Thinking about Torfan again. About the doom of the Renegade path in-game, where it turns into an umbrella term for “proper soldier,” lawfully evil, xenophobe, and straight-up maniac, while Paragon gets to be the default Good Guy.
The Ruthless profile is supposed to give you a Renegade head start, and I can’t stop thinking about what could really have happened down there. It’s pretty much implied that war crimes were committed. And you were twenty-four at the time. Why were you entrusted with leading the assault? Exactly how many soldiers did you lose? Unit is such a vague term. What did you do to drive your seasoned CO—a major, a mature officer—into PTSD? Or was he a weak man from the start? And why were you made the first human Spectre if your reputation still follows you years later?
Whenever I try to headcanon it, it turns out deliciously ugly every time. I still keep half the details buried in drafts, just to keep her from turning into a full boogeyman.
My canon PT I played a ruthless and colonist background because I loved the character development of my Shep, she wants to save everyone because she knows what losing everything means.
But give this creator some love please 🙏 genuinely ❤️
В жизни действующего оперативника, военного, боль - явление привычное и достаточно регулярное. Нечто, на чем не стоит даже заострять внимание. Издержки профессии. Но везде бывают свои исключения. Пост-Торфан.
Kaidan watches Jenna closely as they walk out of Major Kyle's compound. She is silent, staring intently at a spot somewhere in the middle distance.
"Are you all right, Commander?" he ventures to ask.
"Just glad not to be the Butcher of whatever the hell this planet is, too," she answers shortly. "Hackett's people should be down soon to pick them all up."
A pause.
"You knew him, from Torfan?" Kaidan tries again. He's gotten to be able to read her pretty well; he knows she's rattled by the conversation with the former Major, but not whether she'll want to talk about it.
Jenna grunts. "He was the one gave me the orders to go," she says with a slight shrug of one shoulder (a maneuver that requires some effort in a stiff hardsuit). "Gave us, I should say. Me and my sergeant, and our platoon." She smiles bitterly. "Very explicit and direct orders. 'Millions of civilians in danger...victory at any cost...' Things like that."
Garrus glances over his shoulder. "And now he feels responsible for how many people died," he says noncommittally.
Jenna gives him a sidelong look. "You can go ahead and say it," she says. "He feels responsible for all the people I got killed."
Garrus shifts uncomfortably, glances at Kaidan, who hurries to fill the awkward pause in the conversation. "And so he's here now...running a cult. Talking about protecting people, and 'family', and 'blasphemy.' Bit of a 180, if you ask me." He frowns. "Must've hit him pretty hard."
Jenna snorts without humor. "You know I'm the last to say PTSD ain't a real thing," she mutters. "God knows we all know how this shit sticks with you. But given I'm the one who actually had boots on the ground and blood on my hands, you'd think I'd be the one cracking up, not him."
She cocks her head to one side, absently running her eyes over a heavy scratch on one side of the Mako. "Maybe I should try it for a while. Just go off the deep end. Really let myself think about everyone who's died because of me, because it was the only option or because every alternative was worse, and just go all the way to pieces. Might make for a nice change of pace."
There's a long silence. Neither Kaidan nor Garrus knows how to respond to this, and so they stay silent. The bitterness in Jenna's voice is unusual, a vent given to thoughts she usually keeps locked up tight rather than burden anyone around her.
Then the moment passes, she shakes her head sharply and reaches up to hoist herself into the Mako's small cockpit. "Ah, fuck it. Too much work still to do."
In my experience, there are three kinds of Torfan in fanfiction:
A. Shepard is a scary bastard who’s gladly committed war crimes and would be happy to do it again.
B. Torfan Lite. Shepard absolutely got their team killed for the greater good, but there were no war crimes, or the war crimes were someone else’s fault. Any nasty rumours about Shepard are just rumours.
C. Shepard committed war crimes, got away with it, was horrified by what they’d done and is trying to be a better person.
A’s tricky to pull off without going grimdark, and I don’t think I’d write it myself, but it has a lot of potential.
B’s probably the easiest version and makes for brilliant angst material. All the heroism of Elysium but with more ambiguity and complexity (or it actually occupies similar emotional territory to some of the darker takes on Elysium...) Goes particularly well with leaving your LI on Virmire...
C, also fascinating. Redemption arc time! Opportunities to avoid unnecessary violence, by scaring people with their reputation! Excellent combination with the Colonist backstory, or with the more paragon takes on Shep/Garrus, Shep/Jack or Shep/Thane!
Behold, a meta about Lisa I’ve long wanted to write, inspired by this post about Torfan(got kinda long for just a reblog) and motivation provided by @fourthage‘s Mass Effect giveaway. (I’m much better about finishing things when I can give it a deadline, lol)
----
Lisa is my Colonist/Ruthless Infiltrator Shep, and let me tell you, that background combo made her really interesting to play(through the first two games, at least; my computer crashed before I had a chance to import her to ME3, rip) bc she has this big, glaring problem with batarians. The tl;dr is Mindoir was deeply traumatizing and no batarian ever did enough to counter the extremely negative image she has of their race as a result. (apologies for slight stream-of-consciousness rambling, I tried to rein it in, but I think I was only partially successful >.>)
So we start, obviously, on Mindoir. Lisa’s the oldest of four with three younger brothers; Justin, Finn, and Connor, and had two best friends; Javier and Laura. Life was routine and uneventful and the only thing she cared about the larger galaxy was getting to explore it with Javi and Laura after they all graduated.
And then the batarian raid happened. Lisa didn’t see her parents die, but she did see friends die in the initial attack, as well as Laura’s dad. She had to watch Finn and his best friend(Talitha) get dragged to a shuttle. She, Javi, and Laura hid in a storage shed with their remaining younger siblings(one of Laura’s sisters was gone, too) in hopes of keeping them safe. They spent the next three days in there. They were found by a few batarian patrols, somehow managed to kill them all with bare hands and makeshift weapons(or stolen, Lisa got a pistol off one she killed), even as their own numbers got picked down, younger sibling by younger sibling, and then Laura, and then Javi, until.Lisa was the last one left, memory etched with hearing her best friends and younger brothers, brothers she’d promised her parents she’d look out for, die very terrible deaths.
She was found by a couple soldiers from the rescuing Alliance patrol, and actually attacked them when they first came in the storage shed. They had to calm her down, and one went so far as to pull off his helmet so she could see they were human and weren’t going to hurt her. He introduced himself as Gabe and guided her out of her personal hell, both literally and figuratively. After everything she’d witnessed and heard and knew had happened to the colony, to her home, at the hands of the batarians, Lisa didn’t feel the least bit guilty for being glad the Alliance killed every last one of the slaving bastard scum they found. She’d lost everyone in the world she cared about to those monsters, she had every right to be glad they paid for it.
The soldier, Gabe, stuck with her until she’d made it back to Earth and escorted her to the foster home that had agreed to take her in. checked up on her a few times, offered to let her live with him and his roommates(another man and a woman, all three of them soldiers) if she wanted to. She took him up on that, and by the end of the third or fourth month, he was big brother and best friend rolled into one. Being on Earth meant she didn’t really have much(if any) direct interaction with batarians, but she was still working through her trauma and every time she heard them mentioned in news reports it was batarian pirates attacking a civilian vessel or batarian slavers raiding another colony--human, turian, whatever, all it did was reinforce her hostile view of them as a race.
She joined the Alliance military when she turned eighteen, feeling it was the best way to act out her gratitude of them saving her. She still missed her family and friends, of course, but she was healing and adjusting and while batarians still get her hackles up, she wouldn’t go out of her way to cause trouble with them. Largely because that would reflect badly on the Alliance, and she doesn’t want that. She proves to be an excellent soldier, tech genius, and near-unparalleled sniper, which is what gets her the rec for N-school(courtesy of Captain Anderson, who was Gabe’s CO. Gabe introduced them the day she enlisted). She excels in N-school(she’s always been the sort to thrive on challenge) and is clearly going to graduate with flying colors, so she and Gabe work it out--he’s coming for the ceremony, they each manage to get leave for the following week, they’re gonna spend time catching up and celebrating and just get to see each other face to face for the first time in... over a year.
And then, the week before graduation, Gabe is killed rescuing a diplomat’s kid from, you guessed it, batarian pirates(he’s one of only three KIA on that mission, which doesn’t make it sting any less)..That is when they cross the point of no return in her eyes. Two separate groups of batarians are responsible for the deaths of her family twice over. Clearly this was not a “few bad individuals” thing; this is a failing of them as a people(A people who have enslaving others enshrined as part of their culture to the point of calling it discrimination when they’re not allowed to practice it).
She is a driven, pragmatic, determined individual who wants to represent humanity and the Alliance well and so works just fine alongside every other race in Council space. She’s always willing to help, also always willing to make the hard calls to get a job done bc she learned early that people die. You can’t save everyone every time. You still try your damnedest to do it, but sometimes you can’t. And sometimes people die as a result of your decisions and you have to be able to live with that. She can.
And then TORFAN. Well, first Elysium, and then Torfan. By this point, she’s N4, risen to Commander, and absolutely willing to push her squad however hard it takes to accomplish their goal. (In any circumstances, these just happen to hit a tad closer to home than usual) The fight through Torfan’s tunnels to the pirate base is brutal, and there are several times her men point out maybe they should turn back. But she pushes on bc their mission is to take out this group of pirates. In her mind, batarians are already a threat, given their culture of slaving, piracy, and utter disregard for life and others in general. If they get away with attempting a full-scale attack like they did on a world like Elysium, they’ll be exponentially more dangerous. So there have to be repercussions and they have to be swift and they have to be brutal and unflinching and if she’s the one who doles that out so be it.
It costs her 3/4 of her squad, but they do it. They fight the pirates to the point of surrender and then Lisa shoots them anyway. Her mission was to eliminate the enemy, and she’s A) worried the batarians are surrendering as a show, with no intention of actually being prisoners, and B) convinced even if they did surrender, the Hedgemony would demand their return as “political prisoners” or something, with good odds they’d be released after just enough time this “incident” will have faded from people’s memory, and she doesn’t want to risk either. So the dozen-odd surrendering batarians still.die. And while she didn’t take pleasure or satisfaction in doing it, she doesn’t regret it either. Her thought process is somewhere along the lines of “These are sadistic, murdering, slaving scumbags, who have the audacity to ask for the mercy they would never in a million years show their victims. The galaxy is better off without them.”) She doesn’t care it gets her labelled “The Butcher of Torfan” and that people look askance at her when they know her record. She got the job done, the galaxy is just that much safer, and she’s not going to lose any sleep over batarians.
She makes N7 and gets the Spectre nomination bc she pushes herself just as hard as anyone under her command, always gets the job done, and--aside from batarians--has no issue working with other races. When it comes to anyone else; turians, asari, hanar, whoever, she’s all too happy to follow Kaidan’s “jerks and saint, just like us” philosophy and judge them on an individual basis, but--and I’ve actually had her say this in fic--”If you ever find a saintly batarian, let me know and I’ll pin a medal on their chest my-damn-self”. Between what’s known of batarians as a race and culture and her own first or second hand experience, there is nothing redeeming about them in her eyes. (And it’s a very good thing she didn’t run into any during that... week after the Talitha encounter in ME1, bc she probably would have ripped them to shreds with just her bare hands and her omnitool after hearing what that poor girl went through.) She’s not going to go out of her way to gleefully/vindictively slaughter them, but she’s not feeling too charitable or sympathetic toward them, either. If I may make a cross-franchise reference, Lisa’s feeling on batarians are very similar to how Fenris feels about mages in DA2, only unlike him, she hasn’t gotten any examples they’re not all Like That(TM).
As of the end of ME2, she has not seen any evidence to counter her view of batarians, so it’s a view she’s gonna go into ME3 holding(whenever I get around to completely redoing her game), and I don’t see her changing it much at this point. It’s a flaw, and it’s one that’s going to persist probably her entire life, but it made playing her so much fun. (especially since my two previous Shepards were 98% Paragon ANGELS who are best described as bleeding hearts. xD)
Dead. All of them. Their tiny bodies crammed into shipping crates the way you wouldn't even transport animals. There was a stench of urine and feces, scratch marks on the walls - horrific signs that those children had been alive in there not long ago. Stood at the entrance of one of the crates, Shepard felt her stomach lurch as she saw two of the limp figures tangled together in fearful embrace. The smallest could have been no older than seven. Revulsion and rage battled within Shepard, bringing tears to her eyes. She could not look away.
The chase ended here on Torfan. The slavers had surrendered. Their cargo was worthless. Their lives were all they had left, and they begged for them like dogs. In the darkness of her mind Shepard heard the voice of the man back on Mindoir: "You have to find them. Please…" The light dying from his eyes as he clutched desperately at Shepard's hand.
Down the barrel of her rifle she looked from the grey corpses to the throng of disarmed batarian captives. Behind her the soldiers awaited orders to gather the prisoners. It took Shepard only a few moments to make a decision.
"Do you have the slavers?" she heard Major Kyle call over the comm. "Where are they?"
