#We watched gladiator 2 :) watched the first one the night before so full context let's go 💥

[keeps-ache]

need to be exploding something but i Can't for some reason. just Can Not. my ability to do is just. Nay

[ptw30]

New Content ≠ New Information

- or why you might have been underwhelmed by the recent Voltron: Legendary Defender trailer. 

A few people dropped into my messages yesterday and said the exact same thing, “But Dev, we got new content in the Season 8 trailer. How did we not learn anything new?”

I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but the intent was all the same - we got new content, so we know more about Season 8, right?

Not really, no. 

Below the cut - what trailers should tell us, how Season 2′s trailer rocked, what we didn’t learn from the Season 8 trailer, and - okay, I give. There are two new things we learned about Season 8 from yesterday’s meatless burger. 

(I can do food metaphors, too.)

A trailer is supposed to do a few things, but its main purpose to explain what plot is coming up and give relevance to the new content. 

Let me put this in a food metaphor for you. Let’s say the Voltron Twitter handle promises you food. You assume a burger. Now a good trailer is just about half the burger because a season has two main obstacles - the first problem the heroes must overcome and then a second, harder issue at the season’s end. 

So a trailer should explain the initial problem and foreshadow to the final problem. That means you’re still hungry at the end of the trailer, and that’s a good thing. You now need to eat the rest of the burger - or see the season.

Do me a favor - rewatch the Season 2 trailer on Netflix. I’ll wait. 

...

You didn’t, did you? *mock glare*

Within the first 31 seconds, you know the “lions of lore” have returned. You know Zarkon, the villain, can only be defeated by these lions, and you know that Zarkon is actively hunting Voltron PLUS to raise the stakes, Zarkon can find Voltron anywhere. 

...that’s pretty much, in 30 seconds, is a recap of Season 1 and the entire plot of Season 2.  

Then we get -  New Worlds, New Allies, New Villains - which rounds out the new places we visit, the Blades, and the Robeasts. The trailer ends with the defacto showdown you’ve been waiting for since the end of the previous scene. 

Now, we don’t know if Shiro will win this battle verse Zarkon, so we’re not hungry but ravenous for the rest of this burger. And double points to the creator of this trailer because the scene above in “Space Mall” also foreshadows the second showdown between Zarkon and Shiro in “Blackout,” the second problem of the season. 

You essentially have S2 wrapped up in a 1:45 trailer. 

Then, when we watched Season 2 - not only did Voltron deliver the rest of the burger, they also threw in some fries and a milkshake. 

Good job, VLD Season 2.

Season 8 Trailer - where’s the beef? 

The issue with the Season 8 trailer is that it gave us a salad, not even the burger, and I’m not hungry after eating the salad. But I’m also not satiated. In fact, I think the tomatoes weren’t good, and I’m just...not...feeling right. 

The trailer starts with a longer version of the teaser trailer from October. I wasn’t thrilled with the original teaser trailer, but I understood it. The paladins have changed over the last two years. Now, we’ve arrived at the final season. 

No need to redo that in the first 30 seconds of the new trailer and certainly no need to just take random quotes that don’t really reflect where we are now. But - I’ll give. Okay. You want to set the scene, Voltron. Got it. 

But then once the new stuff is supposed to show, you cut to a scene from “The White Lion,” an episode from Season 6.

And okay - the paladins are heading back into Oriande, but...we knew that from the NYCC trailer. Show us something we don’t know. 

Then we see Hunk firing his bayard - 

- which was great in the Season 7 trailer, too. How about something new? ...sure, okay. He’s in a forest. That... doesn’t thrill me - unless I know the forest is the Forest of Life or something. ...more on that in a moment. 

Next, the trailer cuts to Lance who is going into the Void - an old scene from “Postmorteum,” Season 5.

Then we see Allura making a tree glow. 

So? Allura can make Voltron glow. She did it in Season 4 - “A New Defender,” so why is this tree important? I have no attachment to this tree - or Hunk’s forest adventure. You gotta give me a reason to care about this forest, Voltron. 

Then we see Hunk and Lance flying through the forest, so...again, we’re in the forest. Good. We know Pidge is also in this forest from the NYCC trailer, so...I’m glad the paladins decided to go for a picnic. 

Then we see an explosion with the lions - which we’ve seen explosions with the lions before. Why should I care about this particular explosion? (I have a point! I’m getting there...)

Then we see Matt from the NYCC trailer. Not new. Green comes for Pidge. That happened in the first season, “Return of the Gladiator.” 

And here - 49 seconds in - is when we get our first new information of the trailer!

We didn’t know that Haggar fired on the original paladins, possibly killing them. Yes! FINALLY. After all, we knew the original paladins were going to show up from the Voltron Tumblr Questions after SDCC. So good. Now we have context. (More on to that in one moment. I have to put Keef in cuz it’s Keef.)

Then Keith uses his Blade of Marmora blade - 

- which he’s been wielding since Season 2. 

My point is - none of these things mean ANYTHING without context, which the trailer does not give us. 

Who is Keith attacking? Why is he using his BoM blade and not his bayard? Without the context, as far as I know is - he decided he likes to use his BoM blade, which he did in “The Black Paladins.”

The forest! Why is that forest important? Give me a reason to care about this forest - that it holds the Tree of Life and the universe grew from that tree. Something! Anything! 

Even Allura’s end remarks - 

- are a lie because there was an episode called, “Defenders of All Universes” in Season 6.

Voltron, DreamWorks, been there, done that. Move on.

The trailer needed to explain what is actually happening in Season 8 and what makes it special, the final dark night, what are we facing? Haggar? And what? What is she really trying to do and how is it different from what Lotor did in Season 6?

That’s the beef. 

Instead of having Shiro promise the team is going to come home triumphant - it’s Voltron. Of course they are going to win. If you actually have them lose and the universe be destroyed, then at least that’d be a true plot twist. Ultimately - the Defenders of the Universe fail to defend the universe. - 

- tell us Haggar’s plan. Have Allura say, “Haggar wants to go back in time and change what happened to Altea and Daibazaal. She wants to rewrite history using the Tree of Life.”

What’s the hook here? The reality that we know might never exist. The Voltron Paladins may never have existed, and more over - should the paladins try to stop her - or help her? Is it wrong for them to wipe out the last 10k years of Galra conquering, and if so - why?

And then the lions are also in the middle of this - because they are the reason Altea and Daibazaal ultimately destroyed each other. 

Then, show us context or delete context and show us new aspects of the show. Don’t show me Lance and Keith plugging in their bayards to create the big thrusters on Voltron again. 

We watched Season 7. We know!

And explosions don’t thrill us anymore without the context. So either show that this is Earth being destroyed - OR better yet - show me the Blue Bayard being plugged into its slot by Allura or Lance. Show me the Blue Bayard and the Red Bayard. Show me the Yellow Bayard and the Green Bayard. Show me the Black Bayard and Yellow Bayard. Show me Black and Green, Red and Yellow, Black and Blue - these are all combinations that have never been done! 

Give me something to look forward to finding out, not things we have already seen. 

...Okay, there are two places where the trailer achieves this. The first place was above with Haggar and the original paladins, and the second was here - 

Sincline or Haggar attacking Atlas, which arguably isn’t new content because we just saw them on different sides of the battlefield in the NYCC trailer - but I’m making an exception because we didn’t know that Sincline and Atlas would actually meet up. 

TL;DR - Where’s my burger, Voltron? You’re dropping thirteen episodes two weeks from today, and yet - we’ve only seen 53 seconds of new content. What gives?

I’m not asking you to feed me like YJ, with the entire Dollar Menu. They gave me a five-minute trailer six months before the drop, then a scene three months before the drop, and then a full trailer a month and change out.

I’m just asking you for a solid two-minute trailer. That’s it. 

[mugsywrites]

Love your idea about Denise doing psych assessments of new recruits. And I’m so excited to hear that the homesteading au is going well. Do you think you’ll be posting anything soon? For it or Ripples?

Like many things on TWD, it’s such a wasted opportunity for some character development. I mean, they did a little of it with Deanna’s interviews of them all but it would have been interesting for a shrink to question them.

As for Homesteading AU: Maybe? Let me just explain my writing process: 1)I do a basic outline, 2)start writing somewhere in the middle, work my way toward the end and 3) go back and figure out how things got there/fill in the gaps. But doing that means I usually rewrite huge swaths of the ending.

For example: the skeletal outline of “Fables” was “Daryl is injured and stays at Hilltop after the war, while there he falls in love with Jesus, they sleep together, Daryl has a gay panic moment and runs away to the ASZ, Jesus goes after him and something happens which makes Daryl and the group have to look for him, they have an angry confrontation and admit their feelings for each other” . From that the earliest scenes I wrote were the night they slept together for the first time and Daryl left, also scene where Paul confronts Daryl about it and the final scene where Daryl tells him he loves him back. The only thing that remains of those last two scenes are some of the dialog since once I started working toward that the plot changed significantly: Originally the Whisperers were going to be the baddies, and Daryl was going to get bitten and wouldn’t find out until the last chapter that it wasn’t from a zombie and he was going to live. The Whisperers were abandoned because I realized it would take too much time and attention to set them up as baddies, especially when I worked out the best way of telling the story was alternating chapters of “Now” and “Then”. I wanted the “Now” chapters to be shorter and take place over a day or two in contrast to the months covered in the “Then” chapters and that just wasn’t enough for the Whisperers. I changed it to Paul getting injured because the story began with them not sure if Daryl would live and ends with them not sure Paul will, which was a nice little bookend instead of just repetitive.

So that long ramble is just to explain that I’m sort of on step 2 right now, but since it’s an AU of my AU and I’m jumping around a bit I have most of the first couple of chapters roughed out, but I’ve been mostly working on some middle-to-end bits. As small reward for anyone’s patience in reading that ramble, here’s an out-of-context, likely to be deleted/altered significantly, and unedited bit of a scene I’ve been working on (apologies that it’s more TF focused than Desus focused:

“I don’t know where my husband is,” Michonne says quietly, “We were separated a few days ago, and when we went looking…he wasn’t where he said he’d be.”

“What happened?” Paul asks. He wishes Daryl were already home, if Michonne and Carl’s people are out here on the mountain then Daryl would find them. But he’ll be out on his hunt for another two days at least.

“Group of us are on our way to Washington,” she says. She glances to the living room behind her, where Carl has fallen asleep. “It’s a long story.”

“Well. I’ve got time. But you should probably sleep. So should I.”

She gives a weak smile, “I can’t sleep.”

“Not alone?” Paul says with sympathy.

“I can sleep alone,” she answers, “I just can’t sleep when I’m the one doing the waiting.”

Paul nods; he understands this too well. When he’s the one out on a supply run with Daryl and Clementine holding down the fort here at 19 Chicopee Paul sleeps wherever he can find shelter and is out as soon as he lays down. When Daryl’s the one out on one of his hunts even in a warm and comfortable bed in their almost-safe home then Paul is wide awake. “How long have you been married?” Paul asks.

Michonne pauses, “I-we didn’t really have a ceremony, you know? He wasn’t my husband from before.”

Paul has already guessed this; Carl obviously isn’t her biological child anymore than Clem is his.“How’d you meet?”

Michonne’s face changes, goes blank. “It was…maybe a year ago. I was alone,” Michonne says, “for a long time. Lost everything, everyone. It was just me and…” she swallows and looks away, and Paul doesn’t press. He can guess the gist of it, and he thinks if Daryl were gone he would probably cut himself off from everyone as well. “I wasn’t crazy…I was just…gone,” Michonne continues, “One day I found a woman in the woods. Carol. Surrounded by walkers. And for some reason I decided to stop and help. Saved her life. Then it was the two of us.” A faint smile, “Carol…she was pretty much gone too. But we helped each other find our way back. At least part of the way. It was the first winter after everything happened. In the spring…that’s when we found Woodbury.” Her voice grows dark. “It was a big group, an entire town. Was run by this guy who calls himself the Governor. Pretty boy, charming,” she grimaces, “in a Jim Jones type of way.”

Paul knows exactly the type of guy she’s talking about. He nods for her to continue.

“Or more like they found us. Carol’d gotten sick, and the Governor and his men found us. Brought us to Woodbury. We both knew something wasn’t right from the start. Sentries on every wall. Paramilitary wannabes. I wanted to get out of there right away, but Carol was still too sick. By the time she got better she told me we should stay put for a bit. Watch these people,” she snorts. Paul can read her face well enough to know that whatever relationship she had with this woman, it was complicated. Michonne shakes her head, “Carol’s…you’d never notice Carol, not before. Susie Homemaker. Soccer mom. Looks like she’d jump six feet if a mouse farted. No one notices a woman like that now either. She could bake you cookies with a smile then slit your throat without changing her expression. Within a day or two she’s part of a ladies’ social and making dinner for old folks and everybody’s talking to her.” She shrugs, lost in the memory, “Not like me. Carol said I was about as subtle as knife to the crotch.”

Paul can believe it. The woman at his dinner table is soft-spoken, genteel, and nothing like the ferocious mama bear defending her cub he’d met in the woods earlier that day. Even so, “subtle” is the last thing she is. She’s the sort of woman who walks in a room and draws attention without effort. “What’d the two of you find out?”

“That this Governor was a fucking psychopath,” Michonne replies, eyes dark. “Him and his goons raided other settlements for supplies. I think the only reason he didn’t kill the two of us right away was because we had nothing he wanted to take. At Woodbury he had a makeshift arena with weekly ‘gladiator matches’ where you fought in a pit with walkers chained to either side. Had a room full of fishtanks with decapitated walker heads. Kept his dead daughter—Penny—in chains in his house. Thought she could be cured.”

Paul can feel the blood draining from his face, “Holy fuck,” he whispers softly. “And people at Woodbury…they just went along with it?”

She shrugs, “Most people there didn’t want to know. He was keeping them safe, and fed, and together. His soldiers knew, but they didn’t care either. Some of them liked it, like his number two. Merle,” she spits the name out.

Paul’s stomach plummets, and he must look like he’s seen a ghost because Michonne asks him what’s wrong. “Nothing,” he starts to say, but she looks like the sort of woman who can see through lies, so he admits, “My brother-in-law was called Merle. Merle Dixon. And he was a son-of-a-bitch. Ran around with white supremacist militias and dealt meth. Reacted how you’d expect when he found out his little brother was gay.”

Her face goes still, “I never found out his last name, but that sounds like our Merle. Fifties, beefy, blue eyes, gotta mouth on him.”

Paul’s heart races, “He was in jail when everything happened, I’m sure there are a lot of redneck assholes in the state of Georgia called Merle.”

“Well, the world gets smaller at the end. Something Merle said himself. See, he knew Carol. They were in the same group at the beginning, before they kicked him out. The rest of Carol’s group…she thought the world of them. One of them died saving her life, right before I found her. Carl’s mother.” She gives a small smile at Paul’s look of confusion, “Me and Carol were getting ready to escape  when the Governor brought in a new group, one Carol recognized.”

“The one she was with before, with Merle,” Paul says, amazed.

Michonne nods, “World keeps getting smaller. So maybe it is your brother-in-law out there in the woods after us. The night I found her, Carol’s group was overrun by a herd and she got separated. Must’ve thought she died with Lori. They were glad to see her, even…” She trails off, eyes seeing something else, “That’s when I met Rick.” Her voice is unsteady when she says her husband’s name.