30 Days of Mass Effect: Days ALL THE REST! WE ARE DONE! HALLELUJAH!
HOME STRETCH! Might we actually finish this today? Goodness! (And what shall I post about next...)
26. Place You Would Most Like To Visit
The Citadel. It's amazing. I mean, also EVERY SINGLE PLANET that's not Earth because WOW PLANETS, but like, if I can only choose one place, then yeah. The impossible feat of engineering that forms the heart of galactic civilisation, for sure.
27. Favourite OST Track
Ugh, I'm pretty much in love with the entire ME3 soundtrack. You know, Clint Mansell, who was the primary composer, and who composes beautiful, beautiful film scores - he has this gorgeous, minimalist style that I never tire of. Yeah, well, him. He also spent much of the 80s and 90s as the lead singer for Pop Will Eat Itself, who were my husband's favourite band when I met him, and whom I hate. Well okay, hate is a strong word, but I'm definitely not a big fan of their music. Weirdness.
Anyway, if I have to pick one track it'd be Leaving Earth. It mixes the understated sorrow of the piano with the fantastic, deep, disruptive and threatening Reaper horns. It's a really beautiful, poignant and atmospheric piece.
28. Destroy, Control or Synthesis?
Oh god, what with the ending explosion this is such a loaded question. And it's a shame because I think it's part of why the ending is brilliant. Destroy/Control/Synthesis might as well be Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis, and that's why I think they're three really well-chosen options. I firmly believe they mean different things depending on the context of your journey and why you choose them, but ultimately, this choice is about contextualising your journey. It's about making a statement about the type of Shepard you wanted to be.
I think that the ending doesn't work without all three options. I think there are interesting reasons to choose all of them. I have, now, played narratively through the game with three different Shepards from start-to-finish and I ended up with each one picking a different final choice. I'm sure it was partly based on a desire for symmetry, but they all had stories where what they did...made sense.
That said, the ending of my heart will always be Synthesis. I'm a transhumanist, I love cyborgs and I'm still slightly stunned that a mainstream fictional property engaged with those themes in quite such an obvious and unapologetic way. I suppose it paid the price for that; I also didn't realise they were still so alien to a mainstream audience. I think that will...change as time passes. Or maybe not.
Anyway, I suppose I should also admit that I find it hard to view the Destroy ending as anything other than a tragedy. Like I said, I think there are compelling reasons to choose it anyway, but it's a pyrrhic victory at best and in my more cynical moments I do wonder how much of the arguments that it "fails" narratively on "multiple levels" really comes down to, "it didn't follow a narrative pattern that I find familiar and/or makes me comfortable."
I really, strongly resent the at-times pervasive attitude that the only acceptable final choice is "Destroy" and if you choose anything else you're a sucker. Or, worse than that, you're a terrible human being without morals. It got so weirdly personal. Again, in my more cynical moments, I can only assume a large number of people argued from a place of such outrage because it was easier than examining the instability of their position. I think what they were outraged at was the lack of moral superiority in the choice and so they tried to manufacture some.
And I don't get them; I never have. Yeah, Synthesis involves a choice that changes the lives of every single living being in the galaxy, without their specific consent. Yes that's huge. Yes, maybe that's something your Shepard wouldn't do. But anything you do up on that platform, including nothing will affect the lives of every living being in the galaxy. If we start arguing that the genocide of the Geth is less morally reprehensible than giving everyone nanobots because there are fewer Geth, or you don't care about robots, or they volunteered to join the war and knew the risks, well, we're already arguing relative loss, acceptable loss. If I found out someone had massacred an entire sentient race of robots because of my potential discomfort (and despite myths that seem to circulate, the ending to Synthesis doesn't imply that everyone has (a) become Husks or (b) become the Same Species or (c) is in any kind of immediate physical pain), I would be horrified.
I don't expect everyone's math to be the same as mine, but I got really tired, really quickly, of being told that mine made me Rape Hitler. (Because OMFG the inappropriate rape analogies. OMFG.)
At the risk of sounding overwrought, the "DESTROY OR YOU'RE A MONSTER!" propagandist attitude that was (is) prevalent in certain sections of the interwebs was one of the most vile, ugly, hostile and completely unselfaware displays of bullying I've seen in fandom in a long time. Excluding shit pertaining to actual systems of kyriarchal violence. Although, I do think that one of the reasons it disturbed me so much was that it reminded me of the fact that video games fandom is so fucking bullshit full of sexist, racist, homophobic bigots. And I'm not saying it wouldn't have exploded quite so spectacularly in another fandom, but there was just something about the tone involved that felt like it came from that same place of outrage - how dare they not tailor this game to me, I am here to defend myself from even the tiniest suggestion that I broaden my horizons and embrace something that's not about a stubbly white man blowing shit up as part of a masturbatory power fantasy. Like the fact that games companies have to fight to even have a woman on the cover of a game, even in the background, in a passive posture, it's like the war against anything other than a straight, white, cis, hetero, able-bodied dude as the protagonist, even down to hairstyle and beard type, has been won so completely why the hell NOT start on the narrative and see if you can't achieve the same kind of "it's just what sells" hegemony there?
Ugh.
Okay and there's the other reason I shouldn't talk about this at length. It makes me bitter and angry. And I am! And I don't think I'm entirely irrational in being so! But it's still not fun and it still leads me to make sweeping angry statements.
So yeah, sometimes it's appropriate in a narrative that you just want to Blow Shit Up at the end, but given our current media landscape, I really appreciated that this game took the stance that, if you believe that there can be no readjustment of perspective, that it's too dangerous, that it's safer just to blow it up regardless of collateral damage, you can do that. That is a legitimate perspective to have and a legitimate choice to make. But it will cost you. It will actually cost you actual stuff not just tears and manpain.
Finally, I'm always surprised Control gets so overlooked as a moral solution. Synthesis is my personal favourite, but Control is arguably the most ethical. It leaves everything pretty much as is, the only exception being the Reapers, which, pre-Extended Cut at least, are left open-ended allowing you to choose how your Shepard will use them which would, I imagine, mitigate a lot of the worries about that ending. I have one friend who decided that she didn't believe she wouldn't one day become just like the Catalyst or get indoctrinated, so she immediately told all the Reapers to simply lower their shields and power down, allowing the fleets to destroy them all, and her inside. If you want to be sure civilisation is rebuilt, you can force them to do that, and then plan to send them into a black hole if punishing them is important to you. If you're worried about the synthetic vs organic conflict as the Catalyst was, you can keep them around as a peacekeeping force rather than a genocidal one. It's pretty damn vast and is an ending that doesn't involve killing anyone or modifying them without permission.
Well, anyway, there are too many, too judgemental words on the final choice.
29. What Would You Like To See Next? (DLC, More Books, Spin Off, Nothing Else)
Nothing. Really, nothing.
I'm a sucker for sequels because there's part of my brain that always, always wants to know what happens next. And I think sequels can be redemptive because if the story isn't over, recontextualisation is still possible. But they can also ruin things and as I've gotten older, I've increasingly found my natural desire for endless stories at war with the appreciation of a good ending. A clean ending.
Things that end well are rare. So many of my fictional loves collapse as they continue. I've been disappointed so many times.
By now, if something ends well... I think that's worth protecting.
So, you know, I think there probably are ideas for Mass Effect 4 that would intrigue me enough to check it out. Hell, I think a game set on Omega during the two years Shepard was dead, where you either play as either Garrus-as-Archangel or Aria, and it's a noir piece, and you play through as one of them, and then reimport and play through as the other and all your choices as the first person you played through affect your second playthrough as Garrus and Aria work with-and-against each other? (NOT THAT I'VE THOUGHT ABOUT IT OR ANYTHING). That'd be amazing. Or a game set at the end of the last cycle with the fall of the Prothean Empire. Or even a game set during the First Contact War.
But all these things are distant and distinct from the trilogy. They aren't directly going to affect that story, not even the one about Garrus, not really, because that trilogy I think should stay as a complete, independent story.
And the direct sequel most people I see commenting on it seem to be clamouring for? I think that's doomed to failure. No sequel could properly account for the vast differences in the final choice, and by choosing a canon ending, ugh, I don't know. That feels...all kinds of depressing and wrong. The entire point of the ending is to make a statement contextualising your journey and the Shepard you were. A canon choice is tantamount to a "right" choice and that's just...yuck.
I always liked that the default choices for the previous game, should you not import, were always the equivalent of having, basically, had the minimum requirements for survival and completion of the game and nothing more. No choice is the same as a bad choice.
So yeah.
I don't want anything else official. If anything else official comes out, I'll take it or leave it based on how much of my interest it piques but I don't need it, and that's a pretty nice situation to be in.
I suppose, though, if we're wishing, then what I want is for the fandom to continue existing actively, so I don't feel I have to rush to finish all the fanworks I want to make before it dissipates. I want things to settle to a point where mentioning you liked the ending doesn't immediately result in someone popping up to go, "Oh, yeah, but you're only saying that cus you played with the Extended Cut. Oh, wait, you didn't? Ah, then clearly you just don't understand, let me link you to these sixteen articles and four YouTube documentaries."
If I was really wishing hard, I'd also wish for it to become less common that all fanworks are based around choosing the Destroy ending, partly because of the baggage I have with it, but also just because variety, people! It's awesome! And I want to hear stories about Shepard the Computer God and a Shepardless synthetic world as well as stories about human Shepard waking up and rebuilding the galaxy.
But people will write what they play, which is also okay, and some of my favourite fanworks have a Destroy ending somewhere in their canon.
SO! Since what I really want to see next is more awesome fan stuff, why not rec some?
Against the Tide - Mass Effect fan animation - highly stylised and very gorgeous - it's like a three-dimensional shadow puppet show. Female Shepard, Thane Romance, Destroy ending.
I'm now going to rec two fic WIPs which I know is annoying to some people, hell it's annoying to me! But these are good enough and long enough already that even if they never get finished, I feel they're worth your time.
That Which Was Lost - This is an AU where Benezia (Liara's mother) didn't die on Noveria, but was instead incapacitated and put into stasis until they could fix her head at a later date. Now, after a vaguely-Destroylike ending, Shepard is unconscious and Liara has returned to Thessia to try to rebuild, with her suicidal mother in tow, and Aethyta roped, very reluctantly and angrily into babysitting duty to make sure Benezia doesn't totally lose it.
The fic is written almost entirely from either Liara, Benezia or Aethyta's perspectives, and each one is rich and different. The anon!author has described this fic as her love letter to Liara and that's a really apt description. It's a fantastically interesting look at her character and how she's changed - the Liara Benezia remembers is almost entirely unrecognisable. This Liara is slowly realising that to achieve her goals she will need to wage cultural revolution, to learn to be a demagogue, all the while she is afraid she is not afraid of being a dictator - she has grown so used to absolute, unquestioned power as the Shadow Broker.
Benezia is almost a blank slate of a character, but somehow she manages to feel exactly as she should given the tiny snippets we got in ME1 - simultaneously tired of tradition and horrified by its abandonment, unable to connect with her daughter or the world, unsure how to live with herself, but brilliant and regal all the same.
Finally, Aethyta's POV is perhaps my favourite. Hilarious and sarcastic in the middle of a slow-moving, haunting story of democracy and politics, it's a perfect counterpoint and perfectly in character. But, at the same time, it has some of the most affecting segments. The story doesn't let you forget that this is the family Aethyta was thrown out of, and that she has lived too long, and outlived people she should not have.
Samara and Falere make striking entrances in later sections and while it's not being updated as frequently as it was, it is still active and probably racks up at about 50k words already.
You may note from the link above that it's a fill for a kink meme. I don't participate in enough of those to be aware of all the tropes, but I'm fairly certain even the epic "this fill got away from me!" fills are expected to involve some actual kink? So in the interests of not misleading anyone, so far this story has been entirely safe-for-work. The link above is to the first section of the series, and after that post hit 10k comments, it was continued here and that's where it's currently being updated.
It's also going up on FF.net but more slowly, though it's reasonably up-to-date. It's probably three or four chapters behind the kink-meme updates. Anyway, if you prefer to read there - here is the link.
Queen's Gambit Accepted: This is another EEEEPICCCC WIP that I think it worth reading on its own merits. It's basically Mass Effect 3 from the perspective of Samantha Traynor, headed towards a Sam/Shepard romance.
The author's characterisation of Traynor is fantastic - sharp and funny and self-deprecating. Her version of Shepard is fascinating too - she's not quite Paragon or Renegade and nowhere near as generic as Shepards can often be, but she still fits. She's angry a lot of the time and closed-off to the point she seems lost sometimes, but what's interesting is watching her grow from a distant figure to someone Samantha is starting to get to know, because that is, of course, not an experience we ever got in the games. Sam comes to this most of the way through Shepard's story; after she's been killed, after she's been betrayed by Cerberus, after she's spent years screaming that the Reapers were coming and no one would listen.
The other thing that impresses me about this fic is that it manages to do genuinely interesting things with her job as a communications specialist. Seeing Sam's story as it weaves in and out of Shepard's main narrative - watching her actually patching communciations and hearing Shepard's squads chatter sounds like it should be boring, but it never is. The author is inventive and deft in the ways she manages to show you events from entirely new angles.
This fic is already pushing 100k and it's only just about reached the Genophage Cure which tells you something about the detail and care that's going into it. As I said, it's well worth a read even if it goes no further, but it's getting regular updates. Not quite weekly, but well above monthly.
Dragon Effect - Art by Andrew Ryan designing Mass Effect characters in the style of Dragon Age and it is gorgeous. There's a giant portrait of, well, everyone and also individual portraits. Alas Femshep, Jacob and Ashley aren't included but pretty much everyone else is. I particularly love Joker as a dragon-rider.
Mass Effect Family by Virak - An incredible piece of artwork I need on a giant poster hanging along the top of my wall someday. Seriously, I think every single character (including both flavours of Shepard) that ever had anything more than a one-scene appearance is in this. Stare at it for a while and you'll start noticing more and more stuff...
StellarStateLogic on DeviantArt made three amazing diagetically framed pieces of art for each ending:
- Krogan Mural depicting the Destruction of the Reapers.
- Quarian-Geth Tapestry woven in commemoration of Shepard ending the Reaper War by assuming Control.
- Asari Fresco showing Shepard, the Battle-Maiden, leading the war against the Reapers in light of the Synthesis ending.
30. Overall Opinion on the Mass Effect Trilogy
Aaah, dude, if you've read even part of this meme, you already know what I'm gonna say. I think it's epic and awesome.
I think that in places it stumbles, while it'll always be dear to me for the ways in which it doesn't follow the narrative conventions of the genre, in many places it does exactly that, with mixed results. I've spoken about the way I think it too often relies on the rousing GIVE THEM HELL speech, or the self-justification that humans, and Shepard in particular is special because of Pluck and Being Chosen. Fuck the fact it took three games to even get a reversible cover with female Shepard. Fuck the fact only lesbians are allowed in space. You know, it's messy and imperfect.
But among all that, it tells a genuinely epic story that I find genuinely interesting and unusual in its choice of focus. I think it manages to use the medium to tell a story as a truly different experience than it would be in film or print. I think the Mass Effect Universe is one of the more interesting fictional universes of our times. I think it's worth noting that this level of customisation and cross-game importing has never been done before.
Ultimately, and I will risk sounding like a pretentious git to say it, I think it was before its time. Despite all the military jingoism, it was always underscored by the cosmicist, godlessness of the universe in which it was set. It was quietly atheistic and existentialist and transhumanist in its themes. And none of those are precisely "ahead" of this time, but as the core message of a megafranchise, I don't know. I think that was pretty unexpected and probably where at least some of the backlash came from.
I also think that's a valuable thing, a beautifully surprising thing.
This was the video game trilogy that taught me video games and branching narratives could still tell stories that owned my soul, not in spite of the medium, but, perhaps, because of it.
I suspect I'll always love these games.
Now if only they'd release the whole bloody thing with all the DLC on the disc. I WOULD PAY MONEY FOR THAT. But it'll probably get released as a remastered version for the XBone 180. BOOOOO. Ahem. ;)
26. Place You Would Most Like To Visit
The Citadel. It's amazing. I mean, also EVERY SINGLE PLANET that's not Earth because WOW PLANETS, but like, if I can only choose one place, then yeah. The impossible feat of engineering that forms the heart of galactic civilisation, for sure.
27. Favourite OST Track
Ugh, I'm pretty much in love with the entire ME3 soundtrack. You know, Clint Mansell, who was the primary composer, and who composes beautiful, beautiful film scores - he has this gorgeous, minimalist style that I never tire of. Yeah, well, him. He also spent much of the 80s and 90s as the lead singer for Pop Will Eat Itself, who were my husband's favourite band when I met him, and whom I hate. Well okay, hate is a strong word, but I'm definitely not a big fan of their music. Weirdness.
Anyway, if I have to pick one track it'd be Leaving Earth. It mixes the understated sorrow of the piano with the fantastic, deep, disruptive and threatening Reaper horns. It's a really beautiful, poignant and atmospheric piece.
28. Destroy, Control or Synthesis?
Oh god, what with the ending explosion this is such a loaded question. And it's a shame because I think it's part of why the ending is brilliant. Destroy/Control/Synthesis might as well be Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis, and that's why I think they're three really well-chosen options. I firmly believe they mean different things depending on the context of your journey and why you choose them, but ultimately, this choice is about contextualising your journey. It's about making a statement about the type of Shepard you wanted to be.
I think that the ending doesn't work without all three options. I think there are interesting reasons to choose all of them. I have, now, played narratively through the game with three different Shepards from start-to-finish and I ended up with each one picking a different final choice. I'm sure it was partly based on a desire for symmetry, but they all had stories where what they did...made sense.
That said, the ending of my heart will always be Synthesis. I'm a transhumanist, I love cyborgs and I'm still slightly stunned that a mainstream fictional property engaged with those themes in quite such an obvious and unapologetic way. I suppose it paid the price for that; I also didn't realise they were still so alien to a mainstream audience. I think that will...change as time passes. Or maybe not.
Anyway, I suppose I should also admit that I find it hard to view the Destroy ending as anything other than a tragedy. Like I said, I think there are compelling reasons to choose it anyway, but it's a pyrrhic victory at best and in my more cynical moments I do wonder how much of the arguments that it "fails" narratively on "multiple levels" really comes down to, "it didn't follow a narrative pattern that I find familiar and/or makes me comfortable."
I really, strongly resent the at-times pervasive attitude that the only acceptable final choice is "Destroy" and if you choose anything else you're a sucker. Or, worse than that, you're a terrible human being without morals. It got so weirdly personal. Again, in my more cynical moments, I can only assume a large number of people argued from a place of such outrage because it was easier than examining the instability of their position. I think what they were outraged at was the lack of moral superiority in the choice and so they tried to manufacture some.
And I don't get them; I never have. Yeah, Synthesis involves a choice that changes the lives of every single living being in the galaxy, without their specific consent. Yes that's huge. Yes, maybe that's something your Shepard wouldn't do. But anything you do up on that platform, including nothing will affect the lives of every living being in the galaxy. If we start arguing that the genocide of the Geth is less morally reprehensible than giving everyone nanobots because there are fewer Geth, or you don't care about robots, or they volunteered to join the war and knew the risks, well, we're already arguing relative loss, acceptable loss. If I found out someone had massacred an entire sentient race of robots because of my potential discomfort (and despite myths that seem to circulate, the ending to Synthesis doesn't imply that everyone has (a) become Husks or (b) become the Same Species or (c) is in any kind of immediate physical pain), I would be horrified.
I don't expect everyone's math to be the same as mine, but I got really tired, really quickly, of being told that mine made me Rape Hitler. (Because OMFG the inappropriate rape analogies. OMFG.)
At the risk of sounding overwrought, the "DESTROY OR YOU'RE A MONSTER!" propagandist attitude that was (is) prevalent in certain sections of the interwebs was one of the most vile, ugly, hostile and completely unselfaware displays of bullying I've seen in fandom in a long time. Excluding shit pertaining to actual systems of kyriarchal violence. Although, I do think that one of the reasons it disturbed me so much was that it reminded me of the fact that video games fandom is so fucking bullshit full of sexist, racist, homophobic bigots. And I'm not saying it wouldn't have exploded quite so spectacularly in another fandom, but there was just something about the tone involved that felt like it came from that same place of outrage - how dare they not tailor this game to me, I am here to defend myself from even the tiniest suggestion that I broaden my horizons and embrace something that's not about a stubbly white man blowing shit up as part of a masturbatory power fantasy. Like the fact that games companies have to fight to even have a woman on the cover of a game, even in the background, in a passive posture, it's like the war against anything other than a straight, white, cis, hetero, able-bodied dude as the protagonist, even down to hairstyle and beard type, has been won so completely why the hell NOT start on the narrative and see if you can't achieve the same kind of "it's just what sells" hegemony there?
Ugh.
Okay and there's the other reason I shouldn't talk about this at length. It makes me bitter and angry. And I am! And I don't think I'm entirely irrational in being so! But it's still not fun and it still leads me to make sweeping angry statements.
So yeah, sometimes it's appropriate in a narrative that you just want to Blow Shit Up at the end, but given our current media landscape, I really appreciated that this game took the stance that, if you believe that there can be no readjustment of perspective, that it's too dangerous, that it's safer just to blow it up regardless of collateral damage, you can do that. That is a legitimate perspective to have and a legitimate choice to make. But it will cost you. It will actually cost you actual stuff not just tears and manpain.
Finally, I'm always surprised Control gets so overlooked as a moral solution. Synthesis is my personal favourite, but Control is arguably the most ethical. It leaves everything pretty much as is, the only exception being the Reapers, which, pre-Extended Cut at least, are left open-ended allowing you to choose how your Shepard will use them which would, I imagine, mitigate a lot of the worries about that ending. I have one friend who decided that she didn't believe she wouldn't one day become just like the Catalyst or get indoctrinated, so she immediately told all the Reapers to simply lower their shields and power down, allowing the fleets to destroy them all, and her inside. If you want to be sure civilisation is rebuilt, you can force them to do that, and then plan to send them into a black hole if punishing them is important to you. If you're worried about the synthetic vs organic conflict as the Catalyst was, you can keep them around as a peacekeeping force rather than a genocidal one. It's pretty damn vast and is an ending that doesn't involve killing anyone or modifying them without permission.
Well, anyway, there are too many, too judgemental words on the final choice.
29. What Would You Like To See Next? (DLC, More Books, Spin Off, Nothing Else)
Nothing. Really, nothing.
I'm a sucker for sequels because there's part of my brain that always, always wants to know what happens next. And I think sequels can be redemptive because if the story isn't over, recontextualisation is still possible. But they can also ruin things and as I've gotten older, I've increasingly found my natural desire for endless stories at war with the appreciation of a good ending. A clean ending.
Things that end well are rare. So many of my fictional loves collapse as they continue. I've been disappointed so many times.
By now, if something ends well... I think that's worth protecting.
So, you know, I think there probably are ideas for Mass Effect 4 that would intrigue me enough to check it out. Hell, I think a game set on Omega during the two years Shepard was dead, where you either play as either Garrus-as-Archangel or Aria, and it's a noir piece, and you play through as one of them, and then reimport and play through as the other and all your choices as the first person you played through affect your second playthrough as Garrus and Aria work with-and-against each other? (NOT THAT I'VE THOUGHT ABOUT IT OR ANYTHING). That'd be amazing. Or a game set at the end of the last cycle with the fall of the Prothean Empire. Or even a game set during the First Contact War.
But all these things are distant and distinct from the trilogy. They aren't directly going to affect that story, not even the one about Garrus, not really, because that trilogy I think should stay as a complete, independent story.
And the direct sequel most people I see commenting on it seem to be clamouring for? I think that's doomed to failure. No sequel could properly account for the vast differences in the final choice, and by choosing a canon ending, ugh, I don't know. That feels...all kinds of depressing and wrong. The entire point of the ending is to make a statement contextualising your journey and the Shepard you were. A canon choice is tantamount to a "right" choice and that's just...yuck.
I always liked that the default choices for the previous game, should you not import, were always the equivalent of having, basically, had the minimum requirements for survival and completion of the game and nothing more. No choice is the same as a bad choice.
So yeah.
I don't want anything else official. If anything else official comes out, I'll take it or leave it based on how much of my interest it piques but I don't need it, and that's a pretty nice situation to be in.
I suppose, though, if we're wishing, then what I want is for the fandom to continue existing actively, so I don't feel I have to rush to finish all the fanworks I want to make before it dissipates. I want things to settle to a point where mentioning you liked the ending doesn't immediately result in someone popping up to go, "Oh, yeah, but you're only saying that cus you played with the Extended Cut. Oh, wait, you didn't? Ah, then clearly you just don't understand, let me link you to these sixteen articles and four YouTube documentaries."
If I was really wishing hard, I'd also wish for it to become less common that all fanworks are based around choosing the Destroy ending, partly because of the baggage I have with it, but also just because variety, people! It's awesome! And I want to hear stories about Shepard the Computer God and a Shepardless synthetic world as well as stories about human Shepard waking up and rebuilding the galaxy.
But people will write what they play, which is also okay, and some of my favourite fanworks have a Destroy ending somewhere in their canon.
SO! Since what I really want to see next is more awesome fan stuff, why not rec some?
Against the Tide - Mass Effect fan animation - highly stylised and very gorgeous - it's like a three-dimensional shadow puppet show. Female Shepard, Thane Romance, Destroy ending.
I'm now going to rec two fic WIPs which I know is annoying to some people, hell it's annoying to me! But these are good enough and long enough already that even if they never get finished, I feel they're worth your time.
That Which Was Lost - This is an AU where Benezia (Liara's mother) didn't die on Noveria, but was instead incapacitated and put into stasis until they could fix her head at a later date. Now, after a vaguely-Destroylike ending, Shepard is unconscious and Liara has returned to Thessia to try to rebuild, with her suicidal mother in tow, and Aethyta roped, very reluctantly and angrily into babysitting duty to make sure Benezia doesn't totally lose it.
The fic is written almost entirely from either Liara, Benezia or Aethyta's perspectives, and each one is rich and different. The anon!author has described this fic as her love letter to Liara and that's a really apt description. It's a fantastically interesting look at her character and how she's changed - the Liara Benezia remembers is almost entirely unrecognisable. This Liara is slowly realising that to achieve her goals she will need to wage cultural revolution, to learn to be a demagogue, all the while she is afraid she is not afraid of being a dictator - she has grown so used to absolute, unquestioned power as the Shadow Broker.
Benezia is almost a blank slate of a character, but somehow she manages to feel exactly as she should given the tiny snippets we got in ME1 - simultaneously tired of tradition and horrified by its abandonment, unable to connect with her daughter or the world, unsure how to live with herself, but brilliant and regal all the same.
Finally, Aethyta's POV is perhaps my favourite. Hilarious and sarcastic in the middle of a slow-moving, haunting story of democracy and politics, it's a perfect counterpoint and perfectly in character. But, at the same time, it has some of the most affecting segments. The story doesn't let you forget that this is the family Aethyta was thrown out of, and that she has lived too long, and outlived people she should not have.
Samara and Falere make striking entrances in later sections and while it's not being updated as frequently as it was, it is still active and probably racks up at about 50k words already.
You may note from the link above that it's a fill for a kink meme. I don't participate in enough of those to be aware of all the tropes, but I'm fairly certain even the epic "this fill got away from me!" fills are expected to involve some actual kink? So in the interests of not misleading anyone, so far this story has been entirely safe-for-work. The link above is to the first section of the series, and after that post hit 10k comments, it was continued here and that's where it's currently being updated.
It's also going up on FF.net but more slowly, though it's reasonably up-to-date. It's probably three or four chapters behind the kink-meme updates. Anyway, if you prefer to read there - here is the link.
Queen's Gambit Accepted: This is another EEEEPICCCC WIP that I think it worth reading on its own merits. It's basically Mass Effect 3 from the perspective of Samantha Traynor, headed towards a Sam/Shepard romance.
The author's characterisation of Traynor is fantastic - sharp and funny and self-deprecating. Her version of Shepard is fascinating too - she's not quite Paragon or Renegade and nowhere near as generic as Shepards can often be, but she still fits. She's angry a lot of the time and closed-off to the point she seems lost sometimes, but what's interesting is watching her grow from a distant figure to someone Samantha is starting to get to know, because that is, of course, not an experience we ever got in the games. Sam comes to this most of the way through Shepard's story; after she's been killed, after she's been betrayed by Cerberus, after she's spent years screaming that the Reapers were coming and no one would listen.
The other thing that impresses me about this fic is that it manages to do genuinely interesting things with her job as a communications specialist. Seeing Sam's story as it weaves in and out of Shepard's main narrative - watching her actually patching communciations and hearing Shepard's squads chatter sounds like it should be boring, but it never is. The author is inventive and deft in the ways she manages to show you events from entirely new angles.
This fic is already pushing 100k and it's only just about reached the Genophage Cure which tells you something about the detail and care that's going into it. As I said, it's well worth a read even if it goes no further, but it's getting regular updates. Not quite weekly, but well above monthly.
Dragon Effect - Art by Andrew Ryan designing Mass Effect characters in the style of Dragon Age and it is gorgeous. There's a giant portrait of, well, everyone and also individual portraits. Alas Femshep, Jacob and Ashley aren't included but pretty much everyone else is. I particularly love Joker as a dragon-rider.
Mass Effect Family by Virak - An incredible piece of artwork I need on a giant poster hanging along the top of my wall someday. Seriously, I think every single character (including both flavours of Shepard) that ever had anything more than a one-scene appearance is in this. Stare at it for a while and you'll start noticing more and more stuff...
StellarStateLogic on DeviantArt made three amazing diagetically framed pieces of art for each ending:
- Krogan Mural depicting the Destruction of the Reapers.
- Quarian-Geth Tapestry woven in commemoration of Shepard ending the Reaper War by assuming Control.
- Asari Fresco showing Shepard, the Battle-Maiden, leading the war against the Reapers in light of the Synthesis ending.
30. Overall Opinion on the Mass Effect Trilogy
Aaah, dude, if you've read even part of this meme, you already know what I'm gonna say. I think it's epic and awesome.
I think that in places it stumbles, while it'll always be dear to me for the ways in which it doesn't follow the narrative conventions of the genre, in many places it does exactly that, with mixed results. I've spoken about the way I think it too often relies on the rousing GIVE THEM HELL speech, or the self-justification that humans, and Shepard in particular is special because of Pluck and Being Chosen. Fuck the fact it took three games to even get a reversible cover with female Shepard. Fuck the fact only lesbians are allowed in space. You know, it's messy and imperfect.
But among all that, it tells a genuinely epic story that I find genuinely interesting and unusual in its choice of focus. I think it manages to use the medium to tell a story as a truly different experience than it would be in film or print. I think the Mass Effect Universe is one of the more interesting fictional universes of our times. I think it's worth noting that this level of customisation and cross-game importing has never been done before.
Ultimately, and I will risk sounding like a pretentious git to say it, I think it was before its time. Despite all the military jingoism, it was always underscored by the cosmicist, godlessness of the universe in which it was set. It was quietly atheistic and existentialist and transhumanist in its themes. And none of those are precisely "ahead" of this time, but as the core message of a megafranchise, I don't know. I think that was pretty unexpected and probably where at least some of the backlash came from.
I also think that's a valuable thing, a beautifully surprising thing.
This was the video game trilogy that taught me video games and branching narratives could still tell stories that owned my soul, not in spite of the medium, but, perhaps, because of it.
I suspect I'll always love these games.
Now if only they'd release the whole bloody thing with all the DLC on the disc. I WOULD PAY MONEY FOR THAT. But it'll probably get released as a remastered version for the XBone 180. BOOOOO. Ahem. ;)