viverravid wrote...
After about 8 playthroughs, I wanted to write a bit about why I was so disappointed with the story explanation for the end boss. The actual fight, like all of ME2's gameplay, is fantastic, and I think ME2 is a massive improvement over ME1 in every way - except the main story arc.
Before I complain, I just want to emphasize that - ME2 is brilliant and better than ME1 in almost every way. Combat, music, characterization, quest design, combat, music, voice acting, sound effects, combat, music, animation, lighting, did I mention the combat and the music? - all great. The main story is the only let down (and it's only disappointing relative to the high standard of ME1)
The contradictions and ret-cons to the ME1 story have been discussed here at length, I just want to focus on the end boss and the resolution of the collector abduction mystery. Up until that point, Mass Effect had probably the most plausible scientific explanations of plot and gameplay devices of any sci-fi game (or sci-if movie or TV show) ever. It seemed pretty clear the writers had consulted with astronomers, physicists, and biologists in building the universe. Key plot points like the Genophage are scientifically informed and plausible. Even the planet details on the galaxy map seem right (to my limited physics). And from early on in ME2, we learn that the central mystery motivating the bad guys probably has something to do with a unique aspect of human biology. Cool.
Throughout the game, we get hints of why the collectors need to abduct humans. Via Husks, Scions, and Praetorians we can see that they are using humans as raw material to make shock troops. This makes sense - these creatures are clearly built from the remains of adult humans, repurposed to become weapons of the reapers. We've seen the husks created that way in ME1. It's a bit like the Strogg in Quakes 2 & 4, but way better. Using abducted colonists as raw material for this process makes sense. That they have to be human makes sense - perhaps the modifications don't work right with other races biology. Perhaps they developed these techniques on humans and they're sticking with what they know. Plenty to speculate about, and it all makes sense.
But then in the collector base we learn that the bulk of the humans aren't being repurposed in this way, but are being rendered down into a raw "genetic paste", which is somehow the "essence" of humans, and it is being used to... make a giant robot that looks like a human skeleton. Why does it look like a human? Because it's made from the "essence" of humans, of course. EDI tells us this, and she isn't ever wrong.
Now, the human reaper looks badass and bioware lose no points for emphasising cool looks over scientific believability. But.... the story explanation is just silly. Really silly. Really really silly. There is no reason a giant pile of human DNA goop should develop into something that looks like a giant human - unless of course you poured it into a giant human-shaped mould. But if you're just doing that, you could use DNA goop from anywhere. You could even synthesize it. Or you could even, like, maybe, use super strong metal alloys instead. These reapers are supposed to be smart, after all. Why mould yourself out of DNA goop if you could be using unobtanium alloy?
It's like saying that if you got a crate of Drew Karpyshyn Mass Effect: Revelation novels, rendered them down into pulp and ink, and used the resulting materials with reaper printing technology to create a new epic-length manuscript for a book, that somehow this new book would contain the "essence" of Revelation, only it'd be more epic. No actual writing required - the same characters, same plot outline, same locations (but all reaper-y and more epic) would all show up automagically just because you used the pulp and ink distilled from the original books. How'd they get there? They're in the "essence" of the book, silly. EDI said so.
Why is it silly? All any gene actually does is describe how to make a particular protein by joining a series of amino acids together. Human DNA is basically a giant dictionary listing how to "spell" different proteins (though maybe 90 odd percent of it is just unused random letters that have never been deleted) Human DNA is a recipe for making a human only when it is in the nucleus of a human cell. For example, In a newly fertilised human egg cell, there is more of one chemical at one end of the egg than the other. Where this chemical is in high concentration, it turns some genes on, where it's low, it turns other genes on. When a gene is turned on, machinery inside the cell starts creating some of the protein it "spells". This protein may alter the cells around it, or it may turn other genes on or off, which then make other proteins which alter cells or turn other genes on or off, which then make other proteins which alter cells or turn other genes on or off, which then make... etc etc. From that initial imbalance of one chemical, a whole sequence of actions happens that eventually turns into a head at one end and a tail at the other. (And then later you lose the tail, thankfully)
To put it simply - when human DNA is in a fertilised human egg cell, with all the cellular machinery for translating DNA sequences into protein chains and all the surrounding environment of the womb, a whole cascade of things happens, each step depending on the step before it and the immediate environment, and all that eventually builds a human. Outside that environment, one pile of DNA is pretty much the same as any other pile of DNA. It doesn't retain the 'essence' of the creature it came from. The 'essence' comes from the interaction of the DNA code reading machinery and the "letters" spelled out by a string of DNA code. The code letters on their own are useless.
Same as all 5 1/4" computer discs being pretty much all the same useless hunks of plastic and iron oxide as each other these days, unless you still have a 5 1/4" disk drive equipped computer to read them with.
So what if I make a biiiiig stretch and assume that actually the human reaper was being created through some kind of analog of human embryonic development, where the harvested human DNA code was somehow controlling the sequence of building the human reaper larva, just scaled up and altered by reaper tech. Well, then the reapers still wouldn't need the DNA from gazillions of humans. Just one cell from one person would give you the code.
Again, it's like saying that to make a mile-high version of the Mass Effect: Ascension novel you need to pulp thousands of Ascension novels to provide the raw material, rather than the obvious solution of building the giant version out of concrete or steel and just copying the words from one copy of Ascension .
So lets make a bigger stretch and assume the reaper is being grown from actual human cells, fortified by super-reaper-tech, and that's what the colonists were being rendered down into - a paste of still-living human cells. Even then, if you needed human cells to build the thing from, you could just clone them all from an initial cell. In fact you would have to clone them all from one initial cell, otherwise they wouldn't have the reaper-tech-altered build-a-human-reaper DNA sequence required. When a human grows, there isn't the DNA in one cell controlling the whole process, each new cell has it's own copy of the same instructions. It works because they're all reading from the same script. Building a reaper using a mixture of different cells with different DNA from millions of genetically diverse humans is a recipe for epic cancer.
I guess I could be really really generous and assume that the reapers are just constructing the human-reaper from liquified humans as a psych warfare tactic - so they can kill you with your own grandmothers liquified corpse. And they made it look like a skeleton just to make it look scarier. And poor EDI was just confused and making stuff up to cover for it, knowing Shepard skipped genetics 101 and wouldn't notice. (Maybe that's why Mordin dies so easily holding the line at the end - so he won't pipe up and point out the giant genetic plot holes).
I won't complain if the human reaper larva and collector abductions get the ME2 liara treatment in ME3. Ret-con and derail away, please!
Where did it say they are only the goop? Reapers are made using the genetic goop, but much of them, including their shape, is determined by the metals, circuits, tech etc.
It's asinine to assume its only our genetic paste which makes them. Also, by essence, they mean our genetic code, which determines our shape, disposition, actions, etc.
Next, I believe the Turian in the club in the Citadel said it best, "The universe love diversity." Why would it not be helpful to get as large a sample size of human genes as possible?
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