Animyr said:
CloudAtlas said:
The way I see it, Control means you accept the Illusive Man's argument, Synthesis and Refuse means you accept the Reapers' argument.
Actually, all four of the endings have you accepting the Catalyst's logic. Which is (one of) my main issues with it.
You don't have to accept the Catalyst's logic - you can shoot at it, or refuse to make a decision, and bear the consequences. But I understand that's probably not what you meant. So, yes, you do have to accept its logic, in the sense that you are limited to the options presented to you. Would have been nice to be able to argue more with it, to disagree more? Probably. I didn't feel this way but I can definitely see why people were disappointed by that. Would that mean that, if only you were allowed to, you would be able to persuade the Catalyst, to show it the err of its ways? That's a hypothetical questions, but given that I have yet to see a argument of why the logic of the Catalyst is faulty that does not rest on faulty logic itself, I doubt it.
Anyway, I digress. What I meant by "accepting the Illusive Man's argument resp. the Reaper's argument" was more, how should I say it, acceptance at a deeper, thematic level. With Control, you do, in the end, what the Illusive Man has always wanted from you, and what you have rejected all the time before. With Synthesis, you agree that there can be no peace between Synthetics and Organics and that's why the only solution (other than extinction) is to eradicate the distinction.
Consider it this way. The entire story (the third game especially) pretty much revolved around or heavily featured the theme of confronting the differences between different peoples and lifeforms (of which synthetic life was just one category) and resolving them with rational discussion and the forging of interpersonal relationships. Unless you play like a diehard racist, the game shows over and over and over and over that the various denizens of the galaxy aren't all that dissimilar and are entirely capable of getting along just fine, while becoming all the more powerful for the variety among them. The one exception to this is the Reapers, who are of course uncompromisingly hostile.
Then comes the ending, in which synthetic/organic conflict (excluding the reapers!), a problem we already resolved with both EDI and the geth, is suddenly not only brought back, but elevated to be the most important issue in the universe ever. That's weird, but I suppose we can explore the issue and discuss this...nope! Genocide, peace magic, mind control, or mass genocide. That's how we resolve our differences now.
You see how this is a thematic hard-right, of car-flipping velocity? It comes out of nowhere and simply has no basis or precedent in the narrative that came before. Not in lore, not in player choice, not in gameplay. None of this tells us that the four plans of action presented are either moral, appropriate, necessary or even based on an accurate picture of reality (especially if you destroyed or allied with the geth). Well, except for...
Although I agree with everything you say about diversity, the message of the game, and so on, no, I don' see it this way.
The question of synthetic and organic life, what is life, what is sentience, and so on, I didn't feel that this stopped being part of the game after the Quarian-Geth conflict. It's just such a prominent one over the course of all 3 games. Or to put it differently: Just because an issue takes the backseat for a few hours doesn't meant for me that it disappeared. After all, you were still fighting the Reapers, this snythetic-organic life form, you did have an idea about their reason. At least, personally, I guess I didn't have the expectation that just because I was able to solve one synthetic-organic conflict meant that there will be a nice resolution for the bigger problem.
Also, the option to solve the Quarian-Geth conflict peacefully at all rests on having made a number of very specific decisions in Mass Effect 2 and 3, and is an option that is not available in a large fraction of "playthroughs". Neither in one of mine. In those cases, you were forced to commit genocide at either the Geth or the Quarians, you were
not able to make peace. And, as you're being reminded by a Batarian on the Citadel at some point, it's not even the first genocide you committed.
CloudAtlas said:
It assumed that synthetic life always wants to wipe out organic life because it has seen it happen many times before.
Sorry, but that's a blatant violation of the show-don't-tell rule. The strongest example of hostile synthetic life provided in the story itself, and the one force that gives the catalyst's declarations real credence, is the reapers...which are disqualified. Apparently, they are the solution to a problem that they themselves embody! Then there's the geth, but they're actually nice guys and wouldn't have survived without reaper help anyway.
So what does that leave us with? Synthetic races that lived millions of years ago, have never been mentioned before in the story until the last act, and who apparently always lost the wars anyway. Again, we are never shown this in the narrative. The catalyst just TELLS us. And it's upon this that Shepard's ending dilemma, and the fate of the galaxy and all the characters and cultures we know and love, is based upon. A war we know nothing about, have no emotional investment in, and have no intellectual reason to even take seriously as relevant to the modern day (again, except for the reapers).
Maybe it's not the pinnacle of story telling, but how are you supposed to show events that happened many millions of years ago? And the raison d'etre for the Reapers' existence is already foreshadowed in the Leviathan DLC, not just at the very end.
And you don't have to buy any of what the Catalyst tells you anyway. You can just do what you came to do in the first place - destroy Reapers, and be done with it. At any cost.