concept: when zarkon came to destroy altea, alfor ordered civilians to leave with the paladins in order to protect them. blaytz took a group to earth with the blue lion, and the alteans shapeshifted so that they looked like the planetary inhabitants homo sapiens so that the galra couldn’t find them. they joined human civilizations across the planet and became indistinguishable from them.
so all the alteans allura wants so desperately to find are right under her nose, in her ship, piloting voltron. and there are billions more living on earth.
allura was never alone, she just didn’t know what to look for.
Yes! Yes, OP! I agree! I’ve had a variant of this knocking around in my head since season 1. It’s been refined and tweaked as we’ve gotten more information. So here’s where I’m at:
Someone had to go with the Paladins to deliver the three lions (Blue, Green, and Yellow – Alfor locked Black in the Castle of Lions and apparently kept Red, or at least didn’t get a chance to hide it before Zarkon showed up, which is why the Galra already had the Red Lion) to their hidey-holes, because the Paladins obviously didn’t stay near them. The Lions were dropped off and then the Paladins went as far away from them as possible so that Zarkon finding them wouldn’t mean he also found the Lions. It was Alfor’s plan to hide the Lions, so it’s likely that he sent Altean forces with them (especially since we’re told the Alteans were kind of the last holdouts against the Galra conquest – at least up to that point).
So Blaytz dropped the Blue Lion off on Earth in a nice watery (at the time) area. It was a primitive planet, far, far, far away from Zarkon; it shouldn’t attract his attention. Some of the Alteans that went with him then took him back out into space to draw Zarkon away from Blue’s hiding place, but some of them stayed, and some of them were likely alchemists.
I say this because of the symbols that glow in the presence of a potential paladin. All three planets we see Lions on had symbols in the same style and they all light up the same color as their associated Lion when their soon-to-be paladin approaches. (This likely all has to do with the prophecy, too; Keith mentions a prophecy he deciphered out in what is now a desert. That prophecy literally foretold Shiro’s “homecoming” as it were, so there’s gotta be something to it.)
And there had to be SOMEONE associated with Voltron on each planet because when Pidge & Shiro go to get the Green Lion, it’s the Voltron symbol on Pidge’s little tracker thing that gets the dire-sloth (or whatever) to take them straight to the Green Lion.
So, yeah. There were Alteans on Earth around 10,000 years ago. And here’s my favorite part: it’s around 10,000 years ago that we see the first anatomically-modern humans. So just as H. sapiens was developing to what we think of as human, here come the Alteans. It’s possible that our Mitochondrial Eve could be Altean – that is, that everyone’s lineages can be ultimately traced back to some Altean woman (possibly an alchemist).
So, yeah. All the paladins are, to some extent or another, Altean. I like this for a lot of reasons, but primarily because it gives the humans a deeper link to this fight.
I still have hope to see more Altean diaspora out in the universe, because surely not everyone was on the planet when it blew. Some people would have fled beforehand; some people might have been fighting the Galra elsewhere in the galaxy or what-have-you. I want to see what “modern” Alteans look like after 10,000 years of evolution, as well as what their society would be like.
But the idea that some of that diaspora, at least genetically, are the inhabitants of Earth? YES, SIGN ME UP.
love this theory