#lmao she's so mean and when she talks to Garrus she's like 'cool down! this isn't an action movie! strive to do better! Civilian Casualty | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

meggannn · 6 years

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more for lydia (of course): 21, 24, 45, 49

i am the worst person for taking like a day to respond to this omg

21) Best Friend(s)?

it’s hard to categorize her best “friends” because for a while she doesn’t really consider them friends, she considers them “acquaintances she has varying degrees of closeness and unique relationships with” while not realizing that like… that is the definition of a friend? lmao (like for example, she only really let herself think of garrus and tali as ‘friends’ instead of ‘crewmembers i’m fond and protective of’ until the shore leave after the battle of the citadel. though while she was close with her me1 crew, i do think me2 is the first time she realizes she’s allowed to think of her team as friends too.

me1: kaidan and ashley at least in the beginning. by the end of the game i think she’s closer to tali as well

me2: at first, garrus and kasumi, and later when they join, tali and samara. i say this with like, knowing she has fondness for all of her crew

me3: garrus and, after renewing their relationship, ashley

24) Do they have a love/hate relationship with any of them?

not with any of those mentioned above, though i think her relationships with miranda and jack in 2 are a little… not adversarial, but shepard is wary of them as much as she likes them. miranda for obvious reasons, and jack because she genuinely likes her after a while but being around her for so long is a bit of a drain on her energy, since she kind of reminds her of the kids from her old gangs. zaeed she definitely has a love/hate relationship with in 2, in that she appreciates his talks and advice but doesn’t appreciate his attitude and volatile unpredictability.

45) Do they use social media?

lmfao I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS ABOUT SHEPARD ON SOCIAL MEDIA OKAY YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE ASKED ME THIS, it’s not that she’s very tech savvy (though there’s some proficiency with hacking) just growing up as a teenager on earth who stole/resold a lot of omnitools and translators and laptops, she had very few other pasttimes when cash wasn’t coming in. i think she was really into social media during ict training with other candidates, as a way of bonding and non-physical de-stressing. and she obviously knows a lot of online slang and shitty corners of the internet from her teenage days. in the alliance she goes through periods of activity followed by periods of forgetting about the internet at all, like when she’s on missions.

by me1, she’s established enough that i think she’s convinced herself a commander shouldn’t post on social media, that’s not appropriate, blah blah. so for a while she’s mostly quiet with only occasional funny but nonoffensive comments on things like pop culture or whatever. then after the battle of the citadel she gets a huuuuge influx of followers, and she’s like ??? cause she doesn’t use her space twitter much, so she kinda posts once like "hey thanks for the support, look out for my album coming out next spring” and everybody loves it, until she starts talking about the reapers publicly and preparing for war, then everybody’s like “god shut up i thought you were cool” so she gets angry when it becomes apparent that most people just want a figurehead, not her to actually say anything, but she can’t go back to making jokes and pretending things are normal, so she stops posting altogether. maybe like, once or twice more about something irrelevant, and then three weeks later she’s dead. (and then her crew like garrus and tali in particular waste so much time on the internet looking at her online profiles, rereading her last posts, hunting through years worth of her feed far back enough to see she was a different person once, both of them in mourning but garrus denying it)

and then me2 happens, and she’s obviously not thinking about social media for a while. when she does, it’s like maybe midway through the game, like maybe on illium kasumi drags her out to dinner cause she found authentic thai in the markets, and shepard’s just content enough to think “this is the kind of meal you post a picture about and share on social media” and she considers it before remembering oh yeah i was dead……. is my account even still there? how weird would it be to suddenly post out of nowhere again? i know the rumor is i was just under cover, but would it help or hurt the war to treat this like normal? and she basically overanalyzes and decides not to say anything at all. (in reality i think after she died her account was given the space equivalent of a twitter verification, like Yes This Was The Real Shepard’s Account, Tweets Might Be Recorded, which she only discovers after she logs in on a whim back on the ship). i don’t think she breaks this social media fast until she either uses it one day because she 1) completely forgets she was avoiding it, like she just wakes up randomly and types “i had the weirdest fuckin dream let me tell yall about it” because she’s still half asleep and convinces herself it’s a good idea, then goes back to sleep and wakes up to a million notifications like “i KNEW YOU WERE BACK!!” and “SOMEONE HACKED SHEPARD’S ACCOUNT THAT’S DISGRACEFUL” and she’s like oh boy. OR 2) she gets so heated over something stupid (that is definitely about human pop culture) that she completely forgets/doesnt give a rat’s ass anymore about maintaining silence online. like “I JUST HEARD SPACE BEYONCE WASN’T NOMINATED FOR A GRAMMY LAST YEAR. WHAT THE FUCK?” after the collector base, she feels a little more freedom to be funny and has the time to engage and post about pop culture again, so she gains some attention back for that

by me3, coming out of alliance-imposed isolation, i think she takes back to the internet whenever she can, for better or worse, but because most of the news she swallows is so awful, she tries to be positive and reach out to people who @ her, like she doesn’t want to lie to them, but she tries to signal boost official evacuation and relocation efforts and stuff. when the alliance starts gaining allies, there’s a little bit of expectation for her to use her accounts as a political “so honored the turian hierarchy is joining us” blah blah kind of tweet, so she’s kind of like…. well people deserve to know we’ve made an accord, but i’m gonna do it my way, and she essentially starts sharing all the stuff that’s happening on the citadel that might get easily lost in translation, like

“i can confirm councilor udina was just killed by spectre williams after a standoff on the presidum, after he threatened the life of another councilor. we have confirmed that he was compromised by cerberus after his participation in a failed coup. please see the official statement for more details. the death of a high profile politician is always a shock, but to those feeling betrayed, i want every human and alien to be reminded that spectres are chosen to protect the galaxy from both foreign and internal threats. ashley williams takes her role seriously, as do i, and her actions saved lives yesterday. in light of the recent citadel attack, the alliance would also like me to encourage people to remain vigilant against cerberus cyberwarfare and contact with reaper tech. stay safe, everyone.”

just like, very honest, frank statements or clarifications that might not otherwise get out there, with an emphasis on trying to keep morale as high as reasonably possible. it’s not classified info, but she wants people to stay informed, like she wants people across the galaxy being bombarded who think they’ve been abandoned to know that she’s still fighting for them everywhere she can. even though she’s feeling really dejected and pessimistic sometimes i think she’s determined to make other people believe they can win even when she isn’t sure herself.

post-war (AHHA YOU THOUGHT I WAS DONE AFTER ME3, DIDNT YOU) as soon as she can travel, she kind of shoves her way into politics via reconstruction efforts despite her unstable health because she’s terrified everything will just go back to normal and the underprivileged people in slums and terminus colonies will be ignored. i think she keeps up the informative trend of letting people know what’s going on, like explaining what this or that emergency bill that was just passed by the council means, ‘cause she’s still new to politics and honesty all this dense language would’ve definitely confused her too. eventually as things start getting more settled she feels less guilty posting about how her day’s going. and then at one point, there is definitely a collective internet freakout when shepard acknowledges/makes a joke about one of the memes about her, and she’s like “what, you guys think i never go online or something?? i was a teenager once, i know how the internet works!” (she actually doesn’t spend that much time in forums or the like, she just learned about the meme from garrus and vega.)

(and then at some point post-war garrus, who used to have a dumbass video game let’s play account that gained a ton of popularity after me1 when shepard found out about it and asked to play turian call of duty with him on it (the vid was entitled “i play turian call of duty with commander shepard (my co)” and was mostly just them horsing around and then it went viral, but he took it down after she died and then purged the whole account/his entire online presence when he went to omega. but anyway a while post-war garrus comes to her like “hey you remember that video we made” “i remember the jokes about it” “well uh, i just managed to fix this old console i found at a flea market, do you want to do it again? yknow just kill time and lift people’s spirits?” so he makes a new account and introduces her to a lot of other games, she’s good at space overwatch but then when she gets cocky he makes her play like turian dark souls or some shit, and they record and post it online for kicks too)

fuck, i still have one more question left to answer???? i spent a fucking lifetime writing up this, I TOLD YOU ASKING ME QUESTIONS ABOUT LYDIA WAS A MISTAKE

49) Would they consider themselves as a good person, bad person, or morally grey?

mostly i dont think she lets herself think about whether she’s a “good” person because emotionally, and morally, she doesn’t feel much different than she was when she was committing crimes for a living (though she knows logically she’s grown a lot, she convinced herself back then that she was justified in doing bad things by just trying to survive, which is… not entirely too different from now). anyway she still feels like she’s trying to make up for who she used to be, like she wants to put more good into the world than the harm she once contributed to, or failing that, she can at least remove as much of the evil in the galaxy as she can. (i keep forgetting to clarify, she didn’t just do petty theft and break-ins and lookouts and illegal reselling, she was occasionally a debt collector and beat people near to the point of death with biotics, and she hated it but it was mostly out of sympathy that she insisted on going instead of another gangster because if it were anyone else she knows they might’ve dismembered or tortured the person too.)

god i still haven’t answered your question. ive been writing for a full hour, keely. the long and short of it is that i think she’s morally gray. i call her paragade for a reason. she tries really hard to be a good person to make up for who she was (who she “had” to be), so she fights to save every life she can, but against enemies that show no remorse or whatnot, some of her old habits of ruthlessness and reluctance to forgive die hard.

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT MY OCS IF YOU FEEL LIKE SCROLLING PAST MORE LONG PARAGRAPHS ON YOUR DASH, YO

#lydia shepard #keelificent

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