Zetatrain said:
True, why the reapers don't just exterminate all organic life is a major flaw since they too are synthetics.
There's no advantage to the Reapers to wiping out all organics, and a serious disadvantage. They aren't truly immortal; we've seen them die. So if they didn't reproduce, they'd go extinct. It would take aeons, but it would happen. Meanwhile, they cannot improve themselves if they don't incorporate new perspectives, new strengths and even possibly flaws that they can grow by overcoming. The primary disadvantage of synthetic life is that there's no random factor to their reproduction. They can be or do anything they decide to, but there are no new ideas without outside prompting, and they will never develop in a way they haven't thought of and planned in advance. Their culture and mindset would stagnate entirely in a few short millenia.
So, as ME2 revealed, they harvest the most advanced, the most adaptable, the strongest of the young races. There's such a huge difference in tech levels that the organics aren't a credible threat to them, but any culture that knew too much or had too long to develop would be a threat eventually, so whenever they come by to harvest the best they wipe out or repurpose the other spacefaring cultures as a precaution. They leave every pre-spaceflight race alone, possibly with a bit of subtle redirection to become more suitable in the next cycle, but would never wipe out life because they would lose so much potential and diversity. Each of them takes all the best traits of the entirety of the best race to develop in that 50,000 years, combines it with superior Reaper engineering and millions of years of experience, and becomes a being incomprehensibly above us, as we are above the grass. And then, I dunno. Maybe they're working on problems as big to them as they are to us. Maybe they sit around and debate philosophy for hundreds of thousands of years at a time. Maybe their goals are truly incomprehensible to us, as ours must be to a single ant.
Then Shepard comes along. He kills the one they left to watch over the younger races and open the way for the harvest. So Harbinger first orders that he be killed (and in a surprising display of either experience or genre-savvy sends his minions to collect the corpse and confirm a kill instead of trusting the disintegration of the hero's ship to have killed him; it was in the comics and they only failed because of a combination of Liara and Aria), and then decides to begin studying and harvesting Shepard's race early. Did they wait too long and let one of the young races grow too powerful? Are humans special somehow? Was Shepard just magic? But Cerberus rebuilds the dead hero, and he manages to interrupt Harbinger's safety scheme and exterminate some of his best minions.
That leaves us with Harbinger and the Reapers entering the galaxy, with enough power that they shouldn't have any trouble going about the plan as usual... Harbinger is pretty sure that nothing can stop them but is starting to worry. The galaxy has heard the warnings, and had a chance to prepare if they bothered to, and Shepard is still alive out there somewhere. Mass Effect 3 should have been a massive, intergalactic duel between Harbinger and Shepard, the timeless, nigh-invulnerable, incredibly powerful machines that aren't in as secure a position as they should have been, versus the young hero trying to unify the galaxy against them, hit targets of opportunity, and figure out some way to ensure the cycle is broken and the young races survive. And most of the game was like that; unifying the Krogan and the Turians, the Quarians and the Geth under one banner. Hitting the Reapers hard in vulnerable supply points, like the Ardat-Yakshi monastery and the Rachni hive, and destroying a few of them along the way through a combination of luck, intelligence, cooperation, and sacrifice.
In the end... we could have found some weakness, or some weapon, and either used it to destroy the Reapers or just become enough of a threat that it's easier to wait for us to wipe each other out than to fight directly. We could have proven our intelligence to them, and convinced them of our right to exist in the Galaxy. We could have developed a massive enough fleet to destroy them or drive them off; they've gained one or a small handful of ships every 50,000 years, while we have the combined construction capabilities of the Geth, Rachni, etc. so even if we lose a hundred ships for each of theirs, we can replace our losses and they lose millions of years of experience and a huge part of their community. We could have cut some manner of deal where volunteers from our cultures "ascend" to join them; if the million or so colonists the Collectors took was enough for a human reaper it should be easy to find enough people willing to take the deal out of the trillions available. But whatever happened, it should have been an epic resolution to a battle that was quite literally between god and man.
Instead? The Reapers are suddenly mindless slaves, the one who used to lead them and spoke to us extensively doesn't get a single line and shows up for all of a minute, and we get some half-baked justification from the glowing brain-damaged child controlling them all before being forced to destroy everything we've worked for and end galactic civilization. And we're supposed to like this because it's "art."
