sumanoskae said:
Well, I'm not sure if Mass Effect 3's ending counts as a twist, but it sure as fuck has all the elements of a bad one.
Let's recap:
The central conflict of the story so far is just a red haring. Your knew goal is to resolve the metaphysical conflict between organic and synthetic life.
Not only did the series frequently explore conflict between synthetics and organics, but the underlying theme behind every major conflict in the series was the way in which they were created and sustained by a lack of empathy towards one's 'enemies'. It's saying that differing groups will turn to conflict when no effort is made to understand each other because things that are different are frightening or confusing.
sumanoskae said:
You accomplish this via a machine built at an unspecified point in the past by persons unknown which, according to the very enemy you're trying to destroy, can alter all life in the galaxy on a molecular level in an unspecified way. And these mysterious past architects left control of this device to whatever dopey fuckwit happens to collapse in front of this particular command console, which apparently nobody has ever done before.
Of course they have no idea who would use it or under what circumstances. The design was slowly assembled and refined by each successive cycle of galactic evolution, either in theory or in practice, all of them finding a way to pass their work on to the next cycle until someone was finally able to get it right. It's a long shot but that's the point, it's the only thing they can do.
sumanoskae said:
How do you use this machine? Well that depends on which mode it's in.
You can destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, by blowing the fuck out of a tube with your gun. Keep in mind that nobody ever tells Shepard to do this; he or she apparently just deduced that, unlike most machines, blowing this fucking thing up will activate it, as opposed to, you know, blowing it the fuck up. An alternate interpretation would be that the good Commander has finally cracked, and is committing suicide via demolition and hopping to take the Reapers with them.
The Catalyst wasn't actually designed to destroy synthetics since, as you've pointed out, the game seems to present Synthesis as the ideal option. If you really want to get try and get into the mechanics you can probably just assume Shepard is destroying some power regulator or limiter that prevents the energy released from being so strong that it fries the synthetics it's targeting instead of modifies them. That's also why this option seems to destroy the relays instead of damaging them as in the other endings. On a more symbolic level, firing the gun is appropriate for the most violent and militant ending. It's the path of attack.
sumanoskae said:
You can gain control of the Reapers by grabbing a pair of handles and letting the machine disintegrate you. You would think such a thing would certainly kill you, but I guess not. Oh, wait, it DOES kill you, it just also gives you complete control of the Reapers... somehow. "Trust me Shepard; what have I ever done to suggest I shouldn't be trusted. It's not like me and my colleagues have slaughtered countless numbers of your people or pushed you to the brink of extinction. Would I lie to you?"
A human mind couldn't control the Reapers because a Reaper consciousness is not the same as a human one, they make that pretty clear. By interrupting the data stream or something else appropriately sci-fi, Shepard's mind is effectively reformatted into something that can. They aren't the same entity anymore in the same way that the Reaper's aren't the same entities as they were before they were created (But more on that in a moment), but they share enough of the same pieces that they can still empathize with the person they used to be. The 'slaughtering millions and brink of extinction' thing is part of the tragic misunderstanding between the Reapers and organics, which again, we'll get too in a moment.
sumanoskae said:
But wait, there's more. The best option is to take a running leap into a giant green laser beam, which merges all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy... What? So everybody is just half robot now? And the reapers are apparently half organic? How is this even going to work? How does this fix anything? I thought the reapers were built out of liquefied people anyway, aren't they already sort of part organic? Are you just gonna magically transform EDI into a cyborg by replacing her internal organs? Would all children born be cyborgs now as well? Are you accounting for single celled organisms and bacteria, are they now "Synthetic" as well? Don't people with cybernetic enhancements already count as part synthetic? The catalyst said so just a moment ago. This fact hasn't stopped the Reapers so far, why would this change their mind?
Yes, there are a lot of practical considerations that aren't addressed that I would be fascinated to have some more solid answers too. That being said, I don't really need them because none of them are important enough questions to break the thematic logic or emotional satisfaction of what's just a really great optimistic ending. The important part is that Synthesis is meant to give people the tools to make real strides in understanding one another, to put people on an even playing field and tear down the walls of over-reactionary mistrust and irrational misunderstanding that plagued the prior conflicts of the series.
It's a little practically fuzzy to be sure, but not really any more-so then "This magic element we invented manipulates mass really easily because Dark Energy is a thing people have heard of." Speculation and scientific debate is fun, but it's not really the point.
There's also a lot of varied discussion on how exactly Shepard was able to achieve this. The Catalyst says they had experimented with Synthesis before the Reapers were built but were unsuccessful, so some people think that the work the galactic cycles did in creating the device were able to finally solve the problem en masse. A particularly interesting theory is that Shepard themself was so cybernetic at that point due to Cerberus's reconstruction that it provided the Catalyst with a roadmap for successfully integrating synthetics and organics to a degree no one had even accomplished before.
sumanoskae said:
And no matter what I do, the Mass Relays will explode? Just ONE Mass Relay blowing up caused an explosion comparable to that of a super nova. Even if we all survive that explosion, the best case scenario is that we all starve to death. Earth couldn't support this huge galactic armada in it's prime, let alone after what the Reapers did to it. That doesn't even account for the fact that some species, like the Turians, can't even eat the same food that humans do.
The Relays only explode in Destroy, which is one of the many reasons why it's what I consider to be the 'bad' ending. They're only damaged in the others with basically the outright confirmation that they will be repaired. Even in the case of Destroy, ships can still accelerate to FTL on their own, that's how you explore systems in a local cluster in the map. It's just less practical then the Relays, so presumably people can still get around only with greater difficulty and time spent.
In any case, they didn't go nova because the energy stored in the Relay was fired into the beams that broadcast the signal. It would take a hell of a lot of power to transmit something that strong on that scale, and it uses the Relays to feed into the effect.
sumanoskae said:
Why are the reapers even doing this?
Well, as it turns out, the Reapers, a race of synthetics, kill all space fairing species every 50'000 years, so that those same species will not be killed by synthetics... (Yo dawg, I heard you don't wanna be killed by synthetics, so I made some synthetics to kill you, so you won't be killed by synthetics)
This is the big one. Their goal is
not to kill.
This cannot be overstated. The Reapers are confirmed to be built out of the species they assimilate. They're like the Borg, but as one organism instead of a Hive. The only people they kill are the ones who get in their way, the ones who are harvested to become a Reaper are preserved, as a Reaper, as a record of that species and it's accomplishments.
sumanoskae said:
Even if we assume this broad, unsubstantiated claim about all synthetics eventually destroying their creators is true, it doesn't change the fact that THE REAPERS ARE SYNTHETIC! By their own logic, they will eventually turn on organic life and wipe it out. This is fucking madness!
In a sense the idea that on a galactic scale conflict between synthetics and organics is inevitable kinda seems to be true, or at least likely enough as to be worth taking precautions. We see conflicts arise between groups with much, much less fundamental differences with much less reason to mistrust each other all the damn time.
But the Catalyst is right in that the Created are always made to be better then the Creators, if they weren't there wouldn't be a reason to make them in the first place. We build machines to do the things we can't. And if a real full war broke out between sufficiently advanced Created and Creator, the synthetics would probably win in the end because they would effectively be built to. They could adapt themselves, replace themselves, and leverage the natural superiority of not being constrained by the same things that restrain us because we only sort of know how we work, and we can only sort of manipulate the parts that we do know.
And if they set their sights on all organics? They wouldn't be susceptible to the same evolutionary forces, they wouldn't decay, they wouldn't tire. They could conceivably wipe out organic life and then, that's it, game over. And with the continued cycle of galactic evolution the chances get worse and worse. The more times you let the pattern play out the more and more likely a critical disaster becomes by pure probability alone.
The Catalyst was created to prevent this from happening, but it's an AI. A good AI, but still an AI, and here's where it miscalculates. And miscalculates badly. From it's practical, mechanical perspective it all makes perfect sense. Let organics evolve, live their lives and be generally awesome as all hell. And when we think they're as awesome as they're gonna get, we seal them in a little glass jar and keep them preserved so nothing can ever happen to them.
If the geth wiped out the quarians, the quarians would be gone. That would be it, nothing left. But if the Reapers harvest them, the knowledge and experience of the quarians still exists. It's in Reaper form now, but it's out there, and because it wasn't wiped out it can be
used. They're an attempt at Synthesis. A bad one, a limited one, but the best the Catalyst could do with what it had to work with.
The Catalyst doesn't understand how horrifying this is to us because it doesn't understand the way we view the world. We don't understand that the Catalyst is trying to help us because we don't understand how
it views the world. And so we fight because we disagree, and we're afraid. But if we understood each other, imagine what we could accomplish together? That's the optimistic promise of Synthesis. We can work together if we try to understand who we are and why we are who we are.
sumanoskae said:
I'm not even sure if this fucking thing counts as a story, let alone a twist, but it had all the effects of a bad twist; it comes right the fuck out of nowhere and lays waste to narrative coherence entirely.
It lays waste to what a lot of people
assumed the story was, that's all. And if that's what they assumed the story was, it should lay waste to it. Reapers are evil because 'ooh, scary machines with growly voices', that should be simple. But every other fight in the game was more complicated then it looked. The geth weren't evil. The krogan weren't evil. The rachni weren't evil. But the Reapers should just be evil? They don't get to be any more complex or potential sympathetic in the same way everyone else did? Why not? Even the Illusive Man did some really aggressively shitty things but all the name of protecting his people and ensuring that the galaxy wouldn't kick the shit out of them.
There are a lot of games about killing evil aliens because evil aliens, it's what you do. But Mass Effect isn't one of them. It was never one of them. And why would you want it to be? It's about learning about people and what makes them tick, friends and foes alike. And in the end it says that we can be so much and learn so much more from trying to see things from their point of view then we can from blindly destroying anyone different from us because we think we're supposed to.
It doesn't come out of nowhere, it comes out of the theme of the story. Where all the best endings should.
