Your Bioware Crushes & Squishes: ‘Mass Effect’ Friendship Edition

Welcome to “Your Bioware Crushes & Squishes,” where I report on the FemHype crew’s favorite Bioware romances and friendships! Both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series are near and dear to many of our hearts, so I thought I’d throw a virtual sleepover of sorts where we talk about our ~tru luvs~ and brush each other’s hair. Romance not your cup of tea? No worries! We’re gonna talk about our best buds, too, since friendships are just as valid. After discussing heavy theory and social issues, sometimes it’s nice to just kick back, relax, and cry about video game characters.

This time around, we’re taking a look at your favorite Mass Effect characters to befriend after conducting a poll with 485 total respondents. (My apologies to those who had to deal with the initial technical difficulties, by the way.)

Keep in mind that this time around, we’re focusing on a larger cast of characters in response to previous feedback, and like last time, respondents could choose multiple answers for the same question.

25. Morinth

Somehow, Morinth managed to rank lower in this category than she did for romance. To be fair, she does tend take things from 0 to 100 pretty quickly …

24. Diana Allers

Ditto for Diana — another character with little development or exposition. Still sad about her wasted potential.

23. Jacob Taylor

Why don’t you folks wanna spill drinks on the Citadel with Jacob, huh? Is it the controversy over his development in Mass Effect 3 or what?

22. Kelly Chambers

Kelly’s ranking makes me wonder if she’s more liked as a love interest rather than a friend because she gets more scenes (including an appearance in Mass Effect 3) if you romance her. Or it’s because she feeds your fish.

21. Kaidan Alenko

During my second playthrough of Mass Effect 3, I forgot that you had the option to romance Kaidan even if you didn’t in previous games. So when he asked me to hang out on the Citadel, I was like “Of course, BUDDY,” and then he got really sad. Sorry, Kaidan.

20. Ashley Williams

I know that Ashley is super protective of her sisters, so I’d imagine that her and Shepard could have a really cool friendship going on. At least you wouldn’t have to turn her down in the third game.

19. Zaeed Masani

Okay, okay, I got it this time. Zaeed is not the Prothean. I’m currently patting my own back for remembering.

18. Miranda Lawson

I guess Miranda’s arrogance turned anyone who didn’t want to romance her away, which is interesting to me because her and fan favorite Jack have pretty similar backstories, they just react to them in different ways. However, Miranda has the money and success thing going, so that factor probably makes Jack more relatable.

17. Liara T’Soni

I actually don’t know what a friendship route with Liara looks like since I romanced her in both of my playthroughs. Considering how much she hits on you anyway, I’m not sure if there’s much of a difference.

16. Samara

It’s probably a good idea to be on the super soldier asari’s side, isn’t it?

15. Steve Cortez

I literally check on Steve after just about every mission because I’m super paranoid about him not surviving the last one. Gotta look after those canon gays, y’know?

14. Javik

Someone get this guy some alien boxers so he can tell me all about gay subtext in ’90s shows like, stat.

13. Kasumi Goto

Kasumi is the ultimate Jack x Miranda shipper, AKA the hero we all need and deserve.

12. Jack

I hecked up during my first playthrough and got Jack killed at the end of Mass Effect 2 because I wanted her to get a chance to be a leader, dammit, so I only got to see her at the Grissom Academy my second time around. I totally bawled — not even gonna pretend otherwise.

11. Samantha Traynor

Samantha is all of us and I, for one, like to be friends with myself.

10. Thane Krios

I’m not going to give away too many spoilers, but hoo wee, the stuff that happens to Thane in Mass Effect 3 is a total mess, isn’t it? It’s like the Mmm, Whatcha Say meme, but with one person. (Or, uh … frog man?)

9. EDI

You know, I’m writing this during a playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas, so I can’t help but pronounce EDI’s name like you would ED-E (pronounced like Eddy). And then, when I play New Vegas after playing Mass Effect, I pronounce ED-E’s name like EDI’s. I need to stop mixing up my robot son and my robot sister.

8. Urdnot Wrex

“Shepard.”

7. Jeff “Joker” Moreau

Joker is a constant for Shepard throughout the trilogy. He’s just about always piloting the Normandy, and you even assume control of him at one point. I think that’s why you folks ranked him so high up on the list.

6. Tali’Zorah nar Rayya

I was grumbling about Jack last time, and now this time, I’m grumbling about Tali. If they could retcon Kaidan as bisexual in Mass Effect 3, why not anyone else, especially fan favorites Garrus and Tali?

5. James Vega

True friends spar with you in the hangar and call you “Lola.”

4. Grunt

While I’m a total goody two-shoes and lean heavily toward Paragon, I try to be a good example for my krogan son by encouraging him to headbutt and kill things.

3. Legion

Okay, none of y’all answered my question last time about romancing a geth being polyamory. Is it polyamory if you date a geth?

2. Mordin Solus

You folks already know who won the top spot AGAIN, so I’m officially crowning Mordin Mass Effect’s Best Buddy for the sake of fairness. We cool with that?

1. Garrus Vakarian

Hoo boy, you kids sure do like the cockatoo man.

Aw shucks everyone, I messed up. Or Google Forms messed up? Or maybe it was Mordin. Hm. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, there were zero responses to the open-ended questions in the poll regarding any other characters you wanted to romance and comments you wanted to make. So, while I would normally save the next part for your comments, instead, I’m going to use that space to talk about overall trends in both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect polls.

However, if you have something to say that you want me to highlight in Part 6, you’re still welcome to drop me a comment down below or tweet me @LongLiveMelKing! Speak now or forever hold your peace.