ok ok hold on. Now that I’ve watched season 2 I just want to sum up why I have such problems with the way Hunk and Lance get treated, beyond the fact that I just like them as characters:
At this point, we’ve gotten significant character development for Shiro, Pidge, and Keith. Their reasons for being a part of Voltron and fighting the Galra are established, or at least heavily implied– Shiro was a personal victim of the Galra and wants his memories back, Pidge wants her family back, and Keith, at least in terms of season one, just wanted to be around Shiro since he seemed to be Keith’s only current emotional support, and as of the end of season 2 wants answers about his heritage (congrats Keith you’re a fucking Galra. Whoop.)
…And Hunk and Lance are just. There. So far, we’ve been given nothing on their backgrounds in comparison to the others, and if anything they’d be the most interesting ones to look into at this point, specifically because they have no given reason for hanging around… other than that they’re really good, selfless people. And like. That’s fine but it’s not even acknowledged. They’re constantly written off as the idiots and dead weight of the team.
And here’s the thing… If they were a couple dumb white boys in any other show, that’d be annoying, but…. livable. But they’re not. Hunk and Lance are incredibly groundbreaking characters– They’re both visibly POC (we know Lance is Cuban and Hunk clearly isn’t white), and of the whole team, the most comfortable breaking gender stereotypes. Lance is distinctly feminine (to the point where there’s plenty of room to make genderqueer headcanons for him?), and Hunk shows interests and skills in things like cooking, sewing, and knitting, traditionally feminine activities.
And yet, they’re the constant secondary characters of the team, comedy relief and filler space. The things about them that break the norm in writing male characters– Hunk’s love of food, Lance’s feminine behavior, are treated as jokes. Especially this season, when they both felt annoyingly dumbed down. Hunk is a canonically established mechanical genius, and Lance was second in his class at an incredibly competitive military school and shows an obvious aptitude for strategical analysis and planning. They. Are. Not. Unintelligent.
Lance and Hunk are part of the main cast. They are not there for the “oh look he’s heavy-set and likes food!” and “he’s flirtatious and feminine!” jokes. They’re people as much as Pidge, Keith, Shiro, and Allura are, and they deserve to be treated like it.
I’m not saying they can’t ever be funny or make a joke– It’s clearly shown humor is how they cope with stress. It just needs to be clear in that distinction between humor as a coping mechanism and humor because they don’t understand what’s going on. The former is good writing, the latter is not.
And yes, I know the staff wrote season 2 before being open to the brunt of fan commentary and criticism, but they shouldn’t need criticism to realize that writing characters that represent minorities (and also hold representation for gender-nonconforming people), and relegating their only character traits to being “flirt” and “foodie” is Wrong. It’s shitty, shitty writing and I’ve known fan writers who knew better at 13 or 14, myself included.
Stop fixating on your forced heterosexual romances and Keith “I’m apparently half Galra and half fucking White boy” Kogane (Cogain? God his Dad’s white what is their last name going to be??) and give me good, proper development for these groundbreaking, amazing, POC, gender-defying paladins.
