#if you could play lotsb and arrival separately then you could basically skip ME2 entirely

[gonkaccino]

I replayed ME1 and ME2 back to back two years ago, something I've never done before (had ME1 on 360, ME2/3 on PC) and it really highlighted how gonzo twisted the perception of ME1 -> ME2 still is today. Everyone got mad at Ashley for being a horrid evil bitch who won't join your squad, pretending she was unreasonably mad about nothing, until you replay ME1 and pay attention to what Cerberus is up to and realize -- oh hey those guys are nazis. Those are human supremacists performing fucked up experiments on "race traitors", including sole survivor Shepard's previous squad. Those are actually the worst people in the galaxy. The worst people in the galaxy have rebuilt Shepard from a piece of charcoal and now borg-Shep is talking about how the nazis are actually cool with aliens and doing the right thing to save the galaxy. Nazi Cyborg Shepard is trying to convince Ashley that that there's really no need to worry about the nazis doing nazi things because their boss said he won't do any nazi things right now.

Gamers were so mad that a woman disagreed with them that they were more than happy to overlook that the woman was disagreeing with them over the ethics of being a space nazi because the space nazis have cool ships and big budgets. Gamers are STILL overlooking that Bioware made the batshit decision to force Shepard to join the space nazis and rewrote characters into braindead idiots to try and justify that decision when they could've MADE UP A NEW ORGANIZATION THAT WASN'T SPACE NAZIS.

Ashley would've been justified in putting a bullet between Shepard's eyes after finding out they were working for Cerberus, and I would thank her for her service.

The way I have to make sure I don’t get on Mass Effect tiktok because they ALWAYS end up hating on Ashley is so annoying. I swear people played the og Mass Effect once, killed Ashley during that play through and just never thought about her again besides miss remembering her comments.

How many times do I have to say it people. ‘I can’t tell the Aliens from the animals’ is triggered by being around Keepers. In universe there is a on going conversation about what the hell the keepers even are so while her comment is in poor taste she isn’t talking about any sentient being.

The ‘Bear Vs Dog’ monologue is a metaphor where humans are the dogs and the person is the Council. Her point is that the council would throw humans under the bus in a heartbeat and Oh, come ME3 she is completely right.

If you bring her along to the conversation with the  terra firma guy she makes it extremely clear that she doesn’t like them in anyway, even before she gets character development. She the hates her grandfather being used by them and strongly opposes them uses his history to promote their racist messages.

ALL the teammates in the og Mass Effect said dumb shit. Garrus in particular makes some shity comments. Because a group of random wildly different characters that start off distrusting each other but grow to love one another like family is a huge part of all the games.

But oh, Ashley is a woman so she gets to die while the boring soft boy gets to live.