#text: mass effect

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

Oh right, it's not just dissertation month but Pride. I'm belatedly joining the month of my people with ... a poll :)

My best friend has been good-naturedly mocking my predictable (read: gay) taste in female characters since childhood. I thought it would be fun to let the good people of Tumblr vote between some of said predictable options:

[tarysande]

The best part about coming back to the source material after a looooong time is you sorta get a fresh look at canon in comparison to whatever the dominant strains of fanon have become. Or, in fact, whatever your own dominant strains of headcanon have become.

I mean, yes, Garrus “I’m not a good turian” Vakarian gets infinitely cooler (and more competent!) by pretty much every metric as the storyline progresses. He does. But fresh out of ME1 and into ME2 through his recruitment, I find myself genuinely amused by how thin the veneer of badass is over a pretty dominant core of straight-up nerd sprinkled with idealism mixed with self-doubt.

When you have Garrus in the squad all the time (and thus get all his ambient dialogue and remarks), you really pick up on the number of times he calls out bad behavior, unethical actions, cruelty, and rule-breaking, especially in ME1.

He’s not actually a hothead who can’t abide rules of any kind. In fact, most of the time he’s pretty pro-law-and-order, and he gets amusingly hall-monitorish when people are breaking rules he considers important and worth following.

Fundamentally, Garrus chafes when his sense of what is just is at odds with what the authorities do about that injustice (or what they stop him from doing). And I would hazard a guess that the reason his actions seem so intense or harsh or "of course we should have shot down that ship in the middle of the Citadel" is indicative not of his impatience but of the degree to which he thinks the authorities have failed to uphold that justice. We know he can be patient. He's a sniper. His whole modus operandi on Omega is precision kills without civilian casualty. But when that long fuse finally burns down, he goes from zero to shooting down ships in the middle of the Citadel in what looks (from the outside) like a heartbeat.

And yes, injured pride hastens the burning of that fuse; he doesn’t like losing. Or admitting defeat. Or failing.

Having just replayed his recruitment mission, a few things really stood out to me this time.

The merc bands really hate him--and they also reluctantly admire him (he's described as smart, resourceful, dangerous, idealistic, brave, slippery; they all agree they only way they managed to get this far is by isolating him and employing dirty tactics). I mean, there's literally a station-wide announcement that Omega can return to "business as usual" once Archangel is out of the picture because he was disrupting things so completely.

The way Garrus blames himself for the deaths of his squad is so freaking turian. Failure reflects on the leader who places his people in danger they can't handle, not the individual who fails. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Yes, Sidonis betrayed him, but the person Garrus blames the most? Is himself. For trusting Sidonis in the first place. For raising Sidonis to a position where he had the means and opportunity to harm others--and the weakness of character to turn coat, to save his own hide, instead of dying to protect the others.

Garrus mentions more than once that he was trying to emulate Shepard. And his tone always implies that he knows he failed because Shepard would never have let a Sidonis into the fold. Again, he's blaming himself. Like a good turian. Yes, he wanted to avoid the red tape and bureaucracy of C-Sec, but his code--Archangel's code--certainly aligns with Paragon Shepard's morality (with a Garrus Vakarian twist).

And since it wouldn't be meta without adding a Tara's Headcanon Twist ... I've always wondered why "Archangel" when it's such a ... human concept. But this time, when I noticed how he spoke about Shepard's influence, and how quickly he brushes aside the name when she asks him about it, I wondered if it wasn't actually his way of honoring the mythology of the dead woman whose example he was trying to follow. Not that Shepard is a God he's worshiping, but ... there is something about the way he talks about her. Garrus doesn't make himself over in the image of a God, though; he's the soldier, the right hand, the avenging angel responsible for carrying out divine punishments suited and proportional to the crimes committed, the rules broken, the selfishness or cruelty of the perpetrator.

[strawberrykidneystone]

ilysm boy loser garrus vakarian

[dykevandyke]

I’m playing mass effect for the first time and Garrus’s defining character trait seems to be a deep love of extrajudicial executions

[lingle-dingle]

So in Mass Effect, Shepard is pretty famous. So if she was dating someone it would get noticed and you can date Garrus Vakarian - a Turian. There’s already at least one movie about her, I feel like the Turian x Human nature of it after the First Contact War would lead to a romance movie or two being produced.

So, I feel like there’d be an era where human and Turian relationships would become a lot more popularized and real friendships and relationships would form because of that representation. Like it’d be really cool for a human to have a Turian friend and vice versa.

Lipstick is waxy, and by the look of Turian skin, it’d probably be hard to get lipstick off of it. There’s a reality where Garrus gets caught with a lipstick print in public.

I feel like lipstick marks would become a fashion trend amongst Turians - going off to war with it as a token of good luck, boy band members with lipstick marks in scandalous places, Turian school girls getting their human friends to kiss them on the cheeks for the iconic print.

I really feel like it’d be their leopard print.

[rubensmuse]

We here on tumblr.gov sure get into a lot of tiffs over what does and does not constitute monsterfucking. And the moment I laid eyes on this post, I knew I was gonna have to press-gang my bestie into creating this, our finest work,

The Monsterfucker Iceberg

@tinynaught pulled most of the names and did the initial sorting; I helped flesh it out and created the finished product. Feel free to fight amongst yourselves.

Order is based entirely on the looks you would get telling people you wanna fuck that; logistics were not strictly taken into account.

[by-the-dreadwolfs-tits]

in my silly little post-canon happy ending au, i like to imagine that shepard has the tony hawk curse. why? its funny

i didn't SEE anyone else having done this, but if they have uh.... two cakes

og tweets under the cut

[milkywayes]

just… thinking about the tragedy of shepard and garrus. their relationship evolves as we watch - from mentor and mentee, to trusted friends, to supportive partners. the field between them evens out. walls are broken down. thresholds are crossed. she goes from ‘the best humanity has to offer’ to disavowed shadow operative to the tip of the spear in a probably-unwinnable war. he goes from eager-to-prove-himself hotshot to disillusioned outlaw to what’s probably the second most important person in the hierarchy.

it’s such a long way to come. there’s so much to get through to end up where they are.

and both of them only really come into power once it’s already almost too late to do anything with it. everyone else is also facing extinction but these two feel the weight of all those lives so acutely because of the positions they’ve been given.

but if they’re in love. if they go through all of that and fall in love in the process. if they open their hearts while everything around them is literally about to end forever. if he’s the glue holding her together and she’s the only hope he can still believe in. then they’re building their partnership in a graveyard. they both know, this might be all they get. this is probably it. and everyone else - they have it bad, but there’s just a unique tragedy here with shepard and her love interest in that she will save the galaxy, but chances are, she cannot save herself and that means she also cannot save the one who loves her more than anyone else.

these two people working tirelessly to stave off the end of everything, the weight of the galaxy on their shoulders and only each other to lean against, and they’re the ones who pay the price to end the war. they come all this way only for her to give up everything, and for him lose the only guiding light he’s ever had - at best, for a time, and at worst, forever. he might put the plaque on the memorial wall or he might not, but either way their sacrifice is so fucking heavy.

he holds her together until the end and she’ll use it to shatter herself on the citadel. she’s his guiding light and it’ll go out when the path ahead of him is at its least clear, its most daunting.

the war is won, but they’re the ones who lose, and it makes me insane just to think about.

[legionofpotatoes]

I know the discourse well is poisoned and no one hates bioware games more than bioware fans, but I am just 🫠 having so much fun with veilguard it's unreal. It is selfishly the dragon age game I always wanted. with less emphasis on cRPG, a more focused story, curated mission based design that spotlights the high fantasy stuff, slowburn structure with companions, significantly less sidequest bloat, and a fully real-time action-oriented combat system that isn't riddled with the growing pains of previous titles. when I first played origins I imagined something almost exactly like this as my ideal version of a sequel; and it was one of those dirty, selfish thoughts that I knew was disrespectful to the then-established DNA of the thing, but I can't help but feel giddy about having it here and now. like down to the shift away from the childishly dark tone and to something more inherently flexible with a baseline aspirational quality. I hate aesthetically depressing games so much. am I not alive right here and right now already

When I say "aesthetically" there though I do mean it. I'm fully on the opposite side when it comes to tone and positions expressed in the story itself. I am just not including that in my analysis because I am not done yet - so please no spoilers! I think I am where most people consider to be the second act, and I definitely have my gripes with the narrative framework and some of the optics, but I won't put the cart before the horse and will see how it wraps things up first. Above that level, in terms of how it presents itself, of how it plays, of how it balances its core pillars - it is such a bioware-ass game and I could not be any cozier in it. So grateful it exists

[doyouknowthisdisabledcharacter]

Do You Know This Disabled Character?

Jeff ‘Joker’ Moreau has Osteogenesis Imperfecta.

[thefloatingstone]

Me: ugh, I can't imagine being so brand loyal to any company that you'd support them no matter how hard they start sucking

Bioware store:

me:

[tarysande]

There are a couple more Garrus-Vakarian-related hills I'm willing to die on.

Maybe this particular bit of fanon has faded over the years, but there used to be a lot of insistence that Garrus is young and somehow inexperienced when he meets Shepard. Canon doesn't really support this. Turians start their mandatory service at 15. Garrus has at least a decade of experience. Even if he's 2-4 of years younger than Shepard (according to Patrick Weekes), he's got at least as much field experience as she does by dint of the difference in turian and human "enlistment" ages.

Garrus is really damn good at his job at C-Sec. You don't give the Case of Investigating the Rogue Spectre to a greenhorn. You give it to your best, most tenacious agent. Pallin may not always approve of Garrus's actions, but that doesn't actually stop him from putting Garrus on the tough case. Also, we don't know much about how C-Sec works but we do know a bit about how the turian hierarchy works, and we know C-Sec was essentially a turian initiative. That means it's a meritocracy where failure reflects on the superior, not the one who failed. So, in roughly a decade (Shepard's 29 in ME1; I always think of Garrus as about 27), Garrus has not only done shipboard military service, but he's also risen to be one of C-Sec's top investigators; Pallin wouldn't risk having Garrus's "failure" reflect poorly on HIM otherwise. I'd say that actually makes Garrus as remarkable in civilian law enforcement terms as Shepard is considered to be within the ranks of the Alliance military.

Of course Garrus was scouted by the Spectre program. And honestly, if his dad hadn't stepped in, I think Garrus would have become a Spectre, no problem. Especially for a turian, he's cut from precisely the cloth the Spectres would be looking for: extremely skilled, extremely capable, and--most importantly--he's a turian not just able but willing to work outside the chains of command that turians are taught from birth to revere and be loyal to above all else. This is the reason Pallin is leery about Spectres: he's a good turian. Good turians follow straight lines; they don't carve out their own paths.

Garrus's dad's not dumb, and he's not cruel, and he, too, rose to the top of the C-Sec hierarchy. He took one look at his kid, I think, and said, "I love my child, but I'd say it's a 50-50 chance he ends up a shooting-first-asking-questions-later Spectre like Saren Arterius, and I don't want to see that happen." Yeah, he uses his parental influence to try and jam square-peg-Garrus into round-hole-C-Sec and Garrus resents him for it, but there's no way he did it just to stop his son from getting his way or because he doesn't like Spectres. I expect Vakarian Sr. had to clean up more post-Spectre-interference messes than we can possibly imagine. But we also know he and Alec Ryder were pals later.

So the importance of what Garrus learns from a Paragon Spectre Shepard is this: You can't just do what you want and claim the ends always justify the means. That's what Saren does. Over and over again. Garrus's code and his idealism and his sense of justice and his ability to work alone should make him a great Spectre, actually, but he needs Paragon Spectre Shepard's actions to show him the lesson he tells her he's learned during ME1: "If the people I'm sworn to protect can't trust me... well, then I don't deserve to be the one protecting them." (And the seed of Archangel was planted.) I think for the first time he realizes that even though he believes his sense of justice to be correct, it doesn't matter for shit if he can't show others why that's so. And that's where the trust comes in. (Also, ow, the extra level of importance this gives their exchange where she tells him she trusts him and he tells her she's about the only friend he has left is... a lot. Cool, cool. I'm totally fine. Nothing to see here.)

When Shepard asks him what happened on Omega, he replies, "My feelings got in the way of my better judgement." Something tells me that this never happens to "good" turians, which just makes the line so much more devastating. And although the lesson some might take away from this is "feelings bad; no feelings ever," the "grey" that Garrus has to learn to deal with is precisely the grey of recognizing feelings, validating them even, but not acting on them until they've been examined. (Which is why my Shepard stands between him and Sidonis; she doesn't give a shit about Sidonis. But Garrus has refused to process his own feelings of failure and self-loathing, so they have to take the therapy session to the Citadel and deal with it there.)

Ahh yes. The mountain range of character analysis.

[rad-roche]

just me and my best friend the comically small keeper. my smeeper. we are brothers. let me tell you if he engineers the destruction of all life in the universe through quiet maintenance of the citadel i'll be beyond fucking furious. do not let him know i said that

[thedevilsnewsky]

"Shepard...forgive the insubordination, but your boyfriend has an order for you...come back alive. It'd be an awfully empty galaxy without you."

I’m crying, screaming, throwing up

AND HE WANTED CHILDREN WITH HER MY HEART, I CANT

[nyxpheros]

Hannddss

[vidra-comprehends]

Freehand Remnant glyphs for my first attempt at using henna.

[Update: I connected some of them.]