I just wanted to say that your blog is such a great resource for Team Sincline and how to write them, it's genuinely an asset for fanfiction writing! Especially since I am currently trying to write a fanfic in which a human psychic remote viewer joins Team Sincline and bonds with them through their own seasons 1 and 2 (what was Lotor even doing before season 3??). Your posts on Team Sincline are amazing indicators to nail down everyone's personality and how they might work with my OC, who gets recruited because she is a far-distance seer like Haggar is for Zarkon.
So, thank you for all your Team Sincline posts!
So obviously I have not posted about Voltron in a hot minute and don't personally stand by every single take I posted back then as you would expect of a person who's grown and changed since there, but I'm going to be honest:
It's really, really nice to watch people go through that backlog, find my old posts, and still have fun with them. To that end I don't plan to ever delete those posts or 'clean them out'. And I retain a lot of warm feelings about Voltron: Legendary Defender. Arguably, I met my boyfriend because of it!
Lotor and the generals, and their relationship, are fascinating to me. In the canon, there's a lot of what I would say deliberately wasted potential- because the point is that Lotor absolutely could have had something here, but his paranoia ruined that for him. I think the story does a good job intentionally using our sense of that squandered potential because it really hits, especially when the full form of Sincline is finally unveiled, being driven by Lotor alone... and it unsubtly is visually designed in the form of the generals.
Throughout the Voltron franchise, Lotor is traditionally a kind of chronically alone 'mr. wrong' for Allura, and I think VLD's take on it is absolutely compellingly tragic in painting him as a self-saboteur. There's not really anything wrong with him except his extreme chew-own-leg-off-to-escape-trap brain and even when he's hopped up on so much universe juice that only the worst part of him comes to the forefront is so clearly miserable.
With the benefit of hindsight I don't think VLD did everything perfectly by any means- even just regarding team Sincline I think Narti's death smacks a little too close of fridging, as she was the least developed of the generals and it's not totally pleasant to wonder if her stoic nature and nonverbal communication style were intentional, interesting character bits, or the writers fully expecting her to not be around for very long- it's a very solid show in a lot of ways and has a lot of hay to be made. I've joked with my boyfriend that the biggest 'problem' with it is that it's so easy to want more of every character and planet and detail because it's a very, very full world and plot with a lot of robust ideas that it inevitably can't give all of them 'enough' time.
There was a while I batted around a hypothetical voltron fancontinuity but ultimately, that petered out for me. It's no longer a big spin, though it is something I greatly enjoyed and hold fond memories of. I do think it'd be really interesting to imagine a take of it where Team Sincline does make it to full deuteragonist team status, which poses an interesting challenge because exactly as you point out in your ask, we'd have to figure out what they're doing early on and how to introduce the characters and give them enough time to develop for them to feel like 'alternate main characters', while still having the screentime of the main guys.
Happy writing, OP!
Ahh, I am so happy to have received a reply! and such a long one, too (and the tags are gold, too! Love them, haha XD!) I am glad if I could provide you with an opportunity to remember some good old times.
But yes, never delete those older posts, because they might yet prove extremely good resources for even other fans, should they ever decide to write more fanfiction on Team Sincline themselves (whether they plan do do fanfics closer to canon, or entirely jump the rails and go into self-inserting, like I do). I especially love that you go into their team dynamics and the importance of Narti herself as the social glue that held them all together. Narti is so underappreciated, never even got her own voice actor, never spoke a single line, and yet, her death at Lotor's hands caused him to lose his entire team! Honestly, I believe she deserved better, especially as a disabled character. Her psychic abilities are also interesting, in how she uses touch to control other people temporarily.
I get what you mean with Lotor as a 'self-saboteur', and I think that this is the part about him that resonates with me the most, aside from him having abusive and neglectful, malicious parents. Heck, anyone who was abused probably sees a lot of themselves in him. I know this is a reason as to why I latched on to him and his team way more than the protags of the Voltron Paladins.
And I guess a big part of me wants for Lotor to get out of his self-sabotaging ways, so in my AU, the main question is "what if someone had been there who refuses to let him slide into self-sabotage? What if someone was there for him until the end, even if he thrashes out against everybody like a frightened animal?"
I guess that is the point of my seer/self-insert character. I want to write a 'what if' scenario in which Lotor's self-destruction could be avoided (in this case with the inclusion of a new character to the story) - of course, that would come with great difficulties as well. I love that joke of him shaking his seer like a vending machine XD I think a seer by his side would also greatly unsettle him in a way as well, because the potential is there that someone might see through his carefully crafted walls, especially if they are psychic.
Now I wonder how his self-sabotaging ways would flare up if that seer turns out to be in love with him, and very kind and nurturing. She'd understand him even without her psychic powers because he has trauma responses that she knows from herself. Ooof, the delicious drama of him trying to push her away at first! And of her growing a backbone eventually and refusing to let him kill Narti by stepping in before he can kill her!
What do you think of this? How would Lotor, by your estimation, react to someone like that on his team?
Not to mention how much I love letting my insert loose to befriend Lotor's generals! Narti would be besties with her as a fellow psychic!
