SHANNON MUIR'S VOLTRON PAGES - "The Rebellious Women of 1985"

What I am sharing is a first-time realization.

1985 is an interesting year in animation when it comes to women in rebellion against evil empires.

I just realized that HE-MAN AND SHE-RA: THE SECRET OF THE SWORD came out in March of 1985, with the SHE-RA series coming out in the Fall. In that same year, VOLTRON does an episode with heavy focus on a female leader - and by heavy focus, if you look at it, she gets a lot of screen time without the Voltron Force.

Seriously, count how many minutes she's in this episode. Even though the character change arc is Joran's, we see a lot of Omnia and even know more about her backstory than Joran's.

Except that we know it wasn't, it also feels like a "backdoor pilot" to something else. Omnia not showing up again also seems to contribute to this.

If history had been different, wouldn't it have been wild to have a female leader going to another planet that needs the rebellion brought to it that has connections to someone like Omnia who has such a belief in the Voltron Force that she goes "fangirl" on meeting them that it could become a female skewing "sister series" with cameos from VOLTRON characters about fighting the battle on the ground... much like SHE-RA was versus HE-MAN?

In hindsight, we know VOLTRON had female viewership. Something like this might have worked in an environment ready to embrace SHE-RA.

It's not the way things went, but we can always wonder.

** NOTE: The "Nina Season 2" items are largely unfinished premises from ideas being worked on after sending our 21 episodes and art to World Events Productions in the summer of 1985. We iterated on them consistently until receiving Marc Handler's letter in March of 1986. As such I cannot identify when each individual piece was worked on, so all are credited as 1986. These do accurately reflect characters and situations as depicted in the 20 U.S. produced VOLTRON episodes from the Fall of 1985 and our attempts to bring those events in line with our chronology. Nina's own history remained unaltered. Understand that these are being provided as a historical glimpse into the status of VOLTRON fan fiction in the 1980s. **

After a REALLY long break, here is the second half of the Miror return story. It was a one part episode, but we just had a really long prose writeup for it because of the full song lyrics. It's a basic go out and get the robeast with White Lion in the mix story. Just a way to bring Miror back and raise the stakes for character interaction.

Here we get the rest of the actual story. If you're curious, Mt. Alfor and Alfordell aren't canonical. The village near where Nanny is from is at Crown Mountain.

SHANNON MUIR'S VOLTRON PAGES - AND NOW, BACK TO THE FEED...

Hello! I know it has been a while, but a lot of unexpected things happened, not the least of which was having to get a new computer!

I left you on a cliffhanger with Miror's return, but I plan to start sharing again after July 1st, 2026!

SHANNON MUIR'S VOLTRON PAGES - NINA SEASON 2 EPISODE 3 "The Return of Miror" (Part 1 of 2)

** NOTE: The "Nina Season 2" items are largely unfinished premises from ideas being worked on after sending our 21 episodes and art to World Events Productions in the summer of 1985. We iterated on them consistently until receiving Marc Handler's letter in March of 1986. As such I cannot identify when each individual piece was worked on, so all are credited as 1986. These do accurately reflect characters and situations as depicted in the 20 U.S. produced VOLTRON episodes from the Fall of 1985 and our attempts to bring those events in line with our chronology. Nina's own history remained unaltered. Understand that these are being provided as a historical glimpse into the status of VOLTRON fan fiction in the 1980s.

Lyrics for "Dreamer, Dreamer" written by Shannon Muir, 1986.**

This episode features a complete storyline, the re-introduction of an important character from Nina Season 1, the introduction of a new alliance for the Doom forces along with a key character, and the only case I know of where a piece of VOLTRON fiction includes song lyrics (at the very least, I'd be willing to stake it might be first one, if there are others).

The re-introduction of a character is Miror, who is named in the title. In our works, the closest comparison of the role he was meant to fill was Cossak, but fortunately they are a lot less overlapping than Merla and Lotaria turned out to be. As the episode after this will show (mild spoiler) we were able to set them up in more of a rivalry.

In a scene somewhat similar to the exchange between King Zarkon and King Kova in "My Brother is a Robeast" in the series, we find King Zarkon talking to the King of a planet called Shelon, which is important for (SPOILERS!). He offers his greatest pilot, Xenos.

I do have a concept drawing for Xenos, that I never finished coloring. Here it is.

Now, we shift to planet Arus. Wally Fitz (the musician introduced in Nina Season 1) is on tour again, and he is supposed to be arriving for the concert. The dialogue alludes to how in this continuity the space explorers originally met at a Wally Fitz concert at the Academy. Nina knows him from encountering him before she ever joined with the Voltron Force. As she began to doubt her place with the forces of Doom, she had managed to run away with Wally's band for a while and hid out as part of them until Haggar dragged her back. Nanny's niece Starla was his drummer (introduced in Nina Season 1), who comes to live on Arus when Wally disbanded his group in Season 1 to join the Army for the final Season 1 offensive. This draft presumes that you already know that, and it really needed a rewrite to clarify that for newer audiences.

However, Wally isn't here yet. It's actually Nina singing this song with Starla playing drums. It's one of the ones she knows from her period traveling with the band. Though honestly I have no idea how they managed that without a guitar at least to round them out, looking back.

Which now makes me realize that Nina just beat Pidge as DJ Prong in VOLTRON FORCE by over 25 years as Lion Force Pilot and Pro Musician.

Dang.

Obviously some of this stuff was just meant to happen along the way, in some form, somewhere in the VOLTRON mythos. It just sat around in the ether and took longer to surface.

Heh.

SHANNON MUIR'S VOLTRON PAGES - NINA SEASON 2 EPISODES 1 AND 2 "Double Nightmare"

** NOTE: The "Nina Season 2" items are largely unfinished premises from ideas being worked on after sending our 21 episodes and art to World Events Productions in the summer of 1985. We iterated on them consistently until receiving Marc Handler's letter in March of 1986. As such I cannot identify when each individual piece was worked on, so all are credited as 1986. These do accurately reflect characters and situations as depicted in the 20 U.S. produced VOLTRON episodes from the Fall of 1985 and our attempts to bring those events in line with our chronology. Nina's own history remained unaltered, and as such this will create some awkward half-finished situations such as Coran's romantic relationship status. Understand that these are being provided as a historical glimpse into the status of VOLTRON fan fiction in the 1980s. **

If you have followed along from the Nina Season 1 content, you will be aware that a problem presented itself. When we came up with the Nina stories, we had not originally seen the 2 part episode about Coran's wife and son, which we did not catch until reruns. Which it is very likely Nina and none of this would have existed in the first place, because Nina and the White Lion as concepts would have been hard - if not impossible - to work into what was presented.

So, when we did learn of it (long after we had sent the first version of Nina and the White Lion), we struggled to retcon it. If you have seen the "Flight of the White Lion" pieces, you can see where those got stuck at.

"Double Nightmare" is the next step in trying to resolve this mess. I can't remember if we ever developed the monster for this storyline, but the I know what the character line was here. NIna's mother Valda survived the battle of Zohar but had to fake her own death, but because Nina had become unaccounted for didn't reveal herself. Now that Nina is publicly well-known, she was to appear again. Coran thinks he will get a second chance.

Meanwhile, Nina's trying to make her father happy. She's been let in on about the true whereabouts of Leda and Garrett (who will be known as Rhett going forward despite the screenshot since Garrett is also Hunk's last name in the Devil Due comics for reasons I will never understand) by her husband Lance, who doesn't want her to misstep in front of her father in asking about them or anything. Nina (as Mrs. Brewer, not McClain, as that canon last name won't come until Devi's Due - we "Tuckerized" Lance's surname after original head writer Jameson Brewer) goes to the Oolonam to try to find a way to bring Leda and Rhett back from Elsu - and they succeed. I believe Nina was going to be able to tap into things she learned living on Tymancia (see Season 1 for more on this). Fun fact - we misheard the Oolonam's name (probably his title actually) as "Runan" which will be what you see in the notes. I just reconcile it that Runan is his name and the other his title as he says he is called that.

Rhett coming back becomes important, and while I usually don't spoil where things are going, I will in this case because the notes are so fractured. The other issue we had is that Merla (canon) and Lotaria (Lotor's twin sister, created by Lesley) became near duplicates of one another. We paired Rhett with Lotaria, as the two have no preconceived notions of one another, and in so doing became the counterpoint to the dark relationship we had seen with Lotor and Allura.

What follows is what little of "Double Nightmare" was recorded before we stopped in March 1986 upon hearing from Marc Handler.

SHANNON MUIR'S VOLTRON PAGES - The Tone Differences Between Nina Season 1 and Season 2

I am putting this out there in advance. As I am going through the episodes in the form they are, I am finding out they are very rough and raw - as in some topics would have never made it on to the show, even alluded about.

Expect me to use a lot of "keep reading" for these writeups, as well as two-layered writeups, and that I may need to put the screenshots in the content and decide how to deal with the post labels differently.

**NOTE: May be some trigger warnings for the content behind the cut **

It doesn't mean anything.