Act Iii: Final Notes

act iii: final notes

edit: 4/9/2024: added some more stuff!!! i'll put this emoji 🫧 next to the new things so u know where to scroll.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH I FINISHED MY FIRST FULL LENGTH FIC HOLD ON LEMME JUST THROW UP IN THE CORNER REAL QUICK

i am sooooooo normal rn anyways let's get into it thank u for having me on the show, mr. kimmel. i've had a raging headache all day so the content underneath each sections will be kinda short. i'll go through and add more to it once i recover but i wanted to get this up before the week got too busy!

krolia

guys…. im so sorry for the angst….. it was necessary for the plot…….

maybe it’s just me projecting but in the actual show, i kind of wish we had seen more of the emotional fallout that occurred after krolia revealed that she was keith’s mom. because let’s be real here, there’s no way that keith’s traumatized ass would just willingly accept her back into his life. he’d have questions. he’d be in disbelief. it’s hard for him to open up to others and he carries a lot of hurt from being abandoned.

it was crucial in the course of this fic to have that confrontation between krolia and keith. it's not always going to be rainbows and sunshine, and even though they both missed each other deeply, you don't just automatically connect and forget everything that's happened. even if keith hadn't gone into the foster system, he definitely would have carried a lot of anger and hurt towards krolia when she shows back up. i'm sure that things won't just be smooth sailing and they'll need to hash things out multiple times as they rebuild their relationship but that first fight was a big hurdle to get over.

if you’re curious, i have a whooollleeee backstory for what happened with krolia and why she couldn’t get back to her kid. i couldn’t really fit it into the fic but i’ll put it right here for those who are interested:

2000: krolia in the US on student visa, first year of of PhD program

krolia meets heath and they fall in love

2003: krolia gives birth to keith

2008: krolia finishes grad school/PhD program/doctoral degree and applies for a work visa 

2009: she and heath and baby keith are living their life but krolia’s parents find out and are like girl you need to come home NOW or we will disown you 

krolia’s family are really wealthy and powerful 

krolia: i’ll come back for you guys idk how but i will 

krolia goes back to the states

2009-2011: she and heath write letters but then the letters start getting intercepted by the family and eventually peters out

krolia in arranged marriage and thinks her partner forgot about her or didn’t care

meanwhile heath doesn’t know what happened to krolia but can’t do anything about it bc she’s in a diff country and he doesn’t speak korean

2011: heath and keith move to texas for job or whatever

heath tells keith all about krolia and how she loves him but can’t be there and obvi that fucks keith up bc he misses his mom but where tf is she? how does he know she loves him if she’s not even there? he's a little kid

2013: heath dies and keith is put into the system

heath has no other family members

krolia put her english name on the birth certificate and so ofc she doesn’t exist in the US

texas social services try to reach out to krolia along with some friends but letters are intercepted

2016: someone reaches out to krolia after she finally gets facebook 

friend: thinking of you. miss you. so sorry about heath

krolia: …. what the fuck about heath?

friend: uhhhhhhhh

krolia goes on rampage to her family like wtf u mean u didn’t tell me that the father of my child is dead

cousin shows up with the intercepted letters (official notice from social services, heath’s letters and pictures, keith’s little notes and drawings)

krolia starts the process of legally and financially emancipating herself from her family (she basically was Britney’d)

2017/2018: finally is free and able to get a job in the states

starts tracking down heath (they only had a forwarding address for krolia so they’re like wtf who is this bih)

at this point, keith has already met the shiroganes and changed his name

krolia is in a different state and can only do so much 

spends the next few years trying to find him, hires P.I., again keep running into blocks bc social workers and case managers are NOT going to budge on giving up keith's personal information

2023, winter break: krolia reaches out to keith through facebook but it goes into his spam since they’re not facebook friends

allura

what better allegory for sacrificing yourself to save the universe is there than graduating college? in all fairness, i felt like sticking to the notion of allura saying goodbye and leaving the group had its merit, just y’know, i wanted to take a step down from the whole dying thing. i tried to pay homage to the canon material as much as possible while also providing my own spin on things.

one thing that’s been important to me is depicting allura as a college student. sure, while i think most iterations of allura as a kind and a great leader and intelligent are great, even in modern au fics, i just wish there had been a bit more... silliness? outside of her being like the girlboss, the hell yeah supporting character or love interest or bone-tired leader, i always wonder what she would have been like if she hadn't had to save the universe and was just trying to heal on her own terms. yeah, i nerfed her parents in this universe but i tried to showcase her doing normal college things as well, like presenting at research conferences, getting a bit messy drunk, having pizza nights and group hang outs. the funny thing about grief is that life does not stop for it, so you have to just figure things out along the way.

i also didn't want to elaborate too much on her relationship with lotor. she didn't magically heal from that one conversation with lance in chapter 8 but i wanted the readers to get a taste of what was going on in her head through their dialogue. plus, it was a little moment to show how she was allowing herself to open up to other people like lance. no one woman is an island, no matter how much of a bad b!tch you are.

🫧 also, i wanted to include it somewhere but basically, keith knew allura and romelle were hooking up since chapter 14! keith caught romelle sneaking out of allura's room early one morning and he just kept it to himself because snitches get stitches.

pidge

they are so precious to me. they're an amalgamation of 2 of my closest friends, and well, me.

i always knew that pidge was going to be a super important piece in klance development. while lance and keith are great friends, i think pidge played a crucial role in bridging them together in the beginning, before the two of them had cleared up their misunderstandings and made that truce. sure, allura asked them to be on the paintball team but pidge really forced the two of them into close quarters. lance might have extended the offer to keith to hand out without pidge or he might not have. honestly, i'm not really sure. but pidge inviting keith to hang out in chapter 4 was a quiet but big moment because both keith and lance are friends with pidge and will set aside their differences long enough to tolerate each other's presence in a shared space. pidge just has #babyofthefriendgroup privileges.

🫧 i honestly think that after the main two, pidge has undergone the most growth (physically and emotionally) throughout the fic, even though they're a supporting character. we can all benefit from community and friendship but i think pidge needed it a little bit more.

🫧 i partially wrote pidge to represent my younger self, especially when i first attended college. i was scared and alone and i had never been away from home and it was a struggle to form new relationships (and figure out my gender identity. mannnnnn fuck that). it was nice to see pidge find their place and niche among the greater social fabric of college, kind of like comforting my younger self for all the loneliness and uncertainty i endured.

hunk

i love hunk so dearly. ngl, i wanted him to have a bigger arc than he did but hopefully i did a decent job at making feel more well-rounded as a supporting character. i decided to actually kind of lean into this distance in the later chapters as well, esp from lance's pov, as they both got busier. at the end of the day, though, i knew that those two would come back together. hunk is a kind and sympathetic friend and his and lance's friendship will persevere because they're good communicators. their little talk in chapter 17 was me talking to myself and to anyone else who has went through a similar thing where they find themselves drifting a little farther from a friend.

people get busy and that's okay! there will be ebbs and flows in every relationship. even though shared history is a crucial part of a friendship but it can't be the only thing that will keep it going. you need to nurture it and tend to it in order for it to keep it alive and flourishing. hunk understands this and he and lance will be just fine after their talk. hunk is probably the most emotionally intelligent person after adam in the group, and i'm glad he was there to help both lance and keith out when they needed it.

adam

this man!!!!! got i have gotten so fucking attached to adam throughout this fic. he is so dear to me. i know in chapter 10 i wrote from adam's pov and he's a goofy guy in his twenties who's just trying to be a good dad friend but somehow he ended up being a voice of reason and comfort for klance in this fic. lance misses his family a lot and i think adam can not only relate to lance with the homesickness but also lance has started to rely on him a bit like he would with his siblings.

i wanted to try my own spin on adam and keith's relationship. i've seen fics where adam and keith hate each other, don't interact much, or adam takes on a parenting role towards keith as a kid. i wanted to look at keith and adam in the context of two people who both love shiro and then grow to be good friends/surrogate brother-in-law? idk. long story short, adam is very emotionally intelligent and i think he genuinely wanted to get to know keith outside of his connection with shiro and was patient enough to coax keith out of his shell. i tried to write in small ways adam takes care of keith like giving him LactoJoys because Keith likes the taste better than Lactaids, being there for him for his panic attack, adding food to his plate. things that won't draw too much attention, because we all know how keith is about receiving acts of kindness.

i mentioned this in a comment under one of the chapters but all of the advice adam gives keith is either advice i personally received myself or something i wish i could tell my younger self. i hope those words bring you comfort as well!

shiro

i had a lot more planned for shiro but goddammit i had no fucking time or space at this panned out. it's more so klance's story than shiro's.

look, there's a small moment in chapter 18 where shiro is very pleased (and a little surprised) that keith has talked about him with krolia. it has less to do with his faith in keith and more with how he sees himself. shiro has already acknowledged that he has heavy imposter syndrome and deals with his own struggles with self image. it's just always a jolt to your system when someone (could be your own family or your partner of years) validates your relationship.

shiro loves keith very much and just wants to be the best big brother. he has such eldest child syndrome, where he tries to pretend that everything is fine even though things are actually crumbling around him. the thing is, though, you can't build intimacy— real, lasting intimacy and depth in a relationship— without being vulnerable. shiro understands that even though he wants keith to work on opening up, he has to do the same and reciprocate the actions, or else neither of them will really get anywhere and be stuck in that loop of "are you mad at me/i feel like you're hiding something from me/i don't really know who you are."

i tried writing a bit from shiro's pov but i quickly realized that that would drastically change the tone of the fic so i had to scrap it. i might post a little oneshot in the distant future with adashi, though.

keith

🫧 i've talked about this before but although i think keith grew the most as a character in the canon show, that shit was WAY too fast and off-screen. also, i know that the whole found family trope is what drew a lot of fans to voltron in the first place (like me) but is the found family in the room with us rn? i felt like they all started to fall apart or at least weren't as close as the show wanted us to believe. it felt a lot like telling with no showing. other than some occasional moments in the show, the whole #teamasfamily felt hollow.

🫧 i wanted to build on this potential found family for keith's character. he's never had a support system before and he's used to pushing people away but now he has a whole ass friend group that's ready to fight for him if he gives the word.

🫧 initially, when i was writing keith's pov and trying to get a feel for his voice and tone, i struggled a bit. keith is one of those characters that i liked and sympathized with, but getting into his head was a whole different story. i'm more of a lance kinnie but once i got the hand of keith's voice, it was a lot easier. some of my best pieces of writing are from keith's pov! i tried to be as cognizant of keith's development as much as possible as i wrote (think me having various checkpoints for his journey whereas with lance i could just coast on vibes), and i'm pleased with how far he's come.

🫧 although both keith and lance's progress can showcased through their consciousness and thoughts (like duh ur reading from their povs), i leaned into keith's behavior as a way to portray his progress a bit more than lance. things like him being more open to physical affection, not sitting on the outskirts of group dynamics and sticking to shiro, and allowing himself to collect things, which by the way:

🫧 i like the idea of keith's room, once being so empty and ghost-like, is now full of stuff, mementos of his relationships that he's built. i tried to sprinkle in some relics from past chapters (paintball flag, polaroids, ticket stubs), as well add some new tidbits, like shiro giving him a cacti and that korean cookbook!

proud of u, keith bby <3

lance and marco

no i did not just torture lance for the sake of torturing him i would never do that to my boy.

i know this is a fanfiction, but from the start, i wanted to ground this fic in reality and breathe some life into it. lance's little arc with his brother having a substance abuse problem was loosely inspired by events in my personal life.

🫧 i'm not saying that everyone goes through something as drastic as a loved one going to rehab, but as young adults, when we leave home for uni, jobs, other opportunities, etc, there's this worry that something bad will happen while we're away. and often times it does. someone gets sick, a beloved pet passes away, it's all bound to happen. your childhood becomes a thing of the past, and things that you thought would stay the same just won't.

i projected a lot of my feelings onto lance ngl, and writing him work through his own grief and guilt over not being able to be with his family when they're going through a crisis helped me process a little bit more.

although lance had a happier ending than a lot of families might get in reality, i still wanted to show lance having a support system at college and realizing that he has a second family to lean on, and people who love and support him. he doesn't have to pretend to be okay for anyone and that's okay.

black paladin lance or as close to it as i could get

it was so important for me to make lance the new captain of their paintball team, as a stand-in for the black paladin arc he could have had in the show. he’s always been a selfless guy who puts others first and really pulls up when he needs to. he deserves to be recognized for that. not only did every single one of his friends validate him, but the person he looks up to the most literally endorsed him. lance struggles with his inferiority complex and the election scene was a little feel good moment for me, personally, so that he could receive the acknowledgement he deserves, especially with his growth. he's gonna be an awesome team captain (he'll be shuffling down to shiro's room at 2am covered in hickeys and talking about paintball strategies).

wrapping up loose ends

i tried to wrap up as many loose ends as possible and give all the characters a proper send-off. originally i wanted lance and hunk to also move into the house in castle street, like repurpose the basement or something but i realized that that just wasn’t possible because most college basements don’t even have heating or like,,,, a livable arrangement.

ultimately, i think it makes sense for pidge to be the one to take up allura’s room at the house. pidge has lived a single during the academic year but they also had lance and hunk right fifty feet away so it’s not like they REALLY lived alone that year. there was also the logistics of the house having a vacant room, and as much as i would have loved to have all of voltron under the same roof (hunk and pidge sharing a room, keith and lance sharing a room), i think they would kill each other. pidge filling in the gap felt like the right move. and lance and hunk are gonna be over a lot anyways, so it’s not like much has changed in the trio's group dynamic.

🫧 what was your favorite chapter to write?

i think i have different chapters in mind for different reasons, even if it's a copout answer. here are the chapters that are dearest to me:

chapter 4: recalibration this is the chapter where i really got to play around with character interactions. keith and lance's worlds were beginning to integrate in chapter 3 but in this chapter, i got to explore different friendships, like keith & pidge and lance & hunk, and the dynamics they entailed. you can see how important these friendships are to both lance and keith, and how their connection with others eventually helps them to reflect on their previous feelings toward each other, like "hmm maybe i've been too harsh with the other."

chapter 10: let's go to the beach the group dynamics were so solidified to this point, and it was so fun to write. i loved writing from adam's pov and being able to zoom out and showcase klance's relationship progression.

the winter break interludes i waxed poetic about these in a previous faq but to reiterate: i'm really pleased with the way each individual chapter turned out. i love a good character study, and it was a great challenge to my writing and characterization to dig deeper into their home lives and see how the past confronted the present, where their respective childhoods were brought into the light, and how long-held notions of belonging, home, and identity were challenged and remolded.

chapter 17: warm and light my beta reader drunkenguac said that this was some of my best writing and i've been coasting off of that validation for the past 4 months. keith's reunion with his mother was especially cathartic for me. as an adoptee, writing this chapter honestly helped me work through some of my feelings about my adoption as i pictured what it would look like if i was ever reunited with my birth mother. i'm very fortunate that i didn't have to go through the same experiences keith did, but i tried to imbue as much humanness as possible into his section.

chapter 18: moving on it just felt like a proper send-off, the one that we never got from s8 of voltron. i wanted the last chapter to basically have this vibe of "hey, things won't be the same but it's going to be okay because we have each other." when shiro tells matt in the end, "we'll still be here," that's me as the author, telling you, the reader, that this fic will still be here whenever you want to revisit it. it was a comfort to write and i've heard that it's a comfort to read, which is so so so gratifying. when i set out to write this fic in august of 2023, i didn't have any plans of grandeur or even expect like more than 100 people read it— it was just a passion project that i decided to share, and i'm glad that others have sought safety in it. outside of fandom, this fic is a love letter to my own college experience. i remember reading a college au fic when i was still in high school and lonely and closeted and repressed and wondering if i would ever be able to get out of my hometown and find a community as tightly-knit as the fic portrayed it. in a way, i got to reflect on my college experience by writing looking out for you. i find solace in this fic when i read back over it, and i can see aspects of my adventures throughout my freshman and sophomore and junior and senior years, waving from behind a thinly veiled curtain. this fic is dedicated to all the people who made my college experience.

anyways that's me rambling for now! thank you again to everyone who has tuned into looking out for you. this is the first piece of creative writing i've done in a long time, and i never expected to actually finish it. i'm so happy with the way it turned out and the love it's received. until next time!