You know, I find Krolia and Keith quite interesting. I always figured that Keith’s mother would be a cool character, but the more I learn about her and the more I rewatch the episode, I learn just how deep and complex she is.
What do we know about Krolia? Well, not much besides three things: 1) she’s a Blade of Marmora agent, 2) she’s Keith’s mother, and 3) she left Keith when he was younger. They’re all sort of a given and paint a different picture depending on how you look at her, whether you wish to like her because she’s a badass like our firecracker son or hate her because she abandoned him, but the one thing we learned for sure is that she regrets leaving Keith because Krolia is compromised.
During the battle, Keith is captured and Krolia held at gun point. Like most other Blade of Marmora missions, this is when the Blades act on their “mission before all else” motto. If Krolia was a good agent, she would’ve left Keith to die, she would’ve destroyed the weapon like she originally meant to. She would’ve risked everything for the cause.
Instead she tries to barter.
I’m sorry, but when the fuck have we ever seen a Blade of Marmora agent try to barter with the enemy? When have we seen them try to save their fellow Blades, aside from Keith with Regris, or Kolivan with Keith: both, of which, were lessons designed to help Keith learn the “mission before all else” motto. Keith, for all intents and purposes, is dead in the water right now. He is captured, executioner poised behind him, and weaponless. It would take a single tick, and he’s dead.
Krolia, on the other hand, has a luxury. She has a weapon, two of them, and the skills that she could possibly fight her way out of this alive. Keith, however, would be lost. And what does she choose to do instead? If it was just a regular Blade, they’d try to escape or finish the mission. It’s what they do, it’s the oath they took. But Krolia is, as Keith mentions later, compromised.
And Keith reacts accordingly.
He’s never seen a Blade do this. He doesn’t understand.
Just hours before he was sent on this mission, Kolivan warned him about letting his feelings get in the way, about being too emotional, and compromising the mission. And Keith won’t do that. The only time we’ve seen this happen with him is the episode before where it was Shiro’s life on the line, arguably Keith’s only remaining family. He put Shrio before the mission, and it nearly cost him everything. Keith is determined not to screw up this time.
And then, he finds out, it’s not him who’s compromising the mission with emotions this time. It’s Krolia, who he knows to be a long-lived Blade member.
Not that this makes sense to Keith at the moment, because he hasn’t come to the realization as the rest of us, that this is Krolia person is Keith’s MOTHER. It’s his mom, the same mom who left him when he was a child, who abandoned him and is the reason he has these walls up, why he’s so untrusting. Can you imagine how Keith grew up, knowing his mother left him, thinking his mother didn’t want him?
And suddenly, here she is, acknowledging that she left him, but she won’t do it again. That’s how we know that leaving him in the first place, she regrets it. She’s regretted it probably all this time. And now that she has this chance to be with him, she won’t let him die. She’ll throw away the mission and the Blades just to keep him safe.
It doesn’t make sense you know? For Keith, it just doesn’t.
And of course, she has a plan. She plans to save their asses and get them both out alive. It’s something Voltron would come up with, but something the Blades wouldn’t. It’s something Keith did in Season 4 when he first saved Regris. But since then, Keith has learned time and time again how the Blades work. Keith is committed to the mission.
And this part really, really got to me. Because it mirrors this scene from the pilot episode, where Keith launches a hoverbike full of people off the edge of the cliff and tells them to “shut up and trust me.” It’s so telling that they’re related, that she’s his mother, and that he’s her son.
It’s one of the final nails in the coffin of truth for the viewers.
It kind of goes to show you the difference between them. Because these two scenes are parallels of each other, mirrors to show the similarities of these two: mother and son. But it reaches farther than that.
Keith is constantly accused of always going too far in his mission: leaping off a cliff edge, taking a sword to a king’s throat, getting angry and exploding at his teammates. It’s just how he is. It just goes to show that he’s sometimes go too far for the mission.
Krolia, on the other end, won’t go far enough. She risks everything just in hopes of getting her son and her out alive, not for the mission. She nearly gets them killed because of her antics, and in the end, the weapon they were trying to destroy is now free on that base, and there’s no telling what will happen with it in the future.
Keith knows this. He might have died, but they failed the mission. In his mind, the whole mission was a failure.
But not to Krolia, they escaped and now she has her son.
Everything else from here on out is up to you to decide. You can be upset that she abandoned Keith when he was younger, arguably when he was a child because he doesn’t remember her. He never made the connection, he always thought she left, like this isn’t a game. This isn’t someone who left when he was 8 and shit, this is someone who left before her child got to know her.
But she regrets it. Like she said, she won’t leave him again.
And this is going to be so hard for Keith to come to terms with. Because, for the first time in his life, he’s worth compromising a mission for, and for the Blades of Marmora, that’s the most dangerous thing to be… which is interesting if we consider why she left him in the first place.
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
titsay
