🌌Mass Effect Stories

Mass Effect is BioWare's space opera trilogy (plus Andromeda) about Commander Shepard, a human soldier who assembles a crew of aliens and misfits aboard the Normandy to stop the Reapers. The games let you choose Shepard's gender, temperament, and who they take to bed, and that last part is why the fandom's erotica has thrived for over a decade. Almost every squadmate is written as a fully realized adult with their own baggage, and the romance arcs were good enough that fans wanted the scenes the fade-to-black skipped. Add a galaxy full of blue-skinned asari, plated turians, hulking krogan, and suit-bound quarians, and you get a fandom where xenophilia is the default rather than the fringe.

The big draws are predictable if you've played. Garrus and femShep is the flagship pairing, with all the awkward-turian-anatomy jokes intact. Liara's asari mind-meld gets written as a shared orgasm that blurs two minds together. Thane, Tali, Kaidan, Ashley, Miranda, Jack, and Samara all have devoted followings, and Aria T'Loak shows up whenever a writer wants Shepard put in her place. Beyond pairings, readers come for Renegade Shepard using sex as leverage, Paragon Shepard being seduced against their better judgment, the power gap between a Spectre and everyone who wants something from one, and size difference with krogan, yahg, and elcor. Male Shepard harem fics that run through the entire female crew are their own cottage industry.

The stories collected here lean toward a female Shepard who keeps ending up with her clothes off in the line of duty. One long-form piece follows a male Shepard saving the galaxy while methodically working through every attractive woman on the Normandy and beyond. Several shorter, grittier fics put a femShep undercover on the Citadel or Omega, trading drunken dances and then a lot more to a corrupt C-Sec cop for intel, or negotiating with informants when her body is the only currency she has left. The Kolyat Krios hunt from the second game gets turned into an interrogation that goes somewhere the original never did. And there's a Shadow Broker fight rewritten as a stripped, lube-slick wrestling match against a massive alien that ends in penetration nobody planned. The throughline is coercion, compromise, and a Commander who rationalizes it as mission-critical.

If the pairing or scenario you want isn't on this page, RedQuill's generator lets you write your own Mass Effect story with whatever Shepard, squadmate, or alien you have in mind.