| “ | The ancients thought that lightning was shot from the bows of the gods until science proved otherwise. We must always push into dangerous territory in the pursuit of knowledge. | „ |
| ~ Honerva espousing her motto to King Alfor. |
| “ | Sniv: Is it done? With that witch out of the way, I’ll be one step closer to taking power [“Assassin” cleanly pulls out blade] Haggar: Wrong, Commander Sniv. |
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| ~ Commander Sniv making his final mistake. |
| “ | Honerva: I am Honerva of the planet Altea. Merla: That is impossible. Altea was destroyed over 10,000 years ago. Honerva: A powerful portent that is shared with the birth of my son Lotor. Merla: Lotor’s mother? Honerva: Lotor is gone. [Altean colonists gasp] Merla: How did he die? Honerva: Voltron. To all of you who believed in my son so justly, your faith will be rewarded. I have come here today to continue my son’s mission. And for that, I need you all. Luka: We are your humble servants, as will be the members of our sister colony once we inform them of the news. Do you know of their whereabouts? Honerva: Unfortunately, they have also fallen to the evils of Voltron. Voltron and the Galra will pay for what they have done. With your help, I will resurrect my son’s dream. Merla: We pledge our allegiance to you, Honerva, mother of Lotor. [All Altean colonists bow to Honerva] |
„ |
| ~ Honerva manipulating the Altean colonists to her side for her ulterior motives. |
Haggar, also known by her real name Honerva, is the main antagonist of Voltron: Legendary Defender, serving as the secondary antagonist of the first six seasons, the overarching antagonist of Season 7, and the main antagonist of Season 8. She is an incredibly powerful witch that served as the High Priestess and de-facto second in command of the Galra Empire who aided Emperor Zarkon in trying to harvest the living energy called quintessence of the universe. Unbeknownst to most including herself (at first), she was once the kind-hearted Altean scientist and wife of Zarkon, Honerva, whose obsession with quintessence corrupted her and caused the events of the series. She is the most consistent threat in the series and the archenemy of Princess Allura.
What Makes Her Magnificent?[]
- She was once an altruistic and kind-hearted heroic scientist who dedicated her life to helping countless species across the universe for generations and was regarded as the greatest alchemist of Altea.
- She experimented with the quintessence rift between realities that emerged from the comet on Daibazaal and discovered its nigh-infinite energy properties that would make it become legendary and be used as a renewable and powerful energy source and forever revolutionized the universe. Lotor even points out how she advanced technology by eons.
- She also has a comedic and adorable moment when meeting her future husband Zarkon after he came into the room and got scared of her cat which she assured him that her cat Kova was “from this reality” and meant him no harm and was just puzzled when Zarkon got flustered and quickly left.
- Interestingly, despite becoming increasingly stoic and obsessed with experimenting with the quintessence rift, it’s worth pointing out that she wasn’t motivated by power, greed, or sadism but simply the pursuit of knowledge and wanting to learn more and benefit society.
- In fact, despite going on a darker path, she still got a gift with Zarkon to celebrate the birth of Alfor’s daughter Allura even if she was nonchalant about it.
- She also erected a particle barrier with King Alfor to contain the dark entities that came from the quintessence rift to prevent them from slaughtering all in their path and hold them off long enough for Alfor to complete his Voltron project. She also assured Zarkon when he was falling into despair that Alfor’s project would work and save them and encouraged him to have faith.
- Her first use of quintessence wasn’t for any selfish reasons, but to actually save Kova when Kova fell sick and to extend his lifespan although she would use it on herself afterwards. Unlike Zarkon, she still seem only concerned with expanding knowledge whilst her husband tried to convince Alfor they could use quintessence to rule the universe.
- Overall, the above moments and the fact that she was dying and needed quintessence to be saved with Zarkon trying to save her by going into the quintessence rift but instead died and got reborn and corrupted from overexposure with her losing her memories prior and never being there for her son as he grew up or even remembering her family makes her an incredibly tragic figure. This is only further enhanced by the fact that she eventually regained her memories and feels especially terrible about how she missed out on Lotor’s entire childhood and becomes dedicated towards reuniting with him and reclaiming her identity as Honerva.
- She has quite a few “Evil is Cool” moments including creating terrifying yet powerful and epic sentient weapons called robeasts, demonstrating her wide and incredible array of powers in her fight with Shiro in the Season 1 finale, swiftly assassinating a smug Galra officer who thought he killed her, and more.
- After becoming evil and a master of dark magic, she used her magic to imbue Emperor Zarkon with quintessence for 10,000 years and assisted him in conquering nearly the entire universe, leading the mystical order of the Galra Empire called the Druids in harnessing quintessence from across the universe which turned the Galra Empire into the formidable, dominant force it would become and kept it functioning for millennia. She also expermiented with both willing and unwilling subjects like Shiro to implant them with awesome weapons upgrades to become weapons for the empire and further advance Galra tech in the process.
- She sensed the return of the Blue Lion and Princess Allura’s awakening from stasis, informing Zarkon and contacting Sendak so he could go to capture Allura and the Voltron lions.
- She created several powerful mech warriors called robeasts by fusing living things with technology using her advanced dark magic and sent them out to destroy the paladins, each nearly defeating Voltron and killing the paladins had the paladins not been saved at the last few seconds.
- It is worth noting that the first subject was a willing participant who gladly accepted her offer to become a robeast and the second subject was a regular lizard who she wanted and assured would become a powerful warrior, so she was simply pragmatic and not sadistic over this.
- She created the formidable and frightening superweapon, the Komar, and used it to successfully harvest the quintessence of an entire planet within seconds, a process that normally took years and vastly improving the efficiency of the Galra Empire. This revolutionized the way the Galra Empire advanced across the universe as they could now instantly get the quintessence of whole planets and no longer needed to be concerned with conquering and draining them but could instead focus all their energy on capturing Voltron.
- She traps paladin leader Shiro in Galra Command in the Season 1 finale and demonstrates her vast and impressive array of powers against him, effortlessly using her dark magic to repel his attacks and her illusion-casting to trick him over and over again with him being unable to land a hit on her. She reveals to Shiro that she was the one who replaced his arm with an awesome implant and how he could have been the Galra Empire's greatest weapon before rightfully taunting him over his inability to stop her and continuing to play him before striking him with a severe wound and nearly killing him had Allura and Hunk not shown up at the last second. Even when the two ambushed her, she deflected the attacks and still outmaneuvered Shiro when he tried to surprise attack her by demonstrating her teleportation ability and mysteriously disappearing. Allura even acknowpedged how they had to get out of here and regroup with the rest of the team and her overall prowess sent chills down Hunk's spine.
- Just as Team Voltron was about to escape from Galra Central Command via wormhole, she used the Komar to send a burst of dark magic through, causing the wormhole to collapse and the paladins to be separated and stranded while trapping Allura and Coran in a time loop, allowing for a partial-victory for the villains at the end of Season 1.
- She served as the pragmatic voice of reason compared to the smugness of Prorok and Zarkon, always arguing in favor of caution and being well-prepared and chastising against Zarkon's increasing obsession with getting the Black Lion at the expense of anything else.
- She figured out the solar barrier was clearly sabotaged which is why it shut down and Team Voltron was able to escape. When Zarkon blamed Prorok and had him taken away, she convinced him that the Druids should find out all that Prorok knows and that he should then be turned into a robeast to hunt down Voltron which would be more useful which she made clear was her motivation all along regardless of Prorok being innocent. She sent a transformed Prorok to destroy the Galra resistance group called the Blade of Marmora outpost which would force Ulaz, the man who rescued Shiro from Galra captivity, to sacrifice himself to save Team Voltron when Voltron couldn't defeat robeast Prorok.
- She used her dark magic to allow Zarkon to sense the Black Lion from galaxies away so they could relentlessly hunt down Team Voltron.
- She constructed Zarkon’s gigantic battle armor to counter Voltron.
- She set a trap for the Blade of Marmora spy within the Galra Empire and successfully discovered it was Lieutenant Thace and captured him. She would have the access codes and Galra protocol changed and went out to kill a freed Thace and Keith in the power station which would force Thace to sacrifice himself to shut down the power and save Keith.
- She repeatedly tried to convince Zarkon not to rashly go out and get his battle armor to face Voltron on his own, pointing out it was certain death and that all the test subjects for his battle armor hadn't survived and that she could just use the Komar to draw the quintessence out of Voltron and render him lifeless. When Zarkon ignored her and went out anyway, she had the Druids prepare the Komar to enact her plan and protect Zarkon.
- She used the komar to draw the quintessence out from Voltron, rendering Voltron lifeless during the climatic final battle between him and Zarkon.
- She recovered a comatose Zarkon and had Prince Lotor summoned to take control of the Galra Empire in Zarkon’s absence to stop the Galra Empire from completely falling apart and eventually healed Zarkon.
- She somehow figured out that Shiro had mysteriously disappeared and initiated Operation Kuron to successfully create a clone of Shiro to be her unwitting pawn and infiltrate Team Voltron, staging the clone’s “escape” from Galra captivity and successfully having him infiltrate the team with no one including the clone himself knowing of the truth.
- She quickly became suspicious of Lotor’s intentions following his return and seeming disinterest in actually trying to lead the Galra Empire and win the war. Unlike a healed Zarkon who easily fell for Lotor’s fake grovelling and got thrown off into thinking Lotor actually wanted to be by his side and was disappointed when Zarkon relieved him of duty, she detected a mysterious energy on Lotor and seemingly possessed one of Lotor’s generals to learn of his secret obtainment of a trans-reality comet to use against them and informed a healed Zarkon in order to ambush Lotor and force him to go on the run.
- In the Season 4 finale, she used the Voltron Alliance taking control of 1/3rd of the Galra Empire and Team Voltron liberating the last planet Naxela as an opportunity to activate Naxela which was really a planetary bomb capable of wiping out 10 star systems which would take out the entire rebellion in one fell swoop with Team Voltron and the Voltron Alliance getting fooled until it was too late and being unable to stop her and shut down the bomb and Keith deciding to try and sacrifice himself to stop it. She almost succeeded in detonating it had Lotor not came out of nowhere and used his sincline ship (which conveniently was the only thing that could penetrate her ship’s shield) and stop the ritual to save everyone. She accepted defeat and ordered her crew to immediately retreat and got away scot-free.
- After regaining the memory that Lotor was her son, she figured out Zarkon was on a hostage exchange mission to retrieve Lotor and activated Operation Kuron Stage 4 to protect Lotor and directly spy on Team Voltron through Kuron’s eyes and watch over Lotor.
- She swiftly defeated an ambush from several assassins and used one as a decoy to confront Sniv and make him think he beat her before revealing the deception and swiftly killing him in one of her
- Instead of killing Lotor’s disgraced ex-generals like they expected when she confronted them, she recruited them and pardoned their past misdeeds after having them to get Sendak, recognising they were incredibly useful tools for her plans.
- She used Sendak as her unwitting puppet to try to take control of the Galra Empire at the Kral Zera but abandoned Sendak to die (which he deserved) once Team Voltron attacked the Kral Zera and the Galra Empire collapsed into chaos, accepting that the empire had fallen and retreating to regroup and form a new strategy.
- She used Kuron to locate the legendary birthplace of Altean alchemy that she had been searching for for her entire life, Oriande, after Lotor and Allura had went and was revealed to have one of the “Marks of the Chosen” that deemed her worthy to enter, passing all of Oriande’s trials (which is something Lotor couldn’t do) and successfully reclaiming her identity as Honerva and fully gaining moral agency.
- She had Lotor’s former generals break into the Castle of Lions to steal the quintessence field traveling Sincline ships and brainwashed Kuron and drove him insane to knock out Team Voltron, plant a kill code to destroy the Castle of Lions and kidnap (or actually rescue) an unconscious Lotor who had been exposed and captured by Team Voltron. She would then have Kuron lead Keith away from her fleet by exploiting Keith’s strong relationship with Shiro against him and successfully get away.
- She then revealed her identity as Honerva to Lotor, understanding why he would be angry at her and explaining how her transformation into Haggar shrouded any maternal care she should have had and complimenting him for his work and his never-ending quest for knowledge. She only ordered Lotor to be taken away after he coldly refused to reconcile, but when Acxa stepped in to surprise her and reveal she was working for Lotor all along and pointed her blaster to kill Honvera, Honvera simply teleported away and escaped.
- Following Lotor’s escape and disappearance, she would become determined to reunite and reconcile with Lotor and sent Commander Mar to track his whereabouts and once she found a comatose Mar and got the info that Lotor and (seemingly) Voltron had died in the quintessence field out of Mar and called forth the Kral Zera to use a spell to single-handedly kill nearly all of the remaining Galra warlords to end the Galra Empire, blaming the empire and its ways for failing Lotor. She would then discover the Altean colony Lotor had built and manipulated them into fanatically worshiping her and lied about their sister’s colony death being from Voltron when that “colony” was just a harvesting farm of quintessence from Alteans by Lotor to rally them to pledge allegiance to her to avenge Lotor. She would then travel to Oriande with them and have them turn Oriande into their base of operations, and construct extremely powerful and epic Komar like mechs to counter Voltron and absorb quintessence, sending one led by the most fanatical servant Luca to kill Voltron and attack Earth with a self-destruct sequence when Voltron beat her which forced Voltron to nearly sacrifice themselves to stop it and sent a robeast to devastate the Voltron Coalition's capital Olkarion to steal the Olkari cubes and repeatedly sent out more Komar robeasts to absorb the quintessence of numerous planets with her having dark entities possess the Alteans to kill them if they were captured to prevent them from revealing any info with her true goal as Allura figured out being to use the Olkari cubes to immensely magnify the quintessence drained from planets by her mech soldiers to construct a massive Komar powerful enough to not just drain the quintessence of an entire galaxy but rip the fabric of reality and time itself to bring back Lotor’s dead body and mech from the quintessence field and defeat Voltron and successfully launched her base out of a collapsing Oriande, outsmarting and defeating the heroes.
- She drained much fo the Atlas mech and the Balmera’s quintessence to fuse her mech with Lotor’s mech in order to successfully pierce through realities to find the perfect one where she could be with an alternate version of her family and start over even though this would destroy all realities she traveled through with Voltron and the Atlas being unable to stop her with her successfully ambushing them and draining the quintessence out there mechs. In the finale, after she finds the reality she is looking for but her husband and son reject her, she decides to destroy the multiverse if there is no place for her, going to the void of beginning of time and space where all reality strands are to successfully destroys all of them except one, easily making her the most competent, successful, and dangerous threat in the series.
- Her mech also looks very stylish and imposing especially when she is using it.
- She redeems herself and recovers from her breakdown after Allura reminds her of the hero she was once was and how Lotor genuinely wanted to preserve life, realizing the error of her ways and sacrificing herself with Allura to undo the damage she caused and restore the multiverse, being happily reunited with the spirits of her husband and son like she always wanted as they accompanied her to the afterlife.
What Makes Her a Baddie?[]
- She led the Druids in helping Zarkon destroy countless planets to harvest their quintessence for the Galra Empire, with her expertise being the reason the Galra have controlled the universe for millennia.
- She experimented on countless captives from different worlds including Shiro, being the one responsible for replacing his arm with Galra tech to turn him into a weapon.
- She built a super weapon called the Komar to harvest the quintessence of planets in moments, destroying all life on a planet onscreen.
- She punished Prorok with a fate worse than death by turning him into a mindless Robeast even though she knew he was innocent of sabotaging the solar barrier.
- She created a clone of Shiro to be her unwitting pawn to infiltrate Team Voltron and later brainwashed him and had him engage in a really psychologically abusive battle with Keith which would eventually result in the clone’s defeat.
- She created and activated the Naxzela planetary bomb which would wipe out 10 solar systems and the entire Voltron Coalition.
- She manipulated the Altean colonists into fanatically worshipping her and used them as pawns to destroy planets and harvest their quintessence and had no remorse for their deaths.
- She temporarily destroyed all realities in retaliation to finding her alternate universe version of her son rejected her saying there would be no universe at all if she couldn't find one where she was accepted.
Trivia[]
- She is one of the two Voltron: Legendary Defender Magnificent Baddies alongside her son Lotor.
External Links[]
- Haggar on the Villains Wiki.
[]
 Magnificent Baddies
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Animated Features Animated Television | ||