Episode 22: The Voltron Restaurant

This week we’re beginning our coverage of Dirty Laundry, a notorious shipping fic (Keith/Lance) from the Voltron fandom. Unlike previous stories we’ve covered, there’s no doubt this one was written sincerely, and it’s an unbelievably popular fanfic with plenty of genuine fans; it’s also incredibly controversial, and honestly it’s so bad I think it’s been driving both of us crazy. The story is divided into “parts” rather than chapters and they’re pretty long, so this episode covers roughly half of part 1. To close out the episode, we also (re)watched season 1 of Voltron: Legendary Defender in order to provide the canon context for this fanfic. Content warnings: in-universe, homophobia is a plot point in this story (nothing particularly violent or explicit, but it’s still something we have to discuss). Out of universe, this fic is full of racist stereotyping; in particular, Lance and his family are Mexican-American in this story and written very stereotypically. Also, while it’s most likely unintentional, there are some uncomfortable moments in this story regarding underage characters.