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Tried designing a fancy outfit for Tali because she deserved a citadel dress too 💔

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i am once again playing mass effect. have some memes (1/?)

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Ashley can box the punching bag. As a treat

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You have no idea how much Miranda Lawson saved you.

From the very beginning of Project Lazarus, there was this ideal, this perfect sentiment: bring Shepard back as she was. No one went into it with aspirations of turning you into a super soldier, a biotic weapon to rival commadoes, pimped out with enough cybernetics to power a small fleet. They saw you as an ideal. An idol. The first human Spectre, the Hero of the Citadel. Commander Shepard. A household name, there were already blockbuster vids, action novels, Alliance recruitment pamphlets plastered with your face. They wanted that, not some cheap imitation.

And yet, when you were delivered to Cerberus, you were less of a corpse and more a collection of body parts. Your torso was about the only thing still intact. You left leg landed about five hundred meters away, your right another hundred from that. Your skull had caved in, there was barely any discerning your tongue from your nasal bridge from whatever brainmatter didn't get burned away. Reconstruction was far more extensive than you'll ever know.

Miranda had access to your measurements via Alliance database hack approximately one month before your death. So, sorry if you took to late night binge eating or impromptu jiu-jitsu in the month where you were "searching for geth resistence," but she did the best she could with what she had. And what she had was you. All of your scars, your muscles, your temperament. Making you wouldn't be a problem. Perfecting you, would.

The first sign of trouble came from someone (truly unimportant, she forgot their name entirely) suggesting to fix that nasty scar on your face. It's ugly, they said. Unseemly. Makes you look like a thug, not the savoir of humanity.

Miranda fought for you. Said your scars were earned. Said they were apart of you.

Cerberus disagreed.

Wherever you got them-- Torfan, Elysium, Akuze-- it didn't matter. Really, none of your background did. It didn't matter what you did, who you were. Because suddenly, you weren't just a body on a slab. You were a template, you were a focus test, you were an ideal that Cerberus could mold to make their perfect human.

They wanted to leave out your bottom two ribs to make your waist slimmer. They wanted to lighten up your skin, get rid of all the sun damage and freckles, make you a perfect porcelain doll. They wanted to add a cup size, and then another, until you'd be busting out of the top of your armor that Cerberus would kindly cut out in the chest to show you off. Never mind a bullet to your chest cavity would be fatal. You would be sexy, a bimbo, a woman who would suddenly turn a thousand ships around, someone who would have mercs falling to their knees.

Miranda Lawson looked at you, and saw the one thing she never wanted to see. She saw herself.

She fought harder than she's ever fought before to bring you back as you were. And she may have lost the battle to keep your scar, but she won the ultimate prize. You are you. Without the intervention of postulating men who think that their ideal of the galaxy is perview to their own experience, their wants, their desires.

And the only thing you'll ever know is that the evil ice queen Miranda Lawson once considered implanting you with a control chip.

You never knew that you could have woken up and not recognized your own reflection.

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[Captain Anderson] sounds angry. Something must’ve gone wrong with the mission.

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This post is from Ashley's main writer, Chris L'etoile! I'd heard before that he said on the Bioware forums she was Latina but never actually saw the post (by the time I got into ME, the Bioware forums were already known as a place to avoid). Screenshot via Twitter user ~poormanstoe.

That said, interesting that Salma Hayek is his reference or inspiration here: though Hayek is absolutely culturally Latina, biologically she is Lebanese and Spanish. Personally in my headcanoning of Ashley's peoples, Arab had not (yet) crossed my mind :)

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I'm curious how you feel about Shepard(s) wearing Garrus' colony markings? I have a feeling I know and that we share the same opinion, but I'd love to know your thoughts if you're willing to be put it out there

oh dear LOL. well without trying to yuck anyone's yum or be the fun police, you're completely right assuming i'm not into it. i don't read fic that includes the trope and i don't reblog art of it either.

stop reading here if colony-markings!shepard is your favorite thing, thank you.

romance genre is saturated with misogynist tropes and i don’t think that this is the worst offender by far even in shakarian fandom… but it’s still on the list. i don’t think enjoyers of it put much more thought into it than “it replaces wedding rings, how cute,” so i’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything here, but that doesn’t make it not misogynist to put a male character’s visual characteristics all over the female character’s face, oftentimes permanently, to show belonging (ownership). it feels too much like brand-marking cattle. i already hate that a woman was ever expected to take her husband’s surname, and this is that times twenty. it’s viscerally uncomfortable to me. marriage is a patriarchal institution, so tradition in the context of it is often… well, exactly that. we can step away from those traditions and make marriage about sentiment and equal partnership instead, but many still romanticize all the sexist flavorings that come with it. i think this is just an expression of that tendency, again.

that’s my biggest reason for avoiding it lol. but it’s not the only one.

as someone who really likes world building, it just doesn’t make any damn sense to me either. as you said, they’re colony markings. canonically, they show geographical origins. holdover from the unification war, yadda yadda. they are not clan markings, and there is nothing in canon that indicates that turians have family clans at all or would consider them important—that’s the krogan. turians are a meritocracy, and what that means is they value an individual’s contribution to larger society, and they really, really hate nepotism. you don’t get family clan mentality without nepotism or showing excessive pride in something that has nothing to do with an individual’s achievements towards the betterment of turian society. 

while the unification war did reveal a tendency towards tribalism, this was about entire colonies rather than lineages, and about a unit of people brought together by working tirelessly towards the same goal (betterment of the larger social group, again. contributing to the colony. one for all and all for one.) the issue was simply that this social group had shrunk from “all of the hierarchy” to just “all of the people where i live.” a natural consequence of a people spreading out from their homeworld all over the galaxy, i think: it’s easy to lose loyalty to something abstract that you cannot see (the Hierarchy) in favor of what you do see and can directly affect (local community.)

family clans don’t really mesh with what we know about turians. garrus’ colony markings don’t have anything to do with his family line. they’re about where he’s from. to quote a friend, shepard would be getting her partner’s zip-code tattooed on her face. 

nothing about any of that is romantic to me. and well, uh. i also think it kind of looks really bad. so there’s that.

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Mass Effect screenshots for art references

Huge screenshot dump incoming! There will be 3 more parts to this in a reblog chain! Seriously there's 30 shots just of walls 😅 A collection of screenshots that I took for the purpose of creating backgrounds in art, and to study the textures, architecture, infrastructure and furnishings in mass effect Legendary Edition. These are practical rather than pretty aesthetic shots, if one seems completely random i'm probably trying to capture some wires, a floor tile or a sofa etc. I thought someone might find them handy! You are welcome to use and transform these in whatever way you wish and I don't need to be credited.

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Jack my beloved

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my OCs are sooo cool you guys don't know what you're missing. if you could see the show i'm watching in my head rn you'd go so crazy i'm telling u

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"The Veilguard cast is too nice!", "I miss when characters would tell each other to kill themselves," hey quick question how do you feel about them

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Some Fem!Sheps because I miss her

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must be one of those bugged no-notes posts

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I can't be your mother

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M4 Shuriken

mass effect art