary was getting me down when i was in my early teens, i felt really weird about liking things that were angled towards boys. And since i’d only just started existing in fandom spaces beyond favoriting every single art on deviantart and just started reading fic, it felt extra wierd. So something i would do when reading fic of, say, Transformers Animated, is that i would take the roles and personalities of the characters and translate them to Sailor Senshi in my mind so that i’d feel less embarrassed about reading fic.

Optimus Prime= Sailor MoonBumblebee= Sailor VenusUltra Magnus=Sailor Pluto (keep your eye on this one)Megatron= Galaxia

And so on and so fourth. So when the weird shame began to fade and the characters were allowed to be themselves in my mind, i had all of these affiliations i had no idea what to do with. So I made my first crossover fic. It was p. bad, I would rather not get into it, But as i’d been writing I’d considered if the Autobots were involved somehow in the Chaos War, or if the Great War was just Cybertron’s part in the entire Chaos War, according the allspark almanac Kinmoku is a recognized planet for them, so they’d at least be tangentially aware of princess Kakyuu and the Starlights.

So then i plotted out a fic that took place during the Silver Millenium that was essentially ‘to celebrate the newfound peice Queen Serenity invites Ultra Magnus and all the other war veterans we know of to a party on the Moon’

It featured one tiny scene where Pluto was allowed to join the party and she and Magnus forewent the dancing and simply talked to eachother all night, happy to have someone to simply share in conversation with. And that’s how Sailor Pluto/Ultra Magnus as a ship came to be. It wasn’t the first one I made, that was Raphael/Sailor Saturn, but that had been made more as a desire for more female characters in TMNT and it was made to better streamline imaginary games when my friends wanted to play ninja turtles and my buddy Alex had already claimed being April.

But the transformers one is the one that matters, because that worldbuilding, the way the worlds flow together inspired how i made crossovers entirely. The first step is always on a worldbuilding level. It’s never out of a desire for ships, but rather a desire to mess around with worldbuilding. The ships are always incidental to the crossover. I didn’t start crossing Magical Girl Series with BNHA just for ships, I wanted to see how Magical Girls could feasibly still exist in a world of quirks and pro heroes, then i wondered how they’d stay hidden so they wouldn’t be arrested for vigilantism, then i thought it would be hilarious if one of the most ‘sparkly power of love’ magical girls ever saved one of the UA kids from her respective Evil Magical enemies.

So from there ‘Bakugou Katsuki is saved by Wedding Peach’ Becomes an easy conclusion to draw. It was initially just supposed to be a oneshot where it happens, she erases his memory, and leaves. That was it. it wasn’t until i started wondering how he’d react to figuring out someone messed with his memories that the series began, as well as the ship. So birthed Flooding the Sky (and Blurring the Darkness)

All the Star crossover ships are much the same, i went in just wanting to see how Star would act if she was sent to THIS Earth instead of the Earth with Marco and Jackie and Echo Creek. Which through the same type of shenanigans was how Stiro, Starhunk and ChloStar all began.

Though most of the bnha/Star Vs stuff was, for the most part, a little more for the Star Vs Metaverse than my actual crossover collection, the sheer volume of different timeline crossover ships was odd considering we made them FOR the crossover kids we wanted, which was odd since i’d only ever had one crossover child before this (Re:Pluto and Ultra Magnus) I made Dekustar to give Sandy a first mate on the SS crossover, Someone else Suggested Kouki so Hekugou was now in the same timeline, Someone else made Jackieroki for a third child to complete that timeline’s trio, I made Freya and subsequently Bakustar for a joke, Tsustar was made a thing simply as a need for Star to have at least one son in one timeline. And most recently @gererrin and I made a different branching path for Star/Todoroki (I mean RECENTLY like two nights ago i don’t even have a ship name for them yet)

But the timeline that I’ve actually found interesting beyond the child involved was in fact TenStar. And like the ships before it, it came from the story and my writer’s brain, not the creative demands of my artist brain. I considered what would happen when Star starts going through Mewberty at UA, since she couldn’t be let loose, was there a more peaceful way to ease someone through Mewberty? Who would volunteer to take her to the nurse’s? Momo because she’s staying with her before the dorms become a thing? or would Tenya, being Class Rep take it upon himself since there doesn’t seem to be a Nurse’s aid in their class?

then I wrote An Earthling’s Guide to Dealing with Mewberty and TenStar swallowed my soul in a way the others just weren’t quite able to. Because unlike the others, it was made as an extension to the story not with an end result in mind. While i did eventually make a next gen kid for them, what mattered more to me was the actual ship, so that seems to be my formula when creating crossover ships.

Wonder how two franchises could possibly be the same Earth

Worldbuild the hell out of it

plot out a simple yet economic story of how canon characters could/would interact

notice either the opportunity for a quality love story, or a particular amount of chemistry between characters

ship it

#vega answers questions #crossovers are neat #i'm a romantic at heart so when a ship happens it kinda becomes the big part of the story #but like #i rarely go in with a ship already in mind #Anonymous

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thedogsled · 7 years ago

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Hi guys. I’m going to cautiously title this ‘About Zimbio, Destiel, my personal struggle with the idea of wlw vs. mlm, and why what we achieved in the vote today says a lot about our magnificent fandom’.

This is a reminder in advance that I make generalizations but I don’t mean any harm by them. I’m happy to discuss this topic and capitulate on some things, because my experience of shows is extremely limited right now (unless I want to watch them in French). Just like Dean I say ‘we’ a lot but please assume sometimes I mean ‘I’, I by no means make any claim to speak for all of the following groups at any point: bisexuals, mlm shippers, wlw shippers, television executives, social media marketers, the mainstream audience, destiel shippers--etc, etc, you get the drift.) If any of the following upsets you, please let me know, it’s not my intent to cause any harm, only reassure my friends that they did a good job.

I promised I was going to write a post on this, because I’ve seen just a little mumbling and unhappiness that Destiel didn’t make it through in the semis. I get it, it’s only natural that it’s going to lead to some hurt feelings, but I wanted to really put across to you all why I say I was proud of us for our semi-final performance, rather than you just take it for granted.

We are an old fandom. Thirteen years is a long time; it makes Supernatural the longest single run fantasy/sci fi series on American TV (and I mean I think it’s unfair to compare it to non American shows like Doctor Who anyway just on pure numbers, especially since Who has gone through thirteen fourteen? fifteen? are we counting radio drama? actors in the lead role; it’s like a different show every time.) So. It’s had a superb run. Fantasy/sci fi shows are typically considered to be niche, not massive hits (comparatively speaking; SPN isn’t Grey’s Anatomy or NCIS I’ll grant). But what networks are finally waking up to is the power of the fandom of those ‘niche’ shows, dedicated viewing power which can grow a network’s brand, particularly online, and networks are eager to wrangle that.

This modern era of television is fandom’s era of television. Netflix are promoting gamification of television watching (even for kids) as well as choose your own adventure style TV. Binging and rewatching box sets is a whole thing now, not just the domain of the “geek”, and shows which can convince people to stick around and watch something instead of moving on when they run out of material--they’re the ones gaining success, while traditional shows slip further and further as they fail to capture new demographics. We’re making strong social media contracts with the creators and actors of our shows, and making it clear to them - in a way that is increasingly being recognized for the opportunity it represents - that there must be give and take with modern audiences, especially if you seek gratification through social media. (I read a great article I reblogged that called it the ‘Brandom’ effect.)

It’s wonderful, and it’s terrifying, because both fans and creators don’t know what to do with it. They can give fans too much power and the show goes off the rails, or deny it to them entirely, and earn only vitriol. Some shows rub their power right in the face of their fans and increasingly they pay for it. Some showrunners are outright incapable of talking to their fans at all without being respectful (I’m looking at you The 100), and some fans are ghastly, aggressive and outright disrespectful in pursuing what they want (it is a different thing showing joy over your ship as it is to dox actors and send their wives hate mail). Some showrunners, instead, are more embracing of their fans, like the Earpers, and if you want an idea of how actors should be engaging with fans, check out David Haydn Jones’ twitter. That man is a saint. It’s a delicate game of mutual respect, and occasional drama, and intent is the name of the game: do you have good intent, is it honest? People crave honesty on the internet where everything and everyone is fake--and that honestly is a tough thing to achieve when studios are too heavily concentrating on their bottom line.

So, this is a changing landscape, like I said, and people are struggling with new marketing techniques, trying to find their place in the world, running into walls when they realize that in fact they don’t understand their queer audience members. When something works, shows are very quick to jump right into it, almost relieved to have evidence that if they do X thing, their fans won’t all jump ship in horror, but here’s the thing, networks are in a lot of ways far slower to respond than shows. If you want to do something, you have to prove to the person holding the purse strings that it’s a profitable endeavor. Producers are set in their ways, especially old school producers, not realizing how quickly the landscape is changing, and writers are fighting against that all the time, because they’re often a lot more in touch with the creative fandoms they’re trying to inspire. Many have come from fandoms themselves. Queer writers should mean more queer storylines, right? But it means fighting money men to make it happen. Oftentimes that leads to the whole ‘one queer ship is enough’ standpoint, and when it comes down to it, those money men are more likely to put stock in safe investments, in proven investments. Consequently, wlw is flourishing because it draws in audiences without losing them. It’s arguably less risky to make Alex Danvers gay than Castiel. It’s more PC, accepted by wider audiences, groundwork laid by Dark Angel and Buffy in my own recent memory. When good results come from featuring those kinds of ships, they appear increasingly on TV, and it’s AWESOME. There were 16 wlw ships in Zimbio March Madness, and 11 of them got through all the way to 8vs8. There were only 2 mlm ships in 8vs8, and 3 het ships. Internet fandom, passionate and social and dedicated? It speaks, and it says ‘More LGBT rep please’.

We’re in a transitional period. Changes are coming, but when you look at the big mlm ships of the last few years, you can see the uphill climb that’s still ahead of us. I spoke with our Hannigram and Johnlock friends last year about what their experience with this was like. (I haven’t spoken to Sterek folks, but I know there’s disappointment from that front too). Johnlock shippers are largely furious about how explicitly the finale no-homoed their ship when there was absolutely no reason to. Having watched the finale myself, I feel like they really went hard against shippers explicitly. Hannigram suffered too. I haven’t finished S3 even now, but what I recall of the conversation went like this: they’re together, but there was a kiss that didn’t make it to air, and then the show was cancelled. In any case, what I’m saying right here is that this is part of a pattern, a theme I’m struggling with, where mlm fans are dispirited and disappointed and feeling disrespected by the very mainstream shows they’re watching.

(Which isn’t, I’ll quickly note, that I’m saying the same isn’t true of wlw audiences. The last two ships in Zimbio this year are non canon ships, and the fans of both have been hurt by the shows they watch, but they still keep coming back and watching the show. Swanqueen is ending, but the pair have been consistently mirrored - dark and light - with the emotional journey of the show largely being made over the shared custody? I don’t know, they changed it every week while I was watching it of Emma’s son. Supercorp is clearly full of eye sex thanks to the actress’ chemistry (and McGrath is so gorgeous she’d have chemistry with a brick wall) and yet has been outright mocked by the show’s cast. If that sounds familiar to Destiel fans, I almost want to say that Supercorp have it worse; just as with Swanqueen, they’re often told simply to shut up because there's already wlw rep on the show.)

But where shows are willing to go there now, diminished risk is the key, especially as resale value of shows reflects multiple, competitive platforms constantly needing to purchase content to fill their airspace. Naked women, women kissing and women having sex - bisexual women who are explicitly still available to men - that sells, but as far as I can tell networks are struggling to sell the same narrative about mlm. Maybe that’s my perspective only, maybe that’s me watching the wrong shows (and not at all because I don’t enjoy looking at women’s bodies, I do, but variety is the spice of life) Look at the outright surprise last year when GOT gave us a beautiful, pus covered, full screen dick. GOT, of course, which is insulated because it is a Number One performer. I present to you, in terms of dicks on screen, American Gods, then. Neil Gaiman is my hero, selling the network on the premise that they could have his great stories if only they were willing to gleefully integrate peen on every episode. Or so I’m told. There’s a lot on my ‘to watch’ list that I haven’t got around to yet. I will tell you, of course, that mlm is out there, Evak were voted out against Supercorp in the quarter finals) but on a big show like Supernatural that risk is exceptional. That’s why when we talk about Destiel ‘going canon’, we make the shockingly ambitious request of them HOLDING HANDS, or mutually saying ‘I love you’, and sometimes feel like expecting anything more, like a kiss, or god forbid a sex scene, is too much to ask. Why? When lesbians and bisexual women are presented on TV, kisses and sex scenes are a matter of course. In Alex’ coming out, in Thirteen’s coming out in House, Angela’s coming out in Bones - huge ensemble shows where main characters, all women, have come out and kissed (and returned to male partners in the case of the later two). (I should point out I am talking about genre “mainstream” shows in general, not for example Queer as Folk, where the primary aim is to explore sexuality, not fight dragons or solve crimes)

Now in addition to this problem, an issue that I’ve seen for years is that from inside the fandom world we are made to feel as though we are somehow obscene or inferior for shipping mlm ships, a projection that comes from the way mainstream folks will react to you if they happen to discover you drawing dudes together. Sometimes we hide our online selves from the real world out of shame that has only built over the years, where it’s considered that supporting mlm ships instead of wlw ships makes you fetishistic, or objectifying of gay men. I’ve seen it in fanfiction spaces and in rp spaces on dw and lj that shipping wlw has been raised to a point of being considered ‘more pure’. If you ‘claim’, they say, to be a queer woman, you should wholly be supporting wlw ships. When I started hearing this dialogue I was THIRTEEN. This was before Willow/Tara. There were just less wlw ships on tv, and there were less female characters whose autonomy didn’t depend on men, or portray them as being fragile, the weakness of their gender or whatever. There were standout female characters in my youth, absolutely, but they were all independent (mostly) straight women: Kathyrn Janeway, Sam Carter, Clarice Starling, Dana Scully. They kicked out against the system, the world they lived in, intelligent and defiant ladies I still idolize. Nowadays, though those wlw ships are available, and populated by so many beautiful, powerful, progressive female characters - and yes miraculously even strong female characters who still embrace their own womanhood. In contrast mlm ships are not keeping up because, in some way, I think that the ‘impurity’ of shipping mlm has stuck. I struggle to think of even straight non toxic male role models, nevermind male role models who are in engaging, romantic relationships with the same sex. This stagnation of masculinity (apart from the rise of the geek hero which often, as in the case of TBBT, doesn’t break away from inbuilt misogyny) troubles me immensely. (I’m not saying all male characters are awful, incidentally, but it’s not a positive message to outright expose the flaws of toxic masculinity without offering understanding, lessons, and growth. But that’s another essay.)

Trust me, I’m not saying everyone feels that TV is being stacked against mlm, but as a bisexual I really feel fractured by the whole thing. I feel like I’m supposed to loathe myself for shipping mlm, particularly when that mlm ship is ‘two white guys’. The fact that I as a woman enjoy male and female bodies is irrelevant, because one desire is pure, and one desire is fetishism. There is no balance. I’m allowed to be titilated by members of my own gender kissing each other and only that and heterosexuality. As a bisexual who is currently leaning toward wlw myself (sexuality existing on a sliding scale imo), it is the power imbalance in heterosexual couples which puts me off. It’s painfully true to life. I have a particular loathing for Booth and Brennan from Bones, for example, where his toxic masculinity is unilaterally forgiven because it’s true love, while Bones, once independent and stubborn herself, is increasingly nudged further out of character in order to forgive him his trespasses. But when I ship mlm, or write fanfic of my favorite couples, any power I give them is not based on their gender. The same I imagine is true of wlw. (An unfortunate consequence of this is people project it onto real life, where power inequality and abuse can exist regardless of make believe ‘purity’, and consequently people end up believing that something is wrong with them rather than their relationship, similar issues as people face when they imagine marriage is the goal, and everything else is happily ever after, because Disney told them so. In which case I advise you to rewatch Mary Poppins.)

During voting, I was reticent to address why voting for Destiel over the other ships was important to me. It was personal. (Of course anyone could have sent me an ask if they were curious). But why I was voting didn’t matter. It was enough that I was voting for the couple I love, whose relationship my blog is devoted to, and whose love story I hope is resolved. But there is more to it than that. What’s important, I guess, is how I feel about Dean. My reading of him is of a bisexual, still in the closet - perhaps even to himself - in his thirties. He made it out of high school, but that’s it, because he dropped out of higher education for family commitments. He likes rock music and classic cars. He loves pie, and dumb medical TV dramas, and cowboy hats, and riding rodeo bulls and chatting to strangers. He struggles with voicing his true self with people who know him, and might judge him in a way he will never come back from. Dean is basically me. I am all those things. And in this case, he’s in love with a genderfluid (has been both male and female) guardian angel whose love for Dean explicitly and singularly, has been described as a profound bond, and the greatest love story ever told. Castiel’s love for Dean, his willingness to do anything for him, is all I think any of us want from a romantic partner. And yes, we all find different things in our ships, and presumably other people connect with Destiel for reasons that aren’t the same as my own, but that’s okay. My reasons are my reasons.

And yet I am still thrown into that emotional disconnect: that because this couple is an mlm couple I’m wrong to ship it, that I would be better putting my energy into watching shows I don’t necessarily enjoy as much so I can find my representation in more respectable (or potentially less queerbaity) fandoms. That Supernatural isn’t good enough because I’ve been repeatedly told by people inside and outside the fandom that it isn’t good enough. I’ve got to tell you I agree that it struggles with being progressive. While season 3 of Grey’s Anatomy was showing the struggles of a pre-op mtf woman and her wife in an ep that made me actually cry for the dysphoria represented, on the other channel SPN had just got done killing a token ‘woman with an off screen girlfriend’ character. By season 11, we’ve had two gay male couples, both holding hands and leaning into each other to express their relationship. SPN is slow. Nobody in the world would deny that.

But to be quite honest, also, finding representation doesn’t have to mean ‘a ship’, it can just be a well written bisexual woman with a badge, and you aren’t restrained to just one rep either! In fact, the more the better. I find myself particularly starved for that rep, especially since - having been fetishized for my bisexuality irl before - I see painful reflections of that on television. That’s obviously going to be related to bad writing and TV’s particular way of objectifying women in general, too, but when a woman (say Angela Montenegro from Bones) has a two episodes storyline where she makes out with another insanely attractive actress, the music rising, lit with soft shades, the camera focused in on their mouth--before the plot is forgotten entirely, it is incredibly difficult not to see that as objectification and not bisexual solidarity. I want more mlm on TV because I want more bisexuals of both genders on TV, and because of the harmful insinuation in mainstream thought that a guy who comes out as bi late has somehow been lying to himself and was gay all along, while women who are bi are just exploring their sexuality and somehow more up for it. Those views need to be constantly, constantly challenged, because, honestly, people believe them. (Probably not me or you, but it’s out there).

(As an aside: mainstream is also harsh toward female writers who write mlm stories. There have understandably, as a result, been female writers who chose male pseudonyms to pen their gay romance novels. I first experienced this to a lesser extent back in Gundam Wing fandom, because if you were a ‘male’ author it legitimized you and people would read your stories in preference to those penned by girls. Back then it was a numbers game. The prejudice does remain. Audiences are sometimes outright cold to female authors who pen mlm stories! You need only look at the conversation about boycotting Love, Simon because it was written by a straight woman to appreciate just how deeply we’ve built this disconnect, as though to write something the author must always write from personal experience. If that’s the case, I feel terrible for Thomas Harris and Jeff Lindsay, and JK Rowling (who speaks about choosing her moniker because it was genderless) must certainly have had an exciting childhood, what with all the magic and dragons.

As a result I think we (or at least I) have internalized some harmful things about who has the right to interpret themselves in stories told about men, or male protagonists. And in lashing back at girls who for years have been doing just that, considering it to be lesser if I find a role model in Dean instead of Angela, we have harmed the integrity of mlm fans themselves, who increasingly struggle under a burden of self imposed guilt. It is reflecting back poorly on mlm performances, even as wlw stories flourish. In this raising the pedestal of wlw purity, the ‘ethical’ alternative, we dismiss what people can learn about themselves from male role models too, something that we instead encourage if it’s a teenage boy finding a role model in Elsa. My closeted bi self loving Dean Winchester harms nobody, but I am still made to feel lesser for doing so, even if sometimes that feeling is ridiculously self imposed. Hell, maybe I’m alone in this feeling and the rest of this is bullshit, but that’s why I said ‘I vs we’ was definitely a part of this commentary.

In any case, this is what I think this means to the Zimbio vote: As wlw rep has been increasing, mlm has been facing a disappointing deficit. Those once big fandom movers ‘Superwholock’, the Hannigrams, the Sterek shippers--have fractured and splintered off. Destiel has come in waves but it’s still somehow here, without its original opponents from back in the day. It’s here, even with setbacks after season 8 and 10 that had fans breaking away from Supernatural entirely. Optimism now reflects optimism felt before, but let’s face it Castiel was killed permanently at one point, and Bob Singer said outright, even just a few years ago, that Destiel and social media stuff just didn’t come up in the writing room (pr is not showrunning, etc). People are hugely entitled to struggle with optimism for non canon mlm ships because history repeats itself. Add into that feelings like I described above, and the struggle is real. It can sometimes feel like you’re fandom’s three legged, one eyed donkey.

Add to that how old Destiel is. Every fandom coming into existence now, every ship built around, comes into contact with Destiel at some point. If you type ‘queerbaiting’ into Wikipedia, our ship is cited. In Google, we come up first. Thanks to antis (and some genuinely bad behavior from bad apple shippers over the years) we’ve earned a reputation, and it moves before us into every ship interaction we have. Because of that, we can appear both intimidating and as something to be avoided, because ‘what if you meet a crazy one’? You’d think seniority would be a good thing, but few people see us as a ship that’s been there and done that, as they do Swanqueen. We aren’t the ship that can perhaps offer advice on things going on in whippersnapper fandoms based on our experiences, as it would be in an ideal world. We’re not a ship to be aligned with, and because of this odd perception of wlw vs. mlm, there was simply never any potential that support for Supercorp wasn’t going to skyrocket. It was a fight against ‘That monolithic mlm ship that just won’t stop’, as it were, because here we still are hanging onto threads hoping our ship will go canon, and based on past evidence, the fall of other mlm ships, and only looking in from the outside, that seems like wishful thinking.

So we were unlikely to gain allies from heartbroken mlm fandoms. We were unlikely to find allies in wlw fandoms. It’s sad, of course, because for all the talk of representation in media, the desire to express a balance and cheerlead for mlm, imo an obvious representation underdog, simply doesn’t ever come up. Our friends and relatives roll our eyes at us if we talk about Destiel because we get that ridiculous light in our eyes when we do. Ultimately, that meant that Destiel was on its own. It had to unify. It had to pour its passion into voting and be a family again. It’s been knocked out in previous years - honestly based on what I’ve heard it’s been a disaster - but THIS YEAR we pulled out all the stops. That was all us. Despite antivoting, Destiel shippers - and only Destiel shippers - fought and fought - thousands of votes after thousands of votes, as we made small leads only to slip three times further. We didn’t stop. We were there and fighting right up until the end. And it may just have been a silly online poll, but I think it really goes to show what we can do when we put our hearts into it. We more than doubled the amount of votes cast in the previous round, over the exact same time scale, even though Supercorp fought back with everything they had, all the vibrancy of being a fresh, shunned ship determined to prove themselves, using social media strategy and unity to bring in votes from wherever they could get them. They fought well. They were wiley and smart, and so passionate; passionate like I thought I’d forgotten how to be.

And we kept fighting. We were in the semis, with twice as many votes more than Swanqueen, and we fought tooth and nail and almost got there, slipping just in the last half hour.

I have to believe that that’s because some people in the Destiel family have hope. I know we’ve drawn in a lot of new and returning shippers recently, I’ve seen you following me and starting out in meta writing yourselves, joining Destiel exchanges for the first time, sharing your first codas. The DCBB and Pinefest have had ENORMOUS turnouts. We are, despite all odds, growing as a ship again.

I really hope that we can overcome the shame that has somehow been drummed into us for shipping mlm. I hope that we can all, whether we ship wlw, mlm, het or poly or whatever peeps are doing these days, make sure not to raise one as an ideal over the others, because it’s not in the spirit of family, of fandom. It is never ‘us against them’, it’s never a case of moral or ethical superiority, definitely not even in everyday parlance and least of all in a shipping popularity contest.

And maybe despite the risk, we’ll get an ‘I love you’, some hand holding. Hell, maybe even a kiss (Supernatural never even gave us a kiss between Jesse and Cesar, though, so I have my doubts.) But God if that wouldn’t pave the way for better deconstruction of toxic masculinity on genre TV, more presence of bisexual men and gay men on genre TV, and more men kissing and open expression of sexuality on genre TV.

So here’s my final word. Maybe the bunnies will kiss. Maybe they’ll even do what bunnies do, who knows? And maybe next year we’ll win it.

I hope I didn’t step on any toes with this post. I felt like these words needed to come out of me, though, so here they are. Thank God there’s no more Zimbio until next year, right? Please refer back to my first paragraph for disclaimers. Thanks, though, if you read this far.

#zimbio #destiel #bisexuality #as i was writing this i was like wow i have issues #it felt good to talk about them #please feel free to disregard #shipping #multishipping #woes #personal #my bed is calling me #looooong post #dean is bisexual #what that means to me

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