Characters / Mass Effect 1 Party Members

aka: Mass Effect Urdnot Wrex

Mass Effect Main Character Index
Mass Effect: Commander Shepard | Party Members (Garrus Vakarian | Tali'Zorah) | Antagonists | NPCs
Mass Effect 2: Early Party Members (Miranda Lawson) | Late Party Members | Secret Party Members | Main Antagonists | Secondary Antagonists | Normandy Crew | Council Space NPCs | Non-Council Space NPCs
Mass Effect 3: Party Members | Antagonists and NPCs | Multiplayer Characters
Mass Effect: Andromeda: Pathfinder Ryder | Party Members | Crew of the Tempest | The Andromeda Initiative | The Kett | The Angara | Other Characters | Multiplayer Characters

This page is for listing the tropes related to party members who first appeared in the original Mass Effect game.

---

Party Members

Character-Specific Pages

• Garrus Vakarian
• Tali'Zorah

Kaidan Alenko

Kaidan Alenko

Mom was right. I should have brought a sweater.

"We finally get out here and the 'final frontier' was already settled. And the residents don't even seem impressed by the view. Or the dangers."

Voiced by: Raphael Sbarge

A human biotic Sentinel Marine in the Systems Alliance military who specializes in technology and biotic support powers. If he survives the first game, he can return as a party member in Mass Effect 3. He is a romance option for a female Shepard in Mass Effect, and a Shepard of either gender in Mass Effect 3.

---

• Afraid of Their Own Strength: Kaidan has struggled with this ever since he accidentally killed a Drill Sergeant Nasty in self-defense and terrified the girl he was trying to protect to begin with. Kaidan has held back his powers ever since out of fear of hurting someone like that again, which is why, despite being one of the strongest human biotics on record, he turned down the Alliance's offer to train him as an Adept in favor of becoming a Sentinel instead. Eden Prime makes Kaidan realize that he can't afford to hold back anymore.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Dialogues imply that he harbors feelings for Shepard (irrespective of gender) since the first game, but never acts on it because he is mindful of the hierarchy and because he believes that Shepard's Married to the Job. Obviously averted if Shepard choose to romance him, but played straight if they romance anyone but him.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Kaidan rarely talks about it, but it is implied that people frequently give him a wide berth due to his biotics, and he is acutely aware of the fact that human biotics are still considered freaks by most. The outdated implants don't help matters.
• Amicable Exes: If he and Shepard had something going in 1 and don't get back together in 3, he takes it significantly better than Ashley and still gets along well with the commander.
• Anger Born of Worry: If he's romanced and taken to the final mission of Leviathan, he's not happy about Shepard almost getting themself killed.
  Kaidan: Never do that again.
• Animal Wrongs Group: One of his strategies for distracting the guards at the Silver Coast Casino is to claim to belong to one of these.
  Kaidan: I'm with the "Varren Anti-Cruelty Association", and I cannot believe what I'm seeing up here!
• Armor Is Useless: If Shepard is forced to shoot him, they only shoot him once with the Predator, the weakest pistol in the game. Despite wearing heavy armor, having kinetic barriers that have withstood dozens of bullets in cutscenes, a personal ability that makes said kinetic barriers even stronger, and having medigel on hand just in case he gets shot, the bullet goes right through him and he dies a few minutes after.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: During the first act of the third game, he's made a Spectre. He also technically outranks Shepard after getting promoted to Staff Commander in the second game and then Major in the third provided he lives that long.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Kaidan is prone to the occasional non-sequitur and odd, childlike observation.
• Badass Bookworm: He is a skilled technician and field medic, which are his official roles in the Alliance. Considering real-world standards for military officers, Kaidan likely has at least one advanced degree.
• Barrier Warrior: In the third game, Kaidan takes this a step above standard biotics. His Barrier power reduces damage until he chooses to dispel it, and Reave temporarily reduces damage anytime it hits an organic enemy. Together, they make Kaidan nearly invincible.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Most of his Mass Effect 3 outfits have a helmet for vacuum conditions, except his From Ashes DLC Palette Swap. The eyepiece apparently overrides it.
• Battle Couple: With Shepard in the first and third games if romanced.
• Beautiful Dreamer: Implied if he's romanced in the third game.
  Kaidan: You, uh, left without waking me.
  Shepard: I didn't have the heart.
• Beehive Barrier: Reave gives him a temporary one when used on an organic enemy.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Shepard on Horizon in ME2 and Mars in ME3. Shepard's sex and relationship with Kaidan is irrelevant.
• Berserk Button: Politicians claiming to "support the troops" while using that to further their own cause, as shown if brought along to the meeting with the Terra Firma protestors.
• Beware the Nice Ones: For such a soft-spoken, easy-going, and nice guy, he can break your neck with a single powerful biotic blast, and is adept at making your weapons blow up in your face. The whole reason he is so self-controlled is because he knows how easily he could kill someone and doesn't want to.
• Bizarre Baby Boom: Was one of the first human biotics after his mother was caught downwind of a transport crash in Singapore, exposing him to Element-Zero in-utero. He's reasonably confident that his specific case was genuinely accidental, but given the influence that Conatix had after human biotics began emerging and their questionable activities at BAaT, he's highly suspicious about subsequent similar "accidents".
  "No one "knows". Doesn't mean they didn't happen. As big as the exposures were, it was hard to track down accidentals. [...] I'm not saying they intentionally detonated drives over our outposts, but in retrospect, they were damn quick on the scene."
• Bleed 'Em and Weep: The defining moment of his backstory was when a turian Drill Sergeant Nasty beat the crap out of him and tried to kill him with a knife for trying to stand up for his girlfriend after the same turian broke her arm, causing Kaidan to lash out and snap his neck. Having never killed anyone before, Kaidan was horrified that someone died because he couldn't control himself, even if it was in self-defense. He now keeps a tight lid on his biotics to avoid any repeats of that situation.
• Blessed with Suck: His L2 implants give him more oomph than the average biotic running the stabler and safer L3s, but he has to deal with frequent migraines. And he's one of the luckier ones in terms of side effects. Some of the other party members, such as Wrex and Garrus, argue that the power is worth the side effects.
  Wrex: You don't stop using a gun just because the kickback has a little sting.
• Blue Is Calm: Kaidan's default outfit in 3 is blue and white, and he is consistently one of Shepard's more level-headed companions.
• Boarding School of Horrors: To learn how to use his biotics he was sent to one to undergo Training from Hell. It started with the corporation that funded it hiring an extremely racist turian mercenary to train them, who took an immediate dislike to Kaidan politely pointing out his family hadn't fought in the First Contact War, and ended with Kaidan breaking the jerk's neck in self-defense, which led to the entire thing being shut down and almost causing an interspecies incident.
• Break the Cutie: Kaidan had a very idealistic view of the world in the first game, but he gets a lot darker in the following two.
• Bring It: After Sanctuary, Kaidan will be seething with utter rage.
  Kaidan: (Tranquil Fury) Can you feel it, Shepard? Feel the quickening? Illusive Man better say his prayers tonight, because we're coming for him. Murderous asshole. Oh yeah. Tide is turning. I can feel it.
• Celibate Hero: If unromanced in 1, in 3 Kaidan will note that Shepard must have noticed he never dated anyone in all the time they knew him.
• Character Development:
  • In the first game, he takes a bit of convincing to loosen up and let himself go more often. Come the third, he has to convince you to take a "sanity check" with him on the Citadel.
  • He completely writes off Cerberus as a terrorist organization in 2, seeing Shepard working with them as a betrayal. In 3, after the mission with ex-Cerberus scientist Dr. Cole, he asks Shepard if the people in Cerberus were good people and wonders if the Illusive Man was once a good person before he became who he is now.
• Character Tics: In the first game, is often seen holding the side of his head on elevator rides, from his implant migraines. Depending on what dialogue is playing, it can resemble a Face Palm.
• Commanding Coolness: He's reached the rank of Staff Commander in 2.
• Consummate Professional: Definitely.
  • In the first game, Shepard has to repeatedly tell Kaidan to disregard their rank and speak freely, after he admits to being a little uneasy with the idea of befriending a superior officer.
  • Noticeably, whenever he's speaking to those of a lower or similar rank, such as Ashley and Joker, he's far more casual and informal. Dr. Chakwas also mentions he had an Odd Friendship with Jenkins.
• Covert Pervert: He's surprisingly knowledgeable about extranet fetish sites, approves of EDI's new body once the shock wears off, doesn't think he would survive an encounter with an Ardat-Yakshi, is noted to be working very hard not to stare at Diana Allers, and implies that he was checking out Jacob during the mission on Gellix.
• Crocodile Tears: Shows an unexpected talent for this if he helps infiltrate the casino in Citadel.
  Kaidan: I've lost a lot of money. Who can I talk to about getting it back?
  Guard: I'm sorry, sir, you can't... get it back... No, no, please, sir, please don't cry.
• Dangerous 16th Birthday: Kaidan was sixteen when he received his L2 implants.
• Deadpan Snarker: Not as obvious as the others tend to be, but he has his moments.
  (after Shepard is asked for a favor in a dangerous situation) That's very comforting. Certain death for some, fine for us.
• Defensive "What?": When he has his most notable Covert Pervert moment.
  Lorik Qui'in: An asari in a pinstripe suit set tongues wagging among the younger male employees. So to speak.
  Kaidan: It does sound like something that you'd find on an extranet fetish site... (Beat) What?
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing he says is him defending Nihlus against Joker saying he hates him solely for being a Spectre (and not being massively impressed with Joker's piloting abilities), proving that not only is he level-headed but also willing to stand up for those he feels are being mistreated.
• Eye Color Change: Normally brown, but in ME3 they turn blue when he uses his biotics^note Briefly when he uses Reave. Indefinitely when he uses Barrier.
• Fan Disservice: In Mass Effect 3 you get to see plenty of shirtless Kaidan—while he's lying in a hospital bed, with his face beaten in and bruised. Sure, he gets better in subsequent trips to the Citadel hospital.
• Fantastic Racism: He can become this if persuaded by a renegade female Shepard who is in a romance with him. He'll go from saying aliens are saints and jerks like the rest of humanity to calling them damn aliens by the end. This is completely ignored in the next two games. He hates the geth with a passion, being very happy if you let the quarians destroy them. Justified in that, after everything he went through against them, having a personal grudge would be understandable. If the quarians are destroyed instead of the geth and Tali commits suicide, Kaidan will not only blame them for it but admit he still blames them for Ashley's death on Virmire - and that even if Shepard can forgive them for it, Kaidan never will. This trope is subverted however, if peace has been brokered between the two races, which he shows approval and amazement.
  Kaidan: Finally, we're rid of the geth once and for all. (suddenly quiet) Those murdering machines... I can't help draw the parallel. Know what I mean? Yeah, let's just hope the geth don't have the rachni's playbook.^note In other words, "let's hope the geth don't have a way to return after being eradicated".
• Female Gaze: A romanced Shepard takes a good, long look at his rear as they return to the Normandy in 3. This took no time at all to go memetic. A random female NPC◊ can also be seen checking him out in the intro.
• First Guy Wins: If romanced. For Female Shepard, she can start romancing him in the first game and carry it to the end of the third. For Male Shepard, he can stay celibate for the first two games and then jump at the chance to be with Kaidan in the third.
• Flawed Prototype: Kaidan's biotic amplifier implants are L2, a model series that was made before humanity really knew what it was doing when it came to biotics. He suffers migraines... and he's one of the lucky L2s. He decides not to get retrofitted with L3s, because the L2s let his powers spike higher, the surgery that would be required has a high risk of complications, and he has a deep distrust of any Conatix offshoots.
• Forgot About His Powers: In the second and third games in order to make sure his story arc matches Ashley's, such as on Horizon when he doesn't think to use a biotic barrier to keep the seeker swarms away, or on Mars when he tries to shoot Eva Core instead of sending her flying.
• Freudian Excuse: Defied. Out of all of Shepard's human squadmates, Kaidan has the most justifiable reason to struggle with Fantastic Racism, especially against turians. But if suggested that this is the case, Kaidan is not amused and pointedly refuses to use his past like that, because of how hypocritical it would be for a human to do so.
  Kaidan: If one ass was enough to judge a whole race, I'd hate humans too.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Subverted. After Kaidan reveals his full backstory at BAaT, Paragon Shepard is clearly gearing up for a speech about how not all turians are like Vyrnus and Kaidan shouldn't judge all aliens by his example, only for Kaidan to cut it short by revealing that he has already figured that out for himself before pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of judging other races by one bad example while not doing the same to his own.
• Gay Option: In the third game.
• Gonna Need More X: After Virmire, Shepard can try to comfort Kaidan by reminding him that humanity gave the turians a boot in the ass despite how much longer the turians had been around. Kaidan dryly remarks that, for the Reapers, they're going to need a bigger boot. How right he was...
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: He implies in Citadel that he prefers playing good cop.
• Handgun: One of his weapon types in the third game, along with assault rifles. In the first game, he was just slightly less terrible with handguns as he was with every other gun due to small bonuses on his passive class skill.
• Handicapped Badass: Downplayed. The severe migraines and painful static shocks he gets because of his implants don't slow him down any.
• Healer Signs On Early: He is conveniently the first squadmate Shepard gets in the first game and the closest thing the party has to a dedicated healer.
• Heartbroken Badass: Shepard's death messed him up pretty bad. When the Illusive Man tricked him into thinking his grief was all for nothing, Kaidan was livid. He gets better in 3 though, but only if you talk to him.
• Hidden Depths: Kaidan initially appears to be just a quiet Nice Guy. Further examination reveals that he is very introspective about his and humanity's place in the galaxy, and he's so reserved because he's terrified of hurting someone if he loses control.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: The in-universe explanation for why Kaidan wasn't a Gay Option in the first game is because he didn't think Shepard would, or could, feel the same way. Gender flipped if he didn't romance anyone in the first two games and female Shepard finally propositions him.
• An Ice Person: Uses Cryo Blast, and the only character in 3 who can use it other than Shepard.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Kaidan occasionally implies that, deep down, he wishes he weren't a biotic. He's largely made his peace with it by the time the series starts, with the implication that he would be a red sand addict otherwise.
• Incompletely Trained: By choice and the reason he's a Sentinel instead of an Adept. He got BAaT shut down before they could finish training any of the students and had enough residual trauma to turn down the Alliance's offer to finish his training in BAaT's place. He chose to train as a technician and medic instead.
• Informed Deformity: According to Thane, he has scarring that clearly identifies him as a biotic, but even with all the times Kaidan has had his clothes off, those scars are never seen. Then again, Thane's observational and memetic prowess is much higher than a human's, so it might not be readily obvious to others.
• I Regret Nothing: His last words if he dies on Virmire.
• It Has Been an Honor:
  • His goodbye if Shepard chooses to save Ashley instead of him on Virmire.
  • If someone other than Shepard shoots Kaidan, Kaidan will be more forgiving.
    Shepard: Kaidan, why wouldn't you just stand down?
    Kaidan: Man... couldn't defend himself. Shepard... I... (dies)
    Shepard: (sadly) It has been an honor.
• Jack of All Stats: In Mass Effect 3. Decent weapon damage, high biotic and tech power (and the only character aside from Shepard who can use both), extremely tough, and an unparalleled ability to contribute to the expanded power combo system.
• Jerkass Has a Point: As harsh as he was about it, Kaidan was correct that the Illusive Man was using Shepard's gratitude about the Lazarus Project to manipulate Shepard, that he was blatantly feeding Shepard false information, and that he lured the Collectors to attack Horizon (TIM defends this as necessary though). The Illusive Man throws off all pretenses when Shepard decides to destroy the Collector Base, and he was using Shepard for more than just fighting the Collectors, with utterly horrifying results. The jerkass part was born from Kaidan being left in the dark on several essential details, since Liara didn't tell him about the events of Redemption and their other squadmates from the first game believe Shepard without a word because they weren't seeing the information about Shepard that the Illusive Man was intentionally leaking. However, he does actually backtrack on this a bit when talking to Shepard in the hospital in Mass Effect 3, feeling in hindsight that he was actually harsher than necessary since he didn't know all the details. This is also one of the few times he significantly differs from Ashley in conversation, as the latter never really seems to doubt her reaction on Horizon wasn't justified, in order to keep consistency over their respective personalities.
• Just Friends: Regardless of their history from the first two games or Shepard's gender, Kaidan will confess his love for them in ME3. Shepard can either reciprocate or invoke this trope. Also applies Retroactively with male Shepard in the first two games, as before the third game he was only romanceable if you were female. Kaidan's love confession in that scenario is all about how he wants something more with someone that he's already friends with.
• Keeping the Handicap: Kaidan could replace his implant with an L3 model and be rid of all the problems that come with the L2, but gives multiple reasons for not doing so. The surgery itself is extremely high risk; in his own words, "one wrong slip of the knife and you can't remember your own name." It is also extremely unusual for an L3 to give as much power as an L2, and Kaidan doesn't think it's worth both the risk and the loss of power when he "only" gets migraines. Perhaps most importantly, getting a retrofit would require going through an offshoot Conatix, and Kaidan refuses to go anywhere near them because he blames Conatix for the fiasco that BAaT turned into, and likely for the various other abuses they were responsible for in the early days of researching human biotics.
• Killed Off for Real: Depending on your choices on Virmire... and midway through the third game.
• The Lancer: A dual role in the first and third games:
  • Shares the role with Ashley in the first game until one of them is killed off.
  • Back in the part in 3, sharing with Garrus, though one or both of them may be dead at this point.
• Lethal Chef: Implied to be this in the Citadel DLC. He offers to cook something, and Shepard worries that they survived Sovereign, the Collector Base, plus everything else during the course of the series, and can't believe that the one thing that will really off them is Kaidan's cooking. Later, Shepard can point out that the meal was actually pretty good, or that they were teasing Kaidan about how sensitive he is. Shepard is much nicer if they are in a relationship with Kaidan.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: In an elevator conversation with Liara, he mentions that up until Eden Prime he'd been generally keeping his biotic mojo on a tighter leash. Afterward, his determination to stop Saren and the geth means he's holding back a hell of a lot less (which might also function as an explanation for why the supposedly already skilled biotic's skills start out so weak, and get stronger as the game goes on).
• Locked Out of the Loop: One of the main reasons why the reunion on Horizon goes so badly. Shepard seems to be the only one to think it might be a good idea for Kaidan to know what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late since all that left him with were the reports Cerberus itself was leaking to keep Shepard away from their old contacts. In the third game, rectifying this is an essential part of getting back on his good side. The player also has the option of continuing to leave him out of the loop, which potentially ends in his death because he can't be convinced that it's Not What It Looks Like. However, he does confess in one of the hospital scenes that, in retrospect, he could have handled the Horizon affair better than he did.
• The Lost Lenore: Potentially. As Kaidan or Ashley will be the Sacrificial Lion for the first game, they can also be considered this if a romance was pursued and they died.
• Magic Knight: Grew into one by the third game.
• Magikarp Power: He starts weak, but with high levels, no other party member even comes close to competing with him for sheer variety of ways he can screw with the enemy.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: The Feminine guy to FemShep's masculine girl. Particularly prominent if Shepard is a Renegade, but still present if she's a Paragon. Kaidan also has this dynamic with Ashley.
• Master of None: In the first game^note The first game was less kind to hybrid classes in general. The Sentinel class, and by extension Kaidan, got the short end of the stick, though not nearly to the degree he's typically made out to be. Even though he does become more versatile as time goes on and his array of support powers grows, he can never match any of his teammates in terms of combat power. Averted in Mass Effect 3 where his versatility is one of his biggest strengths as well as gaining an assault rifle as a weapon and Barrier, the biotic equivalent of Tech Armor.
• Meaningful Name: "Kaidan" means "shackle" in Ukrainian. In this case, it refers to the mental restraints Kaidan places on himself to avoid losing control and hurting someone by accident.
• The Medic: Kaidan is the only squadmate in the first game to get the Medicine talent, which decreases the recharge time on the First Aid talent. This also technically makes him a Deadly Doctor, since Medicine unlocks the Neural Shock ability.
• Mighty Glacier: Investing in Kaidan's Barrier power, especially without using his default outfit and choosing the evolution to halve Barrier's recharge penalty, significantly slows down his ability to use his powers in exchange for an enormous boost to his defenses.
• Military Brat: Not as prominent as with Ash, but it is still part of his background and influenced his decision to enlist. If not for Alenko Sr.'s military career, it is very likely that the family would not have been in Singapore when that transport exploded. It is also very likely the reason that Kaidan was identified later than the other biotics created from the Singapore incident.
  Kaidan: I think it's commendable to follow in a parent's footsteps.
• Mind over Matter: One of the oldest human biotics. His L2 implant makes him one of the strongest, but at the cost of severe migraines.
• Misery Poker: Inverted. Kaidan tends downplay his own struggles in favor of pointing out how much worse others have it. When it comes to his implant-induced migraines, "I'm one of the lucky ones," borders on his Character Catchphrase, since at least his implant hasn't rendered him physically helpless and/or completely insane like it has others.
• Motor Mouth: When hopped up on coffee.
• Mr. Fanservice: Like default Male Shepard, Kaidan's face is based on a model. Combine that with Raphael Sbarge's voice...
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: With Ashley after Virmire. One of them will always die so it's impossible to finish the game with both of them.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Even though Vyrnnus, the turian Drill Sergeant Nasty Kaidan killed in self-defense had been a violent and abusive thug who'd threatened Kaidan with a knife for standing up for another girl in the program, Kaidan still regrets that someone, no matter how deserving, died because he lost control and lashed out without thinking.
• Nice Guy: One of the outright nicest characters in the series. It in no way impedes his ability to kill someone with his brain. In fact, he is actually the nicest squadmate in the first Mass Effect: in the first Mass Effect game, during any major Paragon/Renegade choice, one squadmate will always advise you to take the Paragon option, and the other will always advise you to take the Renegade option. If Kaidan is one of your squadmates, Kaidan will always advocate the Paragon option, no matter who the other squadmate is (so even the normally Paragon Liara will advocate the Renegade option if Kaidan is the other squadmate). The one exception is the rachni queen if Liara is present, and even then he only pragmatically points out that the acid tanks are not there to be capricious.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In the beginning of the first game, Chakwas mentions that Kaidan has over a dozen special commendations. These are never explained.
  • In the third game's Citadel DLC, Kaidan mentions that he once had a run in with the vorcha Mafia at a casino. His only elaboration is that it involved five-thousand credits and a bottle of whiskey.
• Officer and a Gentleman: He's polite, open-minded, and keeps strict control over himself and his biotic abilities. And he can kick your ass.
• Old Soldier: Even though he is thirty-six, at most, by the end of the series, everything he's gone through by that point has made him feel like one of these, especially compared to his students.
• One-Man Army: It was offscreen, but Kaidan apparently fought through Cerberus's soldiers completely on his own to reach the Council during the coup.
• Optional Party Member: After nearly being killed on Mars, he's absent until Udina's attempted coup, wherein he can actually be killed or, barring that, have his request to return to the Normandy refused, making him a War Asset instead of a squadmate.
• Out of Focus: Like Ashley, Kaidan has a central role in Mass Effect 1's plot, but plays a much more minor role in the sequels compared to the other original party members. The intended subplot about the Illusive Man turning Shepard and Kaidan against each other was significantly stripped down, most likely because of the number of Idiot Balls everyone involved needed to grab for the original plan to work. Particularly jarring if you romanced him in the first game, though it can be mitigated significantly if the player goes to talk to him when he asks, especially since he does confess the shock of seeing Shepard again and with Cerberus made him act more rashly than he feels was appropriate.
• Overranked Soldier: This applies in the sequels, where he is promoted unreasonably quickly. In the 2 years between 1 and 2, he's been promoted twice, from Staff Lieutenant to Staff Commander. Then 6 months later in 3, he's been promoted again to Major (O-6 in the Alliance's rank structure, equivalent to Anderson's rank of Captain in the first game), and is 2 ranks higher than Shepard, yet still answers to them aboard the Normandy. To anyone who knows modern military ranks, this is the equivalent of an officer achieving about 15 years worth of promotions in 2 1/2 years. This might make more sense in wartime, where attrition and military need can see promotions happen much faster, but the Alliance is at relative peace before the Reapers invade in 3.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: By the third game, he's actually been promoted over Shepard, but he still takes Shepard's orders because... well.
  • Gameplay wise, he suffers from this in the first game. With proper skill point allocation, he can single-handedly render any enemy that's not a thresher maw or the final boss's first form completely helpless, but that's often overlooked in favor of the more exotic and flashy abilities other squad members can use.
  • With all the biotics that join the squad in ME2, it's easy to forget that Kaidan is one of the strongest known human biotics, only behind Jack and possibly Gillian Grayson, and about even with Biotic Shepard.
• Perma-Stubble: In 3. The Legendary Edition backports it to the first game as well.
• Platonic Life-Partners: If not romanced with Shepard. Shepard even calls Kaidan a brother to them.
• Precision F-Strike: Kaidan rarely curses, but after the Sanctuary mission, Kaidan gets so angry, he calls The Illusive Man a "murderous asshole". Before that, in 1, when Udina screws Shepard over, Kaidan calls him a bastard for it.
• Properly Paranoid: When Kaidan appears in 2, he warns Shepard that the Illusive Man is using the Reaper threat and Shepard's gratitude to control them. If he is brought to Cronos Station in 3, Kaidan is not surprised to find a recording of the Illusive Man laying out his plans to make Shepard sympathetic to Cerberus.
• Real Men Wear Pink: At the beginning of the second game he comes to Shepard's aid wearing the pink and white Phoenix armor (though he's wearing a black one when you meet him later on Horizon).
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The blue to Ashley's red.
• Refuge in Audacity: Second only to Javik if he helps infiltrate the casino in Citadel. He outright threatens a guard when pretending to mistake him for someone who owes him money, loudly claims that he represents the Varren Anti-Cruelty Association and is very unhappy about what he's seeing, and convinces a guard that he's going to cry.
• Relationship Upgrade: Shepards of either gender can start a new romance with him in 3.
• Relationship Values: Possesses this in 3 with Shepard and it culminates in a Mexican Standoff at the Citadel. A high value will make him side with you, a lower value requires a reputation check, or he'll refuse to budge and either you or a party member will kill him.
• The Red Mage: Kaidan uses both biotic and tech powers.
• Scars Are Forever: At the point of his examination by Thane, Kaidan has had his implant and the matching scars for roughly twenty years.
• Semper Fi: A special operative, like all biotics, but still a Marine.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man
  • The sensitive guy to MaleShep's manly man. Particularly prominent if Shepard is a Renegade, but still present if Shepard is a Paragon. Unlike most examples, they totally avoid the "Manly Man = Seme, Sensitive Guy = Uke" implications if they are paired up.
  • In the first game, Kaidan and Wrex represent the two extremes of the Paragon/Renegade meter. Kaidan, Shepard's most Paragon squadmate, is the Sensitive Guy while Wrex, Shepard's most Renegade squadmate, is the Manly Man. This is also reflected in their classes, as Sentinels focus on support while Vanguards focus on offense.
• Shock and Awe: He has Overload.
• Space Marine: Again, if you're a soldier in the Alliance military, you're a Marine.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: With female Shepard in the second game if romanced in the first. With male Shepard in the third game unless a specific ending is chosen.
• Stone Wall: When he's fighting organic enemies, the combination of Barrier and Reave can make him harder to kill than James, even with the health disadvantage.
• Stop Being Stereotypical:
  • He expresses the belief that a lot of humanity's problems are because of people like Udina pushing for too much too soon. This also explains his hatred of Cerberus.
  • He is also noted to have zero sympathy for biotic extremists.
• Survivor's Guilt: If Ashley dies, though he handles it better than she does in the opposite situation.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In 3, after he reconciles with Shepard, Kaidan will reminisce about a mission wherein you can rescue a group of rogue Cerberus scientists. He comments that they were all good people despite being in Cerberus's employ, and wonders if the Illusive Man himself was ever a good person. Shepard has the option of either being accommodating or dismissive towards this line of thought.
• Took a Level in Badass: In ME3, he went from a Red Mage focused on crowd control to a Magic Knight with Stone Wall tendencies. Storywise, he received a rank up to Major and was declared the second human Spectre; IE, the most badass human in the galaxy after Shepard. Lampshaded in Citadel.
  Kaidan: I may be L2, but I've worked very hard, and now I can reave!
  [everyone else stares at him]
  Jacob: Really? That's... no.
  Liara: That's a bit strange.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: A renegade Shepard romancing him can actually push him to become more aggressive, even outright xenophobic, to the point where he demands the Council being sacrificed during the endgame. How bad is it? Every character has a relative renegade/paragon score, which causes characters to give different advice based on who else is in the squad. Wrex, normally your most Renegade squadmate, will actually advocate for the Council to be spared if Kaidan becomes this. It's all gone again in the sequels.
• Training from Hell: In his backstory at a Boarding School of Horrors. Kaidan notes that a significant number of his classmates suffered psychotic breaks, and a few even died.
• Tranquil Fury: The mess with Vyrnus left this as Kaidan's default state when he gets angry, but a particularly extreme case occurs after the mission on Horizon in 3, where the Illusive Man and Henry Lawson were turning people into husks to try and control them, Kaidan's seething hatred of the Illusive Man manifests itself in him very calmly wanting to rip the man in half.
  Kaidan: After what I saw down there, I have never been more filled with rage.
  • Dips into this again when recounting the atrocities committed by the geth if Shepard lets the quarians destroy them, referring to the geth as "murdering machines" in a quiet yet intensely acidic tone.
• Transhuman: By nature of being a biotic human. Particularly notable for being one of the very first.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: If Kaidan was not romanced in the first game, there will be considerable UST in the third. This applies equally to both male and female Shepards.
• Unwitting Pawn: Since Kaidan was unaware of the Lazarus Project, the Illusive Man was able to turn him against Shepard by strategically leaking information about their survival, something Udina follows up on if Shepard makes no effort to reestablish their friendship with Kaidan.
• We Used to Be Friends: Basically has this with Shepard in 2, carrying over into 3.
  James: You know the Commander?
  Kaidan: I used to.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • He's got some things to say about Shepard apparently faking their death and working with Cerberus in ME2, though he does get better in ME3 once he's no longer Locked Out of the Loop. He also protests if Ashley kills Wrex, regardless of whether it is on your orders.
  • If Shepard is forced to shoot him in Mass Effect 3 when trying to arrest Udina, and never even tried to patch things up in the hospital, his last words are a lot less apologetic.
    Shepard: You stood up for the wrong man.
    Kaidan: Better... better than killing the wrong man.
• Willfully Weak: The incident in his past where he accidentally killed his biotic teacher caused him to slightly fear his biotic potential, so instead of developing further he instead focused on other fields to improve on. It's commented a few times that he is a pretty strong biotic, suggesting if he were to sit down and really focus on it, he could be really powerful, but he decides not to due to his concerns over being potentially dangerous to others.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: To an almost excessive degree regarding his biotics, stemming from an incident where he actually did kill someone without intending to.
• You Shall Not Pass!:
  • In the first game, at the same time as Ashley's. It's up to you whether he survives over her.
  • In the third game, this happens again, when he, as a Spectre, stands between you and Councilor Udina. If you haven't done enough socializing with him beforehand, what Ashley did to Wrex, you do to him.

Ashley Williams

Ashley Williams

Nothing like a nice relaxing stroll on the beach... blasting bad guys with my boomstick!

"Why is it whenever someone says 'with all due respect,' they really mean 'kiss my ass'?"

Voiced by: Kimberly Brooks

A human Systems Alliance Marine who specializes in weapons skills and heavy armor. Returns as an optional party member in Mass Effect 3 if she survived the first game. She is a romance option for a male Shepard in both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3.

---

• Action Girl: Of all of the characters in Mass Effect, only Wrex can match her for sheer toughness, and no one is as adept with weapons as her. This continues in Mass Effect 3, where her skills are mostly focused on dealing damage (as opposed to James, the other soldier character, whose skills are more focused on survivability).
• Affectionate Nickname: "Skipper", towards Shepard. Skipper is a nickname that U.S. Navy crew members commonly use for the commanding officer of the ship. She also calls Kaidan "LT", also a reference to his rank.
• All of the Other Reindeer:
  • In the military, due to being the granddaughter of the only general to ever surrender to aliens, even though he surrendered to spare his men and civilians. For this, he was considered a General Failure and promptly Kicked Upstairs.
  • She reached the rank of Gunnery Chief before we meet her, which is higher than her father ever got, although she says that she had "crap assignments" until that point. After the first game, she essentially "breaks the Williams Curse", either by posthumously receiving medals from the turians or salarians for her actions on Virmire, or by finally getting some good assignments and climbing up past the glass ceiling her family stigma imposed thanks to serving with distinction under Shepard.
• Almighty Janitor: In the first game, Ashley is a lowly non-commissioned officer due to her family being politically blackballed. This is all in-spite of her exemplary test scores. Come ME2 and ME3, her work with Shepard is enough for her to finally achieve the ranks she deserves.
• Ambiguously Brown: Confirmed by the developers to be mostly Hispanic.
• Ambiguously Christian: Maybe. In the first game, Ashley is the Token Religious Teammate of the crew. The game never goes into deep detail of her faith, outside of believing in God and her father being in Heaven and that she regularly prays. Originally, she was supposed to have a more explicitly religious conversation where she asked Shepard about what they saw after dying, but this was Dummied Out.
• Anger Born of Worry: If she's romanced and taken to the final mission of Leviathan, she's not happy about Shepard almost getting himself killed.
  Ashley: Never do that again.
• Anti-Hero: A Knight in Sour Armor or a Pragmatic Hero.
• Armor Is Useless: If Shepard is forced to shoot her, they only shoot her once with the Predator, the weakest pistol in the game. Despite wearing heavy armor, having kinetic barriers that have withstood dozens of bullets in cutscenes, and having medi-gel on hand just in case she gets shot, the bullet goes right through her, and she dies a few minutes later.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: She's made the second human Spectre in Mass Effect 3.
• The Atoner: A lot of her actions are fueled by her desire to restore her family's good name.
• Badass Family: The Williams family is ridiculously badass. Her grandfather, while being most remembered for surrendering to the turians at Shanxi was nonetheless a General. Ashley also mentions that between her sisters, they are trained in hand-to-hand combat, swordplay and marksmanship. Ashley mentions that she once took a leave of absence to deal with her sister's overly horny boyfriend, who tried to push his luck. In the end, she actually didn't do anything, since when the boyfriend tried to hit her sister, her sibling put him into the hospital in a matter of seconds.
• Badass Normal: On teams including a super strong combat robot, a fifty thousand year old Avatar of Vengeance with Psychic Powers, one of the few surviving L2 biotics, a scientist who also happens to be able to lift a Geth Colossus with her mind, and a thousand-year old Magic Knight who also has super strength and can pick up a Geth Colossus with his mind, what does she bring to the table? She carries lot of guns and mods^note  Ammo mods, alternate firing mods like Concussive Shot, etc. and really knows how to use them. This is more than enough to let her hold her own.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Most of her Mass Effect 3 outfits have a helmet for vacuum conditions, except her From Ashes version. The eyepiece apparently overrides it.
• Battle Couple: With Shepard in the first and third game if romanced.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With male Shepard in the second and third games, if romanced in the first.
• Big Sister Instinct: Part of her backstory involves her taking a leave of absence from the Alliance to help her little sister deal with an overly clingy boyfriend.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Her skills center around dealing out as much weapon damage as possible. She's also very enthusiastic, inside battle and out.
• Brutal Honesty: One consistent trait about Ashley is that she never bites her tongue when voicing her opinion. In fact, it's one of the few things that differentiate her and Kaidan in Mass Effect 3, the most notable example being when she doesn't budge on her reactions on Horizon being justified whereas Kaidan is more uncertain in hindsight.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Hits hard and hits first. Also likes poetry, talks to her sisters back home, and develops a soft spot for Tali.
• Character Development:
  • She gradually grows more comfortable about working with aliens over time.
  • In the third game, after Victus' son Tarquin sacrifices himself to prevent the bomb on Tuchanka from detonating, she will tell Tali that she is able to accept others dying in her place because she would make the same sacrifice for them, in contrast to her earlier Survivor Guilt after she is saved at the cost of Kaidan's life on Virmire.
  • A romanced Ashley goes from seeing Shepard as the only thing that makes her feel worthy to not needing to hear compliments from him.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: A mild case; she feels threatened by Liara's relationship with Shepard in the first game; even Liara lampshades this. In the third game, however, if he dated Tali in the second game, she takes it in stride if Shepard chooses to stay with Tali.
• Commonality Connection: Ash and Shepard realise they both had the same drill instructor, Gunny Ellison, at the Macapá boot camp, recognizable his Antiquated Linguistics.
• Cool Big Sis: Acts as one to her younger sisters.
  • Arguably serves as one for Tali as well. If the quarians are destroyed and Tali commits suicide, a heartbroken Ashley will flat-out state she saw Tali as a little sister to her.
• Combat Pragmatist: If Shepard is unable to talk Wrex down on Virmire, Ashley will simply gun him down with no warning from behind while he's in the middle of a conversation.
• Covert Pervert:
  • Pops up if you romance her in the first game. She'll mention that Commander Shepard has a great ass, twice, and will mention it again if broken up with after the Citadel coup in the third game.
  • Seems to be a family trait. Her sister comments that male Shepard is cute in the first game, clearly jealous that her sister has such an attractive boss. Cue Ashley turning around and realizing that Shepard is standing right there:
    Ashley: Tell me you didn't hear that.
    Shepard: 'Fraid I did.
    Ashley: [mortified] Shoot me now.
  • If Shepard is female, Ash's sister will instead turn her affection to Kaidan.
  • In the event that neither she nor James are romanced, Ashley declines Liara's suggestion to join in the pushup demonstration of physical supremacy at the party, clearly enjoying the view.
• Cultured Warrior: Just because she can drill you between the eyes at four hundred meters doesn't mean she can't like poetry. She even tries to romance Shepard with it.
• Custom Uniform: Her outfit in the third game looks nothing like other Alliance uniforms or armor.
• Daddy's Girl: Ashley's father wasn't around often due to his career, but Ashley was apparently very close to him. A large part of the reason she enlisted was to make him proud.
• Date Rape Averted: During one of her backstory conversations, she'll talk about how her Marine father made sure all his daughters could defend themselves. One foolish boy tried to put some unwanted moves on Ashley's younger sister. He got a very painful message - in a twist, he apologized to her, and they continued dating (seems some boundaries were set).
• Deadpan Snarker: Despite being dedicated to following protocol, she definitely isn't shy about sassing Shepard.
• Death Seeker: Has shades of this during the first game. If she survives Virmire, after she says she should have been the one to stay behind, one of Shepard's responses is to lose their temper and accuse her of wanting to martyr herself to restore her family's honor. This seems to snap her out of it.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • During the second game.
  • She also is hospitalized early in the third game after being attacked by Eva Coré on Mars, remaining out of action until the Cerberus coup attempt. Ashley is not given much dialogue on Normandy, but the writers have clarified that she has the same number of lines as Kaidan; her conversations just mostly take place on the Citadel, while Kaidan's are largely restricted to the Normandy. Certain bugged and unused conversations (including one with Liara after the conclusion of Priority: The Citadel II, an unused discussion on morality and death with Shepard in their cabin and unused lines in her date and memorial visit on the Citadel) would have expanded this dialogue further.
• Determinator: Due to her grandfather being the only human to surrender to alien forces, the entire military hates her and assigns her to the lowest and most degrading posts they can. Despite this, she signed up for the Alliance anyway to help redeem her family name. Shepard notes in the third game that the very first time they met Ashley, she had just seen her entire platoon wiped out by geth and instead of laying down and giving up, her response was to pick up her gun and keep firing. Shepard implies that if they hadn't shown up, she would have likely continued to do so even if it meant she had to defend the colony by herself.
• Did I Say That Out Loud: Pops up several times if Shepard is in a romance with her.
  Ashley: If you expect to get me in a tinfoil mini-skirt and thigh-high boots, I want dinner first... Sir!
• Distaff Counterpart: Given that Ashley has considerable prowess with a sniper rifle and automatic rifle, is frequently cast as a Deadpan Snarker and in the first game was something of a Noble Bigot before Character Development, one could make the argument that she's essentially the human, female equivalent of Garrus Vakarian.
• Doom Magnet: As Diana Allers notes to herself in 3, Ash... doesn't have the best luck when assigned to guard things. First, her entire unit got wiped out, then in 2 there's Horizon, and in 3, she's the last woman standing of the council's guard during Cerberus's coup.
• Drinking Contest: This is what constitutes a shore-leave date with Ashley, romanced or not, in the Citadel DLC.
• Driven to Suicide: In the first game, after Alenko performs his heroic sacrifice, Shepard will realize that Ash wants to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to atone for her family's sins. They can call her out on it.
• Dude Magnet: She's pretty popular with men, as many show interest in her over the series and side material.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: If you refuse to patch up your relationship with her in 3 and are forced to shoot her during the Citadel Coup, she will curse you with her last breath.
• Establishing Character Moment: She's first encountered fleeing from two geth troopers and their drones. She dives to avoid the drones' fire, takes them out with per pistol, then jumps behind cover before readying her rifle in anticipation for the two troopers. After Shepard and Kaidan kill the troopers, she thanks them for saving her life and then blames herself for the loss of the other marines.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In spite of how she is less than trusting of aliens, particularly the Council, she references this in Mass Effect 2 to rebuke Shepard's offer of working with Cerberus.
    Ashley: I'm no fan of aliens, but Cerberus has a habit of being... extreme.
  • She also dislikes Terra Firma in the first game, saying that their platform is noble, but too many of their members just use it to spread racism. The fact they keep using Shanxi as a rallying cry also has something to do with her dislike of them.
  • Makes it very clear she distrusts Liara at first meeting and acts surprisingly juvenile about it in a conversation afterwards, but if Shepard points out Liara's lack of social skills means teasing her is probably a bad idea, Ash immediately backs off from thereon out.
• Family Honor: The driving force behind her service in the Alliance military.
• Fangirl: Mildly towards Shepard if they have the War Hero background.
• Fanservice Pack: In the third game, it seems that her promotion to Spectre status included a boob job.
  • Including the lingerie, she wears in the romance scene with Shepard. That doesn't look like regulation military issue (although Traynor and Shepard have the exact same set, so...) Might be a perk of being a Spectre, though, they do always get the best gear.
• Fantastically Indifferent: Her reaction to the discovery of Leviathan in 3? Total indifference. As she explains to Shepard, she doesn't care about where the Reapers come from, she just wants 'em dead.
• Fantastic Racism: A surprisingly nuanced version of this.
  • She doesn't trust aliens and has issues with turians in particular because her grandfather was the commander at the garrison at Shanxi, who was also the only human commander to ever surrender to alien forces. As a Williams, she is already under (unfair) scrutiny for being an alien-sympathizer or not pro-human enough. As a result, the Williams name is something of a curse, and Ashley suffers for it.
  • It's important to note that even if she doesn't trust aliens, she explicitly "[doesn’t] think humans have some kind of divine mandate, if that’s what you mean. I don’t think we’re superior" nor does she “mean we should mistreat [aliens]”. She vehemently criticizes the Terra Firma party for its much more overt racism. She also expresses sympathy for Tali the instant she hears how the Council shafted the quarians after the geth went rogue, and Tali is the only alien whose presence on the ship she doesn't object to on the Normandy. Her only issues with Liara are being a romantic rival for a male Shepard and the daughter of an enemy; she urges Shepard to speak to her after Benezia's death.
  • Ash also has trust issues in general, given her reaction to Shepard being involved with Cerberus in the second game and the fact she takes a long time to trust them again in the third. She herself describes her feelings as less "they're aliens" and more "we shouldn't become dependent on them". When push comes to shove, Ash will gladly accept their help, but in the long run, she knows that if they become desperate enough, they'll take care of their own first and leave humanity to fend for itself. The third game shows she's absolutely right, because almost every other species refuses to help humanity until Shepard solves their specific problem.
  • She is the only teammate to question whether the mercenary Wrex and/or the cowboy cop Garrus should be allowed to be around sensitive areas of the Normandy despite the ship being a turian/human project, is also the only teammate to snap at Liara in front of the rest of the team and has to be told to back off for wanting to tease Liara with a racial joke about asari promiscuity. Her being the only one to shoot Wrex makes it look worse in light of all the other details. She doesn't, however, have any concerns about Tali, who has either been allowed to join the team in front of Anderson, who had no comment, or has been assigned to work with Shepard by Udina.
  • Her comments on the Citadel in Mass Effect 1 like "I can't tell the aliens from the animals" did not help players' impression of her.
  • This trait seems to be completely gone by 3, replaced with a distrust of Shepard because they were working with Cerberus. She also states that she has difficulty in seeing synthetics as truly alive, although this sentiment is largely shared by the rest of the crew except EDI; many of the crew fought against the geth in the first game.
  • She unequivocally hates the geth from the beginning of the series to the end. Her response if Shepard lets the quarians destroy them rather than helping them destroy the quarians or making peace between the two factions sums this up quite well. If taken on the Geth Consensus mission, she's also one of the squadmates (along with Garrus and Javik) who will immediately question Legion's motives and advise against trusting it.
    Ashley: I know that wasn't an easy call for you, but I'm glad the quarians came out on top. I just can't see the geth as "real", you know? And ever since Eden Prime, losing the 212... I'll never forgive them for that.
  • On the other hand, if Shepard chooses the quarians to die, she will be pissed because not only does she hate geth, but she was a Cool Big Sis to Tali, and will tell Shepard she will never consider the geth anything but villains and to keep them the fuck away from her.
• First Girl Wins: If romanced.
• Friendly Sniper: She can use sniper rifles, though cutscenes always show her wielding assault rifles.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: While far from naive and even somewhat cynical, she cannot comprehend what Cerberus hoped to accomplish in Sanctuary on Horizon and considers her inability to do so what makes her human. This is also revealed to more or less be the reason she feels she was justified in being angry with Shepard in the second game whereas Kaidan feels he overreacted; doing wrong for the right reasons is still doing wrong.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Her sisters know fencing and aikido. Ashley knows Marine hand-to-hand and admits that she's "more or less a straight-up puncher".
• Hangover Sensitivity: Shepard can find her on the floor after she's spent the night drinking some of Vega's mescal. Ash's response is to ask Shep not to speak so loudly... in between pained groaning.
• Heartbroken Badass: If romanced by Shepard in the first game, it's clear that she took his death hard. It takes until half-way through the third game until she's ready to believe that Shepard is who he claims he is and trust him again.
• Hero-Worshipper: To Shepard with the War Hero background.
  • She angrily berates a colonist in ME2 who insults Shepard, declaring that they're in the presence of a god. She stops being this after that, however. Less than a minute after that, in fact.
• Hidden Depths: Her views on human/alien interaction actually delve much deeper than simple racism. While she has trust issues, her views fall more along the line of "we shouldn't become too dependent on them."
  • She admonishes Shepard for thinking that just because she is capable of shooting someone between the eyes from 400 yards, it doesn't mean she can't like poetry.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Her default armor in the first game is white and pink. Pink. Justified in that, according to the armor's description, it's supposed to be for medics. But Ashley doesn't have the Medicine talent.
• Improbable Age: Supplementary material says she's 25 in the first game, which is really pushing the suspension of disbelief if she's a senior NCO.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: In the third game, to cope with the impending Reaper attack, James gives her a bottle of alcohol. She drinks the whole bottle.
• Innocently Insensitive: In conversation about her sisters with Colonist Shepard, she might acknowledge that talking about her family to them is a little thoughtless, given Shepard's family were all killed in the raid on Mindoir.
• In the Back: She'll kill Wrex this way if Shepard orders her to or takes too long to talk him down.
• In the Blood: She's a fourth generation Marine. She even invokes it during her encounter with Shepard on Horizon in 2.
  Ash: I'm an Alliance soldier. It's in my blood.
• I Regret Nothing: Her last words if she dies on Virmire.
• It Has Been an Honor: Her goodbye if Shepard chooses to save Kaidan instead of her on Virmire.
• I "Uh" You, Too: She and Shepard do this. They "want each other to be happy".
• Jerkass Has a Point: She comes across as quite cynical and distrustful at times, but a few of her observations turn out to be right:
  • As harsh as she was about it, Ashley was correct that the Illusive Man was using Shepard's gratitude about the Lazarus Project to manipulate Shepard, and that he conspired with the Collectors to cause the attack on Horizon (which TIM himself will freely admit once the mission is over). The Illusive Man's manipulations even become increasingly transparent if Shepard argues for destroying the Collector base, and his supportive demeanor fully cracks if the base truly is destroyed. The jerkass part was born from Ashley being left in the dark on several essential details, due to Liara not telling anyone about the events of Redemption, and some of the things she considers (such as Cerberus having secretly brainwashed Shepard or Shepard themselves being an impostor) are flat-out untrue, but Ashley had no way of actually knowing that and the fact that Miranda had to be explicitly ordered not to do so makes it a valid concern. Furthermore, she won't back down on her comments on Horizon the way Kaidan will in ME3, feeling she had every right to react the way she did since Cerberus were still pretty bad people to work with regardless of Shepard's intentions.
  • In Mass Effect 1, she expresses distrust of the Citadel races and believes that relying on them for help is foolish, on the grounds that the aliens would inevitably abandon humanity in favor of protecting themselves. She likens it to a human siccing their beloved dog on a bear to cover their own escape, because as much as the human may love the dog, it still isn't a person. Later in the game she spells out that in this situation, Saren is the bear which the Council are siccing humanity (the dog) on. In the third game, she's right again. In the opening days of the galaxy-wide Reaper invasion, the federation of the Citadel threatens to break down as every race turns inwards to protect their own territories, leaving humanity alone as the Reapers prioritize the harvest of Earth. It takes Shepherd roaming the galaxy, solving everyone else's problems first, before most of the other races agree to pool their resources into a united war effort.
  • She also asks that the non-human members of the crew be kept away from any important areas of the ship, on the ground that the Normandy is an Alliance vessel first and foremost and as such its secrets should stay within the Alliance. Fast-forward to the third game, and a description blurb notes that the Quarian Fleet's cloaking technology is "suspiciously similar" to that of the Normandy, implying that Tali did steal some of its secrets for the Migrant Fleet.
• Killed Off for Real: Depending on your choices on Virmire. It's also possible to shoot her midway through the third game when Udina turns traitor but it's not too hard to avoid.
• Knight in Sour Armor: She's bitter and distrustful of aliens and the Council, but is dedicated to her job and is willing to lay down her life to do the right thing.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": If Shepard has the War Hero background, she has a little hero worship at the start of the first game.
• The Lancer: A dual role in the first and third games:
  • Shares the role with Kaidan in the first game until one of them is killed off.
  • Back in the part in 3, sharing with Garrus, though one or both of them may be dead at this point.
• Last-Name Basis: Typically referred to as such in the first game, most often "Chief Williams" or "Williams".
• Letting Her Hair Down: As of Mass Effect 3. There's something amusing about James' "she's a fun girl when she actually lets her hair down", given he never met her onscreen before (their first exchange implies they knew each other already, but probably not for long — presumably while Shepard was detained on Earth).
• Lightning Bruiser: In the third game, Ashley's weapon damage is second only to Garrus. Whether it's with her Marksman ability, or by using a combination of Disruptor Ammo, Inferno Grenades, and Concussive Shot in that order to chain together Tech Bursts and Fire Explosions, Ashley can cause large amounts of damage very quickly with no help from Shepard or the third squadmate. She also has the highest defenses of the five squad members that don't have a damage reduction power.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: Coming from a family that has been military for generations, one could argue her attraction to a Male Paragon Shepard is due to Ashley being instinctively drawn towards strong, determined men who are career military. If romanced, in the third game she believes that if her father were still alive, Shepard would be the first boyfriend her father would approve of and the two of them would get on like a house on fire.
• Locked Out of the Loop: One of the main reasons why the reunion on Horizon goes so badly. Shepard seems to be the only one to think it might be a good idea for Ashley to know what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late since all that left her with were the reports Cerberus itself was leaking to keep Shepard away from their old contacts. In the third game, rectifying this is an essential part of getting back on her good side. The player also has the option of continuing to leave her out of the loop, which potentially ends in her death because she can't be convinced that it's Not What It Looks Like. This plays into helping diversify her from Kaidan in Mass Effect 3 since, after dealing with corruption through most of the first game, she feels she was more than justified to rail at Shepard for seemingly leaving her in the dark.
• The Lost Lenore: Potentially. As Kaidan or Ashley will be the Sacrificial Lion for the first game, they can also be considered this if a romance was pursued and they died.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: The masculine girl to Kaidan's feminine boy. Ashley also has shades of this with a paragon MaleShep.
• Meaningful Echo: In the first game, Ash makes the page quote about how 'with all due respect' really means 'kiss my ass.' During the Extended Cut in the third game, when Ash is injured during the run to the conduit and Shepard orders her to evacuate, retorts:
  Ashley: With all due respect, Commander...
• Military Brat: Ashley is pretty quick to let you know that she's the fourth generation of Williams to be in the military.
• More Dakka: Marksman (buffs accuracy and firing rate) is one of her unique powers in 3. This really comes into play if you give her an already fast-firing weapon like the Revenant or Typhoon.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: With Kaidan after Virmire. One of them will always die, so it's impossible to finish the game with both of them.
• Noble Bigot with a Badge: Obviously, her views are influenced by her family's Dark and Troubled Past, but she believes that alien races are just as susceptible to Fantastic Racism as humans are, and that humans should therefore be prepared to go it alone. In any event, she still has concrete standards (namely loathing for the direction the more racist Terra Firma party has gone, and an absolute refusal to work with Cerberus due to their terrorist activities). She is also a Consummate Professional in the field — if you assign her to lead the salarian STG contingent on Virmire, they come away from it with nothing but respect for her.
• One-Woman Army: It happened offscreen, but Ashley apparently fought through Cerberus's soldiers completely on her own to reach the Council during the coup.
• Optional Party Member: In the third game, after being severely injured on Mars, she's absent until Udina's attempted coup, wherein she can actually be killed or, barring that, have her request to return to the Normandy refused, making her a War Asset.
• Out of Focus: Like Kaidan, Ashley has a central role in Mass Effect 1's plot, but plays a much more minor role in the sequels compared to the other original party members. The intended subplot about the Illusive Man turning Shepard and Ashley against each other was significantly stripped down, most likely because of the number of Idiot Balls everyone involved had to grab to make the original plan work. Particularly jarring if you romanced her in the first game, though it can be mitigated significantly if the player goes to talk to her when she asks; especially since she does work to explain her position - namely that, after having seen how the Well-Intentioned Extremist beliefs affected Saren and Cerberus, she feels she had every right to chew Shepard out for being left in the dark when they looked to be on their same path.
• Overranked Soldier: Gunnery Chief (a senior NCO rank) is a somewhat implausible rank for a 25 year old woman to hold especially when she faces the kind of stigma that Ashley holds during a time of relative peace (i.e. before the geth attack on Eden Prime), and in the two years after Mass Effect is promoted to Operations Chief. And in Mass Effect 3 this is taken even further as somehow, in the six months between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, she is able to earn an officer's commission and be promoted to Lieutenant Commander. Note that this is three ranks above the starting officer's rank (it goes 2nd Lieutenant, 1st Lieutenant, Staff Lieutenant, THEN Lieutenant Commander) AND a rank that normally takes many years to earn even for people who began their careers as young Ensigns.
  • It's possible that, since her technical scores are exemplary and she kept getting given crap assignments, the brass were trying hard to get her Kicked Upstairs with a post on some backwater planet, where she wouldn't be much of a problem.
  • Her promotion in 3 might be because being part of Shepard's crew opened a lot of doors for her, since it appears that the while the Alliance tried to hush up the crew about the Reapers, they only were actively trying to discredit Shepard. It also seems that she was being prepared as a possible successor to Shepard as a Spectre. Or at least, Udina probably wanted a Spectre more amenable to his bidding.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Much like Garrus, she's an extreme badass and a fine leader and, in the third game, gets inducted as a Spectre. But when Shepard is around, there's no doubt who's the boss, or why. Exemplified if Shepard is the one to kill Udina, at which point they immediately take total charge of the situation.
  • She will also admit that she feels this way in regard to the rest of the crew in the first game. She fears she'll be ineffective against the geth since she can't use biotics or tech like the others.
• Pair the Spares: If unromanced, she can hook up with James in Citadel if encouraged (though there is no further mention of this, suggesting it was a one time thing).
• Pet the Dog: If you talk to her after the Noveria mission, she'll tell Shepard to go comfort Liara since her mother was killed there after succumbing to indoctrination. She also expresses a hope that having Tali on their team will improve people's views of quarians during one of the game's many long elevator rides. As well, she takes the Virmire assignment of leading an assault force of salarians without complaint. In fact, the salarians come out of it with nothing but respect for her.
• Pink Means Feminine: Subverted; her armor may be pink, but she's tough and hardly traditionally feminine.
• Prim and Proper Bun: In the first two games, although Ashley herself is hardly prim and proper.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Ashley does not trust the Council because she feels if push comes to shove, they will put the good of their own races ahead of humans. Come the third game, she's proven right.
  • When she appears in 2, Ashley warns Shepard that the Illusive Man is using the Reaper threat and Shepard's gratitude to control them. If she is taken to Cronos Station in 3, Ashley is not surprised to find a recording of the Illusive Man detailing his plans to make Shepard sympathetic to Cerberus.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Averted. If Shepard asks about her family in the first game, she relays the time one of her sisters was almost raped by her boyfriend Mike when they were teenagers, but thankfully the Williams sisters all knew self-defense. After Sarah flattened him for trying to rape her on a "romantic walk" in the woods and then flattened him on the pavement again when he tried to verbally and physically assault her in broad daylight over it, Sarah forgave him. If Shepard expresses apprehension over this, Ashley casually dismisses it, saying he was just a kid.
• Real Men Love Jesus: Though obviously not a man, she's very tomboyish and brings up her faith directly (though it's not spelt out to be Christianity). Shepard can either agree with her (citing there's "no atheist in a foxhole," and Shepard's been in plenty of them) or disagree with varying levels of rudeness.
• Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Subversion. She's an undeniable badass and certainly never seen wearing a dress in the main games, but when Shepard mentions that he can't see her in a dress, she hesitates, saying "Damn straight you can't." This implies that she thinks she's supposed to be this way. If you pursue a relationship with her, she's also revealed to be a romantic at heart, while still keeping up appearances of being a hardass.
  • Should Shepard romance Miranda in the second game after romancing her in the first, she angrily notes that when she goes into battle it's in armor, not swimwear. Which is hypocritically hilarious if you use the alternative outfit for Ashley in combat (which is her skin-tight leather suit).
  • Furthermore subverted in the Citadel DLC. If you take Ashley with you on the infiltration mission, she'll wear a dress. And if you don't take her, she'll say that she actually looks good in a dress and wishes she had an opportunity to wear it.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The red to Kaidan's blue.
• Redemption Equals Death: Potentially discussed; after learning about her family's backstory, Shepard can express concern that she hopes for an opportunity to fall on her proverbial sword in order to redeem her family name. If she's the one left behind on Virmire, it has this effect. Not to mention news reports from the second game: she's been awarded high honors by the salarian and turian governments for her willingness to give her life protecting aliens.
• Refuge in Audacity: If she's taken to infiltrate the casino in Citadel. Her antics include feigning extreme drunkenness, loudly crying about a breakup, and brazenly hitting on a guard.
• Relationship Upgrade: You can start a new romance with her in the third game regardless of history (the same applies to Liara and Kaidan, though Ashley's romance remains restricted to Male Shepard). "I'm just saying, we've been through a lot. I have to know — are we going somewhere?"
• Relationship Values: Possesses this with Shepard in 3. It culminates in a Mexican Standoff. A high-value Ashley will side with you over Udina, while a lower one requires a reputation check, and if the reputation is too low, she will refuse to move and must be killed.
• Religious Bruiser: "Hey, if they're trying to find God, I'd be happy to speed them on their way."
• Semper Fi: She's in the human military, so natch.
• Sentenced Without Trial: When Shepard asks her about her grandfather after the First Contact War, she explains that as punishment for surrendering to the turians, the Alliance stripped him of his rank without a trial.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: She got a major visual overhaul between 2 and 3.
• Shipper on Deck: If Shepard romances her but later romances Tali, Ashley actually approves of their relationship due to her sisterly relationship with Tali.
• Shoot the Dog:
  • She kills Wrex on Virmire to protect Shepard if Shepard either orders her to or is unable to talk Wrex down.
  • And if Shepard is unable to talk her down during the Cerberus attack in the third game, Shepard can do the same to her.
• Shout-Out:
  • Her name is a reference to Evil Dead's protagonist. During the Virmire stage, she can also make a comment about her "boomstick."
  • She also romances Shepard with by quoting Walt Whitman (a.k.a. Dead Poets Society).
• "Shut Up" Kiss: Invoked in the third game if the romance was continued.
  Ashley: Just shut up and kiss me.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: She could use shotguns in the first game, affectionately referring to her shotgun as her "boomstick", but she prefers assault rifles. She loses the ability to use shotguns in the third game.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Takes the more realistic viewpoint to Paragon Shepard's continual Wide-Eyed Idealist nature.
  Shepard: That's a pretty pessimistic way of looking at things, Chief.
  Ashley: A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist.
• Sins of Our Fathers: She is a pariah among the Alliance military because her grandfather was the only human commander to ever surrender to alien forces.
• So Proud of You: Her father salutes her after she becomes a Gunnery Chief, a higher rank than he could ever achieve.
• Sole Survivor: Of her unit on Eden Prime and later, of the Council guard during the coup.
• Space Marine: As with all human soldiers in Mass Effect, literally.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: With male Shepard in the second game if romanced in the first. Avoided in the third game only if a specific ending is chosen.
• Straw Civilian: Holds this view of non-military folk, particularly politicians. Granted, most of the time she seems to be right. One elevator conversation has her complaining about how people are going about their daily lives despite the threat of the geth and Saren; other party members' responses vary, but Garrus in particular points out that this is the difference between military and civilian worldviews.
  Ashley: It’s strange. The geth are attacking, and everyone around here is still worried about ordinary business.
  Garrus: You’re military, Chief Williams. They’re civilians. Civilians never believe the enemy is coming until they’re at the gates.
• Survivor Guilt: If she's saved on Virmire, she will express this. In the third game, a conversation between her and Tali showcases her Character Development on this regard, as she tells Tali that she can accept Kaidan's sacrifice because she would have done the same thing in his situation, and says that one day, Tali will have her turn to sacrifice herself.
• Take That!: She gives one to those who have a problem with people having religious beliefs.
• Token Religious Teammate: Mainly in the first game. It's not brought up so much in the third. She was going to have a conversation about Shepard's Near-Death Experience, but it got cut.
• Took a Level in Badass: At the start of Mass Effect, she's a competent but unremarkable marine, and requires aid to survive against a couple geth troopers. In Mass Effect 3, assuming she survives, she's made a Spectre, essentially meaning she's declared humanity's second most competent agent behind Shepard themself.
• Took a Level in Kindness: If romanced by a paragon Shepard in Mass Effect 1, Ashley can get challenged on her views of aliens and end up adopting a more idealistic and accepting view towards them, to the point where she will be character arguing in favor of rescuing the council even if it means sacrificing human lives. Even if not romanced, she develops this way by herself, calling out Terra Firma for racism and getting along well with all her alien squadmates in the elevators.
• Unequal Pairing: With Shepard. She also writes an e-mail to her sister warning about the possible implications of this, including possibly having to decide whether your loved one lives or dies. This becomes Harsher in Hindsight after Virmire, when she can potentially be saved because she's romanced, or sacrificed for a romanced Kaidan. It's technically averted in the third game, where both she and Shepard have the same rank of Lt. Commander, and the same position of Spectre.
• The Unfair Sex: If romanced previously, male Shepard calls her out on this attitude in 3, noting that if he chose to romance someone else in the second game, it was only because Ashley made her feelings abundantly clear on Horizon that they were over.
• Unwitting Pawn: Because Ashley was unaware of the Lazarus Project, the Illusive Man was able to turn her against Shepard by strategically leaking information about their survival, something Udina follows up on if Shepard makes no attempt to reestablish their friendship with Ashley.
• Up Through the Ranks:
  • Assuming she survived the first game, she goes from a gunnery chief (a grade of noncom) to a lieutenant commander.
  • Played straight as she has this attitude to the Alliance, who blacklisted her family ever since Shanxi when her grandfather, General Williams, surrendered in order to save civilian lives. Ashley's struggle to prove herself to the Alliance gets to the point where Shepard can berate her in the first game for wanting to jump on grenades, if it'd mean redeeming the Williams name.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Not always, but she is the only female squad member who can suffer a Plotline Death as early as the first game, while her girlier colleagues, Tali and Liara, don't face that possibility until part two and three, respectively.
• Vindicated by History: In-Universe. If you choose to let her die in the first game, then by the second game she had become a martyr and face of the human fight on Virmire. She gets memorials in her name and all of her family's shameful past is forgotten and has been redeemed.
  • Also happens if she is still alive in the third game where she is promoted to Lieutenant Commander and eventually becomes the second human Spectre. She even lampshades it in the game that the Williams family curse is finally broken.
  • And, perhaps most alarmingly, her Fantastic Racism — the idea that the other species of the galaxy will let Earth burn down if they have their own problems to solve — is proven 100% accurate in the third game. And by that we mean, "is the entire plot of the third game."
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Comes into play if you romance her, especially if she kills Wrex.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: An un-romanced male Shepard or a female Shepard can allow this relationship, especially once Shepard finds Ashley suffering from a hangover in Mass Effect 3.
  Shepard: You know, is it time to test the fire alarm? I think it is!
  Ashley: I'll pay you a million credits not to do that, sir/ma'am.
  Shepard: Two million credits, and we have a deal.
  Ashley: You're a damn space pirate.
  Shepard: I could order Joker to sing to you over the comm.
  Ashley: I hate you.
  Shepard: "I hate you...?"
  Ashley: Sir/Ma'am.
  Shepard: As you were, Williams!
• Walking Armory: In the first game. While everyone was required to carry all four possible weapon types, Ashley was the only squadmate with the potential to use all four effectively. This was removed in the third game when she was restricted to a Choice of Two Weapons like everyone else.
• Warrior Poet: Inherited her love of poetry, particularly Walt Whitman, from her father.
• We Used to Be Friends: Basically has this with Shepard in Mass Effect 2, which carries over to Mass Effect 3.
  James: You know the Commander?
  Ashley: I used to.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: If she becomes a War Asset in 3, she doesn't appear again, and her fate after the battle for Earth is unknown. Particularly jarring in that, while the other teammates-turned-War Assets can be contacted before the final push, she cannot.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • If Shepard is played full Renegade towards her on Eden Prime, she'll call them out on it in the first conversation on the Normandy. Whether Shepard apologizes is up to the player.
  • She gets a brief one from Kaidan if she kills Wrex. If she does so without being ordered, Shepard has the option of giving her one as well.
  • Like Kaidan, she doesn't take it well when she learns that Shepard had apparently faked their death to work for Cerberus in 2.
  • If Shepard is forced to kill her in 3 when trying to arrest Udina, she says she had to take a stand like you did back in the day. If your relationship is negative, however, she instead gives Shepard these last words:
    Shepard: Dammit Ash, he was with Cerberus.
    Ash: So were you. I hope the Reapers send you to HELL. [dies]
  • Choosing the geth over Tali and the quarians will earn her outrage afterward aimed at Shepard.
• With Due Respect: She provides the page quote for the Trope.
  • Despite her opinion of this line (note her head quote above), she uses it at least twice. Once in the first game when discussing alien crewmembers, and again in the Extended Cut if she's the injured squadmate during the airlift scene.
    Shepard: You've gotta get out of here!
    Ashley: With all due respect, Commander...
  • Though her line from above may be an intentional callback on her part to what she said in the first game about what people really mean when they say that. Which makes it a bittersweet funny moment.
• You Shall Not Pass!: At the same time as Kaidan's. It's up to you whether she survives over him.

Liara T'Soni

Dr. Liara T'Soni / The Shadow Broker

Give me ten minutes and I can start a war.

Her appearance post Shadow Broker

"You were marked by the beacon on Eden Prime — you were touched by working Prothean technology. That is why I find you so fascinating."

Voiced by: Ali Hillis (games), Jamie Marchi (Mass Effect: Paragon Lost)

An asari scientist, an expert on the Protheans, and a powerful biotic with powers that can only be matched by an Adept Shepard. Joins Shepard's team after being attacked by the geth. One of three characters who can join your party in all three games - permanently in 1 and 3, and temporarily in 2, via DLC. She is a romance option for a Shepard of either gender in both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3. She is also the only trilogy character to be voiced in Mass Effect: Andromeda.

---

• Action Girl: Prothean ruins are a popular target for pirates and mercenaries looking for quick cash. If you want to excavate them alone, you've got to know your way around a fight.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: Although she'd rather just be an archaeologist. She occasionally makes references to encounters with pirate gangs and hostile wildlife in unexplored systems. Which is actually shooting closer to the actual archaeologist's life in parts of the world.
  Liara: Our travels now are somewhat different from my normal excavations. I would prefer lengthier studies... and fewer explosions.
  Wrex: It's good for you. A nice explosion now and then keeps the mind sharp.
  Ashley: I think you speak for scientists everywhere, Liara.
• Adrenaline Makeover: Compare Liara when you meet her in Mass Effect to Liara by the end of Lair of the Shadow Broker. Though of course whether the getting the guy/gal part gets played straight/averted/subverted/etc depends largely on the player's own choice.
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • In a manner of speaking. Whenever Shepard's being sarcastic, they will switch to calling her "Doctor" or "T'Soni".
  • Her mother calls her "Little Wing" if she's with Shepard on Noveria when they're forced to kill her mother Benezia. Its origin is revealed in the third game by her "father" Aethyta.
    Aethyta: You're treating her like a baby bird, Nezzy, but she's gonna raise one hell of a storm with those little wings.
• Air Vent Escape: How she's reintroduced in 3. While being chased by a pair of Cerberus operatives.
• Alien Blood: In the Extended Cut DLC when injured, she's shown with several blood-stains splattered across her body - which, due to the color of Asari blood, makes her look covered in grape jelly.
• All for Nothing: In 1, if you wait until the last possible moment to recruit her, she is enraged that she spent her entire life studying the Protheans only for the answers she was looking for to simply fall into Shepard's lap.
• All Love Is Unrequited: It's implied throughout the trilogy that she falls in love with Commander Shepard regardless of whether or not you romance her. Obviously averted if you do romance her but played straight if you don't.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Due to being a "pureblood."
• Anger Born of Worry: If romanced, she shows it, though in a subdued way, when Shepard dives into the ocean in Leviathan, especially after they start coughing uncontrollably and going cold.
  Liara: Don't EVER do that again.
• Apocalyptic Log: Made one for Alec Ryder during the events of the third game, just to be on the safe side.
  Liara: I don't know if you'll even receive this message, but we corresponded years ago. I remember you spoke about a plan to settle Andromeda. I don't know if your arks made it out of the Milky Way, but the worst has happened here. I'm with Commander Shepard and a brave crew. We're trying to build a weapon to turn the tide, but I fear that the civilization you remember, the people of the Milky Way as you knew them, could be gone forever. You may be all that's left. Please, don't forget us. Keep us alive in your hearts, and tell your children of the wonders that once were. On behalf of the crew of the Normandy SR-2, this is Dr. Liara T'Soni signing off.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: In the third game, Liara seems to be in complete denial when Javik reveals that the asari goddess Athame and her guide Lucen were actually Protheans. When Liara claims that it is impossible, he snarkily comments that it must be an amazing coincidence that the statues and artwork of their myths just happen to look exactly like him. She even has the attitude if Javik isn't present, and the other squadmate points it out instead, saying they can't be sure, even as the other squadmate gets increasingly tetchy with her.
• Art Evolution: A subtle yet noticeable one. In Mass Effect 1 and 2, she had less striking features, such as lighter lips and eyes, pink around her face, and a rather standard casual uniform. Come Lair of the Shadow Broker, she has darker lips, intense blue eyes, more defined skin features, and wears a kickass yet sexy uniform.
• Aside Glance: Of gratitude when Shepard refuses to give her up to the krogan on Therum.
• Attempted Rape: Twice in Redemption—a batarian and his cronies attempt to proposition/rape Liara. Both times they end up dead.
• Babies Ever After: Alluded to during her romance scene in Lair of the Shadow Broker.
  Liara: So, tell me what you want. If this all ends tomorrow, what happens to us?
  Shepard: I don't know. Marriage, old age, and a lot of little blue children?
  Liara: You just say these things!
• Badass Adorable: In the first game, she's easily flustered and generally socially awkward, especially when dealing with people outside her species. She's also a biotic death machine.
• Badass Bookworm: For a girl who spends all of her time buried in her books, Liara is horribly deadly with her biotic powers. How badass is she, you say? She's the only other character besides Adept Shepard who can use Singularity, and her other biotic powers rival or even surpass Samara's, who has daughters that are several centuries her senior. She's powerful enough that she can send a powerful biotic Spectre with armed backup running for her life. Then again, her grandfather was a krogan.
  • Hell, from her comments about looking after herself when encountering pirates and looters at Prothean dig sites, she seems to be the Space Indiana Jones.
• Badass Family: Liara's mother is said to be a powerful biotic even by asari standards and proves to be a difficult opponent when the player fights her. Liara's father is also unusually powerful for an asari and once took down a krogan with a head-butt. Liara's paternal grandfather was a veteran of the Rachni Wars and both of Liara's paternal grandparents fought in the Krogan Rebellions, on opposite sides; they killed each other once he found out the truth.
• Baritone of Strength: Her voice becomes somewhat lower and huskier after the first game, to go along with her tougher and darker attitude.
• Battle Aura: Uses her biotic glowing to dissuade some enemies a few times.
• Battle Couple: With Shepard if romanced.
• Best Friend: Throughout the trilogy, Liara, alongside Garrus and Tali, grows to be Shepard's most devoted associate and confidante, even if they aren't romantically involved, as evident in her unique ability to consistently get Shepard to drop The Stoic mask and to open up to her about the constant stress and fears they're facing.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Yet again. Liara's a very demure young asari who is entirely capable of turning an entire horde of geth into tinfoil with her brain. Ask the Shadow Broker how seriously crossing her tends to go. Oh wait, you'd just be asking her.
  • Doing a quest for her reveals that one of her assistants is a mole. After informing her of this, the player can go to her office and find out that not only did Liara already kill her assistant, she disposed of her body as well. This is especially hilarious if Shepard calls her to identify the traitor from just outside her office as it can make it appear that she killed and disposed of her assistant in a matter of seconds.
  • Exemplified when you reunite with her in the third game. The Cerberus mooks that were chasing her in the air duct get swept up in a singularity and both take a shot in the chest as they flailed about. They fall to the ground, completely vulnerable to Liara. The demure little blue lady exudes cold blood in her facial expression as she casually double-taps the two mooks.
  • Liara is capable of telekinetically lifting a Geth Colossus — which is an armored war machine that single-handedly wipes out small armies, one-shots tanks, and is the size of a three-story building.
  • In the comics, she holds back hundreds of tons of water with her biotics.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Asari reproduce by "melding", where they join their entire nervous system to their partner's and use the electrical impulses to randomize some of their own DNA for the offspring. Galactic science waffles on the subject, but it often turns out Lamarck Was Right — Aethyta had a krogan father, and notes that she seems to have "a bit of his mouth."
  • The asari are the setting's only innate telepaths, and they use it as part of the mating process. It's not only logical that asari daughters take after their parents psychologically, it's almost inevitable given the depth of the melding. That, or it has something to do with the fact that every asari that the players know take after an alien parent was also raised by said parent, making it Nature Versus Nurture.
• Break the Cutie: By the time of Mass Effect 2, she's much less innocent and kind as she's had a rough couple of years by then. Cranked up during the Fall of Thessia mission in the third game. She's a complete wreck even during the mission, to say nothing about after.
• Break Them by Talking: Liara manages to piss off the Yahg Shadow Broker by basically figuring out how it managed to get off of its home planet and become the new Shadow Broker, giving a smug grin upon reminding him that he'd been used as a pet.
• Broken Bird: By Mass Effect 2 she has become one.
• Broken Pedestal: Javik is... not remotely what she expected from a Prothean. For a good while she tries to be neutral about it, but in the Ardat-Yakshi monastery she hears him say that the Protheans would never let such monsters walk among them and rather acidly asks "They didn't care for the competition?"
  • After the fall of Thessia, she angrily calls out Javik for not even caring, that she's spent her entire life studying his people and feels like it was for nothing. He's a Prothean... he was supposed to have all the answers.
  • After that, she grows up a little, no longer feeling betrayed but also discarding the pedestal entirely.
  • The Thessia mission is a shock even without Javik. Learning that her government's been breaking its own laws about Prothean technology for centuries rocks her entire worldview.
  • Both are tied closely. Liara has this view of what a culture she idolizes is like, and it very much corresponds the image the Asari in general try to present to outsiders, a peaceful, fostering, advanced, spiritual and scholarly culture. She projects those ideals on the Protheans and on her own people, and she reacts poorly when both fail to meet her expectations, the Protheans by being militaristic and imperialistic, and the Asari by having hoarded knowledge in secret for their own benefits and their spirituality being nothing but a sham from the Protheans who uplifted them.
• Came Back Wrong: One of Liara's fears regarding Shepard, after having handed the Commander's corpse over to Cerberus for the Lazarus Project. However, if she's romanced she says she knew it was really Shepard since the first time she touched them again.
• The Cameo:
  • Is the only main party member from all 3 games to make one in Mass Effect: Paragon Lost.
  • In Andromeda, you can come across some audio lectures on studying extinct civilizations, back from when Liara was just an obscure archaeologist. She also sent Alec Ryder a message during the events of the third game.
• Captain Obvious: During parts of Lair of the Shadow Broker. Frequently lampshaded by Shepard.
• Character Development: In the first game, Liara is a stuttering, bookish, nerdy girl (justified, since by asari standards, she's little more than a teenager). In the second, she has become a ruthless information trader, but her tough attitude is revealed to be a defense mechanism if you romanced her in the first game. And by the third, she's double-tapping Cerberus mooks without batting an eyelash.
• Character Focus: Becomes more and more prominent over the course of the series to the point where she becomes the Deuteragonist.
• Character Tic: Whenever something fascinates her, she adopts what could best be described as a standing up variation of the Thinker Pose.
• Child Prodigy: According to her, her intelligence was noticeable even in her youth. In fact, by asari standards she is still very young (human equivalent of around 19, even though her true age is over a hundred) when she meets Shepard.
  Liara: Most scientists dismiss my work. But I'm young and asari, and they're getting older, so we'll see who has the final word.
• The Confidant: Notably, Liara is the only person Shepard will open up to, as they drop their stoic facade to confess their true feelings on the war against the Reapers.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: In the second installment, where she's somehow become an information broker despite no prior evidence that she had any skills in the field. (she does mention horizontal skill application, her talents in handling data and information for her archaeological digs, putting together information and clues from various worlds and discoveries, is very similar to what information brokers do but with more recent information with living creatures) If the terminals around the Shadow Broker's ship is any indication, she also doesn't seem to stop some of his business practices.
  • Still presented sympathetically given that she had to do this to succeed as an information broker and also only uses the resources of the Shadow Broker to help the war effort.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Along with Cutscene Power to the Max. A really weird hybrid occurs when you first rescue her in Mass Effect. You're confronted directly by a Krogan Battlemaster and a small squad of Geth Shock Troopers after exiting the room you found her in via an elevator. In the cutscene right before the fight begins, you see her start glowing with a blue aura and balling her fists, which usually means she's about to unleash a biotic attack. Then the gameplay actually starts and she just cowers on the floor while the battlemaster charges you.
  • However, she had been in a stasis field for a while by this point, so it's possible she flared her biotics in an attempt to fight back but the strain of doing so was simply too exhausting. The Codex and 3 mention that biotics require a higher calorie intake to keep their abilities at full strength, it's safe to say she's not at her full strength during that scene.
    • My Greatest Failure: During the Shadow Broker DLC, Liara tells Shepard she was ashamed that all she could do was cower in a corner while they fought the battlemaster.
• Dating Catwoman: Technically, this is her romance with Shepard in 2. They're a law-abiding Spectre while Liara's the Shadow Broker. However, it makes no problems between them because they care for each other too much.
• A Day in the Limelight: Mass Effect: Redemption and Lair of the Shadow Broker. In the third game, she's also a mandatory squadmate in the missions on Thessia and Eden Prime.
• Deadpan Snarker: She becomes this in 2, and doesn't hold back from that point.
  Shepard: That phone call was pretty damning stuff. How'd you get it?
  Liara: It involved the weapon's biometric data, salarian intelligence, and a hanar prostitute with camera implants
  Shepard: (*beat*) Seriously?
  Liara: No, but the truth is boring.
• Deuteragonist: Undertakes this position by 3. It can also be argued she's one for the trilogy as a whole despite only being a DLC squadmate in 2, thanks to her critical role in stopping the Reaper threat and her close relationship with Shepard even if you treat her like dirt as a Renegade; behavior that becomes less pronounced as the games go on in regards to how they treat their squadmates.
• Developers' Desired Date: Liara is perhaps the one romance option most favored in the series. Aside from being instinctively drawn towards Shepard due to their contact with the Prothean Beacon, she has Plot Armor that prevents her from dying until the very end of the series and gets a lot of interactions with Shepard.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: In the first game, Liara's attempts to explain why she's so interested in you in purely scientific means leads to a series of flustered, ever-escalating double entendres.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • You recruit her by rescuing her from a horde of bad guys, she doesn't fight once throughout the entire level, and she almost faints even after you've got her on the ship. Add this to her general naivete and she seems like the poster child for this trope. Then you actually take her into battle, and quickly realize that she can take care of herself. Lair of the Shadow Broker has her suggest that she's ashamed she had to rely on Shepard back then, like she is now. It should be noted that when you rescue her, she's unarmed and fatigued from being held immobile for goodness knows how long (if you save that mission for last, she thinks she's hallucinating Shepard's party).
    Kaidan: When was the last time you ate? Or slept?
• Double Tap: How she finishes off a pair of Cerberus operatives chasing her during her reintroduction in ME3. After having already trapped them in a singularity and shot them center mass in mid-air.
• Enemy Mine: With Cerberus, to save Shepard's body from the Shadow Broker and the Collectors. The fact that she beats herself up over handing Shepard's corpse to the Illusive Man explains in part her behavior during the second game.
• Failed a Spot Check: Notable if you bring Javik to Thessia.
  Liara: Incredible, the Beacon seems to think you are Prothean, Shepard. It must be from the Cipher you got back on Feros, all those years ago.
  Javik: Or it could be the Prothean standing right next to you.
  • Possibly subverted, as the Beacon works the same way even without Javik being present, so she is probably right in this regard. Still funny though.
• Famed In-Story: By 3, her research on the Protheans has become the stuff of legend. One datapad found on Mars has a scientist practically squeeing about getting the chance to work with her. In Andromeda, Sara Ryder recognizes her name due to her time spent body-guarding archaeologists (as opposed to Scott, who doesn't).
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: In 3, she is the Mage to James' Fighter and EDI's Thief in the triad of party members you are guaranteed to have.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Taking a cue out from the Protheans in 3 she plants several time capsules across many worlds to warn future species in the event that the Reapers aren't stopped. She even has a section devoted to the heroics of Shepard, and you can tell her how wish it told. If you choose the Refusal ending in 3, it turns out that her capsules are successful, and the next cycle defeats the Reapers.
• Foil:
  • Liara and Tali have character traits that play off one another. In the original game, Liara was cast as the dorky Cutie who loved Shepard and practically worshipped the ground they walked on. But, after she took a Darker and Edgier path in the second game, all of those traits fell to Tali. Further, they are both extremely smart and capable women, but extreme opposites in gameplay. Liara is a powerful Squishy Wizard with exceptional biotic abilities. Tali is a Gadgeteer Genius specced entirely toward Tech. Even their firearms contrast: Liara wields a pistol used at a safe distance, while Tali is outfitted with a Short-Range Shotgun, meaning that even having both in the squad at once means the team is prepared for every conceivable obstacle.
  • During the course of Mass Effect 3 Tali can play a large role in retaking her homeworld - in the best case anyway. Shortly therafter, Liara loses her world to the Reapers and rather unfairly blames herself for this. This even gets Lampshaded by Tali, by pointing out that she might not be the best person to comfort Liara given the irony of the situation.
• Friendless Background: Liara admits that she never had friends before because of her heritage as a pureblood and was often made fun of because of her interest in science.
• Gay Option: For female Shepard.
• Genius Bruiser: She is a briliant scientist, who also happens to have enough biotic power to, essentially, lift a freaking ocean
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Liara seems to be on the brink of this in the first game if you decide to rescue her after the rest of the main story missions. By the time you get there, she's completely convinced you're a realistic hallucination. So, yes, all that time you spent flying around, she's been locked in stasis.
• Good All Along: Throughout the first game Liara's loyalty is often called into question because she's Benezia's daughter. In the end, she proves she's a hero by doing all she can to fight the Reapers.
• Glass Cannon: She isn't the best at avoiding or taking damage, but her biotic abilities pack quite a punch, and she arguably has the most powerful Psychic Powers of anyone to serve on the Normandy.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: She's got blue skin and is regarded as attractive by most other characters.
• Guest-Star Party Member: In the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC mission in the second game.
• Handgun: One of her weapon types in the third game, along with submachine guns. In the first game, she was just as terrible with handguns as she was with every other gun, though their innate accuracy still made them her go-to weapon.
• Headbutting Heroes: She doesn't get along very well with Javik after the Fall of Thessia.
• The Heart:
  • Though she doesn't shrink from the fighting, she's (usually) the one who advocates Paragon options, and is generally the "can't we talk this over" squad member.
  • There's one exception in the first Mass Effect game: if, during a major Paragon/Renegade choice (like what to do with the Council, for example), your other squadmate is Kaidan, Kaidan will advocate the Paragon option and Liara will go for the Renegade option. If your other squadmate is anyone other than Kaidan, Liara will always go Paragon.
• Heroic BSoD: After the Fall of Thessia. Her homeworld is burning, she and Shepard have failed their mission, and Kai Leng casually slapped her aside and took the vital Prothean data. On top of all that, the Illusive Man coldly held his successes over her while all she was able to do in response is threaten him over a hologram.
• Hero-Worshipper: Towards Shepard big time.
  • In Lair of the Shadow Broker, it's shown that her apartment is filled with souvenirs of her travels with Shepard from the first game, Prothean relics, a painting of Ilos, fragments of Shepard's N7 armour and a framed picture of the Normandy on her bedside cabinet. At the end of the mission, she returns Shepard's dog tags to them, saying she got it from Admiral Hackett. Why she would bother to retrieve that from him probably says a lot about how highly she regards Shepard.
  • In the third game, she programs a series of time-capsules to be sent across the galaxy in case the mission fails, with one whole section of the archive devoted solely to tales of Shepard's exploits. If Shepard encourages her to be the one to decide how they will be remembered, she practically gushes over them.
• Hidden Buxom: If her later appearances in the series are any indication, her scientist uniform in the first game was very effective at concealing her figure, though it may also be that the armor on Liara's new outfit is making her look more endowed than she actually is.
• Hidden Depths: Lair of the Shadow Broker features this in abundance.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: She adopts a facade in ME2 to allow herself to operate in Illium's underworld. "You're threatening to flay people alive now?" Comes back to bite her on the ass when her father mentioned that bluff or no, it made the asari higher-ups nervous enough to consider assassinating her. Her father convinced them not to go through with it.
  Liara: [flustered] I had to make them take me seriously. I wasn't going to actually do it.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Both her mothers are asari. Which is why she's shunned so much, as asari-asari relationships restrict genetic diversity... and have a higher chance of causing genetic defects like the Ardat-Yakshi.
  • Monogendered asari are "female" in the eyes of every other race, possessing the same sex organs and characteristics as would be expected for mammalian females, though one asari serves as the "father," and upon meeting her, she doesn't know who her mother Matriarch Benezia's partner was.
  • Ultimately averted. Her "father" is shown in the third game to be Matriarch Aethyta, the bartender from Illium and then the Presidium, assigned to keep an eye on Liara after Benezia went evil. Even though Liara's father is "female," she is very adamant that she is Liara's father, not her second mother, because she "didn't pop her out". When Shepard mentions that humans would call her Liara's "other mother," Aethyta says "Well I'm not human, am I? Anthropocentric bag of dicks."
• Hot-Blooded: Liara definitely comes across as this in the second and third game. Matriarch Aethyta, her father, believes that this is because she's a quarter-krogan. "Well, don't go all blood rage on me."
• Horrible Judge of Character: In the Redemption comic, when Feron tries to warn her that Cerberus is a pro-human hate group, she simply responds "I wouldn't call them a hate group, exactly". Potentially after witnessing their crimes firsthand in the first game, and after dozens of Cerberus agents tried to kill her.
• Hypocrite: At the end of Lair of the Shadow Broker, if the player chooses a certain dialogue option, Liara calls Ashley/Kaidan shortsighted for not trusting Shepard. It doesn't seem to occur to Liara that she could have prevented that whole conflict if it hadn't been for her own shortsightedness in obsessing over revenge to the point of forgetting to tell any of Shepard's other companions what was going on.
• Hypocritical Humor: One of her recordings in Andromeda has her describing how one can't let their own perceptions color opinions about the Protheans. Naturally, her following summation of them is her biased interpretation of them as obviously benevolent and enlightened.
• Iconic Outfit: The primarily white suit she wears first during the Shadow Broker DLC and then all throughout the third game has far overshadowed her original clothing in the first game.
• Incompatible Orientation: Can be invoked in the first game by Female Shepard when Liara reveals her feelings to the Commander.
• The Ingenue: Shy, sweet, and easily flustered? Yep.
• Innocently Insensitive: During an elevator conversation with Kaidan, she remarks that having a turian drill instructor at BAaT was probably better than an asari, apparently not knowing that said turian was a terrible instructor, massively racist, and wound up getting killed by Kaidan in self-defense because of said racism.
• In-Universe Catharsis: Lair of the Shadow Broker provides closure for Liara's two years of mourning, grief and pain after Shepard's death.
• Irony: She's first encountered trapped in a Prothean force field. One of her main abilities is Stasis.
• I Shall Taunt You: When confronting the Shadow Broker, she brings up his status as the previous Broker's "pet", triggering his Berserk Button. Judging by the files on him, wherein the previous Broker warned him to watch his temper and that losing it costs him his better judgment, he would have been a far more dangerous opponent in the subsequent battle if Liara hadn't pissed him off.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
  • If you have progressed far enough in the romance with Ashley or Kaidan by the time you get her romance dialogue, she admits she has a huge crush on Shepard but gracefully backs down, saying it is obvious Shepard already has strong feelings for Ashley/Kaidan and that she doesn't want to come between them.
  • Also, in the second game, whether Shepard cheated on her or remained faithful to her, she will tell them that if they want to move on, she can accept that and be happy for them.
• Implied Love Interest: Being the only character you can initiate a romantic relationship with across all three games when including DLC, her importance to the narrative by 3, and boasting a staggering amount of scripted dialogue with Shepard, romance or not, depicts her as the clear favorite of the dev team. Her final goodbye before the very last mission also has romantic undertones, should you choose to accept it, no matter what. She's also one of few characters who survives to the end no matter what, unless you have low EMS or pick the Refusal ending.
• It Gets Easier: In the first game, she's one of the least experienced squadmates. In the third, she's introduced stoically and efficiently killing Cerberus troops. If she never talks with Aethyta, she and Wrex have this to say in Citadel:
  Liara: Killing people gets less troubling after the first few hundred.
  Wrex: It does indeed.
• Karma Houdini: Liara caused a lot of trouble when she didn't tell any of the SR1's alumni about the Lazarus Project. She is never called out or faces any consequences for it, and even Kaidan/Ashley, the squadmate who suffered the most from being left in the dark, remains on friendly terms with her and doesn't even give a What the Hell, Hero?.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Becomes this by 3 after going through a Break the Cutie in between 1 and 2 and getting her In-Universe Catharsis in Lair of the Shadow Broker.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!":
  • When on Ilos, every other party member remarks on how creepy and wrong the planet feels. Not Liara. She wants to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb.
  • Her reaction to meeting Javik, a living Prothean, in 3. Lampshaded by everyone, with Shepard joking that they'll hand over questions to Liara because she looks like she's about to explode.
  Joker: So has Liara stopped bouncing yet? I'm guessing there may have been some bouncing.
• Knight Templar: During the interim between the first and second game, though Paragon Shepard can pull her back from this.
• Knowledge Broker: Becomes one in the second game to get revenge on the Shadow Broker for his part is stealing Shepard's body and what he did to her friend. Regardless of whether or not Shepard aids her against the Broker, Liara defeats him and inherits his power base, information network, and contacts, turning her into one of the most powerful people in the galaxy.
• Lady of Black Magic: The demure Liara qualifies by the third game. She's an Adept who focuses on devastating enemies with biotic powers, and, by then, wears a graceful white outfit and has become more stoic and composed.
• Lady of War: Her Lair of the Shadow Broker outfit, which is also her default attire in Mass Effect 3, gives her a graceful aura. Having biotic powers and being a member of the most graceful race in the galaxy give her bonus points too.
• Light Is Good: Her outfits are all white and bright colors, showing her heroic character.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Throughout the duration of Lair of the Shadow Broker, there is frequent humorous banter and interaction between Shepard and Liara.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: Her mother, Benezia, was an influential asari theologian before her Face–Heel Turn. Her father, Aethyta, is a skilled spy with high-level contacts and is unafraid and very willing to resort to violence as needed.
• Loners Are Freaks: Subverted of course since she's a necessary party member, but in her childhood she was thought of as a weirdo because of her admiration for science. Liara admits that she doesn't fit in with others, but Shepard can coax her out of this.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Is very young for an asari at over a century old, and can have a romantic relationship with Shepard, who is only in their early thirties. Like most asari, she chooses not to dwell on the fact that she will probably outlive Shepard by a very, very long time.
• The Medic: Her class skill in the first game adds to the amount of HP healed by medigel on top of the first aid ability.
• Meaningful Name: Her name may be derived from the Hebrew name "Liora", which means "I have a Light". Shepard, romanced or not, is her guide and primary motivation throughout the games.
  • In 1, she is fascinated by Shepard because they have been touched by a Prothean beacon, and later get to possess the Cipher. It is also then she developed a crush on them.
  • The whole plot of Redemption is about Liara refusing to let Shepard go.
  • In 2, when she has lost Shepard, she becomes noticeably darker. After the events of Lair of the Shadow Broker, she returns to a lighter mood. The possible kiss scene is even bathed in light amidst the dark
  • In 3, she openly admits that if it could save her homeworld, she could become like the Illusive Man. However she keeps to her vow to use her influence to help Shepard rather than fix the problems as she sees fit. After the Fall of Thessia only Shepard can push her into regaining composure and acting productively.
  Liara: Shepard I... I'm yours...
• A Million Is a Statistic: Downplayed. She's sympathetic to the losses inflicted by the Reaper invasion, but she isn't really shaken until she sees it first-hand on the asari home planet of Thessia. This despite having seen it first-hand on Earth (from Mars), Palaven (from Menae), Tuchanka and Rannoch — and being a Required Party Member on the first two.
• Mind over Matter: Usually holds the spot of most powerful biotic on your squad.
• Minored in Ass-Kicking: Most people find it more than a little odd that an archaeologist would be so good at combat. Then Liara points out that, since they have potential for containing incredible technology, Prothean ruins are popular targets for pirates and mercenary raids. And Liara has worked in Prothean ruins. Alone. For decades. It also helps that she is from a race of natural biotics, and she is the offspring of two powerful matriarchs.
• Ms. Fanservice: Her romance scenes are by far the most revealing out of any character in the game, and she's notably the only character in 3 to get completely naked. Also, in the first game she has a unique fidget animation where she puts a hand behind her head and stretches in a way that shows off her body. Neither of the other female party members have any such animations.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Considering that she's attractive and loves science, this trope was bound to follow.
• Never My Fault: Liara has a tendency to blame others for things that she is responsible for: She yells at Javik frequently for not being what she wanted in a Prothean, but also criticizes Ashley/Kaidan for their distrust of Shepard when Shep is working for Cerberus in the 2nd game, even though she'd given Shepard over to Cerberus two years ago, and never told Ashley/Kaidan about it.
• No Social Skills: In the first game. Thanks to a mix of a lonely childhood, long periods of working alone and just what's implied to be natural cluelessness, Liara has very little idea of how to interact with people. At all. Naturally, the time skip between 1 and 2 means she grows out of this.
• Not So Above It All: Her romance shows that Liara's not really as high and mighty in terms of personality as she seems to other characters. She seems to enjoy both Paragon Shepard's and Renegade Shepard's sense of humor.
  Liara: I don't want to put pressure on you.
  Shepard: I have fond memories of the last time you put pressure on me.
  Liara: (Smirks) So do I.
• Not So Similar: In 3, if she's brought along to Cronos Station, she momentarily wonders if she would go as far as the Illusive Man has if it would save Thessia. Shepard is quick to tell her otherwise.
  Shepard: You're not the same as him. You never could be.
• Not So Stoic: Still has moments of genuine emotion namely when she and Shepard kill the Shadow Broker, when she hooks up with you later in the Shadow Broker DLC, hearing about a colony that nuked itself rather than face the Reaper invasion, when Thessia is attacked by the Reapers, and during certain romantic scenes in the third game.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Her doctorate is in archaeology.
• Number Two: In Mass Effect 3, she acts as an unofficial XO for the Normandy, with her office in Miranda's old quarters.
• Offhand Backhand: In Lair of the Shadow Broker, she uses her biotics to swat aside a Broker Agent without even looking as she runs past, while pursuing Tela Vasir.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: If Shepard never goes through Lair of the Shadow Broker, then Liara assembles a mercenary army and takes down the Broker herself.
• Older Than They Look: During the first game, she's 106 years old, which would make her 109 in the third, "barely more than a child." Asari live for about a thousand.
  Ashley: Damn, I hope I look that good when I hit your age!
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist:
  • Averted. In Peak 15, she may say the following upon the end of the first engagement against the rachni:
    Liara: Xenobiology is not my field. Maybe someone in the labs knows.
  • Appears again in the third game, where she explains on Eden Prime the difference between an archaeologist and a paleontologist upon being asked about fossils, only to realize midway through her explanation that the one who asked was just kidding.
  • While she most likely understands written Prothean, she cannot understand the spoken language and relies on Shepard to explain that a VI recording found on Ilos was a distress signal.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Liara threatening to flay a human alive on a vidcall gets thrown back in her face by Aethyta, who tells her saying things like that made the Asari leadership nervous.
• One-Woman Army: Tears through a couple dozen mercenaries during the events of the interquel comic, Redemption.
• Open Secret: By the third game, everyone and their mum seems to know that she's the new Shadow Broker.
• Out-Gambitted: No matter what Shepard does, she ends up being outsmarted by the Illusive Man. The entirety of the Lair of the Shadow Broker was a gambit by the Illusive Man to get Liara to kill off his biggest rival and gain his assets, potentially while wasting a company of mercenaries in the process. She had to sacrifice her base and most of her resources to stop him from obtaining them. He still manages to track her down and dispatches troops to finish her off on Mars (albeit incidentally; their primary mission was the Mars Archive). When Shepard finds her, she's the only survivor in a base overrun by Cerberus operatives with no way out.
• Parental Abandonment: She never knew her second parent's identity, only her species (another asari — a major societal no-no, because asari value genetic diversity and also because that's where Ardat-Yakshi come from) and her relationship with her mother was apparently strained. And that was before Benezia joined up with Saren and co. In the third game, Shepard can find out that her father is Matriach Aethyta, and encourage Liara to go talk to her, because at that point, as the Shadow Broker, she does know who her father is.
• Platonic Life-Partners: If not romanced, Liara will have this type of relationship with Shepard by default.
• Poor Communication Kills: Liara apparently didn't think the rest of the old team needed to know about the events of Redemption, so when Cerberus began leaking information to isolate Shepard from their old contacts, Ashley/Kaidan didn't have the information they needed to see through it. This likely comes from her desire for vengeance distracting her from anything else, as even when Shepard does come to see her, she is clearly distant and almost completely focused and hunting for the Broker. She remains oblivious even after the Shadow Broker is dealt with and has the nerve to criticize Kaidan/Ashley for being shortsighted. She then wastes a six-month Time Skip that could have been used to repair some of the damage she caused.
• Power Perversion Potential: If romanced, Liara is revealed to use biotics during sex.
• Practically Different Generations: With her unseen half-sister. Liara states that her age of 106 is a very young adult by asari standards, and Liara was born after her parents had already been together for over a century. This means Liara's sister would have been over a hundred when Liara was born; roughly the same age Liara is during the trilogy. Given Aethyta's advanced age, the difference between Liara and her sister is likely even greater than the minimum.
• Pragmatic Hero: In the second and third game.
  • Softens up at least a little in the third game, becoming a Knight in Sour Armor. She has the dubiously legal Shadow Broker resources at her disposal, but uses them to help the war effort, and shows empathy toward all victims of the Reaper invasion.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Designed her own version of the Prothean Beacon, in case they failed to stop the Reapers. Judging from the Stargazer scene or the Refusal Ending, they performed their task admirably.
• Redeeming Replacement: To the Shadow Broker, though she wasn't interested in redeeming his name so much as she thought that the organization was too useful to let go to waste.
• Redundant Researcher: If you save recruiting her for last in the first game, she'll lament how you've learned more about the Protheans in days than she has in her decades-long career.
• Relationship Upgrade: Liara can be pursued as a romance in 3 even if you previously turned her down in the first game.
• Religious Bruiser:
  • In the first game, at least, it's implied that she is quite religious.
  • Javik believes she goes into denial when she rejects his assertion that Athame, the asari goddess was actually a Prothean and that his people influenced early asari civilisation.
• Required Party Member: During Lair of the Shadow Broker in Mass Effect 2 and twice in Mass Effect 3. The first is on Eden Prime in the "From Ashes" DLC, where you need her knowledge of the Protheans. The second is the mission on Thessia, Liara's homeworld. She also takes James's place in your squad once you encounter her on Mars.
• Revenge: Her primary goal, as of Mass Effect 2, is to track down and kill the Shadow Broker for trying to sell Shepard's body to the Collectors. The DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker lets you achieve that goal in spectacular roaring rampage style.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Lair of the Shadow Broker is all about Liara rescuing Feron from the Broker after he was captured at the end of Redemption. Liara becoming the Shadow Broker is just an added perk.
• Sanity Slippage: The longer you delay recruiting her in 1, the more erratic she becomes. If you recruit her after Virmire, she spends the first half of your conversation with her convinced you're just a hallucination.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Regardless of whether the player downloaded the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC, Liara is still the Shadow Broker as of the third game. It's just that how she got there is a bit different: If Shepard didn't help Liara take down the Broker, Liara hired dozens of mercenaries — all of them the best of the best — and took on the Broker in a Zerg Rush. Since they're not Shepard, apparently they all died.
• Self-Made Orphan: Potentially, if you make her fight alongside you to take down her mother in the first game. This is actually suggested by a party member, though, since Liara would know more about her mother, who's causing problems for everyone, than anyone else, and you have to fight Liara's mother one way or another. Subverted in the third game when it turns out her "father" is still alive.
• She Who Fights Monsters: Played with. She becomes incredibly ruthless by the second game in her hunt for the Shadow Broker, even if Paragon Shep is continuously trying to pull her back. Ultimately subverted, since while she does kill and even take the place of the Shadow Broker, she vows to only use the vast power to help Shepard fight the Reapers, which may be why Traynor is the one scoring all the victories against Cerberus; Liara's been focused on the Crucible since before Shepard encountered her on Mars.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: In the first game, everyone distrusts Liara because she's the daughter of The Dragon and they assume that she's really a spy trying to sabotage Shepard's mission. She acts like a shy, awkward girl who wants to befriend Shepard, but...she really is an innocent girl who wants to help. In the end, she proves to actually be Shepard's most loyal ally.
• Shout-Out: An archaeologist called L(i)ara...
• Shrinking Violet: In the first game.
• Shutting Up Now: Does this a few times when speaking to Shepard in the first game while alone with them.
• Signature Move: Singularity. She can use it in all three games, and is one of a handful of biotics who can; she even uses it in her introductory cutscene in Mass Effect 3. The only other biotics who can use it are Adept Shepard, Human & Phoenix Adepts in 3's Multiplayer, and her 'father', Matriarch Aethyta.
• Silk Hiding Steel: She's very demure and well-spoken, but she's also an immensely powerful biotic who can more than handle herself in a fight. The silk gets ripped away temporarily in 2, where she's pursuing a one-woman vendetta against the Shadow Broker. She wins.
• The Sixth Ranger: If you wait until after Virmire before going to Therum.
• Skewed Priorities: After talking with Vigil, Liara wants to stay and chat with it a little longer. Despite, y'know, their being on Ilos to stop Saren and Sovereign summoning the Reapers to kill everyone everywhere, something they are five minutes from doing. Shepard calls her out on it, and Liara immediately concedes she got distracted.
• Skilled, but Naive: At least in the first game. No longer naïve in the second game.
• Slasher Smile: In Shadow Broker, she gets off a nasty one after dressing down the Shadow Broker, pressing all of its Berserk Buttons.
• The Smart Guy: Certainly isn't lacking in the brains department.
• Spock Speak: Especially in the first game where she almost never uses contractions and speaks in a very measured, careful tone. She somewhat grows past this in the following games, but not completely.
• Squishy Wizard: Liara can only wear light armor and has low health. She makes up for it with spectacular biotic capabilities. Something of a downplayed example, as while her health is very low, her barriers are actually somewhat above average thanks to said biotic capabilities. Still fragile in general though.
  • Comes back even more strongly in the third game, where she might be the only biotic on your squad (if Shepard isn't one, Kaidan's dead and you haven't bought Javik). This can turn her low CON scores into a distinct Achilles heel.
  • Interestingly while she's very powerful when supporting the player, Liara is the weakest squadmate in 3 when left on her own due to her general fragility, lack of flexibility, and poor tactics. While still capable of killing several enemy soldiers in these scenarios, sending her alone against a squad of even basic trooper-type enemies will usually result in her getting downed quickly. For this reason it's usually best to keep her in the back as a support caster.
• The Stoic: Post time skip and post Break the Cutie in the second and third games she tends to act like this, almost never raising her voice and becoming somewhat The Comically Serious mixed with Broken Bird.
• Story Branch Favoritism: In addition to ascending to the role of deuteragonist, in addition to being one of the very few love interests you can romance in all three games, in addition to being one of the only characters who can be a squad member in all three games — as if she didn't need enough prominence — she's also the character with the lowest density of Plotline Death options (specifically, none. She is one of only four party members who are guaranteed to be alive after the trilogy's final combat segment, and the only one of those four who was recruitable before the third game).
  • In general, she occasionally has to be reminded of reality by more world-weary characters. For example, if taken on the Ardat-Yakshi Monastery mission alongside Ashley, they get into an argument over the capabilities of a seasoned asari veteran. Liara, having been told that asari commandos are the best soldiers in the galaxy, brags that the centuries of experience of the asari makes them immune to fear and disorganization. Ashley, using her greater knowledge of military matters, counter-argues that when a mission goes bad, there's no knowing how a soldier might react, and that the asari are no more immune to this than anyone else.
  • Her final message to Alec Ryder has her acknowledging they were putting all their eggs in one basket with the Crucible plan, and that there was a very good chance of them still losing despite their best efforts.
• Survivor Guilt: In addition to the guilt she feels for handing Shepard's body to Cerberus, it's heavily implied (especially in a romance) that she felt great guilt for surviving while Shepard was killed.
• Tempting Fate: In her recordings heard in Andromeda, she describes the Protheans as pretty much utopian society, although in the end she briefly notes that without any living specimen, this cannot be fully confirmed. She finds one about four years later. Let's just say she was setting herself up for quite a disappointment.
• That Came Out Wrong: Her first conversation with Shepard, in which her fascination with their exposure to the beacon leads her to referring to them as an interesting test subject. See her quote above.
• Took a Level in Badass: She starts out as an awkward and bookish archaeologist. In ME2, she works as a ruthless information broker and is trying to take down the Shadow Broker. When Shepard meets her again, she is threatening to flay someone alive with her mind. She tells Shepard (and in the third game, her father) that she was just bluffing to scare the guy and wouldn't have really done it, but still, quite a change.
  • Mind you, that was before she chased Vasir by jumping out a window, and dropped plasma on the Shadow Broker. Not to mention how many of the Shadow Broker's mooks she tears through.
  • What makes that scene even more powerful (and chilling) is that she's practically channeling Benezia at that point. "Have you ever faced an asari commando unit before? Few humans have." Her mother told Shepard the same thing in ME1.
  • Even before working to kill the Shadow Broker, she displays a lot of determination and ruthlessness in the Mass Effect: Redemption comic book. Apparently, working with Shepard was a very significant influence.
  • Lair of the Shadow Broker has her take two giant levels in badass. The first is when we encounter her in the trade center, where she's chasing down a Spectre and hurling Shadow Broker agents around like toys. Let's repeat that for clarification: Liara is making a freaking Spectre flee from her. The second makes her potentially even more powerful than Shepard.
    Liara: Give me ten minutes and I can start a war.
  • You know how each character is introduced or provided a tag line? The Convict, The Scientist, ect? In the DLC Liara is introduced as The Elite.
  • Her introduction in the third game has her drop out of an air-vent, suspend the Cerberus troops chasing her with a Singularity, draw her gun and casually shoot them... then once more, just to make sure.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In Mass Effect 2, combined with Took a Level in Badass above, she also became a lot more ruthless during her quest to take down the Shadow Broker, ordering hits, coldly dismissing civilian casualties as a necessity, being extremely cold to Shepard (her potential love interest) and more. Mellows out a bit again after the end of the DLC.
• Undying Loyalty: To Shepard, possibly moreso than anyone else in the series, including other party members. Can also fit with Violently Protective Girlfriend below.
• Uneven Hybrid: A chat between her and her father reveals that she's 1/4 krogan. Liara insists that it doesn't work that way; her father's response is how Liara finds out that she has a half-sister.
• Unreliable Expositor: If asked in the second game about why she gave Shepard's body to Cerberus, she claims she did it because she thought the Lazarus Project could bring Shepard back. The Redemption comic reveals this to be, at best, highly questionable. The Illusive Man simply tells her to retrieve the body for him without telling her why, and she does so, with her only given reasoning being that Cerberus and Shepard are both human... even if Shepard lost his entire team to a Cerberus operation and spent a significant portion of the first game trying to destroy them. Liara actually asks The Illusive Man point blank why Cerberus would want a corpse, and he simply says that, as an asari, she could never understand human traditions- basically indirectly saying that they only plan to bury Shepard, though she arguably might have still felt obliged to do it anyway out of loyalty to Shepard. She's only told about the Lazarus Project after she's already dropped off the body with Cerberus. At the end of the comic, she flat-out tells Miranda that she didn't bring Shepard back for them to revive, and thinks Shepard should just be left to rest. Granted, it's possible she just didn't want to set herself up for disappointment if it failed, but it seems more likely that she just didn't want to admit to Shepard that she never actually believed Cerberus could succeed in bringing them back to life. This is reinforced by her greeting Shepard in Mass Effect 2, where she is shocked by seeing Shepard in the flesh despite supposedly being well-aware what the Lazarus Project would do, that they were active in the galaxy again and even paying for their docking fees well before their meeting. This may also explain why she never told anyone else on the SR1 about what she did.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Even if you don't romance her, Liara's friendship with Shepard still has a level of this to it. In the third game, Aethyta will note this if the two of them talk, stating that she's surprised that Liara's underwear hasn't caught fire yet.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Liara is unique amongst the first game's party members in having no military training. In addition to (and partly as a result of) this, she has only one ability that isn't dependent on her biotics,^note Electronics in the first game, which is arguably also justified by the fact that she specializes in Prothean technology can only wear light armor, and can only use the weakest, most basic weapons (particularly in the first game, where she is the only squadmate without a weapon talent). She makes up for this by being an extremely powerful biotic, especially for her age. Considering her mother Benezia, it seems that her power is In the Blood.
  • In the Redemption comic a group of five or so regular mercenaries manage to subdue her with relative ease, despite her having psychic powers potent enough to lift a tank, and fighting with lethal intent while they weren't. How? Two mercs approached her from the front, she splattered them with a enormous biotic attack, and another merc simply flanked her, grabbed her, and put a gun to the back of her head while she was distracted and on a cooldown. If not for Cerberus's intervention, she certainly would've been killed.
  • By the third game, this trope has basically vanished. On Mars, Liara not only has that Establishing Character Moment where she handles two mooks via combined biotics and gunplay without breaking a sweat, she then replaces James on a fireteam consisting of two of the three humans ever considered for Spectre status, and fits in seamlessly, even employing standard breaching maneuvers with them. The Doylist explanation is that BioWare were cutting costs on the cutscene animations, but a Watsonian interpretation, just as valid, is that the campaign against Sovereign gave her a thorough grounding in infantry combat. (This is perhaps underlined by the fact that the three coordinate the maneuver silently, which can only be the product of long experience.)
• Violently Protective Girlfriend:
  • Following Shepard's temporary demise, she took up a one woman crusade to get their body back from the Shadow Broker and the Collectors. As of the end of the second game, she's still working to track the Broker down and make them pay for daring to touch Shepard. Or to rescue/avenge Feron, who she may or may not be interested in.
  • She doesn't even need to be a girlfriend for this. Even if it's just a friend relationship, she will destroy you if ever try to harm Shepard.
  • When you've got a millennium-long lifespan, spending a decade or two hunting down the jerk who messed with your buddy doesn't sound so unreasonable.
• Virginity Makes You Stupid: Though she's depicted as naive, she's not exactly an idiot. Still, she's less streetwise than Tali, who hasn't even spent any time off of a ship, since she spent most of her time alone in Prothean ruins with the only people she ever meets being pirates or looters, who tend to wind up dead.
• Visual Development: Her preferred outfit in Mass Effect 2 and 3 reflects her new Stoic, Lady of War tendencies.
• Vocal Evolution: In the first game, her voice is rather high-pitched, and her speech has much more of an awkward, stilted cadence compared to later games. Justified in that she's rather innocent and immature when you first meet her, having spent much of her life not interacting with others socially.
• Warrior Therapist: Shares this role with Garrus towards Shepard in Mass Effect 3, trying to keep them from falling completely into despair.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: Yes. She has more than a little friction with her mother, Matriarch Benezia, trying to do something to overcome being the daughter of a highly esteemed individual and a union between asari and she never knew her "father" either. Unless you coax the two into talking in the third game.
  Liara: Children shouldn't be burdened with the successes of their parents any more than their failings.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • During the Shadow Broker DLC, if Shepard tries to press her to talk about their relationship, she retorts that Shepard has either moved on (if they hooked up with someone else) or is acting like she can just undo two years of mourning and separation.
  • Shepard can give a number to her for her more extreme actions in her quest to get revenge on the Shadow Broker.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: In 3, she realizes that she could live long enough to see the whole invasion through, and admits that while she used to feel sorry for shorter-lived species, she's no longer sure. The Extended Cut's Refusal ending implies that she lives for quite a long time after the Crucible does not fire.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Paragon Shepard's interrupts in Lair of the Shadow Broker reminding her of how she was when they met and urging her to not descend into Well-Intentioned Extremist territory, not even to protect them.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: After she and Shepard kill the Shadow Broker, she takes his place. She's at least the third person to hold the title.
• Youthful Freckles: She is only 108 years old.

Urdnot Wrex

Urdnot Wrex

Shepard.^note Wrex.

"Anyone who fights us is either stupid or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the universe."

Voiced by: Steven Barr

A krogan battlemaster who combines close-combat skills and enormous physical strength and durability with biotic powers. Joins Shepard's team out of both an interest in fighting a good battle and because the money is nice. He becomes a progressive-minded overlord of the krogan people in Mass Effect 2 if he survived the events of the first game, eventually uniting them under his banner.

---

• Afraid of Needles: Mordin claims this about Wrex when he's eager to leave his lab and donate tissue samples later. Whether it's true or not, it's hilarious, and then when he finally gets around to it...
  Wrex: Let's just say scalpels were never meant to cut where he cut.
• Affectionate Nickname: Affectionately refers to Mordin as "Pyjak".
• All Men Are Perverts: "Eve" dryly tells Shepard that if there's a fertile female to be rescued, Wrex will be on the case instantly. If one goes by the theory "Eve" is Wrex's estranged wife, it's doubly funny. It becomes Be Careful What You Wish For if the genophage is cured, however.
• The All-Solving Hammer: One of the first things Wrex usually suggests when confronted by a problem is to eat the individual responsible.
  • Whenever a Krogan, be it another clan leader or his own brother, starts giving him shit he simply head butts them. While this is Krogan culture, Wrex is not adverse to head butting people of other species to shut them up.
  • Ironically, a Thresher Maw Hammer is exactly the solution to defeat a Reaper on Tuchanka in 3, by summoning Kalros.
• Ancestral Weapon: In this case ancestral armor, but also Subverted. In the first game, he asks Shepard to retrieve his family's armor from a turian smuggler. However, the constant arms race had rendered it useless, and it's only valuable for personal reasons.
  Wrex: My ancestors actually wore this piece of junk?
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • He is a krogan, and thus tends to equate ass-kicking with respect (as shown when he head butts another Krogan who is getting too mouthy for Wrex's liking). He may even discuss this with various other crewmembers, by asking them if they could beat Shepard in a fight. Kaidan dismisses the question with how he'd realistically never have to fight his superior officer; Wrex decides that that's why Shepard is his superior officer, and why they would win. Tali (or Liara) asks if krogan size up everyone for a fight, to which he replies yes; his tone of voice suggests that he's genuinely surprised that the other races don't.
  • If he survived the first game, in Mass Effect 2 he's in the process of reforming and uniting krogan society through sheer force of personality (and head butting, when necessary).
    Wrex: Speak when spoken to, Uvenk. I'll drag your clan to glory whether you like it or not.
  • The "who would win" bit sets up a Brick Joke in "Citadel" - en route to fighting the Clone, Wrex gloats to Ash/Kaidan that they're about to get their answer after all. It's also turned around when Zaeed and Javik ask who'd win: him or Grunt? Both immediately respond with a headbutting contest before Shepard shuts it down because they know what comes next, and it would be hell to clean up the resulting destruction.
• Babies Ever After: In the third game, with Eve, and you can even see the baby in some of the endings! Also to his horror, as his pivotal role in curing the genophage has made him very desirable as breeding stock to all krogan females. And Eve/Bakara encourages them. His poor quad are literally sore from overuse. Also, Bakara wants to name their child after Mordin, which despite suggesting it as a joke he doesn't really want to go through with.
• Badass Boast:
  • Gives one in the third game. Note that the quote is fully capitalized in the game's subtitles:
    Wrex: I AM URDNOT WREX AND THIS IS MY PLANET!!!
  • Wrex gives this winning line to Shepard in London:
    Wrex: You're going to win — because you brought the krogan!
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Eve says that Wrex has always been enthusiastic around fertile females. With the genophage cured, the Citadel DLC informs us that as the leader of the most powerful clan and symbol to the galaxy of the awesomeness of their people, they've been lining up around the corner for his seed. And what's funnier, Eve/Bakara encourages it, probably to break Wrex of the habit through forced overindulgence.
  Shepard: I can think of worse positions to be in.
  Wrex: Trust me, I've been in every position in the past few days...
  • As far back as the first game Wrex expressed a desire for the krogan to get their act together and rebuild their species and civilization rather than wasting time fighting each other. By 3 he's gotten exactly what he wanted despite being relegated to a supporting leadership role rather than being part of Shepard's crew. He admits that he misses the more carefree nature of adventuring around the galaxy with Shepard but also acknowledges that he did ask for this.
• Berserk Button: Any mention of destroying the krogan's chances of curing the genophage will provoke a violent reaction. It can get Wrex killed in the first game unless you can talk him down, and you are forced to kill him in the third game if you sabotage the cure. The rachni are also a particularly sore topic for him, given the brutal war between them and the krogan.
• Big Good: Becomes this to the krogan on Tuchanka if he lives past Virmire. "Eve" in the third game privately admits to Shepard that Wrex is the greatest thing to happen to Tuchanka in over a thousand years.
• The Big Guy: Type 1 (gruff and withdrawn). Also has shades of Types 3 and 5. How big? In the Citadel DLC, he states that he weighs 800 pounds. Add 220 pounds of standard krogan medium armor, plus his Claymore, sidearm, grenades, ammo, and various other gear, and he probably walks around at half a metric ton.
• Big Guy Fatality Syndrome: Wrex is the biggest and toughest of the original squadmates, and he's the first one who can potentially die (if you can't talk him down on Virmire).
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Krogan have secondary everything, from cardiovascular to nervous systems. And four testicles, referred to in the fandom and then in the second game as a "quad". Wrex will say that Shepard has a quad. He'll even say this about female Shepard.
• Blood Knight: Though he's downright moderate compared to the rest of his species. During the geth hunt in the Armstrong Cluster, he'll note that he's actually been enjoying himself, and will be sad when Shepard's team runs out of geth.
  Wrex: They'll sing battle songs about this someday! Reaper blood has finally soaked our soil!
  • Though he's not insane. When Shepard notes Wrex didn't help with the Reaper, Wrex mildly says he helped by offering Shepard encouragement.
• Bounty Hunter: One of many jobs he's taken over the centuries. He first encounters Saren while on the job, unsettling him to the point of quitting — which ends up saving his life.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Not so much in the first game, but played straight from the second game onward.
• Cain and Abel: Abel to Wreav's Cain. So if he sees Wreav get killed by Kalros in 3, he barely cares, saying that he was a pain in the ass anyway.
• Catchphrase: He tries out a few during "Citadel". They generally involve calling himself "Uncle Urdnot". Tali tells him to keep trying.
• Captain Obvious: "I raised the hammers; you have to activate both of them. My advice is: avoid the giant laser!"
• The Casanova: According to Eve that "if there's a fertile female, he'll be there", and "[he's a good leader] when he isn't trying to sire half of Tuchanka". In the Citadel DLC, if the genophage is cured, he'll complain about how he's been so busy mating that he needs an icepack for his crotch. If Eve/Bakara is still alive, he says that she is encouraging it (probably to try and break him of the behavior through forced overindulgence).
• Character Development: Wrex starts off the first game as the most cynical party member, and then some. He's completely fatalistic and hopeless about the krogan's chances and has spent centuries as nothing more than a mercenary and bounty hunter. If he survives the first game, he decides to make a second go at saving his race and ends up becoming a progressive leader for his people, eventually growing from a common mercenary to arguably the most powerful krogan in the galaxy. If Shepard supports him and his desire to cure the genophage, he ends up being arguably the single most idealistic and hopeful character in the third game's entire story. In fact, he's cracking wise and trying to come up with a new Catchphrase. When talking to his soldiers in London, he calls them "princesses".
• Chick Magnet: Again, in 3 if the genophage is cured... before he discovers how exhausting it is.
• Chivalrous Pervert: On the other hand, he respects women a lot more than the average krogan.
• Cool Old Guy: Wrex is up there, even for a race as long-lived as the Krogan. In the second game, this is given as the reason the krogan are uniting under his leadership. His immense ass-kicking skills don't hurt any, either.
• Cool Uncle: The Citadel DLC particularly highlights that the rest of the squad have come to see Wrex as this type of figure. After Wrex asks if Tali's been taking his advice on shotguns, she replies:
  Tali: You're like the crazy, head butting uncle I never had.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • In-Universe, the Urdnot Mechanic acknowledges that Wrex is a "crazy old man", but at the same time, what he's saying makes sense and is actually working. Because of this, in the third game, Eve calls him the first bright light the krogan have had in a millennium.
  • His crazy awesomeness has combat applicability as well: in the Citadel DLC, he saves Shepard and a squadmate from a false flag ambush by CAT6 mercs in a C-Sec shuttle by diving out a window and body slamming the cockpit canopy, which causes it to crash. This is a shuttle model which is canonically described to be designed first and foremost for rugged durability and has been stated to be able to withstand 1000 earth atmospheres of pressure. And Wrex, true to his name, wrecks it.
• Cutscene Boss: In Mass Effect 3, if Shepard sabotages the cure, Wrex jumps them in the Citadel and all dialogue options lead to him being killed in a non-player-controlled gunfight.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Ashley downs him with one shot from a rifle in Mass Effect 1 before finishing him off with a few more shots, (Shepard can pistol-whip him and shoot him repeatedly on the ground) and Shepard can kill him with a pistol in Mass Effect 3. He mysteriously forgets that he has barriers and biotic powers. The latter is notable enough that it might actually be Suicide by Cop after he's lost all hope for the Krogan.
• Dare to Be Badass:
  • To motivate the krogan to fight a common enemy rather than fighting themselves and the rest of the galaxy.
    Wrex: Now hold your heads high like true krogan. There's a Reaper that needs killing!
  • If he's on Earth during the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, he's barking jingo at a squadron, calling them "princesses" and to suck it up.
• Deadpan Snarker: Provides half of the snark in the first game.
• Death Glare: Displays a great one in 3 when the salarian dalatrass insults the krogan. The look on his face makes it clear that he wants nothing more than to pull out a shotgun and leave a large hole in the Normandy's bulkhead where she was standing. For bonus points, the scene is focused on him, so you get to see just how pissed off Wrex is, taking up the entire screen. While the dalatrass is being incredibly undiplomatic, Wrex is being the cool-headed one — and Primarch Victus points this out immediately.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Implied to have gone through a minor one before you meet him. After his father betrayed him he lost hope of reforming his race into anything resembling a proper civilisation, and began roaming the stars and killing people for credits. If he survives the first game he gets renewed hope and has a more successful job at kicking the krogan together.
  • Betray him by sabotaging the genophage cure and he'll completely lose it. He'll withdraw krogan support, leave the galaxy to burn, and try to gun you down with a shotgun to boot. As far as he's concerned, if his species is going to go extinct, humanity can join them.
• Dirty Old Man: In Mass Effect 3, according to Eve, he's a bit... enthusiastic about fertile krogan females. By the Citadel DLC, he's over this. Largely because he's been with so many that his genitals physically hurt. Which says something when you're a member of a species of armored reptilian walking tanks with regeneration capabilities, and you're considered one of the most badass specimens of that species.
• Driven to Suicide: A possibility, if you make a certain series of decisions. In ME3, if you sabotage the genophage cure, Wrex will come after you, conveniently forgetting his biotics and shields... Suicide by Shepard.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Assuming you never recruit Wrex in the first game, he just sort of dies off-screen between there and 2.
• Dynamic Entry: In the Citadel DLC, when Shepard and a crewmate are pinned down by a shuttle full of mercs, Wrex crashes through a window a few stories above and body slams the shuttle.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: If he survives all 3 games, and the genophage is cured without being sabotaged, then his desire to see the Krogan be saved from extinction and become more than just mercenary thugs is finally brought to fruition. If Eve lives, he also has a baby with her.
• Enemy Mine:
  • With the turians in the third game. Despite the fact that neither Wrex nor Primarch Victus are quick to trust the other, Victus is completely in favour of curing the genophage if that's the terms for krogan reinforcements, and Wrex makes good on his promise to send those reinforcements to aid in the defense of Palaven.
  • Victus and Wrex also seem to find common ground opposing the salarian dalatrass. She seems to clearly irritate them both.
• Epic Fail: If you opt to sabotage the genophage cure in 3, he comes after you with a shotgun. In all outcomes, he'll miss Shepard with a shotgun at point-blank range and will be gunned down either by Shepard or C-Sec, despite the former being unarmored and unarmed when Wrex attacks.
• Establishing Character Moment: He is encountered inside the C-Sec offices, where a C-Sec officer is reprimanding him for his attempt to kill Fist. Wrex responds with a series of Badass Boasts, then proudly declares that he's still going to kill Fist to the officer's face before leaving and telling Shepard to mind his own business. If you talk to him immediately after you conclude your business in C-Sec, he asks to go with you to take down Fist and kills Fist after the crime lord tries to surrender. If you don't, and instead wait until after you have dealt with Fist to speak with him, he is impressed by the wreck you made of Chora's Den, and gives you the bounty he was supposed to collect as a show of respect.
• Et Tu, Brute?: In Mass Effect 3, if you betray the krogan and sabotage the genophage cure, he completely loses it due to the betrayal of a close, trusted friend in Shepard.
• Everyone Has Standards: It's clear that he's not evil, but he's decidedly darker than other party members, especially in the first:
  • Take him on Virmire when you discover the captured salarians driven to mindlessness by indoctrination, and he's visibly unhappy about it, saying that you don't do that to prisoners — kill them, sure, but not that. This is why he objects to Paragon Shepard releasing them. As far as he's concerned, even though they'd all die in the blast anyway, it'd take a cold person to let them live on like that for any longer than necessary. A cut-and-dried Mercy Kill is what he would want if he ended up indoctrinated, and hence he agrees to Renegade Shepard opening the door and gunning the salarians down.
  • Wrex wishes for the Krogan to be cured of the Genophage more than anything else but there are still lines he won't cross even for a cure. He can be convinced to stand down on the possibility of a cure from Saren when it's brought up that the cured Krogan would effectively be slaves to his will and he outright refused to work with Maelon when he learned just how brutal the experiments that the scientist wanted to perform would be.
• Expy:
  • Wrex is one of many BioWare characters descended from Korgan Bloodaxe — a Blood Knight Boisterous Bruiser mercenary and also an Old Soldier fond of sharing past war stories. He shares this with Zaeed Massani from Mass Effect 2, so unsurprisingly they get along very well in Mass Effect 3.
  • He shares many traits with Canderous Ordo, another Korgan-expy from Knights of the Old Republic. Both are the team Big Guy, come from a Proud Warrior Race Guy culture, and are disillusioned with their cultures' slowly self-destructive behavior. They also both regain their idealism and become the leader of their people in the second game.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • Seriously considers one during Virmire. If you're unable to talk him out of it, Ashley kills him to protect you.
  • If Shepard sabotaged the genophage cure in Mass Effect 3, he will return later on, having found out, and tries to kill Shepard no matter what. He also calls off all his support for the war. Of course, given the despicable actions Shepard has to do in order for this to happen, you can't really blame Wrex.
• Family Honor: While he was never on good terms with his father and was eventually forced to kill him in self-defense, Wrex appears to have been close with his grandfather, swearing an oath before he left Tuchanka that he would regain their family's battle-armour, stolen by a turian after the war. He can finally achieve this several hundred years later with help from Shepard.
• Family of Choice: He was never on good terms with his father and makes it clear that he and Wreav share only blood. Beyond being a Papa Wolf for his entire race he seems to count Shepard's team as family, lampshaded several times when Tali calls him her crazy headbutting uncle or when Wrex refers to Shepard themselves as a brother/sister.
• Fantastic Racism: He openly admits to be racist against salarians, and his distrust of them causes him to act up and nearly screw up the negotiations in 3. He's not exactly a fan of the turians since representatives of both species played a part in creating the genophage. While he doesn't have any particular hatred for the asari he's quite happy to assume the negative stereotypes about their reproductive habits are true. That said it mostly manifests as ill-natured grumbling and he's perfectly fine with fighting alongside them as part of Shepard's team, and he does end up befriending most of the squad.
• Fire-Forged Friends:
  • Provided that Shepard talks to him and returns his family armor, Wrex eventually sees Shepard as a friend. This becomes a heartwarming Friendship Moment in the second game when you're reunited with him; Wrex immediately ends a meeting to greet Shepard outright calling them "My friend!" Another Friendship Moment happens in the third game, if you stay trustworthy and warn the krogan about the shroud sabotage. Wrex tells Eve "I told you we could trust him/her".
  • He also becomes this with virtually every other member of Shepard's crew, particularly Garrus. Despite being from two feuding species, fighting at each others' sides have made them comrades.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: As a guest party member in Citadel, his most common tactic is to charge into the enemy mob and club them with his shotgun. Horrified players will soon realize that Wrex easily has twice as much HP as other party members, and thus can survive running out in the open and being shot at by multiple assailants. Doubles as a Call-Back, since Wrex's combat style in 1 was virtually identical.
• Foreshadowing: One of the elevator conversations in 1 has Garrus eagerly wanting to see how the Normandy handles in a fight. Wrex is one of the squadmates who point out that it would be stupid to get into a head-on fight in a frigate designed for stealth. The opening of the second game proves that viewpoint correct - although, admittedly, the enemy ship belonged to the Collectors.
• Friendly Enemy: He mentions having one in an asari named Aleena who is strongly hinted to be a past identity for Aria T'Loak in Mass Effect 2.
• The Gadfly: Especially in the first game's infamous elevator sequences, where he frequently says outrageous things to your squadmembers just to see how they react.
• Genius Bruiser: Wrex is an eight hundred pound lizard-alien with multiple redundant vital organs, and he has been fighting since humanity was still using wooden sailing ships back on Earth. He's also incredibly cunning, has a strong grasp of tactics, and is one of the only Krogan living who actually has a plan to save the species from extinction.
• Good Is Not Soft: As krogan overlord, he institutes many reforms to save his race from the brink... and if he has to go against tradition or bust heads for it to work, so be it.
• The Good King: If he survives the first game and is aided in the sequels, he goes on to become a major reformer, eventually working himself up to the leader of the entire krogan species, and is on the path to leading them into a new golden age and cultural renaissance.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: All over his shell. It conveniently helps players distinguish him from other krogan.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Another par for the krogan course. Initially believed Shepard survived being spaced due to having a redundant nervous system.
  Shepard: Yeah, humans don't have that.
  Wrex: Oh.... It must've been painful then.
• Grumpy Old Man: Over a thousand years old, and as curmudgeonly as they come. In classic form, he quickly warms up if Shepard makes an effort to get to know him.
• Guest-Star Party Member: In the Citadel DLC of 3.
• Gut Feeling: His reliance on this has saved him twice. He correctly predicted a trap by his father Jarrod, even though they were meeting in a place where violence was supposedly forbidden. On a later mercenary job for the turian who he would later discover was Saren, he had such a bad feeling that he left without being paid. All the other mercs he was working with were found dead a week later.
• Handgun: In the first game, he had access to all weapons but could train with assault rifles and shotguns. In Citadel, his weapons are shotgun and heavy pistol.
• Hidden Depths: An exile from a barbaric race. Utterly ruthless. A one man army. The most vicious bounty hunter in the galaxy. Also quite possibly the most sensitive and caring character towards Shepard other than Liara and Kaidan. And he tried to end his people's infighting, pretty much making him the Krogan equivalent of a hippie. Who says bloodthirsty, thousand-year-old reptilian warlords don't have hearts? Two of them, in point of fact.
• Honorary True Companion: To the Normandy crew from the second game onwards.
• Honorary Uncle: The Normandy crew consider him to be like this, especially Tali:
  You're like the crazy, headbutting uncle I never had.
• Honor Before Reason: He's loyal to the krogan race, even if that means dying senselessly in a fight with Shepard, if the latter can't talk him down in the first game or sabotages the genophage cure in the third.
• Hope Bringer: Along with "Eve", he becomes this to the entire krogan species over the course of 2 and 3.
• Hypocrite:
  • For someone who protests to no end that the Genophage is a slow-burn genocide, Wrex is all too willing to advocate genocide against the rachni by wiping out the remaining Rachni Queen on Noveria. It's especially dark if you learn more of the lore and realise the rachni were effectively used as attack animals by past cultures in a way not unlike how the krogan were uplifted to turn the tide during the Rachni Wars.
  • Wrex grows distrustful towards Shepard if Maelon's data was destroyed, experiments that Wrex himself had refused to work with due to their brutal nature.
  • If Shepard betrays him by sabotaging the Genophage cure, he withdraws Clan Urdnot’s support for the war effort, but not the other clans, despite his work to value all krogan clans.
• Hypocritical Humor: Jokes during the Citadel DLC that he can't go crawling through pipes because of "too many varren legs" as a snack. When Tali and Liara tease him a moment later about his size, he's snarling.
• Hypothetical Fight Debate: Wrex loves asking who would win in a fight between Shepard and the third squadmate. Funnily enough, it comes to a head when you fight Shepard's clone. He can also be the subject of one versus Grunt in the Citadel DLC which, depending on the mood of the party you choose to throw, can potentially cease to be be quite so hypothetical.
• I'm Standing Right Here: On Noveria, if Garrus objects to killing the rachni queen.
  Garrus: We can't exterminate them. Not without the Council's approval. Genocide is one of the reasons we fought the krogan— ah...
  Wrex: You want to learn about genocide, Vakarian? I'll take you to a krogan obstetrician's office.
• Irony: Wrex is annoyed with how most krogan live up to negative stereotypes and believes that some customs need to be ignored to truly save the species. As a result many krogan despise Wrex for not respecting tradition. Then come Mass Effect 3 and Eve describes what the glorious krogan of ancient times were like and they sound a lot more similar to Wrex than 99% of the other krogan we meet in the series. So it can be argued that the guy closest to being a traditional krogan... is Wrex.
• Informed Equipment: Cutscenes, trailers, promotional art, and the Citadel squad selection screen all show him wielding the Claymore heavy shotgun. For good reason; it's a great weapon to give him in-game.
• I Was Just Joking: In 3 he sarcastically suggests naming one of the new krogan children after Mordin as thanks for curing the Genophage, probably a girl. Near the end of the game, Wrex tells Shepard that Eve is pregnant and wants to name her child after Mordin. He doesn't share her enthusiasm.
• I Work Alone: Fortunately, he's a reasonable example of this trope; he prefers to work by himself, but he's perfectly willing to operate with small groups. Shepard also works in small groups, so he's got no problems with that. It's just being part of armies he has issues with.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Wrex is aggressive and short-tempered, but deep down, he cares about his friends and the krogan race. He is the only one besides Joker to comfort Shepard after they are forced to leave either Ashley or Kaidan behind on Virmire. He also gives Shepard a very warm greeting as the krogan overlord. From a grizzled old cynic like him, that really means something. He even invites Grunt to be part of the clan. As warlord, he does everything in his power to aid his people, whether they like it or not.

  Wrex: Shepard! My friend!

  • Despite disliking salarians in general, he grows to respect Mordin in ME3, affectionately nicknaming him "Pyjak." After Mordin sacrifices himself to cure the genophage, Wrex says that he'll honour him by naming one of the newborn children after him. Maybe one of the girls.
• Just Eat Him: He threatens the crooked security goons on Noveria with this. Considering that Wrex is an eight-foot-tall lizard alien, it tends to be effective.
• Killed Off for Real: Possible in the first game, which allows his more traditional but distrustful brood brother Wreav to become leader of Clan Urdnot. Also possible in the third game; if you sabotage the genophage cure, he'll find out and you'll have to blow him away on the Citadel.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Averted. The Urdnot scientists are actually complaining because Wrex has turned them to agricultural sciences and focused their efforts on increasing crop yield, irrigation and better farming methods. Only on Tuchanka could the scientists be upset that the Warlord doesn't want them to blow things up! In Andromeda, seems like Wrex was onto something, as the crop scientist is one of the most important figures in the krogan colony.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Yes, he does help save the galaxy and eventually becomes chieftain of Clan Urdnot but he's also as cynical as they come. If Shepard continuously supports him, he, like Garrus, shows a much more idealistic side as things go on.
• Leeroy Jenkins: In Citadel, while most other party member AI have the sense to keep in cover during a firefight, Wrex's primary attack strategy is to charge opponents and melee them. He can survive this and win... unless you're playing on Insanity, in which case he predictably gets quickly gunned down.
  • Ironically he can even be this on Insanity with the right build which rapidly turns any adventure on the Citadel into a bit of Strategy, Schmategy - You can do whatever you and your teammate want, Wrex is gonna be knocking heads around.
• Lightning Bruiser: Wrex is one of the last living Krogan Battlemasters. Take an eight-foot-tall sapient lizard with multiple redundant vital organs, natural armor, and enough muscle mass to bench press a car. Add centuries of combat experience, and mix with biotic powers rivaling an Asari commando.
• Like an Old Married Couple: His interaction with "Eve" in the third game. There are plenty of hints that "Eve" really is his estranged wife.
• Living Legend: He's renown throughout the galaxy for his exploits, and as the last Krogan to kill a Thresher Maw during his rite of passage, at least until Grunt if he manages the same thing. ^note Though on Grunt's part, it is optional, and he also did it with the help of Shepard and another Squadmate, while Wrex did it on his own.
• Made of Iron: The Krogan are notorious for this to begin with - so much so that they were the only species capable of going to the Death Worlds the Rachni lived on. Wrex takes this up a notch; he's nigh unkillable on most difficulties. Up until Insanity mode, Wrex can simply charge into a squad of enemies and murder them all with little effort - and he can still more than hold his own on said difficulty. He just can't walk into the middle of the enemy line with impunity anymore.
• Mage Marksman: In addition to his substantial toughness and general combat skills, he's also a biotic.
• The McCoy: To Dalatrass Linron's The Spock and Primarch Adrien Victus and Paragon Shepard's The Kirk, in 3.
• Meaningful Name:
  • He's called Wrex because he wrecks stuff.
  • Also, rex = Latin for king. Fits with him becoming the krogan overlord in the second game.
  • According to the devs, they called him Wrex after a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which still comes from "king." This also leads to an amusing Continuity Nod in the second game, where data on Grunt's extranet searches reveal that he went from searching about Wrex to reading about dinosaurs.
• Moral Pragmatist: His goal is to ensure the survival of his doomed species. He has developed very pragmatic ideas to help the krogan recover from the Genophage, but they're too proud and violent to listen to him. In the first game, when Saren finds a way to breed new krogan, he seriously considers betraying you, and you can only change his mind by either threatening to kill him or making him realize how stupid it would be to join Saren. In the third game, if he survived, Wrex refuses to help in the war against the Reapers unless you cure the Genophage first, and if you sabotage said cure, he immediately withdraws all krogan support just so that humans will go extinct just like the krogan.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: His usual suggestion for dealing with problematic individuals is to shoot them. He viscerally establishes this if you bring him along to raid Chora's Den - regardless of what Shepard says to Fist, Wrex blows his head off as soon as he's given Shepard the information they need.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Invoked in 3 if you bring Liara and Garrus along to Sur'kesh, he's deeply happy she's there... oh, and Garrus too. If you don't bring Liara he's just as appreciative of Garrus however, implying he did this just to mess with him.
• My Name Is Inigo Montoya: Uses one in ME3.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Wrex is somewhere in between playing this straight and averting it. He mostly embraces the overall krogan culture and attitudes, but he's far more willing than most of his race to acknowledge a lot of their actions are idiotically self-destructive (to the point of making some attempt to fix that in the second game).
• No Guy Wants to Be Chased: In the Citadel Downloadable Content for 3, the reason he's on the Citadel at all is because, following the dealing with the genophage in Priority: Tuchanka, every single female krogan wants a go with him so that their firstborn can be of his genes. He'd likely have less of a problem if they actually gave him a break.
  Shepard: Considering everything we've been through, I can think of worse positions to be in.
  Wrex: Trust me, I've been in every position in the past few days.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Wrex very intentionally plays up the stereotypes people tend to have of the Krogan as a whole. In reality, Wrex is every bit as dangerous in combat and physically powerful as the stereotypes would suggest, but he's also been fighting since Earth was still using wooden sailing ships. He deliberately lets his opponents assume he's a bloodthirsty brute.
• Odd Friendship: Quite a few:
  • With Paragon Shepard in 1. Seeing such an idealistic hero become friends with such a surly, disillusioned mercenary is a sight to see. Paragon Shepard's influence eventually rubs off on Wrex as he becomes The Paragon for his entire species.
  • Dialogue in 3 indicates that he's deeply fond of Liara, Tali...and Garrus, in his own way.
    Wrex: I have to make friends with the one turian in the galaxy who thinks he's funny.
  • Despite Wrex's open dislike of salarians, particularly their doctors, he honestly grows to respect Mordin after he stands his ground against him. If Mordin sacrifices himself to cure the genophage in ME3, Wrex declares that he's going to name one of his children after him. Probably a girl. As mentioned in the first game, this is Wrex's way of sizing people up.
    Wrex: Ha! You've got a quad, doctor! Keep her safe!
  • He has a soft spot for Tali too, as shown in The Citadel DLC, in part because her preferred weapon, the shotgun, is his too, and he insists on giving her pointers on it.
    Tali: I can look after myself, you know...
    Wrex: I know, but I'm old and I worry, even though my favorite quarian is all grown up and killing Reapers.
    Tali: You're like the crazy head butting uncle I never had...
  • If Liara reveals she's one quarter Krogan, Wrex will laugh and tell her he knew there was something he liked about her.
• Old Soldier: Wrex hints that he was either born during or shortly after the Krogan Rebellions, making him at least 1,400 years old; definitely up there, even for a krogan. He's been busting skulls for the majority of that time. To put this in perspective, Wrex has been kicking ass for a living since Earth's viking age.
• Optional Party Member: He doesn't have to be recruited to finish the first game. Of course, there are repurcussions if you don't...
• Out of Focus: Of this six original squadmates, Wrex is the only one who never returns to the squad. He still has plot relevancy, but he's relegated to Supporting Leader. Thankfully, he's a Guest-Star Party Member in the third game's Citadel DLC.
  • Whether relatedly or not, he's also the only one of the first six squadmates who isn't a potential Love Interest.
• The Paragon: For his people, should he survive to the second game. Solidly cements this position should the real cure for the genophage be administered under his reign. Fittingly, he had tried once before but lost faith in his people, and was inspired to try again by another paragon: Commander Shepard. As noted in the Irony section above, Eve's description of the halcyon days of the ancient Krogan, they sound like they were a lot like Wrex.
• Parental Substitute: While not overt, it appears that he's taken this role toward Grunt, being enthusiastic about letting him take the Rite of Passage to become a member of Clan Urdnot in 2 as well as placing him in charge of Aralakh Company in 3, in recognition of Grunt's skill. One of his comments in the second game insinuates that he may be grooming Grunt to be his successor as Overlord of the krogan.
• Papa Wolf: Becomes this for his entire species. He also develops a paternal instinct for a few of Shepard's youngest squadmates, particularly Tali.
• Patricide: He was forced to kill his father, Jerrod after Jerrod called a "peace meeting" at the Hollows (the one place on Tuchanka where fighting is strictly forbidden) only to betray him and kill those loyal to him when it became clear he wouldn't join Jerrod's warmongering cause.
• Pen-Pushing President: Downplayed. He still spends chunks of 2 and 3 in the thick of the action but admits that he wishes he could join Shepard adventuring around the galaxy rather than spending as much time as he does keeping the krogan in line and butting heads with the Council in his de-facto chief of state role. In Citadel he's ecstatic to finally cut loose after a while.
• Properly Paranoid: He was hired by Saren once, the turian gave Wrex such a bad feeling that he bailed on the job without even waiting around to get paid. Turns out all the other mercs he was working with were found dead a week later.
  • In 3 he also knows that the dalatrass won't let the genophage be cured without trying something which leads him to discovering Shepard's treachery should they take her up on her offer and sabotage the cure.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Deconstructed; he knows full well that the krogan people are too attached to their short-sighted warrior traditions to save themselves from extinction. In the sequels, he subjects the trope to Reconstruction by seizing power of Clan Urdnot and working to return the krogan to a proud warrior race they should have been instead of a race of thugs for hire.
• Radish Cure: "Eve"/Bakara decides to encourage star-struck lady krogan who want the savior of their race to father their children as of the Citadel DLC, and Wrex has gone from excited at the prospect of doing his part for his revitalized race to putting ice packs on his aching quad and sneaking off to have an adventure with Shepard just to get away.
• Really Gets Around: If the Genophage is cured, every krogan female under the sun wants a piece of him. Unfortunately for Wrex, he's been having so much sex that he needs a bag of ice for his currently-aching quad.
• Really 700 Years Old: We don't know how old exactly Wrex is, but given that he defeated a Thresher Maw over a thousand years ago and hints that he may have been around during the Krogan Rebellions (which happened in 700 AD)... yeah, Wrex is very old, even for a krogan.
  • For those not willing to do the math this would make Wrex nearly 1500 years old at the start of Mass Effect. Even Samara would be half a millennium his junior.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: About as reasonable of an authority figure as you can be for an entire species of Blood Knights.
  • While it's unspoken, it's worth noting that Wrex is perfectly content to allow Shepard, an alien, to serve as a member of Grunt's krantt during their Rite of Passage, likely because he knows that they don't actually have a rule that says that the members of your krantt have to be krogan.
    • Who is in the prospective krantt says a lot. Depending on who you take with you, it's either just Shepard, who has iron-clad and gold-plated badass credentials in Wrex's eyes, or Shepard and someone that Wrex fought alongside in the last game, who has also proven themselves as a badass.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: And red skin, red armor, and red guns...
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Is blue compared to his brother Wreav and the rest of the krogan as their leader, but is red compared to Eve.
• Refuge in Audacity: If he helps infiltrate the casino in Citadel. First he'll claim to be a food inspector (though as krogan leader, he could just declare himself one anyway), then he'll just start distracting the guards by berating them for doing a bad job.
• Revenge Before Reason:
  • At a species level, he's initially the only krogan you encounter in the entire game to defy this. Though he retains some of his racial prejudice against salarians and turians he's got no real problems working with Garrus (other than chewing Garrus out for making some Innocently Insensitive comments) and Captain Kirrahe (provided you talk him down in the standoff on Virmire). He also laments how the krogan are more concerned with maintaining their grudges than actually preventing their own extinction. By 2 he decides to do something about it by unifying the krogan under his rule to focus more on rebuilding krogan society than getting revenge against the turians and salarians. Going by how many of the krogan are following his lead, he does a damn good job of it.
  • In ME3, if you betray his friendship and sabotage the genophage cure, he will come after you on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. To elaborate, he comes to the Citadel armed with a giant shotgun (visitors are forbidden from carrying weapons on the station), assaulting a C-Sec officer and shooting at Shepard in broad daylight. Even if Shepard doesn't kill him himself, it doesn't take long until C-Sec reinforcements arrive and swiftly kill him. He really should've thought of a better plan. Then again, he was probably so angry and hurt that he wasn't thinking straight or didn't care enough for his own safety anymore.
• Royal Blood: To a degree; his father was an overlord of Clan Urdnot. If he survived Virmire, Wrex will take over as clan leader and de facto ruler of the krogan homeworld of Tuchanka in 2 and 3 (as his dealings have positioned Clan Urdnot to be the most powerful clan).
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Wrex used to have a tribe of his own, though he fled Tuchanka after a fight with his father. Later, he will become the ruler of most of the krogan clans.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: His stance when traditional-minded krogan impede his vision. A necessary evil, for the traditional mindset is what led to the decline of the krogan people in the first place.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: In his backstory, he met Saren while working on a job. Something about Saren rubbed him the wrong way, so he left without waiting long enough to be paid. His instincts were right: he was the only merc from that job to survive.
• Self-Made Orphan: In self-defense, as revealed in the first game and expanded on in the third. He reveals that his father tried to kill him when he was young, so he was forced to have him crushed under the rocks.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Believe it or not he embodies both sides of this trope. The latter is obvious but he shows a surprisingly caring side of himself after Virmire. He's the only one to talk about Ashley/Kaidan's death other than Joker and the Virmire Survivor, and the only character to comfort Shepard over it, telling you he respects your decision. The relationship between him and Paragon Shepard also fits this trope.
• Slave to PR: He executes a gang leader against your orders because he was hired by the Broker to personally kill him. He even gives you the bounty if you don't bring him along and beat him to the punch — he won't take credit or payment for something he didn't do.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: With the human C-Sec officer who tries to warn him away from Fist in the first game.
  Officer: You want me to arrest you?
  Wrex: I want you to try.
• Sociopathic Hero: Mostly in the first game, less so in the sequels.
• Special Snowflake Syndrome: The Codex notes that krogan biotics are exceptionally rare, even as biotics go. So, naturally, the krogan who joins the adventuring party just happens to be a biotic. This was for lack of anyone else to fill the Vanguard slot in the original team.
• The Stoic: It's a significant moment whenever he really does emote.
  "Shepard."
  "Wrex."
  • When Wrex joyfully bounds out of his "throne" to greet Shepard with unabashed happiness in 2, it's fairly startling. Especially in contrast to the cold shoulder they get from the Virmire survivor on Horizon.
  • He also appears openly enthusiastic about having Grunt join Clan Urdnot, with almost fatherly pride when he completes the rite. Especially if Grunt kills the Thresher Maw, something no one has done since Wrex himself 1000 years prior.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: He dislikes the self-destructive violence of the other krogan, who justify their reckless and bloodthirsty actions with little more than a declaration of "I'm a Proud Warrior Race Guy!" and leave it at that. Wrex even ended up leaving his clan in his backstory because he became so disgusted with how his fellow krogan kept Dramatically Missing the Point about why they were subjected to the genophage in the first place. Should Wrex survive the first game, he's working to change this mindset as clan leader through reforms that defy tradition and the Blood Knight mindset, albeit not without some butting of heads (both figuratively and literally) from the other krogan. And should Shepard help him go through with it, Wrex will succeed in getting the genophage cured in 3, proving him right.
• Suicide by Cop: Should Shepard sabotage the genophage cure, he'll come gunning for them on the Citadel... with no barriers and armed with only a shotgun, in full view of several fully-armed C-Sec officers. It's pretty obvious how he expected the encounter to end.
• Supporting Leader: If he survives the Virmire mission, he's this for all krogan as of the third game, who can provide the second highest amount of War Assets (only behind the Systems Alliance). This all depends on how you handle curing the genophage, however. Even in the mission on Sur'Kesh, he keeps the enemy distracted to make Shepard's mission easier.
• Super-Strength: Like all krogan. Particularly shown in the Citadel DLC, where he one-arm tosses 150+ kg power-armored mercenaries like hacky sacks.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Provided he survives Virmire and you don't betray him, he mentions multiple times he feels this way trying to keep the krogan in line. It's played for laughs in Mass Effect 3 when he has to explain non-war societal development to them when all they're used to doing is blowing enemies up.
• Taking You with Me: If you betray him in Mass Effect 3, he specifically calls off krogan support for the final battle so that humanity will be as doomed as the krogan.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Wrex is uniformly in favor of the most aggressive, violent and destructive solutions to any problem that the squad encounters. He'll offhandedly comment at one point that it's only a complete mission if explosions are involved. Hilariously lampshaded in Citadel:

  Wrex: That's why I love hanging out with you guys. Why shoot something once, when you can shoot it forty-six more times?

• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Wrex drops a hard one when Allestia Iallis reveals herself to be a sleeper agent for Benezia.
  Wrex: We'll see about that, bitch.
• Token Evil Teammate: Subverted. Wrex admits he pretends to be this, simply because it's expected of krogan. While Wrex isn't evil, he is the most ruthless of Shepard's original six squadmates. When the player is faced with a major Paragon/Renegade choice, one squadmate will always endorse the paragon choice, and one will always endorse the renegade choice. Wrex is the only party member to always endorse the renegade choice regardless of party combination. Even Ashley, the next most renegade squadmate, will endorse the paragon option if she is in the party with Wrex. The only exception is the “save the Council” decision, where Ashley understandably advocates holding the fleets back and not risking human lives.
• Too Dumb to Live: What he thinks of anyone that goes up against Shepard.
  Wrex: Anyone who fights us is either stupid or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the universe.
• Took a Level in Cynic: Long before the first game began. He tried to change the self-destructive nature of the krogan in the aftermath of the Krogan Rebellions. He was opposed by many warlords, including his own father, Jerrod. His father trying to kill him on sacred ground where violence is forbidden, about the only rule the krogan actually respected, and being forced to kill him in self defense caused Wrex to lose all hope in the krogan adapting to the genophage and abandon his plans to reform krogan society.
• Took a Level in Idealism: Starts out as cynical as they come. If continuously supported by Shepard, he becomes more and more idealistic with each game. If the genophage gets cured in the third game, he is arguably the least cynical character in the story.
• Tough Love: Essentially his approach as leader of the krogan. Wrex is absolutely uncompromising and quite harsh in putting his reforms in place, because he knows that they are vital to survival of the krogan people. He may not win all of the popularity contests with the krogan, but everything he does is to their benefit.
• Troll: Wrex has become this in 3.
  Wrex: Hell of a showdown back there on Sur'Kesh. Just like the old days, right down to me pulling your ass out of the fire.
  Shepard: I was the one with bullets flying at me!
  Wrex: And I gave you the moral support to dodge them! (chuckles)
• Try Not to Die: The worst possible "goodbye" before you try and summon Kalros.
  Wrex: I know you're doing this for your own reasons, Shepard, but try to make sure you don't get your ass killed. I wouldn't know what to say at your funeral.
• Tsundere: Wrex comes off as this as he first appears as a mercenary who just gets the job done for extra cash but he is revealed to have a personality that is unique from other krogan. He is a type 1 male non romantic version of this trope. He actually cares about other people, including his own species as he shows great concern towards the well being of the krogan. He tries to get them to stop being violent towards each other and focus on maintaining his own species, which led to him being betrayed by his own father. He even openly voices this concern towards Shepard several times.
• Uncomfortable Elevator Moment: Wrex seems to really like the elevators.
• Undignified Death:
  • Mass Effect 1 gives Wrex a rather miserable death, should they choose to deal one out to him. Namely, he can be knocked down with a punch or a shot, and then shot multiple times like a dog. You then have the option of telling Captain Kirrahe to dump his corpse in the swamps. On top of that, he immediately becomes a Forgotten Fallen Friend to the rest of the group.
  • In Mass Effect 3, if Shepard sabotages the genophage cure, he is unceremoniously shot dead by either Shepard or C-Sec. His corpse is then spaced like yesterday's garbage and the media portrays him as a random mercenary who turned violent over a gambling debt.
• Undying Loyalty: By the second game, even if he can't go with Shepard, it's clear that he has nothing but undying respect for them and will help them anyway he can. However, Shepard can later lose Wrex's trust by deleting Maelon's research and making no attempt to apologise. If they support the Krogan the entire series, Wrex's loyalty to Shepard is unbreakable.
• Use Your Head: In true krogan fashion, he uses this to assert his dominance.
  • Unfortunately, he doesn't see it when Shepard has the opportunity to follow his lead, headbutting the same krogan that Wrex did earlier to get him to shut up. The Shaman does see, and finds it hilarious.
  • In the Citadel DLC, he and Grunt start headbutting as a prelude to some good old-fashioned asskicking to determine who's the stronger krogan. Shepard shuts it down before it goes too far.
• Unwanted Harem: The Citadel DLC reveals there are downsides to being the clan leader who cured the genophage — namely, everyone wants their firstborn to have his genes. There's a line of women outside his dwelling that stretches "as far as you can see", he has to sneak out his own bathroom window to get away, and he still gets jumped leaving Tuchanka.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Garrus. They butt heads frequently during elevator conversations in 1 but grow to respect each other. By 3 their conversations are full of good natured bantering and barb-trading.
• Vocal Evolution: Barr gave a much deeper, more gravelly tone of voice for Wrex in 1 and 2, one which bordered on monotonous at times. When 3 rolls around, Wrex has much more range to his voice than before, and generally expresses a lot more emotion. Justified since his earliest appearances in the series take place very recently after he hit rock bottom, and his experiences with Shepard (whether positive or negative) ended up giving him the push he needed to take charge of his life and his people.
• Wasteland Warlord: Becomes the most powerful and influential clan leader on Tuchanka, such that by the third game, he is treated as the de facto leader of all Krogan across the galaxy.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • If he's taken to Noveria and Shepard spares the rachni queen, he's deadset against it. As he reminds you, millions of his ancestors died to defeat the rachni the first time. By the third game he seems to have softened his attitude, though; he merely says to Shepard that if the rachni prove a problem, it's their ass on the line for it.
  • If you deleted Maelon's research, he has some choice words for you in 3 — you can apologise, but while he doesn't like mistrusting you, he doesn't immediately accept it; it takes rescuing Eve, following him to the Shroud and trying to patch things up between missions for Shepard to win his friendship back.
  • If you betray his trust by sabotaging the genophage cure, he tries to kill you. On the same occasion, he also calls you out for your actions during the Citadel coup if you killed the Virmire Survivor — and for the turian bomb on Tuchanka if you let it go off. It's a bit of a low point for Shepard, all in all.
    Wrex: What's the matter? Ashley not around to do your dirty work? Oh right, you killed her, too! And it's time you found out how that feels!
• What Would X Do?: After the events of the first game, he takes Shepard's example and advice to heart and decides to return to Tuchanka and make another attempt to save his people from themselves.
• Where It All Began: At the end of Priority: Tuchanka, if Eve is alive, you will meet up with him at the place where his father ambushed and tried to kill him, and he will remark about how the genophage turned the krogan into "animals".
• Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: Wrex is a firm believer in using violence to solve his problems. Sometimes he'll threaten to eat somebody instead, just to spice things up.
• World's Best Warrior: On Tuchanka, anyway, but he has some impressive feats throughout the rest of the galaxy, too. The only person probably superior to him is Shepard, and his only clear successor is Grunt. He's also the most capable War Asset among all of Shepard's companions.
• World's Strongest Man: Chris Priestley confirmed that he is the physically toughest of Shepard's followers.
• Worthy Opponent: He considered his Friendly Enemy Aleena^note who is heavily implied, but never explicitly stated, to be Aria to be this. Wrex also views Shepard as one when they first meet, seeing them as a warrior worthy of his respect. He drops hints in the first game that he believes in a fight Shepard could take him down - which, considering Wrex once single-handedly defeated a Thresher Maw, says a hell of a lot. By the end of the second game, Shepard's probably done a lot of the same things he did, and without the Made of Iron characteristics that the krogan have going for them. It's no wonder Wrex respects them.

Guest Party Members

Richard L. Jenkins

Corporal Richard L. Jenkins

With a name like that, surely he'll be around forever. Right?

"We've got a Spectre on board! That's why I'm so wound up - I can't wait for the real mission to start."

Voiced by: Josh Dean

An over-enthusiastic Alliance soldier from Eden Prime, he is assigned as part of your squad when everything goes to hell there. Continuing in the long Bioware tradition of early sacrificial party members, he dies in the opening few minutes.

---

• Be Careful What You Wish For: He says he's itching for some action just before the Eden Prime mission. Too bad "action" in his case meant watching his homeworld get scorched and being gunned down by a pair of geth recon drones.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite his boundless enthusiasm and naïveté, various characters imply Jenkins was a very competent soldier.
• Decoy Protagonist: He's a placeholder for Ash, who joins about a minute or two after his death.
• Doomed Hometown: Eden Prime is this for him. Pity he dies too soon for it to become a plot point. And it's not entirely doomed anyway; there's a DLC mission there in the third game.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Averted. The Normandy crew is very upset about his death, and often recall him later in the franchise.
  • In 2, Dr. Chakwas reminisces about him over drinks with Shepard.
  • One interpretation of when Shepard later encounters a young over-enthusiastic mercenary (who is also voiced by Josh Dean) on Omega, the reason they stopped dead in their tracks, turned slowly around and, if taking the Paragon interrupt, broke the kid's gun and ordered them home, was because he reminded them too much of Jenkins.
  • His name is on the memorial wall in the Normandy in Mass Effect 3, and he will be mentioned if Kaidan, James, or EDI is brought to the Eden Prime mission.
  • In private moments, Shepard is shown to give themself grief over Jenkins' death since it was their orders that caused him to run into the ambush.
• Fun Personified: According to Chakwas. One of her stories involves him pestering Kaidan for a biotic demonstration, only for Kaidan to accidentally throw him so hard across the room, she thought he was seriously injured. Jenkins then leapt up, gleefully exclaiming:
  Jenkins: That was awesome!
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: If you're on a New Game Plus, he'll be level 50+ and still die to a few bullets after having been ordered to take point.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Despite being with you for at most a minute or two and dying right before the first fight, he is a fully functional squad member that can be issued orders and even has some skill points for you to assign despite never having an opportunity to use any abilities.
• Hero-Worshipper: To Shepard. This is rarely a good sign for a character's mortality rate this early in the story.
• Informed Ability: He's apparently a badass soldier of the Alliance, but he is shot dead in the first half hour of the game and never gets to display it. Then again, it was a surprise attack, and even his replacement barely survived one while losing her entire squad to them.
• Innocently Insensitive: If Shepard has a Survivor or Ruthless background, Jenkins can gush about what they've done is worth him being a Spectre candidate, to which Shepard can state that it's a past that brings them bad memories.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Subverted, actually, despite the name. He's very eager to go out there and see action, but still follows Shepard's orders to the letter and takes point. In the end it still doesn't do him much good; some geth drones ambush the squad and Jenkins gets gunned down before the rest know what's happening.
• Meaningful Name: Downplayed. He's named after Leeroy Jenkins, and while he doesn't take it to the level of insubordination, he is rather reckless and eager.
• Naïve Newcomer: Definitely had an incredibly idealistic outlook on the Spectres, and the heroism of Shepard themself.
• Sacrificial Lamb: He dies just before the player's first battle.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: He got one conversation and a couple of lines. For a BioWare squad member, that's waving hello in passing.

---