#serioussamiam

[ferociousqueak]

For the WIP title meme, what's He Who Fights Monsters about?

Ah! I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about this headcanon before but here we go :D

So in ME3, Grissom Academy. It’s near the end of the mission when you come across a group of students holding off two Cerberus dicks with a homemade barrier that the lead student designed herself. There’s a lot of emphasis on her name, Octavia, and she’s also young black girl, so I like to think that was BioWare’s way of nodding to Octavia Butler—truly a giant in the SFF field. And where have we heard the name Butler before?? That’s right! Garrus had someone on his team named Butler. With as much as the Shadow Broker dossiers uncover how much Garrus does quietly in the background, I like to think Octavia is the daughter of the teammate who died on Garrus’s watch, and he arranged for her to get as far away from Omega as possible, to Grissom Academy. I feel like Garrus would feel at some kind of guilt or duty to take care of the kid of someone who was in his command and got killed for it.

Now, the title is a pretty well-known reference to Nietzsche: “He who fights monsters should take care he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” (Or something like that, I’m going from memory here.) I think that’s what happens to Garrus on Omega, which you can see pretty clearly with the way his kill list goes from clean and efficient to sadistic and darkly poetic. There has to be some kind of light, from my perspective, that keeps him from succumbing to a darkness so complete there’s no road back. And that’s where Octavia and her family come in, along with the rest of his team.

Unfortunately, this is my least developed story :( I knew it would be a fic that would take up all my attention once I started it, and I had other fics I needed to finish first. This is the only thing I have written for it (beyond outlines, that is):

The Butler girl was like—what was it Shepard used to say?—a bad penny, and her timing for turning up couldn’t have been worse.

Thank you for the ask :D

WIP Title Meme

[jubberry]

Hi! #s 13 and 26 for the Mass Effect asks please?

thanks for asking!!!

13: Who did your first Shepard leave behind on Virmire? 

I left kaidan on virmire. I was making ashley guard the salarian group so it made more sense to save her because more lives will be saved. I really like keeping ashley as my virmire survivor now. I did do a playthrough with kaidan as vs, but i feel like ashley is who i prefer as mine. It’s just cause theres a story within ashley about her wanting to prove her family to the alliance, and i like the idea that ashley manages to do that by crawling through the ranks and becoming the second human spectre. I also like the idea of my femshep being ashley’s mentor cause women, and because ashley tends to lead renegade and my shep’s paragon balances that out.

I think her relationship with aliens would improve as well if shes the vs. Because she actually sees firsthand the importance of working together, and I like to believe that she gets a cloesr relationship with the aliens of the crew than I think she wouldve if I’d let her die in me1.

26: Who do you wish was available as a romance option? 

Miranda! I really wish femshep can romance Miranda. Im going to suffer so bad choosing between garrus and miranda if that happened. But miranda and femshep is......... sexy............. I just want a sassy, cold lady to balance out my shep. And maleshep x miranda is good but it just doesn’t do it for me!

I love how miranda feels on equal terms with shepard, and she’s also independent and has stuff going on on her own. But I think even tho miranda can be cold, shepard sees her as an angel, the one who ressurected her, and someone with a soft heart. I like the fact that miranda was cerberus and they didn’t trust each other, but now theyre close and have an understanding of each other that feels equal.

Ask me about Mass Effect!

[bronzeagelove]

For the WIP title meme, what's Our Stars about?

So, this was supposed to be the sequel to First Seeds, my first ever published piece of writing (and first fanfic) three years ago!

(spoilers for both First Seeds and the WIP underneath so if you don’t want to know the ending, go read the fic first before reading this thing)

I started writing it shortly after finishing the first, because I really wanted to continue their story, but the more I thought about it, the less I somehow wanted to write it? Thing is, First Seeds ends on a bittersweet note. Jane and Kieran’s relationship doesn’t really end well, despite me writing an alternate happy ending because some readers begged me to ^^

If you have read some of my follow-up drabbles for them (can be found here), you’ll see that I do not give them the happy end they’d get if this was a classic tale of romance.

So that said, I planned this sequel as a way of having them meet again and clinging on to hope but finally realizing that there won’t be a satisfactory ending for them. And since that is painful to admit to myself, I have stopped writing it. I mean, when I started out writing fic, I did intend to write these two as a typical trope-y romance story. But the more I progressed as a writer, and the more my OCs became their own characters with voices and lives, the less plausible I found it. I started thinking about what would make sense for them, for the lives they live, the worlds they’re confined in. And that means that, as adults capable of rational thoughts, they would come to the conclusion that, while it hurts, there won’t be a future for them. What these two love most about each other is the stylized idea of them together, the dream of overcoming differences against all odds.

So yeah... still debating whether to write this (don’t really have a plot except for a lot of agonizing dialogue and pining), and whether I can pull it off in a satisfactory way?

But in any way, please have the beginning of the WIP:

Calming her breath after a fashion, Jane Bergen shouldered her bag and stepped down the shuttle ramp, her feet treading lightly on the smooth polished floor onto Citadel grounds. The transit had taken a few days and required two transfers, one at Arcturus, another in some random place she couldn’t even pronounce. Jane was glad she had been able to hitch a ride for the initial stretch of her journey with a friend, but the second part, all by herself, the first time off Earth, had been hard. The well-known restlessness, and faint anxiety, kept bubbling in her chest at every waking hour, and finally, when their destination was announced, dread squeezed her heart, the well-known voice of 'is this a good idea' growing louder and louder.

She'd worked towards this journed for two years now, ever since Kieran's residence permit was denied and he was forced to return to his old life. Mate, child, steady job at C-Sec. Perfect, maybe. Jane had turned it all upside down, yet those six months with him had been the best of her life. He was the only one able to quench her restlessness, the feelings of inadequacy, of being broken. Time and time again, she'd asked herself if this was a good idea. He was a turian after all, and most humans were still resentful about the First Contact War.

Absent-mindedly, Jane traced the seams on her prosthetic with her left hand, let the frustration take its course. She was off Earth for the first time in her life, after a whole thirty-six years on one planet, chasing after the only man she'd ever loved- or was it? It had been so long since she'd seen him, held him close, she wasn't even sure anymore of what she could believe. Or maybe, what she thought she felt was more of an echo, amplified by cultural norms and a widespread idea of what romance entailed.