Belisarius25 wrote...
It's a good thing Ashley isn't xenophobic then.
She's uncomfortable around aliens, yes, because she's never really been around them (the horror!) - but that's one of the major parts of her story arc in ME1, but she in no way hates aliens or thinks they're inferior to humans or anything. Her point is that she believes that other races will act in their own self-interest when push comes to shove, and that's her concern (realism, not xenophobia) - and she ends up being right.
She's certainly somewhat ignorant about aliens at the start, but that's part of the point of her character, and it's pretty clear her major concern about having aliens on the Normandy is security-related not anything racist.
But yeah, the character who hates Terra Firma/Cerberus, considers Tali like a sister, tells Shepard to comfort Liara after you kill Benezia and exchanges praise with the Salarians if you asign her to them on Virmire is xenophobic
Wow someone has the same opinion about Ashley as me, It's always irked me how people call her racist when she is nothing of the sort.
A major point in her backstory is that she is the granddaughter of General Williams, the only human to surrender a human world to an alien race(you know the unprovoked attack on a human colony for breaking a law they didn't know existed), her entire family has been blacklisted because of it. I would say that would be enough of a reason to have trust issues with the other races.
She does not hate them, the closest she ever gets is when she says that the other races would, if it came down to it protect their own people over humanity, which is exactly what they do
three times. It was also an issue that she would get over as the story progressed as she realised that the other races were only "human"(for lack of a better word).
I would bet that a lot of people who hated Ashley did not even bother to explore her character before writing her off, at no point in any Mass Effect game does Ashley say she hates Aliens, so I've never really understood where people got the whole xenophobia thing from.
Ok if you hate her fair enough, but it's a bit much to call her a xenophobic bi**h when there is actually very little evidence to support it.
She has trust issues for sure (even more so in 3, but what they did with both VS was blown completly out of proportion). But over the course of ME1&3 works well with at least 5 different races even befriending them (in Tali's case a little sister) she openly condemns both Terra Firma/Cerberus, becomes a Council spectre even risking her life to protect the council, none of these are things a xenophobic person would do.