Greatjusticeman said:
I just wanted to pop in here and say good post, OP. This is an ending to think about and that's something a lot of people aren't doing.
Shepard's story ended when he died. Everyone what's to know what is happening now around the galaxy. Well, is it that hard? Everyone is rebuilding and coming together. That's what happens when a crisis ends. You don't need blocks of text or cut scenes, it's obvious and there.
Also, guys, the AI that Shepard talks to at the end is the Catalyst. Not space god, not kid god, not spacekidai god....the Catalyst, it literally calls itself the Catalyst. A lot of you aren't even paying attention.
Not sure if trolling, or missing the point entirely.
First off, depending on how you played and which ending you picked, you get a cutscene that hints Shepard survived. So saying that "Shepard's story ended when he died" is just a lazy copout that doesn't even apply to everyone. So it is a valid concern to know what exactly happens to him/her, especially since scientifically, how he/she survives doesn't make a lick of sense and is poorly explained anyway.
Second, no, it's not obvious and there. Why would you immediately assume that with The Reaper issue taken care of one way or the other that the universe just instantly falls back into the norm, and everyone lives happily ever after? Excuse me if I sound harsh but, do you even understand the implications every ending provides with just the destruction of the mass relays alone? Do you realize that a majority of the species that your fleet was comprised of is now stranded in the solar system, some of them without the appropriate food source they need to survive? Or the billions of life forms in the other galaxies who are now stranded, without transport or their world leaders? So no, you DO need walls of texts and cut scenes to provide information on how everything worked out; that's the purpose of an EPILOGUE, in case you didn't know. It's meant to tie loose ends, and the endings to ME3 lack this action.
Third, and this is the part where I seriously start to consider the possibility of you just trolling; The Catalyst is a metaphysical, self-entitled keeper of order in the universe via Reapers, who takes the form of a child. Aka, a god child. I don't understand how you don't get that. You seem to be taking the information provided to you by the game very brief but literal. Just because he says he's the Catalyst, doesn't NOT make him a god child. Quite literally he states that his entire purpose is to bring order to chaos, using methods that he and his creators deemed best to prevent the permanent extinction of organic life at the hands of synthetic life...by using synthetic life to pacify, for lack of a better word, all advanced organic life. So again, for lack of a better phrase, he's playing GOD with anything that has a heartbeat. Why? Because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
All these reasons and more are why people have an issue with the endings to begin with, and why your argument of "you people are just not paying attention" is completely flawed. The issue that seems to be escaping
your line of vision is that people have paid more attention than you have. And that's not me trying to be a dick, unless you're just trolling, in which case, it is.