#mass effect two

[mendellyill]

Thane has that friend named mouse on the citadel. Do you think he knows what a mouse is? Does Thane know that's not a normal human name? Is he aware that the kid he abandoned on the citadel is being called the human word for vermin?

[fictionisthebetterreality]

Thoughts(TM) on Mass Effect, in no particular order or preference.

- What did they do to Ashley??? Why did she go from kick-ass takes-no-shit-soldier to... kick-ass-takes-no-shit-soldier with eyeshadow and lipstick and a fringe and hair to her shoulders which probably somehow breaks regulations?? That shit would be getting in her eyes when she was trying to shoot, if it wasn't getting ripped out by a rabid husk first... just no.

- While we are talking about this - WHY did they make us suffer the dress(tm) every time woman Shepherd had to dress 'fancy'? First, that is the ugliest effing dress I've ever seen in my life, not to mention out of character for my (and I'm sure a lot of others) Shepherd, who would have been in a suit at the most, or something nicer than that (no, literally, anything would have been better).

+ Garrus... where to even start? Possibly the best developed character in the whole damn game. I adore Garrus. Would kill for him die for him etc. The friendship between him and Shepherd was so lovely and a really nice highlight of all the games. Except for when Shepherd tries to set him up at the bar. Bit weird.

+ Liara... love of my life, light of my life etc etc. Second only to Garrus and only because the romance scene I had ('will you be my girlfriend' in the presidium commons, not sure if there are any others) was so dry and stale compared to the rest of their cutscenes I hated it. But the chemistry between these two across all three games was amazing, and made their relationship (should you choose to accept it) all the more realistic and believable.

- The endings of ME3. Need I say more. -100/10.

+ The 'fight' scene with James at the start of ME3 was so cute. Loved the option of telling him off at the end for the nicknames. Tbh the recurring options throughout the game of whether to respond 'friendly' or 'professional' was a nice touch.

+ Also - the fling/relationship between James and Ashley was equally cute.

+ Anderson and Shepherd?? Maximum cuteness. Especially the 'I'm proud of you' moment at the end. Really focused in on the parent/daughter relationship.

+ The symmetry/comparison of Earth/Palaven/Thessia worlds burning and being ravaged by the reapers... the hurt/comfort of 'I understand exactly how you feel' 'i thought i understood how you felt but this is so much worse??'

+ The party... the party!! Ahhhh the only complaint I had was the prompt to dance disguised as talk... but thats just personal preference. The photo at the end - SO CUTE. Also, Traynor reciting the elements of the periodic table while drunk and dancing was probably one of my favourite moments of the whole game.

+ Joker and EDI. 10/10. Perfect pairing.

- Jacob in ME2. Literally the most bland, boring character I'd ever experienced. Specifically chose him for the mission at the end of ME2 cause it was pretty obvious it would end in death.

+ Tbh, all the other characters I loved to varying degrees. Thane, Samara, Javik, I could probably take or leave. The rest- their stories were all so complex. Hated Miranda at the start, was genuinely upset by her death at the end. Jack's character development was insane. Barely touched Wrex in ME1, thought he was a throw away character (boy was I wrong). Probably the best element of this game is the characters and relationships. Love-hated the death of a character in ME1. That was Kaiden for me, and it fitted so well into the storyline generally it really gave so much depth to Shepherds backstory.

- Samara.... did someone put eight-zero-zero-eight into a calculator while they were having a meeting about her?? Did she put her costume into the dryer when it was line-dry material?? Please TRY and make it less obvious who you are catering to, here. Also upset there was no option to stop her killing her daughter, just...stand by and watch, I guess.

+ ME3 acknowledging and showing the effects of constant war on Shepherd with the nightmares. Enjoyed that you could play it cool/fake it when asked or genuinely respond and say what was wrong. Although, I did notice that for the 'survivor' backstory on Azure, pretty sure it changed from 'Threshermaw attack' in ME1 to 'Cerburus' in ME3. Might've missed something there, tho.

+ Honestly, just the dialogue in ME3. Esp. the mid-fight chatter among teams Mako and Hammerhead in the clone mission. 10/10, apart from the occasional cut-scene dialogue we didn't get enough interaction between characters. Enjoyed it a lot, really put a lot more personality into everyone.

+ Aria... 100/10. Really nice deviation from the 'classic' asari we see elsewhere. Also, her whole appearance and personality were matched so seamlessly, I love it. Felt like it gave my Shepherd an opportunity to play the bad guy a bit more away from her crew. Although would have been nice to get a warning that you can't get back to Omega in ME3 once the mission is completed... I never did find her couch. Saying that, it was a shame she was never made to appear in the final fight cutscene.

+ The ring from EDI... literally the best gift ever. Shepherd is forever keeping it on her tags. Forever.

+-Kinda loved and hated the whole going-to-the-room-the-person-is-in-for-a-chat. The elevator got old pretty quick. A nice touch being able to invite people up to your cabin and meet up on the citadel (although again, at some points it felt like I was at the citadel meeting people more than I was out there saving the galaxy. Shepherd is a popular woman, but more missions to compensate, or mission-related/style meetings could have been nice).

[milkywayes]

Let all time slow / let all light go I'd block the sun / if you want it done

[quantumghosts]

garrus is just mad shepard won't let him use her widow

[minakatana]

Some fun DLC dialogue options

[that-wildwolf]

hey, remember being 18 years old and playing mass effect for the first time and it's got this like intense aura of being very small and very insignificant in a very big, very empty galaxy? remember playing mass effect for the first time and everything all of this is so new and mysterious, and it's 2am and you're sitting in a dark room in the light from your tv and you're playing through feros for the first time and you feel that this is someting very old and very ancient and you are somewhere you shouldn't be and you don't know what's going to happen or where you're going but you keep on. there's a tingling in your stomach and you're playing mass effect for the first time. the thorian is a milennia old sentient plant being. the rachni queen is old and telepathic and a hive mind and in pain. sovereign is an ancient machine that has not been built but is, and has always been, and this is something so alien and so unlike and beyond anything your human mind can comprehend, and this is something unexplainable and huge and as uncaring and indifferent as the empty galaxy around you. you're playing mass effect for the first time and you're walking on the surface of an almost completely empty planet with nothing but your two companions silently walking beside you and everything is so huge and empty and silent and you're so small and insignificant and it's so beautiful and so scary and you feel like you are on a rollercoaster about to drop down. you are playing mass effect for the first time and you're playing the mission on the moon and you stop and just look up at earth visible in the sky. you know this. this is home. you are playing mass effect for the first time, and the galaxy is so big, and you are so tiny, and everything is about to change for you.

[stormcallart]

Beach day and date night 💙❤️

[wingsofthesun]

Instead of Shepard dragging Garrus around everywhere in ME1 because she wants to take him under her wing and teach him, I think it'd be a lot funnier if she drags him around everywhere because he comes pre-trained.

I mean, think about it. By the end of the first visit to the Citadel, besides Ashley and Kaidan (who are full members of the Alliance military), she has/is heading to recruit the following:

Wrex, a krogan mercenary who definitely doesn't have a file and who later admits mainly works alone and/or in very small groups, and has definitely not been part of any formal military structure or anything even remotely similar

Tali, who is a very wonderful person and very knowledgeable about the geth, but is only ~22 (her birth year is 2161 apparently), is on her people's rite of passage, and has never been formally attached to any kind of command nor has had any formal training as far as we know

Matriarch Benezia's daughter, Liara, who they know very little about at the moment other than she's an archaeologist who specializes in the Protheans and has never had any commando training, nor do they know if she even knows anything about her mother's actions

I love them, but they're not exactly on the level someone that's been part of a military for years would be.

By contrast, you have:

Garrus, who's not that much younger than Shepard herself, was part of the turian military for a few years (and had at least one ship posting from what we know from 2), and has also been part of C-Sec for awhile given he's a full fledged detective, so he's used to working in teams and being under someone's command

I feel like Shepard would have taken a look at his file and breathed a sigh of relief because there's at least one person that she won't have to worry will accidentally undermine her authority. He even comes with amazing sniping skills and tech expertise! Of course she's going to drag him around everywhere!

[continuous-spec]

Garrus booby trapping Shepard’s apartment is a form of nesting.

[theredtrails]

HERE IT IS

What if we were two hot women with incredible biotic powers but low sense of self 🤌🤌

[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.

[inkedobsidian]

Nothing makes me scream into my pillow more than the little trope of Shepard being like *oh shit you've been saying it the whole time* in accordance with Garrus' subvocals basically saying he loves her

[milkywayes]

shirtless garrus dot png <3

[foxprints]

Hello @mishikaiya! I'm your gifter for this year's @masseffectholidaycheer event! I've never drawn Kasumi before but she's so much fun! I hope you like her! 💛

[preztee]

there is something so deeply funny to me abt how both kaidan and liara will always wind up falling for shepard regardless of how you play and which shepard you play as. they've been at this shit for years. they're old pros. by the point of me3, love imagining them just being like

kaidan: wow, the stars are amazing.

liara: yes, they are.

kaidan: you know who else is amazing?

liara: shepard?

kaidan: yeah it's shepard lol

[sovereign-spaw]

I wanna check somethin'