37 réponses à ce sujet

[Cheesesack]

So, the Catalyst either directly control the Reapers and they're nothing more than advanced pieces of machinary or he created them with free will and a purpose and then let them get on with it. Either way, he is directly responsible for the Reapers acting the way they do, the way they conduct warfare and therefore every action taken by them or on their behalf (he designed Indoctrination too after all). It is also clear that he cares, in some way and to some extent, about organic life. After all, he is synthetic so he has no personal stake in saving organics, even if they created him. He simply doesn't want organics wiped out (yes, I know his logic makes no sense, but that's not what I'm discussing here) and so devised a 'solution' to prevent what he saw as the inevitable extinction of organic life (by preserving the current species/making way for new ones).

So, let's just assume for a moment that the Reapers were the only logical solution. Clearly this is stupid in itself and relys on faulty logic (yo dawg etc.), but even if we accept this, there's another problem. Why are the Reapers so needlessly evil and cruel. The Catalyst is trying to save organics from themselves. He sees them as children who need protection from their own follies. he also thinks that to ensure the survival of organics as a concept, individual species must die (the same way an insect may kill some of her young so others can survive rather than have all ofthem die) this is act of mercy he thinks he is performing.

In which case, shouldn't the Reapers be as humane as possible? What's with all the intimidating posturing, the brutal exterminations, the needlessly cruel and callous methods of oppression, the facist-style labour camps and the Indoctrination causing allies to literally tear each other apart? The Reapers couldn't possibly be any more evil. They exterminate organic life as if their objective is to cause as much suffering as possible in the process. Melting people down while they're alive. Brutally impaling victims and implanting them with cybernetics (again, while still alive). Torture camps. Destroying their victims sanity, turning brother on brother. These are all actions completely in line with what we believed the Reapers to be before; machine gods who consider organic life an insignificance.

Then we discover this is the merciful solution of an entity that's presented as having our best interests at heart. He must do, otherwise why preserve organics at all? He could have just not done it and trolled around with all the machine races. Can anyone explain/justify this massive problem with the entire premise? He controls the Reapers directly or he made them to act the way they do. He could have made them kind and mercifull; sympathetic figures performing a grisly task that has to be done, but they take no pleasure in. At the very least, he could have made them neutral and emotionless; a simple tool. But no, they have massively deep, imposing voices, they drive people insane just by being near them and they talk abour crushing organic civilization with the synthetic equivallent of nihilistic glee.

Modifié par Cheesesack, 20 avril 2012 - 07:28 .

[A Comedian]

Eh. Maybe it's like Vietnam, and Reapers are Americans.

[Exousia001]

Correction: Reapers are Russians (because it starts with R) and Alliance are Americans (because it starts with A).

FOols

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

The reapers are a machine race that an early race created and when they got out of control, just before they were wiped out they created the catalyst AI to control them, and prevent other races from evolving to the point of repeating their mistake. That race is now the Keepers of the Citadel. Enjoy.

They do this with no moral judgement because they're machines, and are just following their programming. Alive, dead organic units are meaningless to them. You are applying organic thinking, morals, ethics, to machines. It doesn't work that way. They use logic alone. The end is all that matters. Justification is irrelevant.

If Shepard chooses Control, Shepard magically uploads herself (her spirit/personality/intellect/whateverthef***itiswhoneedsdetails) and assumes the responsibilities of the AI. And so you now must determine what to do when a civilization creates a synthetic race that can threaten all organic life in the galaxy. Perhaps you wipe out the synthetic race? In any event you get to commit some genocide. Every so often you might have to "ascend" an organic race to replace part of your police force. Yet you know organic races aren't going to willingly cooperate, so you either send an emmisary like Harbinger to give them an offer they can't refuse (stop your AI research or else), and if they refuse you might have to brutally put them down. Or you may choose to use one of your minions to control the synthetic race like they did with the Geth. Have fun. Enjoy.

[emp6]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

The reapers are a machine race that an early race created and when they got out of control, just before they were wiped out they created the catalyst AI to control them, and prevent other races from evolving to the point of repeating their mistake. That race is now the Keepers of the Citadel. Enjoy.

They do this with no moral judgement because they're machines, and are just following their programming. Alive, dead organic units are meaningless to them. You are applying organic thinking, morals, ethics, to machines. It doesn't work that way. They use logic alone. The end is all that matters. Justification is irrelevant.

If Shepard chooses Control, Shepard magically uploads herself (her spirit/personality/intellect/whateverthef***itiswhoneedsdetails) and assumes the responsibilities of the AI. And so you now must determine what to do when a civilization creates a synthetic race that can threaten all organic life in the galaxy. Perhaps you wipe out the synthetic race? In any event you get to commit some genocide. Every so often you might have to "ascend" an organic race to replace part of your police force. Yet you know organic races aren't going to willingly cooperate, so you either send an emmisary like Harbinger to give them an offer they can't refuse (stop your AI research or else), and if they refuse you might have to brutally put them down. Or you may choose to use one of your minions to control the synthetic race like they did with the Geth. Have fun. Enjoy.

Why should this early race program the reapers to be so cruel? If everything is about logic they would use neutron bombs to wipe out organics, burn the planet with supergiganticstarflamethrowers to cover remains and leave.

[Laurencio]

Cheesesack wrote...

So, the Catalyst either directly control the Reapers and they're nothing more than advanced pieces of machinary or he created them with free will and a purpose and then let them get on with it. Either way, he is directly responsible for the Reapers acting the way they do, the way they conduct warfare and therefore every action taken by them or on their behalf (he designed Indoctrination too after all). It is also clear that he cares, in some way and to some extent, about organic life. After all, he is synthetic so he has no personal stake in saving organics, even if they created him. He simply doesn't want organics wiped out (yes, I know his logic makes no sense, but that's not what I'm discussing here) and so devised a 'solution' to prevent what he saw as the inevitable extinction of organic life (by preserving the current species/making way for new ones).

So, let's just assume for a moment that the Reapers were the only logical solution. Clearly this is stupid in itself and relys on faulty logic (yo dawg etc.), but even if we accept this, there's another problem. Why are the Reapers so needlessly evil and cruel. The Catalyst is trying to save organics from themselves. He sees them as children who need protection from their own follies. he also thinks that to ensure the survival of organics as a concept, individual species must die (the same way an insect may kill some of her young so others can survive rather than have all ofthem die) this is act of mercy he thinks he is performing.

In which case, shouldn't the Reapers be as humane as possible? What's with all the intimidating posturing, the brutal exterminations, the needlessly cruel and callous methods of oppression, the facist-style labour camps and the Indoctrination causing allies to literally tear each other apart? The Reapers couldn't possibly be any more evil. They exterminate organic life as if their objective is to cause as much suffering as possible in the process. Melting people down while they're alive. Brutally impaling victims and implanting them with cybernetics (again, while still alive). Torture camps. Destroying their victims sanity, turning brother on brother. These are all actions completely in line with what we believed the Reapers to be before; machine gods who consider organic life an insignificance.

Then we discover this is the merciful solution of an entity that's presented as having our best interests at heart. He must do, otherwise why preserve organics at all? He could have just not done it and trolled around with all the machine races. Can anyone explain/justify this massive problem with the entire premise? He controls the Reapers directly or he made them to act the way they do. He could have made them kind and mercifull; sympathetic figures performing a grisly task that has to be done, but they take no pleasure in. At the very least, he could have made them neutral and emotionless; a simple tool. But no, they have massively deep, imposing voices, they drive people insane just by being near them and they talk abour crushing organic civilization with the synthetic equivallent of nihilistic glee.

Why would machines be humane? That's inefficent. Better to have machines void of morality than to have them question their purpose.

[LadyWench]

I guess Sovereign was just a jerk? Gotta be at least one in every bunch, LOL.

Seriously, though, this is just one of many reasons that I didn't like the Catalyst. So much of what he said made so much of the previous games (including some of the Reaper smack talk) make so little sense. Hopefully EC DLC will clear some of this up, but until then, I don't think anyone has anything to respond with but lots of speculation. :/

[KingZayd]

or the Starchild is a liar.

[OdanUrr]

"Because good is dumb."

[Samtheman63]

Why do machines that commit mass genocide every 50k years have to be evil?

errr

[kalasaurus]

I wondered this myself. They come off as sadists in most of the three games, and now they want to save us from ourselves. Void of morality or not, the methods they use seem unnecessarily cruel and inefficient.

[omntt]

...this hurts me...

[KingZayd]

If there's anything truth to what the Starchild says, it isn't the whole truth:

Reapers don't care about organics. They care about the availability of organics.
Mass Effect 1: we see they need something from organics. and that organics develop along the lines they desire.
Mass Effect 2: we see they use organics to make baby reapers.
Mass Effect 3: synthetics are a bit of a concern apparently. they bring chaos with them.

So: No Organics---> no Reaper-babies ---> no more Reapers ---> eventual extinction.
Synthetics can be dangerous, and are not suitable for making Reapers.

Therefore: The reapers let organic civilisations grow up to the point they think synthetics are going to come, and then they REAP. Sometimes using the synthetics themselves, if they're a little late to the party.

Note that the Rachni wars took place nearly 2000 years before the Morning War.

Also, i'm flexible on the synthetics thing, because that comes from the starchild, and i do NOT trust him.

The immortal thing: that's the part i've been having difficulty with.. but when i think about it, I think there must be something going on. The Leviathan of Dis is about 1 billion years old. The average time between harvests is 50k years. let's say on average they make 1 reaper per cycle. That gives us about 200000 reapers. If they had that many reapers, they should be able to crush everything far more quickly than they did. What about dead reapers you ask? Well there are 3 we know of: Sovereign, whom we killed ourselves, the Leviatian of Dis and the Derelict Reaper. Those 2 have been around for ages, the Derelict Reaper being 37 million years old itself. This to me suggests that the Reapers don't do a periodic "clean up" when it comes to reaper corpses. We basically cannibalised Sovereign for parts, and indeed took the IFF from the Derelict Reaper. Is this what happened to to the other reapers that were killed? Or do they die elsewhere?

thoughts?

[CapnManx]

Giving them a cruel streak helps ensure they stay on course; gives them more enthusiasm for their work. Give them mercy, on the other hand, and you risk them deciding to spare people.

[jumpingkaede]

GlassElephant wrote...

I wondered this myself. They come off as sadists in most of the three games, and now they want to save us from ourselves. Void of morality or not, the methods they use seem unnecessarily cruel and inefficient.

They're just helping us!  

That's why they taunt us so bad.  And turn humans into husks.  And other races into Reapers.

Also why they instigated the Rachni War.

Just trying to help. 

[Samtheman63]

I think you're someone who can actaully use their brain for thinking rather than jumping on the hate band wagon, well said

[M Hedonist]

Another thing to add to their long list of war crimes: They attempted to use the Shroud on Tuchanka to poison the planet's atmosphere. It's a minor plot point and we never actually got to see what that poison would do, but poisoning the entire atmosphere of a planet seems to be kinda contradictory to their goal to preserve life. They would probably kill all the non-civilized creatures and animals on Tuchanka, too. So much for synthetics wiping out all life.

[Jassu1979]

Laurencio wrote...

Why would machines be humane? That's inefficent. Better to have machines void of morality than to have them question their purpose.

Actually, waging a war (even one that you're pretty sure to win) is far more inefficient.

With the Starchild-retcon, the Reapers' MO becomes utterly nonsensical.
If the whole point was to preserve organic civilizations in reaper form after they've reached a certain level, then
a) it makes no sense to leave behind superior technology that prompts intense technological progress,
it makes no sense to refuse to explain their purpose, and
c) it makes no sense to follow that agenda the way they do.

[Ariq]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

They do this with no moral judgement because they're machines, and are just following their programming. Alive, dead organic units are meaningless to them. You are applying organic thinking, morals, ethics, to machines. It doesn't work that way. They use logic alone. The end is all that matters. Justification is irrelevant.

So much wrong with such a short paragraph. EDI and the Geth are also machines, but they both make choices based on ethical and moral considerations. Their whole story lines underscore the ethical and moral capacity of artifical intelligences. The Reapers are orders of magnitude ahead of the Geth, so it is unreasonable to think they aren't aware of morality or ethics. That doesn't mean their ethics or morality aren't incomprehensible to us, but it's wrong to dismiss them as "machines". The fact is, many of the pronouncements made by Sovereign and Harbinger are moral conclusions; they do offer justifications - just ones we dislike.

And despite what some pop-culture says, logic and morality aren't antinomies, and aren't on some sort of opposing scale. Logic is a method, not a source of principles. From the very first, logic requires postulates from first principles (be they by observation or from axiomatic conclusions of necessity). Subsequent logical choices are guided by error correction within the process of the method. We know that ethics and morality form part of the basis of logic for EDI and the Geth, the difference is one of the alien scale and transcendent nature of Reaper morality.

By analogy, it may seem immoral to the termite that we exterminate their nest, and they certainly wouldn't understand the reasons we choose to do so. Doesn't mean humans (even exterminators) aren't moral, ethical beings.

[Laurencio]

Jassu1979 wrote...

Laurencio wrote...

Why would machines be humane? That's inefficent. Better to have machines void of morality than to have them question their purpose.

Actually, waging a war (even one that you're pretty sure to win) is far more inefficient.

With the Starchild-retcon, the Reapers' MO becomes utterly nonsensical.
If the whole point was to preserve organic civilizations in reaper form after they've reached a certain level, then
a) it makes no sense to leave behind superior technology that prompts intense technological progress,
it makes no sense to refuse to explain their purpose, and
c) it makes no sense to follow that agenda the way they do.

a) They ensure that the races stay close to their technology though. It's basically like herding. You put some fences up and the cattle doesn't tend to leave.

Since when did soldiers ever know what Generals were planning? They are tools, they exist for one purpose and one purpose only. The reason why is irrelvant for them.

c) Do elaborate.

[Phatose]

I figure it's basic strategy. Even for the reapers, a culling take a long, long time. Terror and despair are powerful tools - It both demoralizes the enemy, and gives a reason for non-combatants to actually accept 'negotiations' that they know are almost certainly a trap - since the alternative is so horrific, even a long shot will seem worth the chance.

Simple tactics. Ever had to exterminate a wasp nest? Same principle. Causing immense suffering isn't your actual goal, but if the most efficient way to get rid of that nest happens to be nasty, it isn't going to stop you.

[Henioo]

It doesn't make any sense that the Reapers serve as a solution to the godchild. I mean, c'mon. If they were really doing this, they would come up and openly admit it and even gain some followers, making tje job easier for them. But NOOOOOO, they must be patronising bunch of fricken murderers who bring unspeakable terror and pain to the organics just so the synthetics don't do it.

There is no connection between the way the Reapers act and what comes out of the starbrat's mouth. There just isn't.

[jstme]

Because reapers are made to like their job.
Any creature capable of measurable amount of compassion would stop after few trillions living being killed and think - maybe there is other way. There is that stupid crucible that those primitives try to build every time. Maybe we should try that, and if it fails - continue with ,snif, plan A.
No - the kid done right.
The reapers are designed correctly. I am sure that they have an organic hunting season opening party before they start the rampage and after they return with a new reapers they have an inintiation party.
Harbinger wears a funny hat and Nazara sings.... ,snif snif, used to sing favorite songs of the slaughtered civilisation while rest of the guys laughed and made screeching noises.

[Cheesesack]

It ultimately doesn't matter whether the Catalyst created teh reapers or somehow gained control of them or if the reapers made him or anything. The fact is is that the Catalyst (if he is to be believed, which again, I admit, is a stretch but I feel tha's what the game wants us to do) now controls the reapers. No matter what they were like/doing boefore, he can now repurpose them as he sees fit. he clearly has some control otherwise what is the point in him existing.

And I agree, he/the Reapers may see us as termites whose population needs to be culled. Last time I checked though, we didn't set up termite death camps or reward termites for handing over their felow termites or brainwash termites into killing each other. We use a toxin which kills them almost instantly. It's about as humane as any mass-killing can be. The Reapers could just laser everyone to death or even just show up, and bombard relevant planets from orbit, killing the populations instantly. They could anesthatise people while they huskify or liquify them. It's not exactly difficult and makes no difference for them. If the Catalyst cares enough about organics to devise this entire cycle to protect and nurture them, it's also logical that he doesn't want them to suffer horrifically. It's obvious from the Geth and EDI that once an AI reaches a certain level of sentience it develops something akin to morals or feelings. The Geth feel remorse for killing the Quarian and EDI feels shame over her past with Cerberus. If the Catalyst is so advanced, he too must have these artificial emotions. Even if he sees the logic in harvesting organics, there's no reason why he should make the Reapers like it. And it's not like the Reapers can refuse to do what they do out of moral principle; he controls them.

Modifié par Cheesesack, 20 avril 2012 - 09:05 .

[SP2219]

 Basically, this is just more evidence that they came up with this ending at the last minute.

You don't make your antagonist commit unspeakable acts of cruelty and then try to make out like they're the good guy in the last five minutes.  It doesn't work.  

The only reasonable explanation for this is that they made a very big mistake.  That's OK, just correct it.

I'm not pleased at their inability to admit this.  This is not artistic vision, it's just plain stupid