The Master Chief wrote...
Hey man, if someone feels like the ending destroyed their life/belief/soul/ability to love, then they have the right to express that. It's in the First Amendment. However, belittling them for doing so does go against the rules of this forum.
1. Your First Amendment doesn't apply to me.
2. Even if it did, it would also back my right to tell people they're being ridiculously overdramatic first-world-problemers who need the 1950s-style glass of water thrown in the face followed by a slap to get over the melodrama of letting a video-game ending affect their life so negatively.
3. First Amendment applies to hardly anywhere on the internet, even if you're in America.
Now, I know the "Mass Effect 3 Ending: Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage" video has probably been mentioned and linked quite a bit, but it does a great job of stating my reasons for disliking the ending in a better, much more organized manner than I can.
Which is my problem with people quoting and linking to it all the time.
If you need a YouTube video to make your point for you, all that says to me is that you don't really have a firm grasp of the beliefs you supposedly hold. And worse yet, don't link to a video that starts off with a definition of science-fiction which takes every piece of academic writing regarding genre studies in literature and treats it as toilet paper in favour of erroneous and dumbed down Star Trek analogies. As I recall, one of its main arguments against the ending is "Sci-fi is a nitpicky genre cos Star Trek was all about the technobabble stuff, so nitpicky complaints are appropriate here, so all my nitpicky complaints are valid" (he calls them nitpicky complaints himself as I recall, I'm not just mocking him ... that's actually his argument). It makes me want to take his face and smoosh it into a pile of open books until some semblance of knowledge regarding genre studies is driven in.
It steadily gets worse from there. He spends a good few minutes dragging out how you don't get any closure with any of the characters in a game where you spend almost all your time doing side-missions which allow you to tie up all the loose ends regarding all the characters. He laments how "the Reapers didn't need a reason behind their actions; look at the Emperor in Star Wars, he never needed one" while ignoring that the Emperor in Star Wars never did anything mysterious or unexplained and was content to just be a villain who built massive space weapons, while the Reapers have been imposed a ridiculously complicated system of technological cycles on the galaxy for millions of years. Kind of needed an explanation (and the series was
always building to one; even in the rejected Dark Energy scenario, the culmination of the series was finding out the reality behind the Reapers). He says "the Starchild introduced a new goal right at the end!" when he didn't; he just gave us a way of achieving the goal we've had all along. And then if I remember right I turned off when he started citing random questions which all had perfectly explainable answers and started making them talk over each other, as if drowning out all logical reasoning with the sheer volume of crap and nonsensical questions would make his point more valid.
Seriously, I could go on for ages on that video and how ridiculous it is. Point is ... don't use a video as a substitute for your own words, because there's no way anybody will take you seriously.
Especially if the video you're quoting is so easily rebutted.