Carrying Across A Threshold Or Getting Ready To Chuck? Place Your Bets Here, People!

already seeing "ugh male Rook with Neve in the trailer... that's a LESBIAN" posts on twitter and I'm beating them with a big stick that says "you can HEADCANON whatever you want about anything ever but your HEADCANON is factually incorrect and if it chaps your ass even a little bit when anyone up to and including the literal creators of the character disagrees with your HEADCANON then that's fully a you problem and you should consider developing coping skills about it rather than contributing to this fandom's legendary hostility by policing (even in a manner you'll claim was "joking" when someone stands up for themselvs) people who are only enjoying their own playthrough, headcanon, or ship" and by stick I do mean the block button

"The resources used to write Halsin could have been used to write more for Wyll!"

No. They literally could not. Wyll and Halsin were assigned to entirely different writers. If Halsin had never been made a companion, Wyll would have the exact same amount of content he does now. If anyone would have ended up with more content in the hypothetical alternate universe where Halsin wasn't a companion, it would have been Shadowheart, who shares the same writer as Halsin.

Criticize the lack of content for Wyll, because it deserves to be, but stop trying to make it sound like Wyll's storyline was scrapped in favor of the Gay Bear Sex Fund.

I have been thinking a lot about the entire Coop-Barb-Janey subplot, not only from a viewer's perspective but also a writer's perspective and here's some thoughts of what we might expect in S2 and/or S3:

☢️ Similarly to S1, S2 could open with a scene set in 2077 showing Coop separating from Janey. It'd be safe to assume that at one point Barb swooped in and took Janey with her to one of the good vaults.

Henry/Hank, being Barb's assistant, might have been directly involved. It would explain why Coop later thinks he might know where both of them are

Coop probably doesn't know that for a simple reason: contrarily to the experiment vaults, the location of the high management vaults must be top secret and the entrance must be well disguised and well protected

Side note: Barb and Janey are definitely not in vault 31. They are not listed on the terminal that Norm checks in one of the scenes

☢️ I think that throughout the season/s we'll get some flashbacks of Coop and Barb from the moment he found out about the bombs all the way to their divorce

I theorize Barb was the one to file for divorce, and one of the reasons was she feared his association with "commies" would lose her (and by extension her daughter) the spot in a good vault

I saw an affair angle being mentioned. I'd say it's not out of the realm of possibility. Still, if there was a third man, it would not be Hank but some high ranking executive, someone who could grant Barb that spot in a good vault.

If there was an affair and it was mostly calculated, I think there could still have been an element of genuine attraction there. The way in which Barb accuses Coop of being an ingenue, makes me think she'd be inclined to develop an attachment to someone who is the opposite of that, someone who'd make her feel safe and supported

Side note 1: the affair angle would tie nicely with the fact that Coop appears to think of his family as having been taken from him

Side note 2: ghoulcy shippers might find it interesting that the side of Coop's character that Barb seemed to resent, is the one Lucy would probably appreciate the most

☢️ All that said, Coop will most certainly find Barb and Janey at the end of S2 or at least will find out where they are and will only literally find them at the end of S3. @earthgenre made an interesting post exploring what might have happened to them. I personally am convinced they were cryo-frozen and one of the following will turn out to be true:

They were awakened, lived and died a long time ago (or were just never frozen in the first place) and Coop will have to deal with the fact that they are just... gone.

They were awakened some time earlier but by now Barb is dead and Janey is all grown up, perhaps with a husband and child/ren, or alternatively she's already old. It could make for a heartfelt reunion but in the end, the two would have to go their separate ways.

They are both still in their cryopods. Coop gets to see his wife and daughter again and is faced with a choice to either awaken them or let them sleep. It would be a test of character for him. If this one came true, I think he'd either let them sleep or awaken them just for a moment of closure and then let them go back to sleep again in wait for a better tomorrow.

You may have noticed I didn't include any scenario in which they reconcile and walk together into the sunset. This is simply because I don't think it's really an option. I mean, could you imagine Barb, the clean-cut corporate exec, traveling across the wasteland with her ex who now is also a radioactive flesh-eating ghoul? And dragging their little daughter along with them?

On the other hand, Coop wouldn't subject them to that. Yes, he's been looking for them all this time but it would be very silly of him to expect them to reunite and just go live happily ever after. And he's a lot of things but silly is not one of them. I don't think he wants to get them back. He just wants to know what the hell happened to them. Closure is what he wants and what he'll probably eventually get.

As much as I'd love to see Coop get back what he'd lost, I recognize that it wouldn't make much sense, narratively speaking. Cooper's journey appears to be about two things: regaining his lost humanity and letting go of the past. He cannot turn back into a human but he can become a better man (ghoul?) with strong(er) morals. Similarly, he cannot get his family back, not really, not even if he finds them alive, but he can always get himself a companion - someone whom he could cherish and protect, someone whom he could literally live for - and the narrative so far seems to imply that companion is meant to be Lucy. I won't elaborate further on that because there's already a gazillion posts quoting various parallels and foreshadowing elements than seem to be pointing somewhere in that direction.

At the end of it, I just wanna say, there is no way back, but there is always a way forward and that, I think, is the lesson Cooper is supposed to learn.

Are y’all telling me you looked at Lucanis and expect him to have the understanding of himself that he’s demisexual?

The man doesn’t even realize he can buy his own wyvern tooth dagger with his own money. He’s not doing that kind of reflection.

Ok, so I've never been able to get out of my head the thought of companions who have to tie Durge up every night as a safety precaution while whoever Durge romanced gives them an affectionate kiss at night on the forehead before saying goodnight.

Because then it means any bandit who is dumb enough to try to attack them will get to see not only the companions armed but one particular tied up person in their camp fish flopping out of their bedroll while shouting, "Let me up! I can help!"

While said companions are saying, "No! You're not allowed to disembowel like last time!"

I'll never get tired of seeing Halsin included in this cutscene. It was....not a fun discovery back in the older versions seeing him missing. I figured I'd at least settle for Tav exploring this tower without anyone on the team if Halsin wasn't showing up, but the game auto selected 2 random teammates instead 😑.

It's often the little things like that, that can enhance a game for me.

There are a couple more Garrus-Vakarian-related hills I'm willing to die on.

Maybe this particular bit of fanon has faded over the years, but there used to be a lot of insistence that Garrus is young and somehow inexperienced when he meets Shepard. Canon doesn't really support this. Turians start their mandatory service at 15. Garrus has at least a decade of experience. Even if he's 2-4 of years younger than Shepard (according to Patrick Weekes), he's got at least as much field experience as she does by dint of the difference in turian and human "enlistment" ages.

Garrus is really damn good at his job at C-Sec. You don't give the Case of Investigating the Rogue Spectre to a greenhorn. You give it to your best, most tenacious agent. Pallin may not always approve of Garrus's actions, but that doesn't actually stop him from putting Garrus on the tough case. Also, we don't know much about how C-Sec works but we do know a bit about how the turian hierarchy works, and we know C-Sec was essentially a turian initiative. That means it's a meritocracy where failure reflects on the superior, not the one who failed. So, in roughly a decade (Shepard's 29 in ME1; I always think of Garrus as about 27), Garrus has not only done shipboard military service, but he's also risen to be one of C-Sec's top investigators; Pallin wouldn't risk having Garrus's "failure" reflect poorly on HIM otherwise. I'd say that actually makes Garrus as remarkable in civilian law enforcement terms as Shepard is considered to be within the ranks of the Alliance military.

Of course Garrus was scouted by the Spectre program. And honestly, if his dad hadn't stepped in, I think Garrus would have become a Spectre, no problem. Especially for a turian, he's cut from precisely the cloth the Spectres would be looking for: extremely skilled, extremely capable, and--most importantly--he's a turian not just able but willing to work outside the chains of command that turians are taught from birth to revere and be loyal to above all else. This is the reason Pallin is leery about Spectres: he's a good turian. Good turians follow straight lines; they don't carve out their own paths.

Garrus's dad's not dumb, and he's not cruel, and he, too, rose to the top of the C-Sec hierarchy. He took one look at his kid, I think, and said, "I love my child, but I'd say it's a 50-50 chance he ends up a shooting-first-asking-questions-later Spectre like Saren Arterius, and I don't want to see that happen." Yeah, he uses his parental influence to try and jam square-peg-Garrus into round-hole-C-Sec and Garrus resents him for it, but there's no way he did it just to stop his son from getting his way or because he doesn't like Spectres. I expect Vakarian Sr. had to clean up more post-Spectre-interference messes than we can possibly imagine. But we also know he and Alec Ryder were pals later.

So the importance of what Garrus learns from a Paragon Spectre Shepard is this: You can't just do what you want and claim the ends always justify the means. That's what Saren does. Over and over again. Garrus's code and his idealism and his sense of justice and his ability to work alone should make him a great Spectre, actually, but he needs Paragon Spectre Shepard's actions to show him the lesson he tells her he's learned during ME1: "If the people I'm sworn to protect can't trust me... well, then I don't deserve to be the one protecting them." (And the seed of Archangel was planted.) I think for the first time he realizes that even though he believes his sense of justice to be correct, it doesn't matter for shit if he can't show others why that's so. And that's where the trust comes in. (Also, ow, the extra level of importance this gives their exchange where she tells him she trusts him and he tells her she's about the only friend he has left is... a lot. Cool, cool. I'm totally fine. Nothing to see here.)

When Shepard asks him what happened on Omega, he replies, "My feelings got in the way of my better judgement." Something tells me that this never happens to "good" turians, which just makes the line so much more devastating. And although the lesson some might take away from this is "feelings bad; no feelings ever," the "grey" that Garrus has to learn to deal with is precisely the grey of recognizing feelings, validating them even, but not acting on them until they've been examined. (Which is why my Shepard stands between him and Sidonis; she doesn't give a shit about Sidonis. But Garrus has refused to process his own feelings of failure and self-loathing, so they have to take the therapy session to the Citadel and deal with it there.)

Ahh yes. The mountain range of character analysis.

To add to this, Garrus can die in the suicide mission in ME2. ME3 is designed to go on without him in that scenario. You can flat out refuse to let him on the team in ME1. I have literally done a Shepard run who kept him off the team as much as possible (and discovered that his romance hinges on being on the team in ME1).

Meanwhile, I'm finding out that Liara had intentionally stayed quiet in ME1 about Tali's crush to increase her chances of getting with Shepard. That in of itself isn't a bad thing, but it does bring up questions as to whether she refused to update Ashley/Kaidan (to whom Shepard could even be romantically involved with) for the same reasons. She somehow can remember details on Tali's masturbation habits from 6 months ago to spite her in front of Shepard, but she couldn't remember to update Shepard's potential girlfriend/boyfriend about them being in Cerberus hands?! We should not be wondering whether Horizon is the result of Liara trying to sabotage Shepard's potential romantic relationship at Shepard's expense.

This is one of the many reasons why Liara creeps out people.

if u haven't read it a lot of liara's more action-oriented shift was told in the comics. the shadow broker DLC didn't quite capture how much effort she went thru to secure shep's body and how big feron's role. i personally welcome the change and while i like archeologist liara i think her ME1 characterization is so superficial. she's mostly just a fan girl. the shift is abrupt but it's nice that in ME2 she has her own thing going on outside shepard cos i believe the writers wrote her as the canon love interest in mind so her character often suffers from the fangirl disease. i think a lot of people in the fandom dislike how the game shove her to us so much. which is funny since another famous shepard ship is garrus, who's equally as pushed as liara and is just as much of a shep fan. it's just that he's a guy so he doesn't suffer sexist hate.

I haven't read/seen anything outside the games, no! I've been thinking of getting into that, but first I'd like to sort out all of my feelings wrt the main event - the games. I feel like if I got into the "peripheric" media, it could maybe influence how I view the games and i want to analyze those by themselves (i'm thinking i'll finish this playthrough + another one in which i might or might not play as mshep) and then see about everything else. Thank you for the rec, though! I knew there was extra stuff about tali and garrus but this is the first i'm hearing about liara <3

And well... let's be real, most of the squad is part of the Shepard fan club, even those that can't be romanced, like Grunt and Wrex. The fact that Shepard gets a breeding request in Tuchanka after completing grunt's loyalty mission is like the most Mary Sue thing ever (and I don't necessarily mean this in a bad way). The asari, sex symbols of the galaxy, are throwing themselves at them left and right (Liara, Shiala, arguably Sha'ira, Morinth...). Shepard is the main character, everyone wants a piece of them. It's one of the entertaining parts of the games (or at least I have a lot of fun with it, if maybe a little bit ironically).

I suppose people might single out Liara because she's the one whose actions are the most extreme, and thus it crosses the line from "cute" to "creepy", but she's not the only one. Legion literally wears the armor off their dead body. As I said in my post, maybe her actions and/or attitude aren't 100% justifiable, but they are understandable.

I'm not sure about the game pushing Garrus as a love interest (I think the game itself is skeptical of the player making this choice, like when Shepard says she "can't believe she finds comfort in the arms of a turian" or something like that), but I do think he's definitely meant to be one of the characters that's most influenced by Shepard, regardless of gender.

Personally, I think him being so popular a choice (at least on Tumblr, which has a mostly female userbase compared to other social media) is due to him being a man, yes, but not necessarily because of sexism (or not always), but because het ships are farrrr more popular than femslash. Also, it's very clear how much he respects Shepard in basically every aspect, and it's incredibly fucking rare to see a het relationship in such equal ground, especially with a """bad guy""" lmao. (though ME in general does quite good in that regard I think, the romances in general are not toxic™️ or unequal) (mostly... ignoring that Shepard is basically everyone's boss... lol).

I completely agree that there's a double standard in how female characters are expected to behave vs male ones, and from what i've seen Liara is 100% a victim of this (I had the very bad idea of reading some threads on reddit...yikes). I don't know the fandom enough to know how it compares in relation to Garrus in particular, though, or if there's a correlation between Shakarian fans and Liara haters.

Apparently people thing Halsin is....problemati?????