#also the whole fight gave me drack & ryder mea vibes

[mossattack]

on a side note, bianca looks better than ever

[readbythestarlight]

some MEA negativity under the cut. I’m having Reyes/Ryder feelings and can’t do anything with them so I’m spewing my disappointment here. If you liked MEA you probably don’t want to read. Even if you didn’t like it you probably don’t want to read. This is just a rambling mess.

Sometimes I really want to write Reyes/Zach fic that’s not AU but then I remember that High Noon was a mess and because of that that hardly anything in the whole romance made a lot of sense in context and I get bummed because I’d basically have to restructure canon to make anything work to my satisfaction.

Like. I’ve got no issue with Reyes being the Charlatan. I could easily make that work with my Ryder. He’d be upset at first but if he loves Reyes they would talk it out and things could be fine.

But like the whole... casual murder of Sloane thing? That’s iffy. Idk that Zach could look past that, because it was straight up murder. The lies he can handle because those only hurt himself. And like Zach doesn’t like Sloane, but Reyes had her shot in the back. (Also there’s the issue where the game never really gave us any real reason to hate her other than that she can be cruel, but that’s a whole other thing).

IDK, Reyes is a good character and I love him and my Ryder loves him, but the way the game handled him was such a mess, and I feel like I can’t really fix that without making everything at least partially AU and Reyes at least partly OOC.

Then again there’s also the question of what Reyes’ character really is anyway. Up until High Noon I didn’t really get the casual murder vibe. Sneaky underhanded smuggler vibe, sure, maybe in like a slightly more dishonest Han Solo way. He’d shoot first to make sure he doesn’t die. I’m down for that. If it had been a situation where Sloane found out he was the charlatan and had him at gun point and he got her from a shot under the table, no warning? Fine.

And idk, maybe I’m being one of those fans who can’t accept that her favorite is a bad person who would willingly shoot someone in the back for power? I try hard not to be one of those people. Because like that does a disservice to the character and I don’t want to do that. They are who they are.

Gahhhhh I don’t know why I’m even talking about this. I have homework to be doing and instead I’m sitting here trying to figure out why Reyes seems so disjointed as a character and how I can reconcile it and also wondering why I even care.

Like idk man I wasn’t even upset about the fight with his ex-girlfriend, because she totally attacked first. I wasn’t upset about the lies and the secrets, because those are just part of it. All of that made sense to his character.

High Noon just... didn’t. Not with the context we were given. High Noon made a sketchy dude doing what he has to to survive into a cold blooded killer who shot a woman in the back for power. And there’s a disconnect there for me. If Sloane had been casually murdering people and was a menace who I felt really needed to be stopped no matter what, then fine. I’d have been okay with High Noon (or at least more okay).

But High Noon makes Reyes Vidal look like the bad guy, and I don’t understand that. I just don’t. I can’t reconcile it with 99% of the rest of his behavior.

It’s not even that I need the characters to always do the honorable thing. Zach promised that one Kett guy at the facility that he would let him live if he let the Angara go, but then Zach also broke his promise and killed him. So like. Sometimes there are circumstances that I can accept these things in. Does it make it right, no, but context matters.

I don’t know. I think this really comes back to my issues with MEA as a whole, actually. No one made a lot of sense. (okay... Vetra and Drack did. Their characters were pretty consistent, god bless them). But Reyes? Gil? Liam? Oh my god don’t get me started on Liam and his whole personal quest. PeeBee was decentish, actually. Cora, meh. The non-squad characters were actually more consistent than most other characters, actually. 

My whole point being, I guess, that I get sad because I made this Ryder that I want to write with, and he fell in love with Reyes who I want him to be with, but because the story is so messy and the characterizations so... meh, I feel like too many things don’t make enough sense. I either have to accept that Reyes is a cold enough man that he can commit murder for power, and that because of that he and Zach can’t be together regardless of their feelings, or I have to accept that the writers for MEA went for drama and nonsense over consistent characterization (wouldn’t be the first time tbh...), and have to ignore an entire section of the (already limited) romance just to make things work.

Ugghggghghgh why did MEA have to suck so much?