Especially after reading these tweets. I'm going directly against what he asked people not to do on Twitter but I feel this is important enough to bring up in discussion.TL;DR in bold. (Even the TL;DR has quite a bit of text, sorry.)
Below are a series of tweets and responses from Mike Gamble:
The themes of ME are all about the organic and synthetic struggle. Synthesis breaks the chain forever.
Fan:
Synthesis is even worse than control... What if some people would rather choose death than be a half-machine?
Gamble:
but the idea is there is no concept of machine or organic anymore. There is only life.
Fan:
Did I miss something then? I don't recall organic vs synthetic being all that big of a theme.
Gamble:
geth vs organics. reapers vs organics.
Fan:
how do you figure thats one of the main themes? I never got that impression at all playing ME
Gamble:
cycle of sentient synthetic machines, and the struggle against organics.
Fan:
There was always only life, in different forms.
Gamble:
is EDI alive? do you consider that a form of life?
I also never got the impression that organic vs synthetic was a major themes of Mass Effect, at least to the point that everything you do will come back around to it. It seems sort of forced in the ending. It felt like more of a means to an end than the running theme of the series. A struggle for life, maybe. Fighting for your own freedom and uniting all forms of life.
The question about EDI seems to go counter to evidence presented in the game itself. I'm still not sure if I see EDI as "alive" but there's no denying the scene with Legion and him finally referring to himself in the first person. Later, EDI admits to being afraid.
I'm not convinced Synthesis breaks the chain forever. It will, at least until fully organic life evolves again on the infinite time scale -- the same thing used to defend the Catalyst's arguments that at some point synthetics will wipe out all organic life. Or until the "Semisynetics/Semiorganics" create a true synthetic again. Machines must still exist or ships would cease to exist, unless you're trying to tell me the Normandy is now part organic, because that would just be creepy.
I haven't heard anything yet that makes any sense out of this ending and this isn't helping my confidence in the Extended Cut. I want it to be great but I don't think I can move on as long as synthetic vs organic is supposed to be a major theme when that's not how I see the game. The most popular fan interpretations seem to be the ones that turn the major theme from synthetic vs organic back into fighting for life and uniting the galaxy, such as the Indoctrination Theory.
Take the scene with Javik and how he describes what the downfall of the Protheans was. In his cycle, all organic races were united under one banner. The trouble is, their diferences disappeared under the Prothean empire. Because in this cycle each race is left alone to their own devices -- along with their strengths and weaknesses -- the organic races stand a better chance. Diversity, something that seems to stem from Mass Effect 1 when your squadmates at the beginning of the game dislike alien races but are still forced to ally with them. Protheans refused to ally and preferred to just take over. Synthesis erases the differences between types of "life" (assuming you refer to Legion and EDI as alive).
I also find it hard to believe that both sides of the Synthesized "race" will suddenly join up with one another like nothing ever happened. The geth fought each other and they are both sides of the same coin. I don't think a human synthetic is going to much like a reaper organic. They did try to exterminate us, after all.
Far apart from the reapers, the krogan and rachni, at one point, seemed to be almost as big a threat as the reapers. Choosing to exterminate the quarians, who wanted to kill off the geth; the rachni, who were so easily controlled by the reapers; and the krogan, who out of sheer brutality were posing a danger themselves; seems to show that even without synthetics, organics have enough problems to be getting on with. It isn't without putting aside differences that the major threat can be removed. Synthesis does not put aside any differences, only the superficial one. Control doesn't do much of anything (if the Catalyst can be trusted) that Destroy doesn't do, it's just an insurance plan.
Is the crux of the fan outrage at the ending that most players don't see the major theme as synthetics vs organics? Nevermind that nothing in the game seems to give any reasonable explanation to any of the choices making sense in the context of the game (not to mention how the hell Synthesis is supposed to work on a practical level).
I saw both Dragon Age as a series of forced, sort of myopic moral dilemmas. You're forced to choose between what the player would see as the lesser of two evils in nearly every decision Dragon Age allowed. The decisions in those games seemed very much constructed. While Mass Effect's choices were as constructed, it didn't feel like shows like CSI and NCIS where the empathy is bored into you with a jackhammer. By ignoring the unity of geth and quarians and denying organics a chance by themselves (and teasing the player by allowing Shepard to live), Mass Effect veers down that road that I so disliked about Dragon Age.
If the intent of Thessia and Tuchanka were to make the player second guess themselves in the end, it didn't work. This is just like the "lesser of two evils" choices that I disliked in Dragon Age. Those scenes made me side with the geth and EDI, which is why I consider Destroy the best ending. Synthesis just ruins individuality. Control is no assured hope because the Catalyst can't be trusted. Destroy kills off the reapers and with a high enough EMS, EDI doesn't die so the geth aren't dead either. It rides right along with what I, as a player, have been led to believe by the game. All the others run completely counter.
I just don't think any type of extra explanation is going to change people's minds that easily.
Far apart (again) from the theme, when I first got to the ending, I saw it as the ultimate choice of the game's dialog system: do you go paragon, renegade or neutral. I almost don't think any of them solve the problem of synthetic vs. organic. I see it as a contrived theme with no possible resolution, even in Destroy, but at least Destroy lets Shepard keep his morals and eliminate the immediate threat. There's still time to work it out ("hope", as the Catalyst calls it). The Catalyst served its purpose of allowing the game's ending to take a 180 but in doing so toyed with my interpretation of the game thus far, which is [/i]why the Indoctrination Theory is so appealing: it returns the world to my version of normal.[i]
Modifié par Mystiq6, 27 avril 2012 - 02:52 .
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