#medea shepard

[carabas]

Okay, I’m charmed by the build-your-own-box-art-so-it-has-your-actual-preferred-squad-instead-of-just-the-most-popular-characters thing. I feel catered to, they got me.

[seratlantisite]

my ladies’ instagram pages. template by @clairelions, here

[carabas]

[seratlantisite]

Late to the party but this one is too good to pass up: I was once on a US military ship, having breakfast in the wardroom (officers lounge) when the Operations Officer (OPS) walks in. This guy was the definition of NOT a morning person; he's still half asleep, bleary eyed... basically a zombie with a bagel. He sits down across from me to eat his bagel and is just barely conscious. My back is to the outboard side of the ship, and the morning sun is blazing in one of the portholes putting a big bright-ass circle of light right on his barely conscious face. He's squinting and chewing and basically just remembering how to be alive for today. It's painful to watch. But then zombie-OPS stops chewing, slowly picks up the phone, and dials the bridge. In his well-known I'm-still-totally-asleep voice, he says "heeeey. It's OPS. Could you... shift our barpat... yeah, one six five. Thanks." And puts the phone down. And then he just sits there. Squinting. Waiting. And then, ever so slowly, I realize that that big blazing spot of sun has begun to slide off the zombie's face and onto the wall behind him. After a moment it clears his face and he blinks slowly a few times and the brilliant beauty of what I've just witnessed begins to overwhelm me. By ordering the bridge to adjust the ship's back-and-forth patrol by about 15 degrees, he's changed our course just enough to reposition the sun off of his face. He's literally just redirected thousands of tons of steel and hundreds of people so that he could get the sun out of his eyes while he eats his bagel. I am in awe. He slowly picks up his bagel and for a moment I'm terrified at the thought that his own genius may escape him, that he may never appreciate the epic brilliance of his laziness (since he's not going to wake up for another hour). But between his next bites he pauses, looks at me, and gives me the faintest, sly grin, before returning to gnaw slowly on his zombie bagel.

Some beautiful soul on reddit

[carabas]

i’m still rambling about the ending of me3. because i couldn’t see the shape of shepard’s story arc and it’s been rolling around in my head and it’s just clicked.

it’s a story about taking a chance on people. maybe they’ll surprise you.

because in this particular version of the story, shepard is earthborn, street kid and petty criminal who turned soldier, ruthless, the Butcher of Torfan who got her whole team killed but she got the job done, that’s what she’s known for -

and yet she wound up like 75% paragon. just barely see the scars on her bad days. shepard dragging herself along those final steps, hearing hackett’s voice as she’s bleeding out and immediately asking what do you need me to do?

she was supposed to destroy the reapers. no matter the collateral damage. victory at all costs. that’s what she does. that’s what the person she was before the start of this series would have done.

(victory no matter the cost - see also javik, avatar of vengeance, who imagines that he might have been a scholar if he’d been born in a different time.)

(jack and the kids she’s taken under her wing.)

(thane’s talk of awakening from a battle sleep.)

when everyone thought shepard was dead, they put up a memorial flame on Torfan, of all places. people keep trying to extinguish it. she’s always going to be the Butcher of Torfan.

there are expectations of the ruthless earthborn soldier - her own expectations and everyone else’s - and there are expectations of the geth, and there are expectations that the krogans will overrun the galaxy without the genophage to keep them in check

(mordin, “i made a mistake,” the big picture is made of little pictures, wrex and eve and hope for the future)

and now the Catalyst - this ancient AI whose sole purpose is to treat differences between people as a problem to be solved, who thinks the ideal solution is to eliminate those differences or else eliminate the people involved, created by a culture who saw other races as mind-controlled slaves - its expectation is that synthetics and organics will someday destroy all life, that people who are different from each other cannot coexist.

(shepard the alliance commander with a ship full of aliens.)

(admiral tali'zorah vas normandy opposing the invasion, tali serving on the same crew as legion and coming to see a chance for peace.)

(the geth consensus still remembers the creators before the start of the war, the ones who defended them, and the moment shepard took legion’s hand. “we wish to ensure you are not the last.”)

shepard took a chance on activating an inactive geth platform, and she took a chance on releasing a krogan in a tube, and curing the genophage to save the krogans (they’ll overrun the galaxy), and letting legion carry out the upload to save the geth (they’ll wipe out the quarians)

and now she can either accept that the Catalyst is right, that organics and synthetics will destroy each other, this Catalyst that’s so afraid of what might go wrong that it destroys everything itself instead, over and over and over again

(mordin’s work on the genophage because of what the krogans might do)

(the quarians who started the war because of what the geth might do)

or she can be the Butcher of Torfan that humanity needs her to be, eliminate the surrendering enemy, accept all the collateral damage, wipe out the geth consensus just as they’ve finally made peace - victory at all costs, that’s what she does, that’s what she’s for, she can end this story right back where she started

or she can look at the prospect of creating an AI (like edi, like the geth) based on her, her thoughts, her memories (the earthborn petty criminal trying so hard to prove herself, the Butcher of Torfan), an AI with all the power and knowledge of the Reapers under its command, and there are so very, very many ways this could go wrong -

(krogans without the genophage to keep them in check. edi as the rogue VI on luna, now an unshackled AI. the quarians’ fear of their own creations, and all the geth ever wanted was peace. the geth let the quarians go as soon as they got the chance. they stopped fighting.)

(legion’s faith in shepard, the organic who represents hope that they can coexist - maybe, now, the organic who creates an ai and trusts it to carry on in her stead. ...the geth were created while trying to preserve the thoughts and memories of the dead.)

(anderson’s faith in her, her crew’s faith in her, the one-time butcher of torfan.)

(now mostly paragon.)

so.

a story about taking a chance on people.

[seratlantisite]

[seeyouspacegoth]

it’s fucked up for medea’s will to live to hinge so intensely on thane’s survival especially when it means she’s looking at other people she cares about like garrus and effectively saying “i’m sorry but you are not enough to keep me here” but she’d only just began to contemplate putting down her death wish in ME2 because of the understanding, perspective and support thane gave her and she loses him too soon in the process to continue that progress herself.

even if thane lived and she did too, medea’s an entirely tragic person and it would have been a nightmareish experience to be around her after the war ended and she wasn’t allowed in the field anymore. she genuinely doesn’t know how to live anymore.

[seeyouspacegoth]

i will never not love that medea is genuinely out here looking to die and is constantly thwarted. then she puts huge amounts of her mental stability and shaky will to live in the baskets of a guy from a race that dies at like 60 and a dude who’s literally terminal. like yeah, that’s self-sabotage if i’ve ever seen it.