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shiroics〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Takashi “Shiro” Shirogane
CHARACTER AGE:Legit the most controversial question in the fandom, no exaggeration 25-ish, give or take
SERIES: Voltron: Legendary Defender
CHRONOLOGY: Ported in from the last moments of S02E13, “Blackout
CLASS:Shero
HOUSING: Heropa #014
JOB: Guide at the FIGHT OR FLIGHT WAR MUSEUM
BACKGROUND:
Takashi Shirogane was a prodigiously skilled young pilot -- referred to as a “legend” by many around him -- working as an astronaut for the Galaxy Garrison, a space agency of future Earth. Shiro was on a record-setting mission to Kerberos, the fourth moon of Pluto, with two scientists -- father and son Sam and Matt Holt -- when the crew was abducted by an alien vessel. Despite Shiro’s best efforts to negotiate, the aliens -- representatives of the Galra Empire -- were completely uninterested in making friends and drag them off to prison cells.
One year later, Shiro crash lands back on Earth in a Galra ship. He arrives minus his right hand, and most of his memories of the intervening time; plus a metal prosthetic, a nasty scar across his face, and a Jason Todd-esque White Forelock of Trauma. Taken into custody by the Garrison, he disorientedly tries to convince his superiors that “they” are coming to get something called “Voltron,” but ends up restrained and sedated. Luckily for the universe, he’s almost immediately rescued by Keith, a Garrison dropout with whom Shiro shares some as-yet undisclosed history, and three current students -- Lance, Hunk, and Pidge.
Once Shiro awakens the group compares the clues (and in Keith’s case, possible psychic messaging) that brought them together and sets off through the desert to find Voltron. They find the Blue Lion of Voltron, a sentient spaceship-slash-robot-cat that promptly bonds with Lance and flies them all into space, where it turns out a Galra warship has arrived just as Shiro predicted. The Blue Lion opens a wormhole, and Lance defers to Shiro as senior officer, but Shiro takes a vote: do they go through the wormhole, or not? Since the show is called Voltron: Legendary Defender and not Lance Has a Giant Space Lion and It’s Awesome, they go through the wormhole and arrive on planet Arus.
Arus has been the hiding place of the Castle of Lions, Voltron HQ, for the past 10,000 years, a fact the team discovers when they stumble in and awaken Princess Allura of Altea and her advisor Coran from their extremely long nap. Allura is the daughter of King Alfor, creator and one of the original Paladins of Voltron, a giant humanoid mecha made up of five smaller mecha lions which each have their own pilot. Ten thousand years before, Alfor’s ally Zarkon turned on him in his quest for universal domination. In a bid to keep his extremely powerful weapon out of the hands of Zarkon and the Galra, Alfor split up the lions in different hiding places and sent his daughter and advisor into cryosleep with the last lion and the castle while he went to fight. Sadly, he and every other Altean paid the price with their lives. And as Shiro starts to remember from his capture, Zarkon is still around and ticking, his Galra Empire spans almost the entire known universe, and he’s really pissy that he still can’t find Voltron.
At this point, Allura drafts the humans into being the new Paladins of Voltron, the universe’s last hope for freedom, and assigns them lions based on what she claims are their innate qualities but fandom suspects is actually the clothing colors they were wearing at the time. As the “natural leader” and dude dressed all in black, Shiro is paired with the Black Lion, though he doesn’t get his traditional paladin bayard (a personalized shape-shifting weapon) since the black bayard was “lost” with the previous paladin. Since Black is already in the castle, Shiro heads off to help Pidge and Keith retrieve the Green and Red Lions, respectively. Pidge's retrieval goes without a hitch, but the Red Lion turns out to be on the Galra ship that’s been following them since Earth -- and when they sneak on board, Shiro realizes he’s been imprisoned here before.
Pidge promptly mutinies, wanting to go in search of missing family members Sam and Matt; Shiro suffers a momentary crisis of duty vs conscience but chooses to accompany Pidge, and Keith goes to get his lion alone. Pidge and Shiro don’t find the Holts but do rescue Shiro’s former cellmates, who refer to him as the “Champion.” They get ambushed by Galra drones, and Shiro discovers that a) his prosthetic hand is also an energy weapon, and b) somewhere in the past year he learned incredible fighting skills. The Paladins escape with Keith’s lion, regroup at the castle, and learn to form Voltron just in time to take down the Galra ship.
However, their first victory was a lucky fluke, and while the Alteans try to get the castle(ship) back in working order so they can leave Arus, the Paladins train to work together and with their lions. Shiro is a natural at bonding with Black, able to succeed in expert-level piloting drills within days, but his relationship with Pidge takes a severe blow when the rescued prisoners reveal that he was a slave gladiator, apparently so bloodthirsty that he attacked Pidge’s brother Matt to take his place in a fight. But the full truth is revealed after Haggar, Zarkon’s right-hand witch, sends a Robeast -- a Voltron-sized bio-mechanical monstrosity -- after Voltron. The Robeast is built from one of Shiro’s old opponents, and during the fight he regains enough memory (through a flashback) to help defeat the Robeast and put together what happened with Matt. By injuring his friend too badly to fight in the arena, he pulled a Katniss Everdeen and took his place in a match that would’ve killed the much smaller Matt. Pidge apologizes for doubting Shiro, and Shiro reveals he knows that Pidge, who’s been pulling a Sweet Polly Oliver, is actually Katie Holt, although he keeps quiet about it until Pidge reveals it to rest of the team.
Meanwhile, Sendak and Haxus, commander and lieutenant of the downed Galra ship, survived the battle with a few drones and plot to take the castle. During a celebration with the native Arusians, they successfully set a bomb that almost kills Lance, destroys the castle’s crystal power source, and locks down the lions in their bays. The team is split to deal with the multiple crises that ensue, leaving Shiro alone with Lance when Sendak tries to march his way into the castle. Despite being physically outclassed, Shiro fights Sendak to a stalemate, but Haxus threatens Lance and the two are taken prisoner. Sendak taunts and tortures Shiro before Pidge and several of the others succeed in taking back the castle and imprisoning Sendak in a cryopod.
The castle leaves Arus and succeeds in liberating its first Galra-occupied planet, but Sendak’s takeover has aftereffects -- the Galra power crystal he used to try to hijack the ship corrupts its system and attacks all of Team Voltron in turn. Shiro is alone supervising a memory extraction process on Sendak when the castle gets corrupted. Instead of dealing with malfunctioning gravity or a killer training robot, Shiro is psychologically attacked by a still-sleeping Sendak (or the castle systems using Sendak’s memories, or an auditory hallucination -- look, the whole thing’s a bit trippy), who taunts Shiro into a breakdown by playing on all his worst fears that his imprisonment has broken him and made him into a monster. This doesn’t work out as well for Sendak as he might have hoped, since Shiro’s reaction is to panic, punch his cryopod, and eject said broken crypod into space in this show’s equivalent of the Disney Death. Toodles, Sendak.
After the castle is put to rights, the team infiltrates a Galra transport hub looking for information on Zarkon’s plans. Allura and Shiro manage to sneak onto one of the passing ships but get discovered, and Allura bodily tosses Shiro onto an escape pod, ensuring his safety and her own capture. Distressed and guilt-ridden, Shiro overrides his own caution and orders a rescue mission on Zarkon’s HQ. The team eventually succeeds in extracting Allura, but not before finding out the hard way that the previous Black Paladin was none other than Zarkon himself -- he forcibly splits Voltron with his mind, overrides Shiro’s control of the Black Lion and ejects him, then fights Keith in the Red Lion and almost kills him despite being armed with only the black bayard. Meanwhile, Shiro cuts his way into the flagship and is set upon by Haggar, who plays a few more mind games and injures him before Hunk and Allura come to his rescue and get him back to his lion. The team makes a narrow escape, but not before Haggar uses her magic to corrupt their wormhole, scattering the team across the universe.
Shiro and Keith crash onto the same desolate planet, where their lions are unresponsive and Shiro, still injured and lucky as always, is promptly set upon by a pack of giant lizard-wolves. Keith comes to Shiro’s rescue just in time with the help of the Black Lion. After Shiro’s experiences at Zarkon’s HQ, this unwittingly reinforces his belief that his bond with his lion is weak and that he’s not strong enough to live out the war with the Galra. From this point on he starts grooming Keith to take over after his death, without discussing it with the rest of the team.
Upon return to the castle, Shiro goes straight into a crypod for healing, and pops out having remembered his escape--he didn’t break out on his own but was rescued by Ulaz, a Galra who told him to recover the Blue Lion from Earth and then meet Ulaz at coordinates he coded into Shiro’s prosthetic arm. (It’s also revealed that Shiro lost his memories when he hit his head in the escape pod.) Over the objections of the rest of the team, who worry about a trap, Shiro orders them to rendezvous with Ulaz, who it turns out is part of a Galran rebel group called the Blade of Marmora. Ulaz wants the Blade and Voltron to work together. Contrary to Shiro’s own fears about his past, Ulaz speaks of Shiro as a “fighter and a leader who brings hope,” but before he can fill in the gaps the group is attacked by another Robeast who’d tracked them to Ulaz’s base. Ulaz gives team Voltron the coordinates to the Blade’s main HQ, then sacrifices his life to destroy the Robeast, leaving Shiro grief-stricken and bereft of answers.
Zarkon’s forces continue to track the exhausted team over several episodes, but it’s not until Keith and Allura run away to try and lead them off, then get rescued by the Red Lion, that they figure out how -- the paladin-lion bond is strong enough to hold out over light-years, and Zarkon can find them through his lingering connection to the Black Lion. Shiro goes to Black to work on strengthening their bond, which turns into a metaphysical field trip as Black shows him memories of the distant past and their history with Zarkon. The fun sharing times are interrupted by present-day Zarkon, who drags Shiro onto the astral plane and proceeds to duel him to the death. Zarkon almost kills Shiro then and there. But because Zarkon thinks of Black as a tool (an object, not an asshole), and Shiro as a partner, Black punts Zarkon back into his body and affirms Shiro as their true paladin.
Now that Voltron can no longer be tracked, the team heads the Blade HQ, where two new wrinkles appear: 1) Kolivan, leader of the Blades, is a tool (an asshole, not an object); 2) Keith owns and has apparently always owned one of the Blades’ mystical...er, blades. A tense situation escalates until Keith is fighting in a life-or-death initiation trial and Shiro is forced to watch. As part of the trial, Keith is given visions, starting a visit from the person he wants to see most, aka Shiro. Vision Shiro is also a tool and rejects Keith for supposedly choosing his need for answers about his past over Voltron; Real Shiro gets fed up and goes to Keith’s rescue, but before he can try fighting their way out Keith passes his trial by turning his mystical blade into a mystical sword -- which he can only do if he has Galra heritage. Shiro and Keith return to the castle with the Blade as their allies, but despite Shiro’s unwavering support the revelation of Keith’s heritage causes some friction with the rest of the team, particularly Allura.
With the help of the Blade, a many-armed engineer named Slav, and two of the planets Voltron has liberated so far, the team comes up with a plan to lure Zarkon into the open with the Black Lion, take out his fleet with a virus placed by a Blade saboteur, separate the flagship with a super-sized wormhole, and take down the Emperor for good while he’s completely cut off from reinforcements. Though Shiro shows some trepidation at the idea of retiring from defending the universe, the team is nervous but confident.
Naturally, things immediately start to go wrong -- the virus and wormhole both nearly fail, Haggar uses a magic-boosting machine to suck the quintessence/life force out of Voltron, Allura almost destroys the castle protecting them, Zarkon has a giant Voltron-sized mecha and is still able to mentally force Voltron apart. At the eleventh hour, Shiro levels up in his bond with Black and unlocks their reality phasing powers (complete with cool mecha wings), phases through Zarkon’s mecha and reclaims the black bayard right out of his hand. The team forms Voltron one last time, and Shiro uses his bayard to turn Keith’s sword to a Blazing Sword (capitals required, apparently) which cuts through Zarkon’s mecha and puts him in a coma. Unfortunately, Shiro also drops out of contact, and when the team gets his lion open, he’s disappeared right out of the cockpit, leaving only his bayard behind.
The end?? Not really, there are at least five more seasons. But that’s where we leave off for now!
PERSONALITY:
According to Allura, the Black Paladin is a “born leader and in control at all times, someone whose men will follow without hesitation,” and that description fits Shiro to a tee. Reserved but charismatic, Shiro is quick to take the initiative in a crisis and equally quick to offer help to anyone who needs it, even at his own expense. He’s confident and assumes responsibility reflexively, to the point where even Allura and Coran have deferred to him a few times, but his preferred leadership style is from the back: he supports his team through affirmation, encourages consensus-building and likes to hear the ideas and opinions of the team before making a final decision. Shiro is gentle, wryly affectionate, and stealthily dorky, a bastion of integrity who’s quietly but passionately committed to his calling as a defender of the universe and makes Chris Evans’ Twitter persona look like the Red Skull. One of the fastest ways to enrage him is to put him face to face with a leader who is corrupt or exploitative, like Zarkon himself or Lubos, the Olkari king who sacrificed his people for his own personal gain.
Shiro holds so strongly to his idealism in direct defiance of the cruelty he’s seen and experienced at the hands of the Galra, and his deepest fear is that this cruelty has seeped into Shiro himself. However easygoing he is as a team leader and mentor, in battle Shiro is calculating and ruthless, willing to risk giving the enemy a shot at his throat if he can get a shot at theirs first.
As a legacy of his imprisonment, Shiro is hypervigilant, has yet to be seen relaxing for longer than thirty seconds, and gets anxious to the point of being hostile when without backup in a situation outside of his control. In the first season in particular he freezes up when something in the present triggers one of his buried memories; while this post-traumatic response seems to have eased up somewhat in the second season, he continues to be plagued by the gap in his memories and whatever acts he might have committed in that time.
Though he can’t remember being Champion of the Galra gladiator arenas, he’s very aware that to be undefeated means that he must have, at some point, chosen his own life over that of other prisoners, and that persistent sense of guilt and fatalism means he struggles to let himself rely on the other paladins as much as he trains them to rely on himself and each other. He only lets himself be truly vulnerable around Keith, whom he was close to before the Kerberos mission, and even with Keith he doesn’t so much confide his fears so much as simply allow him to see that he’s hurting.
On some level Shiro believes himself fundamentally damaged and beyond hope for a better personal future. The best contribution he can make to the welfare of the universe is to be the best placeholder leader he can be while getting Keith ready to replace and surpass him when he inevitably falls.
POWER:
Shiro’s prosthetic right arm gives him super strength in that limb, enough that he can toss a large Galra commander (several times the mass of an average human) like a baseball with seemingly minimal effort. With a mental command he can activate his hand as an energy weapon; it lights up purple, and becomes strong enough for him to punch clean through Galra robotic drones, or cut through spaceship hulls using his hand as a blade. The arm also has some data storage capacity and enables Shiro to power up and interface with Galra technology.
Shiro’s paladin armor is a battlesuit and spacesuit in one. It has a built in oxygen supply, a jetpack, a grappling line, and a comms device, and is flexible enough to Shiro to parkour around as he pleases. It’s strong, but not impregnable; think Star Wars stormtrooper armor, not an Iron Man suit.
His third power slot is empty for now, pending further reveals in canon, or my deciding to screw with him.
CHARACTER NAME: Takashi “Shiro” Shirogane
CHARACTER AGE:
SERIES: Voltron: Legendary Defender
CHRONOLOGY: Ported in from the last moments of S02E13, “Blackout
CLASS:
HOUSING: Heropa #014
JOB: Guide at the FIGHT OR FLIGHT WAR MUSEUM
BACKGROUND:
Takashi Shirogane was a prodigiously skilled young pilot -- referred to as a “legend” by many around him -- working as an astronaut for the Galaxy Garrison, a space agency of future Earth. Shiro was on a record-setting mission to Kerberos, the fourth moon of Pluto, with two scientists -- father and son Sam and Matt Holt -- when the crew was abducted by an alien vessel. Despite Shiro’s best efforts to negotiate, the aliens -- representatives of the Galra Empire -- were completely uninterested in making friends and drag them off to prison cells.
One year later, Shiro crash lands back on Earth in a Galra ship. He arrives minus his right hand, and most of his memories of the intervening time; plus a metal prosthetic, a nasty scar across his face, and a Jason Todd-esque White Forelock of Trauma. Taken into custody by the Garrison, he disorientedly tries to convince his superiors that “they” are coming to get something called “Voltron,” but ends up restrained and sedated. Luckily for the universe, he’s almost immediately rescued by Keith, a Garrison dropout with whom Shiro shares some as-yet undisclosed history, and three current students -- Lance, Hunk, and Pidge.
Once Shiro awakens the group compares the clues (and in Keith’s case, possible psychic messaging) that brought them together and sets off through the desert to find Voltron. They find the Blue Lion of Voltron, a sentient spaceship-slash-robot-cat that promptly bonds with Lance and flies them all into space, where it turns out a Galra warship has arrived just as Shiro predicted. The Blue Lion opens a wormhole, and Lance defers to Shiro as senior officer, but Shiro takes a vote: do they go through the wormhole, or not? Since the show is called Voltron: Legendary Defender and not Lance Has a Giant Space Lion and It’s Awesome, they go through the wormhole and arrive on planet Arus.
Arus has been the hiding place of the Castle of Lions, Voltron HQ, for the past 10,000 years, a fact the team discovers when they stumble in and awaken Princess Allura of Altea and her advisor Coran from their extremely long nap. Allura is the daughter of King Alfor, creator and one of the original Paladins of Voltron, a giant humanoid mecha made up of five smaller mecha lions which each have their own pilot. Ten thousand years before, Alfor’s ally Zarkon turned on him in his quest for universal domination. In a bid to keep his extremely powerful weapon out of the hands of Zarkon and the Galra, Alfor split up the lions in different hiding places and sent his daughter and advisor into cryosleep with the last lion and the castle while he went to fight. Sadly, he and every other Altean paid the price with their lives. And as Shiro starts to remember from his capture, Zarkon is still around and ticking, his Galra Empire spans almost the entire known universe, and he’s really pissy that he still can’t find Voltron.
At this point, Allura drafts the humans into being the new Paladins of Voltron, the universe’s last hope for freedom, and assigns them lions based on what she claims are their innate qualities but fandom suspects is actually the clothing colors they were wearing at the time. As the “natural leader” and dude dressed all in black, Shiro is paired with the Black Lion, though he doesn’t get his traditional paladin bayard (a personalized shape-shifting weapon) since the black bayard was “lost” with the previous paladin. Since Black is already in the castle, Shiro heads off to help Pidge and Keith retrieve the Green and Red Lions, respectively. Pidge's retrieval goes without a hitch, but the Red Lion turns out to be on the Galra ship that’s been following them since Earth -- and when they sneak on board, Shiro realizes he’s been imprisoned here before.
Pidge promptly mutinies, wanting to go in search of missing family members Sam and Matt; Shiro suffers a momentary crisis of duty vs conscience but chooses to accompany Pidge, and Keith goes to get his lion alone. Pidge and Shiro don’t find the Holts but do rescue Shiro’s former cellmates, who refer to him as the “Champion.” They get ambushed by Galra drones, and Shiro discovers that a) his prosthetic hand is also an energy weapon, and b) somewhere in the past year he learned incredible fighting skills. The Paladins escape with Keith’s lion, regroup at the castle, and learn to form Voltron just in time to take down the Galra ship.
However, their first victory was a lucky fluke, and while the Alteans try to get the castle(ship) back in working order so they can leave Arus, the Paladins train to work together and with their lions. Shiro is a natural at bonding with Black, able to succeed in expert-level piloting drills within days, but his relationship with Pidge takes a severe blow when the rescued prisoners reveal that he was a slave gladiator, apparently so bloodthirsty that he attacked Pidge’s brother Matt to take his place in a fight. But the full truth is revealed after Haggar, Zarkon’s right-hand witch, sends a Robeast -- a Voltron-sized bio-mechanical monstrosity -- after Voltron. The Robeast is built from one of Shiro’s old opponents, and during the fight he regains enough memory (through a flashback) to help defeat the Robeast and put together what happened with Matt. By injuring his friend too badly to fight in the arena, he pulled a Katniss Everdeen and took his place in a match that would’ve killed the much smaller Matt. Pidge apologizes for doubting Shiro, and Shiro reveals he knows that Pidge, who’s been pulling a Sweet Polly Oliver, is actually Katie Holt, although he keeps quiet about it until Pidge reveals it to rest of the team.
Meanwhile, Sendak and Haxus, commander and lieutenant of the downed Galra ship, survived the battle with a few drones and plot to take the castle. During a celebration with the native Arusians, they successfully set a bomb that almost kills Lance, destroys the castle’s crystal power source, and locks down the lions in their bays. The team is split to deal with the multiple crises that ensue, leaving Shiro alone with Lance when Sendak tries to march his way into the castle. Despite being physically outclassed, Shiro fights Sendak to a stalemate, but Haxus threatens Lance and the two are taken prisoner. Sendak taunts and tortures Shiro before Pidge and several of the others succeed in taking back the castle and imprisoning Sendak in a cryopod.
The castle leaves Arus and succeeds in liberating its first Galra-occupied planet, but Sendak’s takeover has aftereffects -- the Galra power crystal he used to try to hijack the ship corrupts its system and attacks all of Team Voltron in turn. Shiro is alone supervising a memory extraction process on Sendak when the castle gets corrupted. Instead of dealing with malfunctioning gravity or a killer training robot, Shiro is psychologically attacked by a still-sleeping Sendak (or the castle systems using Sendak’s memories, or an auditory hallucination -- look, the whole thing’s a bit trippy), who taunts Shiro into a breakdown by playing on all his worst fears that his imprisonment has broken him and made him into a monster. This doesn’t work out as well for Sendak as he might have hoped, since Shiro’s reaction is to panic, punch his cryopod, and eject said broken crypod into space in this show’s equivalent of the Disney Death. Toodles, Sendak.
After the castle is put to rights, the team infiltrates a Galra transport hub looking for information on Zarkon’s plans. Allura and Shiro manage to sneak onto one of the passing ships but get discovered, and Allura bodily tosses Shiro onto an escape pod, ensuring his safety and her own capture. Distressed and guilt-ridden, Shiro overrides his own caution and orders a rescue mission on Zarkon’s HQ. The team eventually succeeds in extracting Allura, but not before finding out the hard way that the previous Black Paladin was none other than Zarkon himself -- he forcibly splits Voltron with his mind, overrides Shiro’s control of the Black Lion and ejects him, then fights Keith in the Red Lion and almost kills him despite being armed with only the black bayard. Meanwhile, Shiro cuts his way into the flagship and is set upon by Haggar, who plays a few more mind games and injures him before Hunk and Allura come to his rescue and get him back to his lion. The team makes a narrow escape, but not before Haggar uses her magic to corrupt their wormhole, scattering the team across the universe.
Shiro and Keith crash onto the same desolate planet, where their lions are unresponsive and Shiro, still injured and lucky as always, is promptly set upon by a pack of giant lizard-wolves. Keith comes to Shiro’s rescue just in time with the help of the Black Lion. After Shiro’s experiences at Zarkon’s HQ, this unwittingly reinforces his belief that his bond with his lion is weak and that he’s not strong enough to live out the war with the Galra. From this point on he starts grooming Keith to take over after his death, without discussing it with the rest of the team.
Upon return to the castle, Shiro goes straight into a crypod for healing, and pops out having remembered his escape--he didn’t break out on his own but was rescued by Ulaz, a Galra who told him to recover the Blue Lion from Earth and then meet Ulaz at coordinates he coded into Shiro’s prosthetic arm. (It’s also revealed that Shiro lost his memories when he hit his head in the escape pod.) Over the objections of the rest of the team, who worry about a trap, Shiro orders them to rendezvous with Ulaz, who it turns out is part of a Galran rebel group called the Blade of Marmora. Ulaz wants the Blade and Voltron to work together. Contrary to Shiro’s own fears about his past, Ulaz speaks of Shiro as a “fighter and a leader who brings hope,” but before he can fill in the gaps the group is attacked by another Robeast who’d tracked them to Ulaz’s base. Ulaz gives team Voltron the coordinates to the Blade’s main HQ, then sacrifices his life to destroy the Robeast, leaving Shiro grief-stricken and bereft of answers.
Zarkon’s forces continue to track the exhausted team over several episodes, but it’s not until Keith and Allura run away to try and lead them off, then get rescued by the Red Lion, that they figure out how -- the paladin-lion bond is strong enough to hold out over light-years, and Zarkon can find them through his lingering connection to the Black Lion. Shiro goes to Black to work on strengthening their bond, which turns into a metaphysical field trip as Black shows him memories of the distant past and their history with Zarkon. The fun sharing times are interrupted by present-day Zarkon, who drags Shiro onto the astral plane and proceeds to duel him to the death. Zarkon almost kills Shiro then and there. But because Zarkon thinks of Black as a tool (an object, not an asshole), and Shiro as a partner, Black punts Zarkon back into his body and affirms Shiro as their true paladin.
Now that Voltron can no longer be tracked, the team heads the Blade HQ, where two new wrinkles appear: 1) Kolivan, leader of the Blades, is a tool (an asshole, not an object); 2) Keith owns and has apparently always owned one of the Blades’ mystical...er, blades. A tense situation escalates until Keith is fighting in a life-or-death initiation trial and Shiro is forced to watch. As part of the trial, Keith is given visions, starting a visit from the person he wants to see most, aka Shiro. Vision Shiro is also a tool and rejects Keith for supposedly choosing his need for answers about his past over Voltron; Real Shiro gets fed up and goes to Keith’s rescue, but before he can try fighting their way out Keith passes his trial by turning his mystical blade into a mystical sword -- which he can only do if he has Galra heritage. Shiro and Keith return to the castle with the Blade as their allies, but despite Shiro’s unwavering support the revelation of Keith’s heritage causes some friction with the rest of the team, particularly Allura.
With the help of the Blade, a many-armed engineer named Slav, and two of the planets Voltron has liberated so far, the team comes up with a plan to lure Zarkon into the open with the Black Lion, take out his fleet with a virus placed by a Blade saboteur, separate the flagship with a super-sized wormhole, and take down the Emperor for good while he’s completely cut off from reinforcements. Though Shiro shows some trepidation at the idea of retiring from defending the universe, the team is nervous but confident.
Naturally, things immediately start to go wrong -- the virus and wormhole both nearly fail, Haggar uses a magic-boosting machine to suck the quintessence/life force out of Voltron, Allura almost destroys the castle protecting them, Zarkon has a giant Voltron-sized mecha and is still able to mentally force Voltron apart. At the eleventh hour, Shiro levels up in his bond with Black and unlocks their reality phasing powers (complete with cool mecha wings), phases through Zarkon’s mecha and reclaims the black bayard right out of his hand. The team forms Voltron one last time, and Shiro uses his bayard to turn Keith’s sword to a Blazing Sword (capitals required, apparently) which cuts through Zarkon’s mecha and puts him in a coma. Unfortunately, Shiro also drops out of contact, and when the team gets his lion open, he’s disappeared right out of the cockpit, leaving only his bayard behind.
The end?? Not really, there are at least five more seasons. But that’s where we leave off for now!
PERSONALITY:
According to Allura, the Black Paladin is a “born leader and in control at all times, someone whose men will follow without hesitation,” and that description fits Shiro to a tee. Reserved but charismatic, Shiro is quick to take the initiative in a crisis and equally quick to offer help to anyone who needs it, even at his own expense. He’s confident and assumes responsibility reflexively, to the point where even Allura and Coran have deferred to him a few times, but his preferred leadership style is from the back: he supports his team through affirmation, encourages consensus-building and likes to hear the ideas and opinions of the team before making a final decision. Shiro is gentle, wryly affectionate, and stealthily dorky, a bastion of integrity who’s quietly but passionately committed to his calling as a defender of the universe and makes Chris Evans’ Twitter persona look like the Red Skull. One of the fastest ways to enrage him is to put him face to face with a leader who is corrupt or exploitative, like Zarkon himself or Lubos, the Olkari king who sacrificed his people for his own personal gain.
Shiro holds so strongly to his idealism in direct defiance of the cruelty he’s seen and experienced at the hands of the Galra, and his deepest fear is that this cruelty has seeped into Shiro himself. However easygoing he is as a team leader and mentor, in battle Shiro is calculating and ruthless, willing to risk giving the enemy a shot at his throat if he can get a shot at theirs first.
As a legacy of his imprisonment, Shiro is hypervigilant, has yet to be seen relaxing for longer than thirty seconds, and gets anxious to the point of being hostile when without backup in a situation outside of his control. In the first season in particular he freezes up when something in the present triggers one of his buried memories; while this post-traumatic response seems to have eased up somewhat in the second season, he continues to be plagued by the gap in his memories and whatever acts he might have committed in that time.
Though he can’t remember being Champion of the Galra gladiator arenas, he’s very aware that to be undefeated means that he must have, at some point, chosen his own life over that of other prisoners, and that persistent sense of guilt and fatalism means he struggles to let himself rely on the other paladins as much as he trains them to rely on himself and each other. He only lets himself be truly vulnerable around Keith, whom he was close to before the Kerberos mission, and even with Keith he doesn’t so much confide his fears so much as simply allow him to see that he’s hurting.
On some level Shiro believes himself fundamentally damaged and beyond hope for a better personal future. The best contribution he can make to the welfare of the universe is to be the best placeholder leader he can be while getting Keith ready to replace and surpass him when he inevitably falls.
POWER:
Shiro’s prosthetic right arm gives him super strength in that limb, enough that he can toss a large Galra commander (several times the mass of an average human) like a baseball with seemingly minimal effort. With a mental command he can activate his hand as an energy weapon; it lights up purple, and becomes strong enough for him to punch clean through Galra robotic drones, or cut through spaceship hulls using his hand as a blade. The arm also has some data storage capacity and enables Shiro to power up and interface with Galra technology.
Shiro’s paladin armor is a battlesuit and spacesuit in one. It has a built in oxygen supply, a jetpack, a grappling line, and a comms device, and is flexible enough to Shiro to parkour around as he pleases. It’s strong, but not impregnable; think Star Wars stormtrooper armor, not an Iron Man suit.
His third power slot is empty for now, pending further reveals in canon, or my deciding to screw with him.
