Why Kaidan is the Best Love Interest in Mass Effect

Garrus Vakarian - Turian C-Sec Officer

So there I am, finally playing the game that started everything that came after and I first meet  Garrus while he's publicly arguing with his superior. Not a good first impression here. Is he truly upset with his superior or does he have a problem with authority?

I speak to him and learn he can't find anything to implicate the bad guy and he's very upset about it. From his dialogue, I'm not sure if he's more upset that he didn't find anything or because he couldn't prove himself right. Does that mean he's stubborn? Doesn't like to follow orders? Incompetent? Hmm.

Next time I see Garrus he's just fired on a bad guy with no apparent concern for procedure or safety of a hostage. When I berate him for it, his first instinct isn't for Dr. Michel but to deny he did anything wrong. His concern for the doctor is vocalized more as an afterthought rather than true concern for her well-being.

Moving on, he insists his only interest in Saren is to take him down and bring him to justice, but some of his comments to my squad display several deeply held assumptions and prejudices.

He grudgingly admires Ashley while simultaneously showing surprise that a human can be just as skilled in combat as a turian. He applauds Kaidan for having an L2 implant while disparaging humans in general for developing a safer implant in the L3. He insults Tali several times for her people and their creation of the geth. With Wrex he's a little more reserved but not by much, and the two of them exchange insults while in the elevator on the Citadel.

On board the Normandy in ME1, Garrus has few lines and even fewer opportunities to get to know him. He clearly doesn't trust the Council, has no respect for his father or his superiors at C-Sec. In topics involving humanitarian issues, Garrus doesn't have a problem breaking rules or protocol and is solely focused on getting the job done, regardless of the cost to civilian life.

I find myself confused by Garrus and his perspective. He clearly wants to stop Saren, but also feels strongly that sacrificing others to achieve that goal is not only acceptable but irrelevant. He's already shown me he doesn't like or trust authority, enough that he quit C-Sec to join my crew to hunt Saren. Does that mean he's going to quit the Normandy too? Well of course not silly, it's a game and Garrus has to be in it to make Mass Effect 2.

Yet the questions remain. If this wasn't a game or fictional universe, how would someone like Garrus be perceived? Here's a guy with military training who doesn't like rules or regulations and clearly pushes hard against his superiors, believing with all his being that the end always justifies the means. In the real world Garrus would be a vigilante, which in case people don't know is also considered a criminal. On a more basic level, Garrus doesn't seem to have any sort of moral compass. He doesn't think twice about sacrificing innocent lives if it means taking out the bad guy and my conversations with him on the Normandy centre around this topic.

Moving on to Mass Effect 2, Garrus has had a complete psychological makeover. He's now more vocal, flirtatious, humorous and approachable. His dialogue is now peppered with reassuring, sarcastic comments and observations. The improvement to his dialogue is appreciated, but is nowhere near developed adequately. This is made painfully clear when 80% of the time you're on the Normandy, the only thing he has to say is, "Can it wait for a bit? I'm in the middle of some calibrations." (That is of course, unless you choose to romance him as a female Shepard).

Yeah, that's right. If you romance him, he's got more to say. Not as much as others on board the SR-2, but more.

Yeah. That "calibrations" dialogue loop could have been fixed or left out. It wouldn't have been any harder than the "easter egg" dialogue that Jeff (Joker) has if you stand behind him on the bridge and don't click on him for conversation.

[If you want to check that out for yourself, Joker has three lines of dialogue that changes every time you re-enter the cockpit. As long as you're patient, you'll hear them all. Unfortunately, waiting for the next line to pop can be tedious since it takes a while for it to trigger, even between lines. However, once you've heard three you can exit the bridge, come back and do it all over again for more. (I personally have no idea how many times you can do this before you've heard them all, but you can probably Wiki it.)]

Moving on to ME3... uh what happened? Garrus is now suddenly my "bro," my "best friend," my most trusted advisor? Excuse me, but when did that happen? In ME2 when he wasn't getting shot in the face by a rocket or looking to murder the guy who betrayed him, he's calibrating the guns (all the freaking time), or telling you not to take that talking geth or advising you to keep the Collector base or yelling at Kaidan or Ashley on Horizon for being stubborn. Since when did he become my best friend? Did I miss something? Or did Bioware just go with the most vocal, youngest fan base and decide to give him a bigger role?

I'm guessing the last one. Have you seen tumblr? Or DeviantArt? Um... yeah. Anywho, let's just ignore the fact that Garrus represents the opposite of everything Shepard stands for and that not only is he alien, but he is so alien he can't eat or drink my food because he's a completely different life-form that's dextro-amino based, not carbon. Which means my human food poisons Garrus and Tali and their food can poison me. How's that for a night on the town? Oops! Sorry Garrus, that's my varren burger. Wait! Don't eat that! Damn... now you're dead.

Right. So yeah... let's not go into that whole triple xxx adult stuff. Suffice it to say, sleeping with someone whose food could kill you and vise versa, it's probably not a good idea to get naked with them. Just saying.