I first saw Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2 before I had actually played the game. This was in the early days. The release of the first game was almost a watershed in the effect it had on public culture at the time. Videos of Fox News commentators dragging the game for showing two ladies getting down under the digital blankets with each other; even more heinous, you could kiss a boy with the horrifying implication that some mutual dick sucking would go down. This was the closest video games ever got, would ever get to a sexual revolution: a bare nipple or asscheek, and public outcry that the minds of children might see Something Unruly.
Mass Effect broadly wouldn’t let the boys who love boys tango with an alien, even though there’s a race in the game mentioned to be bi-gender enough to change secondary sexual characteristics at will. The Asari are only for the straight male gaze, lesbians-as-seen-on-Skinemax, still all stemming from the same multi-choice dialogue menus that tie every relationship in space together.
In 2008 Fox News had talking heads on to discuss the corruption of the youth via interactive video sexuality. The Girls and Homos could kiss in Bioware’s Mass Effect and if the sound of two clonking pieces of blue colored digital wood pushing faces against each other wasn’t the sign of the culture wars to come I don’t know what was.
There I was, a young, impressionable and poorly socialized male specimen of the human species. I had little in common with the humans of Mass Effect, and less so with Commander Shepard: inside of me a resentment towards femininity brewed. I had no girlfriends in high school and I locked myself away in the bedrooms of my parents’ house at 22 years old thinking I was nothing more than an extra-developed teenager.
My first partner was inappropriately older than I was, and at the time I juggled Persona 3: FES and Mass Effect. Both games independent of each other helped me poorly navigate my tumultuous relationships: the be-latexed women of Mass Effect were object-fantasy for the older woman I dated who was mostly propped up by marijuana and PBR: we once got in an argument because the only music I listened to at the time came off of a videogame console.
I had no experience of life not filtered through videogames. As Commander Shepard, my memories of the sci-fi future aren’t colored by the relationships to the cast: after all, by this point in time, videogames had thoroughly taught me there was little consequence for always trying to choose the right dialogue option in a relationship to get what I want.
Almost a full decade later, my body and mind colored by the decisions I’ve made in the past and the parts of my life I made peace with: the relationships I couldn’t navigate, the terrible things in my blood and in my body that living only in a computer taught me. If I had a responsibility to videogames, it was ten years and one gender later to re-inspect Mass Effect 2. I can’t do any more right by a character dreamed of by a writer’s room than I can fix the conversations I locked up in, because sometimes there isn’t a right response.
It’s that lonely sinking feeling.
It’s just who are we dating in Mass Effect 2, anyway.
At this point in time, Mass Effect 2 hadn’t actually released: All we have to go on is half-heard hearsay, and the reminder that every corporate-produced media is essentially made by cowards of a certain kind. Any, and I do mean any, amount of pushback that could result in pushing less sales is going to be answered with making sure the audience tastefully doesn’t have to see it. That’s the world we live in, and in the world of video games? Girls, not women, need to be perfect.
Mass Effect 2 opens with the player finding out it’s all gone dead-ended and fucked up. The Reapers? They’re BACK baby, and they have a bone to pick with you, the dead and doe-eyed Commander Shepard and your sexually confused and complicit Normandy crew. None of us will make it past the opening cutscene: we can only hope Ashley’s racist ass, if she’s not dead already, is suffocating somewhere outside of an airlock after a C-Beam glitters through our carbon-fiber hull.
Two cutscenes later and a beautiful woman with black hair, blue eyes, and perfect lips is assembling us on an operating table. We’re no longer the voyeur; for a brief scene that exists almost nowhere else in video games, we’re the voyeur-ed.
Other characters shuffle in and out of importance, except for the one present in every single story and cutscene, watching from the background just out of sight in places that render conversations sudden jarring spectacles. They can silently sneak up on every character in the game, have access to every single office and room on the Normandy — except the opposite gender’s bathroom — and their eyes rest staring unfeeling and forward on the front of the box. Her name is Commander Jane Shepard and it’s in italics because this is her story: it couldn’t be Mass Effect 2 without her.
We’re perfect, we’re innocent, we’re Commander Shepard and we’re in our lane and flourishing with a gun in our hands from this point on.
Who is Jennifer Hale’s Commander Jane Catherine Shepard? She’s hardcore. She’s a girlboss. None of this is fun for her: the universe is at stake. All of this is serious, all of the time. Playing the masculine Shepard in comparison is like watching Adam West play Batman in the 60’s: he’s squarely having a type of fun adults aren’t usually allowed to have.
I wonder openly: did we all want her on the box art because we wanted ourselves to be taken seriously? To be in the depth of the space opera. Not someone who’s having a good time but someone who’s looking into the world and seeing it for all of the reality it has. Jane Shepard is for the players, is for the gamers. She ties all of the depth of work together, even gunning people down over what would be called space-hotels if the game was having as much fun as it was allowed. They tumble, they fall, they Wilhelm scream. That’s life in all of the current-industrial futures imagined for us. Hotel balconies, military colony ships and resort living.
There’s a glitch in the fiction, though, and it all resounds with two names: Miranda Lawson, and Jack. One of them is popularly a piece of consternation and embarrassment, and one of them is just kind of embarrassing. Two incomplete women in an unresolved videogame, the guts and blood and hot sweat, the way they’re supposed to look at each other cut out and bled all over the cutting-room floor: all anchored to one red-headed and cat-eyed girlboss called Commander Shepard. There is a cadence and rhythm to the dialogue of the women, when outside of combat, that borders on flirtatious, this woman who has held our body under the scalpel more times than we were awake for.
We find Jack on a discrete prison ship. Ruled by fascists, also known as police officers, even Jane Shepard is on the opposite side of the Law here. We gun down wave after wave of armed officers and police robots, inching ever closer to the holding cell that dares to keep a lesbian in overalls under lock and key. But all is not as it seems.
A Fox News article from several years prior means Jack is into dick! Straight dick from Men, capital M. She’s angry at the world, she’s gender non-conforming with a shaved head and a lithe, muscular body covered in tattoos. Since she can’t be a lesbian, Jack has been filed down and turned into every straight man’s dream: willing to bear skin for them, willing to have an audience with them, willing to tell them no once and yes a second time. I’m dying on the inside writing about it: dying about whose fantasy this is meant to be. Is it mine? Was it mine?
What is Jack’s pain? Jack is a genetic freak trapped in a metal cell that doesn’t even have the dignity to be floating listlessly through space: it’s a rock of technology and security bundled around a trembling fist coated in barbed wire holding tight onto an idea of law and order that was out of fashion hundreds of years before the story of the games even began. She’s trapped there, and bitter and full of anger and resentment for the people that did it to her. Her only crime? Rightfully lashing out against the exact structures of power we’re narratively responsible for propagating in this sequel. In the eyes of the beholder, a faceless, cat-eyed soldier with painted nails and a selection of cocktail dresses in her quarters on the Normandy, Jack is a box that can be ticked, if we want it to be.
Jack suffers from the crime of being dressed by a bunch of high school boys who discovered a woman’s body for the first time in a magazine, and are lust-sick with the idea that strapping down every ounce of flesh besides a nipple is some kind of transgressive statement and doesn’t make the character look like she should be on a Godsmack album cover.
Jack’s emotional arc with Commander M Shepard only resolves if the player tells her no first: otherwise she’ll sleep with the player and then taunt them about using her body. It’s Spec Ops: The Line for women with saved heads you see in a mosh pit at a dive bar. We want to look below the surface, but Jack’s arc with Shepard only exists in Mass Effect 2 – and only for men. Her other emotional arc was cut out, most likely due to panic about a queer relationship in a video game. We can only look at Jack as a “what could have been.”
Any war-driven psychopath with bad boundaries would consider the pain a character like Jack feels to be absolutely no different from the hollow femininity of a character like Miranda. One who trades one father figure who abuses her for another, convincing herself all the while she’s finally found the one that can make her special and different in none of the ways she was literally designed to be special and different. .
The Camera loves Miranda, the Story wants her to still be part of the focus of the Cerberus arc, and she’s a computer program wearing the face of the woman who voices her. Isn’t that all kind of weird?
So many woman-coded boxes to tick in the game. The first time I played it an outlier turned into a driving fetish: there’s a White Woman and a White Guy in the first game, a Blue Woman and that’s about it. We are discouraged from space-fancying the strange alien-fish-crustacean cop and the Our Orcs Are Trolls Urdnot Wrex, both of whom, lacking canonical depictions of anatomy, have the craziest arrangement of dicks you’ve ever seen in fan depictions. I wasn’t interested in the boys the first time – I was hot under the collar for the latex fishbowl alien who’s so allergic to the outside world she’ll vividly describe her snot after the player finally hooks up with her in Mass Effect 2 – that’s Tali’Zorah nar Rayya.
Tali is the only alien fetish object in a game filled with curvaceous women who exist only to be stared at. There’s something to be said there – that in a game meant to be filled with Aliens, the one most unknowable is eventually turned into another regular looking earth-human woman who is Standardly Attractive. All beauty must be digestible to all players, even the kind that should have at least a little revulsion.
“I WANT TALI TO BLOW HER NOSE IN MY MOUTH” – Deep Hell Dot Com
Isn’t that the promise of the Final Frontier since the days of Star Trek? Meeting strange creatures and swapping strange fluids and our twisted human mating rituals – I want Thane to spit on me and that’s okay, but that’s sparsely a dialogue option even considering he is a lizard who wears black skin tight leather. There’s so little queer to go by, even as Jane. Explicit cuddling.
And then there’s Miranda Lawson – perfectly human in every way. Genetically engineered to be her own father’s depiction of a perfect woman, working for a human-supremacist movement, wishing to the player, to our Jane, that really what Cerberus needs is more of the natives to adopt the human supremacist stance. But we already have, as players – as much as it’s considered a mark against Miranda that she’s naive, the plot repeatedly tells us she’s not. We’re here under her scalpel, and she’s getting exactly what she wants.
Revisiting Miranda after almost a decade, when the last time I fully considered the plot of Mass Effect 2 I was a straight man, I was actively repulsed by Miranda. A space-faring fascist who has everything she wants, the camera wants to devour, and we are expected to be consummate voyeurs of. As Commander Male Shepard, Miranda seems like the ultimate trophy replacement for Ashley from the first game. Where Ashley was staid and ponytailed, an oatmeal woman into poetry and unfortunate racial politics – Miranda is a be-latexed Space Babe fit for the sci-fi yarns of the silver screen from yesteryear.
Of course – there’s the second dynamic that everything about Miranda is bio-engineered by her creep father, including the body the camera wants us to linger over. In her relationship to the scalpel she held over us, Miranda has the power to do what the player is meant to do to her as an object of observation. There is, a feeling, revisiting her ten years later, of Gender, of a someone born as a something and turned by their parent into the thing they desire most – there is space to look into Miranda’s heart and imagine the life of a strange queer woman with a post-human relationship to her own body and the world around her.
But Mass Effect 2 is mired in the strange sexual politics of a conservative America, where the future looks like today and the only natives us Earthers are swapping fluids with are the blue-women the game steers as not just fantasy objects, but women you can fuck that will spiritually tell you about your journey in life. Our Shepards navigate the universe through sex with women the script constantly affirms with us are tortured souls that only our cock/pussy can fix – scenes of heteronormative bonking until the heat death of the universe. I ask, in a desperate scream to the sky: where are the fluids? If not in the science-fiction future of video games, where can I see futures not dictated by the same sexual politics we all suffer from in real life? If I had, would I be where I am now?
When the credits finally rolled, when my Commander Jane Shepard had girlbossed her way through the universe, I thought of the stupid-young male who’d initially played these games and what would have happened ten years on. Would I be living in the suburbs with someone who hated me? Would I have taken that middle management job and that relationship where the communication only boils down to what videogames you have in common?
If I had stayed wishing I could be more like Commander Shepard, I would have stayed wishing for a swift exit from an airlock.