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A glorious and horrible 2 YEARS- fundamentally altered fandom etiquette in 2 GODDAMN YEARS

Or an Analysis of what Season Seven was Meant to be before They Rewrote it to Accommodate Black Paladin Keith 

At one point, the EPs mentioned a version of s7 where Shiro went back to being Black Paladin. I hypothesize that was the original version. When they got the go ahead to make Keith Black Paladin, rather than rewrite the entire story, they rewrote parts of the script they already had to fit that. 

This would explain why there’s no mention in the script as to why Shiro isn’t Black Paladin anymore. Because in the original script, he was. 

So, here’s a few things I think ended up being changed, added, moved around or cut from the original to make this new vision “work.”

First Start by Realizing the Truth: There was no Wolf

Let’s go back to s6 and assume everything happened exactly the same way it did… only minus the wolf. Does this change anything in the plot? No. The wolf appears in s6, but does nothing but stand around in the background and presumably provide extra moral support for Keith during their long journey. You could remove the wolf entirely and it would change nothing. 

Kind of like Shiro in the first half of s7. 

Warning: saltiest and longest meta I’ve written. But I think every point stands well on its own, and I tried to touch on as much as I could. Enjoy, I suppose.

To start, just a quick clarification: when I say relationship, I do not mean a necessarily romantic one. While I am a Shallura shipper, this meta will be the examination of Shiro and Allura’s relationship within the team, narrative, with each other (so it may get bit shippy) but first and foremost about why their co-leadership relationship, and the destruction of it, is what has led to VLD becoming the clusterfuck of a show it is now.

So, let’s go by this step by step, shall we? The first one I want to look at may seem a little strange, but bear with me: it’ll make sense as we get further into it. So, without further ado, let’s look at

The Black Lion and Broken Symmetry

By the end of s4, I had a list of certainties that I believed VLD would always come through on. While one of them was Shiro being Black Paladin, the second was that something related to the Black Lion, whether Shiro or the Bayard, would be affected by / affect Allura. This was an idea I’d been nursing since s1, as one of Shiro and Allura’s early scenes in 1x01 and where Allura uses his name for the first time, to tell him that his Bayard was lost along with its paladin. Shiro responds cheerily with, “I guess I’ll just have to make do,” and we see him do so for the next two seasons. 

But by the time s4 had rolled around and put Shiro (who was mostly speculated to be Kuron by that point, although I always believed the clone theory) in the Black Lion again, I had come to understand that Shiro being in the Black Lion would always be relevant for the arc of Shiro and Allura’s relationship.

S1: Shiro becomes the Black Paladin. He and Allura are co-leaders. He then goes to rescue Allura from Zarkon’s central command and finds out Zarkon was the OG paladin.

S2: Allura regrets not telling Shiro the truth about Zarkon. Shiro then beats Zarkon and gains the Black Bayard. Shiro defeats Zarkon battle and disappears.

S3: Allura mourns him and becomes a paladin in his stead. She wears pink to honour him. Keith becomes Black Paladin and Shiro/Kuron is found by Black at the end of the season. 

S4: Shiro/Kuron becomes Black Paladin again. He and Allura are re-established as leaders.

S5: Shiro/Kuron and Allura argue over him giving Lotor the Black Bayard, which is what allows him to kill Zarkon. Allura begins trusting Lotor because of his patricide. Kuron flies Lotor to the Kral Zera in the Black Lion, which leads to a stronger alliance between Voltron / Allura and Lotor.

S6: When Haggar takes over Kuron, he attacks Allura with the Black Bayard before leaving with Lotor. Allura later draws Shiro’s soul of the Black Lion and carries him in her own body.

Shiro and Allura and their relationship with each other, the Black Lion, the position of Black Paladin, and with the Black Bayard, perpetually affect each other and propel the plot forwards. Not only that, but it’s consistent. It was one of the first things, once I got over my initial reaction of s7, that also felt wrong coming away from that season. It had broken the pattern I’d been paying attention to for the first time in VLD’s entire run. 

But, as I’ve gone over the show’s structure time and time again, and think back to the first time I nearly dropped canon, the issues actually started in s3. So, let’s go from there:

When she gets out of that pod, she should be scared. She should be angry. And she deserves to be so. Her father that she relied on for just about everything shoved her into a sleeping pod and suddenly she's awoken by someone who isn't him. Logically, that means he lost. She should be kicking and screaming. She should be having the worst panic attack ever. She should be mourning everyone and everything she's ever known. She should be mourning the status quo that will never again be maintained. She should be mourning the future that can never come to fruition.

She has to figure out life without any system or technology that she's ever relied on. Coran doesn't know how to fix and maintain everything. She's like one of those people that wake up from 10+ year comas and don't understand modern technology. She is my dad who has had the same flip phone since forever and now must figure out how to use a phone with a touch screen.

Every luxury she had as a princess is gone. The castle chef who knew exactly how she liked her food. Her mother's ladies in waiting who told her the castle gossip. Her own ladies in waiting who'd sneak out to festivals and other trivial things with her. The cleaners that arranged her room exactly as she liked it. HER MOM. I don't care if she was a daddy's girl, she still has got to miss her mom.

I feel like she should've had more outbursts. Seeing Keith in the red paladin armor should've made her cry. In fact, all of them should have. The new paladins in their armor is a symbol of a new era- an era without the people she loves. She deserves to scream at the top of her lungs and lock herself in her room and trash something. She should be yelling that life isn't fair. She should be angry. She should be so angry.

Because they deserve the positivity