#jackson shepard

[cr-noble-writes]

I was tagged by @unfair-water-plane to do this palette! I thought of as many names for the colors as I could and then I had nothing left, so there's 4 that remain nameless lol

anyone who sees the thing and wants to do it is welcome to :D

[fromthe-point]

Lethbridge, AB – The Lethbridge Hurricanes Hockey Club announced that they have traded 2000-born forward Jackson Shepard to the Vancouver Giants in exchange for a third round selection in the 2021 Western Hockey League Bantam Draft.

Shepard, 19, was acquired by the Hurricanes in an off-season trade last summer from the Kamloops Blazers. In his lone season with the ‘Canes, the West Vancouver, BC, product appeared in 66 games registering 22 points (5g-17a) along with 44 penalty minutes. He added one assist in six post-season games with the Hurricanes.

The third round selection acquired was originally the Hurricanes pick that was traded to the Giants at the 2019 WHL Bantam Draft.

[cr-noble-writes]

Tfw a week ago you were mostly joking about shipping your OC with your friend's OC, but then you started talking, we're really in it now, Jackson.

[cr-noble-writes]

#11 on the character asks for both Alex Shepard and Jackson Shepard please?

11. What is something that would make your character fly into a rage?

For Alex, the biggest way to send him flying off the handle is to fuck with his people. You fuck with his people, and he'll burn the goddamn galaxy just to make your life hell.

Jackson is a little more complicated, I think? He's not particularly prone to that specific brand of anger. Tbf, he's not very well in touch with his own emotions, and he's very much a bottler. So I think rather than that kind of rage being caused by a particular set of circumstances, its more like he lets his shit build up for so long that literally whatever happens to be the straw that broke the camel's back qualifies as the answer to this question.

Thanks for the ask!!

If you want to know more about Alex, Jackson, or my other Mass Effect OCs, the questions came from this list!

[cr-noble-writes]

30 and 39 for Jackson Shepard? :)

30. When it comes to the arts (music, film, theater, etc), what does your character like?

Jackson is a fan of the arts in general. He loves beautiful things in all their forms. But first and foremost, he loves music. He is a musician (a drummer), and he's studied a lot of music theory in his free time, and one of his favorite things to do is to analyze songs and how they've been created to evoke particular feelings, etc.

39. When people look at your character, is there some assumption they might make about them just by appearance? Is that assumption correct?

I think probably the biggest thing is that Jackson gets underestimated a lot physically. Like, no one looks at the 5'6" wiry bean pole of a twink and thinks "oh that guy can for sure solo a krogan". But he can, in fact, solo a krogan. Not in a straightforward fight, of course. But, you know, he's a spy. He rarely does straightforward fights.

Thanks so much for asking and sorry I took so long to answer!!

If anyone wants to know more about Jackson, Alex, or my other Mass Effect OCs, the questions come from this list!

[cr-noble-writes]

late but for the Shep questionnaire 8. What is their reaction to the Alchera mission? And after?

Wrestling Commentator Voice: Coming in late, its @n0rmandysr1 with the steel chair!

Short answer is that they react poorly haha

For the longer answers, we'll start with Alex, because his story sticks a lot closer to canon than Jackson's does. Also, this is a very long answer, so I am gonna throw down a keep reading lol

So, Alex does not actually remember getting spaced. When he wakes up post-Lazarus, he's basically going from putting Joker in the escape pod to waking up under attack in a place he doesn't know with none of the people he knows and cares about anywhere to be found. He doesn't find out that its Cerberus until he talks to TIM. At which point, he's ready to lose his entire shit. For many reasons, the biggest of which in the moment is that he already tried to wipe these fucks off the face of the galaxy once after finding out they were responsible for Akuze. It doesn't actually hit him immediately that he died and was brought back, basically (although for reasons of science, I am generally sticking to the idea that he wasn't entirely dead), or that two years have passed. I think that doesn't really hit him until he runs into Tali. Anyway, Alex has a severe slide in his mental health (imagine that), and oscillates wildly between "fuck it we brawl" and "im a dead thing, and dead things should stay dead" for pretty much the entirety of the ME2 timeline. There are points where he starts to even out, of course, but they never last because the events of ME2 simply do not allow them to. Ultimately, I think the only reason he actually makes it out of the Collector Base is because Jack refuses to let him die. And then after that, once he's dropped people off where they need to go, etc, he hops on a shuttle and heads for batarian space, because he feels so incredibly guilty for the events of Arrival, and he's perfectly aware that if he goes back to the Alliance, they're never going to give the batarians the justice he thinks they deserve. Thank god Joker contacts Anderson about it haha Alex continues to struggle with the consequences of Alchera and Lazarus probably forever to some degree, but it does get better over time.

So before I answer for Jackson, its important to say that in his story, he is not the Commander, Kaidan is. Also, Kaidan and Ashley are in love lol

So, Alchera fucks Jackson up in multiple ways, despite the fact that he does not get spaced. We'll start with the fact that I think this is probably when he really realizes for the first time that somehow, Kaidan and Ashley have managed to become important to him. It sneaks up on him, because honestly that's actually the only way to be someone that Jackson considers a friend lol So, Alchera happens, and Kaidan gets spaced. Jackson pretty immediately goes into a state of severe denial, and basically flat out refuses to believe that Kaidan is dead without proof. And buddy, he tells anyone who will listen about it. It actually creates a rift between him and Ashley, because Ashley is trying to accept that Kaidan is dead and move on with her life, and Jackson is there trying to convince her he's not. Which is right around when Jackson realizes how important Ashley is to him. He's having a lot of emotions at the same time and it's very overwhelming for him lol Anyway, eventually he goes to Liara, because out of the bunch, she seems the most likely to manipulate into helping him find Kaidan. Like if he brings up the beacon stuff, and says he wants to recover Kaidan's body, she'll probably be on board. So basically, Jackson's inability to deal with his own emotions is the whole reason the events of ME2 happen lol Anyway, part of the reason it fucks him up so much is because of the fact that he wasn't expecting to be so affected by Kaidan dying. But also people he cares about dying just has a lot of unresolved baggage attached, because he's never gotten over his father's death. He never learned how to grieve in a healthy way. And in a lot of ways, this plays out similarly to how his father's death did. But this time, Jackson can do something about it, so he does.

Thank you so much for the ask!! <3

[cr-noble-writes]

4, 17, and 34 for any and all of your Shepards you'd like to answer for! - omniblades-and-stars (tumblr won't let me send asks from the sideblog)

I'll answer for both Alex and Jackson because why not lol

4. Is your Shepard any good at poker?

Alex is not great at poker, actually, despite the fact that he does generally have a fantastic poker face. I think mostly he's just really bad at the parts that actually require a little bit of skill, like knowing when to fold. That being said, he still wins fairly often just because he does have a good poker face. I think the only people who have ever been able to regularly take advantage of the fact he doesn't know when to quit are Reyes and Kaidan. Jackson is so, so good at poker. Like, normally I headcanon that Kaidan is better than Shepard at poker, but not in this case. Jackson's an absolute fucking shark. Not only does he have an impeccable poker face, but he's incredibly good at reading other people and knowing exactly how to manipulate them into doing what he wants, and he takes full advantage of those skills when he's playing.

17. How does Shepard react to attention? Do they enjoy it?

For Alex, it very much depends on the kind of attention and the source of it. He's more than capable of handling attention, but he doesn't seek it out, and for the most part, he doesn't want attention on his personal life. Attention on his professional life is a bit of a double edged sword for him because attention means pressure, and he's already under a lot of pressure for a few reasons, not least of which is the pressure he puts on himself. Jackson wants all the attention, all the time, but only superficially. He wants to be seen, but not known. He wants to be the smartest, hottest, most capable person in the room, and he wants everyone to acknowledge it. He does not want people to realize that underneath that is an absolute dumpster fire of a human being. Mostly because he doesn't want to realize that he's an absolute dumpster fire of a human being haha

34. Got any tattoos?

Alex has several! Before the beginning of the canon timeline, he gets a tattoo of Hermes' winged sandal on his upper arm. After the Battle of the Citadel, he gets a Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts) tattoo on his chest with the Golden Fleece hanging off a tree branch, but instead of the person actually being Jason, it's modeled after Ashley. Post-Lazarus, his orignal tats are gone, but he gets a tattoo of 4 orchids to represent his siblings and mother that starts at his hip and extends up his ribs, he gets the Ashley tattoo redone, and behind his left ear, he gets a tattoo of a Greek Obol. There will probably be others, but I haven't thought of what they'll actually be yet lol Jackson does not have any tattoos.

Thank you so much for asking about my boys! <3

If you want to know more about Alex or Jackson (or both), the questions are from this post!

[cr-noble-writes]

What's something that Alex and Jackson have in common, and something they don't? Please feel free to elaborate in detail. 😁

This is such a great question that made my brain fully cease function for like half an hour after I read it lol. But it gives me the opportunity to talk about (and maybe flesh out a bit) the way Jackson sees his father and Alex sees his mother. So, let’s talk a little about idealizing one’s parent and making decisions relating to finding out whether that parent is really as perfect as one remembers or not.

This is a very long answer, so I am gonna throw down a read more haha.

Let’s start with my favorite emotional constipated disaster man, Jackson Shepard. Jackson absolutely idolizes his father. So much so that a large portion of his life was spent trying to be his father. From a very young age, Jackson wanted to be an N7. Why? Because his dad was part of the earliest cohort of N7s, and like most young kids, he thought his dad was perfect. Mitchell Shepard was certainly not perfect, but we’ll get to that later. Jackson only ever saw the good stuff with his dad. The hero stuff. The great dad stuff. The happy, perfect family stuff. And then Mitchell died before Jackson got old enough to really have the chance to see that his dad was, in fact, just human.

So, rather than going through what most kids go through as they approach/reach adulthood and discovering their parents are just people who are just doing their best, Jackson’s already idealized image of his father became further idealized by his death. This is, of course, A Problem™. Obviously, its not a problem to look up to one’s parents. In fact, one hopes to be the kind of parent their child can look up to. It is, however, Very Bad to have such a perfected image of the person you look up to that you’ve now given yourself something that is quite literally impossible to live up to.

So much of Jackson’s adult life is underscored by the fact that he’ll never be good enough to live up to his dad. Almost every decision he makes is colored by whether his choice is something his dad would approve of. While that doesn’t stop him from making choices that he doesn’t think his dad would have made, it does make those choices weigh heavier on him. The imagined disappointment of a perfect parent hangs like a storm cloud. It takes him a very long time to get out from under that. And while he steps out of his father’s footsteps professionally pretty early in his career, its not until much later that he really takes the first step toward living for himself rather than to try to gain the approval of the Perfect Father that only exists in his mind.

Some ways into the ME3 timeline, Liara uses her Shadow Broker reach to dig up some classified files on Mitchell Shepard. Jackson takes them, but after some thought he decides not to look at them. There’s a couple of reasons for this, because Jackson is a complex, contradictory little fuck who can’t have a simple motivation to save my god damn life. First, I think with the war, everything that’s happened with Coats, and the ways his friendships with Kaidan and Ashley have affected him, Jackson is finally starting to reach a point where he gets what’s actually important. Second, there’s a part of him that’s equally terrified that reading those files will confirm that his dad was every bit as perfect as Jackson thought or that they won’t. But I think this is really when Jackson finally starts to separate his own goals and motivations from the idealized image of his father.

Personally, I think some of the info in those files would actually be kind of comforting for Jackson. Because I think on some level, it would actually be good for him to know that the person he has always thought of as being the best person he knows also did some pretty fucked up stuff in the line of duty. Even that is complicated tbf. Ultimately I do think its a good thing that he decides he doesn’t need to know.

Now, let’s talk about Alex. Alex’s situation is a little different, obviously, but he has absolutely idealized the fuck out of his mother. In a way that really affects his worldview. There are good reasons for this, of course, but ultimately I think that just like Jackson, Alex just… never got to the point of realizing his mom is just a person doing their best. And, I actually think because of the nature of his idealization of his mother, it’s actually far more emotionally devastating for him than Jackson’s idealization of his dad.

So, it starts with Alex landing himself on the streets of Blackdamp as a kid, and the fact that Ishara quite literally saved his life. He was literally suffocating because of an atmospheric disturbance when she found him. Not only did she save Alex’s life, she then took him into her home and allowed him to make it his. A kid who was not only from a different planet, but of a different species. A street rat who had never had a family or a real home, from a species that had only barely entered the sphere of galactic society. She knew nothing about him (or the care and feeding of a human child, really) but she took him in and raised him along with her biological children like Alex had always been hers. Based on that alone, she was an angel so far as Alex is concerned.

Add to that the fact that he knows next to nothing about her life before she had children, and the fact that what he saw from the time he met her was a strong, kind, incredibly intelligent person who was constantly trying to better herself and the world around her? Ishara Atruzea can do no wrong, and could never have done wrong. Of course, Alex’s own sense of right and wrong doesn’t necessarily line up with traditional human values, but that’s a separate thing lol.

The interesting thing, and the thing that makes his idealized version of Ishara so devastating for him, is the fact that while Alex definitely interacted with asari society in a broader sense, Ishara was his first and primary impression of the asari. Consequently, a lot of his idealization extends to the entire species. Not to the same degree, of course. He is well aware that individual asari are just as capable of terrible things as individuals of any other species. In the broader sense, however, he does carry an unconscious bias in favor of asari. He does believe that asari are “better”. That they are above many of the moral and societal failings of other species.

So when he starts finding out that they kind of suck in a lot of really big ways, actually, its devastating for him. Not because it changes his view of his mother in any way, but because it changes his entire worldview. The breaking point for him is the temple on Thessia. Finding out that the asari, who are supposed to be all about cooperation have been hiding/hoarding information that could have prevented the war with the Reapers from getting as bad as it does is deeply painful for Alex, because he truly believed that the asari were above that kind of behavior. But really, I think the paradigm shift starts with Samara.

Alex, being culturally asari, absolutely agrees to kill Morinth. He unquestionably believes that is the only way to deal with an Ardat-Yakshi outside of a monastery. But in the ME3 timeline, when everything goes down at the monastery, and Samara would rather take her own life than kill another of her own children… I think that’s a big moment of “hey maybe the asari aren’t morally superior” for Alex. I think that’s the first time that it really clicks for him that societally, there are actually some pretty serious problems with how the asari do things. And then it just kind of rolls downhill from there.

As far as things they don’t have in common? The list is literally endless haha. The big one, I think, is their approach to people and relationships.

Jackson actively avoids attachment. If asked, he’d probably just say relationships aren’t his thing (this includes platonic relationships; he also avoids close friendships). Truthfully its a combination of a couple of things. He has some pretty severe emotional trauma around relationships. Between the way things went down with his mother after his dad died, and the first time he really loved someone romantically (or at least really thought he did. Its complicated), its largely a defense mechanism in the sense that if he doesn’t let anyone get close to him, no one can hurt him. There’s also the fact that emotional attachment is something he sees as a weakness exploitable by third parties, and he can’t have that either. The few friends Jackson has are accidental, at least on his part. They just manage to worm their way under his skin without him noticing until it's too late lol.

Alex is very aloof and closed off with people he doesn’t know because of experiences he’s had re: being biotic and also experiencing xenophobia because of his background. He doesn’t, however, avoid attachment. All it takes to acquire Alex’s friendship is kindness, really. There are different levels to that friendship, of course. For example, Alex absolutely counts Lee Riley among his friends, and they had a non-romantic sexual relationship for the year they spent training under Anderson, but he never told her about his family. Things with the Normandy crew are a little bit different because someone else told the galaxy about his family, so that immediately became kind of a non-issue, but I like to think that even if it hadn’t come out, Alex would have told Kaidan and Ashley on his own because they definitely unlocked Friendship Prime. There’s also the fact that once he decides someone is His Person, he’s pretty much all in. You’re family now. Stuck with him in one way or another forever and ever, amen. And it happens fast.

Thank you so much for asking this question! I don’t think I’ve ever had an answer for an ask that was this long before haha