Talking Meme: Day #17 (Part One)
From 
lafemmedarla: Favorite Shepards.
Okay, so, there are two ways to interpret this prompt. It could mean talk about my favorites out of my own Shepards, or it could mean talk about my favorites out of other people's Shepards.
Because it's me we're talking about, I figured: why not do both?
In this post: my own Shepards! (Well, five of them. Fiveish. It could possibly be read as six. I'm just saying. Shush.)
To be perfectly fair, I really do love all of my Shepards. I've played more of the game with some of them than others, though, so those tend to be the ones who -- at this point in time -- I'm closer to than the others. So those are going to be the ones who I talk about in this post.
Jay was my first Shepard. Her playthrough was the one where I learned how to play the game, so hers was also the one that didn't always go according to plan. I've played enough now to be able to make things go pretty much however I want, but that wasn't always the case with her.
She was a colonist from Mindoir. She was 16 when Batarian slavers attacked, and her parents and her twin brother, Robin, were killed. Her older sister, Raven, disappeared but her body was never found. Jay was haunted by that fact for years.
Jay spent the next two years bouncing around between group homes and foster care on a handful of Earth colonies. A few months before her 18th birthday, she managed to talk her way onto a freighter heading "anywhere but here" in exchange for doing any odd jobs they asked of her. One of the crewmen, a former Alliance marine, took Jay under his wing during the six months she spent on board the freighter. It was him who convinced her to join the Alliance.
They gave her the chance to find a home to replace the one she lost on Mindoir, and she took advantage of it. When the Skyllian Blitz happened, to Jay it was merely a second chance: she'd lost everything to the batarians once, and she wasn't prepared to let that happen again. She never intended on becoming a hero. She's a biotic, a sentinel, but she's always been better at tech than biotics.
For the most part, Jay was very much a paragon. As the war with the Reapers progressed, she had her renegade moments, but she never let herself go too dark. Whenever she felt herself slipping, she asked herself what her brother would have done in her place if he'd been the Shepard to survive. (In another world, one where Robin lived and Jay died, he did the same thing.)
Jay had a brief relationship with Liara during the mission to stop Saren, but after the Lazarus Project brought her back to life the two of them drifted apart. Which is when she found herself being drawn to Garrus instead.
("I wish you could have met my brother," Jay told Liara during that last party on the Citadel, near the end. "He wouldn't have-- I don't think he would have let you go." Liara gave her a brief kiss on the forehead and sent her to stop Garrus from rigging the punching bag with explosives.)
A brilliant engineer, Shayna grew up on the streets of Earth. She had a few vague memories of a woman who looked enough like her adult self that she had to have been Shayna's mother, but she doesn't really remember her. All she remembers are the streets, and the group homes, and the home she made among the Reds -- until she realized that no matter what they claimed, the gang wasn't a suitable replacement for the family she'd always wanted.
She threw herself into military life after joining the Alliance, and for awhile it was everything that she had wanted. Then Akuze happened, and she spent years trying to put the deaths of her entire squad behind her.
While Shayna tries to make the right choices most of the time, her childhood taught her that sometimes life doesn't give you the option of taking the high road. She's willing to get her hands dirty when she needs to, although she always tries to find another way whenever she possibly can.
During the mission to stop Saren, Shayna found herself drawn to Kaidan, and the two of them started a relationship. Before the final mission that led them to Alchera, it was starting to become something serious for both of them. And then Shayna died. After Project Lazarus brought her back to life, it was over a month before fate (and the Illusive Man's machinations) brought her face-to-face with Kaidan on Horizon.
She didn't take him calling her a "traitor" very well.
Then she met Thane, and everything changed. He made her smile, and then he made her laugh (and then he made her make several sounds whose inclusion in this post would push it into a NC-17 rating). But he also was well aware of everything that had happened between her and Kaidan, as well as the fact that -- while she loved him -- she also still loved Kaidan. And he was the one who pushed her to reconcile with Kaidan after he was injured on Mars, because if he had to die then he wanted to die knowing that someone was watching over her who loved her just as much as he did.
Naomi realized that she was in love with Ashley less than a month into their mission to stop Saren.
A spacer whose mother would have died on Shanxi if the Alliance forces hadn't surrendered when they had, she had grown up hearing the name "Williams" in a very different light than most people. Naomi was a soldier, plain and simple. She didn't have finesse, and she wasn't subtle, and in Ashley she found a kindred spirit.
Especially when the ghosts of everyone she'd watched die on Akuze came to visit her in her nightmares.
Three hours after she saw Ashley on Horizon, Naomi managed to destroy four different punching bags on the Normandy before resorting to punching the wall. Garrus and Kasumi then plied her with alcohol, and the next thing she knew she was waking up next to a smirking Jack in the engineering subdeck with no recollection whatsoever as to how she ended up there.
She then thought about Toombs, and Rodriguez and Smythe and Carrigan and Holmes and Patel and Thompson and everyone else who died in agonizing pain on Akuze thanks to Cerberus and their damned experiments. And she considered exactly how she would have reacted if she'd been in Ashley's shoes. At which point she resisted the urge to go see if they'd managed to magic up a new punching bag and instead carefully, oh so carefully, started writing a message to send to Ashley.
It took time, on both of their parts, but eventually? After Mars? After Udina? Both of them managed to forgive, if not forget.
Naomi saw the world in shades of gray. She'd take the paragon choice when she could, but if there was even a chance that it could cost the mission she was willing to go renegade. The one exception was when civilians were involved. Soldiers, mercenaries... they knew the risks. If there was any way possible not to do so, though, sacrificing civilians did. not. happen. on her watch.
Coraline (usually Shepard, and Cora to a very select few) lost her parents and all of her extended family on Mindoir. The only reason that she survived was because of her fledgling biotic abilities, which had manifested only a few months before the attack. A quiet girl who had always hidden her emotions, Cora dealt with her grief by accepting an offer for biotic training from an asari on the colony she was sent to with the rest of the refugees.
When she was old enough, Cora joined the Alliance and soon made a reputation for herself as someone who was willing to do whatever it took to get the job done. Torfan was the most prominent mission she went on that had a high casualty rate, but it was far from being the first or the last. That didn't mean she was cold or heartless. If there was another way, one that guaranteed results without deaths, she'd take it in an instant. And if there wasn't? She did what she had to do, and she never let herself forget the people who died.
Cora found herself drawn to Kaidan during the mission against Saren and, after some rocky moments as he tried to decide whether or not he could be involved with someone willing to do whatever it took, the two of them slowly decided that maybe if they survived the mission then they'd give it a try and see what happened. Except then Virmire happened, and Cora had a choice to make. And as much as she hated it, as much as part of her wished that she wasn't the type of person who was called the Butcher of Torfan, she left Kaidan behind that day.
As she fell toward Alchera, more than anything she simply felt relief. Except then she woke up, and two years of her life were gone, and Cerberus had brought her back, and she honestly couldn't force herself to give a damn about any of it.
So she went through the motions, doing what needed to be done and sometimes not even considering that there might be another way. Her scars didn't heal. Hell, if anything, they got worse. The people who had known her before Alchera worried. The people who hadn't known her before Alchera worried. Basically the only person in the universe who didn't worry was Ashley, who had no problem letting Cora know exactly what she thought when they met on Horizon, and -- by the time the Normandy had landed on Illium -- Cora was tired of, well, everything.
Then, at the top of the Dantius Towers, she met Thane. And he gave her a reason to care.
Both of Kari's parents were Alliance, although she barely remembered her father who died during the First Contact War. A very gifted biotic, Kari was already a rising star in the Alliance even before the Blitz. Afterwards? She was the perfect poster child for them, at least in their eyes.
She found herself being drawn to Liara during the mission against Saren, and she was just starting to realize how serious it was becoming for both of them when Alchera happened. Then she found herself waking up with two years of her life missing, no sign of her girlfriend for months until -- when they did finally come face-to-face -- she was all but ignored, all before the bombshell was dropped on her that Liara was the one who delivered her body to Cerberus in the first place.
Liara expected Kari to hate her for it. But how could she hate someone who had loved herself to risk everything for the chance that they could possibly get a second chance? The thought never even crossed her mind.
I'm not going to talk about Shea much, not right now, considering I'm in the process of writing what is going to end up being a hellishly long fic about her. I did want to at least mention her, though, even though I'm still pretty early in her story right now. Gamewise, I'm barely into ME1 with her, and -- while I do have some things figured out about her future -- it's much too early to really get into them without completely spoiling my own story.
The basics, though, that I can talk about. Shea is a spacer, born and raised. She never knew her father, as she was the result of a one-night stand. ("One night, one morning, and a good part of the afternoon, actually," her mother said thoughtfully, ignoring the horrified look on Shea's face.) She can make a few guesses about his physical appearance and race, based on her appearance versus her mother's, but that's about it.
Shea's a biotic whose abilities manifested early enough that the Alliance wanted to send her to BAaT, but her mother refused to let her daughter start military training -- even pseudo-military -- until she was older. She finally got a L3 when she was 17, as she'd decided by then to join the Alliance at 18 and wanted to give herself a little bit of time to train with an amp. A few years later, the Blitz made her a hero, but it also left her with quite a few scars: physical and mental.
No spoilers as to how she's going to get there or what the details will involve, but Shea is pansexual and very open in general with sexuality. She's going to be involved with both Ashley and Kaidan at some point or another (and possibly other people as well, although -- once again -- no details because I'm still getting to know her).
This entry has been crossposted to Dreamwidth, and it currently has
replies there. Comment on whichever site you prefer.
lafemmedarla: Favorite Shepards.
Okay, so, there are two ways to interpret this prompt. It could mean talk about my favorites out of my own Shepards, or it could mean talk about my favorites out of other people's Shepards.
Because it's me we're talking about, I figured: why not do both?
In this post: my own Shepards! (Well, five of them. Fiveish. It could possibly be read as six. I'm just saying. Shush.)
To be perfectly fair, I really do love all of my Shepards. I've played more of the game with some of them than others, though, so those tend to be the ones who -- at this point in time -- I'm closer to than the others. So those are going to be the ones who I talk about in this post.
Jay was my first Shepard. Her playthrough was the one where I learned how to play the game, so hers was also the one that didn't always go according to plan. I've played enough now to be able to make things go pretty much however I want, but that wasn't always the case with her.
She was a colonist from Mindoir. She was 16 when Batarian slavers attacked, and her parents and her twin brother, Robin, were killed. Her older sister, Raven, disappeared but her body was never found. Jay was haunted by that fact for years.
Jay spent the next two years bouncing around between group homes and foster care on a handful of Earth colonies. A few months before her 18th birthday, she managed to talk her way onto a freighter heading "anywhere but here" in exchange for doing any odd jobs they asked of her. One of the crewmen, a former Alliance marine, took Jay under his wing during the six months she spent on board the freighter. It was him who convinced her to join the Alliance.
They gave her the chance to find a home to replace the one she lost on Mindoir, and she took advantage of it. When the Skyllian Blitz happened, to Jay it was merely a second chance: she'd lost everything to the batarians once, and she wasn't prepared to let that happen again. She never intended on becoming a hero. She's a biotic, a sentinel, but she's always been better at tech than biotics.
For the most part, Jay was very much a paragon. As the war with the Reapers progressed, she had her renegade moments, but she never let herself go too dark. Whenever she felt herself slipping, she asked herself what her brother would have done in her place if he'd been the Shepard to survive. (In another world, one where Robin lived and Jay died, he did the same thing.)
Jay had a brief relationship with Liara during the mission to stop Saren, but after the Lazarus Project brought her back to life the two of them drifted apart. Which is when she found herself being drawn to Garrus instead.
("I wish you could have met my brother," Jay told Liara during that last party on the Citadel, near the end. "He wouldn't have-- I don't think he would have let you go." Liara gave her a brief kiss on the forehead and sent her to stop Garrus from rigging the punching bag with explosives.)
A brilliant engineer, Shayna grew up on the streets of Earth. She had a few vague memories of a woman who looked enough like her adult self that she had to have been Shayna's mother, but she doesn't really remember her. All she remembers are the streets, and the group homes, and the home she made among the Reds -- until she realized that no matter what they claimed, the gang wasn't a suitable replacement for the family she'd always wanted.
She threw herself into military life after joining the Alliance, and for awhile it was everything that she had wanted. Then Akuze happened, and she spent years trying to put the deaths of her entire squad behind her.
While Shayna tries to make the right choices most of the time, her childhood taught her that sometimes life doesn't give you the option of taking the high road. She's willing to get her hands dirty when she needs to, although she always tries to find another way whenever she possibly can.
During the mission to stop Saren, Shayna found herself drawn to Kaidan, and the two of them started a relationship. Before the final mission that led them to Alchera, it was starting to become something serious for both of them. And then Shayna died. After Project Lazarus brought her back to life, it was over a month before fate (and the Illusive Man's machinations) brought her face-to-face with Kaidan on Horizon.
She didn't take him calling her a "traitor" very well.
Then she met Thane, and everything changed. He made her smile, and then he made her laugh (and then he made her make several sounds whose inclusion in this post would push it into a NC-17 rating). But he also was well aware of everything that had happened between her and Kaidan, as well as the fact that -- while she loved him -- she also still loved Kaidan. And he was the one who pushed her to reconcile with Kaidan after he was injured on Mars, because if he had to die then he wanted to die knowing that someone was watching over her who loved her just as much as he did.
Naomi realized that she was in love with Ashley less than a month into their mission to stop Saren.
A spacer whose mother would have died on Shanxi if the Alliance forces hadn't surrendered when they had, she had grown up hearing the name "Williams" in a very different light than most people. Naomi was a soldier, plain and simple. She didn't have finesse, and she wasn't subtle, and in Ashley she found a kindred spirit.
Especially when the ghosts of everyone she'd watched die on Akuze came to visit her in her nightmares.
Three hours after she saw Ashley on Horizon, Naomi managed to destroy four different punching bags on the Normandy before resorting to punching the wall. Garrus and Kasumi then plied her with alcohol, and the next thing she knew she was waking up next to a smirking Jack in the engineering subdeck with no recollection whatsoever as to how she ended up there.
She then thought about Toombs, and Rodriguez and Smythe and Carrigan and Holmes and Patel and Thompson and everyone else who died in agonizing pain on Akuze thanks to Cerberus and their damned experiments. And she considered exactly how she would have reacted if she'd been in Ashley's shoes. At which point she resisted the urge to go see if they'd managed to magic up a new punching bag and instead carefully, oh so carefully, started writing a message to send to Ashley.
It took time, on both of their parts, but eventually? After Mars? After Udina? Both of them managed to forgive, if not forget.
Naomi saw the world in shades of gray. She'd take the paragon choice when she could, but if there was even a chance that it could cost the mission she was willing to go renegade. The one exception was when civilians were involved. Soldiers, mercenaries... they knew the risks. If there was any way possible not to do so, though, sacrificing civilians did. not. happen. on her watch.
Coraline (usually Shepard, and Cora to a very select few) lost her parents and all of her extended family on Mindoir. The only reason that she survived was because of her fledgling biotic abilities, which had manifested only a few months before the attack. A quiet girl who had always hidden her emotions, Cora dealt with her grief by accepting an offer for biotic training from an asari on the colony she was sent to with the rest of the refugees.
When she was old enough, Cora joined the Alliance and soon made a reputation for herself as someone who was willing to do whatever it took to get the job done. Torfan was the most prominent mission she went on that had a high casualty rate, but it was far from being the first or the last. That didn't mean she was cold or heartless. If there was another way, one that guaranteed results without deaths, she'd take it in an instant. And if there wasn't? She did what she had to do, and she never let herself forget the people who died.
Cora found herself drawn to Kaidan during the mission against Saren and, after some rocky moments as he tried to decide whether or not he could be involved with someone willing to do whatever it took, the two of them slowly decided that maybe if they survived the mission then they'd give it a try and see what happened. Except then Virmire happened, and Cora had a choice to make. And as much as she hated it, as much as part of her wished that she wasn't the type of person who was called the Butcher of Torfan, she left Kaidan behind that day.
As she fell toward Alchera, more than anything she simply felt relief. Except then she woke up, and two years of her life were gone, and Cerberus had brought her back, and she honestly couldn't force herself to give a damn about any of it.
So she went through the motions, doing what needed to be done and sometimes not even considering that there might be another way. Her scars didn't heal. Hell, if anything, they got worse. The people who had known her before Alchera worried. The people who hadn't known her before Alchera worried. Basically the only person in the universe who didn't worry was Ashley, who had no problem letting Cora know exactly what she thought when they met on Horizon, and -- by the time the Normandy had landed on Illium -- Cora was tired of, well, everything.
Then, at the top of the Dantius Towers, she met Thane. And he gave her a reason to care.
Both of Kari's parents were Alliance, although she barely remembered her father who died during the First Contact War. A very gifted biotic, Kari was already a rising star in the Alliance even before the Blitz. Afterwards? She was the perfect poster child for them, at least in their eyes.
She found herself being drawn to Liara during the mission against Saren, and she was just starting to realize how serious it was becoming for both of them when Alchera happened. Then she found herself waking up with two years of her life missing, no sign of her girlfriend for months until -- when they did finally come face-to-face -- she was all but ignored, all before the bombshell was dropped on her that Liara was the one who delivered her body to Cerberus in the first place.
Liara expected Kari to hate her for it. But how could she hate someone who had loved herself to risk everything for the chance that they could possibly get a second chance? The thought never even crossed her mind.
I'm not going to talk about Shea much, not right now, considering I'm in the process of writing what is going to end up being a hellishly long fic about her. I did want to at least mention her, though, even though I'm still pretty early in her story right now. Gamewise, I'm barely into ME1 with her, and -- while I do have some things figured out about her future -- it's much too early to really get into them without completely spoiling my own story.
The basics, though, that I can talk about. Shea is a spacer, born and raised. She never knew her father, as she was the result of a one-night stand. ("One night, one morning, and a good part of the afternoon, actually," her mother said thoughtfully, ignoring the horrified look on Shea's face.) She can make a few guesses about his physical appearance and race, based on her appearance versus her mother's, but that's about it.
Shea's a biotic whose abilities manifested early enough that the Alliance wanted to send her to BAaT, but her mother refused to let her daughter start military training -- even pseudo-military -- until she was older. She finally got a L3 when she was 17, as she'd decided by then to join the Alliance at 18 and wanted to give herself a little bit of time to train with an amp. A few years later, the Blitz made her a hero, but it also left her with quite a few scars: physical and mental.
No spoilers as to how she's going to get there or what the details will involve, but Shea is pansexual and very open in general with sexuality. She's going to be involved with both Ashley and Kaidan at some point or another (and possibly other people as well, although -- once again -- no details because I'm still getting to know her).
This entry has been crossposted to Dreamwidth, and it currently has
replies there. Comment on whichever site you prefer.