At what season did voltron start to go downhill?
ya know iâve been trying hard not to v-slur on main anymore because itâs 2019 and at some point you just have to Let It Goâą, but iâve finally reached a point where i can actually talk about it without burning up in righteous fury so here goes:
VLD started going downhill in S3, for a very specific reason.
iâve said it before but itâs always worth repeating: SF/fantasy lives or dies on the strength of its worldbuilding. solid, consistent worldbuilding is key to ensuring the willing suspension of disbelief from your audience. a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that, because itâs SFF, you can just âmake things upâ - because isnât it all just made up magic mumbo-jumbo? you can just fudge it, right? but the opposite is true. the more fantastical the story elements, the more precise and consistent you need to be in your worldbuilding details. this is about as close as the genre gets to a golden rule: include whatever you like, no matter how fanciful or creative, but for the love of all things holy make sure it follows a set of logical rules.
consistent lore helps to keep the fantastical elements feeling real and solid, but it also prevents them turning into a deus ex machina. magic is the classic example of this. if you read any writing advice at all about writing in fantasy settings, youâll see the same guidelines repeated over and over again: your magic system should have rules. without rules, âmagicâ becomes a cheat code that gets you out of any plot problems. magic without rules and constraints feels too all-powerful, too easy - the audience will get bored of it. the same is true for almost every fantastical SF/fantasy element you include in the story. if thereâs no rules - if the magic or the advanced tech can just do whatever you need it to do, whenever your characters are in trouble - then the story looses any sense of tension. there are no stakes, because the over-powered magic-using heroes can just wave their hands and magic their way out of everything.
this is⊠pretty much what happened to VLD.
voltronmort is a science fantasy space opera about magical robot lions. itâs deep in the intersection of two genres that rely heavily on solid worldbuilding to keep them together. if your story has magical robots you need to make sure those magical robots abide by a set of rules that make logical sense. this is just⊠SF 101. like. donât write SF/fantasy if youâre not prepared to really nerd out in the worldbuilding, dude. honestly.
for the first two seasons, VLD kept its worldbuilding pretty rock solid. the show had problems, sure - people will point to weak spots in S1-2 and moments that could have been handled better - but whatever its other flaws, it stuck to its own rules for how the world and the Lions worked. then we got to S3, and all that flew out of the window.
there is a reason why many people didnât bother catching up on VLD after S3; why many casual viewers dropped it after S2 and never got back into it. itâs not just because of Shiro going missing (he is arguably the showâs most popular character). itâs also because S3 is where the worldbuilding started getting shaky, and there is no faster way to make a SF narrative fall apart at the seams than going âwe can just fudge this a bit, canât we?â no. no you cannot fudge it. you broke a perfectly good space opera is what you did. look at it. itâs got deus ex machina out the wazoo.
S3 is where Lion-Paladin bonds got thrown out the window in favour of âsomething something training wheels Lion something second in command Lion somethingâ and boy howdy did that massively impact on the general quality of storytelling. i really cannot stress enough how much the Lion Switch utterly destroyed VLD. and no, thatâs not me throwing my toys out of the pram over my fave getting screwed over - i did that already, iâm past that. no, this is about basic SF/fantasy writing. itâs about the number one thing you Do Not Do when writing SF. and VLD did it, because the showrunners fell into the trap of thinking âhey, itâs SF! we can just make shit up, right? we can fudge it!â
*stares into the camera like iâm on the office* that is not how Rule of Cool works.
giant magical robot lions that combine into a bigger robot is⊠a pretty daft idea, actually. yeah i said it. itâs inherently kinda ridiculous. but S1-2 managed to sell the audience on that concept for a number of reasons: firstly, because it was just really earnest about it, and secondly, because there was some solid lore to back it up. S1-2 had an underlying theme of elemental symbolism that tied the Paladins to their Lions. it never got really spelled out in canon, but it was implied throughout. Lance, the Paladin of Water, loved mermaids and missed the rain; his Lion got stronger when they visited a water planet, and it had watery powers like an ice cannon and a sonar cannon. Keith was fiery and unpredictable, and the Red Lion was the same, and it also had a fire cannon. and so on. the Lions had personalities, and those personalities matched with their pilots, and both Lion and Paladin felt tied to their own unique element. the solid, reliable Paladin of Earth; the astronaut Paladin of the Cosmos. all that good jazz. even without being shoved in your face, this undercurrent of elemental coding and matching helped the Lion/Paladin connection feel solid and real. that, in turn, helped the whole story feel deeper. S1-2 were widely regarded as really good, solid, amazing television - proof that you can sell people on the most ridiculous concepts as long as you back it up with consistent worldbuilding that makes sense and follows a solid internal logic.
then S3 dropped, and half the team switched Lions, and suddenly the lore wasnât consistent anymore. and that was the point where VLD started to fall apart.
the frustrating thing is, voltronmort had really great worldbuilding. but in S3, the showrunnersâ desire to switch up the Lions overrode the pre-established show mythology, with disastrous results. the only thing worse than not having consistent lore is taking actual, solid, well-thought-out lore and then putting it through a shredder so you can âhandwave itâ for plot reasons. the Lion Switch in S3 didnât make sense, and from there, it was all downhill.
pre-S3, Lion-Paladin bonds were presented as an important part of the showâs mythos and the charactersâ individual arcs. they were based on matching temperaments and âthe quintessence of the Pilot is mirrored in his Lionâ - the idea that Lions and Paladins were fundamentally the same, that at their core they shared the same values and personality that allowed them to bond and work closely together. not only was this a cool SFF concept that promised some interesting storylines to come, it also helped to keep the world feeling real and consistent and believable.
post-S3, Lion-Paladin bonds became a cheap deus ex machina. Keef is the leader because the Black Lion picked him. but⊠shouldnât Allura be the leader? she was already the overall commander of the team, after all. but nope, âBlack picked Keef!â became the deus ex machina that justified a completely nonsensical reshuffle. i have pointed out numerous times that this shuffle made no sense so iâm not going to rehash that in detail, but the Lion Switch is so out of wack with the rest of the showâs mythology that it doesnât survive even the most cursory application of Fridge Logic. if you really think about it even a little bit, it crumbles under the weight of logic. it also relies on some fudged, made up new ârulesâ that never existed before. âoh, the Red Lion is the second in command Lionâ uuuhhh⊠since when?? âBlue is the training wheels Lion!â that doesnât even make a tiny amount of sense. itâs a trainwreck. itâs complete garbage.
the Lion Switch is what you get when two showrunners who donât respect the genre force through a reshuffle based on plot reasons and/or their own personal, selfish preferences. the lore has to get junked in order to make it happen, but they donât care because they think you can just âmake it upâ. which is what they did. and the result is a mess that never really got back on track. from there, it was all downhill. multiple aspects of the story started unravelling. Alluraâs magic became a giant deus ex machina that was wheeled out during season finale fights and then promptly forgotten about. the Lionsâ personalities disappeared, presumably because they were inconvenient now. donât even get me started on S7âČs âoh Shiro is just. not a Paladin anymore because. uh. well. LOOK OVER THERE! AN EXPLOSION!â
in many ways, VLD is an object lesson in how NOT to write science fantasy. i could write a whole thesis about all the many many ways VLD fucked up what should be easy staples of the genre (how can you get clones that wrong iâll never understand). but if you want to find the linchpin - the one thread that was pulled that made everything start to fall apart - itâs the Lion Switch. if you want to know the season where VLD started to get irredeemably bad: S3, and the Lion Switch. that was the start of the inexorable slide into pointless boring garbage.
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
discoholicmusic
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
titsay
gummygunk
