I’ve been thinking about Lotor’s motive.
Bear with me, this is a long one, folks.
Saying what his motive exactly is seems kinda difficult, but I think it’s easy to say what it isn’t.
In my opinion, it seems to stem greatly from his hatred for Zarkon, yet at the same time he doesn’t seem to want revenge per-say on Zarkon, since he was fine either way with Zarkon living or dying. His motive isn’t revenge.
He also remained indifferent to being booted off the throne when his father came back to life. That means his motive isn’t something related to power or control, even a structural ambition. It also is, quite obviously, not to gain his father’s love or affection. Curiously enough, however, he’s not indifferent to Zarkon; he’s insulted by the mere idea of being anything like him. He hates Zarkon, or at least who Zarkon has become.
Lotor is also rather indifferent to Voltron, but only in the respect of whether the lions live or not. He’s quite interested in their mechanics and the way they form Voltron, but as far as Voltron itself goes, he just wants the team out of his business. If he can “round up the lions,” that’s a victory, but if they disappear in an alternate reality, it’s also a victory. He seems neither interested in destroying it nor capturing it as a first resort, so his motive isn’t directly related to Voltron.
That said: I’d say his motive is a very personal one; he lost someone he loved, and now he’s working to do something for them or in continuation of their legacy.
There are two possibilities for this:
1. Lotor wants to carry on Honerva’s legacy
2. There’s another person we haven’t met yet who was important to Lotor
I know that it would likely make more sense for Lotor to be completely lost in Honerva’s work and legacy, but I’m somewhat leaning towards the second possibility.
That said, I’m going to entertain both:
For the first possibility:
Lotor clearly respects Honerva’s work. He thinks that what she has done is permanent and powerful, and he’s disappointed when he can’t re-open the rift. He’s spent so much time on the math and planning of getting to that point, only for it to fail. He has also clearly invested an inane amount of time and energy in channeling “ancient” Altean magic to purify quintessence to such a degree—a purity that matches Voltron’s own (you can tell because their quintessences are both blue lmao). If we assume Haggar is the most perfect magic form of Honerva, then it’s safe to say Lotor’s already better at magic that Haggar will ever be. He may even come close to Allura in terms of power, so we can assume he’s studied under some Altean, or at least read a good volume of information about them.
Even though it sounded completely empty to many Lotor fans, his motive is at least partially rooted in harvesting quintessence between realities, like Honerva did. What he hopes to use that quintessence for is the real question, because we already know Lotor doesn’t want power for power’s sake.
Perhaps he thinks he can revive Honerva somehow.
Maybe he wants to build Honerva’s ideal schematics that went unfinished.
Maybe he was hoping to find Honerva somewhere in the rift.
Regardless, this would give us a trigger point for Lotor’s hatred of Zarkon (not that it’s necessarily paramount for a neglected child to have any sort of breaking point, but for simple cartoon’s sake, let’s say there is one).
When Zarkon and Honerva went into the rift with his mother, and both of them were declared dead, and there was a large total funeral held for them, then only Zarkon came back to life—to a young Lotor, that must have seemed devastating.
Not to mention the way Zarkon immediately defamed Alteans, the way he declared all-out war and started on a power-filled rampage for thousands of years. Ouch.
That leads me to something I’m very solid in believing: he and Zarkon fought. They had a duel, as prompted by Lotor, and if Honerva is truly his motive, he challenged Zarkon because Lotor assumed Zarkon killed her.
Really, the only evidence I have of this duel is the scar over Zarkon’s left eye, which /could/ have come from Alfor... though, when you think about it, the angle of the fallen Narti could have easily been a cover-up to a “left-eye” wound. Parallelism and all that.
A duel also would have been a good way to get exiled from the empire. Not to mention, this happened in GoLion. You know who saved Lotor from being killed by Zarkon in that duel?
Which is what I think happened in this case too. For some reason, Haggar reasoned that killing Lotor would do more harm than good, and Zarkon listened, which is partly why Lotor doesn’t hate Haggar. (Also, he’s not stupid, he’s probably suspecting Haggar is Honerva, even if it’s just a little voice in his head). He might think that with the right quintessence, he can wake Haggar up? Or maybe he just wants to carry on her work. It’s unclear.
Now, the second possibility: he lost someone we haven’t meant yet.
I just don’t see Honerva as having a personal relationship with Lotor at all; she seems so distant and quintessence-driven when Alfor speaks to her shortly after Allura’s birth. That’s not to say she never cared about Lotor; I’ve read a few theories where Lotor was sick and that’s the only reason both of his parents worked so intensely, to cure him.
The sick thing, I definitely see as a possibility, but during this, it would be foolish to assume that Lotor saw his mother everyday. Any love he has for her, I see as something idealistic and skewered. He might love the idea of a good mother who invested all of her time and energy into healing him or building an empire, but if they spent no time together, his love must be quite empty.
This in mind, someone had to tend to Lotor, and it certainly wasn’t Zarkon. Ergo, it was someone we don’t know.
For now, I’m assigning this figure the character of Amue/Romelle, because if it’s anyone who already exists, it’s likely someone both Altean and also connected to the royal family. It would explain why Lotor is skilled at such advanced magic, and if Amue/Romelle ever worked with Alfor, it would explain why Lotor is so amazing at engineering and how he already knew how to build ships from the comet. It also lends some kudos to the original series where Lotor is so impacted by Allura because she resembles someone in his past (specifically his mom in this case), and kudos to the Voltron + Robotech comics where Zarkon kills his mother right in front of Lotor, and Lotor is devistated. Amue/Romelle certainly isn’t his mom, but she’s likely the only character left that would look like Allura enough to really impact Lotor emotionally. (I mean, they might scrap that part altogether, but I think it’s pretty important ya know).
Again, I see a duel happening between Lotor and Zarkon, this time because of something that happened to Amue/Romelle, and this leads to Lotor’s exile.
His motives, in this scenario, are less clear, but I want to point something out first.
It’s already clear that VLD is drawing parallels between Keith and Lotor. Among many things, they share an exile from their affiliated institution. Keith was exiled because he was so distraught over losing Shiro. Lotor was exiled because?
Likely because he lost the person most precious to him. Only, unlike Keith, Lotor never got Amue/Romelle (or even Honerva, if we’re going off of the first theory) back.
In a way, Lotor is a twisted version of a Keith that never got to save the person who stood by him the most. Heavily invested in one cause that only he really understands, willing to break laws and make new allies just to achieve his means, completely isolated from any family he may have made along the way. It’s interesting to ponder.
That said, Lotor truly feels like he owes someone something. Whether he’s trying to find a way to carry on Amue/Romelle’s legacy or he’s just trying to bring her back to life or cure her of some fatal wound that a healing pod alone cannot heal—even if his motive is completely rooted in Honerva—he seems completely invested in something undeniably tied to his deepest emotional connections. He can lose anyone and everyone so long as he can do this one single thing he needs to do, and until then, he can’t die.
I love love love all the possibilities we have for Lotor. I’m puMPED.
