Robosexual wrote...
drayfish wrote...
Robosexual wrote...
So to be clear your entire point, your entire criticism of the hard choices that you spread out over six paragraphs of pure nonsense, is:
They should have concentrated on some of the more grey and black aspects of it.
That's it? You talk about Bioware sending a message despite the fact it has nothing to do with your point? You dislike the hard choices at the end of the game purely by what it decides to concentrate on after said choice is made, and the "message" this sends out is entirely irrelevant to this? It's literally just a pointless observation created to fill space in your post?
Since you seem to be having trouble understanding me (and are getting pretty worked up over 'six paragraphs of pure nonsense'), I can summarise it with less syllables:
They are not hard choices.
That's the problem.
Bioware turned genocide, eugenics and totalitarianism into cheery win-states where no one feels anything but joy.
How you find being pandered to in such a way 'deep' or 'difficult' (or why you find anyone who doesn't want to have war-crimes unreservedly celebrated in fiction hard to comprehend) is a little mystifying.
I never called it deep.
So then, what hard choices would you create? And, what's your point about "war-crimes" in fiction? You keep on making that observation without actually making a point. Is it that fiction should conform to your morals? Fiction shouldn't present morally grey choices?
Because saying the choices aren't hard, not presenting an alternative, and making an observation, isn't a point. It's just paragraphs of pure nonsense. Pointless sentences that go nowhere and say nothing.
You seem a little confused. You keep asking me questions, while simultaneously insulting me for talking too much and offering 'Pointless sentences that go nowhere and say nothing'. ...And the fact that you keep falling back on cheap, slightly hysterical stereotypes (
You just can't handle anthing that questions your morals!!!) rather than actually reading what I'm saying is a little sad.
So since you're not going to bother reading anything I write anyway (or continue to fraudulently lump it into a big pile of indulged whinging that you can happily ignore), I'll answer your questions by repeating something I've said elsewhere:
It is a sign of just how artless and hamfisted the writers of
Mass Effect 3 were that they paint such moral compromises with such arbitrarily glowing, celebratory results. Every one of the endings as we have them forces the player to commit an immoral action - forcing us to comply with a war crime 'win-state', then shows little to no negative consequences for this choice, with voiceovers, allies, and generations of future life, all praising the action without reservation.
It's ...
lazy. At best. More accurately its asinine. Pure, unadulterated indulgence that make-believes at being philosophically profound.
In contrast, there is a wealth of artists and writers who have confronted these subjects throughout literary and filmic history, all of whom do not so witlessly brush over the multiplicity of interpretations and meaning at their heart. (Indeed, I cannot think of any that fail to do so in the way that
Mass Effect does that isn't immediately labelled 'propaganda'.)
If you do actually want to explore warfare depicted in grey, ethically complex scenarios that present humanity forced into genuine compromise, I would suggest
The Iliad,
The Aeneid,
Catch 22, Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's
Othello (actually pretty much any of Shakespeare's war narratives),
The Thin Red Line,
Three Kings, or Hemingway's
For Whom The Bell Tolls...
Literally, there is a whole history of war-narratives that do not fall into that trap -
that is what makes them legitimate works of crisis literature. It's what makes them extraordinary. They are not texts that conclude with 'happy shiny joy endings'; they all communicate the multifaceted nature of warfare, showing its atrocities and heartbreak and bravery and compassion; and none of them (not even
The Aeneid, which was a book of war and invasion
written by the invaders) resort to such simplistic moral relativism.
Mass Effect, in contrast, simplifies such complexity to three arbitrary options - the 'only ways' to win this war. It would be comical to see how ham-fistedly this premise plays out if what it was forcing its players to do were no so pernicious and vile. Anything that simplifies such actions to an either/or scenario, and ultimately trips over itself to soothe you shamelessly into believing that really,
what you did wasn't so bad, proves itself incapable or having anything meaningful to say about such sacrifice or philosophical intricacy in the first place.
If, instead, the game wanted to present genuine hard choices there are plenty of things it could have done rather than pander to players who want to pretend that the horror they have committed was no big deal...
Were the price of Destroy non-discriminate death (Reapers blow up and kill whoever is nearby, for example), rather than a targeted extermination of a specific race in order to stop the targeted extermination of races, I would find it had genuine gravitas.
Were Synthesis about the proposed voluntary alteration of species (Shepard becoming an advocate for the evolutionary future that all could embrace rather than have her force it upon them), it could be a beautiful, potentially mournful vision of the need to adapt and change together, to become something greater.
Were Control about freeing the Reapers from their servitude, sacrificing Shepard to break the hold the Catalyst had upon these brutalised civilisations, innocents mutilated to become the tools of further devastation.
Were this tale genuinely about the price of these actions, not simply 'Which atrocity do you
like better because none of them really matter anyway', then it would have actually had some substance, somethign worthy of exploring and medidating upon, rather than the lazy, vapid indulgence they provided.
Modifié par drayfish, 28 juin 2013 - 01:47 .
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