#also i wasnt trying to offend anyone French or Japanese

[gay-jesus-probably]

so i’ve already done a well recieved text post on some actual facts about takashi shirogane and the entire thing is mostly joking but also completely my headcanons forever

but i figured in honour of season three just kidding i’ve been up all night reading voltron fanfiction havent gotten around to watching S3 yet so here some shiro headcanons that are actually my legit take on his life pre-kerberos

he’s only a partial american citizen. as a teenager, he was a japanese citizen with a school visa to attend the garrison, and after graduating he very easily recieved a work visa, but eventually for conveniences sake reluctantly went for partial citizenship once things started getting serious. he’s not happy about it. he’s in america for the space, he’s not a fan of the country as a whole.

and on the same note, due to being an american and japanese citizen, during the early stages of the kerberos mission set up (like years before launch) the publicity team initially tried to label him as an american astronaut. the second he found out, shiro very firmly demanded that everything related to him be marked with japans flag, not americas, thank you very much.

and again on that note, due to being the sole pilot of the furthest space mission ever, and doing it as a japanese astronaut, shiro met the prime minister of japan once. if there wasnt pictures of him with the prime minister, shiro probably would have convinced himself it wasnt real.

his first language was japanese, obviously. he learned how to read at about three, due to his parents reading to him literally every night, and also him being a genius. he didn’t give the faintest hint of a fuck about other languages, until he realised he wanted to join the galaxy garrison, at which point he went oh shit it’s only in english there, and started studying english like a madman. and spanish, because america’s got two official languages and you never know. and french and russian, because canada and russia are the other major players in space, and you can never be too careful.

mind you he learned these all in a purely academic setting as a teenager, so while he was fluent in all of them by the time he was old enough for the garrison, he was unpleasantly surprised to find that everyone used too much slang and contractions, and he was speaking in a very stilted and mechanical way with a hell of an accent. it took him about a year to get his english to a natural level, and he put up with harrasment for years until he managed to completely scrub out his accent. as a result, the majority of his friends at the garrison were other ESL students from overseas. he still kept every single one of his electronics set to japanese, and when tired, distracted or stressed, if someone tries to talk to him he is much more likely to respond in japanese without noticing. any time he’s returning from a trip home to visit his family, for the first week he starts every other sentence in rapid japanese, stops halfway through, thinks it over, and repeats himself in slower english. its rough to switch over.

he started going by shiro because in his first year, luck of the draw meant he was the only non-american in his astrophysics class, and the instructor was one who believed in groupwork and lots of it, so within a month everyone was acquaintances. there was mass confusion about if shiro’s name was shirogane or takashi, and attempts to explain made it worse. the matter was not helped by this being first year, and shiro not having the best grasp on conversational english. eventually he gave up and just told them all to call him shiro, because just shirogane sounded weird when everyone else went by their first names, and people kept pronouncing takashi weird so he gave up and took a nickname. it grew on him and he stuck with it.

while the garrison had the most international students out of any school in america, it was still very much a predominantly american school with 60% of the students being american. another 20% were canadian, british or australian. white native english speakers were a vast majority, and shiro had to deal with some racists. the racists he honestly didnt mind too much, because he could just physically drag them to an instructor he knew was sympathetic, explain what happened, and boom problem solved. what he absoloutely fucking hated were the weeaboos. he hated them. hated them so much. as a very attractive japanese teenager, he was getting weird fetishizing love letters at least once a month. and the amount of times he got invited to join the anime club. explaining to them that no he actually couldnt stand anime was too much of a chore to be worth it. eventually he worked out how to be juuuust enough of an asshole that they went away, but he wasnt in trouble for it. it was a very frustrating part of his life.

he grew up on hokkaido, specifically in sapporo because hunk and lance are both from tropical islands, keith is from desert texas, and pidge probably lived in the south her whole life because her father was a Big Deal with the galaxy garrison, which is the evolved form of NASA, and NASA operated entirely in the south. my canadian heart cannot handle an entire team thats used to just different shades of fucking hot, i need one of them to be from freeze your balls off up north, and its gotta be shiro.

although ironically, while shiro was more than happy to join the unofficial tradition of students from cold areas laughing at students from warm areas whenever the temperatures dropped, shiro was spending most of the year in florida, where the garrison is, and going back to sapporo during the summer for breaks, as the winter and spring break werent long enough to make the flights worth it. his tolerance for the cold dropped dramatically. his first year after graduating, he went back to sapporo in december for the first time, and was very displeased to realise that he was not prepared for the cold anymore. not prepared at all. oh god. holy shit.

after his application into the garrison was approved, things were a bit awkward for shiro because this meant unenrolling from the high school he’d been attending, and waiting to start class in the new semester at the galaxy garrison. he got the acceptance in spring. classes in japan start in april. classes in america start in september. it was like being on break, but it lasted half a year. it was surreal for shiro. i mean sure, there was preparing to go to america alone, but passport and visa prep only takes up so much time, and luggage/packing isnt a problem until the week leading up to leaving. he spent a lot of time lying around the house during that half year. you can only study alone for so long before you need to do something else. the sudden switch from the highly pressured japanese school enviroment to ~nothing to do~ was very jarring, but ended up functioning as a sort of gap year. as a genius kid, he was under a lot of pressure. being able to take a step back and breathe did him a world of good.

shiro is extremely foul mouthed, but has a reputation for almost never swearing. this is because he never completely gets the hang of english swearing, and decides to just not bother with working out how to properly say things that will land him in shit anyways. but he swears. almost constantly. just, in japanese. its hilariously common for other students to think “oh, there goes shiro, thinking outloud to himself” while shiro is actually violently swearing under his breath about forgetting his notes in his dorm. in his last year, he accidentally traumatized a first year from tokyo, when he was attempting to find a book he needed for his thesis from the library, and the computer he was using refused to cooperate. this led to him furiously cursing out the poor computer. in earshot of the first year, whose offended gasp was legendary. shiro immediately bribed her into secrecy. noone must know.

shiro realised he was pansexual during his half year hangtime between high school and garrison. while not exactly locked in the closet, he didn’t really think the information needed to be shared with anyone, and he was too busy with classes to really want to date anyone. he was only trying to hide his orientation from the weeaboos, mentioned earlier, who would have gotten even worse with the creepy fetishizing and never left him alone. he’s never really dated, and his experience is fooling around with other cadets, and the occasional one night stand when he was older with civilians his age in the nearby town. upon being considered for the kerberos mission, he immediately started very carefully making sure nobody found out about his sexuality. the first public broadcast from the kerberos ship was live to the world, and ended with shiro cheerfully declaring himself the first openly pansexual man in space. mission control had not been warned of this. the only parties warned in advance were sam and matt holt, and they both strongly approved of the idea.

after the kerberos team was declared dead from pilot error, it eventually came out that the garrison had no idea what caused the mission failure, and that the ship just suddenly lost communication and vanished, and that the pilot had been a convenient scapegoat. there was immediate backlash from a great deal of parties. over two dozen different LGBT and/or POC rights groups filed lawsuits against the Garrison, calling rascism and/or homophobia. international relations between america and japan turned frosty. shiro had previously been considered a national tragedy crossed with embarrasement for apparently fucking up such an important mission, but oh the speed at which that turned around. multiple cities, including sapporo and tokyo, comission statues of shiro practically overnight. he immediately swung around to national tragedy crossed with hero.