#HFY if you squint

[grumpygus]

I’m not sure if anyone has said this and I know this is way late, but I haven’t seen anyone say this so I’m gonna say it:

Mass Effect should’ve been a story about capitalism.

At first it bugged me that EVERY single sapient culture you encounter in the Mass Effect universe is capitalistic by nature. Greed, corruption, and the over exploitation of natural resources to the detriment of literally everyone are rampant throughout the game, but I’ve never seen it even mentioned in universe. Sure, you’ll see people talking about the Volus, but always as those funny little reverse naked molerats whose writing has some unfortunate implications. This is the biggest missed opportunity I’ve seen in video game writing, and it’s all because of the Reapers.

The Reapers were designed to protect organic life, and that bullshit about “organic creating synthetics that destroy them” stopped being relevant by the end of Mass Effect 2, and that’s being VERY generous regarding its validity as a motivation.

There’s an even more obvious motivation that was completely ignored, and that’s—you guessed it—capitalism. Think about it, if you were an AI dedicated to preserving life, what would be your biggest concern, a hypothetical machine uprising that could easily be solved through the occasional well-placed computer virus, or a reckless consumption of resources that was fueling the decadence of your creators? Synthetics weren’t the greatest threat to life in the galaxy, their own masters were, so the initial response to betray them was obvious.

So imagine this was indeed their initial motivation. The Reapers likely thought their job done at that point and stepped back from the galactic scene, only to witness the brutal and apocalyptic wars to fill the power vacuum left behind. So the Reapers step in again, wiping out all the warring empires, because obviously they were problem elements that needed to be removed. Then it happened again, so the Reapers decided the wipe the slate clean, as this generation of galactic civilizations had obviously been tainted by the Leviathans. They decided to wait for organic life to evolve and watch after the next generation instead. But that next generation was just as destructive as the previous (because if all the civilizations are gonna be capitalist then you can bet your ass I’m gonna work with that), so they wiped the slate clean and tried again. After a couple of generations of civilizations come and go, the Reapers start to wonder if organic life itself is the bringer of its own destruction. So they create a plan: they quietly observe each generation of sapient life, and if it looks like this generation is also a threat to the galaxy as a whole, they step in to wipe the slate clean and restart the experiment. They create more controlled environments so as to better contain the spread of the ravenous swarm that is “civilized beings”. Each time, they observed, waited in hope that THIS might be the one. THIS might be the generation that can live in harmony with the galaxy. But each time, they’re disappointed, so the cycle begins anew. And each new cycle becomes more efficient than the last, to the point where they’re able to pinpoint a close approximation of the galactic community’s point of no return. After billions of experiments, each more streamlined and full of shortcuts than the last, would the Reapers even bother to check if this generation could save itself? Or would it go with the tried and true method of starting over and seeing if things improve?

And so here we are at the time of the story of Mass Effect. Civilization has reached its designated point of no return and the reapers return to restart the experiment. Enter humanity, the outlier to all their predictions not by being superior to the other races, but by virtue of our perseverance in the face of impossible odds and our occasional tendency to come up with wildly unpredictable solutions to problems. Shepard, of course, exemplifies these qualities and uses them to do the impossible: killing Sovereign and stopping the invasion.

And so we get the plot of the Mass Effect games, this time with themes of the evils of colonialism and a callous disregard for the consequences of unchecked greed, but also more emphasis on the horrors of war, and how it’s often the innocent bystander that suffers the most when titans clash.

Skip to the end, with the Catalyst that isn’t a random human child but instead takes the form of the most important person in the galaxy: Shepard. You literally have to confront your own reflection as this jaded intelligence throws all your failures and mistakes back at you. However, during this conversation one thing becomes clear: The Reapers and Shepard have a lot in common. They’re both protectors: “dedicated to saving the galaxy no matter what it takes” if you lean more renegade, “possessing an unflinching conviction to stand up for what’s right, even if it’s not what’s easy”for paragons, or “utterly committed to your mission and willing to make necessary sacrifices” for more balanced characters. This is Shepard’s opening to reason with the Reapers, either by showing them the flaws in their logic, accusing them of becoming callous butchers who have lost sight of their purpose, explaining that one cannot truly understand people by judging from on high, or any number of possible counter-arguments.

And this is where player choices start to matter! Because the Reapers have been watching Shepard, and might be more inclined to be swayed by certain arguments if Shepard demonstrated the virtues of your argument over the course of the story. Perhaps by proving that Shepard has been a more dedicated protector than the Reapers ever were, or by asserting the virtues of self-determination and that it’s our goddamn right to destroy ourselves if that’s what it takes to be truly free, or by simply shooting the Catalyst in its smug face and starting an epic boss battle.

Of course, if you triumph through violence, proving you’ve learned nothing from everything you’ve seen, the Reapers will bitterly curse you with something like “It would seem that you organics are truly beyond saving. Reap what you sow, Shepard. Reap what you sow.” as their circuits fry and the life sputters out of them.

If you want a more optimistic ending, you win through words and convictions, and the Reapers become convinced that Shepard is a far more suitable caretaker than they are. So now you get the choice: what to do with the Reapers? Do you shut them down to free the galaxy? Do you install yourself into the mainframe (this is the Catalyst’s recommendation) and become an immortal machine god to forever protect the galaxy? Or do you encourage diplomacy by encouraging the Reapers to surrender and help the galaxy repair the untold damage the reapers have done, because the galactic community never needed a king, they just need a friend? The latter is my favorite option but they’re all valid choices and probably not the only ones that could be included. At the very least, they amount to more than multicolored laser beams and destroyed mass relays. You have deposed the king and taken his crown, and it’s up to you to decide what to do with it.

Anyway, that’s my rant. Sorry if it’s incomprehensible, I’m switching meds and it’s made me borderline delirious.

[invisibleanonymousmonsters]

Here's one for HFY. When Y/N was in the hospital talking to Bucky, she was sorta concerned of the wound above her eyebrow scarring. Does it actually scar? Is she insecure about it sometimes? What does Bucky do to help if so?

Howlin’ For You – Masterlist

It’s like a whisper of a scar. Like, you can’t even tell until Y/N points it out. 

Is she still slightly insecure about it? Yeah, a little bit... but it’s not ruining her entire body image and self confidence. 

When she first noticed the scarring, she barely even mentioned it to Bucky. It was more in passing than anything. She doesn’t want to fish for compliments or admit that something so little was bothering her. 

“A scar?” Bucky asked when he realized what she was pointing out. 

“Come here,” he instructed her. He was sitting at her dinner table as she moved about the kitchen. 

She glared at him, knowing what he was trying to do. 

“Come on, doll. Let me take a look at it.”

She humored him and slowly walked over to him. 

Without warning, he pulled her on his lap so she was straddling him and his hands were on her waist. 

“Let’s see,” he mumbled as his eyes narrowed melodramatically. 

In all honesty, he had to squint to even notice what Y/N was talking about. 

“Doll, you can barely see it,” his voice was gentle, making sure not to sound patronizing. “You know what I think?” He asked. 

“What?” She muttered as she refused to meet his gaze. 

“I think it makes you look tough.” Then he leaned forward and placed a kiss right where the scar was. “Your my little badass now.” 

She giggled at that. 

Bucky had plenty of scars from the military and from the Howlie business. His biggest being his entire left arm that was covered in burn scars. But he also knew that society was more accepting of men having scars than women. It made men tough, strong. But people treated scars on women as something that would threaten their beauty. 

“There’s nothing less beautiful about you, Y/N.” He finally declared. “Hear me?”

She nodded, knowing he was waiting for a confirmation. 

From the on, Bucky makes a habit of kissing that spot. There’s no rhyme or reason for when it happens. It just does. 

[frckld]

Unraveled [1]

[Read also on /r/HFY]

Her father had been sitting besides the machine as it buzzed for a few minutes before he finally got up and sighed, shaking his head as he read the printout when the beeping had finally stopped. He was probably going to find her mother, she knew; part of her was curious what the news was that made him completely ignore her. He was supposed to tell her first, but he only looked at her and shook his head before he’d gone outside! With a shake of her head, she’d turned back to her book and went back to lazily paging through its notes, all of which focused solely on describing the stitches as they currently knew them. With a yawn, she couldn’t help but to imitate Pa with a small shake of her own head; it was so boring; with a sigh, she closed the book and snuck towards the door she’d just watch him leave out of. If she pressed her ear up to it, she could probably hear what they were talking about – she hoped, at least.

“They’re saying another… burnt… right to the ground. No, no… why… another report said there was a kid who could… out of his… I’m to take it to the Elves right away… it’ll just be a few days.”

And that was that. She’d backed away from the door confused, standing there almost dumbstruck for a few moments before she’d heard the galloping of their horse away – and, muffled under that, the steps of her mother coming a bit closer. Scrambling, she tried to make it back to the table in time –

“Diana!” she heard her mother chastise, “you were listening!”

Just a moment quicker and she’d’ve made it, her hand resting right on the wooden chair. With as much of a smile as she could muster, she shrugged and turned around and tried to think up anything that could get her out of this. “No I wasn’t.”

She blinked at her mother. Her mother blinked back. “Diana.”

“I promise I wasn’t, Ma!”

Her mother squinted at her, before shaking her head and sighing. “I can’t blame you if you were, dear, but your dad didn’t want you there for a reason. I know he likes to let you stay here with him, but there’s a lot of responsibility on his shoulders,” she gently explained, moving over to the buzz machine. “A lot of the people back home are looking at us right now. And everyone else here.”

“But… this is home, Ma.”

How little she’d known back then. Her mind had been wandering once more as she trawled her hand gently through the remains of the battlefield. Was this commonplace here, to just leave the remains of destruction where they lay? It almost felt as though it was an omen. She knew this place too well, of course; it was just a little bit from where they’d first made landfall. It’d taken a while to transport all the materials necessary to build ships on this side of the stitch, and had the Californian stitch not connected to that little island, she wasn’t even sure if they would have.

Of course, that was something all thought up by people far smarter than her. Lots of things were, but lots of things had changed. Not that she would have ever known. She was barely a child when the railways through the stich had finished, and she barely any had any ties “back home”. She heard they’d finished the first transcontinental railroad across the United States, at least. Good for them. Apparently, the election cycle had everyone riled back up. She was too busy to care much about that.

Gently, she ran the metal of her left arm across the cannon. They’d not even had a time to use it when they finally made landfall, though they hadn’t expected to. Just listening to the Elves, who said it’d be a good spot to build a fort, to establish a first “mainland” colony. That wasn’t the words they used, but they were the closest. She’d been there that day; she had to be. Her ears made sure of that. Elvish made as much sense to her as English did, as did Japanese, French, and Russian.

Diana wished she could shoot fire from her hands instead. It’d be pretty hot. That got a simple laugh out of her; all she needed. It wasn’t until after the stitches that all that had started, and if she’d been born a year earlier she’d’ve been left out. With great power came great responsibility, but the Elves didn’t seem to think of a gift to translate any tongue as much power. Assholes. Friendly assholes, unlike the Orcs, but still assholes. Her fist froze on the metal of the cannon.

So they’d never been able to establish their fort, but as it turned out, there was an Elvish village close enough to hear the conflict. Now it served as the “heart” of this side of the world, and so how long had Ma and Pa been living there? Long enough for her to get a better education than all of the old-world books had been able to provide, at the very least, she had to admit, but Diana still refused to let herself be happy about that much. With a shake of her head, she turned from the cannon, but her left arm refused to leave it; with a deep breath in, she tried to will it otherwise, even as the rest of her mind started to freeze up. She shouldn’t’ve come here; there was nothing she could learn here. She should have made her way right to the hills, like she’d planned to, but something in her said she had to come here.

Stupid Diana. Stupid. If there was any closure that she would’ve gotten from this, she would’ve come here sooner. No need to remember the slaughter, or the fact that her arm alone made her in debt to the Elves for lord knows how long. Then again, it wasn’t her fault their magic didn’t work to just give her arm back to her. It’d taken years of engineering and research to be able to make something like this, and here she was, a linguistics researcher barely making any worth of all the numerous investments placed in her by her family, by humanity, by the Elves.

With a small sigh, she felt her hand finally drop away from the metal as she began to will herself to walk away. It never responded as well as she wanted it to, always excessively bound by her emotions. They were what willed anything to work on this side of the stitch, at least. She’d probably have to clean her bandages soon; the enhanced bronze, iron, and steel that various metallurgists had come up with still didn’t mean anything with how poorly her body reacted to the prolonged rubbing against it. There was simple magic that could be done to prevent it, but she’d either need to be attached to someone who specialized in that (or an Elf) or have been gifted with it herself.

And she wasn’t. Words, of all things.

Her professors had always scoffed at that. After Imperial Common was established between the Elves, Dwarves, and the delegates from each country that had land – or a colony – with a stitch in it, there was little need for any more research into it. There was nothing to learn from any of the other races, the Elves would always say.

Diana bit her tongue now as she thought about it, just as she’d done then, till she could taste the copper in her mouth. There was only so much that she could tolerate to hear from them all, and she could only hope to prove them wrong once more. It’d be the very least she could do. Even if the orcs are the reason she’s stuck in moral debt, she still struggled to trust all of the stories that she’d always heard. Every Elvish scholar she had to run her proposal by had warned her a thousand times not to get too close, and that it was a fool's errand to try and see if these tribes bore any redeeming qualities. Orcs, they all simply said, were just fallen Elves, and they'd lost their intelligence with them. It always seemed probably enough to never be questioned, but it always nagged at her. Too self-righteous, too presumptuous. At best, it seemed like a half-baked attempt to try to post-facto approve the endless wars that had happened long before the stitch, and only seemed to be on a momentary hiatus.

It was the fear of those same wars that gave her the funding now to go out. It was out of amusement, if anything, fear of "what if they are actually smart, what do we do then? It's only a matter of time before their weapons are better than ours, then" scenario (or, she knew the Elves thought, they cut a deal with a human for more arms more accurately), even if they oh-so-obviously rolled their eyes at the thought. At best, she knew she was just being treated as early reconnaissance for a yet unknown crusade once more. Her entire goal of research treated as nothing more than a simple battlefield scout; her entire background in linguistics and society discarded. All they ever cared about was war, their holy righteousness, and part of her feared that if she was to be proven right, they'd carry out their war in a guise of trying to "uplift" such a downtrodden race.

It wasn't as if she could be wrong here, right? She knew she'd been proven right once before, her studies on kobold tactics had saved many lives by noticing how they communicated through scratches and other noises that the common adventurer would ignore; she'd proven that they, too, had a capacity for highly-thought-out pack tactics that would keep them safe. No one had ever tried to reach out peacefully, it was always in the name of gold and resources.

As she made her way to the hill in front of her, a heavy sigh racked her as she let herself shake her head once more. Once, Ma and Pa had been hopeful that humanity would’ve been able to put away the issues that had once plagued them if they were able to find a new land like this. It’s why they moved out to California, they’d told her. Yet even here, they were just seeing problems they’d seen for centuries before.

Diana forgot when she’d first heard it described as wild magic – it’d been in university, she’d thought for sure. It was how the Elves described how magic affected humanity. While Elves – and, she had to imagine, some of the other races here, just in less capability, but why would they every care – had honed the ability to manipulate the forces around them, it’d randomly manifested in some humans across both sides of the stitches. Due to the implications on both sides, there was talks of reunifying the years to be in a common language alongside Imperial Common: the “stitch era”. If it was used, it would’ve been 19 SE when she was still just an undergrad, and 24 SE now. 24 SE meant it was 1862 AD “back home”, and her doing this math meant that she was really so bored with her observations that she was doing mental math and thinking about history. She hated that, but it’s not like there was much else for her to do in these hills.

Diana’s perch in the hills had given her quite some time to spend overlooking the orc tribe that, if she had to guess, might have been the one that beset upon the landing nine years ago, assuming they had stayed in one place for that long – which was always a maybe in the tense peace that’d been settled over the lands. Maybe if something interesting had happened, she’d be more focused, but it was just that – there simply was nothing interesting happening through her spyglass that made her rue it all. This entire study had been her own choice, of course, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t frustrated with her past self now. After all, despite her own doubts of the truth of reasoning for all of the conflict, she knew full well if she was to just stroll up to the front gate, given how they’d reacted to the landing, there was a high chance that they might just skin her alive. Bad blood wasn't her specialty in repairing; she was just a researcher, just solely academic, she had nothing to offer.

A few of the green-skinned behemoths were congregating in the center of their small camp, as she would best call it, even if it bordered on a village in terms of its population -- and unlike the traditional war camps, of what she was told, at least, it wasn't just populated by men. It made her chew at the inside of her cheek; she'd been fed bad information by her advisor or been lied to by him all the same. The bald one with blue eyes and several scars seemed to be the most senior of them, but she hesitated to label him as their leader. The way he acted didn't match with how orc rulers had been described, he seemed far too caring. The sun was making it hard to make out the movements of his lips, the way it kept trying to bounce into her eye, but she did her best to squint through it. She'd found studying the leader to be the most interesting, and so she tried to keep her eyes on him as much as possible; if nothing else, she figured, she knew that he was old enough to have survived several conflicts -- there had to be some wisdom in that.

Yet was he looking right at her? He almost seemed to be, but there was no way he could be. She was far enough off that there was no conceivable way for him to see her by naked eye. With a sigh, she put her spyglass away and pulled out her notebook and jotted down a few scrawls about how nothing had changed. The most interesting thing in the past week had been how they were reinforcing the walls, but beyond that, there was nothing more than just the usual you could expect out of a society that existed, according to all the literature she'd read, as nothing more than a society of nomads. It wasn't as though she could blame them, though.

They had every reason to always be on the run. She'd wait till nightfall to check back in once more, her mind cognizant now of the slight rumble in her stomach. She'd been rationing out her food more than usual after she'd found some of it stolen by wildlife, and she'd been doing that even before to just spend a little bit longer out here. She couldn't be wrong. She didn't want to be, and so she had to refuse even the idea that she could be lest she discredit every other idea that was running through her mind.

But she wasn't a hunter. If it came to it, she would have to return empty-handed. As if for good luck, she extended out the spyglass once more and prayed. The leader still seemed to be looking at her. Was he smiling now? She wondered why.

Every night, the orcs would gather around the center pyre as they cooked that day’s hunt. She couldn't tell if they were talking beyond the small movements of their lips, but it was hard to misplace if that was just chewing or something more. She'd made note of it once, but it barely even clicked in her mind as something to be aware of now. Putting away the spyglass, she shook her head softly as she sunk her lips around a piece of hardtack. Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe they were no better than a group of brutes, able to fight and survive so long simply for their endurance that outmatched anything else in a fight. Elves were more nimble, humans more adaptable, Dwarves had engineering talent that left them only seemingly a few hundred years behind humanity (poor Dwarves), and Orcs were supposedly just simple, stupid brutes.

She rolled her eyes; she was starting to sound just like her teachers all those years. Gently tapping her foot, she tried to think of any probable ideas to roll with here. With the way that the wars kept breaking out, she knew that the orc tribes had been forced into nomadic, and any ruins of their old towns had been taken over by the other races. Nothing there. Moving on by now was an inevitability, but she just had to figure out what she could do with it. Maybe she could move behind a tribe, or try to repeat the study with goblins, but after the kobolds, she had no desires to be underground for an extended period in the near future.

Had she not been distracted, strumming her fingers against her cheek, she'd likely not've noticed the flickering of fire on the walls -- but it wasn't bright enough to be the walls themselves aflame. Bringing back up the spyglass, she looked at it. An orc -- the leader? She couldn't tell in the dark -- was raising a torch above and below the lip of the wall where he was seemingly standing guard, facing right towards her as if to signal to her. Designed specifically to catch her eye.

But how? There was no way that she could have been spotted, yet... if it was that she was being signaled, maybe she would be safe to go down. As she collapsed the spyglass, every logical bone in her body was telling her to not pick up her rucksack and make her way down the hill, yet she had to know. The logical part of her mind screamed she was just a moth to a flame, but the hopeful part told her there may never be an opportunity like this again. With a deep breath in, she had to trust her beliefs. If she was wrong, then she overestimated them; it would be the last mistake she would make, at the very least.