I really wish more people understood that. That kind of mind control has been used in some of the best cyberpunk, transhumanist, and futurist stories I've read. Since when you can affect the mind, you can just stop it from thinking in ways that aren't beneficial to the controller. What I see happening in ME3 is that the Reapers are freed, but the Catalyst also returns them to how they were at creation, telling them that they had been mind controlled.
Knowing the horrors that they had bestowed upon the galaxy, their collective choice (even if there were a few nay-sayers, this must have been a mostly positive consensus) was to offer reparations by helping the species of the galaxy to repair their home worlds. Furthermore, the Reapers freely offered their knowledge to all, without any restrictions. They gave of themselves freely, and that (to me) speaks of their strength of character.
But the problem with gamers is that they love hate fetishes. That's what it's about, on a meta level. See, you have Player 1 (the good guy), and you have the Evil Menace whom Player 1 is chosen to destroy. This has been gaming since the dawn of time, other than certain genres and indie/small developer exemptions. What we have here is a cross-section of the gaming mainstream that believe in black & white, absolute terms.
Player 1 is Good. The Reapers are evil.
Player 1 is Good. The Geth sided with the Reapers. The Geth are therefore evil.
Their thinking is no more nuanced than that. They have simplistic, one-dimensional thinking compared to my own, and they lack my wisdom and understanding. I'm a good storyteller because I have a great amount of three dimensionality to my person, so I'm able to tell a nuanced story, I'm also able to say things like 'hey, the Quarians and the Geth are neither both absolutely good or absolutely evil.'
The kind of binary thinking they represent, the kind of binary thinking that will doom us all in the end, is the kind of binary thinking that stops them from thinking in nuanced, three dimensional ways. They can't understand that the Reapers can change their status, they can't understand that the Geth might have reasons for what they do. This is beyond their limited, black & white, 1 and 0 world view. Because 1 is always 1, and 0 is always 0.
It's this kind of mindset, for example, that believes that rehabilitation is pointless, and all criminals should be mercilessly slaughtered, no matter how minor the crime. It's the sort of thinking I tend to see on the extreme right, where everything is black & white, and good must eradicate evil. Sort of like a really bad Saturday morning cartoon, you know? And I don't think we're ever going to get through to them, they need to mature more before they can understand nuance.
So I understand why they're the way they are. I'm just surprised that BioWare's forums turned out to be such an anti-intellectual ghetto considering the ending. You'd think it would have pulled in more three dimensional people. It has been better of late than it was some time ago, but the numbers of one dimensional, binary thinking people who deal in absolutes is staggering.
I understand them, I understand why they're the way they are. I just also wish they understood more. It's depressing to see people think in such obviously limited ways.
Modifié par Auld Wulf, 07 mai 2013 - 12:52 .
Retour en haut
Of course, then the ITists tried to ruin everything, and I feared that Bioware would pander to them. Well, thankfully that's a thing of the past.
