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kaylin881I'm coming back to the Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom in the year 2023, for reasons that this margin is too small to contain. Looking with fresh eyes at a show I watched 4 years ago, I have questions. Kind of a lot of questions. Let's start with just one.
First, a little bit of context, which will hopefully make this possible to follow for someone unfamiliar with the show.
In episode 1 of Voltron: Legendary Defender (hereafter VLD), we learn that there are 5 giant mechs called Lions that combine to make a bigger mech called Voltron. 10,000 years ago, King Alfor of Altea scattered the 5 Lions across the universe and hid them in an attempt to keep them out of the hands of Emperor Zarkon of the Galra Empire.
In the present day of 2405 AD, our heroes find the Blue Lion of Voltron, which has been hidden in a cave on Earth for 10,000 years. That means it was put there around 7600 BC, in the Neolithic or New Stone Age shortly after the end of the last Ice Age. (Remember that, it'll be important in a minute.)
The Blue Lion takes our heroes to the Castle of Lions, which is on a planet called Arus and is the hiding place of the Black Lion. We find out a few episodes later that Arus has native inhabitants: the Arusians, cute little newt-like aliens with goat horns, who don't display any technology above a medieval level.
From Arus, our heroes are sent to find the other 3 Lions. The Yellow Lion is on a planet that's been turned into a mining colony of the Galra Empire, and we never find out if it has any natives. Similarly, we never even see the original hiding place of the Red Lion, because the Galra found it first. But the team who go after the Green Lion are met by a friendly sloth-like alien. The sloth ferries them to their destination in a canoe that is definitely less than 10,000 years old and looks decidedly Stone Age.
That puts us 3 for 3, in cases where we know whether there were natives or not, for the planets where the Lions were hidden having pre-spacefaring civilisations. (As we worked out earlier, Earth was in its own Stone Age at the time the Blue Lion was put there, although it has since developed space travel.)
Now for my question: Did Alfor deliberately hide the Lions on planets with pre-spacefaring civilisations, and if so, why?
Sadly, Alfor is dead by the start of the series and cannot tell us anything about his reasoning. But I have theories.
Theory: Avoiding spacefaring planets.
The Lions couldn't be hidden on Alfor's home planet of Altea, because Zarkon had just announced to the universe at large that he was about to destroy Altea. They also couldn't be hidden on any of the many planets ruled by the Galra Empire, because it was their ruler, Emperor Zarkon, from whom Alfor was trying to hide them.
Alfor could have hidden the Lions on spacefaring planets ruled by neither Alteans nor Galrans, but there are several reasons he might not have wanted to.
Firstly, he had no guarantee that Zarkon's wrath would stop at Altea. We know from information revealed later in the series that he would be right to worry about this: the home planets of the other former paladins of Voltron were also destroyed. Anywhere with a spacefaring civilisation would interact with the Galra Empire at some point, and therefore ran a risk of incurring Zarkon's displeasure at some point in the future.
Secondly, even discounting the possibility of more genocides, the higher level of interaction and travel between spacefaring planets would put the Lions at a greater risk of discovery by the Galra, simply because there were more reasons for Galran citizens to visit those planets.
Relatedly, the Lions would be harder to conceal in the first place from a spacefaring civilisation. Any planet with space flight, or one that was even close to developing the capability, would be monitoring anything entering its atmosphere. They would know about the Lion's arrival and investigate. On finding it, they would recognise it as a Lion of Voltron, unless they'd been living under a very large rock.
A civilisation that hadn't even invented smelting iron yet, on the other hand, might easily write off a spaceship's landing as a falling star if it didn't fall too close to their village, and even if they found the Lion they wouldn't know what it was. There's a saying...tip of my tongue...something about two people and their ability to keep secrets?
But if secrecy is the goal, why not go for a planet with no inhabitants at all?
Theory: All planets are inhabited?
To the best of my recollection (bearing in mind that it has been about 4 years since I last watched an episode), I don't think we ever actually visit a planet in the show that we know for sure doesn't have intelligent native life. Given this evidence, we might reasonably conclude that, in the universe of VLD, there aren't any planets like that, or at least that they're few and far between.
There are several problems with this. The first and most obvious is that we know of several planets in our own solar system that we're pretty sure are uninhabited (and uninhabitable, at least for all forms of life we know about). Given that by the start of the series humanity has explored out as far as Pluto without meeting aliens, it's safe to assume that this is still true in the VLD universe.
However, it could still be the case that all planets capable of supporting life are inhabited. None of the other planets in our solar system meet this criterion, so they don't disprove the theory. And, in a universe as crowded with diverse alien life as the one the show depicts, it doesn't seem too implausible that life develops literally everywhere it can.
This still creates a problem for our initial evidence. If there are planets that don't support life (which we know there are), why do our heroes never visit them?
One option is just that there's never a reason to. Most of the places visited in the show are planets threatened or occupied by the Galra, important military targets, or similar—our heroes are visiting them for a reason, and they don't have time to stop off for sight-seeing on planets that have been left well alone.
This doesn't explain the places the Lions crash-land at the start of season 2. They're split up by a faulty wormhole, and land on 2 planets and a space junk heap, all 3 of which turn out to have native wildlife. Only one of those—the planet with the mermaids where the Blue and Yellow Lions end up—has intelligent life, but they all have lifeforms of some kind. If you closed your eyes and threw 3 darts at a map in a universe where 7 out of 8 planets were uninhabitable, you wouldn't expect to hit 3 bullseyes.
So this suggests that we're looking at a universe—or at least a part of the universe—where empty planets are thin on the ground. But if that's the case, then why is Earth alone in its solar system in supporting life? Are we just that unlucky?
There might be a way we can marry these observations together. According to...Coran according to the VLD wiki, which doesn't seem to have cited a source...the Milky Way galaxy is "too young" to have Balmera—living planets that are common in other parts of the universe.
What if galaxies tend to get busier over time, and Earth is in a part of the universe that hasn't had time to fill up yet? Terraforming and colonisation are both things we know spacefaring civilisations do in VLD—Naxzela was an ancient Altean terraforming project, for example. This could lead to a pattern where, over eons, more and more planets in a galaxy have intelligent life.
This is all fairly speculative, but it seems like there is at least a possibility that Alfor would have had to look pretty far afield to find empty planets. On the other hand, he did ignore all those lovely desolate planets right next to Earth, so this can't be a complete explanation...
Theory: Stone Age civilisations are invisible from space.
If you were trying to detect intelligent life on a planet, what would you look for?
The main thing humans are looking for, right now in the real world, is radio waves. Broadcasts from alien radio, messages beamed into space. And we're sending out our own, of course. (Hello? Is anybody out there? Do you want to be friends?)
This might sound too obvious to bother saying, but humans were not sending out radio waves in 7600 BC. We also weren't building tall cities or great monuments, logging forests or strip-mining the land on a massive scale, or tilling and fencing off vast acres of farmland to create those lovely squares you see on aerial views of the countryside. We'd just about invented agriculture and cities as concepts.
In fact, if you were looking at Earth from space in 7600 BC, you could probably be forgiven for not noticing that humans were doing anything more exciting than the next monkey on the family tree. It seems plausible that Alfor could have been unaware that the planets he chose had intelligent natives, although he was presumably aware that they were life-supporting and therefore might.
There are two problems with this as an explanation.
Firstly, if Alfor was picking from among planets without obvious signs of civilisation (a group that encompasses both planets without natives and planets whose natives haven't yet industrialised), it seems unlikely that he randomly hit ones with Stone Age civilisations in all 3 cases we know about. We're back to the question of how many empty planets there are in the universe to begin with, and no closer to an answer.
Secondly, if you want an empty planet, the easiest way to guarantee that is to pick one that doesn't support life in the first place. Yet we know that in at least one case, Alfor passed up a string of such planets in favour of Earth. The obvious conclusion is that he was specifically looking for habitable planets—or even inhabited ones. But why?
Theory: Alfor wanted the Lions to be found.
To explain this one, there's one more important bit of context we need.
The Black Lion is hidden in the Castle of Lions, yes, but it's not the only important thing in the Castle. Also within the Castle, sealed in a cryopod that has kept her sleeping untouched by the passage of those 10,000 years, is Alfor's only daughter, Princess Allura.
The Castle itself is sealed so that it will only open for one of the Lions. In the show, it's the Blue Lion's return (with our heroes) that opens the doors and lets them find and wake Allura. If they hadn't come, she might have slept for centuries more—or forever.
When Alfor placed his daughter in the cryopod, it was with the intent of preserving her life and allowing her to survive the destruction of their homeworld. Therefore, he clearly intended her to be found and woken at some point. He wanted someone, at some point in the future, to find at least one of the Lions. He just didn't want it to be Zarkon.
Putting the Lions on an empty, dead planet like Mars would have reduced the chances of anyone finding them to almost nothing. Space is big, and there are a lot of planets out there. The best way to maximise the chance that someone would eventually find the Lions would be to put them on planets with native inhabitants. All the arguments against spacefaring planets still apply, which limits us to planets with pre-spaceflight civilisations.
Alfor planned and hoped for exactly the scenario that ended up happening: someone from a species unconnected to galactic civilisation, that had never even heard of the Galra, found a Lion and was compatible enough to be its paladin, waking it from its hibernation. That Lion happened to be Blue, and the species in question happened to be humans.
But this argument doesn't apply to the Castle of Lions. The Black Lion is sealed away, and can't be revealed by a potential paladin unless all 4 of the other Lions are gathered first. And yet we know it was still put on an inhabited planet, Arus. Are there other potential reasons for doing so?
Theory: Camouflage.
Even to someone who doesn't know exactly what they're looking at, the Lions and the Castle are very clearly artificial creations, not naturally formed. On an otherwise uninhabited planet, where they were the only "man"-made structures around, they'd be much easier to spot as out of place, and likelier to catch the attention of the Galra.
In contrast to the previous argument, this one is particularly important for the Castle. At least two of the Lions were hidden underground, where they'd be less conspicuous anyway. But the Castle is far too big to be hidden in a cave. Instead, it's right out in the open on a rocky promontory. Its camouflage, instead, comes from the Arusians. Take a look at this screenshot from s1e1:
The visible parts of the Castle itself are just the central tower and the 4 outer spires (one hidden behind the central tower from this angle). All the other construction around it, like the arched bridges, was done by the Arusians over the centuries the Castle has rested on Arus. Because the stone is white, like the outer plating of the Castle, they blend together so it's hard to tell from a distance exactly which parts are which despite the different materials. This integrates the Castle into the Arusian landscape and makes it much less conspicuous to someone looking for a spaceship that doesn't belong.
The Green Lion, too, benefits from constructed as well as natural concealment. The locals have built a ziggurat over and around the Green Lion, completely enclosing it and hiding it from view.
Theory: Local assistance and allies.
The Arusians have stories passed down from ancient times about a "Lion Goddess", whom they worship and revere. Even before Allura reveals that Voltron has protected them, they're willing to do anything she asks, up to and including throwing themselves en masse onto a pyre. The sloth-like alien on the Green Lion's planet recognised the "V" symbol of Voltron on the paladins' tracking device as a sign that they were looking for the Lion, and took them to it in the canoe without further questions. It seems like the sloth aliens also had stories passed down by the ancients.
Where did they get these stories? One source is the carvings in the rocks near each Lion's hiding place, depicting the Lions in a stylised form and telling stories about them. The carvings we see around the Blue, Green, and Yellow Lions are all in the same style—indicating that they were put there by whoever hid the Lions, rather than by the locals of 3 different planets. A message for friendly searchers, but also a way to communicate something of the Lions' importance to the locals.
The goal of this would have been to provide assistance in reaching the Lions to future paladins who came looking. After all, they had to be well hidden to escape Zarkon's grasp, but too well hidden and they risk never being found. Having local guides, who can evaluate whether a given searcher was sent by Zarkon or Allura, might help make that tightrope easier to walk.
Alfor may not have specifically intended for religions to grow up around the Castle and the Lions—as seems to have happened in at least two cases—but it's unlikely he would have minded. From the fact that Alfor found it acceptable to put Altean technology on planets with pre-spacefaring civilisations in the first place, we can surmise that Altea didn't have (or he didn't care to follow) anything resembling Star Trek's Prime Directive, the injunction not to interfere with the cultural development of less advanced civilisations. If it helps Allura and the future paladins reclaim Voltron and defeat Zarkon, who cares if a few primitive natives worship the Lions as gods for a few millennia?
Newsflash, Alfor: I care. But my complaints about VLD's, and the Alteans', treatment of the Arusians can wait for another blog post. This one is already long enough.
First, a little bit of context, which will hopefully make this possible to follow for someone unfamiliar with the show.
In episode 1 of Voltron: Legendary Defender (hereafter VLD), we learn that there are 5 giant mechs called Lions that combine to make a bigger mech called Voltron. 10,000 years ago, King Alfor of Altea scattered the 5 Lions across the universe and hid them in an attempt to keep them out of the hands of Emperor Zarkon of the Galra Empire.
In the present day of 2405 AD, our heroes find the Blue Lion of Voltron, which has been hidden in a cave on Earth for 10,000 years. That means it was put there around 7600 BC, in the Neolithic or New Stone Age shortly after the end of the last Ice Age. (Remember that, it'll be important in a minute.)
The Blue Lion takes our heroes to the Castle of Lions, which is on a planet called Arus and is the hiding place of the Black Lion. We find out a few episodes later that Arus has native inhabitants: the Arusians, cute little newt-like aliens with goat horns, who don't display any technology above a medieval level.
From Arus, our heroes are sent to find the other 3 Lions. The Yellow Lion is on a planet that's been turned into a mining colony of the Galra Empire, and we never find out if it has any natives. Similarly, we never even see the original hiding place of the Red Lion, because the Galra found it first. But the team who go after the Green Lion are met by a friendly sloth-like alien. The sloth ferries them to their destination in a canoe that is definitely less than 10,000 years old and looks decidedly Stone Age.
That puts us 3 for 3, in cases where we know whether there were natives or not, for the planets where the Lions were hidden having pre-spacefaring civilisations. (As we worked out earlier, Earth was in its own Stone Age at the time the Blue Lion was put there, although it has since developed space travel.)
Now for my question: Did Alfor deliberately hide the Lions on planets with pre-spacefaring civilisations, and if so, why?
Sadly, Alfor is dead by the start of the series and cannot tell us anything about his reasoning. But I have theories.
Theory: Avoiding spacefaring planets.
The Lions couldn't be hidden on Alfor's home planet of Altea, because Zarkon had just announced to the universe at large that he was about to destroy Altea. They also couldn't be hidden on any of the many planets ruled by the Galra Empire, because it was their ruler, Emperor Zarkon, from whom Alfor was trying to hide them.
Alfor could have hidden the Lions on spacefaring planets ruled by neither Alteans nor Galrans, but there are several reasons he might not have wanted to.
Firstly, he had no guarantee that Zarkon's wrath would stop at Altea. We know from information revealed later in the series that he would be right to worry about this: the home planets of the other former paladins of Voltron were also destroyed. Anywhere with a spacefaring civilisation would interact with the Galra Empire at some point, and therefore ran a risk of incurring Zarkon's displeasure at some point in the future.
Secondly, even discounting the possibility of more genocides, the higher level of interaction and travel between spacefaring planets would put the Lions at a greater risk of discovery by the Galra, simply because there were more reasons for Galran citizens to visit those planets.
Relatedly, the Lions would be harder to conceal in the first place from a spacefaring civilisation. Any planet with space flight, or one that was even close to developing the capability, would be monitoring anything entering its atmosphere. They would know about the Lion's arrival and investigate. On finding it, they would recognise it as a Lion of Voltron, unless they'd been living under a very large rock.
A civilisation that hadn't even invented smelting iron yet, on the other hand, might easily write off a spaceship's landing as a falling star if it didn't fall too close to their village, and even if they found the Lion they wouldn't know what it was. There's a saying...tip of my tongue...something about two people and their ability to keep secrets?
But if secrecy is the goal, why not go for a planet with no inhabitants at all?
Theory: All planets are inhabited?
To the best of my recollection (bearing in mind that it has been about 4 years since I last watched an episode), I don't think we ever actually visit a planet in the show that we know for sure doesn't have intelligent native life. Given this evidence, we might reasonably conclude that, in the universe of VLD, there aren't any planets like that, or at least that they're few and far between.
There are several problems with this. The first and most obvious is that we know of several planets in our own solar system that we're pretty sure are uninhabited (and uninhabitable, at least for all forms of life we know about). Given that by the start of the series humanity has explored out as far as Pluto without meeting aliens, it's safe to assume that this is still true in the VLD universe.
However, it could still be the case that all planets capable of supporting life are inhabited. None of the other planets in our solar system meet this criterion, so they don't disprove the theory. And, in a universe as crowded with diverse alien life as the one the show depicts, it doesn't seem too implausible that life develops literally everywhere it can.
This still creates a problem for our initial evidence. If there are planets that don't support life (which we know there are), why do our heroes never visit them?
One option is just that there's never a reason to. Most of the places visited in the show are planets threatened or occupied by the Galra, important military targets, or similar—our heroes are visiting them for a reason, and they don't have time to stop off for sight-seeing on planets that have been left well alone.
This doesn't explain the places the Lions crash-land at the start of season 2. They're split up by a faulty wormhole, and land on 2 planets and a space junk heap, all 3 of which turn out to have native wildlife. Only one of those—the planet with the mermaids where the Blue and Yellow Lions end up—has intelligent life, but they all have lifeforms of some kind. If you closed your eyes and threw 3 darts at a map in a universe where 7 out of 8 planets were uninhabitable, you wouldn't expect to hit 3 bullseyes.
So this suggests that we're looking at a universe—or at least a part of the universe—where empty planets are thin on the ground. But if that's the case, then why is Earth alone in its solar system in supporting life? Are we just that unlucky?
There might be a way we can marry these observations together. According to...Coran according to the VLD wiki, which doesn't seem to have cited a source...the Milky Way galaxy is "too young" to have Balmera—living planets that are common in other parts of the universe.
What if galaxies tend to get busier over time, and Earth is in a part of the universe that hasn't had time to fill up yet? Terraforming and colonisation are both things we know spacefaring civilisations do in VLD—Naxzela was an ancient Altean terraforming project, for example. This could lead to a pattern where, over eons, more and more planets in a galaxy have intelligent life.
This is all fairly speculative, but it seems like there is at least a possibility that Alfor would have had to look pretty far afield to find empty planets. On the other hand, he did ignore all those lovely desolate planets right next to Earth, so this can't be a complete explanation...
Theory: Stone Age civilisations are invisible from space.
If you were trying to detect intelligent life on a planet, what would you look for?
The main thing humans are looking for, right now in the real world, is radio waves. Broadcasts from alien radio, messages beamed into space. And we're sending out our own, of course. (Hello? Is anybody out there? Do you want to be friends?)
This might sound too obvious to bother saying, but humans were not sending out radio waves in 7600 BC. We also weren't building tall cities or great monuments, logging forests or strip-mining the land on a massive scale, or tilling and fencing off vast acres of farmland to create those lovely squares you see on aerial views of the countryside. We'd just about invented agriculture and cities as concepts.
In fact, if you were looking at Earth from space in 7600 BC, you could probably be forgiven for not noticing that humans were doing anything more exciting than the next monkey on the family tree. It seems plausible that Alfor could have been unaware that the planets he chose had intelligent natives, although he was presumably aware that they were life-supporting and therefore might.
There are two problems with this as an explanation.
Firstly, if Alfor was picking from among planets without obvious signs of civilisation (a group that encompasses both planets without natives and planets whose natives haven't yet industrialised), it seems unlikely that he randomly hit ones with Stone Age civilisations in all 3 cases we know about. We're back to the question of how many empty planets there are in the universe to begin with, and no closer to an answer.
Secondly, if you want an empty planet, the easiest way to guarantee that is to pick one that doesn't support life in the first place. Yet we know that in at least one case, Alfor passed up a string of such planets in favour of Earth. The obvious conclusion is that he was specifically looking for habitable planets—or even inhabited ones. But why?
Theory: Alfor wanted the Lions to be found.
To explain this one, there's one more important bit of context we need.
The Black Lion is hidden in the Castle of Lions, yes, but it's not the only important thing in the Castle. Also within the Castle, sealed in a cryopod that has kept her sleeping untouched by the passage of those 10,000 years, is Alfor's only daughter, Princess Allura.
The Castle itself is sealed so that it will only open for one of the Lions. In the show, it's the Blue Lion's return (with our heroes) that opens the doors and lets them find and wake Allura. If they hadn't come, she might have slept for centuries more—or forever.
When Alfor placed his daughter in the cryopod, it was with the intent of preserving her life and allowing her to survive the destruction of their homeworld. Therefore, he clearly intended her to be found and woken at some point. He wanted someone, at some point in the future, to find at least one of the Lions. He just didn't want it to be Zarkon.
Putting the Lions on an empty, dead planet like Mars would have reduced the chances of anyone finding them to almost nothing. Space is big, and there are a lot of planets out there. The best way to maximise the chance that someone would eventually find the Lions would be to put them on planets with native inhabitants. All the arguments against spacefaring planets still apply, which limits us to planets with pre-spaceflight civilisations.
Alfor planned and hoped for exactly the scenario that ended up happening: someone from a species unconnected to galactic civilisation, that had never even heard of the Galra, found a Lion and was compatible enough to be its paladin, waking it from its hibernation. That Lion happened to be Blue, and the species in question happened to be humans.
But this argument doesn't apply to the Castle of Lions. The Black Lion is sealed away, and can't be revealed by a potential paladin unless all 4 of the other Lions are gathered first. And yet we know it was still put on an inhabited planet, Arus. Are there other potential reasons for doing so?
Theory: Camouflage.
Even to someone who doesn't know exactly what they're looking at, the Lions and the Castle are very clearly artificial creations, not naturally formed. On an otherwise uninhabited planet, where they were the only "man"-made structures around, they'd be much easier to spot as out of place, and likelier to catch the attention of the Galra.
In contrast to the previous argument, this one is particularly important for the Castle. At least two of the Lions were hidden underground, where they'd be less conspicuous anyway. But the Castle is far too big to be hidden in a cave. Instead, it's right out in the open on a rocky promontory. Its camouflage, instead, comes from the Arusians. Take a look at this screenshot from s1e1:
The visible parts of the Castle itself are just the central tower and the 4 outer spires (one hidden behind the central tower from this angle). All the other construction around it, like the arched bridges, was done by the Arusians over the centuries the Castle has rested on Arus. Because the stone is white, like the outer plating of the Castle, they blend together so it's hard to tell from a distance exactly which parts are which despite the different materials. This integrates the Castle into the Arusian landscape and makes it much less conspicuous to someone looking for a spaceship that doesn't belong.
The Green Lion, too, benefits from constructed as well as natural concealment. The locals have built a ziggurat over and around the Green Lion, completely enclosing it and hiding it from view.
Theory: Local assistance and allies.
The Arusians have stories passed down from ancient times about a "Lion Goddess", whom they worship and revere. Even before Allura reveals that Voltron has protected them, they're willing to do anything she asks, up to and including throwing themselves en masse onto a pyre. The sloth-like alien on the Green Lion's planet recognised the "V" symbol of Voltron on the paladins' tracking device as a sign that they were looking for the Lion, and took them to it in the canoe without further questions. It seems like the sloth aliens also had stories passed down by the ancients.
Where did they get these stories? One source is the carvings in the rocks near each Lion's hiding place, depicting the Lions in a stylised form and telling stories about them. The carvings we see around the Blue, Green, and Yellow Lions are all in the same style—indicating that they were put there by whoever hid the Lions, rather than by the locals of 3 different planets. A message for friendly searchers, but also a way to communicate something of the Lions' importance to the locals.
The goal of this would have been to provide assistance in reaching the Lions to future paladins who came looking. After all, they had to be well hidden to escape Zarkon's grasp, but too well hidden and they risk never being found. Having local guides, who can evaluate whether a given searcher was sent by Zarkon or Allura, might help make that tightrope easier to walk.
Alfor may not have specifically intended for religions to grow up around the Castle and the Lions—as seems to have happened in at least two cases—but it's unlikely he would have minded. From the fact that Alfor found it acceptable to put Altean technology on planets with pre-spacefaring civilisations in the first place, we can surmise that Altea didn't have (or he didn't care to follow) anything resembling Star Trek's Prime Directive, the injunction not to interfere with the cultural development of less advanced civilisations. If it helps Allura and the future paladins reclaim Voltron and defeat Zarkon, who cares if a few primitive natives worship the Lions as gods for a few millennia?
Newsflash, Alfor: I care. But my complaints about VLD's, and the Alteans', treatment of the Arusians can wait for another blog post. This one is already long enough.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-23 04:54 pm (UTC)