fucking mordin motherfucker will never not make me cry.

Poor Victus had it so rough. Got assigned into a post he didn't want, to do a job he wasn't precisely qualified for, in the middle of the biggest war in turian history (and that's saying), and what happens? He sends his son, underqualified but trustworthy, to complete an extremely sensitive mission to difuse a situation that could end up with countless deaths and the krogan alliance he needs broken. However, Tarquin falls so badly that he's got to be saved by the human commander of the ship he's been staying on (instead of his besieged planet), and the alliance is still at risk. To make sure the mission doesn't fail, the guy kills himself, and he doesn't even have enough time to process the news when the krogan leader is all up on his face, questioning him about the classified nature of the mission and their so-called allyship. The kindest thing the human has to say about his son's death is pretty much "I told you so".

I want to make a big meta post about wrex and the krogan and the galaxy's treatment of the krogan and how most of them subvert the stereotypes about them but how beautifully wrex does it in particular, but whenever i start to type it i get emotional and become this, basically:

I have a feeling that the spacer pre-service history has the most unique dialogue? Besides the ME1 side-mission where Shepard talks to their mother, since all backgrounds have that. There's also her emails, characters asking after her, Shepard mentioning growing up on ships, etc. I don't remember something similar for colonists, and definitely not for earthborn.

I suppose it makes sense. Shepard would be more reluctant to talk about how their entire family was killed and their community slaughtered or enslaved, and I don't think they'd have too much to discuss with regards to their life on earth as earthborn, no family and an extremely shitty situation.

Garrus' character arc is incredibly interesting in that, in my opinion, it's a sort of deconstruction of the bad cop trope. You know, the typical Hollywood detective who justifies any means to catch the perp, your run-of-the-mill copaganda guy.

He starts just like that. He joins Shepard because by running with a spectre he can avoid C-Sec regulations. He wants to endanger Dr Saleon's hostages because he thinks catching him is more important than their lives. He wants to catch Saren and kill him, period. He went off the rails, so he needs to be punished, and in his mind that means he should die, so thats why he expects Shepard to do just that, why he's got trouble understanding why a more paragon Shepard would want to capture and arrest him, instead of killing him. In his own words, he sees the world in black and white, and he decides what's good and what's bad. If it's good, fine. If it's bad, it should die. At this point, he ignores the gray, or maybe he doesn't even see it.

After the battle of the Citadel and Shepard's death, as the Council keeps burying their heads in the sand about the reapers, he realizes his objective (killing bad people so they don't hurt good people, mainly, since "stopping the reapers" at the time probably felt to him like something that was not going to happen) cannot be completed on the Citadel.

This leads him to become a vigilante on Omega. This is ideal for him. As he tells Shepard (and I'm paraphrasing), if he wants to find someone bad to kill he just has to point his gun. He does the Archangel thing for a while, and then he fails. Spectacularly. The sort of traumatic failure that stays with you for a long damn while. There's a reason, in my opinion, that he's got so little unique dialogue on the Normandy. Three conversations after his loyalty mission, and how many? 3 more at most before it? Poor man's got a shit ton of survivor's guilt to work through. He channels it into anger at Sidonis, into trying to avenge them, but still: he was responsible for their lives (in his mind), and they all, 100% of them, died.

He has all the time in ME2 to come to terms with the fact that he was wrong. To understand why he was wrong and how he failed. I'm pretty sure that by the time Shepard goes back to the alliance, he's learned his lesson: vigilante work, revenge, killing bad guys to save good guys, avoiding the law... all of that won't lead to a better galaxy. Sure, he and his team did good work in Omega, for as long as they lasted, but they weren't going to turn the tables. Archangel was good in concept, he changed lives for the better, but he wasn't going to save the galaxy.

So what does he do, when he sees his methods have failed and shit's about to hit the fan? He finally turns to the official channels. He goes to his ex-C-Sec father, with whom he "did not see eye to eye", and he asks him for his help, in what is, in my opinion, the narrative showing his changed attitude towards formal authority, that which made him a "bad turian".

He gets official government help, he gets his task force, and he gets recognition for his work. He helps the turians' chances against the reapers. He gets formal recognition for his work, as even generals are saluting him.

He learns that there's value in following procedure. He finally starts seeing that gray, a little at least. He outgrows the "bad cop" persona.