snapdragonroar
replied to your post
“snapdragonroar replied to your post “So after Voltron season 5:...”
I thought you’d be all over ‘character is trapped inside their own mind, screaming, as they watch themselves used against their own.’
Oh, I super, SUPER AM. It’s just that with regards to Shiro, there just isn’t a lot of proof there yet beyond conjecture based on past genre tropes?
The case for mind control at this point is 1) assumes this is Shiro and Shiro’s body, and it has been the whole time 2) that he fell into Haggar’s custody at the end of season 2 and was released again in order to 3) presumably sabotage Voltron from within until some critical moment where he could see them destroyed or otherwise manipulated but which 3) was eventually turned instead to supporting Lotor which couldn’t have been pre-planned because Haggar didn’t yet know Lotor was her son.
The sense I’m getting from mind control, whether it’s Shiro or Kuron, is that it’s at odds with stealth. So far, Shiro’s “off” moments that lead to sabotage could just be chalked up to bad luck or stress. Normal Shiro has snapped at team members before, or insisted they follow his orders, or required pain and sacrifice from the team, or isolated himself, but before those had a more positive slant and he was quick to apologize if he sensed he’d hurt someone. He actively looked out for team members and sought them out to support them, something we really haven’t seen Shiro/Kuron do since the end of Season 2. Right now he feels like a parody of Shiro at his worst.
(I also can’t help but notice that he avoided interaction with Sam Holt, someone who would have known Shiro on the Kerberos mission very well as a colleague and might have smelled something fishy, whether it was cloning or mind control.)
But the more Haggar turns up the heat on Kuron/Shiro’s loyalty programming, the more at odds he behaves with Shiro’s true personality. Shiro, or a clone that thinks it’s Shiro, has a loyalty first to Voltron and his loved ones. You can almost pinpoint moments where the programming flexes its muscle and forces him to go against that loyalty in favor of Lotor or the Galra Empire.
The thing is, I think Haggar did a little too much, a little too fast, because now Shiro (or Kuron-who-thinks-he’s-Shiro) is now questioning his own behavior. I think, ideally, such mind control is designed for use only in a sleeper agent situation, where the agent would not be influenced too much in order to keep their normal personality intact and unquestioned so they can do subtle sabotage, or be used in a pivotal moment where victory for Haggar’s side is assured and where being stealthy and hiding the programming is no longer required compared to a quick and easy major victory (like flying Voltron into the side of a shield that will certainly kill them all?).
To go back to “screaming on the inside”, which I am SO IN FAVOR OF as a genre trope, I really think we’ve only got about 2 pieces of proof (though forgive me if I miss something, I haven’t seen the season enough times to have encyclopedic knowledge yet):
1) Shiro’s confession to Lance that he doesn’t “feel like himself.” (A line which felt eerily like an admission that he knows he’s a clone in its literal wording, to be fair) Which, like I said is because I think the loyalty program got pushed too hard so now he’s questioning, because Haggar acted clumsily. However, as far as we know this is the first time he’s questioned his own actions verbally and consciously, like because of being bumped up to Stage 4 Loyalty behavior. So if he’s screaming on the inside, it hasn’t been showing on his face or in his words until now.
2) Lance and Shiro’s “conversation” on the Astral Plain. The thing is, we have no idea how that worked. We know Paladin telepathic communication is disrupted by distance, Zarkon needed a ton of quintessence to track the Black Lion the way he did across space. So this could mean that
A) Shiro is physically far away (perhaps still imprisoned or unconscious somewhere else entirely??),
B) Shiro is on the Astral Plain physically and isn’t yet adept at communicating unless he’s reached out to first or
C) he is inside his own head, as discussed, screaming.
BUT he says he blacked out at that point. Which implies that there’s two personalities in his head and one gains consciousness when the other loses it? Certainly a genre possibility, but we simply lack proof.
I think we really are just at a point where lots of possibilities are still on the table, but the Voltron show itself hasn’t given us enough information to solve the mystery on our own, because it involves magic/technology that hasn’t been explicitly shown to us yet. We just don’t have the tools.
That said, if Shiro IS screaming on the inside trying to warn the others about his behavior, or in a slightly less dramatic example if he’s been subtly nudged to commit sabotage and is only just beginning to behave oddly enough that he notices the strange behavior in himself, hot DAMN is he going to be messed up when he comes out of it. He was already enslaved by the Galra Empire once, this would make for a SECOND TIME and this time with much higher stakes. He’s not just looking out for himself and Matt anymore, his actions could have put the entire GALAXY at risk.
