VLD could've had it aaaAAAAalll, rolling in the deeEEEeeeEEEp, now its just a stinkytrashheeeEEEeeaap
thank you anon this gave me a good chuckle
I ran out of anger about it a long time ago and kinda stepped back from it for a while. But lately I've been rewatching some of my fave eps in s1-6 and the emotion I feel now truly is just bewilderment at how peculiar the last season is in the face of everything that came before it. All these character and story threads in these 6 solid seasons that we were so pumped for and discussed at length never really got any resolution because the final season didn't touch on any of them. VLD is kinda like if someone spent a long time making you a pizza from scratch, like making the dough and chopping the ingredients and shredding the cheese and man that pizza is looking like it's gonna be the best pizza ever--and then instead of putting the pizza in the oven the chef hands you a bowl of lukewarm canned soup and gets kinda surprised and a little irritated that you're asking what happened to the pizza.
Still love Sheith though, always will. I look forward to the day I get to watch something new that has a slowburn relationship as beautiful as theirs but so far I haven't found anything that challenges their OTP ranking in my heart.
Would you ever do another drawing of the Captain Planet AU? I never knew I needed it until it watered my crops lol
I did do another drawing of Coran on my Other Blogue that I’m just gonna throw on here too because I do what I want, Thor!
if you’re looking for the Sheith side of Captain Planet AU there’s uhhh a terrible NSFW idea I had but I might be convinced into drawing more soft Sheith Cap Planet too. Probably not till after s8 though, trying to focus all my energy on canonverse Sheith until then <3
Do you think you’ll ever finish the 5+1 sheith comic?? If you have, I just can’t find the last few panels 🥲🥲. If it’s just something you’ve lost the energy for I completely understand!
Yes, I definitely want to finish it. Actually your Ask is really timely, I kinda quietly put the comic on hold about a year ago and wasn't sure when I'd be back to it but I JUST finished rewatching my fave eps of Voltron and boiii did the power of Sheith really inspire me to get back to it.
I'm a little sad that I wasn't able to finish it when the fandom was still super active; in a way I feel like I've let people down. But I hope that for people who are still here, or for those who have moved on but circle back eventually (Sheith is a forever ship for so many of us lbr) the comic is worth the wait and offers them some closure and happiness. That's the goal anyway. :)
Thank you for sticking around, and for asking about it. I can't tell you what it means to me to know that there are people who are still reading and still hoping for a conclusion. <3
(for those of you who don't follow me on twt @ spiftynifty the most up-to-date panels are there and I hope to post the next update next week)
WAIT. live action voltron? whowhatwhenwherewhy—i googled it and can seem to find anything. :/ could you perhaps pass the info along? thanks :)
Sure! Back when the show was still pretty new, like late 2016/early 2017, it was announced that Universal Studios (DW's parent company) was working on a live action Voltron movie. It would not be related to VLD and the only person confirmed on it was David Hayter as writer. No other news came out after that.
This is entirely my own view so take it with a grain of salt, but I suspect they were waiting to see what kind of success the show would have. The movie probably would've been aimed at young boys like VLD was meant to be, but it would've been very quickly apparent that the demographic making the show popular was largely not male, definitely not young kids, and much more LGBT+ than anyone anticipated. You can't really make a movie for the show's actual demographic if say the majority of the viewers were there because they loved everything the IP holders (and probs DW) didn't want the show to be. If little boys weren't watching the show at high numbers, they probably wouldn't be going to the theatres in high numbers either and the rest of us probably wouldn't turn up for 1.5hrs of a Power Rangers clone.
((sidenote with nothing concrete to back it up but I suspect this is one of the many reasons season 8 was as bizarrely dark (and tbh, kinda boring??) as it was. They figured out their target audience and aged it up to gave us ATLAS bridge jargon and spaghetti Lotor and unbury your gays Zethzor and let's-torture-my-enemies-in-revenge Allura, but seemingly failed to realize that the age group was never the problem, we just wanted to see our fave characters continue to grow and interact. ))
I don't have a link to the video, but I did find this audio clip saved in my drafts: https://paladidnt.tumblr.com/post/174929351424/i-dont-know-if-anyone-has-already-done-this-but
How come it seems like lm and jds can talk more candidly about their intentions regarding other ships like allurance and even k/l but not sheith? I don't understand why they can clarify things like allurance and how it was there from the beginning or flat out state that they never intended for k/l to be a thing, but when it comes to the topic of shiro and keith they won't just clarify what they did or did not intend/want their relationship to be? I'm confused by it. :(
Ooof this is an excellent question and I suspect a complicated one.
First off, they can be candid about Allurance because 1) it’s a hetero couple (and therefore “acceptable” to executives and conservative parents) and 2) it was strongly implied and built up for almost the entirety of the series before they officially, canonically, became a couple. There’s no ambiguity there. They can be candid about kl because Allurance technically “kills” the ship by virtue of existing, but more importantly kl is the fanship that they have been directly asked about on more than one occasion and probably straight up badgered about it more times than we’re aware of. When your production studio gets blackmailed in the hopes of making k/l canon, that ship is being brought to your attention.
Also, Afterbuzz is run by kl fans who have anti-like tendencies. They angle kl questions in nearly every interview, and I was pretty miffed by the way in this interview they heavily, heavily implied that only Sheith fans hated s8 “because their ship didn’t become canon” and yet in the same breath talked about how Allurance wasn’t good and came out of nowhere (something JDS delightfully shut down). In the live chat for the recent interview, people from all ship alignments kept begging the hosts to ask about why SK’s friendship wasn’t included in the final season. In the saltiest tone you can imagine, one of the more vocal kl hosts decided to answer the question (”they helped each other grow and evolve and since they’ve done that, we don’t need to see their friendship anymore, it got lots of screentime in other seasons”) and never let the showrunners actually speak on it, instead moving swiftly to another topic that aligned more with the hosts’ own interests. It was almost like she was afraid of what the answer would be. Was she afraid they’d say “well actually, on the matter of that, Sheith was our intended endgame” or was she trying to save them from having to talk about something NDAs prevented them from talking about?
So why CAN’T they talk Sheith? I have a few theories. This gets long and a little rambly, so I’ve thrown it under a cut.
1) Don’t ask, don’t tell. Except for post-s7, the showrunners themselves have never been asked about Sheith’s relationship in an interview. I think most Sheiths were afraid of rocking the boat and potentially upending a SK endgame by drawing too much attention to it. We were/are definitely the quieter side of the primary vld ships and honestly most of us were not expecting our ship to be canon.
But vld ships and the ship wars are notorious across geekdom for vitriol and death threats, and the creators didn’t want to add any fodder to either side. In the middle of production it would have benefited no one for the EPs to say, “yeah sheith is meant to be viewed romantically” or “no, we can’t go back and change the story to make that true”. Either one would have resulted in an uptick of harassment from antis towards them, towards other fans. And nevermind the production side where DW/WEP weren’t ready for even a hint of m/m until right before s7 dropped. It was only AFTER they got the greenlight on gay Shiro that showrunners could finally be vague and say “some people will interpret [sk] as brothers, others will say it’s 100% confirmed they’re in a relationship”. Which is, in my opinion, a pretty interesting way to respond to that question. But again, if that interviewer hadn’t been brave enough to ask it, I highly doubt it’s something that the showrunners themselves would have ever brought up.
2) Sheith was actually intended to be romantic, but was blocked. We know now that Adam being greenlit as Shiro’s boyfriend happened right before (like a week or less) before s7 dropped. This was a show that had been in production for almost 4 years by this point, and the showrunners stated they picked Shiro to be their rep early on in the process. When they planted that idea in executive’s heads is anyone’s guess, as is when the proper fight for it began. I suspect their immediate team of directors, writers, and in-house producers were well aware and supportive, but kicking that up the chain was another story. I also have a suspicion that it wasn’t until season 6 was complete that the matter was brought up because greenlighting everything we got in s6 knowing Shiro was gay the whole time puts a lot of eyes on Keith.
And really, it was Keith who was the problem all along.
In every version of Voltron, Keith is the main protagonist. He’s the leader of the team, the primary “image” of Voltron, and thus, certain things about him need to be maintained. I’m not sure if this is sheer coincidence or not, but he is the only person on the team who stayed visually the same to his OG counterpart. All of the other paladins have gone from white dudes (and a white lady) to POC, or have had a genderswap. There is much debate about Keith’s race with people creating their own headcanons but ultimately Keith can pass as white. While the handbook states Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half black-half Samoan, Shiro is Japanese and even Pidge gets “Italian”, Keith is just listed as... human. Which is a surefire way to not upset fans who have HC’d him as POC while also not-NOT saying he’s white. Everybody “wins”.
In addition I’m confident a major stipulation of the OG Voltron owners (the “gatekeepers”, as a few of the VAs and the showrunners themselves have darkly alluded to) was that Keith could not be LGBT. We know now he was meant to end up with Acxa, a fact that was already obvious to many of us from their Weblum meetcute. But that relationship was never scripted.
Setting aside the fact that the OG Voltron owners (WEP) didn’t want Keith to be LGBT, I’m sure executives at Dreamworks would have struggled with the idea as well. Shiro stans can come at me all they like about this but Keith was always meant to be the primary protagonist of the show, of every version of Voltron, and making the main, masculine hero of a well-trodden, oft-rebooted franchise gay/bi would have been an ENORMOUS move for animation. Making him end up with the other main, masculine hero would have honestly broken the internet and the minds of countless conservative executives, and been a major benchmark not just for cartoons, but ALL media. Animation often trails behind TV and movies in terms of social progress because something something “protect the chillllldrennn”. And right now I’m struggling to think of a popular live action TV show, or movie, with an older audience, where the main masculine hero is lgbt, and in a relationship with the other main masculine hero. Feel free to offer me examples in replies but the fact that I’m struggling to think of anything is pretty telling. In short, if this revolutionary move still isn’t happening for the live action 13+ audience, asking for it to happen on a cartoon with a 7-11yo boy demographic is like asking for the moon. Keith couldn’t be gay, because immediately it would have been obvious to anyone that he was already very much in love with the other LGBT character on the show. Hell, it’s already pretty obvious in canon that this is the case, and dodging the question about his sexuality is dodging the confirmation that he’s in love with Shiro.
I’d like to believe that one of the solutions to the Adam Problem that was proposed was that KEITH ends up with Shiro, but they were laughed out of the office. The pair’s incredibly close bond aside, it would have been the absolute easiest fix production-wise. They already have their shared history doing most of the legwork, all that’d have to be changed is:
-adding Shiro to the L/K scene in 8x01, just sitting there as Keith encouraged Lance.-Re-recording a couple of Shiro’s lines in 8x05 to make him seem at least somewhat upset that Keith was kidnapped-Showing Keith and Shiro hanging out in the video episode. You could just use the shot of Keith and Pidge but replace Pidge with Shiro.
And the best part is, you could change just one or two of these and then do the wedding epilogue you always intended (but write something that doesn’t insist Shiro retired) but with Keith instead of Rando. Not to mention, there is a slight, slight possibility there was a S/K scene (or two) cut along the way. I strongly disagree with the theories that have floated around about the “massive edits” done to s8, but I think there could be truth to the idea that a Sheith scene was cut to make room for Crew Member, or an effort made to downplay the Sheith friendship that comes off way more intimate than any interaction Shiro has with [man]. It’s more likely that SK scenes never existed at all in this season as the showrunners had to cave to pressures to “have more action”, had no idea what to do with Shiro besides relegate him to a stiff cardboard general, and perhaps had to follow strict instructions about the kind of friendliness an out & proud gay man could show to the men he’d enjoyed good interactions with before.
All this to say, the Sheith battle is messy. It’s fine for the showrunners to say “getting the greenlight for Shiro was a battle” because it’s a battle they won that makes everyone look pretty good. It makes Dreamworks look like they Learned Something and are going to be more open to LGBT content in future properties. It makes WEP look not-terrible because they can add “allowed a character who wasn’t really an OG Voltron character to be gay” to their list of “generous” things they allowed for this re-envisioning of their property. It’s self-congrats all around.
Blocking Sheith has the opposite effect. It reveals that WEP is homophobic because they could allow Pidge to be a girl and Allura to be black but making the hero a non-straight man? That’s TOO FAR. It reveals that Dreamworks higherups are homophobic because they weren’t ready for two LGBT protagonists, just one plus a background character with 3 lines who is literally never named. No one wins, and to be asked about Shiro and Keith and be honest about it could potentially be the showrunners saying, “god, we wanted to, but we were blocked at every single turn”. And thus DW and WEP are the outed villains of the story.
3) Shiro and Keith were never meant to be read as romantic. The showrunners don’t say anything because there’s simply nothing to say. Sometimes the most incredible ships are happy accidents. Sometimes people genuinely don’t realize what they’re doing. I felt a little disheartened watching the AB interview because the way they talked about wanting to include more [man], or how they “hoped viewers would read between the lines” re:Shiro/Curtains, was so casual and flippant it was like they genuinely thought most people would be fine with Shirando if only there had been more scenes between them, as though completely severing Shiro’s relationship with Keith and instead only showing scenes of Shiro bonding with a new character would come off as a good move rather than a baffling (and somewhat hurtful) one.
I do believe that certain directors were absolutely fans of the pair and angled in what they could. Chris Palmer is behind the famous “shiro loves you baby” art and responsible for the eps that include Shiro’s gay panic, the Sheith hug, “As many times as it takes”, Shiro falling into Keith’s arms, and “We have to stop, Shiro’s out there!!” among others. Steve Ahn was the director behind 2x01, 3x01 with heavily grieving Keith, Blade of Marmora, and the episode where Keith screams Shiro’s name so loud he astral projects and then Shiro holds his hands over the controls. He also got really soft when he talked about the pair in an episode of Form Podcast (before JDS kinda hastily shut him down). And even Eugene Lee, he directed The Black Paladins which is an episode so Sheith I still can’t believe it’s real, and 7x01, the other episode so Sheith I can’t believe it’s real. All three of these guys were the original series directors, which is pretty inchresting.
But that doesn’t mean the showrunners were necessarily onboard. Maybe it was really important to them to show a positive male friendship since that never happens in media, just as they felt having Allura sacrifice herself was a powerful feminist move. However the thing I keep circling back to is JDS’ early interview about The Winter Soldier and how if he ever got the chance to do that, he hoped it would be in the future when things could be more progressive, hinting that he wanted to throw more overt romantic undertones if he himself ever got a fight like that to write or direct. It’s pretty interesting that he wrote the Black Paladins, which mirrors the Stucky fight in Winter Soldier so much that it actually rotoscopes one of Bucky’s moves. I’d also point out that JDS’ favorite characters are Shiro and Keith, and I find it impossible to be a fan of both and not also be a fan of how much they love each other, and how much that love straddles the line between romantic love and friendship.
This got long, but I hope it was helpful. The likely final-ever showrunner interview will be on Let’s Voltron sometime this month, and I do hope that now that the series is over someone is brave enough to ask them, “so... what was going on between Shiro and Keith? In a perfect world, what would have happened there?”. In a way it doesn’t matter though. There is always the risk of them saying “nothing was going on there” and us agonizing over whether that was a lie to protect their careers or bald-faced honesty in the face of an NDA or fucks-given that might have expired with their contracts.
But I think the best we can hope for is the same situation that happened with the Avatar creators and that live action movie: 3 years from now when the NDAs are well and truly expired, JDS & LM may come out and say, “SO, on the matter of Shiro and Keith, it’s time to come clean.”
I think that the thing that upsets me the most about s8 is how they (the paladins) end up separated. This show was about found family and friendship, but at the end they go their separate ways and meet once every year. This is just so... sad and contradicts the whole message of this show. Idk
Yeah. I really like the show and it did a lot of things really well but cohesive group friendship was never its strong suit. I would imagine that’s something like 30% it’s tough to come up with solid group scenarios outside of their lions and 70% “let’s not put the animators through having to animate 6 characters all episode long”.
But it was still believable that they at least all somewhat liked each other. Season 8 couldn’t even muster up that much which is absurd for the show’s final season that purports to bank on “teamwork”. We’ve talked a lot about SK missing because it really is the emotional core of the show (sorry Allurance). But we also didn’t get any Heith, Hance, Punk, Lapunk, Corance, or ANY Shaladin friendships. Like it wasn’t just Sheith who didn’t hang out on Clear Day... NO ONE DID except Hunk and Keith and only by accident. Pidge and Lance were vying for the same goal-- something to bring back to Allura-- and what a perfect opportunity that would have been to have them battle each other at the prize stands. Like maybe Pidge beats Lance and wins the glittery prize that Allura wanted and explains to Lance why it was so important to her to see Allura happy. We finally, FINALLY get the bare hint of a really lovely Pallura friendship and... it never goes anywhere.
There was so much excellent potential for this season to be about revenge over real family vs the love between found family and how love, when used for good, is powerful no matter what kind of love it is. We could have explored the theme of love on so many levels:
romantic love (Allurance)
unconditional and undefined-but-the-stuff-of-soulmates love (Sheith, complete with Shiro returning Keith’s I love you with whatever no homo cushion words they needed to make it Totally Not Gay You Guys)
friendship love (the Garrison trio, Allura/Romelle)
parental love (Krolia/Keith, Coran/Allura, Colleen/Sam/the kids, Lance/parents, Hunk/parents)
sibling love (Veronica/Lance, Matt/Pidge)
teammate love (Keith/Shiro/Lance/Hunk/Pidge/Allura and their unbreakable bond should have been the primary lesson of this season. They all should have volunteered to die with Allura, no question, leaving Coran behind to tell their story)
forgiving/compassionate love (Acxa/Zethrid, because in this good version of s8 there are no weird last minute amendments to ep 5) and rather than have Allura go batshit on a Zarkon that was a good guy, have everyone forgive him, have everyone learn about and forgive Lotor too. If you’re going to forgive Honerva, you need to forgive the rest of her family too.
There were just SO many opportunities and it fell flat on every single one that mattered. Instead we got a couple super fleeting moments between minor characters that while nice never actually contributed anything to the plot (Veracxa, Kinzavi, Slam) and in some cases felt weirdly accelerated (Lankei).
And yeah, them being separated at the end was infuriating. Forget the epilogue, forget the meddling on that front, the fact remains is that it’s heavily implied that everyone went their separate ways after Allura died and One Year Later is the first time they’re meeting up since then. I really have no idea what the heck happened here. Losing SK was already a massive blow, losing almost everyone else as well is just bewildering. But I guess when your four mains are unrecognizeable from who they were just a season ago, their key relationships--and in fact, all their relationships--will fall to the wayside as well.
