Player: Jami Character: Keith Current Canon Point: Season 2, Episode 8 Updated Canon Point: Season 4, Episode 6
Updated Background:
Alright, so I'm gonna do my best to concisely sum up what happens between Keith's current canon point and his new one. It's about 20 episodes worth so here we go.
We left off with Keith getting confirmation that he is, in fact, part Galra. This also means his knife came from the Blades of Marmora and this more or less makes him a member of them now, cool. With all that settled and Shiro no longer trying to throw punches at their leader, they all head back to the Castleship to get this alliance rolling.
Off screen, Keith tells everyone about the Galra thing. The rest of the team seems to take it fine all except for Allura who pretty much disowns his ass for the rest of the season. She's short, clipped and when possible, completely ignores him. She even goes as far as to imply that Keith is untrustworthy now, thanks to knowing his heritage. The grudge runs very deep and Keith is pretty tore up over it, but he doesn't confront her about it. Instead he makes a lot of iconic kicked-puppy faces when she's no longer looking him.
Anyway, after the alliance with the Blades is set, things go pretty quick. They come up with a pretty complex but miraculously doable plan to take out Zarkon. To set it up, the team has to split up to tackle a few important tasks. Shiro, Lance, and Pidge head off to break a space genius out of space prison so they can convince him to build a special machine, while Hunk and Keith go after an incredibly rare and dangerous mineral needed to power it. This mineral is mined out of the digestive system of a world devouring space abomination called a weblum, and is only the hardest material in the universe to obtain, so, you know, no big deal.
They are successful! But not before nearly getting eaten by stomach bacteria, digested, and all kinds of other fun stuff. Keith also uncovers a Galra fighter that had been eaten by the monster and frees the soldier within. The soldier doesn't speak the entire time, but they form an alliance to fight through the beast and survive. Once they're finally rounding up the mineral, the soldier turns on them, pointing their gun at Keith as they leave the weblum with a bag of the stuff. This kind of bums Keith out, but all in all the mission was a success and he and Hunk head back to the ship with tons of the mineral needed for the machine. He and Hunk have a little bonding moment in the process, it's very silly.
Back at the castle, everyone starts putting the plan into motion. The idea is to disable Zarkon's central command, teleport it away using the machine, the Teleduv, into a remote area of space without Galra ships, and then attack the shit out of it until it falls. Of course everything goes hideously wrong because this is Voltron. The Marmora agent on the inside tasked with disabling power to the station is caught before completing his mission. With the whole operation in jeopardy, Keith decides to risk going in and finishing the job. He's fast and able to interact with Galra tech thanks to his blood, which makes him the best candidate to do it. The leader of the Blades, Kolivan, objects, not wanting anyone to go on a suicide mission and instead brings up aborting and retreating but Keith is a stubborn shithead and says he's gonna do it fucking anyway. So he does. As he leaves, Allura catches him and apologizes for her actions up to this point, saying that her anger blinded her and asks Keith to promise her he'll make it back. He does and he takes off. He gets inside, actually meets up with Thace, the agent who just escaped from being tortured and the two try to get get the station to shut down again, only to find that the codes had all been changed. Thace decides instead to just blow the whole thing to kingdom come. Unfortunately this means that Keith has to leave him to make sure it happens and thus, leave him to die. Thace assures him it's fine. His story is over, but Keith's still has important things to do as a Voltron Paladin. Keith leaves him reluctantly as everything blows. The Red lion collects him back up again and Central Command shuts down.
They teleport the thing where it needs to go and Voltron starts wailing on it. This is all going according to plan until Zarkon fucking shows up in a mech and starts throwing down with them. It's a really intense giant robot fight and everyone almost dies like six times but finally through some crazy shenanigans Shiro straight up ghost steals the black bayard from Zarkon while they are in mechs??? It was some Guren Lagann shit, anyway. They do a crazy group final attack with a lot of screaming and intense faces and waste Zarkon.
They all get back to the ship but one thing is strange. The black lion was not responsive. Keith fucking desperate anime dashes to the hanger only to discover the cockpit of the black lion empty and Shiro no where to be found. THIS IS FINE.
Anyway, season three opens with Keith still searching the site of the battle for Shiro. The implication is that Shiro has been missing a long time. The team is still trying to carry on without him but its becoming obvious that something needs to be done about missing a pilot for the black lion. Keith takes this about as well as you can expect.
He ruins a diplomatic dinner between several leaders of several planets by blowing a gasket!
Anyway, after several arguments and a nice good peptalk from Lance of all people, Keith concedes to looking for a new pilot. It starts with them, each of them going to the black lion to see if she'll respond to one of them before searching outside the team. Each one of them garners no response until it's finally Keith's turn. Keith, who had wanted no part in this from the beginning, reluctantly enters the cockpit, only to have the black lion respond immediately. Keith, like many times this season so far, does not take it well. Keith goes as far to say he refuses to accept being the pilot of the black lion, only for Lance to step in and tell him he "respects the lion's decision, so [Keith] should too". With that settled, Keith accepts.
Just in time for an attack! Which goes terribly because now they have a black lion pilot, but none for the red lion. Keith, Pidge, and Hunk take off first to try and assist, meanwhile Allura tries once more to bond with a lion only to have the red lion reject her too, and now Lance suddenly can't get into the blue lion? Its a mess, but luckily, Allura realizes its because the red lion has instead chosen Lance after showing proper right-hand-man material and takes off. Once he does, the Blue lion opens up for Allura. Finally, a whole team!! It still goes monumentally terrible. Keith is not used to how slow the black lion is, Lance is not used to how fast the red lion is, and Allura is not used to how not a giant castleship the blue lion is! As Pidge put it: Wow, we are really kind of a mess right now!!
After sort of getting their shit together they find out that behind the attack was some fucker named Lotor. Prince Lotor, aka Zarkon's son. Who the fuck procreated with Zarkon? It was disturbing news for all of them. This marks the beginning of Keith being really obsessed with finding Lotor and presumably kicking his ass. Either way he gets hella fixated on him and this persists well into season 4. Example: just after this fight, Keith immediately tells them to track his ass and find him. Keith is not messing around and they are going to waste this dude just like they wasted his dad. This goes even worse than the previous fight. Lotor spends the entire time toying with them, leading them into a planet made up of highly combustible gas that shorts out all navigation and communication systems, and makes them blow themselves up.
Keith realizes that he has fucked up really bad! No shit. Lance talks him down. Meanwhile Allura has figured out the blue lion's sonar and eventually collects the rest of the team back together. They head back to regroup.
The next adventure involved finding an old Altean exploration ship jammed between two realities, holding a meteor made of the same weird material Voltron was made from. In investigating the other reality they found the Universe conquered by Alteans, Shiro was a Norwegian named Sven, and the Blades of Marmora have in fact been replaced by the Guns of Gamora. It was a strange place. A scuffle ensued to try and keep the meteor away from the evil alternate Alteans but in doing so let it fall into Lotor's hands instead, and he made off with it.
Everyone is kind of bummed about that until they fucking find Shiro, finally. The Black lion picks up a distress signal and they find him in a Galra fighter on the verge of death in the dead of space, so that's great. But whatever, Shiro is back! Everything is great now. At least until the subject of lion assignment comes up. Now they had six paladins and five lions.
Lance offers to step down first, but Keith tells him no. Keith is the one who tries to step down instead, the moment trouble happens and they have to deploy. However, when Shiro gets into the lion, she no longer responds to him. Turns out Keith was still the black paladin, after all. Keith isn't super happy about this, but he goes and they take care of business with Shiro providing support from the ship. This would be fine but it turns out Keith and Shiro's leadership styles clash horribly and they end up arguing a lot during the fight! Though they succeed, destroying something important Lotor was trying to get his hands on, things are kind of weird between them and Keith confides to Shiro that he doesn't think he's cut out for this. Shiro tries to assure him otherwise but the air is awkward after that.
Then, the team gets proper exposition on the origins of the old paladins of voltron, what exactly Zarkon's deal is and how things went so terribly. Really they should have asked this from the start. With that we move right into season four.
At the start we see that Keith has been training with the Blades of Marmora as an actual operative in addition to flying the black lion as a paladin. Unfortunately these two duties have started clashing and Keith keeps missing important missions and assignments as a paladin in favor of his duties as a Blade. This all comes to a head when he gets stuck out in space on a Blade mission when Team Voltron really needed him during a fight. When he returns he finds his absence put a lot of people in trouble, but in doing so ...Shiro was able to reclaim the black lion. Keith, finding this to be a silver lining in this mess, points out that this is the way it should be and that with the information he gained from the last Blade mission, he will need to be away on something undercover for what might take weeks or months to complete. He tells them he's leaving Team Voltron.
Everyone is really startled by this, but they support him, and everyone flies in for a group hug. He leaves with a pretty sad look on his face and from there he's missing from season four entirely until the very end.
Team Voltron comes up with a plan to solidly take back an entire system by liberating one last planet in its midst. To do that it's a complicated joint effort between them, the rebels and the Blades. The rebels and the Blades are tasked with commandeering two very large cannons positioned in various space points while Voltron comes down to the planet to try and swiftly take out their command station. While they are successful in getting the cannons (and for some reason the Blades let Keith man their fucking cannon) it turns out that the planet they were trying to free? Actually used to be an Altean terraforming planet and Haggar just showed up in a ship and has used her crazy space magic to turn the thing into a bomb with the capacity to wipe out everything in ten systems. With Voltron trapped under a force field on the planet the rebels and the Blades join up to try and take out Haggars ship. However the shields are blocking any weapon they try firing. Time is literally ticking.
Keith decides that, okay, so the weapons aren't getting through, why not something bigger? In a last ditch effort to break through, Keith pilots his fighter with the intent to smash it though the shields. That is when he will arrive back in Verens, thinking that he's fucking offed himself in crashing against Haggar's ship. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Updated Personality:
The important thing of note here is that Keith hasn't developed the same way in canon that he would have after a year in Empatheias. Empatheias, which is a place of relative peace with the occasional crises here and there, let Keith open up. He was able to form strong bonds with the people around him, he's been encouraged to do things he's interested in and he's being allowed to be the shitty teenager he never got to be back home, with or without the space war. As such he's let down a lot of walls he's had built up over the years, he's really come into who he is as a person, being in Emp.
Meanwhile, in canon we see him struggle with the role of a leader that was forced upon him when they lost Shiro. We see him unable to control his anger, and we see him wall up and pull away from the people he's come to see as friends and family. On top of that, the kids are really never allowed to rest with threat of the Galra constantly hanging over their heads and the fate of the universe on their shoulders.
His task when he gets back is going to be to reconcile everything that happened for him back home with how everything has gone for him in Emp. He will see the place he came to see as his home and be reminded of the baleful stares of his team when he came in late from that Blade mission. He's going to struggle with his place in everything for some time, and likely regress back into his prickly loner attitude, throwing up walls to keep people out, in order to protect himself from being hurt. It will take time for him to come back out again.
There will also be the fact that he came out of this 97% sure that he died, and that will be something else for him to sort through, too.
Updated Abilities: None! He is the same as before!
Other: With this update he's going to lose the red bayard because he no longer is the one to wield it. As of this update it's in Lance's possession, instead.
Questions: His red paladin armor, which he's had the whole time, would that vanish, too? It's not really stated if he takes it with him when he leaves the team, but I strongly suspect he doesn't. Therefor it's technically not in his possession anymore even if I'm sure that if he ever returned to the team it would be his again. As it is, Keith will be coming in wearing another outfit anyway, so the question is, if his armor would poof away when he got back, like the red bayard?
God i'm so sorry
Character: Keith
Current Canon Point: Season 2, Episode 8
Updated Canon Point: Season 4, Episode 6
Updated Background:
Alright, so I'm gonna do my best to concisely sum up what happens between Keith's current canon point and his new one. It's about 20 episodes worth so here we go.
We left off with Keith getting confirmation that he is, in fact, part Galra. This also means his knife came from the Blades of Marmora and this more or less makes him a member of them now, cool. With all that settled and Shiro no longer trying to throw punches at their leader, they all head back to the Castleship to get this alliance rolling.
Off screen, Keith tells everyone about the Galra thing. The rest of the team seems to take it fine all except for Allura who pretty much disowns his ass for the rest of the season. She's short, clipped and when possible, completely ignores him. She even goes as far as to imply that Keith is untrustworthy now, thanks to knowing his heritage. The grudge runs very deep and Keith is pretty tore up over it, but he doesn't confront her about it. Instead he makes a lot of iconic kicked-puppy faces when she's no longer looking him.
Anyway, after the alliance with the Blades is set, things go pretty quick. They come up with a pretty complex but miraculously doable plan to take out Zarkon. To set it up, the team has to split up to tackle a few important tasks. Shiro, Lance, and Pidge head off to break a space genius out of space prison so they can convince him to build a special machine, while Hunk and Keith go after an incredibly rare and dangerous mineral needed to power it. This mineral is mined out of the digestive system of a world devouring space abomination called a weblum, and is only the hardest material in the universe to obtain, so, you know, no big deal.
They are successful! But not before nearly getting eaten by stomach bacteria, digested, and all kinds of other fun stuff. Keith also uncovers a Galra fighter that had been eaten by the monster and frees the soldier within. The soldier doesn't speak the entire time, but they form an alliance to fight through the beast and survive. Once they're finally rounding up the mineral, the soldier turns on them, pointing their gun at Keith as they leave the weblum with a bag of the stuff. This kind of bums Keith out, but all in all the mission was a success and he and Hunk head back to the ship with tons of the mineral needed for the machine. He and Hunk have a little bonding moment in the process, it's very silly.
Back at the castle, everyone starts putting the plan into motion. The idea is to disable Zarkon's central command, teleport it away using the machine, the Teleduv, into a remote area of space without Galra ships, and then attack the shit out of it until it falls. Of course everything goes hideously wrong because this is Voltron. The Marmora agent on the inside tasked with disabling power to the station is caught before completing his mission. With the whole operation in jeopardy, Keith decides to risk going in and finishing the job. He's fast and able to interact with Galra tech thanks to his blood, which makes him the best candidate to do it. The leader of the Blades, Kolivan, objects, not wanting anyone to go on a suicide mission and instead brings up aborting and retreating but Keith is a stubborn shithead and says he's gonna do it fucking anyway. So he does. As he leaves, Allura catches him and apologizes for her actions up to this point, saying that her anger blinded her and asks Keith to promise her he'll make it back. He does and he takes off. He gets inside, actually meets up with Thace, the agent who just escaped from being tortured and the two try to get get the station to shut down again, only to find that the codes had all been changed. Thace decides instead to just blow the whole thing to kingdom come. Unfortunately this means that Keith has to leave him to make sure it happens and thus, leave him to die. Thace assures him it's fine. His story is over, but Keith's still has important things to do as a Voltron Paladin. Keith leaves him reluctantly as everything blows. The Red lion collects him back up again and Central Command shuts down.
They teleport the thing where it needs to go and Voltron starts wailing on it. This is all going according to plan until Zarkon fucking shows up in a mech and starts throwing down with them. It's a really intense giant robot fight and everyone almost dies like six times but finally through some crazy shenanigans Shiro straight up ghost steals the black bayard from Zarkon while they are in mechs??? It was some Guren Lagann shit, anyway. They do a crazy group final attack with a lot of screaming and intense faces and waste Zarkon.
They all get back to the ship but one thing is strange. The black lion was not responsive. Keith fucking desperate anime dashes to the hanger only to discover the cockpit of the black lion empty and Shiro no where to be found. THIS IS FINE.
Anyway, season three opens with Keith still searching the site of the battle for Shiro. The implication is that Shiro has been missing a long time. The team is still trying to carry on without him but its becoming obvious that something needs to be done about missing a pilot for the black lion. Keith takes this about as well as you can expect.
He ruins a diplomatic dinner between several leaders of several planets by blowing a gasket!
Anyway, after several arguments and a nice good peptalk from Lance of all people, Keith concedes to looking for a new pilot. It starts with them, each of them going to the black lion to see if she'll respond to one of them before searching outside the team. Each one of them garners no response until it's finally Keith's turn. Keith, who had wanted no part in this from the beginning, reluctantly enters the cockpit, only to have the black lion respond immediately. Keith, like many times this season so far, does not take it well. Keith goes as far to say he refuses to accept being the pilot of the black lion, only for Lance to step in and tell him he "respects the lion's decision, so [Keith] should too". With that settled, Keith accepts.
Just in time for an attack! Which goes terribly because now they have a black lion pilot, but none for the red lion. Keith, Pidge, and Hunk take off first to try and assist, meanwhile Allura tries once more to bond with a lion only to have the red lion reject her too, and now Lance suddenly can't get into the blue lion? Its a mess, but luckily, Allura realizes its because the red lion has instead chosen Lance after showing proper right-hand-man material and takes off. Once he does, the Blue lion opens up for Allura. Finally, a whole team!! It still goes monumentally terrible. Keith is not used to how slow the black lion is, Lance is not used to how fast the red lion is, and Allura is not used to how not a giant castleship the blue lion is! As Pidge put it: Wow, we are really kind of a mess right now!!
After sort of getting their shit together they find out that behind the attack was some fucker named Lotor. Prince Lotor, aka Zarkon's son. Who the fuck procreated with Zarkon? It was disturbing news for all of them. This marks the beginning of Keith being really obsessed with finding Lotor and presumably kicking his ass. Either way he gets hella fixated on him and this persists well into season 4. Example: just after this fight, Keith immediately tells them to track his ass and find him. Keith is not messing around and they are going to waste this dude just like they wasted his dad. This goes even worse than the previous fight. Lotor spends the entire time toying with them, leading them into a planet made up of highly combustible gas that shorts out all navigation and communication systems, and makes them blow themselves up.
Keith realizes that he has fucked up really bad! No shit. Lance talks him down. Meanwhile Allura has figured out the blue lion's sonar and eventually collects the rest of the team back together. They head back to regroup.
The next adventure involved finding an old Altean exploration ship jammed between two realities, holding a meteor made of the same weird material Voltron was made from. In investigating the other reality they found the Universe conquered by Alteans, Shiro was a Norwegian named Sven, and the Blades of Marmora have in fact been replaced by the Guns of Gamora. It was a strange place. A scuffle ensued to try and keep the meteor away from the evil alternate Alteans but in doing so let it fall into Lotor's hands instead, and he made off with it.
Everyone is kind of bummed about that until they fucking find Shiro, finally. The Black lion picks up a distress signal and they find him in a Galra fighter on the verge of death in the dead of space, so that's great. But whatever, Shiro is back! Everything is great now. At least until the subject of lion assignment comes up. Now they had six paladins and five lions.
Lance offers to step down first, but Keith tells him no. Keith is the one who tries to step down instead, the moment trouble happens and they have to deploy. However, when Shiro gets into the lion, she no longer responds to him. Turns out Keith was still the black paladin, after all. Keith isn't super happy about this, but he goes and they take care of business with Shiro providing support from the ship. This would be fine but it turns out Keith and Shiro's leadership styles clash horribly and they end up arguing a lot during the fight! Though they succeed, destroying something important Lotor was trying to get his hands on, things are kind of weird between them and Keith confides to Shiro that he doesn't think he's cut out for this. Shiro tries to assure him otherwise but the air is awkward after that.
Then, the team gets proper exposition on the origins of the old paladins of voltron, what exactly Zarkon's deal is and how things went so terribly. Really they should have asked this from the start. With that we move right into season four.
At the start we see that Keith has been training with the Blades of Marmora as an actual operative in addition to flying the black lion as a paladin. Unfortunately these two duties have started clashing and Keith keeps missing important missions and assignments as a paladin in favor of his duties as a Blade. This all comes to a head when he gets stuck out in space on a Blade mission when Team Voltron really needed him during a fight. When he returns he finds his absence put a lot of people in trouble, but in doing so ...Shiro was able to reclaim the black lion. Keith, finding this to be a silver lining in this mess, points out that this is the way it should be and that with the information he gained from the last Blade mission, he will need to be away on something undercover for what might take weeks or months to complete. He tells them he's leaving Team Voltron.
Everyone is really startled by this, but they support him, and everyone flies in for a group hug. He leaves with a pretty sad look on his face and from there he's missing from season four entirely until the very end.
Team Voltron comes up with a plan to solidly take back an entire system by liberating one last planet in its midst. To do that it's a complicated joint effort between them, the rebels and the Blades. The rebels and the Blades are tasked with commandeering two very large cannons positioned in various space points while Voltron comes down to the planet to try and swiftly take out their command station. While they are successful in getting the cannons (and for some reason the Blades let Keith man their fucking cannon) it turns out that the planet they were trying to free? Actually used to be an Altean terraforming planet and Haggar just showed up in a ship and has used her crazy space magic to turn the thing into a bomb with the capacity to wipe out everything in ten systems. With Voltron trapped under a force field on the planet the rebels and the Blades join up to try and take out Haggars ship. However the shields are blocking any weapon they try firing. Time is literally ticking.
Keith decides that, okay, so the weapons aren't getting through, why not something bigger? In a last ditch effort to break through, Keith pilots his fighter with the intent to smash it though the shields. That is when he will arrive back in Verens, thinking that he's fucking offed himself in crashing against Haggar's ship. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Updated Personality:
The important thing of note here is that Keith hasn't developed the same way in canon that he would have after a year in Empatheias. Empatheias, which is a place of relative peace with the occasional crises here and there, let Keith open up. He was able to form strong bonds with the people around him, he's been encouraged to do things he's interested in and he's being allowed to be the shitty teenager he never got to be back home, with or without the space war. As such he's let down a lot of walls he's had built up over the years, he's really come into who he is as a person, being in Emp.
Meanwhile, in canon we see him struggle with the role of a leader that was forced upon him when they lost Shiro. We see him unable to control his anger, and we see him wall up and pull away from the people he's come to see as friends and family. On top of that, the kids are really never allowed to rest with threat of the Galra constantly hanging over their heads and the fate of the universe on their shoulders.
His task when he gets back is going to be to reconcile everything that happened for him back home with how everything has gone for him in Emp. He will see the place he came to see as his home and be reminded of the baleful stares of his team when he came in late from that Blade mission. He's going to struggle with his place in everything for some time, and likely regress back into his prickly loner attitude, throwing up walls to keep people out, in order to protect himself from being hurt. It will take time for him to come back out again.
There will also be the fact that he came out of this 97% sure that he died, and that will be something else for him to sort through, too.
Updated Abilities: None! He is the same as before!
Other: With this update he's going to lose the red bayard because he no longer is the one to wield it. As of this update it's in Lance's possession, instead.
Questions: His red paladin armor, which he's had the whole time, would that vanish, too? It's not really stated if he takes it with him when he leaves the team, but I strongly suspect he doesn't. Therefor it's technically not in his possession anymore even if I'm sure that if he ever returned to the team it would be his again. As it is, Keith will be coming in wearing another outfit anyway, so the question is, if his armor would poof away when he got back, like the red bayard?