Well This Isn't Good

Oh my goddd yes I can but be careful what you wish for.

So Baby You're a Haunted House was my first song pick because, like, come on. It's perfect. She is literally a haunted house. And 'gonna stay in love somehow' is the vibe I wanted to give throughout the story.

Chapter 1 was Silver Springs. So Stevie Nicks wrote Silver Springs as a way to say 'this is what we could have been, we could have had this all but it's gone now.' We've all seen the video of the 1997 performance where Stevie Nicks looks directly at her husband and screams 'you'll never get away from the sound of the woman who loved you;' that kind of rage and sadness and just general wall of emotion is the vibe that I wanted this chapter to have. He's presented with the chance for the family, the job, the peace, the kid! But none of it is what he wanted because he wanted all of that with her, and he carries a lot of frustration along with his grief that it all went down the way it did.

Something I've briefly mentioned on Tumblr is that for every chapter name that gives insight into Garrus' perspective, there's one behind the scenes for Shepard ex Machina. So hers for this chapter is Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac. She wants to be with him, and everyone, everywhere.

Chapter 2 is Nothing Compares 2 U, and I chose that because it's about living in the past when you have everything you want. The singer (Prince originally, but I was listening to the Cat Power version), talks about having the job of their dreams, having money and resources, and still only ever seeing their past love in everything around them. It's also a joke about Miranda's attempt to clone Shepard and Garrus' extremely mixed feelings about all of that.

Meanwhile, Shepard's song for that one is My Love Mine All Mine by Mitski (my baby here on Earth/Showed me what my heart was worth) and that reflects her attempts to try and comfort him in that chapter.

My mini-chapter three is Fernando by ABBA and that reflects both of their perspectives at that moment. Both of them feel a nostalgia for what was, but it's at this point in the story that Garrus starts looking toward the present instead of the past and in that way he's catching up with Shepard.

Spoilers past this point!!!!!!!!!!

She handed the slip of paper she'd so diligently carried with her to the crier. His eyes snagged on the way her name looped across the page, then scanned her face.

"Your ma-" he began, his voice betraying his shock as his face fought to remain neutral.

"Don't finish that title," she snarled, hand automatically at her the weapon on her belt, "Read it as it's written."

He nodded, gulped, and cleared his throat.

"Warden Commander Stevaine Cousland," he cried.

Silence passed like a wave through the crowd from where she stood.

And the king rose from his throne and stared at her.

This was the moment she'd been dreading, the moment she'd been avoiding for the past five years. But blessed protocol kicked in and she sent a silent prayer of thanks to her mother for forcing every single boring gathering on her in adolescence.

Stevaine Cousland, Warden Commander of Amaranthine and Queen Consort of the Ferelden Court, stood patiently in line and waited to greet King Alistair.

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

Bi-pan solidarity

Lesbian-ace solidarity

And the

Asexuals aren't inherently LGBT and don't belong, either (unless they also happen to experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria). Some aces are also pretty homophobic.

We are stronger as a united front!

all ships, and rights for one are

rights for everyone!

I mean ultimately it's up to the player to decide how their Shepard feels about any given situation, but it'd be nice to see those reactions and choices have real consequences in the gameplay environment, and shape how character dialogue my change given said actions. Gameplay wise, this ofc would be very hard to implement because the dialogue trees would be MASSIVE and depend on so many variables, and Mass Effect, was "somewhat" one of the first of it's kind to touch on this, but in the present day, we see this a little more with titles like Baldur's Gate, where some of your choices can be defined by class and race. It's just one thing I wish we saw ramifications of in the game. Like Shepard has gone through a LOT of traumatic experiences, that would rattle anyone, I don't care how much of a soldier you are. You get touches of this throughout the series, especially as we move on to ME3 but man, even in ME2, you get spaced and you DIE, and wake up to a human terrorist cell that has resurrected your body, and is using you to their own ends.

btw, here’s yours: