I Hope Every Single One Of You Outlives These Hateful Fucks On The News Right Now. I Hope Each And Every

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.

In case anyone wanted to read the fic this post was talking about

Baseado em uma one shot que eu li recentemente. Esqueci de postar aqui ksksk

"The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I'm not a trannie or a fag so I don't care, just give 'em the medicine they need."

"This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility."

One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.

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"

my three girlfriends.

And yes, they smoke weed.

I know a lot of people think Halsin whittles a duck for the player simply because he likes them or for the metaphor of 'coming home', but I honestly think he's a sentimental creature and it goes deeper than that.

your very first conversation as friends, you have to push quite hard to learn what he likes. I think a century of being Archdruid meant people didn't actually care about who he was as a person, only that he could fix their problems.

So when the player makes an effort to get to know him - a genuine effort and not allowing halsin to give a polite dismissal- it's novel for him! And you've endeared yourself to him greatly with that one conversation.

So when he has the chance to make a gift for you, he chooses something out of the most romanticized memory in his mind.

The simple conversation where you got him to speak of whittling and ducks

A simple conversation for you, but one that meant the world to him

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.

I wish I could describe just how weird it is to see so much love for this character when you're coming in from a fandom era where the overall attitude towards him was "Ew, he's old" or "He's SO borrrrriiiing!" And most of the affection was neck and neck between Solas and Cullen.

The pendulum has swung I guess

The only reason Blackwall doesn’t look like this in game is because if he did look like this no one would want to sleep with egg man or the catholic cop

I've been thinking about the tendency of some fans who create their ideal OC character in an RPG and the mockery it gets because it's derided as too "Mary Sue" and I thought about my own preferences as I'm prone towards that in my own way.

But it's only done once and then I'm good with wanting to explore other backgrounds, other decisions and appearances. In fact, I explicitly don't want to repeat the one "perfect" playthrough.

I don't know how similar that is for other folks, but I kinda suspect that I do it because in a life of constant imperfections, of compromises and thwarted wishes and dreams, of having to be content with far less satisfying outcomes, an RPG lets me indulge in one instance where I don't have to compromise, where I can have it exactly as I wish (mods have become an addiction) without it harming or affecting anyone else. There's something deeply soothing about being able to save every villager, to have that waistline I know I'll never have, to wear an outfit I'd never feel comfortable doing in public (and still have no wish to), to have a romance that still gives that giddy rush.

It scratches an itch I know isn't realistic, it lets me feel like there's some parallel universe where it inexplicably all came together and then when it's done, I can set it aside and revisit whenever I'm feeling particularly frustrated with the real world. And when I get bored with everything being so specifically to those wishes, I can go try something different.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go provoke a necromancer and then lead him into a fight with the guards.