by Steven Sukkau
The biggest decision I ever made in the Mass Effect trilogy happened four years ago: the choice surrounding Shepherd’s origin story. Beyond merely shaping the character on the screen, that moment helped to define my experience and let me articulate my outlook on the world.
The spacer-sole survivor background would foreshadow every other defining moment of my experience as Shepherd. It was the most important because it was the single guiding force behind my Shepherd, leading him through the life of a military commander. And more than my altruistic paragon choices or renegade concessions, I bonded with Shepherd because of the shared humanity I felt in his imagined backstory — because we are all wounded by our past.
I remember when I stopped idolizing my father. He was standing by my bedside to tuck me in when I announced I wanted to work with handicapped high school students; I wanted to be just like him. Perhaps that wasn’t really true – but I did want to be near him, to follow his footsteps. My bedtime wish was snuffed out in the same instant. He told me, “You don’t want to do that, it’s a hard job and doesn’t pay well.”
I see now he just wanted a better life for his son, but that night my foolish young heart was bruised and wounded; what was probably a constellation of frictions and hurts crystallized, for whatever reason, in that one moment, and I let this dream of teaching die. I replaced it with years of silent promises, that I would never be like my father. It was a lonely road that led me further and further from the man I wanted to be closer to.
That’s why I wanted to wound Shepherd with his backstory. I wanted him as fucked up as I was, a young man trying be a big shot in a world that didn’t contain the kind of meaning he was looking for. That’s how I needed to connect with Shepherd, by sharing this heaving wound in the chest.
We don’t connect properly when we project our best into game characters like commander Shepherd. The paragon choices create the man I wish I could be, just as the renegade fulfills a fantasy. But I have little in common with either of these people. I found myself forgetting Shepherd’s past and I grew emotionally distant from the character. The more he became my idol, the man I wanted to be, the less we had in common. Every step towards being a paragon of justice, every radical act of imposing my renegade will, led me further away from this self-created character. I believe wounds are more intimate than successes or fantasies.
So I created a fiction, almost unconsciously, between the slight lines and details of Shepherd’s per-service history and psychological profile. As a spacer, a boy raised with staunch, humorless dedication to duty and self-sacrifice. Here was a young man who believed in justice from an early age and learned to live with crippling expectations from his parents. Unlike the more typical story of the hard-nosed orphan with nothing to lose, my Shepherd had everything to prove. He wasn’t a decorated war hero or a ruthless tactician. No, he was a Sole Survivor, the background I chose immediately.
The details are sparse. Bioware tells us Shepherd was the only survivor of a thresher maw attack on Akuze, and this hit home for me: the sole survivor grants neither a paragon nor a renegade bonus, and I filled in the rest. In my mind, Shepherd was incorrectly distinguished for overcoming “physical torments and psychological stressed that would have broken most people.” For me, he simply ran and hid. I imagine he found a cupboard. When people started dying he panicked. He closed the door, shut his ears and closed his eyes. I know he did this because that’s what a human person would do, and I am a human person.
I like to believe that’s why I was so hard on the mechanic for running and hiding from Saren in Mass Effect, and again on the Salarian for sealing the door when the collectors attacked in Mass Effect 2. Shepherd was disgusted with these ordinary, working class cowards, because they reminded him of himself. Even now, as the reapers descend on the galaxy, I can feel Shepherd’s chest tightening as the impulse to run and ride becomes stronger and stronger. Sometimes, he catches his hand shake, and steadies himself on the Normandy’s railing. But he will be the man to save the galaxy, not because of his bad-ass attitude or undying hope against all odds, but because of his wounds. This man who ran away, whose selfishness saved his life, who had to live through a nightmare of regret; he will fight the reapers until the end. This is the story I imagined for my Shepard because while I may aspire to be fearless, or fantasize about being powerful, ultimately what really resonates with me is weakness.
During the last moments of the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC, Liara visits your ship. It’s a quiet, intimate moment between two old friends, during the quiet before the coming reaper invasion, when she asks how I am holding up. I think it’s the first time in the game someone asks me how I’m doing, how I feel watching the world ending. I wanted a human response, but there wasn’t one in the dialogue wheel. I wanted to tell her how scared I was, how helpless I felt, and I wanted her to hold me and know that everything was going to be alright. But there was no option for that. Could it be that even this man who has the power to save the galaxy isn’t strong enough to admit these things?
I love my father, just as my children will love me, despite how much I will no doubt wound them the jagged parts of me that I can’t fix.
I remember stories of my grandfather, whose own father sold the farmland right from underneath him; no warning, no apology. He was a hurt and angry man who would carry a grudge with God his whole life, glaring up at the prairie sky. This is the man that raised my father, wounding him, making him the man he is. When my dad says he’s proud of me, I can feel those broken pieces fitting into place, the final snap of a pain-staking puzzle. I can forgive him when I know how his own wounds shaped him, and how they hurt me. And this is not to wallow in pain or self-inflicted misery, but to recognize that part of the process towards healing is knowing why it hurts.
For Shepherd, perhaps this moment would take place in a dream. where he relives, in slow motion, the horror of that memory. Stumbling upon his younger self, hiding and cowering in fear the moment he was wounded. Maybe crumbling and sobbing in front of Liara would be where forgiveness begins. Maybe saving a galaxy would allow him to heal. And maybe Shepherd’s story is a chance to see further down our own road, to a place we want to arrive; powerful not because he is just or ruthless, but because he is human.
