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[spazzed]

ooc information

Name: tsu
Age: 32
Contact Information: boldly

ic information

Character Name: Lance McClain
Age: 17
Canon: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Canon Point: Before Keith abandons the team to go find himself with the Blade of Marmora the end of season 3

History: The jerk writing this app figures that no one in their right mind wants to be linked to a page full of episode summaries — because as far as I've seen, that's about all that exists in the way of an actual outlined history of this series — so we're going to attempt to be as concise as possible while also taking note of pivotal points that get us from point A to point B and make sense of … a canon that consists of a handful of robot space cats and their ( sometimes ) idiot pilots.

A year prior to the beginning of our paladins' story an expedition to the moon Kerberos went really, really badly — badly in the sense that all of its team members were presumed dead — all thanks to the Galra. ( Thanks, bros. Really. It's not like the universe has anything else going for it or anything. ) Early on a few idiots see a crashing craft that happens to hold one of those previously-thought-dead team members, who remembers absolutely nothing about his time spent as a captive of the Galra, and somewhere along the line a dropout hobo by the name of Keith Kogane appears out of pretty much nowhere and helps this ragtag group of goobers come up with a plan to liberate Shiro of his quarantine. Because you know what happens when you're held captive by a hostile alien race after everyone pretty much assumed you and your entire team were dead? You get quarantined.

Fast forward. The Galra are looking for the legendary weapon ( or … one could say defender, if they wanted ) Voltron, but ohoho what happens — these humans find the blue lion first, which just so happens to choose Lance as its paladin, and there's a brief field trip to a wormhole that leads to the castle of lions, and the last remaining Alteans left in cryostasis for ten thousand years.

Fast forward some more to when all the lions have been retrieved and their paladins chosen — yellow for Hunk, green for Pidge, red for Keith and black for Shiro ( because team leader has to form the head, yadda yadda, it makes sense in space ); there's a heck of a lot of effort involved in getting the team to actually work together as one in order to be able to fight as a unit in the first place, but wouldn't you know it, they manage it! After nearly ripping each other apart in the interim. Some people just don't get along well with others. Keith.

Alliances are formed. Alien races are saved from prospective harm from the Galra, because they literally have nothing better to do with their time than conquer planets and make the lives of every living thing miserable; somewhere along the way we find out that Pidge is a girl, and apparently everyone but Lance had gotten the hint way before she said anything. How's that for peripheral awareness?

The Galra take over the castle-ship for a bit, but ultimately get kicked out on their asses with the help of some amazing teamwork ( and Pidge being one heck of an engineer, honestly ) and Lance … gets the stuffing knocked out of him a little, might have had to spend some time in a healing pod but you're not gonna get him down that easily. Not at all! ( There as also a bonding moment that he denies ever happened. There was no cradling in anyone's arms, and certainly not Keith's, for that matter. )

The team meets some 'rebels'. Lance gets tied to a tree because he trusts a pretty girl that ultimately has no interest in anything but taking the blue lion. Both Blue and the lion's paladin are retrieved, but not without a fair bit of smack talk in Lance's general direction, because what kind of paladin allows someone to steal their lion? Honestly, kid. You need to sort out your priorities.

The castle-ship gets haunted. Or … infected. Food goo goes everywhere and Allura's father's AI tries to pilot the ship itself into a star that's about to go supernova. ( Or implode. Whatever. ) Allura and Shiro team up to infiltrate a Galran transport hub in order to gather more information about their intent — or literally anything — and some really bad things go down. Fights! Allura sacrifices herself in order to ensure the paladins escape! The paladins mount a rescue and Shiro … loses the black lion to this evil bastard known as Zarkon, the original paladin of the black lion. Now, I know you're thinking — didn't this all happen ten thousand freaking years ago? How is this asshole still alive?

All in good time, friends. All in good time. Suffice it to say that things are bad enough as they are but here Keith has decided he's gonna fite Zarkon, at least until space dad swoops in with his newly-reclaimed black lion and during a daring escape. Everyone is effectively ejected from their wormhole transport and scattered all across the freaking galaxy.

Keith and Shiro get stuck with giant lizards. Pidge in a garbage nebula. Hunk and Lance in a fully submerged water world — where the lattermost mentioned idiot himself tries to flirt with mermaids, naturally — but as has also been mentioned before, Pidge is one hell of an engineer, and manages to find a way to get the team back together where they belong.

More alliances are formed through space shenanigans and the rescuing from Galran forces — and despite the team's best efforts to keep the distance between them and Zarkon and his need to retrieve the black lion, he keeps tracking them down. There's a little bit ( maybe a lotta bit ) of drama between Keith and Allura both about how in the universe this jerkface keeps finding them, and they separate themselves from the rest of the team in order to test a theory. It's … wrong, because of course it is, because it's Zarkon's connection to the black lion that allows him to track them so easily, which leads Shiro into the need to form a deeper bond with the lion himself, or maybe just enough to break the hold the Galra has on it.

Drama. There's a space mall. Pidge and Lance purchase an old game system and get a free cow with purchase. Shiro forms a deeper bond with his lion that effectively cuts Zarkon off from being able to track them. Take that, you asshole.

We find out Keith is at least part Galra. Loooot of drama and angst surrounding that but it leads to an alliance with the Blade of Marmora, a group of Galra that don't want anything to do with Zarkon or his bullshit, and now there are even more able bodies committed to the cause of Voltron and its defense of the universe. Against this one guy that just wants to screw everything up for literally everyone.

Ultimately, the team fights Zarkon head-on, and if you don't think that's one of the most intense sequence of events in the entirety of the series thus far, buddy. You might need to sort out your priorities yourself. Zarkon refuses to give up his ploy to reclaim the black lion and ends up getting the snot beaten out of him to the point where the paladins think they've won — until they realize that space dad Shiro has disappeared and everyone collectively loses their shit.

Also Zarkon isn't dead, either. Because things are never going to be that simple and it's apparently going to take more than a space-fight to keep him down. Keith takes over piloting the black lion, Lance to red, and Allura to blue — and despite Keith's reluctance to act as team leader in Shiro's absence he at least makes an effort, and it says something about the team as a whole that they still try to work together. Keep themselves together even as they're learning to work as a different kind of unit, with Allura getting used to Blue and Lance to Red. It's a bit of a clusterfuck for a while, but you know what? Teamwork makes the dream work.

Meanwhile, Zarkon's previously unmentioned son Lotor tries to take over the Galran empire in his father's absence, and it's pretty much exactly what you would expect. Young, pretty warrior has his own motives and his own points to prove. He ain't up to snuff but he's got just enough in him to continuously screw up everyone's day.

Somewhere, there's an alternate reality in which the Alteans were never wiped out and apparently Shiro is Swedish. Not-Swedish Shiro turns up out of seemingly nowhere and rejoins the group and while it isn't immediately obvious, there's something off about him. ( And it isn't just the hair, either. It's more than that even if the hair is … disturbing. ) Amidst all this we get a nice history lesson about the original paladins of Voltron, including Zarkon as the pilot of the black lion and King Alfor, Allura's father, as the pilot of the red — and here we learn that it was the result of an alchemical experiment that destroyed the Galra homeworld and thus brought about Zarkon's need to destroy … well, everything. Enact his revenge, what-have-you. After being brought back from the dead along with his wife.

Whose experiment ultimately brought about the destruction of Daibazaal. Good job.

( note; this is honestly not as succinct as it could be and is also kind of vague — not to mention littered with my poor attempts at humor in order to keep the interest alive, because who really likes reading history sections — but if it isn't enough, I would be happy to write more ( with less humor ) and there is also the entire episode list complete with individual summaries. )

Personality: Generally speaking, when you take a first look at Lance you might think to yourself what you see is what you get — and you'd be right, at least on a few superficial levels, because at first gLance he's. Loud. Cocky. Sure of himself and his abilities to a point that it seems a little questionable. ( Maybe … a lot questionable, but we're trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here. ) And he continues to project himself that way until you dig a little deeper, get beneath those barriers he's put up around himself in order to keep up with his fellow paladins.

But first. A little bit of expansion on those aforementioned superficial levels, because it's generally what we see the most unless there are dire circumstances, which usually involve extreme situational duress. Or if he thinks he might be dying or something. Situational duress.

Lance spends a rather sizable chunk of his time engaging the rest of the team with his antics, generally spazzing out over every little thing that could possibly fall within his field of perception ( anyone remember the way he wigged out when Pidge admitted that she was a girl, and the rest of the group took it with a grain of salt? this face right here? ); he tends to only be, uh, calm and cool and collected when he hones in on a pretty little thing in need of some flirtation, and even then he's pretty damned extra when it comes to garnering the sort of attention that he's convinced he wants.

And ends up not getting. Because there have been very few instances in which his flirting has seen him getting anywhere that isn't tied to a tree. ( And he totally deserved that, whether he thinks he did or not. )

He's pretty much the first to use humor as a coping mechanism, to make light of any situation that might otherwise be too heavy for him to handle — that's right, for him to handle, not necessarily anyone else, because the other members of the group might just be a little more mature than he is, and understand what it means to take things seriously. That isn't to say that he isn't capable of it when it really counts, but there might just be a reason behind Pidge declaring that he's the goofball of their little ensemble. And by there just might be I mean of course that's why, because it honestly never fails that he ends up being the comedy relief in any given situation, sometimes whether he wants to be or not.

Which is a perfect sort of segue into those deeper levels. The ones that aren't so superficial and have a tendency to be revealed only when Lance is by himself, or he thinks no one is paying attention; he cares deeply for the other members of his team, his friends even despite engaging Keith in a constant sort of rivalry that has them both effectively at one another's throats in their earliest moments. What little faith he has in himself ( despite all of that hemming and hawing about being the best sharpshooter ever ) is mirrored by that which he places with the others and their abilities, their smarts and their technical prowess. He'll never be as book-smart as Pidge or Hunk, or the sort of common sense ( or … maybe just peripheral awareness ) to, say, keep him from being tied to a tree but he makes up for it in other ways.

And not just with his impulsiveness. He tends to have a wandering mind and finds himself easily distracted but he does listen when it counts, and even ( every so often! it's been known to happen! ) chimes in with his own one-and-a-half cents when he has a thought that might actually do the team some good. It's rare, but it has been known to happen before. Best to just leave the higher thinking to the ones with the brains made for it, or something.

Because when he doesn't have anything of value to add to any given situation, the sarcasm and snarkity-snark-snark comes out and that's never helpful, and he ends up. Making more of an ass of himself than he would prefer, which comes right back around to if you can't say anything nice, yadda yadda yadda.

In … not quite as short as it probably should be, Lance is like an onion. In that he has layers — and it might take a while to peel the outer ones away in order to get to the real meat of him, and those outer layers might not exactly be the most enjoyable. Or even tolerable. He cares deeply and he loves fiercely and be more than believes in the power of the paladins coming together as a whole in order to protect the universe, and if that means the power of friendship or something like that … well. There you have it. He doesn't think he's the strongest or the fastest or the smartest — but it's that level of self-awareness that has allowed him to mature as he has, taking the smallest of baby steps in the direction of the kind of person he would like to be, and hopefully the sort he'll grow into once he's become more confident in himself outside the bravado that covers him like a shroud.

Powers/Abilities: ✔ sharpshootin' pro! all things considered, he might be a bit of a doof in other areas, but you give him a rifle and a target he's on it like a fat kid on cake
✔ he's a decent enough pilot, though he isn't anywhere near on Keith's level — but it might just go without saying that piloting a lion as done a bit of good for this particular skill, and he'll only get better with time
✔ does sarcasm count as an ability, because this boy has it in spades
✔ quick wit, when it counts, and when it can be considered less-than-dull but not-quite-sharp
✔ extraordinarily adaptive
✔ he maintains this uncanny ability to annoy anyone within audible / visible range; that's a skill you can't fake, baby

Suitable Jobs: ✔ certified churro distributor ( okay so that isn't a real thing, but it should be ) general waitstaff at any manner of food service venue
✔ general janitorial duty because who better to get rid of the garbage than an actual garbage can
✔ ride operator? ride operator ( preferably of something like splash or space mountain … or jungle cruise but beggars can't be choosers, of course )
✔ gift shop attendee, or something along those lines, selling those overpriced endorsed toys and stuffed animals for ten times what they're worth — who said that
✔ is there any place he can give beauty tips because he'd be great at that ( like ... if there were a spa anywhere ... yanno like hawaii disney has going for it )

Card Selection: ✔ blizzard
✔ flight
✔ ka-chow!
✔ grand entrance
✔ happy haunting grounds

Third Person Sample: TDM thread with Keef