>>94616007Okay, I've been thinking for a while and tried my best to put this into words.
1) He doesn't seem to be the perfect, untouchable big brother/mentor. He only appears to be perfect, but I think - and I remember an interview with Josh about this as well - that it's all just him putting up a brave front. Similar to but more subtle than Lance's bravado.
2) He has his own subplot that's important to the story and is yet to be resolved. Most mentor figures don't have their own stories to tell and are there with the protag from the beginning, with the same background. Even with mentor figures that have their own mysterious backstory, like e.g. Lockon from 00, the event is a secret to the audience but not the mentor figure. He knows what happened to him, he knows who he needs to extract revenge from, and he is focused on it. Shiro has gaps in his memories from his time in captivity and most likely doesn't know the extent of the Galra's experiments on him. He doesn't seem hung up on getting revenge, either.
3) The mentor figure is usually almost always seen through the eyes of the protag, and usually the first few episodes would have already elaborated why he is seen that way on a personal level. Like, say, Kamina and Simon. First episode shows why Simon looks up to Kamina, because he shields him from the bullies. While we can make speculations on why Keith looks up to Shiro, the story hasn't shown us yet why that's the case in the first place.
4) Even though he gives Keith advice, I think he sees Keith as an equal in a lot of instances too. Like
>>94616180 pointed out. He's not preachy about giving advice to Keith and thinking about it, the amount of time he's given Keith support vs Keith giving him support would be nearly equal if not more the latter, what with Shiro needing to be saved quite frequently so far.
God that was way too long.
