235 réponses à ce sujet

[AlanC9]

You've got a point. I don't know how you liberate a being from its own nature. You can give it a new nature, maybe, but that isn't liberation.

But what does your finding something offensive have to do with anything?

[Indy_S]

I'm seeing this "free the Reapers" phrase a lot. There is no evidence that Synthesis does this. I can claim just as confidently that we never see a free Reaper.

[Nightwriter]

SpamBot2000 wrote...

Quickly scrolling through this page, a comment caught my eye. Ieldra was saying that "there is evidence that the Reapers are mind-controlled by the Catalyst" and that they don't have the choice in whether to support the Cycle.

But is that really what the last minutes of ME3 suggest? Why would we assume that there are Reapers independent of the Catalyst entity? It IS the Reapers. They are not it's "slaves", they are a part of it. It personally Reaped the Galaxy some 50,000 times, and there are no "preserved" species to "liberate". The very thought that the liquidation of all those species was their "preservation" is offensive. Those species most likely consisted of discrete individuals, and even if (and that's a big-ass freaking if) there's some "collective consciousness" in the killbot, that was not the nature of the civilization. Frankenstein's monster is not an accurate reflection of the character of the people whose body parts it was stitched out of. And equating the Reapers with that status is still a reach.

Perhaps one of the most disappointing things people say to me is that any negative moral judgment made against the Reapers is invalid because they were servants of an amoral entity. Therefore culling people and turning them into peach preserves does count as a well-intentioned act on the machine's part, and we cannot condemn this because they have no concept of right and wrong.

And the reason I personally find that so disappointing is that I always felt the major dramatic conflict of the series was between our will to live and self-determinate and the Reapers' will to take our lives and our self-determination from us because they viewed us as inferior. Draining the foe of its intelligence completely neutralizes the force pushing back against us and turns the villain into a nonentity.

[SpamBot2000]

AlanC9 wrote...

But what does your finding something offensive have to do with anything?

We are discussing a work of fiction, and this work of fiction appears to inspire some people to think that reducing living individuals to liquid and postulating some "preservation" in the form of a composite entity is a practise that ought to be respected on its terms. I state that finding this sort of thing very offensive indeed is very much a valid position to take to counter the shrill propaganda that would make people into slave-killing, orphan-beating monsters for not "liberating" the poor killbots.

Or, to put it more succintly, I'm having a moral response to the work that is presumably designed to explore morality.  

Modifié par SpamBot2000, 15 mai 2013 - 08:54 .

[Megaton_Hope]

Auld Wulf wrote...

Why do you feel the way you do about the Reapers?

As presented, the Reapers have been responsible for the extinction of advanced organic species repeatedly over a period spanning millions of years. They are, as a result, mass murders many times over; each Reaper has undoubtedly been responsible for taking trillions of lives, many of which were then reused as raw material to take more lives.

That is objectively bad. It makes Hitler and Pol Pot look like wimps by comparison; all they ever did was murder people, they didn't make their murder victims murder people after they died.

[Yestare7]

Megaton_Hope wrote...

Auld Wulf wrote...

Why do you feel the way you do about the Reapers?

As presented, the Reapers have been responsible for the extinction of advanced organic species repeatedly over a period spanning millions of years. They are, as a result, mass murders many times over; each Reaper has undoubtedly been responsible for taking trillions of lives, many of which were then reused as raw material to take more lives.

That is objectively bad. It makes Hitler and Pol Pot look like wimps by comparison; all they ever did was murder people, they didn't make their murder victims murder people after they died.

+1

Take notes Wulf!

[David7204]

I think that a lot of this stems from the Reaper motive being handled pretty poorly. It was very poorly explained, poorly foreshadowed, and poorly executed. I honestly can't say if the developers wanted the synthetic vs. organic conflict to be a legitimate thing or not. It might have been that they wanted the player to clearly see through it as garbage. I don't know. Like I said, things were explained so poorly that's it's difficult to tell. Leviathan somewhat suggests so, but that was probably more like a response to how much players hated the ending than anything else.

The question is, what is the Reapers had a motive that a reasonable player would have a fair chance of seeing at least some legitimancy to? Would siding with the Reapers still be as bad?

Modifié par David7204, 15 mai 2013 - 09:09 .

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

Megaton_Hope wrote...



 they didn't make their murder victims murder people after they died.

Come on maaaaan  the Reapers just want to hug you and help you "ascend"!

Don't harsh their mellow by struggling!

Just report to your nearest goo tube and let the good times roll!!



We are Harbinger and we approve this message.

Modifié par Grand Admiral Cheesecake, 15 mai 2013 - 09:34 .

[David7204]

I think that little joke has been beaten into the ground enough by now.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

David7204 wrote...

I think that little joke has been beaten into the ground enough by now.

Oh hush David people are having fun.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Actually cuttlefish are fantastic sauteed in olive oil with garlic, shallots, cayenne, and lemon. My Geth domestic unit with the new Xen-o-matic program does a fantastic job of preparation and clean up an never questions a shut down command. It was nice to know someone finally knew what they were doing with their re-programming.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Actually cuttlefish are fantastic sauteed in olive oil with garlic, shallots, cayenne, and lemon. My Geth domestic unit with the new Xen-o-matic program does a fantastic job of preparation and clean up an never questions a shut down command. It was nice to know someone finally knew what they were doing with their re-programming.

https://encrypted-tb...W9I1h60yUOJ-H8B

[Steelcan]

+1 for both jUliA and the Admiral.

[Steelcan]

Auld Wulf wrote...

Attacking my post and then ending yours with a demagogic statement about how you feel the Reapers are abhorrent without fully explaining why doesn't make your post valid. Again, I see a lot of this -- appeals to the crowd, to emotion, and so on. But quite simply? Why do you feel the way you do about the Reapers?

If you can't tell me that, your point of view isn't valid, because you don't actually know yourself.

.  We've all to.d you WHY we don't like the Reapers and think they deserve to die, you just reject our reasons.

[The Night Mammoth]

HYR 2.0 wrote...

It's not exactly what the catalyst does.

The cycle does not wipe out life, it immortalizes all advanced life into a new form.

It's nothing like, say, the geth wiping out the quarians on Rannoch. There is no attempt to clone them all back to life or anything, much less take their genetic material and upload it to a supercomputer. They're dead and gone. In time, they will be entirely forgotten. Not so with the civilizations the catalyst has preserved. They at least live on in some way.

The Reapers are very much the same idea as what one organic race did to preserve themselves over certain-death.

That doesn't make advanced life any less dead. I see nothing of value in storing some genetic material unless they're planning to do something with it. It's like burning every book in the world whilst keeping a single copy of each, but never letting anyone read it. Completely pointless.

So yes, aside from one minor detail which is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, the Catalyst is doing the same thing synthetics apparently would. 

It's pretty clear that the only organics the catalyst concerns himself with are the advanced (sapient & sentient) life forms -- not literally all fauna and flora in the galaxy. Indeed, the "all organic life" was very poor word-choice, but I'm all but certain that it refers only to advanced life, like: humans, salarians, turians... NOT: trees, varren, space-cows...

If space-cows evolve to achieve sapience, they would switch categories (not sure if it even works like that, but Mass Effect seems to think so).

Now, I realize that lots of folks take issue when I go off-script to explain the story, saying it's just headcanon without official in-game explanation. I maintain that -- so long as my explanations do not: directly contradict anything in the game, make sense of what happens well enough, and no better explanations exist -- they are not only valid, but likely the correct interpretation.

In that, I'm more than 99% sure that the organic life implicated is not literally all plants and animals, just ones sapient enough to be creators and thus come into conflict with the created. In which case, EDI and the upgraded-geth both serve as examples of how it would happen. If you continually duplicate the outcome of the conflict with their creators over a long period of time, there won't be any of these creator-organics left.

I don't understand.

Till now, I've always understood the Catalyst as killing off advanced organics before they can create advanced synthetics which will kill them and eventually all organic life, space-cows and all. I think it's a f*cking stupid motivation for the whole Reaper conflict to be based on and its introduction handled about as delicately as an airstrike meant to kill a termite infestation, but logically sound on a basic level.

Is your explanation different? Is the Catalyst simply killing advanced organics first to preserve their genetic material in Reaper form, instead of because they'll make synthetics which will wipe out all organic life (which is flora, fauna, bacteria etc.)?

Because, yo dawg, I hear you don't want to be killed by synthetics...

Modifié par The Night Mammoth, 15 mai 2013 - 10:52 .

[Nightdragon8]

so its this arugement agian... flawed logic is flawed logic. considering the fact that they went down the same path, but only stopped short of whiping everything out. The sad part is, "Killing Centillion (thats 10*303) sapienit beings to "prevent a theoretically worse case senario" from happening is DUMB.

I mean a good example would be nuking a city just because someone got a cold, which could turn into plague"

The fact that the Leviethain DLC states that has happened in the past, yet for some reason they where still able to get more thralls to control which means thos kinds of cicles have been going on for even LONGER than the Reapers had been around. And yet the galaxy still seemed to be in "ok" shape.

And really the Leviathains where only annoyed in the fact that it happened, and didn't seem to care otherwise. And they went and made there own AI's despite knowing what happened to everyone else.

Which points to one thing. The only ones that are dumber than the Reaper's are the Leviathains.

I mean really can you seriously justify killing so many people at the "posiblity" that something bad could happen.

I mean it would be like killing someone who just stubbed there toe, on the off chance they get gain-green

[SpamBot2000]

Nightdragon8 wrote...

I mean a good example would be nuking a city just because someone got a cold, which could turn into plague"

 

And then nuking every other city, just to be on the safe side. 

This is no ordinary BS. Somewhere in Wood Buffalo National Park, there is a 2800-pound bull buffalo, fed on an exclusive diet of pages torn from the Mein Kampf and "The Worst Science Fiction Short Stories of 1979", that produced this plotline. And I suspect he's pretty embarrassed about it.

Modifié par SpamBot2000, 15 mai 2013 - 11:42 .

[thejake1453]

The problem of it all comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of language, funnily enough.
A few people here have expressed that the reapers are being controlled, or are just machines. The thing is this is utterly false. They admit it themselves, the Intelligence says
"I embody the collective intelligence of all Reapers".
Think on that for a moment. This intelligence, or the Citadel or whatever you wish to call it, isn't controlling anyone, it isn't even its own singular being.
The "Starchild" is the embodiment of the collective intelligence that is the reapers.
An embodiment is a representation, a solid understandable representation of something.
The Intelligence does not control the reapers, it IS the reapers, they're either one of two things as I see it:
A collection of individual intelligences
or
One intelligence that inhabits all the reapers - In which case the Starchild is in control of the reapers in the same way you are in control of your fingers. When you execute a murderer you don't feel sorry for his fingers because he used those to strangle his victims.

Thats what an embodiment is, just like a national flag is, argauably, the emodiment of the nation itself.

Thats why I choose Destroy - you're wiping out a being that knows what it is doing and is control of its actions - It's no more ethical or unethical as sending in a sniper to try and Assassinate Hitler.

Synthesis to me seems like a reprehensible choice - forcibly changing peoples DNA's, taking choice away from them and making them all different - it seems to go against alot of what we're fighting for. I was fighting for not just survival, but the right to determine our own future. The Geth and Quarians are proof that the starchild's logic is fallible and their is hope for organics.



Thats how I view it anyway. Have the Starchild say somethign else and it would change things.

Modifié par thejake1453, 15 mai 2013 - 11:36 .

[Enhanced]

thejake1453 wrote...

The problem of it all comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of language, funnily enough.
A few people here have expressed that the reapers are being controlled, or are just machines. The thing is this is utterly false. They admit it themselves, the Intelligence says
"I embody the collective intelligence of all Reapers".

Child: "I control the reapers." How does this confuse so many players?

Modifié par Enhanced, 15 mai 2013 - 12:44 .

[thejake1453]

That's just poor Bioware writing, not knowing the meaning of words.
Which I guess is the root of the problem.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

So, I'm supposed to feel bad for this cycle getting turned into robots, but I'm not supposed to feel bad for the cycles that already got turned into robots?

Interesting.

You can feel bad for those cycles all you like. But there's really nothing left of them pst the giant killer robot trying to kill you. Kind of hard to feel bad about that Reaper. 

But you can't stop those cycles from being harvested. You can stop this one from being harvested.

Don't use a strawman argument. 

Modifié par MassivelyEffective0730, 15 mai 2013 - 02:01 .

[Slayer299]

The Night Mammoth wrote...

Auld Wulf wrote...

AlexMBrennan wrote...

It's best to ignore Auld Wulff and Seival as they are either trolling or really really indoctrinated.

I can't read that as anything but: I cannot understand X, thus due to my own personal lack of insight, I will label X with Y [random pejorative] term.

Has anyone else looked at this statement, noticed exactly who posted it, and felt their heart stop at the sheer hypocrisy? 

Raises hand. Yep, that's pretty much it

[MassivelyEffective0730]

Enhanced wrote...

thejake1453 wrote...

The problem of it all comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of language, funnily enough.
A few people here have expressed that the reapers are being controlled, or are just machines. The thing is this is utterly false. They admit it themselves, the Intelligence says
"I embody the collective intelligence of all Reapers".

Child: "I control the reapers." How does this confuse so many players?

Because he contradicts himself almost immediately after by proclaiming that he embodies the collective intelligence of all the Reapers. I can't trust him, not because he's an untrustworthy being (I don't think he's advanced enough to know how to lie), but because he can't tell a straight story and that he doesn't realize this. 

[thejake1453]

Pretty much. An embodiment is an idea, a representation. Thats fact, that's language. So I decide to believe him when he says that, since it makes more sense to me, and that his statement of him being in control of the reapers is just a metaphor, stemming from his original decision to cleanse organic life which has influenced their decision making.