#kesh'vataar
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c-rowlesdraws · 1 year ago
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Can I have an OC fact? As a treat? Pick one you wanna talk about most right now and... fun lil trivia? I love your characters so much and can't pick a favorite to request
Aw thank you! (Also lol thank you to everyone who did ask me about my OCs, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to answer your asks!)
Since I just drew them again yesterday in that lil comic, I'll share another fun trivia about Kesh'Vataar nar Zakah, my nonbinary quarian OC. This is what they look like under their helmet!
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my quarians have very subtle facial features, but I still don't want to let that make me slip into drawing them all with the same face. I wanted Kesh to look "cooler" than how I draw Tali, so they have narrower eyes and a more oval face with prominent cheekbones-- but also a cute spray of “freckles” across their nose.
also, I think I mentioned this a long time ago, but their outfit is a mix of elements from male and female quarian outfits in-game. I feel like even though we only saw binary-presenting quarians in the series, there's no reason why there can't be other quarian genders. Kesh isn't unusual among their people-- at least, not for their gender identity. The having-a-crush-on-a-volus thing is definitely unusual.
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c-rowlesdraws · 2 years ago
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Are there any examples of, I guess the term would be, gender transgressing? GNC? Quarians? Like do we see female quarians w/o the hood up or male ones with the hood up? I've never seen a reason why the hood thing is gender divided as like part of religious practice or anything
we don't ever see quarians breaking with gendered exosuit styling tradition in canon (that we know of), but that's not surprising. This is the series where one of the developers joked in an interview about how it would be difficult to make female turians, because what could you do? Give them lipstick or boobs? Haha!! So like. That's the level of nuance this universe as presented to us is operating on. But thanks to the magic of fandom and imagination, I can speculate about alien gender presentation as much as I like.
I imagine quarian exosuit wrappings as being based on clothing styles from when everyone still lived on-planet, just with more practical, pared-down silhouettes to save on fabric and not have any loose fluttery bits to get in the way for those who do a lot of manual labor on the Fleet. Maybe quarian women of 200 years ago wore something like a saree pallu draped over their heads, and that's survived as the full cloth hoods over their helmets, with a partial hood as the more masculine style.
My quarian OC Kesh'Vataar is nonbinary (nb people can exist in any species of course, but I also don't see why the quarians would only have binary genders, they're aliens), and I tried to draw them a suit that blended "male" and "female" design elements and also kind of did its own thing:
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especially with the patchwork, hand-me-down nature of quarian suits, I imagine most people would have their own variations on gender presentation rather than adhering to a rigid standard. In my mind, the Fleet's population looks a bit more diverse than what we see in-game.
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c-rowlesdraws · 2 years ago
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Does Siwa have a personalized or customized suit in any way? I've always felt like the Volus suits (and to a lesser extend the quarian suits) that we see in game are a bit too 'one size fits all' to really represent all the options that would be available.
I wanted her to look similar to the other volus NPCs, like she could blend in with a crowd, so her suit isn't customized beyond some painted details, but she does accessorize! Her quarian friend Kesh'Vataar once gave her a Fleet-made belt made of woven cloth, the same kind of cloth quarians wear wrapped around their exosuits, as a present. It's an extremely meaningful gift and Siwa never leaves the airlock without it.
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I think individual fashion choices in Mass Effect across species are for sure more complicated "in real life" than we saw in-game, where factors like budget and time and design priorities keep things like NPC fashion diversity low. I can imagine volus' approach to exosuit style being like how humans are with cars: most people choose from amongst affordable but fairly standard and unremarkable-looking models, some people drop heaps of credits on luxury designs and custom paintjobs for a more flashy and extravagant life-support experience, and some people get full-body wraps of anime characters.
For quarians, though, I can see them taking a different approach to decoration, because the context for their own exosuit usage is very different: the highly-industrialized volus, master navigators of the great currents of galactic commercial culture, mass-produce shiny new exosuits all the time (alongside a thriving secondhand market), but the quarians are a nomadic, isolated community with extremely limited material resources-- an exosuit that's completely newly-made, with no re-used parts at all, must be incredibly rare to nonexistent. In addition, a volus suit is a luxury purchase that the majority of the population never has a reason to go for, while each and every quarian must wear a suit for almost their entire life. I can imagine quarian suit style being all about combining used-and-reused components with newer ones in aesthetically-pleasing ways. Tarnished metal is polished mirror-bright around permanent dents and scratches, skillful stitching and artfully-draped wraps hide awkward seams.
Additionally, the quarians are (understandably) obsessed with holding onto their shattered history, and I can see their fashion reflecting that, too. Small family heirlooms made of gold and precious metals survive to be passed down because their cultural and personal value is greater than their material worth would be to the Fleet, were they melted down for use in electronics. Traditional patterns woven into cloth portray stylized forms of Rannochian ecology and natural features no living quarian has ever seen. I bet they're big on embroidery, too. But yeah, anyway, yes, I can see both the volus and the quarians having more diverse exosuit designs than shown in canon, but i think volus and quarian design sensibilities would also be distinct from each other in significant ways.
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c-rowlesdraws · 2 years ago
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as u read these options imagine me sliding off of my desk chair onto the floor like a giant slug
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c-rowlesdraws · 3 years ago
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some art related to this ask! Another Mass Effect OC? Yes.

Siwa Rusk (volus, she/her) and Kesh’Vataar (quarian, they/them) have been friends for years. They met while Kesh was on their pilgrimage and Siwa was working at her dad’s exosuit repair and refurbishment shop on the Citadel. After discovering a shared love of coding, they wrote some pieces of dual-platform software together that Kesh took back to the Fleet as a pilgrimage gift. The experience, along with her new friend’s quarian cultural sensibilities, gave Siwa an appreciation for free and open-source software that persists to this day, in contrast to her people’s typical preference for strict copyright licensing.

(these drawings are them in the present day! Maybe at this point they have a whole secret handshake routine? Kesh picking up Siwa is absolutely not a mutually-agreed-upon step though.)
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