it's about Mordin, who everyone loves

a Salarian, a race with a hyperactive metabolism that seldom lives to the age of 40

at one point Mordin is subjected to some kind of personal tragedy that I forget

and the next day he's basically just fine

and if you ask him about it he's like

"We salarians have short lifespans, so we process emotions efficiently"

and I can understand on a facts and logic level why that line was worded like that

but the version of it that I would've liked to hear way more is

"Humans have a tendency to hold onto emotions for extremely long periods of time rather than processing them directly"

"I suspect this is due to your long lifespans"

say the same thing but from a salarian viewpoint

to a salarian the salarian lifespan is normal

yeah I think the best apology I have for that is like

asari really dominate the pan-galactic culture

they've met a lot of other races who all have longer lifespans, out in space

so it makes sense that he might phrase it like that to a human

but it's less fun

yeah

Agreed, it'd be neater that way

it's way more common for other fantasy/sf races to live for centuries, so it's interesting to hear the viewpoint of those with even shorter lives than ours

that's one thing I always appreciated about the skaven in whf

in so much sci fi and fantasy the human advantage is that we're the dynamic, chaotic species that isn't afraid to take risks

and the skaven are that, to humans

their advantage is that they will absolutely snort five grams of concentrated moon blood to pull long work hours to make the manmangler 5000

fantasy setting where there's dwarves and orcs and shit but none of them live past like 35

so humans are the wise ancient elder race

ten year long generations, so they're like "bro that human worked with my father and he looks the same now as he did then, are humans immortal"

As a Mordin lover: there's also the chance he's lying about having "processed" it

I was gonna say, I think part of Mordin's thing is that ... hes lying

so idk that his logic here is necessarily conveying a real fact about salarians as much as trying to convince a human hes totally fine

And on the lying front, an added wrinkle: hey buddy you're thinkin an awful lot about species-wide lifespans and mortality rates im not sure you're actually ok

that could still be true if he worded it as a weird sideways jab at human emotional sluggishness

True

while that's true, I think in this particular scene it's still more a jab at himself and how he's increasingly not okay with what he's done with his life

yeah
shorter lived species are interesting!
in small saga all the characters are rodents and most of them call humans gods
this one rat understands them better, grew up in a library and learned to read the language and found out about pollution and climate change and is so so bitter

none of the other characters think of themselves as short lived but they do
they're five years old which, that's ridiculous for a rat, but always saying they haven't had the time they'd need to make mistakes and learn like humans would

all that reading gave them a human perception of time and it hasn't been good for them
they look down on rodent history and accomplishment saying rodent lives are short and meaningless

really the game could have done more with this bc some of the characters are squirrels and those live way longer than rats or mice but it's not brought up in game

I think one reason you see more long-lived aliens than short-lived aliens is

"It's okay to have a relationship with this ten year old because for her species that's equivalent to twenty so she's an adult" is a sentence with really bad optics