I’m Writing A Book And Here’s An Essay From It
I've talked about this a couple of places before, but I am writing a Killing Our Gods book! It will collect the entirety of the Uppercut column Killing Our Gods, a few other writings, and around 8 new essays, ranging from thinking about the specter of the Virgin Mary in Silent Hill and self-harm/self-flagellation in Baldur's Gate 3. The book is a collaboration with my dear friend Gina Fowler, the incredible book artist and writer. Gina will hand-make every copy, so this is truly a project made with love and care.
We are launching our Kickstarter campaign on March 20th. Please support and share!
As a proof-of-concept, I wrote the first new essay of the collection. It may well take a quite different final form, but it is ready to show off and displays the space the book will allow me to take up. I hope you enjoy the read. You can also read this essay directly on my website.
Lost In Each Other: Alternate Selves In Mass Effect
Over ten years ago, I wrote a fanfiction where Shepard, the supercop protagonist of Mass Effect, was mormon. An in-game conversation sparked this idea: one crew member expresses faith in god and asks Shepard about his own belief. He can respond with, “You know that old saw 'there's never an atheist in a foxhole?' I've been in a lot of foxholes.” That line burrowed its own little haven in my mind. I imagined all the foxholes my Shepard had been in and how they made him believe. Mostly though, I imagined how he stopped believing.
Mass Effect's plot hinges on the eldritch Reapers, gigantic robot gods from deep space who facilitate the growth of intelligent life across the stars, only to cull it every 50,000 years. The exact nature of the Reapers is revealed about two-thirds into the trilogy's first game. Notably, the one opportunity in the series Shepard has to express religious feeling comes well before the Reapers are unveiled. This is likely a conscious omission, given the first game's courting of controversy and its franchise's growing inclusion of queer characters. Even so, this moment doesn't allow Shepard to express any kind of religious affiliation, only a harmless, generic monotheism. (Though it does allow him to express a New Atheist-esque disdain for the whole idea).
Those tasteful, appeasing gaps left me plenty of places to expand and insert my own perspective. In my mind, the reapers foreclosed the idea of a benevolent God. The endless cycles of death and life seemed cruel beyond belief; all sentience would fall into oblivion. I imagined that it would seem that way to Shepard too. The faith that had dug him through all those foxholes would end with that confrontation. Now he would believe that human-and-alien-kind were worth saving with or without divine mandate.
I never finished the story, but it started at the end. At the conclusion of the series, Shepard is faced with an infamous three-pronged choice. The reapers are a solution to the allegedly inevitable conflict between robotic and "natural" life. Housed in metal, but made in part of the organic life that came before, the reapers are a means of preserving both electronics and flesh in a holy monument. Shepard's partial victory over the reapers proves them to be obsolete, in a bit of nonsense hand waving. The Reapers' AI master gives Shepard three choices: He can destroy the Reapers along with all other robots, control them, or synthesize the two kinds of beings at the cost of Shepard's own life. In true video game fashion, this means leaping into a giant laser beam. My Shepard did not trust himself with power and he did not want to kill his robotic friends and allies, but he contemplated whether he could really bring himself to jump. He did, ultimately, but the fanfic would have traced the contours of faith, or lack of it, up to the end of his life.
To me, in the kind of twisted logic perhaps familiar to other former christians, this made Shepard Christ-like. To die in the total surety of oblivion for someone else is a sacrifice even Jesus did not have to make. Even as he jumped, he leapt with his hands outstretched in the shape of the cross. These were the kind of contradictions that I loved as a closeted mormon: an apostate christian, an atheist, standing in for god's son.
In fact, I understood Mass Effect primarily as a religious allegory. Shepard as a divine child, the inevitable conflict of flesh and blood beings vs. robots a kind of original sin. The reapers, true to their name, come to cleanse us of our simple imperfection. They make us Gods, but not as we are. They chop us up, use our blood, profane material for divine ends. Mass Effect's final choice, between control, synthesis, or destruction is a choice of salvations, even approaches to sin. We can control or curb it, attempt to eradicate it entirely, or integrate it with hope that sin itself is part of the divine plan.
This allegorical frame was, essentially, the way I was taught to read. Mormon Sunday schools made the Hebrew Bible into a set of shadows, cast in the light of the New Testament. Moses and David as deliverer kings, like the son of god who was to follow them. This extended to pop culture. I remember my mother comparing The Matrix to the plight of mormons. Morpheus and the other human resistance fighters are the ones who know the truth, who can see through the machine, dwelling in Zion. Being devout means endless self-justifications.
Which is not to say that there is nothing to this comparison. It is, after all, on Eden Prime where Shepard receives the first inklings of the Reapers' advancement, shattering mankind's innocence like the fruit of knowledge. At the beginning of Mass Effect 2, he dies and is reborn. In the final moments of Mass Effect 3, he stands in for and advocates for humanity, likely dying or becoming transformed in the process. The games' final post-credits scene calls its protagonist "The Shepherd," a title tinged with devotion. These are, after all, still RPGs about killing god(s). Christianity is going to wriggle its way in there.
Now though, it is Mass Effect's more mundane, political realities that hold my attention. Shepard's initial role is as the first human Spectre, a kind of intergalactic, unfettered CIA. After his death and resurrection, he joins human supremacist group Cerberus, which is a Klan by way of neoliberal think-tank. Finally, he is a general, leader of the war effort against the reapers. Shepard is a savior, because the games constantly make him the tip of the spear of power.
While Call of Duty or Fortnite have clearer ties to the military entertainment complex, Mass Effect's conservatism is dizzying to fully contemplate. At best, Mass Effect offers top-down reforms from diverse oligarchies, enforced by Shepard's iron arm. At worst, there is Shepard alone, more Judge Dredd than Captain Kirk. But they are not that different are they.
The villain of the first game, Saren, is also a Spectre agent, indoctrinated by the Reaper's power to inspire devotion. This "indoctrination" can infect even agents of the state. After the initial revelation of the Reapers in Mass Effect 1, the galaxy's governments attempt to cover up their existence. Only Shepard and his allies stand against these untruths. It is not difficult to see the relationship between this plot and regular, right-wing conspiracy. The reapers are an invisible enemy that can infect any of us at any time, that all the world's authorities deny, but that you, dear reader, know is there.
This interfaces with Mass Effect's existential qualities. Like Lovecraft's ancient deities, the machine god reapers are less literal incarnations of existential dread and more stand-ins for mundane political concerns. The reapers are a comprehensive threat to the galactic order as is, a totalizing enemy against whom any action is justified. One can make any number of ill-advised, but not exactly inaccurate, political comparisons.
This is a painful part of growing older: The realization that the things you loved once were smuggling something else into your mind or reveal something uncomfortable about your past beliefs. Mass Effect is an ultimately small betrayal and not even an emblematic one, but I've spent my entire time in games criticism grappling with it. An ill-articulated and earnest essay about Mass Effect 3 was the first thing I ever published online. Now this is the first entry I'm writing for this collection. I wanted to come full circle, to wipe it clean, to shred its memory.
~
As we age and grow more determined, wiser, hardened, it's easy to see foibles or bad taste as mortal slights. Cringing to yourself because you remembered something you said years before. Before 2018, I wasn't really myself. I only became myself when I came out, when I started HRT, or years into transition. There's truth to this. It's difficult for me to look back on older photographs. There was a meme on Instagram lately of posting pictures from when you were 21. I would rather die. It's easy to remember my unvarnished, cringe, and sincere Mass Effect fandom through that hazy lens, the boy who still did not know what the world was doing to her.
My emotional attachment to Mass Effect is bewildering to me now, but my enjoyment of it is perfectly legible. Video games appealed to me as a closeted, masked autistic because they were a safe space to fail. No matter how many times I died to a tough encounter, Mass Effect's NPCs would greet me as a soldier with the gift of Achilles. If I didn't like the consequences of a decision, I could reload a previous save. This is a cliché in thinking about games. Failure works in more complicated and interesting ways in practice. Nevertheless, that was a fundamental feeling of why I continued to play, because I could be outside of my body, outside of my original sins. While Mass Effect promises tough choices, implicitly failure, it mostly provides means to enforce a limited lens on the world.
That might seem unfair, given Mass Effect's frequent fail states. One of two crew members in Mass Effect 1 is fated to die, you only choose which. Mass Effect 2 centers around a suicide mission, with 12 individual crew members who can all perish. However, these moments of loss play, to some degree, as comedy. Most Mass Effect players are at least a little gleeful at killing either "boring" Kaiden or "racist" Ashley. Losing most or all of your crew members in Mass Effect 2 is not so much grand tragedy as it is Final Destination. Meanwhile, succeeding merely requires time. Doing sidequests, buying all the requisite upgrades, and making the correct choices in specific missions ensures that you will get the best possible outcomes. While you can get "bad" results, they are mostly a consequence of playing impulsively. Mass Effect incentives a languishing, completionist play.
That is part of what made Mass Effect 3's ending so controversial. While you could bolster the war effort and prevent some deaths and unpleasantries that way, its final choice was inevitable. You could not negotiate, charm, or sidequest your way out of it. However, even it places your (admittedly limited) choices at the head of the rest of history. It turns you into a god.
That too though is a little trick of mormonism. All humans have divine potential; under the proper circumstances, they can become gods. Every human being is eternal. Before we were bodies, we were souls. Before we were souls, we were intelligences, spiritual matter that could be made into human beings. As spirits, we chose to come down to earth, to live mortal lives, so that we might live with God again and become like him.
In a certain light, this is a radically human way of thinking about faith. The errors of the flesh are not the mistakes of the fall, but the way to divinity itself. Even mormonism's vision of heaven and hell is more accepting... theoretically. Hell doesn't really exist. Instead, Heaven is divided into Kingdoms and Degrees, though only the highest will let you let your family stay together. In practice, mormons are just as repressed as any other christian, just as punishing. A lower degree of heaven might as well be hell. Their inhabitants are literally damned, barred from god's presence.
That is, though, more of a function of how the theology is read and understood than any inevitability of it. My parents were (are) hardly marginalized radicals, but they were thoughtful, thoroughly aware of the church's critics and unafraid to engage directly with them. My dad once passionately argued that the kingdoms were stepping stones. One sorted into the lowest kingdom could ascend. God keeps us from him not because we are undeserving, but because we are not ready for his presence. Roughly a year later, a mormon friend would passive-aggressively play me a talk where a dead apostle called this idea blasphemy.
Although psychologically and interpersonally I did buy into mormonism's more punitive ideals, I felt far more kinship with my dad's theologies than the apostle's. I remember when a mormon friend of mine asked if I thought I would make it to the highest kingdom. I said yes. He was baffled, asking if I didn't think I would make any mistakes that would bar me. My feeling was that my salvation was not up to me, or my mistakes, but up to Jesus. I believed in grace, or at least I wanted to.
Mass Effect's ending was a way, perhaps, for me to express my theology. That laser beam offered reconciliation, not punishment or control. Sin is inevitable, why shouldn't we hold it close without shame? The promise of exhalation was not that our weaknesses will be burned away, but that they will be made good. I did not want to control myself or destroy the parts of me that disturbed me, but I wanted to hold them, to be whole in god's light. His promise is that "weak things will become strong."
That too has an echo in the delicious frictions of video game failure: the enforced loss, the failure that must happen to advance the plot. These can range from the RPG battle that is impossible or difficult to win to defeating a boss only to lose in a cutscene. These can be a source of frustration or at least awkwardness, but it underlines the earlier mentioned truth about video games. Failure is expected and designed. It is part of the engine that makes them go. Games can make you feel powerful, but that only works through failure. Most enforced failures are temporary setbacks or plot contrivances. Victory arises out of them.
There are a few moments where Mass Effect does something like this. The most representative is the Mass Effect 2 expansion "Arrival," in which entire worlds of bug-like, brown skinned aliens are destroyed to prevent the reapers' imminent invasion. Shepard cannot choose to let the planets live or even warn them in time, but is left to simply make the hard choice. This was controversial at release, but mostly for the wrong reasons. Arrival is not an error in Mass Effect's otherwise player-centric design, but a clear stating of its fundamental theses. Some people have to die, better the wretched of the earth than you. It's tragic, but inevitable.
Mass Effect 3, however, contains the most of these moments in order to emphasize the immense difficulty of its central conflict. The Reapers have fought countless wars before and won every single one. Things have to get bleak. In a harrowing mission toward the end of the game, Shepard and crew must obtain a vital code from the heart of Thessia, the homeworld of the blue spacebabe Asari. Throughout the mission they urge ground troops to fight on, to push themselves harder to help Sheaprd break through enemy lines, only for Cerberus agents to snatch the code from them. The mission concludes with more reapers descending on the world, harsh and spindly against the orange sky, as the radio buzzes with death.
The contrast with Arrival is not lost on me: the regrettable but necessary loss of backwater worlds versus the humanized tragedy at the heart of galactic civilization. But it is a failure and it is keenly felt and dramatized. Nevertheless, this loss leads to a victory. Cerberus were sloppy in one way, leaving behind coordinates to one of their secret bases which chart a path to their defeat at the end of the game. These hard won victories hamper Mass Effect's existentialism. This cycle has to be the one that breaks the pattern; it cannot simply be another loss.
The engine of that break is Shepard's own greatness. He is, as one party member puts it, "the avatar of this cycle." If he is good enough, he can ascend, he can make the world right. All the great cost that came with that is just collateral damage; inevitable really, given the strength of the enemy he was facing. If he is careful enough, he will not fail, he will only make hard choices. I suppose there is some human frailty in that, but not one I can recognize.
I'm no longer interested in Jesus as some great leader, perfect son of God. I certainly don't want to be him, allegorically or otherwise. My teenage read of Mass Effect is more optimistic, but it still relies on Shepard as a Paragon, a hero, the best of us. I don't know that this is a criticism of Mass Effect in the way that its limited role-playing or regressive political imagination or frequently mind-numbing systems are, but it is boring. Ultimately Shepard can either be a monument of the liberal order or an iron fist. These are not human things.
It's easy to read this as a uniquely video game problem. Shepard has to be something of a blank state, so the player can place themselves inside him. It has to be plausible for him to make a variety of different choices. Games like Pathologic 2, Pentiment, Disco Elysium, and even The Witcher prove this wrong. Their protagonists are people before you pick up the controller. Every decision you make with them is interpretive, rather than decisive. These are people you can relate to, and through that relation, feel for. To be emotionally engaged with Shepard you have to read into him. I find that hard to do now.
But once, I didn't. Once I fashioned him into a mirror.
~
I first played Mass Effect and wrote that fan fiction as a teenager. I had started, but never finished, a couple playthroughs of the games as a woman over the years. I remember trying to play Mass Effect 2 as a more villainous lady and couldn't bring myself to commit. I still identified with her.
To start, the female Shepard was dealt a tough hand. You could always create and play as a female avatar, but she had no official design, was not featured in advertising, and only 18% of the playerbase (as of 2013) opted to play as her. Despite her absence from official materials, the fandom-dubbed “FemShep” (ugh) garnered a vocal fanbase, thanks in part to the voice performance of Jennifer Hale. Mass Effect 3 featured a reversible cover, a man on one side and a woman on the other. In a moment reflecting a catastrophic misogyny, developers BioWare offered a fan poll to choose one of six character designs to be the new "official" FemShep. Fans chose a white, straight-jawed redhead.
On replay, my Shepard was also a white redhead, but short shaved, dyke-ish, with a big nose. My teenage self played as a "nice and determined young man," the sort that populates recruitment ads. This time, I opted for the kind of presentation I might like if I was cis (and didn't hold on to my long hair like a beloved family member). A sharp pantsuit, a pixie cut, a proper butch.
It took me over three years to finish the trilogy. I played through the first two games essentially for work and when the gaming press moved on from the franchise's 2021 re-release, I did too. I unfortunately ache for catharsis (it's fake and don't let anyone tell you otherwise). But over those three years I kept thinking about finishing my playthrough and writing something to wrap it all up.
I feel like I spent these three years alternatively chasing and rejecting my dead selves. When I look back at who I was, I want her to explain so much. Many of my current hangs-ups and struggles were because of choices she made. While I understand that I was a victim and foolish and lied to and just young, it is hard not to look back in anger. It is easy to see myself as repudiating, even punishing, who I used to be by becoming who I am. Even back when I felt it keenly, Mass Effect was a poor mirror, but I keep using it, because it is truthfully one of the few things that has remained constant. She played Mass Effect and so I do too, looking for her.
Now is perhaps the time to say that I learned nothing. I once loved Mass Effect and used it as a mirror, but that person cannot be found anywhere in it. I remember reading about someone who modeled his Shepard on his mother. Rereading this made my heart ache. The writer makes the claim that playing as Shepard in this way helped him understand his parent, but it is so clear that the one-to-one comparison reduces and judges its subject. It's the kind of personal writing that an editor should have clamped down on. The person who played and loved Mass Effect all those years ago was probably naive, but I cannot judge her now. The process of identification can be flattening as much as resonant. We can do that to ourselves as much as anyone else.
Fittingly, what profundity I did find came from someone other than Shepard. Thane is an assassin. Like most brooding killers, he has a dead wife. Shepard meets him hunting down the last one responsible for her death, though, ultimately, he considers himself most to blame. Post Mass Effect 1, he is one of the franchise's big religious characters. Thane is Drell, a reptilian species with perfect memory. There are only a few Drell in the galaxy, because of their homeworld's environmental collapse. He is one of fewer still who worships the old gods, particularly Kalahira, goddess of oceans and afterlives.
Thane is introduced in Mass Effect 2, as one of the potential crew members for the suicide mission. To ensure each crew member's focus during the final levels, you can complete “loyalty missions” to wrap up their pasts. Thane's concerns his son Kolyat, who in a fit of admiration, bitterness, and vengeance seeks to become an assassin like his father. Many of Mass Effect 2's loyalty missions center around regrets, but Thane's is the most about personal failure. Kolyat mimics his father because Thane wasn't around to model anything else. Thane knows he is a hypocrite, but wants better for his son than he had. There are multiple possibilities, but in both my playthroughs Thane and I prevented Kolyat from killing his target and made the first steps at reconciling them. On Thane's deathbed, Kolyat prays over him. "You speak as the priests do. You have been spending time with them," Thane smiles.
Thane is dying as Mass Effect 2 starts, the victim of a terminal illness that will kill him by the midpoint of 3. Most of Mass Effect's existentialism is big, its deaths incidental to that broader horror and melodrama. The score, the worst of the three games easily, reflects this with its big military themes and symphonic love ballads. Thane's death is refreshingly quiet, the good death of one who has tried to live past all they have done wrong. His last words are a halting prayer spoken aloud:
"Kalahira, mistress of inscrutable depths, I ask forgiveness. Kalahira, whose waves wear down stone and sand--Kalahira, wash the sins from this one, and set her on the distant shore of the infinite spirit."
After Thane dies, Shepard asks Kolyat why the prayer referred to "her." Kolyat clarifies that the prayer was for Shepard, not for Thane.
As discussed earlier, Shepard is a representative for so much for many people. A savior of humanity for Cerberus (until he is an enemy) and a uniter of the galaxy to many of Mass Effect 3's principle characters. To my mind, Thane sees Shepard in her wholeness, at best a soldier with a grim burden, but more likely just a killer. Thane regards Shepard as a kindred spirit, also a magnificent warrior burdened with sin. He and his son Kolyat are the only people in the franchise who offer her anything approaching grace. Not just love, adoration, awe, fear, or respect, but forgiveness.
Thane describes his love for Shepard as being "lost in each other." In context, this reads as aggrandizing. Because Shepard is a cypher, every romance reads as the character falling in love with some abstract, idealized you. Thane is no different, Shepard saves him and his child and Thane dies in the light she granted him. But from personal experience, that place where the edges between each other blur is where our most profound flaws are found. We love each other not because we cannot recognize each other, but because we can. The keen love that can only come from knowing someone so well.
Shepard is not real, and if there is a judgment there is none waiting for her. In some sense, I wish her nothing but ill. Just like I want no great men, I want no great women. But also I hope that, when she leaps, stretches out her arms, and dies, she will awake on a far shore of Kalahira's ocean. I hope Thane will be waiting. I hope at least that she imagines herself there before oblivion.
In that fanfiction, I wrote Shepard to be content in death. Frightened of the definite end which awaited him, but fully believing in the world which would outlive him. I cannot look back on my life this way. By the metrics of the religion I grew up in, my life is a failure. Go on a mission, marry young, have at least four kids, serve a mission again in retirement, die in your two-story, two-garage home. In becoming myself, I have failed those standards over and over again. I don't regret any of that, but I do regret holding on to those standards for what still is most of life. I did not get married in the temple as a mormon, but I did serve as a missionary. I did transition, but I didn't start when doing so could have gotten me expelled from school. What could I have become had I been more brave?
I doubt I'll ever totally shake that longing. I weep thinking of all the trans children and young people who will be robbed of fully choosing their past like I was. Nevertheless, I am only the person I am, because of who I was. All her failures then lead to me now. This is a lesson I've learned over and over again. But it was nice to find another reminder of it on a well trodden path. True love does mean a kind of forgiveness, a kind of letting go. Both my Shepards lept, and I leap too, hoping.
I cannot love all of it yet. But I am trying.
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