"All organics must destroy or control synthetic life forms"
It is from ME1, said by the AI in the Signal Tracking assignment on the Citadel, and I found it interesting how exactly it foreshadows ME3's ending, where Shepard will get to do exactly that with the Reapers. I then considered the many dealings we had with synthetics over the course of three games and asked myself: this *is* a major defining theme of the story and the MEU. Why didn't it work in the ending?
Here's the hypothesis I propose as an answer: there was a fundamental disconnect between the writers and the players about how we would react to synthetic life forms in general and how we would consider them as life forms. In detail:
(1) I think the writers expected us to see synthetic life forms as fundamentally different, they expected we had to learn to consider them as valid life forms. Recall how hard the geth plot in ME3 stresses the fact that the geth were defending themselves? As if we didn't know that already - it's been in the Codex since ME1 and was a topic in several conversations. We even get to say "they just defended themselvs" to Tali in ME1!
I don't know about others, but I never saw synthetics as fundamentally "other", and I always considered the geth as "just enemies". That they were synthetics was strictly accidental and had no bearing on the interaction. If that's the same for most of us - and from what I've been reading on the forums I think it is - then the writers have drastically underestimated our willingness to consider synthetic life forms as valid right from the start. So, when the topic was brought up in the ending, most of us would go "WTF? That's been dealt with. The geth were enemies, and now they're not any more. Or did you [the writers] think we would think synthetics unable to keep peace? After all you've been writing about the geth's desire for peaceful coexistence?"
(2) I think the writers expected us to lump the Reapers together with the geth into the "synthetic" and thus "other" category of life. So that while we were learning to accept synthetics as people, we would also consider the possibility that the Reapers were "just enemies" and otherwise valid forms of life.
What brought that to ruin so completely that there was no recovery was that they pushed the horror up to eleven in ME2 and again in ME3. To estimate the role of the "abomination aesthetic", consider how you would've reacted if the Reapers had harvested organics, but in a somewhat "cleaner", more clinical way, without all the unnecessary pain and the re-use of organic body parts for their minions. What if the Reaper minions had been machines instead of travesties of existing species? I venture to guess that many of us would have been rather more ready to see the Reapers as "just enemies" instead of "eldritch abominations", enemies with which to make peace was generally considered possible.
I think this hypothesis of a fundamental disconnect explains two things rather neatly: that the writers considered the organic/synthetic conflict to be such a big thing where for most of us, it was nothing more than dealing with yet another species who could be hostile or friendly like any other, and that they expected us to accept more easily an ending where the Reapers were integrated into galactic civilization.
For some of us, that worked. I am one of them. But I had to work hard to see that angle, and I was only willing to invest that work because I saw the possibility for a future I like lurking behind all the thematic confusion. For most players, the ending simply failed, and even if the EC saved it, most people still can't see any fundamental quality in the organic/synthetic conflict that makes it different from any other war between two species.
Bearbeitet von Ieldra2, 15 Dezember 2012 - 04:27 .
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