Lullaby of my world

“It’s beautiful isn’t? The moon."  ”…Which one?“ “All of them.”

SR: Was it always the plan to save Shiro in the end? And was it how popular the character became that influenced this decision?

JDS: It’s not super clean. Like, this answer is not going to be the cleanest answer. Our original intention was for Shiro to, basically, kick the bucket at the end of the first run.

LM: Yeah, the Zarkon arc. End of Netflix season 2.

JDS: We had internally already started discussing way further down the line how we could, y’know, potentially if we wanted to, bring him back and have his conscious be in the Black Lion and all that stuff that ended up coming to be. We had sort of planned to maybe do that down the line. Or, y’know, reserve the right to no do it and have Shiro ride off into the sunset.

But we started getting word that Shiro was one of the more popular characters. And, y’know, without doing a disservice to the character because we’re really, really proud of the story that we ended up telling. We had to do a truncated version of what our long term plan was with him, and figure out a way through the clone story to kind of keep him around and keep him on the roster in some fashion. Again, we don’t want to do a disservice to his character or the story. We are really, really proud, but it’s a version of the original idea we had for his character.

LM: Right. And I just want to clear something up so that fans don’t get confused. Sometimes they think the production schedule for animation is a lot shorter than it is. We hadn’t really gotten fan feedback of how popular Shiro was. I think it was just amongst the executives and the people working here in anticipation of how popular they believed Shiro would become. And I think they just grew to like the character because he’s such a likable character that there was a desire to keep him around longer. It wasn’t really a matter of internet feedback that Shiro was “Space Dad” and then like, ‘Everone change the story’, like that generally can’t happen because animation is so farther forward in production.

JDS: Honestly, the term “Space Dad” hadn’t even entered the lexicon when we were making these decisions and got word from on high that they would prefer to keep Shiro around on the roster. Like Lauren said, animation happens so far out that it was more of an internal decision.

• Joaquim: “You know, besides making Keith half-Galra, and the fact that it ties into this, when we initially started that concept, we didn’t know it was gonna lead here to the Blade of Marmora. But this, to me, opened up the universe and really allowed this version of Voltron to stand apart from the previous versions. And also added a good level of depth to the ‘bad guys.’…there was a whole other side to them that you saw here.”
• Joaquim: “So we see here, sort of the continuing rivalry between Lance and Keith. And at this point, Lance is even getting in Shiro’s face…Shiro backing him off…”
• Steve Ahn: “Shiro chose Keith.”
• Joaquim: “Hey I think Shiro just chooses the right person for the mission.” 
• Steve Ahn: “This is the second moment where Shiro asks Keith–‘Are you gonna be the leader of Voltron?’”
• Joaquim: “That’s right, sort of a very important moment. And we see again, sort of Keith’s reluctance.”
• Joaquim: [After Antok takes the knife from Keith] “And cool moment here–the realization’s maybe setting in with Shiro, and he’s still a bit confused, but a lot of roads in terms of characters’ stories i think are crossing at this moment here.”

• Joaquim: “And that hook of sort of knowledge or death…we went around and around sort of figuring out what this would be. And we had a version with Keith in sort of a prolonged interrogation by the Blade of Marmora, and it was a bit more of a cerebral game that was going on. It didn’t have a ton of physicality to it. Which was really cool on one level, but it was almost mirroring the interrogation sequence that was going on with Haggar. 
• And as cool as that is, just from a psychological perspective, it wasn’t giving us a ton for Keith to really latch onto. Which, you know, Keith’s driving force is really the fact that he’s kind of hardheaded, and he needs to learn the easier path at times. But a lot of times he’ll just barrel through. So the concept that, he’s not meant to go through the doors…that was something that came up a bit later. But when we had that breakthrough, we were really excited.”
• Joaquim: “The fight sequence staging here [was all Kihyn Ryu]. And I think the reason these [scenes] stand out is because Ryu’s boards are so detailed, and so posed out…the animator really just has to look at what equates to layout animation, and just do the in between’s.”

• Joaquim: [if they went through with the BOM interrogation trial] “We would have seen Keith mirroring and sort of learning the techniques Thace displayed [to shield his mind from] Haggar…but we still sort of worked in a bit of psychological stuff here, where he starts seeing visions of Shiro…this is a beautiful shot by the way. And we were very excited that this clip of footage came in right before one of our con panels, and we were able to tease that clip of Shiro just walking away in that image alone at the end…and I remember the whole room was like what is going on with Shiro, what is happening?”
• Joaquim: “[I did] just the first part of this [sequence]. But I thought it was a pretty important moment, to tie the shack that we see Keith in early on to this flashback…and this was a sort of sequence where we came to kind of last minute in the writer’s room, where Keith was going through sort of more of a psychological representation of thee struggle he’s internally having, rather than the way things actually played out. 
• So you know, this isn’t a flashback per say, it’s the manifestation of his dad being what represents his ties to Earth. And then this is obviously his Galra side, his Galran lineage, coming to the forefront…so we really sort of played up the mystery of who his mother is, and where she came from. We were initially never going to see Keith’s dad’s face, and his back would’ve been turned, and we would’ve seen him cutting something with the knife, and Keith would just be looking at the knife…but we wanted to make it clear his dad was human.”

• has a very very wry and subtle sense of humour. 
• literally blink and you miss it. 
• but oh my god if you don’t miss it then it’s REALLY funny 
• once he notices and knows what to look out for, keith picks up on a lot of kolivan’s obscure humour
• a very deeply expressive soul with an admirable amount of self-discipline
• people are always surprised 
• kolivan is no longer surprised that people are surprised
• hums only in the company of himself, and never when on a mission
• hums lullabies to the teeny-tiny kits that can’t sleep in the nursery when visiting 
• organised and meticulous in that organisation 
• actually has really wonderful cursive writing in the galra language but seldom has the chance to put it to good use 
• loves reading and discovering new information about things 
• had a study of books and scrolls on all kinds of subjects to read 
• finds galra philosophy particularly fascinating 
• FORMER POET
• still a poet but nobody knows it, not like kolivan has much time to indulge this or think about it
• mostly spoken as opposed to written, and unintentionally 
• what i mean is his speech when comfortable and away from rank can be really beautifully crafted and cosmically eloquent 
• if it’s written it’s kept in a very small journal kolivan is extremely cautious about people ever seeing
• crafts eulogies for those lost in the war