Player Name: H E-mail: heathar@gmail.com Preferred Contact: mutedtempest everywhere online, mutedtempest#7020 on Discord Timezone: IST (same as GMT) Current Characters in Victory Road: not a one
Character Name: Lotor Series: Voltron: Legendary Defender Timeline: Season 5, the end of Episode 6, "White Lion," after returning from Oriande with Allura on the space Segways Canon Resource Links:The fandom wiki More: Lotor nearly wasn’t born at all. His parents were told there were many complications, and Zarkon asked if there was any way to save the baby. Honerva demanded to be taken to the Rift, because “Quintessence is life; it’s the only way.” Zarkon, being unable to deny his love anything, betrayed the other Paladins and took her in.
Lotor wasn’t introduced to the show until Zarkon had been left comatose by his battle with Voltron. Haggar brought Lotor out of exile to lead the Galra as Emperor pro-tem until his father recovered. He was immediately met with opposition and those plotting to keep him from the throne, to which he responded with battle and a rousing speech that was well received by the Galra. This came immediately after two generals in the audience were discussing how small he is, and how he fights on the front lines with his generals like a common soldier (and how this is shameful).
As the season continued, we were shown that Lotor is extremely intelligent. We were also shown that his fighting and tactical prowess is pretty much unmatched in the Empire. This continues through season 4, where he has yet more run-ins with Haggar. He was relieved of his position by a very unhappy and reawakened Zarkon, but he wasn’t unhappy about this.
He obviously had his own plans that he was working on rather than wanting to be in command of the Empire, and these come to a head at the end of season 4, where it’s revealed that he’d been working on making ships from the comet he’d sent Voltron to get from another reality in season 3. After killing his general Narti after realizing she was being controlled by Haggar in order to spy on him and his ships, Lotor tests these Sincline ships as he knows Haggar will know about them. Haggar does, and tells Zarkon, who declares his son an enemy of the Empire and orders that he be shot on sight.
The Sincline ships don’t work, and Lotor is captured by Acxa as revenge for his killing Narti. He dislocates his shoulders to get out of his bonds and escapes in his fighter, but Zarkon’s ships are right behind him, so Lotor literally flies into a sun to escape him. It works, but just barely. He then hears a transmission from Central Command that a large explosion is imminent in a certain zone, and Lotor manages to piece together that this is all being orchestrated by Haggar. He immediately speeds to the location, and fires on Haggar’s ship with his ion cannon. After this, he tells the Paladins that it’s time they have a discussion.
Season 5 opens with Lotor imprisoned in the Castle of Lions. After returning from a mission, Shiro and Allura go to tell him that his intel has checked out and given them a win, to which Lotor replies that he wants to return the Galra Empire to a bygone era of peace. To prove this, he gives them information about Pidge’s father’s location, and Voltron takes Lotor as a prisoner exchange. This ends up going awry, as Lotor warned it would, and Lotor ends up facing Zarkon. After a hard battle, Lotor ends up killing his father.
He later goes to the Kral Zera, the Galran site of determining the new emperor/empress, in the Black Lion with Shiro. He announces that he is the rightful emperor as he killed Zarkon, and faces off with Sendak in a fierce battle for the throne. He succeeds, and from there forward he makes good on his promise to to try to return the Empire to peace. This involves researching in Haggar’s old lab with Allura, and they find that they can go to Oriande, a world of Altean alchemy secrets. They do, much to the dismay of the other Paladins (and Coran) and Allura is able to pass the tests of the sages and achieve the knowledge contained there. Lotor, however, chooses to fight the White Lion, shouting “Victory or death!” and is thus spat back out onto the temple steps. He later says that Oriande was for Allura, not for him.
Personality: Lotor is designed to be morally grey. He is calculating, manipulative, and charismatically persuasive, while simultaneously having a very genuine air to himself and to the things he says. He is one of the poster children of abuse, being abandoned/neglected/hated by his parents, especially his father, as well as looked down upon and scorned by many of the Galra. As a half-Altean he is smaller than most Galra, which means that all his life he has been underestimated and seen as weak when he is anything but. His fighting ability is incredible, and it’s obvious he’s trained very, very hard to get to where he is. It’s already been stated that he fought at the front lines, so he has that experience (though it’s looked down upon by other Galra generals, who state that “he has no honor” for doing so), as well as the fact that he’s somewhere around 10,000 years old and was born the son of an emperor of a race that valued fighting ability more than most anything else. We see him fighting without much trouble at all in the Galran gladiatorial arena, and while as a prince he may have done this simply for entertainment, one gets the sense that he does it often enough to be confident in his matches there.
He is also one of the most competent pilots in the Empire, able to outrun and outmaneuver his father’s warship as well as those of his father’s commanders and generals. He’s well aware that he has these skills, and while it’s never stated outright that he thinks he’s anything special, he’s obviously confident to the point of coming off arrogant. I don’t think he really is, but given that he often needs to put on a show of strength and power to get any respect from his people at all, he’s able to play the part very well.
His intelligence is vast, something that isn’t odd when you consider that his mother was an alchemist and very interested in science. Zarkon was no slouch in that area either - even after his corruption he's shown to be very shrewd, calculating and analytical. Lotor's circumstances and the fact that he grew up and lived all of his life without his parents’ support meant that he also did not have the support of the Empire, other than that afforded him by virtue of birth alone. If anyone hurt him or made his life hard, they could incur the wrath of the Emperor, which means he was likely very well and highly educated in both scholarly pursuits and combat, but left to himself much of the time. He was exiled for quite some time, only coming back when Haggar needed him to stand in for his father.
Lotor has a very quick and analytical mind, able to make plans that optimize his skills and abilities while lessening those of his opponents, be they members of his own Empire or the Paladins of Voltron. He seeks knowledge and uses this to defeat his enemies, knowing when to withdraw from a battle and to use any new information gathered to re-evaluate and edit his plans. He’s able to think on his feet and play the part needed to get the job done, no matter who he happens to be up against. He is also insatiably curious, and has stated himself that he’s always wanted to be an explorer and learn about the universe.
Lotor seems very emotionally closed off when we first meet him, and this doesn’t change much until season 5. The showrunners have said that the Galra have intense emotions, and this is very true of Lotor, who tends to wear his heart on his sleeve. It’s very easy to see when he’s annoyed, angry, or sad, as he doesn’t hide these feelings from anyone. It can thus be concluded that the Galra, while despising weakness, do not see emotion or the expression of it as such. Of course, this may also tie in to the fact that Lotor is the son of the Emperor, as it’s been stated in the show that he has the ability to go and take anything he wants without asking for it. This may very well extend to his being able to show emotion without being looked down on for it, at least not in any way that matters.
Even so, it’s fairly obvious that his life has been lonely. Haggar was so corrupted by her time in the Rift and the need for quintessence afterward that she has no recollection of him as her son until the beginning of the fifth season, and even then, she definitely doesn’t treat him lovingly. Zarkon seems only to detest him and consider him unworthy of both the throne and his attention, and the only times they speak in canon are very uncomfortable. Lotor is also looked down on for being a half-breed, and this seems to drive him to do better. He considers his Altean heritage a strength, where the Galra see it as a weakness.
In the beginning of the series, Sendak says that the greatest weakness of all is to value the lives of others. In an empire based on conquest and subjugation, this makes sense. Lotor, however, tells Allura that he was sent to the far reaches of the Empire's territory to oversee a planet, and while there, he grew to know and care about its inhabitants and their culture. Finding out about this, Zarkon ordered Lotor to destroy the planet. Lotor refused, and Zarkon proceeded to destroy it himself. This was thousands of years ago, and Lotor is still visibly shaken by it, and is quite sad while sharing it with Allura. Through this his claims to want peace and to want to rule differently from his father seem genuine, and the showrunners have confirmed that everything Lotor says has truth to it. Whether or not he’s manipulating people to get his way is undetermined at his canon point, as are his ultimate goals.
That doesn’t mean that he’s a hero or above manipulation and coercion, though. While we haven’t yet seen him mislead Voltron, he was still introduced as one of the antagonists, and has his own plans to get quintessence to secure peace. To do this, he may very well “betray” them, either intentionally or not, but I can’t imagine it would be malicious. He would simply see it as a necessity to meeting his own goals. (Update post series: yeeeeeah nope not buying the "Lotor is Eeeeeevil" plot twist which had no canon evidence, though it's not relevant at his canon point so I'm just keeping him from right after Oriande so I don't need to deal with the weirdness). Voltron and the Paladins seem to be the first time he’s felt comfortable with people in a long time, if ever. When he greets the Paladins and Coran as his friends when they visit High Command, it sounds incredibly sincere and like he believes it. While he was friendly with his generals, able to joke around and visibly care for them, I think there was still a bit of hesitance on his part simply due to the fact that he outranked them and they were duty-bound to stay by his side. With Narti’s betrayal and his quick decision to kill her for it, he drove a wedge between himself and his remaining generals that could not be fixed. When Acxa pulled her gun on him, Lotor could have fought and more than likely killed her (she didn’t really take him that much by surprise), but he didn’t. He didn’t even make an attempt. He just looked sad. Even when putting the pieces together that Narti was spying for Haggar, he looked more panicked when he cut her down than he did angry.
Allura asks him if he’s all right, after Zarkon’s defeat. He has probably been asked this question before, by his generals at least, but it appears to be something he is not used to on a personal level. I would venture to guess that a Galran prince would not have people asking him such a thing regularly, and when they did, it would be simply out of duty and only in reference to his physical condition. He seems a bit out of sorts when he responds that he’ll be fine. He certainly doesn’t sound it, though. During the battle with Zarkon he looked incredibly scared, and sad afterward, showing that despite their tumultuous relationship, Lotor still loved his father. This is also the first time he shows true vulnerability in front of Allura. This increases as the season progresses, as their connection strengthens. By the end of the season he’s been shown to look at her adoringly, and it’s obvious he genuinely cares about her, and by extension the Paladins (although he’s not as close to any of them, obviously). He even flinches on Oriande when the Sages attack, something he would never risk doing before the Galra as they would dismiss him as weak. Yet as Emperor he didn’t even think twice about flinching in front of her. This shows how much his trust in her has grown.
When it comes to the leadership of his Empire, we aren’t really shown much at his canon point. He states that many are loyal to him, but there are sizable factions in revolt. Lotor is very skilled at war and tactics and though his plans seem to be to find an unlimited source of quintessence so the Empire will no longer need to fight for it, should this not be successful, he may well have to fight. His status as a half-Galra is also a point against him to the Empire, and the number of factions in revolt speak to this. Still, he does not appear concerned about this to anyone aside from the Paladins (and even then, it’s never directly addressed and usually neatly sidestepped). This may be something he does not focus on due to his lack of a way to prevent the battles ahead, or it may simply be an instance of his not wanting to show vulnerability to anyone, as he has been raised and lived all his life in a culture in which doing so gets people killed.
In summary, Lotor is a complicated man with a very dark past, who seems to truly want to help his Empire come to peace. While he is still often cold and cynical, this is changing as he learns to trust others, and while he knows the battle is far from over he seems to have a bit of hope. He has always been at odds with the cutthroat nature of the Galra and has been researching his Altean lineage for centuries, as well as many other things, and this has shaped him into someone that may be a bit terrible at dealing with people or his feelings but well versed in the attempt. His quest for knowledge and his penchant for exploration are definitive qualities, as is his ability to think on his feet.
Pokémon Information Affiliation: Trainer Starter: Purrloin Password: Atomic Fireball
Lotor | Voltron: Legendary Defender
Name: H
E-mail: heathar@gmail.com
Preferred Contact: mutedtempest everywhere online, mutedtempest#7020 on Discord
Timezone: IST (same as GMT)
Current Characters in Victory Road: not a one
Character
Name: Lotor
Series: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Timeline: Season 5, the end of Episode 6, "White Lion," after returning from Oriande with Allura on the space Segways
Canon Resource Links: The fandom wiki
More:
Lotor nearly wasn’t born at all. His parents were told there were many complications, and Zarkon asked if there was any way to save the baby. Honerva demanded to be taken to the Rift, because “Quintessence is life; it’s the only way.” Zarkon, being unable to deny his love anything, betrayed the other Paladins and took her in.
Lotor wasn’t introduced to the show until Zarkon had been left comatose by his battle with Voltron. Haggar brought Lotor out of exile to lead the Galra as Emperor pro-tem until his father recovered. He was immediately met with opposition and those plotting to keep him from the throne, to which he responded with battle and a rousing speech that was well received by the Galra. This came immediately after two generals in the audience were discussing how small he is, and how he fights on the front lines with his generals like a common soldier (and how this is shameful).
As the season continued, we were shown that Lotor is extremely intelligent. We were also shown that his fighting and tactical prowess is pretty much unmatched in the Empire. This continues through season 4, where he has yet more run-ins with Haggar. He was relieved of his position by a very unhappy and reawakened Zarkon, but he wasn’t unhappy about this.
He obviously had his own plans that he was working on rather than wanting to be in command of the Empire, and these come to a head at the end of season 4, where it’s revealed that he’d been working on making ships from the comet he’d sent Voltron to get from another reality in season 3. After killing his general Narti after realizing she was being controlled by Haggar in order to spy on him and his ships, Lotor tests these Sincline ships as he knows Haggar will know about them. Haggar does, and tells Zarkon, who declares his son an enemy of the Empire and orders that he be shot on sight.
The Sincline ships don’t work, and Lotor is captured by Acxa as revenge for his killing Narti. He dislocates his shoulders to get out of his bonds and escapes in his fighter, but Zarkon’s ships are right behind him, so Lotor literally flies into a sun to escape him. It works, but just barely. He then hears a transmission from Central Command that a large explosion is imminent in a certain zone, and Lotor manages to piece together that this is all being orchestrated by Haggar. He immediately speeds to the location, and fires on Haggar’s ship with his ion cannon. After this, he tells the Paladins that it’s time they have a discussion.
Season 5 opens with Lotor imprisoned in the Castle of Lions. After returning from a mission, Shiro and Allura go to tell him that his intel has checked out and given them a win, to which Lotor replies that he wants to return the Galra Empire to a bygone era of peace. To prove this, he gives them information about Pidge’s father’s location, and Voltron takes Lotor as a prisoner exchange. This ends up going awry, as Lotor warned it would, and Lotor ends up facing Zarkon. After a hard battle, Lotor ends up killing his father.
He later goes to the Kral Zera, the Galran site of determining the new emperor/empress, in the Black Lion with Shiro. He announces that he is the rightful emperor as he killed Zarkon, and faces off with Sendak in a fierce battle for the throne. He succeeds, and from there forward he makes good on his promise to to try to return the Empire to peace. This involves researching in Haggar’s old lab with Allura, and they find that they can go to Oriande, a world of Altean alchemy secrets. They do, much to the dismay of the other Paladins (and Coran) and Allura is able to pass the tests of the sages and achieve the knowledge contained there. Lotor, however, chooses to fight the White Lion, shouting “Victory or death!” and is thus spat back out onto the temple steps. He later says that Oriande was for Allura, not for him.
Personality: Lotor is designed to be morally grey. He is calculating, manipulative, and charismatically persuasive, while simultaneously having a very genuine air to himself and to the things he says. He is one of the poster children of abuse, being abandoned/neglected/hated by his parents, especially his father, as well as looked down upon and scorned by many of the Galra. As a half-Altean he is smaller than most Galra, which means that all his life he has been underestimated and seen as weak when he is anything but. His fighting ability is incredible, and it’s obvious he’s trained very, very hard to get to where he is. It’s already been stated that he fought at the front lines, so he has that experience (though it’s looked down upon by other Galra generals, who state that “he has no honor” for doing so), as well as the fact that he’s somewhere around 10,000 years old and was born the son of an emperor of a race that valued fighting ability more than most anything else. We see him fighting without much trouble at all in the Galran gladiatorial arena, and while as a prince he may have done this simply for entertainment, one gets the sense that he does it often enough to be confident in his matches there.
He is also one of the most competent pilots in the Empire, able to outrun and outmaneuver his father’s warship as well as those of his father’s commanders and generals. He’s well aware that he has these skills, and while it’s never stated outright that he thinks he’s anything special, he’s obviously confident to the point of coming off arrogant. I don’t think he really is, but given that he often needs to put on a show of strength and power to get any respect from his people at all, he’s able to play the part very well.
His intelligence is vast, something that isn’t odd when you consider that his mother was an alchemist and very interested in science. Zarkon was no slouch in that area either - even after his corruption he's shown to be very shrewd, calculating and analytical. Lotor's circumstances and the fact that he grew up and lived all of his life without his parents’ support meant that he also did not have the support of the Empire, other than that afforded him by virtue of birth alone. If anyone hurt him or made his life hard, they could incur the wrath of the Emperor, which means he was likely very well and highly educated in both scholarly pursuits and combat, but left to himself much of the time. He was exiled for quite some time, only coming back when Haggar needed him to stand in for his father.
Lotor has a very quick and analytical mind, able to make plans that optimize his skills and abilities while lessening those of his opponents, be they members of his own Empire or the Paladins of Voltron. He seeks knowledge and uses this to defeat his enemies, knowing when to withdraw from a battle and to use any new information gathered to re-evaluate and edit his plans. He’s able to think on his feet and play the part needed to get the job done, no matter who he happens to be up against. He is also insatiably curious, and has stated himself that he’s always wanted to be an explorer and learn about the universe.
Lotor seems very emotionally closed off when we first meet him, and this doesn’t change much until season 5. The showrunners have said that the Galra have intense emotions, and this is very true of Lotor, who tends to wear his heart on his sleeve. It’s very easy to see when he’s annoyed, angry, or sad, as he doesn’t hide these feelings from anyone. It can thus be concluded that the Galra, while despising weakness, do not see emotion or the expression of it as such. Of course, this may also tie in to the fact that Lotor is the son of the Emperor, as it’s been stated in the show that he has the ability to go and take anything he wants without asking for it. This may very well extend to his being able to show emotion without being looked down on for it, at least not in any way that matters.
Even so, it’s fairly obvious that his life has been lonely. Haggar was so corrupted by her time in the Rift and the need for quintessence afterward that she has no recollection of him as her son until the beginning of the fifth season, and even then, she definitely doesn’t treat him lovingly. Zarkon seems only to detest him and consider him unworthy of both the throne and his attention, and the only times they speak in canon are very uncomfortable. Lotor is also looked down on for being a half-breed, and this seems to drive him to do better. He considers his Altean heritage a strength, where the Galra see it as a weakness.
In the beginning of the series, Sendak says that the greatest weakness of all is to value the lives of others. In an empire based on conquest and subjugation, this makes sense. Lotor, however, tells Allura that he was sent to the far reaches of the Empire's territory to oversee a planet, and while there, he grew to know and care about its inhabitants and their culture. Finding out about this, Zarkon ordered Lotor to destroy the planet. Lotor refused, and Zarkon proceeded to destroy it himself. This was thousands of years ago, and Lotor is still visibly shaken by it, and is quite sad while sharing it with Allura. Through this his claims to want peace and to want to rule differently from his father seem genuine, and the showrunners have confirmed that everything Lotor says has truth to it. Whether or not he’s manipulating people to get his way is undetermined at his canon point, as are his ultimate goals.
That doesn’t mean that he’s a hero or above manipulation and coercion, though. While we haven’t yet seen him mislead Voltron, he was still introduced as one of the antagonists, and has his own plans to get quintessence to secure peace. To do this, he may very well “betray” them, either intentionally or not, but I can’t imagine it would be malicious. He would simply see it as a necessity to meeting his own goals. (Update post series: yeeeeeah nope not buying the "Lotor is Eeeeeevil" plot twist which had no canon evidence, though it's not relevant at his canon point so I'm just keeping him from right after Oriande so I don't need to deal with the weirdness). Voltron and the Paladins seem to be the first time he’s felt comfortable with people in a long time, if ever. When he greets the Paladins and Coran as his friends when they visit High Command, it sounds incredibly sincere and like he believes it. While he was friendly with his generals, able to joke around and visibly care for them, I think there was still a bit of hesitance on his part simply due to the fact that he outranked them and they were duty-bound to stay by his side. With Narti’s betrayal and his quick decision to kill her for it, he drove a wedge between himself and his remaining generals that could not be fixed. When Acxa pulled her gun on him, Lotor could have fought and more than likely killed her (she didn’t really take him that much by surprise), but he didn’t. He didn’t even make an attempt. He just looked sad. Even when putting the pieces together that Narti was spying for Haggar, he looked more panicked when he cut her down than he did angry.
Allura asks him if he’s all right, after Zarkon’s defeat. He has probably been asked this question before, by his generals at least, but it appears to be something he is not used to on a personal level. I would venture to guess that a Galran prince would not have people asking him such a thing regularly, and when they did, it would be simply out of duty and only in reference to his physical condition. He seems a bit out of sorts when he responds that he’ll be fine. He certainly doesn’t sound it, though. During the battle with Zarkon he looked incredibly scared, and sad afterward, showing that despite their tumultuous relationship, Lotor still loved his father. This is also the first time he shows true vulnerability in front of Allura. This increases as the season progresses, as their connection strengthens. By the end of the season he’s been shown to look at her adoringly, and it’s obvious he genuinely cares about her, and by extension the Paladins (although he’s not as close to any of them, obviously). He even flinches on Oriande when the Sages attack, something he would never risk doing before the Galra as they would dismiss him as weak. Yet as Emperor he didn’t even think twice about flinching in front of her. This shows how much his trust in her has grown.
When it comes to the leadership of his Empire, we aren’t really shown much at his canon point. He states that many are loyal to him, but there are sizable factions in revolt. Lotor is very skilled at war and tactics and though his plans seem to be to find an unlimited source of quintessence so the Empire will no longer need to fight for it, should this not be successful, he may well have to fight. His status as a half-Galra is also a point against him to the Empire, and the number of factions in revolt speak to this. Still, he does not appear concerned about this to anyone aside from the Paladins (and even then, it’s never directly addressed and usually neatly sidestepped). This may be something he does not focus on due to his lack of a way to prevent the battles ahead, or it may simply be an instance of his not wanting to show vulnerability to anyone, as he has been raised and lived all his life in a culture in which doing so gets people killed.
In summary, Lotor is a complicated man with a very dark past, who seems to truly want to help his Empire come to peace. While he is still often cold and cynical, this is changing as he learns to trust others, and while he knows the battle is far from over he seems to have a bit of hope. He has always been at odds with the cutthroat nature of the Galra and has been researching his Altean lineage for centuries, as well as many other things, and this has shaped him into someone that may be a bit terrible at dealing with people or his feelings but well versed in the attempt. His quest for knowledge and his penchant for exploration are definitive qualities, as is his ability to think on his feet.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Purrloin
Password: Atomic Fireball
Samples
RP Sample: Lotor being Lotor, in Lotor
Victory Road Sample: TDM thread