from the "character solidifying" ask set: 3, 17, 20, 21, and 30!
think I’ll go Mass Effect for this one~
Brothers, sisters? Who do they like? Why? What do they despise about their siblings?
Adrian Shepard doesn’t have any siblings, technically. But as a street urchin, he was informally (and, later, formally) adopted by the grandparents of a kid around his age, so that kid became something of a sibling to him in the process. Unfortunately, Paris Shepard died shortly before Adrian enlisted in the Systems Alliance, so his relationship with her didn’t last very long.
Did they travel? Where? Why? When?
After enlisting, Adrian’s life basically is just... all travel, all the time. Within a few years, space travel loses its novelty and becomes as natural to him as getting in a car is to us. Over the course of his career, he’s been to more planets than he can name, has fought in more skirmishes and battles than he can count, and really, the next frontier for him would be a different galaxy (but that’s for Jericho Ryder to experience, in Andromeda ~).
What were the most deeply impressive political or social, national or international, events that they experienced?
The aftermath of the First Contact War with the turians definitely had an impact on humanity in general and their place in the cosmos, but Adrian didn’t really feel that impact personally until he joined the military and started working alongside turians. Still, you just couldn’t be human in that era without somehow being affected by the intervention of the Citadel Council in that short-lived war -- it was then that humans were brought into the intragalactic community, but with the stereotype of being aggressive and warlike, which caused a lot of prejudice that Adrian later faced as an Alliance soldier.
What are your character’s manners like? What is their type of hero? Whom do they hate?
LMAO Adrian has no damn manners. --Okay, I’m exaggerating, but he’s got a quick tongue and is really impatient with social trappings, which is really just a byproduct of spending his childhood on the street. The Shepards and the Alliance gave him the foundation that he lacked, but like they say, you can’t wholly take the streets out of the boy.
His type of hero is the no-nonsense Get Shit Done(tm) rebellious antihero type. It’s funny, because everything about Adrian suggests that he’s an uncompromising Renegade badass who don’t take shit from no one -- and that’s largely true, but his crew knows the rest of him, and he’s been pretty heroic for their sake in the past, without the hardass Renegade stunts. He just... needs a reason to care.
He hates a lot of people. He hates bureaucrats and cowards and human supremacists and [insert alien race here] supremacists and that one dude on the Citadel who always trails after him asking a billion questions about what it’s like to be Commander Shepard and The Illusive Man and the guy who narrates the Citadel adverts and... like, we could go on for hours. But, hey, he might love a lot less people than he hates, but those people he does love, they get the best of him.
Are they holding on to something in the past? Can he or she forgive?
He still hates whoever gave birth to him and left him to die. He won’t ever forgive that person, but over time he forgets about her more and more. He doesn’t know what happened to Paris and it eats him up inside because he feels a debt of gratitude to the entire Shepard / Anderson family and he’ll always feel like he’ll never pay it off. He never quite adjusted properly to being resurrected by Cerberus, to being part-machine; derealisation and depersonalisation haunts him until the end and he never forgives Cerberus for that, even as he knows that someone had to save the galaxy and it might as well be him. --Really, that’s the only thing that keeps him going, sometimes. When Mordin Solus says, “Had to be me. Someone else would have gotten it wrong,” Adrian feels that down to his soul.
