Hurricanes

LOOK at this amazing drawing VanVermillyon did for my birthday!

It's Shlee!! At long last the protagonist of my WIP fanfiction Halfway Home returned!!! In awe at the smoke and the atmosphere, the linework is always super smooth and solid too <3

Look at my boy, indulging in his worst instincts!!! Do we love to see it? I don't know. But please look at my boy either way!

You can check VanVermillyon's art over his Twitter and his Instagram!!

When I get asked why I'm laughing at my phone and I have to just say 'um, Tumblr...'

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

These are the unused “rival” NPCs from ME1′s Pinnacle Station. There are references to these characters giving Shepard challenges to complete in the DLC’s game files, and you can find a few of them relaxing in the station’s lobby area. Some of them have armor that you won’t find anywhere else in ME1.

By sifting through the model files it is possible to match the names on the Station’s scoreboard to the respective NPC:

First image row: Chior (salarian), C’Sell (asari), Minket (asari)

Second row: Prochor (turian), Fre Natha (salarian), Sophomin (turian)

Third Row: Tahoka (krogan), Mimanox (turian), Thaidi (asari)

There is a lot of unused material in the Pinnacle Station DLC, including unused text conversation lines and Vidinos leaving a note in Shepard’s apartment. Early in development the station was named Meditatus Station.

Salarian Councilor Valern without his Robes of Councilor Mystery.

From Kumail Nanjiani, the voice of Jarun Tann:

“Jarun Tann in Mass Effect was really challenging. That type of acting is difficult because you are playing a character but you are also giving missions to the player so the performance is halfway to presentational and emotive so finding that balance is very tricky for me. It wasn’t just my interpretation of my character, I had to present missions and details in a way that felt “video gamey”.

I was so nervous about my performance that I never actually played the game. “

Conventional wisdom holds that the salarians know everything about everyone, and this is not far from the truth. In war, the unquestioned superiority of their intelligence services allows them to use their small military to maximum effectiveness. Well before fighting breaks out, they possess complete knowledge of their enemy’s positions, intentions, and timetable.

Salarians

What I already knew :

Basically the Council prefers the Alliance as a junior, foolish, reckless partner they can control rather than as a bunch of aggressively expansionist assholes they’ve antagonized. With the Alliance on a leash, they can address the Batarian Hegemony problem and stabilize the Attican Traverse.

Moreover, in the books, specifically Revelation, it’s specifically said that one of the reasons the Alliance did so well against the turians during the First Contact War is because they had very good military software getting dangerously close to AI. Since AI is a big no-no for the Council, it’s kinda imperative that they absolutely get the Alliance to agree to play by their rules, otherwise they might have a geth situation on their doorstep, if not an actual Singularity (they could also go to war and annihilate humanity easily, if they wanted to, that’s the turian option, but fortunately for humans the asari are the masters of the galaxy).

But here’s what occurred to me just now, looking at the very beginning of ME1 : the Council also wants to make sure the Alliance shares all Prothean technology it unearths with them. That would seem to be only relevant in the case of the Prothean Beacon on Eden Prime… until one remembers that humanity has an entire Prothean complex on Mars, including chambers which could not be opened until early 2186. (Probably where the Crucible came from.)

Now we know that the asari, at the very least, have profited enormously from privileged access to Prothean technology, allowing them to always keep an edge. From the Council’s point of view, in this context, there are three options in 2157, at the moment they’ve officially made first contact with the humans :

a) Hostile Takeover : absolutely destroy them, take what you want, make sure they are never a threat again - again, the turian option.

b) Play Fair : normalize relationships and treat that bunch of enormously aggressive jackasses who think they’re entitled to everything the normal way, i.e. let them prove their worth and they’ll get their embassy in the Citadel circa 2257 CE, give or take.

c) Accommodation : give preferential treatment to the humans so that they’re happy to play along, always keep them satisfied without giving them power, buying you time to enmesh them in your vast socio-economic apparatus.

Obviously, with Prothean technology at hand on Mars and the entitled jackasses feeling aggravated, b) would be an absolutely terrible idea for the Council.

And I also agree with you 100% when you point out that the Council stepped in before things escalated out of anyone’s control into a full-blown war with a foe the turians had badly underestimated. I tend to think the diplomatic recourse is both pragmatic (“Let’s not go into a war fully blind, guys.”) and idealistic (“Let’s try to find a diplomatic solution BEFORE we kill each other, GODDESS.”), which perfectly falls in line with what I assume to have been a 2-1 Council vote, with only whoever the turian councilor was back then voting against - but that’s speculation. What isn’t speculation is, like you said, that there were too many unknowns to just go gung-ho on humanity.

However, and this is the gist of my post, from the moment the Council has normalized their relationship with the Alliance and found out that humanity has just discovered mass effect technology, is about 11 billion people mostly in their home system and has a very small military, the Council could absolutely be entitled to treat humanity like everyone else and make them wait. What I was trying to say is that at some point after 2157 the Alliance would be a known quantity - but what would be absolutely terrifying for the Council, I argue, is the potential for harm of humanity if left unchecked.

That’s not even considering all three militaries attacking together, with interested parties (i.e. the batarians) potentially chiming in. There’s a dark AU to be written about the turians occupying Earth too fast so the Council has to back them, the turians would like to make it the Human Protectorate but the batarians are very afraid of having a swath of the Turian Empire right next door so they’re humanity’s best friend in that setting, clamoring and fighting for its independence… What cost might humans be willing to pay to Get Earth Back ?