So, assuming the screwdriver that Master Chief is straight, meaning that Kaiden and Steve Cortez are out, any speculation on who his love interest will be? Here are some pros and cons for each possible candidate:
Ashley:
Pro: Fellow Marine. Atoning for her grandfather being the first person since the Covenant War to surrender to aliens is something that might make Chief take her more under his wing.
Con: Those pesky anti-fraternization rules, plus she's rather obvious fangirl, which is the sort of thing that might turn Chief off.
Liara:
Pro: The only person in the original Mass Effect close to Chief's chronological age.
Con: She's still an alien. Plus, in the first game she's incredibly naive, and in the second she's a tad too driven to get Ferron back to be particularly emotionally available. By the time she's ready for prime time during the Reaper Invasion, Chief may have moved on.
Tali:
Pro: She had as good a reason to crush on John Sierra-117 as she did on Maleshep. Plus, they could theoretically bond over their mutual needs to be fully dressed in encounter suits.
Con: Unfortunately, that crush may have been killed by Chief's adherence to Alliance secrecy rules, and then there's the fact that she's an alien, too. On the other hand, maybe he can make it up to her...
Miranda:
Pro: She's naturally charming, when she wants to be, plus, Chief, being a SPARTAN II, is no less modified than she, so she has much less reason to be insecure around him than she was towards Maleshep.
Con: Unfortunately, she can be a real brat when she doesn't get her way. Plus, no thanks to the Arbiter, her reputation proceeds her to Chief, and not in a good way, and not just because she's TIM's right hand woman.
Jack:
Pro: She's basically everything Chief, well, Linda, Kelly, or Jaye anyway, could have been if Reach had been as staffed with @$$#013$ as Pragia and the Covenant hadn't invaded, keeping the war more of a shades of gray conflict. That sort of thing is bound to cause some shock to him once he's been to Teltin, and maybe find some common ground. And with her biotics, she's one of the few people who could get into an escalating argument with Chief and hold her own, for a little while, at least.
Con: She has more and bigger issues than a lifetime subscription to Sports Illustrated or Time. Even with You Tube playthroughs to help you through it, getting through her romance successfully is a razor-edge challenge with no margin for error, and Chief isn't really Shepard.
Samara:
Pro: All of Liara's good qualities (from Chief's perspective) plus the seasoning of age and experience.
Con: But she's still an alien. Plus, she'll still see reason to shut Chief down if he starts making the moves on her.
Kasumi:
Pro: Well, it's not totally impossible. She'd have as much reason to be a Chief fangirl as she is Shepard's, at least in Game Two, anyway. And this troper suspects that Kasumi will find that Chief probably looks even better working out than Jacob.
Con: Well, considering that she's an utter and unrepentant kleptomaniac...
Femshep:
Pro: Well, if she exists, then unless she has the Sole Survivor service record and was stuck on Earth, Reach, or Arcturus Station shuffeling e-paper during the upcoming Battle of the Citadel, she'll be the third most decorated individual in the Alliance alive (After Chief and Anderson). Definitely closer to Chief's equal than Ashley. Plus, each origin has something in common with Chief's.
Con: Those anti-fraternization rules will still be in force.
Other possible love interests, some more cracky than others:
EDI
Cortana in Eva Core's Body
Captain Lee Riley
Aria T'Loak
Matriarch Aethyta
Dr. Chloe Michel
Gianna Parasini
Emily Wong
Helena Blake
Now please, discuss!
Edited by 216.99.32.42
Here are a few Wild Mass Guesses people can put on that page when and if it ever goes up...
WMG: Both Kaiden and Ashley will survive Virmire
- N'tho, Tali and either Wrex or Liara (whichever one isn't with Chief when he's storming Saren's Base) will have Joker do a Mako drop to save the one Chief isn't going after, then jump boost to get picked up by the Normandy right in the nick of time. Sadly, if it's Kaiden with Kirrahe, the STG captain won't make it.
- The coralary to this is that if Wrex dies, there's only one Virmire Survivor after all.
WMG: Saren/Sovereign's plans will involve at least one of the former 314 species.
- Most likely the Jihariae or Kig-Yar
WMG: There will be a fourth major mercenary company in the Terminus Systems.
- And its membership will be drawn from one of the former 314 species.
WMG: The Fates of Master Chief's Former Companions after the Battle of the Citadel/Alchera System Incident:
- Ashley and/or Kaiden will be promoted and assigned to other posts, eventually serving with Vega, Captain Toni, and/or the story's actual Shepard. They will meet Chief again during the Horizon Incident.
- If Wrex lives, he returns to Tuchanka per OTL, but he will be more impressed with human combat prowess and some less impressed with human honor when it doesn't pretain to courage.
- N'tho returns to his former unit, only to be permenantly kicked out for insubordination. He eventually teams up with Garrus when he's kicked out of C-Sec/isn't even given the time of day for Spectre Consideration, and on Omega picks up the moniker "Seraph."
- Tali returns to the Migrant Fleet. If Master Chief still got her some Geth hardware, she might forgive him. If he leaked some non-human or non-classified technology (like, say, plasma shielding or ex-Covenant beam weapons tech), she might even crush on him a little harder than she did Male Shepard in the game series.
- Liara meets her father early, and has the same chat with her Shepard has at Eternity in Mass Effect 2.
- If this troper's math is right, Cortana should start showing some signs of rampancy about then.
WMG: Grunt will have a different name.
- No way in #3!! Okeer would metaphorically referr to his pride-and-joy by the same handle as the Unggoy's Reporting Name.
WMG: New Companions for Master Chief in Part II/Investigating the Collectors:
- The Virmire Survivor(s), just to show how different the story is.
- An ODST, or at least a former one. (Bonus points if it's simply part of Jacob or Zaeed's new background)
- Another member of the 314 species.
- Shepard!
- Blasto!
- Bonus points if he acts more like the actual actor in the Citadel DLC and/or he knows Thane personally.
- Captain Blasto, from the PS 1 game!
Sithking Zero
How is Mass Effect 2 going to be played out? Originally, ME 2 starts with Shepard falling from space and hitting the ground hard. Here... Well, Chief has already survived falling from orbit at least twice, and we saw in Halo: Reach that this was not something unique to him when Noble 6 did the same thing off the corvette.
So... They're probably just going to go down to the surface and pick him up...
Maxim 34: If your gun is leaving scorch marks, you're not using a big enough gun. -Schlock Mercenary Hide / Show Replies
In fairness, it appears the Forerunner Dreadnought the Chief had escaped on was already nearly at the end of its descent, and if you investigate the area where he crashed at the beginning of the level, there's a piece of metal (airlock?) that he implicitly "surfed" down to the surface. He was still KO'd by that fall. It's unlikely he'll be so lucky when The Collectors come a-knockin' and he's floating helplessly in space before doing re-entry all on his own.
At the rate the story is advancing? We'll find out sometime in 2014. We shouldn't even worry about it for now.
This nattery mess needs to be put into a coherent voice:
- Kick the Dog: Chief has been kicking these a lot recently:
- Plans to kick Garrus off the team for trying to talk to him about Cortana (Causing a Tear Jerker)
- Justified in that AI's are illegal in council space, and if he talks, she could be taken away and destroyed.
- Keeps data on Forerunner Slipspace Drives from Tali, knowing she'll never see it if ONI get their hands on it (Causing another Tear Jerker).
- Justified in that he's following military protocol, and that it's his job to secure advantages for humanity.
- Orders the team to leave the registry. N'tho doesn't want to leave, since he wants to find intel on the Elites. Chief grabs him and lays into him with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about the Elites and their love for the Forerunners (Causes another Tear Jerker).
- Made more understandable because the man has spent almost his entire adult life fighting the Covenant, who were trying very hard to exterminate his species because of said religion. That doesn't justify this speech, but it makes it easy to see where the Chief is coming from.
- In addition, the facility is being overrun at that very moment by Prometheans, Saren's forces, and the freaking Flood. Oh, and a self-destruct sequence has been activated. Chief getting fed up at that moment is extremely understandable.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman