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violethowler · 4 years ago

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False Perception: An Analysis of Lance’s Character Arc

When I first started watching Voltron: Legendary Defender in the Fall of 2016, the fact that it was made by some of the same people who worked on Avatar: The Last Airbender was one of the main things that appealed to me. All I knew about the franchise consisted of a throwaway line from Ready Player One and a one-off gag in Deadpool. While I quickly came to love the show for what it was, that familiar blend of drama, action, and comedy that I loved from Avatar played a big part in drawing me into the story.

But while there are some clear similarities and references, it definitely feels like some people have gotten so caught up in the Avatar comparisons that only a few ever acknowledge Voltron as its own thing anymore. Because so much of the criticism I see with Voltron can be distilled to “it didn’t do [blank] the exact same way that Avatar did.”

Yes, a large portion of the production staff worked on Avatar and Legend of Korra. That’s going to have some influence on character design and writing. But still, those influences are just that. Influences. They did not just copy the same plotlines, themes, and characters from Avatar and put them in space. Even without taking into account that it’s a reboot of a decades-old franchise, Voltron: Legendary Defender is still its own show.

It is not the same story as Avatar. It does not tackle the same themes. And any themes it does have in common are not handled in the exact same way that Avatar handled them. Most importantly, the characters of Voltron do not follow the same character arcs as the Avatar characters fans compare them to, nor should they be expected to.

Yes, this is about the “Lance is Space!Sokka” comparisons I’ve been seeing on tumblr for the last four years. I won’t deny that there aren’t similarities between them, but I’m sick and tired of seeing people use the VLD writers not copying and pasting Sokka’s arc into Voltron as an example of “bad writing.”

I get it. Both of them are wisecracking teenage boys who serve as the resident goofball of their team yet will also buckle down and get serious when the situation calls for it. And both of them start out with sexist attitudes that they grow out of over time.

But just because Lance and Sokka are written in similar traits does not mean that Lance’s arc was ever intended to be a beat for beat retread of Sokka’s, and it’s time the fandom as a whole acknowledged this.

I could go on for ages about how many different criticisms of Voltron I’ve seen that ultimately boil down to “it’s not an exact recreation of Avatar.” But for today, I’m going to focus on breaking down the specific trajectory and themes of Lance’s character arc across the entire series.

The first episode establishes that Lance considers himself rivals with Keith, who Iverson specifically said was the best pilot in their class. When Allura explains the traits associated with the lions, he interrupts to suggest that the Blue Lion “takes the most handsome-slash-best pilot of the bunch?” Then in S1E10 Collection and Extraction, he suggests challenging Zarkon to a fight after learning the Galra Emperor’s weaknesses depicts, saying “winner gets the universe.” This is accompanied by an image of Lance standing triumphantly on top of Zarkon’s dead body in front of a flag with Lance’s face and the word “winner” on it. The image includes Allura looking adoringly up at Lance while the rest of the Paladins all give him thumbs up.

Right from the start, Season 1 does a fantastic job setting up Lance’s ego. He’s constantly trying to hype himself up as The Best. The CoolTM one. When Keith criticizes his offscreen kicking of broken ship parts after the team has practiced forming Voltron at the beginning of S1E03 Return of the Gladiator, Lance responds “I did something cool and you can’t handle it.” When Keith points out that Lance’s kick ruined Voltron’s balance and caused the robot to fall over, Lance deflects the blame to Hunk. When he tries to kick Myzax’s orb, he tells Keith to “stop living in the past'' when the Red Paladin reminds him of the earlier fall. His kick misses the orb entirely and results in Voltron getting bashed in the face.

The failed kick during the fight with Myzax serves to set up a pattern that continues over the first two seasons: Lance attempts to make himself look good by performing something he does not have successful experience with, only for his self-aggrandising to screw things up for the team. In S2E04 Greening the Cube, he pushes Hunk out of the way and starts randomly pushing buttons in the middle of the Paladins doing maintenance on the exterior of the Castle of Lions, causing critical problems that Pidge has to quickly fix.

S2E10 Escape from Beta Traz and onward give audiences a peek behind the mask to show that Lance’s bragging and glory seeking is driven by deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. He wants so badly to be SpecialTM and make himself stand out as someone unique and important because he doesn’t believe he’s enough on his own. When the Blue Lion shuts him out in S3E02 Red Paladin he quickly concludes that he must not be meant to be a Paladin at all. When he confesses to the mice in S6E02 Razor’s Edge that he’s in love with Allura he says he can’t compete with Lotor because he’s “just a boy from Cuba” and that he doesn’t have anything to offer in a relationship.

The personas that Lance tries so hard to present himself as - the peerless Special One who single-handedly saves the day and the suave ladies man - are common tropes associated with the protagonists of many science fiction stories. Particularly those with teen and young adult protagonists. Considering that S4E03 Black Site shows Lance as a video game fan and the Paladins were all attending a school for space exploration, it makes sense that he would consciously or not emulate the protagonists of his favorite stories in order to gain acceptance.

But his attempts to seize the limelight end up having the opposite effect. After moments like his attempts to fix the castle in S2E04, the team is understandably skeptical whenever Lance tries to offer a solution to a problem. They’re doubtful when he refers to himself as a sharpshooter in S2E10 Escape from Beta Traz because while the mice and Allura know that Lance has been practicing with his bayard alone - which we see in S5E03 Postmortem - the rest of the team has just seen Lance’s glory chasing. So they’re surprised when he’s able to keep track of their position relative to the lions while being chased by Zethrid in S8E05 The Grudge.

Prior to WEP’s meddling in the final season, Lance’s arc was set up for him to learn the lesson that he does not have to be a genius or a prodigy in order to be valued as a person. That he doesn’t have to be the Super Special Awesome ProtagonistTM in order to be a hero. The reason his arc was so heavily affected by the executive meddling of Season 8 was because his romantic relationships were heavily intertwined with the themes of that arc, and since the edits were heavily focused around Allura and Lotor, Lance’s love life suffered as a consequence.

Over the course of Seasons 1-7, Lance is shown constantly hitting on every beautiful woman he meets. But his romantic pursuits are ultimately shallow. This is best demonstrated in S2E02 The Depths when he recoils after Plaxum kisses him while wearing a bloated jellyfish and ragged cloak, but does a 180 and starts drooling in awe when she takes those off to reveal that her true appearance is much closer to 21st Century American human beauty standards. Even after pouring out his feelings for Allura to the mice in S6E02 Razor’s Edge, he displays no reluctance or inner conflict when he organizes the travel arrangements for the clear purpose of getting to spend time alone with Romelle.

This serves to demonstrate that while he says he loves Allura, his actions show he’s more in love with the fantasy of her and what she represents than he is with her as a person. His flirting with every conventionally attractive female character and his desire to find “the future Mrs. Blue Lion” as he puts it in S2E02 The Depths ties back to his desire for acceptance by emulating your standard sci-fi protagonists because when you look at all the ladies he’s expressed interest in, they all have one thing in common. Each of them fits into common archetypes for female characters in male-centric sci-fi stories.

Nyma is the dark and mysterious femme fatale.

Plaxum is the leader of the rebellion on her planet.

Allura is the alien princess with magical powers.

Romelle is the (assumed) naive newcomer to the war.

Since Lance is emulating traditional character archetypes, it makes sense that he would apply that same emulation to his love life as well, since most of the sci-fi stories which use the tropes Lance’s trying to live up to involve the hero getting the Special Girl. So it makes sense for his character arc to have his endgame love interest be someone other than any of the extra-terrestrial ladies he’s pursued over the course of the series. It has to be someone from Earth, since his desire to return to his home planet was a recurring point throughout the series.

And looking at the series as a whole leaves only one candidate:

[Image description: Pidge sitting in the Green Lion playing video games during S7E02 The Road Home]

S8E01 Launch Date establishes that Pidge is weirded out by the idea of Lance and Allura going on a date together, but gives up a video game she really wanted in order to barter for an outfit for Allura to make sure the data goes well. During the actual date, Beezer - the robot who had been accompanying Pidge at the beginning of the episode - follows Lance and Allura to the site of their evening walk and takes a photo of them. And though she tries to deny it, in S7E01 A Little Adventure Pidge indirectly admits that she does think Lance is cute.

When Pidge says she thinks the Yalmore is cute in S7E01, her eyes are big in a way that she usually only gets around advanced technology. Her expression when she hastily adds “in a creepy, hideous sort of way, like you Lance,” quickly is frantic and conveys the feeling of awkwardness implying that she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. This brings to mind her words during the mind meld exercise in S1E02 Some Assembly Required when she objects to the Paladins rooting around in her head. Pidge doesn’t like letting other people know what she's thinking and feeling. In that context, her dismissive response to Lance’s navigation skill in S8E05 The Grudge, saying “let’s not get ahead of ourselves” has the same “I’m impressed but can’t bring myself to admit it” energy as Rayla saying that Calumn’s realistically-detailed drawing of the Banther Lodge game room is “okay” in the fourth episode of The Dragon Prince.

Meanwhile in Avatar, Sokka’s arc is focused on dealing with having to grow up fast as a result of his father going off to war and being left to fill the role of the patriarch and protector of his tribe as the oldest boy in the Southern Water Tribe. His insecurities and self-doubts come from a place of wanting to feel like he’s doing a good job at fulfilling the responsibilities that had been forced upon him because of the war.

Lance’s character arc, by contrast, is focused on learning to let go of ego and maturing into someone who recognizes that being able to work as part of a team is more important than individual glory or acclaim. The war with the Fire Nation was a foundational part of Sokka’s life in a way that the fight against the Galra Empire never was for Lance, who doesn’t truly begin to understand what he’s gotten into until S1E05 Fall of the Castle of Lions when he realizes that he may not see his home or his family again for a very long time. As a result, it takes awhile for him to really take the war seriously.

Lance and Sokka do have some traits in common, and it’s valid to point out those similarities. But people need to remember that just because they’re similar doesn’t mean that they’re exactly the same in terms of their character arcs and roles in the overall story of their respective series. The comparisons between Avatar and Voltron were fun at the beginning. I found a few of the posts comparing characters from the two franchises amusing and fun. But since then a lot of fans have felt like they’ve taken those comparisons literally to the point where they expected Voltron to be a rerun of Avatar with a fresh coat of paint.

The Voltron staff may have borrowed or referenced elements from their prior work on Avatar and Korra, but that does not mean that every future project that someone from Avatar makes has to copy the things fans liked about it.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron meta #vld lance #plance #freevlds8

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rens-room · 4 years ago

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noblesse (anime) thoughts:

totally not vampires. not with the insane beauty, cross imagery, blood power, literal coffin, etc.

why did they change some of the names in the anime? (just curious, no hate.) I was a little confused as to why the one guy was being called yu-chan/tashiro.

I like how the show takes two obvious main character types (shin woo and raizel) and says, hey take a back seat to weaker characters and let them get the screen time and fight scenes.

you’re gonna tell me that shin woo wouldn’t be the main character or any other show? with the Orange hair, people constantly seeking him out for fights, and his kind heart? (oh wait I just described ichigo kurosaki oops).

and raizel is insanely powerful, and yes he is the driving factor behind the events of the story but theres always someone else stepping in and fighting instead of him. let me see that blood magic! please!

it is cute how ramen is a running joke in the show.

I love tao. (so much gender envy)

ik han gives me pidge (vld) vibes.

takeo gives me jiang cheng (mdzs) vibes. maybe it’s the long ponytail, or the bangs, or the sister complex, or the purple....

how did it take this long for everyone living in that house to realize that no one was actually as human as they seemed??

I can’t tell if this is a masterpiece or amateur hour.

the op does nothing for me sorry. the ed has really pretty animation though.

something that doesn’t add up for me: Frankenstein’s name. no one else is named after a reference or even has a similar sounding/themed name so why??

you know who’s gonna live based on how pretty they are. only the pretty survive.

oh finally an identity reveal. it’s not like these people have been living with you for the past idk couple weeks? months?

do not kill the old man. he does not deserve it.

Rael “Edgy McEdgy” Kertia.

wait you shouldn’t have a soul weapon, you’re like third in line for clan leader.

I really didn’t come here for politics and family drama but that’s what season 1 turned into. like what happened to the humans at the start of the season?

the fight scenes have pretty animation even if they are not the most interesting/are predictable.

“wait!” *throws body into room*

overall: it’s like the creator took a bunch of popular tropes (vampires, pretty boys, “wrong room”) and mashed them all together. it’s not bad, but there really isn’t enough material animated yet for me to make a final decision.

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the-lightning-strikes-again · 4 years ago

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Hey Lightning, I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on something. One take that seems to keep returning every once in a while is the "Allura fell for Lotor only after he revealed his Altean heritage," but I know u and others have disproven this many times, which does reassure me. While I love Allura, I definitely think one of her weaknesses was her devotion to Altea and singing Alfor's praises, which sometimes became too much. At the same time, it bothers me when I see some ppl (1/?)

Continuing anon message: “ say that she thought Alteans were superior to all other races, and that when the colony plot twist happened, she became repulsed by Lotor's Galra side, which is why she rejected him. For them, that's why she forced violent memories onto an uncorrupted Zarkon, but somehow "saw the good/redeemed" Honerva, the Altean. I can kind of understand where they're coming from, but for me, it just didn't make sense that Allura suddenly had a change of heart considering for most of s8, she was angry and dead set on going after Honerva. Even with that, I think to a lot of her fans, s8 made Allura so ooc that she became unrecognizable, which hurt to watch. I guess for me it's hard seeing antis and people who don't like her claim that that's just how she is and has always been. Haha sorry for rambling, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, since your arguments ease my mind on a lot of things when it comes to Allura :)”

Hi, anon. Wow, thanks for your extended note! I don’t know anywhere in canon that Allura champions Alteans as a superior race. The definition of racial supremacy is a belief that inherent genetic differences between races determine cultural or individual achievement, with social/governmental policies championing intolerance of other races. To get Allura to fit into such a label:

1. A viewer has to ignore or undermine all the evidence available about who the main-universe Alteans really were before main-universe Zarkon’s massacre of them.

2. A viewer has to ignore or undermine how Allura actually responds to a variety of different races in the show, including her own.

So let’s start with issue one. To support an “Allura was a racial supremacist” opinion, a lot of antis (and even non-militant, average viewers) are favorable to the opinion that Alteans as a group, including Alfor, were actually evil and violent colonizer elitists before Galrans killed them off. In other words, they question Altean victimhood, and this allows the militant antis to poison and undermine scenes of a woman mourning her home and her beloved family. And it just gets to be a really unsettling conversation, to listen to someone actually try to justify genocide. They’ll also have suspicions that all of our foundational backstory in the s3 finale was just “cleansed” propaganda from Coran. So if antis can undermine Allura’s entire race and family as corrupt, then they can intentionally undermine any of her canonical statements about or efforts toward peace. Which is hilarious, because this racist tactic applied to Allura is actually what a lot of antis accuse Allura of doing with Lotor.

For the record, I don’t think the show production team actually intended the subliminal messaging/cognitive dissonance that I’m about to discuss. The people who designed and developed this show are fans of robot kitties and aren’t PhDs in social issues. But I think there is a very serious issue about the portrayal of genocide victims that feeds into some very real problems in our world, especially regarding the concept of racial supremacy and conspiracy theories about genocide victims.

VLD tried to play with both genocide politics for edge™ points while ALSO playing with shatterglass theory (shatterglass meaning an AU where the heroes are villains and villains are heroes). Combining these two concepts into the same universe creates some incredibly disturbing subliminal messaging about Alteans that very closely mimics ongoing neo-Nazi propaganda against Jews. Nazis and other anti-Semitists justify their hatred of Jews by equating them as terrible villains out for world domination via some underhanded shadow control of the mass populace. It’s an incredibly malicious form of propaganda, because it works so terribly well. And what do you know, VLD plays right into this kind of propaganda. In the season 3 episode, Hole in the Sky, we’re faced with team Voltron confronting an Altean Empire that was actually evil and out for multiverse domination. And oh by the way, they’re using malicious shadow tech to control a mass populace.

It’s like someone on the production team read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and then just copied/pasted that incredibly damaging and widely accepted conspiracy theory right onto Alteans for s3 funsies because edge content.

This is incredibly punishing, for the narrative to wave the carrot stick in front of genocide survivors that maybe some others survived—and then to suggest that Alteans were the evil ones all along. A shatterglass twist worked very well in Captain Marvel (2019) for a lot of reasons, for example, but it just doesn’t work well in the VLD universe given that the show explicitly portrays the genocide victims as evil and validates this concept. And this episode unfortunately feeds ongoing cognitive dissonance in antis that if AU Alteans could be so evil…how certain are you that they aren’t in the main universe too? On the reverse side, the main-universe goes out of its way to portray that not all Galrans are evil, and even that Galrans were the primary resistance (BOM). But in this singular episode, we see a united Altean empire. And the only Altean who moves to stand against it once the shine wears off…is Allura. There is no AU Altean actually shown in the Guns of Gamara. So Allura stands alone as an Altean against her own people.

For this reason, this episode doesn’t function very well as a shatterglass AU either, because the moral “flip” isn’t a mirror balance to main universe. The Alteans of the AU world appear as fully united in their evil plans. And then, no doubt, anti-alluras point out other quirky things about main-universe Alteans throughout the show—the violent language-learning system that scares Pidge, and the ancient Altean terraforming technology that Haggar activates, and the fact that Oriande is a hidden place that keeps out the less magical with a violent guardian. These details, when removed from main-universe world building, create a cognitive dissonance about whether main-universe Allura and Alteans were actually genuine in how they depicted respectful “peace and diplomacy.” So anti alluras who believe Allura was a racial supremacist really rely on this s3 episode and these details to uphold their conspiracy theory.

So let’s focus on Allura in this episode, because it says a lot about who she ultimately is as a person, and people have forgotten how she actually responded in this episode. Allura is unquestionably hopeful at the thought that her and Coran might not be the last Alteans alive. Pretty understandable. If I were the last human, I’d be darn excited to find out there’s more of me left, lol. So her experience as a genocide victim initially blinds her to the evilness of these Alteans. You can even see the ache on her face, of how badly she wants to believe their narrative of peace.

So Allura is initially star-struck that she and Coran are not the last Alteans, yes, and that somehow they’ve achieved a “peace.” She is also not afraid to admit that they would be valuable allies in the war:

And she’s not wrong there, considering that they have what appears to be extensive military resources and a robot force of their own. But she makes a critical mistake in assuming that “these are my people” means that they share main-universe cultural sentiments. The instant Allura hears Slav (so not someone of her own race) call these Alteans out as actually evil colonizers turning people into slaves, she begins to question the narrative she’s received.

In this instance, she actually affords the Alteans the same courtesy she afforded Lotor—the opportunity to deny the accusations.

But in the AU Altean’s case, they try to turn blame back on other parties. Allura listens to Keith when he grows increasingly fearful of what the Alteans might do to the others, and she tries to plead for actual peace:

And actually, this is a pretty interesting moment for Allura. She tries to salvage an alliance…until she realizes that their differences are irreconcilable, and that their definition of peace is inherently different from her own. This probably sets the stage for why Allura was so triggered by Lotor talking about peace while also killing people—because she’s seen people misappropriate that term before. And also probably informs why she trusts the information of both Keith and Krolia (both of whom have Galran blood, btw).

Ultimately, Allura turns against her own people. Violently:

When they get angry about her wanting actual peace, Allura draws a weapon against them and rejects them from her people. This mimics how she spends several seasons fighting an Altean Haggar/Honerva for her crimes, and how she turns against Lotor too.

So case in point here, Allura loves her people, obviously—but she also is holding them to moral standards regarding their behavior, which is something that a genuine racist doesn’t do. As a matter of fact, Lotor is the only person of Altean blood that Allura genuinely bonds with ever again in the series. She’s distant with Romelle, she’s distant with the s8 Alteans… In s8, Allura even says this about Luca, which refers back to her own mistakes she made with initially being star-struck by the s3 AU Alteans who came in “peace”:

Allura herself had been manipulated in s3, wanting so desperately to not be the last Altean alive that it initially blinded her to how Commander Hira was manipulating her. The plight of the s8 Alteans who are deceived by Honerva is inherently frustrating to her, because she can see herself in them.

Absolutely none of this correlates with Allura seeing or perpetuating Alteans as a superior race. At every turn, her own people continue to disappoint her, and she increasingly and progressively separates herself from them in hopelessness, because they’re so brainwashed that they can’t see they’re just cannon fodder for someone else’s military agendas. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a superior race, lol.

So let’s think about anti accusations here. Allura is a racial supremacist…but she’s arguing against her people who believe unquestionably in Honerva, another full Altean like herself? Nothing about that accusation makes sense with her actions.

The fact is, consistently from season 3 and onward, Allura is faced with her own people morally disappointing her.

The good news for the s8 Alteans like Tavo is that Allura is able to remove the dark entity Honerva is using to control him. Which allows other Alteans to “wake up” from being manipulated and try to make amends.

Regardless, Allura makes a very clear line that simply being Altean doesn’t make someone “right.” She sees herself fully at odds with her own people who are drawn in by Honerva’s lies. And she experienced well back in s2 (revealing Haggar as Honerva) and s3 (evil AU Alteans) that any given race, including her own, can house people who do bad things.

The fact is, she’s consistently and willingly drawn weapons against even her own people when they didn’t meet her moral expectations. So her response to Lotor isn’t particularly out of line there. She’s repulsed by a moral flaw.

And actually, Lotor himself wouldn’t have known this, but he very oddly echoed the AU Alteans by getting angry that Allura was angry over the means through which he was trying to get peace:

So Lotor actually reverts to the same logic of the AU Alteans—peace at any cost, just look at the results—

And keep in mind that the AU Alteans also manipulated Allura’s excitement about them, to get her to make the transreality comet usable so they could go into other realities. So Allura has felt betrayed and used before, by her own people.

So when she says this:

Yes, it’s a reference back to how Zarkon manipulated his friends in order to get access to the quintessence field, at the explicit cost of potentially killing his own people. But it’s not without understanding that yes, Alteans can be just as manipulative and betraying as Zarkon. Because she’s experienced it, again and again.

As a matter of fact, six out of the eight seasons of Voltron: Legendary Defender feature villainous Alteans/Alteans on the wrong side of the war, and we continuously see Allura punished again and again for wishing that Alteans still lived.

No wonder she wanted to die.

This is something that I find uncomfortable about the narrative of the show. Previous iterations of Voltron did in fact have a “blood on everyone’s hands” perspective, such as within the ages 16+ Dynamic Comics. However, Arusians/Alteans in those old Voltron narratives were not victims of genocide. VLD turns Alteans into victims of the worst racial crime possible and then also consistently portrays them as inherently antagonistic to genuine peace efforts in some way, instead of focusing on the evil of the oppressors.

And this is such a double whammy for Lotor’s characters as well, given that he was abused by his parents and threatened with slavery via his Galran culture, and that he was half-Altean too trying to connect to his lost culture.

As a matter of fact, the larger show’s narrative interest in “victims as antagonists” makes it such that when we see victims try to enact actual justice, it feels almost jarring. Let’s look at that s8 Zarkon moment you brought up as an example, where Allura destroys his innocent perspective by showing him his evil deeds.

The s8 Zarkon is a weird topic because 1) This Zarkon actually doesn’t exist outside of Honerva’s mind, so how he has any kind of actual free-will is beyond me, unless someone wants to argue that Honerva actually cursed his true soul just as she cursed the other paladins. It’s hilarious too, because Honerva-mind-Zarkon also calls Honerva a psychopath, so I guess now Honerva is psychoanalyzing herself using her dead husband as the vehicle, while also discreetly helping the paladins to stop herself—

ANYWAY, using this Zarkon as a “proof” of Allura’s “racism” is also cherry picking in the weirdest of ways. Is she angry about his horrific and incalculable crimes, including even how he betrayed the OG paladins and ruined his own planet? Absolutely. Does she want him to be aware of his crimes instead of having to pretend like nothing’s wrong? Yes.

But notice here, this Zarkon actually shows remorse. He is actually crying over those memories and recognizing that he had done something wrong. And Allura can work with that. In fact, out of everyone standing around and doing nothing, it’s Allura who gives him a second chance and offers an alliance with Zarkon in order to stop a crazy Altean:

Keep in mind too, Honerva didn’t have memory loss at the end of s8. She knew exactly what she’d done and had given up and had to actually be convinced to do anything halfway constructive. That’s a very different circumstance than mind-Zarkon had, who jumped at the chance to do something to fix what all had happened, and gets even morally righteous about it, calling his own wife a psychopath, lol.

So generally, antis who believe Allura was a racial supremacist haven’t watched the show holistically. We see her hold the same standards to her own people as she expects out of others. This show would look incredibly different if Allura were a true racial supremacist.

Ah, you ask. Okay, so we’ve refuted the big pieces of “evidence” used to incriminate Allura. But what about all of those weird details about ancient Altean history? The violent language-learning program that scared Pidge? The violent terraforming tech that almost kills Voltron? The concept that Alfor tried to play “police” over the Galra and actually blew up their planet? The Alteans’ ongoing discussions of “peace and diplomacy” and spreading it throughout the universe while they happen to sit on a massive load of ancient power?

The s3 finale and other facts throughout the series very heavily smash the claim that our canon, in-universe Alteans were evil colonizers like the AU Alteans. The biggest piece of evidence to the contrary is that the Altea we know was one (1) planet. You counted right. One planet. Not an empire, but a singular planet. The s3 finale corroborates this, showing Altea as being largely isolationist from a military perspective while Daibazaal and Nalquod warred "for generations," right in front of their salad.

So some viewers would have you believe that Alteans were these big bad, intergalactic police state colonizers. But for all of its great power and knowledge, the singular planet of Altea didn't even canonically interfere in the wars of its own galaxy for actual millennia? And looking at the screenshots upon the stabilization of the alliance, Alfor is revealed to not have had experience with a neighboring culture. His face while exploring Gyrgan’s homeworld is an indication that it’s all rather new for him too. So again, we have evidence showing that Alteans were not colonizing or even functioning as a police state.

Note here that in the s3 flashbacks, the show confirms that it actually wasn’t just Alfor who suggested an alliance. All five leaders had common interests in protecting their galaxy from even worse threats, so all five came together at the same time. This is actually the first piece of evidence we have of Altea entering into some kind of intergalactic military agreement to stave off said worse threats.

And all of this is on top of a history where in s6, the Galran Archivist confirms that the Galran Empire had existed before Zarkon for 3,000 years, with times of “expansion.” It’s very easy to see that Blaytz’s people were actively fighting off Galran occupation of their homeworld within this past.

And that’s actually what I think makes Alfor and the OG paladins some pretty interesting characters. Here, we had colonizing Galran empire setting down its sword and accepting the value and space of its neighbors. Here, we had master alchemist Alfor giving up military power within their group by acknowledging Zarkon as the superior strategist. Here, we had Blaytz who had previously been battling Galran occupation…fully accepting the Galra?

So the OG Paladin backstory represents a pretty incredible alliance that removed a lot of intergalactic toxicity and helped heal broken bonds. But it required all five leaders to agree to that. Alfor did not throw his weight or power around within this. There were several checks and balances here.

But this backstory also helps to explain some of the quirky details about Alteans. Their planet existed within an active war zone, and it’s very likely that they’d had to fight off Galran occupation just as Blaytz’s people did. So the violent robot trainers and fear-based language learning systems start to make sense. Alteans weren’t just simpering people playing harps all day and eating grapes. They were actively prepared to defend their planet and their culture.

So when Allura says in season 1 that Alteans were “spreading diplomacy” across the universe, the only pieces of evidence we have of that is the OG paladins themselves, in which Alfor was a big part in creating that alliance—and then possibly the Alteans with the Balmerans, given their deep collective rituals with that planet while the Galra literally just came in and ripped the planet nearly to death. Allura tries to mimic what it means to accept and interact with a culture without changing it well in season 1, when she stumbles through trying to respect Arusian culture and its demands on its people. Also, there is a big fact that antis like to overlook:

The fact is, despite the untold numbers of civilizations we interact with across 76 episodes, no outside race remembers Alteans as evil colonizers. If they were really so big and bad, we would have heard it, like, “Man, yeah the Galrans are bad. Just as bad as those Alteans, back in the day.” Or something. But nope, nothing.

So I heavily question the history of Altea as an ancient colonizing race. If they were, then Altea wouldn't have just been a single planet with limited resources to fight wars in even its own galaxy. All of this supports the idea of Altean children being raised to fight--because they were preparing to defend themselves when/if diplomacy fails.... But the fact that the Balmerans see Alteans fondly and that literally every other race we run into is explicitly suspicious of Galrans and not at all of Alteans says something.

I think the only piece of evidence there might be for a genuinely colonizing ancient Altea is the use of terraforming technology, as mentioned in s4. Haggar discovers it and activates it to try and kill Voltron--and she nearly succeeds, because said tech destroys the entire crust of the planet to reform it. But you have to step back for a second and wonder--if ancient Alteans were so powerful, why was Alfor struggling so hard to even hold his own planet together in the midst of all these other cultures warring and larger threats? If they had this technology--and they did know about it because Allura recognized it right away as ancient technology--why the heck wouldn't they use it? Or were they using it, and it was to reform uninhabited planets to help sustain displaced peoples? Why is it, if Alteans were so terribly bad, we have no record across ANY of the many alien races being cautious of them? Even Galran Lieutenant Lahn snapped at Allura only because he was jealous of the general security she had back on, you guessed it, explicitly Altea. There's a lot of potential explanations for a positive use of terraforming technology, and the evidence against colonization and Altea committing omnicide against other races is incredibly more aligned with the other details in the canon.

And even Alfor’s creation of Voltron and the blowing up of Daibazaal—that’s something that antis like to position as evidence of his police-state ways to underhandedly control other cultures.

So let’s tackle those too while we’re at it.

Honestly, I know people like to hate on Alfor, and I do think his character picks up some misogynism just from the writers....But I don't think he was as much of a controller as people think he was. He was already in an alliance with four other leaders to try and stop bad things from happening in their galaxy. That meant they were expending incredible amounts of time and resources to accomplish that end—resources that were not renewable and may have been straining various planets. We know that he started building Voltron with Zarkon and everyone else's blessing because he called them "clean ships," but it's only after the rift creatures attack that suddenly Alfor's perception of Voltron moves from "clean energy" to "omg we need a more powerful weapon against this unknown enemy.”

So these are his intentions BEFORE he discovers rift creatures are a threat to the universe. While Zarkon states that these new ships are to be endlessly powerful for the Galra Empire, Alfor shames him by offering what his desire is for them:

After the rift creatures nearly destroy Daibazaal, intentions change.

So here, we see the game change in a BIG way. Voltron is not just about offering a more renewable way of sustaining peace-keeping efforts. Alfor is now adjusting and finishing these ships with the explicit knowledge that if they are not powerful enough, then Daibazaal and the Galran people will die. Alfor’s got a LOT of pressure on him now to deliver a mighty and powerful weapon to stop this new threat. So even his creation of Voltron as a superweapon involved using it to protect people from imminent death—not to police them.

And about Alfor blowing up Daibazaal—once again, it’s Alfor trying to clean up Honerva and Zarkon’s mess. Honerva had convinced Zarkon that the rift needed to be wider, and so Zarkon deceived the paladins into widening it.

So keep in mind here, at this point in time—the rift was destabilizing and eating an entire planet. The entire universe was now at stake. Alfor had to choose between a bad fix and an even worse option of allowing everyone to die, but he very clearly evacuated people before destroying Daibazaal, as part of his promise to keep Galrans safe. So that no one would have to die.

And as a matter of fact—about that terraforming technology. How sure are you that Alfor didn’t intend to use it to build Galrans a new home? It’s entirely within the realm of acceptable conjecture that he allowed for the existence of that technology because it could restore what had been lost.

And here’s where the story gets really screwy and feeds into some anti hate. Because when Zarkon wakes up as a zombie, he desires more quintessence as zombies do.

So he’s pissed that Alfor just cut off his gateway, and he manipulates his people:

And it’s here where we get the idea that Alfor was an evil controller. The idea came from Zarkon, who—we can look around pretty easily and see that he was not a man of honor, ultimately. Even if you chose to not believe the s3 finale flashbacks as being objective, there’s something wrong with Zarkon. (It’s clear that the show thought using Coran was a smart way to shell off massive amounts of info, because clearly if this were truly in Coran’s perspective, we would NOT have had intimate looks into Zarkon and Honerva’s bedroom as Zarkon is tending to her, like omg.) Numerous sources, histories, and cultures outside of Coran confirm that Zarkon hit a point of no return on the evil scale, and that he projected his own blame for Daibazaal’s destabilization onto Alfor in order to raise up his new regime in the name of Quintessence™.

So at the end of the day, even Alfor was a victim. But yet somehow, various antis choose to believe Zarkon’s victim-punishing narrative because said antis can’t or else refuse to connect one scene to another since it undermines their justifications for why they can hate on Allura. And that’s not so much an issue with the story itself as it is just poor critical analysis or malicious weaponization of content against other fans.

Now, at this point, we’ve talked about Allura and we’ve talked about Altean history. I have numerous other posts about Allura’s interactions with other races and Galrans and overcoming trauma to give the entire universe a second chance. So if there is anything in this show that suggests Alteans were in any way a superior race, then it’s probably within the show’s own worldbuilding. The show contradicts its own definitions of what quintessence even is by suggesting Alteans have “bluer/purer quintessence” in order to justify why Lotor would even be trying to sacrifice them for anything. The show-championed concept that Alteans have a bluer, purer life force above all other people, and that only Altean energy could interface with the fabric of space-time. Now, this is a problem in the later seasons’ world building itself. And you know who wrote that in? The production team. So once again, we do have racial issues in this show, in ways that shows like Star Wars desperately try avoid by showing racial diversity in who has Midi-chlorians.

That said, I’m not a perfectly woke storyteller either. I think every story and show is going to have something problematic™, but with VLD it’s very clear that its disrespectful handling of genocide politics and shatterglass conspiracy theories, on top of its weird master race angle created the perfect storm. These mishandled and quirky details have created a cognitive dissonance with the provided narrative, resulting in some people in the anti fandoms to champion what aligns very closely to actual neo-Nazi propaganda against Jews, who according to them are not victims but instead the true perpetrators of all bad things. For the sake of the antis, I’m pretty sure they’re not intentionally looking at VLD this way and are probably just looking for any easily graspable reason to hate on Allura for interfering with their ship or something.

But this kind of subliminal propaganda that undermines victims, and the effect it has had on fandom morality politics, is deeply concerning to me. I really wish that we’d had an opportunity to respectfully and critically discuss this with the production team of the show, because a Y7-FV show about “strength in unity” should NOT result in us needing to have a conversation about people walking away with neo-Nazi-ish propaganda sentiments against genocide survivors. Like. Clearly, VLD is fictional, but it’s feeding into a real-life beast that it does NOT need to feed. And it’s keeping alive ongoing conspiracy narratives against some of our most vulnerable populations on the planet.

So, we need better stories. We need a production team that, if they’re going to get paid to do something involving portrayals of genocide and politics, that they need to do their research on those topics. Nobody is going to be perfect with a creation, but VLD validated some very damaging things—and it ALL is something that could have been fixable. I think it would have been incredibly validating to hear the production talk about and accept that these were issues that cropped up unintentionally, and to hear them confirm that these issues are not the sorts of things that VLD was supposed to champion.

The greatest tragedy of all of this is the potential that this show had to really champion some great and validating messages, and the potential that we as a fandom had to come together and do something that fandom was meant to do—which was celebrate the things we love. Because that’s why we’re all here. That’s why this crazy tumblr of mine even exists. It was supposed to celebrate things.

For that reason, I’m going to end this here. I’ve written several responses now as to my thoughts on the inappropriate narrative lens of the show, its contradictory and damaging worldbuilding about the purest race, and how it champions demonizing or punishing genocide survivors again and again. Within all of that, I’ve talked at length about Allura’s character and behavior over 8 seasons and how she built even empathetic connections with militant Galrans like Commander Lahn. In fact even her own homesickness is how she emotionally connects with Lahn, because she understands that desire to call something one’s own. To have a home. A family.

I now really would like to get back to writing stories that I find meaningful to me using these characters and these worlds—and trying to find the hope in all of this darkness, haha. And maybe with any luck, I can hope to do VLD some justice, knowing that I am still on a learning journey as well.

But I appreciate your note, and I hope this very extensive response helps to settle your questions and concerns once and for all regarding VLD Allura. If you should have any remaining questions, please feel free to reach out via a private message to discuss. Thank you!

#Volron #VLD #Allura #VLD Critical #Alfor #Zarkon #Honerva #Lotor #I hope this helps explain my perspective #I think this might have to be my last refutation to the Allura as racist/racist supremacist conspiracy theory #at a certain point #people either watch the show holistically or they don't #you can't convince an anti #so this meta will probably not help an anti #but if you're sitting on the fence and felt drawn in by anti propaganda #then I hope that maybe this post provides an alternate perspective #and one that tries to be more holistically fair to all 8 seasons of the show #and to the intentions and general oversights that can occur during production #Ultimately it doesn't matter if someone likes or dislikes Allura as a fictional character #we need better entertainment that can handle these hard topics and handle them well #And we also need a fandom who's willing to look at all of the information and not weaponize it to specifically demonize and silence others #Maybe a family TV show shouldn't be appropriating conspiracy theories from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion #real-world fans are incredibly vulnerable to such conspiracy theories #and it creates a lot of real-world strife as a result

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spiftynifty · 5 years ago

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VLD Rewatch: Season 3

For a half-of-a-half season, season 3 packs quite a bit in and sets up a lot of plot. This shouldn't be surprising; Voltron was laid out as three 26-ep seasons, with each season bringing a new big bad and new theme. Season 3 is our beginning of the Lotor arc and there's a lot of setup and... a lot to unpack here.

For those who are still in "can't do it" mode about rewatching the series (which is fair), here's a quick summary to catch you up:

Shiro has been missing for (it's kind of implied) months. Without Shiro, Voltron and the group are fractured, especially with Keith's deep grief over losing Shiro preventing the recruitment a new Paladin.

Ultimately, Keith takes up the mantle of the Black Lion, Lance moves to Red, and Allura gets Blue. The group is clumsy and outmatched by Lotor and his generals who are definitely Up to Something. Keith tries to play leader and it's a bad look when he's making decisions via grief escapism. The team gets briefly trapped on a foggy wifi-less planet, discovers a bizarro alt-reality where Alteans rule the universe and Shiro is Swedish and doesn't mind Slav, and trails after Lotor and Co who have made off with the reality-breaking comet from Svavland.

Meanwhile Shiro escapes the Galra again, catches up with Voltron, shares a couple lowlit intimate moments with Keith while also awkwardly undermining his authority and jeopardizing the safety of the team, but no one suspects a thing.

Oh and there's a flashback episode about the OG paladins that I'll be honest I skipped since it turns out literally nothing that happened in the past is relevant to the present day and our only major revelations are that we (and Haggar) learn that she was once Honerva, Zarkon her husband was once kinda adorable, and turning evil swaps out your voice actor. Oh and Honerva had a cat who may or may not be as old as Haggar and potentially still kicking around.

Let's talk about season 3.

There's good and bad to be had with this season. Originally when I began my rewatch of the show I wanted to do it as though I were watching the season for the first time. Season 1 and 2 made that astonishingly easy; of all the seasons they seem the most confident about what the show is and what it's going for. Season 1 is for the mild setup and world building, season 2 is for the character building, relationship building, lion building, and problem resolving. Season 2 is arguably the show's strongest season overall so it's a tough act to follow. Season 3... makes an effort.

The good of this season is really good. Keith's grief over losing Shiro surprised and moved me the first time I saw the season and I was impressed with how long they held onto it given the show's habit of moving on pretty quick. Keith's grief holds the team back and endangers it; his early insistence on going after Lotor felt like a way to channel his anguish and maybe get a little revenge for his loss. Keith got one of his most significant character boosts in season 2, and following it through in this season sets up a complicated Keith that we will see for seasons to come.

The other good is Lotor. Lotor is handsome and charismatic and devastatingly cunning and is a polar opposite to his Saturday-morning-cartoon-villain dad. Zarkon was threatening, but Lotor is INTERESTING and his "wait and see" approach makes us the audience want to wait and see what he's up to. His band of generals are intriguing and colorful and I love the variation of their designs and personalities.

And of course, we can't talk about the good stuff in season 3 without discussing Shiro and Keith's relationship. Season 2 gave us some really fantastic growth and moments and entire episodes between them, but Season 3 brought a new level of intimacy that definitely bumped it up a notch. From the slow-moving reunion and closeups of only Shiro and Keith's faces, to their quiet moments alone in dimly lit rooms. This season gave us "as many times as it takes", which remains one of the most beautiful little exchanges between the pair in the whole series. The jury is still out on whether or not Sheith was a hopeful intention by the creatives on this show or just an incredibly happy accident, but looking at some of the decisions made in 3x05 and 3x06 especially lean more to the former. These scenes are more bittersweet now knowing how it all ends up.

There is a lot of setup for future things in general, and this is where it becomes difficult to separate what is in s3 with what will be by the end of s6 (and beyond) because some things we just can't unknow. It was really interesting to see how things that made me very hyped after this season now take on a bit of a disappointing and even bitter flavor because some roads really don't go anywhere. Lotor's mysterious plans for instance, only seem to get more mysterious, as do his allegiances. He spends most of this season clearly toying with the Paladins, clearly prepared to destroy them or let them destroy themselves, but later he sides with them and the Paladins seem pretty quick to forgive this and assume he's a good guy now. Lotor's "side" is never clearly established since his goals never are. The Lotor in s3 is interesting by virtue of the assumption that we will eventually learn all his secrets. But we never do, and that definitely for me taints him as a character.

Speaking of some mixed character motivations, s4 reveals that Narti was either a spy for Haggar the whole time or that Kova was, or both, and yet in season 3 Haggar sends a goon off to spy on Lotor. Even in Haggar's private moments she seems unsure of what Lotor is up to so this later reveal that she was aware the whole time is an odd one and still left very vague.

Similarly, major problems arise with Shiro in s3 but only via the hindsight of s4-6. Everything about the way Shiro is brought back into the fold in season 3 is highly suspicious. From a narrative standpoint I want to say it begins with Sven as foreshadowing, an alternate-reality Shiro who looks JUST LIKE SHIRO but is NOT SHIRO. Unfortunately I think this was less of an audience wink and more of an excuse to nod to the original Sven. But Shiro's Journey opens with scientists doing tests on him, Shiro's pupils dilating to the sound of camera lens adjustments, and Shiro literally seeing a dead-eyed copy of himself on a slab. The words "Operation Kuron" are repeated at least three times as the Galra let him escape. When Shiro meets the two aliens on the ice planet and they accuse him of being a traitor, Shiro protests, "I'm not a--" and never finishes. He does pilot logs into a Galra Cruiser as he tails Voltron. And that's just in one episode.

The next episode has him repeatedly undermining Keith's newfound leadership position (a position Shiro repeatedly encouraged Keith into in s1/2 to Keith's great reluctance), to the point of talking over him and shouting at him. He dismisses the safety of the team for the sake of the mission; something that goes expressly against the team Voltron way of doing things (Kolivan details this in s4) and is completely against Shiro's nature. It felt manipulative to me the first time and it still feels off when at the end of this he privately tells Keith "I'm sorry I had to step in back there", referring to Keith's failure (which was not a failure) and then in the next breath "you're good at this." This was the topic of many a heated debate when the episode came out but from my end there is just no way to see that the man presented here is Shiro and not an insidious clone.

There's a term for this that I forget where the storyteller essentially gaslights the audience for no real reason. Ultimately we will come to know that this is Shiro. A little more short-tempered but ultimately a good boy and not the potentially fully aware evil clone that season 3 hints at. It's bad writing; and the reason that it's bad writing is that the audience is privy to very little more than the characters are when it comes to Kuron and yet the characters are not in the slightest bit suspicious about the behaviour that we the audience sees as suspect. We end up gaslighting ourselves because of bad writing, only to learn that we were right the whole time. And genuinely, speaking as someone who loves all Shiros dearly, Kuron is a whole walking writing disaster. But more on that as we get further into the season.

I don't love the episode, but the Comet episode is a surprisingly adult-oriented one and presents an interesting flip to things and an intriguing hypothesis that I wish had been explored better, or longer, or something. As I've said 100x before, Galra aren't an inherently evil race; they're the result of a 10,000 yr universe takeover. This episode suggests that Alteans are no better, and the broader implications of this are massive and should have offered a much bigger fundamental shift in the characters and the way they viewed this war. In particular Allura, who previously immediately turned against Keith the moment his heritage was revealed, despite having become good friends with him. Her learning that her own people aren't immune to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a moment that is not given any real weight or consequence . This is a letdown especially since this potentially weightier-themed episode was self-aware enough of that weight to be the only episode outside of the Voldemort season to show imagery maybe a little too old for its younger audience (the repeated shot of the mummified Altean scientist).

From a production standpoint I noticed a lot of little things. There were a number of hookup issues; some hilariously drawn bg characters, some compositing that worked and some that decidedly didn't. Some of the editing was a little rough in places and some of the timing of things felt very off. There were some jokes that ran long and didn't land and threw the pacing off or stole time from other things. The editing on the Comet episode was particularly off and the characters were visually difficult to track at times. Also, there is definitely a different/longer version of the "As many times as it takes" scene even if it only exists in script or maybe board form. All of the Shiros in that scene were drawn by Ryu, who was often tapped for revisions (particularly for Shiro and Lotor). But the Keith in that scene is not a Ryu Keith; and Keith's "Well--" in "If you're feeling up to it" sounds like two lines spliced together. Ryu's fingerprints are all over 3x06 in interesting places; I definitely spotted his artwork in at least one shot of the Galra post leader and I think a Zethrid. He drew a few of the short haired Shiros as well. I think this episode underwent a number of changes; I remember too that Lance exclaiming "you're looking better" was originally Keith's line. At the same time we get little nice superfluous animations like the foreground gecko. Just a lot of inconsistencies.

Overall it's still an alright season but knowing what's coming means I just don't love this season the way I used to. The little moments that rock still rock but a lot of plot pawns were pushed forward that were ultimately just discarded. I can't wait to see if finishing the next 3 seasons will retroactively bump this season back up to where it once was in my heart.

#voltron #vld #vld rewatch

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dragonofyang · 6 years ago

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From the Sock Puppet’s Mouth

Well folks, good news and bad news.

Good news: the ABTV interview on March 4th confirmed for us that WEP is the reason for the last-minute changes and that certain things were fought tooth and nail for until they came down and axed it.

Bad news: WEP is still using the EPs as their meat shields to hide behind, and despite not being really able to refuse, Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery still said some fucked up shit in this interview and the one before. And we probably should gird our loins for the next interview with Let’s Voltron!

But Yang, why in the fuck are we not going after the EPs, then?

The answer to that and why this is happening is three little letters, my friends.

NDA.

Non-disclosure agreements.

AKA the bane of your existence. And ours. And almost certainly JDS, LM, voice actors, animators, and literally anybody who has to comply with the season 8 we got back in December and the resulting fallout.

These are fairly standard in lots of situations where you’ll be working with confidential material, stuff like stories, military paperwork, movie production, that sort of thing. They generally tell you that you can’t spill the beans until a certain date when the contract expires, or when the information becomes public knowledge and the need for secrecy is lifted. Pretty standard in the entertainment business, keeps people from getting spoiled to trade secrets or important plotlines and ensures that you can trust your employees with whatever you need done for the project in question.

One other thing that these pesky little pieces of paper do is give your employer (say, the owner of a franchise or a superior officer), the ability to order you what to say just as easily as what not to. Don’t believe me? Look up interviews with the people who were in The Last Airbender (yeah… THAT movie). During production and when it was new, they all said how excited they were to work on the movie and be a part of it, but once those magical dates came by to free them of their legal obligations, they spilled more tea than the American revolutionaries did back in Boston. As soon as they wouldn’t get sued, they changed their tune about working on TLA.

Sometimes you just don’t like a project, sometimes your boss is a dick, whatever, but the fact is, if you sign one of those little things titled “Non-Disclosure Agreement”, you are bound by law to say whatever your boss tells you to. It’s very much a “they say ‘jump’, you say ‘how high’” situation. The only time this sort of shit doesn’t apply is if it implicates you in a crime. So like, your boss can’t embezzle money and then tell you to say you did it, or that you helped, or whatever. If it means you’ll get pressed charges, then you’re free to stand up and say “fuck this noise” and leave.

But JDS and LM aren’t being forced to admit to a crime, as heinous as some of what they’ve said in the past two ABTV interviews was. I’ll admit, I saw red the first time I heard the interviews on February 25 and March 4, but ya know fuckin’ what? That was the goal. Those interviews were meant to be a targeted blow against those of us in the VLD fandom who want the real s8 and for the characters to get their stories told correctly, rather than the slipshod stoic nonsense that ultimately created a story with zero meaning.

WEP/World Events Productions/Bob Koplar holds the Voltron intellectual property. JDS and LM are their puppets right now because unless they’re ordered to admit to a crime or otherwise break the law, they could be ruined legally, financially, and closed off from their trade. Would it be nice if they stuck to the scruples they displayed back when the show first started? Fuck yeah. I’d love it if they said, “screw it, here’s the real s8 with the heroine’s journey and the parallel storylines and the ending you deserved to see and get catharsis with.”

Fact is, they can’t, but we, who have never signed an NDA with WEP, DreamWorks, or Netflix or whoever the fuck else is involved, can.

They’re lying, yes, and they said despicable things that would make anybody’s blood boil, but the fact is they’re just the unfortunate human shields that will let WEP get away scot-free and it sets a very dangerous precedent about what happens when a story is being told and someone up top doesn’t like what they see. The narrative LM and JDS are being told to spin is that when the writers left, they went ham and ruined the story and that the real season 8 would be worse than the concoction we got on December 14. LM and JDS have said awful shit as WEP tries to demoralize fans and chase them off from going after the original season 8 and deflecting blame off where it should be aimed. But why would they have to write a story that’s animated and would have been completed before the writers left? LM said it herself that animation is extremely ahead of schedule compared to releases, and if you’re a fan of HTTYD like myself, you’ll know that the third movie’s release date had to be pushed back multiple times to account for the animation schedule because they failed to accurately project when it would be complete, and so pushed it back as opposed to releasing a shoddy product.

It’s simple enough to realize that the story being spun is just logically fallible and factually untrue, but because so much of what’s been said has been attacking the fandom, it’s easy to believe it. I almost wanted to believe that, too. It’s easy when there’s already a face and a name to blame. It’s harder to dig through stinging nettles, even if you know there’s a pot of gold under it all. Luckily I brought work gloves and have friends who know how to wield gardening shears.

We knew before that there was last minute edits to season 8, and @leakinghate did an excellent breakdown of that here in case you want to settle in for a nice read to see what should have been. But the interview on March 4th confirmed multiple times that the problem with the changes and story didn’t come from the EPs or even Dreamworks. The pushback came from the IP owners. JDS says so right toward the beginning, about 12 minutes in when he’s talking about Adam and Shiro’s romance. JDS and LM both discuss how it was the IP owners who gave the order to change an already-storyboarded and approved plotline for Shiro, which directly negates their tweet on March 1 claiming that the store has no creative control and the letter Bob Koplar wrote to a few fans, also written March 1, which claimed the same thing and seemed intent on absolving him as a responsible party for s8. Sure, the person tweeting and the person handling orders might not have to approve things, but that account and the store are both owned by WEP, which is easily proven if you dial WEP’s number. But the IP holders got discussed multiple times throughout the entire episode, more towards the first half than the second, which is when what they’re saying gets really screwy in terms of logic and what they’ve said before and general bullfuckery. Until JDS and LM are thanking the hosts for the unprecedented two hour interview and JDS says, “I don’t agree with myself” at 43:03, they were thanking the fans and apologizing for what happened and explaining that it wasn’t them or Dreamworks, but rather the IP holders who were pushing back.

Don’t believe me?

Click to 12:10 of the March 4 interview. JDS talks about Adam and Shiro’s relationship and how it was originally meant to be portrayed, and at the 12:50 mark he says that they got pushback about their relationship, not from Dreamworks, but from “other controlling parties with Voltron.”

Click to 18:52, where JDS mentions how they didn’t have the position as being creators of the IP. He also points out that, “We were, for all intents and purposes, like, started as a show for boys 6 to 11 to sell as much toys as possible.”

Does that phrase bother you as much as it bothers me?

Because it should.

Ever since VLD ended and the fans started pushing back against what got published as season 8, the EPs have been silent, at least for the first two-ish months. They didn’t say a word anywhere publicly about the show or if they liked it, because their NDAs probably had an “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” clause. Generally, that’s the case because part of your job is to build good PR and hype up your project. Don’t believe me? Look at how they were after literally every other season, they came out immediately saying how much they loved it and how much they hoped the fans would too, and when there was pushback about Lotor’s abuse and the colony plot they were like, “please trust us, we want to do his story justice” even when it probably would have served them better to remain silent.

Not with S8.

Until these interviews, nobody talked. And when they finally did start talking?

They all kept saying the same things.

“This is a show for boys and their dads” and “this is a show meant to sell toys to little boys.”

At no point before this did anybody on the production team say anything even remotely related.

You can look for yourself, but I guarantee you won’t find anything. “Boy toy show” has been the go-to phrase for everybody ever since the silence around season 8 broke, and it’s not their words.

It is, without a doubt, from the IP holder.

We were promised that Lotor’s arc would continue and that “there’s a lot that is at play in his brain and his mind,” in the GeekDad article about him. Narratively, Lotor and Allura were meant to foil Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar. We should’ve gotten an alchemist-versus-alchemist showdown and a cool Lotor and Lance arc. Many things that were built up in seasons 1 through 6 were dropped, and if you refer back to Hate’s meta “Seeking Truth in Darkness”, you’ll find her analysis on what was cut, why, and the plot she pieced together based on the inconsistencies in the details of the season 8 that got released. In the latest interview, JDS said, “We were just trying to break the trope, our own trope. You know what I mean? Like Voltron was its own trope and the sort of little nook that we inhabited was, like, sort of boys toys was its own weird tropey situation.”

And despite all this talk of family and love and complexity and breaking barriers, we received two things from December 14 and on: VLD season 8, and silence.

Complete and utter silence.

The VAs were trotted out to face the wrath of the fans at SAC Anime 2019 and there was nary a word to be heard from the EPs, Dreamworks, WEP, Netflix… Nobody had anything to say about the final season of Voltron. The VAs even commented that there were things they were and weren’t allowed to say. And if they wanted to say anything, their NDAs and general social etiquette prevented them from saying whatever was actually on their mind, because I guarantee you nobody happy about the season would have kept silent. Even when all the season 7 backlash happened, JDS and LM asked us as a fandom to please wait and see, because there would be narrative payoff.

Which is why the latest two interviews with ABTV are all the more rightfully infuriating.

In the February 25 interview, LM specifically says that the initial pitch was to kill everybody, everybody would die and that would be the end of it, and that they had to back off from that. After the broken promises of season 8, that’s pretty damn believable to a fandom who’s rightfully hurting and grieving what could have finished a great show. But then with this March 4 interview, she says that she wanted to go Sailor Moon with it and have Allura come back as a baby after sacrificing herself. Kind of hard for those two stories to mesh when the person LM says would raise Allura would also have been one of the ones to die in the initial pitch.

So what exactly is the truth there?

Frankly, I think neither of those ideas is the truth. At least completely.

Why? A) It sounds like a super early pitch idea and B) because their general behavior disagrees with every interview leading up to season 8. Because if LM and JDS were proud of this product that got released, they would have said so and behaved as normal, if maybe a little more reserved due to fandom backlash. Because they wouldn’t be silent and only coming out with interviews after two months and several of #TeamPurpleLion metas that poke massive holes in what exists of season 8, CallVoltron has been sending letters, and #FREEVLDS8 garnered over 30,000 signatures. WEP has been trying to do damage control ever since we as a fandom started putting two and two together about where these disastrous last-minute changes came from, and only when the petition got updated to include WEP as a point of focus did WEP start trying to discredit the fans and meta writers who were coming too close to the truth. Here is a complete list of everything that’s happened since December 14, to give you an idea of just how wild of a ride this has been.

One main consistent thing throughout everything that’s happened since season 8 dropped is that everybody from the EPs up is lying, whether by omission or outright or through someone else, people have been lying like mad. WEP doesn’t want you to know that they own the IP and have strong input, despite confirming it by liking a tweet on February 13 and how you can be directed to their store if you call WEP’s phone number. WEP doesn’t want you to know that they gave the original season 8 the axe. WEP got scared that we got close and so they trotted out their EPs after two months of silence to try and break those of us hunting for the truth. These two interviews, which, mind you, came after what was scheduled to be the last one.

The official story continues to fall apart with every word of these last two interviews, too. JDS says that they were crafting the epilogue for season 8 during the aftermath of season 7, but according to him they completed season 8 back in June.

Again: which is the truth?

I stand with @leakinghate and the rest of #TeamPurpleLion and think that the original season 8 was completed back in June, but that the backlash from s7 and the general disapproval of a story of empowerment caused the truly-eleventh-hour edits to s8. The EPs are being forced to lie to you due to their contracts, WEP wants to keep hiding and lying and calling their customers liars and mocking them. But the funny thing is that the more intricate the lie, the harder it is to keep it straight versus the truth, as evidenced by how JDS and LM seem to be confusing what was in s8 versus what was pitched versus what they were told to say.

So what’s it all mean, then?

It means you should be watching and writing letters and calling WEP and calling them out publicly whenever WEP and Bob Koplar lie to the consumers and customers that express dissatisfaction with their service and their products.

WEP forgets that there is more to fandom than diehard dads and young boys.

The more they ignore the majority of their consumers, the more money they lose, the more faith they lose, and the less people will want to follow their future projects (like if they decide to do an MFE spinoff). Let’s Voltron is coming up with a new episode with JDS and LM, and they’re hoping to get it up soon. I’d just like to remind y’all that it’s scripted and pre-recorded, it’s not live, and it benefits from being the official Voltron podcast and has to keep good relations with WEP in order to retain that status. So don’t stop calling, write letters, hell just leave a Facebook or Twitter review of the business to express your satisfaction or lack thereof with how WEP treats customers and its show and everything. After all, the road to s8 is paved with honesty.

@felixazrael @leakinghate @crystal-rebellion @voltronisruiningmylife

#dragon's ramblings #vld #voltron: legendary defender #TeamPurpleLion #FREEVLDS8 #free vld s8 #vld meta #strafe

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xoxofandomlives · 6 years ago

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What was Voltron s8???

Alright here we are, finished with Voltron forever, thank god. I should never picked up on this series. Please, please for the love of God, if you have not watched this show, DO NOT WATCH IT. It is such an dissatisfying ending and underwhelming build up with SO much lost potential. Here’s my review and spoilers under the cut.

1. ALLURA DIED. What was the point?! To show how high the stakes were in this war?! Allura literally has gone through way too much for the show to kill her off. She lost her family, her planet, her people, her father’s AI, her leadership, her crown, her agency, got her heartbroken, and now gets ripped apart from her new found family? What kind of writing is this??? It’s not fulfillment??? Sure I get there was foreshadowing in s5 especially with the White Lion reference, but you continuously tortured Allura and beating her up over the course of eight seasons, how does this entitle her losing her LIFE? This was not satisfying whatsoever and she didn’t even get to say goodbye to Coran?????? Funny how this same reasoning was applied to Adam, a character we knew nothing about, but oh! he’s related to Shiro and he’s gay??

2. Honerva. The resolution of her arc especially had me HEATED. How does one look into her past coMPLETELY change her ways??? I thought there would be some complex hand-to-hand combat scene or Allura duking it out with her, but no. One simple conversation and the power of friendship!!! I was already kind of annoyed that her big reason for all this was to reunite with her husband and son which literally sounds like a Disney villain and not a complex written one. When you write her as a big bad, her intention from the beginning should have at least evolved into her wanting a happy ending with her husband, but this literally only became clear in the last season. That’s poor writing and characterization.

3. Lotor???? What was the point of episode 2 showing all these signs that Lotor was a victim of abuse and validating his justified anger (not actions) toward everything IF YOU WEREN’T GOING TO REDEEM HIM. Even worse is you show his melting corpse. What even. I have been upset since s6 at the VLD team for writing Lotor’s arc like that and now I’m fuming. Humanizing Lotor and doing nothing to further a redemption arc????

4. Some of these fight scenes were so underwhelming and when Voltron gets beat down, here comes Keith and his power of friendship speech!!! What kills is that Shiro barely even serves any purpose and doesn’t give these speeches? When Voltron and the Atlas merged (which also was a weird and offputting decision b/c wow nothing like more robots when we HAVE SO MANY), Keith gives the whole we are stronger blahblah but the fact was Shiro was standing like right there in the same panel and he doesn’t say anything??? Like this is SHIRO’S SHIT.

5. The characterization was so off putting and almost everyone was a shell of what they once were. Hugest offender was Lance obviously, how was he reduced to just being worried about Allura all the time and not being able to be proactive??? What sorta bugs me is that it was only Keith comforting Lance the whole time, and not even Allura could provide him ANY bit of comfort. Lance resorted almost 90% of his dialogue about Allura and his insecurities about being with her were never addressed directly to her face. For a VLD romance, you sure loved to make Klance moments look so beautiful while making your main romance look really sad and tired everytime they’re together.

Not to take away value from the Klance sunset scene (because that scene was so beautiful), but if you had Allura say similar words to Lance, you could have written SUCH a better and more believable romance between them. This all felt so one-sided to me. I was all for some cute Allurance. Instead, you leave Lance at this epilogue where he isn’t who he was and it’s because of Allura. You give Lance the girl he loves and SHE DIES? What kind of slowburn romance were you aiming for VLD? They were done sO DIRTY. I fondly shipped Allurance from s3-s5, but they were like destroyed this season. Nothing about this season indicated this was a slowburn romance from the beginning. THIS WASN’T EVEN ENDGAME. And when Allura is saying goodbye to each Paladin, she says something thoughtful about who they are, but just Lance is like i love you and gives him marks to remind him FOREVER of his loss. say what now?

6. Too many characters??? VLD decided to make s8 the season where everyone has to be mentioned once or twice, but it really showed that they didn’t know how to handle their characters and couldn’t focus on developing the bonds of the Paladins even more. What felt super ironic to me was that the team reallyyyy only looked a family to me when Allura made her decision to sacrifice herself and after she died. Like we haven’t seen all of them interact like this in so long, maybe like s2?

7. Don’t even get me started with that half ass wedding. Shiro deserved so much better and he was not the type of person to “leave the battle behind.” That wedding was a cheap attempt at damage control and it GREATLY backfired.

Well these are my main criticisms; there were so many more, but these were the main ones. I only will think of Voltron fondly from s1-s6 and s7 and 8 can rot in hell. Those were AWFUL seasons and honestly destroyed my perception of this show, but I will do my best to fondly see the series for what it should have been.

#voltron: legendary defender #voltron #allura #lotor #klance #honerva

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sol1056 · 6 years ago

Note

Did LM and JDS honestly think no one would ask why Shiro isn't a paladin anymore? Did they honestly think S3-6 proved Keith was a better leader than Shiro? Did they honestly think S3-6 proved Shiro shouldn't be a paladin? Did they honestly think people would drop the show if Shiro was still a main character by the series end? Or were they blinded by their pettiness.

Well, in order:

1 yep, seems like it2 you mean for when he was actually around? guess so3 apparently being imprisoned/enslaved means you can’t be a hero4 dunno, but seems like they would in the audience’s shoes

Thing is, remember they were making these decisions before they could see the fallout. Viewer reactions have been pretty strong at times, though nothing comes anywhere near the pre-S7 hype.

Easiest way to get context is a timeline, so here’s what I’ve pieced together based on episode credits and who’s joined or left the team, and when.

[Also: yes, animation work is continuing on S8, it seems. See note at end.]

jan 2017 >>> S2 releasedRie Koga joins teamChris Palmer storyboards S7E3

feb 2017Chris Palmer leaves, freelances until joining HTTYD 3Michael Chang joins staff as directorSteven Ahn storyboards S7E2

note: it’s curious that the last credit for both Palmer and Ahn were storyboards, which neither had done previously for VLD. it’s also curious that neither left for a different position (either at DW or elsewhere), though Palmer was rehired at DW after a six-month gap of being unemployed.

also, Rie Koga and Chris Palmer share directorial credit on S6E7, the only episode to have more than one director listed.

mar 2017Steven Ahn leaves, starts own company

june 2017earliest date for at least one Garrison cadet character design (based on Killmonger reference)

note: first half of S7 storyboards were done in jan-mar (or earlier), but character designs weren’t completed until june. that means at the very least that storyboards for the second half of S7 didn’t start until last summer.

With Koga and Chang joining Lee on the directorial team, that’s three directors. An episode takes roughly 4-6 weeks (with 4 being utterly insane but doable, and 6 necessary for complex episodes like fight scenes or crowd scenes), plus another week for post-production (foley, ADR, dubbing, subtitles, etc). A production season is 26 episodes, so each director finishes what they’re doing and picks up the next in the list, which means order isn’t as important.

In S7, Lee did 5 episodes, while Koga and Chang did four each. That’s 5-6 months for the three of them + their animation teams to finish all 13 episodes.

aug 2017>>> S3 released

oct 2017>>> S4 released

If some of S7 began (with completed storyboards) back around February-March, and the remainder done in June, all 26 episodes could’ve been done by December.

jan 2018 *** new VP of Production joins DW

At this point, S4 had been released and the numbers weren’t good; viewer interest was falling off a cliff and the toys weren’t selling. With Keith basically absent most of S4, the EPs may’ve gambled on audience frustration as proof fans didn’t want Shiro in the central position. In other words, that S4 justified their original request to remove Shiro from the picture. Bring Keith back, put him in Black, match the original, and that should appease the fans.

According to the articles I could find about the new VP (an external hire), this one guy has final say on all television shows in production. He’s also of an age that he probably saw the original as a teenager, so he probably brought some nostalgia to his decision, as well.

At this point — the start of this year — it’d be reasonable to expect S7 and S8 to be complete and ready for broadcast (barring any last-minute changes to S5 or S6). But look at the timeline of departures:

mar 2018 >>> S5 releasedstoryboarding team offboarded

note: if S7/S8 storyboards were complete in spring of the previous year, there’s no reason to keep storyboarders around. but at least some were released from their contracts in March, way after production should’ve been done.

apr 2018Hedrick departs for F&F project

jun 2018>>> S6 releasedHamilton promoted to story editor

note: four episodes have dual story editors: S7E4, and S7E7-E10. Hamilton had solo credit only for S7E11-S7E13. If we take the dual-credit episodes to indicate Hamilton revised, and the solo-credit to be brand-new, that means 7 episodes got reworked to some notable degree.

With three directors, and allowing only 3 weeks (assuming some amount of reuse of first version), the redux S7 episodes could’ve been completed in roughly 3 months. That would put S7 in the can around June, when Hamilton was officially promoted.

july 2018Rie Koga leaves team for Disney

note: the remaining two directors are still on the team, as is one staff writer and the story editor. Either the EPs have joined in the directing effort, all seasons are done, or the remaining work can be completed by two directors.

As another anon said:

So I am thinking back to the broken connection interview, and how LM asked JDS if they should answer. Almost in a we-realized-to-late-the-story-we-wanted-was-not-the-story-the-fans-wanted-and-now-we-are-stuck sorta way. If I was them, I would have come up with a different headcanon, or choose not to answer, or at least have the series finale rewritten or something.

If my guesses are anywhere right on the timeline, then sure, it’s possible. If they jumped on Keith’s absence as the reason S4 did so badly (and S5 did even worse), there’s probably been a lot of scrambling behind the scenes in the past few months.

S6′s release could not have been a happy day, with the numbers spiking dramatically at Shiro’s return. That could be why they’ve spent so much time doing their best to push the narrative that Shiro is only a burden and should be gone from the story – because that’s where they’re headed, and if they can head fans off at the pass, perhaps the backlash wouldn’t be as bad.

aug 2018>>> S7 released

….and cue backlash.

oh, and thanks to @bbtree for the tip: looks like production continues in some manner. That might be why we hadn’t gotten the exact release date for S8 yet, because work’s still being done.

#vld #voltron #analysis #sol thinks about stuff #television production

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leakinghate · 6 years ago

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Haggar pulls the Strings

The launch of VLD season 7 will soon be upon us - episode one will screen at SDCC in less than a week - and with it the commencement of the Final Arc of Voltron.

The arcs are defined by the primary antagonist of each, Arc One, which covered season 1 and 2 belonged to Zarkon. He was defeated during the final battle of season 2, and while he managed to survive thanks to Haggar’s magic he was never again the same formidable antagonistic force he’d been in earlier seasons.

Arc Two was Lotor’s. From the moment he appears in season 3 he’s been the main force moving the plot forward, and here it’s important to remember that an ‘antagonist’ is defined by their position in the story in conflict with the ‘protagonists’, not by their morality. Season 6′s finale was his antagonistic peak; he’s not gone yet, but when he re-appears in the plot he won’t be filling the same prime-antagonist narrative role.

Now, as we prepare to start season 7 and Arc Three, it’s time to brace ourselves for Haggar.

Despite her being present from the very first episode we’re still missing a major piece of the puzzle when it comes to Haggar: her motivation. We don’t know what she wants. Zarkon wanted ultimate power and control: he was a parasite feeding off the life force of the universe. Lotor wanted access to the quintessence field, to negate the need to steal the life of the living and to tap the wellspring of that power itself. Haggar? Undoubtedly this will come down to quintessence as well, but what exactly she wants it for is still unknown. Unlike her husband, Haggar hasn’t been shown to need to consume quintessence personally to preserve her life. Unlike her son, Haggar has no compassion and would have no wish to preserve the lives of others.

So what does drive Haggar? To some extent she shares Zarkon’s need for power and control, but that’s secondary to her lust for knowledge. She pursues it to the detriment of all else. As Honerva she was willing to sacrifice her people, her planet, and even her own life to discover the secrets of quintessence. We don’t know what will drive her going forward, but we know what has driven her in the past. And we know a few of her other, smaller motivations. Now that she remembers that Lotor is her son she wants control of him. Whether on not Lotor’s time in the rift corrupts him as it did his parents, Haggar has already been shown to possess both a talent for mind control and a breathtaking lack of regard for bodily autonomy. She'll be looking to re-acquire her position as High Priestess, and to end the only real extant threat to her power: Allura.

As early as the season 2 finale we’ve known that Allura is the biggest threat to Haggar. It was pretty clear even then that Haggar wouldn’t be going down without us getting a reprisal of the showdown between her and Allura in ‘Blackout’. With both of them now empowered by their experiences in Oriande and Haggar having regained her memories as Honerva it looks like the inevitable Alchemist vs. Alchemist fight should be part of the series finale.

Being placed as our third and most formidable opponent, it should also turn out that Haggar has had a hand in the events of both prior Arcs. Her connection with Zarkon is by now obvious and explicit, it was her power that enabled him to be everything that he was, her scientists that built the power armor that ultimately injured him beyond recovery.

Haggar summoned Lotor in the very last minutes of season 2, and so was ultimately responsible for him entering the story. But despite this, and her having a blood connection to Lotor, so far his actions and ultimate fate in season 6 have seemed to occur completely independent from her.

Except.

Before Haggar triggered Shiro to kidnap Lotor when he did, the paladins were about to secure him - possibly in the very same cell they initially kept him in. As evidenced by his rushing back to the Castle as soon as he was able to do so, Lotor would not have left there of his own free will when he had yet to be given an opportunity to explain. And if both parties had managed to have a conversation without being at the helm of giant war machines, things would probably have turned out differently.

Before season six, if you’d had a discussion in fan spaces about ‘the colony’ or ‘Lotor’s colony’ you would have been referring to the mining colony that Lotor told Allura about while in Oriande, in s5e6, ‘White Lion.’ We now have two colonies that can fit that label, and I think it’s on purpose that we haven’t been given a proper name for either of them. Additionally, seasons 5 and 6 were originally one season. There are only three episode between Lotor mentioning the mining colony and the episode where we find out about the Altean one, titled, fittingly enough, ‘The Colony’. We are supposed to conflate the two in our minds because the situations will turn out to be similar.

What was the story with the mining colony again? Lotor was placed in charge of a colony where he opted to work with the inhabitants and extract quintessence sustainably. When Zarkon found out he destroyed both the planet and the people and sent Lotor into exile. When Lotor relates this story he emphasizes how he was unable to protect those people from Zarkon’s wrath; he feels responsible for their deaths and views it as a personal failure. He outright rejects Allura’s assurances that he did everything he could to save them, the outcome is what matters to him when assigning blame.

We know the events at the mining colony took place before Lotor set up the Altean colony because Lotor states that it was this event that prompted him to begin research into his Altean heritage. It would make sense that only once he began looking into this did he discover that there were some surviving Altean refugees. Romelle also relates in her narrative that it was Lotor’s extensive knowledge of Altean culture that allowed him to track down those survivors in the first place.

So what is happening in the Altean colony? It’s Lotor’s attempt to avoid a repeat of the mining colony disaster. Just switch the parent in question.

We’ve been show on screen just how toxic Lotor’s relationship with Zarkon was, yet, it’s significant that Lotor still acknowledges Zarkon as his father. S6e5 confirmed that Lotor is well aware that Honerva became Haggar, but he refuses to recognize her as his mother. His hatred of ‘The Witch’ rivals no other. What could she have done, beyond all that Zarkon and she have already done, to cause that? We’ve seen throughout VLD that Lotor is quick to shrug off sleights against himself (with one very notable exception), so it doesn’t seem that anything Haggar had done to him directly would be the cause. But Lotor values Altean life and culture above all else, he tells Allura he’s given everything he has to preserve it. If Haggar had caused harm, or threatened to cause harm, to his colony it could explain his hatred of her.

There have been exactly two types of beings that have been shown to posses the ability to use magic: Alteans, and Haggar’s Druids.

The Druids have faded into the background since the end of season 2, only spotted briefly during Throk’s interrogation and Haggar’s ritual to turn Naxcela into a bomb. We still don’t know much about them, besides the fact that they are magic users, can refine quintessence, and that they’re sucked into a luxite blade when struck with one. They are also uniquely associated with Haggar. This late in the game, at the end of Act 2 of 3, it would be strange to introduce a heretofore unknown second species capable of handling magic. Thus, they are most likely at least part Altean.

Now Romelle’s story allows room for Haggar to have gotten her hands on a portion of the surviving Alteans: she only says that Lotor managed to track some of them down after all. It’s entirely plausible that Lotor hid the colony so well to protect it from Haggar instead of Zarkon. But there’s another, more disturbing option. An idea that plays well into the implication that whatever morally dubious thing Lotor had been doing at the colony, he’d viewed it as the best of many bad options and ultimately necessary.

Notably, when Haggar is shown seeing Romelle and hearing her story through Shiro’s eyes she never looks the least bit surprised. For being one of only four living Alteans you would expect her to have some reaction to suddenly being presented with a fifth person, much less learning there is an entire colony with thousands - potentially millions more. A good explanation for this is that she already knew. So if she knew, why hasn’t she exploited this resource?

The only answer for that, of course, is that she's been doing it all along.

Haggar has some ability to sense Altean energy sources, but only when they’re active. In the very first episode of VLD she senses Allura’s awakening, but was unaware that Allura still lived while she was in stasis. Now, Allura is obscenely powerful - or at least, has obscene power potential - but the vast majority of Alteans would not be so. But if you get a large enough number of weaker talents together, it’s conceivable that the accumulation of that power could catch Haggar’s attention.

The colony was started a good while, ‘generations’, in fact, before Lotor began sending people to the second colony. Something changed, and it might very well be that that power threshold was finally crossed.

We’ve already seen that there were sections of the empire’s operations separate from the main force and away from the Emperor’s knowledge. If there weren’t, once Lotor became Emperor he would have known about project Kuron. And we already know what Lotor does with Haggar’s spies, be they willing or not, thanks to Narti.

With Zarkon hell bent on the eradication of the Altean race, and with the experience of the mining colony behind him, Lotor would be well aware what would befall the Alteans should his father become aware of them. Haggar would have known this too. And so, I propose, they made a deal.

At this time, presumably, Lotor didn’t yet have reason to to despise Haggar the way he does at present. Though he no doubt hated her in some capacity. Haggar historically holds no regard for consent or bodily autonomy, and Lotor as an Altean/Galra hybrid would have been a unique biological curiosity to her. It’s quite possible, even likely, he fell victim to her experiments at some point in the past. Nonetheless, he thought working with her would be the lesser of two evils, when the alternative would be condemning the entire colony to death at Zarkon’s hands. Haggar agreed to keep her knowledge of the colony a secret if Lotor would turn over the most alcemically gifted of the Alteans to her.

Haggar is frightfully powerful, but she is only one person, and can only be one place at a time. We saw in season 1 that she required the assistance of several druids to operate the komar. She needed subordinates who would not only be capable of magic, but unquestioningly loyal to her. By some unknown method she twisted these Alteans into druids. Rendering them similar to the Shiro clone we saw in s6e4 and s6e6; servants devoted to her will to the point of death, yet independently minded enough to construct and execute complicated plans. She may even have tried her ritual on Lotor himself at some point, but it failed due to his mixed heritage. This could be why Lotor was so caught off guard that he was chosen to enter Oriande - if he was already under the impression he had no magical potential. However it happened, it’s Lotor’s horror at her actions towards the Alteans and perversion of Altean magical knowledge that is why he reviles her so. He nearly says as much in s5e5, ‘Bloodlines’, that Haggar was constantly seeing out Altean knowledge to twist to her own uses.

Leading from this theory, there are three potential explanations for the Alteans in tanks:

1) The Alteans in tanks are former druids and Lotor has preserved them in cryostorage while he attempts to find a cure for whatever Haggar has done to them.

And a) The procedure to turn them into druids involved quintessence overexposure and the blue quintessence is extracted from them as a byproduct of the attempted cure.

Or b) Lotor still doesn’t know what exactly Haggar did to create the druids. He has extracted the quintessence and done experiments with it in a effort to discover exactly what happened and why. He may have taken some from otherwise healthy Alteans to use as a baseline as well.

Or c) The blue quintessence is actually being used to treat them. it is not being exported from the colony but imported into it. The source of the quintessence remains unknown.

2) Only the first Alteans to be sent to the ‘second colony’ were delivered to Haggar. Any subsequent Alteans who develop a strong enough magical talent are taken to the lab where their quintessence is extracted and they are placed in cryopreservation in a effort to prevent Haggar from becoming aware of them.

3) That lab actually belongs to Haggar, the Alteans in it are in the process of being turned into druids.

So that’s one theory, but how does Romelle fit into this?

Haggar is brilliant and conniving and terrifying, but even so it seems an impossibility for her to have orchestrated this sequence of events simply because she couldn’t have predicted Krolia and Keith’s roles in it. The way I see it we’ve got two options here. On one hand, it could be that she didn’t set it up, she simply saw it happening and took advantage of it. She would definitely have been paying attention while Lotor and Allura entered the rift - this is her area of expertise after all. If she saw Romelle when she first stepped out of the shuttle with Keith, and heard they were looking for Lotor, it’s a pretty clear leap of logic to assume this is about the colony.

On the other hand...

In the past I have ignored the possibility that Haggar could have entirely set up the events of season 6 because I cannot see a way for her to have predicted Keith and Krolia. But we already know we’re missing a few big pieces of the puzzle. If we accept that one of those missing pieces could explain that issue and put that one conflict aside, where can we take this speculation?

If Haggar had planned the conflict between the Paladins and Lotor a lot of things begin making a lot of sense. There’s also more than a decent amount of foreshadowing in that direction.

At the end of season 5 we see Haggar spying through Shiro’s eyes on the people in the castle ship. The final shot pulls back and lingers on the image of Allura and Lotor looking at each other affectionately. The implication is that Haggar intends to, and will, come between them. She cannot allow their alliance to persist. Haggar wants both her son and his empire under her control, so it is imperative for her to sever the growing relationship between them.

Haggar has proven to be incredibly perceptive; she correctly deduced that Keith’s relationship to Shiro was much closer than that of any other two paladins, and that he would be uniquely vulnerable to exploitation through that bond. While Haggar has been able to see through Shiro since she activated stage 4 of Project Kuron during s5e2, ‘Blood Duel’, Keith has only been around to interact with Shiro on two occasions since then. Though not shown, it’s likely Keith and Shiro spoke after the Kral Zera, and they had a brief sequence of interaction during s6e4, ‘The Colony’, after Keith arrived with Romelle. Utilizing only information gleaned during those two events Haggar was able to correctly assess the depth of connection between Keith and Shiro.

She had almost the entirety of seasons 5 and 6 to observe Lotor and Allura interacting and come to the same conclusion regarding their their relationship that Pidge, Hunk, and even Lance were explicitly confirmed to have picked up on: their connection was undeniably romantic.

If Haggar wanted to disrupt that burgeoning romance it would be easy enough to pinpoint where to attack. Allura wears her heart on her sleeve regarding her bias towards anything Altean, and it would be obvious that Lotor hadn’t yet told her about the colony. All Haggar would need is an access point, and Romelle provided that.

Someone in the Lotura discord (forgive me, I’ve misplaced the reference, let me know who you are and I’ll credit you) pointed out that Romelle bears a striking resemblance to Nyma, with her yellow pigtails and purple eyes.

Now, we remember how Nyma and Rolo were introduced, don’t we? As duplicitous manipulators, pretending to be potential allies in distress. Reaching out to our erstwhile heroes for aid, and playing into their biases to engender sympathy. Only to turn on them and sell them out to their enemies once they’d got what they wanted. Who was it that Nyma targeted? The blue paladin, Lance.

Who is the current blue paladin?

Why, it’s Allura of course.

If Romelle is really in league with Haggar... The real plan might have been to assassinate Allura, but Lotor had to be gotten out of the way first. Haggar still wants her son alive.

Lotor wasn’t the target of this plot, Allura was.

This clears up the question of whether Romelle is a puppet like the clone of Shiro, or an independent conspirator. It’s the latter: Romelle is acting in accordance with Haggar, but not directly under her control. Likely she didn’t know about Shiro or project Kuron, only that Haggar was assisting her to exact her revenge on Lotor in exchange for Romelle in turn helping bring down Allura. Haggar would have no intention of holding up her end of the deal - that’s why she had the generals poised to rush in and steal the Sincline ships and assist in the abduction of Lotor. She probably expected that either Lotor would be immobilized somehow by the paladins or that he'd flee. When Allura knocked Lotor unconscious it just made things all the easier. All Haggar had to do was trigger Shiro’s programming.

Supporting this, Romelle knew Allura was in the same ship as Lotor, as did the audience. There was no need to have her yell 'open fire’ only for it to be re-explained to her and the audience again. Not unless she was hoping to deal with both of her targets at once.

It's a miracle already that Allura is still alive, since it was only Pidge's pre-made program that saved them. If Pidge hadn't recognized the code as coming from Shiro’s arm the castle and everyone on it would have been destroyed. That's why Haggar had the generals kidnap Lotor. So he'd be out of the way when the teleduv blew. She was trying to take out Allura, not her son.

Allura is her greatest enemy, and Haggar lost the last time they went head to head in a duel. What better way to take her out than forgoing magic altogether.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. Lotor reunited with his generals and escaped Haggar and the paladins survived. Then the paladins went on to trap Lotor in the rift between realities. This was the opposite outcome of what Haggar was going for, but it’s still something she can work with.

Unfortunately for Lotor, the only two people who can plausibly get him out of the rift are the woman who put him there in the first place and the monster his mother became. Allura might be persuaded by her conscience to try and retrieve him eventually, but it seems much more likely that Haggar will beat her to the punch: she’s in need of a puppet to take over the empire after all, and who better than the man who’s currently Emperor?

Team Voltron has lost their home, but more importantly they’ve lost their access to the teleduv. Without that they have no way of rapidly responding to distress calls. They’ve just betrayed their largest ally, and those they have left will rapidly be in danger once the Empire finds out what Team V did to their Emperor. The teleduv was one of their biggest assets in the original fight against the empire: it allowed them to strike fast and retreat without leaving a trail for their enemies to follow. But now they don’t have one, and Haggar does.

Thank you once again to the Lotura 18+ discord!

This is the second part of the meta that spawned from a marathon 111 page chat session following our first season 6 re-watch stream. I said I wasn’t going to write up the speculation, but, oops - guess I did.

Yes. This is the ‘Druid Theory’ that’s been rumored to be in progress for a while now. Sorry for the long wait!

#Haggar #Romelle #Lotor #Allura #lotura #vld #Voltron legendary defender #meta #Hate tries to Meta #Druids #Alteans

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sage-nebula · 6 years ago

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@nerd-bastard replied to your post: “I’m going to make numerous posts about season two of The Dragon Prince...”

well said. i'm still a little raw after vld, and part of me is still upset that the writers deemed it necessary for them to die, but yeah, p much everything you already said. i'm willing to try and trust them based on how clearly important social justice is to their story.

First, I’m sorry this reply is so late! I laid down to rest pretty much immediately after I wrote that post last night and then slept for . . . a long time, haha. But I do want to reply to you, because I have seen a lot of comparisons to VLD ever since The Dragon Prince released, but I really, truly believe we don’t have anything to worry about here. I truly believe there is not even a sliver of a chance that The Dragon Prince will end up anything like VLD. And if I can pass a bit of that reassurance onto you, then I want to (or at least, I want to try).

(Note: This is very long, and also full of VLD negativity / salt / criticism.)

Before anything else, I just want to say that I completely understand being burned by VLD. I don’t know how much you know about my personal feelings on it given that you just started following me recently, but I actually dropped the show after season six because the way Lotor was treated in season six made me so upset that I had to miss work the next day because I was so physically ill from panic attacks. I’m a mixed-race child abuse survivor myself, and so to see Lotor treated the way that he was---to have JDS and LM confirm in a post-season interview that their intention really was to say, “unless you have a good parental figure in your life [like Keith had Shiro, was the example they used], you’ll end up evil and/or just like your abusive parents” was just too much for me. There were already a thousand reasons why I was upset with them for things they had done in VLD and in interviews (e.g. how they used the slur “half-breed” to refer to mixed-race characters, their treatment of female characters such as the generals, and so on), but that was the final straw. I know what happened in seasons seven and eight because it was impossible for me not to hear about it given how big the fandom is, so I know all about the queerbaiting with Adam and what their intentions were with him and Shiro’s sexuality, but I didn’t actually watch myself (outside of select bits of s8 because I couldn’t resist childhood flashbacks for Lotor), and I will not watch anything JDS or LM work on ever again. They have no respect or care for people like me, so I will not have any for them.

So I completely, completely understand still feeling hurt and upset over VLD. Believe me when I say that I am in the same boat, and I have nothing but empathy for you. But I also really, truly believe that we have nothing to fear when it comes to The Dragon Prince and its crew.

To begin with, just some base comparisons:

Voltron: Legendary Defender was produced by DreamWorks Animation, and though both LM and JDS have said that they were fans of the original 80s Voltron series, I think it’s far more believable that they accepted their roles of executive producers for VLD more because of the paycheck and the career boost it would give them than anything else. Surely, DreamWorks decided to create and air a new Voltron series because of the revenue it would bring them, given that it was already an established franchise in the past and it came ready-made with plenty of toy ideas. Likewise, being at the helm of a product that would already garner plenty of attention and exposure for them---and a massive boost to their careers if it was successful---would no doubt be attractive to LM and JDS. I don’t believe that VLD was ever a passion project for any of them. It was a job. It was a job that maybe had the potential to be fun, but it wasn’t something they came up with themselves because of a love for the story or the characters. And keep in mind, I’m not trying to bash them by saying this, I’m just stating what I think are the facts. Plenty of creators in television and even film sign onto projects they don’t necessarily love so that they can get the money and boost to their careers to make the things they do. That’s just how the business is sometimes, and I think that’s what happened here.

But that’s not the case with The Dragon Prince. The Dragon Prince is being created by Aaron Ehasz, Justin Richmond, and Giancarlo Volpe. Aaron and Justin founded WonderStorm in order to make this show (and the game that will tie in to the show). They had the ideas and passion for the story and characters first, before they made their studio. And that’s just it: Their studio of nineteen people exists solely to tell this story. Particularly since we know that Netflix doesn’t have an overhead for the content they air, this means that Aaron, Justin, Giancarlo, and everyone else can do whatever they want with this story. They don’t have executives twisting their arms behind their backs. But more importantly, they’re also telling this story because they want to be. Since they’re a small indie company, this was actually something of a risk for them; they’re not guaranteed more seasons, they’re not guaranteed financial success, and if The Dragon Prince failed, that could mean the end of their company. So they’re not doing this for critical acclaim or money (especially since they all could have gone to other projects being created by major companies like DreamWorks if they wanted more money or exposure). They’re doing it because they have a story they love, that they want to tell, that they want to share with others. All nineteen of them are here because they care, not because it’s “just a job” that they have to do in order to make money or get more exposure and fame.

And that might be all fine and dandy, but just because you’re doing something as a passion project doesn’t mean that you’re doing right by those you want to represent, right? I would agree with that, but I think we can already see massive differences between VLD and The Dragon Prince when it comes to representation.

VLD was originally acclaimed for its representation due to having characters with different racial backgrounds in the main cast. The fact that Shiro was disabled was also critically acclaimed as well, because he was a disabled main character who was still allowed to be a hero. The thing is, however, that VLD’s representation is by and large shallow. They don’t really care about actually representing anyone as much as they care about getting the accolades and praise for doing the bare minimum. As a few examples:

Shiro is disabled, but his disability might as well be a cosmetic difference than anything else. We see Shiro affected by his PTSD a grand total of once (when Sendak was mocking him in season one), and we never see him really impacted by his arm. Keep in mind that I am NOT saying that his character arc should have revolved around his disability. Writing disabled characters with their disability as their only personality trait is horrible writing, and would be even worse than what they actually did. But what I am saying is that while losing his arm and having it replaced with galra tech should have been something traumatizing for Shiro, we never actually see that. We never see him experience phantom pains from his missing limb (which he could do even with the galra arm, as we see with Edward Elric and his automail in the FMA manga). I can’t remember a time when the arm malfunctioned or broke down to the point where he only had one arm in a potentially dangerous situation, and had to cope. Instead, in all honesty, his arm just looked cool and gave him a ton of abilities he wouldn’t have without it. Whereas Edward Elric has phantom pains with his automail, has it break repeatedly, can’t go into very cold or very hot temperatures without risking serious injury and so much more, Shiro’s arm is pretty much there just to look cool and offer convenient solutions to galra problems. He’s disabled, yes, but he’s not shown actually having any of the experiences that disabled people with prosthetic limbs in real life have.

Similarly, we find out in season seven that he had a chronic illness . . . but we never actually see him experiencing that in the show itself. He had a chronic illness as we find out in flashbacks, but in seasons 1-6 he was never shown actually suffering from that chronic illness. The reason given is that Haggar had it removed while experimenting on him (which . . . makes his kidnapping a good thing because he would have died otherwise? What??), but the point still remains that while Shiro could have been excellent representation for people with chronic illness had we seen him have at least some effects of chronic illness on the show (needing medication at the least, or having some fatigue symptoms, or something), he wasn’t, because without being told that he had chronic illness in flashbacks in season seven, no one would have known. I’ve seen people say that he’s supposed to be representative of the chronically ill, but in my personal opinion invisible representation is not representation. It feels an awful lot more like JDS and LM just wanted to slap another representation label on him without doing any of the legwork and call it a day.

They included more female characters, but used them as plot devices or supports for male characters. I distinctly remember a pre-season three interview when LM was gushing about how excited she was for Lotor’s generals, because they were generals now instead of being a part of a harem as they apparently were in the 80s version (I didn’t watch the 80s version, so I couldn’t tell you). But at the end of the day, Acxa, Zethrid, Narti, and Ezor were glorified plot devices or supports for male characters, and other female characters on the show didn’t fare much better. A quick rundown:

Acxa was defined by her relationships to either Lotor or Keith. She was either Lotor’s most loyal general, wanting to carry through his vision or support him endlessly, or she was so moved by Keith’s sparse interactions with her that she wanted to do everything that he did. It briefly seemed as though Acxa did have her own motivations when she turned on Lotor in season four in order to protect Ezor and Zethrid, but in season six that was wiped away by showing that it was all a ploy and that she never lost her loyalty to Lotor in the first place. Don’t misunderstand, I love her relationships with Lotor and Keith as I write them in my works, but I also take care to give Acxa her own backstory and motivations that aren’t dependent on her relationships with those male characters. In canon, we didn’t get that. Not at all.

Narti was a disabled character who was both blind (unless linked with Kova) and mute. She was also abruptly killed off for no reason other than to give Lotor and the other generals a reason to separate. Narti was never given characterization, backstory, or a real purpose in the narrative. She was apparently trusted enough by Lotor to be given his beloved cat, but that ended the moment he struck her down. I used to think that perhaps this was foreshadowing for how he’d react when he found out about Shireplica, which would in turn set the rest of Team Voltron against him, but that wasn’t even it. Instead, it was just that Narti was seen as disposable by LM and JDS, possibly because since she was blind and mute, they didn’t consider her as worthwhile as the other generals. Disgusting.

Ezor and Zethrid were plot devices. In the beginning it seemed that they surely had motivations and character arcs of their own. Ezor was the most upset about Narti’s death, and was the first to call for mutiny, whereas Zethrid only agreed after the first attempt at the rift gateway failed. But as the seasons continued it became more than clear that they were only there to do as the plot commanded them to do. Zethrid suddenly wanted to conquer things in season five despite agreeing with Lotor’s vision before. Ezor was “glad to be on Lotor’s side again” in season six despite being the most upset over Narti and the first to call for mutiny in season four. I fully believe that the only reason why they were written as a couple in later seasons is because they were the only two remaining generals of Lotor’s who didn’t already have another potential love interest (as Acxa had Keith). I also believe they only miraculously survived in season eight due to backlash to their deaths in season seven. But whatever the case, it’s clear that Ezor and Zethrid were not given consideration as individuals. I can’t even list them individually here because that’s how little consideration JDS and LM gave them. It’s goddamn sad.

Krolia only exists to be Keith’s mom. That’s it! At first it might seem as though she did have her own motivations and goals when she was introduced in season five. It seemed highly likely that she left Keith behind because she believed in the cause and the mission to overthrow the Empire, something that she and her son would end up having in common (because Keith would likely make the same choice). But in season six, this was dashed. No, she was perfectly happy to abandon the mission and war to have a family, and only left because she wanted to protect Keith. Fuck the billions of people who were enslaved and dying that Krolia could have cared about---fuck her friends and found family in the Blade of Marmora that she could have cared about, fuck everything else she had going on in her life before she crash landed on Earth that she could have cared about---no, she only cared about Keith. And her role in the show from that point onward was just to be his mom, too. She did end up leading the galra alongside Kolivan later on in season eight, but everything she did was for Keith. She didn’t have any interests, any passions, any goals or opinions that weren’t tied to him in some way. She wasn’t created as her own character, she was created to be Keith’s Mom and that’s it. Disappointing. More important female characters were able to stand on their own for the most part, but even they were done dirty in similar ways. Pidge’s entire character arc revolved around wanting to find her father and brother, for the most part. She had little brief spots of wanting to connect with nature here or there, but for the most part it was all about her male relatives and how she wanted to find them. Her character was never explored more deeply than that. And Allura just wanted to follow in Alfor’s footsteps. All the choices she made with regards to wanting to be a paladin or an alchemist were all because her dad did it first. Rather than giving her an arc about wanting to carve out her own legacy, or realizing that she should want that because Alfor wasn’t the perfect paragon of goodness she believed he was, she instead just wanted to make him proud and that’s it. She was defined by how well she lived up to his legacy. (And that’s not even getting into the misogynoir of her ending, my god.) At the end of the day, LM and JDS wanted to get props for having Strong Female Characters™ without actually writing female characters in a strong way. It’s shallow representation at best.

And finally, the issue of queerbaiting and Bury Your Gays with Adam and Shiro. Prior to season seven, JDS and LM announced that Shiro was gay and had been in a relationship with another instructor at the garrison, Adam. Fans were promised that we would meet Adam and season seven. They generated as much buzz and fanfare as they could, got everyone excited . . . and then not only was it not evident without knowing beforehand that Shiro and Adam were romantically involved, but Adam died about five minutes after his introduction. What they essentially did was pull a JK Rowling: We only knew that Shiro was gay in season seven thanks to them telling us beforehand (similarly to Dumbledore’s “reveal”), and Adam died immediately so there would be no chance of a reconciliation. Shiro did later get to marry a man and have a kiss and all, which is at least something (though the fact that we didn’t get to see that relationship develop is highkey disappointing), but that doesn’t change what they did in season seven. To make matters worse, JDS admitted in his open letter that they knew they were doing the “Bury Your Gays” trope, but that they (paraphrased) “hoped that the reveal of Shiro’s orientation would overshadow it.” I.e., they just wanted the brownie points for saying, “Hey, Shiro’s gay!” instead of actually showing him in a loving relationship with another man and letting the story tell itself. They didn’t want to actually write a queer character or queer relationship; they just wanted the praise and positive buzz for saying they did.

And that’s the same pattern that almost all of VLD’s representation falls into. With the exception of the racial diversity on the show (and even that fails in some areas, such as the writing hinting that mixed-race galra are treated badly, but never delving further into it, though at least we did have skin color diversity among the human characters), VLD’s representation was shallow and only there for brownie points and accolades. The VLD staff did not actually care about representation; they just wanted the awards for having a diverse show. As far as I can recall, I believe that they only started talking about queer representation once people started pestering them about it on twitter. To that end, we could even surmise that it was never originally planned (which would explain why Shiro did not ask Keith about Adam after first waking up in season one, because even if they had broken up, Shiro had planned on marrying that man; you can’t tell me he wouldn’t have cared or been curious), but that they just slapped it on once they saw it would garner positive publicity after shows like Steven Universe aired. Everything LM and JDS ever did was for their own glory; it was never out of genuine care and consideration.

By contrast, The Dragon Prince has given us both representation and care. As another brief rundown:

General Amaya is a deaf character who speaks in ASL and who was created by the crew working with deaf and hard of hearing individuals to make sure she was portrayed authentically. The crew has said in numerous interviews that once they decided to make Amaya deaf, they worked with numerous deaf and hard of hearing people to make sure they were portraying her authentically. They had deaf and hard of hearing people doing ASL in the studio so that the animations were accurate and authentic, too. They didn’t just decide that Amaya was deaf and call it a day; they actually worked with people in that community to make sure that her portrayal would really speak to others in said community, that she wouldn’t be an offensive stereotype or a shallow presentation. And even more than that, we see how Amaya’s disability has informed her character and arc. While she can read lips (and the ability she has to do so is a bit realistic, but that’s been addressed by the creators saying they did a bit of leeway for the sake of the story flow), she still has an interpreter with her in her season one appearances, and we see that her soldiers have learned ASL as well. In fact, it’s because one of the soldiers knows ASL in season two that he is able to tip Amaya---and only Amaya---off to the fact that there are sunfire elves holding him hostage. Amaya being deaf doesn’t define her character, but we do see how it informs her character (and her relationship with her sister, when she and Sarai share a dirty joke that those who don’t know ASL don’t understand!), as well as how it informs and affects the plot.

The female characters are ALL well-rounded, and none of them are dependent on male characters for their arc. Honestly, I have so much to say about the lady characters in The Dragon Prince that I could be here all day if I tried to do a rundown like I did above for VLD, but the simple fact of the matter is that all of the lady characters---even ones we only get glimpses of, such as Sarai---show that they have thoughts, motivations, and character arcs that aren’t dependent on their relationships with male characters in the show. To try to keep it brief:

Rayla was raised and trained by Runaan to be an assassin, and she does want to get Azymondias back to the dragon queen, yes. But she’s also motivated by the sense of shame she has over her parents abandoning their duty as Dragon Guards to flee for their own lives instead. She’s motivated by a deep, internal sense of Right and Wrong that pushes her to hesitate to kill those who aren’t attacking her, and to defy Runaan’s orders once she learns that the egg wasn’t shattered after all. This same internal sense of Right or Wrong has her questioning her job as an assassin in season two, and pushes her to defend the defenseless dragon that Soren and Claudia want to chop to bits. She cares quite a lot about Callum and Ezran, given that it’s heavily implied that they’re the first friends she’s ever had her own age, but she’s not afraid to argue with (or even temporarily separate from) them in order to do what she feels is right. She’s her own character, and even if any of the male characters were removed, she’d have enough to stand on her own.

Claudia was taught dark magic by her father, Viren, and she cares a lot about her brother Soren, yes. However, she also has clear passion and love for dark magic; she considers it “fun” to turn chains into snakes, gets super excited when she has a new breakthrough, and is fascinated by magical ruins and artifacts. She studies magic not because she wants to be like her father or because she wants to make him proud, but because it genuinely fascinates her and she loves pushing her own potential. She’s also impatient and frustrated when her “shortcuts” don’t work out; she uses dark magic for convenience, as seen when she uses it to make pancakes, and she throws tantrums when things don’t go her way. She also has little regard for lives that aren’t human. She’s her own character, and even if any of the male characters were removed, she would still have enough character and motivation to stand on her own.

Sarai was Harrow’s wife, and mother of Callum and Ezran. Lesser shows would have just left her as that. But even though we’ve had hardly any time to get to know Sarai, we see that she was so much more than that. We see little details, like how she had a sweet tooth and felt that dreams that weren’t dirty were “boring.” We also see how she was Harrow’s closest adviser when she was alive, and how she “advised” him through sparring matches. We see how she was passionate that all life was sacred, how she argued against killing Xadians for the benefit of humans, even those humans in her own kingdom. We see how she was willing to stand by Harrow even when she disagreed with him, and that she didn’t let go of her disagreement, but still did what she felt was Right. And we also see that even when she disagreed, she could still see when the success of the mission was more important than anything else, as she gave her life to save Viren’s so that the people of Katolis and Duren would live. Sarai was her own character with her own motivations, and would have been strong even if she hadn’t been Queen of Katolis. These are just three brief examples, but the way that characters such as Amaya, Ellis, Lujanne, and Aanya were portrayed follows these same lines. The female characters in The Dragon Prince are written to be people rather than Strong Female Characters™. Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond never bragged about having strong female characters on their show, but they didn’t need to for us to see what a diverse and well-rounded cast of female characters they have.

Finally, the queer representation. In season one it was strongly hinted that Runaan and Tinker Elf from the credits were in a relationship, and I’m of the opinion that Aaron recently confirmed on twitter that Runaan is in fact queer (because when someone asked him if Runaan was the queer character who died, Aaron said “we all know Runaan isn’t dead :)” which would imply that while he’s not dead, he is queer). Unfortunately, they’re not happy together just yet, but I have hope that Runaan will be saved in the coming seasons, that we’ll get to meet Tinker, and that we’ll get to see them happy together. I hope so. Then there’s Aanya’s mothers. I already spoke about this in the post you replied to, so I won’t go on about it at length again, but I will point out that no one on the crew bragged about having queer representation this season (it was a Hypable reviewer who brought it up), nor was their relationship ambiguous in the show itself as Shiro’s and Adam’s was. Moreover, when Aaron addressed the fans, he agreed that fans had a right to be upset that they were, promised more representation in the future, and asked us to trust him. Rather than growing angry at the fans who were upset and liking petty salt posts defending him on twitter the way JDS did before admitting that all he wanted were brownie points, Aaron sympathized with the fans and promised to keep listening. And with the way they improved the animation after hearing fan feedback, I believe that they’ll take this to heart in the future. We already know that Ezran’s choice at the end of this season wasn’t originally planned, but that they went with it because they listened to his character. This tells us they aren’t married to their plot, and are instead writing to character. I believe that they’ll take all this into consideration moving forward.

No show is perfect, because no content creator is perfect. I’m not saying that The Dragon Prince hasn’t or will never make mistakes. But I am saying that we have already seen five billion times more care and consideration from the crew of The Dragon Prince than we ever saw from VLD. All the cards are in place for The Dragon Prince to truly do right by its story, characters, and fans, and that comes right down to the crew and what they’ve already shown us. Any depth and care that VLD had came from the fans rather than the creators or the show itself. With The Dragon Prince, we see depth and care within the first episode or two, and that has never lessened. I completely understand being burned by VLD, because I was, too, but The Dragon Prince is an entirely different project by an entirely different team from an entirely different studio and is on an entirely different (much higher) level. VLD’s sins have no place here, and I truly feel that we have nothing to worry about.

#nerd-bastard #//#///#////#/////#voltron salt #voltron negativity #representation

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bisorens · 6 years ago

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hmm ok it’s later let’s chat about how awfully vld treated shiro and adam this season!

ok so... obviously the whole bury your gays trope. yes. i’m v angry about that. but even like... even beyond that entire thing their relationship was handled so INCREDIBLY terribly like!!

1. we only get scenes of adam in a flashback that shiro has while LITERALLY DYING and then another flashback-of-sorts where we learn about what happened to the garrison, in which adam die after 10secs of screentime

2. they never have shiro talk about adam in the show?? it would literally be so easy to have shiro say ‘i hope i can see adam again / i wonder if adam is ok / i want to apologize to adam’ literally anything that would just... canonly confirm that they were together. explicit lgbt rep needs to be said not just shown

3. apparently adam and shiro were so close that they were fiancés and gonna get married but nothing in the show even supported that??? we got no insight on how shiro felt ever and it’s insulting that we didn’t get that

4. the literal only present-day reference to adam and shiro’s relationship was when shiro apologized to adam and touched his memorial name badge and when we saw that badge again during shiro’s speech at the end

5. we never saw shiro mourn for adam like what the fuck!! he was literally given ten seconds where he sounded close to tears and then we all moved on from it like listen i love pidge and matt but they really gave her a more emotional reaction to thinking her brother died and he wasn’t even dead, and they also gave keith now time to mourn shiro when he was dead too (and shiro even came back too!) if they can give that to pidge than shiro deserves just as much time. like, fuck, the damn castle of lions got a better mourning scene than shiro and adam did!

i’m just sayin it’s very incredibly transparent that the writers didn’t really care about having lgbt rep in the show, they’re doing it for fandom points. and it’s more disgusting (and yes i do keep harping in about this) because of how shiros been treated in the past like they really removed all traces of home for him. and along with that they SAID they understood how harmful bury ur gays is! and still went through with this!

#voltron #vld #vld spoilers #adashi #i will be mad about this gorever

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myupostsheadcanons · 6 years ago

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More of the Same (Halloween Franchise Edition) :

(i did one for people who were complaining about VLD, suggesting other shows to watch that did things the same or better, might as well do a list for my current obsession)

Halloween 1978:

Christine (John Carpenter and Steven King. Besides the Rockabilly music, the rest of the score is very much like Halloween) Made in 83, but is set in 78. The visuals are very reminiscent of Halloween as well.

The Thing. John Carpenter’s remake of the classic B-movie.

Friday the 13th (Part 1) Intentionally made to be a Halloween Rip-off. The killer twist was one of the better ones, and likely more of a Psycho reference.

Those that Came Before Halloween:

Psycho. The Grandfather of Slasher Movies. Hitchcock. Has Jamie Lee Curtis’s mom Janet Lee in it.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)

Carrie (more Steven King)

Dual (1971) (Steven Spielberg)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Black Christmas

The Exorcist

The Omen

Rosemary’s Baby

Halloween 2 (1980):

Came out the same year as “The Empire Strikes Back”.... “Laurie, I am your brother.”

My Bloody Valentine (1981) Another “cash grab” Holiday movie. Has another killer twist ending, much like F13 and Psycho. Decent practical effects and outside of the “love triangle” the rest of the characters are pretty well done in that ‘cheesy and dated’ way.

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Debut of Freddy Kruger, bacon-man dream eater.

Alien (1979). Single location. Soulless killer. Sigourney Weaver.

Halloween 3:

An American Horror Story (TV Show). The Halloween name was going to be an anthology of different movies that were going to be loosely connected to each other. This concept wasn’t liked during an era of Slasher Movies.... HOWEVER, this concept was revived under American Horror Story, as each season is set in a new location with new characters and are loosely based on other seasons.

Halloween 4 & 5 (the “child-in-danger” movies)

The Shinning. A dad turns on his family and attempts to kill them while cooped up in a snowed-in ski and retreat lodge in Colorado. The supernatural and mysterious “shine” allows the young son Danny to see ghosts of the past.

IT (TV and Movies): Children of small town tormented by supernatural alien creature that feeds on fear and in disguise as a “friendly” clown named Pennywise.

The Sixth Sense: Child Psychiatrist trying to help his young patient with a supernatural problem. (If Loomis left a sour taste in your mouth Malcolm is more palatable)

The Babadook. Mom is driven to her wits-end by the loss of her husband and the demands of a child with special needs. A mysterious creature called “Mr. Babadook” starts stalking the child and begins to torment the mom.

Child’s Play. Little boy gets the doll he always wanted, only for said doll to have been possessed by a murderer by voodoo magik.

The Ring. creepy child drowns in well, wants everybody to keep circulating the tapes. Mom has to save her creepy son from the ghost girl.

Halloween 6

Hereditary. A dark secret was left dangling over a family after the passing of the grandmother. The mother struggles to get over the abuse and trauma she grew up with, and at the same time cope with issues with her own children. The sins of the past return to consume their lives.

Split (more accurately: Unbreakable, Split, and Glass): A man with multiple personality distorter, one of which being a super-powered cannibalistic killer that demands “pure” women to be sacrificed. Secondary plot of one of the victims growing up living with an abusive uncle.... Glass sees a return of the characters from Unbreakable and Split, but they had been captured and institutionalized... Shyamalan twists abound, and why it is in this part of the list.

Jason Goes to Hell (Friday the 13th), made 2-years prior to H6, has a similar gimmick of Jason trying to kill off his family (a sister and niece we previously didn’t know about), bonkers dark magic, and him chasing after a baby.

Halloween: Twenty Years Later (H20)

Halloween (2018).... yes... recommending a different Halloween movie.

Scream. the movie makes a cameo in the background.

Jeepers Creepers. Killer that comes back every 20-something years.

Freddy vs. Jason. Same Late-90′s to early 2000′s problems with making horror-slasher films too camp. (Child’s Play had the same problems with Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky)

The Blair Witch Project (1999), the movie that killed slasher horror until Saw came out 5 years later. Why “shaky cam” took over horror and action movies.

Halloween: Resurrection

Don’t Breathe. The better version of this movie. YA’s break into this guy’s house to rob him. Only to find themselves in a Murder Home.

The Boy. Woman that is escaping from an abusive relationship is hired by an odd family to take care of a doll that they treat like their own lost son.

Unfriended. If you want more of that cyber-horror, and being a bleh movie.

The Gallows. Takes place at a school...

SAW. why we have Escape Rooms now.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween (1 & 2)

House of A Thousand Corpses

The Devil’s Rejects

Machete

My Bloody Valentine (2009)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

Nightmare on Elm Street (remake)

Friday the 13th (remake)

The Blair Witch

Rings

Halloween (2018)

The Visit. (when Shyamalan began to be good again) Kids go spend vacation with Grandma and Grandpa, only to discover something is not quite right with them.

Prometheus/Alien: Covenant. Reboot/sequels to the Alien Franchise.

The Prodigy (2019). Child genius turned sociopathic killer.

No Country For Old Men, not a slasher/horror, but Anton Sugur practically qualifies as one.

Widows. Heist action movie of vengeful angry wives.

#halloween

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violethowler · 4 years ago

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A VLD Production Timeline

A common view I often see expressed in the Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom is that the production of the series was rushed. This stems from the fact that the entire series was released on Netflix within two and a half years, with as little as 2 months passing between new seasons dropping on Netflix. In debates among the fandom regarding the legitimacy of the final season being the showrunners’ true endgame, this timetable has been used to argue that the season couldn’t have been edited in such a short period and was therefore the creative team’s plan all along. I would like to address this point, but in order to do that, I first need to correct some common misconceptions about the pace of VLD’s production.

What a lot of people may not realize is that an animated TV episode is produced up to a year or more before the audience ever sees it on their screens. Netflix broke up the seasons the way they did in order to get audiences “more Voltron more often, so we don’t have to wait so long between each drop[1],” but this doesn’t mean that the episodes were being made in an equally short time-span.

While Netflix chose to release Voltron episodes over the course of two years, production began between April and June of 2014[2][3], and by the time Season 1 dropped on June 10, 2016 production had been completed up to at least Season 4[4].

On average, the production of an animated series is typically 1-3 years ahead of the episodes that are broadcast.

For example, work on Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2005[5], but the first episode of Season 1 did not air on Cartoon Network until 2008.

The DuckTales reboot premiered in 2017 but production started back in 2015[6].

The development of an animated show is generally broken up into three stages

Pre-Production: Scripts are written and finalized. Character and layout designs completed. Storyboards made for each episode to plan out shots.

Production: Episodes are voice acted and then animated once voicing is finished.

Post-Production: Music and sound effects added. Individual scenes stitched together into a complete episode. Color correction done as needed.

Due to the different tasks involved there is a great deal of overlap where different episodes or even seasons are being worked on in different stages of the process at the same time. For example, at the same time that the Legend of Korra was doing post-production for Season 2, production of Season 3 was already underway and Season 4 was entering pre-production at the same time[7]. The production of Star Wars: The Clone Wars followed a similar pattern, with pre-production of what would have been Seasons 7 and 8 being underway while Season 6 was being animated at the time of the show’s initial cancellation. Here’s a chart to help visualize what the process generally looks like:

[A huge thank you to @CrystalRebellion for putting this chart together]

Another thing that some fans may not be aware of is that there is a difference between a broadcast season and a production season. Episodes of an animated show are produced in batches that do not always correspond to how they are presented to the audience. For example, episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars were produced in batches of 25-26, but the first four seasons to air on Cartoon Network were only 22 episodes each. In every season there were an average of 3 episodes that had been created as part of a separate batch[8]:

Voltron: Legendary Defender was contracted with Netflix for a total of 78 episodes. Though they were released as 8 seasons (6 13-episode arcs), they were produced in batches of 26. Seasons 1-2 on Netflix are considered Production Season 1. Seasons 3-6 are Production Season 2. And Seasons 7-8 are Production Season 3. This fits with the voice actors for the MFE pilots - who were introduced in Season 7 - mentioning in an interview with Let’s Voltron podcast that the lines they recorded for their characters were supposed to be for the third season[9].

At some point during the production of Seasons 7-8, changes were ordered to the season that resulted in more work for the animators, resulting in the creation of S7E04 The Feud as a filler episode with limited animation to give the animation team a break. As a byproduct of this, some episodes ended up being moved around from the order they were originally intended[10].

So with all of this in mind, the timeline of VLD’s production looks roughly like this:

2014

Writing begins for Production Season 1 (Netflix Seasons 1-2) between April and June

2015

Writing for Production Season 1 (Netflix Seasons 1-2) finished

Animation for Production Season 1 (Netflix Seasons 1-2) begins

Writing for Production Season 2 (Netflix Seasons 3-6) begins

2016

Animation for Production Season 1 (Netflix Seasons 1-2) finished

Writing for Production Season 2 (Netflix Seasons 3-6) finished

13 episodes of Production Season 1 released on Netflix in June as “Season 1”

Animation for Production Season 2 (Netflix Seasons 3-6) begins

Writing for Production Season 3 (Netflix Seasons 7-8) begins

2017

13 episodes of Production Season 1 released on Netflix in January as “Season 2”

Animation for Production Season 2 (Netflix Seasons 3-6) finished

Writing for Production Season 3 (Netflix Seasons 7-8) finished

Animation for Production Season 3 (Netflix Seasons 7-8) begins

7 episodes of Production Season 2 released on Netflix in August as “Season 3”

6 episodes of Production Season 2 released on Netflix in October as “Season 4”

Animation for first half of Production Season 3 (Netflix Season 7) finished

Changes ordered to first half of Production Season 3 (Netflix Season 7)

2018

6 episodes of Production Season 2 released on Netflix in March as “Season 5”

7 episodes of Production Season 2 released on Netflix in June as “Season 6”

Changes to first half of Production Season 3 (Netflix Season 7) finished

Animation for second half of Production Season 3 (Netflix Season 8) finished

Kimberly Brooks and Jeremy Shada called back into the studio in July to record new dialogue

13 episodes of Production Season 3 released on Netflix in August as “Season 7”

The epilogue is created sometime in the fall

Screencaps of the epilogue are leaked on the internet in October

13 episodes of Production Season 3 released on Netflix in December as “Season 8”

In June 2018, many of the show’s writers announced their departure from the production team. Because this occurred shortly after the last 7 episodes of the second production season were released on Netflix as Season 6, many assumed that this meant that the writers had no input on Seasons 7-8 and that this was the reason for the decline in the show’s writing quality. However this is observably false as the same writers who left are still credited in all episodes of the third production season. Most notably, Tim Hedrick is credited with S7E04 The Feud, one of the last episodes of Season 7 to be created.

The changes that resulted in the creation of The Feud would have happened after the scripts for the final production season were already finalized. This means that once those new episodes were complete there was nothing left for the writers to do before the remaining episodes dropped on Netflix. That is when the writers left: after their role in the production process was officially over. Not right in the middle of it like so many assume. Their job was done, so there was no reason to stay.

Critics of the #FreeVLDS8 campaign claim that those involved, particularly Team Purple Lion, are saying that the entire season was reanimated, which is incorrect. If that were the case, the animators at Studio Mir would not have been surprised at the season we got in December 2018.

If you’re looking at this timeline and going “but there still wouldn’t be time for them to edit the season, you would be correct if you are only thinking in terms of new animation being created. Because if the editing of Season 8 was accomplished by new animation, there truly wouldn’t be enough time to make new animation for an entire season. And that’s because they didn’t.

So if there was no new animation, how was the editing done?

Exhibit A:

[Sorry for the glare from the ceiling lights in my bedroom.]

It was done by cropping the split screens. Taking out pieces of episodes. Using stock photos and static images to put characters in shots they weren’t originally there for. Dos Santos even mentioned cutting and pasting mouths from one character to another[11]. He claimed at the time that it was specifically for the epilogue, but that’s impossible because with the exception of Shiro’s kiss there was no movement in the epilogue whatsoever. (I refer you to @dragonofyang’s piece on NDAs[12] for more on how those early 2019 interviews were misleading). The only “new” animation as casual fans think of it would be places where one character is traced over another in a few key shots that had to be left in to meet the required runtime and ensure that the final season met the minimum number of episodes mandated by their contract with Netflix.

It is because there was no time to re-animate the entire season that Season 8 had as many visual and audio mistakes as it did. Post-production of the season would have already been finished by late June/early July of 2018. All the showrunners could do in the time they had was cut, paste, rearrange, and trace over in order to make sure this Frankenstein version of the season had at least the semblance of a coherent plot.

This is why supporters of FreeVLDS8 are so confident that an uncut version of Season 8 exists. Because production was already over when the editing happened, and it was done in such a way that the odds are in our favor that Mir and Dreamworks would have backup files of the original episodes archived on a computer somewhere.

Sources:

[1] Comic-Con 2017: Voltron Legendary Defender Season 3 is Only 7 Episodes But…; July 20, 2017. https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/07/20/comic-con-2017-voltron-legendary-defender-season-3-is-only-7-episodes-but

[2] Creating Voltron: Legendary Defender; June 10, 2016. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/creating-voltron-legendary-defender/

[3] Tweet by Joaquim Dos Santos; October 12, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20200723131054/https://twitter.com/JDS_247/status/1050905860728213506

[4] Voltron Season 4 Episodes 1 & 2 Review w/ Joaquim Dos Santos, Lauren Montgomery, & Jeremy Shada; October 16, 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80SejQPuS9E&feature=youtu.be

[5] “starwars.com at Comic-Con 2005”; July 12, 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20080323023414/http://www.starwars.com/community/event/con/f20050712/indexp5.html

[6] DuckTales Cast Not Returning For Reboot; May 15, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150526071332/http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/news/Ducktales-Cast-Not-Returning-for-Reboot/

[7] Tumblr post by Bryna Konietzko; July 13, 2013.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130822050636/http://bryankonietzko.tumblr.com/post/55788253484/to-give-you-a-sense-of-just-how-long-it-takes-to

[8] List of Star Wars: The Clone Wars episodes - wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars:_The_Clone_Wars_episodes

[9] Let’s Voltron, Episode 180: “MFE Pilots Interview with Anna Graves, Zehra Fazal & AJ LoCascio”; May 27, 2019. https://letsvoltron.simplecast.com/episodes/mfe-pilots-interview-with-anna-graves-z

[10] Voltron Legendary Defender Interview - The Garfle Warfle Snick Spectacular; October 24, 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcJmq0sNGN4

[11] “Voltron Full Series Review with Showrunners in Studio”. Afterbuzz TV; March 4, 2019 www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_t8A99WJo

[12] From the Sock Puppet’s Mouth; March 27, 2019. https://www.teampurplelion.com/from-the-sock-puppets-mouth/

#freevlds8 #voltron legendary defender #voltron season 8 #vld season 8 #vlds8 #vld production #production timeline #voltron meta #vld meta

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mateushonrado · 6 years ago

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Voltron: Legendary Defender S7 (aka S5) thoughts [part 2]

Status Post #6282

"The Ruins"

And now back to a serious episode.

Mother and son bonding moment.

Cool simulator.

Hunk making wraps.

The wolf finally has a name: Cosmo.

Coran watching a sitcom that becomes a dramedy.

Distress signal from the Blade of Marmora.

Team Voltron enters inside a ruined planet.

Cosmo confronts a mysterious stranger.

Where's Acxa? Probably finding so and so.

The mysterious stranger's voice sounds so similar to Lotor, though I doubt it and his name is Macidus.

Krolia discovers so many swords.

Haggar's druids continued her work and Macidus likely doesn't know that she went to Oriande and regained her true Altean form and recently, teleported away after Acxa attempted to stun her.

Oh crap, so many BOM were exposed and hundreds were killed by the druids.

It turns out that Kolivan was probably killed in action or did he?

What the? Macidus is the druid who confronted Keith back in season one.

Things gets reasonably darker.

Keith and Cosmo as Team Voltron are trapped.

Keith confronts Macidus.

Macidus' face is revealed, so this likely josses the theory that the druids are Altean.

Macidus' "There is no escape but death!"

Wait, Kolivan is actually alive but imprisoned.

Allura uses her powers to free her fellow teammates.

Macidus is taking down the Paladins one by one.

Keith manages to kill Macidus, thus saving his teammates and Kolivan's lives.

Kolivan apologises to Keith and sent a team to find the Altean colony.

It turns out the colony is now empty and the other Alteans have disappointed.

Kolivan vows to rebuild the Blades with Krolia.

Krolia tells Keith that she has to help Kolivan but Keith tells her that he'll see her again. Aww.

"The Journey Within"

10 billion decafeebs is 1.5 Earth years?

Dark matter, you say?

Shiro talking about the events of "Blackout".

My goodness, the Lions have been affected by storms to the point that it's shocking the team, thus being depowered as a result.

Coran, Shiro, Romelle and Cosmo are frozen.

Allura's got a spare zipline.

Teamwork time on the zipline stuff.

"Everyone into the Yellow Lion."

I'm sensing some Gravity references.

Team Voltron are stranded without their Lions.

The Paladins talking about so and so.

A white light appears. Is it a ship? Don't think so as they're actually a swarm of alien birds.

Was it real, Allura?

Hunk talking about his past at the Garrison and talking about the passing the torch.

They're in the Quantum Abyss.

Save yourselves, Paladins.

The Paladins talking about some things.

Calling out time.

This is very deep.

They finally reached Earth or is it?

They've become delusional but at least Hunk has a good point about his teammates.

That evil one eyed monster.

Allura's "we're a team".

Keith apologises to Allura and tells his teammates these events that has brought them together as friends. Aww.

Team Voltron prepare to take down the one eyed creature.

The creature is defeated.

Form Voltron!

Voltron takes down the storms.

They're reaching Earth.

Five episodes and they're returning back home.

"The Last Stand, Part 1"

Pidge attempts to send her message to her father.

The Galra have invaded Earth, likely the Purification of Fire from Sendak.

Flashback from four years ago.

Sam is told by Admiral Sanda some news.

Sam reunites with his wife Colleen and tells her everything after his capture.

Sanda tells Sam not to send a message to tell Voltron yet but Colleen is not having it.

I can see Pidge got her attitude from her mother.

Sanda tells the Holts that alien life has to be covered up for now.

Colleen tells Sanda that if Sam goes, she'll go with him.

Sam talking about Zarkon and reveals his plans.

Sanda's "Quintessence?"

Sam Holt is a legend.

Iverson pronounces Shiro's first name as Takeshi and recapping events of the first episode.

"War is coming."

Sanda is sceptical of Sam's plans and such.

Sam sends a message to Team Voltron.

Colleen has cut her hair short.

Sam talking about the crystals.

The best pilots in the Galaxy Garrison are James Griffin, Officers Rizavi (I'm suspecting that she's of Arab descent, given her last name), Kinkade (first black character in VLD), Leifsdottir (she's of Nordic descent).

The Garrison pilots are astonished at Sam's own shuttle pod.

Man, the ships look like something coming out of Star Wars.

A year later, the Garrison pilots are taking some friendly actions.

Colleen tells Sam that Matt's contacted them.

Matt tells his parents that Voltron disappeared and yep, Acxa was right that the Coalition haven't heard from them for three years.

Matt also tells his father several members of the BOM and the Coalition have been hunted.

IGF Atlas.

Colleen Holt is a badass mother like Krolia.

Colleen and Sam sends a message to the citizens of Earth and reveals the truth about the Kerberos mission along with showing the existence of Voltron.

Hunk's family appears and his uncle is called Filo.

Lance's family appears.

Sam calls out Sanda. He's got a point and I was wrong. Iverson is actually a good guy.

This is bad. This is really bad as Galra ships reach Earth.

This is some serious stuff.

Who voices Colleen? Renee Faia and Zehra Fazal voices Rizavi. I have a feeling that it is indeed Lotor's voice actor voicing James.

#voltron legendary defender season 7 #vld s7 spoilers

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the-lightning-strikes-again · 4 years ago

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Review Replies for The Second Law Chapter 14

Thanks to the following awesome people for reviewing my Lotura fic, The Second Law, last chapter: LunarMagnolia, Geeeny, Rosenthorne, EllieDoll, mutedtempest, AfroditeOhki, NickyADon, Paranomrally_Normal, Krisari, TiffanyBlue, Espanholina, CherryVelvetQueen, Brynn, RogueSareth, Star-gazer, DestiniesEntwined, UltraFirelily, mintpearlvoice, graciebuns, Ecrire_Call_me_ment, MystiTrinqua, Qwennie, and Smallblaa!

You can read individual review replies below! :)

LunarMagnolia: Ahhh omg thank you so much for your very kind and extended review! Yaaas, let the princess be cared for! She needs it so much, omg. And guh, I’m so happy you enjoy the banter among the various characters! Thank you as always for your support!

Geeeny: Oh my goodness, words cannot describe how much that means to me, bless! Thank you for continuing to read and review TSL!

Rosenthorne: Thank you for your review! Yes, lots of things are in a bit of a disarray at the moment, haha—definitely a system problem in this story. XD And ahh thanks for your vote! This upcoming chapter is a little shorter, so I hope that works better for you.

EllieDoll: Ahh, thank you so much for your thoughts here. I try really hard to make an immersive experience! But yoooo valid to be suspicious of wild lurking Haggars! Yaas, Lotor and Allura both are so precious, I love them. And bwahaha omg, an “annual” mind-sex jamboree celebration, complete with banners and marketing materials. XD As always, thank you so much for your support!

Mutedtempest: Yoooo I think you got a good point about Allura protesting too much about that druid mind-meld being comparable to sex, loll. But yeah, there’s definitely a lot of tensions, and I’m hoping to grapple with those while also trying to move forward/beyond them too. So we’ll see where this next chapter takes us there, haha. Again, thank you so much for your support on this story. It really means a lot!

AfroditeOhki: “Taken by milkshakes, granola bars, and whatever mind-sex jamborees” LOLL. This comment made me giggle so much. Thank you for coming back to this story and reviewing it!

NickyADon: Oof, you bring up a really good point about maybe why Allura hurt/comfort isn’t so often seen in the archive. Although loll perhaps even this past chapter still counts as whump, since that can include a character getting sick. XD TSL has spent a lot of time focusing on Lotor’s ailments, so I definitely wanted to take an opportunity to explore Allura’s physical and mental state after so much has happened. Either way, I’m so happy you’re still enjoying this story!! I really enjoy the challenge of trying to hold in tension all of the different characters and their perceptions. And guh, yaaas, I love the generals! I’m looking forward to seeing more of them and seeing our renewed Alliance come to form! Thank you again so much!

Paranormally_Normal: Thank you, dear, for reading and reviewing! It’s not a baby, but it’s definitely in reference to something really important! This next chapter starts to unravel that mystery a little bit more. Thank you again!

Krisari: Ahhh, thank you so much for continuing to hang out in this fandom space, even though it definitely does feel a lot quieter. I’m doing what I can to make sure that Lotura fandom doesn’t die, haha. And I feel very inspired by your review! To answer your question, I do have a short reference to Allura’s struggle in the upcoming chapter. I do think, in speaking of the humanity of Team Voltron, that if Haggar hadn’t interfered, they would have likely put Lotor back in his s5 shame tube and worked out some kind of justice/trial to determine next best steps. That’s what Coran refers to in the last chapter, anyway. It seems like Haggar’s interference really heightened tensions in a big way, and that even Lotor has some blame for creating an unwinnable situation too….But yeah, haha. Lots of tensions and problems to grapple with, but also hopefully more hope than what was provided in canon! And thank you again for your reviews!

TiffanyBlue: Bless, thank you so much for that very high compliment! This story is two years old now, and I’m so humbled and appreciative that you’ve continued to return to it and provide feedback and support. It means a lot! And yaaas, oh man, the mind-share might halfway have been a plot device so I wouldn’t have to grapple with a massive retailing, but the more I got into it, the more I loved the idea that Allura and Lotor could feel each other’s emotions and the genuine character of their memories. And yaaas, Allura is a bab and deserves care too. Thank you so much for your review!

Espanholina: Ahh thank you so much for reading and reviewing! I’d love to get to the point of reconciliation and defeating that nasty witch, haha. This upcoming chapter might help to move us in that direction! As always, I appreciate your support!

CherryVelvetQueen: Yoo thank you for all of those kudos and for your review as well! I have hopes of seeing it through to its completion, so I hope this upcoming and future chapters can continue to meet your expectations for it. Thank you so much for your support!

Brynn: Words cannot describe how very thankful I am for not just your review of this past chapter but also for your reviews of all the entire story as well! This year has been quite the mind-twist between the COVID pandemic and several other disasters, but your reviews throughout March and April helped to inspire me and give me something to look forward to. So thank you again! To answer your Chapter 14 question (also yaaas I love Zethrid so much too!), I did end up doing a little scientific research into planetary atmospheres and the conditions that upset them. So I tried to integrate that as best as I could as a salute to the intelligence of Pidge and Hunk’s characters! But of course I’m no expert, haha. Regarding your Chapter 1 review, oof, it was definitely haunting for me as well to think about the chapter 1 Lotor clones after what they showed of Lotor in season 8, guh. And yaas, omg we definitely got robbed of Lotor interacting with Earth culture, but I hope to remedy that in several ways in this story! Hunk and Romelle mean a lot to me too, so I’m so happy that you enjoy what they bring to this story. They really feel like underutilized characters in a lot of ways. And thanks so much for your thoughts on how I write Lance in this story! He’s definitely a squirrely character by virtue of how he’s presented in the canon show. I really wanted him to exhibit less toxic behaviors and more supporting behaviors for his team and especially with Allura and with her interests. ALSO YAS, CATCH ME LAUGHING IN MINIMUM WAGE TOO, lol. Anyways, thank you so much for your reviews and your support! It means so much!

RogueSareth: I feel like in so many books and shows, the battle aftermath gets totally glossed over? So I really wanted to give a nod to that, because I think even the aftermath can show something important about our characters! I’m thankful you enjoyed that addition! And thank you so much for your ongoing support with this story!

Star-gazer: Thank you for your review and for continuing to read TSL!! It means a lot!

DestiniesEntwined: Wow thank you for all of your wonderful thoughts and high compliments here! I feel you, on desperately needing a break from all that high-tension battle, haha. I think this next chapter will also function as a “rest” chapter too. And ahhh, yaas, the mind share was so fun! I really do take a lot of interest in the similarities and differences between “clonetor” and “original/TSL Lotor.” I definitely want them to feel similar, but that there’s these behavior patterns that are informed by their unique experiences?? And ahhh thank you for your thoughts on chapter length as well! This next one is a little more condensed and not so long, so hopefully that better fits the amount of content you like to read at one time. Thank you again! And yes, I’m doing much better at this point—just trying to not get sick again in this COVID world, lol.

Ultrafirelily: Oh my goodness, I feel the same way! Like, why didn’t Lotor take two seconds to explain why he just assassinated Narti in front of everyone? Canon bothers me for a lot of reasons, lol, and that’s definitely one. To that point, I love the generals as well! And yeahh, I definitely feel like clonetor would have had a reason of some kind for why he did what he did. Here’s to hoping we can grapple with that a bit in this story. Thank you so much for your ongoing reviews and support, especially considering that this story is now 2 years old. It means a lot!

Mintpearlvoice: Thank you so much for reading and reviewing, dear! I appreciate it!

Graciebuns: As always, your reactions to these chapters just uplift my whole spirit! Thank you dear! I really liked the potential of Shadam, even the messy tension between them, so I hope to close the loop on that in some way. And yaaas, omg Lotura in this fic pleasantly frustrates me because I just want to smash them together in a kiss, but there’s so much tension between them as well! We definitely know they’ve got something going on per all that nsfw hand-holding and mind-sex, and TSL being jealous of VLD Lotor, though. XD And the beginning of dat “bond claim” is definitely gonna come back, haha. Thank you again for all of your reviews and support. I’m very grateful!

Ecrire_Call_me_ment: Ahh thank you for your review and for checking out this story in the midst of your Voltron nostalgia! I really love Zethrid, too. I feel like her character wasn’t really explored to the extent that I would have loved. I’m hoping to show more of her in future chapters. Thank you again~

MystiTrinqua: I’m so happy that this story could function to make your day better! And oof, yeah I really enjoy writing Pidge in this story, haha. I catch feelings a lot for these paladins, omg a;sdfa;adjlf. Anyway, thank you so much for your reviews and your support both on AO3 and on tumblr! It means a lot!

Qwennie: Thank you for reading and reviewing! I appreciate it!

Smallblaa: Oh wow, what a treat to see your name appear again! I hope you made it okay through the twitter bullying and through your schooling as well. Life can definitely be tough sometimes! And I definitely understand how current circumstances can beat a person down even more right now. I fight that a lot too. So I really appreciate you taking a chance to come back to this story and read and review it. Thank you, thank you!!

#The Second Law #Review Replies #guh thankie so much #i really appreciate it y'all #your feedback has kept me going #I can't believe this story is 2 years old now!#thank you for supporting my work!

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