Hear Me Out. Falmer/Dwemer Ghoulcy!

I feel like, we as a society, don't talk enough about people messing up needle felting.

This.

During a fight with Lorroakan, an allied Deva got shoved over the railing. To my surprise, he didn't die but landed on a level below....which I did not know existed as an actual accessible level. It was there I discovered that there was another level below it that can only be accessed by a Weave button according to the placards in front of them. Getting there revealed a unique robe that resembles a beige copy of Elminster's robes and a Legendary Draconic staff:

Sometimes I wish for a mod that took the sex scene and used it as a reconciliation moment after his judgement (sans waking up alone in the barn)

gentle reminder that you don’t have to wind up naked and alone in a barn to continue the relationship with blackwall and can instead have the softest, purest scene with him instead at no cost of approval

I refuse to believe they didn’t know what they were doing when they made The Ghoul. You mean to tell me a good man and father with a fondness for dogs and in love with his wife, over the course of centuries and nuclear war, turns into an irradiated cowboy bounty hunter with flexible morals, quippy one liners, and a reluctant fondness for an earnest and kind (but total badass) young woman with whom he shares an equivalent exchange before they end the season with the promise of two unlikely parties joined together on a road trip quest…and people DIDN’T expect tumblr to go feral?

Reach

Female Tav x Halsin

(Just a personal headcanon for one of my Tavs)

The Imp patagium laid on the highest shelf, just a few inches out of her reach if she went on tiptoe. Normally, not a terrible inconvenience if she floated a bit, but with the lambent flames cooking the suspensions and the steam of the sublimates, she was reluctant to risk an accidental brush with her robes. She tried approaching from the side, but the distance just felt longer. She tried placing a knee on the edge of the stone slab used as an alchemical workspace, but the shelf was behind the arrangement of vials and flames and stinging steam.

"Let me, my heart." One long, broad arm reached above her head to pluck the small vial. Looking upwards, she could see the smile on his face.

"I could have gotten that."

"Indeed you could." Wrapping one arm around her waist, Halsin laid a gentle kiss on her head. "But I figured this was easier for you."

Luth could feel herself relaxing into his embrace, swaying with him as they often did during their moments alone.

"Thank you. Really." She turned around, smiling as she reached up to take the patagium from him.

He kept it out of her grasp.

Puzzled, she extended her arm, all the while looking at his broadly grinning face that never changed. He inched it further from her hand. Dawning comprehension revealed the mischievousness in his smile as he leaned a bit further back.

"You're almost there," One step, then two before he had already led her away from the alchemy bench and had sat down on a nearby slab. Every time her fingertips grazed the glass, he'd swap hands with it.

"How-" She let out a huff of laughter. "-how are you so tall?!"

Frustration had her gripping his forearm with both hands, hands that still could not encircle his arm completely, pulling herself further up until she finally snatched the elusive ingredient with a triumphant cry.

"Aha!"

"Very well done, my heart."

His grin had never faded and she had now realized, that he had maneuvered her so that she'd be draped all over him. Only the clothing they wore separated them from fully feeling the length of each other's bodies. From his vantage, he had the satisfaction of watching his beloved's face flush redder and redder, mere inches from his.

"You planned this."

"Mm-hmm." Thick fingers had already slid under her embroidered robes, rubbing circles on bare skin. "Whatever should be done about that now?"

"You-" Luth could not even pretend to be mad, not with growing evidence of his interest beneath where her legs were straddling him. "This is why we're behind on our potion stock."

"By all means, don't let me stop you, my love."

Luth had to laugh. "You are dangerous."

His chuckle joined hers as the vial of patagium fell to the ground.

There are a couple more Garrus-Vakarian-related hills I'm willing to die on.

Maybe this particular bit of fanon has faded over the years, but there used to be a lot of insistence that Garrus is young and somehow inexperienced when he meets Shepard. Canon doesn't really support this. Turians start their mandatory service at 15. Garrus has at least a decade of experience. Even if he's 2-4 of years younger than Shepard (according to Patrick Weekes), he's got at least as much field experience as she does by dint of the difference in turian and human "enlistment" ages.

Garrus is really damn good at his job at C-Sec. You don't give the Case of Investigating the Rogue Spectre to a greenhorn. You give it to your best, most tenacious agent. Pallin may not always approve of Garrus's actions, but that doesn't actually stop him from putting Garrus on the tough case. Also, we don't know much about how C-Sec works but we do know a bit about how the turian hierarchy works, and we know C-Sec was essentially a turian initiative. That means it's a meritocracy where failure reflects on the superior, not the one who failed. So, in roughly a decade (Shepard's 29 in ME1; I always think of Garrus as about 27), Garrus has not only done shipboard military service, but he's also risen to be one of C-Sec's top investigators; Pallin wouldn't risk having Garrus's "failure" reflect poorly on HIM otherwise. I'd say that actually makes Garrus as remarkable in civilian law enforcement terms as Shepard is considered to be within the ranks of the Alliance military.

Of course Garrus was scouted by the Spectre program. And honestly, if his dad hadn't stepped in, I think Garrus would have become a Spectre, no problem. Especially for a turian, he's cut from precisely the cloth the Spectres would be looking for: extremely skilled, extremely capable, and--most importantly--he's a turian not just able but willing to work outside the chains of command that turians are taught from birth to revere and be loyal to above all else. This is the reason Pallin is leery about Spectres: he's a good turian. Good turians follow straight lines; they don't carve out their own paths.

Garrus's dad's not dumb, and he's not cruel, and he, too, rose to the top of the C-Sec hierarchy. He took one look at his kid, I think, and said, "I love my child, but I'd say it's a 50-50 chance he ends up a shooting-first-asking-questions-later Spectre like Saren Arterius, and I don't want to see that happen." Yeah, he uses his parental influence to try and jam square-peg-Garrus into round-hole-C-Sec and Garrus resents him for it, but there's no way he did it just to stop his son from getting his way or because he doesn't like Spectres. I expect Vakarian Sr. had to clean up more post-Spectre-interference messes than we can possibly imagine. But we also know he and Alec Ryder were pals later.

So the importance of what Garrus learns from a Paragon Spectre Shepard is this: You can't just do what you want and claim the ends always justify the means. That's what Saren does. Over and over again. Garrus's code and his idealism and his sense of justice and his ability to work alone should make him a great Spectre, actually, but he needs Paragon Spectre Shepard's actions to show him the lesson he tells her he's learned during ME1: "If the people I'm sworn to protect can't trust me... well, then I don't deserve to be the one protecting them." (And the seed of Archangel was planted.) I think for the first time he realizes that even though he believes his sense of justice to be correct, it doesn't matter for shit if he can't show others why that's so. And that's where the trust comes in. (Also, ow, the extra level of importance this gives their exchange where she tells him she trusts him and he tells her she's about the only friend he has left is... a lot. Cool, cool. I'm totally fine. Nothing to see here.)

When Shepard asks him what happened on Omega, he replies, "My feelings got in the way of my better judgement." Something tells me that this never happens to "good" turians, which just makes the line so much more devastating. And although the lesson some might take away from this is "feelings bad; no feelings ever," the "grey" that Garrus has to learn to deal with is precisely the grey of recognizing feelings, validating them even, but not acting on them until they've been examined. (Which is why my Shepard stands between him and Sidonis; she doesn't give a shit about Sidonis. But Garrus has refused to process his own feelings of failure and self-loathing, so they have to take the therapy session to the Citadel and deal with it there.)

Ahh yes. The mountain range of character analysis.

"You are the red of the sunrise, the yellow of high noon and the orange of sundown."

I did a double take when Wyll said that to Hemera as it suited her color palette really well.

idk my brain does somersault about these two

For those wondering what that looks like. It was made by a Syracuse University professor Sam Van Aken, who grafted several stone fruits together to create these trees. It takes approximately 8 years for the tree to grow and produce fruits for those with money to burn and buy one. (Corrections welcomed by anyone who wants to add more).

Me giving the highest compliment I can think of: "You're like the tree of 40 fruits!"