LEGO’s Voltron-themed Ideas set has generated a lot of excitement amongst LEGO and Voltron fans alike (check out our full review of 21311 Voltron). But as a fan of the show myself, I found the set something of a disappointment. LEGO decided to only focus on the show’s ships, not its characters (there aren’t even any minifigs in the set). It is also based on the original 80’s version rather than the wildly popular new Netflix reboot. To address this glaring oversight, I decided to craft my own LEGO tribute to the show that explores different kinds of ships …relationships!
While one segment of the Voltron fan base enjoys its large mecha and explosive battle sequences, another group prefer to engage in shipping. For the uneducated, shipping is the act of expressing, arguing or obsessing — often via fan art — over which characters you would like to see become romantically involved. Each “ship” even comes with its own Hollywood celebrity couple style name, for example, Lotor + Allura = Lotura.
We seem to live in a time where it has become acceptable to openly express intolerance toward the diversity that is so fundamental to our society. But this intense yet creative corner of the fan community has given me the perfect opportunity to use LEGO to remind people that love will always win over hatred, and that it should not — and cannot — be constrained by boundaries of race, gender or nationality.
For this project I wanted the figures to be screen accurate but also extremely poseable. This required me to develop a new style of character building that blended some old and new techniques, revisit the black art of brick dying, and even engage in some occasional brick ‘surgery’! Some of the models have over 20 points of articulation, and for the most part they stand quite happily in the poses that I dreamt up. Observant readers may even spot a few Easter eggs in the form of creatures from other shows and a guest appearance by LEGO’s own Voltron set!
This is probably relatively unexplored territory for the LEGO art community, but I hope you enjoy these images and their message of love and acceptance as much as I enjoyed creating them. And to my fellow Voltron fans – I’m sorry if I didn’t cover your favorite character or shipping combination; maybe I’ll add more at some point in the future.
This is the most pathetic blog self-promotion I’ve seen on TBB all year
@Alex: TBB is as much a collective of builders as it is a group of writers. Over the past 13 years, I’ve always encouraged every one of our contributors to share their own work with our readers. How is this different from anything else by one of our resident builders we’ve featured recently or in the past?
Totally disagree Alex–love to see that at their core the BrotherBricks contributors don’t just review official sets and showcase the work of others–but are builders themselves. The likeness of each character was spot-on! Especially loved the very tiny Voltron featured with “Shance” and the use of the lipstick pieces for wings.
It’s different because Iain is bashing a perfectly good set to promote his cringey pop culture garbage. If he wanted to show off his MOCs, thats cool. But why does he have to share his (bad) opinion on a set most people like?
Self promotion sucks, it’s been the most disappointing part of this blog for the whole 13 years. And this is the worst of those 13 years.
Ian’s post is insulting drivel. Insulting the person who made the ideas project and the lego designers who worked on the set, insulting digital mocists, suggesting that sexualized fan content is more legitimate than canonical content, and pompously claiming that he’s pioneering something new by portraying relationships in lego… Ian, if you want to spread your “message of love and acceptance”, why don’t you bring back your final blog post on thelivingbrick where you ranted about how people who make digital creations are deceitful hacks who need to be outed from the fandom by people who build “real” lego like you, who cuts and dyes and customizes your bricks, and apologize for spreading such hatred towards your fellow fans and intentionally making people feel uncomfortable for enjoying the same hobby you do.
Delete this comment if you want, I know you guys don’t like seeing people upset at your content. Just do make sure ian knows what we think.
I agree 100% with what Alex said…
Am I missing something? Why are people angry about this? All I’m seeing are some fun Lego creations.
If depicting romantic relationships between elders and minors are “fun lego creations”… whatever floats your boat man. Love an acceptance and all that.
Dear lord, the absolute VENOM some AFOLs have toward one another is always so pathetic and appalling to behold.
I think VENOM directed at underage romantic pairings being glorified by one of the TBB admins in a self-post feels pretty fair. The lack of outrage over a 16yr old with a thousands year old pairing has to be simply due to lack of awareness over the show, right?
Right?
To be fair, Lotor’s pretty fit for his age…
I really feel more hate aimed at the “self-post” than the “underage” thing. Why is is so wrong to post one’s own creations?
It sounds as if there might be some history behind the comments. That Ian has rubbed people the wrong way before, and now people are reacting more to the history, than the post itself…