30 Days of Mass Effect: Days 18, 19, 20 & 21
MAN, this meme kind of failed as a way to get me to keep posting, huh? But dammit, I will finish it, for myself if nothing else!
I've been a bit scarce on the ground lately just because of life and crap. You know those parts of your life where you're just so battered by the complicated, ingrained...patternedness of it, you realise you've completely lost your ability to be objective about it. Like, you cope as well as you can and make the best decisions you can but you honestly have no idea if you're reacting to reality or a wounded perception of it. What do you do when stuff gets like that? There's probably not that much you can do. People outside the situation don't see its intricacies. Your eyes see things upside down and your brain flips them around and edits out the delay between seeing the information and processing it. All we ever see is an interpretation of reality.
So. Anyway. Let's talk about a different one.
Okay well the first thing to note is I'm not totally sure what this means... Because I'd totally pick EDI, who needs some love in this meme and sadly lost out to Tali in the female Squadmate entry, but the fact this specifies protagonist and NPC rather than Squadmate makes me wonder if this is supposed to be a non-Squadmate? Which she was in 2 but not in 3?
BUT THEN, I sort of struggle to think of many NPCs in Mass Effect who aren't squadmates who I'd be comfortable bestowing "Protagonist" status on. Like, there's a reason I went for the more minor characters - Aethyta or Al-Jilani, for "favourite NPC" and this seems like it should be bigger.
But then, you kind of get thin on the ground when you're looking for characters who aren't squad members but who still have enough narrative attention you could view them as a "protagonist". Like, Anderson and Joker maybe?
So, okay, whatever, YOU DON'T OWN ME, MEME, I'm gonna just pick EDI. Because I think she has a great storyline, she's funny, she's clever, and while her storyline sometimes runs a little close to The Robot Falls In Love (well okay, that's exactly it), it involves enough genuine science fiction and thoughtful discussion on the topic - and is balanced against the less humanistic Robotic Individual story we get from Legion and the Geth - that I kinda don't care.
I love that she was present in ME1, even though we didn't know it at the time. I love how central she becomes to the final conflict; regardless of Shepard's choice, EDI and Joker are intentionally symbolic of something to protect, strive towards or mourn.
She's also hilarious without being one note and Tricia Helfer's deadpan delivery is perfect. Anyone who hasn't played the Citadel with her in your squad to retake the Normandy, OH MY GOD GO DO THAT, GO DO THAT NOW IT'S A BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL THING.
Runners Up: Traynor (BECAUSE SHE IS PRECIOUS) and Urdnot Bakara/Eve (BECAUSE SHE IS AWESOME).
For this one, I'm going to go with Aria T'Loak. I know it's a slightly broad interpretation since you're never in outright conflict with her, but while I wouldn't call her an villain, given that she's the head of a criminal empire and even the most Renegade Shepard is a Spectre, I think antagonist works.
Besides, I think she's more interesting than any other antagonist except the Reapers themselves and they work best as a broader force, not, like, an actual character I want to talk about.
I love how magnificently she doesn't give a shit about your shit. It doesn't even come across as faking in order to get one up, she just does not care beyond mild interest. She manages to mix practical understatement with a dramatic weight that lets her pull of the PIRATE QUEEN OF THE TERMINUS SYSTEMS schtick.
She's magnificently bitter in this fabulously disinterested way and I think she does a lot to puncture a lot of the stereotypes about the Asari. She's not the wise, virginal "good" girl, and while she might at first appear to fit into that second category - the stripper-ninja seductress - that really is a comparison based solely on the criminality of her profession. She's got form-fitting clothes, for sure, but the eye is drawn to her gleaming, high-collared white leather jacket, collar-upturned like she's shutting out the world. It's regal, that high collar; it's also the trick a thousand cynical PIs use before they hussle out into the rain. I'm quite likely reading too much into it, but I think it's a costume choice that manages to both accentuate her character and stylishness - and sexiness - while making it clear that it's not for your benefit.
I wasn't totally sure I adored Aria the first time I met her, because I was approaching the entire ME2 game with a slightly annoyed "they're trying too hard," take. I think I took her initial "Don't FUCK with ARIA" introduction a little less well than I could have, feeling like it, too, was trying too hard. But then I realised she was as unimpressed as I was with well, basically everything that was pissing me off at that point in my gaming experience, and now I'm like BABY, I PROMISE NOT TO FUCK WITH YOU. (I mean when we take back Omega, I'm probably going to piss you off a little, but if I could, I'd buy you jewellery until we were friends again...)
The end of it. I genuinely and seriously think that the pre-Extended Cut ending was brilliant. It was thematically coherent and philosophically difficult, but honest. As the girl who played through ME2 hanging on Legion's every word, who thought the persistent, but subterranean questions about the boundaries between the synthetic and the organic, asked in transcendently positive contexts (EDI's personhood) as well as nightmarishly violent ones (the creation of a Reaper), as well as truly complicated discussions of the moral and ethical implications of our relationship to technology in broader terms (the Genophage, genetic engineering and biotic experimentation, the plight of the Quarians)... It was a fascinating and wonderful to see those themes grow and take on more prominence with each game.
I understand, then, why some gamers missed the significance; played through it without realising that these themes were always there, were always important, weren't second-fiddle to bad-ass destruction and a message of co-operation and victory through putting aside differences that I would never, ever call simplistic, but would very strongly argue is simple, in that it's a common, uplifting theme, and one we are all more primed to see in a big-budget military scifi action flick.
But it didn't come out of nowhere, and I think that the way it snuck up out of the background is actually kind of valuable to the way it works; to the reveal. The well-worn trope of reaching the end, and only then realising that you are part of something far larger than you ever realised, or perhaps, can comprehend - but it's always going to work better if that thing is both a surprise and something that makes sense.
For me, I guess I spent three games playing through, expecting the endgame to be a traditional, explosive victory, whether painted in unambiguously positive terms, or with the regal tragedy of Gladiator, and I was prepared to accept that, but I was also only expecting it because it didn't even occur to me to believe that they'd have the...guts, I guess is the word, or perhaps integrity? I don't wish to cause offence; but on this topic I fear it may be inevitable - to run with the synthorganic stories that were woven into this fictional universe's DNA. Every character, every subplot, the question of what we can do with technology and what the consequences are.
So I'm picking the end both because I thought it was a good end, and because I'm just so surprised and thrilled that they went in that direction.
If you're curious, or perhaps masochistic, a more formal, and hopefully less messy, analysis of what I think the ending was trying to do, why I think it worked but why I think so many people hated it, is here.
The beginning of Mass Effect 2, after you wake up. ARGH. I've already talked about how I have slightly conflicted feelings about ME2 in that it has some of my favourite characters and locations, but tonally, there's something about it that reminds me of movies where you wonder if random executives showed up and demanded changes for marketability.
Anyway, I really hate how they railroad you into working with the Illusive Man at the start of this game, as well as parts of how they handle your resurrection.
Now, I LOVE that Shepard is a cyborg. From the religious resurrection parallels to the technological implications, hell, I wish they went more into it if anything.
But I was always confused about like...well honestly about what the fuck went down. Because if Shepard was dead-dead for even a little while, then how the hell is she alive again? This franchise is usually a little better at inventing science for this shit, so I thought, like, maybe it was because of the Prothean Beacon that made her brain more able to like, withstand death or...something? Like I actually thought it must be that (which remains my personal retcon) so I was confused when nothing was really mentioned about it again. Because Liara recovering Shepard's body from whoever was going to sell it to the Shadow Broker and then handing it over to Cerberus instead, that doesn't sound like a sequence of events that happened in a short period of time. Like, it sounds like Shepard was DEAD dead.
I mean, I'm actually going to get back on point in a minute because I'm mostly sidetracking to a lesser issue here, but like, if Miranda can RESTART BRAINS, including all relevant chemical and electrical connections, that's fucking amazing! That's huge! I want to know more about that!
And if, instead, it was more like, one of the Broker's agents was trailing the Normandy and picked me up after I'd just been space-vacuumed for like a few hours, and then kept me in some sort of biotic stasis field/emergency life-support situation for the subsequent journey, that's more in keeping with what I know of the medicalness of the world, but equally, why not just say that...?
But as I said, I'm mostly just whining that it was a missed opportunity to tie in the Prothean Beacon for no good reason and that in turn ties into my more serious beefs with the Illusive Man's treatment in general.
Cus I really HATED how that was handled. I flat out did not want to work with him. And when I finally met him I hated that I wasn't given the option to refuse. Even if I had that option and they then shut me in a cell and I had to agree to "work with him" to get the Normandy back, I would have felt better about having been forced into it. Or, like, an easier option would have been to allow me to talk to the Council and have the same conversation I would have had anyway with them (or with Anderson if they were dead), where basically I get the cold shoulder and no funding. Then I have a legitimate reason to make a difficult decision based on available resources and evidence that the Alliance/the Council won't help me.
Instead, I make the decision to work with a known terrorist - who may have been responsible for the death of my entire squad and basically my Batman genesis story (I really don't get why Sole Survivor Shepard never gets to comment on this) - based on his word that the Council wouldn't help me, even though my last alive-memory was of being given permission by them to work on this threat.
It feels like massive and frustrating railroading that only works if you buy into the ~coolness~ of ~going rogue~. Or the ~moral ambiguity~ of working for Cerberus.
The other thing I have a problem with is the whole insistence the Illusive Man has that your brain be untouched and that he couldn't have a clone in case it didn't have your MAGICAL YOUNESS. It feels overly sentimental both for the universe and for the Illusive Man's general attitude. I do get that the total being more than the sum of the parts is a valid perspective, and if it was Shepard's unique personality that was important, that's not cloneable and might be affected by a control chip. I just don't get why he was so desperate for that personality. I don't get what Shepard did, exactly, to merit that level of hero worship from him other than the classic "you are the Chosen One," narrative that's rarely critiqued in video games which are based around self-insert hero fiction, really. But it jarred with me here. It broke the fourth wall and felt like an excuse for the character not to have fucked with your mind when obviously that's what you'd expect him to do.
Which leads us back to the far more sensible reason he should have given for not fucking with your brain: the Prothean Beacon! Because who knows how that would react to cloning or control chips either! And it's totally relevant to your mission! But no. Shepard is special, blah blah.
Shepard is already special. Shepard has an exceptional service record, saved the galaxy, has a beacon lodged in her brain and just came back from the dead. I don't need a peptalk on my additional superspecial awesomeness from a jackass. It just makes me feel coddled. Like movies when some uber boring whiny manchild becomes the Chosen One because everyone keeps telling him there's ~something special inside him~ with absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Except in this case there's boatloads of evidence! But apparently we STILL need that same speech as if there weren't, or as if it didn't count. Because speeches from random dudes about how there's "something special about you, Protagonist," are just so obnoxiously overused.
RARGH.
Ahem.
Okay. Yes, there, I'm done. But that's it. The bit I think represents the biggest narrative fumble. Probably because it would have been so easy to have make more sense. And yet it ended up being so infuriating.
Runner Up: KAI FUCKING LENG.
DONE!
I've been a bit scarce on the ground lately just because of life and crap. You know those parts of your life where you're just so battered by the complicated, ingrained...patternedness of it, you realise you've completely lost your ability to be objective about it. Like, you cope as well as you can and make the best decisions you can but you honestly have no idea if you're reacting to reality or a wounded perception of it. What do you do when stuff gets like that? There's probably not that much you can do. People outside the situation don't see its intricacies. Your eyes see things upside down and your brain flips them around and edits out the delay between seeing the information and processing it. All we ever see is an interpretation of reality.
So. Anyway. Let's talk about a different one.
Okay well the first thing to note is I'm not totally sure what this means... Because I'd totally pick EDI, who needs some love in this meme and sadly lost out to Tali in the female Squadmate entry, but the fact this specifies protagonist and NPC rather than Squadmate makes me wonder if this is supposed to be a non-Squadmate? Which she was in 2 but not in 3?
BUT THEN, I sort of struggle to think of many NPCs in Mass Effect who aren't squadmates who I'd be comfortable bestowing "Protagonist" status on. Like, there's a reason I went for the more minor characters - Aethyta or Al-Jilani, for "favourite NPC" and this seems like it should be bigger.
But then, you kind of get thin on the ground when you're looking for characters who aren't squad members but who still have enough narrative attention you could view them as a "protagonist". Like, Anderson and Joker maybe?
So, okay, whatever, YOU DON'T OWN ME, MEME, I'm gonna just pick EDI. Because I think she has a great storyline, she's funny, she's clever, and while her storyline sometimes runs a little close to The Robot Falls In Love (well okay, that's exactly it), it involves enough genuine science fiction and thoughtful discussion on the topic - and is balanced against the less humanistic Robotic Individual story we get from Legion and the Geth - that I kinda don't care.
I love that she was present in ME1, even though we didn't know it at the time. I love how central she becomes to the final conflict; regardless of Shepard's choice, EDI and Joker are intentionally symbolic of something to protect, strive towards or mourn.
She's also hilarious without being one note and Tricia Helfer's deadpan delivery is perfect. Anyone who hasn't played the Citadel with her in your squad to retake the Normandy, OH MY GOD GO DO THAT, GO DO THAT NOW IT'S A BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL THING.
Runners Up: Traynor (BECAUSE SHE IS PRECIOUS) and Urdnot Bakara/Eve (BECAUSE SHE IS AWESOME).
For this one, I'm going to go with Aria T'Loak. I know it's a slightly broad interpretation since you're never in outright conflict with her, but while I wouldn't call her an villain, given that she's the head of a criminal empire and even the most Renegade Shepard is a Spectre, I think antagonist works.
Besides, I think she's more interesting than any other antagonist except the Reapers themselves and they work best as a broader force, not, like, an actual character I want to talk about.
I love how magnificently she doesn't give a shit about your shit. It doesn't even come across as faking in order to get one up, she just does not care beyond mild interest. She manages to mix practical understatement with a dramatic weight that lets her pull of the PIRATE QUEEN OF THE TERMINUS SYSTEMS schtick.
She's magnificently bitter in this fabulously disinterested way and I think she does a lot to puncture a lot of the stereotypes about the Asari. She's not the wise, virginal "good" girl, and while she might at first appear to fit into that second category - the stripper-ninja seductress - that really is a comparison based solely on the criminality of her profession. She's got form-fitting clothes, for sure, but the eye is drawn to her gleaming, high-collared white leather jacket, collar-upturned like she's shutting out the world. It's regal, that high collar; it's also the trick a thousand cynical PIs use before they hussle out into the rain. I'm quite likely reading too much into it, but I think it's a costume choice that manages to both accentuate her character and stylishness - and sexiness - while making it clear that it's not for your benefit.
I wasn't totally sure I adored Aria the first time I met her, because I was approaching the entire ME2 game with a slightly annoyed "they're trying too hard," take. I think I took her initial "Don't FUCK with ARIA" introduction a little less well than I could have, feeling like it, too, was trying too hard. But then I realised she was as unimpressed as I was with well, basically everything that was pissing me off at that point in my gaming experience, and now I'm like BABY, I PROMISE NOT TO FUCK WITH YOU. (I mean when we take back Omega, I'm probably going to piss you off a little, but if I could, I'd buy you jewellery until we were friends again...)
The end of it. I genuinely and seriously think that the pre-Extended Cut ending was brilliant. It was thematically coherent and philosophically difficult, but honest. As the girl who played through ME2 hanging on Legion's every word, who thought the persistent, but subterranean questions about the boundaries between the synthetic and the organic, asked in transcendently positive contexts (EDI's personhood) as well as nightmarishly violent ones (the creation of a Reaper), as well as truly complicated discussions of the moral and ethical implications of our relationship to technology in broader terms (the Genophage, genetic engineering and biotic experimentation, the plight of the Quarians)... It was a fascinating and wonderful to see those themes grow and take on more prominence with each game.
I understand, then, why some gamers missed the significance; played through it without realising that these themes were always there, were always important, weren't second-fiddle to bad-ass destruction and a message of co-operation and victory through putting aside differences that I would never, ever call simplistic, but would very strongly argue is simple, in that it's a common, uplifting theme, and one we are all more primed to see in a big-budget military scifi action flick.
But it didn't come out of nowhere, and I think that the way it snuck up out of the background is actually kind of valuable to the way it works; to the reveal. The well-worn trope of reaching the end, and only then realising that you are part of something far larger than you ever realised, or perhaps, can comprehend - but it's always going to work better if that thing is both a surprise and something that makes sense.
For me, I guess I spent three games playing through, expecting the endgame to be a traditional, explosive victory, whether painted in unambiguously positive terms, or with the regal tragedy of Gladiator, and I was prepared to accept that, but I was also only expecting it because it didn't even occur to me to believe that they'd have the...guts, I guess is the word, or perhaps integrity? I don't wish to cause offence; but on this topic I fear it may be inevitable - to run with the synthorganic stories that were woven into this fictional universe's DNA. Every character, every subplot, the question of what we can do with technology and what the consequences are.
So I'm picking the end both because I thought it was a good end, and because I'm just so surprised and thrilled that they went in that direction.
If you're curious, or perhaps masochistic, a more formal, and hopefully less messy, analysis of what I think the ending was trying to do, why I think it worked but why I think so many people hated it, is here.
The beginning of Mass Effect 2, after you wake up. ARGH. I've already talked about how I have slightly conflicted feelings about ME2 in that it has some of my favourite characters and locations, but tonally, there's something about it that reminds me of movies where you wonder if random executives showed up and demanded changes for marketability.
Anyway, I really hate how they railroad you into working with the Illusive Man at the start of this game, as well as parts of how they handle your resurrection.
Now, I LOVE that Shepard is a cyborg. From the religious resurrection parallels to the technological implications, hell, I wish they went more into it if anything.
But I was always confused about like...well honestly about what the fuck went down. Because if Shepard was dead-dead for even a little while, then how the hell is she alive again? This franchise is usually a little better at inventing science for this shit, so I thought, like, maybe it was because of the Prothean Beacon that made her brain more able to like, withstand death or...something? Like I actually thought it must be that (which remains my personal retcon) so I was confused when nothing was really mentioned about it again. Because Liara recovering Shepard's body from whoever was going to sell it to the Shadow Broker and then handing it over to Cerberus instead, that doesn't sound like a sequence of events that happened in a short period of time. Like, it sounds like Shepard was DEAD dead.
I mean, I'm actually going to get back on point in a minute because I'm mostly sidetracking to a lesser issue here, but like, if Miranda can RESTART BRAINS, including all relevant chemical and electrical connections, that's fucking amazing! That's huge! I want to know more about that!
And if, instead, it was more like, one of the Broker's agents was trailing the Normandy and picked me up after I'd just been space-vacuumed for like a few hours, and then kept me in some sort of biotic stasis field/emergency life-support situation for the subsequent journey, that's more in keeping with what I know of the medicalness of the world, but equally, why not just say that...?
But as I said, I'm mostly just whining that it was a missed opportunity to tie in the Prothean Beacon for no good reason and that in turn ties into my more serious beefs with the Illusive Man's treatment in general.
Cus I really HATED how that was handled. I flat out did not want to work with him. And when I finally met him I hated that I wasn't given the option to refuse. Even if I had that option and they then shut me in a cell and I had to agree to "work with him" to get the Normandy back, I would have felt better about having been forced into it. Or, like, an easier option would have been to allow me to talk to the Council and have the same conversation I would have had anyway with them (or with Anderson if they were dead), where basically I get the cold shoulder and no funding. Then I have a legitimate reason to make a difficult decision based on available resources and evidence that the Alliance/the Council won't help me.
Instead, I make the decision to work with a known terrorist - who may have been responsible for the death of my entire squad and basically my Batman genesis story (I really don't get why Sole Survivor Shepard never gets to comment on this) - based on his word that the Council wouldn't help me, even though my last alive-memory was of being given permission by them to work on this threat.
It feels like massive and frustrating railroading that only works if you buy into the ~coolness~ of ~going rogue~. Or the ~moral ambiguity~ of working for Cerberus.
The other thing I have a problem with is the whole insistence the Illusive Man has that your brain be untouched and that he couldn't have a clone in case it didn't have your MAGICAL YOUNESS. It feels overly sentimental both for the universe and for the Illusive Man's general attitude. I do get that the total being more than the sum of the parts is a valid perspective, and if it was Shepard's unique personality that was important, that's not cloneable and might be affected by a control chip. I just don't get why he was so desperate for that personality. I don't get what Shepard did, exactly, to merit that level of hero worship from him other than the classic "you are the Chosen One," narrative that's rarely critiqued in video games which are based around self-insert hero fiction, really. But it jarred with me here. It broke the fourth wall and felt like an excuse for the character not to have fucked with your mind when obviously that's what you'd expect him to do.
Which leads us back to the far more sensible reason he should have given for not fucking with your brain: the Prothean Beacon! Because who knows how that would react to cloning or control chips either! And it's totally relevant to your mission! But no. Shepard is special, blah blah.
Shepard is already special. Shepard has an exceptional service record, saved the galaxy, has a beacon lodged in her brain and just came back from the dead. I don't need a peptalk on my additional superspecial awesomeness from a jackass. It just makes me feel coddled. Like movies when some uber boring whiny manchild becomes the Chosen One because everyone keeps telling him there's ~something special inside him~ with absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Except in this case there's boatloads of evidence! But apparently we STILL need that same speech as if there weren't, or as if it didn't count. Because speeches from random dudes about how there's "something special about you, Protagonist," are just so obnoxiously overused.
RARGH.
Ahem.
Okay. Yes, there, I'm done. But that's it. The bit I think represents the biggest narrative fumble. Probably because it would have been so easy to have make more sense. And yet it ended up being so infuriating.
Runner Up: KAI FUCKING LENG.
DONE!