Nightwriter wrote...
RollaWarden wrote...
And here's another thought:
I want a moment in ME3 when Miranda at last reveals just why she devoted every waking moment of the last two years of her life to bringing Shepard back.
We know that Cerberus had been closely monitoring Shepard ever since he became a Spectre and started his mission to defeat Saren and Sovereign. Maybe Cerberus was monitoring Shepard before that, even. Maybe throughout his whole Alliance career before his Spectre appointment.
This is an incredibly good thing you've touched upon and something I think really needs to be addressed.
Not exactly why she spent her time on Shepard - that's easily explained. It was because the Illusive Man gave her an assignment. I honestly don't think there was any other reason, other than the drive of professional excellence and the longing to make the impossible possible.
However what they do need to talk about is that Miranda spent two years with nothing to do but Shepard. I always found it strange that despite the fact that he was the constant focus of two years of her time she does not treat him especially different. He is just a colleague. Even if you're playing female Shepard, Miranda has intimate familiarity with just about everything about you now and you've been a big, close part of her life for a considerable time.
Thanks, Nightwriter. I should have earlier seen the parallels between Miranda/The Lazarus Project and Victor Frankenstein/his creature. Allusions--especially in the absence of the writer's confirmation of them--are a bit of a slippery slope, but this hallmark western motif is certainly present in ME2. If we understand the Byronic hero and Shelley's concept of him in her character Victor Frankenstein, we can understand, somewhat, Miranda's work on Shepard a bit better.
Perhaps like Victor in
Frankenstein, Miranda was obsessed with achievement. Her motives are open to speculation--here she was very nearly doing what her father did. Like Victor Frankenstein, Miranda was driven--for whatever the reason--to complete her work, and bring it to perfection. She achieved it. This project, it seems to me, was much more than a simple order. Simple orders just don't come like this one did. Such an obsession, if we understand what Shelley might be trying to tell us, the work of a genius, borders on, and sometimes crosses over into madness. That hyperfocus is often a quality of high intelligence or genius.
Shelley understood the line between madness and genius all too well. Her father, William Godwin, and her husband, Percy Shelley, were both mad geniuses of a kind. And perhaps Mary was terrified herself of her own talent.
Of course, too close a parallell/allusion won't work in any motif or archetype; it doesn't have to fit exactly. Miranda is certainly not mad, nor is Shepard a "Frankenstein's monster." If we try to fit an allusion to closely to the original, we find that the peg we're trying to fit into that square hole is just a little too round.
Still, an understanding of the Frankenstein myth might help us understand, a little, Miranda's work, to borrow the title from Dave Egger's book--The Lazarus Project is
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
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