HYR 2.0 wrote...
There is no implied/explicit consent for genocide. Otherwise, the krogan wouldn't have cared for a cure. And Legion would not have tried to kill you for recruiting the quarians instead of his people.
Genocide is the fate that everyone is fighting to save themselves from.
There is also no consent involved for destroying our own technology and synthetics. There are synthetics and people not involved in the war that will be affected by that. Also, that there may even be people who would prefer something other than Destroy if they knew what the choices at hand were.
Destroying the Reapers was the only known goal, as people assumed it was what the Crucible would do. So, they were all basically riding on the Crucible. In some instances, Control can be its only function. That's the way it goes. They've basically consented to it saving their asses, however the hell it does so.
Also, Shepard has no orders from Hackett apart from simply winning the war. Hackett saying something =/= it's an order.
He tells Shepard to recruit the quarians, but he can choose the geth instead and Hackett really doesn't care (though he clearly trusts them less). Genophage arc: he defers to Shepard's judgement on the cost of the salarian support being too high. If Shepard sabotages the cure, he prefers not to know what Shepard did to get both sides' support.
The Geth themselves actually set the tone, they gave implied consent for genocide when they willingly allied with the Reapers. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
There's a difference between dying to fulfill the stated objective and for no particularly good reason, people do the former all the time in combat. It's about how worthy the cause is (or seems); for example, look at how WWII is viewed compared to say, Vietnam, or Iraq - most Americans tend to believe WWII was a war worth fighting, Vietnam and Iraq... Not so much. The dialogue with Lt. Kurin serves as a good example as well; she's unwilling to have her people die for a "field of rubble" so the commander can reach the temple on Thessia, but when told the relic inside that temple is the only chance to complete a war-winning Prothean superweapon? She has her people hold their ground. The only difference here is the scale of the sacrifice needed to achieve the objective.
It's also untrue that Hackett doesn't give orders, when he shoots down the idea of controlling the Reapers; "Dead Reapers is how we win this", given the Commander's other orders (e.g. interdict enemy forces) killing the Reapers is at a minimum what anybody in the military would consider an implied order, if not a direct one (and throughout the series, following the orders of one's superiors is typically considered a Paragon act in and of itself).
When it comes to forging alliances, etc. his orders specifically allow him to do so "as he sees fit" in the e-mail from Hackett (along with the direction to interdict enemy forces); and even then the good Commander admits to cutting corners, as Joker says "well, they can always court-martial us after we save the galaxy".
And the sad fact is, when in a big enough war (especially one involving an actual existential threat), everyone's going to be affected anyway. Whether it be rationing among the civilian populace, the draft, destruction of infrastructure, etc.
And if they accepted the risk of the Crucible's true outcome being a complete unknown, then none of the three outcomes are an issue.
They didn't accept it as a complete unknown; look at the example Hackett uses - the first atomic bombs and the fears they could ignite the atmosphere. It was considered a possibility the Crucible would blow everybody up; this was the hope behind finding the Catalyst - to direct the Crucible's power against the Reapers alone.
That the only known function of the Crucible was thought to be destroy is irrelevant; exterminating the Reapers was the goal the galaxy united to achieve, and the possibility of the Crucible potentially causing major collateral damage was seen as a distinct possibility right off the bat. In general, when one signs up to join a war, they kinda forfeit the right to complain that the decision may result in death.
Retour en haut
