Mass Effect Lead Writer Was "Blindsided" By Fans Love For Garrus

thegamer.com:

Thanks to multiple games across both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, romance options have become somewhat of a staple of the BioWare RPG. Conversations surrounding these games include often intense discussions on who is the most dreamy and smoochable, but no character is as widely adored by BioWare fans as turian sniper Garrus Vakarian.

However, Drew Karpyshyn - lead writer on Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 - doesn't quite understand the appeal, revealing in a Reddit AMA (thanks, PCGamer) that he was intially "blindsided" by the amount of fans thirsting over Garrus, and was actually surprised when fans wanted both Tali and Garrus to be romance options in Mass Effect 2.

Related: I Finally Understand Why All My Friends Are In Love With Garrus

"We always knew they'd come back as companions," says Karpyshyn. "I was a bit surprised fans wanted the romance options. Tali I could sort of see... you never saw her face, so it was easy to imagine something vaguely human. (But she had those weird feet!) Garrus blindsided me—but once we saw what fans wanted, we decided to deliver!"

To be fair to Karpyshyn, the last thing you'd probably expect people to be drawn to romantically is a human-shaped velociraptor, but it's probably testament to just how well-written and convincing a character Garrus Vakarian actually is. It also probably helps that romancing Garrus has players enter into a more tender and subdued relationship than with most other companions aboard the Normandy. Still, it's nice to see that Karpyshyn still went ahead with the romance plot with Garrus, even if he didn't quite understand the appeal himself.

From former Mass Effect writers to current ones now, as in related news it was recently revealed that Marvel's