Takashi "Shiro" Shirogane (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lionhandler) wrote2018-07-12 09:11 pm
lionhandler) wrote2018-07-12 09:11 pm
Entry tags:
Canon update write-up
Player: AF
Character: Takashi "Shiro" Shirogane
Current Canon Point: Season 2, Episode 8
Updated Canon Point: Between Season 2 and Season 3
Updated Background: So, we left off with Shiro learning that Keith is part Galra at the Trials of Marmora. With the issue of Keith's knife resolved, Kolivan agrees to an alliance, and they bring him back to the Castle of Lions to sort out a plan for what they're going to do next. They work out a complicated scheme to isolate Zarkon's ship from the main fleet so they can take him out, but there's a bunch of shit they need to get together in order to make this plan work, so the team splits up.
Shiro goes with Lance and Pidge in the Blue Lion to rescue a genius engineer named Slav who has been imprisoned by the Galra. They infiltrate the facility where Slav is being held easily enough, and it's Shiro who actually finds the dude himself, but actually getting Slav out turns out to be an immensely difficult endeavor, mostly because Slav's intense anxiety and paranoia involving probabilities and alternate realities make him immensely uncooperative in the escape. They do manage to extract him successfully, but by the end of it, Shiro's about this close to just strangling the guy himself.
They meet up with the rest of the team back on the Balmera, where they fight the lizard robeast again because we just had four episodes in a row without any actual Voltron action and that clearly cannot stand, and then they head to Olkarion to get all their shit sorted before launching the big attack. Shiro has a conversation with the team in which he does not outright say that Voltron is two days away from retirement, but he might as well have, honestly.
And so, the attack against Zarkon! Step one is for Shiro to draw him out using himself and the Black Lion as bait. Step two is for the Blade of Marmora's man on the inside, Thace, to disable Zarkon's flagship by uploading a virus into its systems, and that's where the plan starts going wrong. Thace was discovered as a spy and captured before he could carry out his part of the plan, and so Keith volunteers to go in and finish the job himself. Kolivan objects to letting him do something so suicidally dangerous, but after some silent consideration, Shiro gives his blessing, and off Keith goes. Despite Kolivan's reservations about it, it is a success, if not quite how they originally planned it. With the flagship rendered immobile, they use a massive teludav to teleport it away from the rest of its fleet and from there the plan is basically "wreck shit" but of course wrecking shit is never that easy.
While Voltron's slicing the shit out of Zarkon's powerless ship, Haggar uses her magic to fire the komar against Voltron, a weapon designed to suck out an entire planet's quintessence at once. As you can imagine, this is not a remotely pleasant experience. Voltron is rendered inoperable and the Paladins are briefly knocked unconscious. And because that's not nearly shitty enough, out comes Zarkon himself in a giant robot suit all his own, ready to reclaim the Black Lion fucking personally.
The Castle fires on Zarkon to protect Voltron and the Paladins, but he blocks and redirects their fire to disable the Castle itself, and Shiro gives an inspiring speech to get the Paladins to focus their energy and get Voltron running again and back in the fight. But even then, the fight isn't going well for them. Zarkon hits Voltron so hard it separates into its component lions, and Shiro is knocked unconscious again, though at least he's the only one this time. Slowly, he regains consciousness as the other Paladins struggle to keep Zarkon away from him, with an emphasis on the struggling, and his drive to protect his team helps him unlock the power of the Black Lion's full wings, which he uses to phase through Zarkon's mech to nab the black bayard from him.
Voltron reforms and engages in combat with Zarkon again. They stab Zarkon's mech with Voltron's sword, Zarkon grabs Voltron's head (where Shiro is) and pumps it full of electricity, Shiro fights through the pain to use his bayard to activate Voltron's blazing sword, they slice that mech open good and proper, and then Zarkon's mech explodes. Voltron also comes apart in the blast, and as the power is coming back on Zarkon's ship right about now, Allura makes the call to retreat.
Except the other Paladins notice that the Black Lion is powered off and unresponsive, so they tow it back to the ship, and when everybody goes in to check on it, the cockpit's mysteriously empty, Shiro nowhere to be found.
The how and why of this remain unexplained all the way until late in season 6, where we finally learn that the reason for the empty cockpit is because Shiro fucking died. But when he died, the Black Lion held onto his essence, keeping it safe and sound inside its consciousness, colloquially referred to by the fandom as the astral plane, given its appearance of an empty plane full of starry nothingness. I'm taking Shiro from between seasons, so he has time to adjust to this "being dead and stuck in his Lion's magic brainspace" thing but it's still before Keith takes over piloting the Black Lion in his absence.
Updated Personality: You know that feeling where you've got something you have to do, but you're really dreading it and you keep putting it off, and then you finally do it and it's honestly not as bad as you thought it was going to be?
That's basically how Shiro feels about dying.
Basically, he's still mostly the same, but with that off his shoulders, he's a little calmer, a little more at peace. Admittedly, though, some of that's going to be offset by him still actually being in a position to affect things in Emp, so overall the change is small, but. There it is.
Updated Abilities: OK, so, here's the thing: Shiro's dead, but he's not really quite dead. 99% dead. The Black Lion absorbed his essence after he died, leaving him without any sort of physical body, but still mentally a separate entity confined within the astral plane. He's aware of what's going on out in the world but he's wholly incapable of interacting with anything or anyone outside the astral plane.
NOW OBVIOUSLY SUCH A STATE IS COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE FOR RP, so the way I see it, I basically have two options: OPTION ONE is to just play him the same as any other character taken post-death, i.e. basically normal, he just remembers dying, etc., etc. OPTION TWO is to play him as a spoopy purple ghost, drawing on his appearance and the things that happen with him within the astral plane as a guideline, but allowing him to appear and interact outside of the Lion. Here's an itemized list of aspects of how I'd play that and how it's drawn/changed from canon:
-The Black Lion is now the main physical body between the two of them; it's the one wearing the crystal amulet between the two of them, it's the physical center of Shiro's emotional effects. Prior to this update, we had it so Shiro and the Black Lion could be a mile apart before the Black Lion would stop working, but I'd like that reduced to about 100 yds and now when that limit is exceeded, the Black Lion remains operational, but Shiro vanishes, returning to inside the Black Lion where he belongs. The basis on this is, of course, Shiro's canonical state of being part of/trapped within the Black Lion at this point, pretty self-explanatory.
-Shiro has to willfully manifest outside the Black Lion, it's not the default state. By default, he manifests as solid, since he can physically interact with others in the astral plane in canon, but depending on his emotional state, he can end up less solid or even outright disappear. He vanishes on Keith mid-sentence in the astral plane at one point, so that's precedented by canon.
-No body heat or pulse or anything of the sort, which isn't really precedented by canon, but just, like, makes sense and is logically consistent. This also means that his prosthetic hand can still light up, but it doesn't generate any heat, either (unless he's, like, super pissed, as an emotional effect, probably). We know the hand can still light up in the astral plane because he uses it in his fight against Zarkon there, and it doesn't seem to cause any additional lasery damage at that point, but that is also true of his fight against Sendak that took place in normal actual reality, so /SHRUGS
-Shiro appears like this now:
I would like him to be able to change which outfit he manifests in, just because all Paladin armor all the time is kind of awkward and it's not like he can change clothes normally on account of the spoopy ghost thing. This is somewhat supported by canon. We have two separate instances of actually seeing Shiro in the astral plane: his fight with Zarkon and when Keith accesses it in season 6. In the former instance, he's wearing his civvies, just as he is in the real world when it happens, and in the latter, he's in his Paladin armor, just as he was when he died, except he's not wearing his helmet when he was wearing it when he died. Additionally, when he uses the Black Lion's phasing ability to take the black bayard from Zarkon, there's a shot where he's shown passing through Zarkon on the astral plane, and in this shot, he's shown in his civvies despite actually being in his Paladin armor at the time. So I'd call that precedent for Shiro's appearance in the astral plane being influenced by his self-perception.
SO THAT JUST ABOUT COVERS THE SITUATION WITH SHIRO? Worth noting, perhaps, is that this is ultimately all going to be very temporary, as Shiro is brought back to life at the end of season 6, and I intend to update him to or past that point after we get season 7 and see how canon is handling that whole entire mess. Other than that, I am totally willing to answer questions if anything is unclear and if you guys would rather I just played him as normal dead then that is fine, too.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! When I put in the regain for the Black Lion, I noted that it might be capable of teleportation but we weren't sure yet, and you guys understandably said to take that out since it wasn't confirmed. As of season 6, teleportation has been confirmed, so what do you all want me to do about that? Still leave it out or would it be okay with restrictions?
Other: I'm not planning on sending Shiro off to update until the start of August, so there's no rush on these answers; I just figured I'd get this shit in nice and early to give you guys plenty of time to figure out your judgement on it.
Questions: /gestures to that fucking mess of an abilities section
Character: Takashi "Shiro" Shirogane
Current Canon Point: Season 2, Episode 8
Updated Canon Point: Between Season 2 and Season 3
Updated Background: So, we left off with Shiro learning that Keith is part Galra at the Trials of Marmora. With the issue of Keith's knife resolved, Kolivan agrees to an alliance, and they bring him back to the Castle of Lions to sort out a plan for what they're going to do next. They work out a complicated scheme to isolate Zarkon's ship from the main fleet so they can take him out, but there's a bunch of shit they need to get together in order to make this plan work, so the team splits up.
Shiro goes with Lance and Pidge in the Blue Lion to rescue a genius engineer named Slav who has been imprisoned by the Galra. They infiltrate the facility where Slav is being held easily enough, and it's Shiro who actually finds the dude himself, but actually getting Slav out turns out to be an immensely difficult endeavor, mostly because Slav's intense anxiety and paranoia involving probabilities and alternate realities make him immensely uncooperative in the escape. They do manage to extract him successfully, but by the end of it, Shiro's about this close to just strangling the guy himself.
They meet up with the rest of the team back on the Balmera, where they fight the lizard robeast again because we just had four episodes in a row without any actual Voltron action and that clearly cannot stand, and then they head to Olkarion to get all their shit sorted before launching the big attack. Shiro has a conversation with the team in which he does not outright say that Voltron is two days away from retirement, but he might as well have, honestly.
And so, the attack against Zarkon! Step one is for Shiro to draw him out using himself and the Black Lion as bait. Step two is for the Blade of Marmora's man on the inside, Thace, to disable Zarkon's flagship by uploading a virus into its systems, and that's where the plan starts going wrong. Thace was discovered as a spy and captured before he could carry out his part of the plan, and so Keith volunteers to go in and finish the job himself. Kolivan objects to letting him do something so suicidally dangerous, but after some silent consideration, Shiro gives his blessing, and off Keith goes. Despite Kolivan's reservations about it, it is a success, if not quite how they originally planned it. With the flagship rendered immobile, they use a massive teludav to teleport it away from the rest of its fleet and from there the plan is basically "wreck shit" but of course wrecking shit is never that easy.
While Voltron's slicing the shit out of Zarkon's powerless ship, Haggar uses her magic to fire the komar against Voltron, a weapon designed to suck out an entire planet's quintessence at once. As you can imagine, this is not a remotely pleasant experience. Voltron is rendered inoperable and the Paladins are briefly knocked unconscious. And because that's not nearly shitty enough, out comes Zarkon himself in a giant robot suit all his own, ready to reclaim the Black Lion fucking personally.
The Castle fires on Zarkon to protect Voltron and the Paladins, but he blocks and redirects their fire to disable the Castle itself, and Shiro gives an inspiring speech to get the Paladins to focus their energy and get Voltron running again and back in the fight. But even then, the fight isn't going well for them. Zarkon hits Voltron so hard it separates into its component lions, and Shiro is knocked unconscious again, though at least he's the only one this time. Slowly, he regains consciousness as the other Paladins struggle to keep Zarkon away from him, with an emphasis on the struggling, and his drive to protect his team helps him unlock the power of the Black Lion's full wings, which he uses to phase through Zarkon's mech to nab the black bayard from him.
Voltron reforms and engages in combat with Zarkon again. They stab Zarkon's mech with Voltron's sword, Zarkon grabs Voltron's head (where Shiro is) and pumps it full of electricity, Shiro fights through the pain to use his bayard to activate Voltron's blazing sword, they slice that mech open good and proper, and then Zarkon's mech explodes. Voltron also comes apart in the blast, and as the power is coming back on Zarkon's ship right about now, Allura makes the call to retreat.
Except the other Paladins notice that the Black Lion is powered off and unresponsive, so they tow it back to the ship, and when everybody goes in to check on it, the cockpit's mysteriously empty, Shiro nowhere to be found.
The how and why of this remain unexplained all the way until late in season 6, where we finally learn that the reason for the empty cockpit is because Shiro fucking died. But when he died, the Black Lion held onto his essence, keeping it safe and sound inside its consciousness, colloquially referred to by the fandom as the astral plane, given its appearance of an empty plane full of starry nothingness. I'm taking Shiro from between seasons, so he has time to adjust to this "being dead and stuck in his Lion's magic brainspace" thing but it's still before Keith takes over piloting the Black Lion in his absence.
Updated Personality: You know that feeling where you've got something you have to do, but you're really dreading it and you keep putting it off, and then you finally do it and it's honestly not as bad as you thought it was going to be?
That's basically how Shiro feels about dying.
Basically, he's still mostly the same, but with that off his shoulders, he's a little calmer, a little more at peace. Admittedly, though, some of that's going to be offset by him still actually being in a position to affect things in Emp, so overall the change is small, but. There it is.
Updated Abilities: OK, so, here's the thing: Shiro's dead, but he's not really quite dead. 99% dead. The Black Lion absorbed his essence after he died, leaving him without any sort of physical body, but still mentally a separate entity confined within the astral plane. He's aware of what's going on out in the world but he's wholly incapable of interacting with anything or anyone outside the astral plane.
NOW OBVIOUSLY SUCH A STATE IS COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE FOR RP, so the way I see it, I basically have two options: OPTION ONE is to just play him the same as any other character taken post-death, i.e. basically normal, he just remembers dying, etc., etc. OPTION TWO is to play him as a spoopy purple ghost, drawing on his appearance and the things that happen with him within the astral plane as a guideline, but allowing him to appear and interact outside of the Lion. Here's an itemized list of aspects of how I'd play that and how it's drawn/changed from canon:
-The Black Lion is now the main physical body between the two of them; it's the one wearing the crystal amulet between the two of them, it's the physical center of Shiro's emotional effects. Prior to this update, we had it so Shiro and the Black Lion could be a mile apart before the Black Lion would stop working, but I'd like that reduced to about 100 yds and now when that limit is exceeded, the Black Lion remains operational, but Shiro vanishes, returning to inside the Black Lion where he belongs. The basis on this is, of course, Shiro's canonical state of being part of/trapped within the Black Lion at this point, pretty self-explanatory.
-Shiro has to willfully manifest outside the Black Lion, it's not the default state. By default, he manifests as solid, since he can physically interact with others in the astral plane in canon, but depending on his emotional state, he can end up less solid or even outright disappear. He vanishes on Keith mid-sentence in the astral plane at one point, so that's precedented by canon.
-No body heat or pulse or anything of the sort, which isn't really precedented by canon, but just, like, makes sense and is logically consistent. This also means that his prosthetic hand can still light up, but it doesn't generate any heat, either (unless he's, like, super pissed, as an emotional effect, probably). We know the hand can still light up in the astral plane because he uses it in his fight against Zarkon there, and it doesn't seem to cause any additional lasery damage at that point, but that is also true of his fight against Sendak that took place in normal actual reality, so /SHRUGS
-Shiro appears like this now:
I would like him to be able to change which outfit he manifests in, just because all Paladin armor all the time is kind of awkward and it's not like he can change clothes normally on account of the spoopy ghost thing. This is somewhat supported by canon. We have two separate instances of actually seeing Shiro in the astral plane: his fight with Zarkon and when Keith accesses it in season 6. In the former instance, he's wearing his civvies, just as he is in the real world when it happens, and in the latter, he's in his Paladin armor, just as he was when he died, except he's not wearing his helmet when he was wearing it when he died. Additionally, when he uses the Black Lion's phasing ability to take the black bayard from Zarkon, there's a shot where he's shown passing through Zarkon on the astral plane, and in this shot, he's shown in his civvies despite actually being in his Paladin armor at the time. So I'd call that precedent for Shiro's appearance in the astral plane being influenced by his self-perception.
SO THAT JUST ABOUT COVERS THE SITUATION WITH SHIRO? Worth noting, perhaps, is that this is ultimately all going to be very temporary, as Shiro is brought back to life at the end of season 6, and I intend to update him to or past that point after we get season 7 and see how canon is handling that whole entire mess. Other than that, I am totally willing to answer questions if anything is unclear and if you guys would rather I just played him as normal dead then that is fine, too.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! When I put in the regain for the Black Lion, I noted that it might be capable of teleportation but we weren't sure yet, and you guys understandably said to take that out since it wasn't confirmed. As of season 6, teleportation has been confirmed, so what do you all want me to do about that? Still leave it out or would it be okay with restrictions?
Other: I'm not planning on sending Shiro off to update until the start of August, so there's no rush on these answers; I just figured I'd get this shit in nice and early to give you guys plenty of time to figure out your judgement on it.
Questions: /gestures to that fucking mess of an abilities section