You know what’d be a fun trend for Spacer Shepard OCs?
OC alien step-parents. Your father wasn’t really on the scene, or was chucked out, or died in the FCW, and then your mum married an alien.
Asari are the obvious possibility - they’re generally friendly with humans, there are probably a fair number of them living on Arcturus, and most of them are attracted to female humans. Turians also work - there’s a bit of interspecies hostility but not enough to make cross-species relationships unlikely, and human-on-turian relationships are probably rare due to the massive physical differences but they’re clearly not unknown! Hell, salarians have been known to marry asari so there must be some who’d be interested in humans... or go further afield...
Perfect opportunity to give your Shepard a slightly non-standard background and some alien cultural influence!
@ferociousqueak @galpalaven @garrus-vakarus thanks for doing it! Can we have some more examples please?
Ok, ok, ok, just bear with me....
Quarian step-parent.
Just imagine it! Like, how else could an Engi Shep take one look at a powerplant in meltdown on Omega and go “Oh, this is an easy one!” and fix it in 5 seconds? Or a non-Engi Shep fix it AT ALL? Clearly this Shep had spent their childhood fixing advanced tech as a bonding activity.
Plus, you have the delicious dynamic of being familiar with Quarian culture without favoring it, since the QSP would have to be an exile to stick around! How would this affect their relationship with Tali? How would it affect their relationship with LEGION? How completely steamrolled would the Admiralty Board have been if Shep showed up citing previous rulings at Tali’s trial? Would Shep feel conflicted over saving Tali from the same fate as their parent? Or would it be cathartic? How torn would Shep be about Rannoch? Would their QSP want to go “home” without them? Would their QSP even be allowed, or would the exile keep them from that dream?
It adds SO MUCH CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT you guys! (Al-Jilani would think Christmas came early!)
(Plus, who wouldn’t want a Shepard with traditional Quarian patterns on their clothes and in their quarters, like, seriously.)
Ooh, now that’s an interesting one! I’m wondering how a quarian exile gained a good enough reputation in the Alliance to marry a navy officer without significantly damaging her reputation, but the Alliance doesn’t seem particularly prejudiced against quarians, so I suppose it depends on why they were exiled...
Decided the Migrant Fleet were far too obsessed with Rannoch, and either left of their own accord or got kicked out for excessive dissent?
Upset the Admiralty by being far too keen on making peace with the geth? Upset the Admiralty by being far too keen on war with the geth, turians, batarians, insert conflict here?
Insisted on trying to revive their ancestors’ language, while the government was trying to insist that the Migrant Fleet is only allowed to have ONE LANGUAGE? (I’m not saying the Admiralty are doing this in canon, but it’s an interesting idea!)
Or maybe they just did something really stupid and then didn’t repeat it. Like when you have a perfectly sensible friend who did time in jail for assault, twenty years ago.
Early on, the Alliance would be grabbing at any chance to advance their technological understanding to level the field. The QSP could have been selling tech that the Alliance hadn’t technically been cleared to have by the Council yet.Hmm, and if the QSP was enough of a Grease Monkey to respond to “Would you explain how your ship works, please?” with “WOULD I?! :DDDDD”, then they’d have a definite in. Especially if this happened before the Brass were familiar enough with Quarian culture to realize that the QSP was an exile. What I’m getting at here is that they could have become a Strategic Asset, and whatever opposition there was to a non-human romance could have been kept in check by politics (and possibly being Just That Damn Likable. Shep has to get that charisma from somewhere, right?).
As for WHY they were exiled... There are a number of Quarians who go on their Pilgrimage and just... don’t come back. They get declared exile more for not returning to help on the ships than for any specific “crime”. Maybe QSP just liked it better out of the Migrant Fleet, and they had been a roaming merchant for decades? Maybe they were still on their Pilgrimage, and meeting Hannah is what convinced them to stay? Or maybe they used a bad part when repairing something and a lot of people died? It was their “fault”, but the only thing they could have done differently was be more careful? Or, to be wildly different, they intentionally killed someone because they were convinced it was the right thing to do?
There are just SO MANY POSSIBILITIES!
...this is when I realise I have an Engineer/Spacer OC whose biodad was never in the picture in the first place...
This is not where I was planning to take Hannah Louise’s love life, but hmmm there are possibilities here.
I can definitely see a few quarians just getting sick of the Fleet, and never coming back!
