#i'm going to go farm balloons in acnh now

[octerminal]

I’ve talked before about how Nadia being Earthborn is the central reason she’s renegade leaning, but I really want to get into it again because I’ve been listening to Hadestown a lot recently and that always makes me think of Nadia because the musical touches on how traumatizing poverty is. And also just because, well, I always want to talk about Nadia.

But before I can do that, I have to talk about a few other things first.

(This is going to be niche and also super self-indulgent, but it’s my blog, so who cares. Note that because of what both Hadestown and the Earthborn background entail, this is going to get slightly political. But again, it’s my blog, so who cares.)

Generally speaking, Mass Effect has an issue with downplaying trauma. Ashley, Tali, Garrus, and James all go through the traumatic experience of being sole (or almost sole) survivors. Tali goes through this twice, because the comics show that before she even met Shepard she lost the team she’d been traveling with. (And that’s not even counting the fact she also loses a chunk of her team on Freedom’s Progress. They use this trope with her a lot.) Liara loses her mother in the first game and she has almost no reaction. Shepard dies in the beginning of the second game and spends the rest joking about it, with very few opportunities to express anything but humor over the situation.

People respond to trauma differently, and the game is also told primarily from Shepard’s point of view, so consequently we only see what Shepard sees. All of these characters likely grieved in private, and they definitely do carry scars (literal and figurative) from what they’ve gone through. But I also think that Mass Effect likes making characters go through objectively traumatic things without fully considering how someone might act coming out of it. In fairness, that’s the fun of fanfic, and I also do think everyone on the Normandy has some degree of experience in compartmentalizing because they simply don’t have the time to sit down with their feelings. (A lot of them are also just averse to doing this.)

But exploring that trauma is what I’m interested in the most, and that’s how I approached Nadia. Earthborn is my favorite background for that reason. It’s not a single event that’s shaped their life thereafter, but a sustained stressful environment they endure for years and only escape once they sign up with the Alliance. And in that regard, Nadia rather sees it as trading one cage for another, but that’s neither here nor there.

Like, to go back to Hadestown (I swear I’m not going to write Hadestown meta on this blog), “When the Chips are Down” is one of my favorite numbers because it so accurately describes Nadia’s response to poverty. “How can you expect me to care about another person and put their wellbeing above my own, when doing that will result in my own death? How can you expect me to trust another person, when that could result in my own death? How are you going to lecture me on having no morals when if I had prioritized morality, I never would have survived?” (This is something I love bouncing off Kaidan, but I’ll get to that later.)

In other words, and this is an incredibly obvious thing to say, poverty is traumatizing and violent. It is an incredibly violent thing to put another human being through, to make them worry for their basic safety, to live their day to day in a constant limbo of uncertainty that permeates every facet of their life. Will you be able to eat today? Will you be able to sleep in a safe environment? Can you trust this person you’ve never met? Will trusting them endanger what little safety you’ve managed to achieve? How much money do you have? How long can you make that money last? Where will you be tomorrow? How about the day after?

This is something that leaves its mark on anyone it touches. It’s hard enough for an adult to plan for the future when they don’t have the luxury of knowing how they’ll even survive the week; when you’re a child, and that sort of stress is all that you’ve known, how do you even imagine a better life when you’ve known nothing different?

Before I get any further, I want to pause for a moment. Something that’s always been curious to me are the codex entries for Earth. Here’s a portion of ME1′s codex:

Here’s a portion of ME3′s codex:

(Written transcripts of the complete codex entries at the links.)

In both of them, they talk about how humanity is in a new golden age. A lot of pollution and common diseases have been eliminated. The colonies have brought in more resources. There's even been some correction to the damage early climate change caused. Then the Fire Nation—I mean, Reapers, attacked and ruined all of this. Except, take a closer look at ME1′s codex:

“While every human enjoys longer and better life than ever, the gap between rich and poor widens daily. [...] Less fortunate regions have not progressed beyond 20th century technology, and are often smog-choked, overpopulated slums.”

This seems incompatible with the idea of Earth being in a golden age. How can Earth be thriving if the class disparity is growing, not narrowing? How can Earth be thriving if entire swaths are still "smog-choked” and using centuries old outdated technology?

It’s not incompatible if the idea is that Earth has entered a golden age only for the ones who can afford it. And this is the reality Earthborn Shepards were raised in: the idea that their suffering is an unimportant, insignificant underbelly to an otherwise “prospering” homeworld.

So, resuming with that in mind: the way Nadia sees it is that to allow poverty to exist is an inherent societal failure that reflects on the government. This is why Nadia has no loyalty to the Alliance, and why she doesn’t trust them. This is why she subsequently has no loyalty to the Council, and why she doesn’t trust them, either. It doesn’t matter that the Alliance and the Council weren’t personally responsible for her childhood, because they’re still governments. She knows that governments will lie and exploit and allow for people like her to fall through the cracks if it will benefit them. She knows they will broadcast only the best of what they have to offer while conveniently pretending people like her don’t exist.

Like, personal politics aside, as shown above with the codex entries, this is just...canon. And Thane’s loyalty highlights poverty on the Citadel through Mouse and the concept of “duct rats,” so we know that it exists there, too. How the Council presumably feels about poverty on their station is outlined if you speak to Avina on the Citadel in the second game:

AVINA: Asari futurists believe poverty cannot be eliminated without “cornucopia” technology, which will create anything the user desires. Such technology is unknown outside science fiction.

Essentially: yeah, unfortunately, poverty exists on the station, but what can you do? Believing poverty is avoidable is actually utopian and therefore unrealistic, sorry! 

But when you meet Anoleis on Noveria as Earthborn, he can literally tell you poverty doesn’t exist on Sur’Kesh. (And sure, he could be lying, and we have no proof either way. It doesn’t erase the fact that, at the very least, the existence of widespread poverty is something that even a corrupt and money embezzling salarian thinks is an easy jab.)

ANOLEIS: My homeworld is clean. Poverty is non-existent. If you take some perverse pride in that overheated, acid-washed slum, that is your business.

There’s nothing about the Alliance and poverty that I know of¹, which makes sense considering the main branch of the Alliance we see throughout the games is its military branch. There are still plenty of instances in the trilogy where the Alliance does exploit the vulnerable, or attempts to cover up their self-inflicted shortcomings. An obvious one is with Kaidan and Conatix; Kaidan literally tells you the Alliance is the one who “made mistakes.” That in their haste, they allowed a man to brutalize children for the sake of research. And when it backfired, they sealed the documents and pretended it never happened.

UNC: The Negotiation is one of my favorite ME1 missions for this reason, too—it highlights a part of the Alliance the series doesn’t really focus on otherwise. Darius tells you that the entire reason he’s operating in the region at all is because the Alliance is the one who set him up there. 

DARIUS: You see this gun? This is your gun. Your military set me up here, and now it wants to pretend it doesn’t know me! But I know the truth. The Alliance needed me here! So treat me with the respect I deserve!

SHEPARD: You said we set you up. Did the Alliance give you weapons?

DARIUS: After the batarians were driven out of the Verge, the Alliance wanted to stabilize the region. I had the strongest syndicate in the area. They gave me the weapons and money I needed to take over.

After the mission, Hackett implies the entire reason he sent renegade Shepard to cover a diplomatic negotiation is because he expected and wanted them to kill Darius, because he was now more trouble than he was worth.

HACKETT: I’m sorry that you were unable to negotiate with Darius peacefully. His death is regrettable. Nevertheless, the resulting chaos will create a power vacuum that makes future raids upon our miners unlikely.

SHEPARD: You didn’t think I’d negotiate with him. You wanted me to kill him.

HACKETT: Sometimes extreme measures must be taken to ensure humanity’s safety. Or did you think you were the only one willing to break the rules to get the job done?

(Link, so you can watch the mission yourself.)

None of this is me saying the Council and the Alliance have no redeemable features whatsoever, or that they have never contributed positively to galactic wellbeing. It’s just me citing instances in canon that support why Nadia has the opinion she does of them, and why she’s not exactly incorrect in having them. 

So, to loop this back around to Kaidan? As I said, he’s not a stranger to government-level negligence. But Kaidan had a much different reaction than Nadia did, and this is something that absolutely fascinates her once she finds out.

Before that, though: the two of them don’t really hit it off in the beginning—though they’re both still professional—and this is mainly due to Nadia being, well, Nadia. She is not a people person and she never tries to be, which consequently makes her off-putting to most people. On her end, she’s generally unimpressed and uninterested in the people around her. She sees a lot of them as puzzles to be solved and then to move on from, or threats to assess.² The rare times someone does pique her interest enough to act on it, she still prefers to not linger around for long. So, you know, just general unhealthy behavior.

So, Eden Prime is illuminating for them both. Like, on Kaidan’s end: Nadia comes off as callous. She doesn’t care about the colonists, she doesn’t care about Jenkins’ death. On Nadia’s end: Kaidan comes off as naive. How has he been a marine for this long and she has to tell him to suck it up after someone dies? (This is one of the reasons why she didn’t want to work with regular marines again; in my canon, Anderson had to needle her³ into accepting the Normandy position.)

But the truth of it is that the reason Nadia comes off as callous is because she’s thoroughly desensitized. Like, when you grow up poor, on the streets, and in a gang? You’re both witnessing and being put through a lot of traumatizing situations. Akuze, of course, only adds onto this. There’s this one dialogue option in the beginning of the second game when Miranda and Jacob are assessing Shepard’s memory, and while Nadia doesn’t take this option in canon, it is how she feels:

JACOB: You enlisted, and you survived a thresher maw attack that wiped out the rest of your team. Do you remember that?

SHEPARD: Yeah, I remember it. Everyone screaming, gunfire, blood everywhere. I was the only one focused on survival.

Paragon Shepard focuses entirely on the other marines: how they were their friends, how something like that can destroy you if you let it.

Renegade Shepard barely thinks of anyone else at all. There were fifty other marines on Akuze, and renegade Shepard thinks they survived simply because they were the only one focused on it. For Nadia, that’s because that’s what her entire life has already been until that point.

Look, there are a lot of different ways to play renegade; it runs a much larger gamut than paragon, in my opinion. Nadia is more of a neutral renegade. She’s not particularly bigoted, just dispassionate and apathetic⁴. She resorts to violence and intimidation because it’s the easiest way to control her surroundings, not because she thinks what she’s doing is particularly righteous⁵. This can get brought up in Samara’s loyalty when talking with Morinth:

MORINTH: Violence is the surest expression of power.

SHEPARD: Violence is a means to an end. Power is that end.

Like, Nadia is a person who’s had to live a life surrounded by violence, not because it’s what she initially chose, but because it was repeatedly inflicted on her. She didn’t have the luxury of nursing her compassion and generosity, or of prioritizing morality. Those things would’ve gotten her killed. What she focused on instead was survival: the best way to survive, the easiest way to survive, the way that consistently ensured her own safety. This meant violence, and in order to survive, she became very good at inflicting violence.

That’s what I meant when I said Nadia thinks she traded one cage for another: the Alliance wasn’t freedom in the truest sense; she’s still doing what she ultimately would’ve done if she had remained with the Reds⁶. She’s just doing it with government approval and a steadier paycheck. She knows she’s still being used, and it’s only who’s using her that’s changed. All that’s to say, she isn’t an N7 ranked infiltrator because she feels strongly about protecting Alliance space and dirtying her hands to do it. She’s an N7 ranked infiltrator because it’s simply what she’s good at.

One of my favorite renegade lines in the entire trilogy is during Thane��s loyalty because it perfectly highlights Nadia’s philosophy on her situation:

SHEPARD: Your father and I have killed a lot of people. You haven’t. There’s no reason you should start.

To Nadia, her life is what it is because of the circumstances she was raised in and the decisions she made in response to that. She doesn’t deflect blame for the sort of person she’s become; she holds herself the correct amount of responsible.

She kills people for the Alliance, she kills people for the Council, she kills people for Cerberus. Other Shepards might dress it up differently when death is unavoidable: “it’s a shame, but it was necessary,” said along with the appropriate amount of guilt. Or: they were a terrorist, they were a mercenary, they forced my hand. To Nadia, it’s all death, and there’s no inherent difference between killing someone “to protect humanity” (read: protect the Alliance’s interests) or killing someone “to protect the galaxy” (read: protect the Council’s interests) and simply killing someone in a situation paragon Shepards would deem unnecessary. And to Nadia, if you haven’t had to live a life like this—why start? You still have other options. Use them.

One thing I love about Hadestown is how it discusses the simple accessibility of being able to live your life, let alone live it virtuously. Like whether or not I agree with that, it’s an interesting thing to explore, and it gets brought up multiple times:

“When you’re hungry and there ain’t enough to go round / ain’t no length to which a girl won’t go / [...] and sometimes you think / you would do anything / just to fill your belly full of food” 

“See how the vipers and vultures surround you / and they’ll take you down, they’ll pick you clean / if you stick around such a desperate scene / see, people get mean when the chips are down” 

“Aim for the heart / shoot to kill / if you don’t do it, then the other one will / [...] nobody’s righteous / nobody’s proud / nobody’s innocent / now that the chips are down” 

“Go ahead and lay the blame / talk of virtue / talk of sin / wouldn’t you have done the same? / in her shoes / in her skin / you can have your principles when you’ve got a belly full” 

“I did what I had to do / that’s what they did too” 

“Some flowers bloom / where the green grass grows / our praise is not for them / but the ones who bloom in the bitter snow” 

Again, I’m not going to meta about Hadestown⁷ and the precise context for these verses are different in that canon (for starters, Eurydice never kills anyone), but the concept is similar: when you’re poor, you’re often driven to desperate measures to survive. Sometimes that means stepping over other people, or otherwise ignoring how your actions will affect them. Often, this is to your own detriment. And it’s really, really easy to cast judgment on the poor people driven to these decisions when you were never in their position. It’s really easy to just live when you’re not in a situation where you had to worry about your survival on a day-by-day basis.

I bring up Hadestown because it’s a nice conduit to explain Nadia’s issues. She’s not renegade because she thinks she’s on a crusade and anyone who gets in her way is acceptable collateral damage. She’s renegade because her survival depended on it, and as Sha’ira points out, it’s what has allowed her continual survival:

“I see your skin, tough as the scales of any turian. Unyielding. A wall between you and everyone else. But it protects you, makes you strong. That strength is what kept you alive when everyone else around you was dying. You alone survived. You will continue to survive.”

For her to survive her childhood, she had to step over other people and put herself first. This meant not allowing herself to get close to other people, and to not care about them beyond what they can give her to ensure her own survival.

And this is why Kaidan interests her. Kaidan’s response to brain camp wasn’t to minimize the importance of his morality, it was to double down on it. (Yes, partially to his own detriment, but that’s a different post.) His response wasn’t to distrust others, because after all, one of his defining characteristics is his compassion. It’s just that Kaidan’s inclined to troubleshoot everything, even his interactions with other people. He might be “once burned, twice shy” but he’s not going to be “once burned, byedon’tfollowmeI’mgoingtorelyonlyonmyselfforever.”

Like, he still wants to help...

SHEPARD: So why are you telling me this? Are you saying I’m cutting corners somewhere?

KAIDAN: I’m saying...it’s probably inevitable that we’ll have to. And when that happens, I want to help you. When someone important to you is up on a ledge, you help them. Keep them from mistakes better made by a kid.

SHEPARD: I’m a big girl, Alenko. I don’t need your help.

KAIDAN: I didn’t say you needed it, I said I’m offering it.⁸

...even though his desire to help (because he cares, because he thinks it’s the right thing to do) is precisely what led to the culmination of his trauma.

KAIDAN: He hurt Rahna. Broke her arm. She reached for a glass of water instead of pulling it biotically. She just wanted a drink without getting a nosebleed, you know? Like an idiot, I stood up. Didn’t know what I was gonna do...just, something.

He figures out what went wrong and tries to avoid repeating that mistake. He doesn’t just stop trying at all. He doesn’t lose his faith in having faith.

It’s antithetical to how Nadia responded to her own circumstances, and she can’t quite process the logic behind...why you would be this way. It’s not that she expects everyone to be like her. She’s seen a lot of different people traumatized, and consequently a lot of different ways people have reacted to trauma. It’s more like: “fool me once” is enough for Nadia. There are no second chances after that. She sees no point in ruminating over why something went wrong. Just accept that it did. (Or don’t, but never think about it, anyway.) She thinks living any other way is akin to, I don’t know, laying down in a snake pit right after one just bit you. Stupid, in other words.

(I should also clarify: this is mainly when it concerns people. She will troubleshoot when it comes to things like tech.)

Like, I’ve joked about this to a friend, but when Nadia first reads Kaidan’s file⁹ her impression is: alright, boy scout. Then she actually meets him and she thinks her assessment was more or less spot on, and she loses whatever vestiges of interest his file did manage to leave despite its otherwise boy-scouty-ness. 

But the thing is, Kaidan isn’t naive. He chooses to have the faith he has in the Alliance despite what they’ve put him through. He’s acutely aware that the Alliance is capable of mistakes, because he’s been on the receiving end of it—yet he still wants to help and feels that as a biotic, the Alliance is his best avenue to do that:

KAIDAN: I’m not looking for “the dream.” I just want to do some good. See what’s out here. 

KAIDAN: Commander, I thought real hard about how to use my talents. When I swore the oath to defend the Alliance, it wasn’t on a whim.

Like, Nadia thinks Kaidan giving his loyalty to the Alliance is a stupid reaction, yes (in fairness, Nadia thinks loyalty to organizations in general is stupid), but it still fascinates her precisely because Kaidan has some semblance of an idea of what the Alliance’s negligence can and has caused, and yet he still continues to put his faith in them. Kaidan hasn’t had the easiest life¹⁰, but instead of closing himself off, his reaction was to give the Alliance a second chance, to still place his faith in others, all because he still wanted to do some good.

It’s not what Nadia has done, and she can’t say she understands it, but realizing that Kaidan isn’t the ignorant boy scout she pegged him as goes a long way when it comes to the development of their relationship. (For instance: it allows the relationship to develop at all, lmao.) And the development of their relationship is one of the early domino pieces in a long line of dominoes that sets Nadia down a much healthier path.¹¹

~

¹ We do know, however, that the Alliance does offer to pay college/university tuition in exchange for serving with them in some capacity, thanks to conversations with Traynor and Ashley.

² You know that one Iron Bull banter with Cole where he talks about how one of the first things he does when he meets a new person is to figure out the best way to kill them? Yeah, that’s Nadia.

³ This is because Anderson’s brain is huge, and he understood no one can forever live life the way Nadia was living hers unless they’re a death seeker.

⁴ One of the most in character renegade lines in the trilogy is, once again, during Thane’s loyalty (a big reason why it’s one of my favorites: it’s really, really good Nadia content) when you choose the first renegade check during the interrogation. Shepard sounds so bored, so matter-of-fact. That’s the kind of renegade Nadia is.

⁵ This is probably worse to some people compared to “hard” renegade, since at least “hard” renegade can genuinely believe in what they’re doing, even if others consider it evil. Fortunately, I don’t care.

⁶ I don’t really think she killed anyone during her time with the Reds. (Or, if she did, it was only one person and it would’ve been near the end of her time with them.) I think they primarily used her for cybercrime. She still would’ve witnessed and been expected to participate in a lot of beatings, etc. And, as previously said, had she stayed with the Reds I do think this would’ve ultimately progressed into her killing for them, too.

⁷ Though if you enjoy criticisms of capitalism, an exploration into the traumatizing effects of poverty, and an ultimately hopeful message that meaningful change is possible even when everyone is conditioned to believe it’s not, I recommend giving it a listen. It’s easy to follow along through audio alone, but you can find a low quality bootleg pretty easily, too. (Be warned that some of the songs will differ from the official album recording, though.)

⁸ If the remaster brings better lighting to Kaidan’s little hub area and doesn’t hideously whitewash him like in ME3, this is absolutely one of the first things I’m going to gif because it’s one of my favorite moments in the entire romance.

⁹ Nadia reads the files of everyone she’s going to work with, not because she’s particularly interested in them, but because she wants to know what level of incompetency to expect.

¹⁰ Unrelatedly: ask me about my headcanon about how disgustingly rich Kaidan’s family is, and how much Nadia wants to kill him when she finds this out.

¹¹ This is absolutely not saying love, romantic or otherwise, cures her lifetime worth of unpacked trauma.