Mass Effect fans may not be able to agree on much, but if there's one thing that unites us all, it's our love of Garrus. Alongside Tali, he seems to be the most popular love interest in the series. But only femshep can be anything more than friends with everyone's favourite bad boy. So, of course, modders had to fix this.
Thanks to Nexus Mods user bugbuns, we have the Gay Garrus Vakarian mod available for the Legendary Editions of Mass Effect 2 and 3. They're still works in progress, but there's currently enough there to romance Garrus as Dude-shep in both games, snuggling up with him throughout the battle against the Collectors, and the Reaper war.
"While playing as Male Shepard, you can now ask Garrus out," says the creator, bugbuns. "This is a very simple mod that disables the gender check within the code, and makes it available for Shepard to romance Garrus."
Thanks to bugbuns' work, the game should never bug out and replace your character model with femshep, as has been known to happen when players try to get past the gender restrictions.
Another mod from bugbuns lets you continue this romance into the Legendary Edition of Mass Effect 3, making him Shepard's main love interest regardless of gender. This also means he'll be the one you say goodbye to before heading off to the final showdown, just as many of us femshep players got to experience.
Of course, one drawback of implementing an unofficial romance is the lack of voice lines for Shepard himself. Whereas other queer romance mods have cut content to work with - such as the femshep and Miranda pairing - it seems that BioWare never considered making Garrus a bi/pan romance option. It's possible that modders could fix this too, however, sticking audio together from elsewhere as other mods have done in the past. That's much easier said than done, of course, so at least we have all of Garrus' lines intact.