#danni shepard

ok so! She’s named after Danni’s foster mom! & her middle name is Karen (named after Chakwas). She’s 5′5, an inch shorter than Danni, and neutral good. She’s a lot more like Kaidan than Danni, except that she can have a pretty bad temper at times. She doesn’t like her nose, but she likes her hair! She smokes (it’s her coping mechanism;;). She’s never set foot off of the Ark until Andromeda rolls around (she’s 20 when she wakes up), so she experiences everything for the first time when she gets off. Rain, weather, other life, etc. etc. She spends a lot of time watching vids of those kinds of things.And I’m just… gonna add a little bit of back story, because I feel like it.She’s conceived before the end of ME1, and in my canon, Shepard and Kaidan get together before Virmire. Danni leaves Kaidan behind because he went with Kirrahe and she didn’t think she would be able to get him before the bomb went off. She doesn’t find out that she’s pregnant until after the end of ME1 (I HC that ME2 starts 10 months after the end of ME1), so Mary is a month old when the Normandy goes Kaput. And Danni doesn’t want to have to raise a child in a reaper infested galaxy, and she knows about the Andromeda program, and she personally knows Alec Ryder (because why wouldn’t Shep know him??? they weren’t in the N7 program at the same time but there aren’t that many N7 operatives??? I feel like they would be a tight community). Anyways, she asks if he’ll take Mary and raise her because Danni doesn’t think she’ll make it out at the end, and she doesn’t want to leave Mary alone. Alec agrees and takes Mary, raises her as his own kid, basically. Now, when Danni is rebuilt by Cerberus, Mary is 2 years old, and has never met her mother. Danni is obviously emo about it, but she sends Mary holovids every month, telling her about Kaidan (and eventually Thane), but never about herself because she’s ashamed of the things she’s done. She visits her maybe once because the Arks set off, and she gives Alec Kaidan’s dog tags to give to Mary when she’s older. Of course, Mary won’t watch the vids until she’s old enough to understand, but she watches the vid of Danni talking about Kaidan the most, because she feels closer to him than she does to Danni??The vids start slowing down towards the end of ME2, and the last vid that she sends to Mary is just her telling her how proud she is to be her mother, and that she’s the only good that Danni has done.(I also HC that the kids aboard the arc aren’t put into cryo until they’re 18/19, so that they have time to be trained, etc. So Mary spends a lot of time rewatching those vids).Anyways, Danni dies at the end of ME3, and Mary wears Kaidan’s dog tags. The only thing she really knows about Danni is what she hears other people say about her, because Danni never actually makes a vid telling Mary about her own history/self/etc. The way that Ryder reacted to Sloane Kelly in the gameplay trailer, the whole, “great, she’s a hothead” line is basically what Mary thinks of Danni. Before she learns more about her, obvs. She doesn’t want to live up to the Shepard name, completely defies the whole idea that she could. She’s not a soldier, she’s a synthetic engineer and mechanic. She’s obviously trained in some areas, like she knows how to use a gun and everything, but she wasn’t trained for combat, she was trained for building and fixing the Arks/Nexus. So when she becomes the Pathfinder, it’s difficult for her to adjust.I have so much more I can talk about (like how I’m currently doing a playthru where Kaidan is alive & Thane isn’t romanced & it’s tearing me UP inside thinking that Kaidan could’ve been raising Mary for the 2 years that Danni is “dead”), but i need to STOP because this will get too long;;;