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I can't believe I'm about to say this but...
I don't like the way the crew of Shera and the Princesses of Power behaves in public. I don't like the way they shit-talk their peers making related series, like VLD. I don't like the way several of them court antishippers.
But I do think it is awfully interesting that at approximately the same time we know the edits were being made to Voltron season 8, that's when the SPOP crew started really talking shit about Voltron.
It's awfully interesting that this crew, working under the same studio and therefore subjected to less stringent NDA restrictions, just so happened to complain about the exact things that we now know were being fucked by the S8 edits.
It's almost as if the SPOP crew had heard about the shitshow going on next door at VLD and, knowing that their own property (another toy-driven 80s media re-vamp with strong influences from anime and ATLA, and a large capital-F Fandom following) might be next on the block for that kind of meddling, tried to speak out.
Badly, mind you. Unacceptably, in my opinion.
And yet, it's awfully fucking interesting.
But I do think it is awfully interesting that at approximately the same time we know the edits were being made to Voltron season 8, that's when the SPOP crew started really talking shit about Voltron.
It's awfully interesting that this crew, working under the same studio and therefore subjected to less stringent NDA restrictions, just so happened to complain about the exact things that we now know were being fucked by the S8 edits.
It's almost as if the SPOP crew had heard about the shitshow going on next door at VLD and, knowing that their own property (another toy-driven 80s media re-vamp with strong influences from anime and ATLA, and a large capital-F Fandom following) might be next on the block for that kind of meddling, tried to speak out.
Badly, mind you. Unacceptably, in my opinion.
And yet, it's awfully fucking interesting.
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And I don't pay much attention to twitter, let alone crew twitters, but from I've seen from the odd screenshot or two from the She-Ra twitters... yeah. It's super unprofessional (and not the 'arbitrary standards' sort of professional, in the 'be polite/do not piss in anyone's cheerios' sorta way.) (I also got the feeling, maybe inaccurately, that they tried to make their show look better by bagging on other shows? Which is not... a great move, as artists, imo.)
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The easiest thing to point to, if you're not a fan of the show and haven't been following its narrative, is that huge portions of the animation in season 8 are just still images and slideshows.
There's a climatic battle between a protagonist and the man who killed her entire species, a full 8 seasons in the making, and it's a single still image with no dialogue for about 30 seconds, a still image reaction shot wherein nobody else is having any kind of actual reaction they're just staring blankly, and then a return to the initial still image (still no dialogue) for another 15 or so seconds.
There are multiple places where footage was very obviously recycled from previous seasons without even being editted, including some spots where character A will say, "character B, we need you here now! get here as fast as you can" while character B is IN THE SHOT NEXT TO THEM because of the recycled footage.
A rough timeline has emerged over the last week indicating that most of the changes made to season 8 were finalized in October, only TEN WEEKS before airing. Ten weeks is enough time to make a change to, like, a single scene maybe. They dropped at least 2 episodes that we know of.
One voice actor's major character DIED and he didn't find out until after airing when people told him ON TWITTER, because so much of his recorded dialogue was cut.
And that's just the beginning of the technical aspects of the problems.
Narratively, the edits changed what were obviously supposed to be comedically over the top acts of sexism to be used as subversions later on (because the target audience of the show is 7+ and subtlety is not good for them yet), were instead played completely straight. Making the moral of the story, "this beautiful black princess must give herself romantically to a man whom she has turned down dozens of times over 8 seasons, because her father said so, and then she must die for him."
And that's just one of the characters they brutally fucked over.
This show is rated Y7. That means it's for children ages 7 and up. It appears in the netflix kids filter as being safe for young children to watch unsupervised.
Season 8 shows the ROTTED, MELTING CORPSE of a fan favourite who is the child of two abusive drug addicts, and the narrative specifically goes out of its way to NOT redeem him but instead say that he deserved to be killed screaming and that his corpse should have been left to rot while his abusive mother puppets his dead body.
The abusive mother gets forgiveness, though.
Like, there's so much to unpack, I barely know where to start.
The racism!! Setting aside what happened with the black princess, who is an alien and therefore something about aliens not experiencing racism could be applied.
The Everyman character is a young Cuban man whose entire life has been dedicated to two things: exploring the universe, and being kind to his friends. is crippling anxiety often manifested as trying (badly) to be a "Ladies Man," but otherwise he was a good dude.
They made him immortal at the end of the season, and then had him LEFT. ON. A. FARM. Because, you know, those latinos, they love farming I guess???!!!!!?!?!?!?!??!?!
Or, hey, lets talk about the queer character everyone is so up in arms about! Leaked footage from before the edits were ordered has been found, showing that the queer character was originally intended to get married to the other major character that has been his relationship and growth partner throughout the series. In fact, their relationship is literally the impetus for the series starting at all!
however, marketing decided that this was not appropriate, and quite literally traced over the other character's frames (BADLY! Even my dumb ass could do a better trace job! I literally have, for fuckign homestuck edits!!!!) to replace him with an unnamed NPC character who is--and this is true--literally selected from the background of the original footage and is still visible in the background because they didn't even erase him out of the background of his own wedding.
Or, let's talk about a different queer character who died in season 7. She was confirmed dead. In fact, her death is a plot point in season 8 itself, with her wife trying to murder a main character in revenge. The dead woman is drawn into scenes to "prove" she's still alive, has literally no lines except a piece of recycled dialogue from a different character with a DIFFERENT ACCENT and a different actress, and is never interacted with by ANY other characters. She's just pasted into place. Because, I guess they decided her being dead was a bad look for the show, except they STILL LEFT IN THE SCENES WHERE HER WIFE IS OUT FOR MURDER-REVENGE
There are entire scenes that the audio-descriptive track just doesn't even acknowledge because they were added in later, which is a huge fuck you to blind people, and, like. Ugh! Ugh!!!
as;ldajs;ldfj
This doesn't even cover most of the shitshow fuckery of voltron season 8, just you know. Gives a general gist of it.
Anyway, back on topic. I do think the She-ra crew were wildly inappropriate on twitter, and yes, there were definitely points where they tried to make their own show look better than voltron in comparison.
however, a lot of the criticism they were lodging at VLD made no sense, given what the show had done and was stated to be doing in the future, at the time the tweets were made.
With the context of season 8, however, all of their criticisms suddenly make perfect sense.
And given that the crews of both shows have worked together in the past, and were currently working under the same studio?
Well, if my senpai's show was being mangled beyond recognition, and I was working on a show in the exact same, super-specific genre intended to be a spiritual successor?
I'd get pretty fucking pissy about it too.
Still inappropriate, but a lot more understandable.
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(I've watched up to around s3? And then I was like 'I'll catch up later!' and then suddenly there was no more seasons being made and everything was one fire?)
How-- how did any of the executives think this was a good idea??? I could see how *some* of the decisions might have seen reasonable, but 'let's retcon someone to being alive, but not retcon the murder-revenge plot!' and 'lets have someone marry and background character, and not get rid of the background character!' are just... WHAT.
(Though this is leading to a fun guessing game of 'which character ended up as a rotting corpse?' and ' which characters were meant to get married?' My current wild guess is that Rotting Corpse was the guy who got erased for a bg character.)
And 'make an audio description track' is, like, one of those things you have to budget time for, and not just skip. Seriously.
...Executives: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
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I watched season 8 when it came out, but I've always been a pretty casual, mostly uninterested viewer, so my reaction to everything was either "That was kinda weird but, eh, this show has always been weird about pacing and plot structure" or "That was kinda weird, maybe I misremembered X."
Seeing everything laid out is just...what the hell.
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But taking the show in as a whole, and then the entire.... fucking.... mess that is season 8 in comparison to the rest of it, it's just kind of fucking insane?
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I assume you're talking about Lotor/AJ here? There's been so much going around and very few credible receipts, but that's the only one that made sense when everything else about this story was so off.
As for everything else: yeah, it's still stupid to suck up to antis, full stop. They're all so quick to turn on each other the minute one steps out of line...look at how fast even Shada went from Golden boy to cishet white scum after his video at the Toronto con or how "suddenly" someone discovered an old tweet of Seamus Kelley's about Shidge from way back in 2016 after he stopped feeding the delusion about Bi Lance was going to happen.
Internal politics or not, courting these kinds of bad fans is playing with fire.
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It's all just really messy.
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Why would creators (whether its the EP's or the studio) want to entirely fuck over their fanbase like that? I don't think it was to troll the fans since the bulk of this show would've been wrapped up by mid-2017, but...again, yikes. I just have no other words at this point.
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Wow, that is some impressive destruction of their own material. I just... it started so well. And now...ugh.
It's...probably overly fandom-invested of me to wonder if the last-second swap was because of all the Sheith/Klance drama.
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SPOP is not a show I'm interested in. I find the writing to be very sloppy and the characterization shallow and inconsistent. But, I'll admit, I was also judging it very harshly because of the behaviour of the crew in public. Behaviour which, with greater context, is still unacceptable, but much more understandable.
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(A damned shame abt SPOP particularly b/c I liked Noelle Stevenson's earlier work and she's always struck me as a pleasant person.)
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Second is, if she had tried to silence her crew, and then it later turned out that they were making valid and reasonable complaints about the way Voltron was being handled by the same studio they're working for, it would have looked unbelievably bad on her.
She made, I think, the right call in staying out of the fuss.
As for the specifics, unfortunately the blog I had saved the discussions to is fucking locked down so I can't see anything on it, because tumblr is hell.
Here's a little bit of it though:
http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/176025511995/mmm-apparently-a-storyboard-artist-for-she-ra-is
That's records of a crewmember's twitter being vocally, aggressively antishipper and talking about has "shallies" make the voltron fandom unsafe, whereas the She-ra fandom would never have such garbage in it.
That same crewmember was a part of the same specific "gang" of antishippers who threatened to break the VLD showrunner's arms, so credibly that the showrunner was followed by police and private security at subsequent cons and public outings.
In light of this particular crewmember, any nonviolent criticism coming from SPOP crew members (such as claiming that unlike Voltron, SPOP would have queer characters and storylines from the very beginning instead of tacked-on "fake" representation), just looked increasingly petty and awful.
But now we know that instead of the original storyline wherein the "queer representation" was a manifestation of 8 seasons of relationship growth, it's just literally a 5 second gif slapped into an epilogue, well. Suddenly that criticism makes perfect sense.
So, the behaviour of a good number of the SPOP crew is still absolutely unacceptable. But some of the stuff we shrugged off as more petty bullshit from a petty crew actually makes an unfortunate degree of sense in hindsight.
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(What I don't get is the bile towards the VLD _creators_ as if they chose to be screwed by the network. Antis gonna anti,I guess?)
I reiterate what I said about the Masquerade, if this is how fandom-creator interfacing is gonna be in the post-social media age.
And thanks for soothing my feelings about Stevenson, too. Like, I know Idolising Creators Bad but goddamn my meagre interactions with her and her projected self-image on Tumblr and Twitter (especially some of her autobiographical stuff) gave me Good Vibes about her.
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(Tangentially: I like She-Ra, and my preferred ship from the show is the most purest sparkly uwu wlw romance you can imagine. But goddamn do I want to write dark shit now just to spite people.)
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https://imgur.com/a/pA5JWFc
And here's a little bit about threats made against Lauren.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Wt2kG-5y18J:https://aminoapps.com/c/voltron-legendary-defenders/page/blog/i-am-sick-and-tired-of-this-fandom/BwZe_XkswurbKpGzVdNj4bXqW7NQWN576+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Basically, these assholes actually managed to get together the funding to rent a fucking bus, and planned to collect other antishippers and go to dreamworks and attack her.
https://grumpy-old-fandommom.tumblr.com/post/176492061666/getting-right-into-this-i-saw-someone-share-this
Part of the problem with sourcing this one is that the group that arranged the whole shitshow specifically did so on instagram, to minimize the amount of time that the information was readily accessible.
Nevertheless, the threat was considered credible enough that Lauren hired private security for a while.
Here's more of the, like, history and timeline and stuff
https://archive.fo/1nrIZ
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Voltron:_Legendary_Defender
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My wacky theory is that the studio that animated She-Ra might be responsible for animating new sequences and re-animating scenes in VLDs8. Like, some scenes have the feel of "animesque but poorly" that all of She-Ra has.
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I hope that's not the case. That would just be really, like.... especially fucked up.
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