On Protest: A Reflection on Retake Mass Effect

Trains are a great place to think. This has been in my red notebook for almost a week now -- thanks to this weekend's paper fiasco, I didn't have a chance to type it.
I did some introspection, and came up with a better view of some things in relationship to Retake Mass Effect.

Now, if you'll pardon the ensuing exposition and picture-heavy blog:

To start, I have 4 Shepards, all started in Mass Effect, three of which are well defined and one of them I don't like because she was sloppy.

Elora Shepard is my first spacer/war hero/vanguard, who grew up on Arcturus while her parents rotated their tours. Comparatively she's rather easy-come-easy-go, taking everything pretty much in stride. For example, while she did pistol-whip Archer in ME2, she would have been relatively nice to him after seeing he was concerned about his brother's welfare, and she took Horizon considerably well (since all of my Sheps romanced Kaidan in ME1).

I mean, seriously. Look at this guy. 

Adelaide Shepard is of the colonist/sole survivor/infiltrator persuasion. She's a bit more renegade than Elora, but only when it comes to protecting her crew. She's overprotective, because she's terrified of losing people -- she would have panicked the night before the suicide mission, but not have reacted as badly as Elora or my canon!Shep to the Bahak explosion </geek>. However, after Horizon, she leaned heavily on Garrus for support because she'd essentially felt she'd lost Kaidan, and one thing led to another ...

He's my other Sheps' BFF. Garrus is such a boss, man.

Garrus stabilized her after that perceived loss.

Marrakech A. Shepard is my canon!Shepard, and by far my favorite. She's my second spacer/war hero/vanguard, and was a lot like Elora in ME1. Her father died on Shanxi so his squad could retreat, meaning that she grew up with her mother on various cruisers or dreadnoughts when they weren't stationed on Arcturus. Hackett was a friend of her mother's and a distant acquaintance of hers, and Marrakech looked up to him as a sort of surrogate father figure for part of her life. She applied to and was offered spots at a number of universities, but opted to go into the Alliance against her mother's wishes. She and Joker met during her last year in school (while stationed on Arcturus) and, while they weren't close friends, she kept a protective eye on him. He wasn't fond of it, but they didn't meet after graduation until he was piloting the Normandy.

"This is a fertile land. We will rule over it, and we will call it . . . this land."

"I think we should call it your grave!"

"Ah! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

"Mwhahaha! Mine is an evil laugh!"

She was nearly completely paragon in ME1, with only a few renegade options (people like Harkin, who just deserved it). The Prothean beacon messed with her implants, which means her biotics have a green tint rather than the regular blue one, and she's fairly self-conscious about the change. She almost completely fell apart after Kaidan's rejection on Horizon, deciding in the moment that she needed to push him away to keep Cerberus from using him against her, while hating herself for that decision. After Horizon, she started to become increasingly renegade. The big decisions were paragon, but the actions she used to get there weren't. She started to recover a little after the Collector base was destroyed and they left Cerberus, but the destruction of the Bahak relay put her teetering on the brink of the Despair Event Horizon (click at your own peril). She started to be self-demanding, self-punishing, cynical, and depressed, but hid almost everything but the cynicism from her crew.

Marrakech Shepard wants to know who told you she wanted to die.

She was only one day away from retirement!

(Yes, that's her)

And then there's Annalyse, my first Shepard and my only soldier. I don't like her. She's sloppy. And she kept me from finishing the suicide mission with everyone alive because she picked Jack over Miranda because Jack was crazy.

So what's the point, you ask, of me expounding on my various Shepards? It's because these are my Shepards. I know them as well as I'd know any character I wrote in one of my novels (except maybe Annalyse).  Bioware gave me the template, sure. But I gave them life. The personalization, the familiarity is what I imagined. Elora would hesitate to sock Han'Gerrel in the gut after he nearly killed her, but Marrakech would happily do so. Adelaide and Elora don't crack under pressure, while Marrakech is starting to feel it. And this personalization was Bioware's goal, from the very get-go. Shepard was to be our creation, and that was what she became to me. All four of them.

And without space magic! *gasp*

In some ways, especially with Marrakech (perhaps more so, because the stress is something humans would feel), Shepard is everything I'd love to be. Even though life creates a vortex of suckiness and everything is going to hell around her and she's losing faith in herself and the universe, she keeps going because she, more than anything else, believes that people have a right to life.

In the words of Ernest Hemingway: "The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for."

She may have been handed the worst cards the universe could find, but she was fighting for the people who deserved to have it better.

Perhaps it's because of this that the ending of ME3 doesn't make sense. Of all Sheps, only Elora may have gone along with Starchild -- and I mean maybe. Adelaide would have thought it was joking, then hacked it herself; Marrakech would have logic-bombed it to hell. She would have argued the Catalyst to flat-out capitulation.

"What the hell are you talking about? You just created a paradox. Think about it. Think about it." 

*Catalyst Explodes*

"Good AI."

But for all of them, I know my endings would be the same. They would hear the options, they would remember the relay destructions, they would look around them and see all these fleets and realize that no one would survive . . . and they'd pick destroy, every time. Because it was better and more fair than the alternatives.

But why did that (which is admittedly only one reason I loathe the endings) encourage me to join a movement of fellow "entitled, childish gamers" to get it changed?

Like I said, just ONE problem with the ending.

I'm usually not one to jump on bandwagons. The closest I came to changing something ever was getting the attention of my school superintendent in high school, or almost counter-protesting the Westboro Baptist Church last year (my senior thesis got in the way). I went to a hippie school, but never protested for the environment. I'm passionate about human rights and stopping human trafficking, but I don't do marches or sign petitions. Granted, that is also what I'm going to school for, so take that as you will.

So why the heck did I suddenly become involved enough in Retake Mass Effect that I plan on liveblogging the Mass Effect 3 panel at Pax on Friday?

I had a long chat with my subconscious, and I think I figured out why.

Speaking of the subconscious...

Casey Hudson: No, we don't need more than three different-colored endings. 

Why do I have a shotgun, and why are my hands covered in tic marks?

All those "big problems" out there -- global warming, human rights, human trafficking -- those are all things that feel hopeless. No matter how many marches we march, petitions we sign, protests we attend, you feel like it won't change. There's no hope, whatsoever. I can protest all I want to get the US to intervene in Darfur, or to keep Syria from hitting that point, but in the end no one will hear me. My voice alone isn't powerful enough, and the issues I care about aren't abortion or omgnogayslol, so I don't have enough people with me trying to change the government's mind. I can do whatever I want to do, but people won't stop trafficking in humans or exploiting others until it becomes financially unprofitable to do so. All I can do is raise awareness, not stop the problem, and I can't do it alone. It's depressing.

Then along came Retake.


Compared to what I'd love to change in the world, Retake is small. It's focused on one gaming company's faux pas, a letdown that in the grand scheme of the universe is so unimportant that it's almost not worth fighting over. It's the betrayal of a company's promise, a heart-stab to loyal fans, but not a literal betrayal causing hundreds of deaths, or a literal stab to our heart. People are not actually dying. 

Yes, EA/Bioware, it's exactly like that. EXACTLY.

But Bioware is not a government. Bioware/EA is changeable, moldable, able to be affected by falling sales. The Retake struggle is something winnable and, living in a world where winnable things are few and far between, we need that victory. It's a bright light in a dark world where it feels like no matter what we do, we're going to somehow end up between the proverbial rock and a hard place with hell on one side and a fire pit on the other. Finally, something that we can hold on to, something that we can be victorious with. 

And from taking down Saren to destroying/killing the Collectors, through ending the quarian-geth war and curing the genophage, we've fought those impossible battles alongside our Shepards. We know what makes them tick, what breaks their heart, what makes them happy, what scares them to death. "Why did Shepard made Decision X?" is something we all know as well as our own motivations, because the fight to save the galaxy was ours as well. And we might not be able to solve those big, ground-shaking, real world problems ourselves, but we could take on Shepard's problems, see ourselves making those hard decisions, and watch ourselves being heroes, and that gave us a reason to fight.

And now, all those hard decisions we made have no pay off, no reason to have happened. We see this all the time in real life -- someone makes a decision to make a change, and then it's rendered irrelevant by circumstance and the cruel workings of the universe. And we didn't want that, because this was supposed to be a game where everything worked out, the hero won (maybe with sacrifice) and the galaxy went about its business, as happens in basically all Space Operas (click link at own risk). This is what we were expecting. Instead, this is what we got.

Yep.

Betrayal, hurt, pain, and a Gainax/Sudden Downer/Pyrrhic Victory/Pyrrhic Villainy/Cruel Twist ending. And we decided that, like Shepard, we were going to make a change. Because Bioware, since ME1, has ingrained us to fight. And we will fight, and we will prevail. Because that's what Shepard would have us do. 


Keelah Se'lai, and I should go.

"I've gone through this much hell. There's not much of a reason to stop now."

Marrakech Amelia Shepard