Okay but there’s a very clear thing with the layout here that’s absolutely wonderful and where they put everyone -
All the current Paladins are matched up with their predecessors in the background, and the people who’ve lion-switched are kind of in between/closer to where they’ve ended up.
So Hunk is off frame of this grab I found up front with Gyrgan, Pidge is in front of Trigel. Shiro and Keith are closest to Zarkon, with Keith lagging behind a little - enough for Alfor to also be close by. Lance is in front of Alfor looking back at Allura, which puts both her and Lance also close to (Out of frame mostly) Blaytz.
I am really disappointed in vocal fandom, and anybody who wants to claim it’s queer activism can fuck right the Hell off.
A major thematically important side plot about love and redemption centered on a lesbian couple with a happy ending “doesn’t count” because apparently wlw ceased existing and are unimportant. A major leader figure and important character being openly gay and getting a happy ending with a wedding and an on-screen kiss “doesn’t count” because the partner wasn’t a major character. And all this with copyright holders that have been very vocally noted to be draconically conservative.
We’ve got a Y-7 action series that I can’t show conservative family members because they’d be livid that the “gay agenda is being pushed on poor innocent children”, and every kid that’s been watching - and buddy, I get more recognition of my shirts and stuff from kids than I do “adult fandom” - gets to see a wlw couple and a gay marriage treated as normal relationships with happy endings as a good thing, but no, even the people who wasted hot air talking about how “I know my ship won’t be canon, I’ll be happy if they both live and get a good epilogue, at least we’re not like the more visibly toxic part of entitled fandom that was sending death threats en masse, we respect that it’s not our show uwu” is pitching fits about their ship not being canon and claiming it’s activism.
And if you want to explain to me, after I grew up hammered on all sides with how queer people were unnatural and awful whose first exposure to the idea of queer people as PEOPLE was Vanyel of Valdemar and who didn’t see queer characters in major media ESPECIALLY for kids getting to be both major heroes and have happy endings until I was grown, how no really this is a betrayal of queer people, you can just fuck right off and hit unfollow or block now, because you have jack and shit to do with caring about queer people on this one.
Sam built the Atlas by improving on Altean designs and schematics the way he did with Galra ones while they were making him work for them, specifically working with the archives on the Castle.
You cannot tell me that he did not get into Alfor’s shit while building the Atlas, in addition to the general Altean schematics and Coran’s/Coran’s grandfather’s,
Which would COMPLETELY explain the Atlas’s sudden “what is the ship doing what wait it can do that what where did this come from” moment,
BECAUSE THAT’S JUST HOW ALFOR’S SHIT WORKS AND NOBODY WARNED SAM ABOUT IT.
Like literally, Voltron itself was: “ALFOR WHAT IS IT DOING” “IDK GO WITH IT”
And Coran just went “oh okay we’re doing this now” and looked so focused and Okay With This because he recognized some of Sam’s stuff being built off some of Alfor’s while he was helping with it and Just Knew.
He Knew the Atlas was going to do SOMETHING nobody had built into and nobody planned for, because Sam Used Something of Alfor’s and Alfor Was Like That.
(Does this make that last battle a beyond the grave Engineer Bitchfight In Spirit between Honerva and Alfor? I mean, she’s still technically undead...)
In an area reachable from Keith’s shack, probably buried, there is:
Krolia’s busted up fighter.
Probably at least pieces of 3-4 other Galra fighters.
And considering there weren’t armored bones hanging around when they found Blue, three or so dead Galra in military scout armor.
Which is amazing when you realize that Keith was intelligent, dedicated, and observant enough to almost find the Blue Lion, and focused on investigating alien threats.....
And managed to not trip over any of it due to a lucky monsoon rain unburying something or something.
I am pretty sure his entire story was mostly fabricated as a way to lure people in so he could trap them.
The rotting food was actually the first clue - someone who’s living in a place is going to NEED supplies, not leave them to rot. The only reason for it to all be rotting is if the person staying there doesn’t need it.
AKA “Either he had other supplies elsewhere or he didn’t actually need them”. I kinda lean towards the latter because the Druids have always been kind of unnatural and Haggar’s pets, and we KNOW she’s messed with both some very skidgy kinds of energy and altering living things... And honestly, Macedus with his mask off looks kind of dessicated, much like the change that happened to Zarkon and Honerva when they revived as Space Liches. This is why I think him being from that planet is a part of his ruse/the story he’s come up with to get people to hold still long enough to trap them; he looks (like he used to be) Galra when he takes the mask off, and his entire ruse of being one of the locals who survived in hiding would...not really work if he DIDN’T take up their clothes to pass off as one of them.
(It’s possible there WAS an actual trapped survivor that is probably dead now, with Macedus killing them and taking over their hideout/their clothes to trap any stragglers he could lure in.)
Krolia starts getting up and restlessly snooping not long after he starts the part about Kolivan deciding to call all the Blades together for a Heroic Last Stand.
She is a Good Spy, and Good Spies find out what trap they’re in before they spring it. Nothing about that idea sounds like anything we’ve seen or heard of the Blade’s philosophies and tactics. The Blades have survived thousands of years by vanishing and being good at vanishing, they’ve emphasized self-sacrifice as a last resort and “don’t go back for someone trapped, one casualty is better than two or three and that one should be able to take care of themselves if there IS a way to get out”. KOLIVAN has emphasized it and gotten grouchy more than once about it. The Empire is collapsing and yeah, they’re now known and more visible, but that DOESN’T prevent them finding ways to hide who they are, infiltrate groups, and otherwise disappear; it just means they have to be more careful about it.
I figure that’s where Krolia realized they were in a trap, she just knew that if she called it out, it would snap shut before she’d had a chance to get intel; keeping him talking meant more time to figure out what was going on.
So, I don’t think Kolivan called the Blades to that planet; either the Druid trapped Kolivan and got the code from him to use it to lure them in, or Kolivan was investigating who was using their code and got caught.
There obviously was a large battle between the Druids and the Blade, but “gather for a last stand” is standard Imperial “VICTORY OR DEATH”, not Marmoran tactics. My guess is that either there was a significant group of Blades trying to back the locals up and the Druids took advantage and came in ambushing Blades that were there outside of a fight/ambushing Blades that were in the middle of a different fight, or the Druids used the populace and the Blade’s codes to set up a trap to gather as many of the Blade as they could in one place. Kolivan was either coming in to investigate what’d happened to them/who was using their codes, or had been caught already and was how they GOT the code to begin with, and was likely NEVER the actual willing source of the signal.
Macedus probably was the only surviving Druid out of the fight. If there were survivors among the Blades/local populace, they probably fled and never looked back, because a trap set by a large group of Druids is not a thing you ever want to return to... and odds are, he’s been at luring Blades who haven’t heard that it’s a trap out there for a *while*.
Okay, going to poke at one of those unpopular opinion things in VLD fandom:
I don’t actually see anything wrong with the lion swaps, and don’t think it’s contradictory with the idea that the lions have preferences in their Paladins and form connections.
A lot of the general understanding seems to be the lions being the stereotypical kind of fantasy Bonded Creature, except they don’t actually follow a lot of the closest examples of that genre.
In fact, Voltron and the lions are a very different scenario, since they exist primarily to work AS A GROUP, not as a bunch of sets of independent pairs.
A couple of the big iconic forms of the trope, off the top of my head, are Pern dragons, the dragons from Eragon, and the Companions and Bond-birds of Valdemar, and I know a lot of the fandom probably at least had some exposure to one or another of these. All of these have a similar idea to them as the “familiar” type of connection; there’s a large number of them, and individual creatures bond directly to an individual person, in a way that the life of the creature is directly tied to their partner. Pern dragons even take this to the point of having very little agency of their own, and Eragon dragons from what I remember aren’t hugely ahead of that on agency. They’re extensions of their riders that live for their rider and die with their rider, one way or another. Companions have a little bit of an edge in agency since they’re in-verse meant to be morality checks on those in power, but are still tied to their bondpartner specifically and independently of other pairs and other ties.
In all of these cases, the creatures are something where it’s a one to one connection, with a lot of their power and purpose tied up in their connection to specific individual humans, to the point that many of them die when their partner does.
And all of these exist as discrete pairs of Person and Creature that work with similar pairs, but the highest unit is the pair, not the group.
The lions aren’t a one to one that exists for the sake of their Paladins. The lions outlive their Paladins, and the lions exist as part of a larger unit that is greater than the sum of its parts.
So, for one, we already know it’s not an inviolate situation where the Lion exists only for One Specific Person; if that were the case, the lions would’ve either shut down when the old generation died, or Shiro never would’ve been able to work with Black in the first place. After all, a major complication at the end of S1 and conflict in S2 was that Zarkon’s bond with the Black Lion was still there, and Shiro wasn’t ready yet to challenge him for it. Shiro managed to cut it off by confronting Zarkon in a way that gave the lion the final say, but before that, Zarkon’s connection was still a very real thing. Moreover, we already had one incident of a lion working with someone else in an emergency, with Keith in S1.
For two, it isn’t a scenario where all we’re dealing with is one to one bonds between Lion and Paladin. The lions are all tied to each other as parts of Voltron, and that gives the Paladins a bond as a group that’s been emphasized since the first episode. Which Paladin is in which Lion is as much a function of their role within the group as their individual temperament - Yellow and Blue acting as supports, Red and Green taking more active roles, while Black functions as a coordinator. Voltron itself only forms if the Paladins are acting in tandem as a unit, and some of its strongest powers - the Blazing Sword and using the bond to overpower the thing trapping them in S5 - came from the lateral bonds between the group in some fashion as much or more than the ties between each individual paladin and their lion.
It’s not a bunch of pairs, it’s a GROUP working as a UNIT. When the old Paladins mostly died and Zarkon went off rails, the lions found a new group that could also work as a unit. When Shiro died, the lions were the ones with the control over who went where, and it was a matter of group dynamic and group roles changing; the lions shifted who was where to respond to the changing situation and try to get the group dynamic functioning the way it should again.
Lance going from Blue to Red wasn’t a matter of some kind of severance from Blue, it was Lance being capable of Red’s forward-active role and doing the angle of support the Red Paladin was expected to do for the whole team just as well as he could do Blue’s more background role. The same goes for Keith’s shift when Shiro died and Black intervened to arrange things so he could be saved; Keith had the potential to lead once he worked through his issues, while before that with Shiro, the team was strongest with him functioning as Shiro’s second and taking Red’s role.
The lions have agency, an existence that is greater and longer than any individual Paladin of theirs, and the bonds have always been among the group just as much as “Paladin to Lion”; in fact, considering how much relies on Voltron being stronger together, arguably the group dynamic and group bonds are almost more important than the individual lion bonds, and that’s what makes the lion swaps make sense.
And the current shift with Shiro and Black? This isn’t a series where the non-Paladin support cast has been forgotten or unimportant. Black giving him a chance to rest and re-adjust to living again is not exactly bad for him after everything he’s been through.
Summary: Pidge starts a project to find a way to call home and contact their families, and recruits Slav to make sure it can't be traced. She loses track of working on it in the excitement; Slav doesn't.
And after the events of the last battle, while the Castle is damaged and recovering, they all need it.
(Title and chapter titles are references to Radio Silence by Styx.)
Artwork by @ninnani ! Fic done as part of the @voltrongenminibang
