A mainstream show would be written by cishet white men focusing on cishet white male character/s with target audience being cishet white people and has track record of treating its already small cast of poc, women, and queer people like shit, and the fandom watching it would still be like, "they will absolutely make the fandom favourite yaoi ship canon and everything wrong with this show would be fixed because the fandom favourite yaoi ship became canon. Trust 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻"
Fandoms are like- All the adult female characters who are nice are mom/mom friends except the female character who is an actual mom, no she's either abusive bitch or dead or both despite in canon she is loving but flawed
Hello! Really random but I was talking to a friend about the deal with the “evil altean” alternative universe that unfortunately exists and knew you had some thoughts on it!
I want to be able to explain it better but you have a better understanding than I do! I hope you don’t mind me asking your thoughts on it!
Hollow-dweller has explained it much better than i ever could here and here, and most of my reply is just giving out the same points they made. Anyway in my opinion Hole in the Sky is a shit ass episode and i deeply resent it.
To start with this episode is another example of Reverse Racism the vld writers love so much and one of the many many many many Many examples of the fact that vld is very much written by white writers for a white audience and focusing on a white UsAmerican narrative that pretends to be progressive and inclusive but is absolutely shallow in its ideals and is not at all sympathetic towards minorities, victims of oppression, and those who are not white american. Furthermore this episode is yet another example of this shows contant need to criticize and punish Allura for wanting to reconnect with her dead people and culture.
First of all lets look at the motivation of Empress Allura that led her into making a colonizing mind-washing empire out of her once peace loving diplomatic people. Apparently it is similar to main reality in that the Galran attack and Alfor was killed, however this time they went with Allura's plan in the first episode to bring voltron together which leads to the Galran empire's defeat and Altea becoming the colonizing force instead (i rewatched that stupid episode just to answer this ask, so yes this is literally what happened in that episode. While the evil alteans dont say that Empress Allura brought the voltron together, it was jds who mentioned in an interview that that's what happened)
Problem with that is we already know how Allura would react to such situation! In canon! And sure she was (rightfully) hurt and angry about it, but she never let go of her kindness because of it! She lost her father And her planet And everyone she ever loved and still remained a kind and giving person to her own detriment.
And inspite of what your average Allura-hating Keith/Lotor/Klance stan would have you believe, her hatred towards Galran was never this deep to the point of enacting unjust violence on them, let alone destroying the universe because of it. Yes she was distrusting of Ulaz except he also broke into her castle and beat up her teammates which most likely did colour her opinion. Yes she was cold towards Keith except it only involved side-eye and a cold comment for which she apologized in the very next episode without anyone else's prompting. And people bring up her actions against Lotor after his reveal and rage against good!Zarkon to say she's a bigot, and i am sorry i don't have to explain how that's just plain stupid, all i can say is that even after everything the stans still think that she didn't deserve to kick both their asses let alone genuinely consider she was in the wrong then i am sorry but there really is no hope for them.
Also even if she had a damning corruption arc, do you really think Coran and the paladins of the old who very likely were alive to defeat the galran would have let her go that far? Do you really think she wouldn't have crumbled immediately if Alfor's Ai had come to know about this and looked at her with shock, pity, and disappointment?
Not to mention Alteans were established to be a peace loving diplomatic species. How did they end up being this colonizing brainwashing race? This was certainly not written to be a nuanced take on topics like "trauma and tragedy causing a massive shift in a culture causing continued cycle of violence" or "Oppression is relative in nature", because this was only one episode. One episode and the only thing we get is "All Alteans in this reality are evil" with no "it's not black or white" notion this series wants to preach but absolutely fails at.
This show does this thing a lot where it's much more critical of victims being angry at their treatment while coddling the perpetrators. Galra get the "They are not All Bad, they were just following Zarkon's orders who is also Not All Bad poor baby just got corrupted by bad quintessence and also if you are mean to them you are just as bad uwu 🥺🥺🥺". Meanwhile Alteans are just, "All Alteans in this reality are evil", and there's certainly no corrupting purple quintessence involved cause otherwise everything would be purple.
And yeah i knowww it's because it's one off episode vs entire series but it still could and should have been better. Have Sven be an Altean which actually makes sense given Guns of Gamara represent Blade of Marmora in this reality, or make it so it's not Allura who created this empire, or better yet! Just Don't Write that episode! One of the links i added above talks about an alternative dark!Allura which i found to be much more interesting and provided for a much more meaningful introspection and possible arc for Allura without turning into another "Oppressed can be as bad oppressors" shallow life lesson white people seems to think is height of nuanced truthful worldview. You could have had a Galra-won bad end timeline to establish multiple realities. There were just so many options.
And of course this episode is another example of putting down characters of colour to put fucking Keith on pedestal. All throughout the episode is Keith as this "logical, voice of reason who's always correct" white-coded man, While making Allura out to be "illogical dumbass who nearly handed clearly evil alteans an ore that would threaten all the realities all because she wanted the help from those Alteans 🙄🙄🙄" Black-coded woman. Maybe it was her trauma and wishful thinking talking but i feel like the moment she heard them call her Empress Allura while a Shiro looking hates Alteans, she should atleast some suspicions. But nope, Allura has to be an idiot specifically because she wants to get in touch with her culture while Keith is the extremely Specialist Boy who is always right. I fucking hate it here.
And of course the shit cherry on the top of this enormous shit pile of tone-deafness, you have this episode framing Alfor's decision to hide the lions be that if they had formed it.... It would result in evil altean reality. Not because the head of voltron is controlled by Zarkon, not because it's an extremely powerful weapon with very high chance of falling into wrong hands, not because they did not have enough paladins to pilot the whole thing, not because it was literally a losing battle. Nope! Apparently it was possible to win the war 10k years ago, but there was a possibility that living Alteans, including his own daughter would go on to take over the universe for asinine reasons so he pretty much hid the weapon so that the Galran can take over the universe and take over the universe and destroy multiple planets including his own. Yup this is totally a normal and logical thought process to have, nevermind that Alfor's ai literally says they should have gone with Allura's plan in the very first episode. Yup this a totally normal and logical thought process to have/s
Tldr- it's a shit ass episode
Honestly if you want to improve on it/keep it's elements here are my suggestions-
Make it a Lotor focused episode instead of Allura focused episode. Let other reality Lotor be the one who formed the empire instead of Allura. Especially if you want to redeem him. He's the one this obsessed with Alteans and this hateful towards Galran. He's the one who believes in sacrificing as many people as there needs to be in order to achieve peace. (In this episode it is implied he cause the death of many pilots while trying to get the Ore). Let him see this version of him who has achieved what he could only dream of, except he can stare in horror seeing a version of him has become just like their father
Or
2) Make Sven and Slav be unreliable narrators being lied to by Guns of Gamara and the two Alteans we see as lying liars who lie. Make these two Alteans extremists lying to Allura because they truly believed that she would agree with their plans and wanted to impress her. There's no Altean empire just Altean planet ruled by one of Allura's descendant who's trying extremely hard to arrest this extremist almost cultish group. No they haven't captured entire planets but instead kidnapped few aliens and brain washed them and the descendant is trying their best to stop these idiots. Have Sven and Slav be ex-victims of brainwashing by the extremist Alteans only to be "saved" By Guns of Gamara, who is anti-Altean faction who lied to them that the Alteans have colonized the entire universe whereas the truth is Alteans are just.... Alteans. Nothing sinister going on.
Enough about men, where's Allura's torrid toxic yuri situationship with a batshit insane morally corrupt woman? Where's her Will-they-wont-they rivalry with this rogue/assassin type selfish woman with a permanent smirk on her face who's only fucking up everything for unknown reasons and for the love of the game and causing as much chaos as possible? She deserved it
@severewonderlandstarlight why would you do this to me?/j (also I just realized my askbox got closed? Eh I'll fix it later)
I am gonna get hate for this but personally I feel it's overrated. I can see why it was and is still liked so much, (rivals-to-lovers and water-and-fire, red-and-blue and opposites attract are like staple in shipping side) and don't get me wrong some shippers have made some genuinely incredible pieces of work around this ship, but it's also like fandom treats it like this ultimate example of queerbait when in truth in canon it was barely developed.
And maybe it's because I personally dislike K3ith's character and the way the show prioritised his character over everything including the plot but for me the few canon moments that are there are only to benefit K3ith's character. Which brings to my second opinion which is that I don't get this insistence that canon KL could have fixed vld. Cause like no, almost all of the problems in this show happened because of just god awful mismanagement, writers and eps very obvious racism, misogyny, and ableism, and the fact that they shat out 8 seasons in merely 2 years.
Insisting that the only thing wrong with the show was a fanon ship not becoming canon (whether it be KL or let's be most of the mlm K3ith ships because no way the writers would have let their precious self insert be interested in men, especially male characters of colour they love to humiliate and kill) just ignores all the terrible ways they managed to fuck up such a diverse cast. Even if kl were to become canon what's more likely to happen was Lnce being reduced to K3ith's damsel in distress therapist boyfriend who ends up getting killed for K3ith's development.
So yeah, I admit i used to like this ship, but i have grown tired of it both because it's Everywhere and because I have lost interest in shipping in general. I still enjoy it time to time, but overall meh ship, Lnce can do and deserves better/j
(This isn't me hating on the shippers btw, if you are a kl shipper reading this-do whatever you want pal! as long you all are minding your business and not sending death threats over stupid ships literally just do whatever you want)
