I spoke at length at VOLTCON 2024 regarding the work my sister and I did when we were young and sent (twice) to World Events Productions in the 1980s. Articles from the archives had Peter Keefe talking about how kids requests had been incorporated into the new episodes. Our story, and the spiritual alignments between Omnia (shown above) and Nina, were addressed as part of the lingering question if something that we know was submitted and something that aligned with that same intent actually appearing. I really want to reiterate that I don't know, and never will know, if the work my sister and I did played any influence into this. But the influence on us cannot be discounted.
That anticipation as to who she might be, especially when both names end on the same syllable, completely shocked us. I did not go into detail at VOLTCON 2024 about the confusion and disappointment that followed when the names were not identical, but throughout the episode she looked and acted like we would have expected Nina to be.
After we knew the show was over from Marc Handler's 1986 letter, I don't think we gave much thought to Nina again until the 1990s when I took a trip to Missouri. Being in St. Louis for a convention brought old ideas to light and I begin to wonder if VOLTRON in general could be adapted to novels as ROBOTECH successfully had been. I played around converting the Nina stories to prose for a bit, but abandoned that.
And so, after that point, I really did not give much though to any of it after posting my site in 1996 and heading to Los Angeles. Even though VOLTRON: THE THIRD DIMENSION, which was five years later in time, it became pretty clear that they had started the board over and while my mind might have briefly flirted with the idea, the starmap ultimately took center stage. I didn't watch VOLTRON FORCE consistently when it initially aired (short version, I actually was employed for the company that owned the cable network that aired it) so I felt a bit torn. I would see the whole series in 2020, but we will get back to that.
VOLTRON: LEGENDARY DEFENDER obviously had its own continuity and I watched it on its own merits. But I had a very odd dream the night after seeing the finale. Lance from the VLD finale is staring off into space and I think was saying something about wishing you were here. He got back one sentence: "I've always been here." That Lance turned to face Nina with Altean markings.
Definitely wasn't expecting that, but didn't pay much other attention other than I thought maybe my subconscious wanted to deal with something.
When I didn't have much else to do, I discovered VOLTRON FORCE was available online. So I began watching all the episodes. I noticed Lance no longer seemed to have that ongoing interest in women, but he seemed to be harboring a lot of anger, and the series never addressed why even in an aside. Like VOLTRON: THE THIRD DIMENSION, it did another take five years later. So what happened to this Lance in the past five years? I began to wonder about that. And then when the series ended on its cliffhanger, like others who became invested I wondered about where things went from there.
I think that's what opened the door to two ideas simultaneously - beginning to recognize the Nina/Omnia similarities and utilizing her canon character to try and answer those questions. As I worked, the parallels between Omnia and Lance's backgrounds became more apparent. I wondered why Joran's name was only different than Coran's by one letter, especially when Coran was supposed to have been Nina's father, and how annoyingly odd it was to have a guest character so closely named to a semi-regular.
That's how I started to make some of the connections I have talked about more recently, with the VOLTRON FORCE fanfiction I started writing as part of helping get through a dark time. Helping my sister pack up everything in our family home and seeing the original writings for the first time in many, many years when we got the Apple II the premises were originally written on to load just proved even more of an eye opener.
I don't know what the answers are. I am convinced Lesley and I never will. But I think people deserve more of an explanation of how that all came to evolve. It was beyond the scope of the public presentation.