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chefbayardee) wrote2030-01-01 12:00 am
chefbayardee) wrote2030-01-01 12:00 am
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Player
Name: Phil
Age: 25
Personal Journal: Here but I don’t use it.
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
velthomer
Other In-Game Characters: N/A
Character
Name: Hunk (seriously, that’s it)
Age: 17. Possibly older, we don’t know how long he’s been in space for.
Gender: Male
Canon: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Canon Point: End of Season 5.
History:
Here is a wiki link to an uninformative episode list.
Hunk used to be a simple student of Earth's Galaxy Garrison academy, the squad engineer alongside Pidge, the communications expert, and Lance, the pilot. They were... not great at their jobs- the series opens with, among many other mistakes, Hunk vomiting in the gearbox, Pidge removing their safety harness, and Lance crashing the simulated ship. The trio, dejected, stumble their way onto the roof, and witness alien broadcasts and a craft crashing like a meteor into the Earth's surface nearby. As it turned out, the craft held Shiro, a famed pilot who'd been missing in space for a year, and the trio ran into Garrison dropout Keith while trying to investigate. The five of them pile onto a hovercraft and outfox the Garrison's teachers, taking refuge in a desert shack where Keith has done a lot of investigating into something called "Voltron." Pidge heard chatter about it the night before, and Hunk is able to craft a Geiger Counter to lead them to... a giant ancient alien blue space lion. It reacts to Lance, they climb in, and are sent screaming through space, damaging an alien spacecraft and getting flung through a wormhole, because the Lion kind of has a mind of its own.
Hunk and friends find themselves at an ancient alien space castle, dark and abandoned and empty. Well, except for Allura, Princess of the destroyed Altea, four mice she became psychically linked with, and Coran, her mustachioed butler. The two tell the group they're to be Paladins of Voltron, lion-driving Defenders of the Universe. Most of the group was wholly unaware that aliens existed until the day before, but they roll with it. Lance takes Hunk and the Blue Lion to a Galra (see: evil oppressive purple alien empire, wants to kill Allura, rule the world, etc) mining outpost where Hunk's Yellow Lion is waiting. Lance ejects poor Hunk by spitting him from the Lion's mouth, and the Yellow-Paladin-to-be hotwires an elevator shaft while being shot at, bulldozes through a wall, and uses his Lion to burrow out of the then-collapsed mine, protect Lance's lion, and destroy the last of their assailants.
Then, the group forms Voltron, a humanoid amalgamation of their five Lions, and destroy the ship of Sendak, the Galra general hunting them. He survives as the Paladins make friends with the locals of Arus, the planet they're on, and Galra troops infiltrate the Altean castle during a celebration, setting off a bomb that nearly kills Lance and damages the crystal that allows the castle to be a castle ship. Hunk goes with Coran to a Balmera, a living planet, to harvest a new crystal while the rest of the group cares for Lance and keeps the Galra from securing the castleship or the Lions.
This is where Hunk's life gets even more interesting. He meets Shay and Rax, two natives of the Balmera, and learns that due to the Galra empire's intensive mining efforts turning all Balmerans into slaves, they've never seen the sky and can't even comprehend freedom. Rax, paranoid and afraid of repercussions from the Galra, rats out Hunk and Coran to the empire overseers, but a timely intervention from Shay, who can communicate with and somewhat control the Balmera, allows the two to escape with the crystal they needed at the cost of her capture. Meanwhile, Sendak and the remaining Galra are dealt with by the rest of the group, and Hunk finds his drive.
They have to free the Balmerans from Galra control. He becomes single-minded and pushy, even suggesting they abandon Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, a trio of shipwrecked spacefarers. It turns out that they're being manipulated into working against the Paladins to clear their criminal records, and that they don't wish any ill will towards the group. Things work out about as well as they could, with the criminals getting their freedom back and the Paladins making their way to the Balmera. Hunk rescues Shay, the group is able to clear out the Galra, and they even manage to defeat a Robeast, a giant monstrosity formed by the magic Druids of the Galra empire, with some help from the Balmera who crystallizes the thing. The victory galvanizes the entire team, and they're able to build their confidence, they want to do more. That comes with dealing with the corrupted AI-spirit of Allura's father, and then staging an assault an an isolated Galra space station. The infiltration goes poorly, and Allura is captured to let the rest of the team escape. They don't like this outcome, and try to get her back, crossing blades with Galra Emperor Zarkon himself. They learn that the Galra get their quintessence, their cosmic superfuel, by destroying planets, and that Zarkon was the original Black Paladin. The party is barely able to manage an escape, but their wormhole falls apart, separating the group throughout space at the end of a very busy Season 1.
Season 2 has Hunk and Lance end up at an aquatic planet, populated by nice merpeople. Except it turns out they're enthralled by the mind-controlling plant life connected to an insidious and gigantic sea serpent. The two Paladins defeat the serpent and befriend the merpeople before reuniting with the rest of the group. Then they find weird green spores in space, which turn out to carry distress signals from the planet Olkarion, where the people interface with nature as easily as one types on a keyboard. The Galra are repelled, and another ally is made. Zarkon's forces track the group down again and they're wholly unprepared, barely able to get the wormhole generator up and running so they can escape. Most of the group goes to a Space Mall with Coran to get lenses for the teludav (alien space tech), but Hunk spends his time eating a not-actually-free sample and working off his debt in a food court, wooing the populace and earning the undying admiration of Sal, of Vrepit Sal's. Hunk helps triangulate a way for Keith and Shiro to make contact with the Blade of Marmora, and then ventures with Keith into the belly of a weblum, a giant planet-eating space serpent, to get scaultrite to repair the wormhole generator. Though the mission is gross, they're successful, especially after Hunk pieces together how the beast works, lets himself get farted out, and then distracts it until Keith gathers the scaultrite. The party returns to the Balmera and truly defeat the Robeast that was frozen in crystal, allowing the living planet and its people to begin to truly flourish again. Then, they take the fight to Zarkon, and win, putting Zarkon on life support and... somehow making their leader Shiro disappear entirely from the Black Lion.
Season 3 is spent dealing with these repercussions: Keith take the Black Lion, Lance takes the Red, and Allura herself takes the Blue. The party starts to engage in diplomatic efforts, which is difficult with high tensions from the Paladin shakeups. What's worse, they start crossing paths with Lotor, Zarkon's son, who is impossibly clever and spends as much time toying with the Paladins as he does manipulating them for his own ends. There are a lot of growing pains for many of the cast: Keith tries to control his impulsivity, Lance tries to manage Keith and help Allura, Allura has no idea what she's doing, and Shiro wakes up on a frigid, hostile planet without his Lion. Hunk, meanwhile, supports them all as best he can, but it's mostly their spotlights. They liberate the planet of Puig, find an interdimensional rift that shows a dictatorial alternate timeline where the Alteans won the war and the Galra were defeated, and they tussle with, and ultimately lose to, Lotor while trying to procure an interdimensional meteor from the aforementioned rift. Shiro reunites with the group, and they all learn that Voltron was made from a similar meteor, that the pursuit of quintessence corrupted Zarkon and turned the Galra empire into what it is today, and that the war started as Zarkon sought revenge on King Alfor (Allura's father) and the Alteans for allowing his home planet Daibazaal to be destroyed.
Seasons 4 and 5 start to move a lot faster, thankfully. Keith's training with the Blade of Marmora and his knowledge that he's actually some amount Galra-blooded distract him from his Paladin duties, and he gives up his position, moving Shiro back into the Black Lion. Pidge finds her long-lost brother, Lotor has machinations against the interests of the Galra Empire, and Coran pushes for a hammy, embarrassing stage tour to raise morale and build public support for Voltron. Their alliances are a full-blown Coalition, even bolstered by fugitives like Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, and so they move on the planet Naxzela. It turns out to be a trap set up by Haggar, the witch at Zarkon's side, to gravity-bind Voltron into a planet-sized bomb. Allura's nondescript Altean Space Elf Magic comes through, and she's able to get the team out of that situation. Keith, in a Blade of Marmora ship, is about to sacrifice himself to destroy the barrier on the Galra flagship, but then Lotor of all people, abandoned by his Generals and his father, damages the ship and comes to the rescue with his own meteorite-forged fighter ship.
But this is when life for the Paladins gets awkward: Lotor wants to help them, and he gives them a steady string of good information on various targets. Zarkon's forces snag Pidge's father, and offer a trade: Sam Holt for Lotor. The entire deal devolves quickly, with Pidge and Shiro fighting Lotor's Generals in a falling spaceship (and winning, dropping them out the cargo door), while Lotor fought and killed Zarkon. Tensions amidst the Galra explode into infighting over the position of Emperor, with upstart generals taking advantage of any weakness they see to build themselves up and sabotage each other. The Kral Zera, the Galra ascension ceremony, turns very bloody, and Lotor ends up taking the throne. While he and Allura research quintessence and ways to circumvent the now-allied Galra Empire's destructive ambitions, Hunk and Lance and Pidge introduce some much-needed comic relief, reprogramming a sentry robot to have fun and getting into a lot of mischief on Lotor's flagship. Then, the party accompanies Allura and Lotor to the Altean equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, though they have to leave the adventuring to those two because a spectral white lion only wants to deal with Alteans (Lotor is half, by the way). That Lion happens to knock out the power on the castleship, putting a hard limit on the amount of air the rest of the group can breath, and a very real time limit for Allura and Lotor. Lucky for them, Allura unlocks the secrets of Altean Alchemy (Lotor does not) and they're able to restore the castleship before most of the cast dies from asphyxiation.
Will things get better now that there's an Altean Alchemist and a solid collaboration with the Galra Empire? Probably not, because Season 6 is happening in a few months, and Shiro might be getting controlled by the evil with Haggar, it's a total mystery. And since Haggar's goals are unknowable but definitely sinister and maybe against Lotor, the crazy train won't stop chugging anytime soon.
Personality:
Traits: Warm(+), Stalwart(+), Brilliant(+), Lighthearted(0), Anxious(-), Snide(-)
In the first episode of the show, Princess Allura gives descriptions of almost every Lion and their Paladin’s role. When discussing Hunk’s new role as the Yellow Paladin, she says: “The Yellow Lion is caring and kind. Its pilot is one who puts the needs of others above his own. His heart must be mighty. As the leg of Voltron, you will lift the team up and hold them together.” Not-so-surprisingly, this was spot-on for Hunk. While Shiro is the leader, Pidge is the brains, Keith is the temper, and Lance is the… Lance, Hunk is the heart and soul of his group, a fact which seems readily and casually accepted by his peers.
“Hunk’s our mechanic. He’s also a chef and just a pretty cool dude to hang out with.” – Lance, S2E10
The Yellow Paladin corresponds to the element of Earth or Land, and like a scorching desert or sun-dappled soil, Hunk is an undeniably warm person. When he’s not getting shot at or otherwise having a bad time, he’s smiling and palling it up with those around him. He calls the native Arusians adorable, and is absolutely thrilled to attend a banquet they throw and entertain them. When looking for a crystal on the Balmera, Hunk is the one who makes friends with Shay and the Balmerans, setting in motion Team Voltron’s first big win against the Galra and proving to all of them (especially himself!) that they can make a difference. He’s the one who cooks up Earth foods for diplomatic meetings, and smooths over awkward conversations with the ever-exotic “pizza roll.” When Allura was going to be killing a lot of time by herself, Hunk taught her and her space mice how to play games like charades to keep them occupied. Hunk’s also prone to crying and physical affection. He cries more than anyone else by far (whether for good or ill), pulled Lance and Keith into a hug while saying they’re brothers after forming Voltron, and dragging the entire team into a crying hug when Keith leaves the team to support the Blade of Marmora.
Of course, his compassion doesn’t just extend to his friends and oppressed people, but also to animals! He thinks Allura’s space mice are awesome, to the point where they’re the first good thing he mentions during a bonus vlog he makes. While inside the Weblum, a giant planet-devouring space serpent, Hunk is very endeared to little organisms that start to land on his spacesuit… only to realize they were melting his armor and there to digest food. When the Balmera is rejuvenated by Allura and immediately crystallizes the rest of the team stares dead-eyed at Hunk as he crouches on the ground and begins petting the planet while baby-talking it like it’s a puppy, saying “It’s alive, and it wuvs my scwatches.”
“A hero named Shay saved my life, and I swore I would return to do the same for her and her people. You understand.” – Hunk, S1E6
Of course, Hunk wouldn’t be able to support his team if he wasn’t stalwart. Hunk is often the one that’s tasked with heavy lifting, distracting enemies, and taking hits for the rest of the team, even though he frequently complains. He travels to the Balmera with Coran to get a new crystal for the castle ship, and after Coran hurts his back Hunk carries him through hostile mining tunnels until he’s recovered. The only thing Coran could think of that would be more dangerous than the trip to the Balmera would be going into the belly of a Weblum… which Hunk does alongside Keith in the following season. Hunk even agrees to tank the planet-eating space serpent’s lasers so they can get what they came for, even though Keith was the better pilot. His Lion’s gear reflects this as well: the strongest armor and reinforced claws to let him hold his ground, dig through the earth, and rip apart his enemies. He’s held up ships, destroyed mountains to create new angles of approach, and tanked countless hits. On foot, he prefers giant gatling guns to cover his allies and suppress his enemies, and when he needs to, he can handle most of an encounter on his own!
But outside of missions and combat, Hunk’s one the group often confides in. He knew Lance since before they were teammates at the Garrison, Hunk and Pidge are close enough to make a cutesy name (Team Punk) for their antics, Keith talked to Hunk and not his role model Shiro when his half-Galra heritage put a rift between him and Allura. He and Shiro have tag-teamed defusing arguments, and Hunk was one of the more nurturing and supportive characters when Allura began coming into her own as a Paladin. They’ve all learned to trust his gut, whether it’s his intuition screaming that Rolo and Nyma can’t be trusted (and boy did he let the team know it when he was right) or his actual stomach helping him realize that a monster was attacking an alien village not out of malice, but out of hunger for the festival food the natives had made.
“It’s a Galra finder? Well, “finder” suggests that it locates the Galra, whereas it would be more accurate to say that my model predicts their likeliest- Fine. It’s a Galra finder.” – Hunk, S2E6
Pidge gets most of the credit for being the brains of the team, but there’s no denying that Hunk is brilliant. In the first episode, he’s the reason the team even finds the Blue Lion; he recognizes Pidge’s data as a Fraunhofer line, a number describing the emission spectrum of an element that doesn’t exist on Earth. Then he casually builds a Geiger Counter to find this element out of things laying around a dilapidated desert shack. While unequipped and getting shot at by Galra fighters, Hunk manages to hotwire a Galra elevator console while complaining about the situation. He and Pidge collaborated on and regularly upgraded their Galra Finder, and they even reprogrammed a war sentry robot to have fun and be rebellious. He brings up a joke about symbolic logic and innumerably infinite sets (see: math) and Lance cuts him off saying it’s boring, to which Hunk agrees that it was before zeroing in on the joke rather than the concept. His engineering skills are top-notch, and he’s the only Paladin whose Bayard has a non-combat function: Hunk uses his laser cannon as a welding torch to help repair the Ark of Taujeer so it can escape. Sometimes, Hunk can even out-think Pidge, coming up with ways to amplify communications around black holes, or freezing vines to hold chunks of a planet together.
But his brilliance is most noticeable in the kitchen. Hunk seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Earth cooking, able to recreate dishes like pizza rolls and canapes with only alien ingredients. He somehow turns scaultrite, a substance used for space lenses, into cookies. When he’s forced to work off a debt in a space mall by cooking at a food court hole in the wall, he’s not only competent, but the customers are happy and form a crowd. The owner, Sal, is so taken with Hunk’s work that he vows to find him and get him back in the kitchen, because he’s that good. Hunk is able to consume alien spices and substances and not only stomach them but improve them, whether it’s an after-the-fact review or an in-the-moment tossing of ingredients into a ceremonial dish. Being able to intuit what is and isn’t safe for humans to eat on top of what can be consumed by various alien species with their own unique biologies is ridiculous. And he rarely puffs out his ego for intellectual matters which shows that while he’s maybe the second-smartest person in the show behind Pidge, he’s typically very humble about it.
“Calzones. I mean, uh, heck, yeah, I'm thinking about calzones, okay? I mean, does it always have to be about Zarkon? He's a bad guy. We're trying to defeat him. I get it. I'm hungry.” - Hunk, S2E11
Hunk is most consistently the comic relief Paladin, and it’s something he often takes in stride, because he’s just a very lighthearted guy. While he spends a lot of time freaking out, Hunk spends just as much time laughing, telling jokes, or being otherwise silly and dramatic. When entertaining the native Arusians in the castle ship, a fumble throws a plate of food into Hunk’s face. There’s a pause as everyone looks in concern, only for Hunk to turn around with food over his eyes, prompting laughter from everyone nearby. He’s prone to silly and ridiculous things, like slamming his laser-brick Lion into Keith’s to turn them into Voltron. It doesn’t work and Keith is upset. He makes puns (crème goo-lee, ugh) and gets up to all sorts of antics, like suggesting to Lance and Pidge that they impersonate chefs and raid the Garrison kitchens, or helping reprogram a war sentry to have fun and blow things up in the process. He’s got no issue with funny voices or silly sound effects, and his overblown reactions to many things means he’s often just ridiculous, despite being a trained soldier. But, his casual nature helps him calmly and rationally approach stressful and unusual situations. A sea serpent mind controlled him and some mer-people with weird kelp (a wormhole happened) and when Lance snaps him out of it, well…
Hunk can just roll with a lot of things. In fact, he makes a habit out of pointing out the wacky absurdity of their lives as often as possible, whether it’s pointing out that yes, they’re inside of a giant ancient alien robot lion head on the other end of the universe, or recapping a past battle with “We formed Voltron, then I stuck in my Bayard and shot it with my blaster right in its arm lasers. But that didn’t stop it so then we had to punch it.” He breaks things down and, while it makes their day-to-day sound ridiculous, it’s not wrong, and it’s often helpful. Other times, his casual approach to life can be less helpful, like the time he took a “ten minute” nap during a strategy meeting… and was unconscious for three hours, contributing nothing… but they were polite enough to let him sleep! Or the time Keith pondered what was in some storage containers, and Hunk got unusually passionate about sporks.
But while he makes a lot of jokes and they’re rarely at the expense of others, Hunk doesn’t appreciate being the butt of jokes himself. Snarky remarks, normally from Coran, have provoked more frustration than most things, and he was perpetually grouchy and angry when Coran’s parasite-drug-fueled creative bender forced Hunk to go on an intergalactic stage tour and be… the oafish fart joke. The only exception was when Keith made a joke about his vomiting tendencies, because Keith never makes jokes. And sometimes Hunk’s jokes can be mean-spirited; he hacks a sentry during some downtime to make it slap itself in the face, and when Pidge tells him to stop torturing it, we get a clear statement of one of Hunk’s largest weaknesses…
"No, what if the Yellow Lion doesn't work? Wh-What if I—What if I can't get in the mine? What if I start crying? It's too late! I'm already crying!" – Hunk, S1E1
Hunk is by far the most anxious and stress-prone member of the cast. He spends the first half of the first season almost exclusively screaming, crying, and saying how much of a bad idea it is to do most of the things they do. His response to the robot-slapping-itself scene is that he needs something to keep himself busy, so he’s not worrying about the rest of the team and their tasks, or Pidge and Lance and Himself getting caught by their enemies. When he doesn’t have something for his mind and energy to focus on, he can easily start freaking out under stress. Lucky for him he’s been busy fighting an intergalactic war. But when he’s not on missions he bakes, because baking clears his head. That combined with the fact that he’s a great chef implies a lot of stress, and that he’s worked with it for long enough to know how to cope, despite being at least 17. While his anxiety can sometimes manifest in clever caution and not rushing into a situation blind, it most frequently displays as exasperation at being thrown like a brick-shaped distraction at giant monsters and sometimes a complete aversion to conflict and danger altogether.
While his nerves have strengthened as he became more comfortable as a Paladin, he still gives himself pep talks, like before he and Pidge took out a Galra communication hub by themselves, a job upon which the entire rebellion hinged. It’s possible that his anxiety and nerves influenced his Bayard’s weapon choice: he’s the only Paladin solely with ranged weapons (Keith had a sword, Allura had whip, Shiro punches things, Pidge has an electrified grappling hook dagger, and Lance picked up a sword of his own in Season 5 alongside his assault and sniper rifles) and Hunk’s aren’t calm. He uses a giant laser cannon, whether as a BFG-style blaster or as a rapid-fire gatling gun, but either way he’s a spray-and-pray fighter who hangs near his team.
"Oh yeah, sure, just drop me off in an alien planet. That's cool, man. It's only occupied by mean purple aliens that want to kill me, but whatever. Just ignore them and go connect with a big, yellow, mechanical cat. Easy-peasy. Yeah. That all makes a ton of sense to me." – Hunk, S1E1
It’s probably best that Hunk focuses on supporting the team and cracking jokes, because when he doesn’t, he becomes unsettlingly mean and snide. The quote above is said when Hunk is thrown from the Blue Lion, where he rolls across the ground towards a Galra mine while a battle rages overhead. Hunk’s tasked with finding the Yellow Lion, and it’s one of few instances of anger that we see. At the end of a teambuilding gauntlet, Hunk is exhausted and hungry, so when Coran handcuffs the team’s arms to each other so they must work together just to eat, Hunk’s “Coran, think about what you’re doing” sounds more like a threat than anything else, especially combined with the twisted, sadistic angry faces Hunk was making at the time.
At one point, while stressed and unable to occupy his thoughts, Lance asks Hunk if Allura ever talked about him- she hadn’t, and didn’t seem to care much for him. Hunk lies to his face, voice oozing with sarcasm, saying that Allura is totally interested in him, which is pretty messed up, even though Allura and Lance are very close now. And that says nothing of the fact that he went through Pidge’s things after they rescued Shiro on Earth, and didn’t ever apologize for it, though it’s probably how he was so unfazed by Pidge being a girl the whole time. In between his first and second visits to the Balmera, Hunk is driven, direct, and cold, even advising his team to abandon Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, three criminals they find stranded along the way (they would later steal the Blue Lion for a short time), and he’s so outspoken and authoritative that the people they found thought Hunk was the leader. He tries to be courteous enough, but when they betray the group he’s loud, condescending, and does such an “I told you so” dance that the entire group has to loudly acknowledge that he was right so he’d shut up.
Backstory/Motivation:
"Yeah, free. It means you can go where you want, be what you want, do what you want. No Galra masters to tell you what to do." – Hunk, S1E5
Hunk’s backstory is sparse, prior to the Galaxy Garrison- he doesn’t talk about it, though it could be because he doesn’t want to make the others homesick. He mentions having a family that he loves very much and who he’d love to return to, and the Paladin life is so far from his comfort zone that at first he wants to go home. When Sam Holt is about to leave to return to Earth, the team gives him recordings that they all made for their families, and Hunk mentions that he cries. A lot. The fact that he mentioned seeing Keith and Lance as brothers could’ve been more than just adrenaline. We also know that his skills are the real deal- Lance got into the Galaxy Garrison because Keith dropped out, and Pidge assumed a false identity, which means Hunk most likely earned that spot since he hasn’t mentioned otherwise. We know he deals with motion sickness and used to hate the idea of flying, to the point where he couldn’t even try to pilot the Yellow Lion with his eyes closed. The motion sickness was a common thing, too, and vomiting still happens here and there even after he adjusted to being a Paladin.
But the most important part of Hunk’s character growth so far is his love of freedom. He personally inspires the Balmeran people to rebel and makes it the team’s first real mission. After they’re successful, his cowardice and desire to leave Voltron are pretty much destroyed, and he’s in for the long haul. He contributes to diplomatic efforts and has thrived on vital two-person missions with most of the cast. In Hunk’s character vlog that he recorded to guide future adventurers, he tells them that they should all stay home… but that he’s glad he didn’t. He’s making a difference, he enjoys helping people, and he’s in a position where he can do so every single day.
Samples:
Hunk's Top-Level, Tags with Naoto, and Prose with Hope on the Test Drive Meme!
Vaikuntha
Moogle Name: Balmogra
Moogle Gender: Male
First Job: Gourmand
Second Job: Magitek Knight
Name: Phil
Age: 25
Personal Journal: Here but I don’t use it.
Contact:
Other In-Game Characters: N/A
Character
Name: Hunk (seriously, that’s it)
Age: 17. Possibly older, we don’t know how long he’s been in space for.
Gender: Male
Canon: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Canon Point: End of Season 5.
History:
Here is a wiki link to an uninformative episode list.
Hunk used to be a simple student of Earth's Galaxy Garrison academy, the squad engineer alongside Pidge, the communications expert, and Lance, the pilot. They were... not great at their jobs- the series opens with, among many other mistakes, Hunk vomiting in the gearbox, Pidge removing their safety harness, and Lance crashing the simulated ship. The trio, dejected, stumble their way onto the roof, and witness alien broadcasts and a craft crashing like a meteor into the Earth's surface nearby. As it turned out, the craft held Shiro, a famed pilot who'd been missing in space for a year, and the trio ran into Garrison dropout Keith while trying to investigate. The five of them pile onto a hovercraft and outfox the Garrison's teachers, taking refuge in a desert shack where Keith has done a lot of investigating into something called "Voltron." Pidge heard chatter about it the night before, and Hunk is able to craft a Geiger Counter to lead them to... a giant ancient alien blue space lion. It reacts to Lance, they climb in, and are sent screaming through space, damaging an alien spacecraft and getting flung through a wormhole, because the Lion kind of has a mind of its own.
Hunk and friends find themselves at an ancient alien space castle, dark and abandoned and empty. Well, except for Allura, Princess of the destroyed Altea, four mice she became psychically linked with, and Coran, her mustachioed butler. The two tell the group they're to be Paladins of Voltron, lion-driving Defenders of the Universe. Most of the group was wholly unaware that aliens existed until the day before, but they roll with it. Lance takes Hunk and the Blue Lion to a Galra (see: evil oppressive purple alien empire, wants to kill Allura, rule the world, etc) mining outpost where Hunk's Yellow Lion is waiting. Lance ejects poor Hunk by spitting him from the Lion's mouth, and the Yellow-Paladin-to-be hotwires an elevator shaft while being shot at, bulldozes through a wall, and uses his Lion to burrow out of the then-collapsed mine, protect Lance's lion, and destroy the last of their assailants.
Then, the group forms Voltron, a humanoid amalgamation of their five Lions, and destroy the ship of Sendak, the Galra general hunting them. He survives as the Paladins make friends with the locals of Arus, the planet they're on, and Galra troops infiltrate the Altean castle during a celebration, setting off a bomb that nearly kills Lance and damages the crystal that allows the castle to be a castle ship. Hunk goes with Coran to a Balmera, a living planet, to harvest a new crystal while the rest of the group cares for Lance and keeps the Galra from securing the castleship or the Lions.
This is where Hunk's life gets even more interesting. He meets Shay and Rax, two natives of the Balmera, and learns that due to the Galra empire's intensive mining efforts turning all Balmerans into slaves, they've never seen the sky and can't even comprehend freedom. Rax, paranoid and afraid of repercussions from the Galra, rats out Hunk and Coran to the empire overseers, but a timely intervention from Shay, who can communicate with and somewhat control the Balmera, allows the two to escape with the crystal they needed at the cost of her capture. Meanwhile, Sendak and the remaining Galra are dealt with by the rest of the group, and Hunk finds his drive.
They have to free the Balmerans from Galra control. He becomes single-minded and pushy, even suggesting they abandon Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, a trio of shipwrecked spacefarers. It turns out that they're being manipulated into working against the Paladins to clear their criminal records, and that they don't wish any ill will towards the group. Things work out about as well as they could, with the criminals getting their freedom back and the Paladins making their way to the Balmera. Hunk rescues Shay, the group is able to clear out the Galra, and they even manage to defeat a Robeast, a giant monstrosity formed by the magic Druids of the Galra empire, with some help from the Balmera who crystallizes the thing. The victory galvanizes the entire team, and they're able to build their confidence, they want to do more. That comes with dealing with the corrupted AI-spirit of Allura's father, and then staging an assault an an isolated Galra space station. The infiltration goes poorly, and Allura is captured to let the rest of the team escape. They don't like this outcome, and try to get her back, crossing blades with Galra Emperor Zarkon himself. They learn that the Galra get their quintessence, their cosmic superfuel, by destroying planets, and that Zarkon was the original Black Paladin. The party is barely able to manage an escape, but their wormhole falls apart, separating the group throughout space at the end of a very busy Season 1.
Season 2 has Hunk and Lance end up at an aquatic planet, populated by nice merpeople. Except it turns out they're enthralled by the mind-controlling plant life connected to an insidious and gigantic sea serpent. The two Paladins defeat the serpent and befriend the merpeople before reuniting with the rest of the group. Then they find weird green spores in space, which turn out to carry distress signals from the planet Olkarion, where the people interface with nature as easily as one types on a keyboard. The Galra are repelled, and another ally is made. Zarkon's forces track the group down again and they're wholly unprepared, barely able to get the wormhole generator up and running so they can escape. Most of the group goes to a Space Mall with Coran to get lenses for the teludav (alien space tech), but Hunk spends his time eating a not-actually-free sample and working off his debt in a food court, wooing the populace and earning the undying admiration of Sal, of Vrepit Sal's. Hunk helps triangulate a way for Keith and Shiro to make contact with the Blade of Marmora, and then ventures with Keith into the belly of a weblum, a giant planet-eating space serpent, to get scaultrite to repair the wormhole generator. Though the mission is gross, they're successful, especially after Hunk pieces together how the beast works, lets himself get farted out, and then distracts it until Keith gathers the scaultrite. The party returns to the Balmera and truly defeat the Robeast that was frozen in crystal, allowing the living planet and its people to begin to truly flourish again. Then, they take the fight to Zarkon, and win, putting Zarkon on life support and... somehow making their leader Shiro disappear entirely from the Black Lion.
Season 3 is spent dealing with these repercussions: Keith take the Black Lion, Lance takes the Red, and Allura herself takes the Blue. The party starts to engage in diplomatic efforts, which is difficult with high tensions from the Paladin shakeups. What's worse, they start crossing paths with Lotor, Zarkon's son, who is impossibly clever and spends as much time toying with the Paladins as he does manipulating them for his own ends. There are a lot of growing pains for many of the cast: Keith tries to control his impulsivity, Lance tries to manage Keith and help Allura, Allura has no idea what she's doing, and Shiro wakes up on a frigid, hostile planet without his Lion. Hunk, meanwhile, supports them all as best he can, but it's mostly their spotlights. They liberate the planet of Puig, find an interdimensional rift that shows a dictatorial alternate timeline where the Alteans won the war and the Galra were defeated, and they tussle with, and ultimately lose to, Lotor while trying to procure an interdimensional meteor from the aforementioned rift. Shiro reunites with the group, and they all learn that Voltron was made from a similar meteor, that the pursuit of quintessence corrupted Zarkon and turned the Galra empire into what it is today, and that the war started as Zarkon sought revenge on King Alfor (Allura's father) and the Alteans for allowing his home planet Daibazaal to be destroyed.
Seasons 4 and 5 start to move a lot faster, thankfully. Keith's training with the Blade of Marmora and his knowledge that he's actually some amount Galra-blooded distract him from his Paladin duties, and he gives up his position, moving Shiro back into the Black Lion. Pidge finds her long-lost brother, Lotor has machinations against the interests of the Galra Empire, and Coran pushes for a hammy, embarrassing stage tour to raise morale and build public support for Voltron. Their alliances are a full-blown Coalition, even bolstered by fugitives like Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, and so they move on the planet Naxzela. It turns out to be a trap set up by Haggar, the witch at Zarkon's side, to gravity-bind Voltron into a planet-sized bomb. Allura's nondescript Altean Space Elf Magic comes through, and she's able to get the team out of that situation. Keith, in a Blade of Marmora ship, is about to sacrifice himself to destroy the barrier on the Galra flagship, but then Lotor of all people, abandoned by his Generals and his father, damages the ship and comes to the rescue with his own meteorite-forged fighter ship.
But this is when life for the Paladins gets awkward: Lotor wants to help them, and he gives them a steady string of good information on various targets. Zarkon's forces snag Pidge's father, and offer a trade: Sam Holt for Lotor. The entire deal devolves quickly, with Pidge and Shiro fighting Lotor's Generals in a falling spaceship (and winning, dropping them out the cargo door), while Lotor fought and killed Zarkon. Tensions amidst the Galra explode into infighting over the position of Emperor, with upstart generals taking advantage of any weakness they see to build themselves up and sabotage each other. The Kral Zera, the Galra ascension ceremony, turns very bloody, and Lotor ends up taking the throne. While he and Allura research quintessence and ways to circumvent the now-allied Galra Empire's destructive ambitions, Hunk and Lance and Pidge introduce some much-needed comic relief, reprogramming a sentry robot to have fun and getting into a lot of mischief on Lotor's flagship. Then, the party accompanies Allura and Lotor to the Altean equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, though they have to leave the adventuring to those two because a spectral white lion only wants to deal with Alteans (Lotor is half, by the way). That Lion happens to knock out the power on the castleship, putting a hard limit on the amount of air the rest of the group can breath, and a very real time limit for Allura and Lotor. Lucky for them, Allura unlocks the secrets of Altean Alchemy (Lotor does not) and they're able to restore the castleship before most of the cast dies from asphyxiation.
Will things get better now that there's an Altean Alchemist and a solid collaboration with the Galra Empire? Probably not, because Season 6 is happening in a few months, and Shiro might be getting controlled by the evil with Haggar, it's a total mystery. And since Haggar's goals are unknowable but definitely sinister and maybe against Lotor, the crazy train won't stop chugging anytime soon.
Personality:
Traits: Warm(+), Stalwart(+), Brilliant(+), Lighthearted(0), Anxious(-), Snide(-)
In the first episode of the show, Princess Allura gives descriptions of almost every Lion and their Paladin’s role. When discussing Hunk’s new role as the Yellow Paladin, she says: “The Yellow Lion is caring and kind. Its pilot is one who puts the needs of others above his own. His heart must be mighty. As the leg of Voltron, you will lift the team up and hold them together.” Not-so-surprisingly, this was spot-on for Hunk. While Shiro is the leader, Pidge is the brains, Keith is the temper, and Lance is the… Lance, Hunk is the heart and soul of his group, a fact which seems readily and casually accepted by his peers.
“Hunk’s our mechanic. He’s also a chef and just a pretty cool dude to hang out with.” – Lance, S2E10
The Yellow Paladin corresponds to the element of Earth or Land, and like a scorching desert or sun-dappled soil, Hunk is an undeniably warm person. When he’s not getting shot at or otherwise having a bad time, he’s smiling and palling it up with those around him. He calls the native Arusians adorable, and is absolutely thrilled to attend a banquet they throw and entertain them. When looking for a crystal on the Balmera, Hunk is the one who makes friends with Shay and the Balmerans, setting in motion Team Voltron’s first big win against the Galra and proving to all of them (especially himself!) that they can make a difference. He’s the one who cooks up Earth foods for diplomatic meetings, and smooths over awkward conversations with the ever-exotic “pizza roll.” When Allura was going to be killing a lot of time by herself, Hunk taught her and her space mice how to play games like charades to keep them occupied. Hunk’s also prone to crying and physical affection. He cries more than anyone else by far (whether for good or ill), pulled Lance and Keith into a hug while saying they’re brothers after forming Voltron, and dragging the entire team into a crying hug when Keith leaves the team to support the Blade of Marmora.
Of course, his compassion doesn’t just extend to his friends and oppressed people, but also to animals! He thinks Allura’s space mice are awesome, to the point where they’re the first good thing he mentions during a bonus vlog he makes. While inside the Weblum, a giant planet-devouring space serpent, Hunk is very endeared to little organisms that start to land on his spacesuit… only to realize they were melting his armor and there to digest food. When the Balmera is rejuvenated by Allura and immediately crystallizes the rest of the team stares dead-eyed at Hunk as he crouches on the ground and begins petting the planet while baby-talking it like it’s a puppy, saying “It’s alive, and it wuvs my scwatches.”
“A hero named Shay saved my life, and I swore I would return to do the same for her and her people. You understand.” – Hunk, S1E6
Of course, Hunk wouldn’t be able to support his team if he wasn’t stalwart. Hunk is often the one that’s tasked with heavy lifting, distracting enemies, and taking hits for the rest of the team, even though he frequently complains. He travels to the Balmera with Coran to get a new crystal for the castle ship, and after Coran hurts his back Hunk carries him through hostile mining tunnels until he’s recovered. The only thing Coran could think of that would be more dangerous than the trip to the Balmera would be going into the belly of a Weblum… which Hunk does alongside Keith in the following season. Hunk even agrees to tank the planet-eating space serpent’s lasers so they can get what they came for, even though Keith was the better pilot. His Lion’s gear reflects this as well: the strongest armor and reinforced claws to let him hold his ground, dig through the earth, and rip apart his enemies. He’s held up ships, destroyed mountains to create new angles of approach, and tanked countless hits. On foot, he prefers giant gatling guns to cover his allies and suppress his enemies, and when he needs to, he can handle most of an encounter on his own!
But outside of missions and combat, Hunk’s one the group often confides in. He knew Lance since before they were teammates at the Garrison, Hunk and Pidge are close enough to make a cutesy name (Team Punk) for their antics, Keith talked to Hunk and not his role model Shiro when his half-Galra heritage put a rift between him and Allura. He and Shiro have tag-teamed defusing arguments, and Hunk was one of the more nurturing and supportive characters when Allura began coming into her own as a Paladin. They’ve all learned to trust his gut, whether it’s his intuition screaming that Rolo and Nyma can’t be trusted (and boy did he let the team know it when he was right) or his actual stomach helping him realize that a monster was attacking an alien village not out of malice, but out of hunger for the festival food the natives had made.
“It’s a Galra finder? Well, “finder” suggests that it locates the Galra, whereas it would be more accurate to say that my model predicts their likeliest- Fine. It’s a Galra finder.” – Hunk, S2E6
Pidge gets most of the credit for being the brains of the team, but there’s no denying that Hunk is brilliant. In the first episode, he’s the reason the team even finds the Blue Lion; he recognizes Pidge’s data as a Fraunhofer line, a number describing the emission spectrum of an element that doesn’t exist on Earth. Then he casually builds a Geiger Counter to find this element out of things laying around a dilapidated desert shack. While unequipped and getting shot at by Galra fighters, Hunk manages to hotwire a Galra elevator console while complaining about the situation. He and Pidge collaborated on and regularly upgraded their Galra Finder, and they even reprogrammed a war sentry robot to have fun and be rebellious. He brings up a joke about symbolic logic and innumerably infinite sets (see: math) and Lance cuts him off saying it’s boring, to which Hunk agrees that it was before zeroing in on the joke rather than the concept. His engineering skills are top-notch, and he’s the only Paladin whose Bayard has a non-combat function: Hunk uses his laser cannon as a welding torch to help repair the Ark of Taujeer so it can escape. Sometimes, Hunk can even out-think Pidge, coming up with ways to amplify communications around black holes, or freezing vines to hold chunks of a planet together.
But his brilliance is most noticeable in the kitchen. Hunk seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Earth cooking, able to recreate dishes like pizza rolls and canapes with only alien ingredients. He somehow turns scaultrite, a substance used for space lenses, into cookies. When he’s forced to work off a debt in a space mall by cooking at a food court hole in the wall, he’s not only competent, but the customers are happy and form a crowd. The owner, Sal, is so taken with Hunk’s work that he vows to find him and get him back in the kitchen, because he’s that good. Hunk is able to consume alien spices and substances and not only stomach them but improve them, whether it’s an after-the-fact review or an in-the-moment tossing of ingredients into a ceremonial dish. Being able to intuit what is and isn’t safe for humans to eat on top of what can be consumed by various alien species with their own unique biologies is ridiculous. And he rarely puffs out his ego for intellectual matters which shows that while he’s maybe the second-smartest person in the show behind Pidge, he’s typically very humble about it.
“Calzones. I mean, uh, heck, yeah, I'm thinking about calzones, okay? I mean, does it always have to be about Zarkon? He's a bad guy. We're trying to defeat him. I get it. I'm hungry.” - Hunk, S2E11
Hunk is most consistently the comic relief Paladin, and it’s something he often takes in stride, because he’s just a very lighthearted guy. While he spends a lot of time freaking out, Hunk spends just as much time laughing, telling jokes, or being otherwise silly and dramatic. When entertaining the native Arusians in the castle ship, a fumble throws a plate of food into Hunk’s face. There’s a pause as everyone looks in concern, only for Hunk to turn around with food over his eyes, prompting laughter from everyone nearby. He’s prone to silly and ridiculous things, like slamming his laser-brick Lion into Keith’s to turn them into Voltron. It doesn’t work and Keith is upset. He makes puns (crème goo-lee, ugh) and gets up to all sorts of antics, like suggesting to Lance and Pidge that they impersonate chefs and raid the Garrison kitchens, or helping reprogram a war sentry to have fun and blow things up in the process. He’s got no issue with funny voices or silly sound effects, and his overblown reactions to many things means he’s often just ridiculous, despite being a trained soldier. But, his casual nature helps him calmly and rationally approach stressful and unusual situations. A sea serpent mind controlled him and some mer-people with weird kelp (a wormhole happened) and when Lance snaps him out of it, well…
HUNK: Whoa! Whoa! Where am I? What am I doing? Is that a jellyfish on your head?
LANCE: Hunk, you've been mind-controlled by the queen and you were trying to kill me.
HUNK: Oh, really? Sorry. My bad.
LANCE: We're kind of in the middle of a battle. So, I'm going to need your help.
HUNK: Got it.
Hunk can just roll with a lot of things. In fact, he makes a habit out of pointing out the wacky absurdity of their lives as often as possible, whether it’s pointing out that yes, they’re inside of a giant ancient alien robot lion head on the other end of the universe, or recapping a past battle with “We formed Voltron, then I stuck in my Bayard and shot it with my blaster right in its arm lasers. But that didn’t stop it so then we had to punch it.” He breaks things down and, while it makes their day-to-day sound ridiculous, it’s not wrong, and it’s often helpful. Other times, his casual approach to life can be less helpful, like the time he took a “ten minute” nap during a strategy meeting… and was unconscious for three hours, contributing nothing… but they were polite enough to let him sleep! Or the time Keith pondered what was in some storage containers, and Hunk got unusually passionate about sporks.
But while he makes a lot of jokes and they’re rarely at the expense of others, Hunk doesn’t appreciate being the butt of jokes himself. Snarky remarks, normally from Coran, have provoked more frustration than most things, and he was perpetually grouchy and angry when Coran’s parasite-drug-fueled creative bender forced Hunk to go on an intergalactic stage tour and be… the oafish fart joke. The only exception was when Keith made a joke about his vomiting tendencies, because Keith never makes jokes. And sometimes Hunk’s jokes can be mean-spirited; he hacks a sentry during some downtime to make it slap itself in the face, and when Pidge tells him to stop torturing it, we get a clear statement of one of Hunk’s largest weaknesses…
"No, what if the Yellow Lion doesn't work? Wh-What if I—What if I can't get in the mine? What if I start crying? It's too late! I'm already crying!" – Hunk, S1E1
Hunk is by far the most anxious and stress-prone member of the cast. He spends the first half of the first season almost exclusively screaming, crying, and saying how much of a bad idea it is to do most of the things they do. His response to the robot-slapping-itself scene is that he needs something to keep himself busy, so he’s not worrying about the rest of the team and their tasks, or Pidge and Lance and Himself getting caught by their enemies. When he doesn’t have something for his mind and energy to focus on, he can easily start freaking out under stress. Lucky for him he’s been busy fighting an intergalactic war. But when he’s not on missions he bakes, because baking clears his head. That combined with the fact that he’s a great chef implies a lot of stress, and that he’s worked with it for long enough to know how to cope, despite being at least 17. While his anxiety can sometimes manifest in clever caution and not rushing into a situation blind, it most frequently displays as exasperation at being thrown like a brick-shaped distraction at giant monsters and sometimes a complete aversion to conflict and danger altogether.
While his nerves have strengthened as he became more comfortable as a Paladin, he still gives himself pep talks, like before he and Pidge took out a Galra communication hub by themselves, a job upon which the entire rebellion hinged. It’s possible that his anxiety and nerves influenced his Bayard’s weapon choice: he’s the only Paladin solely with ranged weapons (Keith had a sword, Allura had whip, Shiro punches things, Pidge has an electrified grappling hook dagger, and Lance picked up a sword of his own in Season 5 alongside his assault and sniper rifles) and Hunk’s aren’t calm. He uses a giant laser cannon, whether as a BFG-style blaster or as a rapid-fire gatling gun, but either way he’s a spray-and-pray fighter who hangs near his team.
"Oh yeah, sure, just drop me off in an alien planet. That's cool, man. It's only occupied by mean purple aliens that want to kill me, but whatever. Just ignore them and go connect with a big, yellow, mechanical cat. Easy-peasy. Yeah. That all makes a ton of sense to me." – Hunk, S1E1
It’s probably best that Hunk focuses on supporting the team and cracking jokes, because when he doesn’t, he becomes unsettlingly mean and snide. The quote above is said when Hunk is thrown from the Blue Lion, where he rolls across the ground towards a Galra mine while a battle rages overhead. Hunk’s tasked with finding the Yellow Lion, and it’s one of few instances of anger that we see. At the end of a teambuilding gauntlet, Hunk is exhausted and hungry, so when Coran handcuffs the team’s arms to each other so they must work together just to eat, Hunk’s “Coran, think about what you’re doing” sounds more like a threat than anything else, especially combined with the twisted, sadistic angry faces Hunk was making at the time.
At one point, while stressed and unable to occupy his thoughts, Lance asks Hunk if Allura ever talked about him- she hadn’t, and didn’t seem to care much for him. Hunk lies to his face, voice oozing with sarcasm, saying that Allura is totally interested in him, which is pretty messed up, even though Allura and Lance are very close now. And that says nothing of the fact that he went through Pidge’s things after they rescued Shiro on Earth, and didn’t ever apologize for it, though it’s probably how he was so unfazed by Pidge being a girl the whole time. In between his first and second visits to the Balmera, Hunk is driven, direct, and cold, even advising his team to abandon Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer, three criminals they find stranded along the way (they would later steal the Blue Lion for a short time), and he’s so outspoken and authoritative that the people they found thought Hunk was the leader. He tries to be courteous enough, but when they betray the group he’s loud, condescending, and does such an “I told you so” dance that the entire group has to loudly acknowledge that he was right so he’d shut up.
Backstory/Motivation:
"Yeah, free. It means you can go where you want, be what you want, do what you want. No Galra masters to tell you what to do." – Hunk, S1E5
Hunk’s backstory is sparse, prior to the Galaxy Garrison- he doesn’t talk about it, though it could be because he doesn’t want to make the others homesick. He mentions having a family that he loves very much and who he’d love to return to, and the Paladin life is so far from his comfort zone that at first he wants to go home. When Sam Holt is about to leave to return to Earth, the team gives him recordings that they all made for their families, and Hunk mentions that he cries. A lot. The fact that he mentioned seeing Keith and Lance as brothers could’ve been more than just adrenaline. We also know that his skills are the real deal- Lance got into the Galaxy Garrison because Keith dropped out, and Pidge assumed a false identity, which means Hunk most likely earned that spot since he hasn’t mentioned otherwise. We know he deals with motion sickness and used to hate the idea of flying, to the point where he couldn’t even try to pilot the Yellow Lion with his eyes closed. The motion sickness was a common thing, too, and vomiting still happens here and there even after he adjusted to being a Paladin.
But the most important part of Hunk’s character growth so far is his love of freedom. He personally inspires the Balmeran people to rebel and makes it the team’s first real mission. After they’re successful, his cowardice and desire to leave Voltron are pretty much destroyed, and he’s in for the long haul. He contributes to diplomatic efforts and has thrived on vital two-person missions with most of the cast. In Hunk’s character vlog that he recorded to guide future adventurers, he tells them that they should all stay home… but that he’s glad he didn’t. He’s making a difference, he enjoys helping people, and he’s in a position where he can do so every single day.
Samples:
Hunk's Top-Level, Tags with Naoto, and Prose with Hope on the Test Drive Meme!
Vaikuntha
Moogle Name: Balmogra
Moogle Gender: Male
First Job: Gourmand
Second Job: Magitek Knight