The Voltron Fandom Hag

It's just a coincidence. The original concept for Voltron Force sidelined Keith and the other Voltron pilots in favor of five new cadet characters. Here's a blurb with the show's original concept along with pictures of cadets:

I don't think American fans were deprived of anything from not getting Gladiator Voltron. However, it's hard to say how well it would've done had it came to fruition. I know Albegas flopped in Japan, which is part of the reason WEP scrapped converting it into Gladiator Voltron. Then again, GoLion didn't perform well in Japan either. But I just don't see it becoming the huge hit Lion Voltron did. So I think WEP made the right call by creating a second LV season instead.

A few years ago I posted about Gladiator Voltron, the proposed third Voltron season which was to be adapted from Lightspeed Electroid Albegas. Ultimately it was abandoned in favor of producing another batch of Lion Voltron episodes. About a year ago Toei released the first two episodes of Albegas with English subtitles on Youtube. You can watch both episodes here and here. 

This post is meant to be an update of my first Gladiator Voltron/Albegas post, with more detail about the characters and setting. I also briefly share my thoughts on the show based on the two episodes available.

SETTING AND STORY

In the future, the nations of Earth have been at peace with each other for many years. Our three protagonists, Daisaku, Tetsuya, and Hotaru, are talented students at Aoda School, which is famous for its robotics program and located near Mt. Fuji. Their lives are turned upside down when the evil alien Derringer Empire, who already rules the galaxy, invades Earth. Earth’s only hope against this threat is the super robot Albegas and the three teenagers piloting it.

THE HEROES

Our heroes are teenagers who attend Aoda School in Japan. Each of them created a robot for a school competition. Their bots were later improved and modified so they could combine into Albegas. 

Hot take: Ginger is a good character and deserved way better than how the old fandom treated her. 

This is subjective of course but I'd say the worst incarnation of the character is King Lotor from 2011's Voltron Force.

I mean, the potential was there. Again, people are probably going to disagree with me, but I really do think there was a good story to be had with Lotor's setup in VF. He died and then was brought back to life years later through the use of an addictive, corrupting, and unstable magical substance. Not only is he addicted to the stuff, it's destroying his mind. That's some really dark, traumatic stuff.

However, what we get is Lotor being turned into the show's buttmonkey and Kenny. He's just a boring maniacal villain whose inhuman stupidity gets him killed over and over again. All the trauma and dark themes they assigned to the character were either explored in the shallowest way possible or played for laughs. Honestly, I wish Lotor had just been sidelined like the other DoTU villains and hadn't appeared in VF at all.

Honestly, it's part of the reason I dislike V3D Lotor too. Again, this version of Lotor has gone through a seriously traumatic event. He was nearly killed, badly disfigured, and most of his body was replaced with cybernetics. A lot of focus was put on his disfigured face, but the show states 80% of his body was now cybernetic. Yeah. Most of his original body was GONE. But this trauma and disfigurement was played for laughs in the show while Lotor's characterization itself was boring and generic. However, he at least as voiced by Tim Curry and never became the complete joke VF Lotor was.

Well, I don’t know for sure! It was a pretty common thing in fanon, though. Almost every fic made Keith an orphan for example. No, really. Fans could give him almost anything for a backstory, but him being a traumatized orphan was regurgitated over and over and over and OVER again to the point you were hard pressed to find literally anything else. And many Kallura fics made him an intense workaholic who was unable to see his own worth. This fanon may have influenced some of the earlier Voltron remakes, as the people behind them may have believed angsty Keith was what fans wanted. 

Also, I admit this is very subjective, but I personally find DoTU Keith kinda static and a bit of a blank slate. So maybe these writers, who felt the same, tacked the tragic backstories  in an attempt to give more meat to his character. The thing is, he still has defined personally in DoTU to expand upon and have fun with. Like, DoTU Keith does have an adorkable quality to him that gets overlooked by both DoTU fans and the makers or every Voltron incarnation. He’s idealistic to point of being starry eyed, has his goofy moments, and is shy about his feelings for Allura. He’s serious and focused on the battlefield, a good leader, accomplished, but still has a silly, boyish quality about him around those he loves and, despite his supposed cool headed-ness, and has some strong emotions. He can have a tough shell, but there’s a gooey, sweet marshmallow core at the center, if you ask me.

In GoLion all the male pilots had a crush on Princess Fala (Allura) to varying degrees. I’m going to show you a few examples to get my point across. 

There’s a scene in “Introducing Beautiful Honerva” where Fala dashes straight to castle control from her bath, clad only in a bath towel, to answer Raible’s (Coran’s) summons. 

The male pilots all blatantly ogle her:

The rest of this is going behind a cut because of all the images. Also, there’s going to be some discourse and salt. So if you want to avoid that, consider yourself warned. 

One of the things I found most upsetting about VLD and the fandom was the weird moral double standard they applied to Lotor. According to the VLD writers, Lotor had just gone too far to be redeemed and HAD to die a horrible death. Then in the final season they turn around a redeemed Haggar, who abused her son, tortured people, and committed multiple genocides. But she, according to the narrative, still had good in her despite being objectively worse than Lotor on every level. 

Then there’s the fandom itself. Fuck. The tidal wave of hate began before the character even made his first on screen appearance. I remember a bunch of anti types screeching and whining about how you couldn’t separate Lotor from his previous incarnations, including Sincline. According to their logic, because Sincline was rapist and stalker, VLD Lotor was also a rapist and stalker. And if VLD was to redeem Lotor it would, by extension, redeem Sincline as well. They were the same character. Period. Expect,this logic again seemingly only applied to Lotor. No one was insisting we hate Coran because his GoLion counterpart was sexist. Or we that we hate most of the male GoLion pilots because they were 20 something year-old men who spent about half the series ogling a teenage girl. And, strangely, there were no posts tell us how we can’t like Zarkon or Haggar. Hmmm, funny that... These people were exclusively, and weirdly, obsessed with making sure no one liked VLD Lotor. And to this day I haven’t seen any of them post a coherent answer as to why.

Yes, I’d say so. The dynamic was toxic and abusive in both shows, don’t get me wrong, but there was a difference to be sure.

Initially Daibazaal seems fonder of Sincline than Zarkon is of Lotor. There’s a scene in “The Legendary Bridge of Love” where Daibazaal tells Sincline how he’s going to teach him what it means to be emperor.

This is also an interesting contrast to certain scenes in VLD. Anyway…

Honvera then informs them that Princess Fala (Allura) is overseeing the opening of a new bridge on Altea and how it’ll be the prefect time strike. Sincline wants to lead to the charge, but Daibazaal wants Sincline to stay and party with him.

It also takes longer for Daibazaal to get fed up with Sincline’s failures. And when does lose his temper, Daibazaal even admits he initially went easy on Sincline because he’s his son. 

Contrast this Zarkon who starts doubting Lotor’s abilities before he even has a chance to do anything and more quickly becomes verbally abusive. 

Daibazaal also had a harder time controlling Sincline than Zarkon did Lotor. In “The Prince Imperial’s Dark Love” Daibazaal pleads for Honerva’s help dealing with Sincline’s outburst about his mother and refusal to marry Princess Sahlia. 

Wow, would you mind messaging me your forum user name? Because you must have gone way back on that board to remember the likes of RedLion or WetDiaperBoy. Holy cow!

And for those of you unaware, anon here is talking about a few of the troublemakers and trolls who haunted the now defunct official Voltron forum over the years. Since I’m certain very few of you know about them, I’ll go into a little more detail.

RedLion: Was most infamous for his unrelenting negativity, repetitiveness, and endless complaining about the Voltron comic published by Devil’s Due. The fact he didn’t like the DD comic wasn’t the problem. The problem was his habit throwing a tantrum across multiple threads on both the Voltron forum and the DD forums about everything he disliked in the latest issue. Pretty much any deviation from the 80s show upset him. When people finally snapped at him or asked him to give it a rest, he’d then bemoan how he couldn’t post an opinion without being attacked. Like, dude, it’s not your opinion that’s the problem so much as it’s your burning need to post said opinion 75 to 100 times in the same thread. All this from a man who, at the time, was in his late 50s.

WetDiaperBoy: A particularly infamous troll who went on a rampage when the board’s sole admin went on vacation. Antics included trying to impersonate the admin, sending messages to various board users threatening to ban them, creating an army of sockpuppet accounts with increasingly offensive user names, and spamming the forum with racist, homophobic, and sexists posts. This lasted until admin returned from his vacation a few days later.

This probably isn’t a surprise given the lack of activity here, but I’m putting this blog on hiatus for the foreseeable future. Voltron isn’t inspiring me and I just can’t finish anything I attempt to write for this blog. I’m sorry if this disappoints anyone but creating content for this blog is supposed to be fun, but it’s just not anymore and hasn’t been for awhile. My fan-ish interests have also shifted to The Dragon Prince and I’m currently running a blog for that, which I’m enjoying. However, I’m leaving my ask box open and I’ll do my best to answer any Oldtron related questions you might have. Feel free to message me if you want too.

Fans didn’t realizes just how different GoLion was from Voltron in terms of both characterization and plot. A lot people viewed GoLion as a more violent, adult version DoTU. This changed over the years more information about GoLion slowly tricked out. Like when someone on a fan-run Voltron forum got a Japanese friend to watch and translate the scene where Sincline (Lotor) kills Honerva (Haggar); that’s how Western fans found out about Sincline being half Altean and Honerva being Daibazaal’s (Zarkon’s) mother. That sent serious shockwaves through the fandom and really started to change how people viewed GoLion.

There were also some unconfirmed rumors flying around about GoLion’s production. One claim that’d pop up from time to time was that Sincline and Fala (Allura) were originally going to be half-siblings. However, I’ve seen absolutely nothing from any official source verifying this.

Some fans also had a tendency to project their own wishes and fantasies onto GoLion, which the lack of information made easy to do. A rumor somehow started on the official forum that in the episode “The Seven Free Planets” (The Summit Meeting in DoTU), Kogane (Keith) confesses to Raible (Coran) that’s he’s in love with Fala. As you can imagine this sent many of Kallura shippers’ hearts a twitter and soon the entire fandom was abuzz about it. Many of these fans long carried a desire to see Keith and Allura confess their love, and I guess this played into that fantasy and made them feel validated. However, a forum member who went by the name of Arus talked a Japanese friend into watching the scene. Turned out it was nothing even close to a love confession; Raible and Kogane were discussing training Fala to pilot the Black Lion.