(This is an archived version of a post to r/HobbyDrama, written by Reddit user Plane-Slight. The text is mirrored for archival purposes.)



Hi, everyone! Firstly this is my first post on r/hobbydrama, so feel free to correct me if I get anything wrong here. Secondly this story primarily focuses allegations of racism, particularly against Mexican Americans, and I am very white and European. So again, please correct me if anything on here is incorrect. Anyway without further ado, let's get on to the shitshow:

1: What is voltron?:

Voltron: Legendary Defender, or vld for short, is an animated series created by dreamworks and broadcast on the streaming service netflix. It's a remake of the 1981 mecha anime Golion, and follows 5 paladins from earth who are sent to space to fight an evil alien overlord who plans on taking over the entire galaxy. The paladins consist of Pidge, Shiro, Keith, Hunk and Lance.

2: What is klance?

Klance is the extremely popular ship of Keith and Lance. It became particularly popular on social media websites such as twitter and tumblr, and next to sheith is the most popular ship from the show.

2: What is dirty laundry?

Dirty laundry is a klance fanfic, posted first on archive of our own by a user named Gibslythe on July 11th 2016. The plot is as follows: Lance, who is visiting his family for the holidays, asks Keith to come along and pretend to be his boyfriend in exchange for washing his laundry for free. Angst and gayness ensues. The original fanfiction has been deleted from Archive of Our own, but you can find it on wattpad here.

Wait, why was it deleted? What happened?

Well, here's where things get dramatic.

Part 1: The rise to fame:

Honestly it's hard to describe just how insanely popular Dirty Laundry was in the voltron fandom without being there, but this fanfiction was everywhere. It went from being a fairly popular klance fic to being the fifth most kudoed fic on ao3 of all time. After Gasolina, a 2010 reggaeton song was referenced in the fic, the comments section was filled with klance fans. This video contains some examples in the comments below. Fandometrics, a fairly popular tumblr blog which chronicles the most popular fandoms / ships of the time, made this post on July 27th, 2016 referencing the voltron fandom "airing dirty laundry". Sanchez became a popular headcanon for lance's last name after the fanfic (note: this was before Lance was officialy confirmed by the voltron crew to be Cuban). Other headcanons from the fic, such as Lance being Mexican American and having a large family were already around, but they really blew up after Dirty Laundry. "Abuelita is coming" became a popular in joke amongst Dirty Laundry fans, as a reference to the fic. So yeah, Dirty Laundry was insanely popular. The author was getting kudos and praise, fanart was abound, and DL fans were eagerly awaiting the lastest updates. What could possibly go wrong?

Part 2: Things go wrong:

After a short time of being an untouchable masterpiece, some voltron fans began to.. question the fanfic. In particular, its portrayal of Lance's Mexican American family. Here are just some of the issues parts of the fandom, especially Latino fans, had:

It's hard to find these posts now as many of them have been deleted, however tumblr user huntypastellance has a post here which sums up the drama. There were also allegations that some of the people calling the fanfic racist were white themselves, but as I can't find evidence either way I can neither confirm nor deny this. This drama lead to the author herself making a tumblr post, which you can find here. The TLDR version is the author apologised for any offensive portrayals of Mexican Americans in the fic, and was willing to listen to any Latino person who was offended or wanted to help her in writing it. This received mixed reactions from the fandom, but overall things seemed back on track. The author admitted she fucked up and wanted to learn, what more could one ask for? What else could possibly go wrong?

Part 3: Mama Mia, here we go again:

So aside from the racism allegations, the fic seemed mostly drama free. And in spite of the controversy, the fic was still very popular and receiving kudos, fanart and bookmarks galore.

Then Alexi was introduced.

Alexi is a a family member of Lance's who is introduced in chapter 4 of dirty laundry. In chapter five, Alexia is confirmed as having autism and sensory issues, such as food textures, which is common in people with autism.

All hell broke lose.

Now allegations of ableism for a stereotypical portrayal of autism AND racism were being launched at the author. Eventually Gibslythe made another post addressing the drama, which again you can find here. One bombshell from this post includes the author stating she will not be updating the fanfiction regularly (previously updates were posted weekly), and would instead just post one big update and be done with the fanfic. Again this received mixed reactions, although even people who didn't like the fanfic began standing up for the author as she began receiving harassment for the writing. However, the damage was done; Dirty Laundry and its author was receiving hate and critsism, and even people who originally like the fanfic began to stray away. And this is where we come to the grand finale.

Part 4: Yes I've been broken hearted, blue since the day we parted:

So, you're probably wondering now why I can't link the original ao3 link to Dirty Laundry. Well here we are, at last! While I can't find the spefic date, in 2018 many dirty laundry fans went to the fic as usual, whether that was to check for updates or to look back for old times sake.

However, the fanfic was gone.

And it was replaced with the bee movie script.

Naturally there was uproar, questions and sadness from fans. What made the author delete the fic? Was it the harassment? (the answer is yes). Gibslythe later explained it on twitter, however the link isn't working for some reason: basically some kind of glitch on ao3 marked the fic as orphaned and it couldn't be deleted. This was later fixed, and in 2018 the fic was gone.

So, that was dirty laundry. It was a cute little Voltron fic that had a surprising meteoric rise to fame, before crashing down and becoming a meme for the author's reaction to the hate. Again if you want to read it's linked at the top, and I will end this with the quote from the authors note after the bee movie script was uploaded: " To bee free is to cast away the shackles that hold you down "