First posted April 2022.

The Andromeda galaxy in the world of Mass Effect is home to the angara, an alien race who live in a constant state of war against the kett invaders. Centuries before the events of the game, a phenomenon known as the Scourge wiped out swathes of angaran homeworlds, people, and, as we come to learn in one minor side quest, stories. Being the person that I am, I took this side quest and ran with it.

In ‘The Lost Song,’ an angaran biologist tells Ryder about an animal species called the yevara, which appear to be somewhat analogous to whales. The yevara’s song was said to bring the sun out of hiding and reveal the stars. When the Scourge hit, the planet Voeld was encased in ice, and the yevara remain trapped in the water below the ice layer. Cut off from food and oxygen, no one knows how they persist.

Tales of the yevara are the only surviving stories in the angaran folklore tradition. When this was stated in the game, it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I’m genuinely not sure if the implications of that are something that the writers thought about. Discussions between the angara on Voeld (including Jaal, in Ryder’s party) indicate that losing the yevara would be losing their last stories — which suggests angaran folklore is an oral tradition. Further supporting the solely oral tradition theory is the museum on Aya; curator Avela Kjar’s knowledge comes from what she was taught by her predecessor, and she laments the lack of literature to help her make sense of new discoveries of past relics.

For the Scourge to have wiped out an oral tradition means that every person who knew the stories died. Not only every elder who kept the stories alive in telling, but every child who was told the stories. The scale of what the angara have lost is incalculable.

Though krogan folklore is barely touched on, a line between Vorn and Drack during Drack’s loyalty mission reminded me of the angara and their oral folklore. While arguing about the 1400-1600 year-old (dates given in the game vary) Drack’s expendability, Drack says the colony needs Vorn because of the knowledge in his head (implying it doesn’t exist in written format). Vorn shoots that right back at Drack: “We know what we lost because you lived it.” The krogan fight to reclaim a past they’ve heard stories of — stories they’ve heard from Drack, who didn’t hear them as stories himself, but lived them.

The angara, on the other hand, don’t even know what they’ve lost. No one who had knowledge of them survived.

Folklore studies encounter this sort of thing all the time, if not on the scale of an entire galaxy. There are folklores we will never, ever know, because they belonged to people who took them to their graves. There are cultures whose stories were written down by people outside their groups, and the stories as they existed within the culture die out as the outsiders’ version is more likely to be preserved and propagated.

Perhaps the most famous example of oral tradition transitioning into written tradition is the work of the Brothers Grimm. Admittedly, it’s not strictly true that they went around to all the little old German ladies they could find and wrote down their stories, but the end result is essentially the same; it was their goal to preserve in writing a part of German culture that had only existed in the oral tradition, and that is what they did. Their own edits to the versions they wrote change the stories immeasurably, of course, and so even the earliest editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen are not accurate transcriptions of how these stories existed prior to them. Those versions died out as the Grimms’ grew in popularity. We can sometimes reverse-engineer the previous versions — for example, based on similar variants from other cultures, we know many of their stepmothers were previously simply mothers and the Grimms changed them to encourage a kinder view of the German mother figure — but it’s always guesswork to some extent.

Another real-life example to look at is the One Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights. Before Western influence, the treasury was a compilation of stories transcribed from the oral traditions of several cultures across north Africa, and west, central, and south Asia, built up over centuries. It’s notoriously a bit of a beast, historically speaking; untangling how it came together, which stories came from where and when is nearly impossible with the weaving of oral and written folklore. We know these stories came from many different traditions, but what they were before they were written down is necessarily a mystery.

Once a story is written down, it becomes more accessible to people outside the culture, for better or worse. Already an amalgam of many different influences, the first translation of the One Thousand and One Nights into a European language in the 18th century added another layer of distance from the oral tradition origins. The French translator’s cultural perspective necessarily changed the interpretation of the story, as did the British translators after him. When a story in the collection was written down in 10th century Persia, both the wider world and the smaller sphere in which the story was written were vastly different to 18th century Europe. Even just the act of writing a story down fundamentally changes it from what it was in the oral tradition — stories in the oral tradition evolve much faster, changing with each individual teller, each performance, each differing word or character choice. It becomes static in the writing — frozen in ice, like the yevara.

The stories in the One Thousand and One Nights survive, if only in the twisted and retold versions we have today, but whatever they once were, when they passed between people with no pages dividing them, we’ll never know. The angara declining to write down their stories keeps them in a fluid state, and it keeps them within their own culture — they control who knows their stories, and given their history with the kett, it absolutely makes sense that they would protect their culture so fiercely from outsiders. But it also keeps them in a perilous position. They’re only one more galaxy-wide disaster from losing what little they have left.

In a scene at the very end of the game, unlocked after the epilogue, Drack says, "I'll teach them, Ryder — about what we used to be, and what we are now." This line illustrates exactly what it is the angara are missing, what losing their stories means. Folklore tells us so much about a culture, what they value, what their lives are like, what they dream of, and without that breadcrumb trail, the angara have no idea what they used to be. They have no one like Drack who holds that living memory.

But it's not all tragedy. As Jaal says, the angara write their own story, create their own destiny. Where they came from doesn't matter; they get to decide where they're going, and the future is full of every possibility. Even trapped below the ice, the yevara still swim, still thrive, still sing. The sun's coming out of hiding, and every star is within reach.