No kidding. When I got to Tumblr around April 2017, the wank was going full tilt. I had no idea that show premiered less than ten months earlier but it had wank and drama at the level of a long running show like Supernatural O_o
Remember folks: it doesn’t matter how invested you are in a series or character. It is NEVER okay or justified to threaten the safety of other people or their loved ones. The writers, animators and voice actors are humans too. They don’t deserve being sent death threats on blast.
To add onto that... If you send death threats over fiction, it's not about whatever moral cause you claim to be championing, it's about your inflated sense of self-righteousness. Every time. No exceptions.
I still can’t get over the fact that a bunch of people trying to add “diversity” to their AU renamed Takashi Shirogane, a perfectly normal real Japanese name, to Hachiko. A dog. A dogs name that makes no sense for a human.
@@HamazuraGODbecause it was made by a bunch of ignorant racist teens. Idk if it is the same fanfic, but some people even changed Lance's name because it was too short and not Hispanic enough for them so they made it that is nane was actually an acronym for his real name
I’ve never thought of it this way. Honestly I like this explanation because I do love some of the fandoms I’m in but there have been some people I really dislike in them.
Shit you not, 14 year old me was at a convention cosplaying as Keith and my friends were cosplaying the other paladin. A fully grown adult came up to me cause I was holding hands with my buddy who was cosplaying Lance (neither of us shipped anything). This ADULT MAN got pissed at us for being 'klance shippers', like homie, we were obviously minors.
not abt vld but dude same- i was 13 and i went as ginny weasley and was holding hands with my friend who was luna (i do ship them, but i was just holding hands to stay together and didn’t think anything of it) and someone grown ass man came up and got made that i didn’t ship hinny. people r such douche bags 🙄
"I hate my fans, that's why I killed a gay man and a black women." Sure. I watched the show, I'll be real with you, it ALWAYS sucked. It just took for season 6 until people figured it out
i love how that one person thought it was "weird" how steven yeun did not engage in this parasocial relationship stuff with the fandom as if keeping to himself and maintaing his privacy was something weird
Especially with how toxic the fandom is/was, like why would he want to interact with the fandom seeing how his fellow VA’s were treated and all the drama going on?
Steven Yuen also had an extremely busy work schedule so he honestly did not have the time together into The Discourse(tm) the way some others (notably Bex Taylor) did. But even if he did….who would do that, seeing how the fans treated everyone else?
Because today nothing can be private anymore if you're a celeb or an influencer. Heck, kids have their real names, ages, sexualities, ethnicity and more on their carrds or in their bios which is kind of insane. He certainly made the right call tho lol
I agree wholeheartedly, everyone else either got forgotten to hell (Hunk and Lance's character arc especially) or got written into so many arcs that everyone's saying that they're hogging the spotlight for other characters with more interesting arcs (Keith Definitely so and maybe Shiro)
I’ll never be over how I got accused of being an abuser because I made a post where I said that I related to Lotor and his character arc because I was a victim of parental abuse myself
Yeah! Lotor’s whole scene with Allura just broke…well the fandom from what I saw. Something about it just shot everyone. Hell, even A.J (Lotor’s VA) was salty about it. It made me look down at Voltron as a group because S7 and S8 is legit their fault 😔. Like they always assume the answers.
Maaan I loved Lotor! He was morally grey in a show that consistently portrayed a universal war as black and white. But anyways, long story short I was very depressed by what they did to him in the end (thankfully fanfics exist huh?)
@@blackbun130 Due to their lack of understanding about how politics work, causing a power vacuum without a backup in place. Allura of people should've seen that or at least Coran 😕. I understand that she was emotional and all that but that's not a good excuse to send billions to their deaths. 🤔 For the team to encourage her behavior is also problematic since they rarely, if not ever, call her out when she's acting immature 😶. The group has constantly acted out before thinking leading to a lot of near death experiences if not for some Galran or some other alien race to get them out (Example: Thace saved them the first season on the final episode, Lotor Saved them the 4th season final episode, Olkarians saved them I think...2nd season and I'm sure there's more 😅.) Now, Lotor has sins that he, by right, should've discussed with the team since this is still war and there could be a chance of manslaughter. But I at the same time, their actions and his issues wouldn't allow him to do so 🙂. Hm...they also did what lotor did but with a higher kill count in Season 8: Sacrifice few to save more making them quite hypocritical 😅. That's within the time the disappeared before, during and after 👍.
Man, back in the day the meanest thing I did as a 13 year old was typing disguised swear words on habbo hotel and feel bad afterwards. Imagine threatening an adult with murder because they ship a pairing you don't like and feel like you're the righteous one in the situation.
I swear some the most consistent things in fandoms are: - Stories of dangerous desserts - Despising female characters for one reason or another (like i swear i've seen this so many times wtf) - Ship drama - Harassment of people working on the material in question - Kids being idiots
I mean, true. This is all large fandoms. Although depending on which one, it often involves despising specific male characters just as vehemently, if not more. I see the classic "hold a female character to a vastly higher, unrealistic standard" shtick all the time in translated Chinese/Japanese/Korean webnovels, which I edit for semi-professionally, though. Me? I hate individual character writing in a truly equal opportunity sense. If I already can't stand the trope when a generic manly mchero man does it, it ain't gonna make it less unbearable when a stock YA girlboss does it.
@@FelisImpurrator I have memories of the m/m shippers in the Hetalia fandom disliking the female characters bc they 'got in the way of ships' or something like that.
@@PixelRoserade Which was kinda fucking dumb because apart from the genderbent characters, there were only like 5 female characters, with the ones getting more screentime being Hungary and Leichestein
@@tarotsushima3332 yeah and Ukraine/Belarus were weirdly sexualitized? Especially since they were paired with their brother Russia. Maybe it was commentary on some political drama I don't know about? It was weird.
Sad thing is, it's not always kids. It's also people in their 20s & 30s pulling this stuff, usually people with families & good jobs, and I have zero idea why they think it's cool to threaten people over TV shows.
@@idkidc2573 Yeah, I'm part of the twitter she-ra fandom and it's honestly very chill, poking fun at ridiculous ships like glimglim and stuff is the most I've seen. I could be wrong cause I joined the fandom after the show stopped airing
@@freval2493 yo, def watch more she-ra. Season 4 and 5 are straight up masterpieces. The fandom is super involved. Year later they’re making fanart, fanfics, animations, you name it. We are pretty chill! The fandom is mostly on twitter and reddit I would say
This show ruined my life. "Hi, I'm Keith." It's been 6 years and I've heard "like Keith from Voltron?" more times than any Keith ever should ever have to.
I don't even know you and I apologize for you having to deal with that. I can't even imagine how god damn annoying that must have been and I sincerely hope it stopped.
//Another note is that: if your ship is not canon you could just make your own au, write fanfics, draw fanarts of that au without attacking the canon version of the story.
If I had a nickle for every fandom that has sent someone pastries with sharp objects inside, I would have 2 nickles, which is not much but is weird it happened twice
@@iwonthesitatebitch1265 Undertale! Pretty much an artist got given cookies with needles in it from another person at the con. People looked up the artist and found out they shipped frisk x sans and people started spreading rumors that the reason the artist got given the cookies because the person hated frisk x sans sooo yeah TLDR: Artist got given needle cookies and people used it for ship wars :l
I remember being nervous to wear any VLD merch because I didn't want to engage with any radical fans who saw it. When I did end up wearing some outside, another fan commented that she loved the show (this was a little after season 2 aired) as well. We hit it off great, but when the topic of favorite characters and ships came up I could see that she was just as scared of what I was going to say just as I was about what she would say. Our OTP's contradicted each other, but neither of us minded and we agreed that the toxic fans were being childish and we should be allowed to ship whoever we wanted without the gatekeeping that we saw both online and during cons.
Yea I fully on agree with that, I am so tired of people just fighting each other, I am also afraid to talk about ships to anyone in the VLD fandom. The shipping is just a warzone and I would just rather get out of it. I think everyone is allowed to ship whatever they want to. I do have a friend that ships Sheith and Klance, and we're both cool with eachother. I don't think anyone should end a friendship just because of what they ship btw. I never really interact with any vld fans anymore, I never did interact tbh.
Sounds like my old friend and I. While she enjoyed the idea of Lance & Allura being together and I leaned more towards Klance it didn't affect our friendship and we bonded over our shared obsession for Lance.
Throw back to when I was in highschool and someone wrote 'shiro x keith' on one of the cafeteria walls, which then led to a friend of a friend breaking down into tears because she thought her ex boyfriend (named keith) moved on to date a girl named shiro and they wrote that on the wall specifically for her to see
I totally agree that it's almost impossible to decide 'the worst fandom', as every large one that was known for being a dumpster fire was also filled with wonderful people and so much amazing, creative content. But damn did Voltron cut it very close.
@@inkuii genshin fandom is the normal amount of popular toxic, curious how you think it's really that bad? CN honkai servers has got to be worse, because it's fandom is so crazy there was an actual assassination planned on the ceo of mihoyo. it was failed ofc but damn was it bad. there was a whole investigation and everything
@@aikn7551 Oh you sweet summer child...at least a dozen artists have been driven off the platform just for drawing ship art, actually just shipping two characters together will net you death threats if it’s two certain pairings, people throw riots over the age old debate and throw around the kiddy diddler word around so much it has lost meaning, yeah I’m referring to kaeluc and chilumi. Not to get into the age old debate or the whole incest thing, but ngl I have not seen this much vitriol in shipping SINCE Voltron
@@inkuii honestly the Genshin fandom is shit. But god, they are NOTHING in comparison to the CN Honkai fandom. (The western Honkai fandom is so fucking chill though.) They got mad at global players when they got an event they didn’t for the first time in all of honkai’s existence, tried to kill the ceo of Mihoyo, are very rude towards the people working on Honkai and generally just suck. At least in the Genshin fandom you can hide in a corner.
Funfact for the Robin Williams clip: He was a big anime fan, Neon Genesis being one of his favorite. He intentionally pronounced Evangelion wrong just to mess with fans.
This isn't actually true. Robin Williams didn't know anything about Evangelion at the time. The reason that specific toy was chosen was because the Mark Romanek (The writer and director) thought it "looked cool", and also didn't know anything about Evangelion.
@@piperplimmyplymouth That is the real story. Because then the kid goes on to say that "Neon Genesis Evangelion" fights the bad guys. Saying that about a figure of the Mass Produced EVA lol
Back in 2018 there was an oc tag on TikTok where people would make and cosplay OCs that were the children of different Voltron ships. I made an Allurance child, not because I shipped it, but simply because I was working with what was in my closet. I got death threats for it.
Death threat... Death threat every where on the internet, even for a small dumbass reason.. smh I feel like those people never seen a sun or go outside.
I remember when Voltron came out, I got death threats because my cat (before he passed) was named Lance (named after Sir Lancelot) and people thought I was Lance stan and I have never even seen the show. It was wild.
One of the most surreal parts of this fandom to witness were the jokes that Jeremy Shada was locked up in a showrunner’s basement and banned from convention panels in case he accidentally confirmed Klance... then some fans actually believing it and protesting for his release
I had an ex “girlfriend” that simped so hard for these anime boys that I basically didn’t exist. I just started distancing myself until eventually I was gone and she never noticed, I couldn’t compete with a literal cartoon
very happy u got out of that bc mate you deserve a lot lot better. some ppl just arent fit for real relationships yet. even i who is really attached to fictional characters and simps for them really hard still make 90% of my time dedicated for my loved ones wtf
I read a theory that the reason Rhys Darby is mostly reserved on social media in the wake of Our Flag Means Death is that he was a VA on Voltron. He saw everything.
@@Batmantherealbatman absolutely. this shit always happens when the cast get too friendly with their fanbase. all it takes is a couple of BNFs to start thinking they're best pals with the stars and the next thing you know you have almost cult-like groups of their mosly teenaged followers being given well-meaning validation by some actors that are just happy people are enjoying their work and have no idea how their every word and gesture are being (mis)interpreted. And if the cast grows or the show manages to stick around long enough... well then you end up with a Supernatural situation, where some of the cast (or even a bodyguard or writer or two) get a bit too precious about the fandom for their character specifically (adding more fuel to the ship-war fires) or outright using the opportunity to encourage and exploit the parasocial relationship with fans in ways that feel kinda wrong well past queer baiting. From what I understand, the MLP fandom had a bit of that going on, too It'd be lovely if cast & crew could have easy, friendly relationships with their fans, but unfortunately people are gonna people, creeps are gonna creep, and teenagers are gonna do both those things at speed as they try to figure the world out while surrounded by people and creeps
Lindsay Ellis recently said something that quite applicable to shipping wars: "it's okay to just not like something, it shouldn't have to be a moral crusade"
@@rosenrot234 Ah yes because nobody is allowed to slightly contradict things they said 5 years ago with more nuanced opinions, growing as a person makes you a hypocrite
@@voidify3 Sadly, "anti-growth, anti-recovery" is a keystone of the horrible moral purity rabbit hole. This fandom phenomenon is what happens when a whole lot of people want to be progressive and inclusive, but all they know how to do is to repeat the hyper-socially-conservative abusive behavior patterns that were done to them growing up. Which leads to moral essentialism and obsession with purity and all that crap.
the way i contemplate rewatching voltron now that the fandoms "dead" its so tempting bc even of the fanart id make but memories of the fandoms chaos juss GOOD LORD
My dad introduced me to Voltron. I watched it on Netflix with him and my sister, we all loved it. And I never dipped my toes in the fandom whatsoever simply because I never bothered to. Oh, the joys of learning about all the stupid drama I got to miss out on. …so glad I never got into the fandom. ;-;
I've been in infamous fandoms... (FNAF, Hetalia, Danganronpa) - and I can say that even though I had an absolute amazing time and spent hours being stupid with other fans, some of the stuff I saw was honestly traumatizing. Voltron would've broke me
Mood I literally avoided the fandom like the plague because I heard a lot of shit about it so I never once touched it. Cause I know the toxic fandom would eat my ass alive for saying” Yeah klance is cute but so is Seith :)”
I was only around ten or eleven when it got big, so thankfully my older sister (Around eleven or twelve) and I were our own fandom of two. Just meant we both routinely fought over who got Keith. (It was settled when we became Klance shippers)
This series really condensed the entire lifespan of a toxic Fandom down into just two years. That's impressive. Sherlock took like 7 years before it finally fucking died.
@@lulucool45 What it is is Efficient. By 2024 toxic fandoms will Hypernova within the week, so hot and bright and spewing deadly radiation that they'll be on the news around the clock.
As someone who just got into VLD, this all sounds insane. This is why I like only getting into shows after they've wrapped up or the fandom has died down.
Someone should do a legit study on fandoms. I feel like there is DEFINITELY an unhealthy level of obsession some people have and it would interesting to see that researched. I don’t think being a part of a fandom in and of itself is unhealthy, there are a lot of people who make it their entire life and I just feel like that really needs to be discouraged more than it is.
I had a friend who was writing her dissertation on furries, and dropped out because it’s incredibly hard to get funding or professional credibility when you want to study fandoms. Maybe one day we’ll get there!
once boomers aren't the majority in academic circles i do feel like there will be a good couple of sociological studies on fandoms. I think that the phenomena that take place within them could be extended to all kinds of social groups that are centered around liking/following someone or something.
No joke, Voltron literally tore me & my best friend's relationship apart. It wasn't even because of the shipping, though. We planned to go to comic con and cosplay (me as Pidge, her as Lance), but I wasn't able to get the outfit bc of time constraints/lack of materials. I then made the stupid decision to wander off with my then-boyfriend (who was Super controlling) and I abandoned her. I completely broke her trust and felt horrible about it. Maddie, if you're reading this, I really am sorry, even all these years later.
My absolute favorite piece of Voltron drama was the batshit crazy conspiracy theory that claimed Steven Yeun secretly shipped Klance. And that him not getting involved in the fandom was because he was upset Klance never became canon.
As an aspiring creator if I had a fanbase and my fans started treating me/my coworkers like that I’d be REALLY tempted to just end the show or do something drastic to a character out of spite. I never would do that but it would definitely be a thought. If my fans are gonna act like spoiled children, I’m gonna want to punish them like they’re spoiled children lmao.
Trust me I bet that’s what every single creator has in mind (and rightfully so) Problem is of course, punishing the ones who don’t do such nonsense is an easy way to tank everything you’ve made Not arguing btw just a passing comment
The creator for Attack on Titan did something similar where during the years long hiatus between seasons 2 and 4, I forget his name but the author revealed in a quote "I want my story to hurt my fans, the original plan was to have the whole cast die". Which means in another universe it was more than just a possibility
Petty retaliation is also the act of a child, especially if its being targeted at "children". The attack on titan guy is a different story too. He wanted to kill his characters, that was the intended dark story. But then he changed it and made it less so, the ongoing chapter progression and fan love leading him to expand the story, have gentler moments, sell more merch, go more epic...
Voltron fandom was INSANE i still can't believe it only lasted 2 years, it has so much stories and fuck ups it feels like brony fandom tier in length. And yet-
all i knew was the *lance VA* was leaking klance so lauren (?) locked him and other leakers in her basement joke and pretty fanart and hc to fill plot holes
honestly it’s so weird to look back on voltron and realize it was such a short timespan. if i didn’t know better, my gut would tell me that lasted at least 4 years, especially since it felt like it consumed the bulk of my high school years. the fandom grew SO quickly and the show matched that energy by going downhill SO quickly; together it really was just a perfect storm for a fandom disaster
The "Dirty Laundry" fanfic drama still haunts me to this day. So like in 2016 there was this Klance Fanfic called "Dirty Laundry" where the basic premise was: Lance was going home to his family for the holidays and convinced Keith to pretend to be his boyfriend so Lance could show his family he wasn't single and over the course of the fic the two fall in love. Since this was before Lance was confirmed to be Cuban, the fanfic writer wrote Lance as mexican-american and since the fanfic took place at Lance's family farm, there were a lot of scenarios where mexican-american/general Latino culture and family dynamics were bought up. Like Lance's mom threatening him and his siblings with the Chancla (sandal), Lance's traditional mexican father trying to come to terms with Lance "dating" a guy, and (my fav scene) Lance and his siblings rapping/singing along to the song, Gasolina (an old early 2000's rap/reagaton song that's kinda a meme within the Latin community.), with Keith looking on in awe. The controversy came from the fact that the fanfic writer wasn't Latino or mexican-american, but white (supposedly, all I know for sure is that the writer wasn't Latino.), and a bunch of non-latino (mostly white) Voltron fans were offended and harassed/sent the writer hate for "being racist" and "offending" Latino fans and that Lance and his family were "racist stereotypes". But in reality, Latino readers (including myself) loved the fanfic and it's portrayal of Latino/mexican-american culture/ family and the struggles of being a queer Latino in a homophobic culture. Literally none of us were offended or saw the fic as "racist" or "problematic". We were literally going "guys, stop harassing them, they're not being racist and we actually love the portrayal of our culture in the fic!" But non-latino fans ignored us and kept getting offended FOR us and kept harassing the writer, who btw, was like 16 years old when this happened. They (the writer) were getting so much hate that they deleted the fic off of every social media platform they had it on, except for Archive of Our Own, bc that was the only platform where they weren't being harrassed 24/7. Idk if they ever finished writing the fanfic but I remember it being pretty good, highly recommend reading it if it's still around!
There was also the drama about one of the OC characters introduced in later chapters that were autistic, and portrayed as so, however the author got so much hate from that, to the point where I think the fanfic was put on hold for awhile. I remember reading it as it came out, but I was so oblivious to all the drama until I got on the tumblr tags aha
@@soph9033 holy shit I remember now. If I remember the author was either also autistic or had autistic siblings so they were portraying the character based off of their own experiences. but people were still sending them hate.
I sadly have terrible flashbacks because I got harassed when klance shippers were getting upset at Lance VA ( I told them that not everything was about klance and they started to harass me ). I just left the fandom for good when that happened
Diversity win! The characters you are screaming and arguing about are now Aromantic. No exceptions. I would've been murdered if I was in the Voltron fandom at that time
Especially when the show's lifespan was at its peak during the 'ace discourse' era of tumblr. Thank god that exclusionism phase has ended. Cryptoterfs have been using ace exclusion tactics to recruit young terfs so its been rough.
bruh i was so damn tired of the ships that i genuinely only looked for any platonic fancontent. and this was just post season 1 before season 2 aired, i watched like half of that and stopped
jdkfj as long as you werent vocal about what you liked, you were Generally fine... but that also meant "dont like posts on your main account or your mutuals will find out and hunt you for fun". I was in the fandom from beginning till a WHILE after the shows end... it was.... Something Else jfdlkajlsjdf
**angrily confronts a voice actor using an anonymous account** **voice actor reciprocates the energy and defends themself** “wow how dare you I’m literally a minor” what,,,, you can’t dodge accountability using your status as a minor as a catch all shield 😭 **voice actor apologizes** **the fandom is MAD they apologized 😡** WHAT??
@@tehuselessguig3138 yeah, I wasn't involved with the drama at all while it was going on, but even as an outsider it was obvious that they knew what they were doing.
@@errortryagainlater4240 yeah... making minors completely untouchable and devoid of responsibility for their behavior and throwing people under the bus the second they reach 18 is pretty lame ngl
I think the fandom would be (hopefully) different if it came out during quarantine, or just was marketed to a different audience (also maybe a bit less cringe)
At a local con, the VA of Lance was a guest and you could just see his face get more and more grim with every fan that approached him and asked him about shipping and all that.
Klance is like Sterek where 80% of the fandom is convinced that they were 3 seconds from getting married but the reality is that they barely liked each other.
When the show was airing I was under that belief. I’m rewatching the show now and I can see just how much they really didn’t have that click. I hated the Allura and Lance pairing back then, especially in season 8, and I love it now
This is why I'm so glad that the crew's other work - Avatar: The Last Airbender was released in the early 2000's, imagine if that show was released during the time of the rise of fandom culture. Just. *Yikes.*
As a fan who watched ATLA when it came out, the new crop of ATLA fans that have come in after it was released on Netflix are 100x worse than the ones circulating while the show was airing. When the show was airing no one threw serious real-world accusations at you for the ship you liked, they just said you sucked and left it there.
@@undeadbread Yeah, as intense as the Zutara vs Kataang shipping wars were in its heyday, the flame wars really just boiled down to "my ship is more canon than yours" or debates on what constitutes good taste. Was it cringe? Yeah, I don't look back on that time too fondly mostly cuz I was just an embarrassing preteen. But at least it was nothing like Voltron, where the word p*do became so distilled that it lost all resemblance of its real-world meaning.
idk what kinda trip I went down because if your comment. so I recognise steven yuen. I know he's the "you are gay" guy and also voices mark from invincible, though I did not know who he voiced in voltron/the other franchise he was apart of. so I highlight your comment and search his name up. I get to his wiki page and scroll to roles. oh, he also voiced someone in troll hunters? haven't seen that since the year it came out. lets see who this Steve Palchuk is. and I search up the character and go to his fandom wiki page. WHY IS HE PREGNANT. WHY THE FUCK IS HE PREGNANT.
@@blueberrycrepes look, that movie was quite possibly the worst ending to a franchise I have ever seen. Steve being pregnant gets erased by time travel anyway, making the whole thing moot.
i personally bring up the "bad artist blacklist" quite often. basically it was a list of tumblr users who shipped any of the other paladins with shiro and i guess if it helped anyone to filter out artists whose content might have made them uncomfortable then good for them, but iirc it was more about "these people are p3d0philia supporters, they are ruining the show and shouldn't be online" :,D and the best part of it all? several actual dreamworks employees were on the list.
Anti culture is what happens when a bunch of young people seeking refuge from sockally conservative abuse (if you look closely, almost all of these people come from extremely repressive, often religious fundamentalist households) try to create a progressive, inclusive space, but bring literally all of the bad, internalized mindsets beaten into them by the nightmarish hellscapes they live in. Everyone ends up being as emotionally fragile as sugar glass and as militantly devoted to punishing perceived moral deviancy as the Spanish Inquisition. (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!) And it's all wrapped up in a horrible, anti-recovery echo chamber. I've been on the inside of that hell in the early 2000s and 2010s. And I may not be very sensitive myself, but I am not going back.
Tbh, I’m pretty sure the only Shiro x Paladin ship that falls under p3d0 is Shiro and Pidge seeing as Shiro is 25 while Pidge is 15- All the other paladins were 18 when the show started (pretty sure) so it’s not exactly p3d0 with them-
I think one of the worst things that happened in this fandom was the harrassment of Shiro's VA for playfully encouraging sheith early on. The poor guy had no idea how much of a landmine this was. He refused to talk about ships after this and I completely understand why. This fandom had so much harrassment it was scary. You could get dogpiled with insults for the slightest implications that you weren't against sheith, and the VAs got the worst of it. Being neutral on shipping was not an option, it was very much "with us or against us".
There was a Tumblr post that described the Voltron fandom as people raving about this amazing restaurant, and when you actually go there, they serve plain bread on a paper plate, but all the smiling happy customers brought their own condiments. Needless to say, I'm glad I never got involved.
I had a fun time for the most part. Yeah, the restaurant and some of the customers sucked, but there are some really talented people in the fandom. Some of the best bread I've ever had was thanks to those artists and writers.
re: age gap discourse, I think it's worth noting that there were no canon ages when season 1 first dropped, so fans just made headcanons. I saw Lance, Hunk, Pidge and Keith as 18 because they were in a military school - it just made sense to me that they'd be legal adults. But if someone viewed them as younger, they were free to do that and it still fit the school setting. I really wish the show had kept it that way, then maybe most of the drama could've been avoided.
From the outset I shipped Shiro and Allura because they filled the role of "the adults in the room" and, as an adult myself, I related to them more than the younger characters. I always read Shiro as being in his mid-30s and Allura maybe mid-20s, and tbh I keep that headcanon because I think it makes more sense then their official ages.
@@natmorse-noland9133 precisely I never really shipped any of the characters romantically but as family positions. Like Shiro as a father, allure the mother, coran the weird but meaningful uncle, Keith Lance and Hunk the middle children and pidge the youngest. They where a found family with many personal issues
I find it funny that people got so worked up over a 17 year old dating a 25 year old because my sister was 17 when she met her first boyfriend and he was 25. Age gaps aren't a big deal in my country so seeing Americans get this pedantic over "minors" dating "adults" is funny
@@milkmatcha3698 oh for sure, they were doing that before the ages were confirmed lmao, but I think that having canon ages encouraged the discourse and that most of the harassment would've faded out if they hadn't been confirmed. of course I can only guess, it's too late now lol
I was an avid Klance shipper (still kinda am) and I wasn't really mad about Lance and Allura ending up together since it was clear Lance liked her since season1. I was just disappointed that we couldn't actually see Allura develop romantic feelings for him since it was always portrayed that she thought he was kinda anoying. Obviously I also don't like Shiro's rushed marriage or the fact that Lotor had a lot of potential for a redemption arc (think Zuko from ATLA level) but they trew him away. The vld Fandom is still active today, but I don't see as much toxicity and that is a relief. Its nice to see that a lot of people matured out of those dark ages lol. (Sorry for any spelling mistakes. English is not my first language.)
Thank you for saying my exact thoughts. The thing that I didn’t like the most about Allura and Lance was how rushed it was, specially after Lotor left Allura (I literally don’t remember exactly what happened lol). It’s kinda why I was never completely behind Allura and Lance, she never really showed interest at all. Also the wedding was v rushed but god knows my 14 year old ass cried just to see Shiro happy at the end
Allura had been warming up to lance since season 3 when he actually started maturing and respecting her. It's unclear if it was romantic but she definitely started caring deeply about him when he started caring deeply about her
That was why I didn’t like Allurance. I felt like they had no real chemistry on screen, no hint that there was anything other than a schoolyard crush on Lance’s part. I don’t hate the idea of them together, but man I would’ve liked to see them get closer. If anything, Allura and Keith had more chemistry LOL
I remember being in the fandom, but bad stories aside. I once met Shiros va at a con and he signed my artwork. It was really bad at the time but he was so nice I think about it to this day.
ive been calling this phase of my life my voltrauma. this era literally changed me forever. it was crazy every day was an adventure and it was very rarely a good one
VOLTRAUMA EKDKSKDKE dude same, voltrons artstyle is like 90% of my current artstyle and if it hadn’t been for voltron I probably wouldn’t have gotten into art
Reminds me of Genshin fandom. I swear, if Homestuck had any sort of faces for characters people would have been doxxing and doing all sorts of horrible bullshit. Its the one thing Homestuck had going for it, no names or faces to attack, only each other. It's a damn shame that VAs and creators feel like they can't participate in fandoms for the media they're creating- even some that had been involved in prior fandoms they had voiced for just cut off certain fandoms because they're so done with the bullshit that happens. It's despicable.
I’m quite literally in both and I see the parallels. I’m a multishipper and quite a chill enjoyer of almost anything so you can BELIEVE THE SMACK i’d get for suggesting a pair other than the main consensus ones. (I shipped klance too but damn you are never safe lol)
Klance and Kaeluc is just one part of fandom history’s cruel rhyme scheme. Griffin Burns and Josh Keaton as the main hate sinks, Corina Boettger and Bex T-K being seen as “annoying”, Sean Chiplock and Steven Yeun both vibing away from the fandom…
@@atanvardecunambiel8917 fandom culture can be so toxic Dx If people have issues with the source material they should be on Hoyoverse's ass, not the poor VAs.... and don't even get me started on Kaeluc, jesus christ-- the most toxic shippers I've ever experienced in my life, and i was a homestuck way back when. best way to experience fandom imo is just to vibe in your little circle of friends
@@sealpup9341 VLD only aired for two and a half years. Genshin Impact’s second anniversary is this month, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. I’m scared to see what the Genshin fandom will look like by EoS.
It must be exhausting to be so invested in fictional relationships EDIT I only mean those so invested that they'll do bizarre things, not the average person :)
I didn't realise how much shit the writers were given by the fandom. I honestly can't blame how downhill the show went considering how much pressure they were under
Definitely. I don’t think they rlly expected voltron to be that big of a show, maybe as popular as Castlevania is right now but not the level it was at its peak. I watched the show ever since s1 and the fandom was just gifs and fanart, and you can def tell that as the toxicity rose, the writing got worse.
@@Syndersis Yeah ik i was one of those ppl lol. I think what im trying to say is that the level of engagement w voltron was somewhat unexpected because of just how focused everyone was on it + social media esp twitter getting a big boom. It was like the Supernatural fandom in a way, something LoK had the pleasure of avoiding lol
I was a Shallura shipper and let me tell you, I used to get tons of people calling me "A straight white girl invading our space." Which was weird cuz I was a pansexual biracial girl.
Man, I've been in random a where people assume so much shit. Its annoying when people assume I'm white and don't know what I'm talking about, especially in fandoms about Latin American movies,,, like,,, I'm actually Colombian check yourself and find an actual problem with what I'm saying that doesn't boil down to me being s certain race.
And like even if you were white, what the fuck does it matter? As if your race has any bearing on how informed you are on any one topic. Its just people being straight up racist. But I guess we cant call them racist because its against white people and thats less racist than if it was against other races? Help me god
@@yungoldman2823 Somehow it manages to be both racist and not? Because I am half chinese so it's like not the coolest to call me white when I've got all this heritage
@@meilizackrison I mean… I think shipping a canonically gay man with a woman IS definitely….. not great, like, actually definitely erasure of much needed gay characters, but assuming you were young that’s a huge overreaction for people to have especially if you shipped it before he was confirmed gay lol
Thanks for the TL;DR of this. It just confirms what I already knew: Your fandom is you and some friends. People get on the internet, stay on the internet, forget that real people are more important than fictional characters, and then lose their minds. I'm glad I was able to enjoy Voltron on my own.
I think Voltron was one of the big reasons why people started hating shipping. Sure, there were shipping controversies before (looking at you, Danganronpa, and probably also Steven Universe and like MLP), but nothing on the sheer scale of Klance. Now, I enjoy shipping - I tend towards rarepairs and secondary characters in unconventional relationships, and this is because I like to imagine how two less-explored characters would handle being in a relationship together. However, I've always known that my ships are a personal thing, and that no matter how close they get to canon, the creators don't owe me making them canon just because I enjoyed their story. It seems like a lot of toxic shipping fans assume that because they want something, that means they must get it. I wholly support anyone shipping any characters they like (though not real people, as it's somewhat rude and disregards their free will), but you should never assume that your ship will become canon. You shouldn't even assume that the creators care about what you think or ship. Shipping is a personal matter, and more people need to understand that.
To admit, I first found out about shipping when I started watching Voltron, and since then, I hate the majority of shipping because most people are weirdly obsessive and toxic.
@@wolfywonder8480 Like I don’t want to judge people, so I won’t, but it honestly gets me so agitated when there’s that one ship that people get so obsessive and toxic over, and completely ignore the shows plot for that ship. I’m not a shipper, but I am glad when people with mutual feelings finally get with each other, though I’m not that fussed, but sometimes I seem to care less when you get those types of shippers because of how they act. Like I hate the Klance ship because of Klance shippers, which has now made me a little annoyed with Catradora and Lumity. Like it’s nice hearing that when people have feelings for each other are going to end up together, but again, that’s all the fans care about, so now I just don’t care about those ships because it’s taking away focus on such amazing shows. People don’t watch ATLA for Zutara, but Zutara shippers are definitely on that list of obsessive and toxic. Probably up there with Klance.
This is exactly why I hated shipping back in the day. I've cooled down on since then when I learned there are people who go "I think these characters would be cute together" and leave it at that without deciding anyone who doesn't agree with them must be the scum of the earth.
Istg Klance was the first ship I EVER had a personal vendetta against just bc of the fans 💀 I don't anymore obviously, and if you like the ship then that's totally okay!! But I definitely came out of the VLD fandom a different person lmao
Wait, Danganronpa shipping controversies? Can someone please fill me in on this one? I've tried looking it up on the internet but all I could find was ship-ability tier lists and templates...
Ive been on the internet since the 90's and seeing it morph into this crazy melting pot of gatekeeping, toxic waste, filth and grime and genuinely wholesome shit its a real trip for me.
man you said it. as a 17 year old who grew up in these toxic wastelands known as modern fandom culture its basically normal at this point to hear of another awful fanbase with terrible fans bc this is what we are accustomed to.
My man avoided so many problems by not being active in fandom. People make fun of him being so uninterested when he was smarter than the big chunk of the fandom. Keeping your mouth shut makes wonders lol
i was in the steven universe fandom and it's so weird how similar it was to the voltron fandom according to this video. the wild accusations, shipping discourse (lapidot anyone?), harassing the crew, etc.
Honestly, the thing that bothered me about the last seasons of Voltron was the treatment of character development as a whole. Pidge was never explored again after the whole "I want to find my family" arc, Hunk was given like 1 important plotline in the entirety of the last two season and was treated only as the 'advice giving friend' trope, Shiro was like barely there and had like no on-screen grieving for his dead fiance even though the show hyped it up too much, Allura was powered up only for her to die just like that, Keith was kinda ok, even though I remember almost nothing about him except being the emotional support of a lot of the other paladins, and lastly Lance, who at this point was trashed of any build up and was constantly treated as the comic relief, the lover or the unreasonable one for not wanting his love interest sacrifice himself even though he seemed to be more of a rebound than planned love interest because the one who persuaded Allura into touching the damn evil thing was her DEAD EX, LOTOR, and they made him, the only canonical latino character, a forever grieving FARMER. As a latina, I can say that did rub a lot of people the wrong way because they made his whole life revolve around someone he dated in his teenage years/young adulthood.
omg the whole lance becoming an altean flower farmer thing sucked so much. like wdym this adventure-loving guy who was implied to be the main protagonist decided to spend the rest of his life growing altean flowers and being sad because the girl he dated for like a week sacrificed herself (which also made no sense but hey at this point lets just assume the writers were picking plot points at random for the fun of it)
for what i even heard, they made lance and allura "sweethearts" at the last season and they had no quemistry whatsoever between the two. I only watched the first seaso and i heard about this from people who like voltron and watched it fully, and all of them told me that they have no interested in each opther until last season or so. I only care about ships if both people do have somewhat of a build-up connection, like all the 5 paladins (platonically), and they also did Shiro super dirty. Building up for him like that, starting with him super friendly with allura to then throw us to the face that he's gay(i have nothing against lgbt), hitting to a love interest to then show such love interest dead/disapeared/separated and then "5 minutes later" he gets married to someone completly unknown to everyone?? dude? Im still planning on watching the series, i've been waiting for the series to end and for the fandom-hell to die down so i can finally enjoy the series, so some of this opinions and ideas might change, but at least this is based on what ive seen, read and heard. And on a side-note, from first season and previews of the other seasons, i like seeing lance and keith together as a couple, i like the quemistry they have together both in love and as a warrior team, They compliment each other very well as character as they are very well written (till a certain point), but thats just me.
as a fanfiction writer : i will never understand why people fight for ships. just enjoy what you enjoy period? i am so confused. i don't like certain ships, my remedy? i don't engage with them. solved. insults and death threats are.. so not needed
It's fine until people go into my inbox and try to purposefully traumatize me and tell me my abuse isn't valid because XYZ. It's fine until someone wants to rub my nose into it because they're obsessed with the idea that everything they like MUST be pure (it doesn't) but the problem is I don't like these elements and they give me flashbacks to my trauma. And I don't want those flashbacks. I don't need those flashbacks. But HOW DARE I NOT FIND THEIR BEAUTIFUL SHIPPY POO SO BEAUTIFUL. Because I didn't like being abused with those words years ago and I don't like reminders now so get out of my inbox. Now this has NOTHING to do with Voltron. The ship I'm talking about has to do with canonical sexual abuse that I asked people to stop talking to me about. But this is usually why. It's someone obsessed with the idea that what they love is good and pure and it never has to be.
Honestly! What’s the point of arguing over ships? It really doesn’t make ANY sense 🥲 everyone has their own interpretations of character dynamics, they don’t need to start arguments with other people just minding their own business
It's so damn easy to block tags referencing ships you don't like. Don't like a ship? Block it! Don't like people discussing it? Block it! Like the ship, but dislike certain aspects of it? Block the people who create works containing them! Granted, with fandom OTPs it can be pretty hard to avoid them, but even with those, you can easily filter most of the ship content out. I've literally been dropped by a longtime friend because I said they shouldn't get too worked up about a specific ship. I didn't even really show support for it, I just kind of...passively tolerated its existence. And it wasn't even an inarguably problematic ship. These people are downright delusional. I seriously hope they get some help, this just seems so incredibly unhealthy for everyone involved.
I came into the fandom around the time s3 dropped and immediately fell into what was then a crackship of Lotura which was A Whole Ordeal for our tiny little enclave of the fandom when s6 and 7 happened. The whiplash from the only canon on-screen kiss in the show to Allura slamming Lotor into the floor in the span of like 2 minutes was something to live through.
I 100% agree. every time i think about coran i think of every missed opportunity he had for serious character moments. allura wasn't the only one who had lost their entire civilization to the galra!! he was hilarious and i loved him but damn, they could've done so much more with him
I was there for literally the whole thing, since the beginning of the show. I can easily classify it as a god awful fandom because I have seen a LOT of fandom in my time, and Voltron was by far the worst I ever witnessed or was a part of. My OTPs were Plance and Heith. I didn’t really care for Klance or Shieth, and since I was in to “rare pairs”, I stuck to my own circles and was just there to enjoy those pairings alongside others who did. I made and posted a lot of fan art, and had made a handful of friends who enjoyed various different ships and were just there for a good time, and I don’t regret that part because even though I’m not into or involved with Voltron anymore, one of those people became one of my best friends who I still talk to daily. Unfortunately however, I can’t call it a good fandom. I (as a middle schooler) received death threats for shipping Plance because it was straight and for shipping Heith because it wasn’t Klance. I was called homophobic repeatedly and I had to block a lot of people for my own safety. I’m grateful for the friends I did make, but at the end of the day, I’m even more grateful that the fandom dies a little bit more with every day that passes. Also I love your garfields.
DUDE HEITH WAS SO FUCKING GOOD OML, heith sheith and lotura were my top favs… I wish the fandom was just friendly positive good feelings and pleasant ship vibes but everyone was constantly at war w each other. I got a lot of rabid Klance fans at my throat in the dms for the things I shipped which made me feel more confused than anything, I didn’t understand why ppl couldn’t just have their separate ships and be chill. Like bro Klance is cute pls leave me alone just because I ship something else more than ur otp
PLANCE MY BELOVED. I had a similar experience however I didn't really receive a lot of toxicity. I didn't have a twitter at that time and wasn't active on tumblr during that phase. Thank GOD.
Dsmp ships are so toxic. There’s like 3 sides: following people’s boundaries (sometimes even spamming them or being hypocritical), spamming/forcing ships, and people ignoring boundaries. The difference between Voltron and Dsmp is that Voltron has a level of disconnect because you know that the cast are voice actors but with Dsmp there’s barely any disconnect between the CCs and characters.
i’m part of the dream smp and mcyt fandom but goodness can the community get toxic and overall terrible. i would absolutely love to see a video in a few years once the hype around the dsmp is died down tearing into the fandom
as someone who went from vld to dsmp (albeit like 3 years apart) god i can attest to the fact that both are as bad as each other, dsmp/mcyt probably worse
i literally couldn't give two fly's wings about klance nor sheith. the pairing that spoke to me was Lotura. it was so much fun. of course we were devastated that the show killed off both the cosmic royals, but the Lotura circles were so chill with incredible writers & artists. happy to have met them. all that thanks to Lotura 💜💖
Back in 2018 i cosplayed Keith to a convention. Around then voltron was still in its hype, and so my friend (who was cosplaying Shiro with me) and I garnered a lot of attention. Around midday we ran into a Lance cosplayer who we befriended, and the three of us hung out as a trio. And that’s when shit hit the fan We were asked countless times if we could “kiss for a photo”, and I, being 17 at the time whilst the Lance and Shiro were in their earlier 20s, the whole thing made me very uncomfortable, and it also made my friends uncomfortable, considering they were adults being asked to kiss a minor. One guy even said that he shipped Lance and Shiro, and when my friend who was Shiro said “that’s gross, Lance is a teenager”, the guy said that’s what made the ship more appealing. Overall the voltron fandom is terrifying and I never wish to be a part of it again
I hate when people can't separate cosplayer from the character. Absolutely a weirdass move to ask strangers to kiss. I've also heard of people harassing Akechi cosplayers from P5...like bruh that's a human person.
That is embarrassing. I feel bad for all three of you. Especially with that Lance and Shiro shipper. That guy is a full definition of a creep. And honestly, I would be extremely uncomfortable if I was one of your friends. The wholesome thing is that you actually encounter a new friend from that convention. I really hope you guys are still friends though.
I understand liking a ship, but yea, basing your whole personality on it is literally insane. But I also feel like it’s also just as crazy to just adamantly HATE a ship and anyone who ships it. Like, I understand if it’s a ship that’s genuinely fucked up, but when it’s deadass just a ship between two consenting adults, I don’t see how it’s such a big deal for both those who ship it and hate it.
@@KayBbyXOXOXO I can barely understand why people are so much into shipping. Maybe it comes from my disinterest in having romantic relationships myself.
Especially when you have people who threaten self harm (or worse) over it, or complain that their mental health is ruined because their ship didn't become canon...like??? That's very manipulative and pathetic ngl.
In my experience it‘s about escapism. And I think that the people who get particularly obsessive over ships are usually teenagers who have experienced a lot of trauma. As a Klance shipper myself I can say that I see a lot of myself in both Keith and Lance and i will always value fanon over canon because there are so many AUs you can explore. A lot of stories you can look at and think okay, this is what my life could be like if things go well for me. It can give you hope. I can see why some people, especially younger kids who may not have a good support system offline can get super obsessive and aggressive when they perceive another ship or even the creators as a threat to their safe space. For me personally, Klance is somewhat of a coping mechanism. I am terrified of losing control and when it comes to creating fan art and fanfiction, I am in full control of what I create. Even when it comes to reading fanfiction, you have much more control over it than the canon of a show since there‘s such a big variety and you can search for specific tags. The control thing is very specific to me but I see it as an example and I think a lot of the toxic shippers are just traumatized kids who latched onto these characters that bring them comfort and now feel overly protective of their idea of how things should be
@@heyna1185 That sounds like a healthy way to interact with ship culture, sorry if it sounded like I was talking about you. I meant to the degree shown in the video.
seeing all this drama makes me so glad that I just stuck in the Plance and Kidge community, along with other rare pairs that had a small fanbase and were honestly pretty chill (wink wink) we did our own thing, created our inside jokes, had a bunch of talented artists and writers, we even had a joke where plance had a lot of ship names, like flirtyrobot, lidge, etc. and rarely engaged with ship drama. I miss it a lot, now that I improved my art I kinda wanna go back and redo some of my fanart💖💚💙
@@trin1894 I’d assume Plance was Pidge x Lance and Kidge was Keith x Pidge. Definitely not pairs I’ve seen pop up very often, but if the community was nice, I’m sure it was one of the breaths of fresh air in the fandom
Yeah, i was in the plance end. It was a really cute dynamic, made ocs based off of that. It was a good way to meet new people, and some of them are still my bestest friends half a decade later :))
Tumblr fandom culture is finding something you like, painting an image in your head of what the thing you like is, and then getting mad that the thing you like doesn't adhere to the image you have of it in your head.
This is a perfect analysis and it's accurate to a lot of Twitter fandoms too. It's ALSO like walking up to someone who's eating a sandwich, snatching it off them, biting into it and then getting angry because they used cheese and you wanted tuna 💀 like sometimes, things that you don't personally enjoy WILL exist, just ignore it and move on!!
I always get so shocked every time I’m reminded that the show only ran for about 2 years because with the amount of seasons it had and the crazy amount of drama that happened it really feels like everything went down over a much longer period of time
My favorite thing is when online personalities do better research and journalism than professional new outlets. All the money and resources but still a single person on TH-cam has the more concise story. This isn’t just for Izzy, so many channels I follow do the same thing and it’s mind-boggling
pretty sure the reason for that is: most yt creators actually care about the topics they cover (whether they are a part of the phenomenon they're talking about, or they just find it interesting). as a person that manages social media for a company, I can say that at some point all you want to do is meet the qouta and get out, especially, if you don't have any knowledge about the thing you're covering and/or have to work with strict deadlines.
@@daydihey3045 Another really important thing is that a lot of journalists are working on multiple projects at the same time and have really strict deadlines. So it can really be hard to dedicate the time needed to research and explain a specific topic. And like you said, journalists cannot pick the topics they want to research. Many times they genuinely don't know anything or absolutely despise what they are working on. TH-camrs on the other hand can pick the subjects if they are working solo or are freelancers. Many a time they have sponsors, Patreon, and YT Ad money so they can focuse on their work (actually make more money that most journalists) and not be worried about getting fired or remove from a future project if their publications are not very popular. Also, depending on your employer, you might not have a salary and instead get paid in commission.
honestly being in the fandom was the worst best experience of my life. The characters as well as klance are still dear to my heart but the shit i saw on tumblr is stuff i will never get over, just overall a really negative space
I still remember when The New York Times made an online article about ships and Klance was one of the examples so everyone lost their marbles, or when the Hashtag Leakira surpassed the Voltron one on the trending page of Tumblr
Should I know what Leakira is? Sounds like a madhouse... EDIT: K, I finally saw the video, because I was waiting for my ride after my shift, so I couldn't do much besides read the comments. It really is a mad world in the Voltron fandom.
@@helentran204 Basically rewamped Klance but with new names. From what I remember, they were gonna be a couple and the fandom was reaaally invested with them, but I just felt disgusted bc they just created this whole new universe bc they had their shipping googles on for too long and wanted to dedicate it to only two characters alone. I could be wrong since I did stay away from that mess so I have limited informations, anyone who knows more can go ahead and correct me.
@@mp6450 I myself always considered it a Klance AU, thought the idea of cyberpunk Klance was cool. Most of the people I saw doing fanart of them weren't doing the whole "yeah Voltron reboot!!!" So much as they just liked to interpret them in the cyberpunk aesthetic. I think most of the people who were talking about Kickstarters and reboots were middle schoolers who didn't understand how the tv animation industry works lol
I actually matched someone on tinder bc of voltron and we talked about ships and they were honestly nice! (probably bc I was a multishipper?) idk where they are now but I think about them annually. Honestly probably the only positive interaction I got in the fandom. Great video btw
The Voltron fandom scared me out of reading fanfiction. The first and only fanfiction I've read was Dirty Laundry, it was a Klance one! I was scared out of reading them because while I enjoyed the story at the time the writer was harassed and bullied so badly they lost their passion for writing and said they are never going to share their writings again
I was never in the voltron fandom but I’ve watched the toxicity spill out into general tumblr culture and it’s been pretty yikes. I block people pretty much daily for telling people to “kys” over fictional characters. Idk it just seems really hypocritical to “protect” fictional characters by hurting real life people.
The fact that the entire shebang surrounding "Dirty Laundry," literally ONE of thousands of klance fics could probably kill a small Victorian child is indicative of the rest of the fandom's issues
I tried reading it when it was still up in AO3. It was well written, but it was boring as well, so I dropped it in chapter 2 (when it wasn't a one-shot yet). There are plenty of other fics that are more interesting.
I read most of it, they never posted the last chapters, to only delete it because of the flack they got. It wasn't great, but it was a fun read. Would have loved to see its finished since the author was really invested in it.
I don’t have any personal horror stories, but I remember after the show ended and I moved on, I was shocked to see how toxic the fandom was in retrospect. I only really had Instagram at the time and just followed artists, so it was really chill. Not everything was so horrible as people make it out to be I think 😅
I remember the Pidge Gender Discourse. People got way too upset over what gender people headcanoned Pidge to be. A lot of people, myself included, were misled to believe she was canonically a trans boy, even though she calls herself a girl within the first season. People would tag their fics with what set of pronouns were used for her. It was wild, worst trans headcanon discourse I've ever seen
@@fishiefish2249 That's fair. I was always a fan of the trans girl Pidge headcanon. The issue was that people started drama over what was the "right" headcanon
same dude. I did back from the fandom for awhile at one point tho, i think its when i started seeing more people being toxic and angry over anyone who didnt ship klance. I thought klance was a cute ship but seeing that stuff made me wanna get off the internet for awhile lol. never rly heard much ab the glass cupcake incident tho. i heard of it once or twice but i never thought it was real, i always thought it was like a joke or smth
Same. I got into the show about a week or two after the first season came out and was in it till the show ended. The drama from that was... intense. I have a close friend who shipped Lance and Pidge and the amount of harassment she got over that was crazy. Me and my friends all did voltron cosplays but intentionally stayed away from Voltron events. The fandom was a mine field and it was so hard to try and stay away from all the toxic stuff. Those of us who shipped smaller ships had cleaner spaces for a time but those didn't even last since people took offense to us shipping Lance and Keith with anyone but the other. (Seeing the tags flooded with hate or people getting death threats over shipping two fictional people was insane) Voltron was my first true experience with a big and toxic fan space and ive been cautious of fandoms ever sense working to avoid drama in them.
@@ellastar1756 there were reports of or times were VAs or Voltron staff had to cancel going to events due to threats against them. A friend of mine was once nearly assaulted over her ship. I remember when the "shiro you're like my brother" line happened someone baked a cake with writing on it saying Sheith was dead and was harassing sheith shippers with it. Those of us who shipped straight ships were called homophobes and accused of hating gay people. Time of people who shipped smaller ships like Plance/FlirtyRobot (Pidge/Lance) getting death threats and hate messages and accused of pedophilia (because of a 2 year age gap???) People harassed the VA for Shiro and were harassing his kids. Like legit that man was so excited to voice Shiro and at the start was so bright and you could see the strain the hate and harassment had on him over time. There are a lot of stories. Heck I have a group chat I could jump in right now and get more from since everyone in that chat had bad experiences with the fandom.
I remember getting into voltron after its first season and managed to get a few friends into it too. We stepped into the fandom in 2017, saw how toxic it got and left. Me and one of my friends watched til the end but i feel so guilty for taking my mates down with me smh
Stories like this are why I don't usually interact with the mainstream part of fandoms. I just find my little corner and chill/nerd out with them and ignore any chaos on twitter
Voltron really managed to go through every fandom drama possible throughout the span of the two years it was airing
They made 8 seasons in only 2 years?!
@@Jurgir09 Just about, yeah. 😬
Thought it was 3 years
A real 100% speedrun of batshit nonsense
2 yEARS????👁👄👁
Voltron really pulled a never seen before speedrun on toxic fandom culture.
This comment made me snort. Thank you
No kidding. When I got to Tumblr around April 2017, the wank was going full tilt. I had no idea that show premiered less than ten months earlier but it had wank and drama at the level of a long running show like Supernatural O_o
Well until the She Ra remake...
Then Dream cheated it back
Agreed
Remember folks: it doesn’t matter how invested you are in a series or character. It is NEVER okay or justified to threaten the safety of other people or their loved ones. The writers, animators and voice actors are humans too. They don’t deserve being sent death threats on blast.
This!
True
B...but mah headcanon...!
To add onto that...
If you send death threats over fiction, it's not about whatever moral cause you claim to be championing, it's about your inflated sense of self-righteousness. Every time. No exceptions.
@@lurkinnshadow7277 I hate our fandom, we're always cancelling our creators over nothing >:C
I still can’t get over the fact that a bunch of people trying to add “diversity” to their AU renamed Takashi Shirogane, a perfectly normal real Japanese name, to Hachiko. A dog. A dogs name that makes no sense for a human.
Why did they do that, exactly??? Was his full name not revealed at the time or something?
@@HamazuraGODif I recall his name was known episode 1. So idk
Might as well have named the guy Fluffy
In the anime/manga "Nana" it works because there's an explainaition for it.
@@HamazuraGODbecause it was made by a bunch of ignorant racist teens. Idk if it is the same fanfic, but some people even changed Lance's name because it was too short and not Hispanic enough for them so they made it that is nane was actually an acronym for his real name
steven yeun staying out of the fandom bullshit and not engaging was very sexy of him imo. king
I already loved him, but each time I hear his name, I usually find more reasons to love him.
Proof that he is the best man
He was just doing that show to get the dough lol, not deal with bullshittery that he probably doesnt give a fuck about
he’s always given me unproblematic vibes. i’m glad my gut has been right so far
Ketchup yeah well your name is cringe
Someone once said that fandoms are like a city: you can love a city but that doesn’t mean that every stranger you meet is automatically your friend.
Welp I’m gonna start drawing fandoms as cities now.
Gotham be like
Athens in the 5th century (BC) be like
@@CJCroen1393 countryfandoms
I’ve never thought of it this way. Honestly I like this explanation because I do love some of the fandoms I’m in but there have been some people I really dislike in them.
Shit you not, 14 year old me was at a convention cosplaying as Keith and my friends were cosplaying the other paladin. A fully grown adult came up to me cause I was holding hands with my buddy who was cosplaying Lance (neither of us shipped anything). This ADULT MAN got pissed at us for being 'klance shippers', like homie, we were obviously minors.
Nice profile
@@popcat9743 my lord i paraise you
not abt vld but dude same- i was 13 and i went as ginny weasley and was holding hands with my friend who was luna (i do ship them, but i was just holding hands to stay together and didn’t think anything of it) and someone grown ass man came up and got made that i didn’t ship hinny. people r such douche bags 🙄
The only person here not bitching about Klance
@@ChangedMyNameFinally69 I realy do not care about shipping
I still stand by the belief that Seasons 7 and 8 were written specifically as a well-deserved "fuck you" to the fandom.
What happened in those seasons? I stoped watching the show at season 5 because of all the fandom drama. I don't mind spoilers
"I hate my fans, that's why I killed a gay man and a black women." Sure. I watched the show, I'll be real with you, it ALWAYS sucked. It just took for season 6 until people figured it out
@@anjetto1 sthu
@@Wandasolosurfavs why are you booing them theyre right
@@klowbiiii1069 sthu
i love how that one person thought it was "weird" how steven yeun did not engage in this parasocial relationship stuff with the fandom as if keeping to himself and maintaing his privacy was something weird
Especially with how toxic the fandom is/was, like why would he want to interact with the fandom seeing how his fellow VA’s were treated and all the drama going on?
Honestly, that was the wisest decision ever
Steven Yuen also had an extremely busy work schedule so he honestly did not have the time together into The Discourse(tm) the way some others (notably Bex Taylor) did. But even if he did….who would do that, seeing how the fans treated everyone else?
Steven Yuen is just that one bit in spider man where Stan Lee is working in a library with headphones on while Spiderman is fighting lol
Because today nothing can be private anymore if you're a celeb or an influencer. Heck, kids have their real names, ages, sexualities, ethnicity and more on their carrds or in their bios which is kind of insane. He certainly made the right call tho lol
New Fandoms: "glass cupcakes?? That's insane!"
Old fandoms: "first time?"
Hetalia, Homestuck and Undertale would like to agree
I'm not new to this, but *my god*, there is a thing call "self-control".
I remember the undertale needle cookies like it happened yesterday
@@MarcusFigueras ahhh *a classic*
@@MarcusFigueras The *W H A T?*
Coran is the only character who’s consistently excellent throughout the entire series and never once dips in quality. I will die on this hill
You're right and you should say it
You’re absolutely correct
I agree wholeheartedly, everyone else either got forgotten to hell (Hunk and Lance's character arc especially) or got written into so many arcs that everyone's saying that they're hogging the spotlight for other characters with more interesting arcs (Keith Definitely so and maybe Shiro)
@@Cynicalhamptur hunks character existed for one season, and it was season 1
scoot over im dying here with you
I’ll never be over how I got accused of being an abuser because I made a post where I said that I related to Lotor and his character arc because I was a victim of parental abuse myself
Yeah! Lotor’s whole scene with Allura just broke…well the fandom from what I saw. Something about it just shot everyone. Hell, even A.J (Lotor’s VA) was salty about it. It made me look down at Voltron as a group because S7 and S8 is legit their fault 😔. Like they always assume the answers.
Maaan I loved Lotor! He was morally grey in a show that consistently portrayed a universal war as black and white. But anyways, long story short I was very depressed by what they did to him in the end (thankfully fanfics exist huh?)
@@Hilophyle same...I got hit by depression out of no where
@@hirahiro2331 how was it their fault again? They simply disappeared for a few years but they never intended that
@@blackbun130 Due to their lack of understanding about how politics work, causing a power vacuum without a backup in place. Allura of people should've seen that or at least Coran 😕. I understand that she was emotional and all that but that's not a good excuse to send billions to their deaths. 🤔 For the team to encourage her behavior is also problematic since they rarely, if not ever, call her out when she's acting immature 😶. The group has constantly acted out before thinking leading to a lot of near death experiences if not for some Galran or some other alien race to get them out (Example: Thace saved them the first season on the final episode, Lotor Saved them the 4th season final episode, Olkarians saved them I think...2nd season and I'm sure there's more 😅.)
Now, Lotor has sins that he, by right, should've discussed with the team since this is still war and there could be a chance of manslaughter. But I at the same time, their actions and his issues wouldn't allow him to do so 🙂.
Hm...they also did what lotor did but with a higher kill count in Season 8: Sacrifice few to save more making them quite hypocritical 😅.
That's within the time the disappeared before, during and after 👍.
christ, imagine being the weirdo who sends d3ath threats to a grown man and his family over a robot cartoon
Sad thing is, shippers sending death threats to creators of something isn’t rare among large fandoms :/
fucking exactly
Kids be like:
Man, back in the day the meanest thing I did as a 13 year old was typing disguised swear words on habbo hotel and feel bad afterwards. Imagine threatening an adult with murder because they ship a pairing you don't like and feel like you're the righteous one in the situation.
If it's real
I swear some the most consistent things in fandoms are:
- Stories of dangerous desserts
- Despising female characters for one reason or another (like i swear i've seen this so many times wtf)
- Ship drama
- Harassment of people working on the material in question
- Kids being idiots
I mean, true. This is all large fandoms.
Although depending on which one, it often involves despising specific male characters just as vehemently, if not more. I see the classic "hold a female character to a vastly higher, unrealistic standard" shtick all the time in translated Chinese/Japanese/Korean webnovels, which I edit for semi-professionally, though.
Me? I hate individual character writing in a truly equal opportunity sense. If I already can't stand the trope when a generic manly mchero man does it, it ain't gonna make it less unbearable when a stock YA girlboss does it.
@@FelisImpurrator
I have memories of the m/m shippers in the Hetalia fandom disliking the female characters bc they 'got in the way of ships' or something like that.
@@PixelRoserade Which was kinda fucking dumb because apart from the genderbent characters, there were only like 5 female characters, with the ones getting more screentime being Hungary and Leichestein
@@tarotsushima3332 yeah and Ukraine/Belarus were weirdly sexualitized? Especially since they were paired with their brother Russia. Maybe it was commentary on some political drama I don't know about? It was weird.
Sad thing is, it's not always kids. It's also people in their 20s & 30s pulling this stuff, usually people with families & good jobs, and I have zero idea why they think it's cool to threaten people over TV shows.
"Voltron fans moved on to newer shows like She-Ra"
that actually explains a lot
At least the She-Ra fandom is mostly civilized. Haven’t really seen too much drama
@@greenrangeralex hence why I said ‘mostly’. Honestly, fans harassing people who don’t like their thing is like a requirement for every fandom.
@@greenrangeralex that's not true. Most fans are chill. The ones harassing others are a minority
@@idkidc2573 Yeah, I'm part of the twitter she-ra fandom and it's honestly very chill, poking fun at ridiculous ships like glimglim and stuff is the most I've seen. I could be wrong cause I joined the fandom after the show stopped airing
@@freval2493 yo, def watch more she-ra. Season 4 and 5 are straight up masterpieces. The fandom is super involved. Year later they’re making fanart, fanfics, animations, you name it. We are pretty chill! The fandom is mostly on twitter and reddit I would say
This show ruined my life. "Hi, I'm Keith." It's been 6 years and I've heard "like Keith from Voltron?" more times than any Keith ever should ever have to.
Like keith from voltron?
I don't even know you and I apologize for you having to deal with that. I can't even imagine how god damn annoying that must have been and I sincerely hope it stopped.
My apologies to you and every Keith in the world
my mom named me lance so i think you can imagine how my life has been going since voltron. we are brothers in arms my friend
Yikes man 😬😬
//Another note is that: if your ship is not canon you could just make your own au, write fanfics, draw fanarts of that au without attacking the canon version of the story.
Yes! Since when do you need a ship to be canon to ship it?
sad thing is that toxic asshats will still shit on you for just doing anything
To me, that sounds like a solution i strongly agree with
That’s exactly the same thing I do. The big brain power we hold is otherworldly.
@@Murasaki.Masaru truly indeed
If I had a nickle for every fandom that has sent someone pastries with sharp objects inside, I would have 2 nickles, which is not much but is weird it happened twice
😂omg that was funny gotta give you that one
(what was the other fandom?)
@@iwonthesitatebitch1265 Undertale!
Pretty much an artist got given cookies with needles in it from another person at the con.
People looked up the artist and found out they shipped frisk x sans and people started spreading rumors that the reason the artist got given the cookies because the person hated frisk x sans sooo yeah
TLDR: Artist got given needle cookies and people used it for ship wars :l
Aren't most of these Tumblr stories fake?
@@ChangedMyNameFinally69 the cookie one isnt thoug, Izzyzzz has a video about it
Didnt she literally say in the video that theres no proof it happened though?
Someone once told me "I bet you like Voltron".
Only now do I realise that is a brutal insult.
I am so sorry
F
I read this in the melody of All Star
I remember being nervous to wear any VLD merch because I didn't want to engage with any radical fans who saw it. When I did end up wearing some outside, another fan commented that she loved the show (this was a little after season 2 aired) as well. We hit it off great, but when the topic of favorite characters and ships came up I could see that she was just as scared of what I was going to say just as I was about what she would say. Our OTP's contradicted each other, but neither of us minded and we agreed that the toxic fans were being childish and we should be allowed to ship whoever we wanted without the gatekeeping that we saw both online and during cons.
Yea I fully on agree with that, I am so tired of people just fighting each other, I am also afraid to talk about ships to anyone in the VLD fandom. The shipping is just a warzone and I would just rather get out of it. I think everyone is allowed to ship whatever they want to. I do have a friend that ships Sheith and Klance, and we're both cool with eachother. I don't think anyone should end a friendship just because of what they ship btw. I never really interact with any vld fans anymore, I never did interact tbh.
Sounds like my old friend and I. While she enjoyed the idea of Lance & Allura being together and I leaned more towards Klance it didn't affect our friendship and we bonded over our shared obsession for Lance.
Throw back to when I was in highschool and someone wrote 'shiro x keith' on one of the cafeteria walls, which then led to a friend of a friend breaking down into tears because she thought her ex boyfriend (named keith) moved on to date a girl named shiro and they wrote that on the wall specifically for her to see
I feel bad for laughing 💀
That’s such a funny turn of events but still sad
LMAOOOO
oof
im so sorry for her but this is too funny
I totally agree that it's almost impossible to decide 'the worst fandom', as every large one that was known for being a dumpster fire was also filled with wonderful people and so much amazing, creative content.
But damn did Voltron cut it very close.
And it's pretty sad to see that Voltron has become the standard for fandoms these days //stares in Genshin//
@@inkuii genshin fandom is the normal amount of popular toxic, curious how you think it's really that bad? CN honkai servers has got to be worse, because it's fandom is so crazy there was an actual assassination planned on the ceo of mihoyo. it was failed ofc but damn was it bad. there was a whole investigation and everything
@@aikn7551 Oh you sweet summer child...at least a dozen artists have been driven off the platform just for drawing ship art, actually just shipping two characters together will net you death threats if it’s two certain pairings, people throw riots over the age old debate and throw around the kiddy diddler word around so much it has lost meaning, yeah I’m referring to kaeluc and chilumi. Not to get into the age old debate or the whole incest thing, but ngl I have not seen this much vitriol in shipping SINCE Voltron
@@inkuii honestly the Genshin fandom is shit. But god, they are NOTHING in comparison to the CN Honkai fandom. (The western Honkai fandom is so fucking chill though.) They got mad at global players when they got an event they didn’t for the first time in all of honkai’s existence, tried to kill the ceo of Mihoyo, are very rude towards the people working on Honkai and generally just suck. At least in the Genshin fandom you can hide in a corner.
I agree. I don't think there really is a worst fandom. If you've been in enough fandoms, you'll notice the same type of toxic people in all of them.
Funfact for the Robin Williams clip: He was a big anime fan, Neon Genesis being one of his favorite. He intentionally pronounced Evangelion wrong just to mess with fans.
Rest in peace Robin Williams.
The man, the myth, the legend
Based king liked EVA. What a chad.
This isn't actually true. Robin Williams didn't know anything about Evangelion at the time. The reason that specific toy was chosen was because the Mark Romanek (The writer and director) thought it "looked cool", and also didn't know anything about Evangelion.
@@piperplimmyplymouth That is the real story. Because then the kid goes on to say that "Neon Genesis Evangelion" fights the bad guys. Saying that about a figure of the Mass Produced EVA lol
Back in 2018 there was an oc tag on TikTok where people would make and cosplay OCs that were the children of different Voltron ships. I made an Allurance child, not because I shipped it, but simply because I was working with what was in my closet. I got death threats for it.
Just… yikes. Hope you’re doing better since
Death threat... Death threat every where on the internet, even for a small dumbass reason.. smh I feel like those people never seen a sun or go outside.
@@Ocidad lack of sunshine turned them into incredibly aggressive creatures that get hurt by outside world
@@Ocidad I bet they live in there grandmother basement
I'm sorry you've gone through that
I remember when Voltron came out, I got death threats because my cat (before he passed) was named Lance (named after Sir Lancelot) and people thought I was Lance stan and I have never even seen the show. It was wild.
Jfc I'm so sorry
@@quaelgeist3337 I just replied "my was named of the knights of the round table disgus." Kids these days
Oh yeah, death threats were like a big thing in this cursed fandom unfortunately
Um wut lmao
wtf
One of the most surreal parts of this fandom to witness were the jokes that Jeremy Shada was locked up in a showrunner’s basement and banned from convention panels in case he accidentally confirmed Klance... then some fans actually believing it and protesting for his release
dont forget that him even wearing a red shirt made people think Klance was confirmed
Poor Jeremy
This reminds me of L@rries except it's actually real people
Man, what a fever dream
Dude, I posted memes about that, damn
I had an ex “girlfriend” that simped so hard for these anime boys that I basically didn’t exist. I just started distancing myself until eventually I was gone and she never noticed, I couldn’t compete with a literal cartoon
That’s horrifying that she got THAT attached. You deserve better than that.
I’m sorry that happened, you deserve better
It's okay to have fictional crushes, but geez. I'm sorry that happened to you, you deserve better
the fact that the same thing happened to me lol
very happy u got out of that bc mate you deserve a lot lot better. some ppl just arent fit for real relationships yet. even i who is really attached to fictional characters and simps for them really hard still make 90% of my time dedicated for my loved ones wtf
I read a theory that the reason Rhys Darby is mostly reserved on social media in the wake of Our Flag Means Death is that he was a VA on Voltron. He saw everything.
He's making the right choice, that fandom is already losing it
@@Batmantherealbatman absolutely. this shit always happens when the cast get too friendly with their fanbase. all it takes is a couple of BNFs to start thinking they're best pals with the stars and the next thing you know you have almost cult-like groups of their mosly teenaged followers being given well-meaning validation by some actors that are just happy people are enjoying their work and have no idea how their every word and gesture are being (mis)interpreted.
And if the cast grows or the show manages to stick around long enough... well then you end up with a Supernatural situation, where some of the cast (or even a bodyguard or writer or two) get a bit too precious about the fandom for their character specifically (adding more fuel to the ship-war fires) or outright using the opportunity to encourage and exploit the parasocial relationship with fans in ways that feel kinda wrong well past queer baiting. From what I understand, the MLP fandom had a bit of that going on, too
It'd be lovely if cast & crew could have easy, friendly relationships with their fans, but unfortunately people are gonna people, creeps are gonna creep, and teenagers are gonna do both those things at speed as they try to figure the world out while surrounded by people and creeps
I get so excited when I find him in any show though haha he seems like such a cool guy
This fandom went through every bad controversy you could think of in 2 years and by god it felt like 10
I wasn't even a part of this fandom, yeah I still remember the drama of it and it did feel like it was like 10 years
i feel terrible for 12 year old me 😭
Oh yeah, it was rough back then
Lindsay Ellis recently said something that quite applicable to shipping wars: "it's okay to just not like something, it shouldn't have to be a moral crusade"
Which is GOLD coming from her given how butt mad she got at AVGN for not wanting to go see the 2016 Ghostbusters
@@rosenrot234 Ah yes because nobody is allowed to slightly contradict things they said 5 years ago with more nuanced opinions, growing as a person makes you a hypocrite
@@rosenrot234 And so, you prove the point inside of four hours.
@@voidify3 Sadly, "anti-growth, anti-recovery" is a keystone of the horrible moral purity rabbit hole.
This fandom phenomenon is what happens when a whole lot of people want to be progressive and inclusive, but all they know how to do is to repeat the hyper-socially-conservative abusive behavior patterns that were done to them growing up. Which leads to moral essentialism and obsession with purity and all that crap.
@@rosenrot234 furry pfp, opinion discarded
The phrase "Voltron fandom" literally puts me in fight or flight, and that's BEFORE we talk about the goddamn shippers 💀💀💀
the way i contemplate rewatching voltron now that the fandoms "dead" its so tempting bc even of the fanart id make but memories of the fandoms chaos juss GOOD LORD
Same. I watched like 2 episodes before I learned that Tumblr had gotten ahold of it. Scared me off quick.
legit it scares me. i used to be in the fandom in like middle school and anyone still in it have since scared the ever living shit out of me.
Lol oof
Not gonna lie, I got scared away from even watching the show itself because of the stuff going on.
My dad introduced me to Voltron. I watched it on Netflix with him and my sister, we all loved it. And I never dipped my toes in the fandom whatsoever simply because I never bothered to. Oh, the joys of learning about all the stupid drama I got to miss out on.
…so glad I never got into the fandom. ;-;
Damn you’re so lucky, If only I never step foot to the SMT and FNAF fandoms I’ll would’ve been more mentally well…
I've been in infamous fandoms... (FNAF, Hetalia, Danganronpa) - and I can say that even though I had an absolute amazing time and spent hours being stupid with other fans, some of the stuff I saw was honestly traumatizing. Voltron would've broke me
I didn't delve into the fandom until the fans started accusing the writers and even the voice actors of "queerbaiting".
Mood I literally avoided the fandom like the plague because I heard a lot of shit about it so I never once touched it. Cause I know the toxic fandom would eat my ass alive for saying” Yeah klance is cute but so is Seith :)”
I thought I was the only one, omg. I feel lucky that I didn’t step into the fandom and enjoy Voltron by myself
The fandom is a complete and utter mess. I’m so happy my voltron loving father isnt “tech-savy” so he doesn’t know what internet fandoms are.
@@KezzDaddy LMFAO
I was only around ten or eleven when it got big, so thankfully my older sister (Around eleven or twelve) and I were our own fandom of two. Just meant we both routinely fought over who got Keith. (It was settled when we became Klance shippers)
New Voltron AU where your dad was Klance14. let's make it happen folks.
I’m curious what you’re dad’s thoughts on Voltron: The Third Dimension are.
@@KezzDaddy HUH😟
To all new viewers: Welcome. This isn't the first time izzzyzzz talks about hazard-filled pastries.
I knew I wasn't going to be the only one to mention the needle cookie.
"hazard-filled pastries" hehehe
im still disturbed
It’s not even the first time she talked ab the glass cupcakes
Man, I remember the antoons days. Crazy how time flies
This series really condensed the entire lifespan of a toxic Fandom down into just two years. That's impressive.
Sherlock took like 7 years before it finally fucking died.
fandom life cycles are getting shorter and shorter and it's terrifying
@@lulucool45 What it is is Efficient. By 2024 toxic fandoms will Hypernova within the week, so hot and bright and spewing deadly radiation that they'll be on the news around the clock.
I mean, it's still going, it's just not as big as it was in its heyday
@@Nanfoodle13 Ofc fandoms still have people who stick around, but it might as well be dead.
it feels like supernatural is somehow still limping on.
As someone who just got into VLD, this all sounds insane. This is why I like only getting into shows after they've wrapped up or the fandom has died down.
Someone should do a legit study on fandoms. I feel like there is DEFINITELY an unhealthy level of obsession some people have and it would interesting to see that researched. I don’t think being a part of a fandom in and of itself is unhealthy, there are a lot of people who make it their entire life and I just feel like that really needs to be discouraged more than it is.
I now have a mighty need for one
I'm suprised psychologists don't study fandoms more.
I had a friend who was writing her dissertation on furries, and dropped out because it’s incredibly hard to get funding or professional credibility when you want to study fandoms. Maybe one day we’ll get there!
once boomers aren't the majority in academic circles i do feel like there will be a good couple of sociological studies on fandoms. I think that the phenomena that take place within them could be extended to all kinds of social groups that are centered around liking/following someone or something.
there’s a writing course at my college taught about fandoms called “Media Fandom: Geeks, Stans, and the New Participatory Culture”!!
anyone else look forward to seeing izzy’s makeup each video ?
me and you both
Literally every time
their makeup is always so cool looking
Always ✌
Me 👍
my heart literally fucking dropped
*Gasp* dey he is
I’m so sorry joey please forgive me
same
Mine did too I literally was like "Joey Is gunna be so sad"
whats up checkmark
and same :eye: :lips: :eye:
No joke, Voltron literally tore me & my best friend's relationship apart. It wasn't even because of the shipping, though. We planned to go to comic con and cosplay (me as Pidge, her as Lance), but I wasn't able to get the outfit bc of time constraints/lack of materials. I then made the stupid decision to wander off with my then-boyfriend (who was Super controlling) and I abandoned her. I completely broke her trust and felt horrible about it. Maddie, if you're reading this, I really am sorry, even all these years later.
That sounds really awful, I hope one day you two can make amends
Deserved
@@adenmitchell7633 what
@@adenmitchell7633 dont say that
@@adenmitchell7633 REAL ASF
My absolute favorite piece of Voltron drama was the batshit crazy conspiracy theory that claimed Steven Yeun secretly shipped Klance. And that him not getting involved in the fandom was because he was upset Klance never became canon.
Omg I remember that I swear the crazies of the fandom be connecting dots that don't even exist
Dude I remember hearing that one and I wasn't even into Voltron. I swear that shit spread so much that even non-Voltron fans heard about it.
No but ONG this was the funniest thing in the fan base. You’d scroll down the klance tag and find a Steven Yeun klance edit with flower crowns
@@merriichin NOT THE FLOWER CROWN EDITS 💀💀💀
@@errortryagainlater4240 ngl flower crown edits on people can be cute, dragging people in drama and holy wars is still nasty tho
Ah good ol' fandoms 'taking matters into their own hands', rather than just stopping, going outside and eating grass. Or, however the saying goes.
*eating glass
@@NIHIL_EGO that's fucked up LMAOOOOO
@@NIHIL_EGO You did not just--
@@deltaweathers I did, and I'll do it again.
ok but please don't eat grass, human stomachs can't digest it, it's really unhealthy please don't-
It’s crazy how fast they pumped out the seasons like 8 seasons in two years. They should have slowed down.
How in the world did they manage to pump out 8 seasons in only 2 years?! That's insane!
@@michaelwinchester5003 korean animation studios.
And fandom STILL wasnt satisfied? Wow.
Ikr? I like, dipped out after season three since I couldn’t even keep up anymore...
@@icedceilin yeah i watched the first two seasons after that i started getting confused
As an aspiring creator if I had a fanbase and my fans started treating me/my coworkers like that I’d be REALLY tempted to just end the show or do something drastic to a character out of spite. I never would do that but it would definitely be a thought. If my fans are gonna act like spoiled children, I’m gonna want to punish them like they’re spoiled children lmao.
I would do the same tbh. Like if you're gonna act like kids then fine you're gonna get treated like a little kid.
“If you don’t start playing nice, I’m turning this car around and going right back home!”
Trust me I bet that’s what every single creator has in mind (and rightfully so)
Problem is of course, punishing the ones who don’t do such nonsense is an easy way to tank everything you’ve made
Not arguing btw just a passing comment
The creator for Attack on Titan did something similar where during the years long hiatus between seasons 2 and 4, I forget his name but the author revealed in a quote "I want my story to hurt my fans, the original plan was to have the whole cast die". Which means in another universe it was more than just a possibility
Petty retaliation is also the act of a child, especially if its being targeted at "children".
The attack on titan guy is a different story too. He wanted to kill his characters, that was the intended dark story. But then he changed it and made it less so, the ongoing chapter progression and fan love leading him to expand the story, have gentler moments, sell more merch, go more epic...
Voltron fandom was INSANE i still can't believe it only lasted 2 years, it has so much stories and fuck ups it feels like brony fandom tier in length.
And yet-
all i knew was the *lance VA* was leaking klance so lauren (?) locked him and other leakers in her basement joke and pretty fanart and hc to fill plot holes
honestly it’s so weird to look back on voltron and realize it was such a short timespan. if i didn’t know better, my gut would tell me that lasted at least 4 years, especially since it felt like it consumed the bulk of my high school years. the fandom grew SO quickly and the show matched that energy by going downhill SO quickly; together it really was just a perfect storm for a fandom disaster
IT WAS ONLY 2 YEARS OF MY HIGHSCHOOL LIFE BACK THEN BUT IT FELT LIKE SO MUCH MORE.....
The "Dirty Laundry" fanfic drama still haunts me to this day.
So like in 2016 there was this Klance Fanfic called "Dirty Laundry" where the basic premise was: Lance was going home to his family for the holidays and convinced Keith to pretend to be his boyfriend so Lance could show his family he wasn't single and over the course of the fic the two fall in love.
Since this was before Lance was confirmed to be Cuban, the fanfic writer wrote Lance as mexican-american and since the fanfic took place at Lance's family farm, there were a lot of scenarios where mexican-american/general Latino culture and family dynamics were bought up. Like Lance's mom threatening him and his siblings with the Chancla (sandal), Lance's traditional mexican father trying to come to terms with Lance "dating" a guy, and (my fav scene) Lance and his siblings rapping/singing along to the song, Gasolina (an old early 2000's rap/reagaton song that's kinda a meme within the Latin community.), with Keith looking on in awe.
The controversy came from the fact that the fanfic writer wasn't Latino or mexican-american, but white (supposedly, all I know for sure is that the writer wasn't Latino.), and a bunch of non-latino (mostly white) Voltron fans were offended and harassed/sent the writer hate for "being racist" and "offending" Latino fans and that Lance and his family were "racist stereotypes".
But in reality, Latino readers (including myself) loved the fanfic and it's portrayal of Latino/mexican-american culture/ family and the struggles of being a queer Latino in a homophobic culture. Literally none of us were offended or saw the fic as "racist" or "problematic". We were literally going "guys, stop harassing them, they're not being racist and we actually love the portrayal of our culture in the fic!" But non-latino fans ignored us and kept getting offended FOR us and kept harassing the writer, who btw, was like 16 years old when this happened.
They (the writer) were getting so much hate that they deleted the fic off of every social media platform they had it on, except for Archive of Our Own, bc that was the only platform where they weren't being harrassed 24/7. Idk if they ever finished writing the fanfic but I remember it being pretty good, highly recommend reading it if it's still around!
Holy shit that's wild, I hope the author is okay.
@@chocopie5992 they have a tumblr art account if i can recall correctly, n they want nothing to do with the fic lol
I've read translation of it and ngl it was good. It qas physicaly hard to stop reading.
There was also the drama about one of the OC characters introduced in later chapters that were autistic, and portrayed as so, however the author got so much hate from that, to the point where I think the fanfic was put on hold for awhile. I remember reading it as it came out, but I was so oblivious to all the drama until I got on the tumblr tags aha
@@soph9033 holy shit I remember now. If I remember the author was either also autistic or had autistic siblings so they were portraying the character based off of their own experiences. but people were still sending them hate.
THIS PROBABLY GAVE SO MANY PEOPLE WAR FLASHBACKS
The title alone gave me emotional whiplash
I barely escaped panic attack. But I managed. It's been two and a half years after all
**sobs**
It’s been so long…
I sadly have terrible flashbacks because I got harassed when klance shippers were getting upset at Lance VA ( I told them that not everything was about klance and they started to harass me ). I just left the fandom for good when that happened
Diversity win! The characters you are screaming and arguing about are now Aromantic. No exceptions.
I would've been murdered if I was in the Voltron fandom at that time
Especially when the show's lifespan was at its peak during the 'ace discourse' era of tumblr. Thank god that exclusionism phase has ended. Cryptoterfs have been using ace exclusion tactics to recruit young terfs so its been rough.
bruh i was so damn tired of the ships that i genuinely only looked for any platonic fancontent. and this was just post season 1 before season 2 aired, i watched like half of that and stopped
jdkfj as long as you werent vocal about what you liked, you were Generally fine... but that also meant "dont like posts on your main account or your mutuals will find out and hunt you for fun". I was in the fandom from beginning till a WHILE after the shows end... it was.... Something Else jfdlkajlsjdf
pfp?
@@fricka4798 I think it's hoodie from Marble Hornets
**angrily confronts a voice actor using an anonymous account**
**voice actor reciprocates the energy and defends themself**
“wow how dare you I’m literally a minor”
what,,,, you can’t dodge accountability using your status as a minor as a catch all shield 😭
**voice actor apologizes**
**the fandom is MAD they apologized 😡**
WHAT??
i was thinking this. i’m like how is anyone supposed to know anyone online is a minor or not. especially on tumblr where most people are anonymous.
To be fair, the VA shouldn't apologize for something like that.
it was 100% bait to cancel the VA for daring to reply to a minor, wasnt it ?
@@tehuselessguig3138 yeah, I wasn't involved with the drama at all while it was going on, but even as an outsider it was obvious that they knew what they were doing.
@@errortryagainlater4240 yeah... making minors completely untouchable and devoid of responsibility for their behavior and throwing people under the bus the second they reach 18 is pretty lame ngl
Voltron: let's add more diversity to please the fans
Fans: no wtf you're doing it wrong. i'll do it myself
Also fans: no wtf you're doing it wrong too
I think the fandom would be (hopefully) different if it came out during quarantine, or just was marketed to a different audience (also maybe a bit less cringe)
Milking the fandom is a dangerous game.
See also, destiel....
At a local con, the VA of Lance was a guest and you could just see his face get more and more grim with every fan that approached him and asked him about shipping and all that.
Klance is like Sterek where 80% of the fandom is convinced that they were 3 seconds from getting married but the reality is that they barely liked each other.
Sounds about right.
When the show was airing I was under that belief. I’m rewatching the show now and I can see just how much they really didn’t have that click. I hated the Allura and Lance pairing back then, especially in season 8, and I love it now
I think that's the point
@@BlueJayBabysame
This is why I'm so glad that the crew's other work - Avatar: The Last Airbender was released in the early 2000's, imagine if that show was released during the time of the rise of fandom culture. Just. *Yikes.*
Well yeah I can imagine it, korra
Korra's fandom was pretty bad too from what I can remember.
Mike and Brian probably count themselves lucky they never got glass cupcakes from Zutara shippers.
As a fan who watched ATLA when it came out, the new crop of ATLA fans that have come in after it was released on Netflix are 100x worse than the ones circulating while the show was airing. When the show was airing no one threw serious real-world accusations at you for the ship you liked, they just said you sucked and left it there.
@@undeadbread Yeah, as intense as the Zutara vs Kataang shipping wars were in its heyday, the flame wars really just boiled down to "my ship is more canon than yours" or debates on what constitutes good taste. Was it cringe? Yeah, I don't look back on that time too fondly mostly cuz I was just an embarrassing preteen. But at least it was nothing like Voltron, where the word p*do became so distilled that it lost all resemblance of its real-world meaning.
Steven Yeun has been apart of at least two franchises with wildly rabid fandoms now. He knows better than to participate
Was the other one Walking Dead? Don't know how insane they get if that's the case
idk what kinda trip I went down because if your comment.
so I recognise steven yuen. I know he's the "you are gay" guy and also voices mark from invincible, though I did not know who he voiced in voltron/the other franchise he was apart of. so I highlight your comment and search his name up.
I get to his wiki page and scroll to roles. oh, he also voiced someone in troll hunters? haven't seen that since the year it came out. lets see who this Steve Palchuk is. and I search up the character and go to his fandom wiki page.
WHY IS HE PREGNANT. WHY THE FUCK IS HE PREGNANT.
@@blueberrycrepes It's best not to think about it.
@@blueberrycrepes alien logic
@@blueberrycrepes look, that movie was quite possibly the worst ending to a franchise I have ever seen. Steve being pregnant gets erased by time travel anyway, making the whole thing moot.
i personally bring up the "bad artist blacklist" quite often. basically it was a list of tumblr users who shipped any of the other paladins with shiro and i guess if it helped anyone to filter out artists whose content might have made them uncomfortable then good for them, but iirc it was more about "these people are p3d0philia supporters, they are ruining the show and shouldn't be online" :,D and the best part of it all? several actual dreamworks employees were on the list.
...
What on earth...
Anti culture is what happens when a bunch of young people seeking refuge from sockally conservative abuse (if you look closely, almost all of these people come from extremely repressive, often religious fundamentalist households) try to create a progressive, inclusive space, but bring literally all of the bad, internalized mindsets beaten into them by the nightmarish hellscapes they live in.
Everyone ends up being as emotionally fragile as sugar glass and as militantly devoted to punishing perceived moral deviancy as the Spanish Inquisition. (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!) And it's all wrapped up in a horrible, anti-recovery echo chamber.
I've been on the inside of that hell in the early 2000s and 2010s. And I may not be very sensitive myself, but I am not going back.
Tbh, I’m pretty sure the only Shiro x Paladin ship that falls under p3d0 is Shiro and Pidge seeing as Shiro is 25 while Pidge is 15-
All the other paladins were 18 when the show started (pretty sure) so it’s not exactly p3d0 with them-
@Wendy Seddy Yeah
@@theautismrizzler you forgot the "-" after you said "yeah"
I think one of the worst things that happened in this fandom was the harrassment of Shiro's VA for playfully encouraging sheith early on. The poor guy had no idea how much of a landmine this was. He refused to talk about ships after this and I completely understand why.
This fandom had so much harrassment it was scary. You could get dogpiled with insults for the slightest implications that you weren't against sheith, and the VAs got the worst of it. Being neutral on shipping was not an option, it was very much "with us or against us".
At least hes doing better for himself these days
I still remember being in the fandom and everyone has been thirsting for Lotor.
Edit: Damn… what did you do Lotor?
.....then that one corpse scene lmaoooo
@@crazycorgi2184 💀💀💀
LMAO I FORGOT AB THIS
lotor and his loreal commercial hair
I mostly just remember seeing that post of Lotor’s VA doing the Barbie Malibu Dream house monologue (thank fuck)
There was a Tumblr post that described the Voltron fandom as people raving about this amazing restaurant, and when you actually go there, they serve plain bread on a paper plate, but all the smiling happy customers brought their own condiments. Needless to say, I'm glad I never got involved.
yeah I tried to watch a couple of episodes but I seriously could not get into it : /
thats more like the she ra fandom tbh LMFAOO i am so glad i wasn’t in the VLD fandom at the time
I had a fun time for the most part. Yeah, the restaurant and some of the customers sucked, but there are some really talented people in the fandom. Some of the best bread I've ever had was thanks to those artists and writers.
@@gatos1800 honestly yeah. she ra is overhyped. I got more invested in vld than spop and vld succkeed
@@allurajane4979 fr, sorry but she ra sucked, they did adora, the main character so dirty at the end when they put her with her abuser, catra
re: age gap discourse, I think it's worth noting that there were no canon ages when season 1 first dropped, so fans just made headcanons. I saw Lance, Hunk, Pidge and Keith as 18 because they were in a military school - it just made sense to me that they'd be legal adults. But if someone viewed them as younger, they were free to do that and it still fit the school setting. I really wish the show had kept it that way, then maybe most of the drama could've been avoided.
From the outset I shipped Shiro and Allura because they filled the role of "the adults in the room" and, as an adult myself, I related to them more than the younger characters. I always read Shiro as being in his mid-30s and Allura maybe mid-20s, and tbh I keep that headcanon because I think it makes more sense then their official ages.
@@natmorse-noland9133 precisely I never really shipped any of the characters romantically but as family positions. Like Shiro as a father, allure the mother, coran the weird but meaningful uncle, Keith Lance and Hunk the middle children and pidge the youngest. They where a found family with many personal issues
I find it funny that people got so worked up over a 17 year old dating a 25 year old because my sister was 17 when she met her first boyfriend and he was 25. Age gaps aren't a big deal in my country so seeing Americans get this pedantic over "minors" dating "adults" is funny
nah, they'd just complain about _assumptions_ of wide age gaps because "character X is minor coded" or some bs.
@@milkmatcha3698 oh for sure, they were doing that before the ages were confirmed lmao, but I think that having canon ages encouraged the discourse and that most of the harassment would've faded out if they hadn't been confirmed. of course I can only guess, it's too late now lol
I was an avid Klance shipper (still kinda am) and I wasn't really mad about Lance and Allura ending up together since it was clear Lance liked her since season1. I was just disappointed that we couldn't actually see Allura develop romantic feelings for him since it was always portrayed that she thought he was kinda anoying.
Obviously I also don't like Shiro's rushed marriage or the fact that Lotor had a lot of potential for a redemption arc (think Zuko from ATLA level) but they trew him away.
The vld Fandom is still active today, but I don't see as much toxicity and that is a relief. Its nice to see that a lot of people matured out of those dark ages lol.
(Sorry for any spelling mistakes. English is not my first language.)
Thank you for saying my exact thoughts. The thing that I didn’t like the most about Allura and Lance was how rushed it was, specially after Lotor left Allura (I literally don’t remember exactly what happened lol).
It’s kinda why I was never completely behind Allura and Lance, she never really showed interest at all.
Also the wedding was v rushed but god knows my 14 year old ass cried just to see Shiro happy at the end
Allura had been warming up to lance since season 3 when he actually started maturing and respecting her. It's unclear if it was romantic but she definitely started caring deeply about him when he started caring deeply about her
I'm a klance shipper too but allurance is also fun. I dabble on occasion
@@liahuribe2126 She left him when she found out he turned her people into cattle and was literally draining the life from them
That was why I didn’t like Allurance. I felt like they had no real chemistry on screen, no hint that there was anything other than a schoolyard crush on Lance’s part. I don’t hate the idea of them together, but man I would’ve liked to see them get closer.
If anything, Allura and Keith had more chemistry LOL
I remember being in the fandom, but bad stories aside. I once met Shiros va at a con and he signed my artwork. It was really bad at the time but he was so nice I think about it to this day.
My ex got to meet him at con in Cincinnati and it was really cool. He is such a nice person
That's so sweet! I hope you framed that signed artwork.
AJ LoCascio, Lotor's VA, sent me a little resin ghost statue he made of Lotor art I drew him! I still have it, it's very cute!
ive been calling this phase of my life my voltrauma. this era literally changed me forever. it was crazy every day was an adventure and it was very rarely a good one
same, i now like sci-fi games.
you can see me talk about halo or doom.
i also like sonic.
VOLTRAUMA EKDKSKDKE dude same, voltrons artstyle is like 90% of my current artstyle and if it hadn’t been for voltron I probably wouldn’t have gotten into art
@@strawberryspikes nice profile picture
At the end of the day it was all one big Y I K E
"Voltrauma" 😭😭😭
I'm stealing this because I definitely came out of the fandom as a different person and I barely even fuckin talked to anyone lmao
steven yeun doing the smart thing and just not getting involved what a king
Reminds me of Genshin fandom.
I swear, if Homestuck had any sort of faces for characters people would have been doxxing and doing all sorts of horrible bullshit. Its the one thing Homestuck had going for it, no names or faces to attack, only each other.
It's a damn shame that VAs and creators feel like they can't participate in fandoms for the media they're creating- even some that had been involved in prior fandoms they had voiced for just cut off certain fandoms because they're so done with the bullshit that happens. It's despicable.
I’m quite literally in both and I see the parallels. I’m a multishipper and quite a chill enjoyer of almost anything so you can BELIEVE THE SMACK i’d get for suggesting a pair other than the main consensus ones. (I shipped klance too but damn you are never safe lol)
the genshin fandom is like that BECAUSE of the voltron fandom. well, at least partly. at least 40%
Klance and Kaeluc is just one part of fandom history’s cruel rhyme scheme. Griffin Burns and Josh Keaton as the main hate sinks, Corina Boettger and Bex T-K being seen as “annoying”, Sean Chiplock and Steven Yeun both vibing away from the fandom…
@@atanvardecunambiel8917 fandom culture can be so toxic Dx If people have issues with the source material they should be on Hoyoverse's ass, not the poor VAs....
and don't even get me started on Kaeluc, jesus christ-- the most toxic shippers I've ever experienced in my life, and i was a homestuck way back when.
best way to experience fandom imo is just to vibe in your little circle of friends
@@sealpup9341 VLD only aired for two and a half years. Genshin Impact’s second anniversary is this month, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. I’m scared to see what the Genshin fandom will look like by EoS.
It must be exhausting to be so invested in fictional relationships
EDIT I only mean those so invested that they'll do bizarre things, not the average person :)
Only if it’s THIS toxic otherwise it can be very comforting. I got a oc ship that are a 100% comfort couple
@@lordlehuezerher oh definitely, a nice, relaxing ship I can definitely see the benefit. Going that far though is...wow lol
@@lordlehuezerher I agree, my personal confort ship currently is Lumity, it's just a ship I like to draw alot. When I have art block, I draw Lumity.
Eh, only when people make their entire personality revolve around it/take it to this extreme.
@@freshcupofangst definitely
I didn't realise how much shit the writers were given by the fandom. I honestly can't blame how downhill the show went considering how much pressure they were under
fr, the amount of people sending threats to people who were involved in the making of Voltron, no wonder the series dipped in quality
Definitely. I don’t think they rlly expected voltron to be that big of a show, maybe as popular as Castlevania is right now but not the level it was at its peak. I watched the show ever since s1 and the fandom was just gifs and fanart, and you can def tell that as the toxicity rose, the writing got worse.
@@chailatte1234 Tbh many fans of LOK watched Voltron because the art style was similar to LOK (since the same studio was animated both shows)
@@Syndersis Yeah ik i was one of those ppl lol. I think what im trying to say is that the level of engagement w voltron was somewhat unexpected because of just how focused everyone was on it + social media esp twitter getting a big boom. It was like the Supernatural fandom in a way, something LoK had the pleasure of avoiding lol
What pressure? They're in no harm lol
I was a Shallura shipper and let me tell you, I used to get tons of people calling me "A straight white girl invading our space." Which was weird cuz I was a pansexual biracial girl.
Man, I've been in random a where people assume so much shit. Its annoying when people assume I'm white and don't know what I'm talking about, especially in fandoms about Latin American movies,,, like,,, I'm actually Colombian check yourself and find an actual problem with what I'm saying that doesn't boil down to me being s certain race.
Personally I don’t see it but of course again like people need to respect opinions
And like even if you were white, what the fuck does it matter? As if your race has any bearing on how informed you are on any one topic. Its just people being straight up racist. But I guess we cant call them racist because its against white people and thats less racist than if it was against other races? Help me god
@@yungoldman2823 Somehow it manages to be both racist and not? Because I am half chinese so it's like not the coolest to call me white when I've got all this heritage
@@meilizackrison I mean… I think shipping a canonically gay man with a woman IS definitely….. not great, like, actually definitely erasure of much needed gay characters, but assuming you were young that’s a huge overreaction for people to have especially if you shipped it before he was confirmed gay lol
Thanks for the TL;DR of this. It just confirms what I already knew: Your fandom is you and some friends. People get on the internet, stay on the internet, forget that real people are more important than fictional characters, and then lose their minds. I'm glad I was able to enjoy Voltron on my own.
I think Voltron was one of the big reasons why people started hating shipping. Sure, there were shipping controversies before (looking at you, Danganronpa, and probably also Steven Universe and like MLP), but nothing on the sheer scale of Klance. Now, I enjoy shipping - I tend towards rarepairs and secondary characters in unconventional relationships, and this is because I like to imagine how two less-explored characters would handle being in a relationship together. However, I've always known that my ships are a personal thing, and that no matter how close they get to canon, the creators don't owe me making them canon just because I enjoyed their story. It seems like a lot of toxic shipping fans assume that because they want something, that means they must get it. I wholly support anyone shipping any characters they like (though not real people, as it's somewhat rude and disregards their free will), but you should never assume that your ship will become canon. You shouldn't even assume that the creators care about what you think or ship. Shipping is a personal matter, and more people need to understand that.
To admit, I first found out about shipping when I started watching Voltron, and since then, I hate the majority of shipping because most people are weirdly obsessive and toxic.
@@wolfywonder8480 Like I don’t want to judge people, so I won’t, but it honestly gets me so agitated when there’s that one ship that people get so obsessive and toxic over, and completely ignore the shows plot for that ship. I’m not a shipper, but I am glad when people with mutual feelings finally get with each other, though I’m not that fussed, but sometimes I seem to care less when you get those types of shippers because of how they act. Like I hate the Klance ship because of Klance shippers, which has now made me a little annoyed with Catradora and Lumity. Like it’s nice hearing that when people have feelings for each other are going to end up together, but again, that’s all the fans care about, so now I just don’t care about those ships because it’s taking away focus on such amazing shows. People don’t watch ATLA for Zutara, but Zutara shippers are definitely on that list of obsessive and toxic. Probably up there with Klance.
This is exactly why I hated shipping back in the day. I've cooled down on since then when I learned there are people who go "I think these characters would be cute together" and leave it at that without deciding anyone who doesn't agree with them must be the scum of the earth.
Istg Klance was the first ship I EVER had a personal vendetta against just bc of the fans 💀 I don't anymore obviously, and if you like the ship then that's totally okay!! But I definitely came out of the VLD fandom a different person lmao
Wait, Danganronpa shipping controversies? Can someone please fill me in on this one?
I've tried looking it up on the internet but all I could find was ship-ability tier lists and templates...
Ive been on the internet since the 90's and seeing it morph into this crazy melting pot of gatekeeping, toxic waste, filth and grime and genuinely wholesome shit its a real trip for me.
This!! ^^^ 😵💫🤯
That's the human race for you.
Insanity.
bro the gate keeping is needed.. you dont gate keep and you end up with this .. voltron "fans" who only far about sexuality's.
man you said it. as a 17 year old who grew up in these toxic wastelands known as modern fandom culture its basically normal at this point to hear of another awful fanbase with terrible fans bc this is what we are accustomed to.
the internet was still a toxic wasteland in the 90's/2000's. it was just mainly cishet white dudes, and they were being toxic the other way.
steven yeun maintaining his reputation as an unproblematic king
as he should 😌
The Voltron fandom maintaining its reputation as batshit crazy minors with a preference for violence
My man avoided so many problems by not being active in fandom. People make fun of him being so uninterested when he was smarter than the big chunk of the fandom. Keeping your mouth shut makes wonders lol
i was in the steven universe fandom and it's so weird how similar it was to the voltron fandom according to this video. the wild accusations, shipping discourse (lapidot anyone?), harassing the crew, etc.
A lot of people that watched SU also watched VLD so that's probably why
Imagine being so invested in the potential couple of fictional characters that you blackmail the very people who make the piece of media you like.
Literally in the video Izzy points out this was complete misinformation lmfao
Honestly, the thing that bothered me about the last seasons of Voltron was the treatment of character development as a whole. Pidge was never explored again after the whole "I want to find my family" arc, Hunk was given like 1 important plotline in the entirety of the last two season and was treated only as the 'advice giving friend' trope, Shiro was like barely there and had like no on-screen grieving for his dead fiance even though the show hyped it up too much, Allura was powered up only for her to die just like that, Keith was kinda ok, even though I remember almost nothing about him except being the emotional support of a lot of the other paladins, and lastly Lance, who at this point was trashed of any build up and was constantly treated as the comic relief, the lover or the unreasonable one for not wanting his love interest sacrifice himself even though he seemed to be more of a rebound than planned love interest because the one who persuaded Allura into touching the damn evil thing was her DEAD EX, LOTOR, and they made him, the only canonical latino character, a forever grieving FARMER. As a latina, I can say that did rub a lot of people the wrong way because they made his whole life revolve around someone he dated in his teenage years/young adulthood.
fr they did lance soooo dirty
voltron sucks after 3, i miss when all of them had their og lions and actually had potential to grow
omg the whole lance becoming an altean flower farmer thing sucked so much. like wdym this adventure-loving guy who was implied to be the main protagonist decided to spend the rest of his life growing altean flowers and being sad because the girl he dated for like a week sacrificed herself (which also made no sense but hey at this point lets just assume the writers were picking plot points at random for the fun of it)
for what i even heard, they made lance and allura "sweethearts" at the last season and they had no quemistry whatsoever between the two. I only watched the first seaso and i heard about this from people who like voltron and watched it fully, and all of them told me that they have no interested in each opther until last season or so. I only care about ships if both people do have somewhat of a build-up connection, like all the 5 paladins (platonically), and they also did Shiro super dirty. Building up for him like that, starting with him super friendly with allura to then throw us to the face that he's gay(i have nothing against lgbt), hitting to a love interest to then show such love interest dead/disapeared/separated and then "5 minutes later" he gets married to someone completly unknown to everyone?? dude?
Im still planning on watching the series, i've been waiting for the series to end and for the fandom-hell to die down so i can finally enjoy the series, so some of this opinions and ideas might change, but at least this is based on what ive seen, read and heard.
And on a side-note, from first season and previews of the other seasons, i like seeing lance and keith together as a couple, i like the quemistry they have together both in love and as a warrior team, They compliment each other very well as character as they are very well written (till a certain point), but thats just me.
as a fanfiction writer : i will never understand why people fight for ships. just enjoy what you enjoy period? i am so confused. i don't like certain ships, my remedy? i don't engage with them. solved. insults and death threats are.. so not needed
right? even the ships that are like... problematic in illegal ways I just avoid. I don't wanna see that stuff, so I don't look at it.
It's fine until people go into my inbox and try to purposefully traumatize me and tell me my abuse isn't valid because XYZ. It's fine until someone wants to rub my nose into it because they're obsessed with the idea that everything they like MUST be pure (it doesn't) but the problem is I don't like these elements and they give me flashbacks to my trauma. And I don't want those flashbacks. I don't need those flashbacks.
But HOW DARE I NOT FIND THEIR BEAUTIFUL SHIPPY POO SO BEAUTIFUL.
Because I didn't like being abused with those words years ago and I don't like reminders now so get out of my inbox.
Now this has NOTHING to do with Voltron. The ship I'm talking about has to do with canonical sexual abuse that I asked people to stop talking to me about. But this is usually why. It's someone obsessed with the idea that what they love is good and pure and it never has to be.
Honestly! What’s the point of arguing over ships? It really doesn’t make ANY sense 🥲 everyone has their own interpretations of character dynamics, they don’t need to start arguments with other people just minding their own business
Sending death threats is never the answer.
It's so damn easy to block tags referencing ships you don't like. Don't like a ship? Block it! Don't like people discussing it? Block it! Like the ship, but dislike certain aspects of it? Block the people who create works containing them!
Granted, with fandom OTPs it can be pretty hard to avoid them, but even with those, you can easily filter most of the ship content out.
I've literally been dropped by a longtime friend because I said they shouldn't get too worked up about a specific ship. I didn't even really show support for it, I just kind of...passively tolerated its existence. And it wasn't even an inarguably problematic ship. These people are downright delusional. I seriously hope they get some help, this just seems so incredibly unhealthy for everyone involved.
I came into the fandom around the time s3 dropped and immediately fell into what was then a crackship of Lotura which was A Whole Ordeal for our tiny little enclave of the fandom when s6 and 7 happened. The whiplash from the only canon on-screen kiss in the show to Allura slamming Lotor into the floor in the span of like 2 minutes was something to live through.
The biggest thing about Voltron that I dislike was how dirty the show did Coran, he was a superior character and it didn't deserve him
He was the best
Coran Coran the gorgeous man!
SMH....CORAN DESERVED BETTER!!!
They did coran dirty 😭
I 100% agree. every time i think about coran i think of every missed opportunity he had for serious character moments. allura wasn't the only one who had lost their entire civilization to the galra!! he was hilarious and i loved him but damn, they could've done so much more with him
I was there for literally the whole thing, since the beginning of the show. I can easily classify it as a god awful fandom because I have seen a LOT of fandom in my time, and Voltron was by far the worst I ever witnessed or was a part of.
My OTPs were Plance and Heith. I didn’t really care for Klance or Shieth, and since I was in to “rare pairs”, I stuck to my own circles and was just there to enjoy those pairings alongside others who did. I made and posted a lot of fan art, and had made a handful of friends who enjoyed various different ships and were just there for a good time, and I don’t regret that part because even though I’m not into or involved with Voltron anymore, one of those people became one of my best friends who I still talk to daily. Unfortunately however, I can’t call it a good fandom. I (as a middle schooler) received death threats for shipping Plance because it was straight and for shipping Heith because it wasn’t Klance. I was called homophobic repeatedly and I had to block a lot of people for my own safety. I’m grateful for the friends I did make, but at the end of the day, I’m even more grateful that the fandom dies a little bit more with every day that passes.
Also I love your garfields.
I’m so sorry this is very off topic but I couldn’t stop reading this in herlock sholmes voice and I’m dying
DUDE HEITH WAS SO FUCKING GOOD OML, heith sheith and lotura were my top favs… I wish the fandom was just friendly positive good feelings and pleasant ship vibes but everyone was constantly at war w each other. I got a lot of rabid Klance fans at my throat in the dms for the things I shipped which made me feel more confused than anything, I didn’t understand why ppl couldn’t just have their separate ships and be chill. Like bro Klance is cute pls leave me alone just because I ship something else more than ur otp
PLANCE MY BELOVED. I had a similar experience however I didn't really receive a lot of toxicity. I didn't have a twitter at that time and wasn't active on tumblr during that phase. Thank GOD.
^
Yes I had the same two OTPs, but I was always too scared to say bc I was like 12 and thought they’d all rip me to shreds lmfao
i cant wait until the day she makes a video about the dream smp and rips into them-
just 4 words dream not found shipers
Dsmp ships are so toxic. There’s like 3 sides: following people’s boundaries (sometimes even spamming them or being hypocritical), spamming/forcing ships, and people ignoring boundaries. The difference between Voltron and Dsmp is that Voltron has a level of disconnect because you know that the cast are voice actors but with Dsmp there’s barely any disconnect between the CCs and characters.
I am part of dsmp random and honestly I'm ashamed of most of them. Like respect people's boundaries
i’m part of the dream smp and mcyt fandom but goodness can the community get toxic and overall terrible. i would absolutely love to see a video in a few years once the hype around the dsmp is died down tearing into the fandom
as someone who went from vld to dsmp (albeit like 3 years apart) god i can attest to the fact that both are as bad as each other, dsmp/mcyt probably worse
i literally couldn't give two fly's wings about klance nor sheith. the pairing that spoke to me was Lotura. it was so much fun. of course we were devastated that the show killed off both the cosmic royals, but the Lotura circles were so chill with incredible writers & artists. happy to have met them. all that thanks to Lotura 💜💖
No lotor didn't he literally used her people 💀
Back in 2018 i cosplayed Keith to a convention. Around then voltron was still in its hype, and so my friend (who was cosplaying Shiro with me) and I garnered a lot of attention. Around midday we ran into a Lance cosplayer who we befriended, and the three of us hung out as a trio.
And that’s when shit hit the fan
We were asked countless times if we could “kiss for a photo”, and I, being 17 at the time whilst the Lance and Shiro were in their earlier 20s, the whole thing made me very uncomfortable, and it also made my friends uncomfortable, considering they were adults being asked to kiss a minor. One guy even said that he shipped Lance and Shiro, and when my friend who was Shiro said “that’s gross, Lance is a teenager”, the guy said that’s what made the ship more appealing.
Overall the voltron fandom is terrifying and I never wish to be a part of it again
I hate when people can't separate cosplayer from the character. Absolutely a weirdass move to ask strangers to kiss.
I've also heard of people harassing Akechi cosplayers from P5...like bruh that's a human person.
it's fine to ship whatever you want but leave people alone jfc
That is embarrassing. I feel bad for all three of you. Especially with that Lance and Shiro shipper. That guy is a full definition of a creep. And honestly, I would be extremely uncomfortable if I was one of your friends.
The wholesome thing is that you actually encounter a new friend from that convention. I really hope you guys are still friends though.
i don't understand people who base their entire personality on the romance dynamics of children's cartoons
I understand liking a ship, but yea, basing your whole personality on it is literally insane. But I also feel like it’s also just as crazy to just adamantly HATE a ship and anyone who ships it. Like, I understand if it’s a ship that’s genuinely fucked up, but when it’s deadass just a ship between two consenting adults, I don’t see how it’s such a big deal for both those who ship it and hate it.
@@KayBbyXOXOXO I can barely understand why people are so much into shipping. Maybe it comes from my disinterest in having romantic relationships myself.
Especially when you have people who threaten self harm (or worse) over it, or complain that their mental health is ruined because their ship didn't become canon...like??? That's very manipulative and pathetic ngl.
In my experience it‘s about escapism. And I think that the people who get particularly obsessive over ships are usually teenagers who have experienced a lot of trauma. As a Klance shipper myself I can say that I see a lot of myself in both Keith and Lance and i will always value fanon over canon because there are so many AUs you can explore. A lot of stories you can look at and think okay, this is what my life could be like if things go well for me. It can give you hope. I can see why some people, especially younger kids who may not have a good support system offline can get super obsessive and aggressive when they perceive another ship or even the creators as a threat to their safe space. For me personally, Klance is somewhat of a coping mechanism. I am terrified of losing control and when it comes to creating fan art and fanfiction, I am in full control of what I create. Even when it comes to reading fanfiction, you have much more control over it than the canon of a show since there‘s such a big variety and you can search for specific tags. The control thing is very specific to me but I see it as an example and I think a lot of the toxic shippers are just traumatized kids who latched onto these characters that bring them comfort and now feel overly protective of their idea of how things should be
@@heyna1185 That sounds like a healthy way to interact with ship culture, sorry if it sounded like I was talking about you. I meant to the degree shown in the video.
People who get this angry over fictional characters' relationships need to go outside and touch grass.
So gay representation doesn't matter?
@@ChangedMyNameFinally69 Gay representation matters, but not enough to justify harassing and sending death threats to the cast and crew.
@@ChangedMyNameFinally69 if that's everything you're taking from this then you really need to go touch some grass...
@@Homodemon I'm a future writer, this shit matters to me
@@ForeverTraitor Who takes death threats seriously
seeing all this drama makes me so glad that I just stuck in the Plance and Kidge community, along with other rare pairs that had a small fanbase and were honestly pretty chill (wink wink)
we did our own thing, created our inside jokes, had a bunch of talented artists and writers, we even had a joke where plance had a lot of ship names, like flirtyrobot, lidge, etc. and rarely engaged with ship drama. I miss it a lot, now that I improved my art I kinda wanna go back and redo some of my fanart💖💚💙
sorry what was plance? was it pidge and lance im stupid... also was kidge keith and pidge?
@@trin1894 I’d assume Plance was Pidge x Lance and Kidge was Keith x Pidge. Definitely not pairs I’ve seen pop up very often, but if the community was nice, I’m sure it was one of the breaths of fresh air in the fandom
@@alexander_markovski makes sense ty, i’ve only heard of plance out of them lol
kidge was my SHIT back then omg
Yeah, i was in the plance end. It was a really cute dynamic, made ocs based off of that. It was a good way to meet new people, and some of them are still my bestest friends half a decade later :))
Tumblr fandom culture is finding something you like, painting an image in your head of what the thing you like is, and then getting mad that the thing you like doesn't adhere to the image you have of it in your head.
This is a perfect analysis and it's accurate to a lot of Twitter fandoms too.
It's ALSO like walking up to someone who's eating a sandwich, snatching it off them, biting into it and then getting angry because they used cheese and you wanted tuna 💀 like sometimes, things that you don't personally enjoy WILL exist, just ignore it and move on!!
You did it! You broke fandom down to its bare essentials!
I always get so shocked every time I’m reminded that the show only ran for about 2 years because with the amount of seasons it had and the crazy amount of drama that happened it really feels like everything went down over a much longer period of time
My favorite thing is when online personalities do better research and journalism than professional new outlets. All the money and resources but still a single person on TH-cam has the more concise story. This isn’t just for Izzy, so many channels I follow do the same thing and it’s mind-boggling
pretty sure the reason for that is: most yt creators actually care about the topics they cover (whether they are a part of the phenomenon they're talking about, or they just find it interesting). as a person that manages social media for a company, I can say that at some point all you want to do is meet the qouta and get out, especially, if you don't have any knowledge about the thing you're covering and/or have to work with strict deadlines.
@@daydihey3045 Another really important thing is that a lot of journalists are working on multiple projects at the same time and have really strict deadlines. So it can really be hard to dedicate the time needed to research and explain a specific topic. And like you said, journalists cannot pick the topics they want to research. Many times they genuinely don't know anything or absolutely despise what they are working on. TH-camrs on the other hand can pick the subjects if they are working solo or are freelancers. Many a time they have sponsors, Patreon, and YT Ad money so they can focuse on their work (actually make more money that most journalists) and not be worried about getting fired or remove from a future project if their publications are not very popular. Also, depending on your employer, you might not have a salary and instead get paid in commission.
honestly being in the fandom was the worst best experience of my life. The characters as well as klance are still dear to my heart but the shit i saw on tumblr is stuff i will never get over, just overall a really negative space
I still remember when The New York Times made an online article about ships and Klance was one of the examples so everyone lost their marbles, or when the Hashtag Leakira surpassed the Voltron one on the trending page of Tumblr
Oh god..I forgot about Leakira. That was freaking wild
Should I know what Leakira is? Sounds like a madhouse...
EDIT: K, I finally saw the video, because I was waiting for my ride after my shift, so I couldn't do much besides read the comments. It really is a mad world in the Voltron fandom.
@@helentran204 Basically rewamped Klance but with new names. From what I remember, they were gonna be a couple and the fandom was reaaally invested with them, but I just felt disgusted bc they just created this whole new universe bc they had their shipping googles on for too long and wanted to dedicate it to only two characters alone. I could be wrong since I did stay away from that mess so I have limited informations, anyone who knows more can go ahead and correct me.
@@mp6450 I myself always considered it a Klance AU, thought the idea of cyberpunk Klance was cool. Most of the people I saw doing fanart of them weren't doing the whole "yeah Voltron reboot!!!" So much as they just liked to interpret them in the cyberpunk aesthetic. I think most of the people who were talking about Kickstarters and reboots were middle schoolers who didn't understand how the tv animation industry works lol
I actually matched someone on tinder bc of voltron and we talked about ships and they were honestly nice! (probably bc I was a multishipper?) idk where they are now but I think about them annually. Honestly probably the only positive interaction I got in the fandom. Great video btw
hang out with keitor stans u will either extremely regret or they will literally bow down to u
Shipping discourse: is Voltron itself a starship or nah?
28 seconds
@@The_Wosh 54
They could fly through space in it, so yeah
Starships were ment to flyyy
Well, seeing as how it needed pilots in order to operate properly, and it could fly with the aid of jet thrusters... I would say yeah.
The Voltron fandom scared me out of reading fanfiction. The first and only fanfiction I've read was Dirty Laundry, it was a Klance one! I was scared out of reading them because while I enjoyed the story at the time the writer was harassed and bullied so badly they lost their passion for writing and said they are never going to share their writings again
Damn really? I read that yearssss ago that’s sad to hear
Especially when there is wayyyyy worse and honestly disturbing content out there
I was never in the voltron fandom but I’ve watched the toxicity spill out into general tumblr culture and it’s been pretty yikes. I block people pretty much daily for telling people to “kys” over fictional characters. Idk it just seems really hypocritical to “protect” fictional characters by hurting real life people.
Good point there. People seem to care more about their uwu fictional gay ships than actual human beings. It's sad.
“Shalladin” is such a funny word to me because Shaladin is a ship in the Stormlight Archive
Same! It can be confusing
Support vets
@@Fjdjfjsz92938 to all the ex-Voltron fans in the current cosmere fandom… I pray that Kaladin doesn’t remind you too much of Keith. Amen.
Bridge Four ✊
yeahhhh
The fact that the entire shebang surrounding "Dirty Laundry," literally ONE of thousands of klance fics could probably kill a small Victorian child is indicative of the rest of the fandom's issues
I hear Dirty Laundry wasn't even that good, that's the funny part
@@DilettanteThat it wasn’t lmao
it was well written but SO GENERIC
I tried reading it when it was still up in AO3. It was well written, but it was boring as well, so I dropped it in chapter 2 (when it wasn't a one-shot yet). There are plenty of other fics that are more interesting.
I read most of it, they never posted the last chapters, to only delete it because of the flack they got. It wasn't great, but it was a fun read. Would have loved to see its finished since the author was really invested in it.
I don’t have any personal horror stories, but I remember after the show ended and I moved on, I was shocked to see how toxic the fandom was in retrospect. I only really had Instagram at the time and just followed artists, so it was really chill. Not everything was so horrible as people make it out to be I think 😅
I remember the Pidge Gender Discourse. People got way too upset over what gender people headcanoned Pidge to be. A lot of people, myself included, were misled to believe she was canonically a trans boy, even though she calls herself a girl within the first season. People would tag their fics with what set of pronouns were used for her. It was wild, worst trans headcanon discourse I've ever seen
I just hc her as genderfluid with she/him, it fits him.
@@fishiefish2249 That's fair. I was always a fan of the trans girl Pidge headcanon. The issue was that people started drama over what was the "right" headcanon
@@mercuryn8983 people needs to be bonked every time they start forcing headcanons on people. its a HEADcanon for a reason, lol
Can an girl just being GNC in peace without transcoded? This is Chihiro Fujisaki all over again
@@Limacinablues GNC?
Oh besties it’s my time to shine- I was in the Voltron fandom for a while and BOY was it a mess
The only thing worse than my mental state is this fandom
Any crazy mini story's you have?
same dude. I did back from the fandom for awhile at one point tho, i think its when i started seeing more people being toxic and angry over anyone who didnt ship klance. I thought klance was a cute ship but seeing that stuff made me wanna get off the internet for awhile lol. never rly heard much ab the glass cupcake incident tho. i heard of it once or twice but i never thought it was real, i always thought it was like a joke or smth
Same. I got into the show about a week or two after the first season came out and was in it till the show ended.
The drama from that was... intense. I have a close friend who shipped Lance and Pidge and the amount of harassment she got over that was crazy.
Me and my friends all did voltron cosplays but intentionally stayed away from Voltron events.
The fandom was a mine field and it was so hard to try and stay away from all the toxic stuff. Those of us who shipped smaller ships had cleaner spaces for a time but those didn't even last since people took offense to us shipping Lance and Keith with anyone but the other. (Seeing the tags flooded with hate or people getting death threats over shipping two fictional people was insane)
Voltron was my first true experience with a big and toxic fan space and ive been cautious of fandoms ever sense working to avoid drama in them.
@@ellastar1756 there were reports of or times were VAs or Voltron staff had to cancel going to events due to threats against them.
A friend of mine was once nearly assaulted over her ship.
I remember when the "shiro you're like my brother" line happened someone baked a cake with writing on it saying Sheith was dead and was harassing sheith shippers with it.
Those of us who shipped straight ships were called homophobes and accused of hating gay people. Time of people who shipped smaller ships like Plance/FlirtyRobot (Pidge/Lance) getting death threats and hate messages and accused of pedophilia (because of a 2 year age gap???)
People harassed the VA for Shiro and were harassing his kids. Like legit that man was so excited to voice Shiro and at the start was so bright and you could see the strain the hate and harassment had on him over time.
There are a lot of stories. Heck I have a group chat I could jump in right now and get more from since everyone in that chat had bad experiences with the fandom.
I remember getting into voltron after its first season and managed to get a few friends into it too. We stepped into the fandom in 2017, saw how toxic it got and left. Me and one of my friends watched til the end but i feel so guilty for taking my mates down with me smh
KIRYUUUU❤
Stories like this are why I don't usually interact with the mainstream part of fandoms. I just find my little corner and chill/nerd out with them and ignore any chaos on twitter