space loser giant kitty committee (voltron)

So who wants to hear Zarkon singing Blondie? (please watch this video, I am dying of laughter)

 

He hums this to himself while searching for the black lion.

 

I could not watch all of it. Because they would have to revive my corpse and I'm in the clubhouse.

 

Neil Kaplan is a goddamn gift.

 

I DIE.

 

please watch this, for the love of god

 

I am up to Ark of Taujeer. And I feel deeply sorry for the crew of that particular commander. I am also side-eyeing Pidge for not thinking to reinforce a pod she put booster rockets on. tardigrade people!

I am kind of annoyed that the Galra commander is a little guy. Mostly because he is the spiritual opposite of Miles Vorkosigan. Good grief. (Now I am imagining Miles as a Galra commander. OMG.)

Coran, no. You are dumb.

Red agrees! Off she goes to rescue her Paladin!

Uh. Dude. Little dude. You were told to capture, NOT dunk in acid. (Why is a planet mostly made of acid?)

Little dude, you should definitely retreat. How did you even get in command of a ship? It was nepotism, wasn't it. You're some cousin of a cousin of someone actually important, and this is why you have command of a ship, way far away from the Hub, where all the actual decisions get made.

Uh. I think this would have been a good time to mutiny, crew-dudes. You know this joker ain't the real deal and the order he just gave is dumb. Consider the possibility of Fragging. (Which I would not be surprised if it was very common in the Galra military if they get commanders like this very often.)

Whoops, no need for anything, the ship is gone bye bye.

(I wonder what the voltron team would do if a Galra ship surrendered?)

To the rescue!

And now for the after battle debriefing, in which Shiro is the War Leader. And we end with a Startling Revelation.

 

Why is Coran HOT!???????

 

rip in pieces liz

 

I'm honestly wondering, now, why we haven't seen anyone going "no, captain, your orders are stupid and will get us all killed, and won't even benefit the empire on top of that" and mutinying. My best guess would be that Zarkon (and/or Haggar) have discouraged it so that it's seen as culturally Improper? Like, you don't mutiny, you challenge your captain to a duel or smth with proper rules and prove that you're better to lead the ship. Or possibly there's very little room, culturally, for challenging the leadership at all; you either survive a stupid leader or you don't (with the implication of "if you didn't survive a stupid leader, how smart could you have been yourself"), because giving room for people to challenge leaders they disagree with means that some cleverboots might go "...Emperor Zarkon isn't actually doing any good for the Empire, time to mutiny" and I suspect Haggar at least would've wanted to reduce the number of potential challengers for the throne.

That said, I am pretty damn sure that Little Dude got captaincy via nepotism, yes. Or he used to be a decent low-ranking manager and recently got overpromoted past what he was either prepared for or capable of handling, and then shuffled off somewhere reasonably out of the way once it became clear that he wasn't really good in the position on the grounds of "he just needs time to find his footing (and if he can't find it, better that he's nowhere near anything important when he fails)". The empire seems to have a lot of this, actually!

"What would the Voltron team do if a Galra ship surrendered" is a very good question, and one Allura should be seriously thinking about. Because you can't just shoot everyone who's in a uniform, and you're going to need to get inside help with sorting out the mess that a beheaded thousand-year-old Empire is going to leave. I mean, from the bits we've seen, the life for the average Empire-member is generally reasonably nice; Shay and her people are obviously in a shit situation, but on the other hand: space mall. You don't get a space mall unless there's sufficient population who're interested in and capable of travelling to it and spending enough money to make the trip worthwhile, and that means that there's some group that's doing things like visiting space malls. It might be a stark divide between rich and poor, or there might actually be some sort of middle class, but the space mall didn't look like it was suffering at all, economically; it looked like a typical early-to-late 90s mall, in space. (Which is to say, "reasonably busy, probably not especially crowded for that time of day/week/month/year".)

 

...although now I'm wondering if the Galra are even allowed to surrender. Like - granted that the fact that we haven't seen any of them do that yet doesn't mean that none of them ever will or ever can. (I mean, some of them are very obviously mutinying, albeit stealthy.) But the fact that none of them have tried to surrender to Voltron...hm.

Zarkon's had a thousand years at least to run his propaganda machine, though. Who knows what they might believe is in store for them at the hands of their enemies, if they surrender? Who knows what'll happen to them if Zarkon gets hold of them again, after they've surrendered?

 

Crossposted from the Dreams thread XDD

 

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1386367348053410

I'm fucking dying

 

I've finally started watching Voltron, I'm up to episode 10 (just finished the evil crystal episode). The fandom really put me off, but the show is good.

*I'm into Shiro having debilitating PTSD flashbacks. He got to the point where he at least attempted to murder a helpless furry by flushing him into space because he was hallucinating. I hope it was mostly a hallucination (maybe an evil crystal induced hallucination?). If it was, then it's definitely going to happen again at a crucial moment.

*It's great how Lance is trying to have some kind of Rivalry with Keith, but Keith is like "????? what are you doing?" most of the time. Keith seems genuinely fond of Lance, while Lance is Tsundere about their friendship out of insecurity.

* I'm adding Pidge to my basket of girls who aren't particularly feminine or masculine. She and Peridot can build a robot together.

*Love that Allura is highly feminine but she both confident in taking charge and not put off by getting dirty/messy. Her earrings bother me, they are attached to her ears with invisible thread made of gravity. Why are they just..hovering? ehhhhh

*Pidge is so singlemindedly motivated by her lost family, it's great. I hope she gets more focus episodes.

* All of the aliens are adorable. Even the bad guys..Hell, Zarkon looks like Megatron from Transformers Prime so he's already a familiar face.

* Come to think of it, there's a great deal of TFP aesthetic in the show, especially the bad guys's tech and space ships. Coincidence? Idk. I swear they stole poor Soundwave's tentacle arms for that episode where the furries were trying to hijack the castle-ship.

Spoiler: Decepticon Aesthetic

Soundwave's extra limbs - When you are the communications officer and have to function without proper hands (the poor dude's fingers are stuck to the end of his arms, he's got limited mobility).

bad guy space aesthetic - purple, glowy and menacing.

 

I've been in the Voltron fandom for like three days now, obviously I know EVERYTHING now.

Question: is Zarkon really a Galra?

I..never got the impression that he was the whole time I was watching. He always called them "The Galra" whenever he referred to them, instead of "my people" or some thing like that. He is purple but he doesn't look like the rest of them otherwise. I was under the impression that they were a vulnerable race that he picked up along the way to serve as agents of his empire, that they were all indebted to him for this.

 

Oooh that's an interesting take on it!

 

So is there a definitive answer? Has anyone seen canon material with his species listed?

Edit: do the kids even have canon last names? Why does everyone on tumblr think Keith is white? I'm pretty sure Keith is supposed to be the cool half Japanese kid that always crops up in anime with an international cast. He has a Japanese last name in the tags of some posts?

I'm so confused.

 

To answer: ssssoooooort of? Katie and Pidge both have a canon last name given in the show (Holt/Gunderson). Keith and Shiro are never referred to in Legendary Defender with anything other than their first names, but a lot of fans yoinked canon names from Lion Voltron Force (the original Go Lion adaption) and assumed it's also canon in this verse, so we have Keith Kogane and Takashi Shirogane. Lance and Hunk were never given last names in either canon.

 

Slight correction: Lance and Hunk got full names in the 2003 comics--Lance Charles McClain (a subject of considerable amounts of heated Discourse in the unpleasant parts of the fandom, given the showrunners' confirmation that Legendary Defender Lance is Cuban and therefore cannot possibly have a caucasian-sounding last name) and Tsuyoshi "Hunk" Garett (which those same parts of the fandom seem pretty okay with, even after the showrunners said Hunk is Samoan. idk man. idk.)

 

Yeah, seems from those two data points alone (Hunk is Samoan, Lance is Cuban) the comic isn't influencing LD canon, least not names wise, and can probably be disregarded.