#some of this conversation is retreading the same old ground and not making any huge revelations

[holocene-sims]

next // previous

october 1, 2021 4:15 p.m. grant's house

[juhani] hello? grant, can i call you tomorrow? it’s late.

[grant] no, you can’t. i know it’s 11 o’clock where you are right now, and i don’t really care. you answered, so you’ve trapped yourself.

[varpu, faintly] juha, if you don’t talk now, he will never call you back.

[juhani] i want to speak with you, of course i do, it’s just–

[grant] fantastic, because that’s what we’re doing. we’re talking! i have 30 years of stuff to get off my chest, and i'm sure you have your own piece to share. not sure where to start, but.

[juhani] may i ask you a question? what did you overhear at dinner the other night? are you upset i'm moving? is that it?

[grant] i mean, that stung a little after the whole “i’ll be around to build a relationship with you,” thing, but i gave you my express permission to go home, so it’s whatever. we are both adults, so i am not going to fault you for making adult decisions that improve your life. i'm more upset by you claiming you didn’t tell me about your plans or include me in the moving and wedding stuff and whatever because i'm difficult.

[juhani] that’s not what–

[grant] oh, come on. don’t kid yourself. you said it yourself, anything involving me is like pulling teeth. i heard it loud and clear.

[juhani] well, when i tell you things, you never react well. it always goes precisely like this conversation is going.

[grant] really? never? because i remember being pretty positive about your proposal and about you contacting me in the first place and about coming to dinner to acquaint myself with varpu’s kids and about meeting varpu a while back…

[grant] what i react poorly to is you leaving me out, you calling me difficult, you complaining about me in front of impressionable people, etcetera.

[juhani] i don’t want to leave you out.

[grant] that’s what varpu said, too, but i didn’t believe her, so why would i believe you?

[juhani] i have no idea how to interact with you. i've apologized to you, told you i regret the events of your childhood. nothing works.

[grant] do you regret it? because it kind of just feels like you’re doing the same shit again. abandoning me for your own self-interests. oh, and this time you’re replacing me with a brand new family you treat better.

[juhani] i'm not repl–okay, what would you prefer me do when you push me away? you told me i was difficult.

[grant] when did i say that? i mean, that's true, sure, but i would not say that to you. what i probably said that you’re misconstruing is that talking to you is hard because i'm not comfortable around you.

[juhani] and how long will it take you to be comfortable around me? i don’t know what else you want me to do. truly, i don’t, and it is not pleasant to be rejected endlessly.

[grant] well, i'd have to forgive you, but i don’t. if forgiveness was meant to happen, it would not be instant. you’d have to keep trying with me, even if i piss you off, even if i push you away. you’re my fucking father, it’s your job. you show up for your kid even if they’re horrible or annoying. you never turn your back on them. but, you know, you didn’t show up for the first 22 years you were around, so you’d have to try extra hard now to change my mind.

[grant] but honestly, i will never be comfortable around you. i've realized that over the last few days. i did actually think if you just kept trying, i'd relax and be less on edge, but nope. you could become an honest-to-god saint tomorrow, and i'll still be furious because nothing will make me understand why you couldn’t have been a decent person when i was a kid. like, when i needed you.

[grant] and i don’t get why you weren't. i don't. i'm serious. i can’t comprehend it. clearly, you have it in you to be a decent person. you love varpu's kids. you're fatherly towards them. you take them on vacation, you invite them to house and wedding venue tours, you tell them about and include them in your hobbies, you remember details about them, you smile at them without being forced, you go to their weddings and don’t flip out about them being queer even though you were viscerally disgusted with me when you found out–

[juhani] you shouldn’t bring them into this. it isn’t fair. and i've taken you on vacation before, for one.

[grant] i am being petty, but i think it's fair because i'm not shitting on them specifically. and yeah, okay, you took me on vacation once. you took me to finland exactly once, but i never met your family, and i remember nothing other than the plane rides.

[grant] and you shouldn’t do this. we don’t need to split hairs. you don’t need to crawl through that list of grievances and “well, actually” me as many times as you can manage. one vacation changes nothing. that does not erase all the times you sat there like a lame duck and ignored me or mocked me or let my mother abuse me. there is nothing for you to pat yourself on the back about.

[grant] nothing.

[juhani] so, what are you upset about now?

[grant] why?

[juhani] why what?

[grant] why are you like this? why were you a terrible father? why have no heart for me or my sisters? why did you save all your love for someone else’s kids?

[grant] oh, and how about cerise? you sure didn’t care about your bastard kids either, did you?

[grant] shit. i'm sorry. that just kind of came out. that’s not how i wanted to, you know, pepper that into this conversation. i was going to save that for the end.

[juhani] how do you know about her?

[grant] doesn't matter. it's a long story.

[grant] on that note, what is up with the secret daughter? how’d that happen? is she the only one, too, or should i be on the lookout for any other siblings? and hey, you only divorced my mother in the last few years, so you were cheating. how many times did you fuck around on her, and why would you? you wouldn’t divorce her because you were afraid of her, but apparently it's no big deal to cheat.

[juhani] grant, how can i answer you if you don't allow me to talk? cerise’s mother michelle is a doctor. your mother and i were both at a conference in detroit about healthcare outreach, and…

[juhani] i know it seems contradictory, given how long i stayed with your mother, but i was unhappy in the marriage. i met michelle there at the conference, and she was kind and intelligent, and i suppose the rest of the story should be obvious to you.

[grant] goddamn, man. i hate my mother, but that’s bold: sleeping with another woman right in front of her face.

[grant] did she ever find out?

[juhani] eventually. you remember how she was with the finances. she tracked all the money going in and out of the household. you couldn’t have one cent go missing without being accused of something, and she’d always blame it on some incident with her brother and start ranting about him.

[juhani] look, the agreement with michelle was that i'd stay out of her life and send child support, and she wouldn’t interfere with my family either. i used to lie and tell your mother the child support funds were going somewhere important, but she didn't believe me very long. she did finally question me and find out the truth.

[grant] and?

[juhani] in hindsight, her reaction reminds me a lot of the one she had when you lashed out at her during your graduation dinner. very little left her speechless, but that did. initially, i should clarify. she would go on to never let me live cerise’s existence down.

[juhani] and to answer your question, as far as i know, cerise is the only other child.

[grant] as far as you know?

[juhani] i cannot rule out further surprises.

[grant] jesus christ. my grandmother is right, all men are dogs, but you most of all.

[juhani] does it upset you that much?

[grant] again, i don’t like my mother, but if i needed any more proof that you’re more spineless than a sea sponge, this is it. you were so unhappy with my mother that you’d cheat on her, but you’d not divorce her when your kids were vulnerable.

[grant] you disgust me. you slept around and thought with your dick before you spared a single thought for the kids you let my mother abuse. or for yourself! fuck you. if you’re going to be that selfish, at least be selfish enough to prioritize yourself and leave the woman making you that miserable!

[grant] and now i don’t believe you when you say you wouldn’t leave her back then because you were scared of her. do you seriously mean to tell me it’s less terrifying to cheat on her than to just walk out of the house and never come back?

[grant] i did that, you know? when i'd had enough of my mother, i told her as much and then never spoke to her again. and guess what? wouldn’t you be so stunned to find out she’s never tracked me down, never tried to call or email to reel me back in? she left me alone after i told her to go fuck herself!

[grant] and technically, you know it's possible to leave her, too. what did you say about the divorce? that she just rolled over and let you do it and was fine with you just coughing up all the assets and dipping?

[grant] exhibits A, B, and C that she’s a coward, too. she thinks she’s the boss, but if you fight back hard enough, she gives up. you could have left her at any point in time.

[grant] god. oh my god. you stupid, spineless motherfucker. i thought i'd maxed out on anger. apparently not!

[grant] you really could have been a better father. you could have had your whole little life overhaul decades ago, and you could have saved the entire family so much pain. you, me, elizabeth, kelly…

[grant] i should have suspected as much, and i guess i did, but it's shocking to realize over and over just how useless you are as a father. i think it can't get any worse and then it does. you are a complete and utter failure as a parent.

[grant] this is why i can’t forgive you. you didn’t have to mess up so badly. but no. whatever you got out of the relationship was enough to convince you to sit there and watch my mother ruin all of us, and even thought you weren't happy with her, you got by with fucking other women and only regretted staying a billion years later when you noticed you had nothing of substance left in life but my mother. and that’s a pretty depressing way to live, isn’t it?

[juhani] i stayed because i thought we deserved each other.

[grant] with that attitude, maybe you did.

[grant] listen, i'll admit this, no problem. it’s no one’s fault that she is the way that she is. it’s not even yours. she’s abusive, and what she does to other people is her fault and her responsibility. she’s excellent, too, at convincing you to just go along with it and never question her. it's not that hard to get caught in her trap at first, and she will try her very best to break you. but at some point, you have to question anyway. at some point, you have to recognize you deserve better and do something about it.

[grant] but you didn’t. not until it was too late for it to mean anything.

[grant] i would never think i've done everything right, but in the end, i've respected myself enough to make better choices and do something about the situation i was in, and i've had to do that because the adults in my life weren’t responsible or organized enough to fix things before responsibility fell into my hands.

[juhani] you are a braver and a better man than i.

[grant] i'm glad i am, but do you know how exhausting it is to be brave all the time?

[grant] i am because you weren’t. it is entirely because you failed. you weren’t brave enough to give a fuck about yourself or your kids, so i've had to be brave my entire life. brave enough to survive my childhood, then brave enough to leave. and guess what? i don’t want to be brave. i just want to exist. and back then, i just wanted to be a kid.

[grant] just a kid.

[grant] i wanted to come home from school and play with my pokemon cards and hear my mom and my dad say, “hi honey! how was your day? we love you!" i didn’t want to live in fear of what horror would befall me each and every day.

[grant] fuck you. fuck you. fuck you. you stole my childhood. you stole elizabeth’s childhood. you stole kelly’s childhood.

[grant] you and my mother, but you could have done something. you could have given us our childhoods back. you could have done something! you should have done something!

[grant] you didn’t have to do everything right even. parents mess up, i know that, but you could have at least tried. the bar was on the floor. i would have over the moon living in a single parent household with a father who at least showed up to my hockey games if he wasn’t busy at work and gave me a hug every once in a while.

[grant] and you know what, you did more than steal our childhoods. because you couldn’t stand to sacrifice your comfort long enough to take care of your kids, we all have to live in permanent hell. i have to spend the rest of my life freaking out when someone walks up behind me or speaks too loudly or–god forbid–touches me! it took me years to finally learn not to flinch when someone high fives me! and kelly–i don’t know what she deals with, but i know her life can’t be peaceful.

[grant] again, i am not blaming you for what my mother did–i know she was not kind to you either– but i do blame you for not even trying to stop her or get away from her. you were an adult with power, and you didn't use an ounce of it. actually, you did use it, just not for good. you threw me specifically under the bus because it was easier to let my mother use me as a punching bag than you.

[juhani] you’re right.

[juhani] you’re right, grant.

[grant] i have nothing else to say, short of "fuck you" again. i think i'm done yelling at you.

[grant] no, wait, one last thing. what did you even see in my mother in the first place? what was so enticing about her that you’d stay with her so long and ditch your college sweetheart for her?

[juhani] i don’t know. i don’t know anymore.

[grant] i guess it was two people drawn to each other's misery.

[grant] great. well, that’s all, folks.

[grant] good luck with the new family. maybe you can make it right with someone else and enjoy a totally fresh start because you will never make it right with me, and i will never let you forget what you did to me and my sisters. and don’t lose varpu again, by the way. she is, like, far out of your league–so far it's not even funny–and you are lucky to have this second chance with her and to have a good relationship with her kids.

[grant] also, just so it's clear, i don't want to speak to you anymore after this. don't call me, i won't call you either, except in one circumstance. i'll consider it on the day my mother kicks the bucket. we can toast to the end of that chapter of our lives and hope that the haunting ends. because surely you have to feel a little haunted, too, right? i have a sinking suspicion that’s why you reconnected with me. you don’t care about me. you care about that fresh start, about making yourself feel better about wasting your life and fucking up everyone around you.

[dgcatanisiri]

I said I’d hoped to get this out by the end of the month. FINALLY, the next installment of my series of Hypothetical DLCs. 

Welcome to DG’s Listing of Wish These DLC Existed, where I theorize, speculate, and just kinda generally throw ideas at the wall about DLCs for games I love that never happened and never will happen, but damn, I’d like to see them anyway. 

Because I have ideas, I can’t get them made as mods, I don’t have time to make them into fic, and they’re never going to happen anyway, so why not put them up in a public place? After all, they’re tie ins to games I have no control over anyway, so it’s not like I’ll ever make money off of them anyway. And, as I’m not bound by any hardware limitations in terms of crafting ideas, or production cycles dictating when the game’s endpoint is, these can and do go on a great deal longer than the standard lifespan of a game.

A review of the format: There will be a name for the DLC, a brief synopsis, a reference to when this hypothetical DLC would become available/if and when it becomes unavailable, and then an expansion/write up of the ideas going in to them. Some ideas will have more expansion than others, because I’ve just plainly put more thought into them - in a lot of cases, I wrote them down just on the basis of ‘this idea seems pretty cool,’ and then gave them more context later on.

Feedback is welcome! Like an idea? Don’t like an idea? I welcome conversation and interaction on these ideas. Keep it civil, remember that these are just one person’s ideas, we can discuss them. Perhaps you’ll even help inspire a part two for these write ups! Because I do reserve the right to come up with more ideas in the future - these are the ideas that I’ve had to this point, but the whole reason this series exists is because I come up with new ideas for old stories.

With the KOTOR games both dealt with, we move on to the next category of the BioWare franchises, Mass Effect. This one took a while, considering the much more open-ended aspect of choices within the Mass Effect universe. And ME2′s edition is going to take a good long while as well, considering... Well, I’ll explain that when I get there. 

Anyway. Given the way that Mass Effect carries decisions forward, there is an additional category for the ideas within these editions, where there’s a brief summary of the way they will impact future games - granted, most of these are ME2 letters and ME3 war assets, but it’s still worth making a note of.

Also, given the context of ME1′s rather open-ended structure, where there aren’t really any serious plot breaks or boundaries that prevent advancement too soon, aside from Virmire and Ilos not being unlocked until events in the plot, assume that, unless otherwise noted, these DLCs are all available at any point after Shepard is made a Spectre and given command of the Normandy, and, obviously, must be played before Ilos. 

To business!

First Contact

As a Spectre and Alliance officer, Commander Shepard is called in when an Alliance team goes missing after reporting they had made contact with a new alien species. The Normandy is assigned to recover the team and establish peaceful relations if at all possible – yet there is a mystery here, one that the natives are not happy to welcome meddling in...

So, yeah, the basic idea here is simply that, with the whole Reaper thing, we don’t really get to see much of the more basic ideas of space exploration – big plot trounces little ideas. And first contact is as basic a concept for a scifi series as you can get. In my book, that’s the advantage of DLC in this series, to go for the smaller scale stories.

So let’s go into detail. We’re going to need a character to act as the exposition fairy – I vote that, at least in the briefing, this is coming from Pressley, so we can offer him a little more characterization and involvement (let’s honestly consider “Pressley gives a briefing that offers him more characterization, involvement, and general utilization” a thing for all of these, since he really doesn’t get a lot of usage in ME1, which is probably why he’s not really replaced on the Normandy after this game, and take this opportunity to give his character some expansion so that his death can mean a little more when ME2’s prologue goes down). He’s giving the baseline facts about why the Normandy is going in and handling this situation.

Obviously, the First Contact team has gone out of contact, and the Normandy is tasked to discover what has happened to them and make the best of the situation they end up in. I’m not locking this to after recruiting Liara, but I do picture her, Kaidan, and Ashley getting some fair use in any and all of these (a few in particular – we’ll get there when we get there), both because of their role as love interests and because of their general attitudes and thematic roles – Liara’s the wide-eyed idealist (considering her romanticizing of the protheans – any culture that refers to themselves as an “empire” is not going to be a peaceful collection of philosophers and scientists), Ashley’s the reasoned cynic, and Kaidan is something of the balance between them – cautious optimism and ready for if/when things go to shit.

The arrival finds Shepard and company on our new world (location to be decided – given Citadel rules on activating dormant Relays, it’s probably best that this is a planet within an already existing cluster, and we probably ought to put it somewhere within the boundaries of Alliance space, what with them taking lead on this first contact). The locals seem welcoming and friendly, but there’s a clear air of uncertainty – are they a threat, where’s the Alliance contact team, why are they acting like they know something that Shepard and crew don’t?

I know, we’re running the risk of retreading the ground of Feros and the thorian here, but, one, honestly, I like Feros, so I’m okay with revisiting it as a concept at least, two, it’s not like BioWare doesn’t recycle their own plots all the time anyway, even granting that they usually don’t do it within the same game, and three, I see it ending in a different place, so we’re going with this.

Anyway, investigation, suspicion, blah, blah, blah... I swear, the fun would be in the investigation, the building mystery, so I’m skipping over the work for the sake of a summary. The end result is that of course the natives killed the team, but the reason is because this is a group of descendants of a prothean subject race. They’d engaged in a revolt, adapted/stolen a colony ship, and flew off into the black, and done this right around the time of the initial stages of the Reaper invasion of the prothean empire – the protheans had bigger fish to fry (or be fried by, depending on how you use the metaphor), and given how proud the protheans are, I can see them covering this up in the name of saving face, both of which allowed these people to escape the notice of the Reapers – systematic destruction or not, finding one lone ship in the depths of space isn’t “needle in a haystack,” it’s “needle in the midwest.” It’d have been one thing if they’d found a planet to establish themselves on right away, but they dove into the black without a clear destination – also use this to emphasize WHY most Council explorations tend to stick to familiar clusters with an established Mass Relay nearby, that space is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big.

As a detail for this race, I’m gonna include one of my headcanons for the protheans, since, hey, my DLC idea – while the protheans developed their technology around the Mass Relays and such, as the Reapers intended, the tech of their own design, without the influence of external powers, would have more of an organic bent to it, that they were more inclined to “grow” their tech than build it. Like they accepted the Mass Effect as a foundation for their tech, the Citadel as a base, but they weren’t all that happy about it, just never quite getting their own designs really match the designs of “inusannon” technology in effectiveness. So in response, this species turned towards cybernetics (maybe they’re members of the zha’til, to connect them having this knowledge with the tidbits Javik offers in ME3? *shrug* I’ll use them as the name for this species for simplicity’s sake, because that’s less awkward than no name at all, but I’m not married to it being them), to not just give them an edge against the protheans when they came after them, but also to serve as a taunt towards them, a statement of “you fear technology, so we’re going to become the personification of your boogeymen.”

So the survival of these zha’til has been their hidden nature, and they have developed into a pure xenophobic society – no aliens are accepted among them, and, with the appearance of Shepard’s team, they are fully of the belief that there will be those who come after. They can recognize that the appearance of outsiders once means it will happen again. And they will be ready – Shepard’s crew is a boon for them, allowing them access to biologies of not just humans, but asari, turian, krogan, and quarian. They’d prepared for the damage the protheans could do upon finding their retreat, spent fifty thousand years becoming something the protheans would have to fear. Of course, Shepard’s gonna have to ruin it. I can see them trying the ‘we’ll erase the coordinates, put up a warning buoy, ensure no one comes here’ argument, but that’s not flying with these guys, since organic nature tends towards curiosity, and just blanking the system would leave a mystery, one that organics would want to solve, and a warning buoy can malfunction or be ignored – they want total isolation, and, even if the odds are like one in trillions, that’s too high for them, so they’d sooner be the only life in the galaxy.

I’m thinking the solution is in their reliance on their tech, having attained this symbiosis with it that they all are implanted – tech can be hacked, it can malfunction, it can be a vulnerability as much as an asset. Going way back to the start of the involvement of Kaidan, Liara, and Ashley, here’s them all getting to voice their solution, with Ashley going the straightforward route of “they’re a threat, they’ll keep being a threat, they don’t want to change and stop being a threat, I don’t want to commit genocide, but I also want to defend the Alliance, and those options look mutually exclusive right now,” Liara is all “think of what they could offer us, their history is invaluable, they were contemporaries of the protheans, what might they know, and even if we have the ability to wipe out an entire species, that’s an action that can never be undone,” and Kaidan is the middle ground of “the leaders and people we’ve spoken to made a threat, but we can’t call the entire population of this planet genocidal maniacs, surely there must be something we can do to find a reasonable solution.”

It basically comes down to Shepard getting to hack the tech, and then faced with the decision – a) wiping them out by way of effectively setting all their implants to electrify themselves – they’ve shown themselves to be a threat, they have violent intentions towards other life in the galaxy, and nothing indicates that there is any dissent among their population, especially if their implants can allow for like planetary consensus or something, b) shutting down the tech, their greatest threat, as a way to keep most of them alive, but reducing their civilization to like Bronze Age – the Citadel races would certainly be willing to help the zha’til recover, but it’s not like they’d be happy to accept it, or c) use this as the way to force them to come to the table and negotiate in good faith, under the threat of destruction as a result of them using this weapon, give them a chance, with the downside being that they have done nothing to indicate that they deserve this chance, or that the second they develop a workaround, they’ll be back to threatening all alien life.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from the head of a Council-approved research team, investigating the planet, with or without inhabitants.

ME3: Assuming the zha’til survive, a representative is on the Citadel, offering their aid. If they were reduced, they are a significantly smaller War Asset.

Investigations

The Citadel’s Wards house people from across the galaxy, and murder is a common occurrence. When the murder victim is a prominent Alliance politician, however, one whose controversial opinions made him a target for non-humans, the Alliance can only trust one person to investigate on the Citadel – the first human Spectre, Commander Shepard. 

Honestly, the Citadel could absolutely support its own game. Just the pieces we get of it from the trilogy and the Citadel DLC tease a massive station that probably has a population higher than some planets. So there’s A LOT to do here (indeed, looking over my notes for this, I have at least one DLC focused entirely on events on the Citadel in each game, and all of them can utilize entirely new areas, so...). And, really, who doesn’t enjoy an old-fashioned ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery?

Obviously, we have more than just the basic mystery happening here, or else we’d just have a standard sidequest, not a full DLC length story. I feel like this needs to go in depth on corruption within Citadel politics – poke around my blog, you’ll find I’m HIGHLY critical of the Council’s handling of the Saren matter, where they appoint a C-Sec officer with a reputation for not playing by the rules as the only investigator of the Eden Prime incident, give him roughly a day to look in to things, (Shepard’s out about sixteen hours, according to Doctor Chakwas, they arrive at the Citadel, get summoned to the Council, and encounter Garrus, at which point the trial is about to start, with no indication that more than hours at most have passed) and then TELL him that his investigation is over, Saren is allowed access to the files of the man he is accused of killing, an eye witness report of Saren’s murder of Nihlus is completely dismissed, while the data file Tali extracts from a geth, which Anderson says upon hearing that he’s never heard of this happening (to say nothing of the quarians’ status among the Citadel races) is deemed “irrefutable evidence”... There’s A LOT that is at best questionable about how the Council handles things. And that’s just sticking with the first game.

So I’d like to pull back some of the veil on Citadel politics, and use that to explore the human-alien friction. Due to Shepard’s rising profile throughout the series, we kinda lose a lot of the big level details of this, and it’s one of those things I like about the Mass Effect universe circa the first game – humanity ISN’T the big kahuna, they’re the latest arrivals, and the rest of the galaxy thinks they’re a bunch of jerks trying to take what they haven’t earned.

Hence where we start – our victim is an Alliance politician, someone who’s got one of those jobs that makes them friends and enemies of the same people. Obviously, this means that there are a lot of people on the Citadel (and outside the Citadel) who would easily be picked up as suspects – again, we’re going an investigative route, to help show off Shepard as a tactician, to show off their brains as well as their brawn.

This is going to lead us first to explore more of the Citadel Tower, the place where the Council and other assorted political figures meet. Udina probably plays a part in things, considering he IS the ambassador at this point, so he’ll probably be talking to Shepard about matters along the way, something of our regular check-in point (plus good to offer him some more characterization and expand him somewhat).

Obviously, with a murder mystery, we investigate through the location, taking us through the Tower and into its deeper structure, to the point that Shepard ends up in the Tower’s basement (or whatever we call the lowest level). Down here, the discovery is that there’s (what else) a conspiracy. Humanity is moving too fast – they’ve only been here for about thirty years and they already have an embassy, are angling for a spot on the Council, how long until they replace all the races who were here first on the Council, make the Citadel humans only?

I feel like we could also get some retroactive elements of Cerberus’s human supremacy in play here, suggest that our victim was being manipulated by them and used to advance their agenda – not just to foreshadow how Cerberus gains prominence in the next game, but also to show that even well-intentioned people are preyed upon by Cerberus’s actions (hello Paragon Shepard). Cerberus didn’t mind using him for their objectives, even if he’s not some pro-human bigot.

Speaking of, let’s tie in Terra Firma a little more into this – they seemed to have some influence in the first game, then drop off the face of the earth, so yeah, let’s throw them in somehow. Like I see that as part of our concluding decision, where the replacement political figure is one of their people, so they seem like the “obvious suspect” red herring – I think by this point we’ve established with these that one of my priorities is worldbuilding, and, again, Terra Firma dropped off the face of the series when it seemed to have developing prominence in the first game.

Anyway, back to the plot. Obviously, Shepard has to do something about this conspiracy. The problem is, of course, while extreme, they represent a dominant view among the Citadel races. And it’s one that has validity to it, humans are demanding more power than any other race in the Citadel’s history (this cycle, anyway, who knows about the previous ones?), and to these races, they are seen as aggressive in that pursuit.

Here’s the thing, and I’ve gone over this in my critiques of the Council before – humans are aggressive about getting more representation because of a handful of things. Number one, humans are out to advance, we recognize that we learn best from making mistakes, while the Citadel races seem to abide by a code of “none shall advance faster than the slowest.” That no advancement is made until all are “capable” of benefiting from it in certain ways, despite how we have the example of multiple species not even being able to compete on a level playing field with races like the asari, the salarians, or the turians – the volus are a client race of the turians, despite having been a part of the galactic community longer. It’s why we see the relative stagnation – the asari discovered the Citadel two thousand years ago, and yet so much of it is still a mystery.

Number two, humans are aggressive because the Citadel races were aggressive to them first. The First Contact War started because Citadel law is that no one shall activate dormant Mass Relays. Thing is, humanity opened Relay-314 at a time that they’d never even heard of the Citadel and its government. So the turians who opened fire first? They were holding humanity to the standards and rules and laws of a governmental body that they didn’t even know existed until the shooting started.

That the turians enforce this law so rigidly, and that the asari and salarians don’t seem to understand how much the asshole it makes them, is the honest source of a lot of the tension between the races in the game.

Like, I vehemently disagree with the racist attitudes of the Terra Firma asshole we meet, but he’s not wrong in pointing out that if you see a kid playing with a matchbook, you take the matches away, but you don’t shoot them for good measure. The turians started the conflict, and you can tell that the Citadel races never acknowledge their responsibility in this – it’s all “humans are so aggressive” without any understanding of why a species whose introduction to the greater galaxy came at a cost of life and involved acts of violence inflicted on them, literally on the basis of information that by definition, they could not have, just MIGHT hold a grudge.

...So, uh, bringing this back around to the topic at hand... This is where we get to the central conflict. Our Terra Firma assholes who are all “Earth first!” have a valid point that the Council and the Citadel races mistreat humanity, and wrap it up in condescending bullshit, so the fact that they’re looking to take some kind of action to do something about this is understandable, even if they’re doing it wrong. The opposition is the conspiracy folks, the ones who murdered the outspoken human, all in the name of protecting their people from perceived human aggression.

And yes, it really does all come down to something that simple, as both sides are right and both sides are wrong, and now someone has to clean up the mess their hostilities have created. I do want this to really come down to something so simple and, on paper, easy to resolve, because when this kind of thing happens in our world, it’s frequently just as on paper simple, but, because of the emotions involved and the personal grudges accumulated, no one is able to take that step back and try to make amends (not saying that as a value judgement, just a fact – sometimes it is appropriate to address the personal grudges, sometimes you need let them go for the greater good).

There’s an interconnectedness to the Citadel races in the course of the series, and this is one of the ways to showcase that, by displaying that both of these peoples need each other in the course of the continuation of this cycle’s civilizations. So Shepard’s ultimate decision is about making a decision, and the hard work is in making them both recognize and acknowledge that they are both wrong – pulling this off right, meaning Shepard found all the ways to make good in-roads with both factions so they’ll listen when they make a big persuasive speech, we have the legitimate grievances acknowledged and at least on course to be redressed (one of the galactic news reports can, if the Alliance fleet is sacrificed to save the Destiny Ascension, say that the turians are considering reparations – maybe with this option, this happens regardless). Pulling it off wrong, Shepard has to side with one faction or the other, leaving tension and hostility remaining unresolved, impacting future relations.

Post Game Followups: 

ME2: Emails from the sided faction, talking about their political advancement.

ME3: Impact on Citadel politics, affecting the attitude of the populace in the Citadel Defense Force

Old Wounds

Shanxi was the site of the First Contact War. Since then, the human colonists have resisted alien interference and involvement on their world. But things become complicated when a turian effort at reparations ends up as a hostage situation. Naturally, the Alliance has one person they want to send in to help smooth things over – Commander Shepard.

An Ashley focus mission, we’re giving her the spotlight here – consider this something of a proto-loyalty mission, since the game itself didn’t have these. Because Shanxi is a place that means a lot to her and her family, so we’re going to say that she is on this mission. That obviously also limits this to a pre-Virmire position in the plot, because she may not make it off of that planet.

Shanxi is talked about, but it’s never even given a flyby in the games proper, and so we head there. And, especially with the context of the last entry in this list, I feel like there should be some effort to acknowledge that there should be reparations to humanity – like I said there, the turians discovered humans on Shanxi and decided to openly attack them, hold them to laws and rules that they had no way of knowing existed, and then decide that humans are the aggressive ones because of how they respond? Yeah, that’s bullshit.

So we have a situation where a group of turians have this realization and are trying to convince the people of Shanxi of their good intentions. Shanxi is, understandably, reluctant to believe it. Shepard is going in to smooth things over, try and ease the tensions that are inevitably flaring up, and Ashley is, ultimately, conflicted about how to feel about this whole matter – this is Shanxi, Williams are not exactly welcome here. But there is still a feeling of responsibility here all the same, because her family impacted this world and now she’s here to help try to build a bridge. The “hostage situation” of the synopsis will actually take place during the course of events – before that happens, we get a chance to explore Shanxi, learn about the history there.

This seems like a point to bring it up: Ashley’s grandfather surrendering Shanxi, in the name of preventing a massacre, and being branded a traitor for it makes little sense to me. Of course, I get that surrendering looks bad, if you’re only looking at the act, and not the motivation. People were losing their lives, he acted to protect them. The Alliance military being unforgiving assholes is not unbelievable, but the general public going along with it, refusing to have his name cleared, even decades later, is.

So we’re going to have to dig into the reasons for this. People on Shanxi will resent the Williams for the surrender – they wanted to fight to the bitter end, and they passed this along to their kids. The “death before dishonor” crowd think it would have been better to have fought to the last – sent a stronger message to the Citadel about the wrongness of that whole “shoot first, ask questions later, blame the victim for everything” approach. They’re the ones who lead the charge against Williams’ actions, saying he was weak for surrendering to the turians. Meanwhile others are aware that he saved lives.

If anything, this makes things difficult for Ashley. As much as she lives under the specter of her family, she is not quite sure about what life would be like if he’s cleared – even knowing that things would be better, her family not getting shit details and crap assignments, it means getting a new perspective on the future that she never expected and needs to process that.

Core plot is still the hostage situation, one that Shepard ends up being involved in. The hostage takers are a group demanding more for the turians in terms of reparations – they can’t bring back the dead, of course, but the turians aren’t giving enough in their eyes. I don’t know, let’s say that it’s coming across as a perfunctory kind of apology, the “We’re sorry you feel we disrespected you” kind of reaction, which... Yeah, I totally see the turians doing that and the humans calling bullshit.

I mean, yeah, you want more to it than just “we’re angry” and such, because that’s a pretty straightforward mission, but the idea here is as much for exploring Ashley’s character and development over just an outright mission story. This is about her, and we’re going to explore her through this as much as the plot, so the plot can get away with being fairly limited in scope or scale, because this is about the character.

And this means that Ashley needs to have the big moment of resolving the crisis, rather than Shepard. Like, RPG, we’ll say Shepard gets the option to decide who gets that moment, but let’s be real, to culminate her arc in this DLC, it should be her. Bookend the portrayal of her grandfather with her – depending on how Shepard’s interacted with her, with how much digging they did into the history of the place, how they’ve interacted with the people, and it leads to Ashley (or Shepard) being able to talk down the hostage takers, defuse the situation, resolve things peacefully. If they can’t, violence ensues.

Resolution-wise, we’d be looking at the turians being upset and nearly starting conflict all over again because “you humans are too damn aggressive,” “the turians aren’t negotiating in good faith and wish they’d blasted humanity back to the stone age,” blah blah blah. Variation is in how the situation was resolved – peaceful resolution leads to the agreement to try this again later, let hostilities die down a little before trying to fix these long-standing grudges, violent is that the turians walk away, the human diplomats basically going “well, we’ll try this again at some point, hopefully.” And, for Ashley, she’s resolved some of her family’s old ghosts – best case scenario, she’s given Shanxi a different memory of the Williams clan, and can walk away with a tangible note on her record that, regardless of how anyone else might try to creatively reinterpret her record, says that her contribution saved lives.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from diplomatic representative about the advancement of the talks over the previous two years.

ME3: If peacefully resolved, a joint human-turian task force is a war asset.

Ascension

The Ascension Project is a home for human biotics. Rumors reach Captain Anderson that there is a biotic extremist group attempting to subvert the teaching and draw them towards pro-human interests, and he asks Commander Shepard to investigate what could be a threat to the human-Citadel alliance.

We had Ashley’s loyalty mission, here’s Kaidan’s. The advancement of human biotics was a running thread through the background of ME1, but sort of fell by the wayside as the series expanded its scope in successive games, so this is a chance to explore that further. And we’re going to do so in part by building on the mission in game that involves Chairman Burns, the Alliance Parliament member who is taken captive by L2 biotics seeking reparations.

Obviously, we see Grissom Academy, the site of the Ascension Project, in ME3, but hey, for one, I like the idea that (retroactively, anyway) this means that Shepard is returning there in the course of the third game, and for two, it’s entirely reasonable to make the Academy large enough to house areas that we just didn’t see in the course of the mission there. Plus we’re seeing it (at least to start) in less of a state of chaos as exists in ME3.

Again, we’re starting lowkey. The idea here is more infiltration first – if extremists are trying to coopt kids’ education, odds are sending in soldiers is gonna tip them off quick and easy. So instead this is going to be framed as an “Alliance biotic recruitment” kind of thing – “The Alliance wants you!” and all that sort. That’s the cover as Shepard’s team heads in. The name of the game here is stealth, that we’re not here to set off alarms, just to ensure that there’s no attempt at subversion of the Alliance’s goals of peaceful coexistence with the Citadel races.

As a sidenote, both this and the Ashley DLC are basically me engaging in retroactively applied stories to further justify why it is that Kaidan and Ashley get the Spectre wings come ME3 – as it is, that kinda feels more like a bone being thrown to humanity in the name of appeasing them with Earth captured by the Reapers, as well as Udina wanting a loyal bodyguard, as opposed to something that their skill and ability has earned them the position. I want some exploration of the skill that justifies them getting that position.

So, yeah, we see the Ascension Project in its glory, causing a bit of a stir of memories for Kaidan, aware that this is more like what he should have experienced at BAaT. He’s glad that there are biotics who are getting to learn about their abilities in a safe environment that isn’t going to treat them like trash – whether or not that’s the military boot camp way, these are kids who have been, by a quirk of fate and chance, given these incredible powers without their consent, they deserve sympathy and understanding regarding their lives abruptly turned upside down, not demands that they show the same level of skill as people who train through their lives to be weapons.

Another investigation story, as we look in on the various teachers, learning more about what the state of affairs with regards to biotics are – if Mass Effect Andromeda is going to say that Cora felt outcasted and isolated because of her biotics, lets at least make this have a tangible feeling of what the actual culture and society she left behind is dealing with, considering that this is something that I’ve seen EVERYONE side-eying at best with her. At least offer it some grounding in the universe so it’s not just her, in effect, whining that she felt alone when we have characters like Kaidan, who killed someone with his biotics as a teenager, and Jack, who was tortured from infancy in an attempt to build a better biotic.

Anyway. The idea is to see more about what the biotics go through, and to better explain what biotics even are to the uninitiated (re: the audience). Biotics are just an accepted part of the universe in the games as is, but these are still a relatively recent thing for humanity, and we don’t really know how people are handling it.

Honestly, I’m kinda inclined to fully lean into a “biotics = homosexuality” metaphor. Like, personal stuff here, that’s one of the things that really... bothers me about the way Cora is handled in Andromeda, that she has this very queercoded story in terms of her self-acceptance, to the point of at one point, in reference to her biotics, saying “what if someone had told me ‘that’s okay’?” about herself. And that’s a line that defines queer narratives, but it is coming out of this cis-straight person’s mouth. So yeah, I’m gonna fix that how I can, since canonically, Kaidan is a bisexual man, and he gets the focus here, and we’re gonna take advantage of this. I may have issues with how BioWare handles their not-straight characters, but since they’re not actually making this, I’m gonna take full advantage.

Oh, right. Plot. Something, something... We get to the overall plot. Of course, we can sway a few people over – these biotic extremists are looking for belonging and acceptance above all. We see things like Major Kyle’s biotic cult, biotics are looking for something that gives them a place, beyond just the military stuff – what happens to the biotic who is a pacifist, where do they fit in when the only place that really seems to accept biotics is the Alliance military? Yeah, sure, these extremists would be testing the idea of “pacifism,” but it’s still the general concept we’re going with.

Like with the above Ashley story, it comes down to Kaidan getting the option to take the lead on this. You know how in the situation in the base game with Chairman Burns, Kaidan will interject about being an L2, like those extremists? Last time I played through, I kinda felt like he should have been more in the lead on that mission, that it should have been his answer to Garrus and Doctor Saleon, or Wrex and the family armor, something like that. So we’re going to have a similar situation here. Like with Ashley above, his ability to talk down the leader of this group depends on how well the player investigated – find the details, talk to the right people, that sort of detective stuff (because I like there being more to gaining experience in games that just combat).

That’s especially meaningful because this particular pro-human person, the one leading these biotic extremists? He worked at BAaT, was one of the people supposedly tasked with watching the situations with the turian biotics who had been brought on. He knew Kaidan. Kaidan knew him. In some ways, because of what happened with Kaidan, that’s why he was inspired to this – letting aliens teach biotics to these children, dictate those terms, WAS abuse, and, in his mind, humans can’t let their children be so violently abused by aliens again.

Kaidan says he dealt with his past in the game proper. But this is still an echo of it, someone who he once knew, worse, someone who cites what happened to him as reason for what he’s doing. Which is why it’s important for Kaidan that he be the one to resolve this. As ever, it can be resolved with words or violence, yay Paragon/Renegade system. For Kaidan, though, it’s just important to see this through and make sure that he has this dealt with.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from a class of biotics saved.

ME3: Student saved during the Grissom Academy mission is among the students encountered here, their presence gives a boost to the biotic students war asset

Ruins of Preita

An asari colony world has discovered a prothean archive that could rival those on Mars. Due to the concerns of the Reapers, Commander Shepard and crew go to investigate – and find an empty world, the archaeology team missing. Finding the missing team leads into a world lost to the galaxy for over fifty thousand years – and a threat even the protheans locked away!

So, now we have a Liara loyalty mission story. If you’ve paid any serious attention to my blog over the years, you’re probably having a laugh at my expense here – I’m always complaining about an overfocus on Liara, and yet here I am, adding to her content specifically. Hey, I’m at least playing fair and giving her time alongside Ashley and Kaidan. Hell, that’s why I’m doing this. I gave them time in the sun, and it’s fair that I give her the same.

But yes, I want to explore Liara’s character through the lens of her as an archaeologist, which basically gets a little lip service in the games proper, but ultimately means nothing. She is supposed to be an expert on the protheans and an archaeologist of renown, and yet that gets dumped as her actual profession in ME2, so that she can “be a very good information broker,” which... Not to dismiss her in what is meant to be a focus mission for her, but that ends up being told, rather than shown. Let’s let her play to her strengths.

This is a mission about her getting to flex that muscle. She learns about this archive – actually, thinking about it, let’s say that this was a dig that she had the chance to go on instead of the Therum dig, and chose it instead in the name of it being more isolated (more on that later). With the latest report she’s read about it, she thinks it’ll be an assist to Commander Shepard – if nothing else, the fact that Saren was interested in Eden Prime’s prothean beacon means that a new prothean archive might well be a lure for him, and he might well show up, or have Benezia or one of her agents go there in his stead. It could lead them to Saren, is what she’s using as her justification for telling Shepard to go and check this out.

Obviously it won’t, because game mechanics, but it’s a solid enough reason to get us where we’re going, which is an asari planet. Here’s where we get a chance to see Liara in her element AND see this pushback against her theories. It bugs the hell out of me that Liara says that her theory of the cycle of extinction is dismissed by other asari because of her youth – by framing that dismissal of her peers with having to do purely with her age, it says that in the two thousand years since the asari discovered the Citadel, to say nothing of anything that might have been included in the prothean archive in the Temple of Athame, NO ONE ELSE has put forward the idea of the cycles. That Liara is the first to put those pieces together. In more than two thousand years. And, as things turn out, she is 100% correct about there being a constant cycle of civilization and extinction.

My suspension of disbelief breaks at that. That she and she alone has developed this theory – this theory that is absolutely fact – in two thousand years. Bare minimum, I would have said that she was part of a fringe collection of scientists who just don’t have the evidential support to justify this being the mainstream view. But it’s the canon we have to work with, so, fine. But this disagreement when it comes to theories on the extinction of the protheans would be another point of why Liara didn’t go on this excursion, that these other researchers are those who do not share her beliefs, and, as she believes, that would mean they would shun her.

But it’s important that these researchers not just be strawmen – they may have held opposing views to Liara, that doesn’t mean they would dislike her. In point of fact, one of them has to have considered herself a friend to Liara, for reasons I’ll get in to in a bit. But these are going to be people who are all for the most part entirely likeable and reasonable. They just don’t agree with Liara’s stance.

Or at least, the records and logs they’ve left behind make them entirely likable and appear reasonable. Because, of course the research team is missing when Shepard and team arrive – like research teams in these scenarios are ever able to avoid going missing and being presumed dead.

This sparks a conflict with Liara – she’s glad that they’re able to try and find them, maybe even rescue them, but she’s also guilty because she should have been on this expedition, should have been with them. Liara’s got a tendency to put things on her own shoulders (see her reaction after Thessia, assuming you don’t have Javik/don’t take the interrupt to get them to an accord). Hell, ideally, this would be something done after Noveria and her mother’s death to explore that some – I hate how by the time you try to speak with her about it, she’s already pulling that “I choose to remember Benezia as she was” thing, seeming to either be accepting or repressing what happened, when what happened is that, regardless of the why, her mother is dead, and Shepard pulled the trigger.

So yeah, while this is a mission available at any point after doing Therum, in my mind, it’s best to take this after Noveria for the ability for Liara to lash out at Shepard for not being able to rescue her mother, how do they think that they can save these people, one among them a friend of hers, look at that, it’s another situation where Shepard is going to fail to rescue someone who mattered to her!

That is her breaking point, where she can’t bottle this all up anymore. That, for the sake of the mission, for “the greater good,” she’s bottled up her feelings and anger and resentment and fear, and yet, here and now, she can’t help it, she has to address it. She knows it’s unfair to Shepard – she heard about indoctrination, understands that it was something horrible for Benezia, that Benezia accepted no alternative to death, but people she cares about keep getting caught in the line of fire, all in the name of what, exactly? “The greater good”? “The ends justifying the means”? Chance and circumstance?

Hell, include some elements tying her closer to Ashley and Kaidan at this point – it connects the crew together more for when the Virmire decision hits, considering that this game only has banter in the Citadel elevators, which, given fast travel, is heavily skippable, and competes with news reports. There needs to be more development of the character interactions, so let’s do some character interaction here, if nothing else. (And maybe also include a post-Virmire conversation with her about how SHE feels about the loss of Ashley/Kaidan, yes I’m moving out of the scope of this DLC idea, but it’s good for characterization, dammit!)

Investigation happens, records and logs do the ‘ominous mood building’ thing... The end result is that what happened was that this planet once housed a prothean lab. A bio-engineering lab. They were creating something that (stated ambiguously, since Shepard won’t know about the Reapers properly yet at this point in the timeline) was meant to fight the Reapers, be something that could stand against them and protect the protheans. But by the time that it was done, the war was all but over, the protheans having lost. The protheans never got the chance to let it loose, pulling up stakes from the facility before the Reapers hit it. But as time wore away the tech, this thing they created has gotten loose on its own after a few thousand years. This thing is like the rachni on Noveria, having been grown in isolation – there was nothing else on this planet, it was literally the only kind of life around, even before getting to it being engineered as a weapon above all else. It’s too mad to save, must be put down.

Easier said than done, of course. The archaeological team are contained inside of it (I’m thinking held in some kind of crystal-like stasis pods on its back), and is drawing on them for life, sort of in the same way that Malak used the Jedi captives on the Star Forge in KOTOR, where it taps into them and heals itself based on their life force. So the Paragon/Renegade choice in here revolves around how much effort Shepard’s going to put in to saving the captives. Freeing them before they get used as batteries, probably with Liara using her biotics to rescue those who they manage to get loose (meaning she’s unable to act as support in combat because she’s busy focusing her biotics), or just killing them first – with Liara distracted and unable to provide support, that justifies the Renegade stance, because it’s one less source of firepower against the thing as it tries to either kill them or add them to its collection.

That’s important because that aforementioned friend of hers is going to be rescued either way the player chooses – Liara will insist on getting her out alive, even if Shepard foregoes saving the others. Regardless of the player choice, Liara’s friend survives, and, once the creature is dead, she’ll respond to how Shepard chose to resolve the situation, if she’s the sole survivor or if Shepard made an effort to rescue everyone. She’s grateful for her survival either way, but she’s angry about the failure to save the others if they were abandoned.

For Liara, though, the ultimate result is seeing something of the protheans being knocked off their pedestal – regardless of the reason (which, yes, we know to be extinction by Reapers), they abandoned this creature, left it to be consumed by madness. The point here is seeing Liara have a moment where she grows up – she has to acknowledge the protheans she pictured for the last century were flawed (Partially because it bothers me the way she speaks of the protheans with such rose-colored glasses even by ME3, when she says “it’s clear they prized knowledge, growth, and cooperation with the rest of the galaxy,” even before Javik sends that image crashing – a species who form an empire, whose legacy is memorialized as an empire, is not going to be first and foremost wise scholars). She’s realizing that whatever the reasons were for creating this, whatever caused them to leave it behind, they still did this to an innocent being that they were responsible for. It’s something of her “loss of innocence” moment, considering that Benezia’s death currently doesn’t really provide that (though, again, we ARE also addressing that... Details.)

Her friend is also going to get a few moments with Liara, talking about the archaeology team, and commenting about how Liara’s development has gone. This is a moment for Liara, to really help give her a character arc in the game proper – considering that she can be left on Therum until right before Ilos, she kinda doesn’t have much of one as it is. Also, this gives a chance for Liara to exist outside of Shepard’s world, considering how she bubbles herself into it as the trilogy progresses. This is someone who’s only really in Liara’s orbit, not Shepard’s, and it gives her a little more grounding and existence outside of Shepard.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from Liara’s friend, commenting about how she handled Shepard’s death, expressing concern for her losing direction

ME3: The creature’s remains have been examined, providing a War Asset, if the archaeologists were saved, they provide an additional boost, Liara’s friend has a cameo on the Citadel after Thessia

Incursion

An Alliance space station on the fringe of the Terminus system abruptly goes silent. As the Normandy’s stealth systems can get there without letting any invaders know, as well as Commander Shepard’s skill, Captain Anderson sends them to check on the station. The batarians specifically have been known to be in the area, but there remains the possibility that this is something worse...

Okay, out of the loyalty mission structure and direct character work, back to isolated stories in the setting. So, the frontier of space? I say this as a lover of scifi from a young age: It is TERRIFYING. You are on the edge of all that’s known, and any number of things, things you could never conceive of because they are so outside of your frame of reference, could show up and kill you. A flimsy barrier of glass (or transparent aluminum or whatever material they make those big honking windows out of) is all that separates you from a suffocating death.

Yeah, we’re doing a psychological horror story here. I suppose technically AGAIN, considering the stuff around the disappeared archaeologists in the above DLC idea, but that was as much about Liara as the atmosphere. This is pure paranoia and suspicion.

The inspiration I’m going with here is KOTOR 2’s opening on the Peragus mine. Something happened here, and the people are all dead or missing – a handful of corpses, but, yet again, we’ve got logs to find, and they’ll include people who we can’t identify among the dead. Because that gives motivation to stick around and solve things, rather than just blow the place to hell.

The first guess is that there’s a batarian slave raid happening here. There are indications that the Alliance officers here were thinking this at first, that this was some raid in progress – sure, it wasn’t open violence, but maybe they were softening things up, trying to get on board, lower defenses, and then let the slave ships show up and take everyone left. That’s what their last attempt at an outgoing message suggested, it’s what Shepard and company show up expecting.

But that wasn’t the case. The investigation continues through the station, with Shepard searching for signs of anyone still alive. And as they proceed through the station, there’s something that seems to keep just passing out of view. Something else is here with them.

Again, I’m skimping on the exposition here, just because the investigation is the important part, and that’s hard to develop without a layout of the station itself in front of me, and what and how the narrative has to adapt to the environment, but also because this is a very atmospheric style story, where the focus is in the build up, the mystery, the way to get to the big reveal of just what it is that happened here. In a story like this, the tension in this is built with how many times you think you’re going to have an encounter with “the monster” before you actually do.

This particular “monster,” as it turns out, is some kind of energy creature, something that came to the station from the unknown depths of space, drawn by the station’s power core emissions. All indications are that this is simply some space-born lifeform that evolved naturally, and isn’t like some Reaper weapon or anti-Reaper weapon. Just some non-sapient lifeform, drawn in by the power core (maybe it had been specially modified, to further explain why this station and why now), and ending up killing the inhabitants of it.

The thing about this is that I’m going to emphasize here is that I DON’T want this as some kind of creation of the Reapers or their servants OR something that was cooked up to combat them. This thing is entirely independent of anything to do with Reapers. One of the things that I appreciated with ME1 over the later games was the “lived in” nature of the galaxy, where there were a handful of things shown and revealed in the course of the story that just spoke to there being life and civilization wandering through the galaxy for countless millennia. Life is pretty persistent when given the chance, and there’s surely life that exists in the depths of space that is so completely alien to our understanding that we might not even recognize it as such. This creature is one such example of life but not as we know it.

Obviously, there’s a straight up Paragon/Renegade choice of killing or sparing the creature, finding some way to lure it off and away from the station. I’m also inclined for a neutral option of trying to humanely capture it – it’s a creature unlike anything they know, it could show them so many things about the greater universe in the examination – but I’m not sure I feel like there’s enough room in the series for that kind of variation, given the limitations – this IS meant to be DLC, you know? Or at least, hypothetical DLC. Either way, though, the end result is that there is a boss battle, Shepard having to either kill it or weaken it, the station is cleared of the threat and the Alliance gets to have the station back, with talk of it being repurposed into some kind of early warning system regarding threats from outside Alliance/Citadel space (hint hint, nudge nudge).

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Emails from the new station commander, referring to the reopening of the station and the fate of the creature

ME3: Station as a war asset, exo-biologists as a war asset, how they examine space-faring life in the galaxy and if they can be adapted in some way to resist the Reapers

Evolution

A mercenary contacts the Normandy, claiming to have information regarding Saren. Following this lead, however, proves to open a separate can of worms, as the mercenary reveals their connections to a cult of people who view synthetics as the next step in organic evolution, and, knowing of Saren’s ties to the geth, seek to stop Shepard – or convert them.

So the idea here is to give more attention to something that seemed to be a running plot thread during ME1 and ME2 – machine cultists. The ExoGeni survey team on Trebin got huskified by an unknown artifact, and in ME2, there’s the mine on Aequitas. Yes, technically that hasn’t happened yet, shush. But we observe this in action in the games proper, and no one ever actually acknowledges it beyond the simple immediate reaction.

So what we have here is a merc, trying to contact Shepard, claiming they have info on Saren. No one really believes it – if Saren’s working with geth, he would have no need for the liability of organic agents. Yet they also can’t really ignore the idea either because Saren is why they’re out here (I really intend to take advantage of the idea that the whole party cast comes back for these with a full on mission briefing/discussion to kick this off – sounds like some fun opportunities for character dynamics with them debating the validity of this claim).

The result of going in takes Shepard and team to a planet where, initial impression, something is OFF about this place. It’s a prefab colony in early colonization, and something about how the people act just doesn’t seem right. They seem to be in an almost trance-like state that no one can snap them out of, a fact that immediately puts everyone on edge.

The merc is here (let’s say he’s a turian), and keeps things frustratingly vague until the arrival of a leader of the colony. The kicker with him being that he appears partially huskified (sorta like the Cerberus goon on Mars that Ashley/Kaidan find). Yet he still seems to be able to act seemingly independently. Of course, someone this obviously not-right has made himself a target, but all the people in the colony, including the merc, are all on his side.

Shepard can try to fight out of this, but they’re overwhelmed – there IS an entire colony of people, and there’s still the possibility of getting them free, Shepard has a responsibility to not shoot civilians (no matter what trigger-happy Renegades might think), and the team at least is willing to take that stand.

The explanation is that this is a group of wanna-call-themselves “next phase of organic evolution,” people who believe that they are the future. That’s what got their attention about Saren and Shepard, knowing about how he is working with the geth (it was an open session of the Council when they got made Spectre, after all). They look to Shepard as a potential threat.

When we encounter Machine Cultists in the game proper, they’re too far gone to really give any explanation. The comics seemed to draw on this – in Mass Effect Evolution, Saren’s brother uncovered one on Palaven, the Illusive Man was involved, Saren had to nuke from orbit the location of this device and his brother with it. We’re kinda going into the same territory with this, but, you know, Shepard gets to save the day.

So the merc shows up, trying to explain, offer the sales pitch (i.e.: the carrot), try to convince Shepard that their leader has the right idea, that this is a true joining of organic and synthetic, and that it will avert the “coming apocalypse” (just in case the whole ‘Reaper artifact’ element wasn’t certain for anyone playing). Then the cult leader shows up to offer the threat (i.e.: the stick), the warning that whatever Shepard expects to do, they will not be able to succeed.

For pacing reasons, I think of this as a pre-Virmire thing, so there’s not a direct awareness on Shepard’s part that just being around a Reaper artifact is a cause for Indoctrination, leading to a period of wondering how this happened and assuming it comes from direct interface – this is as much an explanation for why, if the implication is that the cult leader got to interface with a prothean beacon of some kind (actually Reaper, in the same manner as the vision that Object Rho offers in Arrival), they don’t have Shepard try to interact with this one, that they’re afraid of Shepard becoming like these people.

Anyway, jailbreak sequence! Because we can do better than just running a game of Simon in order to get Shepard out of their cell. Shepard finagles a way out of the cell block and to the colony’s science lab (it’s a frontier world, they need a science lab just to stay aware of all the new things they discover here). Among the things there is the record of what happened here, and specifically the existence of the artifact. Leads to a simple solution – blow up the artifact, and see what that does.

Of course, the artifact is guarded in the heart of the colony’s main site. We meet up with the merc again, who’s seeming a little uncomfortable – the indoctrination hasn’t completely taken root in him, and so there’s some question of maybe he can be reached. Paragon/Renegade here about dealing with him – kill him or spare him. That sparing will come back in a short while

Because now there’s the colony leader – the cult leader, effectively, at this point – to deal with. He’s angry about the damage Shepard has done to everything, ranting about plans to bring the glory of evolution to the galaxy. Yeah, he’s round the bend, the device effectively having melted his mind (okay, yeah, I’m getting flashes of Kenson here, but hey, same tech, so it’s not ripping off, it’s continuity!)

After dealing with him, the plan is to blow the artifact sky high. Here’s where the merc comes back into play – he says he’s too far gone, and wants to be the one to push the button on this thing, die with it. It’s his way of having a good death after this. Another Paragon/Renegade choice about his fate before blowing the thing sky high – the colony, unfortunately can’t be saved, anyone not killed getting there dies when the device is blown.

There’s an after action briefing, too, where, because, again, the idea here is that this is pre-Virmire, the crew really discuss the horrors of what “these Reaper machines” can do, and what if they’re not some geth red herring or something.

Basically, my idea here is that this is adding to the atmosphere and mystique of the Reapers, in a way that, with the game proper focused on the concept of advancing the plot, doesn’t get a chance. This is a more traditional feature of building up the menace, by showing the insidious nature of things, having the Reapers’ subtle side at play – we see references of Indoctrination, but we don’t really get the horrors outside of some talk – sure, there are the salarians who are in the Virmire facility, and Benezia’s talk, but it’s all second hand. This is a case where we see the effects spread across the entire colony, which, given resources in the game, is all of a planet we get to encounter, and Shepard and company are the only ones who aren’t, and that can go to the paranoia, where the people surrounding them all are giving off the vibes of being a threat, but they’re not doing anything. What can I say, I am a sucker for a good atmospheric story.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email about the aftermath of the colony’s destruction, and the research done on the corpses on the effects of Indoctrination

ME3: War asset surrounding Indoctrination research, preliminary anti-Indoctrination tech being introduced around the Catalyst facility, if the merc sacrificed himself, his family offers a boost to turian military morale on the basis of how one of their own resisted (pointedly ignoring Saren)

Relativity

The Mass Relays are the ancient devices that allow faster than light travel throughout the galaxy. The Charon Relay specifically was one that opened the way for humanity to join the races of the Citadel. This only makes a sudden distress call from the Relay all the more urgent, and Admiral Hackett believe that of everyone in the Alliance, Commander Shepard is right for the job.

So the Mass Relays are these massive facilities that are a key point throughout the entire trilogy. Why, exactly, do we never see one up close aside from transition screens? We should totally get to explore one! Like, I realize that it’s never explicitly said if there’s any kind of command station, or if “guarding a Mass Relay” was a ship-based action or if there was actual, physical contact with one, but I’m saying that something of the size of the Relays, even if much of it is a solid object, you maintain SOME sort of command structure within it in order to monitor and examine things. Even if the Reapers have some kind of robotic drones or Keeper analogues running around, doing standard maintenance, I cannot be convinced that there is not SOME areas of the actual Mass Relay that house facilities for organic life to work in. Especially considering the design having the light sources along the hull that we traditionally associate with acting as windows on starships and space stations.

So yeah, this is an adventure taking us into the workings of a Mass Relay proper. The general idea is that there’s a distress call from the Charon Relay, which is something that really worries the Alliance – lose the Charon Relay, humanity loses their connection to the galaxy at large. And the Alliance doesn’t want the Citadel to know about this, at least not right away – if something is impacting how the Relays function, the Council is going to demand getting involved, and the Alliance DEFINITELY doesn’t want to give the non-human races a free pass into humanity’s home system, so they’re calling on Shepard.

Also part of the novelty of this is that I kinda want to have the chance to explore what it’s like for those who are not exploring the stars in this setting – the Mass Relay’s crew is alive and intact and interactable. This isn’t one of the many cases of showing up too late to be able to properly save people (I’m looking mostly at ME2 on this count, even before we add in the above and below of my own creation).

Head of the team on the Relay is an engineer, not a soldier (pulling a name out of hat for them in the name of simplicity in this write up... Let’s go with Sarah Manning, just because my Orphan Black DVDs happen to be right next to me as I’m writing this and it offers as good as a placeholder as any – feel free to picture Tatiana Maslany as this character if you so choose, though, by the rules of this series, in an ideal world, this would have been DLC produced for ME1 in 2007, so this character would probably be at least a decade, probably more, older than she would have been at the time, oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed...). She’s not just concerned about the Council finding out – not that she’s a Terra Firma type, just that she has Earth related pride and considers the Charon Relay humanity’s, and, on a personal level, HERS, given her responsibility for it – but also the lives on board. She wants to protect and preserve as many lives as she can.

The interior of the facility is a mix of reasonably sensical designs, in the areas meant for humanoid habitation, and something far more Eldritch abomination-y when we start moving out of those areas. And, you know, we pretty much HAVE to move out of them as time goes on, since that’s like half of the fun of this concept.

But we start in the more familiar areas, where everything seems normal. Except the people are missing (yes, I know I’m relying on this concept a lot, but it’s good as an in universe mystery and out of universe programming so that the game doesn’t have to account for like a dozen NPCs to fill space). In this instance, the distress signal itself indicates that the Relay’s station commander had ordered their people to a designated safe zone within the Relay’s structure, which is where Shepard will need to head to uncover things. Sarah’s staying in the control area, trying to ensure that nothing else goes wrong.

At some point in the midst of this, I do want the question of if the Relay will be/has to be destroyed to come up, better establish the idea that will come up in Arrival of the destruction of Relay in the game proper.

The exploration takes Shepard into the Eldritch-y areas, which, sadly, because I am a wordsmith and not a picture kind of person, I can really only describe as messing with perception and going all Escher in the design. Basically, the idea is to present the interior and heart of the Relays as being these massively complex and complicated machines that function on a level not really human (or, in the case of the non-human races in the game besides the Reapers, human adjacent). Because, first of all, this is faster than light travel, which means this is this is this franchise’s handwave for how anything happens on multiple planets and is dealt with in (in-universe) real time, and second, Sovereign talked about a level of existence beyond our own and such. This leans into that kind of concept – yeah, sure, we may have the Reapers be shown as effectively fundamentally understandable, but let’s at least justify the hype a little, huh?

The big idea here is that we’re kinda throwing back to the puzzle style of play that you used to see in computer games in like the nineties. That’s why perspective is going to be a part of this. Basically, the engineers on the Relay found something that tripped the security systems, sort of “unhinging” standard reality around them, getting them lost in the various extra layers (dimensions?) that the Relay works in.

I don’t really know if I see any kind of real boss or major decision here, because this is basically about the gimmick over anything else – Mass Effect isn’t a bad place for a gimmicky throwback, right? Maybe... Ah, something’s clicking here for me – the guy responsible for all of this happening in the first place. He was trying to access an archive – he initially thought it was prothean, but he’s been able to realize that this is much older. He wants to get this information, and is the last one we rescue. The issue is that it’s going to be a choice – rescue this guy and lose the archive, or save the archive and he dies. Like, I’m thinking that there’s some kind of rip or maybe a miniature black hole that’s sucking in the both of them and Shepard can only save one. That’s a solid Paragon/Renegade choice, especially since I could see arguments for both.

Anyway, once the crew’s all rescued and the choice made, Manning gets back to Shepard and says that this is about to get slapped with a security clearance so high she’d “probably have to kill [herself] just for remembering [she has] it” (because yes, I want that as an actual quote), and recommends that they get off the Relay before any superior officers show up to rake them over the coals for their involvement – Shepard’s a busy person, doesn’t need to get bogged down in the red tape that’s sure to come.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from Manning regarding the Relay’s subsequent stability

ME3: Manning’s team as a war asset/the archive being tapped for Crucible data and information on the Reapers (mutually exclusive – the team will have disbanded after the loss of the one member if the archive was recovered)

Planet of Peace

An attempt at colonizing a planet, with the aid of all Council races, in an effort at fostering galactic peace, sounded great on paper. The diplomats jumped on the opportunity. The reality has been... less than stellar. Considering the first human Spectre a bridge between races, the Council asks Commander Shepard to try and help smooth over relations.

Frankly, while I understand the focus on the threat of the Reapers, honestly, this seems like a legitimate issue that would be an instant demand for the first human Spectre. And, given the tension and hostility between the races (even beyond humanity against everyone else), it seems like a natural fit, in all honesty. Because it does seem like all the canonical colony worlds always start as one species attempting to tame a single world, rather than taking advantage of the unifying effort of the galactic community.

At the forefront of this colony is the retired human ambassador to the Council, Ambassador Goyle (Anderson mentions her when talking about his candidacy for the Spectres and we see her in the first of Alec Ryder’s memories, now we get to make her a character we get to interact with). This was her passion project specifically, thinking that all races had something that they could offer one another and need to come together.

Basically, she’s underscoring what I like to think of as a core concept of the series, being stronger together than separately.

But, of course, there are tensions. I mean, not even just because we wouldn’t have a plot without it. She is concerned that there might be some extremists getting involved – aren’t there always? When things are tense, some idiot’s always going to come along, see the stacks of dynamite, and decide to light a match. She is specifically asking that Shepard come to help resolve some issues, using their symbolism. Her request is fully aware of this being an exercise in flag waving, but it’s an important bit of flag waving – doing this here can make the galactic community a more stable place.

Bringing back in the element of having the cast back for these, I want to include quite a bit of companion content in this one, including something like how Dragon Age 2’s Mark of the Assassin DLC had a short companion quest for everyone. On a planet that’s a melting pot of the various races that make up the Citadel species, there’s going to be something for everyone here somehow. I don’t know what specifically right now – these write ups focus on the main plot, not the sidequests. But these are things that are there.

As for what is happening on the planet, on the small scale, there’s your standard culture clash brushfires, things that seem small and petty, but have accumulated for the people involved because they’re in such close proximity. But there is a strong Terra Firma presence as well, the “Earth for humans!” type, in addition to similar groups among the traditional Citadel races – this is still only a handful of decades past humanity’s entry, and as we’ve discussed before, the arrival of humanity has made things much more chaotic than they were before, and there’s more than a little resentment among the non-human races for humanity’s attitude and approach to things coming across almost as if they’re demanding more, without anyone Citadel side acknowledging that First Contact was a shit show of THEIR making (scroll back up and see Investigations for more on that...)

But the larger scale conflict is a group out to make sure that this planet fails in its mission and goal, drive a wedge between factions. I’m thinking of going the Star Trek VI route on this, that this group is an ironic banding of humans and non-humans, determined to see peace fall apart at the cost of allying with their supposed enemies, and using “look at how easily they turned on their own to stop this!” as a justification for their own hypocrisy.

Going with the Star Trek VI reference, this group is gearing up for an assassination attempt on Ambassador Goyle herself, believing that stopping her will stop the advancement of this idea. Now, Commander Shepard HAS to save her, we’re not doing the question of “can they stop it in time?” but, for all those pro-humanity xenophobic “Cerberus was right all along!” types, the response of Shepard will be to either name the conspirators and why or utilize their designated fall guy.

BUT WAIT! That’s not the end of this one. See, we’re also going to get an aftermath – the results of this will impact how the population react, and there’s a second story mission that requires a plot progression to access.

Returning to this planet (I feel like it would get some ambitious name like “Hope” or something, but I think it’s kinda provincial for the planet to carry a human name, so...), things are even tenser than before. We get to actively see how the fallout is impacting things, with people drawing lines based on the earlier assassination attempt. This is a lot like how the turian weapons merchant on the Citadel in ME2 will respond differently based on how Shepard resolved ME1 – side with one faction in the first part, their supporters approve of you and their opposites are angry with you, and vice versa.

Goyle appreciates Shepard’s return, because she’s seeing the place beginning to collapse. She’s feeling ready to throw in the towel because of how poorly things are going. Still, until the place closes its doors, she’s going to stand up and act like the leader she’s here to be. Shepard saved her life, she’s going to commit it to preserving this colony. But she wants Shepard’s help all the same, because they can leverage that heroism to helping put things here right.

Of course, here’s where we get to the big finale choice – are you going to strengthen this colony or break it? And sure, it seems straightforward on the idea of what’s good and what’s bad, but here’s the thing that the overall narrative develops through investigation – the Alliance and the Citadel need to allocate their resources. Part of the reason that the sanctioned colonies tend to be dominated by one species or another is a matter of need – when you have a primarily human/asari population, you’ll have to import in resources for turians, things like that – even if they’re trying to grow them on their own, they probably need to import like soil for nutrients and such.

And that not only gets costly, that can divert resources that are more greatly in need. In the long term, this could tie up resources that are needed elsewhere. In the short term, if trying to make these disparate races and cultures work together and play nice is taking up this much time and effort, isn’t it possible, isn’t it plausible, that there are better things to be doing with those resources?

So, do we try and heal the divide and potentially tie up resources in what has been an uphill climb from the start, and right before the Reaper War begins (for all you forward thinkers reading this), or do we cut our losses and focus on making these types of cross-species initiatives at a later point in time? That’s the Paragon/Renegade choice here.

The resolution comes and Ambassador Goyle will be either thankful for the effort or resigned that her great initiative isn’t going forward. Regardless of Shepard’s actions, she’s thankful that they at least made an attempt – she isn’t going to see them as failing if they opted to cut the losses, but herself.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter either from Ambassador Goyle, reporting on the colony, or a news service announcement of her having further withdrawn from the public eye after the colony’s failure.

ME3: For Paragon choice, there’s a decrease in dextro-food reserves, given the colony’s need, but an increase in interspecies morale, with efforts to incorporate multi-species crews underway, and vice versa for the Renegade

Daedalus Station

A space station on the fringe of Citadel space sends out a distress call. When the Normandy arrives, however, no one there claims responsibility for it. Yet the station is in a spiral, a path that will, slowly but steadily, lead the station directly into a sun. Commander Shepard attempts to save everyone aboard from the inevitable death, and discover why they seem unfazed at the idea.

Okay, let’s just acknowledge first, yes, I’m aware that the synopsis sounds not just like a rip off of the first mission of Leviathan but also “Incursion” above. I’m aware. Look, the synopsis is a short brief, not the full details, okay? Strictly speaking, it’s more in line with the events of Leviathan, certainly, but I want to at least acknowledge that I’m aware that there are similarities. Okay, they’re there, LET’S MOVE ON.

Anyway. Distress call, brings in the Normandy. Station is obviously in a death spiral. The moment that Shepard and company board the station, everyone is going about their routine. Obviously, something’s a touch screwy about this set up. Another investigation must ensue.

Of course, as we’ve established, details of the investigations are not where my expansions really shine – it’s easy to stretch out a discovery of this sort, with development A leading to clue B and making revelation C... Yadda, yadda. I’m about the what of these things, not the how.

The ultimate thing about this is twofold. Part one is that this is basically going to be an introduction to the concept of Indoctrination – someone discovered a Reaper artifact, and is trying to adapt it to their benefit. Because frankly, the idea that someone wouldn’t try and take Indoctrination for themselves... Yeah, let’s be real here. Someone WOULD.

Obviously, since we’re still in game one and the Reapers are still mostly a mystery at this point in time, there’s the question of what this is. But, hey, it’s still something that should have happened, and this is the time when there’s the most mystery and least immediate “oh shit, this will horribly backfire if we don’t just straight up blow this up now” reactions.

So, our villain. They’re gonna spiral into insanity (thematic mirroring – as the station enters the death spiral, they spiral into madness), so we’re not going to push too much on making them seem sympathetic, in the traditional sense. Honestly, in writing this, I’m kinda getting parallels to your average dangerous incel aspiring mass shooter, so we’re gonna go with that, someone who perceived themselves as more isolated and alone than they were – the investigation will have us find private journals from other crew pre-artifact that mention him, usually in the fashion of ‘he doesn’t talk much, but doesn’t seem that bad’ kind of messages. Meanwhile, his own talk about the others has a more downcast approach, that he knows they’re not interested in hearing about him, etc. etc.

You know, this is the kind of person who, upon getting the ability to manipulate minds is basically doing it in an effort to bolster his own self-esteem, turning people who were once a little sharp with him one time into his whipping boys, and making himself the king of this little hill.

The problem of his plan? The mental degradation. The last of those to fall under his sway sent out the automated distress beacon, and knew that there was a danger in this guy leaving – but they also couldn’t be sure that their efforts would be successful. It’s a case of the distress beacon being a double-edged sword – can their rescuers save them, stop this guy, or will they fall under his sway as well? But there’s no other solution. They set the collision course (and yes, I’m aware that this is happening on a space station, hey, the pilot episode of DS9 showed that the station could travel through maneuvering thrusters and such – the idea is that they wanted to find a way to destroy the station), and then destroyed the controls so it couldn’t be undone, and disabled the alerts so that the station wouldn’t alert anyone, setting it up to make it that the station’s sensors all seem to send the green light to the rest of the station – the false data would hopefully prevent the station crew from noticing.

Yes, of course I want there to be an apocalyptic log, why would I deny that BioWare staple?

Another thing that I want to do here is kinda retroactively at least make it a part of the universe that Shepard is resistant to the efforts of Reaper Indoctrination. The idea I’m going with is that some of the scrambling of Shepard’s brain (which, sidenote, I also want to take some time in this and call out the fact that it’s a PLOT POINT that Shepard’s brain gets messed with repeatedly throughout this game and no one thinks that might actually be a questionable matter – if a key point of this DLC is “dude, you’re messing with people’s minds, that’s rather unambiguously Not A Good Thing To Do,” then it’s an elephant in the room to not bring up that this is what’s happening with Shepard) has made them more resistant to these effects, though that probably means justifying this as having a watered down effect so that the companions are feeling the tug to fall under our villain’s thrall.

That’s basically where I picture the boss battle going, that Shepard has to fight against one of their companions, who has been compelled to be this guy’s defender against them. I’d say both companions, but that might be a little much, in particular on lower difficulties. So I’m going to say that Shepard can knock out one of their companions before they fall under the sway of the big bad’s influence, but the other escapes. I feel like there could be ways to offset the difficulties of this by way of like finding objects that counteract the signal or whatever, but the idea is Shepard versus companion. While it obviously has to end non-lethally, I feel like this is the kind of thing that is morbidly fascinating to see in just about everyone’s book. I’d also figure that it would depend on a handful of variables that make them resist more or less (because the game should reward investigation, right?)

When that’s completed (I figure it ends with Shepard destroying the controller artifact), it’s time to deal with the station about to be caught in the sun – the station’s going to be locked in a death spiral, but the people of the station can now evacuate. Which leaves the person responsible. On the Paragon side, Shepard is not judge, jury, and executioner, this guy should be given a fair trial. On the Renegade side, he’s a dick who took over people’s minds with no remorse on the matter. Whatever decision Shepard goes with, the station’s population will abide by – they probably want him dead anyway, right?

Aftermath does come into play, with a conversation with the companion Shepard fought against, because, especially if they’re a romance, that’s gotta mess with their heads. Also some general discussion of the artifact itself – obviously, while I expect a variation in the event this is played after Virmire, my idea of this is that it happens some time before it, so things like Wrex and Ashley/Kaidan’s deaths (or possible death) are variation options, this is basically something that I feel can influence matters – if Shepard and Wrex have already fought, for example, I feel like that would earn them enough influence come Virmire for Wrex to stand down there, it’s got parallels/foreshadowing... That kind of emotional work.

Also there’s some consideration about that artifact – once a technology exists, putting that genie back in the bottle is nigh impossible, so now it’s known that you can use this tech to control minds, someone’s sure to try and take advantage of this tech somewhere down the line – Shepard and company will discuss what kind of precautions can and should be taken about these kinds of developments in the future (hint hint, Cerberus/Illusive Man, hint hint).

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Letter from a station survivor, variation on the matter of how the responsible party was dealt with.

ME3: Efforts have been undertaken to block Indoctrination tech, based on the information that Shepard gathered on the station.

Fleet Crisis

With the concerns of Saren and the geth rising, Admirals Hackett and Anderson want to get a chance to upgrade the defenses at the heart of the Alliance. Arcturus Station, home to the Alliance government, is housing a defense meeting, and Commander Shepard is being recalled to speak at it. The Alliance may be facing another crisis, however...

(Two plot planets completed)

We have very little actual Alliance elements involved in the game, did you ever notice that? Like, there’s Admiral Anderson and Admiral Hackett, and we get the inspection tour thing from Admiral Mikhailovich, but other than that, we really are not given much about the Alliance proper. So the idea here for us to go to Arcturus Station and actually encounter the Alliance government proper. We only ever properly encounter the Citadel Council, not the government that technically, Shepard is under the authority of. The closest we ever come is the (rather useless) Defense Committee at the start of ME3.

So yeah, we’re going to the home of the Alliance proper, and seeing the Fifth Fleet – like my first time playing the game, I had no real concept of the Fifth Fleet until it shows up at the endgame. I kinda would like more foreshadowing, more textual acknowledgement of the fleet that is the reason why we end the game as we do. Like, we get to do a fleet flyby in the process, allowing us to see the size of the fleet and talk about what makes the human fleets different from those of the other races. Although the Citadel races do have their bullshit reasons for distrusting humanity, the fact that humanity has this massive force is a reasonable excuse for the behavior.

I also see this as a very different style DLC. As it is, we got one DLC that was basically a shooting gallery, so here, we’re in the opposite direction, where combat is taking almost a total backseat to dialogue – I mean you have a dialogue system like Mass Effect, where every line gets voiced, you would think that would imply that there’s a lot of faith in the writing, wouldn’t you think? And, the whole beauty of DLC in general usually is the fact that everything’s option – if you’re really all shooty-shooty bang-bang, you don’t HAVE to do this. But the whole series paints Shepard as this inspirational figure, and their oratory skills should be on full display as much as their ability to fire a gun.

I’m also kinda anti-“going to Alliance vessels and the in universe equivalent of the House/Senate halls/White House combined and freely shoot up the place,” just on principle.

Anyway, here we are, visiting the heart of Alliance space. We honestly really should have more of an idea of what humanity has accomplished in the universe. Arcturus Station, the home of Alliance government. This is a big deal for the crew, of course – it’s getting invited to speak at the Senate in Washington DC. For the various non-humans, it’s a big deal as well.

Now, of course, in the heart of Alliance government, the involvement of a bunch of non-humans is going to be considered questionable at best. I won’t go straight to “you can’t use any companions other that Ashley and Kaidan,” but there is going to be more of a sense of observation from the other Alliance officers and officials when the non-humans are in the party.

The first thing to note about this is that Shepard’s position as Spectre has made them a combination of being a political tool for humanity’s better advancement, but (as evidenced by Mikhailovich’s ranting) some are concerned that Shepard may be – intentionally or not – turned into a pure Council flunky and only doing the work that they approve, regardless of acting in humanity’s benefit.

That’s part of the reason Shepard’s even here – their position is getting humanity’s foot in the door with the Spectres, but this is creating a conflict in various corners, wondering about where their allegiance will be if pressed. Admiral Hackett is, of course, speaking in Shepard’s favor, but just because they have the approval of Hackett and Anderson, there’s still concern among the brass.

This is going to start out seeming very low-key – we’re in the heart of Alliance territory, who would be foolish enough to come along and mess with anyone or anything here, right? So a lot of initial tone-setting, discussion and debate – the first half is a debate sequence, with Paragon/Renegade points abound as Shepard discusses with the various Alliance officials what they’re doing as a Spectre. That culminates in Shepard’s oratory really getting to stretch as they approach the seat of governing for the Alliance, and all those earlier discussions start to add up to how their performance is among the bigwigs – if you talked up human dominance in the one-on-ones, then talk peaceful coexistence, for example, you get called on it.

After Shepard’s speech is over, that’s where we start to see the real fractures starting to take place. We’re not quite at ‘military coup’ levels (let’s leave SOME plot elements for the later games, huh?), but there’s clear dissatisfaction, that Shepard’s words have only fanned flames for – regardless of the way their speech went down, there are some among the fleet, admirals and other high ranking officers who were involved in the First Contact War and just don’t like how the Alliance is handling things.

It’s not a coup, but it is, in effect, breaking away from the Alliance to set up an independent nation, separate from both the Alliance and the Citadel. It’s still in its earliest stages, of course, but it’s easy to see how it might well turn hostile to both – it’s got several military figures from the Alliance leaving, meaning a vulnerable gap for the Alliance military, and it’s got lingering hostility for the Citadel races (turians in particular, but let’s also not forget that the asari, the famed diplomats of the Citadel, seem to have never picked up on the fact that the human resentment towards aliens comes from the fact that an alien government came along and tried to impose their rules on an unaligned species as humanity’s introduction to the greater galaxy – they are complicit here).

Shepard’s task becomes trying to prevent this offshoot from happening. These are orders being cut by President Shastri himself (let’s make this major Alliance figure a presence we actually feel in the series, huh?), with Hackett’s blessing – meaning if things devolve into a shoot out (which will be possible), Shepard will not be held liable for the deaths of several Alliance military figures, that the record will show that they were acting in the interests of the Alliance in response to an imminent threat of potential armed conflict, even a human civil war. No one wants it to come to that, but it’s also going to be one of the most likely outcomes in the minds of those involved – even if Shepard weren’t a Spectre, if someone of their rank and stature on the galactic stage gets involved, it’s because diplomacy isn’t working.

So there’s another segment of trying to sway the people involved. Shepard will have the choice of approached armed or unarmed (like I said, I dislike the idea of a shootout, but I feel like Shepard’s in a position both to be legally entitled to wear weapons in this situation AND uncomfortable going in without any weaponry), which will feed into the metric of how well their argument is received. Because it’s a mechanic so good, we’re using it twice! (Okay, really, it’s because “dialogue” is the gimmick of this idea, but shush.)

Anyway, the various ‘points’ accumulate to the ultimate confrontation with the heads of this group planning this splintering. Shepard’s arguments are going to be along the line of (to summarize) “you’ll only weaken the Alliance, that can’t be your goal,” “if you have problems, work within in the systems and listen to both sides of things,” “put this aside or else,” or “I support your efforts, but this isn’t the time.” Yes, I’m going with four paths for this, the dialogue wheel does offer that, and I want Paragon/Renegade options for each of these. Like you basically pick a path at the start and argue from that position. Depending on the “points” accumulated through dialogue (and probably a handful of sidequests) in the lead to this debate), it will come to either a peaceful resolution or Shepard pulling out their gun on a handful of high-ranking Alliance officers, ready and able to pull the trigger.

While shooting them isn’t an ideal solution, it can bring the others back into line. It’s just going to cause resentment within the Alliance itself – threat or no, these were respected figures among the Alliance. Meanwhile, folding them back in is an ideal solution, but it still means the resentment lingers, because Shepard’s only delayed the boiling over, not prevented it. There’s still tension in the Alliance because this was about issues that can’t be solved with a few words, especially when this was about the involvement and actions of the Citadel. Shepard might be a Spectre, but whether or not they’ve affirmed themselves as giving the Alliance its due, they’re now wrapped up in those politics.

The curveball in things is that last one, Shepard suggesting that they should wait on this issue. I think it’s a valid possibility among the various permutations of the decision point, to have Shepard support them, especially given that ME1’s Renegade Shepard could be a pro-human asshole, but, considering that this is DLC, and particularly DLC that, by my self-imposed rule, cannot change the base game’s story (because if I could do that, I might as well be rewriting all the games in this instead of just created additional content, and this is all hypothetical to begin with), we can’t introduce some new faction into the galaxy, especially an optional one. So the idea here is that Shepard is supporting it, but saying that they can’t make this A Thing right now.

There is an aftermath discussion with President Shastri as well, discussing implications for the future. I also figure that the companions should have a lot to offer in both the aftermath and the core interactions – again, I see Ashley and Kaidan as greatly recommended for this story, and the Alliance officers should have a lot to add, including conversations in the midst of the crisis.

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Email from Shastri as an update of the tension in the Alliance – it’s also something that should be impacted by the decision of the Council at the end of ME1

ME3: Tensions between Alliance and Council forces are impacted by the outcome – if they were swayed by persuasion to rejoin the Alliance, there’s actually a bump in assets, as well as the Alliance bigwigs being a tactical resource, while there’s a decrease in cooperation if the bad blood was fostered.

The Clean Up

The Battle of the Citadel is over, but even if the geth and Sovereign have been defeated, there is a lot left for Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy to do. Investigating the damage done to the Citadel leads to a possible lead on the Reapers. In the wake of the battle, Commander Shepard and company set out to chase it down...

(Post-Game)

So, as I said in the KOTOR editions, we’re adding a Post-Game to ME1 (since this is all hypothetical to begin with, so we’re going to make that alteration to the mechanics), pretty much solely because I want to do some development of the aftermath of the game, as well as do some retroactive set up for Mass Effect 2. Because I don’t think there was a lot of emotional wrap up to the characters at the time. I will grant that we’ve got an awkward period of time between the games here, but, hey, we’ve got enough wiggle room I think to lead in to the opening of ME2

Basically, we can start in what’s basically the immediate aftermath – Shepard’s now out of their recovery, is looking to get back in the game. But, with the Council either still reacting to the events of the Battle of the Citadel or still needing to be reassembled, there’s really not any particular indication of what to be doing. This is some mood setting, looking at the rebuilding effort, how the Citadel was impacted and seeing the response of people to the attack – some are still shaken, mourning their loved ones lost in the attack, hoping for the lost to be found safe, and all that sort. Others are angry about the attack, and the ultimate approach to it seems to basically be blaming everyone, and Shepard in particular since they’re there, for the failure to protect those on the Citadel – and yes, we absolutely get to call out this bullshit for what it is, because Shepard tried, but the Citadel itself is something of a complacency trap, and even if the politics weren’t a distraction, the fact that the Citadel itself remains aloof is an actual problem

Anderson speaks with Shepard, regarding the geth that are still out there in the Traverse, and the need to deal with them before they put more human colonies in danger. The bigwigs are already trying to downplay the Reapers – Anderson basically tells Shepard that they need to go out, find proof of something that ties back to the Reapers or the Council will likely turn around and make this all about the geth and call it over (uh, yeah, Shepard, about that...).

The lead involved is going to be heading out to the border of geth space, which is also the line of what used to be quarian territory. This is convenient for Tali, who wants to return to the flotilla now that Saren has been dealt with. There’s a trading outpost that will be out there that will give her the opportunity to get a ride back to the Migrant Fleet (because, despite a couple of references, I have never believed that Tali lingered too long on the Normandy – either she has to get her data on the geth back to them, or she has to discover an alternative). Because part of this is also going to be the “characters splitting apart” stuff as set up for ME2. Tali’s going to assist through this branch of the mission, but she will want to come back here before the Normandy returns to Citadel space proper.

The trading outpost is Omega-esque, something of “the poor man’s Omega,” again, setting that up for ME2 (we’re doing a lot of world-building patches here, okay?) The citizens here don’t care about the Alliance and they’re not all that concerned about Spectres, either. This is not a friendly place and will not just accept the appearance of anyone with the supposed authority that Shepard is representing.

This is kind of an introduction to ME2’s merc gangs – ME1 seems to play the systems of the Terminus to have their own government, species not represented among the Citadel races, and just this general atmosphere of the Terminus being more developed than it ends up being when we actually go there (which, yeah, that’s how writing and developing and world-building goes, but we’re here to smooth things over). I’m leaning towards not having the big three on Omega be all that represented here, considering that, lawless border or not, this is not really a place where they care enough to expand their influence. But they should at least be mentioned and referenced as the big dogs of the pack, that the gangs that jockey for power here want to take them on. Probably some poaching of members (through recruitment or snipers) from those gangs that make their numbers never get to where they might pose a threat.

Anyway. What needs to be done here is find out where Saren discovered Sovereign – that’s the idea we’re going with in trying to track down evidence of the Reapers. Sovereign had to be hiding out somewhere, you don’t just stumble across something like that. Considering this is one of the last places you’d expect to be able to find a Spectre, especially a Spectre who is one of the Council’s top operatives, it’s a decent enough starting point for us as the audience – we’ll say that there are records that Saren was out here shortly before the Eden Prime mission and such, explaining why we’re starting here.

Garrus is also going to have a realization about the merc gangs, about the horrible things they’re inflicting on the people who are living here, and being infuriated at the injustice allowed to happen – the effective attitude of the officials here are basically ‘look, unless the merc gangs come after us, we don’t care.’ This is going to dig under his skin (plates... you know what I mean), lead him to why he ultimately breaks with C-Sec, despite Shepard being able to lead him to a better understanding of the rules and regs – he understands the need for them, but sees them being used and abused to allows these injustices to continue, that it becomes a personal mission to see ‘justice’ and ‘law’ be synonymous.

As for the plot, yes, we’re getting there. This does, of course, lead to a shoot-out with a major gang force here, some people who are indoctrinated spies (because, hey, we’re looking for evidence of Reapers). They were left behind as part of Saren’s contingency plans, meant to stop anyone hunting for him – it’s just that the investigation that Shepard went on in the base game didn’t send them here. Even with Saren and Sovereign dead, they’re still here, still indoctrinated – a reminder that this is a permanent thing, a devastating thing, because there’s no way to take the Reaper compulsion away. But this leads to learning about a place that Saren ventured to from here, a place wracked with dangerous phenomenon. The only way to get there is with a crack pilot – which, fortunately, Normandy has.

There’s a brief pause from plot for some further expansion with the others – Wrex has been contemplating the krogan, given what went down on Virmire. His people are dying out, maybe not in the way we traditionally think of it, but still in practice. What is there for the krogan but to be used and abused by the Sarens of the universe, so long as all they care about is getting offworld and fighting and dying, usually being pit against one another as the proxies for stupid, pointless conflicts. It’s not right, and it’s beginning to eat at him.

And then there’s Ashley/Kaidan. Given the events of Virmire, both of them are thinking about the family that was left behind – Ashley’s sisters lost one of their central figures, Kaidan’s family lost their only son. They both are trying to write a letter of condolence to their counterpart’s loved ones (and specifically asking Shepard about the one they should be writing), trying to figure how they can make it better that they were saved at the other’s expense. It’s a complicated matter, and I want to just explore, even retroactively, how these two were friends, were close, potentially (if Shepard shuts down a romance with both of them) starting to come together. Just a bit that not only reestablishes the friendship and emphasizes that the fallen character is not forgotten, plus giving more context to how they’ll say that they and Shepard got through the other’s death together in ME3

This is a point for some romance content, which, I realize I have yet to bring up Liara’s character bit for this – don’t worry, it’s coming. But we do pause for some smoochies.

Anyway. The Normandy arrives in the hazardous area and we get a team meeting – remember how back in the first of these outlines, I brought up wanting to give more for Pressley? I haven’t directly mentioned him much since, but here’s a place to feature him, in the same way that the landing on Ilos does, showing him having a greater involvement in the strategy and such. Team Shepard needs to figure out if there even is a place to investigate within this area. There are sensor ghosts that might be something that they could land on and investigate, though it’s too small for a Mako mission (I may love that tank, but I feel like its final ride being the trip through the Ilos Relay is poetic and I’m not going to mess with that). Joker gets his moment of putting the Normandy through her paces (which is also going to add to the pain of her loss in ME2’s prologue, that she could pull this off, but couldn’t out-fly the Collector ship).

They detect something with a similar energy signature to the prothean beacons on an asteroid large enough to land on, which makes it reasonable for Liara to go with – take the prothean expert to a place that could hold more information on the protheans. She’s nervous because of the confirmation of the Reapers has just made things really real for her – this is facing the same thing that destroyed the protheans, and how can they stand against them, given the protheans’ advanced nature?

Let’s also take a moment and, given the indoctrinated nature of the mercs who attacked back on the outpost, to have some follow-up for Benezia’s death – I may only be speaking for myself, but it has NEVER sat right that Liara’s response to that is to simply go “I choose to remember Benezia as she was,” given that Shepard was, regardless of their reluctance, responsible for the actual bullet that ended her mother’s life. She’s struggling – could the mercs have been saved? Could her mother? Could what they find below offer a way to have saved them, and, if so, would Saren have had it, could he have freed her mother before her death? Did she have to die? Why did her mother have to die? Cue Shepard offering their support for her emotional struggle.

And yes, for Liaramancers, this is where they get their smoochies.

As for what they find... Geth. Plenty of (heretic – though Shepard doesn’t yet know this) geth. They are crawling all over the facility, it’s a firefight all the way to the central database, and, as our big final boss, we deal with a geth augmented with some of Sovereign’s tech, meant to be a Reaper upgrade for the geth. Obviously, this is not going to make it into the geth consensus (heretic or true), and this is effectively the only existing prototype.

The result of this is that they do find an archival interface, the same kind that allowed the communication with Sovereign on Virmire. Unfortunately, it can provide nothing – without Sovereign connected to it, it’s got minimal functionality – something might be recovered, with some time and effort. But the facility is about to move into the areas of this area of space that will fry any systems that get close to it – Sovereign probably had this place selected in the name of being a place where anyone who might stumble upon its hiding place would decide to move on because it’s suicide to remain in the area.

The only choice is to return to the Normandy, without any additional evidence. There are indications of geth vessels having moved out of the area and into other sectors, which could give them something to go on for further investigations. But, with this stage of the mission being a bust, Shepard is going to have the Normandy return to the earlier outpost in the name of allowing all ashore who are going ashore – Tali, Garrus, and Wrex, specifically, but also any other Normandy crew willing to stand down for the time being. Investigating this further is a strictly volunteer mission. This will, of course, lead us to ME2’s prologue...

Post Game Followups:

ME2: Mentions of Shepard’s activities on the outpost while on Omega, a letter from a scientist, passed on by Anderson, about further studies made on indoctrination being done on the sly, considering the lack of approval from the Council.

ME3: Further research has been done on indoctrination, now publicly, and makes for a scientific war asset, the remnants of the merc gang that were indoctrinated have reformed and reassembled as a roving band of resistance fighters against the Reapers.

Miscellaneous 

Bisexual Ashley, Bisexual Kaidan, proper close outs to other romances, romances require proper flirts to start, additional conversations for all characters

Look, no one in space is heterosexual, okay? I don’t make the rule, I just enforce it. Actually, considering the context of these, I DO make the rules, and “no one in space is heterosexual” is one of them, so deal with it. Kaidan is canonically bisexual as of ME3, so there’s no reason he shouldn’t be canonically bisexual in ME1. And we’ll throw Ashley in for good measure, because why not? And we definitely – DEFINITELY – need to do something about the romance mechanic that seems to assume “I would like to get to know you better” means “you, me, my cabin, the way to Ilos, yes/yes?” There needs to be explicit markers for closing out a romance WITHOUT locking you out of conversations with the character in question (particularly considering that now, all of this game’s romances can be options in a given playthrough). And yeah, I think there could stand to be a few extra conversations with the characters, that focus on the characters proper – for most of the crew, they basically end up acting as glorified Wikipedia entries on their species, or, in Kaidan’s case, the plight of human biotics. Let’s give them some more personalized material that lets them tell Shepard something about themselves (and offer Shepard something similar, as character development for the both of them).

[canmom]

mutuals only i guess. sad post. don’t feel obliged to read.

catching up with what a friend i knew for a short while at uni has been up to the last few years, and generally feeling very stupid and inferior, tonight. as in actually spent the last half an hour crying idek.

i look at the kind of thoughts she seems to have so effortlessly and at the clumsy crap that comes out when i put words together about anything that matters, and i just think, how foolish, to think i had something to say! i look at my longwinded articles about D&D or fumbling attempts to understand theory or my shitty twines and just think... god, I have nothing new to offer the world, I just retread old ground with less grace than the people who went before me.

this is obviously a stupid line of thought in my head because the vast majority of people in the world are not like, doctoral students in philosophy writing incredible articles and founding gay marxist poetry journals, and obviously that’s fine, there’s billions of ways to be a person.

and indeed certain people i care about a lot have told me they’ve felt similar sentiments about me and to me that feels ridiculous and i bet if i ever told kay what i’m feeling rn (i would never of course, we haven’t talked in years even though she still follows me on twitter for some reason) she’d also find that ridiculous

but i wish i had the certainty she seems to have, about what i want to do, what my project is or whatever. i wish i was as widely read as she is and found it so easy to say something interesting, like just... idk does she do these interviews as email conversations and spend hours composing each one or is she just like that

my girlfriend once said she feels like “You're doing job things because you want to make yourself not a burden, or because you want to help others, not because you particularly see a future in which you have value in yourself and want to get there” and she’s right and i still have no answer. (she has an answer for herself, she’s busy building care organisations and making sure everyone has medical knowledge. she has figured out a role for herself and every day she does the work. why can’t i do the same?)

i thought like... my writing could be something worthwhile, that i enjoy, that i could imagine i’m half decent at, that could contribute to the world or w/e. not the writing for my job, which i have mixed feelings about at best, but my blog posting, and my fiction.

but honestly... i know what everyone thinks of my blog posts. it’s longwinded, it’s handwringing, it’s basically a huge waste of time both to write and to read. my friends make fun of it (like in a gentle way, they find it endearing... another ‘brynpost’. but i don’t want to be pathetic in an endearing way, i want to write something people care about!)

and as for my fiction... i could make a better case for that. but tbh i’ve written like. two arguably decent stories in a space of multiple years. and I feel totally blocked on my current projects. and I find it hard to believe they’ll live up to whatever people liked about my writing so far.

but even if i do get that same stroke of inspiration that led to hacker... it still feels hopelessly inadequate. kay linked this book review on her twitter and i’m thinking like... nobody could write a book review like this about something i’ve written, i’m just messing about in a sand pit. and sure no doubt the author of that book also started out writing less affecting, clever stories, but they would have gotten past that point by like... actually writing, a lot. you get better at something by doing it.

what have i learned to write by practicing? mostly longwinded posts about how sad I am, none of which - including this one - build towards any sort of worthwhile project.

[eala-captian]

Dream On, Dreamer (1/?)

Guys this is it. This is the MC thats been clawing away at my brain for the past few months. I’ve had so much support from you guys on this, and I can’t wait to see where this world takes me.

This is a Musician!Killian AU. There will be pain, there will be heartache, there will also be an unbearably fluffy happy ending. I promise. 

Warning: 5 year old Killian content. Character Death.

                                      Act I: Songs Of Solitude

Jan 1, 2018.  Jones Residence- Storybrooke, Maine

Well, I’ve been running from this story for years, The ghost keeps chasing me, the grounds keep breaking me, I’m not really lost, I just haven’t found it yet. There is no place on earth where no misery exists.- Killian Jones

Light spilled through the window, and Emma Jones had never felt more content in her whole life. 2018 was their year. After all they had been through the last few years, this actually felt as if they were starting again. Killian was scheduled to meet with the band today. She was starting her new job in a weeks time. It all felt right again. She rolled over to find her husband staring at the ceiling. Brooding. It's what he did. Sometimes when you have gone through so much in life you tend to blank out and focus on negatives. At least that's what his therapist told him. Not today though.

She rolled farther over, snuggling into his chest. He wrapped an arm around her without looking away from the ceiling. “Hey, are you ok?” she whispered. He slowly looked down at her, giving her a half smile then looking upwards again.

“No, but this...my story needs to be told. This is something I owe my fans. Something I think will bring closure for myself.” He said while swiping his other hand over his face and into his hair. “No, I’m not ok, but I will be. Because I have you, and I have Liam.”

“You know you don’t have to do this Killian. Don’t feel like you owe an explanation to anybody. The fans would understand if you didn't want to talk about it.” He looked back down at her like she was the light of the world.

“I know that. I do, love.” He reached his hand down to stroke her cheek “But the whole reason I started the band with Liam was to help people get through pains in life. This is a great way to show that not everyone is perfect.”

“You are an amazing, beautiful, selfless man, and I love you. You know that?” She leaned up to brush a quick kiss to his lips before snuggling back down into his embrace again.

She felt him relax around her.

“Aye I know, I love you too.” This was good. He was good. He was writing a new album starting today. She had seen his lyric sheets laying around the house for the last month and a half. The lyrics she had read on them had been positive. So far from the words he sang just before they met.

Just as she was starting to doze back off the alarm started to ring and signal the true beginning of the day.  He groaned and sat up. His hair a complete mess. She took a moment to admire him. He glanced her way, smirk appearing when he noticed her eyes on him.

“Like what you see love.” He smiled

“If you mean crazy beadhead, sleep eyes, drool on your cheek, and morning breath, then yes I love what I see.” He leaned in kissed her softly on the cheek before pulling away.

“View isn’t too bad from up here either.” With that he walked towards the bathroom suite and dropped his boxers, almost tripping over them, on the way to the shower leaving him naked in the doorway. The bastard turned and winked at her tossing his underwear her way.

“That supossed to be a strip tease Mr. Jones? I thought strippers knew how to take their clothes off without almost busting their face on the doorframe?” She asked as his boxers landed just short of the bed.

“No, that was an invitation to save some water this morning Mrs. Jones.” She hopped from the bed and chased him in to the bathroom laughing.

…

They were eating breakfast with Liam when the doorbell rang. Killian looked at her and then back down at his plate. He let out a sigh then picked it up and carried it to the sink, rubbing the top of their sons head on the way. A murmured “Finish your breakfast, son” tossed out over his shoulder.

She made her way to the door and opened it to welcome their guests for the next few months during the writing and recording process.

“Mrs. Jones, my name is Sydney Glass and I’m a writer and director for AP Magazine. Thank you for allowing us into your home to film.” The man at the door had a whole film crew unloading a truck in their driveway. “Eric Prince from Rise Records is also here with his film crew to capture footage for the documentary that will appear on the album.”

“Come on in Mr. Glass, we’ve got the front room all cleared out for your equipment.” Emma replied stepping out of the doorway to usher them inside. As she turned around she saw her husband leaning against the wall in the back of the foyer. He made eye contact with her before nodding his head in an attempt to silently let her know he was ok.

As Eric walked in, Killian smiled and it was a real smile, one of the ones that lit up his whole face. Emma could pick those out by now. She watched as her husband walked up to Eric and shook his hand.

“Been a long time Jones. You look good.” Eric said letting go of Killian's hand. “Hey! You idiots make sure you take your shoes off before you come in this house.” He yelled as some of his crew carrying equipment tried to slip by unnoticed.

“You would have thought I would have had them trained by now.” Killian laughed and Emma couldn’t have been more relieved.

“It’s alright mate. We have a three year old running around pretending to be a pirate every day. We’re used to it.” Emma stepped up to stand beside Killian putting an arm around his back.

“Eric this is my wife Emma, Emma this is the guy that made a bunch of young musicians look like award winning actors for the first few years of our careers. He shot every one of our music videos.” She reached out and shook his hand as he laughed.

“To be honest with you I was just a film-student when we first met. I had no idea what I was doing.”

“Worked out alright if you ask me mate.” Killian said “Come on in, we can head to the studio. I assume that's where we are going to do this?”

The sound of feet and squeals sounded coming through the living room from the kitchen. Liam rounded the corner heading straight for Emma. “Mama! Mama! I cleaned my plate.” The blur of a child yelled as he crashed head first into her legs. “Papa said finish my breakfast, and I did mama! I even ate the baby oranges, I don’t even like those.”

“Can’t blame you lad.” Killian replied “Gross.” Emma swatted him across the chest. His reply was a wink to his son who giggled at his father. “Eric this is little Liam.”

“I’m not little papa! I’m young!” Emma glanced at Killian who smiled, and then at Eric who was looking at Killian with a knowing gaze.

“Hey, Liam. I’m Eric. I’m an old friend of your papa’s.” Eric said as he bent down on one knee to be eye level with the youngest Jones.

Liam retreaded behind his mother's legs. “Hi.” He said quietly sticking his head out from behind the wall of his mother's body.

“Alright Liam, time to get ready to go to Mary Margaret and David's house for a little while.” She said leaning down and picking him up. “ I’ll be back soon. Just gonna drop him off and head straight back, Ok?” she said directed to her husband.

“Sounds good love. Liam have a good day, lad. I love you.” He said kissing his son's forehead. “And I love you too.” he mumbled as he laid a kiss to his wife’s lips.

“That’s gross.” Liam said with a disgusted face. Eric snorted from the other side of the room. He was now holding a huge case Killian assumed was a camera.

“I’ll see you soon love.” He replied as Emma turned to carry Liam down the hallway to his room to get dressed for the day.

“Well, Eric. Shall we?”

“We shall.”

…

Killian was sitting on the couch in the corner of the studio when Emma returned. He was surrounded by a team of people making sure his hair was just so, and his face wasn’t washed out by the lights they had set up all over the room. She also noticed he had changed from his casual clothes into the clothes she had seen him wearing, on so many tour videos. He had completely transformed from her Killian to Dream On, Dreamer Killian in a matter of thirty minutes. She liked it. The bad boy, rock and roll look on him was always a welcome sight. He had chosen a black s-HEART shirt that showed just enough chest hair, the necklaces with a skull and sword his brother had given him, black pants, and black converse. It had been years since he so much as looked at the closet he kept his tour clothes in. At the same time it was the same clothes he had been wearing when he was rushed into the hospital all those years ago.

“Hey, love. Is he all settled with David and M’s?” He stood up and walked away from the hoard towards her. The woman fixing his hair gave him a death glare as he interrupted her work, to top it off he ran his hands through it to place it back the way he had worn it the past five years. “Bloody people all around me, they need to let me be. I don’t need anyone fixing my damn hair for me. Where’s Eric?” He stopped in front of her, laying his head on her shoulder, breathing hard.

“Hey calm down. It’s all going to be alright. Eric is getting everything ready upstairs. Just breathe for me.” That was another thing that had been a new characteristic for Killian within the past five years. Any bit of change, or large groups of people set him off. He was constantly on edge when he wasn’t secluded from the world at home, but he had just invited the world into it. This was going to be hard. “ The stylist is just doing her job, babe. And Liam is just fine. David was ready with the legos the second we walked in.”

“Good. I’m just worried. I’m sorry.” He lifted his head back up to look her in the eyes. He leaned in a placed a kiss to her lips. “I’ll be fine.” It was probably the one-hundredth time she had heard that today. He was trying to convince himself.

“Killian! We are about ready to start if you want to take your spot on the couch.” Eric yelled from the other side of the studio.

“Showtime.” Killian mumbled as he turned from her, forcing a smile onto his face. A fake one, she noted. He walked towards the couch and sat down with his elbows on his knees.

“Alright, what's going to happen is Sydney here is going to be asking you some questions and you can answer them as thoroughly as you want to, or not answer them at all. The ball is all in your court brother.” Eric addressed him as he walked to the small screen in the soundbooth.  

“Alright. You don't need me to do anything other than talk, right?”

“Nope, this is going to be raw. All you. No pressure.” Eric smiled. “Alright guys, Roll camera.”

“Rolling”

“Sound speed.” Emma glanced at Killian as he took a deep breath and looked into the lens.

“Speed.” He closed his eyes as the slate was placed in front of his face. It was dropped.

“Action.” As soon as that word was said he opened his eyes and Emma knew. She knew he was determined to do this. He was going to tell this story. He was going to write this album. He wasn’t okay. But he would be.

“I’ve been givin the great pleasure to sit down and talk with Killian Jones of Dream On, Dreamer in his studio as he writes this new album. It’s been about five years since you went off the radar as an artist and a sort of public figure. Are you ready to talk to us about it?” Sydney started.

“Aye, mate. As we are starting the writing process of this new album I felt like it was important for me to address my absence, and what better outlet to do that than through music and a documentary for the CD.” Killian answered while leaning back and making himself comfortable on the couch.

“Where did the idea for the band come about in the first place?” the reporter asked, looking down at his notes.

“I’m uh..I’m not quite sure where you want me to start. A lot in my life has influenced who I am today and what I’ve been through is quite a huge part of that.” Killian stated. Emma noticed he was slowly spinning his wedding band on his finger. The same finger coming up to scratch that spot behind his ear that he always seem to gravitate towards when he was nervous.

“How about we start at the beginning….”

…

April 24, 1991. Jones Cottage- Kinsale, Ireland

Killian hated oranges. Always had. For some reason his mother always seemed to put them on his plate right beside his toast. It made his toast soggy. The juice from the offending fruit making his bread taste bad as well. She always told him fruit was good for him. So was spinach, but you didn't see him standing at the fridge eating it out of the bag, now did you? She meant well thought. Even at five years old Killian knew she wanted what was best for him, and he loved his mother so very much.

That’s why today felt weird. They said his mother had a doctors appointment. Why did they say it like it was the end of the world. She had other appointments recently as well. His brother seemed to know something he didn’t. Why would he keep something from him?

“Killian. Are you going to eat your oranges?” Said brother asked him. He shoved his plate over the table to where Liam sat.

“You can have the toast too.” He replied getting up from the table.

The walk to his and Liam's shared room took him through most of the little cottage that they lived in. It was a fairly nice size house for their town. His dad always said he should be thankful that his father had a job that could support them well, compared to the rest of the people in his little town. His father was always gone and came home at late hours.

His father was nice enough. He tucked him in on nights that he was actually home before Killians bedtime, and read stories of pirates and princesses to him and his brother. Sometimes though, sometime his father got mad when he spent too much time in town with his friends. He came home smelling funny and couldn’t talk right. Killian had no idea what caused him to be this way. He knew his brother always went to the fridge and made marks on a clear bottle that Killian had been told not to touch. Every time he saw it the liquid was below the marks.

“Have you got all your bags packed?” He heard his father ask his mother when he walked outside their closed door. He stopped. If his mother was going to the doctor why did she need to pack things. Killian leaned closer to the door.

“Yes, I believe so.” His mother replied while trying to stifle a cough. “I do hope I will be coming home soon though.”

“We all hope so. Are you going to tell the lads?” His father questioned. “Killian is so young. I don’t know if he will understand when you don’t return this evening.”

“He has you and his brother. Liam is a strong boy. He knows more than he leads on. I’m sure he has already figured out what's going on by now.”

What was going on? Why did his mother need a bag if she was just going to a doctors appointment? Was she leaving them? He loved her too much for her to go. She couldn’t. Tears started to well up in Killians eyes as he started to panic. It was too much. He burst through the door to his parents room to find his father hugging his mother. She was holding a bloody handkerchief.

“Mamaí, you can’t leave us! What’s going on? Why do you need bags? I’m scared Mamaí.” Killian yelled as he all but jumped into his mother's arms. The tears were freely flowing now. Liam must have heard him yelling from the kitchen because when he turned in his mother's arms his brother was standing in the doorway.

He looked towards his father to see him staring at Liam like he would rather sink through the floor than have this conversation with his two young boys. Killian slowly sank back to his feet, and sat down on the side of the bed. Liam walked over and put his arm around his little brother.

“Mamaí, Da, what's going on?” Liam asked as he consoled his brother.

Their parents looked at each other silently having a conversation. They seemed to settle on a decision before Killian could comprehend what was happening.

“Boys, you mother is sick.” His father said while kneeling down to be eye to eye with them. “ She is going to spend some time at the hospital to try to get better. Do you understand?”

“Are you going to come back?” Killian asked. “I don’t want you to go.” He wiped his face on Liam's shoulder.

“Ma? It’s bad isn't it?” Liam asked nodding at the handkerchief she still held.

“It’s...It’s not good, but that’s not saying I can’t get better.” She said giving her boys a small smile.

“What’s wrong Ma?” Liam questioned.

“Your ma, we found out a few months ago she has cancer.” Killian felt Liam stiffen at the confession.

“What’s cancer? What does that mean?” Killian yelled.

“Killian my inquisitive little boy.” His mother said smiling at him. “Our bodies are made up of lots of different parts.” She came and sat beside him on the bed. “When someone has cancer, it means that something has gone wrong with one of these parts and it’s stopped doing what it’s supposed to do.”

“Like when I get sore throat?” Killian asked.

“A little bit.” She replied grabbing his hand. She started coughing again using the other hand to conceal the blood that came with it.

Killian looked down to his hand in his mothers. The tears started to flow again.

“I’m going to be going to the doctor so they can try and fix what's wrong inside me.” At this Liam angrly ripped himself out of their embrace and left the room.

“I’ll go talk to him.” His father said rising from the floor to head towards the door.

“Can..Can I get it?” He asked his mother after his father had left the room.

“Not from me, no.” She squeezed his hand. “Just know that no matter what, I love you.”

“I love you too Mamaí.”

…

His mother had been in the hospital for three months, and despite his bothers constant presence he felt completely alone. His father had been at home with them, and was more on edge than ever. Always calling in a sitter so he could spend more and more time in town. Whether that was with his mother, or with his friends, Killian didn't know.

He had hardly seen his father in two weeks. The last time he did see him he was in the living room looking at a photo of their family. He turned and threw the photograph at the wall shattering the glass into a million pieces. Liam led him away from the room.

“Boys get dressed.” His father said pulling him out of his thoughts. “We are going into town to see your ma.”

Killian hated these days. He hated seeing his mother like this. He wanted her better and at home with him. He felt so worthless, and so so lonely. These days were also the longest he could ever remember. Spending time with his father made him feel like a burden.

When he entered the hospital room he could tell something was wrong. She had been getting her medicine through a machine, but now the room was empty except for her bed.

“Mamaí?” He said as they walked into the room.

“Hello boys.” was her weak reply. “I’m glad you came to see me today. I’ve missed you.”

Liam walked around her bed and sat silently at her bedside as he did every time. Killian ran over to her bed and hopped up in it with her. His father stood beside the door. He looked back to his mother who looked nothing like she had only two months ago. She was smaller Killian noticed. She looked weak.

“Boy’s I’m gonna give you a few minutes alone with your ma, okay? I’ll be back soon.” Their father left without another word.

“Come up here Liam.” She said to her eldest boy patting her bedside. Liam reluctantly climbed up onto the other side of the bed. “I know a lot of things in life are going to be hard. You are both strong boys and will be men before you know it. I want you to remember to always be honest with yourselves. Always support each other. I always wished I had a sister to grow up with, to help me when I was going through rough times in my life.” Killian snuggled up into his mother shoulder with unshed tears in his eyes. “Stay with each other, help each other when you fall. Liam I’ve seen the way you look out for Killian, don’t ever stop.” Liam was crying now. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw his brother cry. He was so strong, he didn’t cry, but he was crying now. “Killian, I know you are so young, but I look at you and see a little boy who wants to chase his dreams.”

“Dream on, little dreamer. Dream on.”

…

Jan 1, 2018.  Jones Residence- Storybrooke, Maine

“That...Uh….That was the last thing she ever said to me.” Killian looked away from the camera and found her eyes. “It seemed fitting we honour her wishes in naming the band Dream On, Dreamer.”

She had heard this story before during the nights of Killians recovery. It still hurt her to know he had to endure that pain. A part of her was happy Killian got to have memories with his mother. She herself never got to experience that. At the same time she wished she could take the painful memories away from him.

She heard Killian suck in a breath holding back his tears. Like this, raw and exposed, he was so like the little lost, broken and lonely boy he spoke about. “I don’t remember much about her. I was only 5 when she passed away. Just random good memories from time to time. Liam used to tell me stories of her.”

He looked down at his hand. There sitting on the inside of his right index finger was a tattoo of his mother's name. Alice.

“Alright. Times up for today.” Emma heard Eric say quietly from the other room.

She immediately crossed the room and sat next to her husband on the couch. He put his arm around her. “It feels good to finally explain the bands name. That felt good.” he said as he wiped at his face. “I feel like I need to write now.”

“Go ahead. The rest of the guys should be here soon. I’ll send them down when they get here?” she asked slowly rubbing his back.

“Yeah. That’s fine. Thank you love.” She held him close as the crew filed out of the room and left him to work in peace, only Eric remained with a single camera to record the writing process.  “And Emma, you are a fantastic mother. I love you.”

“I love you too, Killian.”

C.A.N.C.E.R, This is the burden we all carry together. And when we all fade away, and this world can't bare another day, there will be no fight in broken bliss. Respected will we be at the end of this. C.A.N.C.E.R. -Killian Jones

Tagging all the wonderful folks who reached out to me when I needed a push. Thank you guys.... @andiirivera @winterbaby89 @gingerchangeling @icecubelotr44 @teamhook @walkerfairytales @laurnorder

And to the lovely @ladyciaramiggles this is where it all began. 

[daresplaining]

Hey found your blog recently and loved it. I just binged DD and the defenders and what was really jarring for me was the end scene. I didn't peg Matt as suicidal, as he decided to remain behind with Electra. I can't help but think he was prepared to die, whether for Electra or because of her. What's confusing to me was I thought he had laid Electra's hold over him to rest at the end of DD s2, so it just feels like defenders retread old ground. What do you think of the Matt/Electra dynamic?

    Hi, we’re glad you’re enjoying the blog!

    Elektra’s willingness to die at the end was far more jarring to us than Matt’s, since she just spent two shows fighting for autonomy and a life of her own. But we get why Matt did what he did. He doesn’t stay because he wants to die, he stays because he is willing to risk his life to save people– particularly people he loves, like Elektra. He is willing to chance death to rescue her, just as he’s willing to chance death every time he goes out and fights crime. It’s part of being a superhero. And so he stays, refusing to leave her there, fighting up until the very last minute to get her out. For him to abandon her there would have felt out-of-character.

    We’re interested in your choice of words, the idea that Elektra had a “hold” over Matt, and we think we get what you mean. Throughout Daredevil Season 2, Elektra pulls Matt toward the superhero side of his life, in direct detriment to his legal career. And obviously, that is an issue, since Matt needs to find a balance between these two roles. Elektra doesn’t value Matt’s work as a lawyer, she doesn’t think it’s effective, but he does, and we as viewers know how important it is to his character. But at the same time, it’s not like Elektra has him under some kind of spell. These are two people who care deeply about each other, and whether or not Matt’s lifestyle ends up aligning with Elektra’s (which it shouldn’t– they have different priorities, after all), despite any disagreements they have, they still love each other. Even if they go their separate ways, it’s not like they didn’t enjoy being together, or that Matt is trying somehow to escape from her. That’s not the nature of their relationship.

    Overall, we’ve enjoyed their dynamic as it has been established in these shows. It’s not perfect, but it’s still quite good. There are a few different versions of Elektra’s origin in the comics, but our preferred version is the naive, optimistic college student who dreams of changing the world, who suffers tragedy after tragedy until she becomes cold and cynical. That character progression is fascinating on its own, as it makes her a complex character with a compelling narrative arc, but we also love the way it parallels Matt’s story (we wrote a post on this a while ago, right here). This similarity in their character development is part of what, for us, makes them such a compelling pair (romantic and otherwise) in the comics. They understand each other because their experiences are so similar, even though their lives have taken them in completely different directions.

    In the Netflix show we get a very different Elektra, with a unique way of relating to Matt. We like the idea that she initially approached Matt as an assignment for Stick, because we are fascinated by Stick’s relationship with his pupils. We also love the layers in Elektra’s personality, and the ways in which she interacts with Matt. She approaches him while hiding behind a facade– the spoiled, reckless, screw-the-rules rich girl– and eventually, as their bond grows, she reveals to him her true personality. We especially enjoy the flashback to their conversation at Fogwell’s Gym, where they first start digging into each other’s secrets, because that’s key to their relationship: in the comics, Elektra is the first person to whom Matt chooses to reveal his powers, and while Elektra doesn’t have many secrets yet at that point, Matt is one of her first, and only, friends. While in the show, Elektra already knew about Matt’s powers from Stick, her time bonding with him is still real and special for her, since she sees herself in him, and connects with him in a way she’s never experienced before.

    Our main complaint about their dynamic in the show exists on Elektra’s side of the equation. In the comics Elektra is very good at killing, but this mostly comes from the trajectory of her life, not from some innate homicidal tendency. After her time training with the Chaste and the Hand, after having walked away from her college education and lost everyone she cares about, all that is left for her is her skill as an assassin– and so she accepts that and becomes very, very good at it. The Black Sky concept in the Netflix show was mishandled in several different ways, and one side-effect we’re not huge fans of was its impact on Elektra’s psyche. While she doesn’t learn she’s the Black Sky until the end of DD Season 2, she knows from a young age that there’s something wrong with her– something that makes her frightening to the people around her. Her horror at the way people react to her results in severe insecurity and the need to be “loved”. Netflix Elektra longs for someone to understand her, so that she can stop feeling monstrous and unworthy of affection.

   This manifests in a power imbalance in her relationship with Matt: he loves her (most of the time), but she needs him. She is desperate for his validation, crushed when he becomes repulsed by her willingness to kill, and dies for him twice. This is a natural result of the way her character has been constructed in this show, but it’s a removal of agency that is disappointing when compared to her self-assuredness and independence in the comics. We were hoping to see her grow into that self-acceptance in The Defenders, and thus were saddened by her decision to die with Matt at the end. Their relationship works in the comics partly because it’s a meeting of equals– two powerful people with strong personalities and a shared history, who go off and live their own lives, but occasionally bump into each other and have awesome team-ups. We long for their dynamic to reach that point in the show, and for Elektra to stop depending on Matt quite so much.

   A final note: one positive aspect of this dynamic, which we do appreciate, is that it strengthens a weak plot point from the comics: the idea of Matt weakening Elektra. Throughout her introductory arc in Frank Miller’s DD run, a lot of time is spent establishing how badass and deadly Elektra is, the fact that she’s a better fighter than Matt… and then she gets killed by Bullseye, someone Matt has taken down numerous times. The reason for this doesn’t get much development, but the subtext is that drawing up her memories of her time with Matt, and digging into her emotional side– with which she has lost touch over the years– impacts her fighting ability. We’ve always considered this to be weak storytelling. But in the show we also see Matt weaken Elektra, and in this context it makes slightly more sense. Netflix El isn’t weakened by some amorphous emotional disruption. She is weakened because her desire to connect with Matt draws her into behavior that she would never have engaged in otherwise. She knows it’s tactically dumb to go into that warehouse and try to take on the entire Hand at the end of DD Season 2. But she goes in anyway because she gets caught up in Matt’s optimism and the thrill of fighting alongside him. Thus, her death in this universe can still be indirectly blamed on Matt, but in a way that makes more sense than the situation presented in the comics. Any complaints aside, we enjoy this detail.    

[returnerofthesky]

why do you hate skyrim so much, anyway?

To be honest, I don’t… “hate” Skyrim, per-say? Hate’s too strong a word for any game for me, and even then Skyrim isn’t necessarily a terrible game despite how much I dislike it.

Which probably sounds weird, but that’s just me; most games that I dislike aren’t just plain old bad games. I don’t have an emotional dislike of, say, Bubsy, or Superman 64, or so on. They’re shit games, but there’s nothing particularly redeemable about them. They might have had potential, but it’s more conceptual, rather than being very flawed games with some good ideas (like Gates to Infinity, or Super Mystery Dungeon to a lesser extent).

Anyway, to get back to the question, the reason I don’t like Skyrim is because it feels creatively bankrupt.

To steal a quote from Super Bunnyhop, it’s hard to get engaged in Skyrim when every character feels like the most boring character, when every quest feels like the most boring quest, when every dungeon feels like the most boring crawl… you get the idea. To me it feels like every single time Bethesda had the opportunity to do something creative or interesting in Skyrim or its DLCs, they took the easiest, most boring route possible instead, even though it actively hurts the game’s appeal. And it’s very telling that what I consider to be the two most interesting quests in the game (the murder mystery in Windhelm and the peace treaty in the main story) are also two of the buggiest quests in the game.

Like, vampires in Skyrim are a good example of what I’m talking about. There’s a book in the previous games about a vampire hunter and a scholar (actually a vampire) advising him, and he describes Skyrim vampires as having breath that could freeze the blood inside of you, as well as actually living underneath frozen lakes and being able to reach up through the ice, grab people, and drag them under to feed. That’s not only a fascinating (and grim) concept, but an incredibly cool idea for a snow-based vampire.

Now granted, that’s a fairly dynamic idea, and it’d be hard to implement in Skyrim (especially given they never bothered to add underwater combat), so while I could criticize them for that, I won’t. What I will criticize is the fact that they didn’t even try to make the best approximation of that idea, instead opting to make vampires into slightly tweaked and reskinned bandits/draugr/etc etc.

Like, it wouldn’t need to be exactly like the idea presented in the book, but imagine this: vampires spawn in this invisible, walk-through-able state and have a circle that activates them. Once you walk in and out of that circle, an “invisibility spell wears off” animation plays and they properly spawn, body, weapons and all. Then, they aggro and you might get ambushed if you weren’t being careful. It’s not exactly like the book, but it’s close enough, and since the rest of the game’s enemies are so samey it’d be a nice change of pace.

There’s so many elements that are lacking that it’s very easy to sense the hand of the devs making out exactly what you can and can’t do, despite the whole TES brand emphasizing freedom. It’s obvious that you can’t do absolutely anything (well, at least it was obvious until Breath of the Wild came out), but Skyrim is especially bad at locking you out or not considering other options.

You can’t double-cross or double-deal in the Civil War aside from one single part that basically is the last chance for you to decide your faction. Being a thief is basically useless unless you join the guild, because the Fence perk for Speech doesn’t unlock until the skill is almost max. Conversations in general are far less varied and open-ended than before, meaning speech checks are few and far between as is. Stealth is only really useful for sneak-attacking, since most dungeons aren’t designed to be stealthed through completely. Most of the game’s “puzzles” are those simple match-the-symbol ones, and there isn’t anything particular brain-teasing or dynamic compared to even Oblivion.

I mean, even dragons have this issue. Anyone ever try fighting a dragon without any ranged options? It’s hell. And boring. And oh, oh so bland.

Similarly, like I mentioned, the quests themselves are incredibly bland. I’ve already seen plenty of posts on here throughout the years about how even the most mundane, non-combat-sounding quests usually end up with “please go to this dungeon full of Draugr and get my thing”, but it really is that bad. Most of the quests in Skyrim are either being sent to a dungeon to deal with the incredibly mediocre combat, or you get a vague, completely unashamed fetch quest.

A lot of this is tied to the Miscellaneous quest option, which is basically the game’s way of saying “we whipped up a quick, shitty quest in an hour or two, have fun”. In Riften alone, there’s at least seven or eight Misc quests that essentially amount to “I need you to find me some items, please”:

Finding ten fire salts for the blacksmith

Getting a sword and bringing it to its owner at the castle

Finding alchemy ingredients for the alchemy shop’s apprentice

Finding some gemstones and other items for a jeweler

Finding some gemstones for a bartender’s unfinished wedding ring

Finding ice wraith teeth for a lady to preserve her

Going to another big city to deliver a dagger

Going to a small village to pick up some ore and bring it back

And there’s very little proper “masking” to make these quests seem more interesting. The two quests that I didn’t include that are still fetch quests are a quest about mead being stolen (actually smuggled out at lower prices, which you can partake in or tell to the guards), and a quest about a Dunmer raised by Argonians who wants to find out more about his real parents (which is at least vaguely interesting in and of itself, due to the general relationship between Dunmer and Argonians and all that).

It isn’t just the Misc quests that suffer from this, though. Most of the writing is flawed, bland, or otherwise retreading old ground already, and a lot of it suffers from huge pacing issues. The main quest seems to expect that you’re not going to get distracted, so all of the “urgent” situations it sets up fall flat.

The Fighters Guild recruits you, has you do one proper quest where you find out that they’re werewolves, do one more radiant quest and suddenly they decide that you’re important enough to become a werewolf too. Not that “you know so you might as well”, but that you’ve actually done enough work (two quests worth, oh boy) to merit it (also you’re forced to become a werewolf even if you don’t want to). The Dark Brotherhood essentially does the same Oblivion story of a traitor in the guild over again, except with less interesting characters and less personal stake in the goings-on.

And the quests that aren’t tied to guilds aren’t really that much better, save for maybe a handful that I can’t even think of off the top of my head. It’s lazy, messy, and boring. It’s not completely, utterly terrible or full of plotholes, it’s passable at its best, but it’s still not terribly thought-provoking. I mean, thinking about it is what made me realize it’s not that good, so.

Perhaps more damning than any of this though, is that the gameplay itself is so boring. It’s already kind of an issue that Skyrim has iffy writing in a genre that generally needs to have semi-decent writing most of the time, but its gameplay isn’t really interesting enough to pick up the slack, either.

Admittedly, this problem goes back deeper than just Skyrim - even back during the Morrowind days, people were complaining about the combat due to how you could walk up to enemies and attack or use a spell, and you’d miss even though you’re standing right next to them. People still complain to this day about how confusing the combat is for an action-RPG.

But the problem with that logic is that Morrowind isn’t an action-RPG, it’s a proper old CRPG, more along the lines of Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale. You might be moving in first-person with the WASD keys and so on, but make no mistake that its core gameplay is far more in line with how the older isometric RPGs played, right down to standing right next to an enemy and missing your swings even though the animation played. When you view the game this way, most of its design decisions make a lot more sense.

Unfortunately, that never really registered (again, people still say Morrowind’s an action-RPG), so Oblivion changed things to have some sorta-kinda action-RPG combat. They didn’t rebalance the rest of the RPG elements (how to level up, level scaling, etc) to compensate, though, but instead of tweaking everything to work more naturally in Skyrim, they just removed all of the RPG elements entirely except for the Health/Magicka/Stamina thing.

Of course, that results in another problem: if the game is going to lean so hard on its action elements instead of its RPG elements… why not just play a better action game? Like, Skyrim’s combat is nothing to write home about. Oblivion’s wasn’t great, but at least it was faster and you could attack while jumping and swimming. Skyrim’s is just slow and clunky, and lacking in depth unless you actively choose to add it in.

The perks system is what ties into the combat problems the most. The issue is that the combat actually does have a small bit of depth and quality of life improvements… if you pick the perks that activate them. There’s two main screws with this, the first one being that due to how the level scaling works, you’re better off choosing the perks that just upgrade the raw damage you deal. Since even the most basic enemies slowly become health sponges, the fancy perks usually aren’t as helpful when it comes to actually defeating them.

The other screw is that these upgrades are even perks in the first place. While some abilities are understandable (like the one that sometimes replaces a normal cinematic kill with a decapitation), the ones that alter your power attacks to have extra effects have absolutely no business being optional when the combat is already as shallow as it is. If these tweaks to the power attacks had been default abilities, the perk trees could have been changed or expanded to capitalize on the differences between each kind of attack. On top of this, the choice between maces, axes and swords could have been more significant, rather than simply being minor differences in speed and power.

I know there are more abilities and special things you can do with the dragon shouts, of course, but between having to fight through dungeons in order to get those shouts, and then kill a dragon for a soul to unlock it, it’s usually too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it. Forget going out of my way to get Throw Voice - why not just give me a Noisemaker Arrow or something and be done with it?

The unfortunate thing is that despite all these issues, the combat is still generally just okay at best, so it can be hard sometimes to complain about it. But when the entire game is focused almost entirely around this combat, with almost no quest or gameplay variety to speak of, the only way it could be really seen as “good” by any stretch is by people who haven’t played other, better games.

But anyway… uh, yeah. tl;dr: I don’t like Skyrim because even though it’s incredibly safe and boring to play… it’s incredibly safe and boring to play.

Like, it’s oddly depressing to hash all this out because I really was excited for Skyrim six years ago, and I did genuinely enjoy it at first. Hell, despite all these problems I’ve still probably put way too many hours into it than I really should have. But nowadays, it just doesn’t feel that interesting. Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall, and ESO are all much, much better games, and even though they have their flaws, they have a lot more interesting ups, as well. Morrowind is all-around an excellent CRPG, Daggerfall is an incredibly interesting roguelikey experience, Oblivion generally has better atmosphere and more quest variety, ESO has great combat and writing, albeit at the expense of stealth and some puzzles.

Skyrim... I dunno. Skyrim is stuck somewhere between being an average game and an undercooked one, and that really eats at me because I know that the franchise can do better. I didn’t even discuss a lot of the other problems I have with the game, just the major ones. But considering that Fallout 4 has a lot of the same issues, but even worse... I worry for what the next entry in the series might be, if it’s handled by Bethesda proper.

[stevemoffett]

Movies, 2017 (TV and music too)

I didn’t have time to see too many movies this year, but I saw enough to be generally satisfied. Here they are below, in roughly chronological order. Ones I saw in the theater are marked with an asterisk.

Split John Wick: Chapter 2* Get Out* I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Logan Kong: Skull Island T2 Trainspotting Ghost in the Shell The Discovery Graduation (Bacalaureat)* Alien: Covenant* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Baby Driver* Okja Dunkirk* Kidnap It* mother!* Kingsman: The Golden Circle* Blade Runner 2049* The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) Star Wars: The Last Jedi* The Trip to Spain American Made Bright

I’ve just grouped them into a general positive or negative feeling. Many of the negative feelings were just a result of my expectations: if I expect a movie is going to be good, and it turns out to be just okay, then I tend to like it even less. On the other hand, there’s Kidnap.

Generally negative takeaway:

Split (Spoilers):

Oddly enough, it was M. Night Shyamalan himself who spoiled this movie for me on Twitter--well, the very end of it. Anyway, as with this and “The Visit,” I was surprised with Shyamalan’s gall in storytelling, how he implied some unspeakable acts, and killing at least as many people as would be necessary to make it scary, and then some. On the other hand, the whole split-personalities conceit was a little bit stupid. Especially the little kid one. What little kid acts like that? Little kid actors, that’s who.

John Wick: Chapter 2:

John Wick 1 I liked because it was a good action movie that didn’t have filler, not because of the all the “world building” it did. Personally, I could not care less about a bunch of assassins and their version of chivalry. This movie leaned into the world building part and sacrificed the urgency.

Kong: Skull Island:

The part liked the most was its blend of end-of-war Vietnam blue balls with something incredibly silly. Like most modern big action movies, though, aside from a few clever moments, it was pretty run-of-the-mill.

Ghost in the Shell:

I’ve never seen the original, but this movie seemed like it had parts cut out of it, and maybe the original was just so influential that this movie seems old because everything made after it has tread the same ground.

The Discovery (spoilers):

Big disappointment. It started with one of the best setups I’ve heard in the past few years (a scientist proves empirically that some kind of afterlife exists, and millions commit suicide when they hear about it), and then the whole thing devolves into a rip-off of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, without the convincing romance. I didn’t care much about any of the characters--they seemed like maybe the least interesting people the movie could have followed given the setup.

Okja:

Another disappointment, only because 1) it was too long, and 2) knowing Bong Joon-ho’s earlier movies made me ready for this movie to be truly biting, and it did not deliver. At times it was silly to the point of “why am I watching this,” and at other parts, it seemed to pull back when it could have really gotten dark.

It:

The kid-drama stuff was good, the actors were good, but it might have been the least scary movie I’ve ever seen.

Generally positive takeaway:

Get Out:

This movie’s been analyzed to death, and for good reason, so let it just be known that I thought it was one of the best of the year and that the movie kept me completely at unease the entire time. It had great script economy, by which I mean all setups led to satisfying but non-obvious payoffs. That’s one of the great pleasures of storytelling--when you get to look back on earlier parts of the story and realize that you’d read things completely wrong, but the correct reading seems obvious, even inevitable, when you look again. If I had one small criticism (and this is more critical of the online reaction to the movie than it is to the movie itself), it’d be that it wasn’t quite as astonishingly original as it’s purported to be since it had so many parallels to The Stepford Wives.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore:

This movie was made by a guy who works with Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room), and it was sort of a cross between Saulnier’s stuff and the Coen brothers’ movies. A well-timed sense of humor and well-earned anxiety about meaninglessness made it interesting.

Logan:

Yeah, Wolverine + realism + lots of F-words + no inter-dimensional cataclysm at the end = a better superhero movie than usual.

T2 Trainspotting:

I thought this was going to be some kind of sad revisiting of the consequences of the first one but it turned out to be much better: it was a sad revisiting of the consequences of the first one, wrapped up in a sleazy and funny story. It kind of made Begbie into a cartoon character, though.

Graduation (Bacalaureat):

I saw this movie because I wanted to appear sophisticated and cosmopolitan to the person I saw it with, but it was still pretty good. It seemed to be realistic about corruption--specifically, about the banality of that particular kind of evil. We had a long conversation about what makes a good or bad parent afterward.

Alien: Covenant (spoilers):

Some stuff was telegraphed too obviously so the “twists” weren’t surprising, and occasionally it went into the realm of the schlocky slasher movie, and there was a 20 minute part of the movie that seemed to have no purpose, but at the movie’s best, it was frightening and disturbing and had some big ideas. There’s a reason that when I have good nightmares (i.e., nightmares that don’t involve family sickness/death, or taking a final in a math class I forgot I’d registered for), the alien xenomorph is usually the thing that is after me.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:

Cool movie.

Baby Driver:

I saw this on my birthday, and I was in a great mood, so I might remember it as better than it was, but I think in retrospect, 1) it was a better-than-average action movie, and 2) it was extremely well choreographed and edited.

Dunkirk (a big spoiler):

One cool thing I realized after getting out of the movie is that aside from one or two shots at the very end, you never actually see the enemy. I think that’s partially what made it effectively claustrophobic. It’s kind of miraculous that this movie was made--it was so spare that it seemed like a gigantically-budgeted art film.

Kidnap:

This one-long-chase thriller I was prepared to groan at, but it was like another movie I saw and loved called Breakdown with Kurt Russell. There were plenty of “why doesn’t she just...?” moments, but there were also a lot of moments where I was thinking “Yeah, do that, exactly! Yes!” Critically, I thought it was unfairly trashed.

mother! (spoilers):

I generally like Aronofsky’s movies, but this one I might like the least of the ones I’ve seen. In the beginning, by the moviemaking craft alone I was totally rapt, up until a little before the halfway point, when I suddenly figured out what was going on. It was like pulling the correct piece of string from a huge knot. The rest of the movie became meaningless when I realized that there was no logical progression to the story.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle:

This movie was of the same quality as the last movie, but it didn’t do anything as surprising as the original one did, either. I was entertained the whole time, but never really caught off guard.

Blade Runner 2049 (spoilers):

I think if I had to choose I’d say this was my favorite of the year. I hope that it gets a nomination for best cinematography. K’s character was great, the setting was great, and the mystery was actually involving (unlike in the first one!). One thing that bothered me, though, is how the most disturbing murders in the movie were of women. One of the murders seemed almost gratuitous. I guess it was meant to push my buttons, in which case mission accomplished. A huge success in atmosphere and acting, though.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected):

This movie could almost be a sequel to The Squid and the Whale, but I liked it more. It was more schmaltzy but also more realistic and prosaic (in a good way; lately I have less patience for Lou Reed and the final two shots from The Squid and the Whale).

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (huge spoilers):

Even though I wasn’t as over the moon for this movie as for The Force Awakens (this year, it comes in at second after Blade Runner), I’d say that it was almost assuredly because I had ultra high expectations for it to meet. Since it’s not doing that great at the box office (for a Star Wars movie), I hope they don’t get rid of Rian Johnson for his standalone SW trilogy. In this movie he got the tone right (in my opinion), and he made some weird choices, most of which I really liked. They were different and unexpected, and that is really valuable, even if they don’t succeed. The problems I had with the movie are problems I would have with any movie (e.g. why don’t they just make hyperdrive missiles?, where did that romance come from?...).

The Trip to Spain:

This is the third movie in the series and the first one that feels like a retread. While the first two were able to mine ennui out of the landscapes and the men’s reactions to it, this one felt more like someone decided they needed to add plot in. The result is no ennui drawn from the surroundings, and more like the emotional turns could have happened anywhere.

American Made:

After I saw the movie I looked up the real story of the main guy and the movie is almost a total fabrication. That said, it was well-paced, scripted, acted, and edited. Somehow it made a U.S. citizen’s and the U.S. government’s enormously unethical actions entertaining (while also giving reminders of how awful they were, without having to resort to scenes that viscerally demonstrate their consequences). 

Bright:

This movie and Star Wars have made me a little bit uneasy about my relationship with critical reviews. Star Wars got 86 on Metacritic, and while I really enjoyed it, almost none of the critical reviews I read had any of the problems I had with the movie. On the other side of it, Bright got a 29 on Metacritic, with critics calling it dull, awkward, tone-deaf, poorly plotted, et cetera. I found myself entertained all the way through. I think that other than “dull,” those criticisms are valid, though. Maybe it’s just like I said at the beginning--my expectations heavily color the experience I end up having. I’d say that Star Wars was a better movie, but I don’t think I’d be able to easily point out exactly where Star Wars zigged and Bright zagged. Bright reminded me of something I’d channel surf to in 1997 on a Sunday afternoon and stick with. I’m actually thinking specifically of a movie I barely remember called Alien Nation.

Ok--now, for TV:

Master of None season 2:

I liked this season a lot more than season 1. I think the main reason was because it was a lot less didactic this time around.

Love season 2:

Not as good as season 1. I don’t think I’d want to be spend any time with either of the main characters if they were real people. It got a little too convoluted towards the end.

Stranger Things season 2 (BIG spoilers):

The first few “slow” episodes were the best ones, I thought. I didn’t like the X-Men-style episode. Joe Keery’s character was probably the most entertaining (I know I’m jumping on the internet bandwagon with this opinion). I didn’t like the interdimensional cataclysm at the end, as usual, but there was no dropoff in quality compared to season 1 (though, like with Kingsman, the lack of novelty was inevitable. And the X-Men episode wasn’t so much something innovative within the universe but instead hopping into another, extremely well-tread universe).

Mindhunter:

I have read that some people say this show is disturbing. I don’t think it’s disturbing at all, but it’s really interesting and the atmosphere is totally unique.

The Leftovers:

Oh, damn! How could I have forgotten this? The final season was truly great, and it’s one of my favorite shows of all time as a whole. In only a fraction of the episodes, all my anger at the mishandling of Lost is gone.

American Vandal:

The mystery was excellent. I haven’t been in high school for 15 years, but it certainly seems to be an accurate portrayal. Highly recommended.

Black Mirror:

Still my favorite show, but now I’m trying so hard to anticipate the twists that it’s not quite as mind-blowing as it was in its first two seasons. It really is very similar to the Twilight Zone (my favorite episodes of which were “The Lonely” [except for the end] and “A Nice Place to Visit”). I haven’t finished this season yet, but I’ve enjoyed the five that I’ve watched (episodes 2-6).

Whoa, those are all Netflix shows. Aside from that, all I’ve watched was Ninja Warrior (in a group) and Saturday Night Live (I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but I’ve watched almost every episode of SNL since around...1999 or 2000?).

Music:

I generally don’t listen to music that I dislike, so here are the albums I liked the most this past year, in decreasing order of enjoyment (each one links to a track on the album I liked):

Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy

LCD Soundsystem - American Dream

Mac DeMarco - This Old Dog

The Flaming Lips - Oczy Mlody

Aesop Rock - The Impossible Kid (actually came out in 2016)

Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 3 (came out on Christmas 2016)

Beck - Colors

St. Vincent - Masseduction

Foxygen - Hang

Beck’s new one was a little disappointing, considering that he’s one of my all-time favorites. I liked the new Arcade Fire album fine, but I got sick of it after about a week.

My friend Dan got me into the hip hop albums. I almost never listen to hip hop (except the newer Kanye West stuff), but these albums were a really big help when I was a bundle of nerves at the lab.