#milky meta

[milkywayes]

we know that the illusive man hand-picked the sr-2 crew to be inoffensive to shepard’s sensibilities, to lull her into a sense of safety, going as far as to recruit outside the organization specifically for shepard, e.g. gabriella daniels and donnelly. but the ship is twice as large as the original normandy. more than a few would have come from cerberus’ existing ranks, and then for the new hires, there’s the factor of how many truly liberal-minded people would even join cerberus for any reason. which means most of the crew would likely fall in the ‘progressive about some things, not so progressive about others’ category.

which brings me to my second point: the dossiers were all approved by the illusive man, but i don’t believe that anyone knew who archangel was. the illusive man could have manipulated shepard a whole lot better if he’d known. i don’t even think they had any data on him beyond what he’d accomplished: sniper, commander, guerrilla warfare. i don’t think anyone other than garm knew his species. bringing a turian on board was not something that people knew would happen.

personnel might have been vetted to keep their cool about a variety of aliens living on their ship, but humans and turians have a uniquely tense rapport, and no one said anything about turians before suddenly there’s one getting rushed into their med-bay for emergency surgery.

garrus says they’re all working together, everyone’s been polite, and we can take him at his word here. but it’s a lot more fun not to. things to consider: 1) if they’ve all been polite while he was in medical recovery, that doesn’t mean something doesn’t change the moment they realize he’s there to stay as a squad member rather than just a temporary patient 2) being polite to his face doesn’t mean they don’t harbor any resentment, just that they haven’t been overt about it, which could also change at any time 3) garrus has reason to downplay any side-eyes or unpleasant encounters; the last thing he needs in his situation is to get booted off the team for his own well-being and left alone in the wreckage that’s his life with no purpose beyond avenging his team.

ultimately, garrus is not the kind of person who lets his guard down easily, especially not after what just happened to him. omega might have been a more dangerous place to be, but all that means is that he’s confident he can handle whatever a bunch of non-combatant humanity-first xenophobes can throw at him. what he says to shepard — he literally says, don’t worry — feels like it’s entirely meant to put her at ease, stop her from thinking about it. if you look at it that way, it fits with way he’ll withdraw, hole up in the battery and entertain no conversation about how he’s feeling.

maybe any suspicion or hatred he glimpses on a crew member’s face is really in line with how he looks at himself during those months.

[milkywayes]

i think there’s a fundamental difference between revenge for yourself and avenging someone else. there’s different implications about what’s most important to you. who are you doing this for, yourself or someone else? which is to say that i think the language matters when we talk about garrus’ loyalty mission.

fandom loves to compare it to zaeed’s quest for revenge, but i don’t think it’s easily comparable. zaeed was betrayed and left for dead by this man and he would kill any number of innocents to exact his revenge. it’s entirely about his own ego. what garrus is doing is far more complex, considering turian social mores of accountability and absolute loyalty to your team, which garrus is trying to uphold and which sidonis broke. he’s not the sole victim, and he never talks about it in the sense of what sidonis did to him. it’s about the deaths of his squad that he is trying to avenge, taking responsibility as their leader to rectify his mistake of trusting someone that he shouldn’t have trusted, and delivering a sentence that for all we know, turian courts would have upheld. i don’t believe for a moment that betraying your team and causing their deaths isn’t one of the worst crimes you can commit in turian society. as garrus points out, no one who knows what happened cares about it but him. they weren’t turians in the hierarchy, they were outlaws on omega. no one is going to deliver justice if garrus won’t, and his upbringing says this is a crime that cannot go unpunished, and it’s his responsibility, and his fault.

you can draw parallels about what it does to a person to put all their energy into chasing one person to execute them, especially someone who they once considered a friend or team mate. we see the toll it takes on garrus. we see how he reaches for violence first. all fair things to discuss, and i will always argue that talking garrus out of taking the shot is the best thing you can do for his longterm mental health and development.

but they’re fundamentally not the same. zaeed, as much as i like him, is a ruthless killer who thinks only about himself. garrus is trying to repay the trust that was once placed in him and do right by his squad after their deaths. the core motivator is not his own pride, though it gets tangled up in that when it comes to his self view (if he fails to do this, then what does that say about him, what kind of man is he, how could he ever take a leadership role again? he owes these people justice, and he doesn’t know if he can live with himself if he doesn’t deliver it.)

we have no reason to believe garrus would ever let a factory full of innocents burn just to put a bullet into sidonis. he is not zaeed, and this is not petty revenge.

[milkywayes]

When do you think/headcanon Garrus and Shepard realized their feelings for the other became romantic?

I don’t think there’s a singular moment you can point to, for either of them. 

Garrus had admired Shepard during the hunt for Saren. He’d seen her as a role model, a worthy mentor, one of the most impressive individuals he’s ever met. And those feelings, as positive and as strong as they might have been, are always foremost about yourself and what the concept of them means to you, not really about a reciprocal relationship. Affection and admiration from a polite distance. 

It’s different when they meet again. They’re both barely alive, and she greets him like an old friend, and then he thinks maybe they had been friends after all — something rattles in him at the thought, something about the chain of command, about respect and battlefield chemistry, about the way he’d let her change his mind like he’d never let anyone before or since — but they certainly hadn’t had the type of friendship that she’s acting out now. They hadn’t been close. 

In the moment, during the reunion itself — her arms flying wide in the biggest display of emotion she’s ever seen her make — it doesn’t feel wrong. He’s tired, he’s grieving, he doesn’t have the energy to think it through. She was dead, and now she’s not. He talks to her like he would a long lost comrade, not a superior — he hasn’t had a superior in a while — and she doesn’t seem to mind it at all. 

It’s after that that he starts to wonder. Her jokes, her grins, her open concern. It’s different from how she used to act, the distance between them disappearing in an instant, like they were something else than what he remembers, back before she died. But it’s nice. He doesn’t mind it. It comes easily to both of them, and he won’t turn his nose up at a friend when he needs one most, even when he doesn’t deserve it.

He decides to just keep it up.

Though he’s not always in the mood for talking, not always able to accept her company when he can’t even accept his own, he tries because he can tell she needs it too. They start acting like friends and then suddenly there’s no difference to actually being friends and from there it grows organically until he finds he can’t conceptualize his existence as separate from hers, and it’s become the most important relationship in his life.

But he doesn’t think about what that means. He’s never had a relationship like this, especially not with an alien. He doesn’t know what’s possible between them, what’s expected. He doesn’t waste time thinking about what they could be, only what they already are. He follows her lead as he has since the moment she barreled into his Omega stronghold as a changed but alive woman.

He’s shocked when she propositions him, but once again: it doesn’t feel wrong. Suddenly, this too is possible. Risky, terrifying, but possible. And it doesn’t take long from there, this moment that prompts him to think about what exactly they are and what exactly they are doing, to realize that he is already in far deeper than he ever planned to be. 

He knows he has feelings for her before he ever makes it up to her cabin, but he might never know how long he’s had those feelings. 

And as for Shepard — she’s always liked him, always found him charming, and seeing him again so unexpectedly when she’s got no one and nothing, not even herself — they’re suddenly in a position where he’s the closest confidante she has. She doesn’t need a subordinate, she needs a friend. It’s not a conscious decision to just abandon all decorum and treat him like they’ve always been friends first, coworkers second. It’s easy to do away with all of that and jump to the next stage because that’s what she needs them to be, and she doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth and the patience to get there at a slower pace.  

And then they are friends, but that doesn’t stop the urge to get closer, and she realizes she’s set something in motion that she would’ve never, in her right mind, intended. It doesn’t help that he lets her. He’s the steadfast presence that she needed to see her through this Cerberus nightmare, but she knows now the kind of man he’s become in her absence, and she is drawn to that man not out of emotional necessity but genuine intrigue, and she knows that’s too much. Too much for either of them to deal with, in their dire situation.

In truth, she thinks maybe if they just work it out in bed, if he’s amenable to that, she can finally get her head on straight and focus wholly on the mission. 

And if he rejects her, then that would also do the job.

But then he’s saying yes, and he’s fretting, and he’s pacing, and he’s saying ‘This is about us,’ and she has to wonder how long they’ve been an ‘us’ to him — several steps farther than she’s ever let herself think about them — and god damn it, if she pulls the panic cord and rejects him now, there’s a chance she’ll break his heart on top of her own. 

Might as well see this thing through.

[milkywayes]

May I inquire as to whether Shepard Shepard trends paragon or renegade? I know there is a popular conception of paragon Shepard as "boring" or a "goody two-shoes," but I must admit I find the concept of Garrus with a Paragon Shepard very interesting....the teenage conscript essentially forced into service of his fascist-coded military empire, who then grows to disdain and resent what he views as his society's rigid structures and regulations (despite himself possessing an (initially) rigid and inflexible belief system) juxtaposed with his commander (and later lover), a similarly lifelong military woman who, if played paragon, views the very same rules and systemic regulations Garrus resents as a necessary check on individual power, even her own....thrown in with the fact that in ME 1 Paragon Shep expresses the exact same kinds of misgivings about the power of the Spectres as Garrus' father...with whom Garrus strongly disagrees....it's such a good dynamic to me. I wish they touched on these two's differing relationships with the systems they reside in more post-ME1, particularly in ME2 as the paragon Shepard is forced to go rogue against her career Alliance background, and Garrus finds himself having gone rogue as he desired and getting completely wrecked by it, only to find solace in the institutional stability Shepard's Normandy provides....there's so much to chew on there to me. Would love your thoughts on how Shepard Shepard's alignment interplays with Garrus'. Apologies for the massive analysis in your inbox lol

She is paragade! Meaning she leans more towards the paragon side but has her renegade moments. 

I’m really liking your analysis here, very on point. I think it’s very reductive to call paragon boring; it simply means Shepard has a strong particular conviction and that conviction gets tested again and again by her circumstances. It’s only boring if there’s nothing happening, and a fully paragon Shepard will often be faced with making the objectively wrong choice because of her strong beliefs (overwriting the geth heretics as an example, but there’s more instances like this, also often failing to see nuance.) This is a complex person holding on fast to her beliefs to the point of stubbornness. It’s an intriguing character trait, and a fascinating contrast to Garrus, who leans more heavily towards renegade but also has a very stubborn code that he adheres to — it just happens to differ from Shepard’s.

With Shep Shep paragade, I think she is actually very close to Garrus, who I’d classify closer to renegon if we must classify him at all. Close to meeting in the middle, but not quite: their compasses are pointing in the same direction but they have different ideas about methods, about how far is too far, and about how certain priorities are weighed. 

Take Garrus’ Saleon case as an example. He was in favor of shooting down the getaway spacecraft not because he didn’t care at all about the hostages but because he knew they would be tortured for the rest of their lives and used to make more organs/profit for Saleon, and he considered ending Saleon’s operations permanently to have more moral weight in this situation, i.e. he considered the hostages casualties already and wanted to keep the number from rising further. Looking into the future at his end objective rather than getting bogged down by the complexities of the immediate, rather like the sniper that he is. One shot, one kill. (There’s other things at play here too, like pride, but that’s not what this is about right now.)

Shepard, by contrast, would not consider the hostages casualties until they’re already dead, and it would matter to her who the person was who pulled the trigger on them, herself or Saleon. She would share Garrus’ end objective, but she’d be more concerned with how she’s getting there, about the complexities that Garrus is choosing to look past. But she’s gotten her hands dirty before, and is capable of making that choice. It just takes her longer to make it because she has to muddle through it, and that makes her a little less effective in that moment because she is slower to decide, but her choice will be more evenly considered. (She would not shoot the spacecraft — 70% because of danger to other ships/civilians, 30% because of the hostages. But if Saleon had been a greater threat to the overall galaxy than he was, that might have shifted in his disfavor.)

But the most important thing in this scenario isn’t who would choose what, but rather that neither of them would dismiss the other’s assessment out of hand. That’s the core of their moral dynamic for me: they don’t always agree, but they always respect the other. You won’t have Shep Shep lecturing Garrus about what’s right and what’s wrong. At most, she’d ask him some questions to help him think things through from another perspective — and the thing is, he does the same thing for her. Canonically, all the time. Let her work through her moral conundrums with him as a sounding board. They don’t need to have the same approach. They just need to trust in the other’s integrity and competence, trust that they share the same end goal. 

Their compasses are pointing in the same direction, and depending on the situation, the best approach to a problem is not always the paragon one. They will guide each other through these difficulties, open up new perspectives for each other, grow as people alongside each other in a way that they couldn’t if they always agreed on everything.

Garrus is passionate, driven, an idealist at his core. Everything he does is in pursuit of his ideal of justice, but he tries to take the quickest route towards it, he’s impatient, and that’s not always going to end well or yield him the results he seeks. 

Shepard is also driven, but she’s somewhat less of an idealist, ironically. She is very concerned with responsibility, and she places great value in understanding the bigger picture before making a move, though her job doesn’t always grant her that. She is in the Alliance not because she’s burning for it but because she feels indebted to it as her ticket off Earth and out of her previous life, and she wants to do a good job and fulfill her obligation. It’s a contract to her, but one she doesn’t mind. 

The reapers bring their trajectories together.

Garrus, desperate to make a difference in the most radical way he can, will run aground through his attempts to fight The Concept Of Injustice only to find focus and purpose again helping Shepard take down a more tangible enemy.

Shepard will trade her simple sense of obligation to the Alliance for a sense of obligation to every living being in the galaxy, which is way less pragmatic and will bring her dangerously close to running aground herself — her ‘bigger picture’ ideal expands so much, she can barely see the outlines of it.

And Garrus, familiar by that point with what it means to take on a purpose that’s too large for any one person, will be there to prop her up, keep her grounded and focused on the end objective.

[milkywayes]

You recently got an ask mentioning your thoughts on how the Citadel DlC isn't cannon. Do you have a main post about that? I couldn't find it on your profile(I probably just suck at the search function) but would you please link it? I'd love to read your thoughts? Your takes are always super interesting to read

hi! thank you for your interest in my gospel (that citadel dlc isn’t canon LOL)

i’ve never made a serious post about it for fear of pissing people off too much or seeming too much like the fun police. i’ve talked about it in tags some so i think people generally know where i stand.

you were asking so nicely so i will give you my reasons here. they are long.

going into this fandom it never occurred to me that anyone would consider the dlc canon. like, not for a second. i realized that by and large they did over the course of several months because i’d comment on canon/meta either in posts or my art and i’d get comments contradicting/correcting me that didn’t make any damn sense (turian cheese anyone? i’m still annoyed about this) that were exclusively backed up by citadel dlc jokes. and like, that’s what these are. 

jokes. 

it’s the joke dlc. lighthearted fun. it doesn’t take itself seriously and i frankly don’t think it ever intended for its players to take it seriously either. there’s an evil clone plot. they’re breaking into the normandy with a tooth brush. shepard falls through a fish tank. the dialogue is in parts hilarious, and that’s all intentional. 

every line, every character beat, is exaggerating canon character traits for comedic effect that relies on the players knowing and loving these characters to fully appreciate the joke. often it also directly references fan theories or discussion points, giving insiders the positive feeling of being seen and acknowledged by the dev team.

but that doesn’t make these exaggerations and references canon. it just makes them effective comedy for its audience.

some choice examples:

drunk tali: she got drunk once in the game, for a serious reason, and had a funny line about the emergency induction port. here they take it to exaggerated heights with her getting absolutely shit-faced during the party and talking about omni-tattoos, mentioning the taste of her sweat (famously a weird fan obsession) and referencing the common fan ship of garrus/shepard/tali 

garrus’ meetup: if unromanced, it’s exaggerating his romantic incompetence (as fans have been doing forever just because he stammers a little in his romance scenes, which i maintain says more about his feelings for shepard than it does about his general romantic prowess, but i digress) and if romanced, it references garrus fans’ attraction to his voice and then pokes fun at shepard‘s bad dancing before turning it sexy. the whole thing is mildly out of character for garrus and shepard both.

traynor‘s meetup: it’s canon that she‘s competitive about chess, appreciates a good shower and that she’s a bit of a health nut to the point of spending a fortune on a fancy tooth brush — here they have her participating in a board game tournament with a comic book rival, complete with comic book-esque dramatic closeups, and end with her in shepard’s jacuzzi talking about her billions of health problems. 

what we are doing here is poking fun at these games and characters in a loving way, games that are pretty serious in tone and likely left many feeling kind of depressed. it’s giving the players a positive farewell to the series that rewards them for their familiarity of the games and shows that the devs loved the games too.

saying it’s not canon for the games isn’t saying that’s it’s bad or not enjoyable. honestly, the opposite. i’m saying that i enjoy it and i recognize it for what it was intended as, and it was well done. it was the very last content to be released for the trilogy for a reason, and they couldn’t do a post-game joke dlc without invalidating their players’ individual ending choice, so they had to make it take place before that. but i don’t think that means they ever wanted anyone to think it actually happened like this, levity and improbability and exaggeration and all, in the middle of a fraught and devastating war.

no, i don’t think it’s even a “beach episode.” 

look at what it would do to garrus’ canon emotional arc if it were: he’s clearly in love with shepard but unable to say it back to her for the entire duration of the game, until the very end, where he’s losing her, where he finally can tell her that he loves her back. that’s the gut punch. that’s the culmination of his romantic arc. saying it finally when he knows he’s about to lose her, because this is his last chance. if you put the dlc in the middle of this arc, then you’ll suddenly have him unable to stop talking about how much he loves shepard, to her and to other people, before going back to their last romance scene on the ship where he chokes on the word love and says “care about” instead. 

this is my biggest gripe as a garrus fan. but there’s many more things like this that just don’t fit or don’t quite make sense and were never intended to. turian cheese?? anyway. 

seeing fandom at large regard the dlc as canon isn’t just confusing to me but it’s a huge pet peeve, i’m sorry to say. because it destroys entire character arcs, canonizes silly one-liners that don’t mesh with the lore, and encourages flanderization of characters (something which every fandom is prone to already.)

i’m the type of fan who likes to have fun sometimes and liked the dlc but who is mostly serious about canon. i care about meta and analysis. i care about world building. i care about serious discussion. i won’t include the dlc in my reading of the games, and i can’t take any meta seriously that does include it without acknowledging that it’s a joke.

i’ll end with saying that i understand that the reason most fans treat the dlc as a real part of the games is because they needed a moment of levity in the war. they like the idea of shore leave, a good time, a last hurrah. but it doesn’t serve the story, it weakens the story, along with its lore and characters. sometimes stories are dark and serious until the bitter end. that’s the kind of game we are playing here. 

thank you for listening. 🫡

[milkywayes]

Hi milky! How about #3 for Garrus?

(these are really interesting questions 👀!)

Hi Em! thank you for playing ♥️

3: throw this character at any other character of your choice to bounce off each other as outsider pov to each other

Hmm who to bounce Garrus off of…

Let’s pick Samara for this one.

She’s not old quite yet, but the last time even the most grizzled of turians seemed old to her was several centuries ago, and the life she has chosen ties her so strictly to the Code that at first glance, Vakarian is nothing more than a rebellious child acting out against the order his society placed on him. She looks at him and sees a young man who paid for this transgression with his own blood, his appearance, and still doesn’t seem reformed. She’s not privy to the details. They’re none of her business, can’t be her business for the sake of his own life and Shepard’s mission, so she reserves the full brunt of her judgment — but she’s seen many young men of various species eschew order and fall apart in the pursuit of something else. She doesn’t know what that something may be, and she’s not going to ask, but he’s clearly troubled. A shadow over his eyes, pain still in his jaw, the report of his rifle sounding more often than she’d expected from a sniper. But it doesn’t take her long to see past her first impression and recognizes that the other thing he clearly is, is essential to the mission. Competent, more of a team player than she’d have thought at first glance, and invaluable to Shepard, who leans on him implicitly both in the field and, as hasn’t escaped her notice, in private. She is content reserving her judgement indefinitely, or for as long as Shepard’s mission lasts.

Garrus, you could say, doesn’t care. Not about anything that isn’t Shepard or the mission or tracking down Sidonis, not right now. But he’s perceptive enough, and he was there when they picked her up: the asari Justicar, who he’s ninety percent sure Shepard only let on the ship in an effort to save the people working in that Nos Astra precinct. He gets it. If he bothered to think about it more, he’d also be uncomfortable with her presence. He respects those in the pursuit of justice — but it’s hard to pinpoint if that’s what her Justicar Code boils down to, justice, if that’s what he’d personally even call it, or most importantly Samara herself, who as he understands it has surrendered her own reasoning and understanding of what’s just to what’s written in some old tome in some old asari temple somewhere, probably, he doesn’t know. But that’s what doesn’t sit right with him: that she’d act like a drone, only according to the ancient law rather than what she feels is right. He’s seen enough of systems of order to know that they fail where they’re inflexible, and the sharpest instrument of justice is not the letter of the law but the mind of who interprets it. A justicar is if someone had handed red tape a gun. He’s not exactly sorry she keeps to her chosen quarters, and that Shepard keeps her off her squad unless tactics demand otherwise. 

*

I think it’s an interesting contrast… They’re both all in for justice, you could even say that a Justicar is the asari version of a spectre, but their understanding of what justice is couldn’t be more different. I do think that if Samara knew that Garrus’ objective wasn’t revenge as much as avenging, she would respect him for it, but also I don’t really know what the Justicar Code says and I’m sure there’s many things in there I would completely disagree with, as would Garrus. He’d only ever manage an uneasy alliance with her because he knows that her decisions aren’t her own, by choice. And the only vision he’s ever seen for achieving justice has been to trail-blaze his own way towards it.

character ask game!

[milkywayes]

I loooove your interpretation of the shakarian romance circa ME1....pet peeve of mine is when people portray them as romantically attracted to each other on the SR-1. I think Garrus' literal Hierarchical military background makes it so he is a bit taken aback at first by Shepard and the entire experience of being on a human vessel. Since he's lived and worked on the Citadel, he's probably more familiar with humans then the rest of the crew is with turians, but he still doesn't particularly understand the human modes of operation or What Shepard's Deal Is until he realizes that somewhere along the way she's shifted his whole perspective on things. I personally felt like C-Sec, though not exclusively turian, was still mostly a turian shop, and thus Garrus the "bad turian" has felt distinctly out of place for most of career. He recognizes that he's atypical, and while he's not necessarily ashamed of it, the emphasis Hierarchy society places on duty, sacrifice, and the importance of falling in line still makes it so Garrus has internalized a bit of guilt and frustration that he can't just be a "good turian." I think he carries that with him for a long time, and it's really not until he serves on the SR-1 and meets Shepard that he begins to see that he may not necessarily be "faulty" for not fitting the role of the model turian...but he still begins to see some of his perspectives--the black and white thinking, the drive to get results without regard to the cost or harm to others--may still be flawed. It's not that she takes the opposite approach as him, but that she encourages him to rethink the entire black vs white structure he operates under. And I think the openness of a superior officer--and a human, no less--takes Garrus by surprise, and he's even more surprised to find that Shepard's viewpoint changes his.

And I don't think any of it is romantic. Honestly, I think it kind of deeply confuses the both of them, for a bit. A completely unexpected rapport with an "alien" that was simply never contemplated by either party. And then Shepard dies, and the two must undergo another cataclysmic shift in their understanding of one another, and of themselves.

Sorry for the lenghthy meta. Your discussion of their early relationship just really resonated with me lol

(anon is referring to this post)

YES. i love this ask. I think ME1 is essential to their dynamic, and what that means is that they needed that time to even just acclimate to the concept of each other and start becoming the people they needed to be to enter a relationship.

it evolved into romantic love down the line, but with shepard and garrus, it’s the journey they had together that really matters. it’s the foundation of their romantic relationship. in order to get to that point they needed that time to be in each other’s company as coworkers, mentor and mentee, comrades in battle, striving towards a common goal. to build trust and understanding.

garrus says himself that he’s never met anyone like her (and i agree that c-sec is at its core a turian outfit and it’s likely organized in a turian manner even with aliens in its ranks) and it’s very clear that he admires her and has found in her the kind of superior he’s always longed for, namely someone that actually listens to his concerns rather than dismiss him out of hand. someone who explains to him why they choose what they choose. someone who respects him enough to give him that. it’s the only kind of person garrus would have ever accepted in that role, and that’s why he lets her change his mind. there is so much going on in their dynamic in ME1, all of it a prerequisite for falling love, but not yet romantic in nature.

and i take his line where he says he’s never considered cross-species intercourse seriously. some people pretend he never said it, or they prefer to interpret it as a lie. i don’t think so. he’s never consciously considered it (subconsciously is another matter!) and i think in order for him to get to a point where he’s even open to the thought they need a different kind of relationship that they had on the SR-1. there needs to be history and established trust, a good rapport and respect not just on a professional but on a personal level. both of them fighting demons, helping each other, being each other’s rocks. there needed to be an “us” first. that’s not what they had in the first game, but the first game still needed to happen as the first step in the evolution of their relationship. 

fundamentally, they’re best friends who fall in love—and the best friend step is not one you can skip without me having to try extra hard to suspend my disbelief. 

i’ve read fics that handled an ME1 romance well, but to me they’re AUs beyond the obvious. i have to pretend they’re different people than they are.

they’re both capable of loving the other. a well-crafted AU can make it work! but they need to first become those people, one way or another, before that capacity is fully unlocked. there’s things they need to get out of the way first.

[milkywayes]

About the "turians can speak english by copying" thing:

Imagine ancient Turians going full SCP-939 and using the mimicry to copy sounds of prey (or people!) And modern Turians just don't do it now because it is seen as Extremely manipulative and potentially cruel (I can absolutely see the more morbid ones using the mimicry as a way to torture prisoners because they can only mimic what they've heard. Think Jabber Jay from Hunger Games).

Now that so much time has passed in the galaxy, many think Turians have "forgotten" the ability, like how most humans are less inclined to just randomly start climbing trees, thanks to evolution. We still know how, but now, unless you're a kid or it's your job, climbing trees is seen as kinda weird. Because the mimicry is now seen to have incredible potential for emotional and psychological harm, Turians have all but banned the behavior. (Unless they're certain military operatives. Like how the government says "we don't torture prisoners", and they 100% do)

Kinda sketchy and I LOVE the space horror potential that theory has!

ohhh i don’t get any of the references you made but that’s interesting!

i’m not so sure about forgetting the ability since that sort of thing would always be associated with communication, and unlikely to only be used in this one context. but maybe it’s ‘forgetting’ how good they are at mimicking non-language sounds, like disconcerting sound effects, other species’ screams or distinctive noises, stuff like that. i think you could definitely scare and torture someone that way. especially if more turians are involved, the victim cannot see where they are, and it keeps appearing from multiple directions… i’m kind of envisioning a jurassic park velociraptor scene with the pack calling to each other in hiding and the humans freaking out, lol.

i definitely think an ability like that would have been favored by evolution for its use in hunting prey, tricking and luring it, before eventually getting refined to the point where it’s incorporated into their evolving language.

in my HC they have two syrinxes, one in the throat and the other one lower, almost in their chest. they can achieve a Lot of sound layers at once. extremely complex stuff. in the modern day, this wouldn’t be used to its full extent, except maybe in music or very special communal occasions (‘communal songs’). but a species so focused on sound and phonetics would also know to appreciate silence, and talk with only their body. like cats having very subtle body language cues with each other but using sounds for hunting and to communicate with humans. once turians started developing a society, they would have shifted away from using mostly body language in their day to day and started using every tool in their arsenal to communicate increasingly complex ideas to each other. (i do HC that the subtle and intricate body language is still used though, to a certain degree)

i veered completely off topic LOL