Prince Lottie the Thottie

After months of hard work, the first episode of my Constructing Legends video essay series covering Voltron: Legendary Defender is now live on YouTube!

Allura: It all came to a head, I had to remove the virus and all of my fathers data went with it.

Lotor: You were faced with a sacrifice, princess. To have to choose between what is left of the past and the future of those you’ve come to be in charge of.

Allura: I miss him. If I knew what I know now, we could have tried to save him.

Lotor: Princess, i did not know King Alfor. I know only tales and relics, but you, you are his legacy.

Allura: I wish you could have known even the smallest bit of him that was left. If I could go back and do anything differently it would be to save what I could of him. How selfish of me…

Lotor: It is not selfish to long for a bond. Regrets tell us what we have learned, what we can do better, do right, going forward.

"I do not understand," she said softly. "One minute you are kind and the next you are cruel. Whenever I see you it is as if you become a completely different person." She pursed her lips. "You are… unpredictable, Lotor… and that makes you dangerous."

"So you are afraid of me," he said, the disappointment unhidden in his eyes.

"That is not what I said," she insisted gently, and she was surprised to hear the compassion in her own voice.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

Allura’s fingers trembled as they stroked across cracked stone. “How many times?” she demanded, voice wavering. “You speak of multiple universes in the past, as if…total destruction has happened before.”

The ruins of Oriande lay dormant, save for the blip of the stars within a crumbled temple. “Oh my child,” came the soft, dual tone of a Life Giver. “The material world can bend and break in many ways, but its fragments can always be reordered. It is true that the universe you know was built on the ruins of many previous ones.”

“How many times?” she asked again. Her forehead bore no crown, her clothes simple adornments from surviving Alteans. Her face broke with a frustrated twitch. “*How many times has the universe been broken and remade again, and what must I do to fix it all?”

The stars swirled about her in a weak form, stroking her cheek. “Destruction is required for creation.”

Allura backed away, face shadowed by the curls of her hair. “No. No, you do not understand my question. I remade the universe in response to Honerva’s insanity. And…and even then, it was an imperfect restoration.” Pure, bright power flickered from her fingers. “I could not return my father or mother or the millions of others who have been lost in this war. All those who’ve fallen to the ills of quintessence madness.” Her voice broke. “They did not return when I attempted restoration of all physical form, and even this great dimension of Alchemy remains as a ruin. So you will tell me now, great Life Giver, what I have yet to learn.”

There absolutely are. 

And before I go any further, I have no clue if you already know who Bob Koplar is, but if you do, then this little explanation will just be for anyone reading this who doesn’t: Bob Koplar is the current head of WEP (World Events Productions), the company that made the original show in the 80s and owns the Voltron brand. Dreamworks at the time of the Netflix Voltron series’ production only had the rights to adapt the existing Voltron material and did not own the brand outright. All scripts/episodes for VLD had to go through Bob for approval (by his own admission, although the video where he acknowledges this has sadly been deleted from Youtube). 

So with that explanation out of the way, the reason the final season of Voltron is so bad was because the showrunners and writers at Dreamworks had a very specific story they were trying to tell, while based on comments made by cast, crew, and Koplar himself over the years, Bob wanted 1) a glorified toy commercial to sell toys to 6 year old boys, and 2) a successor to the previous Voltron series, Voltron Force. 

Based on all the evidence found in and around Seasons 7 and 8, the crew’s plans for the final seasons would have involved revealing that Lotor was still alive in the Rift, that he was innocent of the crimes he had been condemned for, and that he would reconcile with Allura and Team Voltron before joining them in the final battle against Honerva. 

Bob found out about this while the crew was making Season 7 and ordered them to change it. Based on interview comments and the history of the Voltron brand, the most likely reason was because he wanted Lotor to remain a villain so he could be reused as the antagonist of a sequel series. The crew complied and removed much of the content surrounding this plotline from Season 7, but then reworked it into Season 8 and tried to push for their planned ending anyway, banking on the fact that by the time Bob found out they’d defied him it would be too late for him to do anything. Instead, the showrunners were forced to cut out multiple episodes’ worth of footage and then rearrange what was left in order to have the number of episodes their contract with Netflix obligated them to release. (A summary of the most notable evidence of changes within the season itself, along with a rough outline of what the final season should’ve looked like based on what was removed, can be found here)

And this all happened after production was already completed, as even the animators and most of the voice actors were surprised by the version of the final season we got. 

Bob has also been implicated by multiple interviews with cast and crew as pushing back against the crew’s desire to include queer characters and relationships in the show, and prevented them from including any same-gender romance between the paladins. 

The function of a growl is as a warning. It is a communication that violence is available as a tool, but is not preferred. Other outcomes, besides your death, are available and should be considered.

But the creature that wants to kill you will not growl.

If your death is the goal, then growling will only serve as a delay and may result in your escape, which runs counter to the goal. There will be no growl, no warning. There will be no snarl or hiss or bluster. The creature that bares its teeth with the intent to kill only does so to bring closer its fangs to your demise.

The creature that growls does not want to kill you, but will if it must.

there’s nobody better than you.