HALFWAY HOME - Presentation Post (2022)
The night Shlee hatches in the trunk of a skycar, an asari watches and cries. She promises he will survive, at all and every cost. Shlee believes her. He stomachs the resentment of his alien sisters forced into hiding with him, and dreams about the stars. But the Milky Way is vast, swirling; painfully interwoven. And when Shlee begins to wonder who he is, who he should be, and what secrets keep this fragile galaxy from splitting apart, perhaps it's already too late.
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Shlee T’selvi, a young salarian raised by asaris in secret, reckons with the complex circumstances of his birth and why he represents a threat to the brittle politics of the galaxy in the looming shadow of the Reaper invasion.
Halfway Home is a fan fiction of approximately 174k words based on the space-opera video game trilogy Mass Effect. This story has been crafted with the intent to be understandable by fans as well as people who never interacted with the original material. While most of the story happens during the run of the trilogy (Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2 and half of Mass Effect 3 to be exact), Shlee’s story only loosely connects to Commander Shepard’s, and hopes to focus on the universe with a different lens.
It is a Gen fic, with an Explicit rating.
Halfway Home explores themes of identity, community, violence, and connection, and take them from the Citadel Tower’s secrets all the way to Omega’s fragile hold on galactic power. It attempts to depict perspectives the original trilogy didn’t always consider: batarians and their brutal and systematic dismantlement, salarians in conflict with themselves, the sudden rise of humanity assessed from alien eyes, Aria T’loak and those she sacrificed; and at heart, the societal dysfunction that the Reaper War merely revealed.
This is a coming of age, a mystery, a character exploration. It is also a very rough tale that touches on difficult and painful topics, sometimes in explicit details (I highly encourage you to read the list of trigger warnings if this is something that worries you, because these are not a joke).
This is the first part of the Halfway Homes series, and will be weekly published, starting in November 2022, on Archive of our Own.
(YOU CAN READ IT HERE NOW)
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▪ The Process ▪
I have been working on this story since 2015; early September, to be exact. It’s been my companion ever since; sometimes, it’s been my only companion. The story and characters helped me through very dark times, to the point where I’m not sure I would be here today without it; it also taught me how to write in English, which incidentally landed me a job in my career of choice and allowed me the immense privilege of becoming a professional storyteller in the videogame industry.
I always owe so much to my projects, but this one is special. It stayed with me the longest, and potentially saw me growing the most. And while I would hardly say this story is perfect, far from it, I think it has finally attained the form it always wanted to achieve. It’s saying what it had been wanting to say. And given I believe that art is first and foremost about communication, I think I can, cautiously, call this attempt a success?
The process is not completely done yet. I am still waiting for one last small round of beta reading, to make sure I did fix the things and didn’t cause 25 critical errors in the process; I also want to give this project the highest possible chance to shine, and so I’ll be drawing a ton and work on visuals to accompany it all. But it feels insane, after 7 years of work, to look at a project and not being quite sure what to fix. I’m sure there are things worth tweaking (especially surface-level, like line edits, typos, small clarity issues still lingering, or my bold refusals to ignore the English form sometimes), but I can’t think of any right now. This never happened before. This feels wild.
I was also delighted to discover I am not sick to death with Mass Effect, these characters and this personal take on the universe! I am thrilled to be keep on working on the follow-ups. The Empire of Preys, the second part of the Halfway Homes series, is well underway, and it’s going great so far. I am very optimistic that I can publish it somewhere in 2024 given my rate of writing and how seamless the process is going right now (contrary to Halfway Home, which is one Frankenstein monster of a project). TEoP is, overall, a much more pleasant and less desperate project than Halfway Home ever was, which makes it less difficult to handle (let me tell you that HH has some *interesting* scenes to grammar check…..)
Either way, I am so happy to finally be (mostly) putting Halfway Home to rest, present my weird, messy, problematic child to the world of Tumblr dot com, and prepare for finally letting it run free in Ao3 this coming November.
My ask box is always opened for any follow-up questions or remark, and I wish you all the very, very best.
Here's the complete list of all Trigger Warnings for the series. Please check it out if you suffer from traumatic stress disorders, and always take care of yourself. <3