Characters / Mass Effect Race Tropes Citadel Council

This page is for listing the tropes related to the Citadel Council species in the Mass Effect universe, each with their own (often averted) tropes.

For the pages listing tropes related to specific characters in the trilogy, see the Mass Effect Character Index.

This page includes significant spoilers, and some are by their nature unmarked. Read at your own discretion.

Citadel Space in general

Citadel Space is an unofficial term used to refer to the area of the galaxy that recognizes the authority of the Citadel Council. It covers the vast majority of military, economic, demographic, scientific, and political power in the known galaxy.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • In-universe, Citadel Space holds the opinion that simple VIs can provide everything an AI can without the risk of rebellion. As a result, the creation of advanced AIs is heavily regulated, and the Citadel governments shut down all their "true" AIs 300 years ago, soon after the Geth War. AI research is still allowed but scrutinized and monitored very heavily.
  • However, note that this policy is only internal and they're willing to coexist with external polities composed of AIs. The only time they've discovered a truly alien AI, they made peaceful first contact with it and set up trade despite having the ability to easily destroy it (though there were still tensions).
• All Nations Are Superpowers: Subverted. While it seems that groups like the Systems Alliance or Asari Republics are superpowers that control countless worlds, reading the codex and Cerberus Daily News reveals that in actuality they're simply EU-style federations of independent states that exist to present a unified front to other galactic polities. The only faction that plays this trope is the Turian Hierarchy, being a straight empire that was forged in the aptly named Unification Wars.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: Halfway between the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek and Babylon 5's Interstellar Alliance.
• Benevolent Precursors: In the "Refusal" ending of 3, the current Citadel races are wiped out by the Reapers, but the knowledge they leave behind allows the next cycle to finally triumph over them.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Compared to the militaristic turians, the other Citadel species seem weak. But one must remember that the Krogan Rebellions were going on for years before the turians intervened, indicating that they were anything but an easy fight to the krogan empires. In the earlier Rachni Wars, they held off the rachni for over a century before uplifting the aforementioned krogan. In Revelations, Goyle also notes that despite being less militarized than the turians, the asari and salarian fleets are actually bigger collectively than the turians are alone (with generally better technology for the latter), and that both dwarf humanity's own strength.
  • Citadel Space in general qualifies. With its high standards of living, tolerance, first-resort use of diplomacy, heavily demilitarized current state, and devotion to The Laws and Customs of War, many Terminus residents see them as soft. But as their past wars show, the Council species can become just as savage as anyone else when pushed - and their savagery is backed by an extremely powerful economy. It's just been a long time since they've had to take the gloves off (and the speed of the Reapers' advance doesn't really give them a chance when it would be useful). Even in the peacetime of the present, there's a reason that even a hardened batarian terrorist like Charn fears provoking the Council more than anything.
• Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: The three Council races each specialize in one of these approaches, and each recognizes the benefits of having the other two. Turians have the strongest military in the galaxy, asari are considered the galaxy's best diplomats, and salarians are masters of intelligence gathering. Humans can supplement all three as needed.
• The Federation: Citadel Space consists of trillions of individuals in many species united in a European Union-esque arrangement. It's been continuous for over 2,700 years by the time of the games, so the species are fairly well-integrated with each other.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The original three Council races fit this paradigm. The turians are the Fighters, being a disciplined Proud Warrior Race who serve as the primary military arm of the Council. The asari are the Mages, being particularly attuned to biotic abilities and diplomacy while also possessing natural telepathic abilities. The salarians are the Thieves, focusing on intelligence-gathering and science. When humans joined the Council, they filled the role of the Jack of All Stats that can supplement any of the three as needed.
• Fire-Forged Friends:
  • The current Power Trio of the Council species was formed in the aftermath of the Krogan Rebellions, in which the turians, asari, and salarians led a galactic war effort against the krogan empires in a conflict that lasted centuries. At the end of it, the turians rightfully gained a Council seat and the stage was set for 1,500 years of peace and progress.
  • The Eden Prime War and especially the Reaper War does the same thing to the existing Council species and the newcomer of humanity, as well as previously exiled member species such as the quarians and krogan. Special mention goes to the turian-human relationship. Ultimately, the relationship between Vakarian and Shepard is mirrored in the relationship between their species - despite having initially gone to war with one another, the fact that both their homeworlds are hard-hit by the Reaper invasion causes them to bond together to the point where their ground troops trade good-natured barbs about each other.
  Garrus: Why does the Alliance hire pilots with brittle bone disease?
  Joker: You're shitting me. The turian military has one about me?
  Garrus: Oh, absolutely. I heard it myself from a private back on Palaven.
  Joker: All right, why does the Alliance hire pilots with brittle bone disease?
  Garrus: So their marines can beat someone in hand-to-hand combat drills.
• Galactic Superpower: Anyone who's anyone is part of Citadel Space. Barla Von claims that 80% of the known galaxy's population recognizes the Council's authority. In Andromeda: Annihilation, a bioterrorist notes that killing trillions of Citadel Space citizens wouldn't do much, because "there's far too many of them on too many worlds to really change the balance of power." The implications of this are pretty ridiculous.
• Hufflepuff House:
  • Among other hints, the codex noting that there are several turian client races (as opposed to just one, the volus) implies that there are many minor species in Citadel Space that we simply never see during the events of the four games.
  • Ascension notes that there were a dozen species in Citadel Space's society before the humans arrived. Ignoring the humans, raloi, and Virtual Aliens, all of whom made first contact after this point, that leaves five or six species unaccounted for. The games only show seven: asari, turians, salarians, elcor, volus, hanar, and drell (the batarians having left Citadel Space before the humans arrived, and the quarians and krogan having been expelled). And the drell probably aren't being counted because their population is mostly on one planet and doesn't even constitute a rounding error. Both Andromeda's in-universe history exhibit and Barla Von's dialogue in the first game also state that there are dozens, plural, of sapient species in Citadel Space, and that only the most powerful and influential are represented on the Citadel via embassies, further indicating that there are a lot of minor species that we simply don't see. The hanar, volus, and elcor all have embassies, for reference, so these other species are logically less important than them.
• Interspecies Romance: After thousands of years of integration, this has become fairly common in Citadel Space, to the point that popular mainstream movies are produced about the subject (e.g. Fleet and Flotilla) and the most populous Council species, the asari, considers it the average rather than the exception.
• MegaCorp: Due to Citadel Space's extreme wealth, even its mid-sized corporations are capable of taking over entire planets in the Terminus systems.
• Power Trio: The Council powers initially consist of the Asari Republics, the Turian Hierarchy, and the Salarian Union, which are by far the most powerful polities in the galaxy. There are four Council powers after the first game, the fourth member being the human Systems Alliance, but they're a distant fourth (comparable to the elcor), so the trope still stands de facto.
• Species Loyalty: Downplayed. Each of the polities making up Citadel Space are overwhelmingly composed of one species, but interspecies mixing among worlds is standard. Even the new human world of Elysium is noted to be 50% non-human, and this is not implied to be particularly abnormal for colony worlds. There are even references to thriving vorcha populations in Citadel Space, enough for some of them to reach mainstream acclaim as actors.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Each faction in Citadel Space makes use of thousands of frigates, destroyers, cruisers, carriers, and dreadnoughts, as well as a larger number of corvettes and fighters. Space freighters, colony ships, yachts, and so on are commonplace among the civilian population.
• Utopia: Reasonably close to one. Crime and corruption still exist to some extent, but the average citizen is ridiculously rich in material goods compared to even first-world citizens today, major utilities and healthcare are free (the codex mentions gene therapy and extranet access as specific examples), interstellar travel is cheap and common, genetic diseases have been eradicated with average human/turian/etc. lifespans being up to 150 years (with other species varying depending on their own biology), and businesses are booming and ready to provide just about any service that isn't free for fairly reasonable prices. Citadel Space is borderline post-scarcity thanks to widespread asteroid mining, H3-DT fusion power,^note For civilians; military starships are powered by antimatter-matter annihilation instead. omnipresent VIs/robots, and microfabricators, with many conversations in Mass Effect 2 making it clear that sapient labor and a select few rare resources (like antimatter and certain light and heavy metals) are the only things that have much value anymore. The average citizen is so materially rich that even multi-thousand ton FTL capable spaceships are considered ambitious but buyable by single middle class travelers.^note A retired NCO buys the obsolescent destroyer Audacity in the novel Initiation, and several quarian pilgrims make reference to wanting to buy a ship to bring back to their fleet, as if such a thing is perfectly doable. In the comics and novels released to coincide with Andromeda, more than one character notes that the biggest challenge in (non-human) Council societies is boredom.
• We Have Become Complacent: Justified. The last major galactic wars (the Krogan Rebellions) were nearly 1,500 years ago. As a result Citadel Space is effectively demilitarized at the time of the games, to the point that humanity (which explicitly has mere tens of billions of people compared to trillions in the rest of Citadel Space at a generally higher level of development, i.e. humanity has less than 1% of the total population and industry) is able to get within striking distance of the established great powers' military strength in less than thirty years by building thousands of warships, and a fringe terrorist group with probably significantly less than a single percent of humanity's economic power built over sixty◊ heavy cruisers◊ and a dreadnought◊ in just a few years with the funds skimmed off the top of shell companies, funds minor enough that no one noticed they were missing.^note Which, considering a moderately popular soft drink company has yearly revenue of more than 4.38 quadrillion credits (Tupari's ads say that they sell 12 trillion bottles per day), and minor interstellar traffic jams can knock over a trillion credits off the galactic economy in a single day with no one noticing (per CDN), is completely believable. Citadel Space maintain fleets and armies just large enough to put down infrequent pirate raids, insurgencies, and the occasional rogue state, much like, say, the United States post-Cold War. This leaves them woefully unprepared when the Reapers arrive, and due to the speed of the Reapers' advance, they never get a chance to go into total war production to compensate.
  Kaidan: I can't blame [the Council], though. They've had over a thousand years of peace. Who'd want to believe that's over?
• A World Half Full: While not without its faults, Citadel Space is generally presented as quite a nice place to live.

Turians

Turians

If you want a problem shot, ask a turian...

—Renegade Shepard

Homeworld: Palaven

The third race to join the Citadel Council. The Turian Hierarchy is a very organized and militant society. Every physically and mentally-sound turian is either a soldier, a retired soldier or training to be a soldier. This has resulted in the Turian Hierarchy having the largest military force in the galaxy. Turians were the first alien species that humanity encountered. Unfortunately, this encounter took the form of the First Contact War. Although the other two Council Races managed to end the war diplomatically, human-turian relations are still rocky.

Turians are available for multiplayer and can use the Sentinel and Soldier classes. The Retaliation DLC also adds Ghost Infiltrators, Havoc Soldiers, and Saboteur Engineers. The Reckoning DLC adds Cabal Vanguards.

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• Alien Blood: The turians have blue blood, although you'd be forgiven for not noticing until Garrus takes a rocket to the face in Mass Effect 2.
• Badass Army: They have extremely disciplined armies, the largest fleet of non-Reaper warships (well over 10,000), the most dreadnoughts (39), and a proud military tradition.
  • They were able to hold their own against the krogan empires in a decades-long war of attrition at a time before the genophage when the krogan were actually breeding faster than the other races. They also managed to take down the fleets of krogan dreadnoughts with cruisers and frigates, which required a lot of expertise and production capability.
  • "Reaper troop transports have dumped hordes of husk to capture Palaven's inhabitants but met with little success. Reaper capital ships are destroying city after city. But much of the turian fleet is still operable, and the citizenry is heavily armed. The turians refuse to be intimidated." To put this perspective, the turians are holding their own (even if it's just barely) against the largest part of the Reaper fleet assigned to any individual planet, which they sent in knowing the power of the turian fleet. They even managed to destroy a few Sovereign-class capital ships in the opening attack (contrast the humans and asari who got completely curbstomped in a few hours once the Reapers committed their forces.) They are the only race who actually manage to fight the Reapers on even terms (even if it was still a Hopeless War); the Reaper attacks on Earth and Thessia quickly turn into routs. This could be attributed to Palaven leadership actually preparing for the Reapers, as Garrus and his father convinced the Primarch to consider the fact that the Reapers were real.
  • Of note is that every turian who is of age and is of sound mental capability is a soldier. Military service is mandatory across the entirety of their space. If that turian can walk and talk, that turian is trained to fight. Supplemental material notes that every turian household keeps small arms inside, and every able-bodied turian of fighting age can use them. In 3 this extends to rocket launchers, thanks to the ability of common nanofabricators to produce designs like the Krysae.
  • Of particular note is the Armiger Legion. Every member has a Power Fist, consumable packs that grant borderline invincibility, the best weapons in the empire, and a jetpack.
• Bird People: A less obvious example than usual, but they were modelled after birds of prey, and indeed do have some raptor-esque traits. More than a few Alliance soldiers will refer to them occasionally as "the birds", though these days in admiration.
• Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • Their homeworld, Palaven, has a weak geomagnetic field, meaning it gets bombarded by more solar radiation than comparable planets like Earth or Thessia. How did Palaven's life adapt? It evolved a semi-metallic carapace.
  • They also have dextro-protein chirality (which is basically the biochemical equivalent of being a book read right-to-left in a library of books read left-to-right) and are the only race aside from quarians with this chirality. As such, they can eat any food a quarian can eat. Foods that levo-protein races like humans and asari can eat, on the other hand, will pass out the other end without providing any sustenance at best, or outright kill them at worst.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Though many aliens seem to have trouble with human metaphors, turians in particular struggle with the concept fullstop. Even Garrus has a problem with 'em. Although they are intrigued by how humans have a way with words.
• Bottled Heroic Resolve: The DLC turian classes have a "Stimulant Pack" power that boosts shields and weapon damage.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Humans and turians fought a war that led to humanity's entering the greater galactic population. Humans call it the First Contact War. Turians call it the Relay 314 Incident.
• Cat Folk: While they're mainly modeled after birds, their facial features are very leonine.
• Colony Drop:
  • The turians frequently employ this tactic as a solution to deal with ground-forces, notably seen in the First Contact War and casually suggested by Garrus to take out the enemy geth on Rannoch, much to Tali's horror.
  • They were also frequently the victims of this during the Krogan Rebellions. The krogan had a habit of smashing asteroids into turian planets. It just made the turians angry. Notably, Palaven's moons are classified military installations, specifically to prevent hostile forces from using them as a weapon against the planet.
• Combat by Champion: One of the traditional ways turians can resolve large-scale conflicts: a duel between chosen representatives of each party. Parodied during a certain Cerberus Daily News story covering the War on Taetrus. A turian general and a leader of the rebel group Facinus got into a sword fight to decide the fate of Taetrus. When the rebel leader lost, very obviously photo-shopped images started surfacing the next day showing the general cheating in the duel. Facinus used these images as an excuse to declare war anyway.
• Combat Pragmatist: In a way. In their culture, every turian serves in the army for a while after they reach puberty. Therefore, any population center with adults is considered a military installation. They are... reluctant to abandon this mindset when facing other species. To give an example, during their siege of Shanxi, the turian fleets bombed entire city blocks from orbit simply to take out individual fireteams. As revealed in the third game, they also hid a massive bomb in a major tectonic fault line on Tuchanka as a backup plan in case the genophage didn't work.
  Garrus: Brutal, but it makes a certain kind of sense. Put the krogan down hard if they tried anything.
• Conscription: At 15, turians begin a compulsory term of military service for an unknown length of time (possibly to age 30,) at the end of which they decide whether to remain with the military or become a civil servant. Those who choose to leave are still reservists and can be called back into action should the need arise. The turian military also handles civil service duties such as maintaining infrastructure, police, and bureaucracy, meaning these reservists aren't necessarily going to be handling combat roles except in extreme times of need.
• Defeat Means Friendship: The turians absorb any conquered enemies (both turians and other races) into their ranks as supplementary units. While these units are rarely treated as anything more than infantry or cavalry, at the conclusion of a successful term of service, they are then granted full turian citizenship, with all rights and responsibilities thereof.
• Determinator: A popular saying goes: "You will only see a turian's back when he's dead." Early in the Krogan Rebellions, the krogan tried to destroy the turians' will to fight by hurling asteroids at their colonies. All this did was make the turians even more determined to win. When the Reapers invade Palaven in Mass Effect 3, they continue holding their own and refuse to surrender, to the point that they pin down massive amounts of Reaper resources into conquering their homeworld for months on end, giving everyone else time to continue the fight elsewhere.
• Didn't Think This Through: Though typically not to the same degree as the salarians, turian culture's focus on obeying the letter of the law can lead turians to not consider extenuating circumstances. The most notable example was during the First Contact War, when turians destroyed a human merchant flotilla that was illegally opening mass relays then occupying their colony world. During this whole debacle the turians never considered that humans were obviously an uncontacted species which meant that they had no means of knowing about the laws they were breaking, and Citadel Space had no knowledge of humanity's military capabilities, which led them to attacking humanity without warning, only for them to get a nasty surprise when a fleet showed up to liberate their colony world. The asari and salarians were furious with the turians when they found out what was happening, especially when the turians' first response was to ready an even larger fleet.
• Do Not Go Gentle: More than any other race in the galaxy, the turians breathe this trope. Despite obviously losing, they spend almost the entirety of the Reaper War (implied to be months), engaging the Reapers in an extended slugging match over their homeworld on relative terms that forces the Reapers to commit more to a single front, and with a krogan alliance, score the single largest victory in the war. Absolutely no other race that has their homeworld heavily targeted even comes close putting up the level of resistance that the turians do.
• Everyone Has Standards: The Citadel archives show that even the turian military didn't want to deploy the genophage, with a General Ripper basically overriding them and the salarians and pressing the Big Red Button himself.
• Fantastic Caste System: Downplayed. Turian society is stratified into 27 separate tiers of citizenship, each with its own distinct set of social privileges and duties. However, turian society is intensely meritocratic, and moving up the ladder is not only possible but to some extent expected. For example, promotion to the 26th tier is gained by joining the (compulsory) military service, and promotion to the 25th by honorably completing said service.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: As turians come from a dextro protein-based biosphere, they can only live off of food with a matching chirality and have to take care not to eat foods meant for levo protein-oriented species.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: They're about halfway between space Prussians and space Romans with some Confucianism thrown in for flavor. Literally in this last case - since making peace with the humans, a small but growing number of turians have taken up Confucianism. That said, their dominant religion, while Shinto-esque, parallels Christianity enough that heaven, hell, and saints, amongst other things, are used as translations of their faith's equivalent concepts.
• Fatal Flaw: Rigidity; they are so obsessed rules, laws, and regulations that the mere act of breaking any of them is practically their Berserk Button. Consequentially, they either can't or won't think out of the box, even when they really need to. A few turians, like Garrus and later Victus, acknowledge that this strict adherence to their established order has hindered their ability to think creatively, especially in the face of a threat as great as the Reapers.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: They're the fighter to the asari mage and the salarian thief.
• Foil: Turians are contrasted against humans more than any other race, especially due to their history with the First Contact War. It's considered incredibly unfortunate that the turians, of all species, were the ones that made first contact with humankind, because the turians are so disciplined and rigid about laws that they opened fire on unidentified alien ships without even attempting to communicate, and when things escalated to warfare, they defaulted to tactics that humans consider war crimes. After the war, turians now look at humans as upstart punks with a baby military who won't learn their place and constantly whine to the Council, while humans view turians as glorified Space Fascists. Things finally cool down throughout the series as humans prove themselves an asset to Council Space, and turians show that they are just as earnest about defending humans and other species from other threats as they are fighting them. By the end of the original trilogy, the two can be considered Vitriolic Best Buds.
• Four-Star Badass: Many examples. The Cerberus Daily News brought turian General Partinax to the fore, who dueled Facinus leader Kihilix Tanus. His record is surviving seven duels, 5 to first blood and 2 to the death. The codex also references Admiral Coronati, who managed to defeat the Reapers in a fight above Palaven using relatively primitive dreadnoughts by using the Reapers' massive size against them.
  Codex: Knowing that the Reapers' weapons had a longer effective range than any of his own, Coronati made a short, daring FTL jump — landing his dreadnoughts in the middle of the Reaper fleet. The dreadnoughts then turned to line up their main guns on the Reapers, which also needed to turn to fire on the turians. This ploy used the Reapers' size against them — because they could turn faster, and their concentrated firepower downed several Reaper capital ships.
• Frontline General: Overlapping with Four-Star Badass, turian generals can be found fighting alongside their front-line troops on Manae during the Reaper invasion, including General Corinthus and General Victus, who is next in line to be the turian Primarch. Garrus, who is a government adviser on the Reapers (and is even saluted by the generals,) is right there in the thick of the fighting as well.
• Godzilla Threshold: Mass Effect 3 reveals that their use of the genophage was this; despite all the military might of the turian empire initially turning things against them, the krogan were winning the war in the end, having pushed the line all the way to one of Pavalen's moons. When the turian's learned of the genophage, they pushed for it to be used as a weapon instead of a deterrent like the salarian's were planning.
• Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?: Turian biotics are subject to much suspicion and mistrust by other turians and are taken out of normal military service and placed into special cabals. As a result of this stigma in society, some biotics decide to opt out of continuing to serve in the military after their mandatory service period has ended, to become mercenaries where their talents can be better appreciated and utilized.
• Honor Before Reason: Turians are noted to have very heavy social stigma against avoiding personal responsibility. A turian may choose not to advertise that they committed a crime but would likely admit to it if directly questioned.
• Hover Tank: They have one, the Jiris. It can traverse any terrain, has powerful kinetic barriers, and has a cannon that shoots homing missiles accurately for over 20 kilometers. Unfortunately, it never comes up in the game, only being referenced in Cerberus Daily News. It saw heavy use during the War on Taetrus.
• Humanoid Aliens: Bipedal with two forward facing eyes, but with a more bird/velociraptor like structure and metallic skin plates.
• Humorless Aliens:
  • Compared to most other species, anyway. Turians take discipline and protocol very seriously. Most of the funnier turians (like Garrus) are considered atypical of the species. The fact that turians are uptight fighting machines is one of the reasons the First Contact War was considered one of the worst ways for the human race to become introduced to Citadel Space.
  • Although they are just as likely to be Comically Serious Deadpan Snarkers. There's a reason why a certain dancing turian is so hilarious and memorable. And they do have jokes.
    "How many humans does it take to activate a Mass Relay?"
  • Wrex once said, regarding Garrus, that it was just his luck he happened to know the one turian in the galaxy who thinks he's funny.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Turians take the most direct approach to a problem. They won't hesitate to shoot someone or commit genocide if that's what it takes to end a threat permanently. See the running quote for Renegade Shepard's succinct view.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Often come across as this. Despite all their friction with humanity, after Earth is invaded by the Reapers, they are the first to step up in 3 to offer military aid, and the first willing to end the genophage, despite them being the ones who ultimately decided to use it.
• Lawful Stupid: In-Universe, their adherence to following rules led to their brief war with humanity. Part of the resentment felt by humans is because, while they understand that they were simply enforcing galactic law, the turians never bothered to fire a warning shot or even explain that activating dormant Mass Relays was a felony, before they opened fire on them and proceeded to occupy one of their colonies.
• Masculine Lines, Feminine Curves: Perhaps to give them contrast with species like the asari, the turians tend to favor more straight lines in the The Aesthetics of Technology, their ships and weapons being particularly angular. Even the turians themselves have a kind of "edged" look to them, with their thin frames and semi-rigid plates on their skin. Yes, even the females, as shown in the third game's Omega DLC. In their case, they don't have long fringes; instead, their faceplates have more elaborate edges.
• The McCoy: To the asari Kirk and salarian Spock.
• Mirror Chemistry: The majority of the galaxy is based on levo-amino acids, whatever other differences they have. The turians and quarians are the only ones with dextro-amino-based biology. This caused them a lot of trouble during the First Contact War. Since the food on the human colonies that they conquered were levo-amino-based, they had to ship in their supplies from the Hierarchy, eventually making their position untenable.
• Mirroring Factions: Fought a war with humanity when the two species first met and were the most anti-human of the three council races but compare the stories of how the two races got their council seats. Despite the difference in biochemistry, humans and turians have more similar lifespans, gender dynamics, and social structures with each other than with the other two Council races, the salarians and asari.
• Monstrous Mandibles: Type 2, to the extent that their cheek-flaps can even be called "mandibles," that is.
• More Dakka: They're very well-known for the Phaeston, which has a very high ammo clip for an assault rifle.
• The Needs of the Many: Turian philosophy is entirely based around this. The turian species as a whole always comes before the turian individual. "Squad before self" is how Tiran Kandros puts it in Andromeda. According the codex this is so engrained into their society that the name of the in-universe musical anthem of the Hierarchy is "Die For the Cause"
• Noble Bird of Prey: Designed after eagles, actually, and definitely very lawful, though not necessarily good.
• Only Sane Man: During the Reaper invasion, they're the only major military power who aren't unhelpful and refusing to fully commit to the war effort (asari and salarians), fighting one another in civil war (quarians and geth, krogan with themselves, humans with Cerberus), or penetrated by elements actively hindering the war effort (hanar, the salarian government, Cerberus again). It's also a reason why they are the ones holding out best against the Reapers; they're the only race aside from humanity that tried to prepare for their arrival.
• Planet of Hats: Turians are renowned for and proud of their strict adherence to duty and protocol, and the fact that every member of their species has once served in the military. However, some turians are outliers. Some turians are funny, laid back, pacifists, hate red tape, and everything in between.
• Proud Warrior Race:
  • They're the most militaristic Council race by far, but they place heavy emphasis on discipline, so it's more accurate to call turians a Proud Soldier Race. It offers a Deconstruction of the trope as well: the much more proud, physically dangerous and violent krogan were defeated by the much-better organized, no-nonsense turians. It also provides an extra nuance to the issue of the genophage: if it wasn't deployed, the turians would've had to commit genocide. Their national anthem, fittingly enough, is entitled "Die For The Cause".
  • The prevalence of both firearms and military service among turians means that it is incredibly hard to suppress a resisting population center, as every able-bodied adult is a potential combatant. Part of the way internal turian conflicts are waged is that the turians will set up safe zones where those who do not wish to fight are allowed to withdraw. Once the evacuation deadline passes, any adult turians in the area of operation is considered a hostile and will be killed on-sight.
• Religious Bruiser: They named the standard assault rifle of their military the Phaeston, after the turian spirit of creation.
• Repressive, but Efficient: As an authoritarian and meritocracy-driven society, turians are expected to stay the course and not oppose their doctrines. Garrus will even snark that his tendencies make him a "bad turian" due to his propensity to question authority.
• Shoot the Dog: The salarians developed the genophage, but struggled with the moral dilemma of whether to use it to end the Krogan Rebellions. The turians unleashed the genophage instead, ending the Rebellions.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: They fit this trope in comparison to most other races, but their antithesis is the krogan. The turians are organized, disciplined, and well-equipped. While not above warrior-like concepts like personal honor, orders tend to come first, and the job has to get done no matter the cost.
• Space Plane: Contrary to being one of the more practical species, turian ships have this design if not strictly the function.
• Space Police: The fact that they have the largest fleet of warships in the galaxy (that includes the geth) make them the official peacekeepers of Citadel Space.
  • The majority of C-Sec officers are turian, making up over 50% of the total police force. We also know from the first game that there are several turian Spectres, whereas we usually only ever see one representative of each of the other species amongst their ranks.
• Space Romans: Even their names sound Roman. They even resemble eagles, the empire's official animal.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The Krysae is a turian-made anti-materiel rifle that fires high-explosive rounds.
• Super Drowning Skills: Apparently turians are poor swimmers, according to Garrus in Mass Effect 3. Makes sense considering the metal skin and apparent lack of body fat.
  Garrus: You obviously haven't seen turians swim. It's a lot of flailing and splashing interrupted by occasional bouts of drowning.
• Tattooed Crook: Inverted, as the turians have widespread Tribal Facepaint as a cultural tradition — Instead, the equivalent stereotype is applied to turians who lack facial tattoos (and thus lack loyalty to a clan), with the phrase "barefaced" becoming a shorthand for untrustworthiness. Two of the three barefaced turians across the series are straight-up villainous (Saren Arterius in 1 and Warden Kuril in 2), while the third is a sleazy politician.
  • Speaking of sleazy politicians, "barefaced" is frequently invoked by turians to mock politicans in general — The reason is that successful politicians can't align themselves with the interests of any single clan or colony.
• Theme Naming: Turian names are basically Roman, often ending in either "us" or "ian".
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: See a Colony Drop as a perfectly legitimate form of warfare.
• Tribal Facepaint: The markings on turian faces are worn to signify the home colony that s/he is descended from, a tradition that began in the aftermath of the Unification War, when several colonial chieftains decided to break away from the Hierarchy to wage a particularly bloody war between themselves, shortly after their race ventured into space. While the Hierarchy restored the peace, many turians continue to adorn themselves with their colonial markings out of nationalistic pride. On a more lighthearted note, the term "barefaced" has entered turian vernacular to mean someone who is untrustworthy.
• Utopia: While the asari are a liberal democratic utopia and the salarians are libertarians, the turians are a right-wing military meritocracy like something out of Starship Troopers. Every citizen is in service to the state (their national anthem is called “Die for the Cause”), military service is mandatory at the age of 15, and their entire culture revolves around duty, discipline, and obeying superiors. The Hierarchy is governed by the Primarchs — skilled military leaders who exclusively have the right to vote, freeing up their citizenry to maintain their societal structure like a well-oiled machine. Every turian knows their place, and excessive ambition is not encouraged. They are allowed almost total personal freedoms (including racial and religious tolerance) as long as it doesn’t impede their duties to the government. They also enjoy a stable economy thanks to their client race, the mercantile volus, who vigorously manage it, and are not a command economy (even the military's main suppliers are privately-owned, like Armax Arsenal and ERCS), but an (authoritarian) capitalist market economy with commonplace entrepreneurship (there are no shortage of turian billionaires in the tech and entertainment industries according to the background text, especially Cerberus Daily News).
• Vitriolic Best Buds: While there is still some tension with humanity due to the First Contact War, both races seem to actually get on with each other far better than they do with the salarians or asari. Both governments also are mentioned as having worked together quite well when building the original Normandy, and nowadays the turians see humans as worthy opponents, despite the fact that only 3% of their eligible population serve in the Alliance Navy. When the Reapers roll around, the turians are the first to offer aid to the humans and the Crucible project, even after their councilor had his famous air-quotes moment dismissing the reapers as a threat in the previous game.
  • Potentially become this with the krogan in the 3, though the krogan are naturally still bitter about the genophage. Primarch Victus hopes that the Reaper War will make them Fire-Forged Friends; the odds of this happening are better if Wrex is still alive. When the krogan join the human-turian alliance, the three races combined become arguably the biggest thorn in the Reapers' side.
• Worthy Opponent: What they (grudgingly) consider the humans. The First Contact War (which they refer to as the Relay 314 Incident) gained the respect of the turians due to the resourcefulness and unconventional tactics of humanity. This has become Friendly Enemy with some Teeth-Clenched Teamwork by the time of Mass Effect, and by Mass Effect 3 the two races are basically Vitriolic Best Buds. Even as early as Mass Effect 1, the first human Spectre was recommended for the position by Nihlus, a turian Spectre.
  • Some also come to view the Reapers this way, during the Reaper War. Quoth Primarch Victus:
  Adrien Victus: "The strategist in me admires their brutality. The turian in me knows I'm watching the destruction of fifteen thousand years of civilization. My civilization."
• Written by the Winners: The impression the player is given with the Krogan Rebellions in the first game was that the Genophage was a final blow to force them into submission. It's not until the third game from Adrien Victus that you learn that the war was effectively a Curbstomp Battle in the krogan's favor, and the turian homeworld was almost destroyed had it not been for the Salarians developing the Genophage to steralize them.
• Younger Than They Look: Well, act would be the better word than look. Of the two main turian party members the franchise has had, both Garrus and Vetra act like and have careers of a human in their 30s but are in their mid to late 20s. As a whole it seems like the turian mature earlier than humans. Whether this is a societal or biological trait is still up in the air.
  • Their mandatory military service begins at age 15, which may indicate a commonly-accepted point of maturity among the species, comparable to age 18 for humans.

Asari

Asari

....if you want a problem talked to death, ask an asari....

—Renegade Shepard

Homeworld: Thessia

One of the two founding races of Citadel Space alongside the salarians and the most powerful and widespread race in the known galaxy, the asari often take the role of diplomats. They are a long lived (lifespans generally covering a millennium) mono-gendered race but are seen as female by other species. Asari reproduce by linking their nervous system to another sentient being of any race and gender. The linking helps to randomize the asari's DNA while encouraging positive traits from the "father" species to manifest in the offspring (supposedly), which is always another asari. Partnerships of two asari are looked down upon by most of the species now as they believe it restricts genetic diversity (not to mention that asari born from such a relationship have a much higher chance of being Ardat-Yakshi, a very dangerous mutation). Their government is a loose federation of nation-states collectively known as the Asari Republics. All asari have biotic ability but require training to use it effectively.

Asari is available for multiplayer in 3 and can use the Adept and Vanguard classes. The Resurgence pack adds the Justicar Adept class, and the Retaliation DLC adds Huntress Infiltrators and Valkyrie Sentinels.

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• Alien Blood: Bluish purple.
• Alien Hair: They object to anyone (but themselves) referring to it as "tentacle-hair."
  Liara: They're semi-flexible, cartilage-based scalp-crests that grow into shape—and they don't "flop around."
• Always Someone Better: Considered to be the most gifted race, due to their lifespan that easily quadruples everyone but krogan, Mind Meld like powers, and extremely advanced technology, which all causes issues with other Council races. The asari deliberately cultivated this reaction among the Citadel races when they were first integrated, and while they are still considered to be extremely gifted in the 2100s, the significant number of asari born from one asari and another alien race has made being a direct asari or being associated with asari traditions something that is looked down upon within their own culture. That, and nearly every species on Thessia were naturally infused with eezo, making them natural biotic experts. As Javik's comments and The Reveal on Thessia show, they were evolving at the same rate as humans in terms of technology and intelligence, but the intervention of the Protheans bolstered them to an advanced level, and those few who ever knew about it increased it even further by using a Prothean Beacon and keeping it secret from all other races.
• All Women Are Lustful: Most of other races have this impression of asari. Justified to a small degree considering that it's pretty common for those in their maiden years to either become mercenaries or dancers/prostitutes. Their reproduction habits and concepts about sexuality don't help either. This is actually seen by some as something of a problem in their society—Aethyta, in 2, comments that asari maidens should be doing productive jobs instead of wasting their youths table-dancing or adventuring as mercs. Joker gets a viciously boneheaded remark on the subject in 3 when Thessia is destroyed by the Reapers, noting that things might have gone better for them if they had more commandos and fewer strippers.
• Amazon Brigade: Any asari force, by virtue of all its members being female.
• Badass Army: All asari troops have powerful biotic powers, decades to centuries of training/experience, and, thanks to their powerful economy, access to the best non-experimental gear that money can buy.
  • The asari commandos are widely considered to be some of the most dangerous warriors in the galaxy, as even the "typical" asari commando has spent two or three decades training and hardening themselves for war, with the long-term professionals having quite literally spent centuries learning how to fight. Even the codex notes that getting into a one-on-one fight with one is practically suicide. Their navy is also the third most powerful in the galaxy, behind the turians and geth. There's a turian saying: "The asari are the finest warriors in the galaxy. Fortunately, there are not many of them."
  • On a strategic level, asari territory can usually be quickly conquered... and just as quickly becomes an ungovernable quagmire, as elite biotic insurgents sabotage and assassinate everything. It is worth noting that, even though their standing army on Thessia and other asari worlds are quickly overwhelmed by the Reapers, it is still extremely difficult to actually subjugate a planet whose entire population consists of biotics, and the asari's decentralized nature makes it hard to force a surrender unless all of them agree to submit.
  • The armed forces of an asari settlement also depend on the city-state in question. Those of a small colony or town will be little more than light militia of a few asari with small arms and light armor. The defense forces for a major city on a core world can be large and well-armed, with tanks, artillery, and aircraft.
  • Measuring their ship models reveals that, due to their odd shape, they actually have about twenty times the volume of turian ships of the same type. Their cruisers mass significantly more than human and turian dreadnoughts, though lack the sheer one-shot firepower due to their railguns' power being dependent on length. Despite their size, the codex also notes that asari ships are if anything quicker than those used other species.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: They're apparently able to produce viable offspring with every other sentient race in the galaxy, including ammonia-breathing volus, turians and quarians whom have an entirely different body chemistry from the other species in the galaxy, non-mammalian salarians, drell and krogan, and aquatic hanar. It's indicated in-game that the asari use their partner's DNA as a source of randomness to rearrange their own to produce a genetically unique child. They can obviously also mate with each other, though this is frowned on since contact with alien races became commonplace for their species.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Subverted with most asari: asari eyes turn black when they "meld," an act that merges their nervous system with anothers that is also how asari reproduce. With Ardat-Yakshi, though, it's played straight.
• Boldly Coming: Justified. Asari can mate with any other species, and it's encouraged that they do so. Relations between two asari are considered taboo, perhaps because the child has a higher (bit still tiny) chance of being born an Ardat-Yakshi. This unfortunately leads to In-Universe comments about asari promiscuity.
• Can't Argue with Elves: Asari have played themselves as this for millennia and gotten away with it.
• The Chessmaster: Matriarchs, the oldest asari, are said to make plans that are so complicated (often spanning decades or centuries) that most other beings find them incomprehensible. When you have centuries of life left, you don't really mind waiting a decade or two for a plan to pay off.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Their ground forces. The asari military's focus on elite biotic commandos and light infantry instead of a professional, mechanized standing army means that the turians are relied upon as the heavy hitters in any ground conflict. When the Reapers attack Thessia while the turians are bogged down fighting another Reaper force on their own home front, Thessia falls swiftly once the Reapers win in space because of the lack of a large, standing ground army. They do seem to have some fairly effective air support of their own, but those survive about as long as the other species' against the Reapers.
  • Asari infantry also focus on guerilla warfare to weaken their enemy to make up for their lack of numbers, ranging from attacking weak spots, to destroying supply lines to weaken their enemy. When fighting an enemy that doesn't use supply lines or anything outright exploitable, all their skill goes out the window, which is why they are considered so deadly by pretty much all the other races, as all the major military powers rely on things like that to fight. The Reapers victory over them primarily comes from the fact that the asari can't use the same tactics against them like they would any other military force; Reapers don't need supply lines, command centers, hospitals, etc.
• Constantly Curious: Asari have a fascination with learning and understanding, because their longevity means they can patiently wait to figure a difficult topic or subject out. This is also reinforced in their sexuality and mating cultures—one asari on Illium mentions that dating any race besides a krogan is popular because it's less commitment (the asari is guaranteed to outlive them), and Cora mentions in Andromeda that asari are curious about everything and take a lot of time to "figure things out." According to Peebee, this greatly diminishes once they get to the Matriarch stage. They stop being curious and stop wanting to learn new things because they're so sure they've Seen It All by that point. Again, this also depends on the individual. Samara is a Matriarch well beyond her wanderlust years, and staunchly rigid in morals, but she has a very open mind, particularly in regards to humanity.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: The dominant aesthetic of the asari culture. Even some of their weapons conform to it in Mass Effect 3, being smooth, white and elegantly curved.
• Doomed Hometown: In the third game, some of their worlds burn. Specifically, their homeworld, Thessia, to an extent.
• Elite Mooks: Their entire military is made of up these. While they are effective to say the least, this by consequence makes their military relatively small and unable to wage an effective drawn out war (keep in mind, this is all relative; their actual military is still one of the most powerful in the galaxy), instead relying on the turians for protection. To put it in perspective, you hear two separate accounts of a commando dueling a krogan veteran. In the first case, the battle lasted for days, blew up a space station, and ended in a draw (Wrex vs. an unseen asari, but heavily implied in-game to be Aria.) In the second case, the two of them killed each other (Matriarch Aethyta's parents, and by extension Liara's grandparents.) The turians have a saying, "The asari are the finest warriors in the galaxy. Fortunately, there are not many of them."
• Exotic Equipment: They are renowned for being able to mate (and produce viable offspring) with either gender of any species in existence, due to the unusual nature of their nervous system and reproductive methodology. This does not, however, address the messy issue of where parts... go. However, the fact that asari give birth (Atheyta says she didn't "pop Liara out.") implies that asari have an orifice analogous to a vagina (especially since love scenes between Liara and, in Andromeda, Peebee reveal that asari anatomy is similar to human women to the point that they have nipples). The "Lair of the Shadow Broker" DLC for the second game implies that they have some kind of lower-body erogenous zone colloquially referred to as "azure". Andromeda makes it clear that they can have and enjoy sex without melding through Peebee's romance arc.
• Experimented in College: Played With. Though same-sex relationships are not frowned upon in asari culture (because they see gender as meaningless) same-species couples between asari are a huge taboo. That said, it's common for asari commandos to form sexual relationships during deployment, and it's seen as a natural part of them "figuring things out". Of note here is that have romantic relationships with other asari is not seen as a taboo so much as having children with other asari.
• Facial Markings: Most (but not all) asari have some kinds of marking on their faces, ranging from subtle (Liara) to not-so-subtle (Councillor Tevos). What significance they have, or even if they're natural or artificial, has not been explained.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: Thessia has such high concentrations of element zero that traces are found in all living things, and the asari consequently adapted to a diet laced with the substance. Consequently, Thessian eateries make two separate menus, one with eezo and one without, and asari living offworld have to take eezo in dietary supplements.
• Fantastic Racism: Asari frown on asari-asari mating, with the derogatory "pureblood" epithet aimed at offspring. According to the asari, making with another asari doesn't add anything, as they use the DNA of other species as essentially a random number generator. On a deeper level, Ardat-Yakshi can be the result of an asari-asari union, which may be the source of the bigotry.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Of the ancient Greek city-states, apparently.
• Fatal Flaw: Arrogance. The asari have a well-deserved reputation of being the galaxy's premier scholar race; they know it and take a lot of pride in it. This is further compounded by their Millennium-long Lifespans. However, this attitude causes several problems in their society:
  • They are extremely stagnant on a technological-cultural level, and have no real desire to innovate, meaning their technology has largely been the same for nearly three millennia. Matriarch Aethyta mentions how her proposal to build Mass Relays got her laughed off of Thessia.
  • Major wars break out regularly, but their emphasis on philosophy and diplomacy do little-to-nothing to stop/prevent them. It's typically another race that actually solves the problem.
    • Related to above, they choose not to have a particularly large army, instead preferring to train elite commandoes in guerilla-warfare tactics as well as relying on the turians, and later the humans, for larger military operations and defense. This comes back to bite them when the Reapers attack Thessia. The turians and humans alike are stuck fighting on their respective homeworlds, and able to (barely) hold out for months. The asari, on the other hand, are completely overrun and lose their homeworld in a matter of days.
  • Most younger asari spend their first three centuries as strippers or mercenaries, rather than serve their society in any meaningful way, which causes further stagnation.
  • The asari arrogance is best exemplified in the third game, when the Reapers attack their homeworld. It is revealed that they have secretly been hoarding an incredibly valuable Prothean beacon from the rest of Citadel space, an action that is highly illegal in the citadel laws THEY largely created, all just to maintain an advantage over the rest of the galaxy. They could have used and shared this technology to destroy the Reapers, but instead they squandered it to keep an edge, which very nearly dooms the only chance to save their species and the galaxy from the Reapers.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The mage in the asari-turian-salarian Trio.
• Flash Step: Asari multiplayer characters do a short-range version of this instead of rolling.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: They look like human women wearing rubber headpieces and blue makeup, just "other" enough to be exotic but still attractive to humans. And everyone else.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The singlemost powerful and influential species of their cycle, powerhouses in nearly every field, most of it owed simply to the fact that they're very good at being civil and friendly. For a concrete example, the asari have the greatest economy in the galaxy, just because they're that skilled at charming people into trade deals.
• The Hecate Sisters: A species-wide example. Their life goes as such: once they mature, they spend two hundred years in a state of perpetual wanderlust and thrill-seeking, tending to be mercenaries, explorers, and strippers; a life phase they call the "Maiden" years. Once they hit three hundred or so, they feel the need to settle down and raise a family; the "Matron" phase. Once they tip over the seven hundred point, they retire to become Matriarchs, using their experience and power to lead and advise (politicians, spiritual leaders, and bartenders) — though a very few number of them become Justicars. One of their religions involves worshiping a goddess who vacillates between the three stages as well.
• High on Homicide: This is what makes Ardat-Yakshi so dangerous. When an Ardat-Yakshi melds with someone, she experiences an intense euphoria similar to heavy-duty narcotics. This sensation is extremely addictive, and Ardat-Yakshi who kill leave behind astronomical body counts in their attempts to experience that feeling again.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Naturally. Their unique reproductive method, which is closest to a strange form of parthenogenesis, only requires the partner to have an advanced nervous system to produce offspring.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: There are recorded instances of asari-elcor romances, and at least one case of asari-elcor offspring.
• Humanoid Aliens: Of the species encountered in the game, asari are the ones that most resemble humans, with blue skin and cartilaginous structures instead of hair.
• Hypocrite:
  • They are behind a number of the Council's laws, including one that requires any species who uncovers Prothean technology to turn it over to the Council while they secretly keep an intact beacon on their homeworld in order to give themselves a technological edge over the rest of the galaxy.
  • They frown on batarians for allowing slavery as part of their culture, but one of their noteworthy planets, Illium, has slavery legalized through legal loopholes. When confronted over it, they will insist that it's "Indentured Servitude." Even the asari from Synthetic Oversights will call it for what it is: "slavery", and the Citadel isn't fooled, either.
• If It's You, It's Okay: They are the "you" to many people of many species. No matter what your species is, if you're attracted to women, odds are you're attracted to asari. They can even get salarians, who are otherwise asexual, in the mood.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Averted. They start to leave childhood at the age of forty, and are legally considered adults at eighty. That's forty years of puberty. According to Liara they still suffer from Not Now, Kiddo well into their second century.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: The ability to choose when to get pregnant means that the asari population stays fairly stable. Apparently there is also no age restriction on fertility, either, since both of Liara's parents were well into their Matriach phases by the time she was born.
• Knight Errant: How Samara describes Justicar the order, literally.
• Knight Templar: The Justicar order, who are generally kept away from other species to avoid a diplomatic incident brought on by their very strict code.
• Lady of War: Averted. Although the asari are noted for their elegance, asari commandos are as hard-nosed and physical as most other soldiers in the galaxy. Played straight however, with justicars, if Samara is any indication.
  Samara: Find peace in the embrace of the goddess.
• Long Game: Asari plans and military strategies tend to be as long-term and far-reaching as possible. This greatly contrasts them with their Council peers, who look for short-term and practical solutions. Especially the salarians, who pride themselves on coming up with the most immediate solutions possible.
• Long-Lived: Asari live to over 1,000 on average. One Cerberus Daily News story states that there are still a few surviving asari veterans of the Krogan Rebellions, meaning it's possible (though rare) for them to live to be over 1,500 years old.
• Mage Species: All asari are natural biotics, and as revealed in 3 this was deliberately engineered by the Protheans, or at least enhanced, since the planet itself was infused with eezo.
• Magic Knight: Again, asari commandos. Or anyone serving in the asari military.
• Magitek: Weapons like the Acolyte are designed to simulate biotic effects like Warp to complement an asari's natural biotics.
• Mars Needs Women: Inverted, because most races have an abundant asari fetish. In Andromeda, kett files on the various Milky Way species specifically say that the asari — in particular, their reproductive methods — hold the most potential of them all. They are uninterested, however, in the emotional or spiritual aspects of it.
• Masculine Lines, Feminine Curves: Asari architecture and technology is usually very sleek and curved. For example, compare the Disciple shotgun to every other weapon of its type. They also tend to be lightweight, which makes sense given that heavy weapons make it harder to use biotics frequently. This becomes enshrined in game mechanics in the third game, as lightweight weapons allow their wielders faster cooldowns on their powers.
• Mayfly–December Romance: How asari relationships with any other species that isn't asari or krogan tend to turn out. This is a major factor in the asari worldview; asari know that they will outlive several mates, but rather than getting depressed about it, they accept it and enjoy the time they have with them. Judging by how a turian in 2 reacts when his asari partner tries to bring it up, "the lifespan talk" is a known and dreaded event in any asari-(shorter-lived species) relationship.
• Mental Fusion: Asari have the ability to connect to the neural signals of any organic species. The ability is so potent that they can read or transfer thoughts. When mating, they combine thoughts and feelings with their partner, entering an extremely intimate inner world. If they want to produce an offspring from the union, they gather genetic information through the merger. Overall, it's a highly-versatile power with both practical and perverse capabilities.
• Mind over Matter: They are the only species with natural biotics. In actuality, the Protheans altered their entire species to give them all biotics. The trope is even an occasional battle-cry in the second game.
• More than Mind Control: When discussing asari flirting with him, Mordin admits that he feels attracted to them, and speculates that it can't be pheromones, but "neurochemical" — in other words, they use subtle mind control to influence even salarians.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: More developed asari like Benezia and Samara seem to enjoy showing off their... assets. According to Liara and others, the bosom keeps growing for hundreds of years.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Hiding the Prothean treasure trove to give themselves an advantage not only weakened the galaxy as a whole, but possibly made them overlook the Reaper warnings said trove may have had.
  • Backing out of the war summit negotiations due to bad blood between the krogan and salarians came back to bite them in the ass when the Reapers attacked Thessia as they had no krogan support to call upon.
• No Clear Leader: Whereas most other species have some kind of centralized government or representative (not counting Citadel Councilors), the asari have an e-democracy where laws are determined through public forum without elected representatives. The closest they have to such individuals are the matriarchs, who generally gather followings who heed their counsel, but even they are more honored advisors who (in theory) have no more say in lawmaking than any other Asari citizen. Mass Effect 3 deconstructs this when the Reapers invade and the Asari find themselves unable to mount a successful defense due to not having a clear command structure. In contrast, the Turians, with their top-down authoritarian government with clear lines of succession, manage to hold the Reapers back for weeks, while Thessia is lost in a matter of hours.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Apparently, this is one of their hats, in addition to Boldly Coming.
• One-Woman Army: Asari commandos are considered to be the deadliest fighters in the galaxy. This is perfectly summed up by the War Assets entry for the Serrice Guard, a unit of asari commandos. After a space battle with a Blood Pack ship, they and the Blood Pack were forced to crash land on a planet. Over the course of nine days, the Blood Pack suffered over a hundred casualties from traps, ambushes, and night assaults. When the Blood Pack gave up and finally surrendered, they found out that they had only been fighting five asari commandos. They're like the alien equivalents of Rambo.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Ardat-Yakshi. They're asari with a genetic mutation that impairs their ability to Mind Meld. In the most extreme cases of the syndrome, this "burns out" their partner's neuro-nervous system, which also allows the Ardat-Yakshi to consume the victim's memories. This is a narcotic experience, and boosts the Ardat-Yakshi's Psychic Powers, so they invariably become addicted to the process. This is why any Ardat-Yakshi is either carefully secluded and monitored or executed for refusing to submit to the former.
• Out with a Bang: The Ardat-Yakshi again.
• Phallic Weapon: Inverted with the Destiny Ascension. Instead of looking phallic, it looks more... "feminine".
• Planet of Hats: Boldly Coming Blue Skinned Space Babes mixed with Space Elves. Asari can mate with anything, and it's apparent that both their culture and biology encourage them to, and because of their longevity, they also tend to be patient and very willing to learn. However, some asari are not promiscuous (either mating for life or not mating at all), some hate politics, and a few are flat out worse Blood Knights than the krogan.
• The Poorly Chosen One: The Protheans cultivated early asari civilisation and left them an intact Beacon, having chosen them as the most likely race to defeat the Reapers in the next Cycle. However, they didn't plan on those asari who found the thing keeping it a secret even from their own people, so that they (and the rest of the galaxy, by extension) were left woefully underprepared when the Reapers came.
• Proportional Aging: A 40-year-old asari is considered young, with the 106-year-old Liara being the equivalent of her 20s.
• Proud Warrior Race: It's never given much emphasis, but there are many hints that asari society is unusually martial for a people who haven't had a major war in 1,500 years. They have several monastic military orders (most famously the Justicars), and exalt their soldiers as "Huntresses", with a great deal of romanticism tied to them. There are also the stereotypes of what asari maidens do — the two stereotypically "maiden" things to do is become a stripper, or a mercenary.In Initiation, an asari matron leaves the huntress band she was part of and buys a refitted warship to start a new band of mercenaries / huntresses with. This is portrayed in the novel as the sort of done thing, and she's portrayed in the same way a person today might be when they're buying their first house. Also, while the turians have a larger fleet than them by number of hulls, the average asari ship being so much larger means they definitely have the biggest fleet in the galaxy by raw tonnage — and potentially combat power, given that their ships are noted to be above-average in tech. And again — they maintain this fleet despite no peer adversary existing and not having had a major war in 1,500 years.
• Read the Fine Print: Illium is described as "Omega with expensive shoes" because of this trope. It's quite possible to become an indentured servant or medical test subject if the signee doesn't watch out.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: They look almost exactly like human women, just with fleshy tendrils (they're cartilage-based crests and semi-flexible, according to Liara in the third game) on top of the scalp, skin that is implied to be scaly in texture by the game's graphics, and natural skin-colors being varying shades of blue or purple. The game designers knew early on that they would have to make the asari the most human-like of the alien species so that they would still be attractive to players. This is lampshaded in 2 when a human says asari look like humans, and a turian says they look like turians, leading the human to wonder if asari manipulate your mind to make them seem attractive to whoever looks at them.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: They are responsible for the bulk of the laws that Citadel Space follows, being the race that found and appropriated the Citadel first. As such, these laws have very asari-centric leanings. Nowhere is this made more apparent than when Shepard visits Thessia and discovers that despite imposing and enforcing laws on other species to reveal and share any working Prothean technology that's discovered, they'd been harboring a working Beacon for millennia, but kept it hidden so that they would retain a technological edge on every other race.
• Sex God: Everyone seems to want the asari, regardless of race or gender. Humans, turians, salarians, hanar... According to Javik, the asari were the only "primitive" race the Protheans dated, though the quarians were also consider rather attractive. The rest they conquered and enslaved. Or ate. The reasons for it are discussed by NPC's in Mass Effect 2, where a few bar patrons (a salarian, human, and turian, all males on a "stag party" because of the salarian's reproduction contract) wonder why they're all attracted to an asari dancer, as well as thinking that asari look similar to their own respective species, and wonder whether it's genuine attraction or if there's some sort of subtle mental manipulation going on. This is strongly hinted is the case, since salarians have no sex drives at all, yet the salarian starts becoming entranced anyway. On the other hand, Steve Cortez, one of the few explicitly gay men in the series, expresses no attraction to asari when it comes up, and while there are plenty of cases of krogan being interested or in relationships with asari, there are also a handful of krogan who dismiss asari as physically unappealing. Mass Effect: Andromeda introduces the angara, and almost immediately we're told that asari are the most popular Milky Way race amongst them. A xenophobic group called the Roekkar explicitly finds their race's interest in them to be treason to the species. Andromeda also reinforces the notion that attraction to asari doesn't override human sexual orientation, as Cora, a heterosexual woman who served with asari commandos notes that she wasn't interested in even experimenting with them, and that their friendship was enough.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted with their shotgun, the Disciple. It doesn't do as much damage as shorter ranged shotguns like the Claymore, but it's very accurate and light. That doesn't mean that it's weak, however.
• Smug Super: Owing to their being the most technologically advanced and "enlightened" of the species, quite a lot of characters and npcs alike will remark on how "arrogant" the asari are. This comes to a head by the third game with the revelation that the asari had been hoarding Prothean technology over the millennia to keep their edge on other races.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: Asari troops compared to turian ones. While individually more powerful and skilled, the asari forces lack strong organization above the level of city-states (so field army sized at best), meaning the turians are able to field larger, better-organized, heavier-equipped armies dependent on more complex infrastructure.
• Space Elves: In many respects they're similar to the traditional "high elf" fantasy archetype, being an advanced, enlightened culture that focuses on art and learning but is backed up by elite, graceful warriors.
• Stronger with Age: One of the reasons Matriarchs are so respected. If they get irritated with you, congratulations, you have one of the galaxy's most powerful and patient biotics getting medieval on your ass, and she probably has the connections and intelligence to ruin your life a thousand times over.
• Squishy Wizard: Asari are no stronger than human women, making them on average physically weaker than even male humans, but their natural biotic powers more than make up for it.
• The Kirk: To the turian McCoy and salarian Spock.
• Undying Loyalty: Asari Commandos have the concept of the Tiamna, a steadfast bodyguard who never abandons her charge, no matter what the situation.
• Utopia: Just as the turians are a right-wing, militaristic utopia, the asari are a liberal democratic one. They have a direct e-democracy and local councils as government with an EU-style federation representing their interests on the galactic scene (their main governing body is called the Asari Republics), are notably non-militaristic (though are so rich that they can still maintain a powerful military), place great emphasis on art and education, and are multicultural to the extreme, with any species liable to be found on asari worlds, even vorcha. Their decentralized market-based economy is extremely powerful (repeatedly noted to be the galaxy's largest) and asari corporations and guilds have their fingers in every sector of galactic commerce. Their society is the most technological and culturally advanced (not to mention the richest) society in space.
  • Which isn't to say that they're without internal strife. We see plenty of asari criminals throughout the series, including corrupt government officials and businesswomen, and in Andromeda, we're told by Cora, who served four years with an asari commando unit as part of a cross-species military integration program that asari space remains hectic enough that they require peacekeeping units to be active full time, generally dealing with domestic asari threats; "terrorists, cults, rogue Ardat-Yakshi, people demanding a withdrawal from the Citadel..."
• Warrior Monk: The Justicars, with a side-order of Knight Errant.

Salarians

Salarians

...if you want a NEW problem, ask a salarian....

—Renegade Shepard

Homeworld: Sur'kesh

The second race to discover the Citadel and one of the two founding members of the Citadel Council. Their metabolism is much faster than those of other species; on the one hand, this means they're the second shortest-lived sentient beings in the galaxy after the vorcha. On the other, they waste a lot less of their lives sleeping. They also have "reproduction contracts" instead of marriages (which Mordin attributes to an inability to sustain courtship emotions). Similar to the asari, the salarian government is collection of clans, families, fiefdoms and duchies collectively referred to as the "Salarian Union" ^note Definitely NOT to be confused with the Salarian League. The Council based the Spectre program off the salarian Special Tasks Group, although the Spectres aren't as well-funded — you don't see STG operatives buying their own weapons.

Despite being outnumbered nine-to-one by the males, female salarian "dalatrasses" (clan/family leaders) wield the most political power on their home-world.

Salarians are available for multiplayer and can use the Engineer and Infiltrator classes.

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• Alien Blood: Green.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Averted. The salarians have a nasty habit of trying to groom primitive races as quick fixes for their problems, which they call "uplifting". This leads Mordin and Padok to argue they should have such a rule, but they seem to be in the minority.
  James: These lizards like playing God, huh?
  EDI: The salarians appear to have learned nothing from the Krogan Rebellions.
• Altar Diplomacy: Salarians, being amphibians, don't have any real sex drive and with that no concept of such things as romantic love (except for the ones that hook up with asari). Reproduction rights are determined by negotiation to continue certain dynasties or alliances, for which family history is very important. A family that loses their history can become a non-entity in such negotiations, as evidenced if Shepard returns one family's history.
• Badass Army: The salarian military is basically the pragmatic in the galaxy, who use espionage and stealth technology.
  • Salarians prefer to win a war before it starts through stealth, precision strikes at an enemy's vital weak point and consider the notion of notifying the enemy that they will be attacked to be insane. Of particular note is the Salarian Special Task Group, a special forces organization so badass that they are what inspired the Spectres, as well as provide a good chunk of the original Spectre agents. Their doctrine is actually very similar to humanity's own, albeit larger and more advanced: a relatively small volunteer force that relies on crippling the enemy before the war begins instead of slugging it out; humans cripple the enemy during the war; salarians would rather ensure the war doesn't happen.
  • One hallmark of salarian strategy is that they approach warfare very asymmetrically, gathering massive amounts of intelligence on an enemy before any conflict begins. They also emphasize crippling their enemy with attacks and techniques that leave it impossible for the enemy to fight, such as using the genophage to shut down the krogan, or employing various large-scale, engineered bioweapons such as gene-modded varren to disrupt enemy population centers and economies. They have no qualms with uplifting another species to fight their battles for them such as the krogan or the yahg.
  • While their fleet is the second smallest on the Council (just above humanity's), they also have the best technology on average - for example, by the third game all of their point-defense lasers use UV instead of infrared wavelengths (giving them six times the effective range), all of their dreadnoughts have stealth drives, and even their scouting craft have Thanix cannons as standard.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: They have green blood, blink only with lower eyelids, are a haploid-diploid egg laying species without a sex drive, they only live to be about forty due to a very high metabolism, and they have a skeletal structure that is primarily composed of cartilage.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Though they present a united front to the rest of the galaxy, the various salarian Dalatrasses are engaged in endless political maneuverings and backstabbings to gain power and maintain alliances on their homeworlds. This is particularly notable with how they treated the League of One, their most elite intelligence operatives. In order to curry favor with the asari, they released the League's personnel files, which exposed all of the members and led to them being hunted down by their enemies.
• Combat Pragmatist: They consider declarations of war to be superfluous and stupid. When they attack, it is without warning and after as much time as feasible gathering intelligence and undermining the enemy.
  • They also consider very few measures to be out-of-bounds. One of their research facilities in the third game shows that they were researching altering varren (Tuchanka wolves) to be even more powerful, violent, and fast-breeding so they could be dropped onto enemy planets to completely wreck the ecosystem and attack civilian populations. A throwaway note on one planet suggests they're observing certain areas in the Terminus Systems, and any individuals who have the idea of uniting the warring pirates and slaving bands always die mysterious and untimely deaths.
  • Their reliance on their intelligence networks turned out to be a devastating weakness when the Reapers attacked, as the salarians' entire doctrine lay in destroying the enemy before conflict even began. Since they didn't virtually own the Reapers' communications network nor could prepare for or target their weaknesses prior to the unexpected attack, the salarian military was left at a severe disadvantage.
  • Basically, they are all about avoiding having to actually fight the enemy unless necessary, though they are capable fighters when it comes down to it thanks to their huge military, advanced technology, and super power status.
• Didn't Think This Through: The salarians are very short-lived, and therefore never think of long-term ramifications. They need the problem solved now, and as the race quote notes, they end up just creating larger problems.
• Didn't See That Coming: When the Andromeda Initiative went around looking for settlers, several salarian females saw it and thought it sounded like a fantastic idea, rather than sitting around at home playing dalatrass. Enough of them signed up to throw some serious monkey-wrenches into typical salarian politics.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: Salarian weapons are typically small, sleek, and aerodynamic. While not quite as light or curved as asari weapons, they aren't far off from looking like something Apple, Inc. would release today.
• Explosive Breeder: It goes unremarked, but, as the in-game codex notes, they are "haplo-diploid oviparous amphibians". In other words, female salarians lay dozens of eggs automatically once a year, and they don't need sex to make them hatch; sex merely determines whether or not the eggs will hatch into more females, who will lay more eggs. Salarian worlds are invariably densely populated as a result — theoretically, salarians can actually outbreed the krogan. This may explain why the salarian homeworld has much more people than the turian or asari ones, even though the salarians have managed to spread out their population into the colonies; there's just that many of them.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Salarians overall can be compared to modern-day China, as the Union is an industrial powerhouse with a humongous population, an accent on a large number of males, focus on gaining as much profit as possible, and the ability to wear many hats at once, such as being traders, intelligence gatherers and soldiers.
• Fatal Flaw: For all their intelligence the salarians' relatively short lifespans appear to make them very shortsighted when it comes to decision making on a galactic scale. For example, uplifting the krogan without taking into account the long term consequences of their birth rate, especially when freed from the natural mortality rate of Tuchanka. Worse still it seems they feel the yahg are a great new prospect for uplifting into galactic society. Oddly enough, Dalatrass Linron in Mass Effect 3 takes the opposite stance, thinking in long-term matters regarding the dangers of curing the genophage... but she's doing so at the worst possible time.
• Feudal Future: The Salarian government is divided into fiefdoms run by matrilineal dynasties in a manner similar to medieval Europe.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The thief in the asari-turian-salarian trio.
• Foil: To the krogan. One's a race of extremely durable, extremely long-lived, Proud Warrior Race Guys who believe Violence Really Is the Answer. The other is species of short-lived, squishy^note Not just in the sense of having fewer Hit Points; salarian skeletons have a much higher cartilage-to-bone ratio than most other species scientists who rely on subterfuge, intelligence (both in the military and the cerebral sense) and the best spies in the galaxy. While none of these differences justify the Fantastic Racism that both species throw at each other, it's easy to see why the animosity would start.
• For Science!: Practically the salarians hat, though it's heavily lampshaded that this often doesn't turn out so well.
• Gender Rarity Value: Females are rare, influential, and extremely well-protected. You will never see a salarian female in a combat role unless things are very dire.
• Grenade Launcher: They are particularly well-known for the Scorpion Heavy Pistol, and the Venom Shotgun; both of which have to be treated as such.
• The Greys: They share a lot of similarities with this trope, aside from the actual skin color (which can range in varying shades of browns, reds, greens, and yellows); salarians are an alien species that are extremely intelligent and scientifically advanced, they are physically frail and have short life spans, they have large almond shaped eyes with indistinct pupils that make them appear like solid black orbs, and they have a nasty habit of fiddling around with less advanced species for scientific experimentation or to fight their wars for them. The biggest divergence is that they are very much a known quantity in galactic society and lack the inscrutability of true Greys.
• Helium Speech: The salarians speak with funny, squeaky voices, sounding very much like this trope.
• History Repeats: Mordin notes to Shepard that the biggest mistake the salarians made was rashly uplifting the krogan to fight the rachni without considering the long-term consequences. When visiting Sur'Kesh, the salarian homeworld, you'll find that they have several yahg in captivity to study to determine if they should be uplifted.
• Informed Attribute: They're stated to be amphibious and capable of breathing in water, but we never actually see this happen.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Justified, since males vastly outnumber females, and due to Gender Rarity Value and simple statistics male salarians are far more likely to be casualties in combat.
• Mirroring Factions: The basis of salarian civilization; males compete for the right to sire progeny on females, and females barter breeding rights as the source of their authority. Doesn't that sound just like post-genophage krogans? Salarians are also just as much of an Explosive Breeders as the krogans were before being infected with the genophage. However they aren't nearly as hard to kill as the krogans and have much shorter lifespans.
• Motor Mouth: A few of them. At the very least they talk faster than most other species.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Uplifting the krogan. According to Urdnot Eve in a conversation with Padok Wiks, she's never gotten through a conversation with any salarian without them bringing it up, either lamenting it or patting themselves on the back for it.
• On Second Thought: The Citadel archives show that the salarians decided they didn't want the genophage deployed, and argued against it, as did most of the turians. However, a General Ripper turian basically bullied the salarians and turians and pressed the Big Red Button himself.
• Overly Long Name: Salarians always introduce themselves shorthand. A salarian's full name is, in order, is their homeworld, nation, city, district, clan name and given name. For example, Administrator Bel Anoleis' full name is Rannadril Ghan Swa Fulsoom Karaten Narr Eadi Bel Anoleis.
• Photographic Memory: As well as bolstering their skill as spies, it helps them keep track of their enormous extended families. In salarian terms, a "genius" is one whose memory is so sharp that they can recall trivial information on the spot as if it's still happening. The salarian pilot Kallo Jath is renown to have a particularly sharp memory even among salarians.
• Planet of Hats: Salarians aren't very durable or long-lived, but they are expert at covert operations and intelligence gathering. They also tend to be strictly pragmatic and amoral. But Mordin and Maelon alone are perfect examples of how widely this can change and vary.
• Proportional Aging: Opposite the asari, salarians' short lifespans mean they also have very short childhoods. It is considered completely normal for a salarian to be a tenured professor in high-level academia at the age of sixteen.
• Short-Lived Organism: They have by far the shortest lifespan of the Council races, maxing out around forty years. (For comparison, given the advancements in the setting, humans regularly live past 100.) To offset this, salarians only need to sleep about one hour per night, allowing them to get more accomplished in their shorter overall lifespan.
• Sneaky Spy Species: Although partly renowned as a Proud Scholar Race, the other half of their reputation is based around espionage and black ops. Because salarians aren't a very imposing species, they rely on stealth rather than traditional armies, and even their soldiers prefer to make use of sneaky guerilla tactics rather than straight-up fighting. Throughout the galaxy, the Salarian Union is known for fleets based entirely around surveillance and its legendary Special Tactics Group — which has a reputation for ending wars before they even begin. Party member Mordin Solus embodies both hats, being a brilliant scientist who served in the STG and took part in a covert biological attack on the krogan DMZ, reinforcing the genophage with an upgrade of his own design and secretly disseminating it in person.
• The Spock: To the turian McCoy and asari Kirk.
• Stealth in Space: All salarian ships are equipped with the same stealth technology as the Normandy, even their dreadnoughts.
• Sticky Bomb: They manufacture a pistol for their special forces called the Scorpion that shoots blue sticky grenades. Salarian Infiltrators in multiplayer are also fond of them.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Salarian weapons are fond of this trope. For example, the Venom shotgun and Scorpion pistol both fire explosive projectiles instead of bullets or slugs.
• That's What I Would Do: Ultimately the salarians' Fatal Flaw in their handling of the genophage. Before they achieved interstellar travel, salarians' rapid breeding led to a critical Overpopulation Crisis on Sur'Kesh, with all the environmental damage that comes with it. The salarians adapted to this crisis remarkably quickly, leading to their current system of allowing only ten percent of eggs to be fertilized. The salarians expected the krogan to adapt similarly quickly to the genophage, not accounting for differences in psychology and evolutionary history.
• Underestimating Badassery:
  • Other species tend to do this. As Mordin points out, while the salarians aren't physically imposing as the other races, their sheer aptitude for stealth and subterfuge, combined with their reputation as "easily dismissable", means that no-one ever sees them coming.
    Mordin: Advantage of being salarian. Turians, krogan, vorcha, all obvious threats. (sharp inhale) Never see me coming.
  • It is also worth pointing out that the salarians were the ones who began the Citadel's Spectre program and formed its first operatives, with the structure of the Spectres being based on a looser pattern of the salarian STG. Those who underestimate the salarians clearly have no knowledge of Citadel history.
  • Indeed, the Citadel Archives reveal that the first Spectre was a salarian STG operative, recruited from prison, due to using 30 civilians as live bait in order to flush out the assassin he was chasing.
  • Javik is highly surprised to learn that they evolved at all, let alone became one of the dominant species in the current Cycle.
  • The salarians also discovered the Citadel only a few decades after the asari, and unlike the asari, the salarians didn't have the advantage of the Protheans intervening to speed up their evolution.
• Utopia: They are the libertarian utopia to the asari left and the turian right, with their Hats being intelligence, technology, and commerce. The Salarian Union, in many ways, resembles a kind of enlightened feudalism; structurally, the government consists of fiefdoms, baronies, duchies, planets, and marches (colonization clusters), only really working together through complex matrilineal dynastic bloodlines, with political alliances formed through interbreeding. Each house is ruled by a single Dalatrass (matriarchal head-of-household who also act as political kingpins) which represent an increasing amount of territory and prestige within the salarian political web. Though male salarians rise to positions of great authority in business, academia, or the military, they rarely have any input on politics (with rare exceptions). The dalatrasses determine the political course of their respective regions through shrewd negotiation. The fiefdoms are always in competition with one another on the merit of their brains and finances, being utilitarian and self-interested in the extreme, yet making it work (mostly) through sheer brainpower.
• Weak, but Skilled: Salarians are hardly the strongest or toughest species out there. However, thanks to their accelerated metabolism, they can be quite quick in combat, described as "like a cat" by David Anderson who witnessed a salarian Spectre in a Bar Brawl. They extend this to strategic doctrine in warfare as well; the salarians will hit their enemy hard in the places they are most vulnerable before an opponent has an opportunity to respond because they have spent that much time and effort analyzing them first.
• We Are as Mayflies: With a lifespan of around 40 years, they are shortest-lived of the powerful species behind the vorcha, who rarely last beyond 20 years.
• The Worf Effect: The STG is said (and in the first game, shown) to be a Badass Army with some of the best technology and training in the galaxy, comparable to the Spectres (except they don't have to buy their own gear). However, by the time of Mass Effect 3, Cerberus manages to sneak onto Sur'Kesh undetected and surprise and stomp out an entire base of STG guards with only moderate casualties, with only Shepard being able to help repel them. Campbell even says that, due to Cerberus' technology, the salarians may as well have been throwing rocks.
• Worf Had the Flu: However, this is due to the salarian preference to end a war before their enemy even knows that it has begun. They were completely blindsided by the Reapers, meaning most of their traditional tactics didn't apply and they didn't expect Cerberus to suddenly get a major technological advantage due to being augmented by salvaged Reaper tech from the Collector Base.
• You Can Always Tell a Liar: According to Mordin, salarian body language has distinct cues for hiding something to protect yourself (which inspires curiosity in others) or for more complicated reasons (which inspires discretion). He compares cheating this system to humans faking a yawn; it's almost impossible to pull off convincingly.

Humans

Humans

"... But if you want a problem fixed, ask a human."

— Renegade Shepard

Homeworld: Earth

The most recent species to enter the galactic scene. Humans are a bipedal race originated from Earth. They are the most culturally and genetically diverse of all of the species in the series. On Earth itself, humanity is still very much divided, with major powers including the United North American States, The People's Federation of China, and the European Union, but they all agree to project themselves as one faction to the galaxy through the Systems Alliance. They have advanced in galactic politics more quickly than other races, leading to a belief that humans are all impatient bullies. This advancement coupled with humanity's penchant for devising innovative ideas has led to humanity being considered to be something of a Wild Card; they are going to change the galaxy, but no one is certain how so.

Humans are one of the races available for multiplayer, and are the only one with access to all the classes and a customizable gender. The Rebellion Pack DLC adds the Ex-Cerberus Vanguard and Adept, and the Earth Pack adds N7 special forces characters for all of the classes, each with unique movesets and abilities. Additionally, the Reckoning Pack adds the Talon Mercenary Engineer.

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• All Take and No Give: The way humanity is seen by the other races, with humans demanding they be given equal, if not preferential, power and treatment to the other races, despite having done nothing earn it.
• Ambition Is Evil: Invoked. Humanity's hat is hyper-ambition. A lot of the aliens you meet don't seem to appreciate the fact that they've been grabbing all the power on the galactic stage in the last forty years, when most other races take centuries to do so.
• Arch-Enemy: With the batarians. The Hegemony and the Alliance have been engaged in a proxy war for years in the Skyllian Verge, with Alliance Marines facing off against batarian paramilitaries (like Balak's group), with various warlords and pirate bands being backed by both sides to fight the other. The batarian pirates who attacked Mindoir are an example of a Hegemony-backed band, whereas Lord Darius's gang is an example of an Alliance-backed band. Mass Effect 2 also reveals that the Hegemony is just itching for an excuse to start a war with humanity. As of the third game, this would have probably already happened after the destruction of one of their mass relays and the resultant death of over 300,000 batarians, if they weren't unfortunate enough to end up as the Reapers' first victims.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Discussed. Individually, the Systems Alliance is not yet even close to matching the military or economic prowess of any of the individual Citadel races, let alone the political bloc they represent. What the rest of the galaxy fears is humanity's military and economic potential, not their present might. Despite the fact that something to the tune of 3% of humanity's total population serves in the military, the Systems Alliance was still able to give the turians a decent fight during the First Contact War. Ironically, this is also a big part of why humanity wasn't given the same treatment as the Batarian Hegemony was. Humanity's potential contributions to galactic society are too great to ignore - but that doesn't mean the Citadel couldn't ignore them if they wanted to. The Systems Alliance's potential military might is also a strong part of what endeared humanity and the turians to one another after the First Contact War - the two species have highly similar traditions of civic and military service.
  • Humanity was also doing this in ignorance during the First Contact War. They fought the turian forces deployed to Shanxi to a standstill and were gaining ground. However, the turian military was orders of magnitude bigger than humanity's (not that humans knew that at the time), which had a mere 200 modern space warships at the time, and were preparing to route considerable reinforcements to the Shanxi theater when the Citadel Council intervened and prevented the war from escalating. A recording of two turian soldiers interrogating a human POW from the Citadel Archives even suggests that they may have been considering mounting an invasion of Earth before the ceasefire was called.
• Badass Army: The Alliance military is very small, both on the ground and in space, compared to the other Council races, but an emphasis on maneuver warfare, flexibility, and innovative tactics and technology enables them to match larger and more established militaries, like the Batarian Hegemony. Codex data from across the franchise implies that the N7 Special Operations Program was hardcore enough that virtually every other Citadel race respected the graduates as bonafide badasses.
• Bash Brothers: Humanity and the turians have a great deal in common with one another, but this trope doesn't start to pay off properly until Mass Effect 3, where the turians quickly forge an alliance with humanity that may well be instrumental in saving the galaxy from the Reapers. Even as early as Mass Effect 1, there are shades of this trope; despite the Turian Heirarchy having first encountered the Systems Alliance in an armed conflict, the two factions put their heads together to design possibly one of the most iconic Cool Starships in videogaming, the Normandy.
• Bizarre Baby Boom: Biotic abilities in humans only began to manifest after several starship "accidents" in the 2150s accidentally exposed pregnant women to Element Zero in-utero. As such, most of the first generation of human biotics are only around 30 years old.
• Combat Pragmatist: The war doctrine of the Alliance is to quickly cut behind the enemy and destroy key installations, supply lines, and command centers. They're very big on offense; colonies only get token garrisons for immediate defense, but anyone who attacks will have the full force of the Alliance navy coming down right on their heads soon after. Likewise, their defense strategy boils down to having their Fleets positioned at key nexus points in the Relay Network, so should one of their colonies get attacked, The Cavalry will never be more than a jump or two away.
• Determinator: Lampshaded by the various races, that despite overwhelming odds, humans never give up. Turians are excessively disciplined and krogan are outright stubborn, but humans have an uncanny ability to pull off the impossible.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The trilogy ends with a rebuilt Earth as the center of Council Space, with the Citadel anchored by the Conduit in London.
• Entitled Bastard: Some aliens see them this way, especially the elcor and volus. Almost immediately after joining the galactic community, humanity instantly started demanding a seat on the Council in spite of other, stronger, more established species having to wait centuries for the same honor. It doesn't help that humanity's representative to the Council is Ambassador Udina - you have to wonder who thought that appointment would be a good idea.
  Pallin: If the Council wants to make humanity their favorite pet that's their business. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
  Shepard: The Council treats us like second class citizens. We have to fight for everything we get.
  Pallin: Good. Then fight for it, but don't expect the rest of us to just sit back and let you take it.
• Expanded States of America: The United States has been expanded and renamed the United North American States. It now also encompasses Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands.
• Fantastic Rank System: The ranking system of the Systems Alliance differs slightly from any modern one. While the Marines are no longer independent of the Navy, they like to keep some of their own ranks out of tradition. A complete list of the rank structure is present in the Codex.
• Fatal Flaw: If the turians' is rigidity, the asari's arrogance, and the salarians' shortsightedness, then humanity's fatal flaw is hubris. They frequently parade themselves around like they are entitled to positions of high authority and influence in the galactic community, and get angry when the Council doesn't treat them with the respect and rights they believe they're owed, even if they've done nothing to earn any of them. They also have a tendency act like they're some form of superpower, on par with the Council races, in spite of both their military and economy being vastly inferior. This is most exemplified with Cerberus, who are so convinced that humans are, or at least should be superior, that they commit progressively greater atrocities not just against aliens, but other humans, all for the sake of "human supremacy".
• The Federation: Back on Earth, there's the United North American States and the European Union. There's also the Chinese People's Federation, but it's not clear if they really are a federation or just a People's Republic of Tyranny. These three super-nations comprise the three major Earth-based powers in the Systems Alliance.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: While the other three races specialize in one of these categories as an entire species, humans provide superlative individuals in all three categories. Zaeed is by far the best mercenary in the Terminus, so he is the superior Fighter. Jack is by far the most powerful biotic living, making her the superlative Mage. Kasumi is quite literally the best Thief in the galaxy, whose hacking and infiltration abilities earn her the respect of even a salarian Spectre.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: Unlike other races who are content to let the asari handle diplomacy, humans are not afraid to flex some muscle themselves with their navy. If the council is sacrificed, they use dreadnoughts to scare other colonies into compliance with their interests, causing the asari to use this exact phrase while criticizing the action.
• Humanity Is Infectious: While there are naturally some exceptions, for the most part, humanity has easily adapted to the galactic scene, showing great enthusiasm and expressing a desire for a deeper role in galactic politics and in protecting it from threats.
• Humanity Is Superior: Averted early in the series, discussed in the middle, then thoroughly subverted at the end. Starting out, humanity is a minor power who is weaker than most other established species. After the first game, humanity becomes a lot more involved in interstellar politics. However, after Earth is attacked, humanity desperately has to seek allies from the other species, with most of the final war assets coming from those species. Even then, though, human organizations contribute more war assets than any other cumulatively: the Alliance can max out somewhere in the 1500 range, with Ex-Cerberus defectors contributing close to another 250, while the asari, krogan, turians, quarians, and geth all hover around 600-800, accounting for roughly 23% of the 7800 war assets needed to get the best ending in the Legendary Edition (though in fairness, those given races are also committed to their own fronts).
• Humans Advance Swiftly: Humanity had access to mass effect technology for only seven years and only a few colonies before making disastrous first contact with the Turian Heirarchy. Despite this early misstep, they continued on to become a major political force in the galaxy and subsequently gained a seat on the Council, only 26 years from initial first contact. To put the extent of this achievement into perspective, it often takes centuries for most races to even reach a lesser status.
• Humans Are Average:
  • Physically, humans are the middle ground in almost every way compared to other species, which has proven to be an advantage of sorts. Thane's dossier reveals humans are generally easier to assassinate than asari or turians, and Grunt counts them as less hardy than quarians, which may or may not be because of the quarians' environment suits. In fact, in multiplayer, humans are the only species that can play any class.
  • Mordin reveals in the second game that humans have the most genetic variability in the galaxy, meaning it's nearly impossible to predict where they can fall on the the biological bell-curve, compared to those of other species. If it weren't highly unethical, this would make them wonderfully valuable as a test group for medical experiments.
    Mordin: Biotic abilties, intelligence levels. Can look at random asari, krogan, make reasonable guess. Humans too variable to judge. Outliers in all species, of course. Geniuses, idiots. But human probability curve offers greater variability.
  • This also flummoxes the kett. While they identify desirable traits in other species (discipline from turians, salarian cleverness, krogan aggression, asari biotics), they find humans to possess no obvious genetic advantages. Yet their sheer determination in the face of this perplexes the kett.
• Humans are Leaders: Played with. Many of the Alliance's authority figures have a pretty substantial impact on the galaxy, for better or for worse.
  • Ambassador Udina is bombastic and forceful, but he's also such a massive asshole that his supposed position as the ambassador of all humanity comes off as more of a joke. One gets the impression that the Council would have been much, much more willing to give him what he was asking for if he'd had even a shred of political tact.
  • The Illusive Man is a genuinely skilled, incredibly cunning leader, and a natural politician. He's able to pose a serious problem to the Shadow Broker despite having had a fraction of the time to set up his intelligence network. However, his lack of respect for the Citadel's political system and his intense xenophobia both prevent him from becoming the great statesman he could have otherwise been, relegating him to the leader of a NGO Super Power, and later to a mere puppet of the Reapers.
  • Fleet Admiral Steven Hackett and Admiral David Anderson are positive examples. Hackett's actions in the third game do a lot to solidify this trope in the eyes of other Council races. Where other militaries only fight a local war against the Reapers in their planets and their systems alone, Hackett comes up with a truly galactic strategy and coordinates anti-Reaper operations in all theatres. He is the first and only one to figure out that conventional victory is impossible and adapts an effective sea denial strategy until the Crucible is ready. The only other strategic decision of value - drawing in the krogan - was made in support of the humans' overall strategy. Anderson is not nearly as much of a strategist as Hackett, but he is still a forceful and capable leader of men. Both of them are skilled and tactful military officers who get several opportunities to improve their individual mettle.
  • The ending makes this very apparent: the permanent moorage of the Citadel is to the Conduit in London, strongly implying that Earth becomes the center of the rebuilt galactic community.
  • Humans were also the ones who conceptualized, planned and for the most part carried out the Andromeda colonization initiative. Jien Garson was the visionary, Alec Ryder wrote the book on being a Pathfinder, and most of your outposts there have human mayors. Even Kadara Port is under the stewardship of a human.
• Humans Are Special: Played straight early on, deconstructed later. In the context of the series, humanity did gain political power rather quick, but that's mostly due to Shepard being Shepard. Unfortunately, this trope leads the reapers to earmark humanity as the cycle's "dominant" species, which will be harvested to build a new capital-class reaper ship (all the rest will be mere destroyer-class reapers). This decision may have been influenced by Shepard destroying Sovereign in the first game.
• Humans Are Warriors: Human military tactics are considered rather unpredictable by the standards of the other races; their motto may as well be "achieve more with less." Pound-for-pound, humans rival the batarians in capability (if not numbers), but lack the sheer brute force of the krogan, the discipline, power, and support system of the turian navy, the skill and biotics of the asari, or the savvy and intelligence of the salarians. However, humans are unmatched in maneuverability, flexibility, VI support, and individual initiative. Human tactics are focused around striking high-priority targets and supply lines rather than wars of attrition. They even introduced the idea of Carrier-class starships to the galaxy. This trait was part of what endeared humanity to the turians so quickly, despite their awful first contact; the Turian Navy is much older and much better-established than the Alliance, but humanity's strong military discipline and sense of duty are only two of the numerous traits they have in common with the turians, something that benefits the entire galaxy when the Reapers come a-knockin'.
• Jack of All Stats: According to various comments from other races. They are also the only species able to use every class in the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Depending on the ending in the first game. Despite being, for better or worse, an ambitious and warlike race, humans come to the rescue of the Citadel and prevent a return of the Reapers. Whether this means saving the entirely alien Council from the jaws of certain death and becoming a part of the wider community, or sacrificing them in favor of fighting Sovereign, is entirely up to Shepard.
• The Leader: Eventually take this role in the war against the Reapers over the other races. While the asari are the unspoken leaders of the galaxy, Javik points out that their lackadaisical approach to interstellar matters, combined with Shepard's aggressive efforts to prevent galactic extinction, has forced humanity to be at the center of the conflict in a make-or-break effort to defeat the Reapers once and for all. Despite this, it never crosses over into Humans Are Special territory completely, instead showing humanity's strong independence in turn inspires and drives the other races to band together against a universal threat at long last, with each race bringing something equally important to the table that can either succeed or fail in truly saving the galaxy depending on how many war assets you acquire. Each ending also leaves the Citadel moored over Earth, which implies that the efforts humans have taken to unite the galaxy have proven them at the forefront of them all, completing the trilogy's underlying story arc of humanity earning their place in the galaxy.
• Mecha-Mooks: The codex says that the Alliance makes heavy use of drones to compensate for their lack of numbers compared to other species, ranging from flying tripod machine gun turrets to eight foot tall YMIR Mechs with a machine gun and rocket launcher combo to the anti-tank rocket drones to VI-piloted deep space fighters. In the various Alliance bases gone wrong that Shepard has to come to clean up, there are always huge amounts of mechs and drones there to defend it. In some cases, the mechs and drones are what killed everyone in the base.
• No Transhumanism Allowed:
  • In response to the discovery of the Citadel species, many human countries passed strict laws on genetic engineering to preserve the uniqueness of the human genome. Augmenting existing human abilities is fair game, but adding new capabilities, like digesting cellulose or growing wings, is banned in most countries. Uplifted Animals occupy legal grey areas, and cybernetic modifications - at least, less obtrusive ones - are completely acceptable. Deliberately inducing biotic ability in people where there was none usually involves criminal acts, but people who were born biotic due to incidental in-utero exposure are not sanctioned by any laws. The Systems Alliance Navy actually is a major employer of biotics, as they are often social outcasts in civilian society and the Navy can always use people who can crush things with their minds.
  • Alec Ryder takes this further and enhances a human (his kid) with an AI which can alter internal biological processes to give that human enhanced abilities, including even biotics.
• Planet of Hats: Defied Trope, and a huge Berserk Button for human politicians, military leaders, and colonists alike. What makes humans special is that they refuse to be marginalized or held back in any way, and that scares the other Citadel races and makes them question the hats they've been wearing for centuries or even millennia. But this, of course, means that humanity's "pseudo-hats" are ambition, defiance, and individuality, along with all of its strengths and flaws.
• Small Name, Big Ego:
  • As mentioned above, humanity's biggest flaw, especially at the start of the series, is hubris. They throw their weight around, make brazen demands, and believe they're entitled to respect and authority, despite being weaker than the elcor in practical economic terms. Lead codex writer Chris L'Etoile^note His username is "Stormwaltz" sums it up:
    Chris: The power vacuum at the end of Mass Effect 1 is purely at the Citadel. The Council defense fleet there gets pasted, but the overall turian, salarian, and asari fleets outnumber the humans 10:1. Despite rah-rah-Earth-First rhetoric from Udina, it's utterly impossible for the Alliance to militarily best the Council on anything more than a local and temporary scale. All they have to do is gather their fleets and steamroll us. Also, we have a dozen colonies, none with a population larger than a modern city (Terra Nova, the largest at 4.4 million, is about equal to Riyadh). The Council races each have hundreds of colonies, many old enough to have populations in the billions. We can't out-produce or out-populate them, either.
  • An excellent example of this bias plays out during Mass Effect: Revelation. It's stated that mere sanctions from the Citadel could cripple humanity, and the Council was willing to pass such sanctions on a whim for the relatively minor offense of the Alliance conducting AI research on Sidon. Ambassador Goyle gets it into her head that Humans Advance Swiftly and the Council is trying to stymie their growth, so she attempts to get them to back down by implicitly threatening war. The Council scoffs and points out that the Alliance would badly lose such a conflict, but Goyle uses the issue of diplomatic breakdown as leverage, arguing that a prosperous, integrated humanity is better for everyone than creating another ostracized rogue state like the Batarian Hedgemony. With that in mind, the Council agrees to haggle down the sanctions to something more reasonable. Only when the meeting is ending does Goyle notice that it had all been a bit too easy, leading her to realize that the softer sanctions were what the Council had intended all along. The economy-destroying sanctions were put up specifically to get Goyle to rail against the injustice of it all and demand a better deal, scoring a political "win" for the Alliance that ultimately involves submitting to the will of the Council.
• Standard Human Spaceship: While in effect, at first glance something about the jagged flatness of human ships seems alien to our history of spaceflight. Seeing how turian ships share these traits despite their use of Space Plane like designs while human ones keep the tradition of linear ships going, it's clear humanity took a lot of cues from their first contact species. The Normandy, a much newer ship and ironically a turian co-op design, seems to flex a more recognizably human style with its superfluous aerodynamic curves and more cylindrical fuselage making it look quite like a passenger jet.
• Super-Soldier:
  • The N7 classes. Not exceptionally skilled normal soldiers that become N7s, like Shepard or the base multiplayer characters, but the specialized ultra-elite units that are only playable in multiplayer. They include a biotic ninja who can explode things incredibly rapidly and teleport, an invisible cyborg with a monomolecular blade that can shoot lasers, a human tank equipped with very heavy Power Armor which includes a shoulder mounted missile launcher, a wrist mounted grenade launcher, and enhancements for whatever weapon he happens to be holding, and more.
  • A SAM enhanced Pathfinder is even more so. The SAM enhancements consists of “profiles” that buff abilities on demand, allowing a Pathfinder to fight as any of the six classes at any time.
• Superior Successor: End up this to the Protheans, to everybody's surprise. Especially considering the Protheans had elected the asari to lead the next cycle against the Reapers. Instead, asari leadership squander the gift of the Prothean beacon they were given and hoard secrets, leaving the galaxy woefully unprepared for the Reaper invasion and requiring humans to pick up the slack. Given your war assets are high enough, the Citadel will be moored permanently over Earth to emphasize their new role as the galaxy's leaders in all endings save Refusal.
• Tank Goodness: The Mako is called a tank by marines, despite technically being an Infantry Fighting Vehicle. Perhaps treads didn't cut mustard in the future but saying tank held more traction than IFV. Naming aside, it is a fine piece of work; a powerful cannon, a coaxial machine gun, great speed, powerful shields that recharge, room for an equipped fireteam, can be dropped from hundreds of meters in the air on to a planet, has effectively unlimited ammo (though all weapons in this franchise share that trait), and a total disdain of the laws of physics.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With the turians. The war between the humans and turians are still fresh in both races' minds so it makes collaboration filled with tension. By 3, it's strongly hinted that humans and turians are similar and on the way to becoming Bash Brothers.
• Theme Naming: Alliance Navy ships have name themes according to ship size: Frigates are named after historical battles (most notably the heroes' ship SSV Normandy), cruisers are named after cities, dreadnoughts are named after mountains, and carriers are named after renowned historical persons.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: If a human-led council takes over Citadel politics in 2, they become this, imposing excessive (and in some cases, ludicrous) laws in the name of security, being seen by the other species as arrogant, oppressive and bullying, causing a massive spike in racial tensions, to the extent it's stated some (unseen) species have actually left Citadel politics in protest.
• The Unchosen One: To the Protheans. They evaluated all of the "primitive" species in their cycle and determined that the asari were the next cycle's best hope to stop the Reapers. Cue Javik's surprise when awakens to find that the Reapers are most interested in humanity — in that a human, Shepard, is the galaxy's best chance of stopping them. Even then, it's implied that humanity wasn't the reapers' original choice for ascension. In fact, humanity wasn't even originally supposed to be part of the current cycle. Had it not been for the Protheans' tampering with the keeper signal, the Reapers would have invaded centuries before humanity achieved interstellar flight, meaning humanity would have been the first race of the next cycle.
• Undying Loyalty: Should Shepard cure the genophage with Wrex as leader, the krogan will consider humanity their ally for the rest of time for saving them from extinction.
• United Europe: It's mentioned that Europe is also politically active, apparently having become one Nation-State, although the United Kingdom is also mentioned, leaving it ambiguous whether it's a constituent member or a separate entity.
• Unreliable Expositor: The codex the player reads is a in-universe primer for Systems Alliance personnel. While it's generally reliable on tech details and such, it falls headfirst into Cultural Posturing whenever discussing humanity's importance compared to the other species. Ironically, Mass Effect 3 does bear out many of the assertions it makes - just for VERY different reasons than the original authors could have envisioned.
• Victory by Endurance: Human military strategy in a nutshell. Attack an enemy's resources and supply lines rather than their fleets directly, watch them "wither on the vine" and then when the time is right, curbstomp them.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With the turians. Some lingering tensions remain following the disastrous First Contact War, but the two races have more in common with each other than they do with the salarians or the asari. The two species putting their heads together produced the Normandy, possibly one of the most iconic Cool Starships in science fiction. When the Reapers finally arrive, the turians are the first of any species to offer military aid to humanity, with the turian councilor even helping Shepherd sidestep the Citadel Council's authority to do so.
• We Are as Mayflies: Zigzagged. Humans in this setting are lucky to break one century, but can reasonably live for as long as a hundred and fifty years. The trope is played straight in comparison to asari and krogan, who both live to be over 1,000 years, or synthetic races like geth, Collectors, and Reapers, who are biologically immortal. It's averted with other species, who have similar lifespans, and inverted with the salarians, whose fast metabolisms mean they can optimistically expect to live to 40 years. Even worse are the vorcha, who can count themselves lucky to see 20.
• Weak, but Skilled: Humanity's hat. As newcomers to the galactic stage, the Systems Alliance has neither the sheer numbers and power of the turians, nor the elite troops and intelligence capabilities of the asari and salarians. The reason they're still taken seriously, in spite of these factors, is that humanity's penchant for getting incredible results from minimal investment has caught the notice of every race in Citadel space, for better or for worse. Militarily, the Systems Alliance represents a formidable naval power despite humanity's status as newcomers, and inferior size and power versus the other races. Economically, human-run corporations have been responsible for some incredible advances in their short time on the galactic stage. The reason the Citadel tolerates humanity's excesses is not because they're afraid of what they are now - it's because they're both afraid and respectful of what humanity could be to the galactic community given time to grow. Mass Effect: Revelation drives this home - the only reason the Citadel doesn't relegate the Alliance to Batarian Hegemony status is Ambassador Goyle convincing them that it's in the best interests of everyone involved to give humanity time to grow and compensate for their mistakes.
• Wild Card: Humanity's penchant for advancing rapidly and being incredibly assertive - if not boorishly demanding - have given it a galactic reputation as being wild cards. Given the relative newness of humanity on the galactic stage, most races aren't really sure how to predict human behavior. Some humans, like Ambassador Udina and Renegade Shepard, are pompous, self-important, racist assholes; others, like Admiral Hackett, Captain Anderson, and Paragon Shepard are incredibly charismatic Magnetic Heroes who make tremendous contributions to galactic peace through their military careers. Samara states that humans are more individualist than any species she's met.
  Samara: If three humans are in a room, there will be six opinions.
• Worthy Opponent: The Reapers would never admit it given their enormous arrogance, but there's a good reason why Earth becomes the center of their offensive for the current extinction cycle over all other races. Races that have been part of the galaxy for thousands of years longer than humans.