Here’s a quick little fic featuring Matt and Keith in the aftermath of the decision Keith made at the end of Episode 6.
Take the relationship between Matt and Keith as you will, but I wrote it with platonic undertones in mind. That being said, if you want to take it romantically, I won’t get upset with you!! It’s pretty open-ended.
When Shiro truly believes he’s going to die in S3E5 we get flashbacks of the team, of people he’s close to and fond memories of him and his team together.
Yeah we’ll talk about this pair of screenshots later. EVEN MORE THOUGH when Pidge thinks Matt is dead in 04x02 that entire run up and sequence is built on personal flashbacks:
So this is a very conscious thing that happens in key moments and has happened when it concerns a long build-up sequence of paladins & facing imminent oncoming death (or their own death). And this does a lot in terms of connecting us emotionally to the character’s events and trying to better understand what they’re dealing with.
Keith’s entire sequence is a stark contrast.
Keith has nobody in this scene. He doesn’t call out to anyone. He doesn’t speak to anyone. He doesn’t give himself the luxury of having anyone by his side as dies, at least not enough for us to see it or for the viewer to be made consciously aware of it. We’re given nothing.
Just. Him.
Yes we get flashes back to the team sure but the horrible thing is they don’t know what he’s doing, there are two dire situations about to unfold here and they’re reacting to the bigger one “we’re not gonna make it”. The scene changes that happen here aren’t attached to Keith explicitly. It’s all situational.Only Matt (and inferred Coran - see this) know exactly what Keith is doing. That’s proven moments later, when team voltron actuallycongratulate Keithfor his work!!
In such a notable moment honestly, these contrasts are so telling, given the way they have used flashbacks in paladins + near death experiences, this absence of such HERE is revealing. This speaks volumes on Keith and where he’s at regarding his relationships with everybody else. Keith seems to think he is alone here, and he will die alone. The fact is, we can only speculate as to what his final thoughts were. Given the sequence, and what we know about Keith it’s plausible he was focused solely on getting this done and completing the mission. Whereas with Shiro we are explicitly shown his memories of the team. With Pidge, we are explicitly shown memories of Pidge & Matt.
Keith is purposefully detached and isolated in many senses visually, thematically ect. during this entire scene.
Can I just point out that when Keith was about to sacrifice himself, they zoomed in on the eyes of the paladins except for Shiro? They zoomed in on one eye, and it was widened much more than anyone else’s.
new discourse: did they realize what he was going to do? i’m genuinely asking. i’m not convinced they did.
matt and coran however:
i think they knew. matt was on the radio with keith, and i don’t think the others weren’t looped into that. we see coran realize after he sees where keith’s ship is headed. yeah, i don’t think the others knew though.
If I may chip in here-
I don’t think they knew either. They could hear Matt yelling Keith’s name, so they were aware he was up to some kind of Crazy Shenanigan, as Keith is want to do.
But I think the screenshot here of them looking so distraught was them reacting to their own situation; they all thought they were about to die, as well. They thought they weren’t going to make it, even after fighting so hard. That’s a terrifying reality to be faced with, and I feel for the whole team here.
But I don’t think they knew exactly what Keith was about to do at all. Because as soon as the barrier went down, and they pulled through? Shiro’s immediate reaction was to congratulate Keith.
Shiro didn’t have a visual on him, he couldn’t have known that Keith didn’t end up following through with his plan (thank god). He just assumed that Keith had supposedly achieved whatever it was he was trying to do to get the barrier to come down. I don’t believe team Voltron have any idea of how much Keith was seconds away from sacrificing.
honestly keith is in a super bad mental place right now yet i haven’t really seen that many people… care?
now i hate to say this, but if it was lance going through all of what keith’s going through right now? you know the fandom would be going CRAZY.
…but it’s not. it’s keith.
his teammates all keep dying around him left and right, he keeps nearly escaping death (like when he was stuck in space in e1), and he’s being given a bad mindset just being with the blade altogether. but that’s not even all of it.
we all know keith pushes people away before they reject him, but how do you think he felt when the team, the only family and friends he has, did reject him?
as someone super similar to keith, i can tell you that does not feel good at all.
and i know they ended it all with a hug saying they’ll always be there for him, but don’t tell me it didn’t hurt keith when not a single one of them actually said they wanted him to stay.
especially when shiro knows the blade of marmora way. victory/knowledge or death. and he knows how keith is.
(which shows this shiro… isn’t s2 shiro. that shiro would’ve stopped keith from staying with the blade, like how he tried stopping him from doing the trials.)
now there are really only two reasons keith stays with the blade in the first place.
now that shiro can pilot black again, keith doesn’t feel as if he has a place on the team (similarly to lance). now we do know part of the reason he’s been with the blade so much is because he didn’t like being the leader. he didn’t want that position. he was forced into it, then always criticized for being bad at it. now he did get somewhat better near the end with the help of lance, but i don’t think he realized it. (lance is the only one on the team who ever acknowledged him as leader besides shiro, after all.)
keith tried staying off the team since s3e6, after lance opened up to him. he tried to give black to shiro (which we all know didn’t work) and he let lance have red. so he truly feels he doesn’t belong on the team anymore. the team not stopping him from just straight up leaving cemented that.
the other reason keith stays with the blade is to get a sense of identity. he’s had his knife all his life, it’s his only real connection to who he is. but he’s learning the blade way, the galra way, and it’s not good for him. they keep telling him “the mission is more important than the individual”, which shows why so many bom members we’ve seen (thace, ulaz, etc) have sacrificed themself for the greater good.
keith tried sacrificing himself not only for the mission, but because he believed the team would benefit more having him dead than alive. he didn’t say goodbye to anyone before he did it, not even matt, who he was already talking to. he doesn’t think he matters. he’s just another casualty that (would’ve) died for the cause.
in conclusion keith’s mental state right now is bad. he’s not selfish for leaving the team. he did it because he doesn’t think they need him anymore. he doesn’t think he matters.
and it’s the blade that’s really cementing this in his mind.
Our country has fascism. This is the creator of rick and morty and community saying he’s not a nazi and you should too. To actually stand up and say no.
The discourse is over. Nazi white nationalist whatever the fuck they want to call it now are terrorists.
Their entire platform is to get rid of minorities.
BLM and antifa’s platform is “don’t kill me please”
there was a post going around saying ""dldr is meant for things like, “if you don’t like coffee shops, don’t read this coffee shop AU,” not, “i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer"". a lot of people in the tags argued that this is what they mean when they say incest/p*dophilia/abuse portrayed in a positive light in fanfic is problematic. whats your opinion? xoxo
… phew. this ask almost passes as a legit question, but the ‘xoxo’ at the end is a little much. still, what a great opportunity to talk about this ongoing problem of people ignoring warnings that a work contains content that upsets them, then complaining that they were upset when they viewed it.
(first, a side note: don’t censor the word ‘pedophilia’. It’s not a slur - it’s a content warning. If you censor it, the blacklists of people who don’t want to see posts that mention pedophilia won’t catch it and they could be harmed. Just use the word.)
anti-shippers who look at a fic or fanwork’s tags and say ‘this has problematic content! I better go tell the author how problematic their content is!’, I have news for you:
warnings on fanworks indicate that the person creating the work knows the content is ‘problematic’, not for all audiences, and may hurt people if they view it unsuspectingly.
stop taking fanwork warnings and tags in bad faith and using them as an excuse to harass and harm creators.
warnings aren’t ‘disclaimers’ (and aren’t used as such). they’re the CONTAINS NAPROXIN. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN sticker on painkillers. The content is good, even helpful, for some people, but for others who don’t need it or are too young to understand what they’re consuming could be harmed. take the warnings seriously and if you don’t like what they say the fic contains, you really are better off not reading/viewing it!
‘they’re not warnings, they’re advertisements!’ they can function as both! people who want to read that content can find it and people who don’t want to read that content can avoid it. everyone is happier, except anti-shippers who are mad that people are enjoying content they don’t personally approve of.
‘If the creator knows their content is problematic, then they shouldn’t have created it in the first place! Or if they did, they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see!’ well that’s a very different conversation. What you’re saying is that you advocate for censorship, and in that case ‘don’t like don’t read’ would be worthless: only things you like would be allowed to exist in the first place.
But let’s talk about how ‘they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see.’ the basis for this is, I know, that it could corrupt the unsuspecting youth who read the bad content. But isn’t this a bit contradictory? if a fanwork is tagged with a warning that it contains abuse, everyone who looks at the fanwork is going to know that 1) the author believes that abuse is bad and needs to be warned for, and 2) the work contains abuse. Taking these points together, no matter how positively the abuse is depicted, a viewer has foreknowledge that it’s abusive and the creator thinks abuse is bad. It’s simply insulting to imply that viewers will look at the abuse in the fanwork so uncritically as to not think it’s horrible after receiving such a warning.
In fact, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that people who have been raped or abused (or still being abused) or undergone other harm have read fics with these warnings and because of the warnings, realized what had happened to themselves was not okay. If anti-shippers had their way, those fics wouldn’t even exist, much less be warned for.
I’m about to say something radical, so brace yourself:
because tagging warnings is the accepted way to warn people about dangerous content in fandom, the things more likely to cause confusion and harm in fanworks are the things that aren’t warned for.
Even the most positive depiction of abuse would be spoiled by a warning. Can you imagine if the beginning of every copy of Nabokov’s Lolita started with ‘Warning: this work contains depictions of csa, abuse, and child grooming.’ It would force readers who are blind to the hints that the narrator is unreliable to read the work with a very different eye, and I doubt most people would read it and conclude it’s a love story the way many people do today.
Now Lolita was intended to be a kind of monster story from the point of view of the monster - it was never meant to be a positive depiction at all. Nabokov’s work was too subtle for most people, but he was a master storyteller. I think if he could, he’d go back and add a warning so people would stop getting the wrong idea.
In fandom, where we have a widely-accepted tagging system, potentially harmful content that the creator adds deliberately will be warned for. But the potentially harmful content that the creator doesn’t know about won’t be - and that’s the stuff that tends to be a lot more sneaky and insidious.
Let’s take your example:
“i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer".
Racism does crop up a lot in fanworks, but not in the way this implies. There’s a huge difference between a creator recognizing racism exists and utilizing it as an aspect of a setting or acknowledging it in a respectful, truthful way and a creator who does not recognize their own racist blind spots and therefore ends up perpetuating harmful stereotypes or providing racist narration without realizing it.
The former tends to be warned for; the latter never is because the creator doesn’t even know they’re being racist. The former may be painful, because racism is shitty and harmful and real, but a person can steer clear if they want to avoid it and the warning shows the content is known to be bad. The latter is more painful because it’s not just depicting racism: it is in fact perpetuating racism.
So which is actually worse: the fic that has a warning for racism or the fic that doesn’t?
And this can be applied to anything. A fic that depicts a character being abused but doesn’t warn for abuse tells me that the author doesn’t know the work contains abuse (which is worrying for the safety of the author). A fic that contains dubious consent but the author doesn’t warn for noncon/dubcon/rape tells me that the author has a poor understanding of consent. These are the fics that are more likely to be dangerous. Fics without content warnings are also the ones most likely to unironically and uncritically depict the bad behavior in a positive light - because the authors have been taught by the rest of society outside fandom that what they’ve depicted is normal/not harmful. They are victims, and they need help, not people yelling at them about how problematic they are.
Two last notes, which I’ll try to keep short:
If a fanwork depicts a relationship that’s canonically unhealthy in a world where it’s fluffy and healthy, they are not responsible for putting warnings on their fic that pertain to the canon version of the ship. For instance: Kylo and Rey are enemies in current Star Wars continuity and Kylo tried to torture Rey for information. But if a fic is set in a future where Kylo is well-adjusted and happy and dating Rey in a non-abusive relationship, the fic does not need to warn for ‘abuse’. the fic doesn’t contain abuse. Let it go.
No creator is beholden to using anti definitions of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘abuse’, and ‘incest’ for their warnings. The definition of what antis call ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’ varies from fandom to fandom - sometimes from pairing to pairing. While tags will always be somewhat subjective, the wide variety of definitions these words have in anti-shipper parlance makes them all but meaningless, so use them when you see fit, not when antis demand it. If antis have a problem with it, they’ll just have to start treating ship tags as warnings* and avoid all depictions of ships they don’t like. (which is what we all wish they’d do anyway.)
And now for the final irony: every time anti-shippers use warnings as a reason to go yell at people about how their fanworks are bad, antis give creators less incentive to tag warnings. People might start to hope that if they just don’t warn up front for the potentially dangerous content people will stop yelling at them without even looking at the work itself. Or if the work is borderline (’maybe this is abusive but maybe it’s not’), they may opt to go without the warnings so they can avoid the extra trouble. this is already happening with dubious consent depictions. If a noncon warning gets you yelled at, then fics where the consent isn’t completely denied will just not get warned for at all, and that’s fucked up. And when the warnings aren’t there, people are way more likely to stumble on something of a nature that upsets them!
So as usual, in their crusade to eradicate all content that isn’t unquestionably wholesome and pure antis make everything a little less safe for everyone. Thanks, guys. (please stop.)
and creators: please, depict terrible things in your fanworks in whatever light you choose - and warn for them. you might accidentally help save someone from a real situation that’s terrible.
*ship tags also work as both warnings and advertisements, as it happens. Funny, isn’t it?
welcome to the gaming pissbaby community heres the exit
[draws a person that looks like a person]
GET THAT SJW SHIT OUTTA HERE!
It’s about ethics gais
it’s amazing because it’s not like they gave the character full armour and shit like a lot of the male characters have, she still has a bare midriff and is clearly designed to be sexually appealing, literally all they did was decide to have her proportioned like a human rather than a rubbery fetish beast and that’s enough to send guys into baby shitfits. Astounding
“But…but what about our safe space from the evil wimminz?”
