VLD Retrospective: My POV as a Queer Biracial Asian Aspie
I don't generally enjoy listing my demographics in public spaces but for a Voltron Retrospective, I find it Quite Necessary to better convey how much VLD meant to me personally. This is one fan reconciling with a work I enjoyed for years, remain saddened for, and felt betrayed by. lf I'm good for anything, it's my being a Living Statistical Outlier.
VLD gave me explicit representation within its main cast: it gave me Shiro, who I clocked as chronically ill well before it was confirmed (Like Knows Like) & struggled with mental illness too (I'm not a war vet but Shiro's implicit Medical Trauma was Also There). Shiro is also, very obviously, an Asian &, as later revealed, a Queer Asian. There are few Queer Asians in western media who are Actual Characters: Shiro was (& remains) fun to have on board. It was, primarily, his struggles with his physical & mental health that most resonated with me.
Pidge is someone a lot of fans identified with, being a quirky genderbender maligned for her relative youth: I'm an autistic female who is gender "meh" so Pidge was "Representation" but she wasn't New nor Almost Unprecedented like Shiro or, as I'll elaborate further on, Keith. Every AFAB, every youth has felt undermined by their assumed gender & their youth: this is Not New. Pidge is fun but she wasn't Groundbreaking, not to me.
Keith and, to a lesser degree (as in assocoation with him), the "Half-Galra" Misfits were who I most identified with. Even before Keith was having Existential Crises over being Half-Galra, Keith read as someone biracial: his name, "Keith Kogane", makes him a white-passing Asian . I think current consensus is that Keith's Dad was "Mixed Asian*" but Keith's "orphan" (& secret alien) status prevented him from engaging with his heritage.
I am Not Galran (so far as I know) but I am a white-passing Asian & someone of "Two Worlds" (half white, half east asian). Star Trek's Spock established how most subsequent works of the sci-fi genre depicts half-human aliens: all the vibes of being Biracial, existential crises about Passing & feeling Disconnected ("rejected") by either/both halves of one's identity. Keith checks those boxes and Lotor's Halfsie Squad are similarly Coded (to lesser degrees).
Aliens, half-human ones especially, are very easily read as Neurodivergent as in "has ADHD &/or ASD": Keith continued this tradition & it further isolated him from his peers, especially because (like many of us on The Spectrum) he grew up "Undiagnosed". Keith knew he was Different but no one had the correct Context for his "Difference": this lead him to feeling Wrong, Rejected and Alien. This is an experience Familiar to anyone belatedly recognised as having ASD and also to Literally Any Queer Person.
To summarize the above: Shiro meant A Lot to me because he struggled with his health in silence (& was Asian); Keith meant a lot because his Human Demographics & Coding match almost entirely with my own. Shiro became "more" Important to me through his being Keith's Most Important Person (KH fans: you see where this is going): I was already Attached to Shiro, Keith made me invested in him.
KH fans knew from my invoking of "Taihetsu no Hito" [JP for "Most Important Person"] that, through being Invested in Keith & thus Shiro, I quickly Recognised that Keith? Desperately in love with Shiro. I did not, however, consider Shiro likely to Act on any Reciprocating of such feelings (which he did show signs of developing, as early on as that Stranded From Everyone Else and "when I die, you be Black Paladin" episode) due to the implied age gap between them. I knew Shiro was Younger Than Assumed (very early 20's at oldest, I figured from Contextual Clues), that Lance & Hunk were about 17 & that Keith was Older than Lance (so, 18). The age gap between Shiro & Keith was never that much of an issue: it was their difference in Rank & the ages they were at their First Meeting that were the "real" obstscles, to my mind. Season 6 or 7 did a Flashback that made Keith 14 when he first met Shiro: that very much explains why Shiro was reluctant to acknowledge attraction to Keith & unlikely to act on it. Keith did, however, read as Crushing On Shiro pretty much from their first encounter (Keith stealing Shiro's car was a very obvious effort to gain Shiro's attention & respect: something Keith was unlikely to recognise as Crush Evidence but Shiro definitely did).
And then Shiro lost 3 years to Time Dilation while Keith gained 2: their Reunion post-Space Whale was very telling. For the first time, Sheith actually seemed genuinely plausible to me. Keith had had a Glow Up that allowed Shiro to stop thinking of Keith as the kid he'd been when they first met & actually admit that his excuses to not act on any attraction had stopped holding weight. I remain completely convinced that "Kuron" had fallen, equally & just as desperately, in love with Keith over the series and that the Aggression Kuron exhibited toward Keith was as much caused by That (Gay Pining he refused to act on, even as Keith ran around in his Infamous Blades Uniform) as it was by Haggar (& Kuron's growing suspicions on his "true" nature).
Then there was the "You're my brother... I love you!" scene. Initially, given The Current Events of the time, I was irritated by the Abrupt Brother-Zoning from the Very Obviously Pining Keith to Shiro.
Then I noticed the order of these sentences: first, "you're my brother" (neither Shiro nor Keith have any siblings: in asia, there's MLM equivalent to "they were Roommates" in "they're sword/sworn brothers") and THEN, more desperately and while at the cusp of death... "I love you".
VERY ON BRAND, KEITH. It's also the "I love you" that gets through Kuron's programming enough for Keith to save them both. From my observations of VLD, the sole remaining obstacles to Sheith sailing were "will Shiro retain Kuron's memories and, if so, will he accept Kuron as being another Him" and "will the writers be able to get the execs to sign off on TWO queer paladins being queer with EACH OTHER"?
and then... the love confession was never addressed & Shiro stopped interacting with any of the Paladins beyond a professional setting.
By then, a lot of the show was looking Off and I actually looked at the online Voltron fandom to see if other people were Connecting Dots: some Meddling had happened, Shiro was being OOC as all heck, Allura and Keith seemed pretty miserable, Romelle was Sus as Heck, why was Allurance happening, where the heck is Lotor (etc)....
I was, like everyone else, greatly upset by Allura's needlessly being Killed Off and by Shiro's Stock Photo husband. I was also Not Impressed by the alleged "happiness" found by any of the Paladins: Shiro retiring his greatest dream, of flying and exploring the galaxy when he had just found out he Wasn't Going To Die from his Chronic Illness? Jim Kirk, another charismatic spaceship captain who loved to explore the universe, had a similar "retirement" ending for its Heroic Captain.
The first Star Trek film, set post-series, conveyed exactly how Shiro's "happy" ending played out for a character Shiro was almost certainly inspred by: Captain James "Jim" Tiberius Kirk.
Captain Kirk's "happy ending" was introduced in TMP as being: a promotion/retirement, marriage, & settling on Earth. Sound familiar, Shiro? TMP then shows how that "happy ending" plays out for someone like Jim (or Shiro): barely a handful of years later, Jim is miserable in his "retirement" (he was Promoted to a desk job); his Very Sudden marriage to a Previously Unknown Character is crumbling (& is even implied as being arranged by Starfleet's Brass to keep their Poster Boy on earth!); he clearly misses his Team (his Found Family) & at his first "valid" opportunity to get his Team together to fly into space again? That's exactly what Jim does.
Star Trek: TMP also, incidentally, features Jim living out some kind of Space Divorce Drama with his Right-Hand Man, the Half-Human Alien Spock. The two had apparently spent all those years apart and Spocks's "logical response" to [everything post-TOS] was... becoming a Vulcan Monk in order to Purge All His Emotions. (Krolia, please tell me that the Galra do not have an Equivalent to Vulcan's kolinahr & that, if it DOES, you Forbade Keith From Doing It).
Jim & Kirk saved each other, often very impossibly, in every other episode of TOS. They were also so widely shipped by fans that the "founding" of modern fandom cukture is often attributed to those first K/S shippers.
The easy Parallels between Spock/Kirk to Keith/Shiro were something that seemed to increase as VLD continued, likely as its creative team started recognising how naturally Keith & Shiro played out that epic space romance. The relationship between the Black Paladins was consistently emphasized within the series (until it abruptly Wasn't) and their bond was considered the strongest shared by any two paladins. A Sheith required very little effort from VLD's creative team and, given the Time Dilation plot point, that effort WAS made: Keith shows up Older & Blade-ier, Shiro Visibly Reacts and seems perfectly set up to Reevaluate his relationship with Keith, both of them visibly Adult and already established as "Equals".
Reading the research done by Team Purple Lion helped me understand the many degrees of unpleasantness caused by the Forced Removal of Lotor from VLD's endgame: the series' overall plot, key themes and multiple character arcs were contingent to the ugly consequences of Voltron's [murdering] him, the emotional effects Lotor had on Allura, the ways Lotor was integral to the show's themes of Redemption & Recovery & Love (of all forms). Just about every main character (and the imexplicable presence of several other characters) had their Arc underminded by Lotor's staying [murdered]: Lotor (obvs), Allura (VLD's Actual Main Character), Lance (who suddenly became Every Creepy "Nice" Guy), Pidge, Axca, Romelle, Merla, Yzor & her girlfriend, Honnerva...
I was invested in the plot, characters and themes of VLD: its ending wasn't just upsetting, it was contradictory to its own story. Though I am not invested in any VLD ships other than Sheith (for the way the characters are individually Important to me, the ways Shiro is important to Keith, the ways their relationship parallels K/S down to the syllables), the series had set certain ships up through its Themes and within its plot: Allura/Lotor, a reclamation of Allura's agency & a thematic resolution to the major conflicts of the series; Shiro/Keith, a love story the series spent 7 seasons telling; the tentative beginnings of Lance/Pidge, a Chekhov's Gun that would round their individual character development through better understanding each other; Hunk & Recognition of his Ingenuity, Bravery, Compassion (which would, incidentally, feature Hunk/Shay and Hunk's central role in the intergalactic Recovery proces). All of these ships serve a Purpose within VLD's plot, aid individual character development, reinforce the series' overarching themes, and have a solid basis within the text of VLD (as well as outside of it, in interviews and statements from the creative team).
I was able to "recover" from the betrayal of how VLD ended, largely through the detective work of fans like Team Purple Lion and reading many "fix-fic" wherein Allura Lives and Shiro is not OOC as all heck. VLD was one of many series, at the time, whose Betrayal of its themes & characters made Waves all over Fandom. It was, however, one of the Betrayals that hurt me more "personally". It was also a fantastic example of Creatives having horrid working conditions, Corporate Interests actively Hurting their consumers, of Fans being forced to Play Detective due to the modern Media Landscape: the culture of creatives being under strict NDAs, of their being without Unions, of how abruptly Projects can be undermined by the Whims of singular entities (creating additional work on an already overworked labour force, often in ways that betray their own work).
So, uh, surprise: this was a Retrospective inspired by the current Writers Strike & growing awareness (that we have known & ignored for years) of how unethical the working standards of animators are. There are Actual Americans and Actual Artists who can speak on these issues more specifically, as well as the best ways to help the affected: this was a more individual Take, from One Fan, and the ways that media has affected That Fan emotionally (though, being an Aspie, i'm pretty distanced from articulating any Specifics beyond "upset" because "this is narratively inconsistent"). The purpose of writing this was personal catharsis, a means of discovering how I feel about VLD all these years later, and perhaps as an act of microcosm within a greater fandom macrosm RE: engagement with media & correctly identifying how the faults of its business structure sabotage excellent works of fiction from staying "excellent" or becoming "magnificent".
*"Korean-Japanese" seems to ne the current consensus but as Sourced outside the text of the series. It is not his "exact amounts of Asian" that Keith is "relevant" to me but his being both Mixed & disconnected from his asian Heritage.
