Submitted for your consideration: the goldmine of potential torture that is Shiro's cybernetic arm. You don't really think the Galra would surgically attach a weapon to a prisoner without some means of turning it against him, do you? either by way of remote control or stuff wired up to send incapacitating pain signals straight into his central nervous system at the push of a button, or both. And getting the thing installed in the first place couldn't have been pleasant either, somehow I don't think the Galra are all that big on anesthetic. I ...might be braindumping some stuff for possible fic that deals with this and the equally awful process of disabling the torture functionality. I might be.
In the interests of fairness the Galra are phenomenally bad at security in general (e.g. Shiro's arm can operate their computers, no failsafe alarms if sentries are destroyed), but 1000% agreed on "what is anesthetic, that sounds like something for SISSY species." One of my major questions re: Shiro-torture which I assume they're going to answer is whether he lost his arm in the arena or something and they took advantage of the opportunity to test the experimental model, or if they strapped him down and sawed his arm off just for that.
I can totally see the Galra putting him in the arena a few times and thinking yes good this one puts up an entertaining fight, let's give him a little upgrade and see what he does with it.
That arm is one of the reasons I suspected from the start he'd eventually be revealed as a brainfucked sleeper.
Yeah, I could see it either way, really. There's definitely a lot of evidence towards them having messed with his head just in the first season. The amnesia, the huge discrepancy in his escape story (namely, "how did he get out of his cell in the first place"), the whole conversation where whatshisname the Galra commander keeps calling him a monster, the entire confrontation with the Druid lady, etc. (I've deliberately avoided the S2 trailers and previews, so I don't know exactly what went on there that has everyone expecting awful things to happen to Shiro. Please don't tell me.)
you know how there's that one tumblr post that goes around saying there's two types of fandom people, and one of them looks at their favorite character and goes "i want to take away everything that ever made you happy and break you down until you're a puddle of a person" and the other looks at their favorite character and goes "i wonder what they look like with five toys in their ass"? this fandom is the first time in a long time where i have two separate characters for that and shiro is the former. b r e a k h i m given the flashback in the first episode, when he remembers about the prisoner chambers, and that's one of the first memories that came back? i'm willing to bet they sawed it off for the fuck of it. and see this is why the keith rescue keeps getting to me because shiro is viewed with nothing but suspicion when he returns because of the damn arm. like i'm pretty sure one of the medics strapping him to the table said "i don't trust that, who knows what it could do" and shiro's like JUST LISTEN TO ME YOU FUCKS and no one's listening and then keith actually rescues him and takes a chance on him even with that arm and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaàáâäãåā too vague to tell, really, just some mad theorizing on our parts
I am Type 1 to the core. And the closer they are to my Fictional Crush archetype, the more I want to hurt them. Shiro is close enough on a few key points that I want to tear his mind apart. 888)))
so yeah I guess my ship for this series is Shiro / getting broken into tiny quivering bits and then having to come to terms with the simple fact that he has to let the rest of the team help him okay actually my actual ship ship is Shiro ♣ Lance and Keith and I don't care much whether Lance and Keith have a heart or a spade or both between them. Just... Shiro finding them rasslin' in inappropriate locations and just going >_< while pausing to figure out what manner of rasslin' it is this time before he yells at them to either break it up and shake hands, or go to one of their damn rooms already
okay but i already shipped shiro/keith and lance/keith and now i just want lance to be a little shit to shiro and call him dad and this confuses the man especially in the boner and lance keeps putting keith in compromising positions where it would be really easy for team dad to find them, almost like he wants to be caught, almost like he's showing off (basically por que no las dos is what i'm sayin') in the meantime i want to work on the fucked up shiro/pidge i have as a wip that's tentatively called "Let Not the Left Hand Know" because now just imagine shiro making his ptsd all pidge's fault (somehow) because pidge is a holt and it's obviously her fault everything went wrong on the kaladros mission because reasons. isn't it suspicious that pidge is pretty fluent with galra tech? does pidge want to trigger him? you'd better make that up to me pidge
like lbr the second shiro said "let's keep moving" in s1e1 (to pidge and keith in the galra ship) i had to look up that he wasn't voiced by shannon mccormick because there he is, there's my steel gray with yellow accents fucked up ptsd asshole son agent washington. and now i need to go rewatch s6 of rvb (because holy shit the wash/delta) but first i need to steel myself up for this feels trip.
"Shiro/Paladin hate blog" is so funny. I see it everywhere, but Shiro is a paladin and that always reads to me as considering him not one.
but he's oooooooooold and he's disabled ewwwwwwww on a more serious note, his beyblade WHY THE FUCK DID MY MIND DO THAT? BAYARD is in zargon's hands, and his prosthetic for his amputated arm was done with foreign and possibly dangerous technomagic, even zargon is like "you're not my real dad the true paladin of the black lion" so there's an argument there somewhere buried beneath all the ableism and "dat pedo tho"
i don't feel like pidge 'couldn't be respected' as katie holt -- she was too young to go with her brother, but it wasn't about gender. and when she was banned from the school, it was for nancy drew espionage shenans. there are plenty of female cadets. if anything, she disguised herself as her brother so she'd be taken as older than she is; she's the youngest of the paladins by a fair margin. as for why she became her brother rather than inventing a whole new female persona, it's a smart plan because they look a lot alike and she didn't have to fake up a family and residence and all that. so honestly, i think gender didn't really have much to do with her decision, and she resisted being outed mostly because of a complicated mix of habit, not wanting to be seen as a liar, being a fairly private person to begin with, and not really knowing who katie holt even IS anymore -- i mean, think back to your identity issues when you were a teenager, and add on having lived a deep cover persona for a couple years. much as i want trans representation, i like pidge as cis just because it'll be the first time in basically EVER that a girl-disguised-as-a-boy was outed and then didn't change anything about her appearance or how she relates to the people around her. and apart from lance's "surprises upset me" reaction, nobody changed how they relate to her either. i really, really like that.
*POINTS FINGERS AGGRESSIVELY AND DOES A BOWERBIRD DANCE* THIS FOREVER. i also love the way she comes out as cis because she's like "um some of us can't literally man up and that's kind of sexist, but i totally get what you're going for there and i'm 100% down with being courageous." although i mean. in voltron ld her "undercover name" is pidge gunderson (see: cutting hair flashback where lance and hunk are reading the register to find out who their teammate is), which i think is why it takes shiro looking at her actual face in her actual eyes when she makes an outrageous claim for a 'gunderson' like "commander holt is my father" before he's like "oh okay i get it you're definitely a holt." the general look, i agree, is that of her brother (haircut and glasses, "is that your girlfriend?"), but a matt holt already went through the academy and a commander holt is in the military and they know the whole holt family history already, so she definitely couldn't use the holt name. i mean, it's just an '80s reboot of a tv show, and i'm willing to overlook some logic because the characters are just so good, but. security holes everywhere, oh my jesus, not just in galra tech but also in academy issues--how the hell did a strange kid using an alias with a different gender, without a family, and having no background check make it into a military school? i can only assume pidge-the-superhacker strikes again which i am totally okay with because it gives me a nerd-on. and now i just want to read (maybe write, if i have to) a fanfic on who is pidge gunderson/what happened to pidge gunderson/who is katie holt/what happened to katie holt. i wonder how she broke the news to her mom that she was going to the academy. i wonder if she never told her, just went missing. i wonder if her mom's still looking for her. i wonder if she faked her own death.
how did i miss the gunderson thing? although her resemblance to matt did very probably still influence her choice of a male persona.
oh, i should say -- when i say 'disguised herself as her brother' i didn't mean she was pretending to be matt, i meant i thought she was saying the holts had another son in addition to or instead of a daughter. cuz i'd forgotten gunderson.
Because of Personal Reasons, I have a hard time using she/her to refer to Pidge, but then Pidge has stated "I'm a girl" and while that doesn't necessarily mean feminine pronoun set, I feel bad even sort of misgendering a cartoon character. So I've started having a grand time talking about Pidge without referring to any pronouns and still making the sentences readable. OH MY GOD PLEASE YES!!!!