Hurricanes

Male, Human, Soldier, Warrior; SoulCalibur fan; Mass Effect, Salarians, Progressive Trance, Ambient, Space; Love, Truth, Romance, Fellowship, Sincerity, Honesty, Godliness; Appreciator of art and the obscure, incessant daydreamer

[mybeautifulmultitudes]

[beniko-deactivated20230511]

[rawliverandcigarettes]

LOOK at this amazing drawing VanVermillyon did for my birthday!

It's Shlee!! At long last the protagonist of my WIP fanfiction Halfway Home returned!!! In awe at the smoke and the atmosphere, the linework is always super smooth and solid too <3

Look at my boy, indulging in his worst instincts!!! Do we love to see it? I don't know. But please look at my boy either way!

You can check VanVermillyon's art over his Twitter and his Instagram!!

(and his awesome webcomic Savior if you can read in french! It's got child soldiers with complex attachment issues, psychological drama, astounding architecture work, and so many tiny little scritches!!)

[postitforward]

When I get asked why I'm laughing at my phone and I have to just say 'um, Tumblr...'

to share, use the hashtag #your happy place

[point-maitimo]

Hey guys! I’m currently busy working on two complex commissions, so here’s some of my recent Mass Effect fanarts ;)

[neonbutchery]

i want everyone to look at the gorgeous commission i got from @palavenmoons !! they were a joy to work with and i'm so happy with the finished result, the pose, the little details! go support them if you're able!!

[beniko-deactivated20230511]

[brightwanderer]

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

[ritshoe]

Kudos to fanfiction writers for writing about all the trauma and emotional and mental turmoil that the original content creators dont acknowledge when putting characters through hell

[saltoftheao3]

This has evolved to one of fanfiction’s major assets in my eyes. To every author that cares enough about the characters in their stories to examine trauma, but also the slow, tedious processes of healing and recovery: your stories mean so much to me and other persons with mental health problems. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[lyricsaboutcats]

These are the unused “rival” NPCs from ME1′s Pinnacle Station. There are references to these characters giving Shepard challenges to complete in the DLC’s game files, and you can find a few of them relaxing in the station’s lobby area. Some of them have armor that you won’t find anywhere else in ME1.

By sifting through the model files it is possible to match the names on the Station’s scoreboard to the respective NPC:

First image row: Chior (salarian), C’Sell (asari), Minket (asari)

Second row: Prochor (turian), Fre Natha (salarian), Sophomin (turian)

Third Row: Tahoka (krogan), Mimanox (turian), Thaidi (asari)

There is a lot of unused material in the Pinnacle Station DLC, including unused text conversation lines and Vidinos leaving a note in Shepard’s apartment. Early in development the station was named Meditatus Station.

(Source: DLC_Vegas_GlobalTlk.upk)

[lyricsaboutcats]

Salarian Councilor Valern without his Robes of Councilor Mystery.

By editing ME1′s upk files Valern can be placed in an unused Citadel outfit, which is the same medical uniform that Maelon Heplorn wears in Mass Effect 2.

[lyricsaboutcats]

From Kumail Nanjiani, the voice of Jarun Tann:

“Jarun Tann in Mass Effect was really challenging. That type of acting is difficult because you are playing a character but you are also giving missions to the player so the performance is halfway to presentational and emotive so finding that balance is very tricky for me. It wasn’t just my interpretation of my character, I had to present missions and details in a way that felt “video gamey”.

I was so nervous about my performance that I never actually played the game. “

(Source)

[neonbutchery]

after a shit ton of time wrestling with the yagpdb bot i can proudly announce that i rebooted my salarian-centric server! join here: https://discord.gg/bJzfwRSV

[inquartata30]

Conventional wisdom holds that the salarians know everything about everyone, and this is not far from the truth. In war, the unquestioned superiority of their intelligence services allows them to use their small military to maximum effectiveness. Well before fighting breaks out, they possess complete knowledge of their enemy’s positions, intentions, and timetable.

Salarians

3 / 3

[crapeaucrapeau]

Idly thinking on the relationship between the Citadel Council and the Systems Alliance, as is one’s wont, and I find myself wondering if there isn’t one more reason as to why the Council bent over backwards to accommodate the Alliance.

What I already knew :

Basically the Council prefers the Alliance as a junior, foolish, reckless partner they can control rather than as a bunch of aggressively expansionist assholes they’ve antagonized. With the Alliance on a leash, they can address the Batarian Hegemony problem and stabilize the Attican Traverse.

Moreover, in the books, specifically Revelation, it’s specifically said that one of the reasons the Alliance did so well against the turians during the First Contact War is because they had very good military software getting dangerously close to AI. Since AI is a big no-no for the Council, it’s kinda imperative that they absolutely get the Alliance to agree to play by their rules, otherwise they might have a geth situation on their doorstep, if not an actual Singularity (they could also go to war and annihilate humanity easily, if they wanted to, that’s the turian option, but fortunately for humans the asari are the masters of the galaxy).

But here’s what occurred to me just now, looking at the very beginning of ME1 : the Council also wants to make sure the Alliance shares all Prothean technology it unearths with them. That would seem to be only relevant in the case of the Prothean Beacon on Eden Prime… until one remembers that humanity has an entire Prothean complex on Mars, including chambers which could not be opened until early 2186. (Probably where the Crucible came from.)

Now we know that the asari, at the very least, have profited enormously from privileged access to Prothean technology, allowing them to always keep an edge. From the Council’s point of view, in this context, there are three options in 2157, at the moment they’ve officially made first contact with the humans :

a) Hostile Takeover : absolutely destroy them, take what you want, make sure they are never a threat again - again, the turian option.

b) Play Fair : normalize relationships and treat that bunch of enormously aggressive jackasses who think they’re entitled to everything the normal way, i.e. let them prove their worth and they’ll get their embassy in the Citadel circa 2257 CE, give or take.

c) Accommodation : give preferential treatment to the humans so that they’re happy to play along, always keep them satisfied without giving them power, buying you time to enmesh them in your vast socio-economic apparatus.

Obviously, with Prothean technology at hand on Mars and the entitled jackasses feeling aggravated, b) would be an absolutely terrible idea for the Council.

Of course, c), what they actually went for, completely backfires in a Renegade playthrough with the Council betrayed and the humans politically dominant.

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

I suspect part of it is also that Humanity is a bit of an unknown quality, and also militaristic one, and three out of the last four times the Council tried to deal with a militaristic unknown quality they got the Rachni Wars, the Krogan Rebellions, and the Batarian Hegemony.

[crapeaucrapeau]

Hmmm, I get what you mean, and to go along with what you are saying, one of the big surprises of the First Contact War for the Council species is indeed that the turians actually got yeeted off Shanxi ; the Alliance completely caught them off-guard for a variety of reasons and while there were some factors in the turian defeat that had nothing to do with the Alliance in particular (e.g. turian reliance on dextro rations means exclusive reliance on supply lines ; the element of surprise), the rest could not be attributed to turian bad luck, weaknesses, or incompetence and were in fact Alliance-specific (e.g. combat AI like I mentioned ; also the innovative use of carriers).

And I also agree with you 100% when you point out that the Council stepped in before things escalated out of anyone’s control into a full-blown war with a foe the turians had badly underestimated. I tend to think the diplomatic recourse is both pragmatic (“Let’s not go into a war fully blind, guys.”) and idealistic (“Let’s try to find a diplomatic solution BEFORE we kill each other, GODDESS.”), which perfectly falls in line with what I assume to have been a 2-1 Council vote, with only whoever the turian councilor was back then voting against - but that’s speculation. What isn’t speculation is, like you said, that there were too many unknowns to just go gung-ho on humanity.

However, and this is the gist of my post, from the moment the Council has normalized their relationship with the Alliance and found out that humanity has just discovered mass effect technology, is about 11 billion people mostly in their home system and has a very small military, the Council could absolutely be entitled to treat humanity like everyone else and make them wait. What I was trying to say is that at some point after 2157 the Alliance would be a known quantity - but what would be absolutely terrifying for the Council, I argue, is the potential for harm of humanity if left unchecked.

(Thank you for giving me your insight, it’s so rare to have people actually interacting with these posts ! :) )

[crapeaucrapeau]

Small addition : to stress something I’m not sure was clear in the above but which is worth stressing in full, I have very little doubt that should the Alliance find itself at war against any of the three Council races individually at any time between 2157 and 2186, they would lose. During the FCW, the Alliance navy defeated over Shanxi the forces the turians had already committed to the fight - and for the turians this was a police action. The Council stepping in was a lucky break for humanity because otherwise the turians, who were mobilizing for full-scale war, i.e. total war, would have absolutely destroyed them. The greater size of those three militaries, and their technological edge, and their access to more resources - the Alliance just isn’t a force of the same magnitude.

That’s not even considering all three militaries attacking together, with interested parties (i.e. the batarians) potentially chiming in. There’s a dark AU to be written about the turians occupying Earth too fast so the Council has to back them, the turians would like to make it the Human Protectorate but the batarians are very afraid of having a swath of the Turian Empire right next door so they’re humanity’s best friend in that setting, clamoring and fighting for its independence… What cost might humans be willing to pay to Get Earth Back ?

But that’s only with the capacities of the Alliance in the canon timeline, where humanity has to go along with Citadel regulations. However, if humanity is left free to run amok…

[stg-retired]

[inkiedraws]

_(:ì」∠)_