Good post, but I don't completely agree.
3. The geth/quarian conflict is presented as one-sided – The Rannoch arc is pretty unsubtle the whole way through. Where in ME2 we were presented with a complicated picture between Legion, Tali, and the admirals, in ME3 the wind only blows in one direction. It’s presented as if the entirety of the blame rests on the quarians and that the geth were completely innocent of the matter.
For the record, I do think the quarians are mostly at fault for the Morning War, but they jammed that down my throat trying to make the geth into gentle, frolicking, peace-loving victims who did nothing wrong, when previous games established how they had butchered the vast majority of the quarian race and have consistently killed envoys in the 300 years since.
Even ME2 pushed all the blame on the quarians while painting the geth as innocent puppies. This wasn't just in ME3. In ME2, there's nothing you can do to make Shepard question Legion and its people's actions. I absolutely hated this.
Legion says the geth want peace? They rejected and ignored every communication and call for peace from organics in the last 300 years. During this whole time they killed anyone who entered their space without warning, which also includes ambassadors and emissaries from other species that never even tried to harm them. They want to understand organics, but they refuse to communicate. The geth knew the heretics were committing genocide on organics and what have they done about this? Nothing. They knew about the Reapers, so did they bother warning the rest of the galaxy about them? No.
We don't know exactly what happened during the geth war. What are the details behind it? This was one of the most important and curious questions I had during the trilogy, but the writers completely ignored it. Or should I say, they tried sweeping it under the rug?
The little we know about the Morning War is that before the war, the quarian population on Rannoch alone was in billions. What was the total population of quarians on other planets they colonized before the war? Now the Migrant Fleet, which has grown over the years, has a population of 17 million. The quarians have lost over 99% of their numbers. The point I'm trying to make is that no factor, or even combination of factors, can account for the loss of life on the quarian's side except for one: a very organized campaign of mass extermination. Nuclear war, collateral damage, disease, famine, natural disasters, injury etc. cannot account for such a massive scale of death suffered by the quarians during the conflict. Nothing exterminates over 99% of a multi-planet wide population of sapients except a deliberate campaign of extermination.
What happened to the civilians who surrendered and were left under geth rule? What happened to all the quarians who supported the geth before and during the uprising. Why didn't the geth allow any quarians to return, including the ones who defended the geth?
The geth had clear superiority during the war. They won the war in just one year! This points out the geth could have used other options to deal with the quarians, but they decided to go for full genocide.
Sorry Legion, but you'll have to excuse me if I find it hard to believe that your people want peace.
I hate the quarian and geth arc. Because according to the writers, I'm not supposed to be asking about these kind of questions. I'm not supposed to question and look into the dark side of the geth. I'm not supposed to ask about the mass slaughter of innocents and children done by the geth. Instead, what I'm actually supposed to be asking myself is "does this unit have a soul".
In both ME2 and ME3, the writers were sweeping the geth wrongdoings under the rug. Even worse, they tried hard to reach out the screen and slap players with geth innocence. And if the players didn't buy their innocence, the writers would then try to reach out the screen and slap players for being cold ignorant jerks who apparently have deep insecurities about synthetics.
BioWare tried conveying a different reality than the one they actually conveyed.
When Legion discovered that the heretics had changed enough to sneak spy software onto geth servers, they were astonished.
I strongly disagree with this part because it didn't make any sense. Why is Legion asking itself what have they done wrong? Is this supposed to be another bad attempt from the writers to manipulate the player's feelings?
During this scene, the main thing I wanted Shepard to ask Legion was: "So you didn't think it was possible for the heretics to spy on you like this? Then... how the hell did your people find out about the heretic virus in the first place? Were you honestly not spying on them?"
Wasn't this actually confirmed later on when Legion quoted the conversation between Shepard and Sovereign from Virmire? How else would the geth know about this unless they spied on the Heretics too?