Black Paladin Keith. What do you feel about it. I personally think they shouldn't have done the Lion swap
Ooh, good question! Sooo… initially, what irked me most me concerning the Lion swap was how they just. Didn’t bother to switch suits. Like in Allura’s case — fine, I get it, pink is a valid cultural choice (it doesn’t fit with her Lion, but neither does she, not really), but would it kill Lance to don the red suit and Keith the black? And then I thought about it a little more, and I realised that his issue is kind of the surface layer of an underlying problem. Deep down, Keith is still the Red Paladin and Lance is the Blue Paladin. And the writers know it! In ‘The Black Paladins’, a Freudian slip is made: Honerva refers to Keith as ‘the Red Paladin’, even though his days in the Red Lion’s cockpit are years past.
Why is this? Well, because Voltron kinda forgot that the Lion-Paladin bond was correlative with the Paladin’s character as well as their role in the team. The Red Lion, specifically, prefers a pilot who relies on gut instinct over skill. A pilot who is volatile and reckless and independent — and that is not Lance. A not-insignificant chunk of Lance’s arc is oriented around Lance honing his skill as a sharpshooter in order to feel useful to the team. Lance is also a very social person. In the very first episode, when he sneaks out of the Garrison, he does it with his friends. He is always excited to team up with Allura and/or Keith. He desperately wants to feel useful to the group. His ascension to ‘right hand’ in terms of leadership is nice, but he’s just not an arm; he’s a leg.
And then we have Allura and Keith. After his acquisition of the status of team leader, Keith recedes into more independent work (the Blades). His return to the Black Lion is… momentous, but it does not capture the spirit of what it means to pilot the Black Lion. A Black Paladin must put a team’s victory above personal glory. Upon returning to the team, Keith immediately splits off from it in reckless, independent pursuit of ‘Shiro’. When he returns to face Lotor in the final battle, it is **Allura** who guides the team to victory. Keith’s victory is *lonely*, Allura’s is *collective*. It gets weirder in the seventh season. In ‘The Way Forward’, Keith defers responsibility to Lance and jumps into the bowels of the pirate den to rescue Acxa. From a Watsonian perspective, it’s not out-of-character. But from a Doylist perspective, it’s just odd that Keith’s Big Victory that episode is solitary, rather than a result of his guiding the team. To lean into the aspect of ‘two independent warriors and their bond against the world’ so late into the show, when Keith is supposed to have mastered Black Paladinhood, is… weird. In ‘The Feud’, the joke episode that tests the team’s bond, Keith does not pull through as a leader at all. He reads more like a cog within the team’s machine than the lever that sets it spinning. In ‘The Ruins’, Keith gets a somewhat anticlimactic rematch with Macidus, the Druid he battled with in Season 1. The battle was a result of Keith splitting off from the group. And the rematch is no different: Macidus keeps everyone else trapped in a magic bubble, Keith manages to escape, Allura takes on the role of the team rock through absorbing Macidus’ magic, and Keith takes Macidus down **alone**. In ‘The Journey Within’, Keith is the first in the core group to display antagonistic behaviour: he insults Alfor, blames Allura for Lotor’s manipulation, and calls Hunk a coward. He tries to split off from the team multiple times and refers to their relationship as ‘a series of messed up coincidences’. This is three and a half seasons after he was first chosen by the Black Lion. It takes Hunk’s heart and courage to bring the team together again. Anyway, after that, we have the Sendak subplot, and I really don’t recall Keith doing much of note, esp not in the leadership aspect (apart from getting Hunk to his parents, which was sweet). During the eighth season, the command is not infrequently (ie in ‘Genesis’) given to Allura, due to her superior understanding of Altean alchemy. So, all in all, we’ve got a guy who either fails at leading the group (see: the entirety of season three) or attempts to shirk the responsibility of leadership entirely. Until the **seventh season**, and the Black Lion doesn’t reject him once? Lol.
I actually wouldn’t have so much of an issue with this kind of ‘learned leadership’ arc if it weren’t for the fact that there was a better and more obvious candidate for the role: Allura. Allura is deliberately foiled with Shiro from the very first season. Both are highly self-sacrificing, courageous, disciplined, skilled, kind, etc. Both are masterful orators and both have a wicked mirror (Sendak, Honerva). Both die. Given how many missions she leads as the Blue Paladin, given how she’s relentlessly *there* for the team, given how she has no home to go back to but works tirelessly to ensure her friends can return to theirs, given how she’s a skilled diplomat and the glue that has bound the team together since back in Season 1, given how they all fall apart in different directions once she’s gone, given her sheer power and boundless empathy and sharp intuition and group-oriented spirit, how she is Lance’s hero and inspiration, how she is the Voltron Coalition’s figurehead, how she is the ‘key’ to Voltron that Lotor fixates upon, how she has always yearned to fight but has forever been told to run… It’d just be an extremely fitting arc for somebody like her.
Or, of course, they could’ve just kept Shiro as the Black Lion’s pilot. The big issue with Keith as Black Paladin is that they were clearly trying to juggle *way* too many things with him. He can’t be a Blade *AND* the Black Paladin. Come on. You can’t just shaft Shiro like that.
