Evelyn

The Sailor Scouts!  I Watched some sailor moon on hulu for Nostalgic purposes.  It was better than I remembered (thanks, Viz) and made me want to do a fun character design challenge!  I used only the first season and tried to capture their personalities and little details in each character’s uniforms.  I’ve always been a huge fan of Adventure Time’s gender swap mentality of staying true to the characters as much as possible, not treating it as a joke, and just trying to design legitimate characters while respecting the source!  That said, this was a blast.  

Side note-  Lightning impacts are so crazy looking that they look fake!

“healing and forgiveness”

The Altean colony is set up to look like a beautiful, idyllic pastoral village surrounded by the forest. Everything’s nice there. There’s a local reclusive nobleman, rarely seen by the locals, who keeps to himself but he’s charming and everyone regards him well.

Now and then this noble takes people with him.

They aren’t seen again.

Because Lotor drains the life out of them behind closed doors.

Guys… I just had a revelation. 

Lance is giving up on himself. He views himself as making mistake after mistake after mistake. He’s willing to hold others up, but at the end of the day–season after season–he’s spiraling. He didn’t get the girl, he missed the clues about Shiro. As he said, he’s made so many mistakes. 

He sees no value in himself and I get the feeling that, more and more, he views himself as replaceable. He doesn’t have the special talents of all his teammates, he’s “just a boy from Cuba.” He’s projecting onto others, expecting that they should be doing more important things than playing games because shouldn’t he also be doing the same?

After the “failure” with Shiro, he’s going to be even more down on himself. I thought the Allurance scenes were off because Allura clearly doesn’t return his feelings, but that’s not the point. The point of those scenes was us watching Lance fall deeper and deeper. He spent more time upset and sad in season 6 than he ever has before, and season 5 was no happy time for him either. Him telling Allura that he’d made plenty of mistakes wasn’t him just comforting her, but accepting–albeit in a sad, hopeless way–that he’d never stood a chance with her in the first place. Obviously, because he’s such a screw up, why hadn’t he seen if before?  

He’s gonna be so low that he’s gonna view himself as completely worthless. 

He’s gonna give up on himself. 

And you know the one person who has experience dealing with that sort of feeling? Who had to work through it with the help of someone else? Who is finally stable enough in their own situation to help others? 

There’s only two people in the whole series who have been relatively sensitive to Lance’s problems–Allura and Keith (also Coran that one time in season 1, I guess).  

I think I get it now. I get why, at the end of season 6, Lance was the only one of the group that was still upset even after Shiro had come back. 

If we look at Hunk and Lance comparatively, Hunk’s storyline has been about building up his confidence. No, he hasn’t had a huge arc aside from the Shay arc, but he’s leaps and bounds ahead of where he was in season 1. 

Whereas Lance… Lance has slowly but surely been tearing himself down. 

Maybe Allura will help–she’s shown this season to at least be aware of Lance when he needs comforting occasionally, and said he showed potential for greatness in season 5. But ultimately… 

I bet it’ll be Keith that has to step in. The one and only person Lance physically made the decision to go to when he was feeling down and needed to talk. He’s talked to Coran, sure, but it was Keith who he sought out. 

Lance goes out of his way to comfort Allura, but Keith is the only one that’s turned around and comforted Lance when he needed it (unlike Pidge and Hunk, who laugh at him, and Shiro, who never takes him seriously. I mean, up until seasons 5 and 6, Allura had barely taken him seriously). 

This poor child has become so emotionally isolated and none of his friends even seem to know or realize. 

Thank goodness Keith is back, I guess. 

I could kind of imagine a scene where Lance has decided that they’d be better off without him. Maybe Shiro is still willing to pilot a lion and so we finally get the scene that was referenced in season 3 where Lance is willing to take a step back. But I doubt Shiro will be going back to a lion at this point, not with Keith kind of officially in the black lion. And I could kind of see something along the lines of Keith saying, “Shiro never gave up on me and I’m never gonna give up on you.” Or something like that. Because Lance needs to know that he’s wanted and valued. 

And wasn’t that kind of Keith and Lance’s history in the 80s Voltron? Lance was a rash, problem child and it was only because Keith vouched for him that he got on the team or into flight school or something? And the more and more Voltron we see, the more and more it incorporates bits of its 80s counterpart.  

Or I’m just so desperate for good Lance content at this point that I’m reaching for straws in the dark. 

EDIT: I’m also kind of worried about Lance’s mom, lol. She’s been a big part of his character through the whole series and with the space-time issue going back to Earth and Lance being so close to the breaking point… I’m just worried, lol. Probably worried for no reason, but hey, at this point, ya never know with this show. 

Because, also… Lance’s entire home was destroyed in the 80s Voltron. Not saying Earth will be destroyed, but like… has anyone checked in on Earth? I mean, looks like the perfect place Sendak would go. So much of the characters’ arcs match up with the 80s, at least as far as where their development has gone. 

Is Lance’s family even okay…? The more I think about it and look at how the writers create the new show in relation to the old show, the more concerned I am that the team, and Lance specifically, will not be returning home to good news.

Also, Lance’s family has been a recurring theme for him, which means they’ll play a part later. 

Omg, Lance’s family is dead. 

His home and family were destroyed in the 80s Voltron. 

What I come back to is that I think a lot of people kind of want to be vindicated about Oh, Lotor was nasty all along, so they’re basically taking Lotor’s breakdown as a logical extension of his character where all of the things he yelled were stuff that he completely 100% meant and not something that came completely out of left field, as his generals’ reactions attest. Look at those faces! These are people who’ve been actively helping Lotor achieve his objectives and have more consistently been “in on” the con than anybody else (especially Acxa). If you’d expect anybody to know Lotor has a lurking inner super-villain, it would be them. 

The thing is this makes no sense if we assume . Lotor’s been making exhaustive effort to work with the galra so he’s probably not trying to murder them all. He was firm on the stance that he really did want to work for good, that he meant everything he said to Allura, that she really did mean a huge amount to him. If he really didn’t care about her, he wouldn’t be determined to negotiate and stand down, not shoot at her even after she shoots at him, and then suddenly go for the kill last-minute when they mutually hit each other in emotional triggers.

AO3: turn on a dime

summary: During a routine mission, Lance runs into a small child with far too familiar features, and realises that he absolutely - unequivocally - cannot leave kid Lotor (Lotor! a part of him screams hysterically) behind. Especially not with Haggar.

ratings: gen, implied child experimentation, implied canonical experimentation (shiro)

artist: gerryiscool91 ( @gerryiscool91)

No need to apologize! Your feelings are valid and justified and shared!

Lotor being a species-hybrid, (which is one of my absolute favorite tropes that was very common in mecha anime back in the 80s), can easily stand in for mixed races, and the way this was handled is upsetting.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the way Lotor is written has always been a deal-breaker for me in prior continuities and reboots. Had he been introduced like what we just saw today in S3, I would have dropped the series immediately.

I’ve re-written this response many times because there is a lot I want to say but…

“how could you write…”

I really want to dive into the weeds here, but this is so personal to a lot of people that I don’t want to go full analysis mode, as I do have an idea of what’s happened here, but I’ll skip that for now and say: there wasn’t enough time to handle a character like this. 

Representation is more than just labels. It is more than race or gender bending characters for a reboot. It is more than a press release or bubbly comments about “reps.” It is actions. It is perception of actions. It is the subtle choices that add up to massive wrongs. It is so many things. It is personal.

Representation is considering and really thinking through how all of the traits and identities of a character can get swept up in the narrative, and more importantly, how rarely such a character with those traits appears in fiction.

It’s possible that they didn’t realize (during the writing process) how rare Lotor would be, or at least perceived to be after the fact (e.g. once the writing process is complete), and by how many ways in which people who never or rarely get a chance to see any part of themselves portrayed positively, or at least proudly expressed by a character, as part of his actions and words would relate to him.

I get the sense they worked out a collection of shocking villainous concepts and didn’t think about how those concepts would impact rare representation…which they may never have intended in the first place (despite Lotor’s actions and words seemingly to the contrary).

The plan for “a shocking twist/reveal for the mid-series villain, that pushes the boundaries of what is expected out of a Y7 show about transforming mechanical lions” puts such a character in a really hard place, and it is really starting to sound like they went out of their way to write it such that they were purposefully gunning for bragging rights of “breaking the fans.”

I really can’t see any other justification for talking up one thing—that Lotor would be different from DotU or other prior continuities (which they knew fans wanted)—and then sloppily executing a grimdark version of that very thing just to get those strong emotional reactions because…?? No good reason. No payoff.

On the topic of emotion, I wrote this in another ask this morning but I’ll repeat it here:

The emotional pain felt from Space Runaway Ideon, or say a film like Hotaru no Haka, is worth the experience because they ask the viewer to confront and ask deeper questions about reality, death, life, the nature of war, the suffering of children. There is meaning to be explored there. The emotional pain has a payoff. It has a point.

What we just watched was cheap and poorly executed. It delivered no higher examination of anything, other than the disappointing realization that we are still telling stories to children that bind abuse victims and mental instability/craziness to being doomed to repeat not only one’s parents’ mistakes, but to go on and commit unspeakable acts against others; all while reinforcing a royal flush of toxic relationship tropes to a black woman.

If you look at it… There is something of an imbalance of power here, but it doesn’t flow in Lotor’s favor.

It flows in Allura’s.

Wandered into an article with 140 iconic cinematic shots, the comments complained there was no explanation to their composition. Decided to give it a run down and keep it to myself. 

stereotypical delightful classical music:

battalia a 10 in d major (biber)

brandenburg concerto no. 5

brandenburg concerto no. 3

symphony no. 45 - “farewell” (haydn)

if you need to chill:

rondo alla turca

fur elise

anitra’s dance

in the steppes of central asia (borodin) (added by viola-ology)

if you need to sleep:

moonlight sonata

swan lake

corral nocturne

sleep (eric whitacre) (added by thelonecomposer)

if you need to wake up:

morning mood

summer (from the four seasons)

buckaroo holiday (if you’ve played this in orch you might end up screaming instead of waking up joyfully)

if you are feeling very proud:

pomp and circumstance

symphony no. 9 (beethoven; this is where ode to joy came from)

1812 overture

symphony no. 5, finale (tchaikovsky) (added by viola-ology)

american (dvořák)

if you feel really excited:

hoedown (copland)

bacchanale

spring (from the four seasons) (be careful, if you listen to this too much you’ll start hating it)

la gazza ladra

death and the maiden (schubert)

if you are angry and you want to take a baseball bat and start hitting a bush:

dance of the knights (from the romeo and juliet suite by prokofiev)

winter, mvt. 1 (from the four seasons)

symphony no. 10 mvt. 2 (shostakovich)

symphony no. 5 (beethoven)

totentanz (liszt)

quartet no. 8, mvt. 2 (shostakovich) (added by viola-ology)

young person’s guide to the orchestra, fugue (britten) (added by iwillsavemyworld)

symphony no. 5 mvt. 4 (shostakovich) (added by eternal-cadenza)

marche slave (tchaikovsky) (added by eternal-cadenza)

if you want to cry for a really long time:

fantasia based on russian themes (rimsky-korsakov)

adagio for strings (barber)

violin concerto in e minor (mendelssohn)

aase’s death

andante festivo

vocalise (rachmaninoff) (added by tropicalmunchakoopas)

if you want to feel like you’re on an adventure:

an american in paris (gershwin)

if you want chills:

danse macabre

russian easter overture

egmont overture (added by shayshay526)

if you want to study:

eine kleine nachtmusik

bolero (ravel)

serenade for strings (elgar)

scheherazade (rimsky-korsakov) (added by viola-ology)

pines of rome, mvt. 4 (resphigi) (added by viola-ology)

if you really want to dance:

capriccio espagnol (rimsky-korsakov)

blue danube

le cid (massenet) (added by viola-ology)

radetzky march

if you want to start bouncing in your chair:

hopak (mussorgsky)

les toreadors (from carmen suite no.1)

if you’re about to pass out and you need energy:

hungarian dance no. 1

hungarian dance no. 5

if you want to hear suspense within music:

firebird

in the hall of the mountain king

ride of the valkyries

night on bald mountain (mussorgsky) (added by viola-ology)

if you want a jazzy/classical feel:

rhapsody in blue

jazz suite no. 2 (shostakovich) (added by eternal-cadenza)

if you want to feel emotional with no explanation:

introduction and rondo capriccioso

unfinished symphony (schubert)

symphony no. 7, allegretto (beethoven) (added by viola-ology)

canon in d (pachelbel)

if you want to sit back and have a nice cup of tea:

st. paul’s suite

concerto for two violins (vivaldi)

l’arlésienne suite

concierto de aranjuez (added by tropicalmunchakoopas)

pieces that don’t really have a valid explanation:

symphony no. 40 (mozart)

cello suite no. 1 (bach)

polovtsian dances

enigma variations (elgar) (added by viola-ology)

perpetuum mobile

moto perpetuo (paganini)

pieces that just sound really cool:

scherzo tarantelle

dance of the goblins

caprice no. 24 (paganini)

new world symphony, allegro con fuoco (dvorak) (added by viola-ology​)

le tombeau de couperin (added by tropicalmunchakoopas)

carnival of the animals (added by shadowraven45662)

if you feel like listening to concertos all day (I do not recommend doing that):

concerto for two violins (bach)

concerto for two violins (vivaldi)

violin concerto in a minor (vivaldi)

violin concerto (tchaikovsky) (added by iwillsavemyworld)

violin concerto in d minor (sibelius) (added by eternal-cadenza)

cello concerto in c (haydn)

piano concerto, mvt. 1 (pierne) (added by iwillsavemyworld)

harp concerto in E-flat major, mvt. 1 (added by iwillsavemyworld)

and if you really just hate classical music in general:

4′33″ (cage)

a lot of these pieces apply in multiple categories, but I sorted them by which I think they match the most. have fun exploring classical music!