91 réponses à ce sujet

[Skullheart]

The thing is that even supermac doesn't comprehend the reapers motives.

[Cashmoney007]

I had a post about this a while back on the BSN forums. I am still waiting for that epic battle with the reapers. Maybe I will get it in a dlc. I can only hope. People actually didn't need to have the reapers explained to them. They were out to change the world the way they wanted it to be. As far as I understood, Shepard was going to do whatever it takes to stop them. I didn't need to know anymore then that in the game.

[Fur28]

Had no problem with there being a motivation, but the one we got and the talk with the starchild were such a dissapointment that i would´ve prefered there being none or a better one

[RadicalDisconnect]

Mdoggy1214 wrote...

One of the best aspects of the Reapers is that they are the only ones in the Mass Effect universe that feel truly "Alien" to the player. Even Reapers like Sovereign stressed to Shepard that organics are so far below the food chain to them, that they are like specs of dust, and cannot even begin to comprehend the nature of their existence. That's what was so freaky about the Reapers. And it was effective. To put it in simple terms, they were scary aliens.

But they lost that as soon as their origins were explained.

If that's the case, then the Reapers are just a device for an us-versus-them scenario. Does that appeal to most people?

[Village_Idiot]

Vigil: "In the end, what does it matter? Your goal is to stop them, not understanding them."

I didn't need to know the Reapers' motives in order for them to be effective antagonists. To be honest, when a story's villains are bent on the annihilation of all life, any attempt at a rational explanation was always going to fall short. Better to leave it a mystery, rather than devalue them as characters.

[Xerxes Black]

I agree that they should have stayed entirely alien to us, they're "morals" should have never even come close to our understanding of a good/evil or law/chaos axis. That's what makes them terrifying. They not only can wipe us all out, but even if they tried to explain it to us the basic of all their arguments would be insane to us.

And no... I am not talking about the circular logic that was given to us. That is not higher thinking, that was just plain stupid. I was really surprised they didn't try to pull a tidbit that the reapers are really fighting another war across dark-space with some other elder evil... because that's what they where poised to be before ME3, a legit elder freaking evil. Unknowable, nye-unkillable (except by Shepard), and totally terrifying. When I saw that human shaped terminator reaper in ME2 I wasn't thinking "Hey look a terminator" I was thinking "Wait they harvest us to make more... so what do the previous harvests look like?"

Modifié par Xerxes Black, 05 novembre 2012 - 08:29 .

[Xerxes Black]

Shadrach 88 wrote...

Vigil: "In the end, what does it matter? Your goal is to stop them, not understanding them."

I didn't need to know the Reapers' motives in order for them to be effective antagonists. To be honest, when a story's villains are bent on the annihilation of all life, any attempt at a rational explanation was always going to fall short. Better to leave it a mystery, rather than devalue them as characters.

Ninjaed meee! oh but said better and witha  ME quote so it's ok. 

[Sable Rhapsody]

Because fear of the unknown is one of the oldest, most primal, most powerful terrors in human experience. Revealing the Reapers' origins and motivations, especially in such a poorly-told fashion, stripped that fear out from under them.

Modifié par Sable Rhapsody, 05 novembre 2012 - 09:09 .

[inko1nsiderate]

If you answer questions explicitly after spending a lot of time building their mystery, you run the risk of coming up with an explanation that is less exciting to some of the fans because they have crafted their own theories that appeal to them more than anything the writer(s) can come up with. For me this happened in Fringe, but it didn't bother me with the Reapers, and for fictional works like HP Lovecraft that sense of terrifying mystery is pretty much the point.

At the end of the day, it comes down to a person's personal preferences. I tend to be a bit eclectic in my tastes, as I sometimes enjoy the mystery when it is well crafted and intricately part of the story, and also enjoy having the mystery explained in other story universes.

[FlamingBoy]

because when we found out there motives they ended looking like retards

[Nerevar-as]

Shadrach 88 wrote...

Vigil: "In the end, what does it matter? Your goal is to stop them, not understanding them."

I didn't need to know the Reapers' motives in order for them to be effective antagonists. To be honest, when a story's villains are bent on the annihilation of all life, any attempt at a rational explanation was always going to fall short. Better to leave it a mystery, rather than devalue them as characters.

This. They´ve committed thousands of genocides. What justification was going to make any sense? Whatever the explanation was, no one sane would have bought it. And what we got was an AI programmed by someone really stupid: no shackles, free reign to do what it wanted and control over other AIs,.... were the Leviathan close kin of the Engineers from Prometheus? Because they seem even more stupid.

Modifié par Nerevar-as, 05 novembre 2012 - 10:50 .

[George Costanza]

It should have remained a mystery because it's anticlimactic.

Some things are just better left unsaid. We don't need to know everything, as sometimes, mystery can make characters more compelling. Look at the difference between the two movie versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Few would argue that the Gene Wilder version was a better character. We didn't need to know why he did the things he did, or how he did it. In the Johnny Depp one we get some backstory (ridiculous) and makes the character boring.

The Reapers are committing genocide on a universal level. There is literally nothing that can be revealed as the justification for this that isn't going to seem trivial due to the overwhelming evil of the means to their end. They should have been left without explaining their purpose. Or at least given a purpose that made sense.

[nstar]

As someone else pointed out, fear of the unknown. Not knowing why an antagonist is behaving in a particular manner can be unnerving.

Consider, for example, the birds from the eponymous Alfred hitchcock film - there's no definitive explanation for why they have chosen to start attacking all and sundry and the film is extremely effective (more so for its time, admittedly) at building tension, suspense and being unsettling to large extents.

Contrast the original 'Halloween' with the remake. In the original, the closest we got to to an explanation of the motivations of the Michael Myers character (ignoring the sequels) was "He had the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes" spoken by his psychiatrist. There's no obvious motivation for why he murdered his sister in the beginning of the film, or why he returns to Haddonfield to seemingly randomly slaughter more people. That's quite a scary thought. The entity whose motivations are unknown, who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be controlled... how do you begin to confront such a menace?

Whereas in the remake of Halloween, we have a history of childhood abuse, bullying and and a degenerate father as reasons for his descent into psychosis. The idea of such a madman running around may be an unsettling thought but it doesn't compare to the ridiculously strong "boogeyman" from the original.

And also, as others have mentioned, there's the simple argument that whatever the reason given it perhaps would not have felt like a good one. We're led to believe we wouldn't understand what their purpose is yet the explanation given is hardly complicated, it might very well be ridiculous, but it isn't difficult to understand - just difficult to agree with.

Modifié par nstar, 05 novembre 2012 - 11:02 .

[nos_astra]

silentassassin264 wrote...

ghost9191 wrote...
yeah , something we could not comprehend. they were just monsters that needed to be stopped.

I would have hated that idea.  If you do not reveal the Reaper's intentions or use the "it is beyond our understanding" line, the Reapers just come off as always chaotic evil bad guys.  There is nothing exciting about beating what is tantamount of Saturday morning cartoon villains...even absurdly strong saturday morning cartoon villains.  Villains with no motive or a bad motive kill a story.  Even with what was given in ME3, their motive was much better than leaving us in the dark.  It could have been written better but still leagues better than beyond our understanding.

I've thought about this. 

There was no need to reveal what the Reapers where about. It's silly to do that actually. These are millions/billions of years old beings. Nothing short of the Reapers themselves could explain what they were about. And the Reapers originally thought organics were too far below them to dignify their puzzled expressions and flailing about with an answer.

Of course, they changed this over the course of the series when Shepard became a very poorly justified Chosen One. Shepard was never particularily clever, just stubborn and reckless. That's good for a hero but what exactly qualifies Shepard in the eyes of the Reapers? In eons no organic has proven himself as stubborn and reckless as Shepard?

And how could the Reapers possibly think no one would've understood them had they explained: You know, don't create synthetics because TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY WILL DOOM YOU ALL.  Why would Shepard suddenly understand this ... at the door of death, gravely infured and weakened by blood loss?

What they could have done was: Let the factions (humans, turians, salarians, asari, Cerberus) come up with theories what this is all about and then let Shepard decide which theory he/she supports. Then again, that would have required Bioware not to resort to making everyone dumb, so Shepard can be the one-eyed among the blind.

I don't know. I'm really, really unconvinced that revealing  the Reapers' motives can be considered good storytelling. It has something of a scooby-doo-speech: I was gonna ... if it wasn't for you ... so now.

Modifié par klarabella, 05 novembre 2012 - 01:55 .

[AngryFrozenWater]

The problem with the reapers' motivations is that these do not make any sense. So, I think it is better to leave these obscured (like ME1 did) and make the reapers the horror that they are. ME2 couldn't dream up a solution for their power and thus the collectors were invented. In ME3 there still was no solution. We fight Cerberus there, because the geth were no longer a threat, the collectors exterminated, and the reapers still too strong. Suddenly the reapers were supposed to have reasons and wear white hats. Their cyclical genocidal horrors were supposed to make sense. The synthetics were supposed to be the bad guys now, although in ME2 and ME3 we learn that this is certainly not the case and any synthetic opposition has a reaper or organic cause. By revealing the reapers' "motivations" they have become demystified and became more of a caricature of themselves than a threat.

Modifié par AngryFrozenWater, 05 novembre 2012 - 11:51 .

[Ironhandjustice]

By the way, try to think what reapers are in the MEHEM.

If you see the ending, you can see that the reapers are still a mistery. And is awesome...

[Steelcan]

"In the end what does it matter? Your salvation lies in defeating the reapers, not understanding them"

[eye basher]

Because i don't give a damm about their motivations i'm just there to kill them.

[Gradman]

It really was a massive catch 22... it just wouldn't have been right to get no more information on them. But at the same time they were completely demystified by the explanation given. I think their motives were overexplained, but had I not received anything that would have been just as bad. The issue as everyone has said is that the explanation given as to their motives and origins completely demystified them.

I would have preferred if the final explanation just fortified what you already knew, with maybe a tiny bit more detail. Or maybe it was just the fact that I hated that this awesome force of unknowable, unstoppable monsters were all under the control of fogboy.

[IElitePredatorI]

Understanding somethings motives despite, it being good or bad, allows you to relate to it and I don't mean agree with it. I felt if the Reapers motives were left a mystery, we would be unable to relate to them which could increase the fear factor to an extent.

It also allows you to think of your own ideas for why the Reapers want to Harvest all life in the galaxy.

Modifié par IElitePredatorI, 05 novembre 2012 - 02:05 .

[javeart]

i've never really wondered what the reapers motivations were. maybe i just assumed it was itheir nature to be evil?

anyway, mystery can be nice sometimes, bad explanations never are

Modifié par javeart, 05 novembre 2012 - 02:33 .

[Ieldra]

@OP:
I think people bought into the "Lovecraftian horror" aspect of the Reapers and thought the story would reinforce the idea that there are things we aren't meant to know and that all we can do when the "other" comes knocking at our door is to destroy it.

I'm glad that didn't come to pass. Revealing the Reapers' motivations was one of the core elements I needed in the ending. Without it, the ME trilogy wouldn't be a story I care for in the end.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 05 novembre 2012 - 02:18 .

[Steelcan]

Ieldra2 wrote...

@OP:
I think people bought into the "Lovecraftian horror" aspect of the Reapers and thought the story would reinforce the idea that there are things we aren't meant to know and that all we can do when the "other" comes knocking at our door is to destroy it.

I'm glad that didn't come to pass. Revealing the Reapers' motivations was one of the core elements I needed in the ending. Without it, the ME trilogy wouldn't be a story I care for in the end.

. Could have been a better explanation though.

[BD Manchild]

Frankly, it would have been better if the Reapers' motivations had remained a mystery than the utterly nonsensical guff that was explained in the last ten minutes that completely destroyed their credibility as villains.

I wouldn't have minded an explanation or clear-cut motivation so much if it was handled well and remained thematically and narratively consistent with the story, but villains don't have to be particularly complex to be engaging. Take the Anti-Monitor from the DC Universe, for example. All he wants to do is destroy all of creation. He's as base and shallow as a villain gets, but the way his appearances are executed leave such an impact that you can't help but be hooked. Up until ME3's final ten minutes, the Reapers were the same; arrogant machines with a motivation as base as it gets, but executed with such panache that they did feel like legitimately dangerous threats. Plus the whole Lovecraftian aspect made them work; as others have said they felt genuinely alien, and what made them so scary was that they could not be comprehended or reasoned with. They were like a force of nature.

Let's face it; any explanation Bioware offered would likely never have matched up to our own interpretations, but the big reveal for the Reapers completely destroyed their mystique, reducing them to the level of hired muscle for a crackpot AI.

Modifié par BD Manchild, 05 novembre 2012 - 02:30 .