#🐁 Citadel

[bewaretheblueskies]

This is just a tag test so I can establish consistent tags for all of the stories/universes I’ll be talking about here it’s. Going to be a text wall I’m so sorry

Believe it or not there are more stories I haven’t tagged but I highly doubt I’ll be bringing any of them up so. They’ll get a tag if they need them. Stuff I didn’t tag is mostly Doomsville side stories but also The Thing Which Should Not Be which is a whole other can of worms both because it contains two rapidly mutating universes running simultaneously and also because I’m not the only person working on it so. That’s a story for another day

[sol-consort]

I was making tiny clay cats earlier and had a great idea for an ask, but then I got busy and forgot

I think it was something about fashion with the mass effect species

Electronically sending you a fictional tiny clay cat statue

Thank for the tiny clay cat, I'll put it on the virtual table that I keep in this blog at all times, which is a real table that happened to have a unique eco-friendly design, from an eccentric manufacturer, and definitely not just two logs I lugged from the woods.

🕔

🌱🐈 🪟🏙

🪵🪵 🧺 🩲 🪤 🐁

I hope my virtual son 🧒 (common) ×1 doesn't knock it off with his virtual ball ⚽️ (common) ×1 because I won't financially recover from the purchase of the virtual gold 🪙 (rare) ×99 I'd need to glue the pieces of the broken clay cat back together in order to teach him about Kintsugi, the value of history and taking pride in the scars it leaves on ones body.

But yes, Mass Effect alien species fashion.

I mentioned before that the asari would definitely be into human fashion since we share a similar physical build.

They tend to mix up the centuries, however, wearing Edwardian era garments one day, and then full-on ancient Rome with draped tunics the next one.

To us, that seems silly because it's our history. These fashion designs are centuries old, and our first ever impressions on them were in textbooks or some other non-fashionable place. You wouldn't have a woollen toga at a strip mall where tweens naturally went with their overbearing parents to develop a sense of style.

But to the asari, all of these clothes are brand new! Just in! The latest fashion trends! From the perspective of their timeline, their society started integrating skinny jeans at the same time as robe à la française.

And the fact they live for 1000 years, the entirety of human recorded history is just two asari generations—would help them see our ancient fashion as more of "last Wednesday's"

Although many human cultures do keep their tradition clothes alive, like the hanfu being used in Chinese festives, or the Arab thawb still worn as in commonplace same as it was in 600 AD.... because what other garment is more suitable for desert climates?

Okay back to aliens, my fashion hyperfixation is showing

The asari are easy peasy, it's like two sister civilisations deciding to share their wardrobes and doubling the amount of clothes they retroactively have access to now.

You see many humans on the Citadel adapt to asari fashion, and as the game progresses, you notice asari fashion start getting influenced by predominantly human-fashion traits. Take Ryder's clothes in Andromeda for example.

The Alliance uniforms must seem ancient to the new humans with their cross-species influenced fashion trends, and I do mean ancient.

They probably view them (alongside our current modern hot-trendy fashion), like how me and you view the Victorian era fashion through a thick lens of rose-tinted glass. I wear corsets over flowy blouses, corsets, the thing that used to be considered underwear.

It's just very socially accessible now. Would someone someday wear a 2000's cheetah print thong over their military uniform in the alliance and call it fashion? Who's to say.

You see those modern two-piece suits with neon vibrant colours? The ones with precise cuts, invisible stiches, and all the pieces—down to the jacket buttons—are made from the same exact material and colour?

Someone is gonna dig that up in the year of Mass Effect and call it vintage and it's gonna piss me the fuck off, the trajectory of the earth will be altered from the massive rolls I'll be doing in my grave.

For the rest of the species, I don't see them adapting our garments due to anatomy incompatibility.

But fashion is the keyword here, because it is so much more than just clothes.

None of the asari have eyebrows, they don't have the genes for hair, therefore no eyebrows or anything.

Except, Liara, who has drawn-on (or perm tat) eyebrows.

Which is a VERY human feature, eyebrows might as well be the trademark of humanity. What do you do to an animal in animation to humanise it and make it seem intelligent?

You add eyebrows.

Liara, this rando asari scientist, for some reason, is elbow-deep into human makeup. Literally, no other asari has eyebrows or showed care for human makeup besides her.

We humans can't see our own "invisible" stripes, our faces are usually a blank canvas, which is why makeup is so fun, pretty, and whimsical. It's the same reason you'd add flowers to your hair or draw at the empty corner of the page.

Asari have their own seemingly natural face markings (unless those are drawn too) and putting makeup on top of them might seem distasteful or even tacky. Like drawing over someone's complete drawing.

But you know which species LOVES adding lines to their face? None other than space birbs themselves, the humble turians.

Humans like sunsets, birds like shiny things, and turians love glitter.

Of course, there are zero evidence of that ingame because they wanted the turians to have a metal, baddass, slightly scary aesthetic, and that's fair.

But if we're being realistic, it's just a matter of time before a turian decides to incorporate glitter into their clan face paint. It's a natural instinct for them to be the bird with the shinest, puffest, most colourful coat of feathers in the room.

Turians would love human makeup, wasn't it for the fact it's deadly toxic to them. Thanks, dextro. I mean, not like that ever stopped humans before. Remember when lipstick used to contain lead and mercury? Good time, good times.

But actually, now thinking about it, would those things be poisonous to them? Lead and mercury? I mean, they're already radioactive with a shit ton of copper in their bloodstream. Their body literally grows metal on their faces... and turian seminal fluid is poisonous to humans, meaning...

They might be able to use mineral based makeup! Which is so fucking deadly to humans, but probably fine for turians.

Although the human skin is spongey, the creamy make-up sticks to the top of it like icing on a cake. But it might not latch onto rough metal, aka turian plates.

It's also made with so many oils in mind because humans are actually very slimy, we just never notice it because our pores are so small and the thin layer of oil is hardly noticeable.

It's why bugs find us disgusting and wash our oill off of them after touching us, too bad they still need our delicious nutritious dead skincells and sweat to slurp up, so they endure it for the sake of food.

But we do, in fact, require being moist 24/7. It's where the "soft" skin feeling comes from, silly, being drenched in oil throughout your whole existence does that sometimes.

And turian metals do not, actually the oils might just bleach their shells if left to oxidise.

No, turian makeup wouldn't work if it was creamy or liquidiy like ours—even with the added lead.

My proposal: Chalk Makeup.

It's dry, it's crumbly, it's easy to remove. You ever drawn with chalk on street concrete? Would probably be the same as applying makeup to a turian.

And it has calcium! Yummy yum! Which the turians probably need a shit ton of, considering that most creatures with some kind of shell do insatiably crave it (see: sanils)

My last nugget of wisdom is that what's considered fashion to the geth/ai/synthetics in general isn't that far off from high-end, very personalised custom gaming pcs. Be it the pastel and white hardshells or the neons and glowing cooling liquids.

Hipster geth prefer the fruitger ero early 2010's aesthetic, enjoy that mental image for a while.