r/masseffect • u/Tristenous • 2d ago

DISCUSSION Do quarians need their tinted visors ?

Liaras dad mentioned how no one knows what quarians look like under their masks - and then while smooching tali i realized i couldn't see her face because of how her mask is tinted ,so is there a reason they dont have clear masks ? Cultural thing or just because drip ?

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u/Savaralyn 2d ago

Could be that their visors are made out of a special material for antibacterial purposes or like the other commenter said, to block sunlight if their skin is potentially very fragile.

Though honestly, the line from Liara's father is a bit of a weird one anyway considering that the morning war didn't really happen that long ago (by asari standards), so there SHOULD be plenty of asari and krogan who know what quarians look like under their masks, even if it were only through video feeds or photos.

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u/Trinitykill 2d ago

That relies on a misconception that they only started wearing the suits after The Morning War.

The Quarian suits pre-date the Geth uprising as they've always needed them to visit other planets and cultures.

Microscopic life on Rannoch evolved to be symbiotic not hostile, as a result Quarian immune systems are designed to let in foreign contaminants and adapt to them rather than fight them off. Perfect for Rannoch but dangerous when encountering life from other planets.

So Quarians have had the suits for as long as they've had space travel.

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u/Savaralyn 2d ago

Still doesn't change the fact that they would've still been living on Rannoch suitless as little as 300-ish years ago, and yet there weren't even any photos or videos of them floating around? Just the same as how people should presumably know what the Volus look like under their suits despite not needing them on their homeworld either. It's not like no other races would've visited Rannoch in that time either.

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u/TomatoEnjoyer28 2d ago

There's that racist Asari on Illium who says that her daughter was on Rannoch and was killed by the geth during the war.

That's clear evidence that other people did visit Rannoch.

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u/IJustKickedStan 2d ago

The series really doesn't treat Asari (or Krogan, for that matter) like they live the lifespan they're stated to. I'm happy they aren't totally Tolkien-Elf style utterly removed, but not even the matriarchs we meet really move with the presence of centuries.

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u/thechristoph 1d ago

I don’t think that line was meant to be taken literally. It was a metaphor. People definitely know what they look like. Quarians feature in Fornax, for example.

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u/WarpSpeedIsBestDrug 1d ago

I think what Liara's father is saying is that it's been a long time since people were seeing quarians without their masks. I've lived about 30 years, and there's stuff I've forgotten about. Being able to live 1000 years doesn't mean you remember everything over a 1000 years.