Been thinking about Keith, been thinking about the implications behind how Keith had an early-life trauma he was poorly equipped to talk about and had very little information on (loss of his parents), and that given his parents’ situation, in particular the fact that his mom had some very powerful and very dangerous enemies and his dream sequence in s2e8 features a large galra army advancing destructively / loudly towards him that traumatic separation might not be his only early-life trauma.
Thinking especially about how the implication is that Keith was cycled around multiple foster houses without much consistency, which I doubt the majority of those fosters were bad people, but Keith would have less permanence and not be in contact with people who knew him for a long time, which would hamper self-reflection.
I also think about how a lot of the way Keith in s3e2 and s3e3 gets incredibly snappy flying the Black Lion feels like sensory overload- he’s just incredibly high strung and seems to have difficulty processing all the feedback he’s getting at once and is losing details in a way that’s unlike him.
And that Keith tends to harshly play up his own perceived failings- he self-describes as a loner, in the vlog he says he has a “bit of a temper” (and the amount of flashbacks to every minor time he’s raised his voice at someone suggests that he lingers on it a lot), in s2e8 he’s afraid of Shiro perceiving him as selfish, and despite being a very competent second-in-command who’s not cut out for solo leadership but that’s about it, is insistent that he’s a bad fit and unworthy when Black and Red make it clear he isn’t.
What it all seems to boil down to is Keith is in a position where he’s a lot higher strung than “normal” people- again, early life trauma, no real sense of foundation or certainty, that leading to heightened sensory sensitivity, and Keith really isn’t good at meaningful self-reflection because he’s been cut off from a lot of those resources. In the vlog he struggles hard to describe himself and basically states his job and exasperatedly asks someone offscreen what else he’s possibly supposed to say. When he starts digging at deeper emotions he breaks down crying and bolts.
And I read an excellent meta earlier that Keith tends to perceive any negative emotion in himself- frustration, distress, sadness- as anger, and again in the vlog, as soon as he gets even slightly frustrated by not understanding a social cue, he immediately turns incredibly apologetic and guiltily says he has “a temper”.
When the implication is that Keith’s actual problem is that he’s set up to accumulate stress faster, and deal with it worse, than most of the people around him, and he’s spent his entire life diagnosing this as “I’m just a total asshole” which is probably one of the major reasons he tends to, ironically, sit on his problems in silence until he can’t take it any more and explodes. He doesn’t see himself as someone with heightened sensitivity or someone who’s emotionally vulnerable, when he’s pretty blatantly both- he sees himself as a jerk who gets mad at every little thing.
TL;DR I think Keith misdiagnoses his own stress responses as irrational anger and several of his life circumstances and formative incidents have set him up to be a very high-strung person.
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