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fewer_explosionsSince I'm awake anyway, I might as well post this...
So when the new characters were announced, someone almost immediately pinged me and went "ALL THE MASS EFFECT?"
Yes. All the Mass Effect. From me. Contain your shock, everybody! (Or at least everybody who was around for my disappearance and subsequent two-month tweeting-about-Mass-Effect spree back in March) This is one of my favorite franchises of all time, right alongside Ender's Game and Battlestar Galactica - yeah, my favorite genre is military space opera, hush - and, well, sometimes, the grabby hands.
In other words, if the following info post gets terribly fannish and waxes poetic, I'm, uh, sorry.
MASS EFFECT, the canon.
(No matter what scars you bear
No matter what uniform you wear
You can fight like a krogan, run like a leopard
But you'll never be better than Commander Shepard!)
Now that you've all been thoroughly earwormed (this game has the best fanworks)... welcome to Mass Effect, a sci-fi gaming franchise born in the year of our lord 2007 to famous Canadian RPG-smiths Bioware. They set out to make a sort of retro-80s sci-fi game, and wound up with a kiloton franchise containing many books, comics, an upcoming anime and even a movie. (They also created what's looking to become one of the most-hated sci-fi franchise endings of all time, but we Don't Talk About Mass Effect 3's Ending. It just sours the mood.)
Anyway! In Mass Effect, humans are not one of the old mainstays of the galactic community. In fact, they've only been on the scene for about thirty years when the original game kicks off - and their entrance didn't go too smoothly. See, the humans were running around finding all of these strange artifacts called 'mass relays' just hanging around in space, and as it turned out, activating them meant you could suddenly jump thousands of lightyears across the galaxy. So of course, being humans, they wanted to activate every one they found - and wouldn't that be the way the galaxy originally accidentally let a plague of evil bugs called the rachni in? Yeah. There's legislation about that.
So when a militarized race called the turians found out that there were these weird pink squishy things running around turning on mass relays they didn't even know the destination of, they stepped in - being the galactic Council's peacekeepers and all - and quickly conquered a human colony near such a mass relay in order to make a Point.
Being an upstanding militarily superior race, they didn't quite expect the humans to make a Point right back by pulling an entire space fleet out of their back pocket and kicking the turians off the planet really, really hard.
The turians went 'WTFFFFFFFFFFFF' and promptly started gathering up more troops as they geared up to go punch these assholes right back again, but the other two galactic Council races were going 'oh god this can't end well' in the background, and decided to step in, offering humanity a "Let's be friends y/n?" note. The humans immediately dropped their weapons, went "HI ALIENS HIIII OMGWTFBBQ ALIENS YAY :D :D :D" and joined the galactic community.
Cue thirty years later, and the humans are spending a lot of time bitching at the Council about being ignored and treated like second-class citizens, mostly unaware that there are species who've been around for ten times as long as they have who still have to share their embassy with other species, while the humans gallivant around and stick their fingers in every galactic pie. Humankind actually has its fair share of privileges, mostly because, well, they managed to beat back a turian species-wide draft army with a volunteer military force less than 3% of their population, and the universe at large is shit-scared that one of these days that sleeping dragon is going to wake up, humanity is going to Get Ideas and everybody else's day is going to get ruined.
So, yeah. Put away your Peaceful Federation and your Star Wars Humans are the Norm fantasies - in this universe, humans are widely considered to be the expansionist loose cannon Determinators of the galaxy. And we're clever bastards about it, too: faced with galactic laws that seek to keep a military balance in the galaxy by posing very specific restrictions on the amount of dreadnoughts any species' navy may build, humans looked back into history, found a type of heavy ship the galaxy had never heard of - the aircraft carrier - and started building a fuckload of those instead, leaving the rest of the galaxy going '...uh... what?'.
But the Council - made up of the three top-dog species: the raptorlike turians, the blue-skinned, mono-sexed, diplomatic asari and the amphibian, scientific salarians - is lucky: humans seem to mostly want to play within the lines, at least. Come the start of the first game, they've been petitioning to be let into the Council's elite special ops program, Spectre. They've tried this before and failed, but the Council is willing to give them another shot at it.
Enter humanity's prime candidate - and your player character: Commander Shepard. Shepard makes it into the program, of course, and gets handed a high-tech ship called the Normandy for his/her trouble, but not before 1) discovering that a Spectre called Saren has secretly been amassing an army of intelligent machines called the geth, 2) having to deal with said geth overrunning a human colony called Eden Prime, and 3) getting an ancient Prothean vision crammed into his/her brain that fortells Really Terrible Shit happening in the future (but sadly Shepard can't figure it out).
What ensues is a rollicking adventure in which Shepard discovers the existence of the Reapers, an evil race of gigantic half-robotic alien cuttlefish that sweeps in every 50,000 years to destroy all advanced civilizations, which possesses the ability to indoctrinate - ie, brainwash - anyone who's been in contact with any Reaper technology whatsoever, and which, whoops, is responsible for leaving the mass relays around in an effort to make sure every new galactic civilization develops the same way.
In the first game, Shepard stops the vanguard of this race - Sovereign, which has indoctrinated Saren - from undoing ancient anti-Reaper sabotage and inviting the Reapers back into the galaxy. The second game kicks off with Shepard dying during an assault by an unknown enemy, being rebuilt by a terrorist organization called Cerberus, and going on a suicide mission through a Very Special Mass Relay to beat up a bunch of Reaper stooges called the Collectors.
Not that this winds up mattering all that much, as Mass Effect 3 sees the Reapers showing up on our doorstep anyway, and the entire game basically becomes about convincing all the other races to stop focusing on their own shit for a change and teaming up to kick these fuckers back to where they came from. But that's all stuff you can experience for yourself if you ever pick up the games. Back to the Mass Effect universe at large!
The Mass Effect universe at least tries to be as hard sci-fi as it can be. In order to justify its not-so-scientifically-accurate bits, it has dreamt up something called Element Zero. Element Zero generates dark energy. Dark energy influences mass - ie, it produces the titular mass effect, which allows for faster-than-light travel, gravity manipulation, and even more superior toothbrushes. Really, almost any technology in the game uses some form of mass effect field, and it's explained in excrutiatingly specific, scientifically accurate detail in the codex. Fanboys love arguing about this shit.
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
One of the more significant uses of Element Zero lies in the field of biotics, which is basically Mass Effect's answer to magic. Beings who are exposed to Element Zero in the womb do one of two things: either they develop terminal cancer (ouch...) or the Eezo gathers under their skin in little nodules. When they grow up, they can learn to control their muscle reflexes (also using brain implants) in such a way as to generate mass effect fields, essentially allowing them to control mass and, as such, gravity.
Biotics can throw you around the room, levitate you, or even screw with you on the cellular level. They're dangerous, but thankfully, they are mostly rare in non-asari species. Humankind, for example, has only been experimenting with biotics for a few decades now.
Besides the three Council races, there's a lot more aliens hanging around. Take the krogan, for example, a race of warlike mini-dinosaurs who were uplifted by the salarians to fight the rachni two thousand years ago. Unfortunately, they got uppity after that-- so the turians and the salarians conspired together to hit the species with a plague called the genophage, which limited the incredibly high krogan birthrate so significantly it basically crippled the entire species. What the hell, guys. There's also the quarians, the species who invented the geth, then freaked out at the geth's dawning intelligence so hard they started a war - which they then lost. The quarians have been limping around the galaxy in a Battlestar Galactica-esque Migrant Fleet ever since.
There's the volus, a race of ammonia-based aliens who have to stay in pressure suits to survive, who mostly regulate the galaxy's economy. The elcor, slow-moving, elephant-like beings who express emotion mostly through pheromones, and hence have to start every sentence with a description of their mood in order to make tone clear to people. (You should see the all-elcor performance of Hamlet) The hanar, who are essentially sentient jellyfish who communicate through bioluminescence, and the drell, a species of anthromorphic amphibians that destroyed their entire environment and had to be rescued by the hanar--
You get the drift: the list goes on. It's a big universe out there, with a lot going on, and a lot of themes being addressed left and right. And that's not even touching on the awesome of SSV Normandy crew - which I will in the next segment.
These games are great. They're interesting. They're about personal choice and responsibility most of all - you can influence a good deal of the narrative with your actions - and, in the shape of female Shepard (femShep) it contains one of the awesomest female video game heroes to date. Even if it did take Bioware until the third game to realize that maybe marketing that fact would be a good idea.
also did I mention the awesome fanworks?
The Teacher: Kaidan Alenko
In the middle of all of this abstract sci-fi stuff, we've got the crew of the Normandy - both the first and the second Normandy - who are a real badass bunch, from the snarky ace pilot with brittle bone disease, Joker, right down to biotic rabble-rouser Jack and warrior-poet krogan Wrex. They're the beating heart of the game-- you recruit more and more of them as you go along, and you grow to love pretty much all of them...
...but it started with Kaidan.
Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko's Shepard's very first squadmate in the original Mass Effect. He's a Sentinel: a biotic with tech expertise, as good at flinging around people with his mind as he is at hacking robots from a distance. He's also quiet, reserved, and thoughtful - not really one to make a lot of fuss, but he speaks up when it counts. Gradually, Kaidan opens up to the player, but he's always quick to assure them his issues lay in the past. He likes being squared with his past, and doesn't really enjoy leaving gaping wounds on his psyche just lying around where he could trip over them later.
As it turns out, this is for a reason. Kaidan's part of one of the first waves of human biotics - his mother was exposed to Eezo during an accident in Singapore. When he was much younger, he was enrolled in humanity's first biotics program, BAaT (or 'Brain Camp' as they called it). Because there weren't any human experts on biotics around yet, they hired a bunch of turian mercenaries to instruct the BAaT kids... which went spectacularily badly. Most of these mercenaries were veterans from the First Contact War, and ergo not big fans of humankind. Vyrnnus, Kaidan's instructor, liked to take this shit out on his students. He was abusive; under his tutelage, a lot of kids broke or even died.
And then he made the fatal mistake of trying to physically punish a girl called Rahna for reaching for a glass of water instead of using her mind to get it. Kaidan, who'd had a crush on this girl for a while, flew into a rage. He lashed out, delivering a biotic kick to Vyrnnus's head, which broke under the pressure. The ensuing scandal meant the end of the BAaT program, and Rahna, terrified of Kaidan's temper, refused to talk to him ever again.
Since, Kaidan's devoted his life to controlling himself, and succeeded admirably. After a few years of finding himself, he returned to the Alliance Navy, where he waved off the Alliance's biotics program in favor of a more tech-oriented specialization. Eventually, this brought him to the Normandy, then under the command of Colonel Anderson, with Shepard as his direct superior.
There's a point in the first game - a planet called Virmire - where the player has to make a choice which one of the ship's human crew members lives. In order for Kaidan to survive, you have to sacrifice Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams. The loss of Ashley weighs heavy on Kaidan after that, and he begins to suffer from some survivor's guilt.
Which only gets worse when, at the start of the second game, Shepard dies pretty much right before his eyes after a Collector ship attacks the Normandy. Ouch. Kaidan's promoted to Lieutenant Commander after that, but he's not exactly jumping for joy about it.
It's at this point I'm pulling him from canon: Alliance brass has decided he needs some time to recuperate from all of these losses. Worried about his mental state, they give him an easy assignment through the recently-discovered portal system, scheduling weekly sessions with their psych staff, and Kaidan, being a loyal soldier, goes.
And... that's all you really need to know. He's a tech geek from Canada with biotic powers, a love of steak sandwiches, a slavish devotion to his own integrity above all things, and a hatred of whining. He's a romance option for a female Shepard in the first game, and a romance option for both a male and a female Shepard in the third; he carries an Omni-Tool (a holographic computer) on his wrist at all times, and you probably won't see him out of Alliance uniform an awful lot. Oh, and he's using an outdated biotics implant, because the surgery to replace it is dangerous, and because he can spike higher with this one. Besides, all he gets is crushing migraines, so that's not so bad: most people using L2 implants go bugfuck nuts.
Whoops.
Yes, yes, I'm one of only a select few people in this fandom who loves him deeply but really, you shouldn't argue with that butt. It's even got its own tumblr.
The Student: Liara T'Soni
First off...
As noted, the Council itself is comprised of only three of the galaxy's species. The asari are the oldest of these: they are a species ofhot blue space babes blue-skinned mammals who have a largely humanoid body-shape, but support turianoid cartilage head-crests instead of hair. All asari are telepaths, though of the type that can only do so via mindmeld. They also use this to reproduce, as instead of following the sperm + ova = baby procedure, they instead produce two sets of DNA, one of which they randomize based upon the genetic history of their partner (yeeep). That means that, in effect, they can make babies with anyone of any species and gender in the universe, and in fact mating within the species is now frowned upon; asari are convinced that purebloods don't add much new stuff to the genepool (and there's that nasty but secret bit where purebloods are more likely to be born Ardat-Yakshi, psychic vampires).
Officially, the asari are the diplomats of the galaxy. They have a lifespan of roughly a thousand years, so they're content to take their time with it all. This game enjoys subverting the Planet of Hats trope, though, and there's a damn lot of asari pirates, strippers, mercenaries and commandos running around.
In fact, Liara T'Soni, the last of the squadmates that you meet in the original Mass Effect, is also not exactly the quintessential asari. She's reclusive, naive, and has a tendency to trip over her own words. At only barely a hundred years old, she's considered barely more than a child by asari society-- she's devoted her few decades since achieving adulthood to archaeology, her one true love. Her particular specialty is Prothean archeology - Protheans being the precursor race that stood at the pinacle of galactic society 50,000 years ago, then, ahem, suddenly disappeared. She has a lot of big, starry-eyed ideas about what the Protheans are like that are going to be hopelessly dashed one day when she finally meets one, but right now that isn't really a Thing.
In fact, neither is the archaeologist part - though it's certainly something she has an interest in. Liara is coming to Fandom at age 45, barely out of the asari equivalent of grade school. The galaxy hasn't been introduced to humanity yet, either, so she's going to have absolutely no idea who y'all are and what you are like and what your species is called and oh sorry, did that offend you? She didn't mean to!
So there will be Questions. Not as many as there would have been if she'd stumbled into a Prothean colony instead - anthropology is not her field, Goddess - but, well, she didn't come here by choice, and she has no idea how to get back home, and her mother must be worried sick, but nobody's attacked her yet... so that's good, right?
Not that she's completely helpless. All asari are born with biotic potential, and Liara has the potential to be a very strong biotic. Biotic education is also part of asari education on all levels of society, so she knows how to use hers, though she's still learning about them. Don't mistake the shy, fumbly girl for a victim; one day she's going to be one of the most badass archaeologists in the galaxy, kicking butts harder than Lara Croft (why won't those stupid pirates stay out of her archaeological digs? She's there on her own for a reason!). But she's also, well, a shy, sweet, fumbly girl who doesn't know how to interact with other people terribly well, can she please go hide out in the library now, please?
Fifty years from now, she's going to wind up instrumental to the Reaper War effort, serving as the powerful Shadow Broker under the command of Commander Shepard, ordained savior of the galaxy. There's a backbone in there-- a strong one. Her mother, Matriarch Benezia, is a well-respected diplomat and a strong biotic who always astounded Liara with her grace and poise. She hasn't met her father, Matriarch Aethyta yet - but Aethyta turns out to be the daughter of a krogan war veteran with a predilection for headbutting and calling people out on being anthropocentric bags of dicks, so it's fair to say she's genetically predisposed to be more than the wallflower she seems to be right now.
Oh, and her 'head-tentacles'? No, they don't move. Goddess, Joker.
Anyway! Liara the Dork who can be Terribly Scary When She Finally Figures That Out ("Well, Liara, you did threaten to flay someone with your mind...") I like to say I have two OTPs in this series, one for DudeShep and one for FemShep, but FemShep/Liara is definitely the OTPiest of all. *squishes them* They are love. And now we move on.
You may squee now, teacup.
...and all of those other characters I have.
Atton Rand
Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin
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endsthegame
Cable
spring_lost
Tales of the sci-fi fangirl, aka me.
So when the new characters were announced, someone almost immediately pinged me and went "ALL THE MASS EFFECT?"
Yes. All the Mass Effect. From me. Contain your shock, everybody! (Or at least everybody who was around for my disappearance and subsequent two-month tweeting-about-Mass-Effect spree back in March) This is one of my favorite franchises of all time, right alongside Ender's Game and Battlestar Galactica - yeah, my favorite genre is military space opera, hush - and, well, sometimes, the grabby hands.
In other words, if the following info post gets terribly fannish and waxes poetic, I'm, uh, sorry.
MASS EFFECT, the canon.
(No matter what scars you bear
No matter what uniform you wear
You can fight like a krogan, run like a leopard
But you'll never be better than Commander Shepard!)
Now that you've all been thoroughly earwormed (this game has the best fanworks)... welcome to Mass Effect, a sci-fi gaming franchise born in the year of our lord 2007 to famous Canadian RPG-smiths Bioware. They set out to make a sort of retro-80s sci-fi game, and wound up with a kiloton franchise containing many books, comics, an upcoming anime and even a movie. (They also created what's looking to become one of the most-hated sci-fi franchise endings of all time, but we Don't Talk About Mass Effect 3's Ending. It just sours the mood.)
Anyway! In Mass Effect, humans are not one of the old mainstays of the galactic community. In fact, they've only been on the scene for about thirty years when the original game kicks off - and their entrance didn't go too smoothly. See, the humans were running around finding all of these strange artifacts called 'mass relays' just hanging around in space, and as it turned out, activating them meant you could suddenly jump thousands of lightyears across the galaxy. So of course, being humans, they wanted to activate every one they found - and wouldn't that be the way the galaxy originally accidentally let a plague of evil bugs called the rachni in? Yeah. There's legislation about that.
So when a militarized race called the turians found out that there were these weird pink squishy things running around turning on mass relays they didn't even know the destination of, they stepped in - being the galactic Council's peacekeepers and all - and quickly conquered a human colony near such a mass relay in order to make a Point.
Being an upstanding militarily superior race, they didn't quite expect the humans to make a Point right back by pulling an entire space fleet out of their back pocket and kicking the turians off the planet really, really hard.
The turians went 'WTFFFFFFFFFFFF' and promptly started gathering up more troops as they geared up to go punch these assholes right back again, but the other two galactic Council races were going 'oh god this can't end well' in the background, and decided to step in, offering humanity a "Let's be friends y/n?" note. The humans immediately dropped their weapons, went "HI ALIENS HIIII OMGWTFBBQ ALIENS YAY :D :D :D" and joined the galactic community.
Cue thirty years later, and the humans are spending a lot of time bitching at the Council about being ignored and treated like second-class citizens, mostly unaware that there are species who've been around for ten times as long as they have who still have to share their embassy with other species, while the humans gallivant around and stick their fingers in every galactic pie. Humankind actually has its fair share of privileges, mostly because, well, they managed to beat back a turian species-wide draft army with a volunteer military force less than 3% of their population, and the universe at large is shit-scared that one of these days that sleeping dragon is going to wake up, humanity is going to Get Ideas and everybody else's day is going to get ruined.
So, yeah. Put away your Peaceful Federation and your Star Wars Humans are the Norm fantasies - in this universe, humans are widely considered to be the expansionist loose cannon Determinators of the galaxy. And we're clever bastards about it, too: faced with galactic laws that seek to keep a military balance in the galaxy by posing very specific restrictions on the amount of dreadnoughts any species' navy may build, humans looked back into history, found a type of heavy ship the galaxy had never heard of - the aircraft carrier - and started building a fuckload of those instead, leaving the rest of the galaxy going '...uh... what?'.
But the Council - made up of the three top-dog species: the raptorlike turians, the blue-skinned, mono-sexed, diplomatic asari and the amphibian, scientific salarians - is lucky: humans seem to mostly want to play within the lines, at least. Come the start of the first game, they've been petitioning to be let into the Council's elite special ops program, Spectre. They've tried this before and failed, but the Council is willing to give them another shot at it.
Enter humanity's prime candidate - and your player character: Commander Shepard. Shepard makes it into the program, of course, and gets handed a high-tech ship called the Normandy for his/her trouble, but not before 1) discovering that a Spectre called Saren has secretly been amassing an army of intelligent machines called the geth, 2) having to deal with said geth overrunning a human colony called Eden Prime, and 3) getting an ancient Prothean vision crammed into his/her brain that fortells Really Terrible Shit happening in the future (but sadly Shepard can't figure it out).
What ensues is a rollicking adventure in which Shepard discovers the existence of the Reapers, an evil race of gigantic half-robotic alien cuttlefish that sweeps in every 50,000 years to destroy all advanced civilizations, which possesses the ability to indoctrinate - ie, brainwash - anyone who's been in contact with any Reaper technology whatsoever, and which, whoops, is responsible for leaving the mass relays around in an effort to make sure every new galactic civilization develops the same way.
In the first game, Shepard stops the vanguard of this race - Sovereign, which has indoctrinated Saren - from undoing ancient anti-Reaper sabotage and inviting the Reapers back into the galaxy. The second game kicks off with Shepard dying during an assault by an unknown enemy, being rebuilt by a terrorist organization called Cerberus, and going on a suicide mission through a Very Special Mass Relay to beat up a bunch of Reaper stooges called the Collectors.
Not that this winds up mattering all that much, as Mass Effect 3 sees the Reapers showing up on our doorstep anyway, and the entire game basically becomes about convincing all the other races to stop focusing on their own shit for a change and teaming up to kick these fuckers back to where they came from. But that's all stuff you can experience for yourself if you ever pick up the games. Back to the Mass Effect universe at large!
The Mass Effect universe at least tries to be as hard sci-fi as it can be. In order to justify its not-so-scientifically-accurate bits, it has dreamt up something called Element Zero. Element Zero generates dark energy. Dark energy influences mass - ie, it produces the titular mass effect, which allows for faster-than-light travel, gravity manipulation, and even more superior toothbrushes. Really, almost any technology in the game uses some form of mass effect field, and it's explained in excrutiatingly specific, scientifically accurate detail in the codex. Fanboys love arguing about this shit.
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
One of the more significant uses of Element Zero lies in the field of biotics, which is basically Mass Effect's answer to magic. Beings who are exposed to Element Zero in the womb do one of two things: either they develop terminal cancer (ouch...) or the Eezo gathers under their skin in little nodules. When they grow up, they can learn to control their muscle reflexes (also using brain implants) in such a way as to generate mass effect fields, essentially allowing them to control mass and, as such, gravity.
Biotics can throw you around the room, levitate you, or even screw with you on the cellular level. They're dangerous, but thankfully, they are mostly rare in non-asari species. Humankind, for example, has only been experimenting with biotics for a few decades now.
Besides the three Council races, there's a lot more aliens hanging around. Take the krogan, for example, a race of warlike mini-dinosaurs who were uplifted by the salarians to fight the rachni two thousand years ago. Unfortunately, they got uppity after that-- so the turians and the salarians conspired together to hit the species with a plague called the genophage, which limited the incredibly high krogan birthrate so significantly it basically crippled the entire species. What the hell, guys. There's also the quarians, the species who invented the geth, then freaked out at the geth's dawning intelligence so hard they started a war - which they then lost. The quarians have been limping around the galaxy in a Battlestar Galactica-esque Migrant Fleet ever since.
There's the volus, a race of ammonia-based aliens who have to stay in pressure suits to survive, who mostly regulate the galaxy's economy. The elcor, slow-moving, elephant-like beings who express emotion mostly through pheromones, and hence have to start every sentence with a description of their mood in order to make tone clear to people. (You should see the all-elcor performance of Hamlet) The hanar, who are essentially sentient jellyfish who communicate through bioluminescence, and the drell, a species of anthromorphic amphibians that destroyed their entire environment and had to be rescued by the hanar--
You get the drift: the list goes on. It's a big universe out there, with a lot going on, and a lot of themes being addressed left and right. And that's not even touching on the awesome of SSV Normandy crew - which I will in the next segment.
These games are great. They're interesting. They're about personal choice and responsibility most of all - you can influence a good deal of the narrative with your actions - and, in the shape of female Shepard (femShep) it contains one of the awesomest female video game heroes to date. Even if it did take Bioware until the third game to realize that maybe marketing that fact would be a good idea.
also did I mention the awesome fanworks?
The Teacher: Kaidan Alenko
In the middle of all of this abstract sci-fi stuff, we've got the crew of the Normandy - both the first and the second Normandy - who are a real badass bunch, from the snarky ace pilot with brittle bone disease, Joker, right down to biotic rabble-rouser Jack and warrior-poet krogan Wrex. They're the beating heart of the game-- you recruit more and more of them as you go along, and you grow to love pretty much all of them...
...but it started with Kaidan.
Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko's Shepard's very first squadmate in the original Mass Effect. He's a Sentinel: a biotic with tech expertise, as good at flinging around people with his mind as he is at hacking robots from a distance. He's also quiet, reserved, and thoughtful - not really one to make a lot of fuss, but he speaks up when it counts. Gradually, Kaidan opens up to the player, but he's always quick to assure them his issues lay in the past. He likes being squared with his past, and doesn't really enjoy leaving gaping wounds on his psyche just lying around where he could trip over them later.
As it turns out, this is for a reason. Kaidan's part of one of the first waves of human biotics - his mother was exposed to Eezo during an accident in Singapore. When he was much younger, he was enrolled in humanity's first biotics program, BAaT (or 'Brain Camp' as they called it). Because there weren't any human experts on biotics around yet, they hired a bunch of turian mercenaries to instruct the BAaT kids... which went spectacularily badly. Most of these mercenaries were veterans from the First Contact War, and ergo not big fans of humankind. Vyrnnus, Kaidan's instructor, liked to take this shit out on his students. He was abusive; under his tutelage, a lot of kids broke or even died.
And then he made the fatal mistake of trying to physically punish a girl called Rahna for reaching for a glass of water instead of using her mind to get it. Kaidan, who'd had a crush on this girl for a while, flew into a rage. He lashed out, delivering a biotic kick to Vyrnnus's head, which broke under the pressure. The ensuing scandal meant the end of the BAaT program, and Rahna, terrified of Kaidan's temper, refused to talk to him ever again.
Since, Kaidan's devoted his life to controlling himself, and succeeded admirably. After a few years of finding himself, he returned to the Alliance Navy, where he waved off the Alliance's biotics program in favor of a more tech-oriented specialization. Eventually, this brought him to the Normandy, then under the command of Colonel Anderson, with Shepard as his direct superior.
There's a point in the first game - a planet called Virmire - where the player has to make a choice which one of the ship's human crew members lives. In order for Kaidan to survive, you have to sacrifice Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams. The loss of Ashley weighs heavy on Kaidan after that, and he begins to suffer from some survivor's guilt.
Which only gets worse when, at the start of the second game, Shepard dies pretty much right before his eyes after a Collector ship attacks the Normandy. Ouch. Kaidan's promoted to Lieutenant Commander after that, but he's not exactly jumping for joy about it.
It's at this point I'm pulling him from canon: Alliance brass has decided he needs some time to recuperate from all of these losses. Worried about his mental state, they give him an easy assignment through the recently-discovered portal system, scheduling weekly sessions with their psych staff, and Kaidan, being a loyal soldier, goes.
And... that's all you really need to know. He's a tech geek from Canada with biotic powers, a love of steak sandwiches, a slavish devotion to his own integrity above all things, and a hatred of whining. He's a romance option for a female Shepard in the first game, and a romance option for both a male and a female Shepard in the third; he carries an Omni-Tool (a holographic computer) on his wrist at all times, and you probably won't see him out of Alliance uniform an awful lot. Oh, and he's using an outdated biotics implant, because the surgery to replace it is dangerous, and because he can spike higher with this one. Besides, all he gets is crushing migraines, so that's not so bad: most people using L2 implants go bugfuck nuts.
Whoops.
Yes, yes, I'm one of only a select few people in this fandom who loves him deeply but really, you shouldn't argue with that butt. It's even got its own tumblr.
The Student: Liara T'Soni
First off...
As noted, the Council itself is comprised of only three of the galaxy's species. The asari are the oldest of these: they are a species of
Officially, the asari are the diplomats of the galaxy. They have a lifespan of roughly a thousand years, so they're content to take their time with it all. This game enjoys subverting the Planet of Hats trope, though, and there's a damn lot of asari pirates, strippers, mercenaries and commandos running around.
In fact, Liara T'Soni, the last of the squadmates that you meet in the original Mass Effect, is also not exactly the quintessential asari. She's reclusive, naive, and has a tendency to trip over her own words. At only barely a hundred years old, she's considered barely more than a child by asari society-- she's devoted her few decades since achieving adulthood to archaeology, her one true love. Her particular specialty is Prothean archeology - Protheans being the precursor race that stood at the pinacle of galactic society 50,000 years ago, then, ahem, suddenly disappeared. She has a lot of big, starry-eyed ideas about what the Protheans are like that are going to be hopelessly dashed one day when she finally meets one, but right now that isn't really a Thing.
In fact, neither is the archaeologist part - though it's certainly something she has an interest in. Liara is coming to Fandom at age 45, barely out of the asari equivalent of grade school. The galaxy hasn't been introduced to humanity yet, either, so she's going to have absolutely no idea who y'all are and what you are like and what your species is called and oh sorry, did that offend you? She didn't mean to!
So there will be Questions. Not as many as there would have been if she'd stumbled into a Prothean colony instead - anthropology is not her field, Goddess - but, well, she didn't come here by choice, and she has no idea how to get back home, and her mother must be worried sick, but nobody's attacked her yet... so that's good, right?
Not that she's completely helpless. All asari are born with biotic potential, and Liara has the potential to be a very strong biotic. Biotic education is also part of asari education on all levels of society, so she knows how to use hers, though she's still learning about them. Don't mistake the shy, fumbly girl for a victim; one day she's going to be one of the most badass archaeologists in the galaxy, kicking butts harder than Lara Croft (why won't those stupid pirates stay out of her archaeological digs? She's there on her own for a reason!). But she's also, well, a shy, sweet, fumbly girl who doesn't know how to interact with other people terribly well, can she please go hide out in the library now, please?
Fifty years from now, she's going to wind up instrumental to the Reaper War effort, serving as the powerful Shadow Broker under the command of Commander Shepard, ordained savior of the galaxy. There's a backbone in there-- a strong one. Her mother, Matriarch Benezia, is a well-respected diplomat and a strong biotic who always astounded Liara with her grace and poise. She hasn't met her father, Matriarch Aethyta yet - but Aethyta turns out to be the daughter of a krogan war veteran with a predilection for headbutting and calling people out on being anthropocentric bags of dicks, so it's fair to say she's genetically predisposed to be more than the wallflower she seems to be right now.
Oh, and her 'head-tentacles'? No, they don't move. Goddess, Joker.
Anyway! Liara the Dork who can be Terribly Scary When She Finally Figures That Out ("Well, Liara, you did threaten to flay someone with your mind...") I like to say I have two OTPs in this series, one for DudeShep and one for FemShep, but FemShep/Liara is definitely the OTPiest of all. *squishes them* They are love. And now we move on.
You may squee now, teacup.
...and all of those other characters I have.
Atton Rand
- Is a 21-year-old posing as a 17-year-old simply so he can hang around the school for a while.
- Is also a former Sith assassin who... may be wanting to hang around the school for a while to escape any Sith who might be trying to track him down. Also, his name isn't really Atton.
- Is from a lovely, dark, cynical piece of Star Wars canon called Knights of the Old Republic 2, which is made of absolute win. That means he's from roughly the same time period as cataclysmicluck, though Zayne's a year or two behind.
- Is a Force sensitive who aggressively hides that fact because he really, really, REALLY doesn't want to deal with that right now.
- Is also unusually gifted in the area of keeping telepaths out of his head - even a really powerful one will find his brain a tough one to crack. He accomplishes this by a number of techniques that involve keeping his brain occupied with minor details.
- He's physically a Determinator: he can get back up from any wound, no matter how terrible, unless you are really, really thorough. He absolutely freaking refuses to die.
- Was cast from the same mold as Han Solo, but is rather more of a dick than that. Partly because he's spent most of his life stuck in the middle of wars, and has a huge chip on his shoulder about Jedi because of it. He's killed a lot of people, okay?
- Original info post is here for more details.
Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin
endsthegame- Full name Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin, from that lovely book we call Ender's Game. He's currently almost all of the way through a very very AU version of the book Ender in Exile. Except not really. It's complicated. Due to Fandom's influence on his timeline, he's also currently just past Shadow of the Giant.
- Is a big walking bag of issues, mostly to do with how he's killed rather a lot of people, and also the bit where he had a manipulative, emotionally abusive childhood.
- He's stoic and distant in a compassionate way. He's not a big fan of attachments most of the time, but he hasn't managed to avoid them. Still, don't be surprised if he's kind but not close with your character; it's just kind of how he rolls.
- Lives with his boyfriend (or as Ender puts it, 'pain in the ass') momslilassassin, in room 204. At the end of the summer, they'll be leaving for Shakespeare Colony, and dropping off the radar for a while.
- Wears nice, if mostly nondescript, military-casual clothes most of the time. He's not as thin as his PB, and he has visible muscles, though he tends more towards a sleek swimmer's build than that of a bruiser or a bodybuilder. Ben's the one with the arms, not him.
- Is teaching a really freewheeling philosophy workshop this summer that can best be described as 'Ender Wiggin Asks You Questions; Gives No Answers; Is Pain In The Ass'.
- Has a pet AI called Jane who basically monitors the internet for him, among other things. If there's anything you'd like Ender to sekritly find out about your character, or you need him to get some info discretely or whatever, that's what she's there for.
- Is a graduate after being in the game since the second summer term of his freshman year. I don't even know where all this time has gone.
Cable
spring_lost- Is the Mayor of Fandom Town and hails from the Marvel 616 universe, straight off the pages of Cable & Deadpool.
- Kind of has a Thing with Deadpool. Yeah, we don't know either. They're raising little kid messiah Jan together. His main priority is keeping her safe, and has been since he, uh, stole her.
- 6'7'', half-metal, has facial scars and an eye that glows in the dark. He kind of leaps out. His mutant powers are that of telepathy and telekinesis, but his powers were heavily dampened a long while ago and he tries not to use them unless he has to.
- Also, because it never stops being funny to me, his full name is Nathan Christopher Charles Dayspring Askani'son Summers. Oh, Marvel.
Tales of the sci-fi fangirl, aka me.
- Hi, I'm Len. I'm on the brink of being 26 years old, I'm a broadcast journalism student who's going to graduate ANY DAY NOW, RLY, I'm Dutch and hence genetically predisposed towards the color orange.
- I'm also on the admin team, so I'm always available for any questions y'all might have about anything.
- For those purposes - and for general socialization purposes 'cuz I'm not scary, I swear - you can find me at prince.of.bitca@gmail.com, and ScaryWlsh and ShootingUnicorns on AIM.
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Date: 2012-06-22 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 12:22 am (UTC)I LEFT THAT MISTAKE IN ON PURPOSE.
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Date: 2012-06-22 04:35 am (UTC)Less talking, more apping Garrus or whoever, plz.