marcellaereeves:

quiznackingqueen:

Why Keith is actually 16+ in the S6 flashbacks and why he’s so small:

Okay, so lets start with this screenshot:

THIS IS NOT AT THE GARRISON. Look at the teacher, she’s in plain clothes, so are the students. This is a high school and Shiro is here to recruit students. Assuming the Garrison works like a Service Academy, it’s like a college and requires a high school diploma. The minimum age for service academies and ROTC programs is 17, and it’s safe to assume that that is the Garrison’s minimum age requirement too. I guess they might make exceptions for extraordinary students, but I honestly doubt it.

This next scene is also not at the garrison, and occurs shortly after the classroom scene:

Now, we know that is Keith’s bike. We also know he and that he can probably fly it at this point. Why does that imply he is at least 16? Because he lives in a group home, and any younger than that and there’s no way he would have a chance to get away and learn. At 16 he could get a license, which his caretakers couldn’t stop him from. Even with a license I doubt he has insurance though, meaning he can’t fly the thing in public.

My personal headcanon is that one of the workers at the home knew about his passion for flying and turned a blind eye when he snuck out to the desert to practice. This person is the same one who points Shiro in his direction, where he sees Keith fly for the first time and convinces him to join the garrison.

It’s this last scene that really has me convinced Keith is in his mid to late teens though:

Here, when he’s sitting outside the teacher’s office with the other kid he presumably got in a fight with. The other kid is obviously an older teenager, and is Keith’s classmate, meaning they if they aren’t the same age they must be at least close to it.

How do we know? Look at the gold stripes on their shoulders. The strips mark rank, and presumably how long they’ve been there. They each have one stripe on each shoulder, marking them as younger students. Older students have two stripes. In the first episode the garrison trio all have two stripes on each shoulder, and so does Matt at the launch in Pidge’s flashback.

The stripes are also used for officers. Look at Shiro, in this scene he only has two, and the officer he’s defending Keith to has three, it’s his superior.  At some point Shiro gets promoted because in the picture from the Kerberos news report he has three.

Anyway, back to the point. In this scene Keith also talks about going back to the home. Home refers to a group home for children in foster care. Generally teens that get placed here, usually due to a lack of foster parents or because of behavioral issues, though there can be other factors. I’m not going to go into all that in this post, just wanted to note that these homes tend to house older kids because they are harder to place than younger ones.

So that’s why I believe Keith is 16+, but why is he so gosh darned tiny?

There are a few potential explanations for this:

Keith could just be a late bloomer, potentially due to his Galran heritage. We haven’t been given a lifespan for the Galra, so if they live longer and age slower they probably grow slower too. I mean, Krolia looks the same in the flashbacks as she does now, and 20 years have passed.

Keith’s growth could be stunted due to lack of food. He was a foster kid, and it is quite possible he just didn’t get enough to eat, either because there wasn’t enough to go around, or because food was used against him as a punishment. One or two bad experiences could have left him scared to ask for more or take seconds even when offered.

He’s also half Galra. The Galra are also more muscled and most look like they have a very low body fat percentage. Muscle tissue burns two to three times as many calories as fat, meaning Galra need to eat a lot to maintain their weight, and kite need to eat even more, because they aren’t just sustaining what they have they’re adding to it. There’s also the possibility he needed vitamins and minerals to grow that couldn’t be found on earth. His caretakers may have unintentionally been underfeeding him because they were treating him like a human, not a Galra

So yeah, pre-Garrison Keith was tiny, but he didn’t stay that way:

Ok listen: I am HERE for Keith eating food.

At like… groups-of-children-owned-by-an-organisation kinds of places, food is portioned out - at school it just didn’t happen that anyone went back for more food, everyone got served v quickly and then the leftover food would be taken away.

Look at cap-dude and blondy at the front of Keith’s class, they all look much older than him, but classes are split by age groups, not skill/education.

In series 1 he eats like a wild animal - all meat, two forks. Ik that was to demonstrate how delicious the food was but it was v impressive.

On the space whale they had unlimited amount of weird crab monsters, and Krolia is a Galra and a mother she would absolutely stuff Keith.

100% Shiro picked up a malnourished smol bean who needs garrison Mac n Cheese to become age-weight appropriate.

(Which kind of makes it difficult to age him at his dad’s graveside)

Also makes sense why his clothes are oversized. “You’ll grow into this” and he just… didn’t.

Ok but imagine Shiro dn eat all of his food one lunch while they’re eating together, and Keith obviously inhaled his alrd. He’s side eyeing Shiro’s tray before he gets a tiny rumble in his tummy. Shiro laughs “how can you still be hungry, you just ate?” But slides his tray over “you can have it if you want” even his precious dessert *rip dessert*

Keith eats it and Shiro gets the impression he’s taming a wild cat (accurate, Shirogane). The next day he waves Keith over “Hey I got you lunch already” and there’s two trays, but they’re Officer sized portions instead of cadet. And that’s how Keith goes from looking like an 11 year old to looking like he’s 18 in two years. Keith also gets a warm fuzzy feeling at being cared for.

Tell me how else someone who KO a whole tent of full grown adults nbd managed to look like he lost to some scrawny looking scene kid wannabe?

my first garrison trio art has 666 notes

perfecto

kuron is still alive in my heart and in my head(canon)

how long do you think is a good time to wait for yall fanfic writers before taking ao3 by storm for the good s6 sheith shit

ace-pidge:

Krolia: *is shown as being shorter than her partner*

Me:

dent-de-leon:

Because I’ve gotten countless asks and shitty replies on all my posts about this, I’m addressing it right here and now–why I still ship sheith and it’s not “dead,” here we go:

So, let’s get started with the dreaded ages thing that always comes up, just get that out of the way. According to the guidebook, they were 18 and 25 respectively at the start of the series. Shiro hasnt aged in the astral plane. Sine, you know he’s been dead. And it’s more or less implied that Shiro has been gone for months, and then they meet Lotor and there’s the whole time that conflict plays out, then we fastforward to after he lays low and keith says “Lotor hasnt been seen for months.” we can infer that more or less a year has elapsed since Shiro’s death/disappearance. Adding in the two year time skip, that puts them at about 21 and 25 respectively. You know, a completely reasonable age difference. 

There’s literally nothing indicating Keith was adopted by Shiro period. You realize the guy was probably like 19/20 around that time, right? No 20 year old is out here going to college and thinking ‘hey, why don’t I adopt a teenager?’ I should know–I sure as hell aren’t. You barely feel like you can take care of yourself and a houseplant at that point, let alone a whole other person. 

People claim that Shiro had the “power” to send Keith back to the home because he was his guardian?? That’s not the case. He vouched for Keith, which is how he ended up in the garrison in the first place. When Keith tells Shiro to just throw him back in the home, he’s referencing something said by the other officer only moments before–the only reason he’s here is because of Shiro. One word from Shiro, and literally the whole thing’s off. Keith has very limited options here, and he knows it. 

He seemed to be a recruitment officer sent to Keith’s school to look for new cadets. We can tell because Keith isn’t in the cadet uniform in that shot–he’s in a school setting in plain civilian clothes. Shiro is standing at the front of the room in his officer uniform, and it seems that the teacher is introducing him as a kind of guest speaker. Then there’s the flashback where he and Keith are standing beside Kogane’s hoverbike, implying that Shiro saw his skill as a pilot firsthand and was determined to get him in the garrison–to secure him a better future. Krolia’s thanks to Shiro is in relation to what we already know–that Shiro was there for Keith when he had no one, that he led him down the right path and changed his life for the better. His “guiding light,” as the show runners have said. 

But then they got older, and it’s very clear their relationship changed. The two are equals from the start of season 1, that much is obvious. Now that Keith is older, he’s able to protect Shiro in turn. In fact, more often than not, he’s shown to be the one caring for Shiro instead of the other way around. He’s the one always running to Shiro’s rescue and saving him from certain doom. Some people are so stuck on the flashback, but it’s painfully obvious that he’s no longer a child–after the time skip, he’s been explicitly referred to as a man. I think Keith looked up to Shiro a lot when he was younger, but now that he’s so much older and they’re closer in age, now that he’s had all this time to ruminate on it–there’s clearly something else there.

And Shiro sees Keith in a whole new light in turn, which is clear when he’s so thrown off by seeing older Keith. “Lance is right. You have changed.” I don’t understand how people can acknowlege two characters can change without their relationship evolving in turn–these have always been dynamic characters, nothing is static. It’s like how people claimed Allura was still annoyed by Lance and wanted nothing to do with him after she explicitly said she enjoyed his company. You can acknowledge that characters’ relationships are subject to change, that they can grow and develop and be organic, and move on. 

People latch onto the brother line and insist I can’t read, but then promptly ignore the fact that Kuron was completely unmoved by it. The thing that actually breaks through to him, that yields a very gutting, visceral reaction–that’s Keith’s breathless admission of, “I love you.” He also looks completely shocked by it, which doesn’t make any sense if this was coming from a familial love context that he was familiar with. 

In this season, sheith also covered a number of timeless romantic tropes reserved for a character’s love interest. The same exact tropes that fans praised as High Romance when they presumed it would be in relation to k/l, but then immediately backtracked to “oh,, it’s just familiar!!” as soon as those plot points were given to sheith instead. Shiro and Keith’s relationship is also shown to directly parallel Kogane and Krolia, as well as Zaggar–both canon romantic relationships. Not to mention the very noticeable korrasami parallel. You know, as if their relationship was designed to be interpreted as romantic. 

This is also literally the one and only declaration of I love you in the entire series, something not even explicitly romantic couples like Keith’s parents or Zaggar have shared. It’s completely unique to Shiro and Keith’s relationship, and holds just so much gravity to it. This isn’t even taking into account that distinctly romantic variations of “love” were used in other dubs, such as the Japanese aishteru. 

Nevermind that it’s common for someone that’s gay to refer to a close friend of the same gender as being “like a brother/sister” to avoid confessing their true feelings. Hell, I’ve done it before. And I’ve seen so many other LGBT people express relating to that aspect of Shiro and Keith’s relationship, that it’s a struck a cord with many other fans like me. 

When you’re talking about wanting LGBT rep–rep that Lauren and Joaquim mentioned they have been working towards and fighting for since the beginning–but then you willfully ignore and tear down the one relationship that’s been built up like that, when you understand that they might not have been able to get the explicit rep they wanted but still demonize the subtly hints of it, when you make actual LGBT fans feel like shit for identifying with this sort of narrative–you’re really missing the point. 

You know what else is very telling? That this was the one episode Joaquim directed himself–he cared so much about Keith and Shiro’s dynamic, he wanted to just go all out and really made the episode his. That’s how much this episode–this dynamic between Keith and Shiro–mattered to him. Here’s some commentary on it:

• Marc: “Speaking of credits we’re not used to seeing—Joaquim, you wrote an episode!”
  
• Joaquim: “I did!…Super excited. You know, it’s one of those things that I wanted to do for many, many years now, and finally got to an EP position. I said, ‘Guys, I’m just gonna write one of these things. And, you know—I’m emotionally attached to both Keith and Shiro, and had some ideas on how that episode could play out.”
  
• Marc: “So you’re the one that has to decide how the battle between Keith and Shiro pans out.”
  
• Joaquim: “Somewhat. Along a conformation of assume writers, and Lauren, board artists—yeah.”
  
• Lauren: “Everything in animation is teamwork, but it was definitely Joaquim’s brain child. 
  
• Joaquim: “…when you’ve gotta go back and do painful story cuts on scenes that you wrote, it feels like somebody’s limbs are getting cut off.” (source)
  

Let’s also not forget the brother line has been used for a number of relationships that still became canon–Aang and Katara, Ed and Winry, Ginny and Harry, ect. And lastly, before you still want to call me a monster, let’s not forget that the staff supports sheith in a romantic context, and has since the beginning. They also are more than happy to talk about their intimate relationship. But I mean, of course,, the staff must hate us for this, right? Surely, they never intended for this relationship

to be interpreted as

potentially romantic,,

And sure, it could be that sheith will never be canon–or that it will to some degree, but not explicitly–either way, there’s literally no reason to demonize other fans for shipping it. Especially when the staff themselves have always supported it. If you think you need to take the time to comment on every single sheith post that “they’re only brothers!! You’re disgusting!!!” ect, don’t expect the staff to ever support or even tolerate you, becuase you are the reason both they and the fans are feeling alienated, you are the ones continually harassing the staff for just wanting to have fun. Besides, Shiro and Keith already have “the closest relationship” in canon–Joaquim’s words, not mine–and they love one another. Literally nothing can take that away from them, and if LGBT fans see themselves in these characters, who are you to lash out at them for it? 

pixelgenerator:

buffyannepratt:

me: *plays to relax and get away from people*

developer man: multiplayer!! now with extra people!!!

me:

This is a mood.

got an accidental glance of the broganes side of the fandom and the seeing the certainty that shiro literally adopted keith at 23 from the home instead of like, vouching for this kids skill to this space boarding school is just, so odd