Aug 14, 2018
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Polygon spoke to two of the show’s senior writers, Devon Giehl and Iain Hendry, about creating Amaya and Gren, how it feels to watch the reaction to your work in real time, and what they hope comes next for the series.
Polygon: In a Reddit AMA earlier this week, Aaron mentioned that you spent a lot of time talking to and working with members of the deaf community. What was that process like?
Iain Hendry: We both reached out to deaf and HoH [hard of hearing] organizations, which have great online resources that helped us understand the challenges and the way deaf and HoH people approach the world. And then to get a more personal view, I went to deaf and HoH Facebook groups, so I’d chat with people … It helped us to stay connected and understand their experience as best we could.
So many people had a hand in creating this character, from us writing the lines to people doing the animation and every other part of this process, and a lot of them had a friend or acquaintance that they could talk to. And on the more professional side, we had a huge amount of help from ASL interpreters we worked with directly, Lucy Farley and Darcie Kerr, so when we were doing video references in the scenes where Amaya is doing ASL, we could say, “Does this come across as authentic? Are we going in the right direction with the character?”
Polygon: Some of Amaya’s most intimate moments are untranslated — was that a conscious choice?
Devon Giehl: That was very deliberate. We went back and forth on it, but we decided that when Gren wasn’t speaking for her, she spoke for herself. The scene where she’s at her sister’s grave—we were worried, because it’s a show for children, that we might lose people. But then the animation came back, and she was so emotive, and it’s so beautiful. I think even in the absence of subtitles, it really stands on its own. And she’s a deaf character — we wanted it so that understanding what she’s communicating here is for the deaf audience.
Read the full interview at Polygon.com
It's confirmed: Voltron's Shiro had a relationship with Adam.
According to co-executive producer Lauren Montgomery, Shiro and Adam had a beautiful relationship that lasted for years. Shiro and Adam had been flight partners for a long time and that developed into "something stronger.”
Read more at Den of Geek
Quote: Lauren and Joaquim discuss Keith’s dad’s name
AfterBuzz: [The fandom is] all dying to know... the name of Keith’s dad.
Lauren: Dad.
Joaquim: Yea.
Lauren: Pops.
Joaquim: Pops, yea. We keep hearing “Texas Kogane”, but that’s [shakes head].
Lauren: Neither are confirmed.
Joaquim: His name is Heith.
Lauren: Yea, that’s fine.
AfterBuzz: Perfect! Better than, like, Deith or something. Dad-Keith. ...
Lauren: Or if we’re going with other naming conventions, it would be K!Dad
AfterBuzz: K-Pop!
Joaquim: K-Pop’s actually good, that’s solid. I think K-Pop wins.
Listen to the full interview from AfterBuzz
Interview Quote:
Season 6 finally revealed Lotor’s ultimate plan and we realized that he hasn’t been totally upfront with the Paladins. When you introduced Lotor, did you always intend for his arc to end with him essentially becoming Zarkon?
DOS SANTOS: I think the angle, though, is that there is a genuine element of truth to everything he says. He wants things to work out. He’s not just a power hungry crazy dude who wants to destroy the universe. He snaps obviously. His methods were skewed, but his intentions were true.
MONTGOMERY: I think we knew all along that this was going to be the character that everyone wanted to become the good guy of the Paladins, and we knew that we weren’t going to let that play out. We would happily tease it and take it down that road, but ultimately, the worst side of him was going to be the thing that got the better of him.
DOS SANTOS: We kept saying in the room, because we all come from Avatar: The Last Airbender, “We’re going to get him right to Zuko, and then we’re going to pull it all away.”
MONTGOMERY: And then he’s going to go straight Azula.
Lauren and Joquim talk about Lotor’s plan and how he compares to ATLA characters.
The Dragon Prince co-creators Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond sat down with The Verge to talk about the show
According to Ehasz, they’re well aware of the backlash surrounding the animation, and want to do more to improve it — if Netflix grants them a second season, that is.
“I think there’s a lot of valid feedback about the animation,” Ehasz said. “It’s interesting because you look at it and you have a lot of people responding to the character designs, and the backgrounds, and the beautiful world, the cinematic storyboarding that our great director Giancarlo Volpe and his team has brought out. And then you do have people responding to some of the frame rate decisions. ...
“It’s definitely something that, in the future, if-slash-when we’re making more episodes, we’re not gonna be able to vastly change how we make it, but we’re definitely gonna have an eye toward specific shots and scenes[:] Can we make them more fluid? Can we make them exceed the expectations that were set?”
Read more at TheVerge.com
Fans’ joy was cut short when it was revealed that Shiro’s fiancé, Adam, was killed during a Galra attack on Earth and that their relationship, as well as Shiro’s sexuality, was not even really explored during the season.
[The Mary Sue] had the privilege of speaking to the showrunners of Voltron, Lauren Montgomery and Joaquin Dos Santos, about their decision to kill off Adam, and this is what they had to say:
“It was actually something that happened purely because of the story that was built. So he was kind of a casualty of the story rather than us writing the story specifically to kill that character. If we had, had a story that really hadn’t centered around people giving their lives for the cause … Adam, being the hero that he always was alongside Shiro, went out with his fellow men and women trying to defend their home and he lost his life in the process.”
They also spoke about how the show has been built around the themes of sacrifice, and that no orientation is safe from that in the kind of situations in which the character of Voltron find themselves in. Which, in a way, does make sense; however, the plot of Voltron is fictional and the characters are controlled by the writers. They could have opted to show sacrifice a different way and therefore allowed Shiro and Adam to reunite, making the representation a little clearer and avoiding any accusations of the “bury your gays” trope.
Both Montgomery and Dos Santos seem aware of what Shiro means to audiences, and of the trope itself; this is why they decided against killing off Shiro seasons before. However, despite their good intentions, it is still hard to reconcile that all the happy, alive couple are heterosexual and the only gay couple ended tragically. It’s a harmful narrative and promotes the idea that all LGBT+ stories end tragically.
Read More at The Mary Sue.com