Mass Effect: The Asari

Luke, are you going to comment on the “sex scene” controversy in Mass Effect?

Nope. I won’t because there isn’t one. Controversy I mean. Sex scene is there but it was tame, PG-13 type material. Seriously, most R rated movies go far above and beyond that without being considered controversial. Hell, Indigo Prophecy was way more explicit than this, but didn’t get all that media coverage. Oh, wait – that’s because the thought police cut out all the naughty bits from the US release. Anyways, fuck it. Anyone who played the game knows the scene was rather tame. Anyone who didn’t can watch the full scene on Youtube. And the fact it is on Youtube is very telling since Google tends to remove stuff that is too raunchy fairly quickly.

That’s not what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about the Asari – the “all female race”. If you haven’t played the game, let me explain. They all look like blue skinned human females with little tentacle things on their heads instead of hair. So essentially: Star Trek space babes. How do they reproduce you ask?

Well, apparently they can absorb the DNA of another living beings by rubbing themselves all over them. Yes, any living things. Which means they can and do have sex with every sentient species in the known galaxy and in most cases they will give birth to perfectly healthy children. These kids inherit the looks from the Asari mom and other cool genetic traits from the “father” because apparently they have that much control over the cellular processes involved in conception. I put father in quotation marks because the Asari can mate with both males and females – they are not picky.

Oh hai! We Asari are built just like human females excluding the head squid. But that's just an evolutionary coincidence. Honestly!

What is even more interesting is that they consider mating with members of their own race sort of shameful. It’s not prohibited but frowned upon since it does nothing to “better” the gene pool of their species. So essentially they travel all across galaxies and bed down the most awesome specimens of the alien species they find in order to borrow their favorable genetic traits and reintroduce them to their gene pool. Which doesn’t really make sense if they don’t interbreed with each other to solidify these traits but whatever. In Mass Effect universe it is apparently working pretty well, considering that an average Asari tends to live for over a century.

Sigh… To summarize: bisexual, blue space babes who have sex with everything that is capable of sentient thought. That’s… That’s just a little bit juvenile, don’t you think? I mean, a one sex race is an interesting idea but only if you put some thoughts behind it. In Mass Effect the whole culture and biology of Asari seems to be a plot point. It’s all designed so that the the player character can have sex with them at different stages of the game.

And I would know how immature this is because I’m pretty sure I totally had that type of race in my imaginary Science Fiction setting when I was like 12. What, you never did any world building when you were a kid? Well, fuck you then – I still have some of my old notebooks filled with cryptic notes written about imaginary fantasy and SF settings. And I’m pretty sure I had an all female race.

Actually scratch that – even at that point I was to conscious of biological implications of a single sex race to design Asari. My space babe race was reproducing via straight Parthenogenesis and due to that fact they had astonishingly low genetic diversity, and were susceptible to adverse genetic mutations and some such. Large number of their children were born with severe mental and/or physical retardation. Some would be let loose and would turn feral, while others were kept as servants and slaves. Their scientists actually devised a way to reintroduce sexual reproduction into the species but it was culturally unacceptable and conflicted with most religions practiced on their world.

I also had ideas for almost-single-sex races. And by that I mean a sexually dimorphic race where only a single sex was sentient and/or able to communicate with other races. This included a species in which males never left the larval stage. They would be borderline sentient, symbiotic worm like creatures with intelligence of a dog. They would stay attached to their mother’s body, largely incapable of surviving on their own. The mother could then decide to gift one of them to a worthy female she respected. Once attached to another female the larval male would inseminate her periodically and also keep any male offspring also attached to her body in line acting as the alpha male of the group.

Frankly, my all-female races were never as sexualized as Asari. Every time I sat down to dream up an alien space babe race, the design would morph into something more squishy, and realistic. Sadly I couldn’t help this. Before I discovered science fiction, my favorite books to read on my spare time were my mom’s college level biology textbooks so there were things I could never abide by – like inter species breeding for example. It just couldn’t work in real world.

How about you? What do you think of the Asari? Silly? Juvenile? Or acceptable? Also, what did you think of the “sex scene”. Were you like me underwhelmed by how tame it was, or did you think it was a bit too much for a video game?