Leo / Aug 6 / Fem / Bi / Emmy-Emmer-Em/ My Ao3 is Emers_Writes / Voltron / Klance / Star vs The Forces of Evil / Sonic / #sth / #svtfoe / Legend of Zelda / #botw / Miraculous Ladybug / #mlb / and just... a lot more / requests are open for art / To see my art, tag is #mine or #my art
I want to make a long post on this, but I’m not sure I can phrase everything coherently at the moment, so for right now I’m going to make a short post and say this:
For Lotor, “victory or death” means something different than it means to most everyone else in the Empire.
For pretty much everyone in the Empire, “victory or death” is a battle cry. It pumps them up. It motivates them. It comes from a place of honor, pride, and aggression. For them, “victory or death” means that victory is worth dying for, that they would rather die than face failure.
For Lotor, “victory or death” is a survival mantra. He has spent pretty much his entire life being persecuted and threatened by everyone, including and especially his own parents. He has spent his life with his back against the wall. We’ve seen marked hypervigilance in him as a result of this (how he not only checks, but double checks to see if he’s being tracked), and we’ve also seen how he listens to Empire transmissions from fighters that are actively trying to hunt him down and murder him with the same calm resignation that one would have when listening to an evening news report. By this point in his life, Lotor has learned that if a fight does not end on his terms, then it will end in his death. If he wins, then he sets the terms. He can decide who lives and who dies (and if you look at his canonical track record, he usually lets everyone live, even if he banishes them to a worthless outpost in the Ulippa System because they’re backstabbing, racist fucks). But if he loses, that choice is taken from him. If he loses—
—he dies.
(Yes, he ended up surviving and winning this one, once the Paladins intervened. But before they did, he had lost, and Zarkon was going to kill him, and he knew this, even though he tried to talk his way out of it.)
For Lotor, “victory or death” is a survival mantra. He tells himself that he has to win because if he does not, he will die. It’s not that victory is worth dying for. It’s that victory is the only thing keeping him alive. Even if he wins by the skin of his teeth, barely escaping and only managing because he flies along the surface of a sun, a win is a win. He’s still alive to fight another day. That is good enough for him.
The White Lion attacked him. Repeatedly. It attacked him immediately upon his arrival, and he was thrown clear across the battlefield not unlike when he fought Zarkon. It attacked him a second time—pinned him, actually—and still Lotor did not draw a weapon, he just held the jaws apart so he wouldn’t be mauled and said that he wouldn’t yield, that he sought the Lion’s secrets. Once again he was thrown back, and once again the Lion attacked, and seeing that the Lion was going to keep attacking, that this was a fight, that he had to win somehow or else he would die, Lotor’s survival instinct kicked in, and he opted to not die by winning the fight instead. Was it the right answer? No. This particular bout had a different win condition. But Lotor, who has spent his entire life being persecuted by pretty much everyone, fell back on a survival mantra that has kept him alive—even if just barely at times—for all these years.
Yes, he shouted “victory or death.” But it doesn’t mean to him what it means to the rest of those in the Empire, because they haven’t lived the kind of life he has.
It’s something I think is worth thinking about.
(Note: Not a single word of Lotor hate will be tolerated on this post. If you feel the need to hate Lotor for whatever godforsaken reason, do so on your own, separate post, not on this one, or I’ll just block you straight up, thanks.)
You know, say what you like about Lotor (and there are certainly things to say), but this is something I really like and respect about him.
Like, it’s not just that he had to deal with all this Space Racist BS from everyone around him (including both of his own parents): It’s the way he chose to deal with it. He could very easily - maybe even understandably - have gone the other way, and worked overtime trying to disown or deny his Altean heritage to prove he was a True Galra TM. But instead he sees his mixed heritage as a source of strength and pride, even when the culture he grew up in told him not to. He specifically made a point of associating with other mixed Galra and promoting them to his inner circle. And he spent centuries studying Altean culture and science and trying to connect with that side of his heritage, even though there was no Altea and no other Alteans to connect with anymore (except Haggar, but she obviously wasn’t encouraging him in that; Allura and Coran were still in stasis at the time).
I just… IDK, I find that really impressive and admirable. I think it takes a lot of strength to not internalize the prejudices you grow up with, and to be able to take pride in even the parts of yourself people tell you are wrong or inferior. And it’s particularly impressive that he put so much effort into connecting with a species and a culture that didn’t really exist anymore, when he had no one who could have supported him in that or shared it with him.
If I may it occurred to me that in the first few episodes when Allura’s very distrustful of him and isn’t aware he’s half Altean. I wonder if for a split second he felt that pang of rejection but this time on the other side? At last here’s another Altean but all she sees in me is another Galra not to be trusted. Like it may be a reach if thats how he felt or not but that is a very real thing some biracial people have to deal with in real life.
I think Lotor was more frustrated than anything, judging by his early interactions with Allura. And rightfully so, since he’s doing everything he can to find a solution to end the bloodshed, and yet he’s met with mistrust by the one person who can help him do just that.
It’s when Allura reaches back out to him in episode three and recognizes that he’s on her side that their relationship really begins to shift, and yet it’s not until episode five that he reveals to her that he is Honerva’s son. So I think a big part of this- and the reason Lotor didn’t tell her straight away he was half Altean- has to do with Lotor’s own rocky history with trust and people constantly using him as a tool for their own means and discarding him when he didn’t live up to expectations he didn’t agree with.
He doesn’t trust anyone in the Galra Empire because the Galra have constantly dismissed him, abused him, and stabbed him in the back for the sole crime of being born to an Altean mother. Perhaps since he’s not sure where he stands at first with Allura, that’s why he doesn’t reveal his Altean heritage to her until she first shows that she’s willing to trust and work with the Galra part of him, and after she proves that he finally feels he can trust her with that knowledge, because he believes by that point she’ll understand that he’s Galran, and won’t try to ‘fix’ him or convince him to erase that part of him the way the Galran did, to choose one side of his heritage over the other. Because like it or not, he IS both. Always has been, always will be. So if she only accepted one part of him, but scorned the other, how could he ever really know she actually accepted him?
Something I DO think likely felt like a rejection by his Altean blood/heritage, tragically, was failing the test on Oriande. After all, he wasn’t even expecting to get the chance to try in the first place. In episode 5, his focus wasn’t getting to Oriande himself, but getting Allura there so she could learn the secrets of Altean Alchemy. When he realized he was actually worthy of going with her, he was excited and thrilled and so eager to try and connect to this. Which was why failing the test and getting kicked out hurt him so badly.
ruinedchildhood
