I've read your fix it fic and was utterly in love with it! Should you ever continue it, I'd gladly reread the entire thing all over again before reading the new chapter. It's just been so refreshing to read. I just was curious, if the fic had started from the very beginning instead of starting at season 2's start, is there anything you would have added to Season 1's plotlines for the fic?
Thank you!! I have been feeling a bit nostalgic for VLD / Shallura lately this past year (maybe it's because it's been 10 years, maybe it's because VLD is very conceptually fun and easy). At the time of writing the fic (and indeed for most of my time spent thinking about Voltron, increasingly minimally, over the past 10ish years), I think I was very much in the mindset of "S1 is Good and doesn't really have issues, S2 has some high highs and low lows and is where the issues start".
However, in rewatching season one for the first time since like, idk maybe season six came out in 2018?? 2017?? I've found my stance on season one to be a lot less favourable. It's still probably the best and most even season of VLD, but it has its faults. If I was doing a full rewrite of VLD from the ground up, I think the bulk of the first two episodes would be the same, except for:
The team doesn't form Voltron until like, halfway through the season earliest, potentially in the finale.
Allura terminating Alfor's AI is left to a future season (like s2 or s4 or something) so that we've had more time to see her regularly rely on him and for him to be helpful. As it stands in canon, we get like to see them interact like twice before she terminates it, and it just doesn't hit the same
We keep the Balmera arc but scrap the Sendak + Nyma&Rolo one in favour of keeping the season as unserialized as possible. Instead, we focus more on paladin-paladin and paladin-lion bonds. This is to make forming Voltron something that the team has to maintain being possible through good relations as well as feel really earned. Outside of Hunk&Lance and Keith&Shiro, you're tossing together 5-6 strangers. Let's act like it!
I think in some ways VLD's curse is like, it wanted to be this big sprawling show, meanwhile the core concept is one far more akin to like, Teen Titans where the smartest thing to do is to just focus on the character dynamics' with each other. This is true even for story choices I hated and still hate! I'll never be a fan of the Lion switch, but if the Lions had actual personalities for their new paladins to bounce off of and really have to work with (outside of like, one episode for all 3 of them and the Lions are basically interchangeable to begin with, ironically, outside of Black) then like, it at least would've been interesting?
Like, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (and its thriller-esque sequel, Chaos Theory) is one of my favourite shows. It's about six kids who get stranded in an abandoned Jurassic Park, and they have to survive. The show is aware the main appeal is 1) seeing the kids interact and bond with each other and 2) see how they survive on the island. They do not attempt to make the show anything other than that. Even when the setting and stakes change a lot in the sequel show, the focus remains on how much these kids love each other and how they manage with and cope with these really traumatic events. Kenji from this show in particular is nicknamed Better Lance by my friends, because they have a lot in common (desperate for approval/attention but also a deeply caring friend), but Kenji and his character is actually like developed consistently, all of his relationships receive focus, and his vaguely antagonist "bro" is someone he goes pseudo-canon with in the 11th hour (the hand kiss went crazy).
In a lot of ways, I feel like VLD wanted to be like The Dragon Prince — large, mildly sprawling, genuinely complex. The difference is that TDP never loses sight of the characters' emotional cores as they grow and change amid increasing stakes and violence. The cast of characters is quite different (though two of the main protagonists, Callum and Rayla, have always reminded me a fair bit of Shiro and Allura respectively — and yes, they're mega endgame canon in love) but if you wanted like, deep lore and magic and backstories, TDP has it. My friends and I were recently piecing together how the season one to season 3 intro is going to be recontextualized in future seasons, because literally every line or thing comes back in some manner. It's like the opposite of how VLD just introduces and then drops plot lines never to be seen again. As well as like, what if characters lived through wars and lost people they cared about and it actually affected their behaviour? Crazy, I know.
Both shows have like, actual queer and disabled rep. Yas/Sammy and Janai/Amaya are both central, interracial lesbian couples. Both shows (JWCT and TDP) have amputees; TDP also has two blind side characters and Amaya is Deaf with multiple interpreters. TDP also has 2 canon trans characters, a nonbinary character, and another few gay couples (the queens of Duren; Runaan and Ethari).
This is more of a ramble now but I do think like, keeping in mind what appeals to you most about your own project and staying cohesive with it is very helpful. Even my OG writing is very much a combination of the two above shows: a gaggle of traumatized children thrust into war and grief who have to learn to navigate it without losing themselves or each other. If people get into the series, it'll probably because they too enjoy seeing the sad children put in situations and bicker and love each other, y'know?
A solid show just has to be solidly concentrated on its own premise, and not consistently trying to out do itself. And I think, unfortunately, VLD was never really interested in the core concepts of its premise to begin with, hence why it threw them all away.
