I Cannot Believe There's Absolutely No Way To Watch Free Shows And Movies Anymore, There Are Too Many

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 🤷

People are so weird about Halsin and other characters, I hate fandom sometimes.

Smaugust 2024 by Katy Lipscomb

-Give him content in ME3. Not this token effort that we all saw was just a way of saying, "Of course we didn't forget all your teammates!" Players should have had the option to pick who they wanted on their team for a certain number of teammate slots.

-His script should never have been butchered to make assumptions on behalf of the player. That's what that infamous Femshep greeting came off as: Bioware thinking we'd be so hot to trot for a character we never even got the chance to get to know. His line about how the Normandy is Shepard's love REALLY rubbed people the wrong way.

-Seriously, more effort should have been put into Jacob's story. He should have been part of the main story, trying to take down the Illusive Man after seeing all that madness. Jacob's original writing that had him proactive and seeking to do some actual good would have meant that he'd have been as tenacious in setting things right by bringing karma onto the Illusive Man for misleading him.

how i‘d rewrite jacob to make him a more likable squadmate:

• femshep‘s interactions with jacob would sound normal. none of them would sound flirtatious unless shepard is actually pursuing a romance with jacob.

• if you dump jacob for garrus, cut out the line where he calls garrus a cuttlebone. jacob is supposed the be the nice, good guy, the one who gives cerberus a good image, not some racist prick who uses first contact slur. this move was especially bad since garrus is a trusted squadmate! really, bioware? an easy way to make a character hated is to make home insult a character that is that popular among players.

• don‘t make him say „miranda deserves a better man“ in regards to his past relationship to miranda, and then have him be able to romance shepard. that makes it seem as if he is still head over heels for miranda but settling for shepard, who he thinks doesn‘t deserve a better man.. unlike miranda. cut out that line.

• leave out the ‚heavy risk but the priize‘ line. it‘s so dumb. it objectifies shepard and it‘s just cringy.

• he‘s supposed to be the nice guy yet miranda is more polite than he is. jacob should not be saying he is not in the mood to talk; he should be more open towards shepard

• let us find out more about his past life. he was a privatee with the corsairs, what was that like? also where did he grow up, which colony? why did he join the alliance? how long has he been with cerberus and how did he come to join them exactly? how did he find out about the organization?

• for his romance, make it a serious romance, not some hook up. give jacob and shepard a movie night date on the normandy in the starboard port and have them watch blasto and have us learn jacob has seen all the blasto movies. or have jacob play videogames with shepard. giving him a little of a nerdy side would have make him much cooler.

• to make him more sympathetic, write jacob as being the one who helped jack get the coordinates of teltin facility. after the confrontation between jack and miranda, jacob felt so awful that he decided to help jack sort through the files so she could get the coordinates of that place and nuke it. this would actually prove he is that kind hearted nice man he was supposed to be

• have him apologize to thane at some point, saying he was wrong about him. this would‘ve been a pretty great opportunity to give jacob some small character development

• don‘t have him cheat on femshep, most importantly.

Same here. It wasn't enough that she intentionally got pregnant, abandoned the Nexus and the people who needed her expertise, stole dwindling resources from a group who were facing hostile forces, she had also doomed her kid to a future that had no pleasant end in sight until Ryder started making major steps in turning the odds around.

And she had the. Gall. To be patronizingly smug with no remorse for what she did.

The game even acknowledged she's prone towards selfish actions but instead of giving the player and Ryder a chance to be furious with her for it, we're forced into a position and dialogue where we're supposed to admire her for it when she gives birth.

And the game does not let you refuse this quest. You will see it every time you go to the map or your journal.

This mission makes me so mad I've never finished it. I cannot stand talking to Zoe or Addison about it and there are no consequences to make me want to save this selfish woman from her actions despite me having a completionist streak for even the most innocuous side missions.

On a side note, has anyone else noticed that every single pregnant character in Mass Effect is written to be as obnoxious as possible?! Rebekah being willing to take a larger risk with her baby, Brynn rubbing the fact that she went after Jacob in Shepard's face if Shepard romanced him and that he's better off with her WHILE SHEPARD IS RESCUING THEM, what is up with Bioware doing that?! It's as weird as their tendency to write every one of Femshep's male LIs needing to talk about their exes before she can romance them.

CONFESSION:

For the most part, I enjoyed Andromeda despite the problems/flaws but there was a couple of quests that infuriated me, with one being "The Little Things that Matter". I thought Dr Kennedy was freaking selfish. I wanted to call her out and Addision out for kissing her friend's ass. If I ever do another playthrough, that will be quest I won't do.

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.

I really do like headcanoning that a shakarian romance would have a great impact on turian-human relations throughout the galaxy (especially if we pretend that SPOILER Shepard somehow doesn't die).

Because Shepard definitely is a public figure, especially by the time ME3 rolls around and Garrus is calling Shepard his girlfriend left and right. But the first contact war only happened 26 years before ME1 so tensions are obviously still fresh between their two species. But also, as media has always shown us, a romance is always more sexy and compelling than a peace treaty.

So maybe Shepard and Garrus accidentally actually make relations between their two species really really good. Like repairing decades old wounds good. The two militaries start doing more joint trainings together because of the proof of how good Shepard's team is. More ships like the Normandy are built. Turian-human romantic relationships gradually become less and less of a taboo with them being the poster children for it.

And maybe they never say anything officially but various sources have overheard Garrus Vakarian refer to himself as Shepard's boyfriend and in both political and casual settings Commander Shepard is rarely seen without her right hand turian attached to her hip.

And as much as they both claim to want to retire post-war, the workaholics in them keep them active in their military and politics. So the cameras are still on them constantly, but since they're respected war heroes, the major news networks feel like speaking on their personal lives and asking questions would be inappropriate. And yet, the talking points Garrus and Shepard choose are often about how they are campaigning for more inter-species adoption and how cross-species colonies are vital to the galaxy's rebuilding efforts right now. And Garrus is often seen taking calls from Earth and Shepard from Palaven. So their legacy and mystery continues, and both turians and humans seen their friendship or romance as a pillar in their diplomacy efforts.

Met a couple of elderly British ladies at one of my jobs long ago. One of them said, "Cheery bye" before leaving and I was so charmed by it, but sadly she already gone.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: the hate Halsin gets is confusing and undeserved.

I have an assignment due this week, so naturally I’ve spent all day thinking about a relatively minor aspect of Halsin’s characterisation: his sense of humour.

I haven’t often seen Halsin being funny in fanfic, and while there are probably good reasons for that (writers, including me, love to put him in angsty situations – or just PWP – where humour doesn’t necessarily fit) it makes me a little sad, because his sense of humour is something I really love about him. So I thought I’d do a little bit of analysis of his sense of humour as it appears in a few moments in canon.

First up, this comment he makes to Karlach, saying that being in the Underdark ‘dampens one’s sense of fun’ because ‘noises such as laughter tend to attract predators’:

He’s ostensibly talking about the Society having a dampened sense of fun, but of course it’s also an allusion to his own time in the Underdark, and so I think it’s reasonable to read the 'dampened sense of fun' line as referring to himself as well. I have Thoughts about what this quote says in terms of his time with his drow captors and what a formative experience it was for him, but keeping on topic, it points to something that’s backed up by the rest of canon: his sense of humour is dry, it's not performative or showy, and while I think he’s quite often joking he’s not often telling jokes.

Secondly, we have a moment from one of the conversations you can have with him in act 3 about his dislike for the city. He talks about his dream to find a better way where everyone can be cared for, and then he chuckles and says ‘Listen to me, preaching like an initiate in his cups.’

To me, this is quintessential Halsin sense of humour. He’s not telling a joke, he’s not even really trying to make the PC laugh; he’s just poking fun at himself in a wry sort of way. He’s also using humour as a defence mechanism here, I think; he’s minimising the impact of a potential dismissive response from the PC by undercutting his own speech before the PC gets a chance to do it.

Thirdly, we have his interaction with Lae’zel about the chimera:

I know some people seem to take this quote as him seriously admitting he’s fucked a chimera, but I will die on the hill of ‘he was joking’ (a chimera is functionally an animal! it has an INT score of 3! Halsin is canonically on record as uninterested in having sex with actual animals and has the scars to prove it!)

So this is one of the few instances I can remember of Halsin making an outright joke. Note though that it’s still in keeping with his particular sense of humour: it’s dry (to the point where it’s easy to miss that he’s joking at all) and it’s also self-deprecating, in a way: he’s playing with the conception of him as someone who’ll fuck anything that moves, leaning into that characterisation and by doing so, making fun of both it and of himself.

And finally, the other instance I can recall of him outright joking: when the PC tells him he’s quite large for an elf and his response is ‘I am?!’ I really love this one, both because it’s such an obvious example of him deliberately being funny and also because for once, the person he’s poking fun at is the PC (for stating the obvious) rather than himself.

Looking back at these examples, what strikes me is how much his sense of humour shows itself in relation to other people’s assumptions about him. It’s clearly an important way he copes with people misunderstanding him or being dismissive or seeing him as a caricature. Much of the time he seems to be joking to himself rather than anyone else, which makes sense given the interpretation that it’s a defence mechanism rather than a means of connecting with whoever he’s talking to. (I also have a theory that humour is one of the main ways in which he feels safe expressing anger – c.f. the interaction where he tells Shadowheart that she bleats too much – but this post is long enough as it is.)

In any case, I’d be interested to know if anyone else has thoughts on this, or if there are any canon moments I've missed that might contradict these theories.