#vld theory | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spectacularspatula · 10 months

Text

Just over 7 years after the show debuted, I think I've figured out what the Blue Lion's purpose in the team is.

While at first glance, Voltron seems to follow the five man band trope (Leader, Lancer, Smart Guy, Stong Guy, Heart) pretty closely, color-coded and all.

Black is the leader: cool under pressure, and always able to see reason and the best course of action, and Shiro fits this perfectly.

Red is the Lancer: the leader's right hand man, the one to challenge them, the one who is almost as good as them, and the character foil for them. Keith matches up with this as well.

Green is the Smart Guy: the one with knowledge specialized to the setting, the one the team always looks to when they need something niche, and Pidge/Katie definitely fits here, with her extremely broad and extensive knowledge of technology.

Yellow is the Strong Guy/Tank: the team's hard hard hitter, the one who can take the most damage, and generally stereotyped as super loyal, and Hunk checks all of these boxes (his name even fits!)

Generally next in the list would be the Heart: the emotional center of the team, the one who keeps everyone together, the one always ready to give a pep talk, the one who makes sure no one is left behind. As the pattern follows, you would think this would go to blue (and so Lance), but it isn't. Allura is actually the one to fill this role.

Then where does that leave Lance? He clearly struggles with this question himself, saying he feels like a 7th wheel, like he's just an extra person. He struggles to find his worth on the team, surrounded by amazing people. This internal conflict over self-worth is what makes him so relatable and lovable to the audience, along with his humor. And here, I think is where we find his purpose.

Lance fills the role that I am going to call the diplomat in this variation of the five man band trope. He is the one that makes the team feel like it's not just the most amazing, perfect people out there that we could never compare ourselves to. He feels down-to-earth (pun intended), he's someone a lot of people can see themselves in. He's an extrovert who's great with people and longs for companionship. He's funny, and can make light of a situation, but when he needs to be serious, he is. Overall, Lance is a people person.

And to think of this in context of the show's universe, I think that position is quite important. Imagine if Voltron was real, and was what was protecting you and your home planet. Voltron is a great weapon, but it's larger than life. Even if it's protecting you, you'd probably still be at least a little scared of it, especially if the people piloting it were the best of the best. That's really intimidating. To have one of the pilots be someone you can see yourself in, it makes it feel more real, and less like it's something beyond your comprehension.

It's also important to have the diplomat for, well, diplomatic purposes. To charm those you want to make an alliance with, to mediate arguments, and to have someone the people of each civilization love. This part of the job is why Allura is able to pilot blue in the absence of Shiro.

However, she doesn't really fill Blue's role, and niether do any of the others. Allura is great, but she suffers from the same thing Shiro does in this regard, they're just too amazing. They're paragons of themselves. Allura is one of the last of the mythical Alteans, and she can perform the practically lost art of Altean Alchemy. Shiro is a perfect leader, he's handsome, and that makes him a little intimidating. Hunk is great in the way that he's loyal, but he's more focused on the people he cares about than anything else, and also just doesn't have the charisma that Lance has. Pidge is not the easiest to talk to, and you can find yourself getting lost in all the science lingo she throws around, and her long tangents that don't quite have all the context you need to understand them. Coran Keith speaks for himself, our little asocial emo boy. To be clear, this is not to bash the other characters, it's just to show why they don't really fill the role.

All in all, Voltron is a deviant of the five man band trope, not the poster perfect example it seems to be. Furthermore, Lance is far from the worthless misfit he sees himself as, he is the true charmer of the team.

#lance voltron #lance mcclain #voltron #vld lance #blue lion #voltron theory #five man band trope

22 notes · View notes

plutonify · 1 year

Text

I have extremely complicated opinions and thoughts on how the characters and plot of VLD were handled. My thoughts contradict themselves, they're inconsistent, so I’m writing this to put them down and sort them out. This also serves as the start of me introducing my theories/headcanons that were never fully confirmed and my AU which is more like a completely different show than an AU, but whatever.

The Lion Switch

I have a strong belief that the Lion switch was always intended to happen, I’ve noticed multiple seeds that were planted early on in the show that hinted towards the switch. But I also strongly believe that the show runners never intended for it to be permanent, and that’s where it started going wrong.

——————————————————————————

The “Before Hints”/Foreshadowing

The color coding of the Paladins outfits.

This one is pretty straightforward and obvious, yet there were some that I haven’t noticed other people point out. There’s the ones that everybody knows, Shiro wears mostly black, Keith wears a red jacket, Lance has blue hints in his shirt, shoes & pants, Pidge wears mostly green, and so does Hunk with yellow. But there are also hints of the paladin's colors changing for the Lion switch. Allura’s dress is almost entirely blue and she becomes the Blue Paladin, Keith’s outfit actually has more black than red on it(but this could also be a nice touch to show his connection to Shiro), I unfortunately couldn’t find any for Lance.

Shiro and Keith’s strong relationship(this one is a bit of a stretch).

Shiro and Keith are practically brothers before the start of the actual show. Shiro practically raised Keith. Because of this Keith took after a lot of Shiro’s traits. His morale of the mission coming first, his determination and dedication to a goal. These are just two of them, but you get the point. Simply put, Keith heavily takes after Shiro, it would only make sense that Keith would start to notice how Shiro leads and unintentionally take after that as well.

That scene where Allura is describing the lions and showing them to the Paladins.

As Allura is describing each Lion, said Lion is shown in front of their intended Paladin. Biggest example and the one that supports my theory is the Red Lion floating in between both Keith and Lance, Keith who is Red’s intended Paladin, and Lance who becomes the Red Paladin in the switch.

How the show depicts the Blue Lion in general and how it connects to Allura.

Compared to the other Lions, the Blue Lion is made the center of attention on multiple occasions in many ways. In the first episode Keith describes how he could sense the Blue Lion but didn’t know what it was, and then the Blue Lion was the very first Lion to be found, it also bonded with Lance extremely quickly compared to the others. It is also responsible for finding all of the paladins, not just their own. Keith also brings up the mysteriousness of the Blue Lion being on Earth, especially knowing how far Earth is from Altea and the other planets, and later learning that the Lions can only travel so far on their own. We also never learn of the Blue Lions traits or what they look for in a Paladin(in the show, we learn it in a book later on, and that’s after the lion switch). With Earth in mind, the cave that the Blue Lion was found in had hieroglyphics everywhere detailing the war and other mysterious events, none of the other lions hiding spots did this. Allura also stands out like the Blue Lion, but amongst the other Paladins. She’s royalty, has a strong connection with the lions despite not being a Paladin, and the only female(before the Pidge reveal and Romelle), she’s also an alien(alongside Coran)

Lance has a lot of parallels to Alfor in the show.

This one is brought up in the show itself, but I feel like it never actually fully explored just how deep the parallels went. There’s the one that the show handles, and it’s how heroic and noble Lance is. When Lance unlocks the Altean Broadsword, which was Alfors, Allura talks about how much of a savior and warrior Alfor was and how Lance is as well. Lance’s nobleness comes from his willingness to sacrifice himself to save people and his bravery to always join the battle, Alfor was noble in that he wasn’t just royalty but he was extremely brave and always saw the best in people. There are others that I’ve seen other people bring up, like Lance bringing the team together just like Alfor did. Alfor built the lions and Voltron, he created the alliance, bringing the og paladins together despite their differences. Lance was the sole connection between all of the paladins, he was friends with Pidge and Hunk, he looked up to Shiro like a hero, and held a grudge with Keith from when they were younger. He was also the first Paladin to be found, being the one Blue chose before she even saw him, the others wouldn’t have made it to the castle if it wasn’t for Lance. They both share similar characteristic traits, they just show differently.

-They are both reckless, Alfor completely succumbs to his excitement in the moment, and Lance, as already mentioned, has sacrificial tendencies.

-Their love for Allura, Alfors is that of a father, and Lance’s that of romantic and friendly intent.

The “After Hints”

Allura’s strong connection to quintessence and the White Lion/Her bond with Blue and being a Paladin.

To put it simply, Allura being the Blue Paladin and fully embracing being the reincarnation of the White Lion at the same time is messy and puts even more stuff on her character than there already is. (I should note that I don’t have a problem with “Mary Sues”, I feel like the phrase is a cheap way of reasoning why a person doesn’t like a female character or any character really. I also only believe that a character can be cluttered depending on what’s being put on them.) It’s important that Allura be a Paladin, and even specifically, the Blue Paladin, for some time so that she could connect with the Paladins, feel the toll of being in the battlefield, and getting to fully experience what a bond with the Lions is really like, it also helped to give her the ability to take a break from her princess status and get to act her age alongside the other Paladins. Why Blue? Well, that’s also simple. The Blue Lion is the middle ground. The Blue Lion is below Black and Red in authority, but is also above Green and Yellow in Authority as well. The Blue Lions element being water symbolizes its flexibility in many things, such as already mentioned authority, combat, social status, etc. Being Blue means that Allura can still be a commanding figure herself while being under command as well. But that’s an arc that can be done very quickly, and quickly is what the show did. Allura learned and experienced these things in a quick but meaningful amount of time. Beyond that point, her being the Blue Paladin is no longer necessary to the plot unlike the others. Her having to leave her place as a Paladin and her bond with the Blue Lion would also, once again, give her the opportunity to be like the other Paladins, as Shiro, Keith, and Lance suffered it with the switch.

Allura was hinted to have a particularly strong sense of quintessence sense the beginning of the show. In the first episode, when she locates the Lions, Coran states that she was “directly linked with the Lions life force, she is the key herself”. Later in the Balmera episode, she uses her own quintessence to communicate and heal the planet of Balmera. Her quintessence isn’t mentioned again until after the Lion switch, which it is shown multiple times. When Lance takes the blow for Allura in the Omega Lock, she once again uses her own quintessence to heal Lance. When they find Shiro alive in the astral plane later on, she moves his quintessence to one of his clone bodies, essentially bringing him back to life. And then even later, after she connects to the White Lion, she finds out that her very being can purify dark quintessence. It is also slightly hinted at throughout the show that a lot of the abilities that Allura unlocked in Blue were due to her extremely high amount of quintessence.

While there are some connections between Allura being the Blue Paladin and the White Lion, most of it happens completely separate. It doesn’t help that after Allura sacrifices herself, the Blue Lion projects herself to Lance instead of the White Lion, the only reason why I can think of that making sense would be the fact that both of them were Blue Paladins at some point.

When the current Paladins fought and talked to the previous Paladins.

I’ve already seen some people mention it, but I haven’t yet, so I’m going to. After they fought with Haggar, the Paladins got stuck in the Astral Plane where they fought the corrupted previous Paladins of their respective Lions. When they managed to get through to them, the previous Paladins spoke to the current ones and gave them advice. That’s all cute and all except for the fact that the speeches that Blaytz and Alfor give to Allura and Lance don’t make sense. What Blaytz tells Allura is perfectly suited for Lance, it isn’t even an argument on how much Lance needed to hear. This hints towards the idea that the Paladins were supposed to return to their original Lions and so Lance would be the current Blue Paladin and get to hear the speech from Blaytz. Alfor’s speech for Lance is very short and kind of insulting, in that it boils both Lance and Allura down to their relationship with each other being the only important thing about them. That’s especially a low blow considering how much of a weight it is that Lance is the Red Paladin, in both negative and positive ways(I talked about them a little in one of the above sections at the top). This gives me heavy vibes of this speech being written last minute with little care for how it actually sounded.

#voltron talks #voltron #vld #theories/headcanons #I’ll get better at formatting these as I go #I believe this is my longest post so far #voltron lions #voltron paladins #vld allura #vld lance #vld keith #vld shiro #vld alfor #I’m not tagging the others #Plutopinions

27 notes · View notes

kidge-planet · 1 year

Text

YOU KNOW WHAT ?!

I was thinking:

You know , when pidge announced that she was a girl , everyone ( EXEPT Lance ) knew it ..

I thought about how everyone discovered it :

Shiro : knew it because he knew her father and brother.

Allura: knows bc the mice told her.

Coran: just knew it ( even if he referred to her with masculine pronounces ..)

Now Hunk and Keith !

My theory is that Hunk discovered while reading pidge's journal in ep1 season 1 .

She probably didn't wrote stuffs about her being a girl but stuffs related .

And he understood. He kept her secret for him and respected the fact that she wanted to be called as a boy ( he though she was trans ).

As for Keith , he had doubts. He first thought by her size and voice that she was a young boy ( around 12).. Then they had that bonding exercise where they were supposed to open their minds and everyone could see in each other's head. I feel like Keef was curious and just looked in her head and discovered her secret . ( I think that because he was the only one to tell Pidge to stop think of her "girlfrien". So he clearly saw what was going on in her hand )

Also pointing the fact that she complained about the fact that Hunk was looking in her head .

I think Keith also knew real quick that Matt had a lil sis. So he kinda guessed after all and learned that she wasn't freackin' 12 but in reality a 15 yo that would turn 16 soon ....

That's all for me 😂

#kidge #voltron #pidge #voltron legendary defender #voltron pidge #keith voltron #keith and pidge #pidge and keith #keith #voltron kidge #hunk vld #hunk voltron #voltron theory

23 notes · View notes

xochitai · 1 year

Text

Do you think we could have been friends? - ficlet

The young prince approaches the kit half-hiding behind the blue paladin’s leg.

“Greetings. I’m Lotor. You are?”

They retreat further until Blaytz pats their head. “Go on guppy,” he says in soft Nalquodi, “you’ll be ok, and I’ll be right here if you need me. Maybe you’ll make a friend today.”

Wide yellow eyes look first at their father, then back to the little galra in front of him. Cautiously, they step forward. Their Galran is rigid, but they manage to squeeze out: “My... name... is Kolivan.”

#inspired by the theory that Kolivan is descended from Blaytz and the galra he was flirting with #vld #voltron: legendary defender #vld lotor #lotor #blaytz #kolivan

23 notes · View notes

nervousloveheart · 1 year

Text

*cautiously pops back into the voltron fandom with another theory/universe alteration* *coughs for the attention of the people that were so nice to me the last time I had a theory and for the attention of others in the fandom*

Let's say that when Kuron tried to connect with the Black Lion Haggar sensed it because she put something in all of Shiro's clones that would alert her if they tried to connect with the Black Lion. She forced Shiro's essence to fight Kuron's essence for Kuron's body. Shiro wins, but Kuron's essence is still in the body that they now share, so now Shiro has to deal with Kurons trauma as well as his own.

When Kuron and Keith fight, Haggar intervened to make sure Kuron had control over the body that he and Shiro shared.

So the scene where Allura puts Shiro's essence into the body of the clone would be replaced with one where Allura releases Kurons essence into the fabric of the univers--or where ever dead people go to in the voltron universe--so that he can rest/be at peace.

#kuron #takashi shirogane #Shiro #Shiro vld #voltron #voltron theory #voltron legendery defender fandom #voltron legendery defender #keith kogane #vld keith #keith voltron #keith #haggar #Honerva #Allura

36 notes · View notes

feyravenchatter · 2 years

Text

One last one for the multi-chapter monster I'm naming Multiverse Theory. This one, individually titled Let Sleeping Lions Roar is interesting...

·::·★·::·

At the end of the war, instead of Allura sacrificing herself, Voltron and the Castle of Lions entered the Nexus. No one knows exactly what happened when the universe was restored, and the story has changed over the millenia, but the castle and lions were found floating dead in space. Before anyone could get to them, the lions flew themselves with the last of their power back to their hangars, where they still sit, tall and proud. The castle itself drifted under its own power to an uninhabited planet where it landed safely and stayed. Part of the reason for that is that no one has been able to access the bridge or the lions' hangars. The castle has become a mausoleum, if not physically that anyone knows of, then at least spiritually, home to the ghosts of the paladins, princess, and advisor who vanished to save the omniverse.

It's sat there for 10,000 years, only the descendants of the princess, advisor, and paladins able to even enter. A new unknown threat hovers at the edge of the known universe, making the hundreds of trillions of people throughout the galaxies nervous, including the descendants. The stories have all said that the lions will reawaken when they're needed, although no one really believes them. Until the day when the particle barriers that have remained in place for ten millenia lower, all five lions lowering their heads, their long-gone paladins walking out into the hangars like the last 10,000 years hadn't happened. The paladins won't say where they've been or what happened to them, but they're not what they once were. But whatever they are, they're back, called to save the omniverse again.

·::·★·::·

Excerpt from near the beginning:

They woke abruptly, gasping in shock as though they had all been doused in ice water, five as one. Black, red, green, blue, yellow, the white of their armor reflecting the dimmed lights around them. The weight and pressure of the silence threatened to crush them in their weightlessness until the rumbling chorus reverberated through their entire beings, bringing a sense of familiarity and safety. Words without sound flowed through them, and they understood. They were one, a single unit that fit together seamlessly with both each other and their ageless companions. But they did not feel complete. There was a piece missing. Two pieces. Two others who were not them, but like them, and who completed their circuit. They were not here, but they would be found.

The five knew instinctively, with muscle memory consciously forgotten, but still ingrained. Rising from their resting places, they descended, their companions opening, releasing them into the dimly lit space. The five brought their own light – ultraviolet radiating in wisps and carrying the whisper of the void, red licking into the dark with the distant roar of flame, green swirling vine-like humming warm and low, blue ebbing and flowing every movement bringing the crash of waves, yellow rolling like boulders and rumbling like thunder. A deafening roar tore through the air, the companions heralding their return.

#multiverse theory #my writing #team voltron #keith kogane #lance mcclain #takashi shirogane #pidge holt #hunk garrett #princess allura #coran hieronymus wimbleton smythe #keith x lance #klance #vld #voltron #voltron legendary defender

33 notes · View notes