Idk who else to say this to since nobody else will answer me :( but honestly I feel so queerbaited about Sheith and those god awful antis aren’t helping. I still ship the heck out of them but like.. idk man I’m kinda heartbroken as a gay guy 😔
HOOOOO- As a fellow queer dude, lemme just say I don’t feel queerbaited in the least. Prepare for a long answer that has a lot of tangents but I promise the tangents are important because it defines my journey growing up queer and trans and having a big interest in media representation.
It’s only queer baiting of the creators tease something and then never deliver and even mock lgbt folks for having the audacity to ask for it. It’s why fandom has formed the way it has - fans creating what the creators won’t or will ever be able to do. I was never in the Supernatural fandom but watching from afar, I pitied them. I grew up liking Harry Potter, and while Drarry just didn’t do it for me, I like the open-ended concept of Albus Potter and Scorpius being friends or more. It meant a more open canvas to work out in my brain. Harry Potter as a series is very flawed but fandom back in the day was about just doing your own thing while enjoying the core concepts of a series while ditching the ones you didn’t like, and celebrating when you were validated in seeing the message that creators intended. But I digress.
JDS & LM have promised to fight for LGBT representation, and have explicitly said what they had in mind (real representation that’s meaningful) and hadn’t (space dad and the popularity of kl). So far I’ve trusted them, re-watched the series every time a new season comes up because then I can then take future info into account in the storytelling as well as look for the foreshadowing clues that make sense if you’re a decent/good writer.
If you’ve been watching stuff coming out of Dreamworks Animation and Studio Mir for as long as I’ve studied it, then you’d recognize it like I do, just takes some time is all.
Back when I was 17-18, I got back to watching Avatar because I heard it was a good series and when I was 21-22, Korra was starting to end/ending and the fandom was freaking out but I hadn’t really had the time because I was in college. But I binged on the series during christmas vacation of 2014 and then I was reading articles that the people who worked on Korra were already working on another future project, so then I kept watch on Studio Mir and what they were dishing out, because as I was in the middle of college, I wanted to have a future in media - whether it would be storyboarding in children’s animation, audio engineering, animation or concept art. These are all skills I have and am working on strengthening.
So now to the point of why I don’t feel like I’ve been queerbaited. I can definitively say that growing up and also being autistic (questioning why people acted the way they did), with a fun overdose of heteronormativity (buying into it), I had conflicted emotions of being afab and then frequently hanging out with friends who were also afab and then adoring them so much that I told them they were like sisters to me. In retrospect I realize I was very queer and on top of that I was coming into my self-defined male identity and that while cis men in theory are cute, I liked a lot more than that and honestly I could not be more happy with the layering of how much Keith loves Shiro.
Keith knows that if he’s going to die, Shiro has to know how much he cares, how much he unconditionally loves him, and the most pure form of love is when it’s unconditional and unending. There’s a specific layering in Keith’s words.
Shiro hasn’t stopped pushing trying to kill Keith until he hears Keith’s declaration of his love.
Even when it’s not really “Shiro”, there’s a core part of Shiro and his memories that fights to do good. Kuron up until the last stage of Project Kuron fought for control against Haggar/Honerva at every turn, but this specific declaration of Keith’s feelings for Shiro breaks through to him to cause Shiro to hesitate(a big romance trope called The Power of Love with mind-controlled loved ones),
and it’s a big indicator to what Shiro at his core thinks of Keith, clone or otherwise. “Brother”, didn’t break Kuron but “I love you” did, and it made Kuron beg for Keith to give up fighting because deep down, I don’t think Shiro/Kuron wants to kill Keith because he loves him too, but he was also specific in saying that neither of them are leaving. He says this twice actually.
I have a feeling that while he was working to remove Keith away from the fleet, there was multiple reasons mixed here when he led Keith here specifically, especially if he has faith in him to do what he wants him to do.
1. Destroy all the other clones so Honerva doesn’t ever control another version of him again.
2. Keith kills him if he doesn’t manage to win. Which just leaves more clones to deal with.
3. Keith dies and it’s expected that Kuron is supposed to be expendable because Honerva literally has a bunch of clones right there, so kills himself because he cannot be deprogrammed of being brainwashed and crazy. (And even possibly dying of heartbreak having to take down Keith if he hadn’t confessed at the threat of his life).
4. They all go down together - and that’s it. Honerva wins by killing off two black paladins in one go and still has a bunch of clones laying around at her behest.
Shiro - the black lion was thankfully 5. Which is when Keith mercifully cut off Kuron’s arm, was willing to die with him, and was saved by Shiro who could never have seen any hope of him living a life again. He probably accepted he’d be there in the astral plane for eternity, and who knows if souls fade away there. There’s no telling if Keith’s connection hadn’t been strong enough, he might’ve faded, heck, forgotten what he looked like without a body when you’re just essence floating around. But we got lucky, and considering the lost weight of his right arm, he chose to fall against Keith’s chest, and people wonder if Shiro knows Keith loves him, but I think he does, especially if he had to watch that fight, and also having let Kuron pilot if it meant getting close to Keith again even for a moment. It’s core to Shiro’s being as it is to Keith’s being that they love each other, they are brother’s in arms, Shiro changed Keith’s life and shaped him into the man he is and nothing will change how much they love each other. The layering of my brother and my love only strengthens that love declaration in my honest opinion. Think of it as an art or writing piece. You start with your base, then work in the details that pull it together. My brother is the base. I love you is what holds it together.
My brother is the base. I love you is what holds it together. Beautifully put. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
