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violethowler · 5 years

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The Winding Detour: An analysis of Shiro’s Character Arc in Seasons 1-7

A common accusation I’ve been hearing ever since Season 6 came out is that the EPs didn’t know what they were doing with Shiro. That they never wanted to bring him back in the first place and just kept shuffling him around to give him something to do.

Not only is this contradicted by several interviews with the EPs, but when you actually look at Shiro’s story over the course of the series, particularly with the added context of his backstory that we get in S7E1 A Little Adventure, there was a clear arc in Shiro’s character from Point A to Point B. It’s not immediately obvious because there were a few unplanned zigzags in the middle.

In a Den of Geek interview in August 2017, LM and JDS say “We weren’t allowed to from the executives. That’s it. He had to come back. That’s pretty much it. We wanted him to be gone for a much longer period of time and we weren’t allowed to.” He was going to be gone longer. Not that hey never wanted to bring him back. JDS also later in the interview adds “Concessions have to be made and we’re still happy with where the story has gone, it just wasn’t our original idea.”

Leaving aside the fact that they’ve said they’re happy with where the story has gone even if it wasn’t their original idea, the biggest indicator that they knew what they were doing with Shiro was the fact that when you look back at Seasons 3 – 7 and connect all the dots not just in the show itself but in the similarities and references to the original 80s cartoon, there is a clear trajectory in Shiro’s arc that led to him serving as the captain of the Atlas.

Debates on the ethics of the clone merger aside, the end result of the Clone Shiro storyline, when combined with the revelations about Shiro’s illness in Season 7, presents his story from Seasons 3 – 6 as meta commentary on how DOTU adapted two similar-looking GoLion characters into a single person via the character of Sven Holgorsen. (Credit to radioactivesupersonic for that analysis, I did not come up with that): The GoLion version, Takashi Shirogane, died and was replaced by his previously-unknown to the audience identical brother Ryou Shirogane. The DOTU version, Sven, survives and returns to the team after a long absence. Voltron: Legendary Defender manages to combine both versions of the story into a single character with all the relevant memories.

And I want to expand on the DOTU/GoLion connections some more. In Beast King GoLion, Takashi Shirogane serves as the mentor for Akira Kogane, Keith’s original GoLion counterpart, and pilots the blue lion before his untimely death. Following his introduction later in the series, Ryou Shirogane serves as a key leader in the resistance against the Galra. In DOTU, both Shirogane siblings are adapted into the character of Sven Holgersson, who instead of dying as Takashi did, was sent to a hospital planet to recover, before being recaptured by the Drule (Galra). He escapes with the help of Romelle, and together they lead a significant rebel cell in the fight against the Drule Empire.

And in Voltron: Legendary Defender, Shiro starts off piloting a Voltron lion, before outside circumstances force him to step down from the role. Clone Shiro cannot initially pilot the Black Lion, and so becomes a leader of the Coalition, helping to coordinate between multiple rebel factions. Then Keith leaves the team, Clone Shiro pilots the Black Lion for a while, and then everything in Season 6 happens, and Shiro and his clone are fused into a single consciousness. After returning to Earth, Shiro quickly rises to become one of the highest-ranking people (if not the highest) at the Galaxy Garrison and serves as one of the leaders of the Coalition following the liberation of Earth in Season 7.

Whether other possible storylines for Shiro would have been better, or how well this storyline was pulled off, is a matter of individual opinion. But it is inaccurate to say that the writers had no plan for Shiro when his arc so closely mirrors that of his DOTU counterpart.

Popular interpretations of the line “I don’t see what’s more fulfilling than being a Paladin” assumed that this meant either Shiro was supposed to be the Black Paladin permanently, or that Clone Shiro would find something that would help him form his own identity. But there are multiple different ways that line can be interpreted, and a lot of fans have interpreted it based on what they wanted to happen, rather than what did happen.

In the context of the finished show – not in hypothetical early season 7 drafts with Black Paladin Shiro that the showrunners alluded to in a post-S7 interview, but the show we have on screen – this line is a type of foreshadowing known as Tempting Fate: where a character makes a hypothetical or rhetorical comment or question and is soon proven wrong.

Lines that typically tempt fate include:

“__ is just a myth” and variations thereof. The myth soon turns out to be completely real.

“Nothing could stop us now”. Something comes along to stop them.

“That sounds easy”. It turns out to be a lot harder.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Do I even need to say it?

“What could be worse then __?” Something turns out to be worse than __.

“Can this day get any worse?” Yes, it can.

To break down a specific example, let’s take a look at The Incredibles:

On their wedding night, Elastigirl tells her husband that if their marriage is going to work, they need to be ready to support each other through thick and thin, the good times and the bad. To which Mr. Incredible responds:

“We’re superheroes. What could happen?”

We then immediately cut to a newsreel announcement detailing how the lawsuits levied against Mr. Incredible for injuries inflicted in the process of saving people’s lives resulted in the government legislating all superheroes into retirement and forcing Mr. Incredible and his wife to give up crime fighting.

While the line is typically used for negative consequences, there are examples where the character being proven wrong is a good thing. A common example would be someone saying, “it can’t get any better than this” and then quickly find out that it actually can get even better.

So, when Shiro says “I don’t see what’s more fulfilling than being a Paladin,” narrative convention dictates that by the time the series is over, he will have found something that is more fulfilling to him than being a Paladin.

And in Season 7, he does.

S7E1 A Little Adventure reveals that despite his fame as the youngest pilot to fly a solo mission to space, the Garrison staff had repeatedly doubted him because of his illness. He was seen as a liability, as not being capable of flying the Kerberos mission despite the records he’s broken and the things he’s achieved. Sam Holt had to argue with Sanda on his behalf just for him to be allowed to fly the mission, and even his then boyfriend was telling him, “you can’t do this. You’re too weak. You’re not capable enough for this.” Though Adam didn’t put it in as many words as Sanda did, the message Shiro received was the same.

But S7E11 Trial by Fire is where things come full circle. He’s back on Earth, his illness healed, and he’s literally come back from the dead. With Sanda’s betrayal and Sendak going on the offensive, everyone around him is scrambling and panicked, but when Shiro starts giving orders everyone immediately follows them. No one makes any comment about his rank or his age or his health or his fitness for the job. The man who left home sick and doubted is now the person they all look to for leadership.

At New York Comic Con 2017 a few weeks before the release of Season 4, the showrunners spoke of Shiro’s role in the coming season, saying that with Keith now flying the Black Lion, Shiro needed to adjust to a support role where he isn’t always fighting on the front lines in the thick of the action himself.

Unfortunately, Keith’s VA had schedule conflicts that forced the writers to pause Keith’s leadership development and write him off the team until Season 6 to accommodate the limited time Steven Yeun could make it to the recording studio. As a consequence of Keith’s arc being put on hold, so was Shiro’s, as Keith’s absence forced the writers to put Shiro back in the Black Lion until Keith came back in Season 6.

But what we see of his tenure as the captain of the Atlas in Seasons 7 and 8 lines up as an organic culmination of that arc. And in addition to that particular arc, a recurring theme we’ve seen throughout Shiro’s character development is learning that like Sam Holt told Admiral Sanda in The Last Stand: Part 1, you can’t control every situation. There is repeated pattern across the first seven seasons that because of his illness and his trauma, Shiro has difficulty accepting help from other people and allowing himself to be vulnerable:

S7E1 A Little Adventure: In a flashback to before the Kerberos mission, he tells Adam, “You don’t need to protect me. This is something I need to do for myself.”

S1E9 Crystal Venom: Shiro only starts to grow agitated and directly question Sendak during the memory transfer once Coran and the other Paladins have left. One of the taunts he hears from Sendak is “The others don’t know what you know. They haven’t seen what you’ve seen.”

S2E1 Across the Universe: Compared to his optimism when leading the rest of the team and the way he constantly encourages everyone, Shiro is more flippant and vulnerable with Keith in this episode, particularly in how casually he treats having a glowing wound from Haggar in his side.

S2E3 Shiro’s Escape: When the team questions his decision to look for the mysterious Galra who helped him escape, he overrules their objections and insists that his memory of the event is real despite the Paladins’ valid concerns.

S2E7 Space Mall: Tries to work with the Black Lion to strengthen their bond and drive Zarkon out. When the Lion apparently takes off on its own, he panics at the lack of control and starts demanding the lion turn around. When Zarkon attacks him on the astral plane, Shiro wins by realizing that he needs to trust the Black Lion as a partner instead of using it as a tool.

S3E6 Tailing a Comet: After the trauma of escaping from a Galra laboratory a second time, Shiro is more closed off with Keith compared to their solo interactions in S2E1. He asks Keith “How many times will you have to save me before this is over?” His tone sounds exhausted and resigned, as if he feels he shouldn’t need someone to save him.

S4E1 Code of Honor: Despite saying S1E4 that “People have to want to be part of a team. They can’t be forced,” Shiro continues trying to force Keith to continue as the Black Paladin despite Keith’s clear reluctance.

S5E3 Postmortem: Shiro argues with the team and leverages his authority as the Black Paladin when they question him about the risks of taking Lotor to the Kral Zera.

S5E4 Kral Zera: When the rest of the team won’t support his decision, Shiro flies Lotor to Fayiv by himself.

S5E6 White Lion: Shiro attempts to open up to Lance and admits that he hasn’t been feeling like himself lately.

S6E1 Omega Shield: When the mental link between him and Haggar causes him headaches during the missing, Shiro brushes aside the team’s concern, repeatedly telling them “I’m fine”. Later, he pretty much has a panic attack when Honerva forces her way into Oriande and the backlash reverberates through the link, distracting the paladins at a crucial moment when lives were on the line and their plan required Shiro’s prosthetic hand in order to succeed.

S6E3 Monsters and Mana: Shiro admits at the beginning that he’s “trying to take a mental break”, and says at the end that after playing the game with the team his head “feels so much better.”

S7E6 The Journey Within: When Lance comments on Shiro just now bringing up a way to recharge the lions, Shiro sarcastically comments that “I guess having my consciousness transplanted from the infinity of Voltron’s inner Quintessence into the dead body of an evil clone of myself has left me a little out of sorts these last few weeks.” This is the most open he’s been about anything bothering him since the end of Season 5, and he’s saying it to the entire team at once and not just Keith or Lance.

There is a noticeable pattern here: Shiro started the series suffering from PTSD, but kept it hidden from the team, only attempting to deal with his trauma when he was alone. Because of his disease, he had already developed a mentality of “I have to be strong. I need to do this by myself,”by just bottling up his problems so that others don’t see his pain. And once he’s the Black Paladin, expected to be “in control at all times”, he simply continues with that pattern of behavior. The only person he ever allows to see past the level-headed mask he presents to the rest of the team is Keith.

But the events of S3E5 bring further trauma, tearing him from a place of safety and security back into the hands of the people who violated him. After his escape not even Keith is allowed to see past the walls he puts up. From there, his behavior in Seasons 3 – 5 is driven by his need to re-establish that feeling of safety and security that he had back in Seasons 1 – 2.

It’s fitting that the ship Shiro now commands is called the Atlas. In Greek Mythology, Atlas was the titan who held up the sky on his shoulder. Nowadays, it’s used to refer to anyone who carries a heavy burden of any kind. Shiro has been carrying the weight of his trauma since the first episode, channeling his need for control into his work as the Black Paladin. But as S6E1 demonstrated, bottling up his pain and dealing with it alone only created more problems. In order for Shiro to truly heal, he needed to learn to share the burden instead of stoically going it alone.

It reminds me of the stigma that still surrounds mental illness today, but in particular, it reminds me of the damaging idea that someone who has mental health problems is somehow weak for seeking help and not dealing with it on their own. And that is the underlying principle of Shiro’s character arc: that you don’t have to deal with your personal demons alone. That it is not weak to seek help and rely on support from the people around you. I believe a verbal acknowledgement of this was cut from Season 8 amidst all the other edits, but the arc is still there even though it unfortunately wasn’t addressed out loud.

So, despite a clear – albeit tangled in the middle due to circumstances beyond the writers’ control – line for Shiro’s arc leading to where he is in Season 7, why do fans continue to insist that LM and JDS didn’t know what they were doing with him after they brought him back early?

Part of it comes down to the fact that, as I mentioned once in a brief post, the main flaw of the show’s writing is that is sometimes relies on the “show don’t tell” maxim a little too much: all of the details are there, but you don’t always notice them because the narrative doesn’t call attention to them.

The other part is that this fandom has an unfortunate habit of making quick judgements about characters and storylines based on first impressions, building theories and head canons around those impressions, and then dismissing anything that contradicted those theories and headcanons as bad writing or a character being OOC. (Remember all the Lance-obsessed antis who acted like he was so fragile and underappreciated he’d drop dead if he wasn’t constantly being praised? Because I do). And the gaps between season drops didn’t help matters.

Due to the way Seasons 3 – 6 were structured and released, we had almost a full year to get attached to our own headcanons and theories as to what was happening with Shiro and Operation Kuron. Fans who believed that S3-6 Shiro was a clone wrote theory after theory where the current Shiro’s status as a clone was discovered and the clone was deprogrammed and allowed to live his own life and develop into his own person separate from Shiro. While fans who didn’t believe the clone theory dug in their heels and continued to argue against Shiro being a clone.

In the end, both sides were wrong, but everyone came together to cry foul because they thought their respective interpretations were better than what the writers ended up going with. While I guarantee that with this fandom’s history there would almost certainly have been backlash no matter what (and I’ll grant you that the ethics of the clone merger are a little iffy), I think that if Seasons 3 – 6 were released as two full 13 episode seasons in 7 months instead of 4 half-seasons over the course of 10 months, it would have been a lot less severe because both sides of the Clone or Not Clone argument wouldn’t have had as much time to become entrenched.

TL;DR: Contrary to popular belief, the writers and EPs knew what they were doing with Shiro. They managed to combine three different characters across two different versions of the IP into a single character with an arc that mirrored the story of the DOTU character that he was based on. His character development in relation to his PTSD was meant to reject the stigma that people with mental illnesses are somehow weak for needing help and support from the people around them. I don’t speak for all Shiro fans, and we can debate about how well the arc was handled and the quality of it until the end of time. But it’s inaccurate to say that the showrunners were just making stuff up as they went along where Shiro was concerned when there is a clear, if tangled, trajectory from Point A to Point B for his character arc.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron meta #character analysis #vld shiro #writing analysis

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homespork-review · 5 years

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Spork Introduction

CHEL: Hi! I go by Chel, they or she pronouns, and I’m the one spearheading this project. I still like at least a fair percentage of Homestuck, but after the ending disappointed me a great deal, I got bitter, and when Hussie pissed me off further by Godwinning himself, I decided to do something about it. I’m no longer angry about it, but I felt I’d benefit from picking out what I hate from what I love so I can focus on the latter without annoyance getting in the way, and also to benefit my own writing efforts.

BRIGHT: Howdy! I’m Bright, and I got into Homestuck fairly recently. After ploughing through the archive and digesting for a while, I realised that I was thoroughly annoyed by how something enjoyable had fallen apart so comprehensively. I am looking forward to the time-honoured practice of ripping the story apart to identify its weak points and shout at them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hello, I’m Failure Artist (call me FA for short), she/her/herself pronouns, and I’m so old-school they burned the school down. I was introduced to Homestuck via Something Awful’s Webcomic thread. I checked the old mspadventures.com site and the latest update was [S] John: Bite Apple. After watching that bizarre piece of animation, I had to know what the hell happened before then. I found I enjoyed the wit of the comic though I didn’t really care much about the plot. It was only when Act 5 came around that I became a serious fan. I currently have 122 Homestuck works on Archive of Our Own. I have a lot of free time, you see. I am very disappointed in how Homestuck ended. Possibly there was no completely satisfactory way it could end but it still could have been better. I feel like Hussie was a juggler who threw a lot of balls into the air and ignored them as they fell to the ground and some fans think not catching them was a master move since you’d expect he’d try to catch at least one. Sadly, lots of the problems with the ending are embedded deep within the canon.

TIER: Hi hi. I am Tier, a very late newcomer to the wonderful world of Homestuck (2018 reader!) and average fan overall. I love this webcomic to bits, but the low points are deep and I enjoy seeking out what the heck went wrong. Not particularly analytical myself, hope that's cool!

CHEL: Cool by us! We’ve already done plenty of analysing before we started, as you may realise from my Tumblr’s “homestuck ending hate” tag (at @chelonianmobile).

FAILURE ARTIST: But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the good stuff.

Homestuck is incredibly innovative. It is the first true webcomic. It’s not just a print comic posted online. It uses not just still images and words but also animation, music, and interactive games.

Homestuck is the latest adventure in the series MS Paint Adventures. MS Paint Adventures started as a forum adventure. In forum adventures, the OP acts as a sort of Dungeon Master and other forum members give them prompts. Andrew Hussie’s previous works under MS Paint Adventures were Jailbreak (which is little more than Hussie dicking with the prompters in scatological ways), Bard’s Quest (Choose-your-own-adventure), and the actually-completed Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth lacks the music and animation and despite the weird physics shenanigans is a simpler story than Homestuck. The characters aren’t even two dimensional.

Homestuck (and the previous MS Paint Adventures minus Bard’s Quest) are set up like adventure games. Adventure games are where the player is a protagonist in a story and are usually focused on puzzle-solving though sometimes there’s combat. In the beginning, these games were purely text. The player would type what they wanted to do and the game would spout back text describing it - assuming the computer parser understood you.

CHEL: Oh god, I HATED that. I wasn’t around for the heyday but I’ve played a couple and

Pale Luna

was barely an exaggeration (horror warning).

FAILURE ARTIST: As graphics improved, adventure games started using them, but the commands were still in text. Only later was the point-and-click interface created and players didn’t have to guess what exact sentence the computer wanted them to type. Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures play with that frustration while paying tribute to the genre. The game within the comic uses RPG elements but the comic itself is set up like those good ol’ adventure games. In the beginning, Homestuck was guided by commands from forum members. Even after he closed the suggestion box, he used memes and fanon created by readers.

CHEL: How good an idea this was varies, as we’ll be showing.

We probably don’t need to describe Homestuck much more. Everyone here who hasn’t read it will doubtless have heard of it. Almost everyone with a Tumblr will have seen fanart, almost anyone at a convention will have seen cosplay. Shoutouts have been made to it in professional works such as the cartoon Steven Universe, and the Avengers fandom latched onto “caw caw motherfuckers” as a catchphrase for Hawkeye to the point that it’s now often forgotten it didn’t originate from there.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Homestuck fandom term “sadstuck” for depressing stories/headcanons somehow leaked into other fandoms. Using second-person is actually cool now and not just for awkward reader fics. Astrology will never be the same again.

CHEL: Now, in the interests of fairness, we will say that when Homestuck is good, it’s amazing, and it’s good often. The characters at least start out appealing and are all immediately distinguishable; even with the typing quirks stripped, it’s easy to tell who said what. The magic system is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen, who doesn’t love classpecting themselves and their faves? Hussie also shows a lot of talent for the complex meta and time travel weirdness, and it is fascinating to watch a timeline thread unfurl. And whatever else one says, it’s a fascinating story that’s captivated millions. I think it is deserving of its title as a modern classic.

However, as the years have passed, we have ended up noticing problems, big and small, and they nagged at us until we decided it had to be dissected. Our intention here isn’t to tear apart something we loathe entirely. It’s to take a complex work and pick out what works from what doesn’t. As I said, when Homestuck is good, it’s very very good. But when it’s bad, we get problems of every scale from various offensive comments to dragging pace to characters ignoring problems and solutions right under their noses to an absolute collapse of every theme and statement the comic stood for before.

The comic is ludicrously long; eight thousand pages, or thereabouts, to be specific. Officially one of the longest works of fiction in the English language, in fact. Naturally, we can’t riff that word by word in any timeframe short of decades, and we can’t include every picture, even if that was permitted under copyright law. Instead, as comics have been done here before, we’ll recap most of the time, and include sections of dialogue and pictures when particularly relevant to a point.

Here are the counts we’ll be using, possibly to be added to later if we find we forgot anything. Most of these counts will only start to climb post-Act 5, but we’ll be keeping track of them from the beginning. Most of them could have been fixed with a decent editor, which is sadly a hazard of webcomics, but still frustrating to read.

TIER: Note: we started this endeavor months before the thought of a "technically not but still we'll count it" set of canon epilogues were a twinkle in the eyes of the fandom. That is, by the way, a whole 'nother can of worms that will be dealt with at a later date if that ever comes around. We're judging Homestuck the Webcomic as a whole, so no after the credits stuff is to be noted for whatever reason.

ALL THE LUCK - Vriska Serket constantly gets a pass or gets favored over every other character. This count is added to every time she pulls some shenanigans with which others wouldn’t get away. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? - Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether a thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. We don’t require hand-holding through every joke, but when, for example, we’re supposed to take one instance of violence seriously while a similar case is supposed to be funny, this count goes up. CALL CPA PLEASE - Instances of creepy sexual behaviour (and perhaps particularly gratuitous acts of violence) from the thirteen-year-old cast. Now, mileage may vary on this one. We won’t pretend that thirteen-year-olds are perfect pure angels, especially thirteen-year-olds growing up in what is openly supposed to be a nightmarish dystopia. However, when full pages focus on said behaviour, there comes a point of it being very uncomfortable to read. Clarification: does not refer to cases where the adults do something heinous, this is strictly when the kids do. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS - When an offensive joke or comment is made, particularly when not justified by the personality of the character involved, or presented in the narration as being okay. GET ON WITH IT! - When the pace drags. ‘Nuff said. Hazard of the format, but it makes archive bingeing very annoying. GORE GALORE - For unnecessary and/or excessive torture porn which is treated less seriously because it features troll characters, and therefore less “realistic” blood colours. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC - When the comic does something mentioned in How Not To Write A Novel, and it isn’t justified by the webcomic format. HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING - Characters repeatedly neglect to do something about or even react to terrible happenings, either because they don’t care even if they should or they forget they have the capacity. Not necessarily anything to do with their magical powers, either - characters ignore personal problems that are right under their noses, too. IN HATE WITH MY CREATION - For reasons that are unclear, Hussie chose to create characters he apparently hated writing, or at least ignored in favour of others. Every time he’s clearly disrespecting one of his own characters, this goes up, whether it’s by nerfing their powers or changing their personalities. RELATIONSHIP GOALS? - Romantic relationships in particular get fumbled quite often. Ship Teasing is used with skill, but that skill tends to be lost when the characters actually hook up. Fumbled friendships and family relations can also come under this heading. SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER - When characters other than Vriska get away with something morally questionable. Covers everything from sexual harassment to not trying to save people from the apocalypse. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS - Later on in Homestuck’s run, Hussie tried to make up for the offensive humour and casual -isms counted by Clockwork Problematykks above. How successful he was at this varied. This count goes up whenever an attempt at progressivism is waved in front of the reader but doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. WHAT IS HAPPENING?? - When the already confusing plot kicks it up a notch. Admittedly this is as much a selling point of the comic as it is an issue, but either way, we’re going to keep track. Points will be added to when it gets confusing, and taken away when a previous confusing thing is explained adequately. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM - What is shown about Alternia repeatedly contradicts what we’re told about how different it is from Earth. For example, trolls still use heteronormative terms even after it’s established they reproduce bisexually, and the demonstration of the class structure doesn’t always add up. This count goes up every time that happens. It also goes up every time something happens which strongly implies Hussie was envisioning the human kids as white, despite his later claims that they were always supposed to be “aracial”, and every time their economic statuses don’t add up either.

#homespork #homestuck #review #literary critique #sporking #let's read #reread #homestuck meta

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