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Overview of Creation : Sara Shepard, Part One

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In a way, every Shepard a fanfic writer comes up with is an OC. Sara was no different.

As with most of my OCs, Sara is based on real people. She is a composite of several broken figures I knew. One was a rape victim, another was a gang-banger I helped get out of that lifestyle. One was a buddy who had PTSD and ended up killing himself.

They are all dead, the people Sara is based on. Unlike her, they never found their strength, nor could they bring themselves to rely on others to provide that strength.

Who they were no longer matters. I had a long conversation with Progman (who, along with Michael1110, have shaped more of OSABC than they could possibly know) discussing Shepard. He told me the greatest headshot to canon I could make was making Shepard weak.

Shepard? Weak?

Indeed. Shepard (and case in point, the entire Premiseverse) are deconstructions of something that I found ultimately revolting, the Boring Invincible Hero syndrome that led to so much shock and cries of foul at the end of ME3.

Bluntly, Shepard always wins. Shepard is strong enough to overcome anything. The first time we see any REAL doubts that last longer than a few seconds is deep into ME3 , where most people would have cracked under the pressure.

Shepard is not a God.

When I started, I knew I wanted a Shepard who was physically powerful, sexy, and striking. A Shepard with an agile, strong mind, and the ability to master everything she put her mind to. I built her deliberately to be as Mary Sue-ish as possible.

Then I broke what I had built until it was a festering mass of hate and loss. I crafted a story that stripped away every support and source of human kindness except a very few. I gave her pathologies she couldn’t accept, and a background that she couldn’t get over.

Progman and Owelpost both pointed out Shepard never got over her past and losses and wounds. She never grew up, in a way. It’s hard to see but there is still a tiny frightened girl somewhere in her psyche, eyes shut and tears streaking down her face, waiting to be hurt again, betrayed again, abandoned again.
In canon, no matter what, Shepard overcomes. Akuze? Mindoir? You can make the most sad-sack bastard in galactic history and he/she is still possessed of indomitable will, vast political savvy, endless battlefield competence, blah blah blah.

Given how Shepard is built up in game I remain astounded ME3 didn’t end with Shepard killing Harbinger with his dick.

I rejected that. I wanted a broken image. I wanted that shattered figure who had not risen above their losses because they didn’t have a reason to do so. In a way, I wanted to rewrite the fate of my buddy, with PTDS, who should have been able to (with all the support he had around him, begging to help) get back on his feet and on with his life. I wanted to rewrite the life of that gang-banger, who after pulling himself out of hell fell right back in out of arrogant stupidity.

I wanted  a Shepard who needed people around her to become the best, and when they weren’t there, became the worst. A monster.

Shepard is not and has never been a ‘reactive’ figure ,  instead always following others.  Even in canon, Shepard was not proactive. Shepard made no hard, defining choices that changed his/her OWN life. Yes , they had to pick between Kai and Ash, or to save the council or destroy it. Choose Anderson or Udina. Decide the fate of worlds in ME2, in ME3.

Yet, consider those choices. Much like the catalyst, you were just given choices on a plate. You never were able to point at why you made the call and say “this and this and this” … it was just a menu wheel choice. And while said choices affected the story, it was never fundamental!

You never got to choose whether to side with the Council or the Alliance. You never got to choose whether to abandon Cerberus and work for Liara when she became the SB.

And Shepard avoided the truly ugly choices. She let Anderson take the lead on springing the Normandy. She accepted, all too quickly, Cerberus’ invitation to work for them, even in the face of clear clues that not all was right with the state of events and that Cerberus had not changed it’s stripes in the past or present. She followed the orders of Hackett, a man who had cut her loose in many ways after ME1, and ended up standing trial for events beyond her control.

Shepard, no matter which way you cut it, disgusted me in canon because the hard choices and decisions were never, ever made, until the very last minutes of the game.

I get it. Some of that is just the nature of gameplay.

But to me, the Boring Invincible Hero with no personal weakness, endless strength and willpower, and all the flaws of , say, the Hope Diamond, is just that. Boring. You never wondered if your Shepard would just crack one day. You never had your Shepard’s very ability to understand the world around them compromised on a fundamental level. Your choices were ultimately made meaningless by the simple fact that EVERY choice made Shepard a winner.

Sara Shepard is not a winner. Lethal? Yeah. Powerful? Oh yeah. Smart? Yes. Sexy? Sure.

But she’ll never be Branson. She’ll never have the charm and grace to stop the geth and quarians from fighting.

 

Important Philosophies, ME Ramblings

Notes: Chapter One, Of Sheep and Battle Chicken

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When I started OSABC, it was from a toss off line I wrote into a shortfic about Liara talking to her mother, the full conversation instead of the snippets you hear in the game.

Garrus and Shep were talking in the battery, with Shepard hugging Garrus after hearing about his family. He addresses her as ‘sheep’ and she calls him ‘battle chicken’. Old nicknames, heavy with subtle meaning and nonsensical applique.

They rang something in me, and before I knew it I decided to try my hand at writing a longer fic. Mind you, my skills were (and still are) rusty. I haven’t written professionally in over fifteen years at the point I started this mess, so the first chamber was shambolic and symbolic.

I wanted to frame my AU in the same way the game started. And I knew I wanted to write an AU.

People nitpick the ending of ME3 and let slide the mountain of other shit that Bioware messed up on. Things had bothered me for  a while and I decided to act.

When I say my stories are an AU, I don’t mean something along the lines of Renegade Reinterpretations. RR is wonderful and grandiose, a merging of events that I doubt I could ever pull off, but it still adheres to the basic concepts of everything wrong with Mass Effect.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. But the whole reason there are so many fix-fics is that Bioware drops the ball in lots of places. Romances that feel too much like random banter then schmex. Plotlines that weave, bob and then vanish into thin air. Characters who come out flat and without real human depth to them.

Worst of all, the awful and frankly inexcusable failure of Bioware to characterize the bad guys. I’m not saying I’m a better writer than Bioware. It’s pretty easy to take all the tools they did from scratch and recombine them and polish them. Mass Effect is amazing. But the holes in it, the cliched way they slavishly stick to the Space Opera format, leaves much to be desired.

ME1 gave us Saren, a clearly defined bad dude, without any real explanation for his actions. He is a cipher. We get a single, short cut-scene (of some nice tits, mostly) without context, then some random bits on Virmire, and a rant on the Citadel.

From this, this hero who has let himself be dominated , sacrificed his honor, turned his back on his species, and shot a close friend – from this we’re supposed to believe a random person from a race he despises is going to undo heavy indoctrination with a few pithy lines?

No, no, and no. Saren isn’t the Master of Fallout, and Shepard isn’t the Vault Dweller. But even a cockeyed as that gets, as least there are clear villains – Saren, and Sovereign.

ME2 gives us a concept as a villain – trust Cerberus or no, fight the Mysterious Bug People who are snatching colonies in the middle of nowhere and be a Frankenstein monster. But it never really clarifies why these things happen, or why everyone has daddy issues all of a sudden.

And ME3 sets up a major confrontation that turns into a giant colored dialogue wheel. It’s not that the story is bad, or the endings are bad, it’s that it makes no sense.

I also wanted to present an image of the “other Shepards”, warped ones. By the end of that first chapter, I knew something was seriously wrong with my SA, and possibly my entire universe.

A lot of the changes and alterations (or mutations) made along the way have altered the specifics, but there are still three main points my fic should hit:

  • It explores the nature of heroism. Is it dying bravely, or living past the pain? Is it in what others call heroism, or dying as yourself?
  • It explores the nature of corruption, of a darker, more evil universe where ‘right choices’ don’t exist.
  • It explores the nature of alternative realities, and what happens post-singularity when technology starts acting like magic.