#arguably she is worse than Tann

[assassins-wasteland]

I understand the appeal of Sloane Kelly, love a girl boss, I understand why people don’t trust Reyes, I don’t either, I really do get it, but the first they I saw when entering Kadara was police brutality. And outlandish protection fees or get kicked out to fend for yourself on a death planet? Yeah, I’m not siding with that.

I never really liked Aria T’Loak either, I was 100% ready to betray her in the Omega DLC in 3 and let Nyreen take over so at least my tendency for betrayal is consistent

[rawliverandcigarettes]

Our discussion on turians made me wonder: how do you imagine the culture of the Salarian Union? (I'm sorry, you probably talked about this elsewhere, but I was too lazy to look for that, if so feel free to refer me to that post.) I find that there are surprisingly little elements about it in canon, though there are a few hints, like the fact that the planets in the Pranas system all have modern names, the previous names having been discarded, presumably, because they evoke "bygone superstition"?

Hello! Sorry I took some time. I actually rarely packaged my thoughts on salarian culture in a digestible way, so you gave me a great opportunity to give it a recap! I will go more indepth in the future for sure, but I might do a lil' overarching presentation of my general thoughts.

First, I have written an exploration/explanation of some of my headcanons regarding salarian reproduction, and it can be found here on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18872515

It is sliightly out of date and I need to do a pass to adjust some of my thoughts, but I still go by the general idea.

I also agree that there is very little things in the OT canon. I think there might be slightly more in Andromeda maybe, but I still haven't played the game so who knows!

I even believe the games kind of give up on salarian culture past ME1, where they are arguably given the most importance; we get more depth to it in ME2 through the sole and lonely perspective of Mordin; and in ME3 they are barely worth more than somewhat cheap antagonism and a couple of questionable jokes. Even right now during the promo of MELE, I felt like salarians keep being characterized as weird-cute-gross, and more like the butt of a joke than people. Even the promo for Director Tann in MEA had this "haha you get a role for a mass effect character and you thought you'd be sexy and cool TOO BAD" vibe to it, which makes me think part of the devteam (or at least the marketing side of it) don't think too highly of their very own space frogs :'(((

But to get on my actual thoughts (under the cut and the nice gif, because it won't be as long as it could be, but it's still somewhat long):

So first off, I'm trying to keep in mind how indescribably huge the Salarian Union is: we're talking about a conglomerate of planet-sized communities, moons, artificial stations, plus appendages in every large-scaled, cosmopolitan communities in Council space and possibly beyond. Just like it would be hard to talk about any united "human culture", I think the same could be true for any Mass Effect species --even though, for the sake of both narrative convenience and the tendency for globalization once communities get connected and break down communication barriers, shortcuts have to be made (and that helps make Points, and I like stories to have Points so yee).

For this reason, I have identified organizational tendencies within these communities, based both on baseline of natural grouping emerging off salarian biology (clan-based structures with matriarchal figures) and where I speculated breakdowns would happen in the modern, multicultural setting of the ME universe. To brutally over-simplify: there would be the "traditional" political organization of Sur'kesh (that I will briefly cover later), the "colonial" style (a derivation of the Sur'kesh style with more centralization), and the growing influence of ultraliberalism creeping from Council space back unto these communities, creating a myriad of variations depending on how much the communities are willing to adapt to production being controlled by corporations.

I headcanon the culture, however, to be at once: very collectivist yet an oligarchy (because dalatrasses have a right to power by virtue of existence basically), extremely eugenist to the point of having created literal, biological races that are genetically distinct from each other and cultivated to remain as such by some clans (and therefore can be very cruel towards the disabled/the imperfect at birth too), misandrist (I believe being a male salarian from a shitty clan/baronny is one of the lower forms of political existence that can be in this universe, hence why their lives in the working force are so goddamn disposable), but also designed to protect its members and have the community take care of their basic needs (so homelessness is almost not a thing, or at least used to not be a thing). I also believe the culture to be consistently young and vibrant, with lots of energy (for better and for worse). And during the time of ME, to be under economical and social duress (even gender duress!) as it sits at a crossroad regarding its future, and everyone has a lots of ideas on what this future should look like, including people gawking the outside with economical or political interests in the outcome (this basically the plot of The Empire of Preys, which is technically a prequel to Halfway Home but will be written after HH because I love chronologies that make sense and are easy to understand :) :) ).

So concerning the OG, Sur'kesh style: I have contorted a weird economical/diplomatic/land planning system into quasi-existence, that is based around a unit called the "symposium". This is a *relatively* young system in their history (still milleniums old, it really solidified in the middle of the Rachni Wars as a reaction/adaptation after several waves of imperialism that didn't really look like ours but had the same effect of flattening local cultures into a more aggressive semi-ethnostate), but central into dividing resources, workers, affect. I will not go into too much details because this is quite complicated, but these are basically commitees that will take democratic decisions among its members, based on how many clan members are appointed in both this symposium and and adjacent symposiums that might be helpful to this one --it's a system explicitely based on bribes and social influence, and getting the partial control of key symposiums is absolutely essential for Dalatrasses to maintain the influence and relevance of their respective clans. It's also a system that has, traditionally, very little use for money (it exists, but as a token of exchange that doesn't carry inherent value --if you have only access to money as a clan, you are basically worthless and won't get access to good matches or good symposium seats, or at least you used to until capitalism knocked at the doooooor and that kinda fucked things uppppppp and the society is not recovering and the gaps are getting extreeeeeme this is the plot of TEOP basically).

Oh and on the subject of the transition to more capitalist values and the decay of clans that cannot keep up, I wrote The Leftovers a couple of years ago, which talks about a young dalatrass-to-be discovering she might be sterile, right here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15854244

I have a ton more things to say on the subject (and salarian culture as a whole), buuut this is getting quite long already haha.

And in regards to your question: I headcanon that salarians from one specific continent -that then became the "cultural norm" over imperialism and complications- were confronted, in a continental way, to a huge hurricane that led to incredible floods and then stagnant water and diseases, which really soured their relationship to water that was previously quite holy. This led to a very bitter enlightenment; their "Renaissance" came out of spite against nature rather than anything else, and a lot of previous ideas were abandoned for a time -then reclaimed, then abandoned again, then warped... It's complicated. :D

[hostagesandsnacks]

so the Kadara Port part of the game has been bothering me since the first playthrough, where i sided with Reyes and started to really annoy and frustrate me in the second one, where i decided to choose Sloane. because the thing is, that part never feels like an actual choice that you have to consider and think about very hard. every time it feels like you’re almost forced to pick Reyes over Sloane, so probably the majority of the players do. and why shouldn’t they? he immediately starts charming you on the first meeting, you share a lot of scenes with him, funny, cute, romantic, you name it. on top of that, he’s a romance option, arguably the best m/m romance and in case you got too busy with other stuff, you get constantly reminded to have a chat with him. with Sloane on the other hand, the game frames her as pretty much The Worst Person, with little redeeming qualities, no hope of change and almost universally hated. she gets people hooked on drugs? well of course she does. i’m surprised they didn’t pile on cannibalism. you spend way less time with her and her attitude towards Ryder is cold at best, at least initially, and she only becomes more friendly after you’ve already saved her. she’s disillusioned about the initiative and openly hostile towards Tann. and the thing is, there’s a lot that could be explored with her character but never is. she’s the leader of the outcasts not because she wanted to be, but because for each choice she made during the uprising, the alternative was worse and at the end all the rest of the rebels expected her to take the lead so she did. someone who knows they all have 2 weeks of supplies and if they don’t find an alternative by then, they’re all dead. who probably knows she should return the port to the angara after liberating it from the kett, but realises she can’t afford that kind of luxury. who knows she can’t lead and inspire her people like Jien and she will have to resort to violence and intimidation to get them to work for their survival. who values loyalty only to realise she’s gotten to a point where people so easily betray her when the collective orders Kaetus to be beaten up. anything like that. but the overall portrayal of the conflict is very polarising and lacks nuance so one side is clearly favoured over the other in terms of content and characterisation, not to mention that Reyes survives the conflict no matter what you do and if you want to pursue and continue a romance you enjoy, you have to willingly allow her (a black woman in power on top of everything) be killed in a dirty duel with no alternative solution.

i wish i could hope there is some reason for that setup, but i’m too old and bitter and i know better than to hold my breath. and with so many players predictably siding with Reyes, demanding more of his content & creating tons of fan art and doing none of that for Sloane (quite opposite, i wish i could unsee the countless posts and threads of people joyfully declaring how they wish they could shoot her themselves, not terrifying at all), i wouldn’t be surprised if she ‘magically’ disappeared from any later content. 

for now i’m gonna keep saving her out of spite, because bioware apparently doesn’t want me to, but she really deserved a better treatment.