Shaigunjoe wrote...
3DandBeyond wrote...
The whole idea of setting up chaos as necessarily bad is one of the big problems with the ending. Chaos an order are not bad and good respectively. They are neutral concepts. There can be bad order and good chaos. Chaotic math or Fractal Geometry can create beautiful things. Chaos can lead to beneficial mutations and is sometimes one way evolution occurs. Sometimes it's more orderly but often nature throws things at a problem and sees what works and evolution occurs. Chaos is randomness and without it our own personalities would be boring. Randomness helps to create differences and to even aid learning-random thought, streams of thought, and such things. Order that is bad can best be seen with dictatorships or fascist regimes-everything works like clockwork because there is no randomness to anything. Evolution under some orderly process would take forever.
It was the catalyst that thought chaos was necessarily bad. Not sure how you didn't see this part coming, considering we knew from the first game that the reaper's were a periodic threat, imposing a measure of order on the galaxy, of course they thought order was good. In addition, the reapers are lovecraft horrors, and Lovecraft feared chaos more than just about anything else, so not only does it make sense in game, it also makes thematic sense as well.
Also, chaos is not randomness. Here is help with that: http://en.wikipedia....m_chaotic_data.
The reapers feared chaos, they were pretty cool with randomness.
Ok, exactly how was I supposed to know that the catalyst thought chaos was bad in ME1 when the catalyst is non-existent in ME1. And sorry but yes chaos is random, it's a mess. You are speaking merely of the one form of it with chaos theory, but chaos is about a jumble of things, disorganized and by any stretch of the imagination even there is a randomness within it. Chaos Theory is a more organized and has more order within it-the term is even defined as such within Wikipedia as differing in this way from chaos. I did use the example of Chaos Theory because it is a non-linear thing whereas strict order is very linear. And the kid sees things very linearly.
And yes I know the reapers came through periodically. Just because you can assume this means they preferred order doesn't mean it makes any of this any better. That's the point. The reapers displayed order at its worst as punctuated by the kid at the end-and he controls them so they are then an extension of his "desires". That doesn't lead me to conclude that it's oh so cool to decide by complying that he's right and order is the bestest most precious thing ever. Throughout ME, if the reapers had constantly said "we must have order! Stop this foolish nonsense of chaos" it would have been one more reason to think they were just wrong and needed to be gone. But in the end the kid clearly defines order as good, chaos as bad and never does Shepard contest this. In fact, making a choice that serves the idea of order being good and chaos being bad is exactly the problem I have with how chaos/order is presented at the end.
And no, the reapers weren't ok with randomness if they were after order. In fact, they seeded the galaxy with tech just to insure that randomness had as little effect as possible. They returned cyclically and not randomly. They used indoctrination to control things so as to rule out randomness. In fact it's altogether likely that one of the reasons they had problems with Shepard was because before the galaxy had been a pretty orderly place. Even the example of the Protheans is one of a galaxy that sought order. It's one of the reasons why I had problems with the Protheans and the reapers. But in the end all of us unless we refuse to do so, must tacitly agree with this narrow-minded view that order is good, chaos is bad and it's not true.
Retour en haut
