Lance's Erasure from Season 7

I've made a few observations while I wrote Voltron Is a Love Story and Keith's Soft Spot that made me go hmm... Lance is weirdly absent from this scene and/or switched position with another character...

For example, the first thing I found was this scene in Season 7, Episode 1: A Little Adventure where Lance straight up just disappears from the scene despite being in the lineup of cadets in the previous shot:

[10:10] 

ummmm where the hell is Lance??? Where are the last two cadets in the lineup ???? Where did he go… Lance is just straight up erased from this scene, which makes me think he was supposed to have a bigger role in the conflict between James and Keith. Otherwise, why was he erased if he was just meant to react like Hunk does??

And then I found THIS inconsistency, that places Lance on the Garrison side of the table rather than the Voltron side, that I also posted a while ago on tumblr:

[Season 7, Episode 10: Heart of the Lion, 03:13 ; 03:35]

Here we see the Garrison Officers all on one side with the MFEs behind them, and on the other side we have Team Voltron, just like the last time they had a meeting. But what I find strange is that... Lance is sitting on the side of the Garrison and Veronica is sitting on the side of Team Voltron... I found this very odd, because wouldn't it make more sense to have Lance and Veronica switch places?? Why is Lance sitting next to Sam on the Garrison side instead of on the Team Voltron side??

I started growing very suspicious, because, given what I found of edits in Knights of Light that frequently placed Lance away from Keith, this felt very much like they put him on the Garrison side to avoid placing him next to Keith... usually Voltron is very purposeful with the placement of characters. Why would they go so far to avoid placing Lance next to Keith?? unless it had a deeper meaning ???

And it's even more suspicious, because the next time they're in a meeting in the same episode, Lance is on Team Voltron's side as usual, but this time he's placed next to Allura...

[Season 7, Episode 10: Heart of the Lion, 10:57]

Actually... several characters look like they're downright copy pasted from the first frame... such as the MFE's and Romelle and Iverson and Admiral Sanda and Hunk.... So their positions around the table are pretty much set, are meant to be consistent to the point that the animators can just copy paste the characters every time they have a meeting, so it's even more strange that Lance would deviate from this in the previous scene. That the animators would go through that extra effort to draw him sitting somewhere else.

and look where Veronica is sitting:

[Season 7, Episode 10: Heart of the Lion, 11:28]

Right next to Sam, where Lance sat in the last meeting scene.

We know that Season 7 was edited, because of this podcast, where the showrunners JDS and LM talk about having to amend a few things to Shiro and Adam's story to create plausible deniability. They had to change their apartment to the Garrison's common lounge as well as some of their dialogue to be more general and platonic. But we still see remnants of the original scene, for example here:

 

[Season 7, Episode 1: A Little Adventure, 16:52]

When Shiro enters the common lounge area, the camera zooms in on all of his trophies and medals, as well as a picture of him and Adam, all because it relates to his and Adam's dialogue. But why would Shiro's personal belongings, such as his achievements and personal pictures, be in the common lounge of his workplace, instead of his private home?? if it was his office, I'd understand (even though Shiro's rank isn't high enough to constitute having his own office)... but a common area?? Well, because this common area was originally supposed to be the kitchen of his and Adam's shared apartment, just as JDS and LM said in the podcast. This is also why we don't see any other characters around the "common area" during their conversation, because it was supposed to be in the privacy of their own home.

This example is an instance where the original story kinda seeps through the attempts at covering it up, due to orders from "higher up", and it tells us that there may be more attempts throughout the season. Well, as I said, I already found two instances, the ones above with Lance. These are two instances now that Lance is removed from Keith's proximity in season 7 alone, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. So, I started wondering if there were other instances of this, other inconsistencies that either remove Lance from the scene or place him away from Keith.

Well...

First inconsistency I found was in Season 7, Episode 1: A Little Adventure:

Look at the difference of the styles between these two scenes:

These are back to back, chronologically, with only the flashbacks in between them. Clearly, the second one looks much more reminiscent of a show for a younger audience... their faces are all rounder than usual, and their expressions more cartoonish. Plus, Lance's proportions are hella weird, sorry.

 

Not only that, but his mouth animation is weird too, look:

 [07:56]

You see it right? this mouth animation doesn't really match Voltron's usual mouth animation. Compare to the scene beforehand:

 

 

or this mouth animation of Hunk for that matter:

It's clearly very different. Lance's mouth animation in the scene above is much more flamboyant and open compared to these more subtle movements. Lance doesn't open his mouth nearly as wide when he speaks in the previous scene, compared to the scene at the 7-minute mark.

 In fact, their whole adventure with the Yalmors continues this style...

 

This makes me think that their whole adventure was added. I can't say what was supposed to happen, because it doesn't seem like they kept anything from the original plot.

Furthermore, we also have some weird inconsistencies with Keith and Allura. At the start of the episode, we see Allura say this:

[05:58]

She stays behind to help Shiro in some way, but... we never actually see her do anything of the sort. Like, she just kinda stands there and keeps saying his vitals are dropping:

 [09:23]

 And when his body starts rejecting his consciousness or whatever, she just admits defeat immediately, without trying in any way and says the complete opposite of what she said before:

[21:49]

The following is also really odd to me.

 [04:35]

Why would she say this... why are they waiting for him to wake up?? why does she say they're waiting to see if Shiro will reject the body or not, when he clearly already accepted it at the end of Season 6?

 [Season 6, Episode 7: Defender of All Universes, 21:36]

Also... why is Shiro in a COFFIN in Season 7 Episode 1???  Last we see of him, he wakes up outside of the coffin. The last time we saw "Shiro" in a coffin was here:

[Season 6, Episode 7: Defender of All Universes, 05:21]

Most likely, the scene with Shiro waking up in the last episode of season 6 was added. Here I already revealed how both Black Paladins and All Good Things were edited, and I also provided evidence for the fact that some of the scenes were most likely reanimated at the same time they started animating Season 7. When Keith says, "There must be some way you can help!" and Allura says, "There's nothing I can do." it would make more sense at the end of the season, because then Kuron dies. It makes no sense for her to say this here, when we have clearly just seen her do the impossible and literally bring Shiro back to life. Like, what do you mean there's nothing you can do!! you just did this like one episode ago??? I don't think this was an animation edit, but more so a script edit. I think they rearranged instructions and character lines to amend for Shiro's return.

I suspect Kuron dying and Allura saying there's nothing she can do was the original ending to season 6. Season 6 was originally going to end with Kuron's death. But once they got the order to keep Shiro alive, they had to change everything, rewrite their lines and reanimate the episode. Possibly the original plot of the first episode was going to be about the team moving on from Shiro's death, especially Keith. I think the flashbacks were supposed to come in between Keith accepting Shiro's death for good.

Next we have Season 7, Episode 2: The Road Home. When they all go into the cave, they split up to "thin their attackers" as Keith says. We clearly see Hunk and Allura go into one cave:

[17:33]

 And Lance, Keith and Pidge go into another:

 

 [17:34]

And we further see Lance and Pidge splitting from Keith:

[17:39]

But curiously, when Lance and Pidge are asking for help, we see this close-up of all of their locations:

[21:19]

It clearly shows Keith in the very front, in the same tunnel as Lance and Pidge. We also see Pidge much more in front of Lance, with Lance the one who is closest to the Galra fighter. In fact, these are their exact positions when they split the first time. But in the next shot we see of them, Lance is in front of Pidge...

[21:22]

Not only that, but when they exit the cave, we see Keith and Allura exit together, even though they weren't in the same tunnel at all, as we saw both when they split up AND on the map:

[22:18]

We do see Pidge and Lance exit together though:

[22:19]

And we see Hunk exit out of a completely separate tunnel:

 [22:19]

This is a very weird inconsistency, especially when they gave us such a long closeup of the map, signifying its importance, and making this kind of continuity error kinda obvious. It is not only inconsistent with the map, but also with the way we saw them split up. If anything, Keith should have been the one to exit separately out of the tunnel, since he is the one who ended up splitting completely from everyone on the team.

Again, Voltron is usually very consistent and deliberate with its positions of characters and continuity, so this is just baffling to me. Since we know season 7 was edited, I suspect this fight was edited. It was possibly supposed to look differently, with positions much like the one we see on the map. Possibly, Lance was still going to call for help, but he was going to call for help for himself. And possibly the wolf was supposed to save just Lance, and Keith exits out of the separate tunnel by himself, or Keith was supposed to save Lance and they exit the tunnel together. I can't say for sure what it was supposed to look like, since it was edited (very well), but those would be my guesses.

Next edit is here, in Episode 5: The Ruins, that I also pointed out in Keith's Soft Spot, cause I couldn't resist:

 [Season 7, Episode 5: The Ruins, 01:58]

I mean... they clearly added Shiro here last minute. His style does not match the others, and he is also weirdly inexpressive and stiff.

 Next jarring thing I found was in Episode 9: Know Your Enemy, and it's actually involving Hunk:

[Season 7, Episode 9: Know Your Enemy, 20:09]

 

Look at the way this flashback transitions into Hunk's past. It's very jarring and abrupt instead of gradually fading in like the last flashback. Compare to the previous flashback of his:

 

[07:58]

 It fades into the memory much more gradually than the one at the 20-minute mark (but interestingly it doesn't fade in as smoothly as the second flashback...it kinda just cuts to white and then fades. Possibly something was cut from Lance's family scene as well...). That means something was cut out of Hunk's flashback. That's not his full memory. What that flashback contained, I can't say. Since Hunk's first flashback happened right after looking at Lance's family, and his second happened right after looking at Veronica, who is Lance's sister, I'm guessing the memory that was cut out contained or had something to do with Lance and/or Veronica. And this is supported by what I found on the NYCC 2018 poster. I have to include it here because I think it might tell us what was in Hunk's original memories. Look here:

 

We recognise these characters from Hunk's family and Lance's family.

 

 

 

 

That is the third time now that Hunk's family is connected with Lance's family somehow. And what I'm most interested in is this:

 

Because look who's paired. Lance's niece and nephew with whom I presume to be either Hunk's niece and nephew or his little siblings, along with another female family member of Hunk's whose identity is never confirmed, but does appear again in the second flashback:

 

[20:14]

 

This is also the flashback that's cut short. Not only that, but this character along with Hunk's niece and nephew (or siblings...) look older and are wearing different clothes. AND the animation we see through the binoculars is very strange. No one but Hunk's parents move at any point.

 

 

(sorry for the FPS the website I'm using won't let me use more without a subscription ToT but you get the point)

 

Compare to the first episode and season 3 episode 6 where we do see movement:

 

[Season 1, Episode 1: The Rise of Voltron, 08:15]

 

 [Season 1, Episode 1: The Rise of Voltron, 10:02]

 

[Season 3, Episode 6: Tailing a Comet, 01:18]

 

Keith also starts by saying "I see movement." implying that he's the one looking through the binoculars, but then Hunk says "I see them. That's my mom and dad." and when we cut back to them, Hunk is the one with the binoculars in hand, despite us never seeing them exchange it.

 

Furthermore, Hunk says "I'm gonna get you out." but we never see him do so. The next time we see his parents are in episode 13, where we also see the unnamed man in the flashback as well as one of the kids:

 

[Season 7, Episode 13: Lion's Pride Pt. II, 09:14]

 

We can see that the kid is wearing the same thing as what he's wearing in the poster, meaning we should have seen the woman character and the other kid as well at some point, wearing the clothes that they are wearing in the poster, but we never do. When Hunk is in the hospital, only his parents are there (and his mom has a different hairstyle...):

 

[Season 7, Episode 13: Lion's Pride Pt. II, 21:27]

 

And in Season 8, we only see Hunk's parents again. (where Hunk's mom looks different again.... her shirt design is the same, but the colors are all changed. see Hunk's dad for example. He looks exactly as he did in the hospital. There was proper continuity for his character, but not for Hunk's mother. Character designs are usually never this inconsistent.)

[Season 8, Episode 1: Launch Date, 01:56]

 

That means the woman, the man and the kids were meant to have a bigger role in Hunk's family arc and were meant to reappear in season 8. And given their placement on the poster being beside and intertwined with Lance's family, it was most likely going to include Lance and his family as well. Again, character placements are not random. They all have a meaning. Lance's family was meant to be intertwined with Hunk's family somehow. Why they would need to cut Lance out of Hunk's memory I can't say. Based on the above evidence of further edits and cuts, possibly, Lance was doing something or saying something that involved a plot point/arc that they cut out. Possibly, Lance was going to help Hunk break his family out. It is not a coincidence that it is Veronica who goes with Hunk to see his family. It could have been Rizavi or Kinkade, but it wasn't. It was Veronica, because again, there was meant to be involvement from Lance's family's side.

 

(side note: this isn't the only instance of characters being on the poster but not in the show. This is a link to a tumblr post I made a while ago where I pointed out discrepancies between poster characters and presence in the show.)

 Next inconsistency is the meeting placement that I already discussed, above.

Individual spots may differ, but one thing that's consistent is that Garrison is on one side and Voltron is on the other... Lance is apparently only allowed on the Voltron side if he sits next to Allura.

Next inconsistency I saw was in episode 10: Heart of the Lion (which also involved Lance... man, this guy can't catch a fuckin break huh). So, Voltron usually shows you the ship/area the character is in when they are speaking, if we don't see their faces. We see this pattern pretty consistently in this episode as well:

[19:39]

This is to keep the association between each of the Lions and their respective paladins.

But curiously, for the following shot, we see the Blue Lion, but we hear Lance's voice:

[20:24]

They must have cut Lance's Lion scene/shot, but kept his audio, because in the next shot we see Allura inside her lion, which would be a natural transition from this shot. Why they cut Lance's shot out I can't say. Possibly, his Lion shot would have revealed something from a plot point that they cut/changed.

These were all the inconsistencies I found while rewatching season 7. There may be more that I haven't caught or were edited too well. Practically, it makes sense for Season 7 to be edited much better than season 8, because they had more time to properly storyboard and animate the changed story. Most likely they got the order to edit season 7's storyline at the same time they were told to bring Shiro back to life (for the second time...).

Now we get to the WHY of it all.

Production schedule for animation shows are years ahead of the release schedule. In this podcast, JDS and LM say that they started the Voltron project pretty much off the back of the Legend of Korra, which ended in 2014. Voltron's first season released in June 2016, meaning their production schedule is somewhere around 2 years ahead of their release schedule. Season 2 release was delayed from late 2016 to January 2017. Most likely, this is when they received the order to change season 7, which means they had most likely submitted scripts and outlines for approval and had most likely started on the animation as well, when they received the order. 

But bringing Shiro back to life is a massive change to the story they had already written. All of a sudden they need to account for a whole other character who isn't supposed to be there, and their impact on not only the story but the other characters. If they were to follow the release schedule, they wouldn't have enough time to amend the story properly to account for Shiro. 

In this interview, LM and JDS say that the decision to split season 3 and season 4 in two came from Netflix, because they wanted to release more Voltron episodes more often, but possibly another reason for the story team was to give themselves more time to not only change the story, but also to animate the new story properly. I wouldn't entirely take all the information in this interview at face-value, because LM says in it that they weren't going back to 13-whole seasons, but as we know, both season 7 and season 8 were released with all 13 episodes. Furthermore, JDS didn't say that they didn't have anything to do with it, actually he said that they came with their own input, so they clearly had a hand in the decision in some way. So, clearly, this interview is full of half-truths and should be taken with a grain of salt. 

But what they do say is that OG Season 3 and OG season 4 were already finished in production before they made this decision and thus they could split them in two, the question was just about where. That means it took them approximately 2 years to animate 4 (whole) seasons, thus animating season 7 and 8 should have taken them about 1 year. Well.. Season 5 was released in March 2018, one year and two months after the release of Season 2, meaning they most likely were wrapping up the animation production for Season 7 and season 8. 

Stylistically, season 7 looks different from earlier seasons, but isolated it looks pretty cohesive with itself, and it is not as inconsistent as season 8 was, because they had more time to fix it up. But this is also around the time that Tim Hedrick left the Voltron project altogether.

Throughout the show, Tim Hedrick is credited as the sole story editor, a title he has held alone since the project began. The following are screencaps of the credits from Season 7 Episodes 6: The Journey Within and 7: The Last Stand PT. I:

Tim Hedrick is also the one who wrote Episode 6: The Journey Within, the last episode he ever wrote for the show. 

(side note: JDS and LM reveal in this podcast that the Feud! was initially going to be the episode before they arrive at Earth, because they were thinking of them getting to Earth as their reward for winning the gameshow, but they say they rearranged the "order" of the episodes. Well, I don't know if it was so much the order of the episodes or whether they just added an episode in between them, Episode 5: the Ruins. Episode 5 is the episode Krolia leaves Voltron, because as I mentioned here, Shiro replaces her as Keith's primary guardian, since he didn't die. Stylistically, this episode is also much different from the previous episodes and the episode after this, episode 6: The Journey Within (it has flatter coloring and more anime-like style compared to the other episodes). This means most likely either the Feud! was the last episode he wrote before he left the project or The Journey Within was. Well, this concept of Earth being their reward was used for The Journey Within. Both episodes were written by Tim Hedrick, so, both episodes were the last he ever wrote for the show.)

But in Episode 8: The Last Stand PT. II, Joshua Hamilton is promoted from staff writer to story editor, alongside Tim Hedrick:

 

He is credited as a story editor alongside Tim Hedrick until Episode 11: Trial By Fire, where only Joshua Hamilton is credited as the story editor:

Tim Hedrick has left Voltron at this point. And at this point in the story, Voltron is so far from the original story and concept that it is almost unrecognizable.

I don't know about you, but if I was working on a project (a story that I cared a lot about as a writer with integrity) that kept being meddled with from higher up, I would get fed up. And Tim wasn't the only one. In this podcast, that I also mentioned above in the side note, JDS and LM talk about how a lot of their employees and coworkers had to leave the project, because they couldn't handle working on it anymore. They don't go into detail, but they do say that Voltron was a rough environment to work in. Eugene Lee, the director of the Feud! episode, joins the podcast and talks about how initially, he wanted to quit, too, but he felt that he couldn't with good conscience leave, now that the project had lost two directors already (Steve In-Chang Ahn and Chris Palmer; they not only lost Tim Hedrick, their story editor, but also other writers after the last half of season 7, such as May Chan, and Mark Bemesderfer), so the rough environment is NOT due to JDS or LM. In fact, JDS and LM say in this podcast that they couldn't leave the project even if they wanted to, and leave all of their employees hanging, meaning they probably thought about it, too, or they understood why people left. Well... they say that after they keep talking about how they aren't the IP holders of Voltron, so we can kinda put two and two together and observe that most people left the project because their story was meddled with, they didn't have as much creative freedom as they thought and they kept being put in a position where they had to make last minute changes and put out high quality work in very short time.

It is clear that the production of Season 7 was a turning point for many involved in the project. Season 7 and Season 8 are not consistent continuations of the previous 6 seasons. There is a very clear shift, and it is most likely due to interference and many members of the project leaving. Some changes they ran out of time for doing correctly, and is what enables people like me (unhinged people) to observe these attempts at covering up edits to the story. The running theme of edits I see in Season 7 is Shiro coming back to life, again (and his story with Adam), Lance and his role (most likely as the Black Paladin), as well as Lance's proximity to Keith.

But it didn't just stop there. As we can see in the edits of season 8, executives (ahem IP holders) were still not satisfied. In season 8, the running theme in edits is Lance and Keith's relationship and Lotor's redemption. They gave one last order that broke the camel's back. Remove Lotor and remove Keith and Lance. It is March/April 2018 (maybe even later, possibly around May/June). They have scheduled the release for Season 7 for August 2018 and season 8 for December 2018. How are they supposed to write a whole new season and animate it in just (under) 6 months?? It's impossible. As we saw from the Jujutsu Kaisen scandal (here, here and here), to create a whole season in such short time is to frankly fuck over your animators and make them work in a terrible work environment and schedule. They can't do it. And they didn't. They kept what they could, cut out other stuff, rearranged what they had and implemented rushed animation scenes to create some semblance of a cohesive story without any of the elements they were told to remove. But as we've all seen throughout this investigation, they barely succeeded. And they took the brunt of the inevitable fallout upon release. What we also see from the Jujutsu Kaisen scandal is that companies will absolutely have their employees sign NDAs about terrible work environments and meddling, because they know that if the employees speak out, it looks bad for that company's reputation.

I understand why no one wants to talk about VLD anymore. Really, I get it. If I was the showrunner of a project that kept being meddled with, and I had to take all the shit for it, for decisions I didn't even make, I'd be pissed, and I'd be ashamed of the end product. I would bury VLD so deep under the ground that it would be entirely wiped from the collective consciousness of not only the internet but the animation industry as a whole. And the ironic thing is, everyone wants VLD gone. Even Netflix. Even DreamWorks. That is why VLD is no longer on there. They thought it was better to let it run its course through DreamWorks' contract with them, and then ultimately let it fade into oblivion.

But as I said here, I won't stand for that. I won't let anyone forget. Because as I said, underneath all the edits and all the meddling, there is a great story about love and growing up. A story that would have gone down in history as one of the great modern masterpieces of our time. I won't let the meddlers win.