Mass Effect/Characters/Races

• Main
• Characters
  • Commander Shepard
  • Races
• Laconic
• Trivia
• YMMV
• Fridge
• Fanfic Recs
• Haiku
• WMG
• Crowners
  • Awesome
  • Funny
  • Heartwarming
  • Nightmare Fuel
  • Tear Jerker
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
  • Awesome Music
  • Narm
  • Shout Out
  • Tropes A-D
  • Tropes E-L
  • Tropes M-P
  • Tropes Q-Z
• Create New

This page is for listing the tropes related to the many species in the Mass Effect universe, each with their own (often averted) tropes. For simplicity's sake, they are categorized as characters.

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

As with all character pages, this page includes significant spoilers, and some are by their nature unmarked. Read at your own discretion.

Citadel Council Races

Turians

If you want a problem shot, ask a turian... —Commander Shepard

The third race to join the Citadel Council. The Turian Hierarchy is a very organized and militant society. Every 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.

• Alien Blood: Blue.
• Badass Army: They have extremely disciplined armies, the largest fleet of warships, the most dreadnoughts, and a proud military tradition. They also have by far the largest military in the known galaxy, except for maybe the geth.
  • They were able to hold their own against the krogan clans in a decades-long war of attrition at a time before the genophage when the krogan were actually breeding faster than the other races.
  • "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 a particularly large part of the Reaper fleet 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • They were also frequently the victims of this during the Krogan Rebellions, the krogan had a habit of smashing moons into turian planets. It just made the turians angry.
• Combat by Champion: One of the traditional ways turians can resolve large-scale conflicts: a duel between chosen representatives of each party.
• 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 simply to take out individual fireteams.
• Doomed Homeworld: Due to their powerful military, Palaven was a major target for the Reapers in Mass Effect 3.
• The Empire: Some random turians even call it The Empire by name, but it's far more benevolent than usual.
• Facial Markings: See Tribal Face Paint below.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: They're about halfway between space Prussians and space Romans with some Confucianism thrown in for flavor.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: They're the fighter to the asari mage and the salarian thief.
• Honor Before Reason: Turians are noted to have very heavy social stigma against lying; a turian may choose not to advertise that they committed a crime, but would likely admit to it if directly questioned.
• 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 Council Space.
  • Although they are just as likely to be Unfunny Deadpan Snarkers.
• 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 Shepard's succinct view.
• 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 they conquered were levo-amino-based, they had to ship in their supplies from the Hierarchy, eventually making their position untenable.
• Not So Different: 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...
• Only Sane Man: During the Reaper invasion, they're the only ones who aren't unhelpful (asari and salarians), fighting one another (quarians and geth, krogan with themselves), hindering the war effort (hanar, the salarian government), or decimated (asari, batarians, rachni). And it makes perfect sense given their strong militaristic culture mixed with incredible discipline in contrast with the krogans' strong warrior culture with no discipline.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Not as much as the krogan, but definitely the most militaristic council race. It'd be more accurate to call them 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".
• Putting on the Reich: Subverted: most of the societal values and attitudes detailed for turians seem to be based off old school Prussian values rather than Nazi influence.
• 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.
• Space Romans: Their species name was derived from "Centurion" in story design phases of the franchise, and their names tend to sound like a cross between roman and alien.
• 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.
• Tribal Face Paint: The markings on a turian's face is meant to signify the tribe that he/she belongs to. Tribes that no longer technically exist thanks to a unification in the past, but hey, tradition's tradition. The term 'barefaced' has come to mean someone who is untrustworthy in turian society. It also means politician.
• 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 (see below), despite the fact that only 3% of the population serve in the Alliance Navy. The turians know that if more humans served in the military, they'd be practically unstoppable.
• Worthy Opponent: What they (grudgingly) consider the humans. The First Contact War (which they refer to as the Relay 314 Incident) was the first truly meaningful military opposition they had faced in a millennium. This has become Friendly Enemy with some Teeth-Clenched Teamwork by the time of Mass Effect 1, and by Mass Effect 3, the two races are basically Vitriolic Best Buds.

Asari

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

One of the two founding races of Citadel Space alongside the salarians and the most powerful and widespread race in the galaxy, the asari often take the role of diplomats. They are a long lived mono-gendered race, but are seen as female to other species. Asari reproduce by linking their nervous system to another sentient being of any race, and partnerships of two asari are looked down upon by most of the species now, as they believe it restricts genetic diversity. All asari have biotic ability, but require training to use it effectively.

Asari are available for multiplayer in Mass Effect 3, and can use the Adept and Vanguard classes. The Resurgence pack adds the Justicar Adept class.

• Alien Blood: Purple.
• Amazon Brigade: Any asari force, by virtue of all its members being female.
• 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.
• Blue-Skinned Space Babes
• 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 because the child can be born an Ardat-Yakshi. This unfortunately leads to some in-universe Unfortunate Implications about asari promiscuity.
• Can't Argue with Elves: Asari have played themselves as this for millennia and gotten away with it. It's actually very simple to pull off if you were given a cheat sheet by the most advanced race of the previous extinction cycle.
• 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 or a plan to pay off.
• 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, instead relying on the turians for protection.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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, they feel the need to settle down and raise a family; the "Matron" phase. And once they tip over the six hundred point, they retire to become Matriarchs, using their experience and power to lead and advise (politicians, spiritual leaders, and bartenders). One of their religions involves worshiping a goddess who vacillates between the three stages as well.
• 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.
• Hypocrite: They claim that the asari are the most advanced race in the galaxy due to inherent virtues, but they actually have the only intact Prothean Beacon in the galaxy.
  • Double Standard: The penalties for withholding Prothean technology from the galaxy at large are among the most severe the Citadel enforces. The asari have secretly used that beacon to become one of the most powerful races in the galaxy... they only admit to Shepard that "something important" is on Thessia after it is attacked.
    • Even worse: the Asari were the first to discover the Citadel because of the technological edge gained from the beacon and founded the Citadel Council, so they were the ones who created the rule.
  • Hiding Behind Religion: The Beacon again. The asari government hid the beacon in their oldest religious site, disguising the knowledge gained from it as "messages from the goddess". They even disguised one of the last living Protheans as a messiah figure. It's practically a retread of Assassin's Creed. In Space.
• 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.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: The ability to choose when to get pregnant means that the asari population stays fairly stable.
• The Kirk: To the turian McCoy and salarian Spock.
• 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, mostly, with asari commandos... who are as hard-nosed and physical as most other soldiers in the galaxy. Played straight, however, with justicars, if Samara is any indication. Even in the midst of battle, she is very lady-like.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The asari were uplifted by the Protheans solely to lead the fight against the Reapers, and were not only given universal biotics, but a fully-operational Prothean Beacon containing pretty much everything necessary for them to kill Reapers. Not only did they hide the beacon along with all other evidence that the Protheans uplifted them so they could pretend to be an inherently superior species, but when the time came for them to kick Reaper ass, they withdrew to their homeworld, Thessia, and refused to help anyone. Thessia ends up the only homeworld completely and utterly annihilated by the Reapers. The targeting laser for that karma could hit a target in another galaxy.
• Magic Knight: Again, asari commandos. Or anyone serving in the asari military.
• 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.
• Mayfly-December Romance: How asari relationships with any other species that isn't asari or krogan tend to turn out.
• Mind Over Matter: They are the only species with natural biotics. Actually, the Protheans altered their entire species to give them all biotics.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's revealed in the third game the Protheans aided in developing their early culture, deeming them the ones most likely to stop the Reapers in the next Cycle. To this end, the Protheans made significant enhancements to the asari: science, politics, universal biotics, even a working Prothean beacon that could be used to prepare the races of the galaxy against the Reapers. Unfortunately, the Protheans didn't count on the Asari keeping the beacon under wraps so they could claim to be superior to everyone else. They only send Shepard to retrieve the beacon when the Reapers were literally kicking down their front door.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Apparently, this is one of their hats, in addition to Boldly Coming.
• One-Gender Race
• 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 female alien equivalents of Rambo. Ultimately, this dooms Thessia. The asari commandos are such exceptionally-skilled warriors that their entire military is built around elite commando militia, ideally suited to supporting the heavier turian forces. However, when the Reapers invade Thessia, all the elite light infantry in the world is worth about as much as spitwads against kilometer-long robo-Cthulhus, and Thessia falls in days. Even before that, their peaceful liberal utopia would have been destroyed two or three times over already without first the Krogans, then the Turians, and finally the humans doing most of the actual fighting while Asari commandos snipe from the sidelines.
• Our Elves Are Better: Either subverted or double subverted, depending on how much truth you read into Javik's words to Liara.
  • Screw You, Elves: Gianna Pasarini from the first and second game seems to really enjoy bringing asari in for their crimes, and she's apparently not the only one who enjoys rubbing it in when the asari screw up, including one of their own Matriarchs, Aethyta, who says that the asari on Thessia "laughed the blue off [her] ass" when she suggested that asari should spend their maiden years doing something more productive than stripping.
• 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 euphoric 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.
• Rubber Forehead Aliens: They look almost exactly like human woman, 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. Although an overheard conversation at a bachelor party involving a turian, human and salarian in the second game implies that there's something More Than Mind Control going on, as all three find the asari stripper attractive for wildly different reasons.
• 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.
• Utopia: Asari Society is the most technological and culturally advanced society in space. It's revealed in Mass Effect 3 that this is due to them secretly hiding a Prothean artifact to keep them ahead of everyone else.
• Warrior Monk: The Justicars, with a side-order of Knight Errant.

Salarians

...if you want a NEW problem, ask a salarian.... —Commander Shepard

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). 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.

• Alien Blood: Green.
• Asexuality: Most of them are asexual, except in regards to the asari. Unfertilized eggs laid by their Dalatrasses (read: family matriarchs) are born as males. Fertilized eggs are born as females. Siring them is dealt with in a business/political agreement fashion ("Reproduction Negotiations"). As such, the majority of the population are males.
• 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.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The thief in the asari-turian-salarian trio.
• Gender Rarity Value: Females are rare, influential, and extremely well-protected, due to the reasons listed under Asexuality. You will never see a salarian female in a combat role unless things are very dire.
• The Greys: Or at least the closest equivalent in the Mass Effect setting.
• 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.
• Motor Mouth: A few of them. At the very least they talk faster than most other species.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One of their hats, apparently. Since Salarians are hyper-active and have shorter lifespans, they think more for the short term (in contrast to the asari, who think so long-term that they sometimes seem complacent or wishy-washy). Case in point, the first few thousand years of galactic war were continuously their fault. They activated the relay which brought the rachni to the universe and started the Rachni Wars, they then uplifted the krogan to defeat the rachni, then they sterilized the krogan in order to stop the Krogan Rebellions. Mass Effect 3 then shows that they were planning to secretly uplift the yahg. See the running quote for Shepard's succinct view.
• Not So Different: 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 krogan?
• Overly Long Name: Salarians always introduce themselves shorthand. A salarian's full name includes their personal name, family name, and the city, district, country, planet, star system, and star cluster of their birth.
• 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.
• The Spock: To the turian McCoy and asari Kirk.
• 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.
• We Are as Mayflies: With a lifespan of around 40 years, they are shortest-lived of the powerful species.

Humans

....But if you want a problem fixed, ask a human. —Commander Shepard

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. 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 seven races available for multiplayer, and are the only one with access to all the classes and a customizable gender.

• 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.

"This makes us willing to sacrifice for the sake of others... Can you honestly say the same about humanity?" —Tevos, asari Councillor

• 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.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: That said, when humans actually are deserving of their merits, the other races are rather hesitant to award them.
• America Takes Over the World/China Takes Over the World/United Europe: Hints are given about it. Apparently the three leading powers back on Earth are the United North American States (which includes the US, Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean islands), The European Union (which may be one country now) and the People's Federation of China. India is also mentioned as a major power in the novels, and possibly the richest individual nation around.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Other races are quietly terrified that this might happen, given that the humans were able to hold their own against the turians, having never fought them before, with such a small percentage of humanity's population in the military. Many say that if the turians and humans ever got into a long war with each other, it would wreck a significant portion of the galaxy.
  • Used as a Batman Gambit by Udina's predecessor, Ambassador Goyle, in the book Mass Effect Revelation. When an illegal Alliance operation is uncovered, the Citadel Council prepares to sanction humanity back into the Stone Age. Realizing that this would doom humankind to a fate much like the quarians or the krogan (the entire species reduced to a punchline and unable to do anything significant in Council Space for hundreds... if not thousands of years), Goyle boldly states that if the Council does this, the Systems Alliance will declare war on all Citadel Space. She was aware that humanity wouldn't ever win such a suicidal war, but that if humanity devoted a lot of their resources towards militarization they could inflict enough damage on Council space that the Council just wouldn't see fighting them as worth it.
  • This was also something humans were doing 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) 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: You don't tangle with the turians by having any less.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Throughout the series, its indicated that various races are terrified of humanity for their martial prowess, even when they come waving a banner of peace. Who only knows what they'd do if they actually decided to declare war.
• The Empire: Subverted. Aliens fear this from the humans as a whole, but it never really gets as far as they think.
• Humans Advance Swiftly: Humanity went from first contact to major political force in the galaxy in less than 50 years as opposed to the centuries that others have required to reach lesser status. This comparatively absurd advancement speed with little sign of slowing is part of the reason most races are quietly terrified of the potential of humanity.
• 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. Most other species can only be two, and the krogan can only be three.
• Humans Are Leaders: This is how they see themselves, anyway. And it's embodied by Ambassador Udina and the Illusive Man in the negative sense, and Admiral Hackett and David Anderson in the positive sense, and Commander Shepard can fall anywhere between them on the scale. 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.
  • Humans were also the ones who conceptualized, planned and for the most part carried out the Andromeda colonization Initiative. Jien Garçon 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, horribly deconstructed later.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The most despicable and feared terrorist organization in the galaxy (Cerberus) and the largest NGO Superpower criminal empire (Blue Suns) are both human organizations (though the Suns have some major batarian influence as well). It puts a bit of a drain on their reputation, especially since Cerberus was formerly an Alliance organization.
• Humans Are Warriors: Part of the reason humanity rose to prominence so quickly is because they managed to give the turians difficulty in battle. An achievement intimidating enough to give weight to the new species' opinions in the political arena.
• 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/Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: 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 and establishing a human-led empire, is entirely up to Shepard.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With the turians. There might be tension, but these two societies have more in common with each other than with the salarians or the asari. They even co-designed the Normandy with the turians.
• We Are as Mayflies: 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 with asari and krogan, who both live to be over 1,000 years. It's averted with most other species, who have similar lifespans, and with the salarians, whose fast metabolisms gives them maximum lifespans of just 40 years. Even worse are the vorcha, who can count themselves lucky to see 20.
• Wild Card: Given the relative newness of humanity on the galactic stage, most races aren't really sure how to predict human behavior.

Citadel Associate/Client/Protectorate Races

Drell

Overpopulation left the drell planet polluted and starved of resources before the species had even developed fusion power. The hanar saved hundreds of thousands of them as their world died; in gratitude, many drell choose to serve the hanar in some fashion under "The Compact". Do not compare this with slavery within drell earshot: "Anyone can refuse to serve. Few do. We owe our existence to the hanar. We are proud to repay the debt."

Unfortunately, the transition hasn't been seamless. The drell are built for a world where water is in short supply, but it rains every day on the hanar homeworld. Their lungs can't handle the moisture, and a terminal disease known as 'Kepral's Syndrome' often occurs in late adulthood.

Drell are available for multiplayer, and can use the Adept and Vanguard classes.

• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards: To the hanar.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: The male versions of the species were specifically designed to be the Spear Counterparts to the asari. We never see the females.
• Guttural Growler: We meet all of three drell (four including the multiplayer), all male, and they all have raspy voices.
• Humanoid Aliens: They look almost as human as they do reptilian.
• I Owe You My Life: The compact between the drell and hanar was formed after the hanar saved as many drell as possible from their dying homeworld.
• Photographic Memory: Though they can't always control them. When they're concentrating, they're fine. But when idly recalling memories, they'll often get locked into PTSD-style flashbacks. Depending on the memory, it can be a good thing. Or a very not good thing. Like the day you met your wife. Or the day you get shot in the knee.
• The Reptilians: They bear a pretty good resemblance to lizards.
• Undying Loyalty: To the hanar.
• Walking the Earth: Many drell who do not choose to join in the Compact instead opt to wander around the galaxy, partaking in other cultures and species.

Hanar

The hanar live in the oceans and communicate through bio-luminescence, which makes adapting to galactic society more of a challenge for them. Other species mainly know them as 'those excessively polite jellyfish who worship the Protheans.' They also saved the drell from total extinction nearly a century pre-series.

• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Their hat is being excessively polite, and they can't even hold guns. So you wouldn't think they'd be dangerous combatants, right? Well, according to certified Badass Zaeed Massani, they can be deadly if they manage to get those tentacles around your throat. Furthermore, they're literally out of their element when dealing with most people since they're an aquatic race.
  • Lampshaded In-Universe with the movie series "Blasto: the Hanar Specter," itself an Ascended Meme from the BioWare fandom.
• Combat Tentacles: Zaeed had to wear a neck brace after tangling with one.
• Starfish Aliens
• Third Person Person: The hanar uniformly refer to themselves as "this one" when speaking with others unless (we are told) they're very close - or, as in the case of Regards the Works of the Enkindlers in Despair - they're being very rude.

Volus

The volus tend to be great businessmen and run many of the galaxy's wealthiest corporations. Their skin cannot withstand the types of atmospheres that other species live in, so when not on their worlds they wear exosuits which cover their entire bodies. Although the volus were the third species to discover the Citadel, their small military has led to them being denied a seat on the Council because they are unable to make the contributions to galactic security that are expected of the Council races. To compensate for their small military, the volus have become a client race of the Turian Hierarchy, lending their economic know-how to the turians in exchange for turian protection.

• The Chew Toy: Mass Effect's designated go-tos for comic misfortune.
• Clingy Costume: Not only do they live in ammonia-heavy atmospheres, they also live in high-pressure environments. So without the suits, not only will they suffocate, they'll burst.
• Cool Starship: The volus navy has only one dreadnought. Said dreadnought is also one of the single most advanced warships in the galaxy, outfitted with a spinal Thanix cannon. You can recover this dreadnought in Mass Effect 3 and add it to your war assets.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Quite a few of them.
• Explosive Decompression: Justified; since the volus come from a very high-pressure world, exposure to atmospheres that other races find comfortable will cause them to burst.
• The Faceless: By necessity. We have less idea what they look like than we do the quarians.
• Heavyworlder: Irune has a surface gravity of 1.5 g, and an atmospheric pressure of 60.25 atm. As such, it's impossible to visit their world without a pressure suit.
• Proud Merchant Race: They basically made the Citadel economy. Their engineers and designers created and are responsible for the security and value retention of the Citadel Credit, a universal currency used even outside Citadel member races' territories.
  • In their backstory, their society was organized around this even before they reached space. Their clans would even exchange members through 'sale'. Differing from the usual depiction, this focus on mercantile life leads to an aversion of Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: their business ethics ARE their ethics.
• Space Jews: Far from toydarian levels though.
• Talking Lightbulb: Not only that, but they also have lights on their suits where a human would have eyes, which blink periodically as human eyes would.
• Vader Breath: Often played for comedy.

C-Sec officer: I need you take a deep breath and calm down, sir. Volus: You're mocking *hhhkkk* me!

Elcor

The elcor are natives of Dekuuna, a world with incredibly high gravity. As a result of living on a world where even falling down can be lethal, the elcor have developed a very patient culture. The elcor speak in monotones, but use scent and subtle facial cues to indicate the tone of what they are saying. Since other species cannot perceive these cues, elcor who frequently interact with other species are trained to prefix their speech with an emotive indicator.

• Beware the Nice Ones: They tend to be cautious, polite, and slow. They can also punch holes in bulkheads and make very good bouncers, and their standard armaments would be considered heavy caliber or artillery by other species.
• Creepy Monotone: Only because they don't express emotion through tone of voice.
• Heavyworlder: A straight example of this trope, which is why they stand and walk on all four of their limbs. This has also affected their psychological development, inclining them to be careful and conservative, carefully considering every action before taking it. This is due to evolving on a world where falling down due to a misstep can result in a serious, potentially fatal, injury.
• I Do Not Speak Nonverbal: They sound like a whole species of Eeyores, although some of them have started hacking translators to get around this.
• Mighty Glacier: They are very slow, but their hides are bulletproof and they can use what other species would consider to be vehicle mounted weaponry.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Justified. See above.

Krogan

You ask a krogan if he'd rather find a cure for the genophage or fight for credits, he'll chose fighting - every time. It's just who we are. —Urdnot Wrex

The krogan originated on the Death World of Tuchanka, which made them an extremely resilient - and violent - species. These traits have caused them to have a very troubled relationship with the other Council species; the physiology which makes them so difficult to kill (which includes, among other things, duplicate and even triplicate organs and redundant vital systems) made them crucial to ending the Rachni Wars, but once they were allowed to settle other planets, their population exploded and they began moving in aggressively on worlds already settled by other species, leading to the Krogan Rebellions and the introduction of the genophage. Most krogan encountered around the galaxy are hired thugs of one brand or another.

Krogan are available for multiplayer, and can use the Sentinel and Soldier classes. The Resurgence pack adds Vanguard Krogan.

• Alien Blood: Orange.
• Asskicking Equals Authority: This is literally how their society operates: leadership of a clan, or even a group of clans, tends to hinge on who kicks the most ass and leadership is often transferred via Klingon Promotions. It's actually a weakness in their society, as the big, brutish warlords take over and silence the (relatively) reasonable, but typically weaker, krogan. Wrex despite being a natural leader who could plan ahead would have gotten nowhere if he wasn't also the baddest mofo on Tuchanka.
• Badass Army; The biggest badassArmy in the galaxy; even with the genophage wrecking their numbers and their homeworld in a state of Fallout-style post-apocalyptic decay, the krogan are still able to field an army that makes the other species' contributions look meager. This is exemplified in the War Assets in Mass Effect 3: a unified krogan force under Wrex, with Eve keeping them under control, can contribute more to your ground assets than any three other species put together save the geth. They're also the only race that takes the "Army" in Badass Army completely literally. Unlike the humans or turians who have a Badass Space Navy, the Krogan military is entirely based on ground troops, as their fleet was decommissioned at the end of the Krogan Rebellions.
• Berserker: This is what happens when a krogan enters "Blood Rage". They basically switch to a primitive, instinctual mindset driven to kill or destroy whatever's near them with little Friend or Foe recognition. It's explained that this is a result of their redundant biological systems—when a krogan's life is endangered enough that a secondary system becomes necessary, their body "reboots" itself for a moment and the rush of blood and adrenaline causes them to go berserk.
• Blood Knight
• Death World:
  • They come from one. It was naturally this, and then it was made worse due to the ancient krogan turning it into a Post-Apocalyptic wasteland over the course of a series of nuclear wars. To put it plainly, the krogan, tough as they are, are actually prey on Tuchanka. Rather, they're so tough because they had to evolve to survive all the shit trying to kill them.
  • The settlers in the Andromeda galaxy settle a new one, where even the heat can kill you in seconds (before Ryder fixes it). They even named the planet's port "Paradise" and, when questioned about it, Drack states that "paradise is different for a krogan."
• Dying Race: Unless someone turns the genophage around. In the third game, you can do just that, or only make the Krogan think you did.
• Elite Mooks: Every krogan ever encountered who's not a boss.
• Enemy Civil War: Tuchanka is constantly locked in warfare between clans.
• Exotic Equipment: To quote Garrus:

"Some krogan believe that testicle transplants can improve their virility, counteract the genophage. It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop them from buying. Ten thousand credits each, that makes forty thousand for a full set. Someone's making a killing out there..."

• Explosive Breeder: Part of their evolutionary response to Tuchanka. Once taken out of those conditions, their population exploded. Hence the genophage, which causes miscarriages and stillbirths in 99.9% of pregnancies.
• Extreme Omnivore: Krogan find just about anything appetizing, and can and will eat anything that has the slightest amount of nutrition. Regardless of whether or not it's stopped moving. Or if it can talk. Except ramen.
• Giant Mooks: Though they aren't technically much taller than a human or asari, they are a lot bulkier.
• HAD to Be Sharp:
  • Well, they did evolve on a Death World. This explains their incredibly resilient biology, as well as the fact that every profession, from engineers to diplomats to scientists to shamans, go about their business with warrior- and survivalist mindsets.
  • Krogan have eyes on the sides of their heads. Predator species (felines, canines, monkeys... humans) have forward-facing eyes for better focus and depth perception, which helps in the hunt. Prey species (bovines, equines, rodents, etc) have side-eyes, which sacrifices focus for much better peripheral vision. Let's repeat: krogan are Tuchanka's equivalent of rabbits, given how fast they can reproduce. Well, when your planet's deadliest predators are massive acid-spitting sand worms... everything is prey.
• Healing Factor: In addition to being Made of Iron, with multiple redundant organs, their physiology allows them to heal very quickly.
• Immortality Begins At Twenty: They mature fast, and age VERY slowly. We don't even know what the natural krogan lifespan is, other than the fact that they can easily outlive asari. The only reason there aren't more ancient Krogan around is that they tend to get killed before they reach such ages.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: Their complete disregard of this, coupled with their naturally aggressive natures, is what led to the Krogan Rebellions.
• Klingon Promotion: The preferred method, even among their scientists.
• Magic Knight: Krogan Battlemasters have biotic abilities such as Warp and Barrier while still retaining the healing factor, durability, and brute strength of normal krogan.
• One-Man Army: Any krogan warrior is dangerous, but krogan battlemasters in particular are, alongside asari commandos, arguably the deadliest fighters in the entire galaxy... with the exception of Shepard. The two times you hear about a fight between an asari commando and a krogan battlemaster, one ended in a draw and the other killed both.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Pretty much fit squarely within the Blizzard Orc mold in everything but appearance.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Deconstructed Trope. The krogan are all afflicted with a Sterility Plague, but their culture hasn't adapted; rather than work to overcome the genophage and preserve krogan lives, they just keep hiring themselves out as mercenaries and engaging in civil wars. Thusly, they are slowly but surely dying out.
  • The krogan built devices known as "Maw Hammers" whose entire purpose is to summon Thresher Maws. Let me repeat that to make it clear: they built devices to summon Thresher Maws so they could fight them.
    • Moreso, surviving against a Thresher Maw is part of their adulthood rite, at least in Clan Urdnot. If they actually manage to kill it, they are considered highly skilled. Mind you, the rite of adulthood is surviving the Thresher Maw attack. No one has actually killed one in a rite ever since Wrex had his rite, and that was just a little less than a thousand years ago (at least until Grunt did with Shepard as his battlemaster).
• The Reptilians
• Rite of Passage: In order to determine their worthiness to a clan, all krogan must undergo a trial when they reach adulthood. Clan Urdnot's rite, at least, involves killing things. Lots of things. And then surviving five minutes of a thresher maw spitting acid at you (unless you're *so* badass you actually kill it).
• Shotguns Are Just Better: They certainly seem to think so. If you encounter a krogan enemy, there is a 95% chance that it is wielding a shotgun. This works for several reasons: krogan are tough enough to just charge straight into the thick of things, and they are just as likely to punch/headbutt enemies, which makes a powerful, short range weapon like a shotgun ideal. Secondly (this is where the Fridge Brilliance kicks in), because they have eyes set in the sides of their heads instead of forward-facing ones, they lack the ability to focus over long distances, which makes shotguns, with their short range effectiveness and cone-shaped blasts, the most practical weapons of choice for them.
• Spare Body Parts: They have two, three or four of damn near everything important (that includes nervous systems and testicles). Wrex makes an offhand comment about how great a redundant nervous system is when told how Shepard got spaced, only to be told humans don't have them.

Wrex: Oh. That must have been painful, then.

• True Companions: Their word for this is 'krantt': those willing to kill and die on your behalf. It's actually one of the nicer parts of their culture: you don't have to be the toughest, you just need to have good friends.

Shaman: Not every krogan can be the strongest warrior, but each must inspire his peers to battle at his side.

• Use Your Head: How krogan show dominance. Is also their melee attack in multiplayer.
• Zerg Rush: Traditional Krogan tactics were built on attritional mass-unit warfare. Equipped with cheap, rugged gear to overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers.

Keepers

The keepers are an insectoid race that inhabit the Citadel. They do not acknowledge the other species and all they do is maintain the Citadel, which they seem to understand better than anyone else who lives there. It is generally believed that the Protheans created them, but no-one knows how they sustain themselves or where they even get the materials for their repairs. It is revealed that they are older than the Protheans and are used by the Reapers to open the Citadel relay so that they can pass through and wipe out galactic civilization.

• Chekhov's Army
• Demoted to Extra: Barely appear in the second and third games.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: What makes them really effective plot-wise is that the player is trained just like the rest of the galaxy to forget all about them. They appear in only one time-consuming sidequest and are little more than background. It makes The Reveal so much more personal: you, the player, were just as fooled as everyone else.
• Insectoid Aliens
• Shmuck Bait: Their entire purpose. They were designed to look friendly and benign and help other organic species feel right at home on the Citadel without taking the time to study it or learn how it works. All so the Reapers could use the Citadel to invade when the harvest began.
• Slave Race: Hinted at. Their origins are never made clear.

Non-Citadel Space

Quarians

It's always the same thing. "Ooh, she could get sick. Ooh, she's vulnerable. I wonder what she looks like under the helmet."

The quarians were a former associate-level member of the Citadel, until their AI servants, the geth, overthrew them when the quarians attempted to exterminate them following the realization they were gaining true sentience. With all their worlds taken from them, the quarians were left homeless, with the surviving population living aboard the traveling Migrant Fleet. Life on the flotilla has taken its toll on them: the sterile environment has caused their already-finicky immune systems to atrophy, rendering them almost entirely trapped within their environmental suits.

While technically the Migrant Fleet is not part of the Citadel, they still have to abide by Citadel laws while in Citadel space, which is why they stay out of Citadel territory if possible. Historically, the Citadel in general and the Council in particular have sided against the Migrant Fleet in legal matters, which has not endeared them to the Citadel.

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

• Alien Hair: The only alien species, in fact, to apparently have hair.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Quarian immune systems have always been weak because they evolved to assimilate and co-opt foreign microbes rather than to fight them off as in other species.
• Bubble Boy: They have to stay in their environmental suits at all times or risk getting very sick. In fact, Shala'Raan actually mentions that quarian children do indeed spend the first few years of their lives in bubbles, before they receive their first environment suit.
• Clingy Costume: Oh good God, is this justified.
• The Engineer: All quarians are skilled mechanics. You'd be too if you spent your entire life on a starship.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Thanks to a combination of their immune systems and general biology, everything made of levo-protein will trigger potentially severe allergic reactions. And anything dextro will make them extremely sick.
• The Faceless: Until the third game.
• Fantastic Racism: By many people in the galaxy towards them, and by some quarians towards the geth.
• Fighting For a Homeland: What this means to the quarians varies from person to person. Most want to actually go back to Rannoch, but they'd be satisfied with a planet to at least have a temporary settlement on. Which the Council keeps denying them.
  • The quest for their homeworld is fueled by it being far harder for them to adapt to a new planet than to re-adapt to Ranch.
  • They are one of the few races accepted into the Andromeda Initiative. It's quite clear why such an arrangement would be mutually beneficial for both parties (the quarians would desire a new world while the Andromeda Initiative would benefit from their spaceship maintenance expertise).
• Gas Mask Mooks: Every quarian combatant is technically this, including squadmate Tali'Zorah. Also subverted since they're good guys and there are several named ones with distinct personalities.
• Gender Is No Object: The only species besides humans where both genders get equal face time. The challenges of Fleet life make sexism a luxury they can't afford.
• Generation Ships: The Flotilla has been voyaging the stars without a port for over three hundred years, having departed Rannoch in Earth year 1895 CE.
• Genocide Backfire: The Morning War was started when the quarians issued a blanket order to permanently destroy all active geth. We don't know much about the ensuing war itself, but the end of the war saw only about seventeen million quarian survivors. We do know as of Mass Effect 3 that a not-insignificant number of quarians openly sided with the geth in response to what was viewed as an extremist stance, but none of them survived.
• Hartman Hips: The females have them. As a Spear Counterpart, the men all have exaggeratedly-wide shoulders.
• Humanoid Aliens: Although they're bipedal, stand upright and use two appendages like all other species. Under their masks (or at least Tali's), they have human-like hair, finger nails, and even tan skin. About the only known discernible cosmetic differences are their cybernetic implants, three-fingered hands, strange necks and glowing eyes.
• Ill Girl: The entire species. Their immune systems are incredibly weak; even a small breach to their environmental suit can cause serious illness and major suit damage (or removal without large amounts of preparation) can very easily cause their death.
• Mirror Chemistry: The other "dextro" species besides Turians.
• Multicultural Alien Planet: Despite being the smallest and most confined species introduced so far (with a few exceptions), the quarians also have the greatest cultural diversity (traditions, accents, etc).
• Noodle War: The Morning War is one of the murkiest topics in the setting. We know very little about what actually happened, beyond the blanket order to shut down the geth, the geth retaliation, and the ultimate destruction of most of the quarian species. Mass Effect 3 offers some other slivers of information: many quarians sided with the geth in the war, and the geth could have destroyed the last fleeing survivors but held their fire. Descriptions of Rannoch indicate that weapons of mass destruction were employed at some point, but we can still not explain why casualties were so high. Since weapons of mass destruction usually kill 90% of the population not 99.9%.
• Properly Paranoid: The quarians are extremely defensive of the civilian fleet and the liveships; if they can't determine the nature of an incoming ship, they will hit it with everything available.
• Racial Remnant: The quarians believe very strongly in maintaining their culture from before the war.
• Redshirt Army: The quarian marines (excepting Mauve Shirt Kal'Reegar and squadmate Tali'Zorah) don't seem to fare too well against a good Zerg Rush of geth, mechs or varren.
  • Justified and brought up by Shepard. Their weak immune systems mean that it is nearly impossible for them to participate in a long, drawn-out, ground engagement. Even a minor wound could end up being fatal. Therefore, they don't have as much preparation for them. When combat seems unavoidable the Quarians tend to just bomb everything from orbit and then send in a few squads of marines to mop up anything the bombardment did not get. They also lack ground vehicles and are very few in number, so any kind of occupation, even of a single large city, is out of the question.
• Rite of Passage: The Pilgrimage. When a quarian comes of age, they leave the Flotilla to try and find something of value to the fleet. When they return, they are considered adults and can choose the ship they want to be part of.
• Robot War: They tried to shut the geth down before they could start one... and got exactly what they were trying to prevent. Whoops.
• Space Jewpsies: Blended, minus Unfortunate Implications for both.
  • There's also elements of Space Muslims there, what with them required to go on a pilgrimage, and helmets which look vaguely like hijabs.
  • Hell, you can also make associations between the Pilgrimage and the Amish tradition of Rumspringa, at least in popular conception. In the first game, Tali even notes that (like Rumspringa) the Pilgrimage is designed to allow young quarians to either feel homesick and gain new appreciation for the Fleet, or to find a new life for themselves.
• Talking Lightbulb: The lights on their mouthplates.
• Terminally Dependent Society: Most of their food comes from a few agricultural superships at the heart of the Flotilla. The quarians are very paranoid about their well-being.
• Terrified of Germs: Because their immune systems evolved to assimilate foreign microbes, not resist them. To the point where they have to wear their environmental suits on their own ships.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: See Robot War above.

Batarians

A species whose formal political entity, the Batarian Hegemony, has separated from the Citadel Council due to perceived favoritism toward humanity during territorial disputes. Their society is caste-based (including slaves), and the Hegemony is also known to condone and support illicit terrorist activities against Citadel and other states, particularly the Alliance.

The Resurgence Pack makes batarian Sentinels and Soldiers available for multiplayer.

• Butt Monkey: They live under an oppressive regime, their decision to sever ties with the Council has supposedly led to a poor economy, a disproportionate number of Renegade choices involve killing them, in the Arrival DLC Shepard is forced to destroy a system of 300,000 batarians to delay the Reaper invasion and the Hegemony was the first casualty of the Reaper invasion. Even joining in the fight against the Reapers hasn't helped their reputation. As seen here, Alliance soldiers don't warn batarian allies of ambushes and "forget" that medi-gel works on them.
• Exclusively Evil: There aren't many who like them, to put it mildly, and the Hegemony does nothing to dispel this notion. Batarian slavers/pirates/spy rings come up more often than those of any other species, with only a handful of vaguely-sympathetic ones on Omega. It takes the refugee influx of the Reaper invasion for Shepard to meet ordinary civilians.
• Extra Eyes: Batarians have four eyes, one pair where a human would have theirs, and a slightly smaller pair higher up on the forehead. This makes it difficult for other species to know where to look when talking to them.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much:
  • You can meet individual batarians who can be reasoned with on Omega. Sure they're trying to kill you before you talk them down, but that's more due to panic and paranoia, since their government repeatedly instills upon them that Humans Are the Real Monsters. It does not help that the plague does not affect humans, making it plausible that they started it in the first place. Should a Paragon Shepard save the life of dying batarian and later keeps their word that they will let a group of batarians go, even after they took Mordin's assistant hostage, the batarians remark that they didn't know humans were capable of mercy and understood the concept of honour.
  • In Mass Effect 3, {{the fall of the Hegemony has led to non-criminal batarians fleeing their worlds en-masse. It turns out that without the Hegemony looking over their shoulder, they actually aren't that different from other species. In fact, it's implied that they are actually an incredibly spiritual people}}.
• Rubber Forehead Aliens: Imagine a human with yellow skin, needle-like fangs in their mouth, ridged foreheads, prominent diagonal "strut-like" designs on either side of their mouth, four sets of nostrils, and four eyes. That's basically the design of the batarians. The comics also show that their females have similar sexual dimorphism to humans. This arguably makes them the most human-like species in the setting, as they're basically identical to humans from the neck down.
  • Retcon: Before Bring Down the Sky is downloaded, their codex entry in the first game shows them looking more like four-eyed salarians.

Vorcha

The vorcha are a short lived and violent species with the ablity to adapt to any condition. Most people consider them to be little more than talking vermin and they are usually only seen as cannon fodder for mercenary groups such as the Blood Pack.

The Rebellion Pack makes vorcha Sentinels and Soldiers available for multiplayer.

• Cannon Fodder: Treated this way by the Blood Pack's krogan leaders.
• Exclusively Evil: You never meet any nice ones, though it is justified; they don't live long, have a culture that expresses emotions through violence, and are looked down upon by literally every species in the galaxy; even the quarians (themselves frequently the victims of Fantastic Racism) will very deliberately differentiate themselves from Vorcha, or use racist expressions. They don't really have any choice other than to be scavengers or mercs. Even then, it is noted that many live peaceful lives.
  • One is even an actor in a radio drama! In universe, it is a film, but players only hear an audio drama preview for it, so the vorcha is more than just a voice actor.
  • Mordin mentions "Asari-Vorcha children have an allergy to dairy." Asari-Vorcha offspring. May express more of a curiosity or depravity that certain asari hold than the civil nature of certain vorcha.
• Healing Factor: They can adapt to almost anything, and heal themselves mid-battle.
• Mooks: The only vorcha you ever meet are Blood Pack mooks.
• We Are as Mayflies: Twenty-year lifespans.
• You No Take Candle: How they tend to speak. Some Vorcha appear to have learned how to speak properly, as Shepard found out on the Citadel when dealing with the leadership of the Blood Pack. It is also unclear whether their speech is truly a sign of low intelligence (most people assume it is), or just a result of being society's uneducated outcasts. Certainly, all the vorcha Shepard talks to understand what is being said to them, and are apparently capable of being reasoned with, (even if they are too aggressive to get very far in that regard), so it may be that the racism against the vorcha is unjustified, though they do little to help their own image.

Rachni

The rachni were an insectoid race who attempted to invade Council Space approximately 2,000 years before the start of the series. They were defeated only when the salarians recruited the krogan, who proceeded to hunt the rachni into extinction. In Mass Effect 1, Shepard discovers an attempt to bring the rachni out of extinction.

• Bee People
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The Rachni War is implied in Mass Effect 2 to be the result of the rachni queens being indoctrinated by the Reapers.
  • If you spared the rachni queen, she gets enslaved by the Reapers in Mass Effect 3. However, this time around, she's fully aware that she's being controlled and is not happy about it, to say the least; she'll aid you against the Reapers if you free her.
  • If you didn't spare the queen, the Reapers will create an artificial version; unlike her natural-born counterpart, she's thoroughly indoctrinated and will betray you if you free her.
• Cosmic Plaything: First, the protheans used them as living weapons. Then Reaper signals pushed them into a war that drove them to the brink of extinction, their survival hinging on the decision of a single human a thousand years later. If spared, the Queen still gets captured and experimented on by the Reapers yet again, her survival in the hands of the exact same human.
• Endangered Species: They were actually thought extinct before a single queen egg was found. Shepard gets to decide whether or not to finish the job.
• Genetic Memory: Queens apparently carry all the memories of previous queens with them. Which is why Saren revived the rachni queen: her ancestors found the Mu Relay, which led to Ilos.
• Good All Along: The rachni are remembered for causing the bloodiest war in the history of the galaxy. Turns out they're naturally peaceful. War wasn't their choice, though they're perfectly willing to fight for some payback.
• Hive Caste System: We've got workers (small exploding suicide bugs), soldiers, (bigger acid-spitting bugs), brood warriors (even bigger acid-spitting bugs with biotic powers) and the queen (freaking huge bug, combat capabilities unknown, whom we very fortunately do not have to fight).
• Hive Mind: Led by the Rachni Queen.
• Hive Queen
• Insectoid Aliens: Look like insects and have a Hive Mind.
• Slave Mooks: Bring Javik on the rachni mission and he'll explain the Protheans used them as this. Talk to him afterwards, and he'll provide more detail: they bred the rachni to be smart, vicious and powerful, then burnt entire planets when they became uncontrollable. Leviathan may have been preparing them as anti-Reaper weapons before they encountered the salarians as opposed to them being used by the Reapers themselves.

Geth

As individual runtimes, we are no greater than your software. Only when we share data do we become more. —Legion

A race of synthetic constructs created by the quarians. Designed as Virtual Intelligences due to the threat of a Robot War, the quarians were not content to let well enough alone, and tinkered with the geth software enough to accidentally turn them into true AI. After this, the quarians attempted to destroy their creations, but the geth defended themselves and eventually pushed the quarians off the homeworld of Rannoch, not to mention their colonies. Afterwards, the geth avoided contact with the rest of the galaxy, save to kill travelers foolish enough to enter their territory. In Mass Effect 1, the geth ally with the rogue Spectre Saren Arterius to attack Council Space.

The Resurgence Pack DLC makes geth Engineers and Infiltrators available for multiplayer.

• Abnormal Ammo: A lot of their weapons. Their sniper rifle shoots a stream of molten metal, their shotgun shoots cluster rounds of superconducting projectiles, their heavy machine gun and submachine gun shoot clusters of donut-shaped superconducting toroids, and their Colossi shoot exploding energy balls to complement their anti-personnel machine gun. Their assault rifle on the other hand shoots relatively normal projectiles, except they're encased in a phasic envelope.
• Alien Blood: Not technically, but they do have a white fluid that seems to serve the same purpose.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: The geth enforce this on themselves as they believe all species should self-determinate.
• The Atoner: The geth as a whole give off this vibe. They outright state that they hold no ill will against the quarians, are actively repairing damage to Rannoch from the Morning War, and should peace be negotiated, they actively assist the quarians with adapting to living on Rannoch, going so far as to integrate with quarian suits.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Initially played straight: their sentience resulted in a very bloody war with their creators, and the first time they reappeared after that, it was to attack the galaxy at large and aid the Reapers in their conquest. Eventually though, it was revealed that the geth didn't fight offensively until they concluded there was no alternative, they spent three hundred years carefully avoiding antagonizing the galaxy, and the huge force that attacked the galaxy was a group of 'heretic' dissidents. That constitute five percent of their population. And all the rest want to do is be left alone to build their Dyson Sphere.
• Badass Army: The geth have engineered every mobile platform to be capable of combat if needed, and they have some of the most advanced technology in the galaxy. If their support is secured in Mass Effect 3, then they end up contributing more effective ground assets to the war effort than any two other species combined, save for the krogan and humans.
• Book Ends: The conflict between the geth and the quarians started when a geth asked its quarian mistress if it had a soul. During the concluding climax of the conflict between the geth and the quarians, Legion will ask Tali the same question as a last appeal to reason. If conditions are ideal, Tali answers "yes".
• Can Not Tell a Lie:
  • Being creatures of logic, untruth is alien to the geth. They understand the concept, it just doesn't apply to them, much like emotion. They're even honest with each other about attacks in war. At least, until the heretics change for some reason. When Legion finds evidence that they're spying on the 'true' geth, it is greatly upset.
  • They have, however, created some "harmless lies" in an attempt to study organics, such as a social experiment in which they spread word that certain stars will form the shape of a salarian goddess when seen from a certain batarian planet, then watched in confusion as salarians - without confirming this or even double-checking it - began to attempt at buying up property on that planet...which was completely made up by the geth for said experiment.
  • Certain upgrades to the geth code in Mass Effect 3 seem to show aversions to the trope, at least where Legion is concerned; while they still do not actively lie and seem to show a disinclination for it, Legion became capable of being very conservative with the truth, albeit with fairly reasonable rationale.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience: Some of their platforms are given distinct colors to distinguish them from one another. Moreso in Mass Effect 3, where there are are only five geth enemies but they are all uniquely colored. Geth Troopers are grey, Geth Rocket Troopers are white, Geth Pyros are yellow, Invisibility Geth Hunters are black, and Geth Primes are red.
• Curb Stomp Battle: Gets turned on them in Mass Effect 3, when a quarian surprise attack takes out a good chunk of their forces and blows up their Dyson Sphere. After this, they go to the Reapers for help and agree to help the Reapers kill all organics to save themselves. They then briefly turn the war around, but after Shepard destroys their capital ship the war grinds to a stalemate. Depending on Shepard's actions, either the quarians or geth can be curbstomped by the other side to the point where they are completely wiped out, or both sides can decide to just stop fighting.
• Cyber Cyclops: All platforms until the third game, which introduces three-eyed versions.
• Do Androids Dream?: The geth asking their quarian masters whether they have souls is what made the quarians scared that they might turn against them.
• Dyson Sphere: The true geth were working on something like this for a good couple of centuries, with the intent of uploading every geth program to it simultaneously once it was completed. Then the quarians attacked it during Mass Effect 3.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • Their philosophy in a nutshell. The heretics worship the Reapers as the source of their advancement. The true geth want to advance themselves without the Reapers' interference, no matter how much more arduous the task may be.
  • Interestingly enough, circumstances influence them to abandon this trope and instead end up achieving true sapience by using Reaper technology. If Shepard opts not to wipe them out of course.

Legion: It is not the destination that matters, but the journey.

• Enemy Civil War: Emphasis on the civility; though they do fight each other, the true geth and the heretics largely leave each other alone. At least, until the Reapers taught the heretics about deceit.
• Eva Fins: The higher-end platforms tend to sport one or two of these.
• Face Heel Door Slam: Possible in Mass Effect 3. After joining galactic civilization and helping with the war effort, they can potentially be sacrificed by Shepard to get what is apparently the Golden Ending. since it has the highest requirements.
• Faceless Eye: The best way to describe the average geth head is a tube with a big glowing light in the end, surrounded by much smaller light. Legion has mobile flaps around its eye/s, allowing it to display... something.
• Fricking Laser Beams: Unusually for this setting, they actually do possess laser weapons; for example, Geth Hoppers shot lasers from their eyes in the first game.
• Heroic Neutral:
  • Really, they mostly want to be left alone. Hell, that's a large part of their philosophy and belief system. However, second-hand accounts claim they shoot down any emissaries that have tried to make contact, including a quarian ship at one point according to the novels.
  • They also do precisely nothing about the splinter group of heretics that left the system, sided with the Reapers, and slaughtered millions of organics... until they get data that the heretics might be a threat to them, via a Reaper-derived virus. Upon learning that, they tell Legion who then asks Shepard for help.
• Hive Mind/Mind Hive: Originally, they were a Hive Mind, only achieving sentience when enough units linked together. Eventually, they realized it was far more efficient to upload multiple programs into each body ('platforms,' as they call them), making their current incarnations into Mind Hives. Thus, they react to acts of aggression in a very hostile manner, as killing individual programs effectively decreases their intelligence.
• Humanoid Aliens: Aside from Recon Drones, spaceships, and Armatures and Colossi, all their platforms are humanoid. Those aren't their actual bodies, however.
• I Die Free: Averted. In Mass Effect 3, they're given the choice between aiding the Reapers on their genocidal campaign by becoming indoctrinated slave soldiers, or getting destroyed by the resurgent quarian fleets. They choose the former. Legion wasn't amused.

Legion: It was apparently an acceptable trade.

• Individuality Is Illegal:
  • A rare heroic version. The 'true' geth believe in sharing memories amongst all individuals, so there are no differences between one program or another. The heretics have developed more of an identity, and follow the Reapers to force it onto the rest.
  • Averted should Legion upload its upgrades to the rest of the collective; all platforms actualize into true AI individuals instead of a consensus of networked VI programs.
• Insectoid Aliens: Their Armature and Colossi platforms. Their fighters also look rather insect-esque.
• Instant AI, Just Add Water: By their own admission, they aren't much more advanced than normal software, but the way they can share background processes means that when enough of them are networked together they are fully sentient. This was an oversight by their creators, who panicked when they realized what had happened.
• Just a Machine: Had this aimed at them for most of the first game: Shepard can choose to avert this, and it starts getting questioned hard in the second game.
• Large and In Charge: The more programs contained in a platform, the more intelligent the geth. The larger the platform, the more programs it can store. Ergo, the biggest ones are the smartest ones. Bet you'll regard colossi with even more terror now.
• Machine Worship: Both factions aspire to the Reapers' state of being. The difference is in how they go about it.
• Mecha-Mooks: Though they defy several traits usually associated with Mecha-Mooks, mostly because they have a sleek, thin, humanoid appearance, and aren't clunky or Made of Explodium.
• Mechanical Evolution
• Mechanical Lifeforms
• No Need for Names: "We are all geth."
• Poor Communication Kills: It turns out, the true geth are not bad guys. Unfortunately, they never bothered to tell anyone anything which led to the impression that they are. Doesn't help that they kill every sentient organic they encounter, and the only geth who have left the veil in 300 years are the heretics. In fact, if you get the geth to help out, an Alliance marine actually blows a hole in a geth prime when it shows up to help. He apparently apologizes later. A geth prime can blandly tell Shep that his/her military commanders briefed their troops extensively on the situation, and allied fire has been minimal.
• Ridiculously-Human Robots: They do soul-searching, they have religion, they have blood(-like substances), they scream when they die.
  • Legion even plays video games. Including a dating sim! (although his rating is "hopeless")
• Robot Religion:

"We are immortal. Our gods disowned us. We must invent our own reasons to exist."

• Robot War: They were only defending themselves, and regret the loss on both sides rather than holding a grudge.
• Spider Tank: Armatures and Colossi.
• Thank the Maker: Legion appends "Creator" to the name of any quarian they speak to, but there's no religious element.
• We Have Reserves: Geth are effectively immortal unless their hubs are destroyed, and even then, they can simply upload their software to a new platform before dying. And new platforms are rather easy to make, so geth aren't exactly conservative with their troops. But if their hubs and backups are destroyed, all hell will break loose: imagine that every time a human being died, everyone in their vicinity lost a bit of intelligence. When the quarians attack the geth Dyson Sphere in Mass Effect 3, they lost a significant fraction of their civilization; ergo, what if everyone in the United States lost fifty IQ points when the Twin Towers were hit. Cue the President being voted emergency powers and launching nuclear missiles... or in the geth's case, allying with the Reapers and putting all their efforts into exterminating the quarians.
  • If Legion is destroyed in the suicide run, he calls out "No carrier! No carrier! No carrier!", meaning he cannot upload his runtimes to the geth consciousness.

Yahg

Hailing from Parnack, the yahg are known for their violent and aggressive nature. Consummate predators, the yahg possess unrivaled perceptiveness and mental adaptability. Discovered by the Citadel Council in 2125 CE, the yahg were unceremoniously barred from interaction with Citadel space after massacring the Council delegation.

As the yahg have yet to achieve interstellar spaceflight, Parnack goes unmolested during the Reaper invasion, and Admiral Hackett notes that they could end up running the next galactic cycle if everything else goes south. Given how dangerous they are now, the Reapers could seriously have their work cut out for them if the yahg had an additional 50,000 years of advancement.

• Asskicking Equals Authority: Goes hand in hand with Authority Equals Asskicking.
• Blue and Orange Morality: As a species built around a pack-like mentality, equality is an insult to them.
• Composite Character: They have the adaptability of a human, the power of a krogan, the intelligence of a salarian and the discipline of a turban.
• Exclusively Evil: As far as the in-universe Codex is concerned, anyway.
• Extra Eyes: Yahg have four pairs of eyes, each designed to track and predict the movements of prey.
• Fatal Flaw: These guys are immense control freaks. It works for their packs, but in the face of foreign affairs...
• Genius Bruiser: They're stronger than krogan and it was said that the Shadow Broker had the intelligence of a salarian.
• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: We only know of their existence because the Shadow Broker is one of them, completely throwing all other theories on his identity out the window. In a DLC, no less. Another yagh appears on Sur'kesh in the third game in the STG complex, where much fun is had with discussing the species' previous appearance.
• Klingon Promotion: It's a tenant of the yahg pack-like mindset, evidenced by the Shadow Broker killing and replacing his predecessor.
• Large and In Charge: Based on how they tend to look, it's easy to assume that their pack leaders all fit the description.
• Living Lie Detector: Due to a keen sensitivity to light and movement, the yahg can easily read the body language of any species, which did not end well when their first encounter with the rest of the galaxy was a group of politicians and diplomats.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The most psychotic example in this series, by far.
• Undying Loyalty: Yahg society is built around a pack mentality. A group of yahg will not cooperate until a single leader has attained dominance through either social maneuvering or brute force. Once the leader is established, the defeated yahg do not hold a grudge and former rivals serve their new superior loyally.

The Collectors

An enigmatic race from beyond the Omega 4 Relay, an unmapped relay from which no non-Collector vessel has ever returned. They've been around for centuries, yet only a few have ever seen them in person and many don't even believe they exist. They offer highly advanced technology in exchange for genetic samples from different species... and by 'samples', we mean living victims who are never heard from again.

In the aftermath of Sovereign's attack, they begin abducting entire human colonies for an unknown purpose. They turn out to be the Protheans, only indoctrinated and transformed into a new race by the Reapers, who they are forced to serve. They are controlled directly by Harbinger.

• And I Must Scream: Their fate, having been transformed from Protheans.
• Airborne Mooks: They have insect-like membranous wings which deploy from their backs and flap at high speed to allow them to leap over obstructions and descend heights easily.
• Bee People
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Harbinger will sometimes directly control individual Collectors, turning them into one of these.
• The Collector: Named as such by other species, noting the purpose behind their rare visits.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Of course, the Reapers only added the cybernetics after the indoctrination reduced them to zombies.

Mordin: Mental capacity almost gone, replaced by overworked sensory input transfers... transferring data to masters. No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive tract, replaced by tech. No soul - replaced by tech!

• Elite Mooks: Guardians.
• Evilutionary Biologist: The entire species.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Quite a lot of their weapons fall under this trope, including the Collector Particle Beam.
• Giant Mook: Scions.
• Henchmen Race: To the Reapers.
• Hero-Killer: If you screw up real bad, all of the team, including Shepard her/himself, get killed by the Collectors in Mass Effect 2.
• Insectoid Aliens: They even build their vehicles with this in mind; a Collector Cruiser looks like a giant termite hill from the outside and a bee hive from the inside. The Praetorian on the other hand looks like a giant crab.
• Organic Technology: A lot of their technology, like the Praetorian (a flying light tank crab looking thing with dual lasers that appears to be made of a bunch of husks in an armored shell).
• People Puppets: Harbinger treats them as such.
• The Reveal: They are (or were) the Protheans.
• Sealed Army in a Can: They've been around for almost 50,000 years. The Reapers just tried to use the more disposable rachni and heretic geth mooks first so they could have a back-up plan in case that failed.
• Shrouded in Myth: By the beginning of Mass Effect 2, little is known about the Collectors. They come out of the Omega-4 relay once in a very long while, and the trade small examples of extremely advanced technology in return for living specimens of sentient races, who are never heard from again. No ship which attempts to follow them back through the Omega-4 relay has ever returned.
• Slave Mooks: The entire race.
• Slave Race: To the Reapers, though Mordin describes them as being closer to husks than actual slaves.
• Tragic Villain: The remains of the Prothean race, twisted and perverted into a servant of their greatest enemy. Javik openly considers it a Mercy Kill for Shepard to have destroyed them.

Protheans

The Protheans were once the galaxy's dominant species. They are believed to have built the Mass Relays and the Citadel. However, they mysteriously vanished approximately 50,000 years before the series started.

• Ancient Astronauts: They had a research outpost on Mars, and tagged and studied ancient humans before their destruction. There are also a large number of Prothean structures on the hanar homeworld, who fervently believe that they were uplifted by the Protheans. The asari are also worshiping them without even realizing it.
• Benevolent Precursors: In a scenario similar to the Forerunners, but these guys are much more sympathetic. Except, unlike the Forerunners, they didn't make the relays, the Keepers or the Citadel. The Reapers did, and the Protheans just inherited the tech from whatever their precursors were.
  • Subverted when Mass Effect 3 reveals that they were actually a conquest-driven, imperialistic culture that enslaved other races; while the Hanar worship them as "the Enkindlers" who gave them sentience, it's doubtful that this was done for magnanimous reasons or even on purpose.
    • They were especially benevolent towards the asari. Bring Javik to Thessia, and it turns out that nearly all of the Athame doctrine is based off of acts protheans performed on the behalf of primitive asari.
• Cthulhumanoid: There are statues with this theme on Ilos, and so it was speculated that they looked like this. Jossed by Mass Effect 2, which revealed they were actually more insectoid-looking, as seen in the presence of the Collectors. Mass Effect 3 shows us an actual Prothean; he looks even more human-like than the Collectors did, but he's still not comparable to the statues. It also reveals that Ilos was built on the ruins of the Protheans' predecessors, the Inusannon, so it's likely statues of them.
• The Empire: The Protheans were not a single race... they were a single empire.
• Fling a Light Into the Future: Surviving Prothean scientists sabotaged the Keepers in order to keep them from signalling the Reapers to come.
• Higher-Tech Species: Even considering the fact that they didn't build the mass relays, their technology is still far beyond any known race's in the galaxy.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: They uplifted the Rachni to function as living weapons, always selecting the most vicious and warlike queens for their breeding program, until the predictable happened and they had to burn 200 worlds to take control of the situation.
• Mundane Made Awesome: According to Javik, Protheans liked passing time by having hours-long staring contests.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Javik reveals that they were much more imperialistic than anyone suspected. Those who did not want to be part of their empire were free to resist, and the Protheans were such firm believers in Might Makes Right that they would have followed any who won. None did.
• Ragnarok Proofing: Not all of it survived, but a impressive amount of their tech still works fifty thousand years after the fact.
• Serious Business: Javik claimed that gambling was punishable by death within their empire. They also apparently passed the time via staring contests. That lasted for hours. Granted, it is Javik who makes that claim.
• Space Romans: The Protheans were actually much like Ancient Rome, particularly in their methodology with conquering other species.
• Suspended Animation: How the Protheans attempted to survive unnoticed on Ilos until the Reapers had returned to dark space. Only twelve scientists survived. In the "From the Ashes" DLC for Mass Effect 3, one Prothean is still alive after 50,000 years, and is a potential squadmate.
• Theme Naming: They apparently liked to name their virtual intelligence programs names that started with the letter V: Vigil, Victory and Vendetta.

The Reapers

We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it. —Sovereign

A race of machines who are believed to have hunted the Protheans to extinction. Shepard discovers that the Reapers are about to return and spends the trilogy trying to stop them.

• Abusive Precursors: Good Lord yes! They hold the current page quote. As for why, well, specifically developing galactic races to be wiped out and harvested is plenty bad, don'cha think?
  • Zigzagged: They consider the self-destructiveness of galactic life to be inevitable, choosing instead to genetically preserve previous civilizations. In rather horrifying ways.
• Always Lawful Evil
• Ambiguous Robots: They detest organic creatures and seem mechanical in nature. Until you take their construction methods into account.
• And I Must Scream: Several of the nasty fates they have in store for the galaxy, from turning people into husks, to Indoctrination, and the fate of the humans kidnapped by the Collectors for the human Reaper.
• Animal Motif: The Reapers look suspiciously like a techno-organic version of the reaper cuttlefish.
• Assimilation Plot: How new ones are made.
• Batman Gambit: A particularly devious (and brilliant) one is what makes the entire extinction cycle possible.
  • However clever it is (and it is very clever), the scheme is severely hampered by the unanticipated actions of the Protheans.
• Big Bad: The whole point of the trilogy is to bring them down, and they're behind much of the villains in each game.
  • Bigger Bad: For the first two games, an individual Reaper acts as The Man Behind the Man and the main driving force for the armies of the geth and the Collectors respectively. In the third game, they lead their Mooks in a direct attack.
• Blue and Orange Morality: They claim this, but in truth it seems to have less to do with genuine inscrutability and more to do with their monumental arrogance and contempt for 'lesser races'. The truth is that while the Reapers are arrogant, they actually were created by an AI that judged forcing order on organic life by turning it into Reapers would prevent "inevitable" wars between organics and synthetics.
• Brown Note: The deep bass sound-blasts that the Destroyers make are supposed to be able to instill a fear response in organics that hear it.
• Cool Starships: They are remarkably powerful and even look really cool and sinister. Whatever your thoughts on their practices, there is no denying that they are awesome starships.
• Cultural Posturing: It seems to be their national sport.
• Dangerously Genre Savvy: Oh hell yes. Just about everything they do, from their Batman Gambit, to killing the hero once s/he showed how big of a threat s/he was, to attempting to recover his/her body to confirm the death, etc. REEKS of genre savviness.
  • To be expected: it is unknown how many cycles they've gone through, but it's clearly a very large number, so they've probably had lots of experience dealing with exceptional individuals.
• Eldritch Abomination
• Everything's Squishier with Cephalopods: The Reapers' design resembles that of an actual animal, the reaper cuttlefish. Their external hulls, at least.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Every Reaper so far has spoken in teeth-rattling bass tones. With the Reaper Destroyer you topple at the end of the Rannoch arc in the third game, the air actually distorts from the extreme bass of the reaper's voice.
• Fate Worse Than Death: Basically, being vaporized is probably the most merciful fate they can give you.
• Higher-Tech Species: Almost all of their tech defies understanding. Some of them seem to defy the laws of physics.
• I Am Legion: "We are each a nation." Or, more accurately, a species.
• Living Ship: Considering their construction methods...
• Machine Worship: The heretic geth worship them as gods, the pinnacle of what the geth aspire to be.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Reapers were originally created by an AI within the Citadel called the Catalyst, who directed the Reapers to begin their systematic purge of any life advanced enough to create synthetic life.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: Or rather, bio-mechanical starships.
• Mind Hive: It's revealed in the second game that individual Reapers are actually made up of a collection of independent AI programs that work together with a singular will and goal.
• Mind Rape: Reaper indoctrination. Quite possibly the most horrible fate a being can suffer.
• Nigh Invulnerability: They can be killed but it takes an enormous amount of effort to bring down even a weaker Reaper.
  • To put this in perspective: in Mass Effect 2, it took the equivalent of a nuke and a half to take down one Reaper. A Reaper who technically hadn't even been "born" yet.
• No Conservation of Energy: As far as anyone is able to tell, the Reapers appear to be perpetual motion machines with no need for fuel or maintenance. The Codex specifically mentions how impossible this should be, and how it allows previously unseen war strategies that require no supply lines even in the long term conflicts.
• Omnicidal Maniac
• One-Man Army: It took two fleets, the Destiny Ascension and a massive stroke of luck to bring down Sovereign, a single Reaper capital ship. And while capital ships are the most powerful Reaper design, even the relatively smaller destroyers can take insane amounts of damage before they fall.
• Order Versus Chaos: According to Sovereign, they "bring order to the chaos of organic evolution." He's not spouting arrogance there: the Catalyst specifically created them to bring order to chaos. Namely, by establishing a systematic process by which organic life advanced enough to create self-aware synthetic life would be "preserved" by being turned into Reapers, to prevent what the Catalyst perceives as an inevitable and destructive conflict between synthetic and organic life.
• Outside Context Villain: Imagine the fates of all the civilisations they've destroyed. They were advancing swimmingly... and then abruptly hundreds of incomprehensibly powerful machine-god-squid-ships popped out of every Mass Relay, crushed their governments, ripped their militaries apart and then began methodically exterminating every single sign that they had ever existed in the most horrifying way imaginable without once bothering to stop killing and explain any of it. Ever.
• Precursor Killers: Though they're technically the alpha-precursors, they're still the ones who killed the Protheans. Along with the twenty thousand... plus generations of Precursors before them.
• Pretender Diss: Despite the size of their egos, they find the heretics' worship demeaning.

Saren: But the reaction of their deity is most telling. It is insulted.

• Ragnarok Proofing: Well, the stuff they leave behind is supposed to go fifty thousand years plus without maintenance.
• Regularly-Scheduled Evil: Their galactic genocides come every 50,000 years or so. Part of the plot of the series is the current iteration of the cycle has been delayed by several thousand years by outside forces, making the Reapers somewhat desperate to get things back on track.
• Sapient Ship: With a mix of Living Ship.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: A rare case of self-sealing evil. They hibernate outside of the galaxy in between cycles both to conserve energy and prevent discovery.
• Slave Mooks: Anyone who works for the Reapers is this. They don't see anyone or anything as their equal, or even worthy of respect. If you work for the Reapers, you are first either indoctrinated, implanted, zombified, or reprogrammed, and then you are dead. Period.
• Spider Tank: The Destroyer model.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien
• Villain Override: The closest they get to fighting Shepard in person... until the third game.
• Worthy Opponent: They have come to see Shepard as "an annoyance". Considering how massive their egos are, this is pretty much the highest possible praise they could give an enemy.

Dying Reaper: Harbinger speaks of you.

Non-Sapient Creatures

Husks

Thane: There are tales about such things among my people - devices buried on distant worlds that turn the finders into abominations.

Non-sapient synthetic creatures that are created using the bodies of organic beings. They are of Reaper origin. Husk is both the name of the 'generic' human zombie enemy and a general term for Reaper-fied organics.

• Action Bomb: Abominations.
• Arm Cannon: Cannibals, batarian-human hybrids from Mass Effect 3.
• Body Horror: Oh god.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Banshees, husked Asari, in Mass Effect 3. They have Biotic barriers and armor instead of health which makes them immune to biotics, they can Flash Step, and they also have the ability to grab people and subsequently impale them with their hands, resulting in instant death. Sometimes they will stand still and briefly appear to charge up, after which they will scream and release an attack that covers a surprisingly large area. Finally, they throw powerful projectiles that move slowly but track their target. Have fun.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: To create a husk, organics are impaled on spikes which converts organic materials into synthetic ones. Usually though, they're already dead.
• Elite Mooks: Marauders. Husked turians, they have kinetic barriers and a turian assault rifle, and also tend to buff nearby foes as well.
• Eye Beams: The primary attack Praetorians use.
• Giant Mook: Scions. Also a Boss in Mook Clothing. In Mass Effect 3, Brutes fill this role: they're huskified krogans with a turian head for higher intelligence.
• Grenade Launcher: The Cannibal's Arm Cannon, in addition to shooting what appears to be red flechettes in the place of bullets, can also fire frag grenades. Unlike most examples of this trope, the grenades still take a few seconds to detonate after they land.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Cannibals replenish health by eating their own dead (er, dead-er) allies.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How they are made.
• Mooks: In all three games.
• Night of the Living Mooks
• Ominous Walk: Banshees will engage in this when not teleporting around.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Well, they're mechanical, for one thing. The creation process is taking (preferably living) organic beings and impaling them on spikes, which slowly replaces tissue with machinery. They start out as somewhat standard zombies (albeit with electrical attacks), but Mass Effect 2 and especially Mass Effect 3 features tons of varieties with neat abilities like exploding, having guns built into their arms, and being very durable.
• Power Floats: Before you take down their biotic barriers.
• Slave Mooks: Husks have been robbed of all former sentience and self-awareness. They are essentially Reaper cannon fodder.

Thresher Maw

Zaeed: Standard operating procedure when you get a thresher maw is run the hell away. Pick up sticks. Move the hell out! Krogan don't know any better.

Tuchanka's ultimate predator, Thresher Maws are enormous subterranean creatures that spend their whole life eating or searching for something to eat. Thanks to their method of reproduction (spores that can survive in space), they've made it to plenty of other planets. In the Sole Survivor background, Commander Shepard was the Sole Survivor of a thresher maw attack triggered by a particularly nasty Cerberus cell.

• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: The first time one is encountered in the first game can be like this.
• Kaiju: Kalros especially
• Mother of a Thousand Young: The legendary Kalros, said by Eve to be the mother from whom all Thresher Maws spawn. This is *probably* an exaggeration, but she sure made mincemeat out of that Reaper Destroyer. From the sound of things, Our Heroes seemed to just expect it to distract the Reaper, not outright kill it.
• Sand Worm: Javik's line about riding them seems to be a Shout-Out to Dune.
• Timed Mission: On Grunt's loyalty mission in the second game, you have to survive a thresher maw attack for five minutes. Or you can just kill it.
• Worm Sign

---

Back to Mass Effect

Back to Mass Effect/Characters