Not Me Getting Excited Because Sail North Uploaded Another Song, No.

Not me getting excited because Sail North uploaded another song, no. 😏

Mass Effect Headcanons (part 2)

I love seeing all the different fandom takes on chirality in the ME universe, trying to explain in better detail what was probably just a quick bit of handwavy worldbuilding by the devs who didn't look too deep into it (and I definitely don't fault them).

My personal take is that yes, the rest of the galaxy (or at least the species we see in the games) have to care about chirality because it's a matter of health to them. But humans...well, the other species think humans fit the same chirality rules.

But while chirality of our food IRL can occasionally have an impact, it's not as cut-and-dry as the games make it out to be. All our sugars are dextro, for instance. So in-universe, it could just be that the "wrong" chirality food just tastes a bit different, or doesn't give quite the same nutrition (or any; sucralose, or Splenda, is something that we can eat just fine but can't metabolize at all), or maybe on some occasions triggers a reaction. But for the most part, I headcanon that humans can actually get away with eating the "wrong" chirality just fine. Just a bit like vorcha in that regard.

After all, how many things on Earth do we eat that are trying to dissuade us from doing so, or even kill us, and we eat it just fine? Let that be the humans' "special thing" in the ME universe.

Huh. Realized I never linked this on here. Oops.

As I was working on Awakening, I ended up excising half of the first flashback chapter. I still liked the prose, it's just that it didn't really fit in that chapter. So I decided that I'd make a separate work for the series to showcase any "extra scenes" I wrote, whether deleted scenes from the actual stories, or short vignettes that I wanted to scribble down but didn't fit in any of my outlines. And the first chapter of this work is that deleted portion of that flashback chapter.

Enjoy!

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

one of my favorite things to do in limited perspective is write sentences about the things someone doesn't do. he doesn't open his eyes. he doesn't reach out. i LOVE sentences like that. if it's describing the narrator, it's a reflection of their desires, something they're holding themselves back from. there's a tension between urge and action. it makes you ask why they wanted or felt compelled to do that, and also why they ultimately didn't. and if it's describing someone else, it tells you about the narrator's expectations. how they perceive that other person or their relationship. what they thought the other person was going to do, or thought the other person should have done, but failed to. negative action sentences are everything.