Red and Blue make Purple

ja-e-muffin-art-dump asked:

Hi there! I've been working my way through your Voltron theories and I gotta say, kudos. They're really good! I've been thinking about Keith a lot lately and about his life pre-Voltron. Like we know his dad disappeared fairly early on I assume, and we know he was at the garrison at the same time as Lance and the others. But what I can't figure out is what the heck he was doing in between those points in his life. Did he live at the garrison? was he with Shiro? were foster homes a thing?? Ideas??

radioactivesupersonic answered:

So I talked about this a bit in my Keith analysis (the first section, talking about both confirmed and probable backstory, and elsewhere in the writing) but roughly my thinking goes:

> Keith makes it clear he has no family. When the topic is brought up, his “I guess I could look for mine,” is telling enough, but moreso that when not staying at the Garrison, Keith had nowhere to go. “I found myself lost and drawn out to this place. It was like some kind of energy was telling me to search.”

This means that Keith has no history with the shack, or desert- the only thing that called him there was the Blue Lion. And he had no tie stronger than Blue’s nebulous presence to lure him out there.

> Keith’s official bio describes him as “orphaned at a young age.” Keith’s reaction to the image of his father and the idea of his mother is a very distant sort of reaction- like he’s not really sure this situation is real. The way he responds to holo-dad-Kogane suggests those feelings are not recent. They’re very old. Dad Kogane is not an immediate recent loss to Keith, he feels much more like a distant memory, the face Keith attaches to somewhere he belonged but not someone he engages with nearly as viscerally as he does the image of Shiro.

“Don’t you want to catch up?” he’s been gone a very long time.

> As you say- there’s a big gap between this loss of his father, and Keith as a student in the Garrison. From the Garrison we can follow Keith through the loss of Shiro, his expulsion (though we still don’t know what his “discipline issue” was) and out into the desert, where the show picks up with him. But before that…

I think it’s noteworthy that Keith operates strongly with the idea that the only found family he has is the team. Keith also has, to a certain degree, both a fear and an assumption that he will at some point be forced to leave the team. In s2e6, Keith, unlike Allura, is fully prepared and in fact actively discusses the idea that they may never go back- he’s packed his bags. Allura hasn’t. And I think much of the way Keith utterly refuses to argue with Allura during their conflict post-s2e8 is… the castle is very much Allura’s space.

Logically, as a young child without parents or guardians Keith would end up in foster care. However, if he’d then stayed with one foster family for even a majority of that time leading up to the Garrison, he wouldn’t see himself as someone without family or without anywhere to go home. He would have connections he could rekindle, more recent and emotionally charged faces besides that vague image of his dad.

That would suggest that the foster families Keith has experienced were very fleeting in his life. It’d suggest that Keith has had a pattern of finding people, including people he liked or wanted to connect with- only to be shuffled onto the next one.

So Keith’s trauma, roughly- is not a single incident of being separated from his parents. It’s a repeated cycle of moving from place to place to place. Of losing, or being separated from, people he cares about.

So what I think filled the gap was- a lot of different people, but no one of them really standing out to him except in that it didn’t last.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.