@@lilyehrlichman3390 is that the one where they switch who pilots which lion almost every episode and there’re several combinations for forming Voltron? I can’t remember the name of it, I just remember a few specific details 😅
Hot take Shiro should have either stayed dead or not died in the first place. His original counterpart from Golion only existed to die in the early episodes and get replace by Alura's Golion counterpart (or just get injured in the Voltron version). They seemed to want to keep Shiro around while still preserving the "dies to be replaced" aspect of his character and that just made things a mess.
The issue is that if shiro had to die, it should have been in the first episode. Because they introduced things about shiro that would never ever be followed up on, and also felt like a waste of time because it wasn’t meant to go anywhere but to benefit Keith. For example, getting the black bayard would only benefit Keith and didn’t do anything for his character because it was never about Shiro getting his bayard back. It was about getting the Bayard back for Keith. Another point they introduced was Haggar saying Shiro could have been the empires greatest weapon. What did she mean by that? What were they doing with Shiro? What plans did Haggar have? We wouldn’t know because shiro’s dead and it would never be followed up on
My issue is that all the character moments and cool shit he does where actually just his evil clone. Devalues a lot of interesting stuff because it wasn't actually him.
@@BabyGirlTinyI see where you're coming from, but I also think that with more competent writers, having Shiro die after we know more about him didn't have to be a waste. They could've woven in Shiro's memory as a motivator for the remaining Paladins and let them all grow stronger together while still advancing the stories. As it stands, I feel like people's time was wasted anyway since we were following the "wrong" Shiro for a third of the show and no one in show seemed to give a shit about that and he spent the last third being separated from the rest of the team, which in light of this occurring _after_ he's revealed as gay is....not great optics. If nothing else, it would've killed the ship war in its tracks if he had kicked it for good and maybe spared every other fandom the ongoing age gap bullshit infesting we're dealing with now.
I actually agree with this, Shiro either needed to die or not budge, Allura's role in this version with the castle of lions also being a ship meant she didn't truly need a lion and Pidge was a girl in this series so we had a girl at a lion and another in a leadership position controlling another very powerful ship and calling shots from there, I honestly don't think Allura in blue did that much for her character other than make reference to the og but it has been a while since I last watched it, also idk if it's just me but like when the lion switch happened I didn't think it made much sense personality wise considering the lions in LD were sentient and had personalities of their own like black takes on the "natural born leader" which isn't Keith he had to learn to be a leader and wasn't really up for it in the way Shiro came to leadership naturally and Lance wasn't "difficult" and "temperamental" but that's just me. 🤷🏻♀️😅
The way Lotor's storyline concludes is _so_ frustrating to me. There was just so much ruined potential! The prince of his father's people, who slaughtered his mother's people, struggling to reconnect with his maternal heritage spiritually and personally, while also trying to eliminate his father's cruel influence and guide _their_ people towards redemption and all the opposition to that... it just sounded like such a cool story that I don't remember often seeing elsewhere. Like how _do_ you reconciliate one half of your identity with the other in such a scenario? And I knew not to get my hopes up, to expect all this to end cheaply because I don't trust the people behind The Legend of Korra to know how to deal with stories about oppressors vs oppressed and the spaces between, but Holy Shit. Lotor "rescuing" Altean survivors only to use them as guinea pigs in deadly, inhumane experiments?! That just felt like such a slap in the face.
What slap? Literally the first thing they showed you about Lotor is him being an asshole to his own people. That was his intro. In a show for 7 years olds. They told you he was evil from the very beginning.
@a.r.e.j.1693 1. He was sparring with his father's people, the ones going around being bad guys. I'm not too fussed if he was "mean" to them sometimes. 2. A character being mean to others in their introduction doesn't necessarily mean they are forever destined to be bad. Look at Zuko, for example. It's true that Lotor could be cruel at times, but that was part of the conflict. His father's treatment of him did still harden parts of his person. 3. Plenty of YTV7 show have smart and thoughtful writing. Once again, look at ATLA, for example. Also, acting like it was silly to expect a sci-fi show to do something smart or thoughtful about an interracial character's struggles with their heritage when that show was very much touching upon a lot of similar and related topics is very disingenuous.
I’ll never get over keith being fully prepared and literally a second away from killing himself to save them and they just never mention it again. Like buddy are you okay?
I know you barely mentioned Hunk because he barely gets any attention BUT my biggest issue with the show, personally, is the way he's treated. At the start of the show, he was my absolute favorite character, and in the first two seasons he's given nearly as much attention and development as everyone else. He has plenty to do and is more than just food/fat jokes (tho still too many fat jokes). As the seasons progress, aside from a couple of moments, he becomes JUST comic relief with nothing to do and it is so deeply frustrating. He never stopped being my favorite, I just got more and more indignant at the show for how they treated him. Most of the jokes made around him aren't even funny because, you know. Making fun of fat people is not funny.
this is ESPECIALLY true since it feels like fat people get treated as a joke. Hunk was a very important character for me from the get go, he was my favorite too, and I also associated myself with him for his looks and personality. It hurt a lot to not only see him being put on the sidelines, but also being made fun of. That was the worst part of voltron for me. It did not get better.
The treatment Lotor got infuriates me. Especially when we find out what his fate was. What a terrible message to give to kids that children of genocidal tyrants are and never will be better than their parents and they deserve the worst fate possible.
This show clearly is NOT for children. I would worry immensely if I knew any parents who were allowing children to watch this. Do you seriously think animation is only for younger audiences?
This is where I stopped the show. The lions and Voltron felt less important. The magic system and lore weren't getting developed and what little we got stopped making sense. Allura become a deus ex machina tool, and got a love story that was just used to screw her over later. The Shiro clone went from being his own person that the Black Lion deemed worthy, to a puppet that was killed off. Hunk got sidelined for comedy or convenient tech stuff. Lance got reduced to being annoying about Allura/Lotor. Coran was, there 😭 Pidge and Keith of course got the most development and got to find and build their families and it was all separate from the team. I had friends finish the series and they assured me it kept going downhill from there.
Same. This was what made me so disappointed in being a fan, as well as the toxic fans embarrassing themselves about it 😩😭 Voltron has so much potential, still tilted things wound up like this.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Keith and Shiro were my favourite characters, especially for their dynamic with each other amidst this crazy situation (not necessarily shipping, just that they were important to each other in some way like how the show made it seem) so the season 6 finale should have been exactly what I wanted...but I felt so so much less than I know I should have and I could tell then and there that the little things that had been bothering me up until then had eaten away at my investment in the show, not to mention my trust that the writers must know what they're doing. I liked the other main characters too, I liked the worldbuilding, I liked the way they were having to figure out the best way to save the universe because its not as easy as hitting a self destruct button in a single climactic battle, I liked the fun Sci fi ideas that they made their own versions of...and it all started going down the crapper in a lot of little but important ways and then also some much bigger ways and... It should have been a great finale for me especially and yet it was the final nail in the coffin and that's...really kind of tragic
the group separating from each other and feeling like they weren't friends or even a team anymore was what ruined the show. I would not have cared about anything else if the found family thing that they were going for was written well but it wasn't
And what's wild to me is that the show itself seems to acknowledge this in season 7 and I'm like....??? Okay, but lampshading this seven seasons in doesn't make this better, my dudes. If anything, it just makes the whole thing worse.
THIS!!!! Like I loved the beginning of the show for the found family, I never got heavy into shipping (not against it either, usually I love finding a ship in a show but this time I didn’t) and I was so disappointed to just see them….drift off from one another really for no good reason. The show started with “the gang is getting together!!!” so I feel like it’s almost misleading when the team starts just being like :| towards one another
@@KariIzumi1THIS!!! See, I wouldn’t have minded the arguing scene (especially since they were all starting to gang up on Keith for leaving them if I remember correctly) if they yk….BUILT UP TO THAT MOMENT!! But they didn’t. It could’ve been a good way to have them all come back after being separated for so many seasons but it was way too late. Sad to see how rushed everything was
I'm honestly still disappointed about the handling of Lotor's character. He showed such promise to be something between anti-hero and anti-villain while never quite stepping into either territory. It would've been so interesting to see him actually trying to run the Galra empire and having his relationship to the paladins slowly change, be it in a good or bad way. He could've developed in such interesting directions, but instead they made him do a fast turn into crazy territory and oh, look, he's killing Alteans and plans to genocide another entire race, so now we're justified in killing him off and never talking about him again. Let's focus on Haggar instead because clearly she's the character we should be invested in instead. Probably my biggest issue with the show.
Totally agree. Maybe I'm biased because he was a fav of mine back then but I think there was so many ways they could've written his character and they chose the most baffling one. I really liked his frenemy dynamic with the paladins and was really hoping his bonding moments with them meant he'd be redeemed or at least have a more interesting reason for betraying them and even feel guilty about it. It's cliche but it would've been much more satisfying to just redeem him after he learns about the power of friendship or something then revealing he's actually still evil and then killing him off just like that.
@@neilru5172 He could have easily became the 7th paladin/ranger and could have gotten a lion of his own. Voltron: legendary defender was basically Super Sentai/Power Rangers and it makes no sense why they didn't redeem his character and have him befriend the other Paladins.
@@neilru5172 They easily could have made Lortor the Alucard of Voltron. Him befriending the Paladins and helping them fight against his father. Lortor's journey of making up for his father's mistakes and dismantling his evil empire. He doesn't want or desire power or to be an emperor like his father before him. All he wants is to free the Galaxy from his father's evil tyranny/oppression.
@@neilru5172 The friendship dynamic between Lortor and the Paladins could have been genuine and heartfelt. His relationship with Allura should have been platonic and the two could have had a respect for each other. Lortor just needs some friends to guide him.
Makes me thankful Trollhunters tales of Arcadia didn’t suffer from a toxic fandom (at least I don’t think it did) since that show came out the same year as Voltron. Although the writing like Voltron took an unfortunate nose dive… mostly in the last few minutes of the “Finale” movie. But that’s a story for another time.
@@ShizuruRavenRobin026 only for you to stumble upon the movie (Rise of Titans) that completely erases Everything that was established in the past three shows
i thought it was soooooo weird that season 2 had keith say "i know who i am, im a paladin of voltron" only for him to quit being a paladin to join the blade. i thought that was a really unnecessary jerking around bc it seemed like the prod team didn't know where to put him since it seemed execs wanted shiro to return bc of merch and promo stuff.
Voltron is such a sad thing for me to look back on. Because I loved it so much but almost all of my memories of that experience are just...bad. I don't like the way the show made me act, the series itself was just a massive disappointment...there's just not much good there for me at all. It's such a shame
With all respect, while I share in the disappointment in this show, we all chose how we behaved about it. Me slagging off everyone who criticized that very blatant bait wth Adam just because it appeared to be the way for Sheith to become canon as a bitter Klance anti was absolutely a choice and no one put a gun to my head to do that. So too was doxxing other fans over ages that were never confirmed or harassing creators or both sides highjacking every discussion that people of color tried to have about Allura's death into a discussion about dirty their ship was done. We can't blame creatives for own feelings about their stories, regardless of our opinions on the writing, but we should all take our experience with this cursed fandom as a learning opportunity to do better in future fandoms.
You imaging been a fan a Tales of Arcadia and all it takes is one--Just ONE movie to ruin the entire franchise for you. All the money spend on junk food to watch episodes of those shows and the time my and my sister invested, all for nothing matter at the end.
Please let everyone know how the entire show only ran for 2.5 years! That plays a lot into how insane the fandom was and the fatigue people were feeling towards the end.
I was always suspicious of Lotor from the get go, mainly because he lacked any backstory or flashbacks. Lotor is the writers attempt at a Zuko character, mid-series betrayal included, but he never had the set-up to even be a discount Zuko. All his actions were suspicious, he helped the Paladins but it always felt like a "I help you but it also helps me" kinda way. He never had any inherently selfless acts so it didn't surprise me when he turned out to be evil. His forced romance with Allura was so gross and disturbing because it was always going to end in betrayal.
@LieutenantOzarAnThaceDoneDirty Sorry, but Lotor/Allura it's too gross to have ever existed in the first place, the only option was corrupting him off
The cloning is WORSE than you realize.... the crappy D&D episode adds real existential horror to this plotline. In the D&D episode, it's CLEAR as f'kn daylight... that clone Shiro is a person all his own right... and hot damn he WANTS to be a f'kn PALADIN come hell or high water...... Then we just merc him and override him with original shiro cause... clone's aren't people I guess?
At the time, a lot of people figured out that Shiro was a clone pretty quick. The problem i had was how it was handled. I pretty much dropped the show because of it and a bunch of small things adding up.
To this day I am still upset at the way they killed Lotor off :( he had so much potential and even if his actions could never be redeemed , I feel he should've willingly admitted his faults rather than just go mad with power and die :/
The real injustice for Lotor as a character is that that statement above was all majority of the audience saw for his final moments, when in all actuality, it was so much deeper than that. Did you never think it was weird that the Paladins just blindly believed this Altean woman at face value and have such a strong, emotional reaction to it that they immediately wrote Lotor - who had been a friend and ally to this point - off as evil without so much as a second chance? That's not really something that you do with allies; you give them the opportunity to explain. Despite being immediately attacked and thrown under the bus by all of the Paladins, Allura included, Lotor still tried his best to keep calm and REASON with Allura and the Paladins... Until Allura compared him to his father. That was when Lotor broke and started to descend into madness. Lotor's character is ingeniously thought out and complex. He has subtle physical queues and lots - and I do mean lots - of foreshadowing for character growth. If you re-watch the series from start to finish, you'll see them but may not even realize that they're there. He was born to corrupted parents, both of whom abused him. In season 8, he fought to protect a planet of people from his father. Even begged him to NOT blow up the planet and watched in sheer horror when Zarkon blew it up anyway to punish him. Lotor became a banished prince forced to live in his fathers' shadow. A child of mixed heritage; hated by one and unknown by the other. When Romelle joins up, the audience doesn't even consider the fact that she's recalling things from her perspective and she probably doesn't have the whole, proper picture. Stop and consider the facts: Lotor was infatuated with Altean culture and was visibly at his happiest when he was able to share that with Allura. That wasn't an act. Even when he went mad, he explicitly said that he wanted to destroy the GALRA - not the Alteans. He asked the Paladins to judge him not by his race but by his character, and he didn't reveal the fact that he was half-altean until later on so that his heritage had no sway what-so-ever over Allura and the team coming to trust and open up to him. And even more prominently, Lotor was very, very focused on acquiring a steady resource of quintessence. If he -had- a steady supply by draining Alteans of that resource, why bother looking for another source? Why bother to keep the garden of Alteans so secret, so hidden if all he was doing was using them for nefarious purposes? And why sacrifice the people - your own people (Lotor takes great pride in his Altean side; he sees his mixed blood as a strength where other Galra see it as a weakness) for that matter - for that matter when you have no ill will towards them? No one even stopped to consider the fact that Romelle could be WRONG, and/or that she misunderstood what was happening because of her brother. All of those pilots were willing volunteers and nothing happened to them UNTIL they became pilots. You have to remember that this place was super, super hidden but that Zarkon's forces were everywhere and were still a big threat at the time. The only defense they could've have were the suites they piloted. What if the suits themselves needed a very specific power source that was drained from the pilots that used them? All of those withered people weren't corpses. They weren't tossed aside. They were in TANKS. Romelle's brother was STILL in a tank when they went to that faciility. Why would those people be in tanks if their energy had already been harvested? Why risk being discovered and not dispose of them? Because the tanks they were in were meant to SAVE them. They'd been stripped of the one resource that Lotor had always been shown to be hellbent on finding a supply of. A resource he said was "invaluable" and would be great for his people - notably never saying the Galra explicitly in the same breath. Because it wasn't for the Galra or his father's empire. Perhaps he was so driven to find it to use it to RESTORE the Alteans, and give the suits a better power source so that they wouldn't feed from their pilots. He absolutely was all about saving the Altean race. And no one, not even his allies or the woman that grew to have feelings for him, gave him so much as the benefit of the doubt because of who his father was. His father. His abuser. There is almost nothing more hurtful or damning for a victim than to be compared to their abuser. The look on Lotor's face after Allura says it all: He's mortified. Heartbroken. Shattered. And it's in that vulnerable, emotional state that he gives in and lets the madness take him. Both he and Allura were done so damn dirty by this show and the way that they were handled - especially Lotor - still hurts to this day.
@@Noxazema yeaa, Tbh i never rewatched the show , I just watched it as it aired. I always felt like Lotor's actions werent done out of some evil or selfish intent but had no way of justifying it and the fandom always blows up at you when you try to justfiy "geno*ide" (even tho it clearly wasn't what he was doing but you get it)... thank you for sharing your analysis
I remember also rolling my eyes when it was revealed Shiro was cloned (already had my theories that he was a clone before the reveal), but mostly bc I had tsubasa ptsd w clones making me confused. However, that was both my favorite and most frustrating episode bc I liked the emotional weight from the fight between Shiro and Keith, and I liked those little moments where Keith shows some of his galra side, but then they didn't do more about that, and the next episode just left me "meh". Sometimes I regret continuing the show post s6 bc imo that was the last good we got from this show, since for the next seasons was when it all went downhill, the writers from the previous seasons left and new writers came in, which it showed, especially on the last season.
But doesn't that mean that the clone came out of the tube, and they chopped his arm off on the exact same place and put the prosthesis of a dead guy on him... Was it even clean when they put it on?
It is very, very funny seeing the interviews and watching the crew backpedal on their bullshit. Knowing what we know now, this is very, very cathartic.
Lived with it for too long, it's just habit at this point. I still go by my internet name because I used for all of high school it's just a part of me at this point
I’m realizing now that I watched more of this show than I remember. I thought I stopped after like season 3 but I guess since these seasons were so short I just didn’t realize I watched until 6. The like two years this show ran felt like a decade lol
if you liked it, can you explain how being stuck in solitary confinement for years with his mom made keith suddenly become a great leader when before he had no leadership skills?
Lotor was such a huge missed opportunity and biggest acts of character assassination I've seen. He had so much character potential, he could've been the next ZUKO.But they wasted it all, they could've turn him into an interesting anti hero that progresses into a hero. But no they just make him evil the writers knew they missed up by killing Zarkon to early. And instead of bringing him back, they make Lotor the villain and they don't even do that right. His transformation into a villain isn't even done in a natural progression. He just turns evil by going crazy with quintessence poisoning and wants to kill the Alteans and Golra. Really? There's so much they could've done with Lotor. Say Lotor works with the Paladins the take the throne from his father to make things better for half blood Golra. And uncover the truth about his past specifically his mothers identity.He soon discovers his mother was altean and he tries to learn more about his heritage. Lotor discovers a group of Altean survivers that were in cryo sleep on a lost space shift, he helps them find a home. He also tries to discover a new way of harvesting quintessence by using Alteans . Lotor ends up killing them but by accident,he is morally conflicted and then his father discovers them and kills more Alteans. Lotor gets them to safety by contacting the Blade of marmora for help and joins the Paladins to Atone for his crimes. He befriends the Paladins,gets with Allura and he EVENTUALLY kills Zarkon.
The fact you called out zarkon simps , brilliant also I kinda think he's hot too.Even though you don't like the filler episodes, the Coran one was just funny especially with that line "now get in the tight suit." Also it's should have been me with Lotor, and yes I like his psycho phase.
They were made as three seasons, Netflix cut them up to have more releases. It's the predecessor of "season x part one and part 2". (Mind you not defending this mess, just clarifying.)
I had so much faith in Voltron as a sweet naive child and for the most part, even the space magic voodoo made sense. But when they revealed Shiro was a clone I, too, rolled my eyes because even though it was entirely planned ahead, it felt so out of nowhere and out of place. Shiro kept getting varying amount of limited screentime to the point where I forgot that he was an integral part of the Voltron team while being the black paladin. The whole ordeal could have worked if he just had more screentime and development outside of being "the leader." Then the twist would be expected but also genuinely surprising since he could be established as "human" and not a lifeless husk that already felt like a clone
I think the point about the team no longer being a team is what really got to me in souring the story, like, the plot and pacing became mote and more of a mess, but i honestly wouldnt have minded that as much if the core group were still genuinely a team with their bond (minus shiro clone stuff) in tact,,, like, im biased bc keith was one of my fav characters, but with the whole going off to the blade thing, and them him havjng years time skip with his mom,, it felt like he wasnt really part of the group anymore,, and with the others too, thwy just felt less and less genuinely like friends and more like coworkers in trying to fix the universe,,, and the plot wouldnt have been perfect if they were still a team,, but i think itd be fine ish enough(until the very end where it just nose dives), but with them not really being a team anymore, it just sabotages the story that much more,, things dont feel cohesive, the pacing is rushed, and the characters that used to geound us in the story no longer feel important or like they matter, both to each other, to the writers in terms of their character and to us, despite their theoretical plot importance, they feel hollow and empty without their bonds and relationships and interaction and stuff,, its really a let down after how great the show started out
Speaking as a long time soap opera enjoyer, I can attest that as long as you give people good, solid characterization, they will follow their faves down any rabbit hole the writers put them through. An example of this is _Archer,_ which in its 13 season run spent 4 years as a spy agency, season 5 with its cast as drug smugglers, back again with spying for Season 6 before becoming a detective agency, which ended with Archer himself in a coma, which then gave us three straight seasons of the show as literal AU fanfiction in WWII, the Jungle and outer space before I think it went back to spying again (I dropped off by then so I dunno what happened). That's an extreme example but hey, 13 seasons is a helluva run for any show in the streaming era but the characters all worked together well in all those seasons 🤷♀️ But that's a lotta words to say people come in for the premise but it's the characters and the bonds between them that keeps people coming back. And boy, I've never seen a show crash and burn on impact on this the way this one has, much less one in kids animation. It's gonna be really interesting when all the traumatized kiddos who grew up in this show get into positions of running their own shows to see how that influenced writing of other series from here on our. 👀
Pidge never even had any meaningful conversations or bond with Allura and Keith, the whole team felt like coworkers instead of found family and all just barely tolerated each other. The only two I could see a deep bond with was Keith and Shiro & he was a clone for the majority of the time, and they had to juggle both of them being the protagonist doing their own thing after the first few seasons. Just poor planning everywhere.
@@viheart Voltron legendary defender is an example of a show that should have ended early in its series run like around season 2 or 3 rather than continue on past that point.
To be fair to the clone twist in the black paladins episode, I remember the day season 3 released and within 24 hours of it hitting netflix most of the fandom agreed that the Shiro they found was a clone. We were all just waiting for the shoe to drop.
To be fair, I am not at all surprised that Zarkon might've gone to war over ideological differences with Altea's culture and his own because that's what he was doing with Blaytz when they first met. Alfor stepped in and stopped them from fighting their on-again-off-again war and it was really only a matter of time before things went bad, especially if Zarkon got sick of basically kowtowing to Alfor's commands and whims.
S6 has a lot of issues, but everything from the Shiro/Keith fight up to Lotor's defeat is easily and without competition the most emotionally resonant sequence in the show for me, which allows me to be very forgiving to its faults. That fight and its immediate fallout is the singular reason I still have fond memories of watching VLD to this day, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to give it up even if it meant the writing for S5/6 was less fractured. That being said, I'd have been fine stopping my watch after that sequence. VLD never hit those highs again for me, the writing remained uneven (we got no followup to the clone plot at all? They /killed/ the clone that had worked as their teammate for over a season and no one cared?), and the tone shift that followed was so strong (as was the change in character focus to the MFE pilots once they hit Earth) that it didn't feel like the same show anymore. I also didn't like that Shiro was revealed gay at the start of S7 and then he immediately stopped having any form of meaningful interaction with any of the other paladins. It likely wasn't intentional, and I recognize I am more sensitive to it than others, but it came across as mildly homophobic. It wasn't just Shiro, though; the bonds between everyone on the team began to suffer as the team split in in the S4-5 era, and it seemed to only get worse, with S7-8 being the breaking point for many. I think that if the focus had remained on everyone growing as people and working together the show would be remembered more fondly.
@@BabyGirlTiny Well, one version of Shiro was, yes. But the clone believed himself to be Shiro and had his memories, so I count him as a Shiro as well. It was clear that he was important to the team dynamic even if the OG wasn't there, and the plot didn't throw out his bond with everyone else, which was my main complaint in S7 and on. EDIT: Oh also, OG Shiro did connect with Keith meaningfully in S6 through the astral plane and had that one interaction in the season before with Lance that showed Lance cared about Shiro too, so there was that.
@@WolfmonLigerohe wasn’t important to the team dynamic because he added nothing t to said team dynamic. He didn’t even have a relationship with anyone but Keith. He wasn’t this perfect untouchable leader either and it’s not like everything was easy when shiro was around.
You're allowed to feel the clone added nothing to the story or the team dynamic. I do not agree, but I'm not going to try to convince you that Shiro's clone and the clone's character was meaningful to the team dynamic and story if you truly feel he wasn't. Regardless -- my main complaint was simply that I love Shiro as a character and feel that the later seasons did him disservice because they severed him emotionally from the Paladins. I think we have the same complaint, overall. We simply disagree about when that split occurred.
I’m so glad someone else said this 🙌 I felt like the reveal was so late and almost so awkward from what I remember and afterwards it feels like Shiro is COMPLETELY detached from them, which I didn’t even think he could get farther away before it happened 🤷 like just make a quick reference to his bf/partner at the beginning and continue to story as normal since bf/partner obviously isn’t there currently
As a Shiro fan, I really wanted him to relax,, take time off, literally take a break, cuz the writers were putting him through the ringer. It was like watching a veteran coworker not take their 30min break because every time they try a rush of customers wanting to check out and in order to lessen the stress for everyone, they stay through their break. And considering the differences between the past versions of his character, honestly it was nice having some focus on him but gosh did they really put ALOT of focus on him. A "that's enough slices" moment.
Except they didn’t out a lot of focus on him lol. They put minimal focus on a clone that added nothing to shiro’s character or the story. You can say they focused on the clone, but nothing substantial came about it
So true, I was more in the mind set that he wasn't an interesting character at all in the original series. And unfortunately i do mush both Shiros together to just be Shiro squared 😅 so anything regarding either Shiro is more attention than I thought his character(s) was going to get
if i remember correctly, netflix didn't renew more seasons on a whim as they went, they ordered a set amount of episodes (78) from the start. thats how they released so many episodes with complicated animation in only 2 years, a lot of preproduction was done before hand......it just makes the weird pacing worse in a way, like they knew exactly how much time they had to fill and yet.
No one agrees on what constitutes as a "monster" in the monsterflipper community, but it's widely accepted that gatekeeping is not the vibe. So in a 1-10 scale where 1 is for very human-looking monsters that monsterfrackers often include under the definition such as vampires that just look like pale, pointy-eared, gaunt-faced people, and 10 is for anything incomprehensible such as eldritch horrors, the experience of going through something truly eldritch itself, or carbon monoxide poisoning as a whole (w'hole' lol). This is just the scale I personally have in mind, other monsterfudgers might have differing opinions. With that insanity aside, I'd say Zarkon is somewhere between 3-4. He's a very tall humanoid alien with a face that can emote like a human (though I think him being zoinked with Quintessence probably made him less expressive as a person). His face doesn't look *as* human as the regular Galran, of which I put at 2.5 in the scale. Zarkon's extra points comes from the fact that he even looks different among his alien race. We don't know what his anatomy underneath is like and frankly I don't care to theorize about what kind of schlanger he'd have but we can assume it's compatible with humans as-- well, Keith exists. So. I don't know how to close this off. Yeah sure some monsterfwunger out there probably consider him a Daddy and would try to give Lotor half-siblings or something. Daddy rating (independent from the monsterfcuker scale) is probably a good 9/10 as I saw someone said in this comments section. As for me I'm gonna jump off a cliff or something.
I love Voltron, but the later production, the dropped ideas, and that sad ending were frustrating. I hope a sequel series or film that brings Allura back is considered someday. Lance and Allura deserved a happy ending.
Dreamworks lost the rights to make new material back in 2020. Rumor is the rights are with Amazon for a live action movie, and everyone is adamant it will have zero to do with VLD.
@@Dynaman21 Amazon's recent track record with adaptations has been pretty awful and it's clear they will probably get someone who wasn't a fan of the original series to direct and write series. Also I don't expect them to put any effort into the CGI or any of the acting/writing.
@@Dynaman21 Live action adaptations of animation especially anime always have a tendency to be terrible. The live action anime curse only recently was broken with one piece on Netflix BUT then was immediately tarnished with the knights of the zodiac movie and Yu Hakusho series No one is hopeful for the upcoming Gundam live action movie.
One thing that I think was better in Voltron: Legendary Defender, was that In the Voltron: Defender of the Universe (the 1984-1985 original) the voice acting was kinda janky, ESPECIALLY for Sven and Lotor. In Voltron Force (2011 show) it got better though even if lotor kept on getting revived every time he died in Voltron force. Also in the original (which there are a lot of differences to legendary defender), the ending was essentially, lotor is crowned king, Voltron k!lls Zarkon, Haggar secretly helps Voltron defeat Lotor’s forces because she thinks he’s pathetic for not facing Voltron on his own, haggar reveals that Lotor and Allura are actually relation and Lotor k!lls Haggar’s cat in retalience (he was romantically obsessed with Allura majorly for some episodes), and then Sven almost k!lls Lotor. And then Voltron: The Third Dimension happened, it was 3D.
Glad you came back for this one because the final seasons left me with so much frustration every time I compared them to what made me fall in love with the earlier seasons.
Lotor was undoubtedly the coolest and most fleshed out character in the whole Voltron series. What they did to him at the end was dirty and I wished they could've gotten more out of him. So much potential, so much awesomeness and build up, wasted.
If I remember right, they kinda teased the clone shiro thing in the DND episode with shiro just making a clone of his character that died, which was pretty funny either way
One thing id note for the clone thing which i think is probably part of why i found that part so hype and didnt have a problem with the pacing of it,, is that back in like season 3 if you were in the fandom, youd have seen the thing about kuron or whatever meaning clone, so the idea was already kinda out there and foreshadowed way in advance, so for me it felt like a payoff of heavy handed foreshadowing that had been hanging in the air for seasons,, and it was kinda an epic fight with keith and shiro,,,, also i never watched star wars,, so felt new to me
Absolutely agree, most of fandom seemed to be on the same page only a few hours after season 3 dropped. Barely over enough time to have watched the full season had past and we were all like “so somethings wrong with shiro right? Clone??”
9:30 Zarkon for me personally would be like. a solid 9. Appearance slays, and you already mentioned the voice. Probably the only thing holding him back from a full 10/10 is a lack of extra-ness(though that's just my taste). But I do also feel adding extra to his design would also be too much and it just wouldn't be Zarkon anymore, you know? So this is probs about how high he would get for me. You're welcome.
Zarkon is indeed not Daddy. But Adam is an Angel and I'll never forget how they literally murdered him just to make Shiro sad and then it didn't even matter because they made Shiro hook up with some rando anyways.
Cloned shiro is where I nearly dropped the show originally. I decided in the end I wanted to see where the train wreck went, but it was so so so so painful to get through the rest of the show.
the 'do not enter door' bits are the only thing that got me through this video. i'm even more glad i stopped watching voltron when i did. just watching this was painful.
Voltron really was a flashbang of a first season. I watched until the end of season 1, then never heard when season 2 came out and missed the boat. Thank god honestly, because i know younger me wouldve been insane and mentally ill about it
this may just be bc i had huge (and still have residual) shiro brainworms and he was my blorbo for so long..... but if the writers wanted to just use him as a "mentor figure to kill for keith pain and team inspiration" why make him so compelling? why give him a mysterious past, unresolved trauma we as an audience want to see his journey to overcome? scenes where that repressed trauma is slowly creeping up on him the more he ignores it that hints at a future storyline where it catches up to him and he has to face it? why give him this role as a young guy who just came back from literal hell trying figure his own shit out but by proxy of being the oldest is thrust into a leader role and takes that role in stride because of his naturally nurturing nature despite barely hanging on himself and feeling like he has no one to lean on? why have give him the most natural and impactful relationships with some of the other paladins (keith and pidge) as well as an intense connection to Matt, a character whom the locating of is a constant b-plot journey for several seasons and is the only other person who experienced Galra prison camp so besides pidge the person we wanna see him reunite with most is, you guess it, Shiro? why make us care about him as an individual with a bunch of set up potential journeys that we naturally want to see resolutions to if he was just meant to be a characters whos emotional attachment to the audience was only through his importance to the other characters? all of these compelling traits and hinted arcs are all introduced in like...s1 btw, before his original death was "supposed to happen" not to mention the amazing representation of him being a disabled asian dude with ptsd who was meant to be the cool strong leader but was also a repressed sweetheart who would prioritize everyone but himself basically why give what was supposed to be a disposable character his own individual intrigue and loose ended elements to then whine about how SUPER DUPER WEIRD AND ANNOYING it was that fans got "too attached" to this guy and that you couldn't kill him like u wanted to??? like hello, you set him up as one of the most important and intriguing members of team voltron and then were shocked that he became a fan favourite???? so the fact that his character was eventually reduced to cardboard and stripped of anything interesting is our fault because the fact that we liked this super likeable dude and didnt want him gone before his potential could be fully explored? ok. voltron is a gold mine of wasted potential but i think in shiro moreso than most because its a damn shame how much i could speculate on and glean from the early breadcrumbs about his character that was just unexplored
This was my headspace all those years ago, and still is, now that it’s been years and I’m finally touching Voltron again but like, only in the canon divergent way 😂 Bc Shiro was my darling, a lot of people’s darling - a really resonant, emotional one, BC GUESS WHAT, YOU GIVE A CHARACTER TRAUMA, KINDNESS (and hotness) AND PEOPLE WILL LATCH ONTO IT?? And even the writers, some of them ig, knew it? Coran’s line along the lines of “I’ll get rid of all of you, replace you with new Paladins, and the show will be better than ever before! …except for you Shiro, I’ll never replace you. You’re our most popular character!” (Except they still basically did by copy-pasting an awkward Keith over him, except Keith just feels off-kilter and unfinished after his convenient two-year-timeskip) Tbh I think one of my greatest grievances was that the show wanted to focus on the impact of war… and failed to deliver on that, emotionally. Whether out of restrictions, messed up plans, etc, they had a lot of opportunity to work with vulnerability and mental health and just kinda… pretend it’s a switch to turn on and off. A character is distressed, someone talks them up, we’re cool! The clone mess of S3-6 actually could’ve done something with trauma, funnily enough. I think I might’ve even looked at it then and thought they would. Why have Kuron become more and more affected by his mind-state (they could’ve even dropped the Haggar-migraines and just said, yeah, this happens on its own) if you talk about it once with Lance, leave it untouched, have it blow up, KILL THAT CLONE and give that arc no closure, and then… god it was so messed up. THIS is why I’m off making fan fiction ideas I probably won’t ever write but it helps me heal lmao
Everything about this show was a mess. The first few seasons were enjoyable despite the shipping discourse (which happened because of a lot of conflicting information from different official sources) but the way this felt like decades when it was only two years is incredible. Thank god it died.
The thing that frustrated me most about the Shiro clone plot was that it imo worsens the mess in season 8 with Honerva. Could she not simply clone her family with altered memories? She made multiple clone copies of Shiro in that huge facility (despite it being destroyed, there could easily be another cloning station somewhere else, this is a space empire). Why is intruding through alternate realities her go-to plan when the option of cloning seems far easier.
You got a point though 😂 Maybe she needed a direct reference? Like, they had experimented on Shiro for a year or so, and they really really don’t explain the process (which is probably a good thing bc for a “kid’s show” Voltron managed to get horribly dark and bleak). Something that bothered me more tbh, and maybe I’m also forgetting the last few seasons (and like yeah I definitely am) but also?? I do not recall it exactly but after all Haggar did - like, INCREDIBLY MESSED up things, and to their own? Specific? Friend? - they treated her kinder than people who treated them better?? And like? You’d think Shiro would’ve had SOME kind of greater say in the fight against her but for the life of me, except for that massive super-boosted mecha fight at the end of the show? He’s sidelined, and it’s like ok I guess no big deal
@@crystallion1269 yeah that bothered me as well. The way Shiro was shuffled to the background in later seasons was painful to see, especially when he's someone who has been deeply harmed by Honerva. It was almost like that got left behind after his consciousness got placed into his clone. The whole last season left me dazed and sad
Yes, I am that monster fudger who thinks Zarkon is an absolute Daddy™. His alternate version is what kept me holding on to the shipwreck that was seasons 7 & 8.
There are a few things that i had problems with. One was the ruined potential of Lotor. The other is just Allura in general. I loved Lotor and for them to ruin his potential was a slap in the face. As for Allura i just hated her getting her mits in Lance and I hated how mary sue her character felt
Oof, "mits in Lance" makes her sound like she was manipulating him/she's at fault for allurance. They both suffered as characters because of that nonsense. As for her being kind of a Mary Sue, I honestly don't even know what that means anymore, but I do think she was too powerful at times.
*screams into a pillow about Lotor* He was so interesting, like an actually well written character with multiple goals, and while i think they could have kept him on the anti hero route cause just being the villain is so boring. To have his story end by "He went crazy" just i scream...legit dropped the show at season 6...THE POTENTIAL RUINED I remember even saying at a con to a friend cause i was buying Voltron merch for another friend, i said something like "if Lotor doesn't come back im dropping the show" and the two in front of me in line started laughing and i overheard them go "Wow dropping the show cause your fave dies"....who has the last laugh now
I just hate the fact that the fandom turned so toxic. And listen to me when I say this. I love LGBTQIA representation. I’m Demisexual. But last minute representation is not well earned in my opinion. It’s rushed and emotionless. And Shiro should’ve been sexually ambiguous. Leave it to the fans to decide. Hell, I remember when I drew a fan piece of Shiro saying he was better as bisexual because of the shipping of him with Allura and Keith. Then someone said that I was “homophobic” for having him as bisexual. And this wasn’t on Twitter. It was on DeviantArt at the time. I obviously blocked that person. Bottom line. Because of the way the fandom went down. I keep my bisexual Shiro head canon to myself whenever I’m at anime conventions because I don’t want to start drama. And Voltron deserved so much better
(May contain spoilers for next seasons and ending) I'm so glad you are covering this show. A friend of mine was Hyped ASF back in a day and recommended it to me, it was a great boom for a lot of people, for me it was... fine. Especially first seasons were especially cooler for me, but the introduction of Lotor for Zarkon's case kinda made me feel bad. I loved Zarkon's past etc but somehow when he's son and especially later he's wife made actual fight with main team, it wasn't so engaging, even tho I didn't liked Shiro's Floating arm I loved Idea he was somehow 6th ranger cause he got his own Voltron alike Mech.
I think I stopped watching after season 7? Mostly because I saw spoilers for the ending on tumblr and lost all motivation to finish the show lmao. My biggest issue with the later seasons was the slow realization that some characters just..weren't going to get developed. Personally, character dynamics and relationships is the biggest thing I look for in the shows I enjoy, and seeing the Paladins devolve from a group of friends into people who barely even talked outside of missions was so upsetting. Plus, we ended up spending more and more time with characters I didn't really care about (like Lotor oop who said that). I think Hunk and Lance really suffered the most- Hunk definitely moreso, but Lance was my favorite so to me that was particularly upsetting. What's extra frustrating is there was SO MUCH potential for these characters. Lance has some really interesting hints about his flashy personality covering up some personal insecurities, and his desperate desire to be seen as important and valuable as both a teammate and a friend (and partner I guess of you do wanna get snippy shippy with it). I think he must get SOME development in s8 since he and Allura get together bur i doubt it was done well lmao. I look forward to you talking about it so I don't ever have to watch it, yay! One thing about the ending I still find endlessly amusing is them giving Lance Altean marks after Allura dies because like...Altean Lance was a really popular AU because Klance (which fun fact I have always pronounced Kay-lance not clance like most people) shippers liked the Galra/Altean enemies to lovers ship dynamic thing. Like. That had to be the reason right? I loved Altean Lance AUs but I never wanted to actually see it in the show. Same with Klance itself, actually. I thought it was a fun ship, but I never expected it to be Canon and, honestly, didn't really want it to be. Because the show was never about romantic love, it was about platonic connection. Wow, sorry for the long comment. I guess this show really did traumatize me. I used to daydream about future plot points in church because this show was airing when I was still forced to attend. Maybe the show sucks because God was punishing me for not going anymore, who knows.
14:07 that line makes Starkiller Base look good, and I believed that base on the grounds of they’d been planning that attack for years and it looks like the multiplanet attack takes a long time to make happen.
While I do disagree with a fair bit of your critiques as a fan of the show, I must say that this is a very well put together video and you’re one of the few people I seen using actual properly sourced interviews instead of fake rumours. Good job.
Holy Titan crap it's going to take me awhile to get through 8 seasons The show goes far back is freaking like 2016 what the hell mother of Titan what how how am I supposed to catch up on the show
Shiro being a clone was set in place from season 3, there's a lot of foreshadowing. I mean, you're right when you say it doesn't make any sense lol but it does at least explain why Haggar said Shiro would be "Our greatest weapon"
The episode count was always going to be 78 episodes in total. Seasons 3-6 were produced as two 13-episode seasons. Netflix simply chose to split them up further for release so they could release the episodes faster. The content of the episodes would still be the same and the pacing would still feel just as rushed as it turned out.
@@joyc.e.7511 The split happened after the episodes were already written and produced. Like with season 3, Netflix asked the writers which episodes they could release first, the writers said the first 7 episodes would feel more natural. The other 6 then got released later as "season 4". It's still the same 13 episodes that they wrote, nothing got changed content wise. So the drop in writing quality has nothing to do with the split.
when Lotor turned evil is when I lost my shit and stopped watching (btw lotor means villain in slovak, sooo) so this is all i have seen. so the rest will be a mystery for me
Actually, Honerva was already pregnant with Lotor when they went into the rift, died and were resurrected, so he definitely wasn't conceived after they became undead ;)
you laugh but the showrunners have legitimately said they had no idea how shiro was back or what his deal was. they just decided to figure it out later...
@@KariIzumi1 you know I would almost believe you if you told me they hadn't fully decided before they started making the episode where we actually see all the clones lol. nothing before we see them actually locks it down that shiro's not just being mindcontrolled.
Lotor is a lot like zuko, he was banished and abused as a kid, he’s like a zuko but with out the iroh, zuko was like him when he was evil but he had iroh to make him a better person and lotor had no one
Season 5-6 was where I dropped the show and just read what other fans who did watch the rest on what happened. I suppose it preserve my semi-positive view of the show while also not want to watch said show go in a dumpster fire. I had liked Lotor and would have liked seeing growth or change with his character instead of... this. His parents were only interesting in flashback on how they got to be the big bads, so having Hagger feel motherly affections when it's really way too late for it? It would have made more sense if she wanted to further manipulate Lotor for whatever scheme she had would been better. I do agree that the teamwork between the voltron paladins were lacking and almost nonexistent at this point. Too many ideas, characters, and directions and too little time is a bad combo for this show.
Voltron deciding to have less episodes per season I feel was a bad decision. With a growing cast, you need a good number of episodes per season to give everyone some spotlight. NGL the Filler Episodes in this show were my favorite and I kinda miss those kinds of Filler/Character-Focused episodes in animated shows. Also fun fact, in South Korea, Voltron was released as 3 Seasons of 26 episodes each where they just bunched up the seasons we got into sets. S. Korea Season 1 = Seasons 1 & 2 S. Korea Season 2 = Seasons 3 - 6 S. Korea Season 3 = Seasons 7 & 8
They didn't "bunched up" anything. That's how the series was made/designed/animated/recorded. Netflix cut it up for marketing. Season one is the Zarkon season, season two is the Lotor season, and season three is the Minerva season.
The decision to split into shorter seasons was made after the episodes were already written and produced. Seasons 3 & 4 were actually going to be released as season 3, and seasons 5 & 6 were going to be released as season 4. We know this because before season 3 was released we were told that the show was planned for 78 episodes and that 13 episodes would be released in September 2017. Instead of 13 episodes in September, we got 7 in August and 6 in October. This along with the writers' statements that Netflix wanted to release the episodes faster and that the writers had to find a point in their seasons where it would feel natural to have a break in-between just confirms this. So ultimately the decision to have shorter seasons had no bearing on the writing. The fault is on the writers themselves for trying to cram so much into the episodes they were given.
to this day I'm gonna be bitter over how good Lotor's redemption arc was being built to to be until the writers just decided to toss it all out the window
I never was in the fandom. Watched it with ma besties making bad puns the entire time, the show may be flawed but still I had a time of my life with it, The early season 7 is where we stopped watching cuz of the time issue but hearing from the others what a turn the last seasons took I regret nothing.
Jumped in right before the final season and i seemed to have just missed the tornado that was the fandom. Enjoyed it in the beginning but watching the show seemingly second guess itself more and more was just sad and frustrating, such squandered potential. I'll admit that, writing aside, Zarkon and Krolia did set the neurons firing.
Honestly, my main issue with the show was just the main theme could have been better. it's good, but it should have been even more like the original theme. it was so close to being fantastic. Similar issue with the 2011 thundercats; the theme could have been fantastic, but it wasn't.
VERY TRUE about stuff being done way in advance. I work in animation and the last show I worked on was already finished for a year and a half when it started airing. We finished it, the streamer sat on it for a year and a half, and then it released. People who think they can write an angry Tweet and that changes the outcome of the next week's episode are insane. The only time last-minute changes like that happen are in the rare, rare case where an episode is cut or fully pulled due to something in the news; for example if a school shooting happens irl two days before an episode with a main character getting shot, or if there's a bombing right before an episode where they bomb an enemy building or something, those occasionally get paused in the airing schedule since they'd be really poorly received. Actual last-minute changes to animation are super rare, though. They'd not only require a bunch of re-animating and patchwork (since a BG might not work anymore, or a prop might need a new angle), they'd sometimes require bringing the actor in to re-record lines, which is really difficult to schedule and super inexpensive for small changes.
Spoiler warning : In all honesty I loved Voltron’s as a whole,the only thing that pissed me off was how in the last season was that the princess kept making stupid mistakes
15:13 They could have very easily said somthing like oh yeah its is going to turn into a blackhole and wipe out the solar system. that doesnt make a hole lot of sense but i can suspemd my disbelief but what they chose was so unrealistic like my god.
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After voltron you need to do voltron force
@@lilyehrlichman3390Voltron Force is Voltron
@@lilyehrlichman3390 is that the one where they switch who pilots which lion almost every episode and there’re several combinations for forming Voltron? I can’t remember the name of it, I just remember a few specific details 😅
Hot take Shiro should have either stayed dead or not died in the first place. His original counterpart from Golion only existed to die in the early episodes and get replace by Alura's Golion counterpart (or just get injured in the Voltron version). They seemed to want to keep Shiro around while still preserving the "dies to be replaced" aspect of his character and that just made things a mess.
The issue is that if shiro had to die, it should have been in the first episode. Because they introduced things about shiro that would never ever be followed up on, and also felt like a waste of time because it wasn’t meant to go anywhere but to benefit Keith. For example, getting the black bayard would only benefit Keith and didn’t do anything for his character because it was never about Shiro getting his bayard back. It was about getting the Bayard back for Keith. Another point they introduced was Haggar saying Shiro could have been the empires greatest weapon. What did she mean by that? What were they doing with Shiro? What plans did Haggar have? We wouldn’t know because shiro’s dead and it would never be followed up on
Hey! Shiro best boii no touchy
My issue is that all the character moments and cool shit he does where actually just his evil clone. Devalues a lot of interesting stuff because it wasn't actually him.
@@BabyGirlTinyI see where you're coming from, but I also think that with more competent writers, having Shiro die after we know more about him didn't have to be a waste. They could've woven in Shiro's memory as a motivator for the remaining Paladins and let them all grow stronger together while still advancing the stories.
As it stands, I feel like people's time was wasted anyway since we were following the "wrong" Shiro for a third of the show and no one in show seemed to give a shit about that and he spent the last third being separated from the rest of the team, which in light of this occurring _after_ he's revealed as gay is....not great optics.
If nothing else, it would've killed the ship war in its tracks if he had kicked it for good and maybe spared every other fandom the ongoing age gap bullshit infesting we're dealing with now.
I actually agree with this, Shiro either needed to die or not budge, Allura's role in this version with the castle of lions also being a ship meant she didn't truly need a lion and Pidge was a girl in this series so we had a girl at a lion and another in a leadership position controlling another very powerful ship and calling shots from there, I honestly don't think Allura in blue did that much for her character other than make reference to the og but it has been a while since I last watched it, also idk if it's just me but like when the lion switch happened I didn't think it made much sense personality wise considering the lions in LD were sentient and had personalities of their own like black takes on the "natural born leader" which isn't Keith he had to learn to be a leader and wasn't really up for it in the way Shiro came to leadership naturally and Lance wasn't "difficult" and "temperamental" but that's just me. 🤷🏻♀️😅
The way Lotor's storyline concludes is _so_ frustrating to me.
There was just so much ruined potential! The prince of his father's people, who slaughtered his mother's people, struggling to reconnect with his maternal heritage spiritually and personally, while also trying to eliminate his father's cruel influence and guide _their_ people towards redemption and all the opposition to that... it just sounded like such a cool story that I don't remember often seeing elsewhere. Like how _do_ you reconciliate one half of your identity with the other in such a scenario?
And I knew not to get my hopes up, to expect all this to end cheaply because I don't trust the people behind The Legend of Korra to know how to deal with stories about oppressors vs oppressed and the spaces between, but Holy Shit. Lotor "rescuing" Altean survivors only to use them as guinea pigs in deadly, inhumane experiments?! That just felt like such a slap in the face.
Yeah it kinda felt like they did a Zuko storyline with him only to then abruptly turn him evil again because they realized an antagonist was needed.
I'll say this till I die... Lotor deserved better 😢
Lotor was my favorite part, it really hurt how he went out.
What slap? Literally the first thing they showed you about Lotor is him being an asshole to his own people. That was his intro. In a show for 7 years olds. They told you he was evil from the very beginning.
@a.r.e.j.1693 1. He was sparring with his father's people, the ones going around being bad guys. I'm not too fussed if he was "mean" to them sometimes.
2. A character being mean to others in their introduction doesn't necessarily mean they are forever destined to be bad. Look at Zuko, for example. It's true that Lotor could be cruel at times, but that was part of the conflict. His father's treatment of him did still harden parts of his person.
3. Plenty of YTV7 show have smart and thoughtful writing. Once again, look at ATLA, for example. Also, acting like it was silly to expect a sci-fi show to do something smart or thoughtful about an interracial character's struggles with their heritage when that show was very much touching upon a lot of similar and related topics is very disingenuous.
I’ll never get over keith being fully prepared and literally a second away from killing himself to save them and they just never mention it again. Like buddy are you okay?
No...Keith is never okay tbh😂
I know you barely mentioned Hunk because he barely gets any attention BUT my biggest issue with the show, personally, is the way he's treated. At the start of the show, he was my absolute favorite character, and in the first two seasons he's given nearly as much attention and development as everyone else. He has plenty to do and is more than just food/fat jokes (tho still too many fat jokes). As the seasons progress, aside from a couple of moments, he becomes JUST comic relief with nothing to do and it is so deeply frustrating. He never stopped being my favorite, I just got more and more indignant at the show for how they treated him. Most of the jokes made around him aren't even funny because, you know. Making fun of fat people is not funny.
this is ESPECIALLY true since it feels like fat people get treated as a joke. Hunk was a very important character for me from the get go, he was my favorite too, and I also associated myself with him for his looks and personality. It hurt a lot to not only see him being put on the sidelines, but also being made fun of. That was the worst part of voltron for me. It did not get better.
The producers revealing they almost considered killing him off and replacing him with Keith’s not-girlfriend made it even worse to me.
@@GamerSlyRatchet1 They WHAT!?????
Seasons 7 and 8 getting their own video is so funny to me.. like.. they need the extra time lmao
The treatment Lotor got infuriates me. Especially when we find out what his fate was. What a terrible message to give to kids that children of genocidal tyrants are and never will be better than their parents and they deserve the worst fate possible.
This show clearly is NOT for children. I would worry immensely if I knew any parents who were allowing children to watch this. Do you seriously think animation is only for younger audiences?
This is where I stopped the show. The lions and Voltron felt less important. The magic system and lore weren't getting developed and what little we got stopped making sense. Allura become a deus ex machina tool, and got a love story that was just used to screw her over later. The Shiro clone went from being his own person that the Black Lion deemed worthy, to a puppet that was killed off. Hunk got sidelined for comedy or convenient tech stuff. Lance got reduced to being annoying about Allura/Lotor. Coran was, there 😭 Pidge and Keith of course got the most development and got to find and build their families and it was all separate from the team. I had friends finish the series and they assured me it kept going downhill from there.
Same. This was what made me so disappointed in being a fan, as well as the toxic fans embarrassing themselves about it 😩😭 Voltron has so much potential, still tilted things wound up like this.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Keith and Shiro were my favourite characters, especially for their dynamic with each other amidst this crazy situation (not necessarily shipping, just that they were important to each other in some way like how the show made it seem) so the season 6 finale should have been exactly what I wanted...but I felt so so much less than I know I should have and I could tell then and there that the little things that had been bothering me up until then had eaten away at my investment in the show, not to mention my trust that the writers must know what they're doing. I liked the other main characters too, I liked the worldbuilding, I liked the way they were having to figure out the best way to save the universe because its not as easy as hitting a self destruct button in a single climactic battle, I liked the fun Sci fi ideas that they made their own versions of...and it all started going down the crapper in a lot of little but important ways and then also some much bigger ways and...
It should have been a great finale for me especially and yet it was the final nail in the coffin and that's...really kind of tragic
the group separating from each other and feeling like they weren't friends or even a team anymore was what ruined the show. I would not have cared about anything else if the found family thing that they were going for was written well but it wasn't
And what's wild to me is that the show itself seems to acknowledge this in season 7 and I'm like....??? Okay, but lampshading this seven seasons in doesn't make this better, my dudes. If anything, it just makes the whole thing worse.
@@KariIzumi1 REAL
THIS!!!! Like I loved the beginning of the show for the found family, I never got heavy into shipping (not against it either, usually I love finding a ship in a show but this time I didn’t) and I was so disappointed to just see them….drift off from one another really for no good reason. The show started with “the gang is getting together!!!” so I feel like it’s almost misleading when the team starts just being like :| towards one another
@@KariIzumi1THIS!!! See, I wouldn’t have minded the arguing scene (especially since they were all starting to gang up on Keith for leaving them if I remember correctly) if they yk….BUILT UP TO THAT MOMENT!! But they didn’t. It could’ve been a good way to have them all come back after being separated for so many seasons but it was way too late. Sad to see how rushed everything was
I'm honestly still disappointed about the handling of Lotor's character. He showed such promise to be something between anti-hero and anti-villain while never quite stepping into either territory. It would've been so interesting to see him actually trying to run the Galra empire and having his relationship to the paladins slowly change, be it in a good or bad way. He could've developed in such interesting directions, but instead they made him do a fast turn into crazy territory and oh, look, he's killing Alteans and plans to genocide another entire race, so now we're justified in killing him off and never talking about him again. Let's focus on Haggar instead because clearly she's the character we should be invested in instead. Probably my biggest issue with the show.
Totally agree. Maybe I'm biased because he was a fav of mine back then but I think there was so many ways they could've written his character and they chose the most baffling one.
I really liked his frenemy dynamic with the paladins and was really hoping his bonding moments with them meant he'd be redeemed or at least have a more interesting reason for betraying them and even feel guilty about it. It's cliche but it would've been much more satisfying to just redeem him after he learns about the power of friendship or something then revealing he's actually still evil and then killing him off just like that.
@@neilru5172
He could have easily became the 7th paladin/ranger and could have gotten a lion of his own.
Voltron: legendary defender was basically Super Sentai/Power Rangers and it makes no sense why they didn't redeem his character and have him befriend the other Paladins.
@@neilru5172
They easily could have made Lortor the Alucard of Voltron. Him befriending the Paladins and helping them fight against his father.
Lortor's journey of making up for his father's mistakes and dismantling his evil empire.
He doesn't want or desire power or to be an emperor like his father before him. All he wants is to free the Galaxy from his father's evil tyranny/oppression.
@@neilru5172
The friendship dynamic between Lortor and the Paladins could have been genuine and heartfelt. His relationship with Allura should have been platonic and the two could have had a respect for each other.
Lortor just needs some friends to guide him.
@@naquangreen2192 YESSS! i loved the Alucard paralel
Makes me thankful Trollhunters tales of Arcadia didn’t suffer from a toxic fandom (at least I don’t think it did) since that show came out the same year as Voltron. Although the writing like Voltron took an unfortunate nose dive… mostly in the last few minutes of the “Finale” movie. But that’s a story for another time.
That movie single handedly murdered the franchise and fandom
Of course, it was a small problem that the main actor for that died part way through the series. Very unfortunate scenario
🎉I wish I had got more in to troll hunters over vld 😂
@@ShizuruRavenRobin026 only for you to stumble upon the movie (Rise of Titans) that completely erases Everything that was established in the past three shows
I’m still mad about that movie and it’s been two years
i thought it was soooooo weird that season 2 had keith say "i know who i am, im a paladin of voltron" only for him to quit being a paladin to join the blade. i thought that was a really unnecessary jerking around bc it seemed like the prod team didn't know where to put him since it seemed execs wanted shiro to return bc of merch and promo stuff.
Voltron is such a sad thing for me to look back on. Because I loved it so much but almost all of my memories of that experience are just...bad. I don't like the way the show made me act, the series itself was just a massive disappointment...there's just not much good there for me at all. It's such a shame
With all respect, while I share in the disappointment in this show, we all chose how we behaved about it. Me slagging off everyone who criticized that very blatant bait wth Adam just because it appeared to be the way for Sheith to become canon as a bitter Klance anti was absolutely a choice and no one put a gun to my head to do that. So too was doxxing other fans over ages that were never confirmed or harassing creators or both sides highjacking every discussion that people of color tried to have about Allura's death into a discussion about dirty their ship was done.
We can't blame creatives for own feelings about their stories, regardless of our opinions on the writing, but we should all take our experience with this cursed fandom as a learning opportunity to do better in future fandoms.
@@KariIzumi1 yeah I agree. Idk why I phrased it like that
You imaging been a fan a Tales of Arcadia and all it takes is one--Just ONE movie to ruin the entire franchise for you. All the money spend on junk food to watch episodes of those shows and the time my and my sister invested, all for nothing matter at the end.
Please let everyone know how the entire show only ran for 2.5 years! That plays a lot into how insane the fandom was and the fatigue people were feeling towards the end.
I was always suspicious of Lotor from the get go, mainly because he lacked any backstory or flashbacks. Lotor is the writers attempt at a Zuko character, mid-series betrayal included, but he never had the set-up to even be a discount Zuko. All his actions were suspicious, he helped the Paladins but it always felt like a "I help you but it also helps me" kinda way. He never had any inherently selfless acts so it didn't surprise me when he turned out to be evil. His forced romance with Allura was so gross and disturbing because it was always going to end in betrayal.
@LieutenantOzarAnThaceDoneDirty
Sorry, but Lotor/Allura it's too gross to have ever existed in the first place, the only option was corrupting him off
o.o
@rommdan2716 I would've liked it if lotor corrupted allura instead. THAT would've been sick af
The cloning is WORSE than you realize.... the crappy D&D episode adds real existential horror to this plotline. In the D&D episode, it's CLEAR as f'kn daylight... that clone Shiro is a person all his own right... and hot damn he WANTS to be a f'kn PALADIN come hell or high water......
Then we just merc him and override him with original shiro cause... clone's aren't people I guess?
At the time, a lot of people figured out that Shiro was a clone pretty quick. The problem i had was how it was handled. I pretty much dropped the show because of it and a bunch of small things adding up.
To this day I am still upset at the way they killed Lotor off :( he had so much potential and even if his actions could never be redeemed , I feel he should've willingly admitted his faults rather than just go mad with power and die :/
The real injustice for Lotor as a character is that that statement above was all majority of the audience saw for his final moments, when in all actuality, it was so much deeper than that. Did you never think it was weird that the Paladins just blindly believed this Altean woman at face value and have such a strong, emotional reaction to it that they immediately wrote Lotor - who had been a friend and ally to this point - off as evil without so much as a second chance? That's not really something that you do with allies; you give them the opportunity to explain. Despite being immediately attacked and thrown under the bus by all of the Paladins, Allura included, Lotor still tried his best to keep calm and REASON with Allura and the Paladins... Until Allura compared him to his father. That was when Lotor broke and started to descend into madness.
Lotor's character is ingeniously thought out and complex. He has subtle physical queues and lots - and I do mean lots - of foreshadowing for character growth. If you re-watch the series from start to finish, you'll see them but may not even realize that they're there. He was born to corrupted parents, both of whom abused him. In season 8, he fought to protect a planet of people from his father. Even begged him to NOT blow up the planet and watched in sheer horror when Zarkon blew it up anyway to punish him. Lotor became a banished prince forced to live in his fathers' shadow. A child of mixed heritage; hated by one and unknown by the other.
When Romelle joins up, the audience doesn't even consider the fact that she's recalling things from her perspective and she probably doesn't have the whole, proper picture. Stop and consider the facts:
Lotor was infatuated with Altean culture and was visibly at his happiest when he was able to share that with Allura. That wasn't an act. Even when he went mad, he explicitly said that he wanted to destroy the GALRA - not the Alteans. He asked the Paladins to judge him not by his race but by his character, and he didn't reveal the fact that he was half-altean until later on so that his heritage had no sway what-so-ever over Allura and the team coming to trust and open up to him. And even more prominently, Lotor was very, very focused on acquiring a steady resource of quintessence. If he -had- a steady supply by draining Alteans of that resource, why bother looking for another source? Why bother to keep the garden of Alteans so secret, so hidden if all he was doing was using them for nefarious purposes? And why sacrifice the people - your own people (Lotor takes great pride in his Altean side; he sees his mixed blood as a strength where other Galra see it as a weakness) for that matter - for that matter when you have no ill will towards them?
No one even stopped to consider the fact that Romelle could be WRONG, and/or that she misunderstood what was happening because of her brother. All of those pilots were willing volunteers and nothing happened to them UNTIL they became pilots. You have to remember that this place was super, super hidden but that Zarkon's forces were everywhere and were still a big threat at the time. The only defense they could've have were the suites they piloted. What if the suits themselves needed a very specific power source that was drained from the pilots that used them? All of those withered people weren't corpses. They weren't tossed aside. They were in TANKS. Romelle's brother was STILL in a tank when they went to that faciility. Why would those people be in tanks if their energy had already been harvested? Why risk being discovered and not dispose of them?
Because the tanks they were in were meant to SAVE them. They'd been stripped of the one resource that Lotor had always been shown to be hellbent on finding a supply of. A resource he said was "invaluable" and would be great for his people - notably never saying the Galra explicitly in the same breath. Because it wasn't for the Galra or his father's empire. Perhaps he was so driven to find it to use it to RESTORE the Alteans, and give the suits a better power source so that they wouldn't feed from their pilots. He absolutely was all about saving the Altean race. And no one, not even his allies or the woman that grew to have feelings for him, gave him so much as the benefit of the doubt because of who his father was.
His father. His abuser. There is almost nothing more hurtful or damning for a victim than to be compared to their abuser. The look on Lotor's face after Allura says it all: He's mortified. Heartbroken. Shattered. And it's in that vulnerable, emotional state that he gives in and lets the madness take him.
Both he and Allura were done so damn dirty by this show and the way that they were handled - especially Lotor - still hurts to this day.
@@Noxazema yeaa, Tbh i never rewatched the show , I just watched it as it aired. I always felt like Lotor's actions werent done out of some evil or selfish intent but had no way of justifying it and the fandom always blows up at you when you try to justfiy "geno*ide" (even tho it clearly wasn't what he was doing but you get it)... thank you for sharing your analysis
@@NoxazemaPreach!
@@anonymyus7007it's dangerously close to that.
@@Noxazema yeah, you're giving writing a bit more credit than it needs
i don't think i'll ever forgive them for brushing past keith's suicide attempt. like okay i guess we'll never discuss that little blip! lol
I remember also rolling my eyes when it was revealed Shiro was cloned (already had my theories that he was a clone before the reveal), but mostly bc I had tsubasa ptsd w clones making me confused. However, that was both my favorite and most frustrating episode bc I liked the emotional weight from the fight between Shiro and Keith, and I liked those little moments where Keith shows some of his galra side, but then they didn't do more about that, and the next episode just left me "meh".
Sometimes I regret continuing the show post s6 bc imo that was the last good we got from this show, since for the next seasons was when it all went downhill, the writers from the previous seasons left and new writers came in, which it showed, especially on the last season.
another tsubasa enjoyer! boy, yeah, the clones were a complete mindfuck. at least it’s better(?) foreshadowed in voltron
Ah man Tsubasa reservoir chronicles got insane when the Tokyo arc started and just kept getting weirder as it went on.
But doesn't that mean that the clone came out of the tube, and they chopped his arm off on the exact same place and put the prosthesis of a dead guy on him... Was it even clean when they put it on?
It is very, very funny seeing the interviews and watching the crew backpedal on their bullshit. Knowing what we know now, this is very, very cathartic.
I'll never understand why Katie didn't drop her Pidge persona after they found her brother and father.
Writers forgot
Lived with it for too long, it's just habit at this point.
I still go by my internet name because I used for all of high school it's just a part of me at this point
I’m realizing now that I watched more of this show than I remember. I thought I stopped after like season 3 but I guess since these seasons were so short I just didn’t realize I watched until 6. The like two years this show ran felt like a decade lol
wish you commented more on the time Keith spent with his mom as they bonded and teased keiths upcoming fight with Shiro
if you liked it, can you explain how being stuck in solitary confinement for years with his mom made keith suddenly become a great leader when before he had no leadership skills?
Lotor was such a huge missed opportunity and biggest acts of character assassination I've seen. He had so much character potential, he could've been the next ZUKO.But they wasted it all, they could've turn him into an interesting anti hero that progresses into a hero. But no they just make him evil the writers knew they missed up by killing Zarkon to early. And instead of bringing him back, they make Lotor the villain and they don't even do that right.
His transformation into a villain isn't even done in a natural progression. He just turns evil by going crazy with quintessence poisoning and wants to kill the Alteans and Golra. Really? There's so much they could've done with Lotor.
Say Lotor works with the Paladins the take the throne from his father to make things better for half blood Golra. And uncover the truth about his past specifically his mothers identity.He soon discovers his mother was altean and he tries to learn more about his heritage.
Lotor discovers a group of Altean survivers that were in cryo sleep on a lost space shift, he helps them find a home. He also tries to discover a new way of harvesting quintessence by using Alteans . Lotor ends up killing them but by accident,he is morally conflicted and then his father discovers them and kills more Alteans. Lotor gets them to safety by contacting the Blade of marmora for help and joins the Paladins to Atone for his crimes. He befriends the Paladins,gets with Allura and he EVENTUALLY kills Zarkon.
This sounds so much better than what was given to us
The fact you called out zarkon simps , brilliant also I kinda think he's hot too.Even though you don't like the filler episodes, the Coran one was just funny especially with that line "now get in the tight suit." Also it's should have been me with Lotor, and yes I like his psycho phase.
Legend of Voltron is definitely an example of to not give in to the pressure of pleasing every fan
It's like they shouldn't rush out 8 seasons in 2 years...
They were made as three seasons, Netflix cut them up to have more releases. It's the predecessor of "season x part one and part 2". (Mind you not defending this mess, just clarifying.)
I had so much faith in Voltron as a sweet naive child and for the most part, even the space magic voodoo made sense. But when they revealed Shiro was a clone I, too, rolled my eyes because even though it was entirely planned ahead, it felt so out of nowhere and out of place. Shiro kept getting varying amount of limited screentime to the point where I forgot that he was an integral part of the Voltron team while being the black paladin. The whole ordeal could have worked if he just had more screentime and development outside of being "the leader." Then the twist would be expected but also genuinely surprising since he could be established as "human" and not a lifeless husk that already felt like a clone
i definitely think zarkon has potential to be daddy but he's like just missing the mark
Just realised I still have the klance bible bookmarked lmao, what a time.
I wish they made more Voltron content that was good
I think the point about the team no longer being a team is what really got to me in souring the story, like, the plot and pacing became mote and more of a mess, but i honestly wouldnt have minded that as much if the core group were still genuinely a team with their bond (minus shiro clone stuff) in tact,,, like, im biased bc keith was one of my fav characters, but with the whole going off to the blade thing, and them him havjng years time skip with his mom,, it felt like he wasnt really part of the group anymore,, and with the others too, thwy just felt less and less genuinely like friends and more like coworkers in trying to fix the universe,,, and the plot wouldnt have been perfect if they were still a team,, but i think itd be fine ish enough(until the very end where it just nose dives), but with them not really being a team anymore, it just sabotages the story that much more,, things dont feel cohesive, the pacing is rushed, and the characters that used to geound us in the story no longer feel important or like they matter, both to each other, to the writers in terms of their character and to us, despite their theoretical plot importance, they feel hollow and empty without their bonds and relationships and interaction and stuff,, its really a let down after how great the show started out
Speaking as a long time soap opera enjoyer, I can attest that as long as you give people good, solid characterization, they will follow their faves down any rabbit hole the writers put them through. An example of this is _Archer,_ which in its 13 season run spent 4 years as a spy agency, season 5 with its cast as drug smugglers, back again with spying for Season 6 before becoming a detective agency, which ended with Archer himself in a coma, which then gave us three straight seasons of the show as literal AU fanfiction in WWII, the Jungle and outer space before I think it went back to spying again (I dropped off by then so I dunno what happened). That's an extreme example but hey, 13 seasons is a helluva run for any show in the streaming era but the characters all worked together well in all those seasons 🤷♀️
But that's a lotta words to say people come in for the premise but it's the characters and the bonds between them that keeps people coming back. And boy, I've never seen a show crash and burn on impact on this the way this one has, much less one in kids animation. It's gonna be really interesting when all the traumatized kiddos who grew up in this show get into positions of running their own shows to see how that influenced writing of other series from here on our. 👀
Pidge never even had any meaningful conversations or bond with Allura and Keith, the whole team felt like coworkers instead of found family and all just barely tolerated each other. The only two I could see a deep bond with was Keith and Shiro & he was a clone for the majority of the time, and they had to juggle both of them being the protagonist doing their own thing after the first few seasons. Just poor planning everywhere.
@@viheart
Voltron legendary defender is an example of a show that should have ended early in its series run like around season 2 or 3 rather than continue on past that point.
@@viheart
There is nothing wrong with a show ending in its early seasons then going past a certain point.
To be fair to the clone twist in the black paladins episode, I remember the day season 3 released and within 24 hours of it hitting netflix most of the fandom agreed that the Shiro they found was a clone. We were all just waiting for the shoe to drop.
To be fair, I am not at all surprised that Zarkon might've gone to war over ideological differences with Altea's culture and his own because that's what he was doing with Blaytz when they first met. Alfor stepped in and stopped them from fighting their on-again-off-again war and it was really only a matter of time before things went bad, especially if Zarkon got sick of basically kowtowing to Alfor's commands and whims.
S6 has a lot of issues, but everything from the Shiro/Keith fight up to Lotor's defeat is easily and without competition the most emotionally resonant sequence in the show for me, which allows me to be very forgiving to its faults. That fight and its immediate fallout is the singular reason I still have fond memories of watching VLD to this day, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to give it up even if it meant the writing for S5/6 was less fractured.
That being said, I'd have been fine stopping my watch after that sequence. VLD never hit those highs again for me, the writing remained uneven (we got no followup to the clone plot at all? They /killed/ the clone that had worked as their teammate for over a season and no one cared?), and the tone shift that followed was so strong (as was the change in character focus to the MFE pilots once they hit Earth) that it didn't feel like the same show anymore.
I also didn't like that Shiro was revealed gay at the start of S7 and then he immediately stopped having any form of meaningful interaction with any of the other paladins. It likely wasn't intentional, and I recognize I am more sensitive to it than others, but it came across as mildly homophobic. It wasn't just Shiro, though; the bonds between everyone on the team began to suffer as the team split in in the S4-5 era, and it seemed to only get worse, with S7-8 being the breaking point for many. I think that if the focus had remained on everyone growing as people and working together the show would be remembered more fondly.
Shiro stopped having meaningful interactions before season 7 Lmfao. He was dead.
@@BabyGirlTiny Well, one version of Shiro was, yes. But the clone believed himself to be Shiro and had his memories, so I count him as a Shiro as well. It was clear that he was important to the team dynamic even if the OG wasn't there, and the plot didn't throw out his bond with everyone else, which was my main complaint in S7 and on.
EDIT: Oh also, OG Shiro did connect with Keith meaningfully in S6 through the astral plane and had that one interaction in the season before with Lance that showed Lance cared about Shiro too, so there was that.
@@WolfmonLigerohe wasn’t important to the team dynamic because he added nothing t to said team dynamic. He didn’t even have a relationship with anyone but Keith. He wasn’t this perfect untouchable leader either and it’s not like everything was easy when shiro was around.
You're allowed to feel the clone added nothing to the story or the team dynamic. I do not agree, but I'm not going to try to convince you that Shiro's clone and the clone's character was meaningful to the team dynamic and story if you truly feel he wasn't.
Regardless -- my main complaint was simply that I love Shiro as a character and feel that the later seasons did him disservice because they severed him emotionally from the Paladins. I think we have the same complaint, overall. We simply disagree about when that split occurred.
I’m so glad someone else said this 🙌 I felt like the reveal was so late and almost so awkward from what I remember and afterwards it feels like Shiro is COMPLETELY detached from them, which I didn’t even think he could get farther away before it happened 🤷 like just make a quick reference to his bf/partner at the beginning and continue to story as normal since bf/partner obviously isn’t there currently
I love how there is a Sponsor… proceeds to say there is no sponsor but they can just pop a sponsor in a video 😂
As a Shiro fan, I really wanted him to relax,, take time off, literally take a break, cuz the writers were putting him through the ringer. It was like watching a veteran coworker not take their 30min break because every time they try a rush of customers wanting to check out and in order to lessen the stress for everyone, they stay through their break.
And considering the differences between the past versions of his character, honestly it was nice having some focus on him but gosh did they really put ALOT of focus on him. A "that's enough slices" moment.
Except they didn’t out a lot of focus on him lol. They put minimal focus on a clone that added nothing to shiro’s character or the story. You can say they focused on the clone, but nothing substantial came about it
So true, I was more in the mind set that he wasn't an interesting character at all in the original series.
And unfortunately i do mush both Shiros together to just be Shiro squared 😅 so anything regarding either Shiro is more attention than I thought his character(s) was going to get
I had repressed how badly they fumbled Lotor in the later part of the show …
if i remember correctly, netflix didn't renew more seasons on a whim as they went, they ordered a set amount of episodes (78) from the start. thats how they released so many episodes with complicated animation in only 2 years, a lot of preproduction was done before hand......it just makes the weird pacing worse in a way, like they knew exactly how much time they had to fill and yet.
No one agrees on what constitutes as a "monster" in the monsterflipper community, but it's widely accepted that gatekeeping is not the vibe. So in a 1-10 scale where 1 is for very human-looking monsters that monsterfrackers often include under the definition such as vampires that just look like pale, pointy-eared, gaunt-faced people, and 10 is for anything incomprehensible such as eldritch horrors, the experience of going through something truly eldritch itself, or carbon monoxide poisoning as a whole (w'hole' lol). This is just the scale I personally have in mind, other monsterfudgers might have differing opinions. With that insanity aside, I'd say Zarkon is somewhere between 3-4. He's a very tall humanoid alien with a face that can emote like a human (though I think him being zoinked with Quintessence probably made him less expressive as a person). His face doesn't look *as* human as the regular Galran, of which I put at 2.5 in the scale. Zarkon's extra points comes from the fact that he even looks different among his alien race. We don't know what his anatomy underneath is like and frankly I don't care to theorize about what kind of schlanger he'd have but we can assume it's compatible with humans as-- well, Keith exists. So.
I don't know how to close this off. Yeah sure some monsterfwunger out there probably consider him a Daddy and would try to give Lotor half-siblings or something. Daddy rating (independent from the monsterfcuker scale) is probably a good 9/10 as I saw someone said in this comments section. As for me I'm gonna jump off a cliff or something.
I love Voltron, but the later production, the dropped ideas, and that sad ending were frustrating. I hope a sequel series or film that brings Allura back is considered someday. Lance and Allura deserved a happy ending.
but then what is the best way to bring allura back without it feeling all half-assed and deus ex machina?
Dreamworks lost the rights to make new material back in 2020. Rumor is the rights are with Amazon for a live action movie, and everyone is adamant it will have zero to do with VLD.
@@Dynaman21
Amazon's recent track record with adaptations has been pretty awful and it's clear they will probably get someone who wasn't a fan of the original series to direct and write series.
Also I don't expect them to put any effort into the CGI or any of the acting/writing.
@@Dynaman21
Live action adaptations of animation especially anime always have a tendency to be terrible. The live action anime curse only recently was broken with one piece on Netflix BUT then was immediately tarnished with the knights of the zodiac movie and Yu Hakusho series
No one is hopeful for the upcoming Gundam live action movie.
@@BestOneEver247
Has there ever been a successful legacy series or movie that continues the story and brings back the classic characters.
One thing that I think was better in Voltron: Legendary Defender, was that In the Voltron: Defender of the Universe (the 1984-1985 original) the voice acting was kinda janky, ESPECIALLY for Sven and Lotor. In Voltron Force (2011 show) it got better though even if lotor kept on getting revived every time he died in Voltron force. Also in the original (which there are a lot of differences to legendary defender), the ending was essentially, lotor is crowned king, Voltron k!lls Zarkon, Haggar secretly helps Voltron defeat Lotor’s forces because she thinks he’s pathetic for not facing Voltron on his own, haggar reveals that Lotor and Allura are actually relation and Lotor k!lls Haggar’s cat in retalience (he was romantically obsessed with Allura majorly for some episodes), and then Sven almost k!lls Lotor. And then Voltron: The Third Dimension happened, it was 3D.
Glad you came back for this one because the final seasons left me with so much frustration every time I compared them to what made me fall in love with the earlier seasons.
Lotor was undoubtedly the coolest and most fleshed out character in the whole Voltron series.
What they did to him at the end was dirty and I wished they could've gotten more out of him.
So much potential, so much awesomeness and build up, wasted.
If I remember right, they kinda teased the clone shiro thing in the DND episode with shiro just making a clone of his character that died, which was pretty funny either way
Zarkon is very human-like already but even if he wasn’t I’d probably still say “would”.
I’d gives him 8.5/10
fun fact: Zarkon is voiced by Neil Kaplan, the same voice actor for Madara Uchiha from Naruto.
One thing id note for the clone thing which i think is probably part of why i found that part so hype and didnt have a problem with the pacing of it,, is that back in like season 3 if you were in the fandom, youd have seen the thing about kuron or whatever meaning clone, so the idea was already kinda out there and foreshadowed way in advance, so for me it felt like a payoff of heavy handed foreshadowing that had been hanging in the air for seasons,, and it was kinda an epic fight with keith and shiro,,,, also i never watched star wars,, so felt new to me
Absolutely agree, most of fandom seemed to be on the same page only a few hours after season 3 dropped. Barely over enough time to have watched the full season had past and we were all like “so somethings wrong with shiro right? Clone??”
9:30 Zarkon for me personally would be like. a solid 9. Appearance slays, and you already mentioned the voice. Probably the only thing holding him back from a full 10/10 is a lack of extra-ness(though that's just my taste). But I do also feel adding extra to his design would also be too much and it just wouldn't be Zarkon anymore, you know? So this is probs about how high he would get for me.
You're welcome.
5:02 "I don't have a sponsor for this video"
When I made the video I didnt have a sponsor... oops
• Has a Deep Voice
• Is strong and will protect you
• Has an actual soon
Yes. Zarkon is, indeed, Daddy
Zarkon is indeed not Daddy. But Adam is an Angel and I'll never forget how they literally murdered him just to make Shiro sad and then it didn't even matter because they made Shiro hook up with some rando anyways.
Zarkon is absolutely 9/10 Daddy. My most popular Voltron stuff was about him, got a lot of lovely art of him by others too.
Cloned shiro is where I nearly dropped the show originally. I decided in the end I wanted to see where the train wreck went, but it was so so so so painful to get through the rest of the show.
the 'do not enter door' bits are the only thing that got me through this video. i'm even more glad i stopped watching voltron when i did. just watching this was painful.
Voltron really was a flashbang of a first season. I watched until the end of season 1, then never heard when season 2 came out and missed the boat. Thank god honestly, because i know younger me wouldve been insane and mentally ill about it
this may just be bc i had huge (and still have residual) shiro brainworms and he was my blorbo for so long..... but if the writers wanted to just use him as a "mentor figure to kill for keith pain and team inspiration" why make him so compelling?
why give him a mysterious past, unresolved trauma we as an audience want to see his journey to overcome? scenes where that repressed trauma is slowly creeping up on him the more he ignores it that hints at a future storyline where it catches up to him and he has to face it? why give him this role as a young guy who just came back from literal hell trying figure his own shit out but by proxy of being the oldest is thrust into a leader role and takes that role in stride because of his naturally nurturing nature despite barely hanging on himself and feeling like he has no one to lean on? why have give him the most natural and impactful relationships with some of the other paladins (keith and pidge) as well as an intense connection to Matt, a character whom the locating of is a constant b-plot journey for several seasons and is the only other person who experienced Galra prison camp so besides pidge the person we wanna see him reunite with most is, you guess it, Shiro?
why make us care about him as an individual with a bunch of set up potential journeys that we naturally want to see resolutions to if he was just meant to be a characters whos emotional attachment to the audience was only through his importance to the other characters? all of these compelling traits and hinted arcs are all introduced in like...s1 btw, before his original death was "supposed to happen" not to mention the amazing representation of him being a disabled asian dude with ptsd who was meant to be the cool strong leader but was also a repressed sweetheart who would prioritize everyone but himself
basically why give what was supposed to be a disposable character his own individual intrigue and loose ended elements to then whine about how SUPER DUPER WEIRD AND ANNOYING it was that fans got "too attached" to this guy and that you couldn't kill him like u wanted to??? like hello, you set him up as one of the most important and intriguing members of team voltron and then were shocked that he became a fan favourite???? so the fact that his character was eventually reduced to cardboard and stripped of anything interesting is our fault because the fact that we liked this super likeable dude and didnt want him gone before his potential could be fully explored? ok.
voltron is a gold mine of wasted potential but i think in shiro moreso than most because its a damn shame how much i could speculate on and glean from the early breadcrumbs about his character that was just unexplored
This was my headspace all those years ago, and still is, now that it’s been years and I’m finally touching Voltron again but like, only in the canon divergent way 😂 Bc Shiro was my darling, a lot of people’s darling - a really resonant, emotional one, BC GUESS WHAT, YOU GIVE A CHARACTER TRAUMA, KINDNESS (and hotness) AND PEOPLE WILL LATCH ONTO IT?? And even the writers, some of them ig, knew it? Coran’s line along the lines of “I’ll get rid of all of you, replace you with new Paladins, and the show will be better than ever before! …except for you Shiro, I’ll never replace you. You’re our most popular character!”
(Except they still basically did by copy-pasting an awkward Keith over him, except Keith just feels off-kilter and unfinished after his convenient two-year-timeskip)
Tbh I think one of my greatest grievances was that the show wanted to focus on the impact of war… and failed to deliver on that, emotionally. Whether out of restrictions, messed up plans, etc, they had a lot of opportunity to work with vulnerability and mental health and just kinda… pretend it’s a switch to turn on and off. A character is distressed, someone talks them up, we’re cool! The clone mess of S3-6 actually could’ve done something with trauma, funnily enough. I think I might’ve even looked at it then and thought they would. Why have Kuron become more and more affected by his mind-state (they could’ve even dropped the Haggar-migraines and just said, yeah, this happens on its own) if you talk about it once with Lance, leave it untouched, have it blow up, KILL THAT CLONE and give that arc no closure, and then… god it was so messed up. THIS is why I’m off making fan fiction ideas I probably won’t ever write but it helps me heal lmao
Everything about this show was a mess. The first few seasons were enjoyable despite the shipping discourse (which happened because of a lot of conflicting information from different official sources) but the way this felt like decades when it was only two years is incredible. Thank god it died.
The thing that frustrated me most about the Shiro clone plot was that it imo worsens the mess in season 8 with Honerva. Could she not simply clone her family with altered memories? She made multiple clone copies of Shiro in that huge facility (despite it being destroyed, there could easily be another cloning station somewhere else, this is a space empire). Why is intruding through alternate realities her go-to plan when the option of cloning seems far easier.
You got a point though 😂 Maybe she needed a direct reference? Like, they had experimented on Shiro for a year or so, and they really really don’t explain the process (which is probably a good thing bc for a “kid’s show” Voltron managed to get horribly dark and bleak).
Something that bothered me more tbh, and maybe I’m also forgetting the last few seasons (and like yeah I definitely am) but also?? I do not recall it exactly but after all Haggar did - like, INCREDIBLY MESSED up things, and to their own? Specific? Friend? - they treated her kinder than people who treated them better?? And like? You’d think Shiro would’ve had SOME kind of greater say in the fight against her but for the life of me, except for that massive super-boosted mecha fight at the end of the show? He’s sidelined, and it’s like ok I guess no big deal
@@crystallion1269 yeah that bothered me as well. The way Shiro was shuffled to the background in later seasons was painful to see, especially when he's someone who has been deeply harmed by Honerva. It was almost like that got left behind after his consciousness got placed into his clone. The whole last season left me dazed and sad
Yes, I am that monster fudger who thinks Zarkon is an absolute Daddy™. His alternate version is what kept me holding on to the shipwreck that was seasons 7 & 8.
There are a few things that i had problems with. One was the ruined potential of Lotor. The other is just Allura in general. I loved Lotor and for them to ruin his potential was a slap in the face. As for Allura i just hated her getting her mits in Lance and I hated how mary sue her character felt
I'm probably alone in saying this but I preferred the way she bounced off of Lotor and Keith. Because they allowed her to be a character around them.
Oof, "mits in Lance" makes her sound like she was manipulating him/she's at fault for allurance. They both suffered as characters because of that nonsense. As for her being kind of a Mary Sue, I honestly don't even know what that means anymore, but I do think she was too powerful at times.
*screams into a pillow about Lotor* He was so interesting, like an actually well written character with multiple goals, and while i think they could have kept him on the anti hero route cause just being the villain is so boring.
To have his story end by "He went crazy" just i scream...legit dropped the show at season 6...THE POTENTIAL RUINED
I remember even saying at a con to a friend cause i was buying Voltron merch for another friend, i said something like "if Lotor doesn't come back im dropping the show" and the two in front of me in line started laughing and i overheard them go "Wow dropping the show cause your fave dies"....who has the last laugh now
I just hate the fact that the fandom turned so toxic. And listen to me when I say this. I love LGBTQIA representation. I’m Demisexual. But last minute representation is not well earned in my opinion. It’s rushed and emotionless. And Shiro should’ve been sexually ambiguous. Leave it to the fans to decide. Hell, I remember when I drew a fan piece of Shiro saying he was better as bisexual because of the shipping of him with Allura and Keith. Then someone said that I was “homophobic” for having him as bisexual. And this wasn’t on Twitter. It was on DeviantArt at the time. I obviously blocked that person. Bottom line. Because of the way the fandom went down. I keep my bisexual Shiro head canon to myself whenever I’m at anime conventions because I don’t want to start drama. And Voltron deserved so much better
(May contain spoilers for next seasons and ending)
I'm so glad you are covering this show. A friend of mine was Hyped ASF back in a day and recommended it to me, it was a great boom for a lot of people, for me it was... fine. Especially first seasons were especially cooler for me, but the introduction of Lotor for Zarkon's case kinda made me feel bad. I loved Zarkon's past etc but somehow when he's son and especially later he's wife made actual fight with main team, it wasn't so engaging, even tho I didn't liked Shiro's Floating arm I loved Idea he was somehow 6th ranger cause he got his own Voltron alike Mech.
Please don’t break the Geneva convention is not something I expected to hear today
Idk if the writing for season 6 was dodgy, the black paladin fight between Keith and Shiro is one of my top 3 favorite moments of the series.
I think I stopped watching after season 7? Mostly because I saw spoilers for the ending on tumblr and lost all motivation to finish the show lmao. My biggest issue with the later seasons was the slow realization that some characters just..weren't going to get developed. Personally, character dynamics and relationships is the biggest thing I look for in the shows I enjoy, and seeing the Paladins devolve from a group of friends into people who barely even talked outside of missions was so upsetting. Plus, we ended up spending more and more time with characters I didn't really care about (like Lotor oop who said that).
I think Hunk and Lance really suffered the most- Hunk definitely moreso, but Lance was my favorite so to me that was particularly upsetting. What's extra frustrating is there was SO MUCH potential for these characters. Lance has some really interesting hints about his flashy personality covering up some personal insecurities, and his desperate desire to be seen as important and valuable as both a teammate and a friend (and partner I guess of you do wanna get snippy shippy with it). I think he must get SOME development in s8 since he and Allura get together bur i doubt it was done well lmao. I look forward to you talking about it so I don't ever have to watch it, yay!
One thing about the ending I still find endlessly amusing is them giving Lance Altean marks after Allura dies because like...Altean Lance was a really popular AU because Klance (which fun fact I have always pronounced Kay-lance not clance like most people) shippers liked the Galra/Altean enemies to lovers ship dynamic thing. Like. That had to be the reason right? I loved Altean Lance AUs but I never wanted to actually see it in the show. Same with Klance itself, actually. I thought it was a fun ship, but I never expected it to be Canon and, honestly, didn't really want it to be. Because the show was never about romantic love, it was about platonic connection.
Wow, sorry for the long comment. I guess this show really did traumatize me. I used to daydream about future plot points in church because this show was airing when I was still forced to attend. Maybe the show sucks because God was punishing me for not going anymore, who knows.
14:07 that line makes Starkiller Base look good, and I believed that base on the grounds of they’d been planning that attack for years and it looks like the multiplanet attack takes a long time to make happen.
While I do disagree with a fair bit of your critiques as a fan of the show, I must say that this is a very well put together video and you’re one of the few people I seen using actual properly sourced interviews instead of fake rumours. Good job.
Holy Titan crap it's going to take me awhile to get through 8 seasons The show goes far back is freaking like 2016 what the hell mother of Titan what how how am I supposed to catch up on the show
I mean, the show's already finished and there's less episodes as the seasons go on
Shiro being a clone was set in place from season 3, there's a lot of foreshadowing. I mean, you're right when you say it doesn't make any sense lol but it does at least explain why Haggar said Shiro would be "Our greatest weapon"
The episode count was always going to be 78 episodes in total. Seasons 3-6 were produced as two 13-episode seasons. Netflix simply chose to split them up further for release so they could release the episodes faster. The content of the episodes would still be the same and the pacing would still feel just as rushed as it turned out.
Idk, it seems like splitting it up like that to quicken the release made it worse.
@@joyc.e.7511 The split happened after the episodes were already written and produced. Like with season 3, Netflix asked the writers which episodes they could release first, the writers said the first 7 episodes would feel more natural. The other 6 then got released later as "season 4". It's still the same 13 episodes that they wrote, nothing got changed content wise. So the drop in writing quality has nothing to do with the split.
Cannot unhear they sound like Sokka/Callum's VA
when Lotor turned evil is when I lost my shit and stopped watching (btw lotor means villain in slovak, sooo) so this is all i have seen. so the rest will be a mystery for me
Same :( I had planned to watch the rest of the show someday...
5 years later I still don't feel like watching it 😢
@@flx_resomg same 😭😭😭 still can't be bothered
Keith and Shiro was like my favorite fight ngl
What keeps me up at night is knowing that Zarkon and his wife are undead and somehow still had a child.
I wanna know the science
Actually, Honerva was already pregnant with Lotor when they went into the rift, died and were resurrected, so he definitely wasn't conceived after they became undead ;)
28:23 “Somehow, Shiro returned…”
you laugh but the showrunners have legitimately said they had no idea how shiro was back or what his deal was. they just decided to figure it out later...
@@pheela oh yeah, I know...TIIC wouldn't shut up about it lol
@@KariIzumi1 you know I would almost believe you if you told me they hadn't fully decided before they started making the episode where we actually see all the clones lol. nothing before we see them actually locks it down that shiro's not just being mindcontrolled.
Lotor is a lot like zuko, he was banished and abused as a kid, he’s like a zuko but with out the iroh, zuko was like him when he was evil but he had iroh to make him a better person and lotor had no one
Season 5-6 was where I dropped the show and just read what other fans who did watch the rest on what happened. I suppose it preserve my semi-positive view of the show while also not want to watch said show go in a dumpster fire. I had liked Lotor and would have liked seeing growth or change with his character instead of... this. His parents were only interesting in flashback on how they got to be the big bads, so having Hagger feel motherly affections when it's really way too late for it? It would have made more sense if she wanted to further manipulate Lotor for whatever scheme she had would been better.
I do agree that the teamwork between the voltron paladins were lacking and almost nonexistent at this point. Too many ideas, characters, and directions and too little time is a bad combo for this show.
The legend continues!!
I’m so confused why didn’t they take those filler episodes and make them back story’s for Luther or matts back story
Voltron deciding to have less episodes per season I feel was a bad decision. With a growing cast, you need a good number of episodes per season to give everyone some spotlight. NGL the Filler Episodes in this show were my favorite and I kinda miss those kinds of Filler/Character-Focused episodes in animated shows.
Also fun fact, in South Korea, Voltron was released as 3 Seasons of 26 episodes each where they just bunched up the seasons we got into sets.
S. Korea Season 1 = Seasons 1 & 2
S. Korea Season 2 = Seasons 3 - 6
S. Korea Season 3 = Seasons 7 & 8
They didn't "bunched up" anything. That's how the series was made/designed/animated/recorded. Netflix cut it up for marketing. Season one is the Zarkon season, season two is the Lotor season, and season three is the Minerva season.
The decision to split into shorter seasons was made after the episodes were already written and produced. Seasons 3 & 4 were actually going to be released as season 3, and seasons 5 & 6 were going to be released as season 4. We know this because before season 3 was released we were told that the show was planned for 78 episodes and that 13 episodes would be released in September 2017. Instead of 13 episodes in September, we got 7 in August and 6 in October. This along with the writers' statements that Netflix wanted to release the episodes faster and that the writers had to find a point in their seasons where it would feel natural to have a break in-between just confirms this. So ultimately the decision to have shorter seasons had no bearing on the writing. The fault is on the writers themselves for trying to cram so much into the episodes they were given.
The way they never addressed Keith trying to sacrifice himself by ramming a fligher into the shield thing. Also Krolia is kinda 🛐
9:51 Zarkon? He’s a good 8/10 AT LEAST (but in the end it’s all about personal taste)
to this day I'm gonna be bitter over how good Lotor's redemption arc was being built to to be until the writers just decided to toss it all out the window
I like that you too also have Marina as your Switch icon. You understand.
I never was in the fandom. Watched it with ma besties making bad puns the entire time, the show may be flawed but still I had a time of my life with it, The early season 7 is where we stopped watching cuz of the time issue but hearing from the others what a turn the last seasons took I regret nothing.
I know you're playing it as a joke, but klance was the cannon plan for seasons 1 and 2, not that this removes the chaos but... Still.
I swear half of the stuff is solved by ✨Allura magical unexplained magic✨
the clone thing was hinted at since season 3
Jumped in right before the final season and i seemed to have just missed the tornado that was the fandom. Enjoyed it in the beginning but watching the show seemingly second guess itself more and more was just sad and frustrating, such squandered potential. I'll admit that, writing aside, Zarkon and Krolia did set the neurons firing.
9:45 “is zarkon daddy?” You did not just ask that🤣
Honestly, my main issue with the show was just the main theme could have been better. it's good, but it should have been even more like the original theme. it was so close to being fantastic.
Similar issue with the 2011 thundercats; the theme could have been fantastic, but it wasn't.
VERY TRUE about stuff being done way in advance. I work in animation and the last show I worked on was already finished for a year and a half when it started airing. We finished it, the streamer sat on it for a year and a half, and then it released. People who think they can write an angry Tweet and that changes the outcome of the next week's episode are insane. The only time last-minute changes like that happen are in the rare, rare case where an episode is cut or fully pulled due to something in the news; for example if a school shooting happens irl two days before an episode with a main character getting shot, or if there's a bombing right before an episode where they bomb an enemy building or something, those occasionally get paused in the airing schedule since they'd be really poorly received. Actual last-minute changes to animation are super rare, though. They'd not only require a bunch of re-animating and patchwork (since a BG might not work anymore, or a prop might need a new angle), they'd sometimes require bringing the actor in to re-record lines, which is really difficult to schedule and super inexpensive for small changes.
"He was sick after being exploted"
Love the example of making videos ahead of time by you explaining you didn’t have a sponsor and now you have one 😂
Edit: Zarkon’s armor is daddy.
Spoiler warning : In all honesty I loved Voltron’s as a whole,the only thing that pissed me off was how in the last season was that the princess kept making stupid mistakes
clone shiro was a theory since like s2 honestly so i don't think it's that absurd they went that way, seemed like the plan
15:13 They could have very easily said somthing like oh yeah its is going to turn into a blackhole and wipe out the solar system. that doesnt make a hole lot of sense but i can suspemd my disbelief but what they chose was so unrealistic like my god.