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millenniumfae · 5 years ago

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Reyes Vidal Theories And Headcanons

To start off, we’ll begin with all the canon facts we know about our favorite Kadara King, almost all thanks to his writer’s twitter;

He’s in his late twenties

He’s from Chile (born and raised?)

His first language is Spanish, but speaks English (fluently?)

After arriving to Andromeda but before the Nexus Uprising, he was a shuttle pilot assigned to Initiative callsign ��Anubis’

He’s a dog person

Fan of alcohol??

And that’s it. Everything else about him is all speculation and random headcanons. ME:A has no further single-player DLC upcoming. No new comics, either. It’s really sad to say, but it seems likely that the canon story of Reyes Vidal ended with Mass Effect: Andromeda.

But not if I have anything to say about it! Below are my various Reyes Vidal headcanons and theories. And more to come, along with other Mass Effect characters!

1) Reyes as a ‘Shuttle Pilot’

People in the game sometimes describe flying vehicles as a ‘shuttle’, but technically, a ‘shuttle’ isn’t a type of vehicle, it’s the name for a delivery service - short routes, higher frequency, simple fare. You can shuttle passengers or objects place to place. If Reyes was a ‘shuttle pilot’, that meant he was flying things to-and-fro the Nexus on the Initiative’s orders, delivering people and goods by standardized rates.

We’ve already known a shuttle pilot in the franchise before; Steve Cortez of Mass Effect 3 was the Normandy’s shuttle pilot, because he had to deliver the ground team to-and-fro the ship regularly. Those fugly box-like skycars you see in the ME franchise seem to be Alliance/Initiative standard vehicles, described as ‘UT-47′s by Steven in 3, or a ‘Kodiak’ for similar models. Steve also takes Shepard on a skycar ride in the Citadel DLC, and talks about his piloting passion as if they were indeed on a plane and not a car (”There’s a lot about this bird you don’t know/Pilots would wear G-suits”).

Plus, Steve also trained by flying fighter jets, not ‘cars’. So when we say a character is a shuttle pilot, we really do mean pilot and not ‘flying car driver’. Reyes is a pilot in all sense of the word. Even though those boxy cars can indeed use FTL drive to fly between systems and planets, Reyes worked under the call-sign ‘Anubis’ so we can assume he flew a plane specifically. Aviation call-signs are for aircrafts and not cars. The dock manager would ask for the pilot’s verification, and the pilot would respond with the aircraft’s verification name and number - N-503 call-sign ‘Anubis’.

We never see him flying in-game. On the mission we meet Reyes’ ex Zia, we do see his plane outside the house where the supposed cargo was to be. It’s a poopy-brown, double-turbine-winged helicopter thing, and it’s also the plane he escapes onto if you save Sloane. He’s never flying it, though, it’s always him hopping in/off.

I’ve seen some fics where that’s actually where he sleeps, which I don’t think would be realistic - that plane sees a modest amount of action, not just during fights but also during ambient Kadara Port skydrops - you see it flying by sometimes. Inside isn’t big, you see like three seats and nothing else, good for five people maximum. Reyes would have to have this plane flight-ready at a moment’s notice. He’s still smuggling, after all.

It’s a very different plane from all the others you see. It’s not a boring basic Initiative box car, it’s not a bubbly green Angaran car, it’s not a green mess like the Kett’s. The only time you see a plane like that is during the Meridian final battle, where there’s two-three of those same planes, no matter if it’s Sloane or Reyes. I think it’s a plane that was created after the Nexus Uprising, crafted specifically by exiles. You find guns unique to exiles, after all, why not planes? Kadara exiles have wind turbine engineers, doctors, and not to mention the Angara who must be involved. They gotta have some people who can design and produce good planes. It’d be poetic if Reyes’ plane was a hybrid of Angaran and Milky Way engineering.

2) Reyes being Chilean, Brown, and Bi

I’ve said this before, but I was never happy with how Reyes was handled as a Latino man. I’m not Latinx myself, I’m Asian, so I speak from a different perspective of color. Reyes is a token Latinx person in the game, and he (along with his ex Zia) have thick accents and a sexualized history/personality. His accent in particular is super grating, since it’s faked by a white British actor and you can definitely hear it. As an Asian person, I am NOT a fan of seeing faked accents pasted onto a stereotyped love interest.

So when we see a character like Reyes, we make the best of it. We make him ours, and not Bioware’s very spotty writing. Canonically, Reyes is a flirty spicy Latino bi man, but he’s more than that. Romanced or not, you get to see the man behind that mask. He’s silly, insecure, and very intelligent. He’s good with guns, explosives, and planes. He can play politics to the point where he can become the driving force behind an entire planet.

But all that canon stuff still doesn’t erase the spots on Bioware’s record when it comes to making Reyes. They wanted to create a shady morally grey love interest, and Reyes is the direction they took.

Us fans, on the other hand, can actually give Reyes as a bi Chilean man some weight. We can write his Spanish as actually being specific to Chile, we can explore his sexuality the way bi people do. The Mass Effect universe takes place about 160+ years from now. It’s been more than a century. We all know that progress isn’t linear, but for the sake of our liberation, we’ll say that humanity’s ideals of sexual/racial politics have improved.

So unlike us, maybe Reyes didn’t grow up in a world that attacks brown/queer people. Today, being brown means you’re ashamed of your skin color before kindergarten, and being bi means your sexual journey is hindered by marginalization. Reyes, on the other hand, might have not faced these things at all. Humans of the Mass Effect world might see queerphobia/racism as something incredibly archaic, like oppressing redheads.

Not like Bioware’s good at portraying this type of progress. Sure, we never see anti-lgbt rhetoric in-game, nor marginalization of brown humans, but we don’t see any true evidence that the Mass Effect world has gotten rid of these things. I don’t for a second believe that there would be so many straight humans 160+ years from now. Or so many aliens that fall squarely into the human gender binary.

Headcanon; Reyes, being raised on Earth, sees himself as brown and knows the bloody history behind it. His skin color matters to him much the same way my browness matters to me - its a connection to your family, your people, and the way you look at yourself in the mirror. And he doesn’t identify as bisexual as loudly as many of us do, but not because he doesn’t like lgbt culture. He’ll checkmark the ‘bi’ box if you asked him to write out a census survey, I just think he’s one of those people who’s kinda casual about it. Especially if he doesn’t face the marginalization we do.

But being a queer man means he’s got that flamboyant side a lot of us do. He’s romantically cheesy, he likes red wine over candlelit dinners, he finds flower arrangements beautiful, he’ll go to great lengths to make sure he looks and smells nice (even on Kadara’s nasty sulfer atmosphere), he think he looks amazing in a fitted suitdress. And if he could, he’d repaint his plane to be a nicer color other than that fugly brown, like a sweet duochrome blue-purple, but unfortunately its a color that blends in well with Kadara’s landscape.

3) Reyes as the Charlatan

What’s canon about the Collective? They work from the shadows, cultivate poison, steal supplies, have torture rooms where they keep captured Outlaws, and information between them can get muddled or compromised. They’re not a pretty bunch, and the Charlatan isn’t a pretty business.

Compared to the Outcasts, they’re definitely the more gentle organization. And perhaps with the Outcasts out of the picture, they drop a lot of the shadier stuff they do, what with no one left to torture and assassinate. But their business still runs on crime, opposing the Initiative and the Angara directly at times - such as stealing supplies, illegal mining and producing of resources, and drugs. And Reyes oversees all of that.

You can also compare Reyes’ crimes to Vetra, who’s also a smuggler, but a lot less shady. Vetra does a lot of things without bloodshed or violence, and doesn’t even seem to steal things. Instead, she makes business deals that slip underneath the red tape and break regulations. Reyes, however, had to work under Sloane’s violence for many a month, and adopted immoral methods to work around her.

I truly believe Reyes isn’t supposed to be a violent man who likes bloodshed and murder. He sees it as necessary, and his goals are worth getting his hands dirty. Reyes wasn’t just scared about Ryder finding out he lied, he’s worried about the whole, you know, Collectives being a violent mob gang thing. As Kadara improves, he lets up.

When he’s not hanging out in Tatarus, out smuggling, or doing various other shady things, I headcanon Reyes as actually having multiple places to sleep and hie away. Not the Collective Base, though. No one there has ever met the Charlatan, and even the leader, Crux, only gets orders as messages. Before the big reveal, Reyes doesn’t confess any connection to the Collective. He wouldn’t show up at the base. His living spaces are probably within Kadara Port’s various shitty apartments, and also hideouts in the badlands.

Always he’ll be on call for Charlatan business. Even at the Meridian party, he’s clicking away at his omni-tool while talking to Ryder. He keeps odd hours, probably only managing minimal sleep schedules. And when he’s not available, his most trustworthy representatives take up his mantle. And if Sloane’s killed, he only gets more busy.

With an outpost settled, there’s legitimate money to make and Reyes gets right on that. I assume that, at first, establishing the outpost costs a lot more money than it makes, but having an initiative settlement eventually draws in a lot of resources and commerce. Reyes isn’t just the leader of Kadara Port, he’s the King of Kadara the planet and the outpost is part of his jurisdiction. Ditaeon may have been Ryder’s doing, but it’s Reyes’ town now.

4) Reyes and Ryder - Love And Trust

“He already lied to you once. Guys like that don’t stop lying,” - Vetra.

A romanced Ryder is obviously a big deal to Reyes. He even confesses to his right-hand woman Keema that he worried about what Ryder might think about him, and that’s something pretty personal to exclaim. He’s in deep and his self-esteem is heavily affected by what Ryder says to him. If you don’t decide to kiss him on the rooftop, you can instead say that he’s more genuine than you thought, which actually seems to hurt him.

There’s an animation difference between Scott and Sara - Reyes will slide right up against Scott’s personal space during their first meeting at Kralla’s Song, while he’ll stay a modest distance away from Sara. To our eyes, seeing an unknown, shifty man being so close to a woman at a bar is pretty creepy and scary. You, as a man, do not touch a woman you don’t know. To us, being in a place like Kadara Port and alone at a pirate bar means violence against women is a fear at the forefront of our minds.

He’s so uncomfortably close to Scott, though, probably in an effort to intimidate him slightly. But he’s not gonna pull that shit on Sara, because that would mean something completely different.

Reyes makes a big deal about being the perfect gentleman, which is something of a rhetoric joke. Because he’s not a gentleman when it comes to honesty and honor; he steals, cheats, and lies, he brought a sniper to the duel. But he is a gentleman when it comes to compassion and sympathy. He set up a soup kitchen for the slums. He donates money to the clinic. He prioritizes the Angara native to Kadara. He lifts the ‘protection fee’ nonsense and doesn’t exile people to the badlands.

He said he came to Andromeda to ‘be someone’. I think that’s supposed to be a double-meaning. He wants to be important to people, but why rule from the shadows if that’s the case? Because he wants to make a difference. He actually does want to help people and set up an Initiative outpost and dispense justice. That’s the ‘someone’ Reyes wanted to be all his life, and it grew into a passion when he finally upped and abandoned the Nexus.

Being a ‘gentleman’ is kinda old-fashioned, but Reyes seems to have a special interest in old-fashioned stuff, playing Soft Jazz while dancing quietly with Ryder. I think it’s just something he enjoys, like having actual full-blown romantic dates. Too bad he rarely has the opportunity to explore them.

About Zia; his alleged ‘ex’ is a mystery. Umi, a bartender, pinpoints her as an ex-girlfriend, but Reyes will say they merely had a few drinks and things apparently never went far. And when Zia shows up, there’s no love lost between the two of them, even though Zia apparently knows Reyes well enough. Relationships with a tail-end like that were probably never serious, but still had enough time invested to become actual, significant history.

I don’t know why Bioware wanted to write, direct, code, and implant this mission, as if it adds something to Reyes’ characterization. Zia in particular is a unique character model, which is weird because very few characters have a special face and texture. What does Zia mean to Reyes? To us?

I think Zia was an old smuggling/piloting partner of Reyes, and the two of them might have struck a connection during the first hopeless months of the Andromeda Initiative. Zia grew to know Reyes as a selfish man with no friends, split off from him and ran a competitive smuggling shtick, and even says a romanced Ryder will soon know how wrong they were to place faith in him. Its a side of Reyes we don’t hear from anyone else, and I think it’s meant to shake our confidence in Reyes as the future leader of Kadara - or as Ryder’s love interest.

After all, why would Reyes ask the Pathfinder for help in finding some random lost cargo? Because it was probably something super important. Worth not just money, but morality too. Reyes wouldn’t tell someone as unsubtle as Ryder that they were about to look for some misplaced escaped ark survivors (or whatever’s also super important, I dunno), or everyone and their mother would know they were up to something big.

Zia lured Reyes with the promise of something very big, and tried to take him down because she wanted to make more money. Reyes, on the other hand, isn’t completely money-driven. Zia represents the Charlatan we were told to fear, while Reyes is the true face behind the shadows. And after all that business rivalry, Reyes still buries her.

But Zia still says Reyes is a selfish man, and she knows him much better than Ryder does. Why would a fellow amoral smuggler care if someone was selfish or not? Was Reyes selfish to her specifically? Like, in a bad lover way? That’d suck, but he probably didn’t feel that much affection towards Zia in the first place. Or did Zia have ulterior motives that Reyes didn’t agree with, and cut off contact because Zia wanted to cross lines Reyes didn’t feel comfortable with? That’d be a nicer way of looking at it. Reyes was ‘selfish’ because Zia wanted to, I dunno, hit civilians for extra cash and Reyes said no.

My headcanon; with Ryder, Reyes definitely doesn’t take things super casual like he probably did with Zia. He eventually dedicates himself to them, and invests a lot of his emotions into their relationship. It might even be something he never did before, but a hero’s love is worth so much to him. He can’t leave Kadara, and Ryder can’t stay with him (at least at first). And secrets will continue to bloom between them. But Reyes will continue to improve himself, ‘becoming someone’ to not just Kadara, but to Ryder.

5) Random and MISC

Being an exile-in-an-outlaw-town-during-a-cluster-wide-war-against-the-Kett-and-the-Scourge means shitty food. Which Reyes hates and he does his best to avoid the Jim Bakker bucket-esque MREs that the Initiative hands out. And Angaran nutrient paste doesn’t sit right with Milky Way species, so he doesn’t eat that either. Life on the frontier means adopting to local flora and fauna, which means old fashioned Angaran dishes like Adhi roast, Kaerkyn shell soup, Taurg flank steak, and Drall bits. But no, he doesn’t cook if he can help it - he’s not terrible, just not good, and he’ll instead buy food from vendors on Kadara Port, or order it from the bar. And he’ll get dessert when he can, too.

And he loves Kadara Port. It’s his own little cyberpunk neon noir city, even if it does smell vaguely of sulfur. He loves looking out the window and seeing the bright glowing signs overlapping each other, hearing the shady bustle of exiles 24/7, the patter of acidic rain. When he begins to get involved with Ryder, he begins to take extra time to gaze at the city’s horizon and be sentimental. That’s what falling in love does to a person.

He’s canonically a dog person, and by dog we do include Mass Effect’s alien dogs such as adhi. The Collective is trying to domesticate wild Adhi, which is a project Reyes started to make them into guards and weapons, but a side of him just loves the idea of having an adhi as a pet. If he could, he’d have five rescue pups of varying breeds (and species), posting those Sexy Dog Instagram Photos of all of them at the beach, or something.

Time as the Charlatan means less time to work out. So his muscles aren’t big, and he’s got enough fat to cover them, too. If he undressed, you’d see that he’s smaller than his clothing would imply, no Ripped Taint or Tight Glutes. Lotsa hair, though, all down his chest and pelvis and legs. He actually doesn’t really like it, but he only has resources to shave his jaw.

All his outfits are the typical humanwear that all colonists to Andromeda have access too, but with extra touches because he Cares about his appearance. Fancy gloves, a nifty belt with a shiny buckle. He uses the slighest amount of product to slick his hair up, gotta stretch it out until he can find an Andromeda replacement. Uses a nice deodorant, and will get expensive cologne when he has the chance.

He hates the cold, and Kadara has modest winters that won’t freeze the water but will spread a frost everywhere. That’s already too much for him, and throughout the whole season he’s more tired, grumpy, and seasonally depressed. When spring breaks through again, he gets a burst of energy and happiness from the relief.

If Ryder ever lives with him for an extended period, they’ll quickly learn the difference between a 22-year-old’s living space, and an almost-30′s living space. Perhaps with Sloane out of the picture, Reyes gets a legit place to live and invests in real furniture and interior decor, while Ryder’s still stuck in that college student trash stage. Reyes forbids scratches on the table, or bath towels crumbled up, or windows left open during the rain, etc. Ryder think its cute that Reyes is so domestic, Reyes is just trying to save his expensive couch from shoes on the cushions.

#Reyes Vidal #reyder #mass effect headcanons #mass effect #mass effect: andromeda #me:a

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