Literary Demerit

We’ve finally reached the end of Dirty Laundry! We have a lot to say, so much so that we’re going to need to do a wrap-up episode after this one, but first we need to see how the story concludes. Will Keith accept Lance’s apology? Will Lance properly apologize? Will everyone in the McDonalds clap? It’s also time we did another “obvious” count, though this one isn’t a drinking game as we’d probably get alcohol poisoning.

Content warnings: usual Dirty Laundry warnings, some discussion of abuse.

Content warnings: usual Dirty Laundry warnings, nothing unique to this part of the story. Just Static has a fair amount of gore/violence but we don’t discuss it it much detail.

Part two of part six of Dirty Laundry, aka the “Warning: Triggering Homophobia” scene. The tension that’s been building in the Sanchez household finally comes to a boiling point at Christmas Eve dinner! Will it all end out alright, or will it be just as worse? We also decided to cover part seven of Dirty Laundry in its entirety in our second segment, as it’s not long enough to justify spending a whole episode on and, I’ll be honest, I think we’re both trying to get this over with as fast as possible at this point for the sake of our dwindling mental stability.

Content warnings: there’s some homophobia (obviously), albeit milder than the “triggering homophobia” warning would suggest. Unfortunately this part of the story makes up for being less homophobic than expected by being really bizarrely misogynistic again for no reason, and there wasn’t any warning for that.

We’re onto part six of Dirty Laundry and again so much is happening (and we get so mad about it) that we have to break up this section of the story into two parts. This episode we do some last-minute Christmas shopping with Keith and try to make his $40 budget stretch as much as we can, learn about the true cause of mental illness (stomach demons), and then it’s finally time for Keith to confess his feelings to Lance! Will it go well?! Trick question, this is Dirty Laundry and everything is horrible. After that it’s time for us to circle back to talking about The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, since it gets directly referenced in this part of the fanfic, and now that we’re most of the way through Dirty Laundry we can really take a good look at how much it s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶s̶ borrows from said book.

Content warnings: unfortunately we have to continue talking about the ableism surrounding how this story treats its one autistic character, as well as the misogynistic/bizarrely judgmental way in which Dirty Laundry treats that character’s mother. Since we talk about The Secret Life of Bees again in this episode, we also need to give another warning for antiblack racism.

Part five of Dirty Laundry is a bit shorter so we decided to cover it all in one go; however it does contain two particularly noteworthy scenes, including the (allegedly) the most controversial scene in the fanfic, which we’ve got way too much to say about. Many others over the years have also had a lot to say about this part of the story, which means it’s time to revisit the Fanlore article in our closing segment!

Content warnings: this chapter we’re focusing pretty heavily on the ableist treatment of this story’s token autistic character, and we also go over the (in our opinion, justified) accusations of racism and ableism directed at the author in the closing segment.

Part two of part four of Dirty Laundry. Abuela is coming (haha, sooo funny!) but she’s not the only new character getting introduced this episode, and it’s honestly difficult to say which character introduction we’re angrier about! This is a particularly long and rowdy episode, so strap in; we have a Lot to say about this part of the story. To close out the episode, we checked in with the Voltron fandom on Tumblr to see what people have been saying about Dirty Laundry.Content warnings: in addition to the usual racism/homophobia/biphobia, this section of Dirty Laundry is particularly heavy on the misogyny, and there’s more than a little ableism (with promises of more to come in future).

We’re now right around the halfway point of Dirty Laundry, which means it’s almost time for Abuela to arrive, but first we have a scene where Keith gets confronted about his fake relationship by his not-boyfriend’s fourteen-year-old kid sister and has some Very Normal Thoughts(™) about a potential domestic life with Lance! In our second segment we decided to compare/contrast Dirty Laundry against a Klance fic the two of us actually like, so we read and review Pepsicola by Ao3 author corydalis.Content warnings: usual Dirty Laundry warnings apply (the story is racist and the topic of homophobia frequently comes up), nothing unique to this part.

Part two of part three of Dirty Laundry. Closing out the arcade scene from the previous episode, this section of the story contains such exciting events as Keith being a god gamer, Lance managing to (somehow) sexily play Dance Dance Revolution, and the promise of Abuela’s impending arrival in part four. In our closing segment, we decided to have a little fun and play a drinking game… that we advise none of you try at home, and certainly not with hard liquor. Obviously.

Content warnings: typical for this story, there’s some amount of (out-of-universe) racism and (mostly in-universe) homophobia/biphobia.

This episode covers the first half of part three of Dirty Laundry. Keith and Lance go on a date and play laser tag, a scene which takes up the majority of this section of the fic, so we chose to cover it all in one go. As for our closing segment, this time we decided to take another look at ReicheruKetsueki’s deviantArt account, since there’s more material there we didn’t cover during our Blood Raining Night episodes.

Content warnings: usual CWs for this story, nothing unique to this episode.

The long-awaited second half of part two of Dirty Laundry, which features Lance’s dad outing his bisexual son to a homophobic man and Keith and Lance getting into a very logistically implausible fight by the side of a highway. This part of the story has been driving us particularly insane ever since we first read this fic and we’ve got a lot to talk about. For our closing segment we took a little (virtual) trip to Mesa del Caballo to get a better sense for the location this story’s author so lovingly described.

Content warnings: a fair amount of in-universe homophobia/biphobia this chapter, plus some out-of-universe discussion from us about the author’s poor handling of the topic. There’s also some mild violence this time.

(Additional music credits for this episode: “Passionate Duelists” by Shinkichi Mitsumune.)