“A relationship that strong and that far along, you don’t just stop having those feelings,” voice actor Josh Keaton, who plays Shiro, tells Inverse. “Even if there are circumstances in life that make it impossible to be together, you still love them. And [Shiro’s] doubt is, ‘Did I make the right choice? Should I have stayed home and made a life there?’ That eats away at Shiro the entire time he’s been gone.”
But Shiro almost didn’t have an Adam to get back to. As it turns out, some unknown decisions behind the scenes nearly forced Shiro’s personal life to be more vague than the explicit reveal of Adam as Shiro’s fiancé.
“I don’t really know all of the going-ons behind the scenes,” Keaton carefully makes clear to Inverse, “but it almost wasn’t going to happen.” Alternate takes of Shiro and Adam talking to each other were recorded that were way less explicit about their relationship. “We had to record other stuff to make it more vague,” Keaton says.
But the cast and crew of Voltron never gave up, knowing full well what it meant to have a character like Shiro be gay in an all-ages, action-adventure cartoon. “All of us were really clamoring for it,” he says. “We were like, this is important, we can’t just water it down. I was really upset about it. Bex [Taylor-Klaus] was really upset about it.”
Luckily, things turned around. “Everybody came together because it was something all of us felt was important to see and to have. Even the PR people at DreamWorks helped a lot. Everybody was on the same page.”