I found this Asari wearing an alliance uniform. I’m so curious about this NPC and what her life is like. There is a bunch of other alliance soldiers in the bar, so I’m super curious how she ended up working with the human systems alliance.
So - if you’re an asari, and you marry someone who’s not asari or krogan, you’re basically signing up to look after them while they’re dying.
Maybe they’ll die quick and clean. Or maybe they’ll spend five years gradually forgetting who you are and how to use a toilet. Who knows? At least you’ll still be young and fit enough to be useful!
At least, you’d better be signing up for that. What sort of asshole disappears over the horizon as soon as their mate starts disintegrating? Probably a fairly common sort of asshole, I suspect?
...cue Jin telling her early-middle-aged human girlfriend, apropos of not much, “I promise I’ll look after you when you’re dying of old age.”
“Er. Whaa?”
“Well, I did it for my first mate, so I know what I’m promising. And he came down with a nasty paranoid dementia. Hopefully you won’t get dementia!”
Hannah was very impressed once she got over the initial WTF reaction...
weird mass effect lore question:
1) do you think biotic prisoners would have some sort of inhibitor that keeps them from using their abilities?
and
2) would the same thing be possible with inherently biotic races? (ex. asari)
Non asari: it’s probably possible to replace the external amp with something that inhibits, rather than enhancing, biotics?
Asari: usually don’t *have* amps, so that’s out (unless the character in question decided to get brain surgery for better superpowers? Liara seems to have an amp?). There’s lore that Cerberus invented a drug that prevents asari using biotics, but that’s recent. Also it can cause permanent damage, so I hope legitimate prisons aren’t using that!
On the other hand, asari have been around for a long time and they’ve had a lot of motivation to develop drugs that safely and temporarily suppress biotics, so maybe they already have a good one?
There’s lore in the Mass Effect: Invasion comic that biotic dampeners and mental inhibitors both exist and work on asari. It’s also implied that many biotic abilities require the use of your hands, which is why Cerberus had to use both on Aria to keep her from escaping.
Aria doesn’t recognize the biotic dampeners. So either Cerberus invented their own non-standard model, or only Cerberus has this tech. Personally I go with the former because I don’t buy that literally nobody else made them until humans did.
Cerberus seems to be doing their own research in this area—not wanting to rely on alien tech maybe?—so that could be why their stuff is bulky and unrefined, with nasty side effects. Though I also wouldn’t put it past them to think that permanently damaging a matriarch’s biotics with experimental drugs is a win.
Relevant panels (click for full size because Tumblr is cropping them to fit the grid):
@berryshiara's OC's, Fen and Kari, from their fanfic Interview With an Ardat-Yakshi
I finally finished them!!!
Tessellation art for @inquartata30’s epic fic Tessellation. Came for the Leximance, stayed for the hilarious crew banter, dumbasses in love, and excellent expansion of canon missions and plot. Scientists and engineers get to look awesome, how cool is that?
sometimes you look at the noodle arms in the game and decide you've had enough
for the next ass effect game i want bioware to introduce a squadmates that's just a regular asari but he goes by he/him and then watch the fanbase burn down in flames
Oo interesting mental image :D
Real talk, would asari even have gender pronouns at all, or is 'she' just being added in translating their language to English. Not all human languages IRL even use gender pronouns for people. I doubt those would exist in a species where gender just isn't a thing.
He/him would be every bit as valid as she/her, and I doubt an asari would care much either way about the strange quirk of particular languages of other species.
Im thinking of an in-universe translator update that turns references to asari to they/them. I bet certain parts of the fanbase would still definitely explode. I made the mistake of visiting the mass effect reddit today and apparently the "real gamers" are still mad femshep exists.
Oooh, is this a chance to pull out my “Asari Pronouns” headcanon? It IS! :D
Right. So I fully agree that Asari would have non-gendered pronouns to go with their non-gendered species. This HC also posits that the translators are adding “she/her”, but not for the reason you might think!
When the Asari and the Salarains discovered the Citadel (at around the same time), they also discovered each other. Creating the need for the first Universal Translator (using Melds to facilitate First Contact is GREAT, but not really a long term option). Now, politics would absolutely have stuck its nose into the process, whether people wanted it too or not. So, I HC that, at some point, an Asari working on or with the Translator project looked at the information they had on Salarian culture, noted that they are matriarchal, and said “I don’t want them treating Asari as men, who are to be controlled by their betters. I want them treating ALL Asari as women, who are in control!”. And thus, Asari using feminine pronouns was coded into the first Translators.
Bonus Points: The Asari that made this decision was clearly not authorized to be making choices like that (actual linguist? A tech? Mid-low level diplomat? ASSISTANT to one of those roles?), but by the time people realized what had happened it was too late to change it to more neutral pronouns without the politicians having an awkward conversation... so they didn’t!
Two thousand years later it’s still a thing, and if the new species (hoomans, was it?) would please stop asking inconvenient questions, we would all be happier, thank you.
(That said, let individual Asari pick what pronouns they want to use, dagnabit.)
That is clever and also kinda hilarious to think that a species without gender would get themselves the reputation of being an “all-female” species just for the sake of diplomacy, and also cool as fuck to imagine a world where being female is the powerful position.
Salarian gender strikes me as having as much in common with queen bee vs worker bee as it does with male vs female human. Traditional roles of “important, should be listened to, supposed to make babies” vs “normal person, listen to them if they deserve it, they only get to make babies if they’re particularly awesome and it’s a great honour”
Raeka must be SO GNC by her culture’s standards. I wonder how much side-eye she gets for refusing to be a hive queen? Also wondering if Councillor Valern gets any grief for being a man doing a woman’s job - I’m sure there are some idiots somewhere complaining about that.
Ok, so I love the idea that the asari deliberately picked the equivalent of she/her in salarian language(s). But instead of a junior translator making a choice for the entire species, I think asari would actually officially study salarian languages because a. it's canon that understanding aliens is their jam and b. this is their first ever contact with actual aliens, how exciting!
commission for @dr-ladybird ! this was quite different from my usual and i had a lot of fun working on it. thank you so much!
commissions open on a limited basis.
ooo EXCELLENT!
Ajjin Hakkai, 500-something reconstructive surgeon and cyberneticist. Turned up on Arcturus Station to learn how these new aliens worked, stuck round, wound up marrying Admiral Shepard.
I usually hang out on our friends discord and wanted to share some asari OCs we have fun conversations around for @ockissweek :)
Zoe, in purple and gold, is one of two (as of writing) server OCs that we created together. She is part of a commune and works with arts, crafts, and music.
Jinan belongs to @theivorytowercrumbles and is an infiltrator and was a member of the elite Armali Sniper Unit. She appears in At The Meridian as a part of Matriarch Benezia’s house guard.
Zoe and Jinan are childhood sweethearts and happily bonded early when they were maidens. This piece shows them before Jinan became a commando.
Randi, in white, is the other server OC we created earlier on, when we thought about how fun it would be to experience a day in the life of a random acolyte in the T’soni household (for the gossip). She appears briefly in Garden Variety Destruction.
Thaia belongs to @inquartata30, who has also aptly named this piece Test Drive. She is an ex-commando, astrophysicist, and biotics instructor. She appears in Tessellation as a main character along with Lexi T’perro, as well as several other works.
Randi and Thaia met and had a fling while Thaia was a maiden and training at the T’soni estate with her squad.
Fejla is one of only 3 major OCs I have. She has no significant other (yet) so here she is cuddling with her three dwe’kki: Rael (brown), Lynx (white), and Neph (black) - also my original creatures that the server helped develop.
She is Lexi’s best friend, a romantic, an animal lover, and an Ardat-Yakshi. In our joint AU, she has a crush on Thaia.
I can’t write, but Fej makes a short appearance in this little fluff wip by @inquartata30 :)
Wait I have another explanation for Nyreen apparently having boobs
Daft fashion trend for padded shirts, inspired by the existence of asari
Unisex fashion trend of course. Asari don’t have gender and they probably look vaguely masculine to turians. Dare ya to draw your male turian oc, rocking the look.
painted some asari heads for practice
The name is not creative but its what you’ll have to live with. OF COURSE I have to the majority of this theory under a cut lest I gain the ire of those you have the unfortunate experience of following me (’:
Let me say, this is all something my brain made up. It is in no way shape or form me trying to say, “this is canon!”. Honestly, I just miss taking things and turning them into reasonable arguments for fictional subjects because it brings me joy. I would hope that you read this for fun and not to debate me, because I do not debate on the internet if I don’t have to.
I REITERATE, I DO NOT tout this as canon or aim to disprove any current existing theories on the topic. This is legitimately just something I thought about yesterday coupled with an urge to write it out and this is the result.
Anyways…. lets get to it!
Can we make estimates about when all known members of Liara’s family were born while keeping with canon information ?
Yes. Yes we can.
See below the cut. There’s a tl;dr at the end.
Nice! The one thing I’d add to this, which supports your math, is that Aethyta gives us a rough age for herself, at one point saying “I’m a thousand years old and still don’t know crap”. This suggests that she’s within a rounding error of a thousand at the time of ME3. Moreover, since asari culture prizes age more than youth, and 1000 is likely to be Very Important Milestone number, it would probably be seen as gauche to imply you were over the threshold when you were not, we can assume that she is, at youngest, 1000 years old.
It’s also possible that her mother was older than suggested. It kind of gets glossed over, but the Rebellions were an existential threat to the asari (and the salarians); they were legit concerned about the krogan wiping them all out. That means a matron with commando experience might be called back to service, or, as a maiden, have stayed in uniform longer than she might normally.
These are two very important additions ! Thank you.
The math is too complicated (and I’m too tired) for me to get into detail again, but if we forget about the argument I make about Maiden commandos and time of service, we go back (I think) to Grandma being born at the earliest in c.400 CE (give or take) instead of c.450 CE, if Aethyta was born as early as c.1100 CE and if her mother was shy of becoming a Matriarch then.
This has the effect of putting Grandpa’s birth between c.200 CE (instead of c.250 CE) and 300 CE, the murder pact between c.1200 CE and 1300 CE.
Now with Aethyta, that means - taking what you’re saying into account - she was born at the latest in 1186 CE, at the earliest in c.1100 CE (so she is born in the 12th century, but probably in the first half). So we can be even more precise :
Grandpa was born between c.200 and 286 CE, i.e. in the 3rd century, the last century of the Rachni Wars.
Grandma was born between c.400 CE and c.586 CE.
The murder pact took place between c.1200 CE and 1286 CE, i.e. in the 13th century.
Thank you, @dr-jekyl.
A random Peebee I drew a while back while I procrastinated on something else
Still getting used to my new tablet, but managed to quickly draw Nyx, my asari babe🌌💜
alien studies / sketches
