Sable Phoenix wrote...
(with lamentable snipping)
I reject their choices. I reject the story they told. I reject their claim upon my imagination. Jessica Shepard is mine, and they shall never take her from me.Jessica Shepard - 2154-2012
Semper Fi, Marine!
Godspeed.
@ Sable Phoenix: Phenomenal, heartbreaking post.
I respect the hell out of you for knowing the limitations of your character's mind – even knowing her well enough to foresee the tragedy of watching as she shattered her own moral code to do what (in those perverted circumstances) had be done. Damned compelling stuff, and beautifully described.
Thank you for that.
I have nothing so intelligent or insightful to add to the discussion, nor to any of the other compelling debate that has been going on elsewhere throughout the thread – I have only (as is frequently the case), Batman.
I couldn't help it. I mean, to be honest my brain is usually circling some kind of consideration of the Dark Knight around ninety percent of the day, but as I read your powerful account of Jessica Shepard and the alien figure with which she seemed to be replaced in the final game, I was reminded of the rather fractious relationship I have with many depictions of the Caped Crusader. No doubt this also is in large part a product of my playing too much Arkham City lately, but I'm starting to think of Shepard in Mass Effect 3 the way I think of the first Batman film. Not the Nolan Batmans that saved the character from filmic farce, and certainly not the Schumacher Batman... Schumacher's vision of the Dark Knight in Forever and Batman and Robin was ...bad.
(There we go: I appoint myself the award for Most Understatement Ever Made on the Interwebs! Thank you. Thank you all. I'd like to thank God, for inventing irony. And to my parents: thank you for showing me how to be flippant. This one's for you.)
No, I'm going right back to the Burton Batman, because – and this might be controversial – to me, despite that film's title, it wasn't actually a story about the character Batman at all. In fact, Batman didn't even appear in it.
See, there's a moment in that story when Batman is hunting the Joker and he follows him up into a church. On the way up he has to face your standard thug cardboard-cut-out villains – if memory serves me (it almost certainly doesn't) they were wearing matching sequined jackets or something. But as he fights them, Batman hurls them off the building. He sends them plummeting to their death.
...Now, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the character Batman knows – he's not so much about the killing. Like, not ever. Even with a mass-murdering sociopath like the Joker – for Batman it's not his place to decide who dies, and he would certainly never take a life. But in Burton's Batman he's flinging dudes to their demise, haphazardly shooting a chain gun from his plane (again: guns! never never never with the guns!), and he even possibly (the moment is vague) lets Joker fall to his pancakey death on the pavement. ...Not so much the character established over decades of comic history.
But when I saw this film for the first time I had my moment of fan indignation (what the hell is this?; snuffle, rage, guffaw, etc.) but in doing so, realised what the movie was. It wasn't actually a Batman movie (again, despite the name that would suggest otherwise). Sure it was a vigilante movie, and the main character was a guy in a weird bat costume; but that wasn't Batman. That was Burton's bat-shaped hero-cipher. And once I'd made that shift, I could like the movie well enough – it just wasn't the character or the narrative that I had expected, nor was it one I was going to ultimately love.
I suspect that in the months to come, as I look back on my experience of Mass Effect 3, it will be a similar sensation that I will be left with once the ache of disappointment has finally faded.
Like that alternate 'Burton-man', there were a number of elements within the span of Mass Effect 3's story that (even before the end) alienated this narrative's protagonist from the Shepard that I knew and loved, even though this woman was wearing her face.*
The kid in the dreams, it must be said, was probably the most obvious. No doubt I've spoken of this before, but although my Shepard was a selfless, compassionate figure, even she didn't give any particular crap about that kid. There was simply too much else going on. All life was ending – friends, loved ones, civilisation itself was being annihilated – and if that kid represented anything at all (and he really didn't), it was what happens when people do stupid things and don't let themselves be helped – again, the complete opposite of everything my Shepard believed. To be told – against all reason – that she was haunted by this dead-eyed little zombie in dreams, and to have her lamenting his loss in deep-and-meaningfuls with her Bro, Garrus, was extremely jarring, and wholly character-inconsistent.
And that's just the tip of a number of curious personality shifts that all snowball their way into those endings – a conclusion where the only moment in which she still sounds like herself leads to devastation, ruin, and Liara condescendingly condemning her for having failed the every advanced creature in the universe.
Shepard, like Batman, was a larger than life hero that, until the final game, I recognised absolutely – could read and predict with an elegant, effortless symbiosis. But exactly as you described with Jessica, once I saw her slow-motion jogging toward some drone in a hoodie, all maudlin and broken and dulled, she ceased to be the character I knew. She'd been weighed down by the arbitrary lament of writers who had hijacked her spirit for an artless descent into their final nihilistic bargain.
I suspect they had always intended to use this child as a symbol of the apocalypse (rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem, and all that), but it seems a shame they decided to use Shepard as the first consumable item for the fire. Truly the best had to lose all conviction for the worst to be filled with such passionate intensity.
* In the interests of full-disclosure I should mention that she was actually only wearing the closest facsimile of her face that I could manage after wrestling with the face-import bug. Shepard looked almost identical, but there was nonetheless a curious sensation of disassociation I couldn't shake, like when a television role gets swapped to a different actor.
EDIT: Bah! Top of page. Okay: 'Dead Flowers', by The Rolling Stones.
If you really want a sombre experience, listen to the Townes Van Zandt version:
Modifié par drayfish, 08 juillet 2012 - 02:23 .
Retour en haut
end it in logic cluster****
)
