Alright, That's It

Were there not pre-contact examples? This is going back quite a ways so my memory's a little vague, but I saw a performance of The Last Secret once that set the story in a pre-industrial community, and the sentries and highmen were all wearing robes with decorated collars that hung down in front, much the same shape as the modern chest fashion. Mind you, could've easily been the wardrobe designer's flight of fancy, I have no idea if it was even supposed to be historically authentic.

Damn good show though, I remember that much. Ark Nor Ad was played by Silis Valk, before he got famous.

It's your planet, don't get all shirty at me.

Thanks! :)

Then speaking as the man who is apparently responsible for the entirety of the Earth I'll say that that is completely bullshit and frankly a singularly strange kind of self aggrandizement.

"Look you liked us so much that you were dreaming about us and integrating us into your culture word for word even before first contact! Isn't that great!"

Frankly either you are amazingly uninformed or spectacularly gullible but in either case I have a lovely tale I'd like to tell you about the asari goddess Humani T'ni. You see she was a manifestation of Athame, an embodiment of her most clever and adaptable features capable of surmounting the trials before which all of the high goddess's servants fell short. Unlike most of the others her skin was the color of the earth, here eyes dark. Over time she began to become known as the patron goddess of Thought, Ambition, and Truth.

Isn't that amazing?

It's a big galaxy after all, funny things happen.

Right in any case to return to the original topic:

Frankly I think it says something rather interesting that the asari have access to this technology and that no few commandos and military personnel are capable of using it practically (and really it is an enormously useful item, increasing the survivability of undercover operatives and adding an additional, potentially critical, level of protection to preserve the lives of the comparatively few huntresses and specialists they do have) and yet it is packaged and marketed by large chunks of the government as something to be

well

as you said fetishized rather than respected, valued in the pragmatic sense, or feared. Which, really, speaks to the fundamental issue of the Republics viewing their own standing forces, from the individuals themselves to the gear they wear, as just another vector. A means by which to distribute the fun, seductive, and flighty image that is largely part of the reason that the asari media footprint is so disproportionately vast.

As the maxim goes:

sex sells.

Well, put it this way: One of those military hacks on Dynasty Maker just loved to call me "Private Ammonia." Granted, he called anyone who couldn't run a half-minute kilo Private Fudgeslice, but still.

By the way, Sandman? I know I’m supposed to be the so-called “smart one” here, but it’s difficult for even me to parse your argument when you

well

separate your arguments into a series of blissfully self-aggrandizing sentence fragments, their topics meandering more than an aeronax suffering the twin demons of cocaine addiction and no-doubt unearned mental degradation (from withholding that extra chromosome within their genetic markup), even if it is occasionally marked by

well

a series of points that might have been considered well-reasoned had they not been peppered with a non-stop verbal smirks and verbal condemnations that make it sound all too much like some blue-skinned tart jilted you on your eighteenth birthday. A sentence structure whose means are to disrupt the very entertaining, condemning remarks that would largely detract from the perception that the human political complex is so disproportionately mocked.

As the maxim goes:

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Well, at least I'm no longer wondering what it was I said that merited an unsolicited 'fuck you' from someone I wasn't even speaking or referring to at the time.

For the record though, have a read, courtesy of an Alliance-sponsored extranet historical archive, I'm pretty sure it's been fact-checked once or twice.

And no, I wasn't suggesting some kind of subconscious adulation, just that over the course of enough time and enough cultures, coincidences far more striking than the same name cropping up in different places can happen. I'm pretty sure everyone who isn't you got that. Calm the heck down.

Merciful Ajrakila...

Points for the creative double-insult of cocaine-addicted aeronax with Downs, but the attack about a personal vendetta against asari is a wee bit off-centre considering the subject of today's roast is one; gay and two; entirely right in thinking that most of the asari population of this board is hilariously awful. Pluss you overused the 'linebreak "well" linebreak' joke.

Needs improvement, but shows promise. 6/10

Terribly sorry, my eyes started glazing over halfway through. Could have sworn there were two.

Why does it always have to be about sex?

I'm sorry, that was mean. But you walked right into it.

D'ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh you. You can't see it but I'm shaking my fist at the screen right now.

I think you'll find my dear that I have long since developed a rather high tolerance to that kind of thing. Unfortunately it has the unfortunate side effect of leaving me unable to distinguish between when certain numbers of the board genuinely are not responding to me from when they're doing that weird talking around thing of "I'll try to discredit all of your points but I won't do you the courtesy of basic acknowledgement".
...



I don't

I can't

I just can't.
Firstly, the deity in question shares basic, extremely general conceptual trends with the a stereotypical asari only if you're both blindingly drunk and willing to squint a fair bit. Secondly, it does not at all follow that because "X is vaguely similar to Y after I've attempted self-lobotomy" Y is now similar to the even more offensively stupid Z.

And it is stupid. Forgive me if I forgo higher discourse or bat about a few repartees and merely cut to the meat of the matter: what you are trying to argue is, in this case, stupid. It's is stupid. It's an attempt to explain away laziness (and frankly Carcosa would have made a better argument) and even if it wasn't it is still utterly stupid, useless and without a single redeeming point. Why? Because if we take the implications to the logical conclusion you are essentially arguing that basic similarities between cultures justifies blatant, uncredited, theft for the sake of appearing slightly erudite.

Which, in case you have not yet caught my drift, is stupid.

I don't care.

Thank you.

Not for the support (though that is appreciated) but for not making me want to literally set my haptic interface on fire whenever you post.

I don't know if her thing is true, but it doesn't have to be self-aggrandizing thing. The obvious non-egotistical explanation is the Protheans were fucking with your development. Because they were in your system and they did that.

Okay can we not use "the protheans did it" to justify every half-assed conspiracy theory out there that we don't quite have an answer for?

If the protheans were going around installing subliminal messages of blue two-eyed batarians in every single race that might be uplifted to the galactic stage, the only response I could muster is "why".

Why would you need to do such a thing in the hopes that it would help defend against the reapers or better our race or some sort of bullshit like that?

Might just be convinced to swing by and clean the fucking place out after a couple more days like this.

So. General bullshit mucking up this thread aside, are there any more pressing questions I can clear up in my vain hope that I can make my race look like something other than enormous shitbirds? Something military, mind, or anything that isn't governmental. Goddess' fucking mercy, I can't speak for that.

Actually I do have a question:

In a military body like the Systems Alliance Navy or System Alliance Marine Corps there tends to be a rather broad range of troops that are deployed to combat zones. You have your medics, your pilots, your tankers, your infantry etc but within basic and broad categories like that there is a substantial measure of distinction and diversity. For example you have your infantry that ride light vehicles like troop transports, infantry that is attached to IFVs, to shuttles, to gunships, you have your Special Forces, Recon, Scout Snipers, Heavy Infantry with mechanized suits, Heavy Weapon Operators, and so on and so forth.

Huntress cadres, if I understand correctly, tend to be locally supported and while it is possible for sufficiently large colonies to maintain their own defense forces or pool their resources with their neighbors to fund a more comprehensive infrastructure (like in regions of the Terminus unclaimed by any sufficiently large organization) I've been under the impression that asari don't particularly do that. Or rather they develop their commandos and flout their super-special forces around and let everything else rot. Is this the same throughout as a general rule or only the most prominent examples of the asari military, and, if the latter, so how would you see it changed?

I was both hoping and dreading that someone would ask that question, tbh, so I suppose it's for the best that it was you Aleksanders. It's a bit of a thorny issue (understatement of the century) so I'll start off with a simple metaphor for all the little girls and boys out there.

Imagine a glass of milk. Milk that's been made somewhat poorly, so it came out unevenly. At the bottom of the glass you have the thin, watery white shit that could only be generously called milk. Around the middle you have the bog-standard stuff, lovely for the bones but fattening and generally not something you really want to have 24/7. Then at the top you have the cream, the 1% that makes the rest of it almost worth it.

See, that's pretty much the Republics writ small. I know space isn't exactly a two-dimensional plane with convenient circular blobs for ease of mapping, but the general idea is sound. Right in the middle with core worlds and systems in or around the Parnitha system, there's pretty much no reason to give a fuck. The Reapers were the first real and palpable threat to come close to the capitol in... fuck I have no idea how long and I've broken the 700 barrier. Cadres are practically a formality, a place to send your daughters where they won't fuck random strangers in a skeevy bar on Omega for some credit chits or shoot random strangers in a skeevy bar on Omega for some credit chits. All pomp and no substance, the absolute worst of the worst of asari doctrine.

The kind of middle band, the ring around the proverbial planet, is where things approach acceptable. Yes, they're specialized to fuck and back, but I wouldn't say it's automatically outright bad. If you'll hear me out, and excuse a little generalization, centralized militaries do a lot shit all at once and wind up with so many branches that they resemble the main love interest in Maidens Gone Wild XXX. Cadres are small, fragile, and inflexible but they're good at what they do. I won't say some chest-thumping shit about 'one huntress is worth ten N7s' but you get my drift. It's crippling when they have to deal with shit outside their expertise, but they deal with that through two main avenues; strike first, and mobilize. The further you get from Thessia, the more likely it'll be that a given cadre will be ready to drop everything they're doing and be in line for the nearest relay in sixty seconds flat. And yeah, it's brutal and nasty and very salarian (oh my I said a bad thing), but huntresses do a lot of wetworks. One colony I heard of had to pay off some pirates to leave them alone for a month, only for the pirates to come back in about a week going 'yeah we want more' - their base turned up another month later stuffed fit to burst with white phosphorous and everything short of salting the earth.

That last example is mostly regulated to the outer rim stuff, the cream of the metaphorical glass of milk. They don't get many recruits out there, what with the average maiden preferring to stay and armchair-politick with their ass comfortably cushioned on Thessia or whatever while their fellow asari die, or just slut it up or be a merc. So they get good at what they do, and when I say they get good, I say they get really fucking good.

I knew this one huntress band, 104th Sunset Blades. Scariest bitches I've ever laid eyes on. All of them veterans of several centuries, got more blood on their hands than your average krogan in puberty. I'm not saying they were superheroes, but they were the kind of asari that got forged out there when the rest of their race decided 'fuck it let's snort coke off a stripper's ass and talk about how wise we are'. I spent fifteen years on and off with them and I don't regret a second of it.

Bah, I'm drifting off-topic. To reduce my paragraphs of rambling into bite-sized pieces; Republic space is like a galactic shuffleboard. Colonized worlds specialize in their own shit and specialize in it hard, neutering threats before they come close when possible and getting into the action as fast as they can when all else fails.

...wow.

I...uh.

...I am unironically surprised. Mostly because that does explain a great deal (there's more time to dick about playing politician and publicist if you're not actually fighting, and if you're seeing regular combat and/or are from a relatively young colony you have a disproportionately small representation among the Republics) and I

am not trying to strangle myself with my own tie after reading it.

Which, really, is something of a first when listening to asari on the board try to explain the military.

Though I would contest this somewhat, centralized militaries have that degree of structural complexity largely because they are expected to cover all the roles that might be required of them which, overall, renders them better suited to address a variety of threats. The issue with specialization (depending on the degree of focus) is that even preemption and prevention only do so much to address the problem. For one it forces you to constantly maintain an offensive of varying intensity since you basically have all your chips placed on primacy of assault and anyone that's better at it than you circumnavigates about ninety percent of your doctrine. For another it's rather easy to screw yourself over, for example: a world that specializes in commandos and nothing but commandos is moderately fucked if the enemy is primarily naval based; conversely a world that specializes in fighter pilots and nothing but fighter pilots is worse than useless if they're the only one on hand to, say, seize a space station or raider base.

Unless, as I said earlier, multiple worlds pool their resources (and which you did imply I believe so that might answer my own question right there), but that runs into the issue of mobilizing with a highly decentralized force.

Oh you.


I can't really argue with that, honestly. Centralized militaries obviously work, seeing as how pretty much everyone uses them and they're still around. And yeah, there are likely thousands of times when crippling overspecialization has led to death and disarray. But, honestly... I think it's led to plenty of triumphs that would've otherwise been complete washes. It's not perfect, but it's not worth writing off completely.

See, what I liken it to is drills. If you face off against someone that's practiced a thousand strikes, throws, holds, and biotic powers once, you'll... kick their ass immediately, pretty much. But face someone who's practiced one biotic talent a thousand times? Then you see fireworks. For example, pretty much every commando cadre has at least two or three huntresses trained exhaustively in the projection and sustaining of biotic spheres, or 'bubbles' as pretty much everyone calls them. They can dampen velocity, manipulate trajectory, sometimes stop rounds altogether. So your squad of lightly-armed special forces suddenly become a literal bunker in the middle of an otherwise open killing field while some other specialists, say the snipers, start popping heads with impunity. Or, as another example, a squad trained to maximize their potential with area-affecting biotics. If you paired them with the aforementioned bubble-bitches (a catchy term I must say) you'd have reality itself shitting itself from the sheer number of Singularities and Reaves and shit flying around.

And yeah, places pool resources all the time. They'd be completely dense if they weren't. If the aforementioned world of nothing but commandoes were assaulted by a primarily naval enemy, they'd engage in delaying tactics while they called for reinforcements from, say, the aforementioned planet specializing in fighter pilots. Or vice versa. It's not that hilariously specific and regimented, but you get the basic idea. I guess... that's pretty much a necessary drawback. If you threw everything you had at a 'commando' planet and just nuked the place from high orbit, there isn't shit they could do. But... I dunno. I guess, to me at least, it seems like that'd be a problem anyway. If you rocked up to a colony and decided that it was going down today, it wouldn't really matter if they were specialized incorrectly or diverse or whatever if you outgun them. Overall I think, in a bizarre way, the strict specialization makes us more flexible on a more macro scale.

There's no formal high command really, but what you get instead are kind of loose coalitions of various planets. Branches and subdivisions, specialists among specialists, the skeleton of centralization but not quite. Way more common out on the rim where if you can't count on the gal next to you you can't count on shit. Less democratic and more 'we need this shit and we need it now', mostly free of the usual backstabbery since if you're out there in the first place, you're usually over that kind of shit.

Goddess, there are stories about the Blades that I can't repeat because they're literally incredible. The operations they get deployed on are quite frankly, fucking suicide missions. The closest I ever came to dying was when we ran fire support for them on a mission on the outer rim.

The environment was fucking lethal and nearly half the deployed unit, me included, had caught some kind of fucking fever. By the height of the battle I was bedridden and the pirates were dumping WP on our FoB and the blades were in front of us the whole time. I don't even want to think about their casualties, shit was fucked.

It really is interesting to read your views, Matriarch. You're very clear and explanatory in some ways that remind me of my superiors in my own cadre.