I Love Liara To Death But Sometimes It Does Frustrate Me How Hard The Games Push You Towards Her. I'm

i haven’t been able to finish my current me3 playthrough yet due to my brother hogging the xbox so he can play ARC: Evolved but here’s a list of things i remembered i hate in the OT in no particular order

the elevators

the asari

mark meer’s voice acting in ME1

liara’s writing if you don’t romance her (wtf bioware)…especially considering that the reason i generally DON’T romance her is because in ME1 at least, it feels like an adult dating a teenage girl.

femshep’s romance options and how most of them get fucking shafted to shit in ME3

how heteronormative ME2 was

jacob taylor’s loyalty mission and how racist it was

how racist and lazy the writing for jacob taylor was in general (ofc there are many reasons i dislike jacob in and of itself, but some it can be chalked up to bad writing)

jack’s chuppy ass default outfit in me2 (really bioware??? a woman could have the smallest titties in existence and she still wouldn’t be able to strap ‘em down with just a fucking belt. even if this game was written by mostly men, that’s still dumb as hell)

miranda’s largely unnecessary ass-shots

thane’s death

kai leng

that fact that you can’t call out kaidan for his bullshit cheating accusations in ME3 if you DO choose to romance someone else in ME2 as femshep if you romanced him in ME1, but mshep can do that to ashley (????? BIOWARE!)

the fact that an aro ace shepard it practically impossible to play after a certain point in the series without being a complete dick (and if you play the citadel dlc, impossible as femshep! because if you don’t romance anyone you wake up next to javik! lmao)

the fact that the dlc for the ME2 and 3 literally never goes on sale on pc like it does for the console versions, forcing me to pirate shit i already fucking paid for because i am unwilling to shell out £200+ on this shit again because EA and bioware are lazy money-grubbing fucks thanks ea thanks very much for your business practices

related to the above, but why did they never sell me2 or 3 with all the dlc included? that shit would sell like no one’s business…oh wait, EA…again.

the elevators

fully do not get the thing about halsin coming on too strong at the tiefling party bc like...that's the party where you can flirt with *everybody* and at that point halsin turns you down too.

even before the party lae'zel asks you very up front if you wanna bone and i dont hear ppl saying lae'zel is too pushy (btw i don't think so either, her bluntness is part of her charm)

also when you actually can get with halsin in act 3, he's very respectful abt it, including if you turn him down. i do think some ppl are overthinking things and just aren't ready to deal with their negative ideas about polyam ppl 🤷

Wasn't expecting to get called out so early this morning.....

That's neurodiversity babe!

Yes. And it's a modded versions of all the Shepards I've made. I've had painful longings since the release of ME3 for mods to "fix" Shepard but it took years, help from friends and money to finally afford the tools needed to mod and I've kept the results on my phone since.

Is your phone wallpaper a fictional character?

Hey there! It’s been a while 🤝🏻

Huge thanks to @ladysakurascout for commissioning and supporting me through this long period of time while I was just off and couldn’t draw at all:’)

Now I happily rewatched fallout tv series (I believe it must be around 10th or 15th time :’D) and can share this with you ♥️

a lot has talked about it now but i am never getting over cooper denying dogmeat was his dog with such quickness, lucy could barely get out the question. and when roger said lucy was cooper's smoothie. that man said nothing. all he does is talk. and he said nothing. the camera didn't even pan to him or his face or nothin'. they didn't even pan to lucy's. it really is foreshadowing, i'm sick

This series of polls is regarding whether people like or dislike a character, with anon explaining that they would like to connect with people who have similar feelings to them regarding the characters. So, for the purposes of these polls, I will not be checking tags/replies/comments (and I suggest that anyone else who doesn't want to see their faves get hate take the same approach). If you really want to highlight something POSITIVE about a character, you can send me an ask and I'll (probably) post it. Be kind to real people, and do NOT say anything bigoted. (Also I reserve the right to delete these polls at any time if I feel they're getting out of hand.)

There will be one poll for every companion/advisor (if you want any other specific major characters to have a poll, dm me or send an ask). As this will be a lot of polls, I'm tagging them as 'feelings polls' for those who don't want to get spammed to filter.

In case anyone wants to hear it in game or keep his approval level low so that he never brings up romantic feelings, casting charm or friendship scrolls or spells on him will artificially lower it for you every time it's cast. Just make sure to stop once he hits Low Approval and you'll get to hear the disapproving snark in all its glory without him leaving the party.

Or just keep going if you want him to leave.

low approval/annoyed Halsin is so funny he's just

"I can NOT be assed to help you useless twats but FINE... I will anyway for FUCK'S sake"

Liara can technically die but it requires:

A very low Galactic Readiness score

Her to be on the Beam run

So essentially, you have to screw over the entire galaxy to ensure her death if you're not choosing the Control ending (or can't because you blew up the Collecter Base).

Thing is, death shouldn't be the only way to be "free" of a character. Maintaining the dialogue options we used to have in ME1 would have gone a long way. It's also not like Liara was the only one to suffer from Railroading But Thou Must Dialogue in ME3 as we had that with Garrus as your best bud no matter what, Samara somehow is OK with a Renegade Shep instead of defaulting to violence like she promised or Jack somehow forgot that Shep can have always hated Cerberus and blew up the base as an F U.

It's that I wish Bioware had given players more choices instead of trimming them down to their preferences. I wish they had given us the option to temporarily fight with Mordin and Wrex during the Tuchanka mission. I wish we could have fought alongside with Thane on the Citadel with him on our team. I wish Bioware had put in more time and effort to care about other teammates players might have cared more about.

I wish, that a good chunk of the ME3 cutscenes weren't so heavily reliant on Liara. When I just got done with her time capsule request, I was checking emails to find out she's looking for an excuse to see Shepard immediately after. Then I find out her mother thinks Shepard only listens to Liara because they want to sleep with her (NO. NO I DON'T. THAT'S NOT FUNNY. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY NO TO LIARA?!).

Right after another, I'm getting inundated with Liara wanting special time with Shepard. You cannot skip the cabin requests with Liara if you want to speak with other teammates. You can't get additional war assets if you don't talk to Aethyta. You can't get your dog tags back if you don't invite Liara to your cabin in ME2. They have wound so much content around Liara's presence that you cannot avoid her completely.

The content is not subtle about making sure Liara is present in Shepard's life no matter what.

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.