FemShep's evolving silhouette through the Mass Effect series

To continue the posts about Mass Effect and its portrayals of females...here's an excerpt from an article on Kotaku (beware, there are spoilers! Don't make the same mistake I did):

Reader Sgt.LulzJager has kept the same female Commander Shepard model across all three Mass Effect games. That's a lot of time spent with the same character. So it didn't take long for him to notice something different about her in Mass Effect 3.
Beside a few tweaks to her face, he didn't make any changes to the rest of her physical appearance. That all just...happened.

BIOWARE :<

I mean, don't get me wrong, the developers have made a great female video game character with Shepard. Though MaleShep is marketed as the "main" Shepard and the two share the exact same story and almost all dialogue, not once does the way Shepard is written feel incongruent with FemShep's gender. I never saw her as a "masculine" woman, and I appreciated that the developers didn't create any kind of gender role tension - either by stressing that she was different from "girly girls" or by overcompensating for a perceived lack of femininity and making her into some hyper-sexualized object. And maybe that's the point in some ways. As Shepard, you represent humanity in a universe populated with other alien lifeforms. The game emphasizes that there are unique and unifying traits inherent to all humans, and the differences between men and women - be it biological or societal - become inconsequential in the larger picture.

So it just kind of sucks to see these needless and unexplained cosmetic enhancements to the female Shepard - and only the female Shepard. It reminds me a little of Chell's makeover in Portal 2. I mean, I like both versions of Chell, but it was refreshing to see a female protagonist, let alone a female character, who was makeup-less and hardened looking. That's why I was just a little bit disappointed to see them cave and give her full makeup (which, btw, how the eff did she find time to apply that) and a more youthful appearance.

End rant.

In good news, I finished ME1, guys! Let me just say my 'rush forward with biotic powers and guns a blazin' Vanguard tactics I became acclimated to in the first game are not working in ME2.

me:

I'M A VANGUARD I GOT DIS
(by gobeur)