Shallura

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Pairing
Pairing: Takashi Shirogane/Princess Allura
Alternative name(s): Shallura
Gender category: F/M
Fandom: Voltron
Canonical?: No
Prevalence: Popular
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Takashi Shirogane/Princess Allura, also known as 'Shallura' is the romantic pairing between two characters from Voltron, Takashi Shirogane and Princess Allura.

Canon

Shiro and Allura are good friends and co-leaders. They are shown to support one another in numerous instances where no one else does, such as when Allura wants to undertake a mission in 1x10, "Collection and Extraction." When Allura sacrificed herself to save him and taken captive by the Galra, Shiro dismissed the danger in rescuing her and was wholly focused on getting her back throughout the Season One finale. In the Season Two finale, Shiro was the only one to call her name when her ship was hit, and Allura singled him out when calling for the paladins after their ship was hit. Shiro in particular always took being a paladin and the war seriously, and encouraged the other paladins alongside her to keep training.

In Season Three, Allura states that she wears her pink armour, "To honour the paladins of old. And Shiro." In Season Five, Allura is distressed when her and Shiro's unknown clone, Kuron, keep being at odds with one another, implying that this is not their normal dynamic. In Season Six, Allura carried Shiro's soul in her body and brought him back to life. In Season Seven, Shiro supported Allura to Earthling officials and helped her down from a truck. Allura in turn built him a new arm and used the crystal she wears in her mother's circlet to power it.

In Season Eight when saying goodbye, Allura thanks Shiro. Shiro responds, "You never have to thank me for anything," and they share one last smile.

The ship is non-canonical and had no ship tease. Shiro eventually married Curtis and Allura had romantic relationships with Lotor and Lance.

Fandom

Although Klance vs Sheith was the major ship war of the fandom, Shallura shippers contributed a lot of wank as they frequently allied as a ship mate to the much more popular Klance in a flamewar against Sheith shippers. The Klance and Shallura shippers also engaged in continuous harassment of Kallura shippers. However, this alliance crumbled when Shallura was also shown to be "problematic" like other Shaladin ships (if not even more so) and it faced growing competition from Lotura shippers.

On AO3, Allura/Shiro is the 5th most tagged VLD relationship. It is the most popular het relationship. It is often featured as a side pairing in works where Allura and Shiro are not main characters.

"Shalluragate"

The pairing was generally favored and promoted by anti-shippers as one of the few "healthy" and age-appropriate Shiro ships, superior in every way to Shaladin ships. When Allura was confirmed to be a teenager by the creators in April 2017, the same anti-shippers abandoned and turned on the ship in droves, claiming they were tricked into shipping pedophilia and that the creators "killed" the ship to set up Kallura. The Shallura Hall of Anal Devastation preserved a great number of their reactions.

Admittedly I've never seen Voltron, but I don't get it. The only thing they said was she's a teen? 17/18/19 year olds can be perfectly mature...?

It's not really about maturity. Allura's very mature for her age, and Keith, though he's got a buttload of emotional issues, is self-sufficient and was living on his own for about a year before the canon started. But anti-shippers drew a hard line in the sand about how Keith was a minor and thus should never ever, under any circumstances, be shipped with Shiro, who's an adult in his twenties. Eventually, the argument spread to all the characters. Adults should only be shipped with adults, and teenagers with teenagers. (But not, like, younger teenagers like Pidge. Only teenagers their own age. Yeah.)

Antis made a big deal about how the only healthy, acceptable Shiro ship is Shiro/Allura, because they're both adults and playing Space Dad and Space Mom to the minors on Team Voltron (despite the fact that Allura isn't a maternal person at all). Finding out that Allura was actually a teenager basically imploded that argument. Suddenly, Shiro/Allura was a bad adult/minor ship! Worse still, Allura was now of an age to be shipped with Keith, who she was romantically paired with in previous versions of Voltron. And all this information came on the tail of season 2, which had a storyline in which Keith and Allura shared a lot of screentime together. It was pretty much the perfect set up for a gigantic wankstorm.

Post-Season 7

After dealing with the blow that Allura was a teenager, the ship received another one when the last season confirmed Shiro to have had a boyfriend which many interpreted as him being exclusively into men. The showrunners had left Shiro's sexuality up for interpretation but later re-iterated this by continuously referring to him as "gay". Word of God stated Shiro was homosexual and they further confirmed this in an AfterBuzz interview where they revealed that they hinted at Shiro's sexuality in the writing by having him express zero romantic interest in any of the female characters whereas every other main male character had ship tease with female characters. Shiro being gay was planned from the start and was actually going to be revealed in the first episode of season 2, but executive meddling pushed it all the way back to season 7. Shallura (and all other Shiro het pairings, rare as they were) came to be seen as undesirable, problematic or homophobic within fandom, resulting in wank between Shallura fans who had trouble letting the pairing go and his canonical sexuality. Most fans ultimately abandoned the pairing, at least in public.

Some Shallura shippers did not care about morality in fandom in the first place so they continued shipping it as they did before. Others clung hard to their imagined moral superiority, made claims that Aalura was "de-aged" over the series (even though the show bible explicitly identified Allura as a teenager before the series was even in production), and accused the writers of "robbing" them of the ship by revealing Shiro's homosexuality which is why they fiercely headcanon Shiro as bisexual or pansexual instead. Those critical of this behavior have accused Shallura shippers of performing "gay erasure" since Shiro has officially been confirmed to be homosexual. A few militant Shallura shippers became hypocrites by maintaining that Kallura or Allurance were "heteronormative" despite all of them being heterosexual ships, and Shallura actually involving a confirmed gay man; or that Sheith was "pedophilia" even though Allura was a teenager while Keith was an adult like Shiro, and that Keith by the end of the series was in his 20s and closer to Shiro's age than the other paladins as he was further aged up by 3 years due to a time skip.

Shallura shippers even came up with a conspiracy theory that lead writer Tim Hedrick - who left the show partway - originally planned on making Shallura and Klance canon, and that there was an "alternate cut" of the series, so they would not have to admit that they were wrong the whole time. These claims that Klance and Shallura were originally going to be canon were based on no evidence whatsoever, contradicted writer Joshua Hamilton's comments that all the staff saw Shiro as a gay man from the start, and that Tim Hedrick himself was the one responsible for creating an outline of the entire series (which included Shiro being gay). Showrunners Joaqum dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery also publicly shut down these conspiracy theories,[1] although these unsubstantiated rumors continue to persist in the fandom to this day.

Fanwork

Fanfiction

Zines

Fanart

Links & Resources

References

  1. ^ https://www.letsvoltron.com/episodes/dd427e27
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