Exhibit A:
A Reaper. Your standard skyscraper size death machine, brain the size of a civilization, consciousness spanning time scales that would make your head explode if you even began to comprehend it. Equipped to the teeth with lasers, missiles, and the ultimate form of mind control. Just one of them would be enough to bring a galaxy to its knees - and one nearly did. A completely perfected death machine designed for nothing less than the extermination of all life in the galaxy.
Exhibit B:
Human (insert gender) of slightly above average height and weight. Trained in standard Alliance fashion, about ten to fifteen years experience in team operations, a variety of weapons, and general combat.
Exhibit B killed about 50,000 of Exhibit A.
Commander Shepard - known to many as John, known to many others as Jane, known to even more as whatever the hell they felt like - is about as good a marine as you're going to find. He's the best ship commander in the Alliance. He's an inspirational leader.
What he's
not - on paper, anyway - is the exterminator of exterminators, the savior of trillions, the absolute most amazing hero in the history of time. But don't tell him that. He's just going to go ahead and wipe out the Reapers. Because that's what he does. No one tells Shepard he
can't. Shepard simply does. Shepard stopped Sovereign - one of those skyscraper sized death machines from earlier - from hijacking the Citadel. Shepard survived a literally impossible suicide mission to rip the heart out of a stillborn Reaper. Shepard ripped apart a solar system to buy the galaxy a few months. And in the end, Shepard united the galaxy, created the ultimate weapon, and won the war against extinction.
Shepard should be dead. Shepard should be underneath some Krogan's foot. Shepard should have been vaporized, blown up, eaten, melted, and killed in a dozen other interesting ways. Shepard should be atomized dust circling the ruins of a dead sun that the Reapers chewed up and spit out in their wake. But Shepard isn't any of those things because Shepard finds a way. He's the ultimate leader. He's the craftiest, most resourceful bastard you'll ever meet. He's beyond stubborn.
His opponents? Khan? What is Khan is not a genetic engineered warlord? He's a Krogan without the ugly - and ugly is a Krogan's best weapon. Shepard eats Krogans for breakfast and shits them out without a second thought. Robin Hood? A medieval outlaw with a bow and arrow?
If Khan was his breakfast, Robin Hood is the chocolate on his pillow. He eats it without thinking about it. He eats it because
it's there.
Shepard wins because Shepard always fucking wins.
