#a;dsfjlasj I am a disaster

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the writers in VLD season 8 was the one who wrote the end of Evangelion (you'll probably have to look it up to see what I mean)

Hi, anon! Thanks for the note! Yeahh I know what you’re talking about with Evangelion, and how nihilistic its ending was...tbh, a lot of mecha shows I know are rated higher than TV-Y7-FV just by virtue of the content and social issues involved in mecha genre...Some of them make VLD look pretty tame, lol. I certainly agree that the larger mecha genre likely influenced the production team for VLD. Its EPs, for example, were huge Macross and Robotech fans:

“Macross/Robotech was probably my biggest influence. Beyond the amazing visuals it was the first animated show that I watched that had an ongoing/serialized story and characters that grew with the series. The stakes and drama seemed so real because when characters died they stayed dead and there was this whole emotional/social journey that was going on beyond all the explosions and mecha fighting. The bad guys of the series were not played as your typical bad guys. There was a whole grey area and moral ambiguity to their motivations. It was groundbreaking in so many ways. As a kid the show felt so gritty and real.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2016/06/04/voltron-legendary-defender-showrunner-joaquim-dos-santos-on-staying-true-to-the-source-material/#4679915b7c2d

And they even admitted in another interview just how heavily season 7 was informed by Macross: https://screenrant.com/voltron-season-7-magic-influences-interview/amp/?__twitter_impression=

And then, of course, the production team admits to taking a lot of cues from GoLion, the original 1982 Japanese base to Voltron, especially in regards to drama and its thematic tensions:

“Once you knew, okay, we’re doing Voltron, what was the first thing that you did? Did you watch all of the episodes? Did you brainstorm? How did the process start?

Montgomery: I know the first thing I did but I can’t say it because it’ll be a spoiler. Beyond that we remembered what we loved, we definitely felt like we had to go back and rewatch the source material because we remember what we love about the show but very few of us remember the legit story points.

What we found was that there was a lot of story missing in the original and it wasn’t quite the show that we thought we remembered it being. So what we ended up doing was we went back and watched the very original, GoLion which is the Japanese version and that one has a much more figured out story because they obviously weren’t trying to cobble something together from footage from another series, they were just making a story.

Problem is? That story was a lot darker than anything we could really do here in America.

Dos Santos: Especially in the ’80s when animation was a whole lot more safe and there were a bunch more regulations than now. Honestly I don’t know if audiences were as sophisticated then as they are now. Those themes from GoLion are something we were able to infuse in terms of their more sophisticated nature into our show. They definitely wouldn’t have gotten across in the ’80s.”

Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/voltron-legendary-defender-producers-talk-creative-process/

But GoLion was rated, like several other mechas, TV-14. For reasons, lol.

Ultimately, I think Voltron as a franchise is just having a major identity crisis because it was brought to America in the 80s on an identity crisis of how to “sanitize” dark show content like GoLion to sell toys to children.

Maybe it’ll figure itself out one day? But someone will have to sit down and really think about what makes the Voltron franchise unique compared to all of these competing mecha franchises. VLD tried to get there I think by openly acknowledging its fantasy aspects and more Arthurian legend vibes...Joaquim Dos Santos himself identified the genre of Voltron as “a sci-fi space opera vs a fantasy period piece” in the Forbes article linked above. And that seemed like a pretty accurate take for the 1984 show, even down to how he positions the two genres as in conflict with each other. VLD definitely takes this forward with its greater attention to magic, ancient legends, etc. But VLD seems to have tripped by trying to force Voltron to be more like non-Voltron shows.

(Probably a moral lesson in here about the importance of staying true to yourself)

So whoever can further define how to make Voltron genuinely special as a franchise will hold the keys to the kingdom for the next reboot. Maybe that’s a more appropriate question, at the end of the day:

How do you make Voltron stand out against other mechas? What kind of content does that involve? What is the true heart and purpose for this franchise that makes it so special compared to Evangelion, or GoLion, or Macross, or Robotech? And how can that heart and purpose be carried through each and every episode? 

Hm...