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lady-of-the-lotus · 3 years

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Fractured Ice - Ch. 4/7

Xue Yang whisks a solipsistic Lan Xichen off on a murder roadtrip to raise Xiao Xingchen and Meng Yao from the grave. Because that will solve all of their problems, right?

Xue Yang reaches around Lan Xichen’s head, ties the strip of white cloth over his eyes, and lies down beside him. There’s little room between them on the narrow straw mattresses, and the last thing Lan Xichen feels before he drifts off to sleep is the whisper of Xue Yang’s breath on his neck.

XueXiao & XiYao - Rated M - Read on AO3! Tumblr: Ch. 1 Ch. 2 Ch. 3 Ch. 5

Chapter 4 - turned all the mirrors around

It takes Lan Xichen three days to surreptitiously gather money for the trip. Upon his return from his mother’s house before Lan Qiren’s lectures, he’d noticed that the purse he kept in his rooms was gone, but it hadn’t mattered until now.

Uncle’s hidden hand, no doubt. Worried about what he’d do if he were able to escape the Cloud Recesses.

He meets Xue Yang before dawn at the gate of the Cloud Recesses. Lan Xichen’s heart is beating fast. It’s thrilling, being out so late—early?, sneaking around, breaking a half-dozen rules without so much as a pang of guilt—

All right. Just one pang. Until he reminds himself that nothing matters, that if he can’t trust his own judgment, trust his own senses, then all that matters is how he feels .

Xue Yang tosses him a qiankun bag.

“Your clothes,” he says. “All right, then. Break the gate seal, and let’s get out of this miserable place before I choke to death on all the stuffiness.”

“You didn’t try to break the seal on your own, did you?”

Xue Yang shakes his head in an exaggerated display of pique. “I’m not stupid, Zewu-jun.”

Lan Xichen is examining the gate. “Did you touch it at all?”

“I leaned against it, if that’s what you mean. I was waiting for almost an hour.”

“Sit on the stairs, then!” Lan Xichen quickly draws a shining blue symbol in the air and sends it flying at the gate, but it’s too late. The talismans protecting Cloud Recesses have been upgraded since the Wen invasion, and the second a headband-less Xue Yang had touched the gate it had triggered an alarm.

“We might be able to make it—”

But it’s too late. A dozen white-robed cultivators have arrived, swords drawn, together with—

“Uncle,” Lan Xichen says, bowing deeply. So they had been watching him. Normally, Lan Qiren wouldn’t have been the one to respond to a routine perimeter alarm likely caused by one of Wangji’s wayward rabbits.

Lan Qiren gestures for the other cultivators to fall back. “Xichen, where are you going?”

Lan Xichen finds that Shuoyue is in his hand. He grips it tighter. “Just to Gusu, Uncle.”

“At this hour? Without telling me?”

“He’s the Clan Leader,” says Xue Yang. He’s twirling his hair, a gesture of pointed disrespect. “He can do whatever he wants.”

Lan Qiren looks confused at this sudden departure from courtesy from someone who had always treated him with almost cloying deference in the past.

Xue Yang puts his hands together and bows low, as if rethinking blowing his cover. “Begging Elder Lan’s pardon, of course.”

Lan Qiren turns to Lan Xichen as if Xue Yang isn’t worth his time. Xue Yang smirks slightly, but his jaw is slightly clenched. Then, almost immediately, his face smoothes itself into its usual expression of bland civility.

“Xichen, return to your chambers at once,” Lan Qiren orders. “This is unseemly. We will discuss it in the morning.”

Pressure is building in Lan Xichen’s chest.

“Xichen! Return to your room at once!”

A warmth. A blooming.

“Xichen!”

Energy is flowing through the air around him, crackling, buzzing, a thousand dots of heat and light all converging on Lan Xichen, sending a current of awful energy through him, an expulsion of pure light—

A glowing blue arc tears from his sword, striking Lan Qiren and the cultivators, sending them flying into the rocky steps, the trees, the stone path and stairs. The sound of bone breaking, of groans—

Xue Yang grabs Lan Xichen’s arm and flies off with him through the gate, setting down and landing a few times, finally settling down in the middle of the trees blanketing the mountainside, far off the path, where the rush of a small waterfall masks their voices.

The sound of breaking bone is still echoing in Lan Xichen’s ears.

“Put these on.” A white-and-gray robe is draped over his arm. “They might be a little small, but ordinary people don’t have private tailors, so it will help our story.”

Lan Xichen just stands there, staring blankly.

Xue Yang sighs and shoots him a keen look. “Worried about whether or not you killed anyone?”

“I—I—I need to go back and—check—”

“Don’t bother. I saw everything, and nobody died. Just some broken bones. Get changed.”

“White is too conspicuous,” he hears himself saying. He’s too numb—no, not numb—what is that feeling? Euphoric? Could you be both numb and euphoric?—to offer more than that.

“I thought you could travel as a priest. People help priests. I’ll be your cultivator companion. Protecting you, as it were.”

“Why white?”

Xue Yang purses his lip, then shrugs. “I thought you’d agree more readily to white…”

Lan Xichen reaches for the robes, but Xue Yang pulls away suddenly as if unwilling to let him touch them.

“You’re right. Here. I have backups.” Xue Yang hurriedly tucks the white robes away and unrolls a new set of clothes, exhibiting them to Lan Xichen as if he’s a silk merchant unrolling a bolt of expensive material for a prospective customer.

Peasant clothes.

Xue Yang watches him closely in the dusky pre-dawn light, drawing more amusement from Lan Xichen’s reaction to the clothes than Lan Xichen thinks he, Lan Xichen, has ever taken in anything in his own life.

“Don’t worry, Zewu-jun would look good in anything.” Xue Yang, who appears particularly giddy tonight, winks at him exaggeratedly, and Lan Xichen finds himself smiling despite himself at how utterly ridiculous, how utterly crazy, how absurdly out-of-control everything is.

He’d attacked his uncle, hurt the man who raised him, flung his own people into the mountain hard enough to shatter bone, and all he feels is weightless.

And sick. But mostly weightless.

Wangji attacked and badly wounded thirty-three clan elders, he reminds himself, and now he’s the Chief Cultivator.

Meaning: there is still a way back.

If I want to take it.

He reaches for the clothes.

Normally dressing is something he lingers over—used to, anyway—but there’s nothing to linger over here. A pair of grayish homespun trousers, an undyed tunic, and that’s it. It feels odd to have the shape of his legs showing, and he tugs almost self-consciously at the short hem of his tunic.

“Glad you appreciate them.” Xue Yang has already changed into his own peasant clothes. All-black, with a longer tunic and simple black strip of cloth binding his hair. He sits on a rock, munching on a bag of candied peanuts from his bottomless qiankun sleeve. “If you think it was easy to find peasant clothes to fit someone your height, think again.”

“Couldn’t we travel as merchants?”

“Where’s the fun in that? All right, then, my friend. Off with that murder weapon atop your head, and smooth your hair into a simple knot. Three bumps in front, a knot, the rest down like this—”

Lan Xichen stows his silver hairpiece in his qiankun pouch with the rest of his belongings. “Shall we start?”

“Two tendrils of hair down in front like mine, to better hide your face—It’s too bad we can’t shave a bit of bone off that chin of yours, but I’d never recognize you like this. Although—”

He reaches out, takes hold of the two elbow-length tendrils, and cuts them so they fall no farther than his throat.

“Better.” He raises an eyebrow at the silent Lan Xichen and sits back down with his peanuts. “Not going to say anything?”

“What good would it do? The hair is already cut.”

Another grin. “You’re passive. I like that in a man.”

Lan Xichen winces. “Please stop with those comments.”

Xue Yang rolls his eyes. “It’s just a joke.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Look who’s standing up for himself! Well, let’s see how you do on this, then: headband off. Complete the transformation from butterfly into caterpillar.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Xue Yang tosses a nut in the air, catches it in his mouth. “I thought you Lan liked poetry and stuff. Headband. Off.”

“I—” Lan Xichen feels an odd tingly sensation in his hands, his lips. A sudden coldness runs up and down his legs. “I can’t.”

“I’ll do it, then.”

“No!” Lan Xichen steps back.

He knows Xue Yang is right. The Lan would be after them, and with the Lan Family headband on, he may as well be wearing an “I Am Zewu-jun” sign on his chest with an “If Found, Return To Cloud Recesses” sign on his back.

But—

“Much as I’d love to sit here and watch you wrestle with thirty-odd years of indoctrination, we don’t have all day.” Xue Yang tucks his bag of nuts away. “We need to shake a leg before the Lan gets their act together.”

With trembling hands Lan Xichen reaches behind his head.

And stops.

Xue Yang coughs.

Lan Xichen unties the headband. Cups it in his palm. The silver ornament is so cold against his skin it almost burns. The blue silk ribbon is fragile, almost translucent, where it never was before.

“Zewu-jun?”

Lan Xichen swallows hard, tucks it away in his pouch, and follows Xue Yang down the mountain.

* * * * *

By “Leave it to me,” Xue Yang had evidently meant “Watch me ferret out the dodgiest inns in any given town we’re in or rough it outside.”

Out of necessity, he claims, but that doesn’t explain why he’d already had the peasant clothes prepared as a so-called backup before Lan Xichen attacked Lan Qiren. Xue Yang thrives in these awful places, seems far more at home than he ever did in the refined Cloud Recesses.

“Less pretention,” he replies when Lan Xichen mentions it one day. “These people are angry at someone, they hit them. Something is funny, they laugh. No two-faced hypocrites talking out of both sides of their mouths.”

Lan Xichen doesn’t quite see that, but then again he keeps mostly to himself while Xue Yang enjoys getting into conversations with whomever happens to be around them at the time.

“I’m surprised I haven’t heard any gossip about a runaway clan leader who went berserk,” Xue Yang says one evening.

“You didn’t hear about my brother wounding thirty-three clan elders either, did you.” He knows he shouldn’t have said that, but it’s hard to filter himself after having decided the filter doesn’t matter anymore.

Delighted, Xue Yang looks up from where he’s spreading a blanket out over the grass, his bed for the night. “When did that happen?”

“Thirteen years ago.”

“Really? The ice king? Fuck, I might actually like him now.” Xue Yang produces Jiangzai in a shower of orange sparks, lays it out beside him on the blanket, Shuanghua nestled up under his arm. “I’ve been everywhere, and I never heard a word. What do the Lan do to stop them from gossiping, cut out their disciples’ tongues?”

“It’s called ethics, my friend.”

Xue Yang grins, stretching himself like a cat. “Says the man who just called me— me —a friend.”

Lan Xichen laughs. “My options are few.”

The inns, when they can find them, are smelly, the food barely palatable, but Lan Xichen enjoys the time between, the long stretches of travel through the countryside where he can just be Huan the Peasant. Prior to setting off, it had been a long, long time since he’d been anything other than well-fed and well-taken care of, numbed into a haze by luxury, and now he feels oddly awake.

The earth is firm beneath his feet as they walk. Stable. Sturdy. Cloud Recesses is a hazy blur, a fading dream. The world around him is real, the trees and birds and sunshine, the loud, smelly people, the leaky inn ceilings, the rocky mountain paths and drenching rains and cool breezes of approaching autumn.

He’s stopped dreaming of flying.

“What did you do during the Sunshot Campaign?” Xue Yang asks him as he stares down into a cup of what was certainly not Dragon Well tea, no matter what the innkeeper claimed. They’ve been on the road almost three weeks, and, as they don’t dare stop at any respectable tea house, this is still the closest he’s gotten to decent tea. “Did they cart luxury tents out into warzones for use by the gentry?”

“I don’t mind this. Truly—”

A crash. The busboy has dropped a tray. Lan Xichen turns away as the innkeeper turns on the busboy, backhanding him into a wall hard enough to leave a mark.

“You keep making faces at the tea.”

Lan Xichen had been wincing at the sight of the abuse, but he doesn’t want to dwell on that. Best not to dwell on the uglier side of life, especially now. He’s seen shocking things these past several weeks, things he didn’t realize existed in his territories, but best not think about that. Doubly so now that everything feels far too real. “Something about this particular inn reminds me of…the past.”

Not just this in. Every inn. The rooms A-Yao had rented during their time living together had been in sticky little inns just like all the sticky little inns they’ve stopped in.

Painful memories, for the last year. But now he lies awake at night intentionally recalling his time living with A-Yao in their cramped little garrets. And for the first time in sixteen years, he doesn’t veer away from the memory of the grief and uncertainty of that time, the unrelieved dread.

He stares up at the ceiling in bed that night. The room is small, barely enough room for the two straw-stuffed mattresses crammed inside. Xue Yang lies facing Lan Xichen, holding Shuanghua to his chest, his maskless, disarmingly young face pressed to the sheeny white hilt so tightly that the patterned grip has left marks on his cheek.

At least he’s not sitting up murmuring to the spirit-trapping pouch again, as he tends to do when he thinks Lan Xichen has fallen asleep first. Lan Xichen needs complete silence to sleep, and Xue Yang’s nocturnal mumblings have been a trial. As have been the times he’s woken up to find Xue Yang staring at him.

He doesn’t hold it against him. The rooms have been small. Not many other places to stare if not at the person lying directly across from you.

Jiangzai lies on the floor between them, its elegantly brutal blade gleaming dully in the faint light from the window. It’s set at an angle, resting against Xue Yang’s straw mattress, giving Lan Xichen a glimpse of his reflection in the highly-polished metal.

A stranger gazes back at him. By Xue Yang’s suggestion, he’s been growing a beard and moustache to hide his distinctive chin and jaw. They work surprisingly well, he thinks. His hair is still bound in an unadorned knot on top of his head, face framed by the foreign half-bangs that keep getting in his eyes.

He stares at himself for a long time.

He can get used to this. To being an entirely new person.

Except Qinghe is only days away, and with it everything he’d just escaped. The Jin’s social structure is the most elaborate of the four main clans, but it’s hedonistic and the Family is free to indulge itself as it wishes. But the Nie Clan—they’re rigid like the Lan, unyielding like the Lan, obstinate, uncompromising, and self-righteous.

The fact that someone like Nie Huaisang is in charge would make him dread it less, had it not been for the fact that Nie Huaisang had engineered A-Yao’s death in cold blood and then lied to his face about it.

“Do you think my uncle has cultivators waiting for us in Qinghe?” he asks Xue Yang in the morning.

It’s a thought that has never been far from his mind, but somehow avoiding Lan cultivators on the road had seemed more important.

Xue Yang looks up from where he’s fixing his hair. He’s unexpectedly fussy about his admittedly glorious hair, though he never does more than wind it into a simple knot, leaving the rest free. Lan Xichen would never offer to help him arrange it, of course, but he gets the idea that Xue Yang wouldn’t allow anyone to touch it anyway.

Xue Yang shrugs. “They wouldn’t dare grab you against your will, not in front of the Nie.”

"True. And I doubt he would trust Nie Huaisang with the truth of what happened. But still...”

Lan Xichen lingers by the front door as Xue Yang settles their bill with the innkeeper. Normally they’d have to pay up-front in a low-class place like this, but Xue Yang had been the one to handle the preliminaries, as usual, while Lan Xichen had gone up to the room, and he’d told Lan Xichen that he’d worked something out with the innkeeper.

He watches as Xue Yang yanks the innkeeper’s head down, cracking a cheekbone on a table, and pats the man’s face with his knife, slicing half his long droopy moustache off with the razor-sharp blade.

Oh. So that was what he meant by “worked it out.” Has he been doing this in every inn? Lan Xichen has plenty of money. Is this kind of thing fun for him?

Tremendously, going by the look on his face.

Lan Xichen steps outside. The busboy is sweeping the front stairs, his face a mass of bruises. Lan Xichen passes him a piece of silver.

“For you,” he says. “Not your master.”

“ Passive ,” Xue Yang had called him. Well, here he was, doing something.

It felt nice. Not just the act of charity. He’s done plenty of charity in the past. The doing.

“What good is that going to do?” Xue Yang asks as they walk down the street. “You should have just killed the innkeeper, if you wanted to help the boy and not just make yourself feel better.”

“Just…killed him?”

“Why not? You’re stronger than him.” He looks almost angry for some reason. “You’re as bad as he ever was.”

“He—”

“Not the innk—forget it.”

“Robbing the inkeeper was enough.”

“It’s not like he was a good person,” says Xue Yang, as if the delinquent cultivator even knew the definition of the term. “Aren’t the Lan preoccupied with justice and all that?”

“I agree that his treatment of the boy is wrong, but he broke no law.”

There’s a surprising amount of bitterness in Xue Yang’s voice. “And laws are always right and breaking them is always wrong?”

“No, I’m not saying that, but without general rule of law, society would break down.”

“Because it’s been doing so well with rule of law.”

Lan Xichen doesn’t respond. He’d prefer not to think about how much he does, in fact, agree with the man beside him, despite knowing he shouldn’t.

Xue Yang’s lip curls, and he looks down at his left hand. It’s still bound with bandages, but they’re fitted around his palms, leaving all fingers but the little one exposed. Ready to grasp a sword hilt if needed. “He deserved disembowelment, if you ask me, but I figured we don’t need more people on our tail.”

Lan Xichen glances over his shoulder. They’ve spotted many Lan cultivators over the past several weeks, with a few narrow escapes before his beard came in. “So you didn’t kill him.” He feels a sense of relief. The world had been feeling too sharp and real since they’d left Gusu for that to be something to hand-wave away as he might have when everything was fogged and hazy and dreamlike.

“Of course I didn’t kill him.” Xue Yang gives a little cough, tapping his teeth with the tip of his knife. “Not even a little.”

“So—”

“Ah, here’s the gate. Any money for the exit toll?”

They keep their heads down as they pass through the gate. Two Lan cultivators are nearby, watching the crowd.

“If your people had more brains than a dumpling, they wouldn’t strut around in those white getups,” Xue Yang says. “You were right about white being conspicuous. They stick out like pigs in a henhouse.”

“ ‘Rule 819: Only the cowardly conceal themselves.’ Rule 820: Walk with candidness and sincerity. Rule 821: Do not carry concealed weapons.’ ”

Xue Yang laughs at that one. “Should I just whip out Jiangzai, then?”

Normally, Lan Xichen would laugh too—he’s been laughing more these past weeks—but he just shakes his head as if Xue Yang had actually meant it seriously. Qinghe’s mountains aren’t as lush as Cloud Recesses’, and the grim, rocky terrain is weighing on his already low spirits, and the gritty light of the overcast afternoon only makes things worse.

Lan Xichen shaves in the town nearest to the Unclean Realm after a frugal supper at an inn.

The inn is almost empty. He risks returning to the main room after Xue Yang, who sits drinking sweet white wine and staring at the table.

Xue Yang looks up. “Back to your old self, I see. I thought you were going to meditate?”

Lan Xichen shakes his head slightly. He hasn’t been able to shake himself of his habit of morning and evening meditations, vastly shortened as his sessions are. The one sense of structure in his newly untethered existence. It’s been a way to avoid negative thoughts, but now—

“We’re too close,” he says.

Xue Yang runs a finger around the rim of the wine jar. He’s not drunk, but there’s a melancholy air about him that Lan Xichen has never sensed before. “Would you like a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself…Have you given any thought about what you’re going to do if we fail?

“I…no.”

Xue Yang holds up his cup, examining the chipped ceramic in the dim candlelight, teeth slightly bared. “There’s always a chance. A chance your friend will remain trapped in that coffin. Spirit tormented for an eternity, forever remembering how he ended up in that coffin—”

Lan Xichen reaches for the wine jar.

The rest of the night is a blur. Suddenly Xue Yang is helping him up the stairs to their room, the smallest room yet. Two small straw mattresses with no space between them, filling up all available floor space.

Xue Yang lays him out flat on his bed and kneels facing him on his own mattress, something odd in his eyes. Reaches inside his tunic, pulls out a long strip of white cloth from the left side.

“Here,” he says. “Why don’t you put this on so you can sleep better? I know you’re sensitive to light, and it’s too bright in here, isn’t it?”

Normally Lan Xichen would suggest simply closing the window, shutting out the moonlight, but his alcohol-fogged brain doesn’t even consider it.

“And you can use these as a blanket,” Xue Yang adds, producing the gray-and-white robes he had shown him back in Gusu and spreading them out over Lan Xichen. His hands are trembling slightly. “They’re thin, but better than nothing. I know you still aren’t used to the chill.”

Lan Xichen blinks at him with bleary gratitude. “Thank you, my friend.”

Xue Yang reaches around Lan Xichen’s head, ties the strip of white cloth over his eyes, and lies down beside him. There’s little room between them on the narrow straw pallets, and the last thing Lan Xichen feels before he drifts off to sleep is the whisper of Xue Yang’s breath on his neck.

* * * *

Lan Xichen sleeps late the next morning, finally woken by the feel of something sliding off his face, around his head. He sits up. Xue Yang is holding a long strip of white material in his hand—one of his bandages?

He massages his aching temples. “What happened last night?”

Xue Yang’s eyes are red, as if he hadn’t slept at all last night. He smiles at Lan Xichen, but it’s not a happy smile. “You had a bit too much to drink, my friend. Now, let’s get moving. We want to reach the Unclean Realm before nightfall.”

Lan Xichen changes into his old clothes outside the town. Blue and white. Hair half-up. Back straight.

He avoids looking in the mirrored blades of their swords.

“Don’t forget the headband.”

Lan Xichen stares down at the strip of silk and silver in his palm. It’s heavier than he remembers.

Xue Yang idly tosses his knife in the air, catching it after its sixth rotation. “Hand cramp?”

Lan Xichen ties on the forehead ribbon.

* * * * *

Up Next: Nie Huaisang is (almost) utterly useless.

Or: The Nie chamberlain’s very bad, no-good day. Also some tomb robbing, if that floats your boat.

Chapter 5

#Lan Xichen + Xue Yang road trip!#Or: An innkeeper may or may not meet an untimely end depending on your interpretation of “Of course I didn’t kill him. Not even a little.”#Fractured Ice #Lan Xichen #Xue Yang #mdzs fanfiction #the untamed fanfic #mdzs #the untamed #cw blood #cw violence #tw violence #tw blood #xuexiao #xiyao

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sol1056 · 6 years

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stop and un-remember this

Step away from the echo chambers of twitter and tumblr, and set aside the pockets of the internet where reviews live. Most of a show’s viewing audience -- hell, the vast majority of the US -- doesn’t reside in those places.

For the casual viewers who make up the silent majority of almost every viewing audience, there’s minimal interest in any convention circuit, or interview, or much of anything outside Netflix’s selections. (This is one reason for having reviews and interviews showing up in a half-dozen venues, to try and grab as many low-engagement viewers as possible.)

What that means is that, for the majority of viewers who are not as plugged-in as the core fandom, the story exists only as it’s shown on their screens. So let’s step back from JDS’ and LM’s ex-canonical explanations, and look at how the story appears when taken solely on its own merits.

Behind the cut: five things the story doesn’t explain, and how the actual narrative might appear to a casual viewer.

1. Shiro has a degenerative disease; while perhaps not terminal, it does sound inevitably debilitating.

This is quite a bombshell, and it’s never mentioned again. Nothing in the story offsets or contradicts what Shiro -- or anyone else -- says in S7E1 about how much longer he’s got.

SHIRO: I’ll only be able to maintain my peak condition for a couple more years.

This is underscored by the series’ use of timeframes (to a greater degree than any previous season). We know Shiro spent a year as a prisoner, and from Pidge’s later comment about ‘four years’, we can deduce it’s been another year since then, plus a magical three-year timeskip in the return to Earth.

That means that for casual viewers, the season is shadowed by this assumption that Shiro has an expiration date -- and it’s not that far off in the future.

2. Keith inexplicably stops pressuring Shiro to take position as Black Paladin.

Nothing is said anywhere as to why Shiro is no longer tied to Black nor the Black Paladin. The closest we get to even a nod in that direction is when all but the five current paladins are frozen, in S7E6.

ALLURA: Coran is frozen as well. Our paladin armor must have protected us from the shock.

The problem is Shiro’s wearing armor, too, and he’s also frozen. That single line (and his exclusion from the bulk of that episode) seems to stand in for the message that Shiro is no longer a paladin.

At the same time, S7 had a complete absence of any protest from Keith. We’ve had 50+ episodes of Keith insisting -- even when all evidence pointed to Shiro’s death -- that Shiro remained the Black Paladin.

KEITH: Shiro is gone. He was the Black Lion.

A casual viewer might decide Keith’s silence in S7 meant Keith realized he’d been wrong all along. That in fact, the mantle of Black Paladin passed to Keith upon Shiro’s “death,” and the clone taking Black was another indication of the clone’s wrongness. That is, the clone stole Shiro’s memories and appearance, and Keith’s position as Black Paladin.

3. Shiro’s physical abilities are downgraded significantly.

Most of the fight scenes across S7, Shiro does little, if he’s even present at all. Krolia lampshades this by saying Shiro’s still recovering.

KROLIA: No, you’re still recovering. I’ll do it.

And in the last stretch of S7, Shiro’s contribution amounts to telling other people what to do; his previous physicality is reduced to acting as a conduit for Sam to hack his brain. And finally, Sendak defeats Shiro easily, compared to S1 where Shiro fought him to a draw.

A casual viewer might thus assume Shiro himself chose (offscreen) to refuse Black’s position, between adjusting to a new body and the last stages of a genetic disease (since a clone with identical memories would reasonably also have identical physical aspects).

4. Shiro has the clone’s body, but not the clone’s memories.

In S7E1, the high-drama element is whether his awareness can fix itself to an unfamiliar body. Shiro calls out the clone-situation only once.

SHIRO: Well, I'm sorry, Lance, but 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 for the past few weeks.

Later, Shiro mentions his “disappearance,” and says dealing with the long dark passage alone required adopting routines. He never references any events that happened during his absence. The narrative is pretty clear, so it’d be reasonable to conclude the two had completely separate experiences, and Shiro has none of the clone’s memories.

In short: Kuron was evil, is now dead, and has no further influence on events.

5. While we’re at it, a casual viewer might be unaware of the intended subtext of Shiro’s relationship with Adam.

Yes, yes, I’ve seen all the arguments that say it’s supposed to be coded as romantic, but it’s full of contradictions that create a certain ambiguity. For one, they’re in the officer’s club, with other people present. Second, although Adam asks what he means to Shiro, his next line could imply a long-term partnership of a military kind.

ADAM: Every mission, every drill, I’ve been right there with you.

Although the EPs/writers seem to put family together to a frightening degree that a modern military would never condone --- Matt and Sam on the mission to Kerberos, Veronica going with Lance to the battlefield --- that’s just not the assumption the average person is going to make.

In writing, you always put last what you want to stick in the reader’s mind. The order here leaves room for viewers to skip over any implications in the first line to linger on the second, which could be ambiguously platonic. A viewer not actively looking for queer representation could interpret this as Adam being afraid for his best friend, and possibly a bit jealous at being left behind.

At no point -- in that first episode, or later, when Shiro learns of Adam’s death -- does anyone speak of their relationship. Nowhere does Shiro even put a word to it. If casual viewers had already coded them as best friends or near-brothers, Shiro’s grief is still comprehensible and relatable. In some ways, the platonic aspect of other pop-culture bromances (ie Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers) are just as strong, with mourning just as severe.

Honestly, there was more in a few lines’ exchange between Ezor and Zethrid to indicate a romantic relationship than there was in all of the Shiro/Adam interactions or references. “I’ll always take care of you” and “that’s my girl” are pretty unambiguous, especially given the character designs (and previous interactions) make it pretty clear these two are not siblings.

And --- unlike with Adam and Shiro --- they’re storyboarded with a certain intimacy. They’re alone, and Zethrid gets in close in Ezor’s personal space, with Ezor neither pushing her away nor recoiling.

ZETHRID: Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.

If casual viewers had heard anything in passing about LGBT+ rep in VLD, it’s entirely possible they could’ve assumed this was the rep intended. Of course, both die in a fiery explosion not long after, but who’s counting.

in the absence of in-story explanation

It seems to me that a casual viewer --- lacking the EPs’ explanations --- might have found S7 somewhat confounding. Is Shiro now unable (or not allowed) to pilot Black because he occupies someone else’s body? Is Keith’s tacit appropriation of the Black Paladin mantle meant to signal the S4 handoff was a mistake? By virtue of his disease or his victimhood in Haggar’s schemes, is Shiro no longer qualified to be a paladin?

The season’s also full of characters framed as though we should care as deeply about them as we do about the core protagonists. Adam, Colleen, Iverson, Sam, and a dozen or more Garrison cadets and officers, all better trained, better disciplined, and better equipped than Voltron itself. They not only get two episodes of backstory (twice what Voltron itself got), they dominate most of the second half of the season.

Meanwhile, the protagonists struggle, needing Shiro to tell them what to do; they’re almost their own worst enemies more than Sendak is. Compared to the Earth forces who rally repeatedly, the Voltron team barely hangs in there. They need Shiro’s ultra-ugly oversized insta-mecha to intervene, before Voltron can get its act together long enough to strike the killing blow.

Honestly, it’s no surprise the first flush of audience reaction is so unhappy, if the majority were unaware of the EPs’ explanations. Almost all contradict point-blank what we see in the story itself:

Shiro’s disease was cured during his imprisonment or cured in the cloning process, but either way he’s fine, now

The clone was neither evil nor brainwashed, just basically Shiro doing his best until Haggar struck in late S6

Shiro and the clone are now merged consciousness, with Shiro retaining his memories plus that of the clone’s

Shiro’s link to Black has been permanently broken by Allura’s transfer; he’s no longer a paladin, full stop

Shiro and Adam were in a long-term relationship, either currently engaged or heading that direction, at the time of their breakup

None of that shows up in the narrative. None of it.

Lacking that ex-canonical information, it had to have felt as though the story’s expected trajectory was just thrown out the nearest window. Coupled with the extreme emphasis on an entirely new set of characters, I wouldn’t be surprised if casual viewers got the impression that S7 existed solely as setup for Voltron to gain a new and better set of paladins.

#vld #voltron #analysis #vld spoilers #season 7 #come for the sugar stay for the salt

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