Where Are Mass Effect's Male Asari?
Haven't you ever wondered?
The Mass Effect series is often fondly referred to as Bioware’s greatest work, with all four games featuring gigantic intergalactic spaces to explore, plenty of attractive crewmates of all different species to befriend, real choices with real emotional impact on the world around you, and gameplay simple enough to pick up and play, but deep enough to get gleefully absorbed in.
Very early on, in the first Mass Effect game, our player character Commander Shepard is introduced to Dr. Liara T’Soni. Liara is an asari researcher investigating the protheans, an ancient alien race which mysteriously vanished over 50,000 years prior. She is a highly trained fighter, using biotic abilities to provide Shepherd ranged support.
Throughout the series, you will meet many other asari, and all of them beautiful women.
Justicar Samara, and her murderous daughter Morinth, Tevos and Irissa of the citadel council, the evil Matriarch Benezia, your crewmate Peebee in Andromeda, and countless other notable characters. But they are all women. So where are the male asari? If there are no men, how do they even reproduce?
Let's back up for a second. Why do we even have Asari in Mass Effect at all?
Quite literally fulfilling the wishes of every sci-fi fan in existence, Bioware decided to add a race solely comprised of universally beautiful women. Even from the conceptual stage, the writers knew that they wanted “a beautiful race of exclusively female aliens.” Page 21 of "The Art of Mass Effect" states that the asari were created to fill the “green alien girls” trope, which was made popular by Star Trek: The Original Series.
They created them to be quite the opposite of the normal strange and unusual alien characters of cinema, and instead focused on making them flawless. Their hair spines were meant to support the fact that this alien race had still evolved to have something threatening about them. They may be beautiful, but they are not weak, and have been fighting for their freedom and morals for millennia.
As the script writers worked together with the character designers, they built up more and more history and depth to the species, resulting in the blue-tiful wives we see before us today.
Though the games dove into their race being "all-female" on the surface, there is more to pick apart in terms of asari lifestyle, and why their design is so effective, both in the lore and across the fandom.
It is correct that asari are all women. Or rather, that they all look like women. The asari are native to the planet Thessia, and often considered the most influential and respected species in the galaxy, known for their grace, political aptitude, and skills with biotics. They are a singularly-biologically-gendered race, each distinctively female in appearance.
Asari are known to live for over a thousand years, thanks to their extremely robust cellular regenerative system, and during that time, they are able to reproduce with a partner of any gender or species.
According to Liara, “male and female have no real meaning for us,” and she refers to herself as “not precisely a woman”. Perhaps this is why she is virtually the only female character that a female Commander Shepard can romance.
Asari gender is defined, although not as clearly as human gender is, and although they possess breasts and feminine voices, some asari prefer to refer to themselves with gender-neutral language, as is hinted in Mass Effect Andromeda.
Despite all asari possessing female reproductive systems, they are not asexual and do, in fact, need a partner to produce children. This process isn’t your standard pants dance, but rather, an asari melds her nervous system with that of her partner's, leading to DNA being received, which gets melded with that asari to create a child. In the case of both parents being asari, the 'mother' is the one who carries the baby, and the 'father' is the other. The offspring is always born asari, no matter the race of the father.
It is possible for the asari to use melding other than for reproduction, as Liara melds with Commander Shepard on several occasions to help understand his or her visions.
The asari appear attractive to most other species, their body shape would appeal to humans, their skin colour for salarians, and their head fringe for turians. Shepard’s salarian crewmate, Mordin, theorises that the asari’s galaxy-wide attraction could even be a form of hypnosis; a neurotic persuasion they exhibit to make them appear like the most beautiful species in the galaxy, no matter what kind of creature was looking at them.
The interesting reality is that, even though the asari started with the simplest of premises - let's create a race wholly consisting of candy for hungry-eyed gamers, (which, in itself, is a massively outdated concept) through Bioware's incredible writing, they have placed these characters into such interesting and integral roles, not only in Commander Shepard's story, but within the entire Mass Effect universe.
Not once did players ever see them as tacked-on, or disposable. They were as objectified as much or as little as any other possible romance option, and that is the beauty of incredible character design.
Except for Morinth, that crazy witch can keep herself to herself, thank you.