Voltron: Legendary Defender

I just love that all generations of Yea Forumsmrades can gather around and agree that Voltron fucked up harder than any other cartoon out there.

I mean post S2 the fanbase literally almost suckerpunched it in the name of gay crackshipping and it immediately descended into an unplanned shit show.

I still maintain that literally every single plotpoint and detail, no matter how minor, post S2 was unplanned, except for "Zarkon should come back at some point", "Lotor and Haggar are the vilalins and we kinda want Lotor to be a breakout villain like Azula was" and "We probably need to figure out Keith's mom".

When you look into the production history of the show it's just so much obvious asspulls, last minute, off the cuff changes and retcons, and outright lies and blame shifting post S2.

Everything went wrong the moment they introduced serious romance beyond Lance's one-sided flirtations and Hunk's cute relationship with that alien.

Also, Lotor should've been the endgame villain instead of that asspull with Haggar/Honerva.

You are my sunshine, KlancerJesus.

Same damn ending too. Final villain just gets to be forgiven and walk off into heaven with the person whose death they're directly fucking responsible, for despite ALL of the awful shit they pulled.

Fandom shat the bed with retarded Klancers threatening everyone not even a month after the show started airing

Nice to see you still around preaching the gospel, Klancer Jesus.

Yeah but they took until S2 to actually threaten and blackmail the team.

True

They were telling Shiro's VA to kill himself way before that

Wasn't that just some random Twitter user shitposting? They promised to take down a Tumblr reblog, too, which doesn't really do shit as long as the original post is there.

Nope, was legit.

Yeah. The original Tumblr post was some person who got to take a tour of Studio Mir. They took down the pics.

The Twitter person was just some random asshat.

Josh Keaton deserved much better. First Spectacular and Green Lantern got cut short. Then his work got overdubbed with Drake Bell's by Jeph Loeb. Then Voltron. Now he's the protag of a franchise no one cares about but him.

This is one of those times where the fandom was so unhinged that even outrageous lies and misconceptions like that sounded completely legit.

He was also in Transformers Prime, which was like an early version of "unfulfilled potential" like Voltron turned out to be.

So I keep hearing. I never watched it since Transfomers usually don't interest me with the exceptions of Beast Wars and Animated.

Beast Wars and Animated are the best, honestly. Prime was nice to look at, had some good voice acting, but suffered a lot of setting up cool ideas that didn't go through.

Rescue Bots is pretty fun too.

Worst fandom in a loooiiing time.

The worst part is Pidge and Lance didn't get together

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>Buying into the BW meme in 2019
You can admit it was ugly with an unsalvageable first half now, guys.

I'm glad they didn't use the robot. The new design was weak, the CGI was weak, and the giant robot fights were the worst action bits in the show. It's sad, but Voltron itself is the worst part of VLD; after the writing.

Why would you make Pidge suffer like that.

>I mean post S2 the fanbase literally almost suckerpunched it in the name of gay crackshipping and it immediately descended into an unplanned shit show.

I still haven't seen where Yea Forums gets even a fraction of this "information." It's plausible, but everything I hear is rumors and speculation, nobody ever backs it up with fucking links to verified interviews or anything.

Reminds me of that fucking Zutara shit where people claimed they had "totally" interviewed Aaron Ehasz and he had wanted Zutara in the show but Bryke sabotaged him. People were passing that around for years before a verified interview had him saying that, no, people just fucking made shit up and claimed he said it.

Give me some proof that behind-the-scenes Voltron devolved into a shitshow.

Because it's cute but mostly so I can self insert as Lance to be completely honest with you

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All the characters deserved to be in a better-plotted show. I still can't believe just how badly this thing ended. I've never seen a show just massacre its own fandom that thoroughly. It went from being a damn big fandom (not Avatar or MLP big, but big) to just... a bunch of people that don't want to talk about the show they watched.

>Actually, all of the story-driven Netflix Dreamworks cartoons sans Trollhunters and 3Below had unstable stories and weak endings.

I would say Trollhunters definitely fits that description.

And what other story-drive Dreamworks cartoons were there (not counting She-Ra, which is in-progress)? There's like... Boss Baby, and Trolls?

Why not self insert into a character that doesn't suck?

Hey, Lance managed to be the one verified straight man in the show. That counts for something.

Hunk was straight and his gf lived.

>Shay was his girlfriend
The show never said nothing of the sort. It should have! It absolutely should have! But it didn't. So no, he's not confirmed to be into girls. Like most of the cast he's not confirmed to be into ANYTHING. Dude could be a Jughead for all we know, only into food.

Voltron is a robot made of different parts that have to combine to make something greater.

So really, it should be damn easy to make the theme of the show "we come together to make something greater," with that being what's emphasized with the ending.

NOPE! Gonna go with one member of the team suddenly having more power than God, and it just never came up until now.

>Give me some proof that behind-the-scenes Voltron devolved into a shitshow.
The rush job on the epilogue. Kihyun Ryu's insta shows that he was still working on it just three months before the last season dropped and both the final con poster and leaks point to the identity of Shiro's husband being decided last minute.

Lauren and Joaquim have admitted to doing massive re-writes, especially when Dreamworks wanted them to keep Shiro in the show. They admitted they didn't know who would be the villain to invade Earth in season seven, but remembered Sendak. They admitted Shiro's wedding was an attempt at an olive branch with the fandom. They admitted all this on multiple interviews with those annoying Afterbuzz chicks.

So yeah, a decent chunk of it was unplanned shit they were throwing at the wall as time went on.

Okay, THAT bit is pretty verified, sure. But that's about it. All the talk about staff fighting with one another, and not being able to agree on where the show should end? I've yet to see it backed up with anything solid.

We know that Shiro had a husband tacked on, and there's certainly suspicious shit in the ep with Ezor not being dead even though it sure feels like it was written with the intent of having her be dead.

Not trying to be a pain in the ass, but the fandoms that swirl around these shows have a proven track record of making shit up.

Didn't Lauren also say something about Steven Yeun's availability affecting the writing for Keith?

Yeah, I think that was on either another Afterbuzz interview or possibly on the Form Podcast commentary.

You have no idea how relieved I was when Noelle Stevenson said they know roughly how they're going to end She-Ra. If Voltron taught us anything, it's that you need a goal, you can't just wing it and hope an end of your story occurs to you on the way.

Fuck, if anything taught us that, it's Battlestar Galactica.

Shiro should have fucking died.

Say what you will about BG, it didn't end with the entire multiverse being erased and a character going "oh, the multiverse was completely erased? I can fix that. Sorry for never showing this kind of power level sooner, my bad."

Allura always had incredibly stupid unearned powerlevels, but I will agree, the final season took it to it's both illogical and predictable conclusion.

There's "illogical powerlevels" and then there's "can create a multiverse out of scratch."

A multiverse.

As in "every possible reality."

Having a character suddenly have the ability to recreate every single reality in a destroyed multiverse is hands down the biggest deus ex machina any human being has ever written.

Nah, the "I wanna be a Paladin again" bit was worth a LOT. Biggest problem was they put Zarkon in a coma, then they brought him back, then they killed him like a bitch. For realsies and good. What the everloving fuck.

Yeah, there was a lot of bullshit floating around regarding the producers/directors/writers. It was all pretty much shipfags just making stuff up.
There did end up being a bunch of drama started by some of the lower level staff from both Voltron and She-Ra, though. The vast majority of it got purged because it was super unprofessional.

I remember some of the She-Ra staff being outed as salty shippers who went on to trash Voltron. One of them nuked her whole Twitter I think.

Ehhhh, there's some exaggeration there, but a kernel of truth. VERY small number of LOW level She-Ra staff were involved. One said some things, the others were more along the lines of "liking" tweets they probably shouldn't have, about how vld sucked and ruined its ending.

I'd be harsher on them if "vld sucked and ruined its ending" wasn't the reaction I would expect from any non-retarded human being. It's unprofessional, but VLD fucked things up so badly I'd argue it's damn near a special case where everyone should be allowed kick the corpse a little.

>about how vld sucked and ruined its ending
No, she was liking violent fantasy tweets about Lauren that had been posted by butthurt klancefags.

No, the VLD cast was legitimately that retarded and they wanted to make the ending even worse. Lauren (I think?) wanted to kill off Hunk and have Acxa take over as the yellow paladin instead. As for shipping, none of the non-canon ships were ever hinted at ever unless you count Kihyun and to a lesser extent Joaquim being Sheith fudanshis and Bex making a Klance joke once.

Oh right, that one. Knew I was forgetting someone. Okay, let me amend that. There was one staffer openly saying shit, one caught liking violent fantasy stuff (there was some talk about how it should be seen as "liking death threats," but that just strikes me as autism feeding autism), and I think 2 other staffers that were fanning the flames liking tweets along the lines of "vld buries its gays" and "forget vld watch She-Ra instead."

Again though, I can't get too worked up about it because VLD was almost comically bad in season 8. For fuck's sake, they announced that Shiro's boyfriend would show up in the show AT A COnveNTion, then the character died faster than a mayfly. That's just a self-inflicted wound.

My favorite thing about the Adam debacle was Netflix continuing to use that Adam-Shiro-Keith picture that looked like it was advertising a love triangle fanfiction.

Truly chaotic marketing as it is.
My personal favorite are those hot topic shirts with Allura's tombstone they released after the final. They couldn't even be bothered to make them pink.

Why is she so cute lads?

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Because she's a nerd that's athletic and dresses like a boy.

I’m wondering if they were aiming for that but cut it at the last second. She looked weirdly sad when told that Lance and Allura were dating.

Trollhunters had some flaws, but at least the story concluded what it was building towards. It didn't defeat the main villains too early or took weird story shifts.

Adventures of Puss in Boots. It had a clear story arc and a main villain it was building towards. The things, they defeat him two-thirds into the series and then in the last third, it feels aimless. There's a definite resolution, but it fees so deflated.

All Hail King Julien was mostly a comedy, but the fifth season was way more story-oriented, without becoming grimdark, though. Then the sixth season was just one-off adventures again, which feels off after all they did. I do like its ending better, though.

I sometimes forget Yeun is not a full-time voice actor and has an on-camera acting career, so he can't juggle multiple shows like most VAs. But yeah, that might've been a factor. He would've been recording as a main character in Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters and recurred in Trollhunters during that time as well.

I'm pretty sure Pidge's voice actress ships them

There was something about Hunk saying he was faithful to shay in the comics

>You think the story is the problem?
Not OPanon but … yes.
Voltron (GoLion) belongs to the mecha-sophical school of Go Nagai s. A giant robot that represents a warrior/knight in armour, and not just a technological device, that fights demon-like beings and Lovecraftian creatures. In addition there's also the Five-Man Band component typical of Super-Sentai shows, the simple dualism of good and evil personified by the antagonism between two different kinds of warriors (Keith and Lotor), a fairy-tale setting, the growth path of a frail and helpless princess into a strong female character.
Ok, the original show wasn't so great, but the premises aren't to be sneezed at.
Dreamworks just torn up all those premises. The Lovecraftian monsters are nonexistent, the Villains are good people perverted by a magical substance (Zarkon' s a better king and leader than Alfor, prove me wrong!). The giant robot's hardly shows, and when it does isa total wanker and needs the princess 's magic... or to be incorporated into another robot to win the final battle. In fact the princess is more powerful than Voltron and everything gets solved by magic, so who needs a giany robot to protect the Universe? The Five-Man Band is a SIX-Man Band (obviously someone is one too many here) therefore, get the main character out of the way and put the gay OC in his slot. A dork sense of humor is as ubiquitous as it s annoying. What I cannot perceive instead is the team spirit, the camaraderie, the sense of family. Lance Humk and Pidge form a group of their own, the same goes for Keith and Sihro (for the delight of yaoists and tumblrettes), even Allura and Coran are almost separate case and her only link to the team is that ridiculous "romantic subplot" dropped in the last two seasons with the most useless character in the story.
How can you say the story isn't the problem?

>the comics

C'mon man.

Lance ruined everything.

Honest to God them not doing what the original Voltron did with Sven to Shiro was a mistake. Shiro could have had his own adventures, learning his own lessons, and coping with his PTSD with the lost Alteans and still have his gay romance. I still feel they could have done something with Romelle's older brother character as a potential gay love interest so it wouldn't feel tacked on or cheap.

I mean did Shiro really have any character development? Really? Aside from the stupid vapid Disney Princess XD Big titties memes, which isn't development.

The straight guys are Hunk and Keith. Lance is a turd.

>fart jokes
Lance repertoire.

>The only good character with the the worst

I would argue that there was a LOT of good potential for Shiro when he came back. He's older and more experienced, but he also found himself a bit of a third wheel. It could've been a great dynamic. It just fell flat, like a lot of other things.

Really, the show just shat the bed for no reason.

Lance said he was interested in a girl, pursued her, and got her and then she died.
Keith and Hunk never expressed any interest in girls whatsoever. They're as straight as Jughead until proven otherwise.
COMICS Jughead.

I've never seen a fandom dissolve the way Voltron's did. The last ep aired and everyone just sort of shuffled away, trying to pretend they'd never been in the fandom at all.

As someone that showed up near the end it was a bit surreal. "Hey I'm here to be part of this fandom, welp nevermind."

youtube.com/watch?v=wuQiO6eGU0g

>did Shiro really have any character development?
To be fair, nobody else got much in the way of development either. Plot just kinda happened to them.

They all did in the first two seasons. Then they just... wandered off.

It's all the more galling when you hear the interview with them saying they'd been promised the full run by Netflix right on day one. They fucking knew how many eps they were getting, and didn't make a long-term plan. Fuck those writers, they don't deserve to work in the industry ever again.

he's one chromosome away from being a monkey, death is a better option than a second date with him for sure.
straight guys don't have to act like apes always in heat to prove they're straights, but girls are into them anyway.

You strike me as a mentally healthy and well-adjusted individual.

>They all did in the first two seasons.
How do you figure? They learned to work as a team and that was about it.

It would have been nice if he had been the one to kill Sendak. It may not have counted as development, but it would have felt right, at least. But they even fucked that up.

Well yeah, but they started out pretty un-teamlike. Pidge wouldn't even tell her real gender initially.

Not saying that there was the most epic character development ever, but there WAS enough for people to assume that there would be more, spread out over the rest of the series.

Aaaand there wasn't.

She probably would have browsed Yea Forums.

She's Velma but with character development. In space.

>That counts for something.
No it doesn't, he's terrible and you're better than this user.

If Voltron did anything it proved that there was indeed hope for the internet. It had a terrible ending and none of the fans tried to justify or defend it. It was declared shit and all peaceably moved on.

I mean, some did, but with so many viewers we can write them off as statistical outliers. This was a show that was just bafflingly bad when it ended.

And it's a shame because it really poisoned the water for Voltron as a franchise. No, it didn't come together in the end, but they did what LOOKED like good updates for basically all the cast, and there's no realistic way to reboot the franchise again for the next decade or two without it feeling a lot like Netflix's one. Too much of what they did was "the only sensible modern update" territory, and flat out-ignoring other things (like Pidge being a girl) would alienate viewers at the starting gate.

It's a franchise-killer.

That's depressing and infuriating. They ruined things for everyone.

>they did what LOOKED like good updates for basically all the cast, and there's no realistic way to reboot the franchise again without it feeling a lot like Netflix's one
I don't see why it should. The Netflix's one has been a disaster. I would immediately move away from this version.

Benioff & Weiss are in good company.

No, the Netflix one ENDED disastrously. For most of its run people were enthused. It was largely seen as a decent reboot, with a strong start. Then it just nosedived in the final act.

So many things it did were seen as good updates that it would be damn tricky to reboot the show again without repeating that shit. Not impossible, but tricky enough to make it even more unlikely anyone will bother. The franchise is dead for a generation, at least.

GoT ended better than Voltron.

>For most of its run people were enthused. It was largely seen as a decent reboot, with a strong start. Then it just nosedived in the final act
Is that so?
First I want to know, was this really successful show? I would like to see the real ratings. Netflix released a DVD version only for thr first two seasons. The spin-off sequel and the live-action series have been cancelled way before the finale. Toys, action figures and comicbooks were not as successful as the execs expected.

Not exactly the picture of a successful show.

Eh, it went trending repeatedly on social media. Considering it's a 30+ old franchise that had been rebootedly pretty badly in the past, they did surprisingly well until the final act. Plus, it scored well on audience scoring on Rotten Tomatoes until the final season, so it seemed to be hitting good notes for the people who were watching it... until it didn't.

Sorry user, but I think you're out of your mind if you think the Netflix series didn't poison the well for the foreseeable future. This isn't going to get rebooted again for a decade, if not considerably longer.

As an oldfag, it makes me sad we'll never see another Voltron for decades.

Things went downhill for me around season 4.
The clone thing was handled poorly so those who praised season 6 for being "good" baffled me since Shiro's everything was massacred then made worse in seasons 7-8.

Fair enough.
For me, I would say it started pretty damn well for a reboot of an old property, improved markedly at first, then started to wobble and feel like it wasn't going anywhere good, never really felt like it was improving much, and then... holy shit what the fuck are you retards doing.

I was totally fine without this version

I agree, it started off strong but then wavered when Lotor made his alliance and Keith fucked off. I really lament they didn't do anything meaningful with Coran.

>Klancer Jesus is still around
mad lad.

Same here.

I liked Pidge. You'll have a hard time telling me she wasn't an improvement over the original model. And I liked the new origin for Lotor/Haggar, and some of the designs were nifty. Oh, and I did like Shiro initially, as the dude that lost an arm to get home and warn Earth that shit was about to go down.

It had its moments. All overshadowed by those last few eps.

Hunk had pussy cats fawning over him in the comics. Just a reminder.

>the comics
I've taken dumps that were more canonical to the show.

After Avatar and Korra I get why they didn't want to make shipping a big thing in the show, but Jesus fuck did they go too far. Lance and Allura getting together with virtually no lead-in, Shiro getting a husband in the end credits, Hunk and Shay staying "good friends," Keith and Pidge being just... ambiguously asexual. Just having someone say "I think he/she is hot" wouldn't have killed them. It's like a case study in how trying to avoid shippers just backfires.

>Lance and Allura getting together with virtually no lead-in
I know people holler about season 3's training room scene but it was a drop in an ocean and Allura had more going on with Shiro, Keith, and Lotor.

She may have "interacted" more with Shiro and Keith, but it was pure "they're a man and woman talking to one another" interaction. At least Lance expressed desire in the first ep or two. Making him basically the only man in the entire show to do so.

Yeesh. More sterile than Sesame Street.

Lance was so obnoxious about it. I fucking hate the route they went with. Acting like he owned Allura until he got BTFO by Lotor who wasn't trying.

keith not becoming the new galra emperor was such a letdown

Just a depressing show all around.

Hedrick wrote them. That's more canonical than half the show, honestly.

Keith not having a purple form for more than one frame was a bigger letdown.

>Coran never got a son
I'm still sad.

On the contrary, it was a show where staff didn't agree on things a LOT of the time. So one person wandering off and writing something without getting approval from the others? Especially about the characters' relationships? Yeah, no. I liked the comics, don't get me wrong, but I'm not kidding myself that they mesh well with the show.

And that was their problem. Those idiots even admitted to chucking their bible.

Where'd they say that? I'd believe it, just would love to see their exact words. To laugh at.

>tfw no art book, never ever

For all the shit this show got wrong writing wise, it looked great. They should have at least published a fucking art book.

It was in the Afterbuzz show. I believe it was the last one.

The merchandise choices for this show were ridiculous.

I don't understand why cartoon shows hire non-voice actors, especially for main character roles. A voice actor for a main character not being available is a huge problem and they're better off not hiring a well known live action actor busy with other non-VA commitments, unless they can find a great imitator.

Well with all Netflix shows, the main thing they're producing is... something to make people keep their Netflix subscription. Other merch is nice, but not the priority.

I still wonder why they bothered with a major superstar like Yeun. Labine and Darby are big too, but not pop-culture relevant and popular like Yeun. No one is going to watch Voltron because of Steven Yeun or whatever big star is attached. It's a cartoon.

It honestly feels like a lame excuse to me, since Yeun was a main character in Stretch Armstrong and in Tuca & Bertie. Also, getting celebrities as regular characters in cartoons is becoming increasingly common. They managed to get David Tennant as Scrooge for the majority of the new Ducktales series, for example.

>major superstar
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

They shouldn't have gone with someone that might have other commitments, but that's one hell of an exaggeration. He's got like Walking Dead and that's about it.

Yuen clearly cared more about working on the Arcadia cartoons than Voltron

>She looked weirdly sad when told that Lance and Allura were dating.
I'm pretty sure Pidge was as surprised at Allura liking Lance as the audience was. Like did Pidge ever see Allura warming up to Lance? Although maybe I'm just biased due to my pancefaggotry.

Shiro is too gay, Keith is too emo, and Hunk is too fat sorry.

Despite being a total SJW, Pidge's VA hated dealing with antis so she'd reblog ships they'd hate. She reblogged a lot of Plance so I'm think she genuinely liked it.

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Okay fine, maybe not that far in stardom, but Yeun at the time was in a major hit tv show. Still big enough where the guy would be busy doing other things.

They skipped over all the interesting stuff and focused on all the boring shit. We could have had a fleshed out Galra court with galactic backstabbing and plotting, but it skates past all that for wacky shenanigans of the day.

He clearly thinks Voltron really isn't that important to him if he tells the studio he has other commitments and can't meet their deadline. Should have replaced him like they did with one of Lotor's fangirls.

its embarrassing that the 80s cartoon for all its flaws had a better fleshed out universe, better villains, and more consistent characterization than a modern show

Sven's development was great. A lot more than what Shiro got.

As fun as some of those episodes were, they didn't add shit to the story. They could have woven some of them into the actual story-heavy episodes yet chose not to. I sort of think they used the joke episodes as a crutch to get away with their blaring pacing issues. The audience was complacent to it because lolol funneh XD

>DnD didn't have a plan for GoT
>Rian Jonson admitted that he wrote TLJ before Awakens was even released, and that JJ even confesses they didn't have overall story line of the new SW trilogy would go
>Voltron writers had to change the plot after their bosses told them to keep Shiro, forcing them make it all up as they went
Seriously, what's up with these writers not having a plan and thinking it would end up well for them? These corporations have billions of dollars with project budget funded in the millions and they can't stick to a overall direction of where it begins and how it ends? I mean, come on. Are these people honestly this incompetent?

Some of that's on the fandom though. The writers could have fleshed out the universe, but there were basically no fans asking them to do so. Just screeching hordes demanding their ships.

Which I maintain is what happens when you inherit the fans of shows that HAD romance and give them nothing to work with in your own show. They WILL try to fill the void and obsess about it.

>Voltron writers had to change the plot after their bosses told them to keep Shiro, forcing them make it all up as they went
All those stupid motherfuckers had to do was pull a Sven to keep Shiro alive and make it your B plot line. They already had a fucking template. Yes I am so fucking mad.

From the very first episode it was clear that it's a show meant for young boys and anyone watching outside of that range is kind of an idiot for thinking it's going to be anything good.

Bah. First ep had promises of a bloody war, a dude losing his arm, and references to a show that was decades old. And some characterization shit between an emo bad-boy and a Lancer. People could be forgiven for thinking it would appeal to older viewers and fujoshi.

Shit, whatever else you can say about the shitstain of an ending, nobody will claim it was written with "young boys" in mind.

lol. I'd agree if it were still the late 90s or early 2000s before children's media wasn't as horribly cucked and neutered by soccer moms as it is now. The quality of shows for young boys has decreased so dramatically that literally anything with a semblance of action, worldbuilding, actual continuity, good artstyle and maturity will attract an older audience hungry for good animation. Plus it's on fucking Netflix. You really can't blame older people for latching onto it. It's on Dreamworks/the writing staff for not adapting more to a YA audience like, for example. Young Justice did instead of floundering and still trying to pander to 7 year olds while creating something far too boring and that requires far more attention than they have to consume while occasionally throwing their predominantly teen/adult audience weird misguided bones.

I think he had stuff going on with his personal life around the time Keith dropped off too.

So fucking weird seeing She-Ra doing a better job of this shit. Not high praise, but still, wtf.

the first episode has a fart joke in it man

And a dude losing his arm. You can aim for multiple demographics.

And Stretch Armstrong. And Tuck and Bertie. And even his small role in Legend of Korra. Almost like he prefers roles with actual humor and charm rather than the stoic ninja stereotype.

Yeah, that annoyed me too. They outright said in an interview they ignored the Galra Civil War, because it was "boring". Not more boring than those coalition episodes.

The coalition episodes were pure cancer.

To be fair, the Galra Civil War ended up being boring. Just less boring than what they went with instead.

It would have been so easy. Team comes together, learns to BE a team, beats Zarkon... sorta. Team starts putting together allies, faces Lotor, who defects to their side when Zarkon comes back more powerful. Keep building allies, but damn if the Galra aren't more powerful. Final arc, go after Zarkon again in a big push with all the races together, uncover that Zarkon had never been the real threat, it was that shitty parasite mojo, one last big "we all have to work together (y'know, because it's a show about combining)" as Zarkon and the Galra join them in defeating the real evil. And end show. Simple.

Well at least we rebooted DuckTales and She-Ra well. Oh! And Mystery Incorporated.

That counts for something, right?

How the fuck is Stretch Armstrong even a show?

I disagree. Certainly, the first seasons were the most solid, but the background to the storyline was asinine. Too much magic elements, for a start. The sentient robots, the mystical bond between man and machine whose explanation was different n every season and at any pilot's change. does seem like too much of a coincidence that the lions over all those centuries have never met a single living being with the right characteristics until five choose-ones come together in the same place at exactly the same time? and three of them have already some kind of personal connection to the evil aliens? Not even the original show had so forced plot points. In a such fantasy-magical context the very idea of a giant robot seems out of place.
Pidge is the one and only character that works. I would draw a veil over the others. Allura is absurdly powerful. Shiro is just a carbon copy of Bucky Barns. Three of the main characters serve no other purpose besides the comic reliefs. And Lotor/Haggar origins are not as original as you think.

Hasbro desperately trying to do something with the rights before they lose them, which is noticeable since they did nothing with the show once the initial season got made.

It was simple, but fun.

I just wanted the old Galra Aesthetic. the new one was so fucking boring. card suit robes, skull ships, space coffins. it had a solid theme going on.

If I remember correctly all the bullshit came from DreamWorks execs. From the lack of good merch to the stupid writing decisions. I've never heard of Netflix being super invasive to a show besides cancelling them

Anyone else think about how Shiro's galra arm was 1000 times better looking than the clunky Altean one?

Yes.

>tfw no beach episode never ever
It's not fair lads

Yes. Galra aesthetics are much better than Altean aesthetics.

I'll concede to the idea that the magic was way out of control for this show, same with the concept of the lions being so intrinsically tied to it. And because of the whole "muh personality and lions choose you" thing, I think people went full retard with their "BLACK LION FOR SHIRO/KEITH/LANCE" autism. Though to be fair, Keith always had the black lion, but yeah it was nuts.

DreamWorks needs to get its ass in gear on the merch front. It boggles my mind that they waited so long to get in on the Funko Pop train and that all we had until then were some poorly designed shirts, ugly action figures, and tacky jewelry.

I'd agree execs bungled it but in hindsight there sure was a lot of twitter originating retcons and shit from writers and staff.

"Oh yeah Ezora's alive guys"

Speaking of Ezor, this show has so many OCs that it made it hard for any of us to care about them. They also robbed a lot from the main cast.

"And Gay, because we made her a Ty Lee knock off and you know how Ty Lee wasn't gay, just asskissing out of free and trying to drown fear in optimism? yeah fuck that super gay"

"Also her partner is the most stereotypically butch muscleman-girl we could make to go with her super girly girl nature, and she also survived."

>Rotten Tomatoes
Miraculous Ladybug has very few user ratings and 0 critic ratings, but I bet it's much more popular than voltron for number of viewers that watch it.

I'm still mad they wasted all that time on the cadets.

How do you even compare them? They're completely different shows made for completely different audiences.

I hated the Earthsquad so fucking much. And that boring ugly Atlas ship.

I hated the cadets so much. Very clearly their attempt to be "Hey guys check out our NEW OCs. If you like them enough, they'll be the NEW Voltron crew in a NEW show."
You don't make a reboot to extol your goddamn OCs.

remember when people were excited for lorax to come back from the magic dimension all powerful but they found him as a melted corpse what the fuck

Ohhh yeeeeah.

Yeah, that sucked.

So many things sucked in that show.

Both are children's action cartoon (between 5 and 11) with a toy line based on,as far as I know. The first targered for a wider audience,the second specifically for little girls.

Same honestly. How are you gonna make us care about four new characters, two of which just seem like slightly reskinned versions of your already loved existing cast, in the second to last season?

James - Less dark Lance
Ina - Requisite autist with no personality (and that's supposed to be endearing!)
Nadia - Lance with a vagina
Ryan - the black one

The token gay is missing

Adam - the dead faggot

I would have been fine if they actually did anything with half of them but Lotor's not-Azula team came in, were like an actually cohesive *thing* for all of ten episodes, one of them died off, etc.

Really a lot of Voltron seems like they took notes on what worked and what "worked" [in the Tumblr sense] about ATLA and TLOK, and just punched them in like a cheat code, then sped past them.

Azula and co. worked because we had plenty of time to get to know them, see them doing things, being a cohesive force, they became an integral part of the show. And only split towards the very end.

Lotor's losers were a cohesive thing for so short a period we didn't even get any actual character dynamics down before the status quo with them changed repeatedly.

>Lotor's losers were a cohesive thing for so short a period we didn't even get any actual character dynamics down before the status quo with them changed repeatedly.
Yeah, at one point the generals felt like Team Rocket. They appeared for no reason at all and still failed. It was ridiculous.

Yeah.

Again it's a problem I see a lot these days in everything from comics and cartoons to novels and movies/tv to anime and manga.

Nobody wants any fucking meat and potatoes, they just want dessert. They go lightning fast through the basic motions of what makes characters and stories good and popular, and then jump into an endless chain of escalation beelining straight for the finishline.

Which is really fucking messy when they don't even know what that's actually going to *be*.

One thing I liked about the 2011 Thundercats for example was that it actually understood that there was a difference between "Building and reinforcing a dynamic via one or two off episodes unconnected to the big bad" and "Filler". Not all of them were gems, but a lot of those smaller wacky wayside tribe episodes did a lot to help build a connection with the team.

Voltron has *some* of those but it still spent waaaay too much time trying to do the multi-threaded, everyone's all over the place fighting the good fight thing while skipping over doing a good enough job of establishing and reinforcing the group dynamic, period, let alone without the Galra breathing down their necks to get repeatedly discredited as threats.

The long-term plans for Thundercats 2011 were a disaster waiting to happen. Sometimes its better that a series die in the cradle, so we can have the good stuff unsullied.

I will never forgive them for Pumyra and what they were going to do with her.

The thing people always forget is that as writers, good writers anyway, work on things, the plans slowly change. Not spur of the moment shit, but as you progress, the story morphs slowly beyond a few concrete ideas and an end goal into something new. Thundercats liekly would have changed the majority of their plans once the season wrapped up and as they slowly worked their way through to some degree due to them not working out.

DESU that's why, say, RWBY's shit, they took Monty's old cliff notes and decided to not change any of them rather than letting them shift as time went on.
Well that and the newer writers don't care and are pretty fucking shit anyway. But sticking to old cliffnotes and making them iron clad because they're uncreative is a large part of that.

No, no, no, it makes perfect sense. Mum-Ra killed her, Lion-o failed to save her. Obviously she would hate Lion-o more and side with the dude that literally killed her.

And, y'know... turn into a bug. As one does.

Fuck that Tigrafag director. Ruined everything and everyone.

It's been clear from the beginning that, for the sake of the show and its audience, Keith needed to look straight as little as possible. Pidge is to attract the gender-fluid ones, and no one never gave a crap about Hunk, the bitch wanted to kill him.

>beach episode
What's the point? In this cartoon, except for Shiro, males and females have the same type of body.

>Keith needed to look straight as little as possible
user, this implies them giving far more of a shit than they did.

Yes, user. You wouldn't be able to tell Hunk and Pidge apart if they didn't have different color shirts.

Shiro is the point of a beach episode, you fool.

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>the giant robot fights were the worst action bits in the show.

This is so weirdly conspicuous throughout the show. The giant robot fights aren't bad but they're kind of lifeless, then you have absolute batshit kino sakuga in the hand-to-hand sequences. Like if your passion is martial combat that's cool but what the fuck are you doing animating Voltron?

>Some of that's on the fandom though
The writers room shouldn't be listening to fans at any time.

Prime fucking rules. I marathoned it recently and it's unironically the best action cartoon I've watched in a long time.

>keith not becoming the new galra emperor was such a letdown

I was so sure Keith and Allura were an endgame ship and that they were going to usher in a new era for the Galra with a "love over hate" type deal and instead the show did whatever the fuck it did.

Sending Lotor to the quintessence dimension instead of the Paladins definitively killing him, only to reveal he died in there like two seasons later is the weirdest fucking writing decision I've ever seen in a show.

Shouldn't, but do. And if you've created a massive space story and literally nobody in the audience is going "hey, tell us more about the cultures" you're probably going to think nobody is interested in the cultures and will work accordingly.

Not making excuses for the writers, they fucked up, just acknowledging that we had an unusually shitty fandom that cared vastly more about their awful noncanon ships than the actual fucking plot and lore.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuup.

That would have made more sense than whatever we got.

10,000 years was a fucking mistake.

Resonable conclusion. Keith and Allura could have had their traditional special snowflakey plot. Shiro could have been immersed in his delicious ryona fanservice arc and the Garrison Trio could have had some wacky adventures in Space Dandy style. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, truly.

Does Pidge's body look feminine to you? And don't post pics of Pidge in lewd poses. Fanarts don't count.

And lets not forget about the PRIMARY fan base.

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It would have been nice..
I would've been more inclined to purchase the blu-rays then.

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There was no point to hype his return only for it to be a lie.

Resonable conclusion because Haggar and Zarkon messed up the universe, hence the two characters closest to them should've fixed everything, for better or for worse, even dying together and sacrificing voltron if necessary.
Unpopular opinion. I'm convinced that Keith should've been half alyean and not galaran. He has none of galran hallmarks. This particular heritage didn't lead to anything and doesn't explain his special sensitivity to the lions or the quintessence. A woman from the altean colony should've been his mother, maybe a Romelle MILFversion.

Yes, yes, we get it- the literal first ever all-3d cartoon, made on computers that could barely support more than five characters on screen at a time, has aged pretty poorly. You can get off the horse now, bucky, because even despite its flaws it still holds up as a high-bar TF series.

Prime's pretty damn decent, all told. The vast majority of episodes are worthwhile watching, with a smattering of standout episodes- usually ones introducing characters. Airachnid's introduction episode is Kino, and Predaking basically carried S3 through its weakest parts with presence alone (a good design on a large character mixed with a great performance from Peter Mensah makes for a great combo) -and a few flops.

You can tell which ones are standout and which ones are flops pretty easily. Notably, a number of the latter feature the Asian kid (Miko?) as a main character than a secondary one.

Pidge isn't le thicc, but plenty of folks still would have wanted a beach episode if we got to see Pidge in a swimsuit.

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Jesus fuck, long haired Pidge is adorable.

She is

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She should have had her hair grow longer as the series continued.

Last bump for discussion. Lauquim ruined everything.

Agreed

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Yeah, that was... I don't know what that was.

user was claiming there wasn't variety in body type. Shiro looks pretty different from Lance, who sure as fuck isn't Hunk, who you wouldn't mistake for Pidge, who is pretty distinct from Allura.

I've seen shows with way less variety in the body types. Looking back, it was one of the very few things the show did alright.

Lauquim?

I can't imagine rebooting a giant robot series without giving a fuck about giant robots. Just... how?

The next version show be produced by Toei.

It should have been an anime.

Plus they changed poor Pidge from a cute little boy into some androgynous thing for some reason.

Considering how unwatchable the original Voltron was, Legendary Defender is a work of art.

Lauren and Joaquim.

>unwatchable
It was fine, though yes, dated, and managed to be more coherent and respected characters better than VLD.

OG Voltron will hold up better than the bigger budget reboot. Amazing.

>thing
It's called a "prepubescent girl" user. Try getting out more.

15 year olds are pubescent

Not all. Puberty didn't hit her yet.

Hunk was never more than a fat joke.

So was VLD's Hunk.

VLD's Hunk was also capable of
1. Vomiting
2. Wishing he wasn't there
3. Wishing he was back home
4. Pointing out that people kept forgetting he also knew science
5. More vomiting

Don't forget cooking! Fat people love to cook!!

To be fair, that's still better than OG Hunk.

It literally isn't. A fat person cooking is still an extension of a fat joke.

OG Hunk didn't even have that though. He couldn't cook, a recurring thing was him hassling other people to cook for him. He could eat and fight, that was it.

NuHunk could eat, cook, do science with Pidge (although she obviously took the lead), say that the plans people were cooking up were fucking insane, and pine for home. It ain't much, but it's still way more than the original.

You have a point, but the number of times the show remembers Hunk is an engineer was a drop of an ocean of Pidge's science talks.

Wrong

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I hate how Shiro got all the good suffering, nobody else really went though real trauma to challenge them in any way.

Even if they didn't want to torture kids (Which in itself lame, torturing kids is fine tradition of YA fiction) there were so many precarious siblings none of whom died. Disappointing and also crowded.

Sure, but my point is that the originals were even flatter.
OG Keith: THE LEADER.
OG Lance: The backtalker
OG Hunk: Fat and dumb
OG Pidge: Kid

Like, they didn't do nearly enough to improve upon what they had to work with, but I think it's still fair to acknowledge that what they had to work with was damn little to begin with.

Yeah they had little to work with, and yet they still managed to muck it up. I won't acknowledge their effort because it was C- work.

Present day Pidge is really aggressive but younger girlier Pidge was very meek and timid. I wish they did a time travelling plot to have them interact. That would be better than whatever the hell was the last season.

I could make a long list of things better than whatever the hell was the last season.

Prime was screwed by being a series to sell toys. It could have been great, but they totally got knocked off course by The Hunt For The Latest Toy Shit near the end.

>Sending Lotor to the quintessence dimension instead of the Paladins definitively killing him, only to reveal he died in there like two seasons later is the weirdest fucking writing decision I've ever seen in a show.

Seconding this. What the fuck, VLD writers?

I'm surprised they didn't do more with the broken time region of space. Just Keith and his mom. Tch.

Geez, am I the only one who still kinda likes the show? The ending was a miss, but overall I thought it was way better than 99.9% of the trash dumped on Yea Forums.

The problem is, as always, sexual deviants. Instead of watching and enjoying the show, they demanded things like representation and shipping. They tried to extort the show runners. I am very upset the show tanked, and I squarely blame the faggots.

Then you're an idiot. Maybe blame, I dunno... the writers.

>Plus they changed poor Pidge from a cute little boy into some androgynous thing for some reason.
If anything, they should have genderbent more characters. The fanbase would have lost half of it's cancer if Keith was a girl.

Point.

Far more than half. FAR more.

Nah, I still kinda like it too. I think it's flawed as fuck, but still pretty entertaining.

>Plus they changed poor Pidge from a cute little boy into some androgynous thing for some reason.

OG Pidge was never, at any point, in any language, anything remotely close to "cute."

Fuck off Misha.
Though I'd like Keith x Allura lesbian stuff.

>Geez, am I the only one who still kinda likes the show? The ending was a miss, but overall I thought it was way better than 99.9% of the trash dumped on Yea Forums.

The ending was more than a miss though. It was like crashing a car into a manure truck. Doesn't matter how nice the car was beforehand, it's now covered in shit.

The truth hurts. Fucking Keith-with-someone-else shipping was what made the fandom just insufferable and caused all the fanart to be dominated by stupid ships instead of things like robots, space battles, and weird aliens.

Maybe if those retards established either the old school route or just made the gay garbage with Shiro non-existent or stomp out Klance from the get-go it wouldn't be as horrendous as it was.

>stomp out Klance from the get-go it wouldn't be as horrendous as it was.
How were they supposed to "stomp out" Klance when Keith was already always shitting on Lance and Lance was already always humping the leg of anything with two x chromosomes?

There were many routes to making the fandom not-shit.

Frankly, having Lance OPENLY LUST OVER WOMEN SEVERAL TIMES should have done it, but some people are thick-headed.

You literally tell them as executives in interviews, duh. "Yeah they're not going to get together but feel free to ship them."

They should have done many things differently yet chose not to.

I mean... at the point where they realized they'd need to do that, it had already gotten so bad it would be seen as very hostile to the fandom.

>it would be seen as very hostile to the fandom.
The fandom has already been hostile. They need no quarter.

The people making the show need a fandom watching it. They were diplomatic. It wasn't an insane tactic, they didn't know better.

We learn from their mistakes. Other shows need to either shoot things down VERY fast, or make it VERY clear what every character's preference is. Otherwise you get cancer.

It's what happens when you try to play friends with your fandom. Those idiots had their time to learn their lesson with Avatar and Korra. Playing coy and "omg it's a spoiler~" was a bad idea not even using hindsight.

>People blaming how the writers/producers handled it for the fandom

The writers and staff actually MAKING the show were FINE. The problem was the fucking VAs feeding that shit. Fuck you, Jeremy Shada in particular.

Shows need to make their VAs sign NDAs specifically not to talk about who their character would or wouldn't bone. You're not the fucking writer, you don't fucking get to decide. You read words off a teleprompter, get the fuck over yourself.

in the eyes of fujos that just means he's a double closeted gay

fandoms are only a tiny fraction of people that watch a show, they're just very vocal.

>The writers and staff actually MAKING the show were FINE
With the product they shelled out, they sure as hell weren't.

In their dealing with the fandom, they weren't the main problem. You had VAs going rogue and saying shit at cons that they shouldn't, tweeting/liking shit that they shouldn't, and basically just feeding fans delusions while the writers were trying to keep quiet. You want to point blame for why the fandom turned to shit, look at the actors.

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some of the storyboard artists weren't helping either, with their fanart confused for canon interpretations

Please give blame to Keaton too. Shada was a dumb cunt but honestly some of that fuel came from him too. Bex was also bad.

I miss liking Voltron.

I'd argue that the Thundercats reboot shit the bed harder and faster due to its immediate nosedive after the opening episodes. Voltron did have an impressive belly flop after trying to raise the stakes to such absolutely incoherent levels though.

It didn't help that the directors and writers were changed after the first episode and the new ones were major Tigrafags.

Fair.

Liking Tigra wasn't the real problem. They fucked up the minute they aimed for grimdark

It was fine in episode one.

It seemed fine. We got a look at their long-term story bible though, and if that was the final destination then no wonder things quickly went off track. The Tigra-Pumyra-Lion-o stuff? Making Lynx-o and the Thundercat society into brutal fascists who murdered women and children, went "nothing personal, just following orders," and honestly deserved to be wiped out? Yeah, no, fuck that shit. They approached the show very badly. Voltron actually approached their show better... approaching a reboot with very little planned is actually better than approaching it with a terrible plan.

Voltron is a rarity for me.

I don't want a reboot, I want a redo. I want THIS show, with THESE designs, just... don't fuck up the final acts. Make the ending good.

I don't often have that kind of love-hate relationship with shows.

Keaton was bad, Shada was worse, all of them should have been banned from discussing their characters' love life. If you're not the one writing that shit you shouldn't be engaging with fans about it.

Second.

A lot of folks on Yea Forums defended Keaton but he was a part of the problem.

He was a VERY small part of the problem compared to Shada. If it had just been Keaton's shenanigans things wouldn't have gotten nearly as out of hand.

Korra was OPENLY LUST OVER MEN before she knew she loves pussy

And what wound be' a good ending for you????

Star Lord: THE LEADER
Gamora: The Chick/leader's LI
Rocket: The backtalker
Drax: Huge and zumba
Groot: The kid

*huge and dumb

To be fair, the men in question sucked.
They sucked hard.
Mako was "turn two women into lesbians" shitty.

The story's got more holes than a kitchen sponge and the action was boring

1. Doing something with Lotor other than "oh, you know how we dropped him in the Quintessence instead of just killing him? Well he's dead. Probably should have just shown his corpse earlier."
2. Zarkon and Haggar as lead-in final bosses, with the Quintessence entities as the endgame threat. Y'know, like it had looked like the show was building to at first?
3. How about not doing Lance-gets-the-girl-oops-she's-dead
4. Don't end it with the biggest deus ex machina ever written. It's surprisingly easy to not have one of your characters go "oh shit, didn't I mention? I can snap my fingers and recreate a multiverse that just got annihilated."

Really, what's so galling with Voltron is that a decent (not great, but acceptable) ending would have been fucking EASY.

>3. How about not doing Lance-gets-the-girl-oops-she's-dead
The Lance date episode is cringe incarnate.

Hey, not saying otherwise. Just saying that having the straight couple aaaalmost happen and then she poofs into the afterlife? That was even worse.

what should have happened.

Shiro Dies, but is replaced by Adam as the Earth liaison. Atlas does not transform but has a complementary fleet at all times.
Keith goes full purple and grows as leader
Zarkon is an usurper, after he gets beat, the ugly ass OG Zarkon appears and makes a power play against Lotor
Coran is fatherly. make him the heart of the Paladins, also make him Kamikaze the castle into the big bad in the final act
6th Lion with Pidge's brother.

You very nearly had me nodding along, then you went "and OG Zarkon is there."

You're good enough at writing that you could have been on the show! That's not a compliment!

I just cant handle how sterile the Galra designs are. I mean sure, they are more fuckable, but still.

Nonsense.
That's not what fridging means. Her death didn't somehow motivate Lance to beat up the bad guy and wasn't the sole purpose of her character; it resolved the problem. It's a bog standard, boring heroic sacrifice.

That doesn't mean you out-of-left-field say "oh, and the guy you thought was Zarkon should be replaced by the original Zarkon!"

That's just bad writing, user.

I agree, it's definitely one of those shows I have a love/hate relationship with. There's so many things I like, but so many things that I wish they had done differently.

Well what shows managed to nosedive harder than Voltron? An argument's been made for the Thundercats reboot, and nothing else.

Voltron was already a dead franchise
VLD revived it and then fucked up

For a show meant to sell merch, it sure wasn't that Toyetic

I want to make this sweaty nerd cum.

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It wasn't meant to sell merch. No netflix shows are. Netflix has a partnership with Dreamworks, Dreamworks has rights to a bunch of old properties, Netflix wants shows made out of those "classic" properties to entice people to subscribe and keep subscribing. Not to say that they shouldn't have merchandised better, but the primary goal was to get people to stick with Netflix for a few years to get the full story.

She has a laptop and an intergalactic internet. She can take care of that herself.

It was dead...ish. It could have been resurrected competently. It had name-brand recognition among an older demographic, which is a handy place to start.

Lotor.
His name is Lotor.

No, I'm pretty sure it was Lorax.

1. 2. As much I like Zarkon, Lotor in Darth Vater mode and Hagar should've been the final bosses.
3. Don't make me sick! Allura and the Dumb together are meaningless and cringie.
4. I never likes Godess Allura but she has been the deux xe machina from the start, so her ending didn't come from nowhere. Maybe should've been better she reborn s as a child living with Coran in the new Altea.