#and yeah og timeline has Anderson as the first N7 in the first contact war when he was 20 like damn dude

[kipaia]

Hey tell me about your Insane Mass Effect Timeline!

Oh my god. Mary.

I know you are FULLY aware of how FUCKING INCONSISTENT AND ANNOYING the official Mass Effect timeline is. I had a night last spring where I was trying to plot out my fanfic from start to finish and was getting super irritated about it so I went through, year by year, from 2115 to 2188 and wrote up my own timeline down to the exact dates of everything I needed to know for something like 14 characters entire lives, of which I think 10 or 11 are all complete ocs; I needed to know exactly where they all were and what was happening around them all at any given time, so I went through year by year wove them into the given Bioware timeline and put everything into a legible order.

This fucking document. The timeline alone (because I did end up sticking a couple of one shots on the end because I was too lazy to switch at the time),

Is thirteen pages long.

I have a thirteen page long timeline where I could put everything in a more sensible order, stretch out some of more ludicrously condensed major historical events of the official timeline and wrote up an actually sensible working order for the first two games because frankly, the way Bioware wrote it there is no possible way Shepard could have been spotted on Omega in Mass Effect 2 in mid-February of 2185 after having been dead two years and ten+ days and still have had enough time for the events of Mass Effect to occur in 2183.

If rumors of Shepard being alive came from Omega on Feb. 15th, they'd been dead for at least two years and ten days (plus a couple of days to account for Freedom's Progress and travel), and the attack on the Normandy happened a month after the Battle of the Citadel, the official timeline puts the entirety of Eden Prime war in the span of, maximum, the first week of January 2183, which can't have been the case if they also listen 2183 as the year the Normandy was constructed.

So yeah I got mad at that and how young a bunch of the 'older' characters canon ages are listed as (Anderson is in his early 40's according to the official timeline which I do not agree with, Hackett I think is something like 53 in official timeline, I don't remember off the top of my head) when humans canonically have 150+ year lifespans now. Neither of them would even be middle aged in that case, ffs, yet we're supposed to believe they're grizzled older gen soldiers on the verge of retirement? Yeah, no. First Contact War experience notwithstanding, I aged almost everyone from the older generations up, as well as my Athena Shepard by a few years because she has a teenage kid in the first game and I needed to sort all of that out.

I love my insane thirteen-page timeline and I reference that thing like it's the fucking bible whenever I'm writing anything for my mass effect fics.

Yeah so that's my rant about the Mass Effect timeline and how my thirteen-page monstrosity came to be and I love it so much