Garrus Loyalty
Have I mentioned that Garrus is also one of my favorite characters from the ME series? I don't really know why. I'll have to think about it. Perhaps I like him even more as a Renegade FemShep. I contemplated pursuing a relationship with him as my FemShep character, but didn't end up going there. (Actually, I didn't end up pursuing any romantic connections at all in this playthrough.) Perhaps it's because I can appreciate sarcasm, and Garrus definitely amps up the sarcasm.
Largely, this mission was about understanding the difference between vengeance and revenge. (The mission is even called "Eye for an Eye".) Garrus was effectively being a turian version of Batman who acted as an anonymous vigilante to wipe out crime syndicates and mercenaries. He gathered other strongarms who believed in his cause. One of those sidekicks, Sidonis, turned on him and caused his entire team to be murdered. Naturally, Garrus is seriously upset about it, dealing with a lot of guilt and anger. The mission (should you choose to accept it) is about helping Garrus to either kill the SOB or forgive and forget him. As a Renegade, I absolutely helped him with the killing. (Garrus is an excellent sniper, let me tell you.)
I couldn't help but remember that scene from Batman Begins when Rachel Dawes is talking to Bruce after the trial for his parents' murderer. She points out that Bruce wanting to kill his parents' murderer is revenge, not vengeance.
Define "revenge": The action of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for a wrong suffered at their hands.
Define "vengeance": Punishment inflicted or retribution exacted for an injury or wrong.
By the dictionary, there is no definitive difference between the two. Hence the confusion. I think a lot of the issue here is that revenge indicates pleasure or satisfaction with the act, whereas vengeance is supposed to be a form of justice that elicits no pleasure from the enforcer. Revenge is dehumanizing, but vengeance is morally acceptable. I find this interesting, since the dictionary claims that they're synonymous and society differentiates them by emotional empathy. One word changes whether or not you're morally reasonable. Is this a clever ploy created by some guy years ago to make murdering his dirty cheating wife justifiable?
This clip isn't the whole scene, and cuts out the dialogue that I'm referring to, but I always laugh when Rachel slaps him not once, but twice. This remix nearly made me erupt with laughter in the middle of a quiet library area. Oops.
Investigating a Collector Ship
Every time I do this level, it kinda freaks me out. This game isn't easy to play at night if I'm alone in my room, I admit it. The Collectors are creepy. It's the one area of the game where I take pleasure in blasting my guns. I loathe the husks with a fiery passion and enjoy watching those ugly, evil creatures fall to their deaths. The Collectors themselves are just below my feelings for husks, so I hate them, too. (After knowing things from the ending of this game and ME3, I don't hate them quite so much. All for the love of science and, in a twisted way, saving the galaxy. But I'll always hate the husks. They're almost an equivalent to zombies, except worse.) The danger of influence and science at its most extreme form is embodied by the Collectors themselves. (Again, nod to ME3 with the issue of organic versus synthetic.) The whole place is like a technological beehive. I don't like bees. It makes sense that the game makers did it this way, though, since the Collectors harvest species for study. They're meant to be like insects.
Personally, I was pissed that the Illusive Man lured me into the ship. He planned the whole thing just so he could get some intel from the inside of a Collector ship. From the Renegade perspective, though, it made sense. Shepard makes impossible missions possible and has some of the best of the best crew members in the whole galaxy, so having confidence in FemShep's abilities is reasonable. Furthermore, the opportunity to learn about the Collectors from first-hand experience is rare and incredible. Their technology - which is technically Prothean and Reaper technology - is very advanced. To be able to study that would be amazing and could help out humanity as well as other species. (In other words, it's a very dangerous thing to put into the Illusive Man's hands as a Paragon, but a very good and innovative thing to give him as a Renegade.)
FemShep spoke with Mordin after the mission. (He's the voice of reason in all of this chaos, which is interestingly contrasted with the difficulty of following his speech pattern.) The Collectors are not Protheans, or even descendants of Protheans. They are clones of Protheans. Their genetic and organic material was studied, taken apart, and put back together with modifications to create the Collectors, a race purely designed by the Reapers to collect species, study them, and probably do the exact same thing. (ME3 answers this, I think.) They have no culture or personality - nothing that gives them any sense of individuality. Culture and art, as Mordin points out, represent a philosophical and intellectual progression in some form. Advancement in society is dangerous at opposite ends of the spectrum; if there is no progression when society is ready for it, or progression when society is not ready for it, bad things happen. There must be a balance where a step forward in culture occurs when the people are prepared for it. As time changes, society changes. The Collectors have no society to be changed, and time makes no difference to them. This proves their synthetic connection - the part of them that is technologically altered by the Reapers. They're organic robots. It's an awesome and terrifying idea.
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| Image of Prothean statues on planet Ilos from ME1. (Click to enlarge.) Supposedly, a living Prothean actually makes an appearance in ME3 which has me really excited. It's difficult to see what they look like here, and the Collectors have altered the actual appearance of the Protheans. |
There isn't a lot to say about this one, I don't think. There's the stuff about Miranda as a character, which is interesting. She is a genetically-modified human. Everything about her is made to be perfect, or as close to perfection as physically possible - even her appearance, as she herself points out. Technology assisted with making her so freakishly awesome, but she's very much a living being with flesh, blood, and personality. Not an organic robot. She has some serious baggage, though, about having no choice in the matter. Her father literally designed her to be this way. He's so narcissistic and egomaniacal that he used his own genetic material and combined it with whatever else he found that was the best of the best. She doesn't have a mom. (How sad!) She ran away from him once she had planned it out and was old enough to, and Cerberus scooped her up. She quickly rose in ranks and became one of the Illusive Man's best cohorts. Goody.
This mission is about Miranda's identical twin. Genetically, anyway, since her twin is actually several years younger. Miranda kidnapped her sister, Oriana, to save her from their father. She did it to protect her, since she understood the villainous ways of her father and wished to spare her from that life. You could compare her to the "silent angels" that euthanize dying patients in hospital wards, acting by the belief that they're helping others when perhaps they're not. (Free will, folks.) Did she have the right to do it? Maybe since she's actually a familial connection, there's more of a reason for her to be allowed to do it. And, of course, she experienced it herself and actually knows for a fact what her father is like. I'm on the fence about it. The situation warrants more merit than the typical trying-to-protect-my-sibling case. But I also never got to hear about the father's side of the situation, nor much about him as a guy beyond the fact that he's uber wealthy and successful in business. The whole concept of twins and genetics and whatnot is particularly relevant to me because I'm an identical twin. All those jokes and references and stuff made in society about twins is something I'm either fully aware of or have experienced in my two decades of life. I can attest to the fact that I'm absolutely not a clone, by the way, and that there are some pretty substantial differences between my sister and I.
I'd really like to pick a bone with Bioware about potentially sexist programming with her character, how the camerawork specifically forces the gamer to "check her out" and accentuates her feminine aspects, but I'll bite my tongue for this blog. The game itself largely appeals to the young-adult male demographic, but I'm a college girl who loves these games. Then of course, you could argue whether they should do the same sort of sex appeal for male characters and if I would complain about that, which I very well might not, so... Ah, devil's advocate.
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| I love Yvonne Strahovski. She's a great actress, she's modest, she's gorgeous, and she's Australian. And all of this is coming from a straight woman. |
A quick note about this planet. It's like a futuristic Seattle or New York City. The only place I visit as FemShep is Nos Astra, a marketing district to buy stuff. Pity, because this place would be awesome to explore. Well, I visit a couple of separate locations for the missions with Samara and Thane, but they're exclusive buildings that are nearby. This place is much less grungy than most of the planets visited. Clean, shiny, and - as well other places in the game - boxy. Synthetic stuff is to lines as organic stuff is to circles, if that makes sense.
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| Pretty, no? |
I believe a character in the game described her best: a warrior monk. She's an asari like Liara (who I'll come to in my next post) with wicked biotic abilities. (Hence the weird glowing purple stuff in the image below.) She's a justicar, a term in the game that refers to a small, powerful classification of asari who strictly follow a set of codes to uphold the law. They're similar to Spectres. The term "justicar" came from medieval England, and is used appropriately since justicars from our own timeline were judges who upheld justice. Good job, Bioware, for your historical accuracy. Asari justicars are selfless and lethal. They have a reputation for killing law-breakers ruthlessly and protecting the innocent to the death. If you're a criminal, you do absolutely everything in your power to steer clear of justicars or they'll getcha. They're a monastic order that follows a borderline religious code that covers pretty much any possible circumstance they could possibly face. They're governed by this code rather than living beings. In American society, the citizens are checked by the government, and the government is checked by the Constitution. The invariability lies in the fact that our court system can change the code with the laws and interpretations they pass. But I'd rather not delve into that ethical debate right now. Even so, I find Samara to be a fascinating character.
Again, I'm biting my tongue over sexism here. Speaking plainly, Samara's boobs are ginormous and the outfit she wears certainly emphasizes that. Boing! As a character that vocally sounds like an older woman (and as a character who technically is an older woman), this could be a representation of the male audience that enjoys the appeal of "cougars". I could be making an interpretive leap here that isn't true, but...um. I have reason to believe it.
Video games are nothing but symbolic coding figured into computers to create technical images. How interesting that asari justicars abide by a strict code, when as far as I'm concerned, they're completely created by a technological code.
Gaming Segment (7 Hours)
Free will keeps popping up in my mind with the ME series. It's much like the article I posted about ME3 where they actually do discuss how free will plays an important thematic role in the series:One of the series’ strongest themes is an exploration of what it means to be a living being. This ties very closely the concept of free will, and both ideas are defined by contrast to the Reapers. Reapers see other beings as material resources, and their most insidious trick is that before destroying organic life, they rob it of independence. In Mass Effect, the struggle to maintain control over oneself at all costs, even if it means dying in the process, is an important concept. This is further developed in Mass Effect 2, first in Jacob’s loyalty mission ( his father is discovered to have used the side effects of an indigenous plant to turn female coworkers into sex slaves as a means of survival), and with Legion’s, where it’s revealed that the Geth are actually a complex people who simply want the freedom to go their own way without fear of being destroyed. This creates a moral environment in which the crew of the Normandy isn’t just fighting to save Organic life from evil machines, they’re actually fighting for the right to exist on their own terms.
It can't be ignored that a powerful concept that humans love to explore is free will. Look at the United States and our history of gaining independence. Look at our Bill of Rights and the First Amendment to the Constitution. Humans love freedom and frequently exercise their right to have it. It's no different, hypothetically, for any other competent species. Granted, we also love control and power, which creates a very interesting and conflicting dichotomy.
I'm enjoying this project immensely and am finding great intellectual satisfaction in it. I hope others can share my enthusiasm for it. Video games are awesome.
~Mel
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