#something something blue amplifying spirits so they’re visible enough to be noted something something blue seeing her true love

[madtangledblues]

lesbian visibility week aligning with st mark’s eve….. trcsbians win

[ganymedesclock]

What do you think the difference(s) between Kuron and Shiro are/were? Idk if you've discussed it before, but it'd be cool to see your take on it.

So my two cents honestly haven’t changed much since where they started in s3e5 when Ryou first showed up. (And I’m obstinate about not calling him Kuron- that’s not who he is that’s what Haggar did to him.)

That is to say: Shiro and Ryou are identical people. The one thing Josh Keaton says in his depiction of Ryou is that Ryou is a little shorter-tempered and impatient, and that’s not a difference of character.

Ryou is effectively just an exact duplicate of Shiro who was retraumatized where he felt safe and has a long, growing fear that he can’t trust his own thoughts and feelings. We’ve got abundant evidence before the switch from Shiro to Ryou that getting snappy and belligerent is Shiro’s stress response. 

S2e10 is one example, and it’s not because Slav is supposed to be abnormally annoying- remember, we don’t see anybody else lose their cool with Slav anywhere near the magnitude Shiro does. Other people can be at worst a little flustered or exasperated with Slav being overly intrusive in his curiosity, finicky or doing things that don’t make that much sense from the outside perspective (hitting the teludav with a rock) but both Lance and Pidge completely gape at Shiro when he loses it on Slav in s2e11.

And we’ve seen Shiro plenty pushy about his way before. For most of s2 he was bashing ahead on working with the Blade of Marmora and repeatedly pushing Allura on the subject whether or not she was comfortable. The only reason Shiro didn’t then take the route he did in s5e4 was because Allura caved and agreed to meet Ulaz and then his organization. If she’d refused either in s2e3 or s2e8, I would bet good money that just like in s5e4, Shiro would eventually walk out of the conversation and some time later, the Black Lion would conveniently go missing.

Shiro is characterized through the virtues of the Black Paladin as being a force of personality. Part of that is charisma, but here’s the thing about a natural leader- they’re a “natural leader” when you agree with them. When you don’t, they’re horribly bossy and stubborn.

If you’re a person who naturally and quickly takes charge of situations, that’s who you are. You don’t somehow become automatically patient and understanding in the face of setbacks when, from your perspective, there’s an obvious solution right there that just needs people to listen to you like usual and do what you tell them and it’ll help everyone.

This is not to say Shiro’s a bad or unsympathetic person- or even that he consistently lacks patience! But Shiro’s patience and empathy has to fight that Black Paladin strength of will and calculating mind- there’s a reason he focuses so much on the importance of patience and remind both himself and others that people aren’t obligated to follow if they don’t need to.

There’s a reason Shiro takes people like Lubos and Zarkon who abuse their followers’ trust and reverence for personal gain, so incredibly personally. Because if he chose to just give in, become impatient and forceful, that’s a person he could become. It isn’t, because that’s consistently how he chooses not to be.

For my intents and purposes, I consider Shiro and Ryou as interchangeable people. I don’t believe we witnessed anything that would really fundamentally set one as separate from the other. You have to remember that Ryou had Shiro’s memories- all of them- and plenty of time to dwell on those memories. Ryou, also, like Shiro, is a Black Paladin in that exact same vein, which means he’d spend a lot of time thinking very hard and poking at those memories.

If there was an inconsistency in Ryou’s personality to Shiro’s, if there was something other than “Ryou is snappier on account of being under greater stress and to a greater degree than his predecessor, afraid of himself” thumping away under the hood, Ryou would notice. He would see the inconsistency in the memories that he thought were his own, he’d come to the alarming conclusion that he can’t understand why his past self made the decisions he did.

Ryou doesn’t notice- and neither does anyone else around him, including Keith, who knew Shiro for years. The only time Ryou confesses he doesn’t feel like himself, he’s obviously not talking about the normal “oddity” of being a duplicate of Shiro that he’s been used to for months now. He’s talking about the negative symptoms of Haggar’s power over him.

It’s also worth noting that during the same span of time, the few times we see disembodied Shiro and Ryou reacting to similar stimuli, they mirror each other. In s5e3, Shiro tries to warn Lance- Lance brings it up to Ryou, not realizing the distinction, and Ryou’s response is not to blow it off or dismiss it, but confess that something strange happened and he’s not certain. And Ryou gives Lance his own S.O.S. in s5e6 afterwards, with very similar tonality.

Furthermore, we have to remember that the only reason Shiro appeared to Lance at all was because Ryou functionally acted as his accomplice and set him up- it was Ryou that socketed the Black Bayard which “boosted” Shiro’s wayward spirit strong enough to let him try to communicate with Lance. Which, that in particular is interesting to me, because it would seem to imply on a soul level, Shiro and Ryou are the same person.

After all, Ryou became a paladin in s4e1. Black chose to trust him. And we have to consider in s5e3, Lance socketing the Red Bayard didn’t boost Keith into the astral plane. So the bayards don’t boost their “true” original wielder- they boost their current holder.

At the time of s5e3, that current holder was Ryou. Logically, Ryou should have appeared in the astral field.

He didn’t. Original Shiro did.

The one time Ryou’s essence was projected into the Black Lion, it didn’t manifest separately from Shiro, but rather, amplified and strengthened Shiro himself.

The kicker here? The only way you can tell Ryou and Shiro apart in their paladin armor is by looking at their hair. Unlike when Shiro talks to Keith in s6e6, where his head is clearly visible... the Shiro we see in s5e3 has his head obscured.

Yes, original Shiro takes credit for it- he says that he was trying to warn Lance that he’d been switched out. But I don’t think he was exactly alone.

Because again- logically since Lance was projected into the field by the red bayard but not Keith, and Allura being able to enter the field by the blue bayard- Ryou should be here. And Ryou, recalling, says that everything “went black” when he socketed the bayard, which would sure imply he went somewhere.

I think, without realizing it, original Shiro temporarily absorbed Ryou in that scene. Lance wasn’t just talking to the disembodied s1-s2 Shiro.

This would give us a precedent for s6e7 and what seems to have happened with white-haired Shiro, and, thus, my thesis of this entire post:

Ryou and Shiro, on a soul level, are so similar that they can merge into a single cohesive person without even realizing the difference. 

This is why I don’t tag Ryou as his own character, incidentally- and something that kept me away from clone theory for a long time, because while I was ambivalent to the idea that it wasn’t the same Shiro, I deeply detested the angle which was commonly taken with it- where people acted as if traits Shiro’s consistently exhibited all along are somehow wildly different in Ryou when they’re. not, really.

TL;DR in my honest opinion, Ryou is just a version of Shiro under very specific stresses that make him slightly snappier and this is the only functional difference.