my piece for "reunion at dawn", a 5-year anniversary zine for fire emblem three houses :) there were already a couple pieces featuring claude + hilda + lorenz, so I wanted to make something featuring the rest of the illustrious golden deer ^^
can i ask why you ship shirley and lelouch? im a fan of the show and dont have any ships (though i do like him with cc but im not invested in that) but i never see lelouch and shirley shippers, it seems like the fanbase prefers him with cc or kallen. i think if lelouch just stayed as a regular person him and shirley could've gotten together
Hi there, anon! You can absolutely ask but I must warn you, this is going to be long 😂
I ship Lelouch & Shirley mainly for three reasons: the first being their development together (and the sides of Lelouch that Shirley is able to bring out); the second being the meta (and all the ways it implies and foreshadows LuluShir); and the third, their sheer potential and what I felt it could've brought to the story.
First, what I loved most about their development is that Shirley fell for Lelouch because she was intrigued by his thought-process, which lead her to become his friend and fall for him in the process. She fell for him after seeing all of his painfully un-cool sides, and loved him despite finding out he was behind the Zero mask. Her love is as genuine as it can get; and the way she falls for him is ridiculously realistic.
Meanwhile, Lelouch loved Shirley dearly (she's the only one from the StuCo that he brings up in Episode 2, aside from Rivalz, who at that point was set-up as his closest buddy), but he took her for granted and didn't realize that literally everyone around them thought it was only a matter of time before they got together - this, too, is ridiculously realistic in a school setting.
It's only when Shirley makes her feelings clear and that he loses her at the hands of Mao, that Lelouch's own feelings for Shirley come to the forefront. And they bring out what I love best about Lelouch; that deep down, he's just a desperate kid that bit more than he could chew, one that sadly doesn't know how to keep what matters to him safe.
And Shirley is one of the things that matters most to him. We may not see this in the day-to-day scenes where Lelouch is distracted by his big Zero Plans™, but the series never shies away from it when push comes to shove. Shirley is the very first person CC tells Lelouch to keep at arms-lenght so he won't lose her; and Shirley is also the one person Lelouch constantly tries (and fails) to be selfless about. Like erasing her memories just so she will stay away from him and be safe & happy.
And the thing is that, Shirley's dynamic with Lelouch is the only one explicitly romantic from both ends throughout the whole show. You can't watch Lelouch & Shirley's biggest moments and read them platonically because the series didn't write them that way. When Lelouch erases her memories, he hugs her close to him and tells her that if he could do it all over again/if they could be reborn, they should be lovers. Then he waxes lyrical about how her smile saved him and how precious she is to him, all while a love song about Shirley from Lelouch's POV plays in the background. She's also the only one he kisses back. Then in S2, he blurts out that he likes Shirley and when Shirley suggests that he's lying, he denies it in such an emotional way that he takes himself aback. Then he literally sits there, expecting Shirley to kiss him, and looks so nervous that his closed eyelids are shaking. And then blushes up a storm simply because Shirley calls him out on expecting a kiss from her.
This is the same boy that had a semi-naked Kallen fall on-top of him and didn't bat an eyelid. The same guy that sees CC's naked legs every other day and just picks up her discarded boots to tidy up the room. Yet the simple thought of Shirley kissing him makes him turn into a lost, nervous school-boy; and that's what I love most about them and their development. The effect Shirley has on Lelouch and the sides of him she is able to bring out; because I love Lelouch most when he's at his most honest and vulnerable, and I feel like only Shirley, Nunnally and Suzaku are able to get him there.
Secondly, the meta. Look at the scene above, for example; Shirley's dad is explaining to Shirley that one day she'll fall for someone, and as long as that person sincerely loves her, he'll support them with their whole heart. The series literally had Lelouch's own victim step up and clear up that they would support LuluShir, as long as Lelouch sincerely loves Shirley back; and the way the scene was set-up, with precisely that line being heard as we pan to Lelouch, really stood out to me. Because it was clear foreshadowing of the fact that either Lelouch already did or would come to do just that. Otherwise, Shirley's dad's monologue could have simply been about how he would support Shirley's love regardless of who it is, instead of focusing on how he would support it if the love is mutual.
All this to say that, like I mentioned before, Shirley's and Lelouch's dynamic is written in such a way that you can't take the romance out of it. Kallen's with Lelouch remains one-sided throughout the entire show, CC's with Lelouch is fantastic but it reads the same way whether you see them romantically or not. Romance is not an integral part of it; depending on how you look at it, it isn't even a factor. With Shirley, however, it is integral from the beginning up to the very end.
But that's not all, Shirley's dynamic with Lelouch is also a lot about hope and kindness; all of the values Lelouch seeks in the ideal world he wants to build for Nunnally. This is best represented in the episode where Lelouch finally realizes that his happiness has been in Ashford all along, and takes Shirley's wish - of wanting to light fireworks together with everyone - as his own.
The fact that when Shirley dies, Lelouch stops hoping for a happy ending says it all. Just like Euphie represented the hope of a bright, kind, happy future for Suzaku; so did Shirley to Lelouch. And just like Euphie being tragically ripped from Suzaku sealed Suzaku's ending, so did Shirley being ripped away from Lelouch; because it was at this point that Lelouch truly cuts-off Ashford, the happy place he longed to return to.
Similarly, both Euphie and Shirley are at the core of what makes Zero Requiem possible. Euphie, because she didn't tell Suzaku who Zero was (thus showing that she believed in Lelouch despite everything) and Shirley, because she's the one that plants the seed of forgiveness into Suzaku's mind. Euphie and Shirley, with their endless kindness, inspire Suzaku and Lelouch both to make the choices that lead to Zero Requiem.
So essentially, from a meta perspective, I believe Shirley is meant to be to Lelouch what Euphie was to Suzaku. And Euphie was Suzaku's one true love and his hope for a happy ending. She was his biggest tragedy.
The difference is that Suzaku had no other potential ships more popular than himself with Euphie, so Sunrise didn't have any reasons to play it safe. Which sadly wasn't the case with Lelouch and Shirley, and their narrative does suffer greatly from it.
Despite this, Lelouch and Shirley are the only ones to have their own love song (which is, ironically, given to Lelouch & CC in the fanfic movies once Sunrise decided to make them the main romantic ship in that continuity- which once again, says it all) and they're also the ones that get their happy ending in the side-story featuring Lelouch's ideal world, which shows him asking out Shirley to a concert rather than the other way around.
So I feel that the intentions were there, but Sunrise didn't commit to LuluShir the way they committed to SuzaEuphie; which brings me to the third reason I ship Lelouch and Shirley.
I believe that Lelouch and Shirley, their hopes and their tragedy, had the most potential out of any of Lelouch's ships to elevate the show even higher. I do believe that just like Euphie, Shirley was always meant to die because of the effect her death would have on Lelouch; and so he could fully parallel Suzaku. However, I think that if only they had committed to LuluShir the way they did to SuzaEuphie, the tragedy of Shirley's death would have even more impactful.
If Lelouch had been allowed to savor his happy ending after he starts dating Shirley; if he had been genuinely allowed to touch it, however briefly, only to have it ripped away from him - I believe that would've hit the general viewer even harder. If asking ourselves Did Lelouch love Shirley back? weren't necessary at all, Lelouch's loss would've been much more widely felt and that last scene where Lelouch lies dying and Shirley is the first thing to go through his mind would've been much more touching (the montage Lelouch sees as he dies opens with Shirley's smile and closes with his own - the kind of subtle yet extremely telling thing Sunrise pulls with LuluShir throughout R2).
Code Geass could've literally ripped my heart out and stepped on it, but instead they decided to play it safe and just imply LuluShir throughout meta stuff and Lelouch's reactions and commentary here and there; and that sadly didn't do justice to all the potential they had.
The main reason for this, I feel, is that you're absolutely right; the fanbase does indeed prefer him with CC and Kallen, and this has been the case since the beginning. Leaving aside those that genuinely enjoy their dynamics with Lelouch more than Shirley's (which is completely fair), a good part of the fanbase associates Shirley with 'uncool Ashford stuff' while they would rather Lelouch be Zero 100% of the time, so CC and Kallen fit the quota better. The fact that one of them is Lelouch's second-in-command and the other the token fanservice-action-girl of the show also nets them more points than Shirley with the general viewer, who watches Code Geass for the political chess moves and the flashy mecha fights.
Sunrise could've found a way to make the general viewer care more about Shirley, so that her storyline with Lelouch and the role she was meant to play on it could've lived up to their full potential; instead, they chose to leave her on the side-lines until it was time to set Lelouch on his no-happy-ending-in-sight path. Which was, to me, a huge loss of potential.
So when it comes down to it, the last reason I love LuluShir as much as I do is that I see and treasure what it could have been.
I hope this answers your question, anon! Thank you very much for wanting to know my thoughts about this!
Been half playing Metaphor Refantazio recently, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that I needed to paint Rella like a renaissance saint. So here’s that I guess.
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