5087 réponses à ce sujet

[LawNinja]

Yes, OP's professor is actually a professor.  (At least, I believe this is the same one.  He's the only C. Dray I could find on Google who was a "Literature" professor.)

[optimistickied]

oh man. when i asked my lit. professor to weigh in, she told me to read a book.

anyway, how can he say that the tension between technology and organic life was never a theme of the series? also, dickens defended his 'street' work, most famously in the 1858 library edition, where he prefaced the novel with a response to criticism. he defended ****in but ultimately revised the character probably to avoid being smeared as anti-semitic. i don't really see the parallel. he wasn't pandering to his fans by writing the novel in installments; dickens wrote that way throughout his career (jumping from one story to the other) and most novels were being published serially in the 1830s.

according to biographers, doyle largely resented his long association with holmes. after being pressured by his fans and editors to resume his adventures, he expressed his frustration to friends. he candidly spoke of the hate mail he'd received, of how he thought holmes diminished his literary reputation, and the bondage he felt toward writing the novels, feeling overworked and uninspired.

on a critical level, i thought the endings themes were pretty consistent with what had come before. cooperation, compromise, teamwork... blah blah.

[Shaigunjoe]

Yea, I don't know,usually Lit professors critiques are better written, this just seems like a knee jerk reaction from a fan boy, which isn't really a big thing either way. Professors can still be wrong though, this isn't any more valid/invalid than any other opinion.

[DocturKnowles]

Not re-written out of fandom, but even J.R.R. Tolkien re-wrote parts of "The Hobbit" after he started writing "The Lord of the Rings" so that they blended together better. (Originally Bilbo won the ring from Gollum rather than just finding it and tricking Gollum in the riddle game)

Re-writes aren't always a bad thing. The problem with the endings for ME3 is that they made no sense. Re-writing them wouldn't jeopardize Bioware's 'artistic integrity', that's already done.

[Namz89]

I can just agree with the OP's professor. I wish I had professors like him at my place.

[Gormane01]

Yeah, they were certainly Thematically terrible, put simply you can't introduce so many new themes(or at least bring so many themes which whilst present were not structured to be clearly the core theme, from the background into the foreground) so late in a story. It is bad storytelling.

[Kloreep]

Made Nightwing wrote...

All three endings were so entirely removed from the themes of the whole series that they were completely unrecognisable! It's like Casey had just finished playing Deus Ex and Mac had just watcched teh season finale of BSG.

...

"In conclusion, I must say again that all the endings were thematically revolting. It is absolutely critical in the name of good writing that the ending of a story must match the journey. Mass Effect has never been a story about the disparity between synthetics and organics....

Sounds like I'd get along with your prof. At least where discussion of ME3 is involved.

Made Nightwing wrote...

BW has already stated that the ending was thought up between Casey and Mac, without any part of the peer review process being consulted.

Link? I only recall seeing this in a post claiming to be from a ME writer. A post that that writer denied having made.

Modifié par Kloreep, 17 avril 2012 - 12:33 .

[pistolols]

CronoDragoon wrote...

pistolols wrote...

CronoDragoon wrote...

pistolols wrote...

Made Nightwing wrote...


"I don't get it. You get a choice between control. I just shot The Illusive Man five minutes ago because I said that we weren't ready for that power. Why on Earth isn't there an option to express how faulty that choice is?

Dr. C. Dray.

/facepalm

no offense, but your professor is retarded if he couldn't grasp the contrast between illusive's man's desire for control out of a lust for power compared with, for instance, Edi's control of the dangerous robot Eva.. which was out of necessity.. arguably the same situation shepard faces with the reapers.  And then just in general with how big of a theme 'control' itself is throughout Mass Effect... the choice fits perfectly thematically.

Seriously, i would not sign up for any more of this guys' classes if i were you.

"We're not ready." Shepard explaining why controlling is bad.
"So the Illusive Man was right."  - Shepard to the Catalyst.

"so the illusive man was right" (about the possibility to control them)

-don't take shepard;s statment out of context.  he was not saying "derp illusive man was right about everything!"  No...

Now read what you quoted originally again. Hopefully you will see why the choice is strange.

huh?  perhaps you could try to make some sense?  Maybe you should read what i wrote originally, and hopefully you will understand that this goofball professor is completely ignoring a major contrast the game (the entire series, for that matter) trys to make between the necessity for control and the desire for control.  It's a MAJOR theme within Mass Effect.  The writers hammer us with it over and over in all 3 games (the thorian, ardat-yakshi, etc).  It was always about control.

[oneyedjohn]

AdmLancel wrote...

I like it when the crazy notions I come up with are independently verified by college professors.

+1

[RollaWarden]

pistolols wrote...

huh?  perhaps you could try to make some sense?  Maybe you should read what i wrote originally, and hopefully you will understand that this goofball professor is completely ignoring a major contrast the game (the entire series, for that matter) trys to make between the necessity for control and the desire for control.  It's a MAJOR theme within Mass Effect.  The writers hammer us with it over and over in all 3 games (the thorian, ardat-yakshi, etc).  It was always about control.

Probably not a good idea to go with an ad hominem argument, pistolols.  It's another one of those pesky logical fallacies that tend to undermine your point of view.  Kinda' seein' that you're into the...you know...logical fallacies.  The folks around these forums are pretty wise to those.

Just a friendly recommendation from another goofball professor.

Modifié par RollaWarden, 17 avril 2012 - 02:12 .

[Necrotron]

DocturKnowles wrote...

Re-writes aren't always a bad thing. The problem with the endings for ME3 is that they made no sense. Re-writing them wouldn't jeopardize Bioware's 'artistic integrity', that's already done.

I really don't see how a rewrite could hurt them.  It would, in fact, win back all the customers they are losing.

But it's their story, so they can do whatever they want, really.  It's just that this path they've chosen tends to make a lot of loyal fans angry.

[RollaWarden]

Opsrbest wrote...


So how long until we get that dissertaion of ME1/2/3 as individual narratives and the series as a whole?

Lol, Opsrbest. My colleague who does a lot of research on popular culture (I've recommended to her that she investigate the ME trilogy and the ending controversy) has just started playing ME1.  I'd say it'll be some time.  I'm turning tomorrow to a lot of fantasy literature term papers, and working on a couple of conference proposals.

Good times, good times.

Modifié par RollaWarden, 17 avril 2012 - 02:37 .

[Evenjelith]

Made Nightwing wrote...

ShepnTali wrote...

He's an entitled whiner who doesn't get it.

He also had something to say about that.

"If I go to a concert, and pay top dollar to be entertained by the beautiful music of the orchestra therein, why would I be called a whiner when at the very end the musicians throw away their instruments and start playing death metal? Am I not entitled to expect the end to the concert to be what I have paid for?"

Agree with your points up until this last one. I think Dethklok have disproved it 

www.youtube.com/watch

[Surgeon_Sniper]

 Nail. Head. Bam. Nice post.

[blitzing bear]

Your professor is awesome!

[Strange Aeons]

MegumiAzusa wrote...

Strange Aeons wrote...

MegumiAzusa wrote...
[...]

[...]

Okay then take this example: Legions Loyalty mission: brainwashing or mass murder, which one is better? It is in fact exactly the control or destroy choice in ME3. (Just listen here to the other crew members in ME2, each one has a opinion on it and tell you that either choice isn't right)

The decision in Legion’s loyalty mission is nothing like the ending of ME3 except in the most superficial sense that both involve some sort of choice. The context of the situations, the nature of the revelation involved, the significance of the “choice” are all completely different.

At the time we met Legion, we had just spent a game and a half fighting the Geth, who were actively waging a war against the Citadel races in conjunction with the Reapers. There was no question that at some level they were a destructive and dangerous enemy. Then we learned that this was only part of the story. This information challenged our assumption that the Geth were a homogeneous society, but it didn’t contradict the clearly-established lessons of the story that preceded it. It expanded our knowledge of the situation without asking us to ignore the significance of what we had witnessed previously.

ME3’s ending, in contrast, demands that we disregard everything the last three games have taught us about synthetic life. It’s not a good thing when the primary motivation of your antagonist is revealed to be completely incongruous with the story you just told. The games go to great lengths to establish that synthetics are alive and capable of growth and selflessness and individuality and love just in time for Shepard to exterminate them all. It’s like ending Pinocchio with Geppetto stuffing him into a wood chipper.

We’re also implicitly asked to forget that this was never even the central conflict of the game. The Reapers—and the heretic Geth, for that matter--were not our enemy because they were synthetic. That they were synthetic was incidental; it would have been the same had they been oozing, fleshy space-shoggoths. No, they were our enemy because they were trying to destroy and/or subjugate us. The battle of ideas at the core of the ME series was never organic vs. synthetic life, but rather indoctrination and subjugation vs. freedom and self-determination. Appropriately, this theme was even paralleled in the gameplay itself through its unprecedented emphasis on meaningful player interactivity vs. being forced down a predetermined path. Then they reached the end and inexplicably threw it all out the window.

It’s just as faulty to compare the choices in Legion’s loyalty mission to the red and blue endings. Shepard never sought to control the heretic Geth. You can indeed argue the ethics of rewriting them, but you cannot claim it is the same as Shepard attempting to control the reapers after spending literally the previous scene (and ME2, if you were a Paragon) explicitly explaining to TIM why controlling the Reapers was insane and doomed to failure. Based on everything the game has told us, there is no reason to think attempting to control the Reapers will even work. Really, the best comparison for the control ending is not rewriting the Geth but rather Morinth convincing Shepard that he’s so awesome and special that he can survive mind-melding with her. How did that turn out?

Likewise, destroying the heretic Geth was a serious and debatable decision, but killing a hostile enemy in wartime is a far cry from deliberately massacring your own allies to the last man after gaining their trust. A general might send his men into a dangerous and deadly situation to fight; that’s a realistic ethical dilemma. No general of any conscience, however, would simply butcher his own men himself in exchange for an objective. Some prices are simply too high to pay, and he would attempt to find another way even if it meant losing. Without question Paragon Shepard would reject that sort of diabolical calculus. Even Renegade Shepard, who is no less committed to self-determination, would balk at being shoehorned into the Catalyst’s phony and obviously flawed paradigm.

This decision is not even a sacrifice in any meaningful sense of the word. People wrongly use that euphemism to describe Shepard’s arbitrary killing of the Geth, probably because it sounds nobler than alternatives like “mass murder,” but it is nothing of the sort. The Geth are not giving their lives. Shepard is taking them without their consent. As for Shepard himself, he is condemned the moment he enters the Citadel. It’s never a question of whether; it’s just a matter of how. There is no feeling of choosing to give up your life in exchange for a greater good (as, for example, there could be at the end of Dragon Age: Origins) because your life is automatically forfeit, and it’s never clear that any of your choices even result in good, regardless. That’s not a sacrifice: it’s a gratuitous death sentence.

MegumiAzusa wrote...

It doesn't need any further explanation as it is a simple choice in itself, but you have to think about what the consequences could be, as you cannot know them, and make a choice depending on a more or less educated guess.

Legion could have used considerably more buildup than he received, and the idea of bringing a live Geth aboard the Normandy on a whim and then allowing it to run around loose in the AI core, of all places, was extremely silly. Still, at least we knew what a Geth was at that point, and we were given some opportunity to question Legion, gain a feeling for his character so we could decide whether or not to trust him, and even fight alongside him. If you didn’t trust him, you could choose not to carry out his loyalty mission at all, which had a whole separate set of consequences both in the suicide mission and later in ME3. And, of course, there was also the option to ignore Legion altogether and just sell his body to Cerberus for spare parts or whatever. So, Legion’s existence had some level of justification, we had a legitimate frame of reference for evaluating him, we were offered a wide range of options for how to deal with him, and the choice we ultimately made in his loyalty mission did not contradict what we knew about the game, nor did it violate Shepard’s fundamental character.

The Catalyst, in contrast, appears literally out of nowhere. He has no precedent whatsoever in the game, and we have no way of knowing what he really is. He admits he is the controlling force behind the Reapers and appears under highly suspicious circumstances, yet we have no way to investigate or challenge his assertions. The story he tells us makes no sense based on everything we’ve witnessed in the game, yet we must accept his premise without question. There is no reason to think anything he tells us is even true. In fact, it seems just as likely to me that it’s an elaborate trap.

That’s not a simple choice at all; it’s a bewildering mess. There is no way to make an educated guess because it arrives with no buildup, justification, or legitimate information to guide us. For all that we have any real ability to evaluate the consequences of this utterly baffling development, we might as well just pick the result out of a hat. That sort of sloppy, careless contrivance would be bad enough for a side quest; it’s downright disastrous when it occurs at the most pivotal moment of the entire trilogy.

The thing about a deus ex machina--and to dignify the ending with that term is to be charitable enough to place it within a literary tradition--is that the audience must understand and accept the authority of the god for it to work. When it was Hercules or Apollo descending before the audience of Euripedes' day, people knew who they were. We know nothing whatsoever about the Catalyst; he is dumped upon the audience with absolutely no buildup or justification, and we are compelled to accept his three "choices" at face value

MegumiAzusa wrote...

Also why hopeless or futile? The Reapers get stopped and civilization can live on, where is that hopeless?

I’ll begin by pointing out that the writers failed to make it remotely clear, as innumerable criticisms of the ending have already detailed, whether civilization really can live on to any meaningful degree. They can apply whatever rationalizations they like after the fact, but with the information we actually have in the game it’s reasonable to surmise that the ending results in every bit as much an apocalypse as if the Reapers had just gone about their business unhindered.

For almost three full games we were led to believe that our decisions could make a difference, that what we did really mattered. Certainly, that was the case in ME2 in the suicide mission. It was true in ME1, as well. We could save Captain Kirrahe’s squad against all odds, and make the call on which of our crew survived; the way we handled Saren and the council set the philosophical tone for what followed. ME3 was supposed to be the apotheosis of this design philosophy. The big payoff. A whole trilogy’s worth of granular decisions were supposed to culminate in a spectacular finale that glorified hundreds of hours of play. Instead, all of our painstaking decisions were stuffed into a blender and homogenized into a single number that did not meaningfully alter the outcome with respect to things that people actually cared about.

Yes, we “took back” Earth, I suppose, even though I’d never even been to Earth in ME and really had no emotional investment in taking it anywhere. Yes, I’m sure people were thrilled to learn that Big Ben survived if your number was big enough, for reasons that remain unclear. I guess we won, for whatever that’s worth, though they never bother to show us how the allies we brought together really contributed to the outcome, or how they fared in the end.

Wasn’t there something else, though? I feel like I’m forgetting something…oh, right, the characters. Maybe there ought to have been something about them?

“…we didn’t know there was such a huge demand for it.”

Oh.

See, the concept of the Reapers and the backstory of the ME universe are really just a hook, in the same way that the Federation, the Enterprise, etc. are just the hook for Star Trek; they’re the skeleton for the story. The animating force of the story is the characters. The rest of it is just an excuse for them to do something exciting.

If Shepard has a home, it’s not Earth: it’s the Normandy. If he has a family, it’s Tali, Garrus, Liara, Ashley/Kaiden, Joker, and the rest of the Normandy’s crew.  “Humanity” (you manatee?) is just a word. Tali, Garrus, and Liara are the people who believed in Shepard and stood by him when nobody else would.

After all the effort Bioware put into developing the cast of the series, letting us talk with them and learn about their problems and build friendships with them and even romance them, what were we really fighting for?

“The galaxy?”

A vague resolution to an esoteric, eons-old conundrum we didn’t even know existed?

I sure as hell wasn’t. I was fighting for the characters that I cared about.

And at the finale of a game built around an emotional center of relationships established over the course of an entire trilogy, it’s all for naught. Shepard faces the Catalyst alone. He dies alone. He never learns what happens to his friends or LI—we don’t even really learn what happens to them—and he takes the events of the Crucible to the grave. There is no way to save them, let alone reunite with them, any more than there is a way to save yourself.

You reach the Catalyst, you do something (I’m not really sure what), and then random stuff happens. Have a nice day.

It’s inconceivable to me that the writers could possibly have been that tone deaf about their own creation. There is a forum called “Character and Romance Discussion” on this very site with almost 450,000 posts in it, and they thought this stuff wasn’t important to people? It’s like they failed to see the trees for the high-concept, "artistic" forest.

The ending betrays its own design philosophy of meaningful interactivity; it betrays the values and principles of Shepard’s character; and it betrays the emotional investment of players who devoted their time thinking that they could shape the outcome by playing well—you know, the sort of thing you expect from a video game.

It’s a disgrace, and everyone who had a hand in producing it ought to be ashamed.

Modifié par Strange Aeons, 17 avril 2012 - 03:21 .

[Quietness]

RollaWarden wrote...

Opsrbest wrote...


So how long until we get that dissertaion of ME1/2/3 as individual narratives and the series as a whole?

Lol, Opsrbest. My colleague who does a lot of research on popular culture (I've recommended to her that she investigate the ME trilogy and the ending controversy) has just started playing ME1.  I'd say it'll be some time.  I'm turning tomorrow to a lot of fantasy literature term papers, and working on a couple of conference proposals.

Good times, good times.

Really looking forward. I've thorougly enjoyed a few psychologists write-ups on why they feel people have been affected how they have. It will be nice to read this from a technical stand-point.

[recentio]

RollaWarden wrote...

Opsrbest wrote...


So how long until we get that dissertaion of ME1/2/3 as individual narratives and the series as a whole?

Lol, Opsrbest. My colleague who does a lot of research on popular culture (I've recommended to her that she investigate the ME trilogy and the ending controversy) has just started playing ME1.  I'd say it'll be some time.  I'm turning tomorrow to a lot of fantasy literature term papers, and working on a couple of conference proposals.

Good times, good times.

Please to point her to this ironic thread (yes, I admit it's mine) about the bizzare movement of conflict/resolution from fiction to RL back to fiction. The basic idea: Avatar's conflict in fiction was not resolved >> becomes conflict in real world for unsatisfied player, aggression directed at real world entity with power to create fictional resolution for avatar >> real world company yields to cooperative player aggression and revises fictional world >> avatar's conflict in fictional world resolved (pending EC DLC). Making Retake vs. BioWare the "final boss fight" for those player's Shepards.

[kyleshuey]

EnvyTB075 wrote...

I like this guy.

[ChickenMan77]

Strange Aeons is brilliant and more eloquent than I could ever be..that's why every choice feels like a loss..and why the ending blew up in Bioware's face..If they really wanted to fix it.."or expand on it as they say"..they need to read your post ..spot on

Modifié par ChickenMan77, 17 avril 2012 - 03:49 .

[jinxter69]

Strange Aeons is a very good writer...great posts.

[CDRSkyShepard]

MegumiAzusa wrote...

incinerator950 wrote...

MegumiAzusa wrote...

He misses the point of an impossible choice.

A lot of people do, but the point he raised actually makes sense, and I for one stopped playing ME years ago just for the story or character.

He makes some good points, yes, but still misses what it's about, the impossible choice, if he had stated BW didn't very well picture it I would have agreed. As long as he doesn't do that I'm still saying that he had missed the point of the ending.
As the Guardian said: the choice is yours. Now you have to choose from 3 choices with all having bad sides to them, you cannot choose right in this one. Hints that the final choice will be one are throughout the games. Also most of the other choices are to prepare you for one final choice, it's completely a matter of perspective.
For example saving Maelons data is first the renegade choice in ME2, but after you choose it Mordin explains why it is the right thing to do, and later in ME3 it's the only way to save Eve.

My bad for taking this off the first few pages. XD

Mass Effect is about difficult choices, not impossible ones. It completely clashes with Shepard's never say die character. 

Besides, I agree with this professor wholeheartedly that Shepard has no right to make any of these choices for anyone, especially Synthesis.

It's also ridiculous and breaks immersion when you just told TIM we're not ready to control the Reapers, then LOL we suddenly have the choice to do so. Picking Control makes Shepard a total hypocrite.

Then there's the whole "there is no choice" argument. Pretty much everything you do gets you the same result: defunct relays, no more Reaper invasion, destroyed Normandy, stranded crew, stranded fleet. So much for choice.

[wicked_being]

*slow clap for Strange Aeons*

I was seriously clapping and pointing on the screen while reading your post. Great job.

[FrozenDreamfall]

Amazing,I had an English test today and the topic of the essay was how advertisement influences the public's behavior.Of course I wrote a positive example and a negative one from the ME3 ending on false advertising and how it caused so much rage for the fans.