While we have such an excellent topic of a fun, plausible, if not necessarily accurate idea, I thought I'd throw in a somewhat-related concept: the Shepard-could-always-have-been-with-Cerberus roleplay, copy and pasted from another, more obscure thread.
Not an assertion, more of a roleplay concept, but definitely a possibility that meshes well with this thread. (And here, I won't lose track of it either!)
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Shepard was always working with Cerberus.
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The basic premise came from an observation I made
awhile ago: you can pick and choose options in ME2 so that you and TIM never
say (or even act) like you've never met or heard of eachother before. Even
from the first conversation, you can slip into a familiarity. There's nothing
in the game, anywhere, that can say 'Shepard never knew or worked with Cerberus
before.' Nothing specifically implies it, but nothing prevents it via
roleplaying.
How Does This Make Sense?
The general premise is 'Shepard could have been a secret Cerberus agent from
day one, and it still would have fit.' And it could: infact, it would have
gone a long way in explaining why Shepard was chosen, ie because TIM wanted
a secret Cerberus operative to be Humanity's representative and first Spectre,
where he/she could go a long way in advancing human interests.
After that, even Cerberus involvement is explainable: you didn't know
Cerberus was behind the Thresher Maw ambush before you informed Admiral Kohaku.
When you discovered links to the Rachni, Cerberus Command was happy for you to
clean up a failed project. Pretty much any time your run across Cerberus is a
failure on their part, and Shepard acting as a cleanup crew against compromised
Cerberus cells both cuts loose ends and protects Shepard from suspicion.
I, personally, didn't do the Kohaku missions, and you never have to
work against Cerberus, but even that can be explained as 'acceptable losses': exposed
cells that already would have been compromised, and letting Shepard act covers
tracks. Shepard remains far more important politically than those cells as
well.
Come ME2, you pick up a working relationship with TIM (and can do so in a way
which doesn't invalidate the premise), and you can continue to keep the fact
you were a Cerberus mole a secret: Jacob and Miranda were never 'in the
know' before you became to important to tell others, and after that the Council
and Alliance's concerns of your relationship with Cerberus can have a lot more
basis.
"Advancing Human Interests"
There's no need to play a Cerberus Shepard, but it can be a great deal of
fun by giving an unconventional frame of reference for playing as Shepard, and
one that doesnt actually lock you into all that much. We've seen in ME1 and 2
and the novels that there is no Cerberus archetype that every Cerberus member
is modeled to fill: you can find idealists like Kelly and cynic bastards
like The Illusive Man, pragmatics like Miranda and insecure ambitious people
like Doctor Archer, monsters like the Pragia rogue cell to frustrated Paragons
like Jacob. And eventually, of course, Shepard.
Cerberus is the full spectrum of humanity, united by one goal: Advancing
Human Interests. What that is considered, and how that happens, depends on the
person. And in this case, the Shepard you control.
You can play a human-supremacist Shepard if that's what you want: Renegade is
the politically most human-centric alignment. But you can also play Paragon as
well: you can sincerely believe that peaceful cooperation with the Aliens
is the best way to advance and defend humanity. Both soldiers and statemen
defend and advance the national interest, and so too can both Paragon and
Renegade feel it appropriate to work within Cerberus. A Renegade can see the
obvious allure. A Paragon may feel that, while Cerberus is not ideal or always
right, it does a necessary role in a non-ideal universe: a Paragon, after
all, can even see the value of Spectres, or of the genophage. A paragon
can clain to 'enlightened self-interest' as the key to advancing humanity.
You can think on it, make it into a mind-exercise. What does human interest
mean to you? If you don't think a Renegade human-centric act is good for
humanity, why would a Cerberus Shepard be compelled to do it? Is your Shepard
unfailingly perfect and consistent? Is Shepard's beliefs validated, or is TIM playing
her for a fiddle for his own designs? Shepard can hold a wrong belief just
as well as anyone else.
SImply because you're a Cerberus Shepard doesn't mean you like everything about
Cerberus either: you can be anywhere on the spectrum from total acceptance
to partial-excuses to immense unease. You can just as easily play your Shepard
as increasingly disillusioned (and eventually break with Cerberus at the end of
ME2) as you can a True Believer.
In the end, a Cerberus Shepard is no more set in stone than any other Shepard.
They can be ruthless or kind, embrace it or be trying to get away unscathed. In
the end, about the only presumption is that, at one point, your Shepard joined
Cerberus. Everything past that is up to you.
The Paragon Sole Survivor Example
The more familiar with the lore, and with limits of it, the easier it can be.
Plenty of people have complained that there would be no way a Sole Survivor
would ever, ever work with Cerberus for Akuze. Here is a case, my personal
paragon Shepard, to try and defy that belief.
Loyal Shepard was a Spacer brat. Parents in the military, moving around
constantly, she virtually grew up in a military uniform. While never staying in
any one place long enough to make lasting connections she still inherited her
father's love of the Alliance, and of Humanity. Because of that, or perhaps
because of the lack of singular connections, she grew up wanting to protect
humanity as a whole, as opposed to individuals: individuals, after all,
come and go, but the whole of humanity means that individuals like her parents,
even if they die, can make things better for everyone else. Loyal Shepard never
doubted she would join the Alliance to protect Humanity.
The difference came after Mindoir. It was a troubled time in her life, the
Alliance itself reeled in response, and she saw secondhand the suffering, the
loss, the weakness of the Alliance. Unable to stop mere slavers. Unable to
protect an entire planet. She felt that things had to change so that things
could never happen like that again. So when she heard her fathers' friends
whisper about the sort of people who were being tasked to prevent another
Mindoir, she wanted in.
Back in that day, Cerberus was solidly an Alliance Black Ops outfit, taking the
best of the best of the Alliance who could keep their mouth shut and were good
loyal humans. The best of the best, naturally, included N7's, and it wasn't
uncommon for some promising N7 recruits to be taken aside, asked a few
questions, and possibly see their careers change forever. And Shepard, at last
realized and trained as a biotic adept of immense power, was a supernova of
promise. When they asked the questions, Shepard gave all the right answers. She
was in.
In 2177, the colony of Akuze went off the extranet. It was immediately
covered up by the Alliance, which was reeling: who, how, was unclear. No pirate
activity had been detected or suspected. But some, the few with the right
clearances and who needed to know, knew. The colony of Akuze had discovered
signs of a new species of alien, seen on multiple planets across the galaxy,
and a Cerberus science team investigating the creatures witnessed the monsters
suddenly rise up and destroy the small colony from beneath, taking it
completely by surprise. The entire colony was destroyed,
(Years later, no evidence was ever supplied linking Cerberus
to causing the Thresher Maw attack. Only it’s involvement in the following
catastrophe.)
The Alliance was terrified: the space-born Thresher Maws were
known to live across the galaxy, and on a number of Alliance-colonized planets,
but Council law forbade study of them due to the dangers involved. What little
information there was imprecise, and political concerns at the time made the
Alliance fear asking for Council help in this matter, for fear of looking weak and
being deemed reckless for their colonization policies. Just how capable, how destructive,
how dangerous, the Maws were was unknown. Were they merely large, dangerous
beasts who’s danger was primarily if they attacked by surprise? Were they more
of a passive danger? The Alliance had no doctrine in response to them, and no clue how dangerous they were. The
Alliance tasked Cerberus to find out just how much of a threat the Maws were to
all of the Alliance colonies, and to do so yesterday. With the time ticking
until another colony, or two, or twenty faced
Fifty trained, equipped, mechanized Alliance Marines, as
many as fought through the Torfan Bunker against a bunkered and prepared,
dedicated enemy wielding state of the art weaponry. A sixth of the total losses
in the First Contact War. Full combat descent into the hot zone. This was not
an unequipped, helpless force. This was not a number of helpless lambs being
led to the slaughter. This was a force that could raze a colony on its own.
And Shepard was their trump card, one of the most formidable
biotics in the Alliance military, a woman so capable she would nearly single-handidly
slay a Thresher Maw on foot years later. Academically, she knew the danger. But
in the pride of youth, in the ignorance of the time, in the arrogance of her
biotics, she sincerely believed that even if there was more trouble than
expected, her biotics would save the day.
No one, not Shepard, not the Alliance, not Cerberus, knew
just how powerful Thresher Maws actually were. It shouldn’t have happened like
it did: it should have been, if not a cake walk, an ‘acceptable’ cost. Two,
three, maybe two dozen, the reports predicted. Primarily in the initial
surprise. Not nearly the entire unit. Not monsters that could shrug off direct,
point-blank hits from a tank gun. When Shepard escaped, barely made her way to
the Cerberus recovery team, she thought she had lost all her biotic powers for
all the good they did.
The
Alliance got it's data. It learned just how dangerous the Maws were,
and just how much they needed to prepare those colonies that remained
exposed. Thresher Maw doctrine was at last made, and saved many lives
over time. But at such cost!
Shepard was the sole survivor. Traumatized, scared by the
loss of her unit, wracked by guilt: how many more would have lived had she even
just warned her comrades that there was a known threat? Why had she relied so
much on her biotics? How could she ever look anyone in the eyes again?
She almost quit Cerberus then. Indeed, she gave the signal
for an agent who would go offline indefitely: not the first agent to suffer a
crisis of confidence. It likely would have been a nigh-request to silence her as
well: something that could be passed off as a survivor’s guilt suicide. But it
was Shepard’s mother, Hannah Shepard, who unknowingly convinced her to stay.
Speaking to her sobbing daughter who spoke words of regret and despair that
meant one thing but Hannah believed meant another, the older Shepard gave her
daughter sage advice that would help pull her through.
“We all make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean we have to
quit: it means we have to work to make up those mistakes, to become the
paragons we can be to avoid those mistakes in the future.”
The harder, goal-oriented Shepard went away after Akuze. In
her stead a more idealist, repentant Shepard emerged: one who truly wouldn’t
sacrifice others unless no other way, no matter how hard, could be found. One
who even more than before wanted to protect Humanity, not only from the
exterior threat but from Human weakness and arrogance as well. No needless
killing, no betrayal without the most pertinent reason. One who, as she
explicitly said when she withdrew her termination request with Cerberus, would
never lead another unit into disaster blind.
Cerberus accepted her terms: she remained willing to work,
and her goals coincided with Cerberus’s own, even if she wouldn’t fit in with all
their projects or methods. But there were other things she could do, did do,
and did well. When the time came to select a Human Spectre, she was an ideal
choice: one who recognized diplomacy for the Alliance was not a weakness, one
who was willing to and could make bonds with others, a Paragon whose example
would reflect on other races views of humanity. And, of course, a Spectre
sympathetic to Cerberus’s concerns, and who now had the power to solve them her
way. Not all assets are measured in terms of credits gained or threats killed
rather than arrested.
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How Loyal Shepard played:
When playing with a Paragon Cerberus Shepard, enlightened
self-interest was the name of the game. When diplomacy cost nothing, she used
diplomacy. When enlightened self-interest was reasonable, enlightened
self-interest, rather than just morality, was the basis of decision. A strongly
paragon slant, but with some Renegade choices here and there, reflecting Loyal
Shepard’s inner, dormant Renegade. This woman was changed, but not broken by
Akuze, and while holding a whole lot of regrets she still holds that will to
survive that marks all Sole Survivors.
As a profile of some choices from ME1 through 2, to give
example of how things can be justified:
-She paragon-convinced Bhattia to let his wife’s body be studied
to research Geth weaponry to hopefully save lives: she was sympathetic, and
would have fought to any length had it been for another reason, but any
unnecessary lives would have been too many.
-Saving the colonists on Feros was never a question: indeed,
it was very much a case in which she would have gladly sacrified her life to
save just one colonist. Luckily, she was good enough she didn’t need to.
-She saved the Rachni queen for the reason she said: she
hoped the Rachni Queen would prove a valuable ally, though she was glad she
didn’t need to commit genocide. If not, though, the greater burden for dealing
with the mess would fall on the Turians, who would almost certainly want human
help and boost the role of the Alliance in dealing with the small threat before
it grew too large.
-When she found Corporal Toombs, she shot him before he
could reveal his purpose. She was terrified that he would reveal what happened,
that he would expose her past and ruin everything she was trying to do (insert
possible implications that she[/i] handed
Toombs over to the Cerberus doctors, though not with the intent of being studied).
While she can even claim in hindsight she would do the same, because Saren and
the Reapers are really too important for Shepard’s true past to be revealed, it
also cemented in her mind that she just as well killed her entire unit with her
own hands, just like Toombs. With Hackett not asking questions, and Cerberus
burying the report, it’s not likely anything will ever come of it.
-She shut down the loose Rachni on behalf of Cerberus, but
went after Kohaku’s findings as per his last request. She hadn’t thought
Cerberus would do another Akuze, and the recent events of Toombs were still
rattling her. She reported her intent to do it to Cerberus ahead of time,
citing it as a necessity to avoid raising suspicion, but part of her wanted at
least one partial revenge on Cerberus for repeating on purpose what had once
been a tragedy. The Illusive Man understood this, but didn’t forward her
warning to the cell in question: tipping them off or evacuating them would have
risked compromising Shepard, who was far more important. But he hasn’t
forgotten her act.
-Even though she was romancing Kaiden, receptive to the
interest of a good, morally sound man, she left him behind on the AA tower in order
to secure the nuke. The mission was too important to compromise, but she always
intended to come back to him; Joker left without her order, even though he had
to. Her greatest regret was that she never told him the truth, about how the
woman he was interested in was such a monster.
-She saved the Council. It was very much the heat of the
moment, and she was still suffering a concussion from an earlier fight that
made it hard for her to understand just how the battle was unfolding: she later
quietly regrets her decision, both due to private disagreements with the
Council and for risking all sentient life needlessly. It all turned out for the
best, but when one day Miranda shares that she and the Illusive Man thought she
couldn’t have done better, she feels ashamed and wonder just how much better a
dominant Alliance could be doing to prepare for the Reapers.
In Mass Effect 2, far more Renegade choices actually make
sense both morally and from a Cerberus viewpoint. Loyal Shepard became more of
a Paragade, reflecting a darkening cynicism about the Council and a partial
return to her original, more renegade self now that she’s back in company with
Cerberus.
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