#those 6 months after the end of me2 must've been hellish for shepard

[monowires]

you know what fucks me up the most about me2, though? it isn't just the fact that there was a 2 year time gap, it's that that time didn't even pass for shepard.

shepard was, as jacob puts it, "in a coma or worse" for most of it—the only real conscious moment he has before waking up at the start of the game during the attack is that one moment where the sedatives wore off and he started waking up.

everyone he runs into gives him some form of "it's been two years, you shouldn't expect things to be the same," but it's literally been like blinking to shepard. he was asphyxiating in space and then he was fighting for his life in a cerberus facility. he's expected to handle this reorientation himself; it's never really talked about, not fully. he catches up with people like anderson on what's happened in the past two years, but it's never really clarified how he processes it. and even so, he makes a visible effort to try and understand it, to try and understand the viewpoints of old allies like kaidan and tali and garrus.

this is something that i feel a lot of the characters overlooked when chiding him for 'working with' cerberus. like, my dude died and then woke up immediately thereafter (to him) in a cerberus facility. his only options were to ally with them or die, and then the elusive man went to extensive lengths to make it such that shepard COULDN'T leave—where would he go? the normandy wasn't his anymore. what crew would he take with him? they'd all been contacted by cerberus beforehand.

it just breaks my heart, because he dies saving joker/his crew during the normandy attack, and is then thrust into the future—literally, to him—and expected to just get up and keep moving. he was never given any time to process it, never given any time to argue, never given any autonomy beyond which mission he did first.

in me3, he still isn't given the luxury of being understood—people don't trust him, and understandably so given the reputation cerberus built for itself—but they also don't listen to him. when he tries to defend himself by saying he didn't have much choice, he is told "isn't that just what they want you to say?"

even jack gives him shit for it, and she was with him in me2. and if he tries to say he knows, he knows cerberus is awful, she says something along the lines of 'i'm sure that'll comfort all the people they killed' and that just stung in the moment because it really shows how alone shepard is, how alone he always has been. how being alone is a necessity when you're tasked with the fate of the galaxy—how he has to sacrifice himself in more ways than one to ensure the continuity of time itself.