Rack of Ages

Liara didn’t get much rest her first night aboard the Normandy…

Happy May 14th!

*laughs nervously*

edit: this is @natsora's fault

painting practice because something something new year's resolution

special thanks to @rackofages for brainstorming the blurb pun and especially for making my made-up asari alphabet glyphs into a font so I don't have to suffer through my own handwriting

This is Matt’s Nicole Shepard from his excellent fic Beyond the Fire (srsly A+ go reed), sharin a moment with her space girlfriend (。・ω・。)

It's nice to look back sometimes...2019 to 2020.

✦✧✦N7 Day 2020✦✧✦

Happy N7 day!

It’s been a tough year. Remember to love each other (and your pets)

For SAtS: Chapter 10

Liara 🤍

For SAtS: Chapter 14

Why - from a Watsonian perspective - does Liara T’Soni exist?

She seems to have been a wanted child, more or less, but her parents weren’t really supposed to be reproducing with each other, there’s a vibe of her mother being too busy to parent her, and they broke up (horribly enough that they never spoke to each other again) before she was born. What happened there?

Obvious and interesting possibilities:

Relationship sliding downhill - “I know! We’ll have a baby to save the relationship!” - yeah, that never works.

Accidental pregnancy, which might or might not have been one of the main reasons the relationship failed.

-Canon does state somewhere that asari can only reproduce deliberately, but when that gets in the way of your fic, it’s easy to elide that to “can usually only reproduce deliberately… accidents are rare.” Maybe they got careless because they assumed Benezia was too old?

-Or slightly more canon-compatibly: how about “asari can only get pregnant if they try, or if they subconsciously really want to?” Insert something about a failing relationship, and Benezia being lonely and wanting to hang on to as much of Aethyta as possible…

-that second headcanon is definitely your friend if you want Shepard/Liara accident babies! (Sure, that headcanon turns up in a lot of complete crap, but it can be damn good when it’s done right.)

Anyone have any other suggestions?

Benezia wanting a heir makes sense (although that raises questions about whether she had any other children - I could easily see her having one or two much, much older children with a different father, especially as Liara doesn’t seem to inherit anything except a lot of money, and those kids would make great OCs)

From what both Liara and Aethyta say, Aethyta and Benezia’s breakup may have been very one-sided (i.e. Benezia decided to end things), but it was mutually painful.  Aethyta, when talking about Benezia, sounds more hurt and resigned than angry at her, saving her anger for the wider social trends that caused conflict between them (though, of course, this may only be her perspective after the benefit of a century of hindsight).  Benezia, as we know, found the whole topic so painful (Liara’s words) that, not only did she refuse to talk about it, but that everyone else in Liara’s life honoured Benezia’s wishes to keep the identity of Liara’s father secret.  And we also know that Aethyta and Benezia did communicate after Liara was born, and that Benezia actually sought out Aethyta’s advice raising Liara at least once.  There are lots of ways that this can all be read, but I, the big sap that I am, tend to go with a relationship between two people that loved each other but just couldn’t make it work long-term.

And the reason they couldn’t make it work?  I think there’s a lot of truth in what Aethyta says about it being because of Benezia’s career and her own militancy. Everything we hear about Benezia across three games, from the moment she’s first introduced to us properly by Tevos, is someone who is famous and powerful, both politically and biotically.  She’s also classic asari centrist and consensus builder who promotes peaceful relationships with others, and is a a philosopher and religious leader to boot.  Probably a siarist and, given siari’s core belief that all life is interconnected, there’s a decent chance she’s a pacifist or close to being one.  Which makes being married to someone like Aethyta extremely problematic for her.  Aethyta is, in her own words, unabashedly militant and even a kind of asari-supremacist, and was quiet about neither of those things during their marriage.  At some point, staying married to Aethyta would make Benezia look hypocritical, and she’d only look more hypocritical the longer it went on and the larger her public profile became.

It would also make her look hypocritical in another sense: Aethyta is another asari.  Look, I find the whole ‘pureblood’ thing to be one of the dumber bits of Bioware lore, but if we take it at face value, and take what little we know about siari’s basic tenants at face value, as long as she stays married to Aethyta, Benezia is someone who talks the talk - and talks it a lot - but doesn’t walk the walk with regards to building relationships with other species and building strength through diversity.

Add in the natural tensions caused by a relationship in which the participants hold radically different political philosophies, and it just reached a point where continuing as things were was no longer tenable on Benezia’s side.  Either she ended things with Aethyta and kept her career, or kept Aethyta and lost her career.  Asari supposedly take the long view, and if Benezia thought she could do greater good in the long term by ending things with Aethyta, she would have, regardless of the personal cost. We know that’s her nature from the way she attempted to intervene with Saren.  Benezia absolutely will martyr herself for the right cause.

And this is what makes me think that Liara was planned and wanted, precisely because both Benezia and Aethyta knew the writing was on the wall.  I don’t think it was necessarily a ‘a baby will save us’ situation, but more Benezia, despite being forced into ending things, didn’t want to let go of Aethyta entirely.  A century is a long time to be with someone and love someone, even for an asari matriarch.  Having a baby with Aethyta was a way to keep part of her around, and even see part of their relationship live on past its death.

As to whether or not Benezia had other children - I tend to think not.  Not as a mother certainly, and only maybe as a relatively uninvolved father.  Again, she’s someone who accepts immense personal sacrifice as part and parcel of pursuing her ideals, and even though I think asari society is much more geared around making motherhood work for everyone, I also think she would have decided that she didn’t have the time to devote to raising daughters of her own during her matron phase.  Which honestly would make the whole Aethyta and Liara situations deeply tragic: marrying Aethyta and having Liara were two of the very few times Benezia allowed herself to be selfish.

The other thing though, that I’ve always found interesting about this whole situation, is that the public record of Aethyta and Benezia’s marriage must have been scrubbed somehow..? Otherwise Liara, the curious little shit that she is, would have been able to find evidence of who her daddy was pretty easily.

Yes, the lack of public record of Liara’s paternity is weird and hard to explain. Canon does clearly state that they were married, right? We’re sure it wasn’t one of those “bodyguard unofficially doubles as concubine” deals?

Personally, I’ve given up on canon’s “asari aren’t supposed to marry other asari” thing, and just settled for “asari aren’t encouraged to reproduce with other asari.” But yeah, that’s an outright yeeting of canon on my part.

Those are all excellent points.

I also personally tend to yeet that canon out in much the same way, because dumb canon is dumb and should not be endured.

It’s very strongly implied that they were married, but not outright stated.  In ME3, Aethyta says “Nezzy and I were together for more than a century. (…)  It was pretty clear that she was leaving.  You can’t be the wise Councillor when you’re married. (…)  You have to be available, mysterious…”  In ME1, Liara says “Benezia never spoke of her partner. Whatever happened, it caused her too much pain to dwell on it. “   At the very least, both seem indicative of a long-term, committed relationship that, in some ways, limited Benezia’s ‘availability’ to other suitors.  So, yeah, I er on the side of some sort of formal recognition.

The lack of public record, I’ve got a few possible explanations, but none of them are quite satisfactory.  Maybe a mixture if them?  I don’t know.

Other suggestions are welcome.

Aethyta’s identity is ~habitually Not a matter of public record, perhaps? she’s laying low as a barkeep when we first meet her, and as a commando she may have so many aliases that it would have confused as well as expunged various records that would have existed of her and Benezia’s relationship?and maybe best, some combination of many of these factors made digging it up extremely difficult/ maybe emotionally charged given Benezia’s own wish for privacy

IIRC  Aethyta makes it absolutely clear both her and Benezia wanted to have Liara and both thought she was wonderful. Aethyta even implies she was around during the early part of Liara’s childhood (as Aethyta was the one to inspire Benezia’s “Little Wing” nickname for Liara after noting Benezia was being too much of a mother hen). Also, several people suggest a bodyguard/principle thing as cover, but let’s not forget that Aethyta WAS an active politician in her own right. The reason she isn’t during the ME games is because in her own words she was laughed off of the homeworld after insisting more Asari should their formative years train as military. To me it seems like Aethyta and Benezia loved each other very much (which Aethyta emphatically confirm when asked) but  the point where Aethyta pushed things far enough to become persona non grata in Asari politics was also the point where they couldn’t function as a couple anymore. Aethyta notes that Benezia “was the only one who listened to me when [she] said that the asari were stuck in the past.” but that “mostly [the relationship] ended because Benezia wanted to solve things the smart way. [Aethyta] wanted to fight.” My best guess is that the Asari didn’t try to cover it up but simply decided to not mention the time one of their most respected political figure was involved with someone who so thoroughly ruined her own credibility in the public’s eyes, and Liara herself could have searched for who her father was but she only wanted Benezia to tell her for emotional reasons, not some cold facts from a database. 

Liara knows that her father was another asari. Maybe she internalized enough of the pureblood shame that she didn’t really want to look into it?

Or maybe she always meant to look it up One of These Days, but it never seemed as important as getting a grant for the next dig site or studying the latest Prothean discovery. And eventually Benezia would tell her so it’s not that urgent anyway....

u can do it liara

like water // like stone

Slapped some color on Liara’s jumpsuit/tulle cape look. She really does look good in everything.

(ref.)

art by @sky-ham

No Need to Say Goodbye | Read on AO3

London, Earth. It all comes down to this battle, this fight. Shepard, battered and broken, still stands. Liara sees the woman buried under the Commander, the woman that is tired and weary. She offers Shepard what comforts is available in the end of times, the final of hours.

—

Read the rest on AO3

I don’t really have any works that I’m dying to talk about, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about the last chapter (26) of That Which Was Lost, aka Liara has to deal with an angry mob in the Fic of Dooooooom.

This chapter is interesting in hindsight because, aside from the chapter where Benezia has her big psychotic break, this is the one that underwent the most re-writes.  It’s also probably the chapter that most differed from the original idea for it.  You see, originally it was more of a trial, and in it Liara *was* going to have a big rousing speech that got everyone on her side and showed everyone what a leader she was.  She was also going to be the one who proposed Benezia be confined instead of executed. 

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