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[d1sciple]

*first up this isn't in the general forum because of the spoiler restriction*

so yeah, any thought's on how they operated, how they lived, possible culture etc? everyone in the galaxy seems to almost deify them, like we do the ancient Mayans, Egyptians etc. but alot of aspects of those ancient cultures were barbaric and savage, possibly evil to our current beliefs, so any guesses as to Protean culture? by the statues on Ilos they look like monsters to me, if we believe that most cultures depict themselves or their ancestors/gods in statue form and that they would share a close resemblance with them. i guess we also know they didn't build the relays or the citadel, they were studying alot of different planets, colonised a bunch of different places, but who's to say they weren't a Krogan-like race built on total domination of the galaxy?
remember there's no solid facts out there, we're just guessing here but that can be just as fun.

[MrFob]

First of all, I don't believe in a classification such as "good" and "evil". There is action and reaction, cause and effect and everyone does what he/she does for reasons they believe are good or at least justified.
Now, as for the protheans, as you said, there is very little solid information out there. As far as I can see, the only direct link we have is vigil and his story. If we assume that all he said was true and accurate, I think that shows that the protheans shared a lot of values with our society today (and also in the ME time). Value of organic life, the will to fight for one's survival and bring sacrifices (such as shutting down the pods of low key personal. Even a capacity for non genetically motivated altruism can be deduced from the fact that the surviving scientists chose to go to their death on the citadel in order to change the signal for the keepers and break the next cycle. Of course, this are all interpretations according to what vigil implies. It is possible their motivation was simply to take revenge on the reapers in some fashion.
Furthermore, we know from the consorts trinket artifact that they were curious and did not shy away from experimenting on proto-human cultures. However, this experiment did not harm or interfere with the life of any individual (not even the test subject) in a harmful way as far as I can see. To me, it seems they took care to study with a minimum of interference.
All in all,as said before, their values and interests seem to be very similar to our own. Whether you want to trust the sources and whether you want to classify them as good or evil, that is up to you I guess. I think they probably had pragmatists and idealists (or paragons and renegades if you will ) and everything in between, just like us.

[KevShep]

MrFob wrote...

First of all, I don't believe in a classification such as "good" and "evil". There is action and reaction, cause and effect and everyone does what he/she does for reasons they believe are good or at least justified.

People must look at there options when making a decision that can be "classified" as good or evil. For instance One must look at options that LEAST harms ones well being or civil rights. If this one person makes a decision, and that decision is not in the LEAST terms when they clearly had the ability to do that....then that can be seen as evil. 

[Dean_the_Young]

d1sciple wrote...

*first up this isn't in the general forum because of the spoiler restriction*

so yeah, any thought's on how they operated, how they lived, possible culture etc? everyone in the galaxy seems to almost deify them, like we do the ancient Mayans, Egyptians etc. but alot of aspects of those ancient cultures were barbaric and savage, possibly evil to our current beliefs, so any guesses as to Protean culture? by the statues on Ilos they look like monsters to me, if we believe that most cultures depict themselves or their ancestors/gods in statue form and that they would share a close resemblance with them. i guess we also know they didn't build the relays or the citadel, they were studying alot of different planets, colonised a bunch of different places, but who's to say they weren't a Krogan-like race built on total domination of the galaxy?
remember there's no solid facts out there, we're just guessing here but that can be just as fun.

Not enough data available.

I'm impressed you noticed, though. While the Protheans are lionized as a great and powerful and wise civilization, nothing at all has ever implied they were nice.

[MatrixTheRenegade]

A friend of mine mentioned this possibility once, and it's interesting. Were the Protheans the only intelligent race around in he Galaxy 50K years ago? That seems unlikely given the diverse races in the current cycle, no?

He offered up the possibility that the Protheans did a little Reaping of their own, and said that would explain the Prothean colonies (or ruins of colonies) that can be found literally everywhere, and especially on planets that could sustain life. Basically his theory was that the Protheans would take over other civilizations and erase them when they reached a certain level of advancement, then erase all sign of their culture, architecture, etc. I'm not sure if I buy it, but why are the Protheans the ONLY advanced lifeform from that time that we know of? It's an interesting possibility...

As for the sacrifice the last of the species made to break the cycle, well. Didn't Vigil say there were too few Protheans left to repopulate? It's kind of a no brainer decision unless you're a complete coward. Plus even a civilization like the one my friend posits could overcome its own needs to make a decision for the greater good of the universe.

[d1sciple]

some good points there. as far as my 'good or evil' statements go they're way too broad to be seriously discussed in such a way, the idea was weather or not we could maybe figure out some aspects of their possible culture that we could categorize as more to one 'side' than the other, as we see it from the virtues that we have now as a generally developed society. not to say we're perfect, far from it! but looking at our own values gives us a basis, maybe judgementally so but then all theorising is framing ideas based on your own beliefs etc.
anyway again some cool ideas. i though Ilos was a pretty oppressive kind of place, the statues, architecture, same as Feros there's something cold about it. i'm still trying to figure out how that makes me feel about the Protheans myself but it's an example of the kind of things i've been thinking about. i can't get passed the statues, they're quite horrific, if that is a depiction of the Protehans themselves then what does it say about their culture? the fact that they look like monsters? of course we can only say that based on our own experiences but when we look at the universe the way a species looks give away alot about their culture. for example the Krogan, Elcor, Volus etc. all look like actual physical representations of their culture. they pretty much 'act' how they look. as far as ME3 goes i don't think we'll be getting anymore answers as far as the Protheans go, they're almost irrelevant to the story now, it's just left to us to theorise.

[Stammer6]

It's hard to classify "good" and "evil". I prefer using "altruistic" and "selfish". And the protheans were definitely thinking of others with everything they did. They wanted to see the cycle of extinction end so they seemed to have done everything they could to make the lives of future civilizations better.

I'm sure like every species, the protheans had good people and bad people.

[MatrixTheRenegade]

It does bear mention that we find a lot of statues of Protheans on chairs with a very unusual elevation to them. Like, chairs on ten foot pedestals or something. That says a lot about their likely mentality, the way the Protheans are elevated like that. I don't know. I'm a coin flip on it but I do kind of like my friend's theory, and it says interesting things about the Protheans if that's the case.

I agree about their architecture feeling oppressive, as well. But that could be the same uncanny valley vibe we get from ancient cultures of our own. You have these very advanced civilizations that existed so long ago that the world (or universe) they lived in might as well be completely different. As such the breadcrumbs they leave in the cosmic trail seem cold and, well, alien.

Still, I'm betting the Protheans had their unsavory aspects, like every culture in the real world and the ME universe. How predominant it was in their culture, however, is hard to imagine.

(Super unrelated, but I wonder if there were biotic Protheans...?)

[d1sciple]

biotic, yeah i like that idea, that's the kind've stuff i've been going over with a mate of mine in our drinking sessions. i have an idea that maybe they were, at least towards the end, a little too much like cerberus? the end justifies the means type of thing? the fact that the Ilos Protheans were willing to die to end the Reapers says alot, but we don't exactly what until we analyse everything else. who did they worship, since it's assumed they 'discovered' the relays like our current galaxies inhabitants? maybe they were a single minded race, hell bent on growth at any cost, maybe they were a compassionate race, doing their best for the galaxy, who knows? the only reasoning tool we have is looking at our own history etc. and that's cool stuff to get into and have some fun with. my mate brought up Cthulhu the other night, man did that get us talking!

[008Zulu]

Maybe they were the victor species in a galactic war. The universe is a much to large a place for there to be only one species. As a side note, how old is Asari and Krogan cultures? They both live to be about 1,000. You think that maybe their ancestors got beaten back to the Stone Age by the Protheans? The Reapers might have mistaken them as un-evolved or not worth harvesting.

[d1sciple]

008Zulu wrote...

Maybe they were the victor species in a galactic war. The universe is a much to large a place for there to be only one species. As a side note, how old is Asari and Krogan cultures? They both live to be about 1,000. You think that maybe their ancestors got beaten back to the Stone Age by the Protheans? The Reapers might have mistaken them as un-evolved or not worth harvesting.

like they did with us? taken that the asari, turian, salarian, hell even the hannar and elcor 'evolved' space tech before us it has to be said that maybe they were around too. i mean we're what, 60,000 years old? the protheans were studying primitive man when they got the **** reaped outta them, taken it took us another few tens of thousands of years to get into space and find a relay, some of the more technologically advanced cultures had to be more advanced than us at the point of the last reaping, why were any of us spared?

edited to add the conversation with the hannar in ME1, the 'enkindlers' directly affected and interfered with the hannar, which is where they get thier enkindler beliefs from. so that's another hole in the reapers and protheans claim of the galaxy-wide extinction of all organic life, it's simply not true.

Modifié par d1sciple, 26 août 2011 - 10:16 .

[Lapis Lazuli]

MrFob wrote...

First of all, I don't believe in a classification such as "good" and "evil".

...granted it is hard to determine what is right and wrong at times, but in a court of law,  the demonstrable lack of knowledge in such a distinction is cause for an insanity plea. You can kick it with Napier in Arkham Asylum...

[MrFob]

Don't care about the law in this instance. I don't believe you can judge a whole species of individuals as good or evil. That's it. I don't think there is any insanity in that.
But then, I guess many insane people don't realise their problem. And after all this time visiting the BSN, hmmmmm...

Modifié par MrFob, 26 août 2011 - 03:22 .

[Dean_the_Young]

The insane rarely see themselves as insane indeed.

[Eski.Moe]

They were a whole people who spanned many systems across the galaxy. It's hard to identify a whole people under such black and white conventions.
No doubt they had aspects which could fit under either according to our perspectives.

[Raven4030]

Not enough evidence to suggest they're good or bad, or that we can even definitively distinguish their actions as 'good' or 'evil', they may have elements in their culture that are sufficiently alien as to defy such a black and white classification. As an example from CDN (archived on Mass Effect wiki):

In human culture, it is considered evil to kill civilians or to round them up into camps to make occupations easier. In Turian culture this is considered standard operating procedure because every 'civilian' has military training and often keeps military grade weapons at home, so to quote one general: "There is no such thing as a Turian civilian". For centuries they rounded up civilians and put them in camps that are meant to be safe (and occupying forces actually live up to that), creating a situation where, as a member of one of the Turian 'death squads' (who go around to the homes of those who refuse to go to a camp and, well, execute them), at a certain point the only ones left are "shooters and looters". Based on human values the Turian government is an evil dictatorship, but when you factor in cultural conditions and standards, it creates problems with such a black and white classification.

In summation: impossible to call Protheans good without more data.

As far as them seeming to be the only species to have space travel in their time, I would hypothosize that there are others around at the time of the Protheans and cultural homogonization resulted in these other cultures seeming to be the same as the Protheans to archeologists. Here are some observations from the game that led me to this hypothesis:

1) The only military vessels we have seen in game other than the Destiny Ascension are either Turian or Human design. Both designs however, are concievably human. I bet if you took images of Turian combat ships and Human combat ships and showed them around, nobody would know they were made by different species and would be challenged to identify which one was 'human' made. The only exception is the Destiny Ascension, whose design is sufficiently alien from the rest that it would definently be identified as such by future archeologists. However, barring that one ship, unless we have more information on ship design from the other species it is safe to say an archeologist looking at whatever remains of these vessels (if anything) would consider them to be made by the same species, but were meant to serve different roles.

2) We do see variations among the building designs incorporated by various species, but the 'alien' structures seem to have mostly adopted standard conventions. In fact, on all the worlds visited, the only place I would say has a style divorced from the rest is Haestrom (anyone else think 'Quarian architecture' makes everything look like a construction site?). Humans do have their own unique style, but their status as 'newcomers' mean they have not sufficiently integrated into the galactic community to adopt building conventions yet.

3) We see evidence of cultural homogonization all around. For example: all though Turians are supposed to make poor entrepreneurs, we still see a lot of Turian merchants running around, especially on the Citadel. In fact, for such a mercantile race, I've only ever bought from a store ran by a Volus once that I can remember, though I acknowledge this is probably because they are not a combative race and your primary reason for shopping is to buy military equipment. Still, it does strike me as odd most merchants are non-Volus.

4) This is my primary observation that led me to create my hypothesis: Why would the Protheans make the Citadel their seat of government? Sure it would have important government functions, but there is no reason to move the capital of their Empire from their homeworld all the way to the Citadel. The only reason to even move to the Citadel is due to its status as the center of the mass relay network and for living space. Otherwise it would be difficult to maintain a population and a non-sensical location for a capital unless you had other species to interface with. It is perfect as a neutral ground for multiple species, but if there is only ONE species running around, then the Citadel is an absolutely horrible place to put your seat of power as long as you still have your homeworld intact.

Feel free to refute my idea, I enjoy a good debate.

[KevShep]

Raven4030 wrote...

4) This is my primary observation that led me to create my hypothesis: Why would the Protheans make the Citadel their seat of government? Sure it would have important government functions, but there is no reason to move the capital of their Empire from their homeworld all the way to the Citadel. The only reason to even move to the Citadel is due to its status as the center of the mass relay network and for living space. Otherwise it would be difficult to maintain a population and a non-sensical location for a capital unless you had other species to interface with. It is perfect as a neutral ground for multiple species, but if there is only ONE species running around, then the Citadel is an absolutely horrible place to put your seat of power as long as you still have your homeworld intact.

Feel free to refute my idea, I enjoy a good debate.

Good point. If the protheans were the only race then there would be no reason. I hope that Bioware gives us an answer for that one.

If I were to guess then I would say that the protheans were not the only race. Maybe all the races back then were thought to be one race(protheans) instead of many different ones. If this is the case then they would not be on there homeworld and have to use the citadel.

[d1sciple]

again sorry for the broad good or evil statements, they were broad so that we had a large idea as a starting ground. all of us would class the **** regime as evil, though they thought they were the good guys, so we have a defined set of actions that can help us classify a people. it's a strange point that they were the only spacefaring species in the galaxy. maybe they interfered with us all, maybe they thought they were gods. it seems the statement that the reapers wipe out ALL organic life is just factually wrong and needs to be changed to the reapers 'reap' organic life that has evolved along their design, agreed?

*after posting this i just saw that the name of the regime in question had been censored, which is strange. in any case it should be an easy guess and if not then they also called themselves the third reich*

Modifié par d1sciple, 27 août 2011 - 12:19 .

[KevShep]

d1sciple wrote...

. it seems the statement that the reapers wipe out ALL organic life is just factually wrong and needs to be changed to the reapers 'reap' organic life that has evolved along their design, agreed?

We do know for a fact that they were trying to reap humans. However judging by how all of the races of the galaxy look similar (for example humans look the same as asari/batarians and truians look the same as quarians/salarians/krogan features) it could be possible that the protheans manipulated evolution against the reapers design( i.e. the reason for reaping). The protheans may have been around after the reaper invasion (refering to human cave man vision in ME1). If this is the case then the protheans may have been tampering with evolution and the reapers are just trying figure out what the protheans did to them by experimenting on us and other genetics of this cycle.

The reapers motives are still unclear. ME3 will most likely give us a spoiler about the reapers that we did not know about.

Modifié par KevShep, 27 août 2011 - 12:28 .

[docthe12th]

That vision, which implies an ancestral species to H. sapiens, would most likely predate 50kya. aside from anatomically modern humans ( and the isolated floresienses), only H. neanderthalensis was around after 50kya, and even they were into decline then, likely due in part to AM humans spreading their population. If it was a species like H. erectus, it would predate 50 kya

[BrotherArdis]

Raven4030 wrote...

(...) if there is only ONE species running around, then the Citadel is an absolutely horrible place to put your seat of power as long as you still have your homeworld intact.

It is only so assuming the species controls an area of space that the Citadel is at the fringes of. The Protheans expanded into an empire that spanned the entire galaxy, therefore putting the Citadel in the centre of their territory, while their homeworld probably slowly migrated to the peripheries. It is logical that they would move at least their heart of administration to a more central location, for pure convenience and efficiency of governing.

Other things:

1) Reapers harvest all organic life / why were we spared if we've been around at the time of the last reaping.

Reapers don't harvest all organic life... It's not 40k, they ain't necrons. They only eliminate space faring or close to civilizations. Sterilizing the entire galaxy is neither feasible nor desireable for the Reapers. For whatever reason, they want the cycle to repeat. It took 5 billion years for sapient life to evolve on Earth from scratch; if the Reapers reduced the galaxy to barren rock state every time they dropped by, they wouldn't have more than a few harvests before stars themselves started to die out. They move in, eliminate the races that are getting close to matching them in technological advancement and disappear, leaving primitive life forms to evolve to the desired level, show up again, harvest the crops and leave again. Space farmers.


2) Did Protheans conquer/exterminate other species?

Considering what usually happens when an advanced culture meets with an underdeveloped one, it's unlikely they didn't wipe out at least some of them. If it had happened once in the current cycle already (Rachni) - a cycle that is supposed to be very multi-culture-galactic-society-development-friendly - almost happened once more (Krogan) and we were well underway to getting a third race enslaved to another (Turians vs Humans, mostly saved due to Council intervention), there really is no reason to believe that it didn't happen in an environment where we had a single dominating species.



So were they good or bad?

Like someone already said, probably neither much better or worse than anyone else. Especially considering that the evolution of all civilizations in ME galaxy largely follows the same patterns, as designed by the Reapers.

Modifié par BrotherArdis, 27 août 2011 - 03:12 .

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

I've always seen the Protheans as being designed as "Relatively benevolent precursors" to contrast the Reapers "Ridiculously abusive precursors".

So I like to think of them as relatively good with room for the asses that every group seems to have.
But I admit we don't really have any proof one way or another.

[KevShep]

docthe12th wrote...

That vision, which implies an ancestral species to H. sapiens, would most likely predate 50kya. aside from anatomically modern humans ( and the isolated floresienses), only H. neanderthalensis was around after 50kya, and even they were into decline then, likely due in part to AM humans spreading their population. If it was a species like H. erectus, it would predate 50 kya

I know^.......I was refering to the notion that some of the protheans would have survived the invasion. Then they would have to sabotage the evolution plan the reapers had...hence the reason for the protheans to be at earth(the ME1 vision). 

[d1sciple]

so more late night discussions and i'm getting stuck on a couple of things. the protheans were the only space faring species-they were spread out across the entire galaxy-they were studying us at least and interfered with the hannar-virgil says they discovered the reapers too late to do anything about it-the reaping took hundreds of years.
so i'm looking at this thinking, did they intentionally interfere with all the species in the galaxy to hold us back so as not to be harvested? through all the surveying and mining and wiki hunts i've found evidence of a couple of other species that have been reaped, 300,000 years ago, millions of years ago, maybe the reaper design only allows for one species, maybe the protheans interference has diversified things to a degree that stopping the cycle is possible?
wouldn't that make them good? lol

[capn233]

Perhaps the Protheans eradicated or assimilated other alien civilizations. I don't think it is spelled out so it would all be speculation. However, I would tend to think that they were in fact the only civilization advanced enough to get to mass effect based tech in their cycle. It isn't too hard to believe that each cycle may have a different number of species that would advance far enough for the "reaping," not only due to limited numbers of planets conducive to life, the time it would take them to evolve, and the propensity of apex predators (like humans, and probably the Protheans) to be somewhat violent... Stated more directly, there could have simply been nobody else that had evolved in just the right amount of time with the Protheans such that they avoided the previous reaper cycles, or did not destroy themselves at some point, preventing them from reaching that level.

That being said, I could imagine a scenario where the Protheans had evolved to be somewhat benevolent and perhaps would have assimilated species that had reached near their level of technology. This might be more akin to the Federation than the Borg (pardon the Star Trek reference ). Evidence against this though would be that the Protheans were the only quad-DNA stranded species noted: unless all their other member species had very similar genetics, I would imagine that archeologists would have discovered the bodies of the other species and been able to compare skeletons and DNA fragments and learn that they were in fact distinct species. I don't know what condition the bodies were in on Ilos, but I imagine if they were a collection of species, some of them would have been different, and would have been discovered when Ilos was studied in between ME1 and ME2.

As to the original question, I imagine them as good or benevolent. I think they are sort of set up that way in the game in opposition to the Reapers. I do agree that the data is limited, and that this may be partly due to idealization of the Protheans by multiple characters in the game.