Summary
- Ashley Williams is still held in low regard by many in the Mass Effect community.
- Although she holds views that could be considered xenophobic, players don’t consider her background.
- Ashley happily co-exists with aliens after spending enough time around them.
Mass Effect remains as popular as ever, and is now coming back into the zeitgeist following BioWare’s release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, as the studio’s next project is the long-awaited Mass Effect 5.
The discussions among the fandom remain as robust as ever, with constant back-and-forth about the various moral quandaries presented to Shepard in the trilogy. Some people somewhere probably still talk about Andromeda too… out there in deep space. However, contemporary discussions tend to focus on the original trilogy that made us all fall in love with the series.
The companions of Mass Effect can occasionally be polarising, but the majority of them are almost universally beloved. I mean, if you don’t love Garrus Vakarian or Thane Krios then what are you doing? However, a couple of them are still regarded with scepticism by many in the community.
Gunnery Chief Williams
Despite the overwhelming majority of players choosing to save Ashley Williams over Kaidan Alenko on Virmire, possibly to keep their romances intact, she is still held in low regard by many in the fandom. The reason for people’s low opinion of Ashley is their claim that she’s a human supremacist because of her prejudice against alien races.
A recent thread from tippytuliptoes on Reddit dug into this oft-maligned aspect of Ashley’s character. The original poster points to a line in Mass Effect where Ashley says “I can’t tell the aliens from the animals.” As the original poster points out, there are non-sentient aliens (Keepers) and sentient aliens on the Citadel, and Ashley’s never interacted with aliens, having spent her entire life on human colonies.
Ashley firmly believes that humanity needs to look out for humanity’s interests, and she doesn’t believe the Citadel’s alliances will hold up when push comes to shove. That being said, she distances herself from the extremist views of the human supremacist group Terra Firma, calling them “xenophobic jackals.” She’s also willing to go into battle alongside other alien races, respecting their skills as soldiers.
As AwkwardTraffic rightly points out, “Ashley gets so much flak for being racist when so many of the alien squadmates say even more racist stuff.” Our beloved Garrus unabashedly racially profiled people during his time as a C-Sec Officer, and tells Wrex that he’s surprised by his intellect because he thought all Krogan were “bloodthirsty thugs.”
The overcoming of differences to combat a common enemy is the core theme of Mass Effect. As OffOption says, “Wrex and Mordin get less bigoted over time.” Ashley is simply written as the quintessential human military woman, she’s meant to show the player what humanity’s interests and opinions are in this multiracial universe they’ve found themselves in. Tali plays the same role for Quarians, Wrex plays the same role for Krogans and so on.
Unfortunately for Ashley, much of the early dialogue with the character concerns her opinions on aliens, painting a one-dimensional picture. If fans were to consider Ashley holistically, they would realise she’s far more likeable than people give her credit for.
