Canadian Delicacy - The Kaidan Alenko Thread

I think girls falling all over your Shepard's and Ryder's feet as a very Mass Effect thing, I don't feel it that way in DA or SWTOR or JE... I think only Isabela was that flirty... then again, she'd hit on everything on two legs.

Then again, Kaidan is the kind of man who is forward if he is interested. But he could handle rejection just fine.... which is a trait everyone in general should learn from..

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This week I'm taking a break from SWTOR to play the trilogy again. Felt like its a different game with 60 FPS  but texmod get buggier with EGM installed.

Strange how many people got so triggered that he's wearing red and white Phoenix heavy armor.


Five minutes of screen time and an entire game of Shepard being miserable without him...  I might redo the trilogy again for completionist sake but all I care was getting to ME3 as fast as I can. And I'm not disappointed.

Gosh, love all the non-verbal communication between these two!!! I didn't realize how much I miss seeing it again. All the yearning looks, expressive eyes... the question, the trust, the gamble, the heartache... 





Funny how you can see the emotional progression of his character simply from scrolling down...

Wished Bioware know the magic that they did with this romance that majority of the playerbase was ignorant about. Here's hoping Arcann would be as lovely.

aoibhealfae: Red and white? Well, must be the computers I've used to play, because they're distinctly pink to me. Red is the stripe on Shepard's armor, pink is what we see in the Phoenix armor. Very difference shades. Note, though, that there's a guy in Nos Astra during Samara's recruitment mission who also wears the Phoenix armor.

There's nothing wrong with the color schemes other than what we grew up with (blue denotes baby boy, pink denotes baby girl). Hell, I've out Wrex in phoenix armor. Maybe Garrus, too. But my own cultural biases tend to be against putting men in pink. However, since that armor isn't the best, no one stays in it for long.

As for Kaidan, well, I'm making an assumption that BioWare had some general idea that it would be Ash or Liara most often and so left the same armor for all.

dmc1001 I saw it the first time. Also I modded ME2 with all casuals and armor, it is default red/white, same as Ashley's actually (she only wore the pink version at Horizon which is why people assume Kaidan wore that armor). Then again, ME2 have this terrible orange/yellow tint that may screw with colour perception.

Yes, they almost certainly feared fan reaction in ME1. But the dialogue is all there and has been uncovered.

Not so sure that term was even in use in 2007 so I doubt it would have happened exactly as such.  And I can blame them, just as I can blame them for the shitty homo content in MEA.  They amended things later on in ME3 so I was happy but, yes, I can blame them.

Also a possibilty.

Because this a thread about Kaidan. I didn't like it when Liara or Peebee made sexual advances at me either. But obviously they don't apply in a thread about Kaidan. 

Kaidan did wear a red and white armor and it still showed under normal light during the cutscene. Heck, if you wear that exact shade of pink, the colour wouldn't show that dark in amber light... it will be washout light brown orange.

Which is why Ashley wear red and white armor as well.
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dustiesmasseffect.tumblr.com/post/143775132249/kaidan-romance-and-me1/embed
" I spoke with Lukas Kristjanson (write of Kaidan in ME1) this weekend, and learned something about the ‘Kaidan was supposed to be an LI in ME1′ debate surrounding the pre-recorded romance lines by Meer.

Lukas admitted that Kaidan was never intended to be a same-sex LI in ME1, and that this wasn’t some malicious plot from the higher-ups who yanked it at the last second for some reason. He did tell me that he never thought Kaidan was straight, and that he always thought he’d be open to loving a man (and thought that discrimination based on sexuality while in space would be odd), but never explained why he was never an option in ME1.

He did, however, explain why Meer recorded the lines (and why Hale recorded for the Ashley romance as well). This was the first time that Bioware had ever had a voiced protagonist, and their technology was still a bit crude. They didn’t have the ability at the time to flag the dialogue as either ‘male’ or ‘female’, and so they had the VA’s record ALL of the lines for the game so they could use what they needed and scrap what they didn’t later on. This made it so the VA’s would just come in, record all the dialogue, and then Bioware didn’t need to call them back into the studio to do more lines after they developed their dialogue technology a little more. Basically, it saved them time and money to record everything and just cut what they didn’t need later on. Lukas pointed out that the dialogue that Meer read was all female dialogue, and that Sbarge never recorded dialogue with male pronouns.

But Lukas said he was thrilled when Kaidan was made available to Male Shepards in ME3, and even though he didn’t get to write Kaidan for the game (he’d moved on to Dragon Age full-time by that point), he thought the new writer did a fantastic job of making the romance a natural progression from friends to lovers. He really enjoyed the male romance with Kaidan. "

There is no conspiracy, its just that they never considered their manly MaleShep as anything but default straight male video game protagonist. They even halfheartedly made FemShep that when you create a new character, you won't see the option to play as her. She's just a placeholder female character like all their games.

What's more even more strange was the lack of M/M romance in ME2 since Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2 already offered Zevran, Anders and Fenris by then. ME2's writers and players never seem to realize Miranda and Oriana are Henry Lawson's clones, was genetically altered to appear as women. Rather than explore this aspect of her, the game simply want you to view Miranda's body sexually in every frame. Try watching Orphan Black and imagine Miranda being aware of the existence of her other clones.

Then again. most of the meaningful aspects in Mass Effect series was the ones they unintentionally create.

Does this mean you are making the same complaints in those threads?

I dont trust ME team, and we know by gaycaravaggio that no having a m/m squadmate in MEA was intentional to not hurt dudebros's minds, in 20 freaking 17, so I will be taking with a grain of salt the official statement about Kaidan in ME1, because in that time Casey Hudson said Shepard couldnt be gay and the Asari werent females thus asari are not lesbian options even though the codex explicitly say that they are a monogendered female race. Anyway ME team sucks, Casey Hudson sucks


In defence of Sera's writer, I've only heard good things from queer women about her romance, some of them just dont like her because she's childish or "annoying", but her sex scene is treated with a lot of respect and no male gaze unlike other f/f options.

Anyway please, let's gush over this lovely man and forget the rest.

Boo hoo for you, not getting your favorite character to be 100% straight.  I have no empathy for you.  I got jackshit until Kaidan was made bisexual.

Actually, I have mentioned this about Liara multiple times on other threads on how much I hate her and how much I can't stand how Bioware tries to force her romance on to you. I may not have done it on the specific character thread. But I'm not going to go on a thread for a character I don't like. And before you say "why are you doing it in a Kaidan thread?" Unlike Liara, I actually like Kaidan. You should also know that I have said nothing but positive things about Kaidan before on this same thread before my one small complaint that people are blowing out of proportion.

As for Peebee, I just don't care enough about MEA to do that.