#I just cant talk in normal sized thoughts I am sorry genuinely honestly

[legionofpotatoes]

Who exactly is your Shepard? What choices did you make? What was their background? Do you have any personal headcanons about them that the games didn't provide?

Hey nonnie, another big question in my inbox! I have a hard time believing y’all genuinely care about all this from me, but flattered nonetheless :D

Also I don’t have a good answer to this question? Couple of reasons there but main one’s that the last time I touched the OT was probably 2016-ish, which is why I’m so excited for MELE because I’ve been actively trying to forget as many little details as possible so I can have a nice, relatively fresh experience. It won’t work of course and all of that obsessive playthrough mania will bust out my memory box the second I boot it up and hear vigil, but like the thought keeps me warm.

Another reason is because I’m not uh great at creating original characters in videogames? Without turning them into vessels of my own values and temperament, more or less? Which is to say I haven’t made up too many personal headcanons that I can recall, no. My main was a colonist war hero, I don’t remember if I gave her a unique name at all. She was an empathetic team leader who tried her best to fix the wounds of dissent whenever she encountered them, but held nothing back when dealing with scumbags (I don’t think I ever really held Garrus back from vengeance, maybe once as an experiment. Never made a deal with the Dalatrass, even though the war was essentially at stake. Stabbed the stinkman much like everyone. Furiously supported the geth and very nearly trampled over the quarians for their sake, before coming to my senses a bit :D). She loved her crew, kept them loyal and together as much as she could, and chased after that turian booty when it was time to bone down. The ending was a LOT, and the two things I remember for sure is that she did all she could to keep the Crucible safe, and that she never chose Synthesis. Her survival stopped being a factor at that point, and she had gone for both Destroy and Control at various points. I think the latter is what I truly believe in deep down, in that naive trusting-life sort of way. I never subscribed to that indoctrination theory or any other esoteric concept that was not in the text; I found the thematic execution of the end choices pretty clunky, but functional overall. That’s kind-of where my Shepard’s psychology was at as well.

I overall enjoy finding nuggets of thematic coherence within these stories without focusing on characters too much (who had their own thematically rich arcs of course). In that vein, I did have this one headcanon that I semi-followed through via my Shepard’s decision-making; the text doesn’t REALLY support it, it’s kinda dangerously naive, but nothing overtly refutes it either. My Shepard always considered that the Crucible, much like the Relays and the Citadel, was also a concept seeded secretly by the Reapers, a goose chase task they tailor-made for each cycle to test the condition of empathy over apathy within the galaxy, to eventually discover an instance outside of predicted organic patterns and then work with its population on a way forward. Building, transporting, and docking the thing to the Citadel with an emissary of life present on-site would be the signal of success. The entire non-practicality and theatricality of the harvest would also make sense as an intentional demoralizing performance testing the weakest links of organic behavior that usually led to the self-destructive patterns in the first place.

In essence, the harvests weren’t just a reset button on intelligent life, they were also an accelerated worst-case scenario pressure test to reexamine the pattern theorem itself and hopefully find gaps. Hence the relays, hence the citadel, hence the crucible. Accelerating conditions. Because an AI’s mind would have to leave itself some margin of error; it would not just stand there surprised that Shepard showed up on the Crucible. It would be hoping for it every single cycle, because that would mean its prediction wasn’t accurate 100% of the time; it would mean that its logically shackled mind would finally let go of this catastrophically violent solution and undo the rat maze experiment the milky way had turned into.

Or at least that’s what I and my Shepard hoped the case was. The thing about this theory is that nothing really would have to change. The kid would still need to act surprised, the harvest would still need to proceed without any hindrances, life would still need to be tested to its limits. The music would still play and we would still have to dance, but this framework gave it all a moral purpose beyond just raw survival for Shepard. Because as important as defeating the Reapers was to her, it was almost as important for her to prove them wrong. Whatever their reasons may have been. And so I like to imagine she received that absolution in her conversation with the Starchild. I just like it when theme unabashedly leads everything, and when it doesn’t quite get there I just push and prod until I find some textual reference point to force it out :D This was mine.

(this all started forming in my head during the discussions with Hackett where he’d say no one was really sure WHAT the Crucible did, only that it required the help of every single race in order to be built and sheltered. Sounded like a textbook togetherness test to me! Of course it turned out to be a big fuel tank for the Citadel’s cool relay laser beam in the end. But I like to think it never really needed the Crucible to fire. It only needed it as a gesture of a cycle breaking through and earning the power to shape their own destiny. Which is why I also love the idea of the relays and citadel getting wiped out in the end; as individually tragic as it is for the characters, it is also the ultimate roll call of life’s liberation from apathy. The rat maze falls).

Hey this was another needlessly long answer to a very simple question huh! I don’t like it either!! Sorry!!!

[cognacdelights]

omggg look at you 👀 bf very soon?? i did have to google what a wag was i’m sorry hahaha i think i get it but eeek so cute i’m excited for you!!

but yeah i’m alright, definitely sick of being sad and i am mostly over it or like that actual thing anyway just everything else that’s come from it has been draining (i’m so sick of fucking crying 😂) i also have learnt why i hate wine and why i stopped drinking it so never touching a drop of wine ever again lol

the whole of nz! i know it doesn’t sound like much in comparison to other countries, we are also a lot smaller than other countries too though. just to jump from 260 being the most to then in 3 days it’s basically 1000 is like 😬 one of my friends who’s gone over the uk was saying how it’s crazy that everyone over there has pretty much had it! i hope your family recovers quickly though 🥺 i still don’t know a single person over here who’s had it which is crazy cause everyone knows everyone here haha

ahh constant dizziness sounds horrible, have you ever had a positive test before?? i’ve only been tested twice from being in like locations (only once with symptoms) but i feel like the symptoms of covid are just how i normally feel so i never know haha

OMG not primary school drama hahahaha i love when kids tell you drama about people they don’t like at school it’s so cute and funny hahaha IM SORRY SIZE 10???? that can’t be normal

#💛

i don’t know, honestly… if we do get together then i don’t think it will be soon. i’ve only known him a week and we’ve both said that we want to take things slow so i can’t imagine it being like soon? idk it feels weird like he’s really nice and we do genuinely get on so well but i can’t picture myself in a relationship at all, commitment and having to talk ab feelings and all that stuff genuinely terrifies me

hahaha omg not the wine 😩 i feel that tho! i cant drink straight wine anymore, i need to dilute it with lemonade

okay yes now that you say it like that i totally get it! it’s a small island and i presume most of your population is clustered in big cities/towns?

no, i’ve never had a positive test! but yeah… i think i’m the only person that i know that hasn’t had it… and I’ve known people who have had it multiple times!

no it’s so hilarious! you see my cousin likes adam but adam is going out with chloe (size 10 feet) but they’re on again off again and adam may have cheated on chloe with lily who was cheating on sam (girl sam not boy sam) it’s a MESS

and yes the 10 year old has size 10 adult feet 😭 it was so funny bc my cousin just came out with it one day last year (so she was a size 9 back then), we drove past her walking home and she just sighed so loud and said “there goes chloe with the size 9 feet” and it was one of those things that it just came out of nowhere that i couldn’t stop laughing I THOUGHT SHE WAS JOKING