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dragon age inquisition is the only story i’ve seen that’s bold enough to ask - what if we attempt the found family trope, but half of your found family are so catholic they’re in line to be the pope and also you start out as pretty much a hostage

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going through da: i the first time you're like "oh my god he's not a grey warden? how unexpected, how out of nowhere!" going through it any other time you're like "jesus this guy is really making me go collect grey warden knickknacks for no reason and then can't even lie competently about it"

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Queen of Swords

commission for @alienturnipp of her Hawke! 💗

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i am the others

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POV nines rodriguez beats the shit out of you

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*banging on the table* vampires vampires vampires

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i’m very into neon lately

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apparently people are annoyed because the thor in the new god of war looks like a strongman instead of a bodybuilder lmao

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Probably not a popular opinion but I don’t particularly want to play Shepard after spending three game watching them go through hell???? I’d really rather them finally get the vacation they deserve. If they do bring them back for this game there better be a damn solid reason someone else can’t do whatever needs to be done. And the comments in the Youtube Teaser Trailer about how “Thank god we’re back in the original trilogy Andromeda is shit” just sort of :\ I want to know what happened to the quarian ark. I want to know about the creation of the angara. I want to explore the Kett empire and see the other alien races they’ve been exalting. I want to meet a new squad, try a new romance, and develop Ryder as a character. I want to see the twins with their mother again. There were genuinely interesting plot points in that game worth exploring, and the idea that people are happy leaving those open because the game had some shitty animations and bugs is… depressing.  Not to say you can’t dislike the game. That’s absolutely valid. My silly rambling is more of a sigh of disappointment because the people who dislike the game are much more vocal than the people who did enjoy it, which means I’m unlikely to ever find out IF A REAPER WAS CHASING THE QUARIANS ARK I’LL NEVER BE OVER THAT BIOWARE PLEASE TELL ME-

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Mass Effect: Initiation is a fucking gift and you need to read it: an essay/liveblog in bullet points.

(Minor spoilers follow)

Cora Harper is a gift

There are some hella excellent nods to the Expanse, and if you haven’t read that get the fuck on it, why are you reading my trash?

“Right about the same time she started to suspect the ‘shrimp’ were actually a variety of Horizonian insects that tasted great, but had a mild laxative effect” STOP EATING THE SANDWICH BABE, also you know that poor Virmire found this out the hard way.

Turians clack their mandibles when they’re super angry

Baby SAM is hilarious, and really, really goddamn bad at pretending to be a VI: but that’s okay, Cora is super bad at adding two and two together

There’s actually a lot of really useful shit regarding biotics and their implants for the fic minded among us. Where the implant is, what it feels like, what it looks like etc, plus what the abilities feel like being used

TINY krogan pilot/drone expert oh my God I love him and his custom labeled ‘KILL ‘EM ALL’ drone button.

TIMELINES oh my god there’s actually a solid timeline for where this thing fits in the whole ME story — Shepard’s sighted on Omega as of the 15th of  February 2185 (oh god does that mean they find Garrus around/on the 14th of Feb? Throw me a bone Bioware)

“Earthborn Australians enjoyed tormenting outsiders with fanciful tales of ‘dropbears’” oh my fucking god my future countryfolk I SALUTE YOU and never change

“I do not believe Lieutenant Harper is an asshole,” ilu SAM

“What’s Wrong With Your Children, Version 7.12” - “I haven’t bitched about my children in months” “You haven’t seen your children in months” Alec buddy you gotta do better

“Can we get an actor that looks like Shepard? Will Shepard’s estate sue us?” JFC

SAM admires the Rachni, Cora is a little bit disturbed by this.

Cora’s dad read her stories about cats when she was a kid, and she was ‘a little obsessed’

Imagine a mission that’s between that creepy rogue VI in ME2, and the Adujcant mission from Omega in ME3. That’s the middle half of this book

REAPERS or rather not-reapers that are suspiciously fucking Reaper like.

Proto-SAM: Hey Cora, you ever wanted literally hulk out? No? Well the situation kind of calls for it rn

This is all happening at the same time Vega is doing his thing on Fehl Prime

SAM is 100% done with Alec’s shit and we haven’t even left the Milky Way

Hulk Cora: “Not so psychotic”  beat “Maybe a *little* homicidal”

Interlude: apparently half the galaxy finds James Vega hot, and he’s responsible for making neck tattoos sexy again. I shit you not.

We get to see Cora with some of her squad! They’re actually less dickish than they sound in game, and the sniper has a major thing for her.

Cora: “Just say I was FUBAR, SAM” SAM: “The anti-FUBAR treatment was a success”

Matriach Nisira? Has two husbands, a krogan and a turian.

There are BAD THINGS afoot in the Initiative (as we knew, BUT)

Interesting shit on the Hyperion: important shit, like the medical facilities, Pathfinder team and other critical personal housed on the ring part, while Joe Colonist is on one of two ark-holds that can be jettisoned independently if needed.

Alec Ryder, you goddamn asshole.

Alec, man vs superheated plasma is not going to go in man’s favour.

This (nearly) kills the man

Jian Garson is canonically Asian

This book is making me rewrite SO MUCH thanks Mass Effect

I’m pretty sure this book just implied that Alec Ryder doesn’t wear underwear? Cora accidentally sees more than she bargained for; mocks Earthborn modesty standards

ALEC YOU BAG OF DICKS

SPOILERS

Confirmed: SAM can only go to another *genetic* Ryder, so Cora could never have been Pathfinder, it always had to have been one of the twins. Cora does not know; Alec’s …. kind of not okay about it

Cora Harper is a goddamned snarky bad-not-shrimp eating gift and I love her

This book is like $5 AUD on the Kindle store and y’all need to get on this shit pronto. It’s like Mass Effect meets Leviathan Wakes, and it actually feels like part of the Mass Effect universe, way more than Nexus Uprising did. There’s some handy little mentions of some OT friends (go home Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani, and quit (inadvertently) fucking up people’s heists) some excellent timeline information, A LOT of handy hints for writing biotic characters (so many suspicions confirmed) and apart from all the sneaky hints for Andromeda stuff I wish we’d gotten to play, it was a shitload of fun. 

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Okay so you actually articulated how much a flaming dumpster fire Alec Ryder was and I thank you profusely. Like, I understand the entire reason behind the Initiative was fleeing the Reapers and time was a factor but wow did that selfish prick literally do everything wrong that he could have and then he seemed actively FIND shit to fuck up. God I can’t stand him the more playthroughs I do.

Yeah God i am captain of the alec ryder hate club because he’s literally the Worst

he didn’t even create the initiative to flee the reapers bc according to Ryder Family Secrets his main motivation was to hop galaxies to find a cure for aend likely not because he loved his wife, but out of sheer guilt for abandoning his children, admitting to never telling them he loved them in their 20-25 years of existing, and feeling like his wife would take care of them better

he more or less lied to get everyone on board with the initiative, literally enslaved the krogan (in nexus uprising it’s revealed that the krogan aren’t allowed to hold leadership on the nexus and the only reason kesh is superintendent is because she forced tann [who is so underqualified to be in the position that sloane kelley calls his former job ‘bean counting’] to give her authority in exchange for repairing the ship - on top of this, as the krogan don’t have a set lifespan, they would’ve been working for the nexus indefinitely), used experimental technology on every known alien race based off of a sample size of his (1) human wife (lest we forget that he cryogenically froze quarians, hanar, elcor, and drell on top of the races we see in game), lied about how advanced and unchained the AI he programmed to see the entire project through when AI in mass effect has a history of rebelling and killing their creators and he put this tech in his children and every pathfinder’s head….. SAM’s nice and all but he also has the ability to kill ryder with no aasimov laws? that’s bullshit and highly dangerous 

oh also he allowed cerberus agents onto the same ship and inevitably to the same galaxy with non-humans, who they notoriously hate and do eventually experiment (and will continue to experiment on if you don’t kill them yourself). so really. what didn’t he fuck up that he didn’t project onto jien garson and then let her take the blame by getting outright murdered on the nexus (which he anticipated according to nexus uprising?!) while he was safe and asleep on ark hyperion

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it’s always wild to see people claim alec ryder was a good dad or did the best he could. i mean setting aside literally all of mass effect andromeda, there’s this from the book mass effect initiation:

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listen as much as i talk about how much of a jackass alec ryder is and was, literally nothing is more tragic than what’s gonna happen when ellen, who likely thought she was fucking dying and/or Currently Dead when she was put into cryostasis, is woken up by one of her children once they find the cure for AEND.

she thought she was dead. she thought she could trust her husband to take care of her. she expected To Die and instead alec sabotaged his family’s reputation, scott’s career personally, and involved every single citadel race in a mad dash out of the galaxy powered by the tech that ruined his family. the same tech he was developing to explicitly deny her wishes to Die.

those first few minutes out of the pod, ellen’s going to think she’s dead and the ryder opening the pod is dead too. she’s going to ask if alec is there too. i can’t imagine how painful it’ll be hear her child say that he endangered so many people and the sole reason any of them survived is because he died and forced them to take his goddamn place. that every moment after she and her children thought she’d died, it’d just been one selfish act after selfish act.

alec ryder didn’t just throw his kids unprepared into the pathfinder position knowing damn well he wouldn’t survive. he threw his kids into the position of cleaning up all of his messes while he escaped the consequences of it all

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This guy is the oldest known cave painting in the world, dating to at least 45,000 BCE. Look at him

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y’know instead of having Alec be completely unable to let go of Ellen and go against her wishes by putting her into stasis and then kill him off, Andromeda could’ve really pushed for him trying to be a father. In one of the earlier memories, he says about not letting the twins lose their mother because they’ve not had a father, to which Ellen retorts ‘then give them one.’

It would’ve been more narratively interesting to see Alec survive Habitat 7 (injured enough that he can no longer be Pathfinder) and have to start trying to follow Ellen’s advice - making an effort to reach out to his child, to offer advice and commentary on their progress all while watching over the comatose twin. Trying to give his children a father instead of obsessively trying to return their mother to them while potentially violating her consent.

And maybe Ryder accepts that he’s making an effort… Or maybe they push him away because it feels a bit late to be playing a father role now. If the twins can be close or distant dependent on choices, it could easily be the same with Alec.

Plus, as the story progresses, instead of witnessing memories, Alec occasionally calls Ryder back to the Hyperion because he’s decided that they’re ready to know more about SAM and the Initiative. He slowly reveals more about his own motivations behind creating SAM, what little he knows about the Benefactor, and finally, when he thinks they’re ready, he tells them about the Reapers.

Alec just had so much potential, and they could have delivered on a really rewarding narrative if they’d kept him alive. You don’t have to kill off parents to provide a ‘coming of age’ story.

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so Bioware’s telling me that scrapping for resources Quarians, rebuilding derelict ships Quarians, permanently spacefaring Quarians, do not have solar panels?

we could have had proper space ships with solar sails that would 

a) make thematic sense, 

b) would be so freaking cool and 

c) we could have had so much more interesting and distinct designs

…

THE MISSED POTENTIAL IS KILLING ME 

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i fuckin hate the summer y’all 🔥☀️

(edit: apparently the video might not show up on mobile, but feel free to click it if you enjoy listening to squelchy melty sounds 💀)

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