I was terse, but not inaccurate.
Unless you really want me to go in-depth how every ending choice was a violation of the galaxy on some level. Or the narrative dissonance on any but a narrow set of world-states. The completely out of left field nature of the Crucible and the Catalyst. The bizarre messianic attributes attributed to Shepard who, at the end of the day, was just a human. The sense of utter futility I as a player got when I realized that my first playthru was the absolute best possible outcome after five years of constructing my Shepard. And, as I said in my above answer, it sucked.
Your post was dismissive and contributed nothing to the ongoing discussion beyond presenting your dissenting opinion as absolute fact.
You rocked up to yell "You're wrong!" and there is just no useful place we can go from there. Even your next paragraph falls back on the broader reasons you disliked the ending rather than engaging with any of the specific thematic issues under discussion, such as uncertainty, existentialism, Nietzchean philosophy, transhumanism, and whether or not their implementation was successful, appropriate, or intentional.
You didn't like it. That's fine. You don't think what I saw was intentional or well-executed. That's fine.
But when you show up to do nothing except remind everyone of your disdain for the opposing position, there's no useful place we can go from there. That's not an invitation to discuss anything.
Not exactly. The problem is that the story isn't neutral. If the story were neutral with regard to which kind of thing we should consder good or bad, giving equal weight to both sides, there would actually be more uncertaintly if the ending didn't spell out what happened, but it would've left more space for my imagination. As I said in a post very early after ME3 came out, it's not the undefined things in the endings I didn't like but the defined ones: the dark age, the pastoral world with no technology where you end up, such things. If the story doesn't tell me the outcome, I have no problem imagining one for myself. However, ME3's original ending didn't do that. Instead it told me that on a thematic level, the endings will turn out badly.
Interesting - I think here is the crux of our disagreement as I felt then ending was neutral and didn't see the anti-intellectual, regressive message you saw about the possibilities of transhumanism and organic/synthetic relations.
But I think I get why you feel that way. I don't know if you watched the more recent Battlestar Galactica? I adored that show until the ending betrayed everything I felt the show stood for as humans and robots were finally able to live together in peace, to an extent, but at the cost of joyfully embracing a regressive scheme to throw their ships and technology into the sun and a bunch of babble about brains outracing hearts. I hated it. Apparently I'm always going to be on the unpopular side of robot apocalypses starring Tricia Helfer. 
Hopefully as I go through your answers I can explain why I felt the ending of Mass Effect was different and avoided a lot of those anti-intellectual pitfalls, but it is certainly possible that I felt differently because I was using Battlestar Galactica as a reference point.
But I suppose the thing to note here is that I don't feel that either Control or Synthesis will necessarily lead to technological dark ages. Control - in the original ending - was the only one where the animation cut off before the relay exploded, which, along with the Citadel not exploding, implied to me that the relay network was damaged, not destroyed. Synthesis always felt as though the loss of the relay network would be counterbalanced by the unimaginable personal leaps in evolution/tech advancement in a way I struggle to think of as a "dark age" even if there's more difficulty in long-haul interstellar travel.
They are, indeed, terrying and joyful - Interesting that you see that the same way as I do. My problem was that in the original ending, even Synthesis had that hint of a dark age. My impression was - consider the post-credits scene as part of the outcome - that Casey Hudson wanted this to be like a myth that might have played out in the past of a future civilization that hadn't reached the stars again as yet, only told as imperfectly as many of our own myths are because so much had been forgotten in the dark age. With some distance, I can even see the beauty of that, but at the time, it told me the ending destroyed everything I set out to save. That Shepard would die was foreshadowed for a very long time, and as opposed to others, I didn't exactly like that but I could live with it. Destroying galactic civilization, that was different.
Yes, absolutely. People often talk about how Synthesis is immoral because you're forcing a change on nearly every sentient being. But any choice Shepard makes at that point - including nothing - will affect every living being. Synthesis, like transhumanism in the real world, is both fascinating and frightening, and I say that as something of a transhumanist myself. In a sense my fascination with it is from an evolutionary perspective: I think it's inevitable. Our evolutionary niche is tool-building. Using our brains to create technology to compensate for our physical limitations is what we, as a species, have evolved to do. Logically, the ultimate extension of that is us eventually creating a machine that no longer needs us and/or is capable of self-improvement, or incorporating technology into our physical existence on an increasingly radical basis. The idea of being able to consciously direct our evolution rather than adapting generationally, without conscious planning, to our environment, is incredible, but also terrifying when we consider how poor our judgement has sometimes been, particularly with regards to medical ethics and economic justice when it comes to access to healthcare and technology. But either eventuality is a paradigmatic shift that will change our civilisation as we know it.
I definitely read the final scene differently to you. I mean it's deliberately vague - it's hard to know whether the old man is treating space like a fairytale because he's educating a young kid, and wants to impress on him the wonders and scope of space, or if it's because space has become something of a fairytale. I suspect that's because it has to fit with all three endings. You have to be able to believe that that's a Grandpa from an ending where the Reapers were destroyed and the galaxy plunged into a technological dark age. You also have to be able to believe it's part-synthetic Grandpa who might be sharing illustrations of Shepard's story from historical documents wirelessly with his grandson via the nanotechnology in their bodies.
But from my perspective, the old guy knows that there are billions of stars, orbited by planets, housing life. This is a society at least as educationally advanced as 20th century Earth, possibly much more so. If they wanted to hammer home that space travel was more or less lost, then his response to "when will I get to see the stars," would perhaps have been, "one day, I hope," not "one day, my sweet".
I see the epilogue as deliberately flexible.
I wrote quite a bit about that, too, early after ME3 came out. I can dig up the post if you're interested. Interestingly enough, my motivation was to write against the dark age implied by the original endings. As for Synthesis, of course I like its transhumanist implications but I don't like the quasi-religious way it came about, and it betrays the transhumanist theme as much as it embraces it, since transhumanism tends to be a rather individualistic ideology, and transhumanists are rarely as strong in their assertions as when they say they don't want to force anyone to do anything to their own bodies.
Absolutely, I'd be interested!
I find your reaction to synthesis and its religious implications understandable, even though I don't entirely agree. I say entirely because one of the biggest reasons I dislike the Extended Cut was the way it attempted to make synthesis seem like a less ethically complex decision. I mean, I, personally, found it joyful and exhilarating but I'm aware - and my Shepard was aware - that she was making a huge determination with regards to the fate of, well, everyone, essentially without their consent. But the game didn't baby us and hold our hands when we held the fate of the Krogan or the Geth or the Quarians, when we had to make unilateral decisions about their fate, and it didn't need to here either.
Synthesis went from being an option which was presented without moral comment, except for the moral questions raised within Shepard herself (or her player), in the original version to being... I don't know. Some confused mess where the Catalyst tries to explain how it didn't work before because people "weren't ready" but "you" are ready now? Like, does that mean Shepard is ready? That the vast and diverse societies in the galaxy are all, magically, somehow ready because...that sounds nicer? Some hearts-and-rainbows feel-good dodge? It felt like the Catalyst might as well have pulled out a giant "NOT RAPE!" sign in response to all the offensively inappropriate comparisons* that were being made by the fandom at the time. For me that's what shifted it into the realms of...not exactly messianic weirdness, but certainly something adjacent. "Oh but it's different for you because you're just so special and awesome everyone'll be fine with it!" It was...juvenile.
(*I'm not trying to minimise the scope of the changes made to people or dismiss issues of bodily autonomy by saying those comparisons were offensive. It's more I'm tired of shock-tactic comparisons to rape to the point I think it needs a Godwin's Law analogue. We don't need it to express that we find something abhorrent, you know?)
The overall messianic imagery I was okay with actually, but that's because I often enjoy it when religious imagery is used in science fiction narratives. I find the juxtaposition interesting and generally feel like it's adding an interesting thematic layer and feel that the story subverts the imagery, rather than the reverse. I also feel like the messianic imagery has been there for Shepard since the beginning. You begin your adventures on a planet named Eden, which has been despoiled by the discovery of ancient, evil knowledge. In ME2, you die, are resurrected, and must collect twelve disciples, all the while on the run from the Establishment for preaching "the truth". Miranda arguably bears comparison to Mary Magdalene, the morally ambiguous figures who witnesses the messiah's resurrection, and is delivered from sin (Cerberus). Legion is named for a collection of biblical demons, exorcised by Jesus - Legion ultimately ceases being a collection of (traditionally antagonistic) geth and becomes an individual under Shepard's guidance. And of course, ME3 then ends with Shepard dying to save everyone along with Eden imagery, once again, for the survivors. They also named the protagonist, "Shepard" - a title often given to Jesus. It wasn't overwhelming, but it was definitely present.
So...my personal feeling was that this wasn't a problem and also didn't represent a break from how it had been handled previously. I didn't feel like Bioware were trying to tell a religious story. I felt that they were using religious iconography in their science fiction story, and yes, that comes with certain resonances. But this is something that works for me in other shows as well - for instance Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and - up until the final episodes - Battlestar Galactica.
If you have seen BSG, then the following may help explain the difference as I see it. At the end of BSG, it's revealed we are all descendants of the first human/robot hybrid child, but at the same time, the show carefully retconned or killed off every other human/robot child and shifted from suggesting she was the first of her generation, to suggesting she was a one-off, inexplicable miracle. That, to me, shifted the story from one focused on evolution to one focused on intelligent design. At that point it stopped being a story that used religious imagery in deliberate and interesting juxtaposition to its themes and became a story that was just plain-old using religious imagery to make its points. Personally, I didn't feel Mass Effect made that same mistake.
For me, the positive imagery was a problem. Above, I said the story, on a thematic level, told me some things I believe to be bad are good. This is one of them. I was told I should consider this dark age that destroyed everything I set out to save as a good thing. Something survived, yes, but that's a rather abstract concept. The story made me care about my civilization's life, not "something" in general. The Garden Eden imagery also suggested that now we can start anew from a state of technological innocence. Ugh. I really hated that because it meant that we'd forget the past along with losing most of our technology.
Yet again, I wrote quite a few things about how the future might look, and in fact, I chose my own meaning of Synthesis and wrote my own epilogue. It was a lot of work, and a lot of fun at times. The problem: all the time, I had the impression that I was fighting the writers. that exactly that which I extrapolated from one thematic side of the story, the other one told me wasn't intended. The pro-Destroy people are right in one thing: for 2.5 games, the story screamed "Destroy" in my ear at an annoyingly loud volume. I was so very relieved when we got different choices, but these unexpected possibilities, unfortunately, didn't counter enough of the weight of what came before. The ending told me Synthesis was a good outcome, but how could that be if earlier parts of the story left an outright anti-transhumanist impression? How could the story allow me to embrace radical advancement that changed what we are as desirable, when earlier parts of the story - between Miranda's genetic engineering and the genophage - were full of heavy-handed traditionalism? How could I embrace fast-tracked artificial evolution if the antagonists claimed the same theme for themselves?
Well, as I said earlier, I have a lot of empathy for your stance because I was left in a similar position by the end of Battlestar Galactica - unable to accept what I felt was being presented to me as a happy ending as anything other than a tragedy. Like you I also engaged in a project to refine the story to something I could live with, though in my case I created a fan edit of the final half of season four. I also found it rewarding and fun in a lot of ways, but there was an omnipresent, sinking feeling that I was warring against authorial intention.
I cannot explain why I reacted differently to Mass Effect 3's ending in a way I am fully satisfied with, because it comes down to simply not having read the previous thematic synthetic/organic conflicts in the series in such a proscribed, negative or traditionalist way. But I wish I could pin it down more specifically than "that's not what I got out of it."
Again we agree that it was exciting when we were suddenly offered choices other than destruction. Because this was offered at such a crucial point - at a point that would contextualise much of what came before - I feel it is more heavily weighted in terms of the overall message. In itself I feel that the option of something other than destruction, is a strike against reading Mass Effect as traditionalist in its messages on synthetic life.
I felt the persistent techno-organic aspects of the story - including Miranda (and Grunt's) genetic engineering, the genophage, the quarian/geth conflict, humanity's brutal history with Biotic experiments (as exemplified by Jack and to a lesser extent Kaidan), the geth's repeated choice of the Reapers, Shepard's own cyborg body, EDI's unwitting violence as she achieved self-awareness, even Thane's death, caused by a disease that was ultimately the result of a climate change disaster... It's a theme that saturates a huge amount of the series. It's offset occasionally by undeniably positive examples, such as Joker and EDI's relationship, or potential quarian/geth symbiosis, but it's definitely the source of much of the conflict in the series as well.
But in the same way that we can say that political differences are responsible for most wars, it's not the concept of a political opinion that is the issue, if only because we can't avoid having those. It's how we react to and deal with those differences that matters.
With my evolutionary take on transhumanism and our relationship to technology because we are tool-builders, I'd argue the same applies here. We can't avoid the prevalence of technology in our lives, and it probably shouldn't be "death and taxes" it should be "death and technology". Ever since we developed opposable thumbs, this is the basket in which we've placed all of our eggs. Still, the end result is either our obsolescence or changing ourselves radically. That creates inherent conflict. The prevalence of these themes underscored, to me, that this was the central question of the game, but not what the correct reaction was.
I felt the options we had in addressing the conflict were adequately wide-ranging not to impose moral judgement. Destroy favours returning to our organic roots. Synthesis favours embracing our synthetic future. Control provides a policing mechanism powerful enough to maintain the status quo. Thesis, synthesis, antithesis.
I never understood the comparison of Saren's goals or the Reapers' methods with Synthesis because it seems to me self-evident that there's a huge gap between turning someone into a techno-zombie without free will, and giving someone a nanotech upgrade in a way that doesn't seem to affect their personality or autonomy. To put it another way, I feel it's like saying an operation to remove an appendix before it bursts is the same as disembowling someone. Both involve cutting up your midsection and pulling out some of your guts, but the purpose and context could not be more different.
The Eden imagery I do find very interesting and I can see why it could play poorly. But in the Synthesis ending, particularly, I feel that there's something very interesting going on in its juxtaposition with the very start of the game. Eden Prime presents paradise doomed by technological "knowledge" in the form of the beacon. Here technology (knowledge) is external and malignant. Synthesis ends with a synthetic and a (now predominantly) organic couple positioned as Adam and Eve, in a new world where technology (knowledge) is literally painted across your skin; technology has been internalised and is not portrayed as a corrupting influence. To me, at least, the visual message is that in breaking the cycle, we restart it in a healthier place. This Eden does not demand the separation of technology and knowledge from innocence. It is no longer a polluting force.
That very uncertainty you mention allowed me that, so I rather appreciate it. The more defined parts of the story, however, did their best to kill what I drew from that with their dropped anvils.
I'm not quite familiar with existentialist philosophy, but if "there is no predefined meaning in the world" is one of its main precepts, then it's exactly what I believe. I make my own meaning, I don't need to be told what things mean by someone else. However, if you read or play a story, and attempt to determine what it might mean for you, you have to use the imagery and the themes the story presents to you, and I think it's very hard to write and present those in a way that doesn't suggest some meaning that exists in the minds of the writers. Also, the more experience of stories you have, the more you're conditioned by the meanings suggested by the use of certain tropes, and those meanings come across regardless of whether or not the writers are aware of them. Thus, my impression that I had to fight the writers in order to draw some non-depressing meaning from the story.
In terms of literary criticism I have a lot of time for reader-response theory, which holds that the intentions of an author aren't as important as the reader's perceptions of them. I'm sure that part of my ability to embrace that uncertainty is related to my perceptions of their intentions too.
Though it does raise an interesting question. If we both believe that "there is no predefined meaning in the world" (which yes, is one of major pillars of existentialism), but we also believe that a story will always hold signifiers dropped - intentionally or otherwise - by the author, is it possible to tell a story that engages with the idea of meaninglessness? If it isn't, and if that's a major feature of our universe, that's...a strange situation to be in, given the function of stories in our society as things that help us discuss and form opinions on our world.
For myself, that's why I found it so interesting that this was replicated in the mechanics. In the way that the guidance system of paragon/renegade and confirmation of consequence were removed. Because - at least to an extent - that forces the experience to exist within us, rather than in anything from the author.
No, he wasn't, but in ME2 you had the option to decide against TIM. In ME3 you didn't have the option to decide against the Catalyst until after the EC, and even then it was a bad option. With regard to technological themes, ME3 did some things right that its predessors didn't, but at the same time ME3 introduced that quasi-religious interpretation of sacrifice, both in the case of Legion and of Shepard, that IMO undermined the technological themes.
As with many things in the ending, the Catalyst is fascinating as a concept. I didn't have any problem wrapping my mind around the idea of a completely non-human godlike AI that acted on principles a human wouldn't be able to consider. On this level, the questionable morality of the ending choices wasn't just not a problem, but perfectly adequate to the entity that presented them to me. I can imagine myself in that situation, and the idea of having to make a decision under those circumstances is terrifying, but does not present a problem if what little you're told of the outcomes is coherent. However, it wasn't. In fact, the presentation of Synthesis in particular was of a kind that insulted my intellect. What happened then? I left the in-world perspective and switched into the storytelling perspective, and then the thematic inconsistencies of the story that were meaningless in the in-world perspective swooped down and exploded into my face.
In the end, I think it would be most correct to say I have a love/hate relationship with the endings. I see their potential, and I can deal with the uncertainty, but I can make no choice without a sense of having been betrayed. Even that alone might have not soured me towards the story, but there are two other counts of having been betrayed: Shepard's characterization was taken from me and my favorite NPC's story and characterization went in a direction I hated. So, it was a bumpy ride, occasionally great, occasionally anything but, but I'm glad it's in the past.
I don't think I have anything to add here that I haven't already covered in my monster reply, but I did want to thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed and thoughtful response. Your feelings on the way synthesis was presented as superficially progressive, but subtextually regressive, for instance, were particularly interesting.
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(which in and of itself could be a philosophical underpinning of ME3's endings).
