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Please explain in what way you think they treated Shiro badly in season 7.
well, its late and I’m not going to be at my peak for answering. If you’re honestly curious, there are people that have stated it all much better than I could and you can check my ‘seven salt’ tag for their very excellent points as well as my own when I am more awake (and Shiro wasn’t the only one whose story was poorly treated in season seven). But let me try to summarize my points as best I can and I am only doing the points that apply directly to my comment about Shiro being a PTSD amputee war vet and will not even cover the other representations he stands for and how those were misused and mistreated as well. Also I am including the clone in this summary because while he was not Shiro he too was a PTSD amputee war vet in all the ways that mattered and his experiences, while different, also reflect on the invasive message the show has regarding that.
where to start? Because the treatment didn’t start in season seven. It just culminated there. Should we start where the writers killed Shiro without any explanation despite the fact Zarkon took a flaming sword to the chest in the same battle and lived? Should we point out the way the clone of him was treated - through multiple cries for help that included: vulnerably confiding in Lance and also writhing and screaming in incredible pain in front of Pidge on a mission - that were never addressed or brought up by the team members that could have tried to find out what was wrong or help him? Should we point out the way the team immediately turned on the clone before they even realized he was the clone, going so far as having the writers make Hunk of all people ask if they should even go after him ‘since he wasn’t Shiro anymore’ even though no one knew what was wrong and the clone had been a supportive and consistent team member up to that point and they all knew what the Galra had done to him the last time they’d had him? Should we count the way the team was willing to violate the clone’s unconscious body and push another soul into it without even questioning the morality of it? Maybe we’ll skip right ahead to season seven where the loss of his arm seems to be the only canon difference (dying technically shouldn’t matter since canon showed us that Zarkon also died and was brought back to life while retaining his bond with Black and it was by something a great deal less benevolent than Allura) in the Shiro of season one and two, black paladin of Voltron, and season seven where he’s suddenly not only not flying the Black Lion but its never mentioned as if its not important at all (because? the viewers aren’t supposed to care why he’s not Black Paladin anymore? Is he so unimportant to the writers that they can’t even include an answer to what should be an obvious audience question?). Should we point out how he was constantly left aside in the writing for the first half of the series, to the point that a handcuff attached to his belt was enough to keep the same man that threw himself at Sendak with both hands chained behind his back in place while a fifteen year old was threatened with torture? How Keith left Lance in charge of the team despite Shiro being right there? Can we point out he didn’t make the game show that was supposed to only be for ‘people with great destinies? How about how - when they finally get to Earth - for some reason he actually flat-lines while they’re hooking him up to a new arm? Because dying for the second (or fourth) time in the show is really the route to go with someone that’s spent a year of his life tortured and fighting for survival to the point he lost a body part over it. Let’s skip ahead to the fight with Sendak, someone he’d fought to a stand still previously with what, one would hope, was a less advanced arm and in a body that was wracked by whatever muscle disease canon had given him and still, despite the new positives of a new arm and a healed body to his account, had his self-agency taken away from him and failed to even complete the basic story arc of a victim being able to win the fight against their oppressor. Maybe we can end it on the fact that, while the entire team wakes up surrounded by family and friends, Shiro is shown alone surrounded by lions he can’t connect with anymore, giving encouragement to others instead of having any for himself? The fact that he is shown to have one relationship that ended badly (when the person it was with told him to choose between them and his career choices, which I’m sure, I say in a completely dry and sarcastic voice, no soldier in a military relationship has ever heard before) and even that person wasn’t left for him to see again when he came back to Earth? The fact Shiro isn’t shown with any family at all and isn’t even shown with his team at the end?
Even if you can come up with answers that are suitable to you for all of these things, it doesn’t change the fact that you had to come up with reasoning for them in the first place. You had to fill in blanks to make these things ‘not bad’ because the writers didn’t even bother.
At what point did Shiro’s story have a fulfilling arc past season two? You can see Atlas as a positive, and the writers certainly want you to, but that doesn’t change all the other ways he was punished, pushed aside or written out of things without any story explanation (and the executive producers throwing out headcanon afterward to try to cover the holes in their story doesn’t matter if the majority of their viewers are never going to hear that.) To anyone watching, and judging the story by the story alone, the message is very clear
that an amputee without a prosthetic is ‘useless’ (Hunk can fly a lion while asleep, but the one armed man can’t?).
That a war vet isn’t allowed to form bonds with a group of friends or have a family,
that the ‘friends’ of someone dealing with PTSD will always be expecting him to turn on them for no reason and will abandon him when he does.
Keith is great but no one person should be the entire lifeline to someone else, that’s not healthy. At the end of season seven we see the war vet isolated from everyone he cares about, pep talking others. I can’t condone that kind of message and I won’t encourage other people to watch a show that preaches it by giving them free advertising on social media wearing a product I would have paid them money to own in the first place.
As said, those aren’t the only issues with his treatment in season seven. But I’ll let other people that he represented or who felt that their own experiences connected in other ways I haven’t talked about have their turn. I am also going to reply to you this way. I stated my stand on things once on @voltron‘s post in direct response to them asking me to promo their product. That was feedback. Filling up their promo/advertisement post with a barrage of tag and reply posts would be harassment however and that’s not how consumers upset with a product should react. Which is why I’m replying this way instead of directly to your reblog.
