allawander:

idkwhatswrongwithworld:

that gifset made me think but ‘are we really even friends’ would actually be something keith thinks considering he spend last 2+ years with krolia and before that with BoM with minimal contact with the team like?

or do yall consider people you havent talked with for more than 2 years your friends? Jus saying

Tbh, I understood where Keith was coming from, too??

It’s not even just the time spent apart. The writers didn’t really do a good job making me believe that the Paladins were super close. Yes, they’d fight and sacrifice for each other in battle; that’s how a combat unit survives. Yes, they’ve had some fun times together.

But there are some hallmarks of really close friendships – the kinds that easily endure years of absence – that the Paladins just never hit in my eyes. (At least, not all of the Paladins together. Maybe subgroups.) Really tight friends know your quirks. They know how you tend to think, because you’ve been together through some shit and have had some deep, personal conversations. They can’t read your mind, but they can guess your motives to their general neighborhood and proceed from there.

Pretty much all of the paladins other than Shiro have repeatedly mischaracterized and wildly misinterpreted Keith’s motives. After spending months, if not years, together on this mission, they still don’t seem to know how he ticks. Keith can be withdrawn, yeah, but you’d think there would have been more progress after so long. It makes sense Keith would characterize their relationship as “just a bunch of people thrown together by coincidence” when he’s so often misunderstood.

Good friends also recognize when they’ve gone too far and apologize or – if this is difficult for them – at least express guilt or try to make up for the error. This is another thing that just never seems to happen, particularly where Keith is concerned. The VLD writers have a habit of creating these interpersonal conflicts (good) and then never really resolving them (bad). Lance, in particular, often accuses Keith of selfishness or cowardice, and I can’t remember a single instance of him ever apologizing or even showing remorse. Yeah, you can let some stuff go as “water under the bridge”, but how much?

I dunno. It’s terrible, but I kind of anxious-laughed at Keith’s “Are we even friends?” line, because I felt it was skirting uncomfortably close to the truth. I think the writers meant for the Paladins to have a deep, familial, platonically intimate bond, but that’s not something I think they executed on successfully. I don’t know if it was because of outside sources demanding more robot fights and fewer conversations or what, but for me, a lot of the Paladins’ friendship has been all tell, no show.

Because when Keith demanded to know if they were really even friends, I didn’t think he was entirely wrong to do so.