Made Nightwing wrote...
Suddenly Shepard was not simply being asked to sacrifice a race or a friend or him/herself for the greater good (all of which was no doubt expected by any player paying attention to the tone of the series), Shepard was being compelled, without even the chance to offer a counterpoint, to perform one of three actions that to my reading each fundamentally undermined the narrative foundations upon which the series seemed to rest.
I can accept if a person simply does not enjoy this form of entertainment, but, isn't it a valid form of entertainment nonetheless? Does not life have a complete disregard of narrative foundation so that if you want to explore certain topics via literature/art/media you would have to undermine seeming narrative foundations? Was the narrative foundation truely undermined? After all, control, destruction, and synthesis were presnet through out the series. The differences were the context in the ending, "OK, so you think this is what you will do. You think this is right or wrong. Now, you are bleeding to death in The Catalysts home. He wants to make a deal. You don't have the power to change his mind. He sets the conditions. He dictates the terms. Pick your poison. What do you do now? What compromise do you make?"
I do find it odd that I could not inform The Catalyst about the Quarians and The Geth getting along and The Geth achiving individuality or that he did not seem to be aware of it. All Shep could say was, "Maybe." But, The Catalyst could have persisted in his pessimism anyway.
Made Nightwing wrote...
In the Control ending, Shepard is invited to pursue the previously impossible path of attempting to dominate the reapers and bend them to his will. Momentarily putting aside the vulgarity of dominating a species to achieve one's own ends (and I will get to complaining about that premise soon enough), this has proved to be the failed modus operandi of every antagonist in this fiction up until this point – including the Illusive Man and Saren – all of whom have been chewed up and destroyed by their blind ambition, incapable of controlling forces beyond their comprehension. Nothing in the vague prognostication of the exposition-ghost offers any tangible justification for why Shepard's plunge into Reaper-control should play out any differently. In fact, as many people have already pointed out, Shepard has literally not five minutes before this moment watched the Illusive Man die as a consequence of this arrogant misconception.
Everyone who had previously attempted to control the reapers were indoctrinated, Shepard was presumably not. Although, that ending is short and simple to leave the future uncertain, as are the other two endings. None of the endings have long term closure. You simply pick the compromise you feel best about even if horrible nonetheless.
Made Nightwing wrote...
The Destroy ending, however, seems even more perverse. One of the constants of the Mass Effect universe (and indeed much quality science fiction) has been an exploration of the notion that life is not simplistically bound to biology, that existence expands beyond the narrow parameters of blood and bone. That is why synthetic characters like Legion and EDI are so compelling in this context, why their quests to understand self-awareness – not simply to ape human behaviours – is so dramatic and compelling. Indeed, we even get glimpses of the Reapers having more sprawling and unknowable motivations that we puny mortals can comprehend...
Now that you mention it, Reapers having more sprawling and unknowable motivations that we puny mortals can comprehend does make the control ending seem more ambigous. Not that it made sense that Shep could control them if he has to sacrifice himself.
Made Nightwing wrote...
To then end the tale by forcing the player to obliterate several now-proven-legitimate forms of life in order to 'save' the traditional definition of fleshy existence is not only genocidal, it actually devolves Shephard's ideological growth, undermining his ascent toward a more enlightened conception of existence, something that the fiction has been steadily advancing no matter how Renegadishably you wanted to play. This is particularly evident when the preceding actions of all three games entirely disprove the premise that synthetic will inevitably destroy organic: the Geth were the persecuted victims, trying their best to save the Quarians from themselves; EDI, given autonomy, immediately sought to aid her crew, even taking physical form in order to experience life from their perspective and finally learning that she too feared the implications of death.
The major factor in the Geth sparing the Quarians is that they could not calculate the outcome of the destruction of the Quarians, so they prudently retreated where the Quarians would not follow, although they did maintain Rannoch.
If you have legion achieve individualty, The Geth attempt to help The Quarians. They are not vengeful. But, it is not certain that should the Quarians become hostile again, that the Geth will not obliterate them. They may not need to, they might. The Geth were not driven by emotion or ideology, so it narrows their motivations to a set not common among humans. But, if all life is Synthesized, are the Geth now burdened by emotion or ideology?
Made Nightwing wrote...
And finally Synthesis, the ending that I suspect (unless we are to believe the Indoctrination Theory) is the 'good' option, proves to be the most distasteful of all. Shepard, up until this point has been an instrument though which change is achieved in this universe, and dependent upon your individual Renegade or Paragon choices, this may have resulted in siding with one species or another, letting this person live or that person die, even condemning races to extinction through your actions. But these decisions were always the result of a mediation of disparate opinions, and a consequence of the natural escalation of these disputes – Shepard was merely the fork in the path that decided which way the lava would run. His/her actions had an impact, but was responding to events in the universe that were already in motion before he/she arrived.
To belabour the point: Shepard is an agent for arbitration, the tipping point of dialogues that have, at times, root causes that reach back across generations. Up until this moment in the game the narrative, and Shepard's role within it, has been about the negotiation of diversity, testing the validity of opposing viewpoints and selecting a path through which to evolve on to another layer of questioning.
Suddenly with the Synthesis ending, Shepard's capacity to make decisions elevates from offering a moral tipping point to arbitrarily wiping such disparity from the world. Shepard imposes his/her will upon every species, every form of life within the galaxy, making them all a dreary homogenous oneness. At such a point, wiping negotiation and multiplicity from the universe, Shepard moves from being an influential voice amongst a biodiversity of thought to sacrificing him/herself in an omnipotent imposition of will.
I do not think your interpretation of Synthesis is supported by ME series. Prior to the invention of synthetic life there was only organic life, one framework for life. One could argue that after the invention of synthetic life there was still only one framework for life but two hardware platforms. Synthesis returns life to one hardware platform. It does not mean that life forms will stop warring. It simply means that organic life will continue to exist in some hybrid form, perhaps. After all, you can not be certain that ideologues will not seek to be purely organic or synthetic and attempt genocide unless it is made clear that Synthesized life has the evolutionary advantage over either organic or synthetic life. But, we see that the vastly, incomprehensibly, superior reapers are not strictly synthetic and that organics typically choose to augment with synthetics when they can. So, evolution was already pushing Synthesis, Shepard mearly pushed it along, if you choose that ending.
I think the sameness of the endings implies that the authors see the future as inevitable in the terms expressed in the series.
Made Nightwing wrote...
The obscurities in the ending of Mass Effect 3 have not been similarly earned by its prior narrative. This narrative has not until this point been about dominance, extermination, and the imposition of uniformity – indeed, Shepard has spent over a hundred hours of narrative fighting against precisely these three themes. And if one of these three (and only these three) options must be selected in order to sustain life in the universe, then that life has been so devalued by that act as to make the sacrifice meaningless.
And that is why I shall continue to go on shooting Haley-Joel-Osment-ghost in the face.
...Sorry again for the length of this post.
It is often expressed in ME that the reapers are incomprehensibly superior, not infalible, but superior. It is only natural that we should be shocked by the ending. To think that the reapers could be destoryed when there are so many of them and it takes so much effort to destroy one is extremely optimistic. But, Anderson and Hacket's plan was not to beat them conventionally. They said it was highly unlikely. The plan was to sneek into their supposed week spot and pull their linch pin. But, no one knew with certainty where and what the linch pin was. The Crucible was always a gamble. No one knew what it would do. Even The Catalyst was changed by it by surprise. The Crucible made it possible for Shepard and The Catalyst to negotiate some result. It gave neither party a dominant position. The Crucible made it possible to either reset the conflict to it's begining, i.e. a time when only organics existed, or it's mid point, i.e. synthetics exist under the domination of organics, or the future, i.e. synthetics and organics meld. The Crucible is an evolutionary force. Evolution cannot be stopped unless all life and it's precursors are destroyed.
Modifié par nicethugbert, 02 mai 2012 - 09:39 .
Retour en haut
![=]](https://lvlt.forum.bioware.com/public/style_emoticons/default/sideways.png)
) While I do not completely agree with you, I believe you make very valid points. In fact, jbauck nails it here :
Of course, it's not without flaws, but I believe it's a step in the right direction. Most successes arise from countless failures ; BioShock's "twist", while imperfect, had the merit of being there and shook off the gaming world a bit. Which is always a good thing.
) got the breath scene as the "tell" moment to clue them in. But even people that picked wrong got a similar (but substantially more subtle) tell by the way Shepard appears to be turned into a 
