MEA ALTEA !

And about 80% of that was me just making up words to fit the rhythm, the rest was just figuring out how to place things based on my already-invented sentence structure + suffixes LMAO. Full sentence-by-sentence translation coming soon.

Heads up: The Altean version is WAY more intense.

ORIGINAL ENGLISH (click here)

ALTEAN

(Click here to hear me sing it :3 cries bc this took me like…an hour…to sing it even CLOSE to perfect…and it STILL has mistakes………………sfdglkjlfksj)

(EDIT: Made some mistakes writing the grammar. Those have been corrected.)

Ae wen gelen na sinaltha AMERICAN Ae wen na kempa-te tea shinta. Valkiram sintalor-te volgan mu Amerikha feagalnor fealu.

Chorus Alsaefavira de Erda-te valuram Furovel vaina ALIEN NATION OK tarae yevenka ala vey Teluvijonil ya re’ulha nemnor E vo yi levon uru-na HEY Saewako elanvorleibra!

Volonko me “AMERICAN AMERICAN na” Ae saewa yi he erei devera Galra Yi kala-kala naymel volun-akar Ye valuramklo kulu-kulurar

Chorus

Ae wen gelen na sinaltha AMERICAN Vu kempa shinta, vaina tea neverda. Va puri genae, lovohe bela-bela For mrrde ereinva Amerikha.

Chorus

ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ALTEAN

I don’t want to be an AMERICAN nonempath* I don’t want the media’s new world. There, the sound of uninformed swarms of fears Subconsciously mind-rapes America.

Chorus Welcome to the multitude of fears that Earth struggles against From sea to sea, an ALIEN NATION OK will never happen there Televisions dream your future O, but you were not meant to listen--HEY** Resist the imperialism of freedom!

Call me “un-AMERICAN AMERICAN” I resist your fucking Galra agenda Every day you speak and shit propaganda Singing endlessly your boundless paranoia.

Chorus

I don’t want to be an AMERICAN nonempath Under the new media, one world falls. Flowing like water, its stream of nonsense*** Fucks America in the ass.

Chorus

ENGLISH Don't wanna be an American idiot One nation under the new media Information age of hysteria Is calling out to idiot America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension All across the alien nation Where everything isn't meant to be okay Television dreams of tomorrow We're not the ones who're meant to follow For that's enough to argue 

ALTEAN I don’t want to be an American nonempath Under the new media, one world falls. A never-ending stream of nonsense Fucks America in the ass.

persistent guy gets the girl despite her not showing interest at first (lance and allura)

strong, suffering black woman (allura)

black woman is the mom character (allura, though this is somewhat more in fanon)

sacrificial negro (allura)

killing off the black character (allura)

abuse victim turns out just like their abusers (lotor)

mixed person can never truly belong to any of their heritage (lotor)

abuse survivor forgives abusers too easily/when they shouldn't (lotor)

EDIT: lotor forgiving honerva for the sake of honerva having HER happy ending also carries with it the implications that 1) abusers get to be part of their victims’ healing process and 2) that the abuse victim is somehow responsible/obligated to care for the emotional well-being of their abuser so add those in, too.

bury your gays (adam)

gay tokenism (curtis)

unhealthy lgbt dynamic (adam and shiro)

spicy latinx lover (lance)

fat person loves food (hunk)

fat person is comic relief (hunk)

innocent white woman incriminates brown man (romelle and lotor) 

abusive colonizers get redeemed (honerva and zarkon)

"good" colonizer/slave owner narrative (zarkon & honerva after their redemption and honestly i think this is what they were going for with lotor)

one significant thing i took from ep.12 is that honerva - even after regaining her memories - still isn’t capable of motherly love. she’s come to accept that lotor is her son, but even when confronted with a healthy & smart boy, she subconsciously thinks of him as her property rather than the child she longs to care for.

it breaks my heart that lotor is better off without any motherly figure at all… but on the other hand, it does feel good to know that in at least one alternate reality, little lotor is loved and cherished by his papa. 

Fucking this. The nasty look in her eye when she demanded him to come, the way she immediately started yelling about sacrifice and then summoning magical energy to attack Zarkon and Lotor when they rejected her…That tells me right away that even if she successfully remained in the reality where she could be with them once more, she would have fucked up her family yet again and she’d be back in the same situation as she is now.

lotor isn’t going to get a redemption arc. he’s no longer deserving of one (though i say he was still deserving of one in season 5) and i have made my peace with that.

however.

as someone who as a trauma survivor associates herself with lotor?

if honerva–the woman i associate with my abusive mother–gets a redemption arc next season (or is otherwise given too much sympathy despite her being an abuser).

i am going to throw my entire computer out my eighth story window because holy SHIT that would probably be the worst storytelling decision they would have ever made.

I have a ton of personal hcs about how Altea isn’t as peachy-clean as their narrative presents it, hcs that are nowhere near canon even though they do not contradict it--in fact, the Altea of my headcanon is probably even more fucked up than our human world. I won’t go into those here. But I have discussed them all in depth with my friends and I want to see just how right I am about how fucked up they really are, if any of what canon says lines up with what I’ve come up with.

More than anything, I want to see Allura--who has idealized Altea to the point of ignoring blatant imperialism from the alternate reality Alteans--confront once again the dark truths of her own culture. Whereas many humans would immediately be skeptical of Hira’s claim of “bringing peace to the universe” because of the whole white man’s burden implications that carries, Allura seemed to just blindly accept that everything was hunky dory, without even asking about how that peace was achieved. This demonstrates that she carried the assumption that Alteans are innocent and good--and also demonstrates that even THIS reality’s Altea was zealous enough about “spreading peace” that they would want a peace formulated on their terms to be spread throughout the universe. And while we saw Allura being upset that the alternate reality’s Altea was nothing like what she wanted it to be, we never really heard her (or anyone) say anything to the effect of “boy, this sure does say something about (us) Alteans, now doesn’t it?” So, that is the conclusion I want the characters to draw from Season 8. I want Allura and the others to see what Honerva does to the colony, and not only learn but also articulate the flaws of Altean ways of thinking.

however.

as someone who as a trauma survivor associates herself with lotor?

if honerva--the woman i associate with my abusive mother--gets a redemption arc next season (or is otherwise given too much sympathy despite her being an abuser).