Obsessed with ur guys au!!! I really love the way ur writing shiro, is there any more info on him (her? 👀) you'd like to share?
Just in case, I point to Pix's fic Wandering Lord for all the Shiro stuff
The trans Shiro concept came up because Pix specifically wanted to make this meme, but our main trans egg at this point was Nina, and she HAS to be The Fujoshi. So we turn our gazes. Who else is trans...
Bwah I ended up rambling more about Trans People In Fateslandia but there's also Shiro things in here I think!
The fun part about setting parent pairings in stone is thinking about how this affects the kids, which Pix had really taken advantage of for the fic! In a fit of teenage rebellion, Shiro cuts his hair to look more like Scarlet... He starts accessorising like her... Within our beautiful world the Scarlet/Ryoma relationship was drifting apart over parenting differences, meaning that Shiro, in hating his dad, just starts drifting much more into admiring his mom.
So, taking that to the logical extreme... Pix declares that Shiro can be a beautiful butch woman. And I say truthnuke. We already did funny name stuff where Shiro's full name is actually Shinonome (Shiro's jp name) but he's using an alias while traveling, which is simply inherently transgender as well.
The difficulty lies of course in "how much gender stuff is known to this setting and these characters?" My guess is "not a lot". Shiro & Nina would be trans in a modern setting where people are just trans and it's known you can do that, but here... Alas. At the very least we'd have to think more about how genderqueerness could fit into the Fateslandia setting. I still think regularly about a transfem Inigo fic I read once that said transing your gender is the only reason someone would willingly visit a dark mage, and Nohr already has shapeshifter illusion magic, so... Perhaps...
ANYWAY. More about Shiro.
My one thing I wanted, which I probably talked about already somewhere, is trying to recreate the canon dynamic. But it's so Deeprealms specific. And that's where Ryoma being a hands-off parent leaving Shiro to his tutors came from.
Nohr & Hoshido are in an uneasy truce, right. And Ryoma fundamentally believes that truce is one day going to end. That Nohr will return to attempting conquest. And that's how he's been raising Shiro. It ended up being essentially the inverse of canon: from Shiro having no clue about royalty, to Shiro having no clue about the common people.
Another sort of inverted aspect is in a scene that definitely needs more planning: Kana going dragon-mode for the first time. The "main plot" is something we kind of have hammered out the least (hah), but the idea for this scene is very much mirroring ch5 of the Fates prologue. And Shiro is... reverse Sumeragi?
Wanting to see the world n all, we have accidentally turned him into a wandering ronin, and he does not want to be recognized by his relatives (Kiragi. Rhajat already knows.), so he's throwing on a hood and being mysterious.
This means, during the parallel to ch5, we have a mysterious hooded figure showing up to help everybody. This is extremely funny to me.
He also sadly has to promote to Master of Arms in lategame (within the imaginary romhack of our dreams) so he can use the Raijinto, because they need the Omega Yato to defeat Anankos, and Ryoma is not trusting a 11yr old child enough to actually awaken the blade. (Since the awakening of the Yato seems to be very much based on trust. The Raijinto glowing during the Ryoma-chapter of Conquest gets me. It does.)
Perhaps this family can reconcile after there is official peace, what with Shiro becoming friends (...and perhaps something more?) with the Nohrian crown prince. And with the return of Corrin, the true reason for Ryoma's faith in a coming war is over.
Shiro should also 100% do the Knight of Cheve thing with the flower. Where rev Scarlet is like "when something momentous happens we pin a flower to our chests". Because it's cute. Now I'm imagining that Shiro pins a cherry blossom to his chest when he's about to return to Shirasagi alongside everyone...
(He does consider hiring Nina & Asugi to just steal the Raijinto from Ryoma. He really does.)