Leviathans and Ardat-Yakshi

I came up with this theory after I completed Leviathan the first time and saw that it gave Dominate as a bonus power. I then noticed another similarity with Morinth: the time she mentally enslaved a village and had them bring her sacrifices sounds an awful lot like what the Leviathans did to their thrall races, although we don't know exactly what the Leviathans meant by "tribute".


My theory is that there is, or was, a Leviathan Artifact on Thessia, since they were in their paleolithic era. Based on what Ann Bryson says about the artifacts, I think it is possible for an asari to use them to remotely mind meld with a Leviathan and impregnate herself by doing so.

The initial offspring of these remote mindmelds appear no different from any other asari. It was only later that some, not all, descendants of these unions started harming, and in some cases killing, the people they meld with. The greater the concentration of Leviathan ancestry, the worse it tended to be, but because it wasn't an issue with the first generation, there was a big enough gap that the asari never made the connection.

This could explain why only pureblood asari can be Ardat-Yakshi. Traits taken from the father take precedence over traits inherited from the maternal grandfather or further back, but this only lasts the immediate generation. If the father is an asari, even if neither parent is a pureblood herself (although a pureblood mother likely increases the risk), there is nothing to override the daughter's Leviathan ancestry, and the result is an Ardat-Yakshi.

This might also explain why the husk creation process apparently works differently on Ardat-Yaksh and those with the potential to give birth to Ardat-Yaksh differently than it does other asari.