Entertainment: Culture and amusement across the galaxy

The peoples of the Citadel and the wider Milky Way devised an enormous range of entertainment for their own consumption: films, plays, books, magazines, musical acts, sports, and games of every kind. Popular culture was thoroughly cross-species, with humans, asari, turians, elcor, hanar, quarians, and krogan all producing their own works while eagerly consuming one another's. The result was a body of culture that not only amused but revealed how each race understood itself and its neighbors.

Theatre and the elcor stage#

Live theatre flourished, and one of its most celebrated achievements was a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet directed by Francis Kitt and performed entirely by an elcor cast. The elcor actors used their native body language and pheromones to convey the play's emotion, signals obvious to other elcor but lost on non-elcor audiences, who instead attended to the dialogue. Kitt framed this as a feature rather than a limitation, wishing to let viewers judge Hamlet "by his deeds and not his emotions." The work entered planning in 2183 after hundreds of elcor were auditioned, and by 2185 it had become an award-winning hit running over fourteen hours, later abridged for home viewing.

Kitt followed this with plans for a Macbeth featuring a krogan in the title role, arguing the krogan brought "a raw brutality to the stage that emphasizes the ruthless actions of his character," and even adding a non-canon pyjak character played by a live animal. Separately, an elcor doctor named Yorrik, once nearly cast as Polonius in the Hamlet production, authored his own all-elcor Macbeth estimated at some sixteen hours in length, previewing portions of it to a small audience before his death left the play unfinished.

Cinema and the rise of Blasto#

The galaxy supported a thriving film industry that produced both prestige work and crowd-pleasing spectacle. Among the acknowledged masterpieces was Starless, a gothic horror filmed in part on the airless world of Faringor, whose grim, dim surface and preserving vacuum kept its sets intact for tourists long after production. At the popular end stood Blasto, a fictional hanar action hero billed as the galaxy's first hanar Spectre, who anchored a long-running series of films. Beginning with the exploitation picture Blasto: the Jellyfish Stings, the franchise produced numerous sequels, including wartime hits during the Reaper War and entries supposedly still being produced centuries later for settlers in the Andromeda galaxy.

Other films engaged directly with recent galactic history. Citadel, presented by Eridani films, dramatized Commander Shepard's role in the Eden Prime War, with scenes that varied depending on whether Shepard had saved the Council during the final battle against Sovereign. Perhaps the most beloved cross-species work, however, was Fleet and Flotilla, an award-winning vid about a romance between the turian Bellicus and the quarian Shalei. Noted for its positive portrayal of turian-quarian relationships, it spawned a soundtrack, relationship simulators, and a musical adaptation, and held special meaning for turian and quarian viewers.

The printed word and the press#

Galactic print culture was equally broad. Classic Earth poets such as Walt Whitman, Rumi, and Alfred Tennyson remained continuously in print across the centuries, sitting alongside the verse of contemporary writers like the reclusive asari poet Techllis Bel. Military-historical fiction was popular, with novels such as Revelation and Ascension dramatizing humanity's expansion into the galaxy after the discovery of the Prothean relay in the Sol system, and the cult organization at the heart of those stories.

The periodical press ranged from sensational to scandalous. Fornax, launched in 2167 and billed as "the galaxy's finest xenophilia," became the first human magazine to offer full five-sensory stimulation, running specialty editions for individual species. Publications such as Justicar Heroes recounted, and frequently exaggerated, the exploits of asari justicars, while polemical e-books and conspiracy titles accused the Council and its institutions of concealing inconvenient truths. Together these works formed a vigorous, opinionated print culture spanning every species.

Music, sport, and games#

Music spanned styles and species, from the human R&B singer Lady Sweat to the sensory band Expel 10 that played on Omega, with annual showcases such as the Galactic Video Music Awards honoring new artists and choreography. Sport was just as varied. Humans carried baseball and American football into the wider galaxy, while genuinely cross-species games arose as well: biotiball, in which teams of biotics maneuvered a ball into a basket; clawball; and kailat ring-ball, a zero-gravity favorite of the Terminus Systems scored when a ring flashed colors only some species could see. Combat simulation was hugely popular, with venues such as the Armax Arsenal Arena on the Citadel projecting fully immersive holographic battles for paying crowds.

Games filled the gaps between. Chess, brought from Earth, became a particular favorite of the elcor, while the asari strategy game Kepesh-Yakshi and the krogan children's game Firebreathing Thresher Maws of Doom reflected their own cultures. Card games such as poker and the centuries-old human pastime of solitaire spread to other species, and sprawling virtual worlds like the turian-mythology role-playing game Galaxy of Fantasy boasted billions of players. From the stage to the arena to the omni-tool, entertainment was woven through the everyday life of the galaxy's peoples.