#mass effect initiation

[nesonkin]

Sometimes it makes me feel insane knowing that "the reason Alec made one of his kids a Pathfinder is not because he wanted them "to see the process through" but because his SAM cannot be safely integrated into anyone who doesn't carry his genes" is not common knowledge because I doubt many bothered to read Mass Effect Initiation

[neves-trouble]

Cora Harper you will always be famous

[not-a-newt]

Anyways, here's an excerpt (Mass Effect Initiation) on the way that turian, asari, and krogan crowds move as opposed to humans

[theratking-heheheheheh]

I fucking love Mass Effect so much

[onedismay]

Thoughts on Mass Effect: Initiation

Back with another mostly spoiler-free ✨book review✨, or more accurately a collection of disjointed thoughts about a book.

This time it's Mass Effect: Initiation, and this time I read the whole thing first so this can be just one post. Guys I've read more books in the past three months (2) than I've read in probably the preceding decade (0), these are wild times.

(note: I mostly liked the book but I did put on my hater glasses when it comes to Alec so if you like him, you might want to skip this post)

So. I haven't played Andromeda (YET), so this book was my introduction to Cora Harper. I like her a lot!! My first impression of her was "why is someone with her background so insecure" but as I kept reading and learned more about her, it started to make sense. I want only the best for her and am looking forward to seeing her in Andromeda. o7

Alec on the other hand, holy shit, no offense to anyone who likes him, we all have different tastes, but man, I was bored to death with him. If you're gonna spend that much time on screen I wish you'd show at least like, one interesting personality trait. (being an emotionally distant father (figure) is not interesting, it's the factory default setting) He consistently comes across as either not as smart as he supposedly is (especially towards the end of the book), or disturbingly callous without realizing that's what he is. I hope he's the former and not the latter. In any case I'm gonna keep an open mind when I get around to playing Andromeda, maybe it'll give me something to like about him.

This book was kind of a slow burn for me in the sense that near the start I didn't immediately feel invested or even really interested in any of the characters. One silly metric I use when deciding whether I liked a piece of media is "Did it make me cry?" and as the chapters kept going by I got a suspicion this book wouldn't. It was entertaining but I just didn't care, you know. But! Eventually I did tear up a couple times, which is excellent and shows that oops, I did start caring at some point after all (about Cora and SAM-E specifically).

Since I've only read one other ME book, Annihilation, I can only compare those two with each other at this point. I enjoyed both books a lot, but since roughly a third of Initiation was from the point of view of a character I found thoroughly uninteresting, I gotta pick Annihilation as my favorite out of the two. :D I think I rated Annihilation 5/5, this one gets 3,5/5 I guess, maybe 4 if I try hard to ignore my gripes. I really really liked Cora and her interactions with other characters as well as all the action (and I don't usually care for action!), but the larger plot and politics mostly left me frustrated rather than intrigued.

For my next trick I will read Nexus Uprising.

[whispersmith]

NK Jemisin’s Mass Effect novel brings the asari gender mindset that was so missing from the games, as well as an asari whose primary physical characteristic is Muscle

[official-skyhold]

I <3 Cora

[theravenofwynter]

“But flashing biotics was something asari did to show anger—their version of krogan headbutting, or turian mandible-clacking, or human and batarian fist clenching.”

- Initiation