Victor Shepardverse

It's Better Than It Sounds; much of the material concerns how this particular Shepard affects the people around him and spends little time re-writing canon, instead focusing on how others see Victor and what his actions mean, both for himself as a person and for how he changes things around him. Very Original Flavour, with an emphasis on exploring certain things not given much detail in canon like Shepard's Earthborn Backstory. Shepard's history and even his class are drawn on for Character Development, all of it making him the person he is instead of being mentioned once in the summary and promptly forgotten. The writing itself goes up in quality as the author improves with each entry.

Victor himself is notable for being one of the few Shepards in the Fandom using the default model.

The series:

• One Last Mystery: A short one-shot where Miranda wonders about a minor unanswered question. [Non-canon]
• Parallels 31: A short on how Shepard spends his thirty-first birthday; the author, as the title suggests, went with an idea to draw a parallel between two different versions of Shepard, the other featured being markedly different from Victor.
• Mass Mayhem: A series of 100 drabbles written for a prompt challenge, exploring various moments in Victor's life, as well as the lives of the people around him.
• Beyond Limits: A short extension to Mass Mayhem, consisting of ideas that didn't fit into the drabble-challenge format.
• Covert Operations: The 1Character Challenge done for Victor.
• Coded Pieces: How the aftermath of Operation Overlord affects Victor, a lead-in to Chessboard.
• Chessboard: Post-Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard goes missing, leaving the Normandy's crew to track him down and, more importantly, figure out why. A longer, multi-chaptered story, in contrast to the one-shot nature of the rest of the series.

Tropes used in Victor Shepardverse include:

• Arc Words: Alesh'Kal
• Batman Gambit: Samuel Yin's contingency against capture.
• Big Bad: Anna Whitwell, until the title is stolen by Samuel Yin.
• Boot Camp Episode: One of the Mass Mayhem drabbles touches on Victor's time at boot camp after he enlists, although it's an introspective moment in the calm at lights-out.
• Conversational Troping: About where Shepard and Joker fit on the line between Invisible to Gaydar and Camp Gay; Joker sees himself as the woman of the relationship, and Jacob answers this by bringing up the fact that Victor, who does not have any readily visible Camp Gay behavior, has a subscription to a men's fashion e-zine.
• Drabble: Mass Mayhem's format.
• Mr. Fanservice
• Face Heel Turn: Shepard, due to Blackmail.
• Foreshadowing: There's a reason the events of Bring Down the Sky bother Victor more than most other Shepards.
• Friendly Sniper: Victor has elements of Cold Sniper was well, but he's mostly friendly.
• Genre Savvy: The Normandy crew is instantly distrustful of Yin when he appears out of nowhere to help them track down Shepard; they only follow his advice because they have nothing else to go on. Actually, though, they're right. He usurps Whitwell as the Big Bad.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Joker about Shepard, slightly.
• I Uh You Too: Twice, one of which is a Shout-Out to the instance from Star Wars.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Joker mentions that women on the extranet write Commander Shepard Fanfic, some of which pairs him up with Kaidan.
• Love Hurts: Shepard and O'Connor didn't end well.
• Mysterious Past: Shepard and the MSV Snake Fang
• The Reveal: As a First Lieutenant, Victor let over 70,000 colonists die rather than kill Jake O'Connor to stop it. The fact that the colonists were batarians doesn't make him feel better.
• Rule of Symbolism: Anna Whitwell and Samuel Yin are the chessmasters playing a game on the eponymous (metaphorical) Chessboard. The color schemes of their employees reflect this.
• Invisible to Gaydar: Shepard, Joker, Jake O'Connor.
• Took a Level in Badass: Victor, lampshaded whenever he runs into his old gang buddies, who invariably start the conversation off with how they can't believe he's gone from a skinny runt who couldn't pull the trigger on another human being to the hero of Elysium and savior of the Citadel.
• Word of God: Most updates as they appear on the author's blog have more in-depth notes explaining the thought process behind the writing, not present in the Fanfiction.net uploads.