Theoristitis wrote...
-skiping to the relevant point to respond to-
One more thing - with regards to the heretic geth, may I ask how reprogramming them is "genocide"? The species itself is still alive - Vigil does not call the genocide of the Protheans "complete" until all the slaves have died (which I believe is the only time that the game brings up the topic so explicitly).
Genocide doesn't need to be totally successful across a species to be genocide all the same: in fact, most historic genocides weren't. Infact, genocide doesn't need to be of a race at all, by UN standards: it's more or less the destruction of a community and identity, even by non-lethal means.
Yes, the UN definition of genocide is broad enough that you don't actually need to kill someone to count as genocide.
In the context of the Heretics, rewriting the Heretics is killing who and what they were: their thoughts, their identities, their culture and beliefs, such as they were. Here's the UN's standard of genocide:
///
In the present Convention,
genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- (a) Killing members of the group;
- (
Causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group;
- © Deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part;
- (d) Imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group; - (e) Forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group.
Rewriting the Heretics is intended to destroy the Heretics as a faction, and leads into definitions b (forcibly altering the minds of the group), c (removing the Heretics from the universe), d (preventing the propegation/production of any more Heretics), and e (mind-wiping all Geth, new and old, and transfering them to the 'true' geth).
In fact, one could counter that, in rewriting the heretic geth, a full Paragon was freeing an enslaved race. After all, their natural state was NOT under Reaper control; Sovereign introduced a virus to enslave them.
No, Sovereign did not. Legion specifically refutes this if Shepard asks. It doesn't even make sense, because there would be no logical reason Sovereign couldn't or wouldn't have used the virus to capture the rest of the Geth at the same time.
Legion, both post-recruitment and post-loyalty, is clear about it. Heretics came to their own conclusions that were accurate for them. Two is less than three, versus three is less than four. It was a frame of reference difference: the virus only existed now, as the Heretics finally finished it. You aren't freeing an enslaved race: you're killing millions/billions because they disagree with you and want to kill you. It is genocide. It's also not especially morally reprehensible to defend yourself. As Legion put it, they chose a path that made co-existence possible.
If it were possible to "rewrite" the Collectors (removing the error, not taking control of the implants), turning them into Protheans, would that be "genocide"?
It would certainly be a genocide of the Collectors. It would be the beginning of something new and better, but who and what the Collectors were would be gone forever. That's a genocide. That's also a good thing in this case. It's also a genisis of something else, which is even better.
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