rekn2 wrote...
GUYS! good god man "Mass Effect Romance Logic"
adhd kids, ffs
I wrote an actual response towards the beginning on this thread and got no replies.
CronoDragoon wrote...
I need to know more about your Shepard. If - as it seems - Liara's devotion to saving Shepard and Tali's devotion during ME2 cancel out, then I think it just comes down to chemistry. What type of good guy is your Shepard? What are his fears? What does he admire in others (besides loyalty)?
I'll give you my rationale for ultimately choosing Tali. Shepard as a paragon, becomes a symbol for himself during the course of the series. He becomes idealized by others - assimilated into the "hero" mythos. He's a walking metaphor. Importantly, he's conscious of this - how his actions affect others, how the galaxy sees him. It puts an incredible strain on him. He can't afford weakness - he can't express doubt to others. He has to imitate what everyone has made of him.
Tali's situation mirrors his, since so much about the quarians is a question of image versus reality, about perception versus nuance. The quarians are vagrants to the galaxy, "suit rats", cast out from galactic society. The process is the same, only sliding in the opposite direction: they've become idealized, too, as their suits, as the people who lost their homeland because they created AI and then got whupped and exiled from their own planet.
Tali's content deals with this larger quarian problem on a more personal level. Haestrom and Freedom's Progress are situations where a role was imposed upon her for which she was ultimately unsuited: she's no leader, despite her lineage as Rael's daughter and despite being one of "the Normandy crew." She fails, she's crushed. Then her loyalty mission, in which she's explicitly turned into a symbol for the quarians' debate over the geth. In which her father used her as an excuse for his experiments. Now it's not just her mask crushing the girl behind it; she has the weight of a society's perception bearing down on her.
Some of this is inseparable from quarian culture. You simply can't function in such a close-knit society without accepting the expectations of others, without assimilating their vision of what you are. Eventually this becomes indistinguishable from "the real you." Is this desirable? What if this was preventable? What if someone was there to keep you grounded - to allow you to process your superego healthily? This is why I like Tali's final Citadel convo in ME3 so much with the turian: she's able to see others' perception of her and internalize them without letting them rot: she knows who she is, and so the perceptions of others are nothing more than another opinion. They won't dominate her.
The difference between Shepard and Tali is largely one of personal strength and influence. She's got a strong will, but it's not enough. She's got some standing in quarian culture, but cannot remove herself from it. Shepard is drawn to her because he sees his own problems reflected, and because he knows he can help her. Tali is drawn to him - initially - because his actions represent everything she can't accomplish as a leader. Eventually, she's drawn to him because she understands what incredible expectations such actions can bring, and how they can weigh on someone's mind.
Once I started talking about exercising everyone's on board. Keep giving cheese to a mouse that goes the wrong way in the maze and he'll never find the exit.
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