elearon1 wrote...
>>Personality and body cannot be separated from one another in Miranda's case.<<
Agreed, Miranda's personality is influenced by her appearance - as is anyone's whether they want to admit it or not. Would I want an ugly Miranda? Of course not. But neither would I want an attractive Miranda with a weaker personality. People are packages of psychological and physical traits - you can't just separate one and expect the other to remain intact.
There's a
fic where she gets sliced up by the Praetorian on Horizon. As they're taking her back to the Normandy, Shepard asks, "What is she's deformed for life? It would destroy her." I liked that line because it points out one of her vulnerabilities without making her seem like a narcissist. Like you say, her looks are part of her personality.
elearon1 wrote...
>>I don't want to play an unsubtle action hero whose sole modus operandi is to blow things up and who doesn't stop to think a second about the miraculous fact he's been brought from the dead, preferring to comment on that with "I got better".<<
I just don't see it. Perhaps I'm better at taking the stuff I like and ignoring the rest, but I like my Shepard. Yes, she is unsubtle and in your face at times ... she's a marine ... but that doesn't mean she isn't thinking and wondering about the things happening to her. Do I need a scene where she sits down and talks about her philosophical perspective of being brought back from the dead to imagine she thinks about these things? Personally, I'd rather not have that scene and let it play out in my imagination the way I feel my Shep would react ...
I find Shepard to be much less the unsubtle action hero when she's FemShep. Maybe that's just Jen Hale's much deeper voice acting (and not to bash Meer, maybe he was told to voice DudeShep that way). Admittedly I also wince at her closing argument at Tali's trial. That just struck me as too dumb to come out of her mouth.
FemShep does get a chance to voice her thoughts on being brought back from the dead, and her feelings of abandonment, when romancing Thane or Jacob (to the displeasure of FemShep fans who don't care for those romances).
And I agree it's good that some of these moments/scenes are left to the player's/fan fic author's/artist's imagination (the
funeral, for example). I've sometimes imagined scenes such as first meetings between characters that turned out to be big disappointments when actually portrayed in canon (though not in Mass Effect so far).
elearon1 wrote...
And she worries about her relationship with Liara ... things happened on Illium that opened her eyes to how different they are ... how fleeting her life is in the thousand years Liara might well live.
Yes, the way Hale says "About
us," in response to Liara's question ("What are we supposed to talk about?") is perfect. Many emotions are packed into those two words.