He’s also a potential love interest for a girl protagonist from Mass Effect 2 onwards. And Garrus appears to be a popular choice vis. alien smooching, much like how everyone just knows who is objectively the best Hollywood Chris. But though Chris Evans’ supremacy is self-evident, I cannot wrap my head around wanting to shag Garrus. The title is not a facetious question. I am a curious person and would like detailed answers from the Garrus-fanciers in the comments. Before I am dragged to some kind of highly advanced, holographic stocks to be pelted with exotic space fruit, I should point out that I really like Garrus. He’s one of the very first pals you pick up in Mass Effect, and over the three games he goes from slightly nervous rules-follower who hates all the red tape binding him, to a cool and awesome vigilante (but like, not in a modern Batman kind of way. Garrus plays by his own rules but hes a good boy, so his rules are pretty nice. Look, it makes sense in context, okay?). Garrus typifies why people get so attached to characters in BioWare games. You get to see his arc over three games, spanning months (if not years) of in-game time - but it takes up actual years of cumulative real-life time waiting for the each game to come out, so you sort of feel you know him for longer than he actually exists. This is true of other Mass Effect characters, of course, but not many are squadmates in every single game. And compared to a lot of the others, Garrus’s arc is fairly personal. Some of your squadmates end up involving you in the fate of entire races, sometimes forming really important parts of the main plot. But Garrus gets you to chase down some bad criminals and betrayers, and considers how much taking of the law into your own hands is too much. He’s pretty chill, and he’s there from the very start of your journey to the very end. Garrus is a constant. He is an incredibly reassuring presence. So much so that I was very uncomfortable when I watched an episode of Criminal Minds starring Brandon Keener, and Garrus’s calm, sensible voice came out of a murdering pedophile rapist; I understand that is how acting works but my psyche was upset. Garrus is one of my go-to squaddies. I have a Funko Pop figurine of Garrus. I love Garrus. But not like that.
Since Garrus is not a romantic prospect for the entire first game, and since he is one of very few characters there for me the whole time, a squadmate from the get-go, Garrus is in fact my absolute best mate. A lot of us have done that thing where you hook up with your best friend, but generally speaking it’s something you only do once, when you’re like 21. It becomes clear, somewhere between the first time you go out with your regular group of mates and the first time you have a fight, that it the worst idea since the last time two best mates hooked up and each told their respective parents “Yeah, but I think it’s going to work out for us.”
You would do that, if you hooked up with Garrus: you would tell people you honestly thought that it’d be different, and that this time hooking up with your best mate would be fine, but it wouldn’t. And you would persevere with it out of shame and desperation until you broke up and never talked to your best mate again. It would probably ruin the defence of the Turian homeworld as well. Garrus would be too depressed to lead his task force. You’re already going “But I never thought of him as my best mate!” but honest, who else fills the same role as Garrus in this series? Wrex? Wrex is clearly your space-dad, you fool! And what, you’re going to tell me you’d be besties with Ash, a space racist, or Kaiden, a nice beefcake but a yawn in the form of a man? Come on. You’re lying to me, and more importantly, to yourself. And some of you are arguing that you’re supposed to be best mates with your partner. That’s up for debate, but even so, you’re supposed to become best mates with your partner, not become partners with your best mate. And you’re still faced with the problem of not having a best mate if you remove Garrus from the position. Garrus is, to me, obviously the person you would more naturally go to when Jack or Thane or whoever forgets date night and you need to bitch about it. He’d be like, “How dare they?!” but then also talk about how good you are together and that you’ll work it out.
I’ll join in with the memes and what have you, partly out of a sense of community and party because saying “I’d like to get in the middle of those calibrations!” is just very funny. But deep down I think we all know that Garrus should just be left to his own calibrations.
