.....i wonder if i should ever actually type out my personal complaints with VLD. I never have before, because it felt like....what is there to say that hasn't already been said? it's almost redundant.
also, at the time season 8 released everyone was so upset that I was scared to dip my toes in lol.
my voltron experience was that I watched the 1st episode when it came out, thought it looked interesting enough. got distracted and decided i'd "catch up later." So, in interest of avoiding all spoilers, I blocked and blacklisted ALL mentions of it. for almost the entire 2 years of its run. I avoided everything. and I procrastinated so long, that I didn't get around to catching up until the final season was about to drop......
watched seasons 1-7 all in one block (like, three hours of sleep in between. it's roughly 24 hours of tv show, btw, if you were curious. i dont know what was wrong w/ us.)
imagine my experience of avoiding EVERYTHING related to VLD and then finally unblocking it. Right after season 7 dropped.
i've never been so bulldozed by such a massive tidal wave of pissed off fans. and so bewildered trying to figure out what the hell happened.
look, it didn't occur to me to get mad about Adam, because I had never heard of him. I barely registered he existed. maybe this was for the best!! really, I think watching voltron all in one block, without any pauses to ask questions or think too hard about bizarre story pivots, is the best way to do it. also, I did not have the experience of...whatever misleading promises the creative team may or may not have been making during its run. I had no context for any of that. Playing catch up on the discourse was certainly an experience. In many ways, I was never really able to catch up. rip to whoever was actually present in the trenches during that time.
it was only on re-watches that I began to have big complaints of my own. and then MORE complaints as time went on. I was still too scared of VLD's bad reputation to touch it......But for the initial binge it was fun.
so i probably don't have any Spicy Interesting takes that others haven't said better. still, I think it would be cathartic. I am long past the point of being emotionally upset by how fumbled it was. Now i'm just. so so intensely curious to pick it apart and try to guess Why Any Of That Happened. ugh the people who worked on that show probably never want to acknowledge it again because of the fandom backlash, but I want to know what happened during the production sooooo bad. what even was the writing process. HOW did this many episodes get released so fast. how many decisions were actually someone's artistic choice and how many choices were desperately trying to appease requests from higher ups. how did we get here. was there another story bible at some point. girl....tell me......i can't trust word of mouth fandom rumors to be accurate.