onlygirlshavewings | Still more kitties...

Bullet-list summary | Paragraph summary
Okay, so the Wikis are generally character-centric in that they focus on appearance, personality, and ability without actually talking about the history... which is understandable. All of them have the same basic history in the series with differences being who was where when what happened, so it's really just easier for me to do it this way. Since the basics are the same, I literally copied a lot of this out of the history I wrote for Lance & Keith and rewrote things for Shiro, so if some of the wording seems similar, that's why.

Bullets

Shiro is junior officer and the face of Galaxy Garrison
goes to keith's school, wowed by keith, gets car stolen by keith, springs keith from juvie and tells him to make it up to him by showing up at the garrison
becomes keith's "big brother" figure, refusing to give up on him because kid has potential
suffers from disease that causes his muscles to deteriorate
chosen by sam to go on kerberos mission
almost isn't allowed to go because of his disease
gets into fight with boyfriend Adam over mission and they split
goes on mission anyway
while on mission, is abducted by Galra
kerberos mission failure (pilot error: Shiro was pilot), Galaxy Garrison reports all are presumed dead
has right arm removed by Galran druids and replaced with Galran prosthetic
makes a name for himself as "the champion" in the Galran gladiator pits
is rescued by Ulaz and sent via escape pod to Earth to find the blue lion with info uploaded into his arm for blade of marmora location
pod crashes on earth and shiro is caught/sedated by Galaxy Garrison
Keith breaks in to rescue Shiro, is joined by Lance, Pidge, Hunk and all escape
Group goes to find Blue Lion, it wakes, they're launched into space
Landing on Arus, meeting Allura and Coran, told he will fly Black Lion
goes to assist Pidge with finding Green Lion
went with Pidge and Keith to retake the Red Lion from Sendak's ship
saved prisoners, formed Voltron, won the battle
underwent various training exercises with team to boost their bond
met the Arusians, fought first Robeast (Myzax)
Sendak infiltrated castle and destroyed the crystal that powered it, injuring Lance
Hunk and Coran go to balmera for new crystal, Keith and Allura go see Arusians, Shiro stays with Lance
Battle with Sendak for the castle, Sendak is contained.
Lance is healed, Pidge is girl, launch castle ship
answer distress call - Rolo, Nyma. is fake, Blue Lion stolen but retrieved.
Go to Balmera to free Balmerans, fight Robeast #2, Balmera crystalizes it
Castle AI is corrupt due to Sendak's crystal, try extracting info from Sendak's memories
Shiro's PTSD gets the best of him and he ejects Sendak into space
Castle is headed for star about to explode, Allura destroys AI and gets control back, all are safe.
Find transport hub from Sendak's memories, sneak in.
Shiro and Allura get onto Galra ship headed for Central Command
Try to hack system, get caught, Allura sacrifices self to get Shiro out
Plan is hatched to get Allura back: take Voltron into enemy territory.
Zarkon tries to take Black Lion, Shiro is injured by Haggar, attempt to escape via wormhole when shield goes down, but Haggar corrupts it and they're ejected at different points.
Shiro and Keith are on deserted planet with critters. Shiro almost gets himself killed but Keith pilots Black to save him. Pidge finds them.
Shiro in healing pod has flaskbacks to Ulaz who helped him escape from Galra, remembers data in arm.
They go to coordinates in arm, Ulaz sneaks on ship and confronts paladins, recognizes Shiro, and takes them to Blade of Marmora outpost
Voltron fights another robeast, Ulaz sacrifices self in order to help them escape, destroying robeast.
Find Olkari spores in space, go to Olkarion and help liberate Olkari from Galra - destroy Cube.
Zarkon finds them. HOW???
Escape Zarkon via wormhole, teludav is cracked, can't wormhole as far. Zarkon reappears, escape again, teludav VERY broken. Try to lure Zarkon away with Voltron. Mention of scaultrite, turns out Hunk made temporary replacement lenses instead of cookies. Return to castle and use those to get a full wormhole jump.
Keith and Allura leave for a bit because they both think Zarkon is following them (wrong). Others go to assist Taujeerians being attacked by Galra, can't do it alone, need Voltron. Turns out Red Lion went after Keith so all are present to form Voltron and save Taujeerians. Zarkon is OG Black Paladin and tracking them through Black Lion.
Group goes to Space Mall for teludav lenses, Shiro goes to strengthen his bond with Black Lion - Success! Manages to win Black's trust and eject Zarkon from Lion's mindscape
Now group goes to find Blade of Marmora. Shiro takes Keith, turns out Keith is Galra and wakes the blade he carries. Leader of Blade comes to meet with Allura and Voltron, hatches plan to put end to Zarkon
Group splits up: Hunk & Keith to get more scaultrite from weblum; Pidge, Lance, Shiro to rescue engineer Slav from Galra; Allura to Balmera for enormous crystal; Coran to Olkari for massive teludav
Get into Beta Traz. Shiro & Lance get into prison, each find Slav (Shiro's is real, Lance's is the warden's yupper)
Slav proceeds to drive Shiro up a wall with his neurotic behavior and Shiro loses his cool
They manage to escape with the real Slav (the warden keeps his pet yupper) and head back toward the Castle.
Get call from Allura: Balmeran robeast is loose. both groups wormhole to her location to fight.
Voltron is formed and Robeast is eventually beaten. Group goes to Olkarion to oversee finishing of teludav, makes preparations for what's to be the final battle.

Paragraph summary
Several years pre-series, Takashi Shirogane (aka. Shiro) was a Junior Officer, a renowned ace pilot, and the poster child of the Galaxy Garrison, a military-styled school smack in the desert with its nearest town a 30 minute drive away. In fact, he was such a poster child that he was the one sent out to local schools to speak to classes and recruit students with potential through the use of a video game flight simulator. It was at one of these school stops that he encountered an orphaned boy named Keith, who not only wowed him by making it to Level 5 (most barely hit 3, nobody else reached 5), but after Shiro tried speaking with the teacher to recruit Keith only to be told he has a discipline problem and wouldn't be a good fit, the sound of tires squealing alerted him that his car had just been stolen -by Keith. Instead of being upset or angry over it though, after the car was returned and Keith apprehended, Shiro wanted this kid at the Garrison badly enough that he paid his way out of the Juvenile Detention Facility that the boy was being held at and insisted that he could make it up to him by showing up at the Galaxy Garrison.

At the Garrison, Shiro took Keith under his wing, becoming something of a 'big brother' figure for him. No matter how many fights Keith got himself into, Shiro always backed him and refused to give up on him, believing in Keith even when the boy couldn't believe in himself. He could see plain as day that the kid had potential, and he wanted to do everything he could to help him realize that potential. The two of them became very close and remained this way for years.

Not long after, Shiro was chosen by Sam Holt to accompany him and his son Matt on a mission to Kerberos at the edge of the solar system (it's one of Pluto's moons). At that time, it was the farthest out anyone has ever managed to go and would be a landmark mission for mankind, but the higher ups were quick to try and throw a wrench into Sam's plans as Shiro had been diagnosed with a disease that caused his muscles to deteriorate, and although he was being treated, they felt that he was unfit for the job. The higher-ups weren't the only ones voicing their disapproval: Shiro's boyfriend Adam also argued the point with him, culminating in the ultimatum that if Shiro chose to go on the mission, their relationship was at an end.

Shiro chose to go.

The mission to Kerberos was sort of a success in that they managed to arrive there safely and were in the process of acquiring samples from the surface to be studied back on Earth... but it was also a colossal failure in that they didn't return home. While obtaining the samples, a massive alien ship appeared overhead and the trio was abducted by aliens. The ship's commander contacted the Emperor and was discussing what to do with them when Shiro woke up in time to hear they would be taken to the main fleet for interrogation. He tried to plead on their behalf, saying they came from a peaceful planet and didn't mean them any harm, but their captors weren't interested in hearing him out, knocking him out cold again. Back at the Garrison, the Kerberos mission is pronounced a failure, with pilot error being given as the reason, and its three-man crew is declared dead.

Meanwhile, back with the aliens (Galra from here on out), Shiro was interrogated by the Druids and after finding that he genuinely held no information, was sent with Matt to the Gladiator arena. Matt, who was just a kid at the time, was chosen to be first to face off against the current champion, but Shiro "snapped out", grabbed the guard's weapon, intentionally injured Matt so that the boy couldn't fight, and demanded he fight first. Shiro came out victorious in that battle, catching the attention of Emperor Zarkon and his witch, Haggar. Haggar and her Druids removed Shiro's right arm, replacing it with a Galran prosthetic so that the Gladiator matches could continue to be entertaining for them, and Shiro continued to fight, making a name in the pits for himself as the "Champion".

Among the Galra, not all were loyal to Zarkon, and one of those who secretly rallied against him sought to set Shiro free in hopes of using him to thwart Zarkon's plans. Ulaz downloaded some information into Shiro's Galran prosthetic arm and created a diversion to allow him to reach the escape pods and return to Earth. The entire thing was a risky gamble meant to hopefully keep Zarkon from getting his hands on part of a superweapon that had been hidden on Earth nearly 10,000 years ago, but if there was even a sliver of hope, Ulaz wanted to take it. And so Shiro returned to Earth, information on how to find the rebel group Ulaz worked with uploaded into his arm, and absolutely terrified because he knew what the Galra were capable of... and that unless something was done to stop them, they were coming to destroy Earth.

The pod crashed in the middle of the desert, and the people of the Galaxy Garrison were dispatched to investigate and retrieve what they could. What they found was a Galran escape pod and one Takashi Shirogane, now sporting a white forelock, a scar across the bridge of his nose, a prosthetic the likes of which humans had never seen before, and a metric ton of PTSD. Because they didn't know what to do about his arm, they sedated him immediately without listening to a word he had to say, and Shiro is seriously looking like a damsel in distress here. Never fear, though! A bunch of plucky teenagers who broke curfew and one who spent the last year living in the desert in a shed came to his rescue, breaking him out of Galaxy Garrison hands, taking them on a wild goose chase through the canyons, and finally making a clean getaway (I have my beliefs on this, given the only map you see in the series, but that's not a thing to worry about for Shiro).

Shiro woke up this time in a shed in the desert, surrounded by faces he probably didn't recognize... and one he did. The shed belonged to Keith, who had been expelled not long after Shiro had been declared dead. The group introduces themselves, Keith gets to talking about the strange energy that pulled him out there, Hunk insists he can build a device to help search for the energy source, and they all go to investigate, eventually stumbling across a giant blue lion that turned out to be the piece of the superweapon that Zarkon was looking for. Kids are kids though, and they wound up venturing inside and taking a joyride across the universe at speeds that were unheard of (they passed Kerberos in minutes, which should've taken months to reach) until they had a run-in with a Galran ship, went through a wormhole, and landed on planet Arus.

On Arus, they met Princess Allura and Coran, the only known survivors of the Altean race which had been slaughtered by Zarkon. In fact, the Blue Lion was part of the superweapon Voltron created by the late King Alfor of Altea who had scattered the pieces and sent them away to keep them out of Zarkon's hands before he himself fell to Zarkon. Allura then "recruited" the others to become the Paladins of Voltron, sending Hunk and Lance to find the Yellow Lion, and Shiro and Pidge to find the Green. Shiro and Pidge's adventure went off without a hitch, and when they returned, they were given the bad news: the Red Lion was on a Galran ship headed right toward them. The team suited up and set out to retrieve the Red Lion from Galran Commander Sendak.

There, while searching through ship, Shiro had a flash of memory from his time on the ship after being taken prisoner. Pidge immediately insisted she wasn't leaving any captives behind, telling them that Commander Sam Holt was her father, and Shiro made the decision to accompany her, leaving Keith to seek out the Red Lion on his own. Although they managed to rescue the prisoners on the ship, they weren't able to locate Sam or Matt. It would also appear that Shiro had blocked out a great deal of his memories from his time with the Galra, as when his hand activated, he was initially in a great deal of pain until the fog cleared from his mind and he fought off their pursuers so the escape pod of prisoners could depart.

During this time, the Blue and Yellow lions were joined by Red and managed to destroy enough of the ship that they bought enough time to return to Arus and wake the Black Lion., but only enough time to do that. Despite the fact that they had no time to test-pilot and learn to form Voltron, the Paladins had to rush headlong into their first battle. They did what they could until they got stuck in a tractor beam and were ready to give up... and then Shiro brought them all back insisting that they were the only hope for the universe. The lions escaped the beam, successfully forming Voltron and managing to destroy Sendak's ship, winning the day.

Later attempts to form Voltron were horrifically unsuccessful, so the team went through numerous training exercises to strengthen their bond. All of them were failures up until Coran had them all handcuffed to one another at the dinner table. This action led to arguments, which led to a food fight, forcing the paladins to work as a team to do anything because they were still cuffed to one another (and Pidge and Shiro with one hand to their chairs). Finally, they gave it another attempt, and were successful.

Around this time, Allura decided to set out and meet the Arusians, the native people of planet Arus. Everything seemed well and good, but Zarkon's forces weren't one to take lightly and Haggar sent in one of her creations, a Robeast, to take out the paladins since Sendak wasn't able to. During the battle, Shiro realized that he knew the creature's fighting style - it was the Gladiator, Myzax, that he'd fought in the arena that first time. This also meant that he was able to guide them to victory, relying on his memories of how it fought and how its weapon worked. Once it was defeated, Allura chose to celebrate by inviting a host of Arusians into the Castle of Lions for a party, but something wasn't sitting well with Shiro, so he set out to patrol the area.

While he was out, Sendak and his crew hatched a plan, sending a bomb in the form of a Galran drone to blow up the crystal that powered the Castle while also faking an attack on the Arusian village, setting fire to it and leaving behind broken sentries propped up to look like an invading force. Pidge set things up for Coran and Hunk to go find a new crystal, Allura and Keith went to help the villagers, and Shiro remained behind with Lance, who had been injured in the explosion, only to come face to face with Sendak himself. The two of them fought head to head, only for Shiro to lose because the Galra weren't above threatening him with Lance's life.

When Keith and Allura realized the ruse, they returned to the Castle only to be locked out because Sendak brought a new crystal to power the ship. Pidge, working from inside and communicating with Allura, managed to stop the launch of the ship and bring down the barrier for Keith and Allura to get inside. The three of them were able to contain Sendak and rescue Shiro and Lance, and Coran and Hunk successfully brought a crystal back to the Castle to restore power. After restoring power and healing Lance, they set out to leave Arus, launching the Castle of Lions.

Soon after, they received a distress call from a downed ship, where they met Rolo and Nyma, who claimed to be on the run from the Galra, but their ship broke down. Hunk set about doing repairs, albeit reluctantly, and the others questioned Rolo about the Galra while Lance took Nyma for a joyride in Blue... which resulted in him being handcuffed to a tree and his lion stolen because the entire breakdown was a ruse. The Paladins went after them and recovered the Blue Lion, leaving Rolo and Nyma to wait for rescue again while they set out for the Balmera where the crystal Hunk and Coran had gotten came from to rescue its people from the Galra.

On the Balmera, they were tricked into venturing into the center so that the Galra could steal the lions. The Balmerans that Hunk had befriended came to their rescue and they managed to get out, but not before another Robeast appeared and the planet began to crumble as the battle between Robeast and Voltron waged on. There didn't look to be any way to defeat it, and everything they tried only injured the Balmera further (it's not actually a planet, but a petrified animal, so it's alive and can feel pain). Finally, Allura made an attempt to perform an Altean quintessance (life energy) rejuvination ceremony to revive the planet, and the Paladins distracted the Robeast until it's complete. They still weren't able to kill it though, but it didn't matter anymore: the Balmera, rejuvenated by the ceremony, crystalized it and stopped it.

Leaving the Balmera after freeing the Balmerans, they attempted to extreact Sendak's memories from him so they could figure out what Zarkon was planning. The process was incredibly slow and Sendak was incredibly unwilling, so the others went off to do other things while Shiro waited patiently. His patience had a limit though, and coupled with his PTSD, it wasn't long before Shiro broke and, in a fit of panic, ejected Sendak into space. That was how the others found him, having a panic attack with no Sendak in sight. The castle began a wormhole jump, and they all rushed to the bridge to try and convince Allura to stop because they were heading for a star that was about to explode. Allura snapped out of the Castle AI's control, as it had been corrupted from Sendak's crystal, and ran to destroy the AI (the AI was her father, King Alfor, so destroying him meant losing his recorded memories forever), turning the Castle around and saving them all.

From what little they got out of Sendak, the group was able to track down a transport hub, and from there, Allura and Shiro snuck onto a Galra ship headed for Central Command. There, they tried to hack the system to get more intel, but the system caught them after recognizing Shiro's imprint (his Galran prosthetic allows him to access their systems - sure, give the prisoner access, real smart there, guys.) and they were attacked. Despite his best efforts, Allura sacrificed herself to let Shiro escape since he was a Paladin of Voltron and more valuable to the mission in her eyes, and once he was back with the others, the plan began to form as to how to get Allura back.

The plan was incredibly dangerous and incredibly winged: take Voltron into the heart of enemy territory, grab Allura, and fight their way out. Unfortunately as soon as they were in, a barrier was erected and they couldn't escape, but they kept fighting. And then soon after they rescued Allura, Zarkon attempted to take control of the Black Lion, Shiro was injured by Haggar, and their attempt to escape via wormhole when the barrier suddenly collapsed was corrupted by Haggar's magic so the wormhole ejected them all over the place.

Now separated from everyone else, Shiro and Keith crash landed on a desert planet. Shiro, heavily injured from Haggar, climbed out of his lion only to get attacked by tusked creatures. He managed to find a place to hide for a short while until Keith could get closer, but the creatures began digging through the rock and he was flushed out into the open. Keith was able to get Black to move enough to chase the creatures away, and while the two of them sat next to a fire to await rescue, Shiro informed Keith that if anything were to happen to him, he wanted Keith to lead Voltron. Shiro didn't have time to explain, however, before a wormhole opened in the sky and Pidge came to lead them out of there.

Shiro was put into a healing pod to recover from his injuries, where he had flashbacks to his time spent with the Galra, and Ulaz in particular. He recalled the mention of the data in his arm, and Ulaz's name, and as soon as he was out, he had Pidge start running diagnostics on his arm to try and locate the information stored there. It turned out that what was there wasn't necessarily information so much as coordinates, and while attempting to go to those coordinates, their ship was breached by an unknown assailant. Trying to take them down was difficult, but in the end, they stopped when confronted by Shiro... and the individual in question turned out to be none other than Ulaz himself.

Ulaz took the Paladins to an outpost hidden in a space-time pocket and told them about the Blade of Marmora, a resistance group made up of Galra who weren't loyal to Zarkon. They'd been trying to gather their forces, and had several spies planted among Zarkon's men, but thus far weren't able to launch a full-scale assault because Zarkon's empire was far too vast to bring down without numbers. Before they could really go any further though, another Robeast attacked. This time, Voltron was heavily outgunned, and attempts to beat it were unsuccessful. Things were starting to look bleak, until Ulaz joined the fray and attacked, letting himself get pulled into the Robeast and activating the space-time fold which caused the Robeast to collapse in on itself and destroy itself, killing Ulaz in the process. His sacrifice wasn't in vain. Voltron was freed and able to continue the fight, and now they had information that there were others out there who could join them in the fight against Zarkon.

Back to cruising in space, Shiro attempted to be serious for a little while, but his attempts were thwarted by a sporeball to the face thrown by Lance. Instead, he and the others proceeded to have a sporeball fight in space while Pidge analyzed them. The group went in for decontamination, then learned that the spores were actually a distress beacon, so they set out for the planet Olkarion, where they'd come from. Olkarion had been subjugated by the Galra, and the Paladins set out to liberate it, discovering that the leader the Olkari believed to be held hostage had traded his people for his own safety. The Olkari launch an assault with the help of Voltron and defeat the weapon the Galra were building, successfully freeing Olkarion from Galra occupation.

Not long afterward, they were set upon by Zarkon and fled... only to be found again and again and again, and each time they fled, the distance the wormhole put between them was smaller and smaller because the teludav lenses that channel the beam to create a wormhole were cracked and in need of replacing. Finally, after their attempt to hide in the middle of a storm fails, they use Voltron to lure Zarkon away. The mention of still needing to find new scaultrite lenses makes Pidge perk up, and when the lions return to the castle, they take the 'cookies' Hunk had been baking and line up inside the teludav - it turned out the 'cookies' that were hard as rocks were also workable makeshift lenses because he'd used scaultrite in the mix. The attempt to wormhole that time was a success and they managed to get far enough away that it would be a while before Zarkon could catch up.

Allura was still worried about how Zarkon was tracking them, so she decided to sneak out and separate herself from the others, but it turned out Keith had the same idea. The two of them chose to isolate the variable and left the Castle while the others went to assist on planet Taujeer where they were under attack from the Galra. Unfortuantely, they couldn't do it alone and needed Voltron, but they were short a lion. In their haste to return to the Castle, Keith and Allura's pod exploded, abandoning them in space... until Red came out of nowhere to scoop them up and got Keith back in time to help out. However, this also showed them something very, very important: Zarkon was tracking them through the Black Lion.

During the downtime, Coran took Lance, Hunk, Pidge, and Keith to the Space Mall to hunt for teludav lenses while Allura played with her mice and Shiro went to strengthen his bond with the Black Lion. If Zarkon was using it to track them, then Shiro's bond needed to be stronger. Black took him on a ride through space and refused to listen when he wanted to turn back, finally ending at a destroyed planet: Daibazaal, home to the Galra. And then Zarkon found him. The two of them proceeded to duke it out on the astral plane until Shiro managed to win over the Black Lion's trust, strengthening their bond and ejecting Zarkon from the Lion's mindscape. Now, it would be that much harder for Zarkon to find them, as Shiro could use his bond to mask its presence. With that done, Shiro asked to return to the Castle... only to find that they never really left at all.

When the others returned with lenses, the teludav was repaired and the group set out to find the Blade of Marmora. It was decided that Shiro would go in, taking Keith with him. Once there, they discovered that Keith was part Galra and the blade he carried belonged to a member or their order. After he managed to awaken it, as the blades are tied to the lifeforce of their holder, the Blade agreed to join forces with Voltron and their leader met with Allura to start hatching a plan to put an end to Zarkon.

In order to do this, though, they needed a few things: lots and lots of scaultrite, a massive Balmeran crystal, an immense constructional undertaking to build a teludav, and an engineer that was being held prisoner by the Galra. Hunk and Keith set out to find a weblum to harvest the scaultrite, Allura went to the Balmera for the crystal, Coran went to Olkari to build the teludav, and Lance, Pidge, and Shiro went to find the engineer Slav.

Sneaking onto Beta Traz, a maximum security facility built to house a single prisoner, Pidge talked Shiro and Lance through hallways until they hit a fork in the road and were forced to split up. Pressing on, they each managed to find a cell... and each managed to find Slav, or so they thought. It turned out that Lance had released the warden's pet Yupper, Laika, who only said 'yup' hence why he thought he had found Slav. As for Shiro, the Slav he'd found was the real deal, and he was incredibly exhausting to put up with. Slav's neurotic behavior drove Shiro up a wall, causing the normally composed man to lose his cool, get increasingly frustrated, and snap at him repeatedly. They met up as they tried to escape, just barely making it out through closing hatch doors, leaving behind the warden and his Yupper.

After getting out of Beta Traz, they made their way back to the Castle when Allura called to tell them the Balmeran Robeast was loose, so they wormholed to her location where they met up with Hunk and Keith who'd returned from collecting scaultrite. Voltron was promptly formed and though the battle was rough, the Robeast was eventually beaten. With the Robeast destroyed, Allura was able to collect the crystal they needed and the group set out for Olkarion to meet up with Coran and oversee the finishing touches on the teludav and prepare for the final battle.

. . . which is actually not a final battle at all for the others, just for him, because the next time you see Shiro...

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