✧ɪɴғᴏ ᴘᴏsᴛ;
Feb. 16th, 2013 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
n7
CHARACTER
NAME: Commander Jane Shepard
SERIES: Mass Effect
CANON POINT: Post-Destroy ending
GENDER & SEX: F and F.
AGE: Physically 30, technically 32.
BIRTHDATE: April 11th, 2154.
SIGN: Aries.
TATTOO: Right shoulder blade, around an inch in diameter.
POWERS
ONE: Fire: Manipulation
KINKS
YES: just ask! she's pretty adventurous and potentially quite creative in the kink department, so chances are she's open for it.
NO: poopan, barfan, the usual, probably most guro.
MORE
PERSONALITY: Shepard’s a born leader. Miranda comments early on in her acquaintance with Shep that she has “that fire that makes someone willing to follow you into hell itself.” And indeed, it needs to be pointed out that Shepard has solved just as many (if not more) of the major conflicts in her time with persuasive words than with military might. Granted, she has few qualms with using force to accomplish an objective, but her outlook is measured and pragmatic. She believes that sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices for the greater good--what Garrus terms “the ruthless calculus of war”--but it is not without misgivings and not without carefully weighing the options set before her.
As Mass Effect allows the player some freedom to choose Shepard’s background and general moral character, it’s necessary to go into some specifics to this particular version. Jane Shepard was born into a farming family on the colony of Mindoir. At sixteen, she survived a raid brought down on the colony by batarian slavers that would go down in history as nothing less than an atrocity against innocent lives. Rescued by an Alliance ship, she enlisted once of age. She took her military career seriously and quickly rose in rank. It’s reasonable to assume that her loyalty to the Alliance has roots in this history, but it’s also instilled in her a touch of cognitive dissonance: her survivor’s guilt has manifested in an unwillingness to involve innocents in the turmoil that unfolds around her, but she has nonetheless demonstrated a (reluctant) willingness to cooperate with that “ruthless calculus,” to focus on the larger picture and see her mission through by any means necessary.
At the age of 22, Shepard made a name for herself for the first time during the Skyllian Blitz. While on shore leave on Elysium, she found herself singlehandedly fending off hostile batarian forces and other pirate troops while the Alliance rallied their defenses. Shepard has no strong love for the batarians as a whole, given her history and a slavery-endorsing culture that runs counter to her human sensibilities, but other species are simply a fact of life in her time and she believes progress is achieved through cooperation first and force or isolationism second.
Many humans might not agree, but there’s a little sliver of Captain Kirk in Shepard that deserves acknowledgement. While this particular Shepard never involved herself in romance, instead putting her responsibilities toward the galaxy at the forefront of her mind, she has had ample opportunity and interest and is not at all beyond flirtation. In theory, she would not have objected to the notion of casual sex, be it with a man or a woman, human or alien, but she has also remained acutely aware that further complicating the task her people have before them is a thing to be avoided. She is by no means as opposed to fraternization as the Alliance itself is, but chooses to decline.
Her tendency to prioritize the bottom line has, in fact, led her down some questionable paths before. Because she would prefer to do the “right thing” over the “lawful thing” any day of the week, she cooperated with Cerberus willingly and even a bit enthusiastically in the beginning. Although their methods were questionable in the eyes of the rest of the galaxy, they held the promise of getting the job done. The Illusive Man’s betrayals were not received by her kindly, and she ultimately turned her back on him just as quickly as she had once chosen to cooperate.
Shepard’s not temperamental, per se, though she’s been known to call people out with a certain level of bluntness if she feels their actions are stupid or reckless or detrimental to the task at hand. She can certainly take a joke (which is good, because her attempts at dancing truly do invite ridicule) and is happy to treat her crew just as much like friends. She lost her family early, so it makes some sense that her crew has come to serve that purpose. This means that every one of her people is, in her view, someone she would defend to the death. She’s a good friend to have. She’s a powerful friend to have.
Though Shepard fought as hard as she could throughout the Reaper War and the time leading up to it to preserve as many lives and cultures as she could--saving the rachni, saving the council, curing the genophage while pacifying the salarians, brokering peace between the quarians and the geth--in the end, she found herself facing down that bottom line again. She felt it was not her place or her right to force the synthesis of synthetic and organic life. She knew controlling the Reapers would make her no better than the Illusive Man. So ultimately, she made the choice she’d intended to make all along: she chose to destroy the Reapers, knowing she would likely die, knowing the geth would be wiped from the earth, knowing EDI would cease to exist. She made her choice for the greater good, but not without understanding the toll it would take.
OTHER: Likes aliens. Headbutts to show dominance. Don't let her dance.
