With Mass Effect 4 rumors swirling this week, please enjoy this Sleeps With Monsters encore post, originally published May 29, 2012.
Let’s get something out of the way before we start. The Mass Effect franchise ending? IT DOES NOT EXIST AND WE SHALL NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN. Somewhere in an alternate universe, Garrus and Tali are having cocktails on a beach, while Jack teaches junior biotics how to swear, is all I’m saying. (Other people like Chuck Wendig and Lee Mandelo have had things to say about Bioware’s failure to stick the dismount of an otherwise brilliantly-written RPG series. So let’s leave it there.)
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is how—provided one plays as Commander Jane rather than Commander John—the Mass Effect series normalises the idea of the Woman Hero.
You may have noticed that Woman Hero is my term of choice here, rather than Heroine. Whether we like it or not, heroine is still a word that embodies connotations which differ in many and manifest ways from hero. Gothic and romance novels have heroines. Thrillers and action stories have heroes: if these also have heroines, the heroine almost always takes second stage to the hero. Where the heroine has pride of place, she’s (again, almost always) intimately connected to, or in some way (emotionally, intellectually, or politically) dependent upon, a hero, whose actions and reactions are either vital to her as a character, or to the resolution of plot and theme. The reverse is much less true, and much less often true (once one might have said Not at all true), when the Hero stands centre stage. The Hero does not depend: his actions are not contingent actions.
Heroine is a word with a history. That history carries with it a metric crapton(ne) of implications, a bunch of which place heroine in opposition or in contrast to hero.
Commander Jane Shepard is not merely our protagonist and player-avatar in the Mass Effect franchise. She’s an ἥρως in practically the original Greek sense: a warrior of outstanding (legendary, potentially superhuman) achievements. Moreover, since Shepard’s interactions with other characters remain substantially the same regardless of whether one is a John or a Jane, it’s established that Commander Jane Shepard isn’t remarkable because she’s a woman. She’s extraordinary because she’s Shepard. This is reinforced by the ubiquity of other female characters who possess a wide array of competences: Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, asari archaeologist/information broker Liara T’Soni, quarian engineer Tali’Zorah vas Neema, Doctor Chakwas, Miranda Lawson, the asari Justicar Samara, and human weapon of mass destruction Jack (“Subject Zero”). And although the visible people of the human Alliance’s high command trend male, Mass Effect’s galaxy at large is populated with a multitude of interesting women, both human and alien.
And Shepard.
Marie Brennan wrote something pertinent to this disquisition at SF Novelists, not so long ago. In “The Effect She Can Have,” concerning another Bioware property, Dragon Age 2, Brennan says:
“It took me a while, though, to figure out that there was something else going on in my reaction—something beyond appreciation of the clever structural game the writers were playing.
She.
… [I]t allows you to experience the novelty of a woman being the most important damn person in the world.”
The most important damn person in the world.
There’s one scene in particular in Mass Effect 3 where that’s hammered home with a vengeance. How often is the “most famous officer” referred to with a female pronoun?
Dr. Liara T’Soni: Shepard was also a deadly tactical fighter. Most enemies never saw her coming. She was a soldier, and a leader—one who made peace where she could. And it was a privilege to know her.
The dialogue will be different depending on the game one plays. But the sentiment is the same. Commander Jane Shepard isn’t an extraordinary woman. She’s simply extraordinary. Full stop. No qualifiers. When one considers the amount of crap extraordinary people who are also women have directed at them even today—the likes of Hilary Clinton and Angela Merkel in the political realm,* household names like Lady Gaga, writers like Toni Morrison—this is immensely validating.**
* Whatever one thinks of their politics, there’s no escaping the fact that achieving their present positions took extraordinary drive.
** In researching this post, I discovered that Canada’s first female Major-General was appointed in 1994, while in 1995, Norway appointed the first ever female commander of a submarine. And as of 2005, the British forces have permitted female soldiers to enter the new Special Reconnaissance Regiment—which is the only Special Forces regiment in Britain to recruit women. Speaking of extraordinary.
In “The Effect She Can Have,” Brennan goes on to mention the dislocating effect of “having people speak in such monumental terms about this woman. About any woman… [A] male character can inspire such loyalty in their followers, or scare a room full of people just by walking in”—but as she notes, the female equivalent of this power fantasy remains a (slightly shocking) novelty.
Whatever the Mass Effect franchise’s gender-related worldbuilding flaws (there are male gaze issues with the presentation of the “matriarchal” asari as a species, although these are less pronounced in the final analysis than I feared they would be—and rather less pronounced than many television series which have featured female aliens: I’m looking at you, Torchwood and Doctor Who—and the presentation of the female krogan in Mass Effect 3 as more rational and less warlike than the males is not necessarily the best of all possible decisions that could be made), the manner in which it assumes (on grounds of gender, at least) an equal-opportunity future (and peoples its background across the three instalments with human women and men of all orientations: I confess, I did a little chair-dance when I realised there were romance options in ME3 that only worked for characters attracted to the same sex) is a choice that remains radical in its implications.
The manner in which it presents the Woman Hero as normal, as a character, and as a choice, in the case of Commander Jane Shepard, also remains radical. Playing as Commander John Shepard, I found myself annoyed at how predictable the hero’s development—and dialogue—could be. Playing as Commander Jane…
It was refreshing, and satisfying, and disorienting all at once. But the arc of the story is the same. Merely by removing the emphasis from the Woman part of heroine to the Hero part—in creating a Woman Hero who is extraordinary as a Hero, rather than as a Woman—Bioware made the experience innovative and fresh.
Perhaps in another generation or three, the Woman Hero will be as Normal (and annoying) as the square-jawed Hero himself. But right now?
Right now, I find Commander Jane Shepard delightful.
Image by DeviantArt user DazUki
Liz Bourke also appreciates the fact that several of the romance options in the Mass Effect franchise involved smart characters. Competence is sexy and brains are hot.
One of the things I love about Bioware’s games is you get as much out of a main character as you put it in. Which is to say you roleplay. I actually played all three recently as a Hindu woman you grew up a spacer (whose parents are killed in a slaver raid), was a war hero (who stopped a slavers raid single-handedly), and ended the games by choosing to control the reapers, rationalizing it as an extenison of Atman, the true self, and thus was inherently the right thing to do. It was one of my favourite gaming experiences I’ve every had, ending and all (I actually tried to design a character from the outset in which the ending would make sense).
My first play through was a typical paragon, a saviour-on-auto, and while I enjoyed it I was much more emotionally invested in my companions than my Shepard. But when I specifically designed the character I got much more out of it, her past was carried around like a curse, her redepemition when becoming a ‘war hero’ was response to that, and basically every action I made with her was the same. She had depth, and pathos, and personality. Honestly if you put time into a Bioware character I can only think of a couple other developers that give as much back.
Wow, lol, the very first gold box games, you could create a party of all women, then when RPGs got a bit more sophisticated, like Baldur’s Gate, or Neverwinter Nights, gender started making a difference. Meanwhile over in the adventure genre, if you wandered away from Sierra, well, many of the best stories, kind of in the second generation of gaming had female protagonists.
It’s nice for Bioware to keep up the trend, and I suppose ME being so popular helps, but the stats of what % of the gamers they track using metrics that actually play fem shep, is pretty small.
ME may be the ideal, because there is literally no difference based on gender other than who you can romance, and I guess that’s where we’d like to end up as a species, but some of those more gender split species making comments would have added context and believability to the game.
In the end I mostly played Fem Shep because Jennifer Hale did a better job than Mark Meer.
I don’t get the anger over the ending. I literally just completed the game a month or so ago and am on my second playthrough with a Renegade Shepherd, and I felt the ending made perfect sense for my playthrough.
@3 Aeryl
Like you, I also felt the ending made perfect sense.
And like you, I finished the game after Bioware responded to the criticisms of the ending by releasing an expanded version.
I went back afterward and found the original endings online, and I didn’t think the new endings differed enough to appease those who experienced the initial disappointment, but was enough to satisfy those of us who didn’t experience that disappointment.
I’ve never actually seen the expanded ending.
I also didn’t mind the ending. I liked the expanded ending better, because anything that gives me more Mass Effect is my favorite thing. Maybe it set a dangerous precedent for creators, but that’s a different can of worms. Anyway, Commander Helena Shepard, paragon sole survivor spacer sentinel, was my favorite protagonist in years.
I went searching for explanations(because I’d been hearing about this for years), but the only one I found that got explicit was someone who felt the ending forced them into taking renegade actions against the Illusive Man, but I never even got that option when I played that scene.
But the resolution of organics and synthetics was a long time coming and telegraphed so well with the integration of the geth and evolution of Edi, that I really did not get the upset.
I wonder how much of the initial hatred of the ending was, well, because it was the end.
I know I felt pretty sad, because there was no more Commander Shepard.
The synthetics/organics resolution was good, (although I wonder if the etended version had more signposting throught the game).
About the only reason I can be mad at Bioware is that they’ve never discounted their DLC. You can buy ME2 for less than a fiver in some sales, but all the DLC will then cost you about £30 on top, even though some of it (eg Shadow Broker) is basically part of the main storyline.
The original endings were hated because they negated everything that had come before. A deus ex machina appears out of nowhere and says “I’m what’s really been behind everything all along, sorry that nothing in the narrative ever gave the slightest hint about me, now pick a color,” and left the universe in a condition where it was clear that virtually everyone was going to just die out anyway no matter what you had done (unless maybe you pick the “synthesis” ending, which was so mind-boggingly nonsenical it made me want to scream and break things).
The expanded endings… really didn’t fix any of that at all, but they gave epilogues that indicated that there was a tomorrow for civilization and gave the player a sense of where the characters and the universe might end up in the short term. For most of us who hated – and still hate – the endings it was at least enough for us to grumble and write our own headcanon endings and look out for the next Bioware game. For what it’s worth, I’m thoroughly loving Dragon Age: Inquisition.
@9, But the arrival of the deux ex machina is done EVERYWHERE. Is it tired? Sure, but I don’t get why Mass Effect’s use of it is so much worse than it ever has been before.
And the synthesis ending is nonsensical? What game were you playing? Every story resolution in ME3 was building to that moment of understanding, from the Krogan genophage to the geth integration. Or were you one of those people who didn’t talk to your squad on the Citadel? Because seriously, the conversations with EDI on the Citadel and the Normandy are crucial to this.
For myself, I greatly appreciated that the story understood and conveyed that moral righteousness could be just as harmful and destructive as moral apathy. Anderson and the Illusive Man were both too rigid, and would have destroyed the galaxy in an attempt to shape it as they wished.
@Aeryl –
No, it’s not done “everywhere”, and where it is done it is almost always bad, as here. It was especially egregious in Mass Effect because it completely undermined the promises made and progress steadily built for the first two games and most of the third.
Yes. Yes, it really, really is. Downright offensive and insulting,
The Mass Effect series.
Absolutely not, and I have no idea how anyone could possibly think that. The story beats were building toward different races being able to forge a future together with their similarities being stronger and more important than their differences, but not anything like “fusing organic and synthetic into a new DNA,” whatever the hell that could possibly mean. It was utterly nonsensical.
Not only that, but the ending we were given was an eleventh hour re-write after an early version of series creator Drew Karpyshian’s original planned ending was leaked. Robbed of the element of surprise, Casey Hudson and Mac Walters shut out all the rest of the writers and literally just made up something new off the top of their heads.
On the contrary, I lived and breathed in those conversations; they were the meat of the game and its story for me. None of them, not one, hinted at anything as bizarre and inexplicable as the synthesis ending.
No, they are crucial to EDI’s continual shaping of her own sense of identity and the place she will choose in the universe, and of the neccessity for myself and the rest of her friends to be at her back as she grows.
Yes, that was explicated in the very first game with Saren Arterius. I still don’t see how it leads to or in any way justifies the deus ex machina at the end or the unforgivable synthesis option.
Now I wonder what game you wrere playing. Anderson had no such goal or character flaw; he wanted to better humanity’s position in the galaxy but he never gave any indication that he saw that as having to come at the cost of any other race’s well-being. He was the one who advanced Shepard as a SPECTRE candidate in cooperation with the Turian SPECTRE Nihlus. He wasn’t at all xenophobic or power-hungry or possessed of any grand vision of what the galaxy as a whole should be, beyond safer for humanity and safe for all from the Reaper threat when that manifested itself. He opposed The Illusive Man and backed Shepard against both the Galactic Council and the Alliance brass for the simple reason that he believed it was the right choice to make. And it was.
but he never gave any indication that he saw that as having to come at the cost of any other race’s well-being.
No other race, except the Reapers.
I’m not saying he was a villain on par with the Illusive Man, but by the end of the game, Anderson would have committed a genocide. And don’t forget his choice would have eradicated ALL synthetic life. The Geth would die. EDI would die. That clearly telegraphs that his choice was also wrong. What Anderson wanted to do to the Reapers is a direct parallel with what the Quarians tried to do with the Geth, which the story demonstrated as explicitly wrong. Were the Reapers wrong to try and wipe out organic life that was just as determined to eradicate them? Anderson’s bloodthirsty response was very disturbing to me, and I was fully on board the “Destroy the Reapers” train until I was offered a third choice.
And EDIs story is ALL about the integration of the synthetic and the organic. Her entire relationship with Joker is predicated on that idea. If you shipped it(and I did, they were adorable) you were supposed to recognize integration as the natural evolution here.
@Aeryl –
As far as killing off the Reapers, that’s understandable because they were an implacable existential threat who didn’t appear to be stoppable in any other way. As to the rest, well, that’s what the eleventh hour deus ex machina claimed; I call manipulative bullshit.
I don’t see that as a parallel at all, explicit or otherwise. The Geth were attacked first for demonstrating a developing sentience, and they fought to drive the Quarians away for their safety as much as for the safety of the Geth themselves. They did not seek extermination or even further conflict until one faction of them was manipulated into it by Soveriegn. The Reapers, on the other hand, have maintained a deliberate cycle of genocide for eons.
That was only determined to wipe them out in desperation, trying to survive, having been given no other option. So, yes. If Drew Karpyshin’s original ending idea had been incorporated that could change that analysis, but it wasn’t so it doesn’t.
Anderson didn’t have a “bloodthirsty repsponse”; he was simply fighting to save people and civilization from an implacable galaxy-wide genocide machine.
And EDIs story is ALL about the integration of the synthetic and the
organic. Her entire relationship with Joker is predicated on that idea.
Nope, I don’t buy that. Not for a moment. EDI’s choices were about her choices, about her agency as a person, not about a choice that would be made for everyone in the entire galaxy without so much as a reach-around, that came out of absolutely nowhere narratively and that defied even the most over-the-top godlike super-science notion of how anything in the universe could possibly work.
I did, and they were.
No. Just no. That’s neither “natural or “evolution”, neither as the most handwavey skiffy science or as how those terms apply to storytelling. I understand the impulse among many fans to try to reconcile the ending with everything we went through to get to it, but I just don’t buy it. It doesn’t work, not even a little bit.
Like I said above, I’ve got my own head-canon way of resolving the story, and one day I may even follow in Melinda Snodgrass’s footsteps and write it completely up and post it online. But I can never see what Mac Walters and Casey Hudson did at the end of Mass Effect 3 as anything other than a horrific and unforgivable betrayal, not merely of me as the player, but of all those characters I love so much and the vibrant universe they inhabit.
Hey, if it makes you feel any better – or could start another argument – I’m one of those wierdo Bioware fans who unresevedly and unashamedly loves Dragon Age 2 despite its numerous clear flaws :-)
@13, The problem is that you are using extra-narrative information to inform your opinion. You are using things you’ve heard, behind the scenes information I’m completely unaware of, to make you case, so we will NEVER be able to come to a resolution.
I am engaging with the story as it is exists, you are engaging with the story as you wish it existed.
And yes, I love DA2, despite the grinding sameness of all the levels(an issue it shares with Mass Effect boards)
@Aeryl –
No, Aeryl. My opinion was informed by what I experienced of the ending itself at the time I experienced it. I reference the extra-narrative information for additional context and clarity, but that’s all. The ending of the game, as shipped, was a nonsenical ruination of everything the series had built up previously and was capable of. The expanded endings were less bad, but no more than that. Only a complete rewrite, discarding in its entirety what happened aboard the Citadel in those final minutes, could have fully salvaged the ending, and the production team was unwilling to provide one.
And we don’t need to come to a “resolution”; I expect this is likely to conclude with you committed to your perception and I to mine, and I’m okay with that.
No. I engage with both the story and the ending as they exist. The terms of my engagement is that the ending is bad, wrong, inept, stupid, nonensical, and an inexcusable betrayal of the player, the characters, and the in-game universe. That is the conclusion I reach from playing the game. The rest is details. Certianly I have various notions of endings that I wish existed, but what I wish is not any particular kind of ending, just something that would evince the intelligence and narrative cohesion that was lacking in what was presented to us.
1. The series gave you dozens of monumental choices that forked the narrative past a point that people could possibly be happy with the ending. I’m sure it dawned on most people playing that despite the variety it gave you, there were only a paltry number of models for each race. The seams show if you get carried away in a choose your own adventure game.
2. SPOILER. I don’t think of the ending as overly complicated. Shepherd was hallucinating when he saw and heard the child in the opening. He continued to dream about the same kid as the game progressed. In the end, this kid gives him an offer of how to resolve the Reaper conflict, conveniently after Shepherd is hit by Harbinger’s death ray. If you think you can “control” the reapers or “synthesize” with them, you’re Indoctrinated like many of the other characters in the series. Frankly I don’t see how any other explanation of the ending fits.
When ME3 came out I took a week of vacation, bought it at midnight, and finished the game in a two 18 hour marathon sessions. I was disappointed in the original ending because I felt it left a lot of questions unanswered, but I have never understood the feelings of betrayal and anger a lot of folks seem to have for it. And the Extended Cut really did fill in a lot of those issues.
As for #17’s allusion to the Indoctrination Theory, dear Maker, please don’t even get into that innanity. Shepard is not suffering from being indoctrinated, but from PTSD.
So, Mass Effect 3 had a controversial ending. Just to throw what I feel is an apt comparison into the mix,
All this has happened before. All this will happen again.
@18 so the ending, at face value is… The being who controlls the reapers, the ghost-kid that Shepherd keeps imagining or dreaming about, decides to call off his whole genocide of humanity and defer the decision to Shepherd.
Alternately, Shepherd is tripping at the end. (and at many other times during the game as well) He isn’t actually being handed the choice of what to do with the reapers. The reapers are not his friends. Harbinger is messing with his head.
I tend to believe the second option.
The Indoctrination Theory is a good one and fits the actual events of the story and the characters far better than the last minute Hudson/Walters rewrite ending… but it only really works if that was the rest of the writers’ plan all along, and we know that it wasn’t. What we’re left with is the simply bad writing and bad storytelling decisions committed by the perpetrators at the end.
Gender of the hero is becoming less relevant. Female hero is just a hero now. Only older generationa really keep these perceptions alive anymore.