#god its been a while since ive explained voltron to someone. i could do a video essay on this shitshow fr

[blueskittlesart]

tell me more about voltron please

i considered putting this behind a readmore but i dont think i will actually. i think im going to subject you all to this. okay to begin with when i say voltron i am not talking about the 1984 anime voltron. i am talking about the american 2016 reboot of that anime, voltron legendary defender. it had eight seasons within 2 years and i was obsessed with it for the majority of my time in middle school. it did irreparable damage to my brain.

voltron was run by two people named lauren montgomery and joaquim dos santos. voltron voice actors and writers also had a kind of unprecedented amount of interaction with their fans, both in-person and online. the majority of those fans were adolescent lgbt people, as are fans of most netlfix cartoons. this did not end well. i'll get into it later.

the first two seasons of voltron came out to relative praise. it appeared, at the time, to be an interesting character-driven children's show, similarly to steven universe and other cartoons of its time. As I mentioned, a lot of fans were adolescent and/or young adult lgbt people. this obviously led to fandom, and, as a consequence, shipping culture. the problem was that the shipping culture in voltron was insane. there were two MAIN ships that people were into at the time. keith/lance (klance) and keith/shiro (sheith). for context, keith and lance were 17 & 18-year old classmates and established rivals who had several heart-to-heart/romantically-coded scenes in the first two seasons, causing fans to latch on HARD. shiro was keith's 26-year-old adopted brother.

the mid-stage voltron fandom literally coined the terms "anti" and "proship." "anti" originally meant "anti-sheith" that is the kind of fandom culture were talking about here. before voltron, these debates had obviously still been present in fandom, but voltron dialed everything up several notches. it was insane. I was put on blocklists for being anti-sheith, as a FOURTEEN YEAR OLD.

I mentioned earlier that the showrunners and voice actors had a kind of unprecedented amount of interaction with their fans, and i actually think this is what lead to the show's downfall. What happened was, basically, at the very beginning of the show's run, one of the showrunners teased that they would have lgbt rep in their show. everyone assumed that this rep would be either klance or sheith, and went insane about it. the staff of the show could not have a single event without some fan asking if shieth or klance was going to be canon. they would always dance around it, which i don't REALLY blame them for. the biggest problem was that they actively REFUSED to condemn sheith, an incestuous ship between a 26 year old and a 17 year old. some fans at the time suggested that they even encouraged the shipping culture within the fandom because they knew it brought them more engagement. however, encouraging this kind of thing and refusing to condemn sheith led to several unsavory situations with voice actors and fans, most notably pidge's voice actor bullying a 13-year-old off this site after they pointed out it was weird that the voice actor openly shipped sheith. there were also several incidents where FANS were in the wrong, most notably when a klance shipper took photos of unaired material during a tour of the studio where voltron was being made and then threatened to leak it if the showrunners didn't make klance canon. it was an insane couple of years to be in fandom spaces on the internet.

this is bad, obviously. all of this is really bad. but it also all came alongside the steady, obvious decline in quality of the show itself. what had once seemed like an interesting, well-paced, character-driven narrative was clearly devolving into a badly-paced serialized mess. subtle racism began to creep into the writing. the racism became less subtle as the show went on, obviously favoring white characters. Characters would have development teased and then never followed through on. filler episodes would be full of weirdly malicious digs at fan-favorite characters for seemingly no reason. the story became disjointed, the tone shifted to be much darker with little warning, and the plot became nearly impossible to follow. what came out later on, after the show had concluded, was that sometime after season 3 or so, the showrunners had THROWN OUT THE SHOW'S BIBLE. meaning past a certain point, there was ZERO PLANNING, zero written plot, zero ANYTHING. it was obvious in hindsight why the show started to go downhill so quickly. It was speculated that the bible was thrown out specifically to spite klance shippers, who the showrunners later openly admitted to hating and wanting to screw over.

six seasons came and went with no lgbt rep like they'd promised. the fans were getting incredibly impatient. the longer they went without the satisfaction of a klance or sheith payoff, the harder it became for them to overlook the writing problems in the show. something had to be done.

at sdcc 2018, the voltron team showed a clip of their new season.

this was an EVENT in the fandom. like. i remember exactly where i was at the time. i remember refreshing the blog of a mutual i had who was at the panel, liveblogging it, and praying that they would finally fix everything they'd fucked up over the last year. they showed a clip of shiro and another man, who was named adam. the clip itself was ambiguous, but when asked about it afterward the showrunners confirmed that adam was shiro's fiancee.

this literally sent voltron fans into a rabid state. we were going fucking INSANE for those 2 weeks between the panel and the season's release. as far as we knew, at the time, we had been given the lgbt rep we'd been promised, and they'd somehow managed to do it WITHOUT PISSING OFF EITHER SIDE OF THE SHIP WAR. it was a miracle.

two weeks later, the season aired. adam was in about 2 minutes of the episodes, total. EPISODES, PLURAL. there were 13 in the season. his presence on screen amounted to the ambiguous scene which was played at the con, where it's unclear what his relationship with shiro actually was, and a scene of him DYING IN A FIGHTER CRASH.

the fandom fucking imploded at this point, and i left it basically immediately afterwards because the lgbt rep was basically the only thing i'd been holding out for. i can't tell you exactly what happened after that but the rotten tomatoes score for voltron went from like 79% to 10% overnight, if that gives you any idea. voltron legendary defender is also currently cited as an example on the wikipedia page for queerbaiting. they lost about 90% of their fanbase that day, and the rest was lost a few months later when they killed their only black character and redeemed their genocidal villains in the final season.

voltron sucked ass and i have no idea what possessed me to sit through ONE season of it, let alone seven, when it was just so obviously never going to be what i wanted it to be. that being said, the fandom was a literal cultural reset for every lgbt person between the ages of 14 and 25 at the time. make of that what you will but for the love of god do not watch it for yourself. stay as far away from this fucking show as humanly possible