#they just didn't give enough exposition for us to connect the dots

[eggs-can-draw]

Hi this was originally gonna have art but maybe I'll rb this with it later I unno I do not have Time to draw it and still finish this before eep time anyways normal foreword HI I don't know where this came from I went into a fugue state and just kinda started typing on google docs. this is mostly shuichi and kokichi thoughts with an infodump disguised as exposition. uh. Warning for Oumasai but only if you wanna see it that way I unno they're complicated rn

Sea salt on his tongue. Blinding sun in his eyes. Sand under his feet that burned him like coals in a fire. Today was long but he wouldn't have spent it any differently. After everything they had been through, they deserved a summer to have fun and heal from everything that had happened.

His mind still felt fuzzy around the edges but after a few weeks, he had become a master at the basics of who he was.

His name was Shuichi, his name felt good and Right on his tongue. He knows who his friends are and who his family is, and with every passing day, he remembers who He is a little more.

That said, it still frustrated him to no end every time he saw something and could feel himself remembering but he wasn't remembering. His mind would call him back to something he didn't have access to. He wasn't alone in this, they could be talking about anything at all but one small thing and a blank look would slowly creep across his friend´s face. He swore if you looked close enough you could see the static in their eyes. Hear the buzz of memories failing to tune in correctly.

They learned to live around it but that didn't mean they accepted it. Dozens of family photos and mementos from their childhood had been brought with them on their summer rehab trip to help with reconnecting the dots.

When outside of their daily allotted “Memory Rehab Time” they spent most of their time goofing off. Usami had tasked them with using a friendship bracelet system to rebuild their connections with each other. For every friendship successfully reconnected, they would both receive a friendship bracelet, with Mister Nagito and Aunt Nanami helping them tie the bracelets together.

He enjoyed the routine. He would wake up, go for a walk around the island, and meet his friends at the Hotel Mirai restaurant for breakfast. They’d all spend some time working on recovery for an hour or two then were set loose on building bonds and making memories. Halfway through the day they would all meet up for lunch and chat about how their days were going.

Today’s lunch was slowly wrapping itself to a close, he had been talking to Kaede about some songs he wanted to learn on the piano (He knew how to play!) and she had been giving him advice when she was eventually pulled away by Miu who had ‘Important Hot Girl Shit’ to do with Kaede.

So here he was, cleaning up the sandwich he had been eating and wondering what to do next. He had been hanging out with Maki earlier, both talking about some memories that had resurfaced from their childhood, but the dark haired assassin was currently nowhere to be found. As he looked around, Shuichi eventually realized he was the last person left. This wasn't a problem really, he’d spent many an afternoon on his own and was going to spend this one working on a book he had found when who else but Shuichi’s self proclaimed “Life-Long Rival” came strolling into the room.

“Well well well, Mister Sherlock, all on his lonesome” Kokichi announced to no one, looking around as if the room were filled to the brim with people.

“Hey, Kokichi,” Shuichi replied, tossing his trash into the nearest can. “Why so late, I thought you loved lunch?” he added, turning to give the smaller boy his full attention.

“What can I say, I got a little caught up briefing my minions for our all out attack on the island, we strike in 5 days” he says, tossing a hand up nonchalantly.

“But since you’re ever so lonely, you know what that means!”

Shuichi gulps.

“You’re all mine Shumai”

And with his plans decided for him, Shuichi was quickly dragged out of the restaurant.

🌊🌊🌊

The sweet taste of ice cream, the loud noise of the Titty Typhoon, the cool ocean breeze on his now bare back, the calming lullaby of the ocean waves, the crunch of –

“LOOK ALIVE SUSHI-CHI!”

Violently ripped from his thoughts, Shuichi turned just too late to meet a water balloon directly to the face.

“What the- WHAT WAS THAT FOR???”

“You looked asleep!! I was helping!”

With a huff, Shuichi made his way over to the bench Kokichi was resting on. He WOULD retaliate but Kokichi just so happened to be wearing Shuichi’s jacket, leaving him safe (for now)

Once he sat down, a silence settled between them. Their day had been pretty hectic, with Kokichi taking him all over the islands to ‘Jog his memory’, but Shuichi was 99% sure he just wanted to goof off. All things considered, he’d gotten pretty fast after moving to a cane over crutches (not as fast as when he was in a wheelchair tho, he convinced Miu to add rocket boosters for the price of letting her ride too, and they never knew peace after that)

It was still kind of weird, all things considering. He didn’t realize just how much he knew about Kokichi until he was in the moment and suddenly talking about something dumb they did in the 4th grade. Kokichi always seemed a bit lighter whenever Shuichi correctly remembered what he was talking about, like a weight had been taken off his chest after an eternity of carrying it. Despite that, Shuichi couldn't help but feel like something was still bothering him.

“The sunset’s not bad,” Kokichi said, almost whispering. There was a fragility at the edge of his voice, threatening to crack and break everything.

“Definitely not the best sunset I’ve seen, but this will do for now, I suppose” Kokichi quickly added, a veil of confidence hastily thrown atop his voice.

“Uh, Kokichi-”

“I would prefer to spend this with my organization of evil, but you’ve made an ok minion for today”

“Kokichi.”

“The poison I put in your sandwich earlier definitely makes you an easy target thou-”

“KOKICHI.”

“UGH WHAT SHOE-ICKY?”

“Can we talk?”

“We were talking”

“You know what I mean”

“What is there to talk about”

“I just. I just wanted to apologize.”

“I- wait what?”

“I’m sorry for the way that I treated you. I understand that it was a ‘high stress situation’ and all, but I still hurt you and I just…”

“…”

“I don’t think I could live with myself if that was really one of the last things I ever said to you”

“…”

“…”

“…thanks, Shuichi. Really.”

Kokichi began to scoot away, but Shuichi shot up to stop him. They both stood there. Neither wanting to make the next move. The tension was almost stifling. Just as things reached their peak, Kokichi slowly moved forward and wrapped Shuichi in a hug.

🌊🌊🌊

Shuichi is a pretty honest guy. With that fact in mind, he definitely didn’t feel any tears on his back, and when they both sat back down on the bench, he remained perfectly composed the whole time.

And when he woke up later to find himself inside the small pillowfort him and their friends had built at the Hinata’s, he definitely did NOT wrap his arms around Kokichi.

[violethowler]

A speculative analysis on Shiro, Haggar, and the Rift.

I think I’ve done it. I think I may have managed to crack the code and figure out what Haggar’s plan for Shiro was. I was sitting in art history class last night thinking about how fans had so many theories about what Haggar was up to that were ultimately disproved by Season 8 when I suddenly remembered this one line from season 3 that started a chain reaction in my head as all the little details and narrative puzzle pieces we’d been given over the series (even in the butchered version of Season 8 that we got) that not only painted a coherent picture of what Haggar’s endgame had been, but also explained just why she had been so interested in Shiro enough to clone him so many times. 

It’s been an ongoing complaint in the fandom that we never find out what Haggar’s plans were for Shiro when she said he “could have been our greatest weapon”. But I was struck by a burst of inspiration while sitting in art history class the other day and realized that the answer had been there all along. It was just that nobody noticed it because it was another aspect of the narrative where the writers took the “show, don’t tell” maxim too far. Ironic, considering that they straight up told us Haggar’s plan all the way back in Season 3. All that changed since then was the “why” and “how”.

In the flashbacks of their resurrection in “The Legend Begins”, Coran’s narration outlines that the reason Zarkon was hunting for Voltron so fervently that he was still looking ten thousand years later was because he was trying to re-open a rift to the Quintessence Field. (That was how the Paladins deduced that Lotor was attempting to do the same with Sincline) Because of her status in the Empire as Zarkon’s right hand and, as others have noted, the sense that despite her deference to him she’s the one ultimately calling the shots, this means that Haggar and Zarkon have been jointly working towards the goal of re-entering the Rift for millennia.

And it makes sense when you think about it. Zarkon may have wanted to reclaim the Black Lion for the sake of his ego, but he was too invested in obtaining all five lions after ten thousand years for it to just be for his ego alone. Haggar’s line in Season 2 that his obsession with the Black Lion is clouding his judgement already read like an admonishment not to let his wounded pride distract him from the big picture even before Season 3, and with that line in Season 3, it basically amounts to “hey dumbass, getting back into the Rift is more important than your battered ego.”

It makes a great deal of sense that Haggar was trying to re-access the rift because all of her projects that we see in arc one play a role in her ultimate success in Season 8. The fact that the Altean mechs are referred to as Robeasts means we, the audience, are supposed to look back on the mindless monsters fought in the first act as prototypes of the intelligently-piloted mecha seen in the third. As for the Komar, it’s there to serve as an energy source. In all of the times that Voltron is shown traversing between realities in Seasons 3 – 6, it’s only ever entered an existing rift (Hole in the Sky, The Legend Begins) or re-opened one that was recently closed (Hole in the Sky, Defender of All Universes). We have never seen Voltron open a brand-new rift between realities all by itself. That’s where the Robeasts and the Komar come in.    

In Season 8, we see Haggar tear open a portal to the Quintessence Field after draining the quintessence of at least four different planets, amplified by the Olkari echo cubes, and the White Lion of Oriande. Since she was simply creating an opening large enough and long enough to return Sincline to the main reality, she didn’t need Voltron to pull off just that. This communicates to the audience that it takes a massive amount of Quintessence. Considering the emphasis placed on her Komar, we can surmise that while Zarkon dedicated the Galra fleet to capturing Voltron, Haggar’s primary research has been dedicated to amassing enough Quintessence to tear open a rift to the Quintessence Field once they had Voltron.  

But the Komar we see in the first arc has its limits. Its range is limited and can only be used on planets that are within range of Zarkon’s command ship. Not to mention that Season 2 shows that there is a limit to how much Quintessence the first model can absorb before it overloads. This is where Seasons 7 and 8 clarifies the purpose of the Robeast project: attaching the Komar to a mech makes it more mobile, and by designing them to draw on the Quintessence of the pilot as a fuel source, they can absorb larger quantities of Quintessence over longer periods of time.

But by now, you’re wondering where Shiro being the Galra’s “greatest weapon” fit into this. During the wait between seasons four and five, it was pointed out that the bio for the Black Lion on the official VLD website states that the Black Lion “takes the most energy from its pilot”. Given the indications that the lions are fueled by the Quintessence of their pilots, this indicates that a potential Black Paladin needs to generate enough Quintessence in their body to not pass out from the energy drain every time they fly. Ideally, this means that if Haggar found a Black Paladin candidate with enough Quintessence reserves in their body to survive sustained piloting of a Komar-Robeast, she could then clone them to have a mass-produced Quintessence battery.

Zarkon doesn’t seem like he would have been okay with being cloned, mainly because he didn’t want anyone getting access to his genetic material. So Haggar has to look elsewhere for potential Quintessence batteries. That’s where her arena projects come in. It's shown in Season 1 that the gladiator Myzax was also Haggar’s personal project at the time of Shiro’s capture. But the question of why she had him in the arena where he could be killed, and why she kept him alive afterwards, was never textually answered. But in the subtext of what her Robeasts were being used for, we can take a guess. Judjging by how we’ve been shown the robeasts drawing on their pilot’s Quintessence as a power source, I think the energy weapon Myzax used in the arena was also designed to use his own Quintessence as a power source. And given the way he uses it, I think there’s enough details in canon to suggest that Shiro’s Galra prosthetic functions similarly.  

With her subtextual desire to find individuals with naturally high amounts of Quintessence in their bodies, Haggar appears to have been using the empire’s gladiator arenas to find potential candidates, and test how their physiology reacts to using weapons that are powered by their own Quintessence. Myzax was the reigning champion of the arena at the time because he was the best she could find. He was a peerless fighter, but his weapon had limitations. The orb needed to be returned to the base of the weapon to recharge. In retrospect, this is implicitly to give his body time to replenish its Quintessence before resuming the attack.

And then along comes this human from a backwater planet that's not even on the empire's radar, who defeats Haggar’s best test subject with nothing but a plain sword and his own ingenuity. He’s a peerless fighter, a symbol of hope for the enslaved prisoners, an amazing pilot, and has all the makings of being a capable leader. Really, he couldn’t be more obvious unless he had “Future Black Paladin” tattooed across his face in Galran. He’s basically everything Haggar could want in a Robeast pilot gift wrapped and offered up on a silver platter. Once he’s spent enough time in the arena that she can be certain his victory over Myzax wasn’t a fluke, she starts the next round of experiments.

She took his arm and installed the prosthetic with an energy weapon powered by his own Quintessence, then tests to make sure that he can survive it. Once she’s certain she has what she’s looking for, she takes his genetic material and starts production of her clone army. But then Ulaz frees him and sends him back to Earth. No wonder she sounds so frustrated when she fights him in the Season 1 finale. After all, if the Shiro-Komar-Robeast combination is the pinnacle of ten thousand years of research and experimentation, what else would she call him if not her greatest weapon?

But after the end of Season 2, the balance has shifted. It’s clear to Haggar after her failed attempt to use the Komar against Voltron that Zarkon will never be able to capture the lions. And with Zarkon’s link to the Black Lion completely severed, her husband will never be able to command Voltron himself. So, she switches gears and starts putting other irons in the fire, fading into the background as she works out a Plan B. Since she can’t capture Voltron, she redirects her energy to destroying it, via Naxzela in Season 4 and the virus in Kuron’s arm in Season 6. She stops sending Robeasts after Voltron because with Zarkon comatose she doesn’t have the resources or authority to do so without Zarkon on the throne. But she still keeps plugging away at the energy requirement for reopening the rift, even if we don’t see the results until at least Season 6.

This, I think, is where things diverge from what the writers were planning for the second and third arcs before they brought Shiro back in Season 3 and had the Keith leaving bit in Seasons 4-6. Back when Season 3 came out, the showrunners said that they had been forced to bring Shiro back early, not that he hadn’t been supposed to come back at all. What this suggests to me is that Keith would still have learned of Shiro’s death in Season 6, but without a body to transfer his consciousness into, Season 7 would have seen him filling a similar role to Alfor’s AI in Season 1.

And then the cliffhanger ending of the season would have been finding a Shiro Clone in the cockpit of the Komar Robeast. In addition to the added implicit horror that every mech they fought was being piloted by a clone of Shiro with enough of his memories to know how to fly and just enough self-awareness to act independently, it would basically have given them a free way to pull Shiro’s consciousness out of the Black Lion and restore him to life.

But since the execs wanted Shiro to be brought back in Season 3, Haggar instead sent one clone loaded with Shiro’s memories (how she got the post-escape ones is a mystery to be puzzled out later) to infiltrate the team and serve as her unwitting spy. Once she had the information she needed (plus Lotor and the remaining two Sincline ships), she pulled Kuron out, crippled the Castle of Lions, and ordered him to lead Keith away. But even underneath her brainwashing, the clone was still fundamentally Shiro, and fought against her the only way he could: lead Keith to the cloning facility and have a fight big and destructive enough to deprive her of a critical resource.

Because when you think about it, if Honerva had still had access to her army of Black Paladin Quintessence Batteries, she would have been able to open the rift and pull Lotor from the Rift in a lot less than three years. The destruction of Operation Kruon and Lotor stealing back the Sincline ships were a major setback for her in the same way that the end of Season 2 was. And by the time she gets her feet back under her, her reasons for getting into the Rift have changed. Whether it was just For Science or she was the herald of some eldritch space god like some of us have speculated is ultimately irrelevant after Season 6 because from the moment she realizes that Lotor’s stuck in the rift, her priority is getting her son back.

But with Operation Kuron gone and no trans-reality ships in sight, she had to start over from scratch. So, she takes her Komar and her Robeasts and heads for the Altean colony, where she knows that she’ll have an army fanatically devoted to her son, all ready and willing to do whatever she asks of them in the name of bringing their savior home. She casts the Druids aside now that she no longer needs them and sends Sendak to Earth to destroy the lions so that Voltron cannot interfere with her plans. It takes another three years, but that’s hardly a drop in the bucket for a woman who’s been alive for millennia. She’s been playing the long game for thousands of years, and she knows how to adapt.  

TL;DR: Haggar’s goal of accessing the Quintessence Field never changed, even if her reasons (Power>Retrieve Lotor) and methods for doing so (Shiro Robeasts>Altean Robeasts) shifted over time.

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2021

#48 - The Vagrant, by Peter Newman

Mount TBR: 46/100

Beat the Backlist Bingo: A non-human character

Rating: 2/5 stars

I did like enough about it to finish it, despite the concerns and complaints this review will list in detail; I don't care for it enough to keep going with the series.

I started this book almost two months ago, but in the middle of what eventually became obvious was a major reading slump. After 60 pages, I put the book on hold, reasoning that I was frustrated with reading in general and not with this specific book.

When I picked it back up, I started over, and this time, I annotated it to help myself pay more attention, and to pick at the edges of the mysteries that lie thick on the ground in this story. The "eight years ago" narrative line did eventually answer most of my questions--those it didn't were almost uniformly about world-building details I was struggling with.

So there's my first major complaint: this world is going for "cool" and "dark" without really having a cohesive style. Sometimes it's idyllic landscape, sometimes it's the Blasted Lands (which I will forever think of as a zone in World of Warcraft, but I guess the author hasn't played that.) The few cities had distinct but fairly generic personalities--one was a little Blade Runner, because there were neon signs everywhere, while another felt like a standard large fantasy town, and eventually the Shining City is certainly shiny, but also devoid of any originality.

The infernal aspects of the world-building--literally, the demons and how they worked--started out as an interesting concept, which I interpreted as them basically being incompatible with reality as we know it, and to combat that, they anchored themselves (in various and generally disgusting ways) to living flesh. Gross, creepy, excellent. But my early notes about what I pictured the Usurper and the Uncivil and the fallen Knights as actually looking like, or how I imagined they functioned, didn't end up jiving with information that came later. And yeah, readers can be wrong about things that authors set out clearly, but this felt more like I had developed a framework for the infernals that was more codified than what the author himself envisioned, because there were contradictions, and there were gaps, and whenever I encountered one I got frustrated.

Another frustration quickly sprouted from the style of the prose. What at first was a charming way to make sure I'm paying enough attention to connect some dots eventually became a slog. Yes, make me work for the connections about characters and plot. No, don't make me dig through every single line of a fight scene trying to figure out whose limbs are being cut off and who is buried under rubble and who died. There is a constant and deliberate lack of clarity to the narrative that I feel would serve the story better if it were saved for those big special occasions--who is the Vagrant, why can't he talk, how did he end up with the baby--than spreading it like a frosting over literally everything down to the smallest and most mundane details.

This extends to names, as many characters don't have them at all, or only get them late in the story, and even when they do, they are often still referred to by epithets. Harm doesn't need to constantly be "the green-eyed man," or I don't know, maybe he does, because half the time when he or the Vagrant look at something, the text doesn't say "The Vagrant looked at the sky," it says, "Amber eyes searched the clouds."

That's another complaint--the detachment. At the bottom of page 107, I scrawled a note to myself: "I've just hit on what I don't like about this narrative style--the descriptions sound like I'm reading a screenplay." The sentence which triggered this revelation reads: "Sweaty faces shine in shielded lamps." It's the first sentence after a scene break, and it frustrated me because I could see the effect of the description in my head--sweat glowing by lantern light in an otherwise dark space--but I didn't know who those faces belonged to! I didn't know who to picture because that sentence told me nothing about where the scene had jumped to! The following line tells me that men and women are in tunnels--okay, I'm in tunnels, but who are the men and women? The third sentence finally gives me a character name and I know I'm back with Tough Call's gang.

And this, too, is a constant problem. Not every chapter or scene break takes that long to establish who I'm reading about and where we are, but throughout the story, there's this repeated stepping back from the characters, a distancing, by referring to their actions in that deliberately obscure way. "Reluctantly, amber eyes open." "Breath labours in the dark." "A small foot twitches." I know that active verbs are great and conjugations of "to be" are easy to overuse, but it's possible to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Let my brain rest on some easy verbs and sentence constructions once in a while! Not everything has to be so vague and portentous!

Final stylistic complaint: I dislike present tense narratives in general, but lots of people like them, so whatever, authors are going to keep using present tense and sometimes I'm going to end up reading it. But I absolutely fail to understand the benefits of using it for the past story line. If the main bulk of the story is "now" and uses present tense, shouldn't the "eight years ago" use past tense? Because, you know, it's the past?

So after all of that, what did I even like about this? The baby. The goat--the tiny and rare scenes written from her viewpoint are generally hilarious. Harm ended up being okay, in shouldering the weight of one-sided conversations with the silent Vagrant. Though I question the wisdom of having a mute protagonist paired with a deliberately vague and detached narrative style (seems like an obvious recipe for the difficulty I had connecting to the story) I do think Harm brings out the Vagrant's desire to communicate as they get to know each other, and their deepening relationship as they bond over their struggles to save people, keep themselves and the baby safe, and still find a way to journey onward...okay, that was compelling enough to keep going even when I was frustrated by nearly everything else.

But the ending? No, sorry, this book failed to get me invested enough to care about why our protagonist achieved his apparent goal then decides to reject the dominant social order to do his own thing. I get it--it's super clear, even for this often-vague story, because the reason is exposited immediately after it happens. But I didn't care. And I don't have any need to find out what happens to our ragtag found family of weirdos afterward.

Hm, I hadn't considered that before. Found family, as a trope, pretty much relies on emotional investment in developed characters, whereas this story opted for (mostly) flat characters viewed from a safely detached distance. No wonder I couldn't get into it, these goals are fundamentally opposed.