hello to one of my favorite James scenes in the entire game
James: I'm gonna be right here.
Yes, excellent, good looking out for Ann. She does not say much other than "Okay, I'm ready" but presumably it IS comforting to have a friendly space marine next to her. Something to consider even when Leviathan takes over and everything is terrifying. (Unfortunately, Rae does not have friendly company when she's stuck at the bottom of the ocean and Leviathan's messing with her brain and everyone else is up above).
I always like to take James along for the previous mission, partly because the bridge control kicking is funny and partly so Ann has the context of "oh it's one of those guys who helped rescue me" instead of just "that's one of Shepard's crew."
Mission let-Leviathan-take-over-Ann is a go and she almost immediately starts flailing around, so it's really good that James was there.
Rae switched to her I'm-talking-to-a-Reaper-like-creature-that-I-want-answers-from-and-frankly-don't-trust tone.
Shepard: Listen to me. I found you. And the Reapers are right behind me.
Leviathan: You have brought them. YOU ARE A THREAT.
Shepard: So are you. I've seen what you can do. The war needs you.
Leviathan: THERE IS NO WAR. THERE IS ONLY THE HARVEST.
I was a little dubious of the reasoning behind "we need the creature that can control people's minds to fight the other monsters that can control people's minds" but then I remembered that nobody knows that there's a destroy-all-Reapers-and-hopefully-also-Leviathan option so I can accept that Rae and co. are grasping at straws.
Rae checked in with EDI - who was in charge of tracking the signal - and EDI got a partial lock.
James: You heard her. We got enough. I'm hitting the shield.
Partial lock is definitely good enough for Rae, who told him to go for it.
Lots of anxious huddling around Ann, aw, and asking her if she's all right (she thinks she is).
Ann: Commander, I sensed something else. Anger.
Rae was not particularly worried about that ("It knows we're getting close").
Ann: I think it wants to kill you.
Squadmates presumably do hear about this part (if nothing else, James tells Cortez about the whole thing with Ann, as Cortez mentions later) so that's a fun additional worry later for the guys (poor Kaidan) on top of the whole "what do you MEAN you're diving a mech underwater by yourself" factor.
Rae gave Ann a pat on the shoulder and said, "Come on, let's get you some help."
I have decided that the destroy-all-Reapers beam DOES go ahead and kill Leviathan too and all its creepy artifacts and therefore Ann doesn't have to worry about running into any more of those/Leviathan ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL again.
It's that time of year again, where I feel a little older. XD
My birthday is actually falling on my Friday stream day this year, and as usual I'll be doing a Jackbox hangout that day. At the end of the stream, I'll be giving away three Steam gift cards ($10, $15, and $25) to three people randomly selected from those who have come to hang out over the course of the stream. :D
You'll be able to catch me at http://www.twitch.tv/blackjack_kent from 9pm-12am US Central Time on June 5!
Would love to see y'all there to help me celebrate 37 years on this wild old planet. :D <3
Fiddled with dialogue to see what James says if he's the one talking to Shepard in the mech and alas, no "Lola," only "Whoa...Hey, Commander. Are you really serious about this plan?"
And no "I'll be fine" from Shepard because that's a romance thing but aw, Cortez did say, "Take care down there, Commander."
Fiddled some more and romanced/friend Liara both have the same first I'm-not-happy-about-this line, so I'm guessing that's the case for all the romances.
Ann was insistent about her let-the-artifact-control-me plan ("It's my call, not yours. You said I'm your last chance to find this thing"), and stuck to her guns despite Rae saying things like "We have no idea what will happen."
Ann: You're looking for something to fight the Reapers, Commander. I'm looking for the monster that murdered my father.
Rae was really not winning that argument and eventually gave up (except for asking Ann one more time if she was sure) but was not happy about it.
James was also not happy and said it was dangerous (correct!).
Nobody comments on it, but I am amused that Ann's initial reaction to being told that Leviathan took control of her was "Leviathan itself? That's incredible." She and Liara should become scientist friends. XD
Oh, the conversation with Ann about her dad was not fun for Rae (whose own dad died when she was sixteen).
(Oddly enough, Kaidan has no dialogue about his dad afterwards; you'd think that'd be a painful reminder. Entirely possible that he's Not Thinking About It. Ash *does* have dialogue, but it's odd dialogue I choose to ignore because it doesn't mesh with her own dad having died, even if it was apparently some years ago.)
Ann was not picking up at Rae's attempts to explain that she has bad news - and busy speculating about Leviathan - until Rae finally got down in front of her at eye level.
Shepard: Ann, you need to listen to me, okay? Your father is dead. I'm sorry.
Ann: He's...what, dead? He can't be dead.
:(
Rae is absolutely being too hard on herself about not being able to stop Bryson's assistant, because "guy who has not been around unshielded Reaper tech suddenly getting possessed by a Reaper-like creature" is not even remotely a scenario she could have planned for. Little bit like Ash beating herself up about the geth on Eden Prime.
Ann wanted to see her dad's office, so off to the Citadel.
EDI commented on the ship that she'd "formulated a psych profile for Dr. Ann Bryson. She is not used to death, but she might be quite capable under stress." Correct!
Poor Ann. :(
Rae - who was very much refusing to think about her own dad right then - asked Ann how she was doing.
Ann: My father and I didn't leave things in a great state.
Shepard: An argument?
Ann: Yes. It was trivial. A disagreement over how to file some of the specimens.
Ann: I was mad about something else. I don't even remember what. I took it out on him. So stupid.
This was followed by Ann elaborating on her complicated relationship with her father and saying things like "Sometimes I felt the same way [that I didn't get a chance to know him]. He was a great man. A pioneer. I felt like an inconvenience growing up."
Rae: *genuinely sympathetic but also silently going "Oh no. Oh, this sounds like me and my mom" at that
Shepard: You sound angry.
Ann: I was angry. Still am, I guess.
Ann: But sometimes he was so full of stories he nearly burst. I loved that about him. It's why I signed up for this work.
Ann: I can't believe he's gone.
:(
They talked a little more about how Rae needs her help and Ann wants to find what's on the other side of the artifact; Rae asked her if she was sure she was up for this.
Ann: Yes.
Ann: When Leviathan took control of me, I remember being somewhere cold and dark.
Ann: But my father taught me to never be afraid of the dark.
Go, Ann, go!
More chatter on the way into the lab - Ann's father thought her dissertation on the rachni was a waste of time 😬 (She and Liara SHOULD be science friends!).
More chatting by the artifact:
Ann: Unless it needs something, Leviathan doesn't bother communicating.
Ann: I guess it and my father had something in common.
I like to think that Shepard shows Ann her father's log about keeping the decryption key from earlier "close to my heart" and that it's on nine-year-old Ann's drawing of her father; maybe that will help a bit.
So Rae ended up lying on the couch that evening staring at the ceiling with her legs across Kaidan's lap and was all "aside from everything else, Ann said some things about her dad today that really sounded like my mom and I." Hoo boy. (Hannah really did try her best and they both love each other but ohhh it is complicated).
I love how Shepard treats Ann, particularly if you go Paragon all the time. So many good bits.
Kneeling/crouching down (automatically!) to get on roughly eye level to tell her about her dad is a nice touch.
Saying "It's all right. I can come back" during the lab conversation when Ann's distraught and starting to leave and put off the whole Leviathan hunt in favor of giving Ann some time, yesss, and then asking her if she's sure she's up for this when Ann decides to help anyway.
Initially dismissing Ann's let-the-artifact-control-me plan as too dangerous and being visibly unhappy about it and asking her if she's sure about going through with it.
More automatic crouching in front of Ann and asking if she's all right, aw.
I am once again contemplating post-Leviathan headcanons because there's just all that open space between the shuttle scene and Shepard walking around the ship normally.
I understand why it is the way it is ingame (variables! money!) but every time I sit there and go "oh, in a romance or adventure novel you'd never get away with skipping over the fluffy bits after your protagonist really got clobbered like that."
I refuse to believe my Sheps go from "literally unconscious" to "upright and having a coherent conversation with Ann" in the space of about a minute. Nope. Time to get entirely knocked out of action for a day or so instead of doing the usual "well, I fell off a building but I just had to keep on going."
This is their collective single instance of being a bad patient and attempting to get up and roam around and do work while clearly unfit (mostly because their decision-making processes have taken a back seat to the rest of their brains going "ow. I feel terrible" and "I've kept going when feeling terrible before so clearly I should keep going now") and immediately folding like a deck of cards upon Ash or Kaidan or Liara (or Liara and best friend Kaidan teaming up) going "Nope, I am handling things, and you are going to go lie back down immediately."
Lunoct propaganda time: one of my frustrations with FFXV is that Noctis and Luna are 100% canonically in love, but the game absolutely sucks at telegraphing that sometimes. Sure, they haven’t seen each other since they were kids, but they’ve been writing each other ever since Noctis had to leave by sending a journal back and forth across enemy lines via a magical dog. That is STUPID romantic!! But the game severely undersells it by making the letter-writing a game mechanic and making Noctis only able to reply in single-sentence responses. The implication is not that they’ve been sending each other five-word sentences every three weeks for the past twelve years. That makes absolutely no sense for where their relationship is at in-game. But in simplifying it to make it playable, Square seriously shot themselves in the foot.
…but on the other hand, you can’t 100% blame it on the writers. Part of it is just Noctis’ personality. He’s an extremely reserved guy, especially about his emotions (even to Luna!!!), and because the marriage is arranged and he already resents his father, he feels like can’t act happy about it and give Regis the satisfaction. And as for his friends—I mean, think about it. He’s in his early twenties, he’s out on his own for the first time, and he is trying desperately hard to be cool. (Especially for Gladio and Ignis, who are older than him and have been his retainers for a very long time, and have seen him be supremely uncool on many an occasion.) Of course he’s not telling his bros that he’s been kicking his heels whilst writing at night to a girl in their magical shared diary. What is he, a loser
I know there's a popular headcanon that Grace's crew died because of feeding tubes malfunction (based on the paperwork Grace was doing right before the explosion), but — in the book he specifically says that even after the accident he kept dealing with that same paperwork on minor Hail Mary issues, so I doubt that feeding tube problem was left unaddressed. May I offer instead:
Grace was put into coma by the people who cared about him. They (especially Yáo being Yáo) probably double-triple-quadruple checked everything. They watched him sleep for those first few days — I doubt they went into coma immediately after leaving Earth's orbit. They probably talked to him, assuring him that he'll be okay.
Ilyukhina's coma procedure was probably supervised by Yáo. He made sure that everything was in order, but — he is just one man and he is not a doctor. There was much more room for mistakes.
When Yáo went to sleep, he was alone. He had to rely on the technology completely.
Shame that Ash and Liara don't also get romance lines after the first Leviathan mission like Kaidan does ("Let's make sure that we never let time just slip by us, okay?") but at least one of the three ME1 LIs does.
After the mission where Ann gets rescued, Liara's lines about "rescuing scientists from dig sites that have been overrun by hostile forces" come across as oddly flirty if she's just a friend, but it's a such a fun bit if she's romanced that I don't really mind.
Cortez and James have fun banter after that mission.
Cortez: If another harvester keeps me from dropping you off in the target LZ, so help me....
James, cheerfully: Esteban, don't let those oversized roaches push you around.
Cortez: Mr. Vega, taking on a sky full of worm-necks in a troop transport is like sending you against the Earth invasion armed with brass knuckles.
James: What? You don't think I could do it?
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