#sendak

Ezor as Helga Sinclair

Sendak as Lyle Tiberius Rourke

Atlantis AU

Part 4

aceiato:

I was partnered with @foxaloxa for@galrareversebang and created a fic based on their art peice which can be found here!
It was so fun working with you !!! <3 <3

Title: Different Currents
Word Count:13,950
Summary:Kolivan and Sendak have been friends since they met at daycare but their friendship turns sour when Kolivan joins the Blades.
Follow Kolivan as he overcomes hardships and makes difficult decisions that not only test his morality, but his loyalty as well.

Read here on AO3!

This year I’m ignoring inktober prompts and drawing fanart, let’s do this thing!

New Galra from Season 8. Alternate Reality versions are considered new characters.

Returning characters with a clothing/appearance change, first face/voice reveal, given a personality, different age or rank.

In no particular order.

bosstoaster:

headspacedad:

protagonistscum:

okay so, if i am understanding the show right, zarkon wanted the black lion back along with the rest of voltron. the black lion, for him, was a weapon he wished to control again. plus, i doubt he wants anyone to able to use the other lions. 

then in the ep where the origins of voltron and the OG paladins are explained, we are basically told he wants voltron so he could open up rifts for the quintessence????

yet, what the fuck was he planning to do if he got the black lion? like. the other lions need pilots. the pilots need to vibe to form voltron. he needs a whole ass TEAM if he wants voltron. 

like was he going to find a way to pilot voltron all by himself? that’s created by the sentient lions that have OPINIONS? lions that could just. put up a shield and go NO <3??

what was the PLAN HERE

and like this applies to when the voltron crew is running around. like, okay, take the black lion from shiro, okay. then what? beat the shit out of the other lions? then what? not like you can form voltron with lions that are hurt???? 

somehow get the other paladins to work with you???? like REALLY? or kill the new paladins and then what? try to find new paladins? when at the end of the day, the lions CHOOSE their paladins. 

was haggar going to try to do some altean magic on them? to like convince the lions otherwise??? 

the in they had was the black lion, who very clearly, was no longer a fan of zarkon, old bond or not. sure, he could take control, but that is not a partnership. this would not stop the black lion from giving him trouble or merely making it harder for him to pilot. the lion could deadass go, fuck you actually, and not respond quickly in the heat of battle. 

ah the beautiful dumb ass writing of VLD that probably had a point at the beginning but nobody hung on to it long enough to use it later on and just pulled stuff out of their ass instead

so - theories

Voltron CAN be piloted without all the pilots.  That’s canon.  Alfor and the rest of the pals get Voltron out of the Rift with a dead Zarkon in Voltron’s hand (or something like that, its been a while and I’m not going to rewatch).  Anyway, Voltron can be piloted, at least temporarily, without one or possibly more of its paladins even alive.  MAYBE Zarkon thought he was mentally strong enough after thousands of years to give it a go. 

MAYBE Zarkon was just planning on running through every Galra in his Empire until he found four others that fit.  there’s not a lot of indication that the lions are actually moral creatures in the way we understand it.  I remember back in the day there was a lot of talk about the lions being - orange morality I think?  Anyway, gist of it was that the lions could quite possibly not have black and white morals the way we see them.  There was also speculation that they took their moral codes/cues from their paladins.  I mean, if we’re being brutal with our interpretation - Black dumped Shiro off in the astral plane the first time, knowing full well that if he died there he died IRL and then kinda sat there while Zarkon did his best to kill him right up UNTIL the point Shiro said ‘no one commands the Black lion’ at which point Black FINALLY showed up and saved Shiro.  Brutal interp of that is that the Black lion was willing to let Shiro die and sit in the castle with a corpse in its cockpit rather than fully accept another paladin that was hell bent on controlling it if Shiro failed its test.  So while Black might not accept Zarkon again, it COULD be forced into submission and maybe he hoped the other lions could be the same.

My theory is that Zarkon was just obsessed and logic went out the window.  He wanted Black because Black denied him and was denied TO him.  Someone in absolute control wanted absolute control over the one thing he didn’t have it over.  And maybe there was a part of him that missed the bond he’d had with Black as the paladin.  And maybe there was a part of him that wanted the ‘Zarkon Hero’ he’d been back, even if just in fake.  Maybe all three, maybe a combo of some of those.  Canon showed us that Haggar was the sensible one and if he’d taken her advice several times he would have won the day but his obsession with possessing the Black Lion had him making stupid mistakes one would assume the ruler of the known galaxy didn’t make a habit of or he wouldn’t have been ruling that long.  By the end, I felt at least that it wasn’t about opening Rifts for Zarkon.  It was about having what he’d been denied.

Haggar - now that was the girl with her head on straight (in the early seasons).   If she hadn’t been so devoted to Zarkon, she could have wiped the floor with Voltron several times (and I really liked how the early seasons showed that, but also showed how she put Zarkon before herself even when it wasn’t the smart thing to do).  To me, Zarkon had a blind spot with Black and it got larger and covered more every time the lion was with Shiro instead.  Once Zarkon had Black he might not even have used it.  After all, when it ejected Shiro and got beamed aboard the mothership in season one, Zarkon wasn’t in the hanger waiting for it, he was space walking kicking Keith’s ass instead even though he had to have known what was going on with the Black Lion.  I think, and its all theories because the show never gave us a good reason,  it was the ‘being denied’ that he was obsessed with.  Not the logic of what he’d do once he got what he’d been told he couldn’t have.

To add to this:

Voltron is the largest threat to the Galra Empire, basically period. Over 10,000 years they had free reign for their conquest, and it wasn’t until the lions were back together that progress was made in the other direction. This is fact in the show’s universe.

Time and again, we’re shown not only the power of the individual lions, but Voltron as a whole. What the five cannot do, Voltron can. It is greater than the sum of its parts.

But you also need those parts. If you take just Black away, you may have only one lion who may or may not work with you. But you deny the other side not only a powerful ship and one of their best pilots: you deny them Voltron as a whole.

Take or leave the others: the fact that the Galra held onto Red for so long does suggest that they were planning on using it. The fact that it was on Sendak’s ship in particular probably means they thought Sendak could fly that lion - that could be delusion, that could be accurate. We don’t know.

Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Four lions and no Voltron is a losing equation. Zarkon wanted Black because he saw Black as his. But honestly, it didn’t matter which lion. It still shuts down resistance.