ME3 End: Do you agree with the Reapers?

[Coreless]

Um, no.

Because the "solution" is the most ridiculous idea ever. While it sort of make sense to get rid of advanced lifeforms to protect lower forms of life from being destroyed by the synthetics that the higher forms of life made, just looking at the Geth/Quarian peace situation completely blows the God Child's theory that synthetics will always destroy organics out of the water.

And you are complexity ignoring the fact tat the ONLY reason peace was able to be made between the two races was because of the impending threat of total annihilation by the Reapers.

Had there been no reapers there would have been no sovereign, no Saren going rouge, no Geth attack on Eden prime, no Shepard doing ANYTHING in ME1, no Legion being built to find Shepard, no Shep finding Legion, no bringing together of the two races.

Had the Reapers not shown up the Geth would have remained as they were, behind the Perseus veil suffering from on again off again attacked by vengeful Quarrian's and other organics hateful of AI which very likely could have led to an AI/Organic war, despite the Geth's want for peace.

Do not try to take actions that only resulted because of the existence of the Reapers as proof of what things would be like without them.

It is terribly flawed logic.

Secondly because pace was made does not guarantee that it would last, the prospect for an AI/Organic war are just as likely after peace was made as they were before peace was made.

Nor does the fact peace was made with the Geth mean future synthetic races relationships would turn out the same

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey1cCgdgOEw (I can't get the youtube linking to work >.<)

Javik says it really well.

But just because there is a peace between Geth and Quarians right now doesn't mean they won't grow and try to wipe out Organics further down the line. As well as Humanity has also been toying with AI systems, so what if that goes rogue and builds a massive amount of creatures that wipes out anything and everything because humanity decided not to follow Council regulations?

To me, the Reaper's Ideas make completely logical sense, if they had wiped out all synthetics and left all organics left, how long would it take for the organics to rebuild the synthetics all over again? And the entire process was pointless to complete.
Now wiping out the organics what know how to create synthetics removes any knowledge that could recreate synthetics for a large number of years, (Say up to 50,000).

^What they have said, I have always felt that the underlying essence of the Mass Effect universe was always, that as cold, unsympathetic and incomprehensible as the Reapers are to us, they are the necessary evil that preserves the continuity of organic life as a whole. It isn't the most ideal solution, but it is a solution none the less and one that has been in effect for who knows how long.

The phrase "You have more choice than you deserve" I think for me was the line that the catalyst said that really made it hit home just how methodical and unsympathetic the thinking behind it is. The fact that they even allowed us time to enjoy some merit of a civilization before being removed I guess is their way of saying what they never could, "your welcome, enjoy it while it lasts". The conversations with Sovereign and Legion are always the highlights of my playthroughs because they hint at a much darker, colder vision of the cosmos beyond anything organics could understand or accept and to me that is as fascinating as it is terrifying.

Do I agree with the Reapers? Of course not, I think its safe to say that no organic would ever agree with them if they value their soul of their culture, but in the words of Sovereign.....

"Reaper? A label created by the Protheans to give voice to their destruction. In the end, what they chose to call us is irrelevant, we simply are. Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither, and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it".

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I'm quoting you!

I'm quoting you too!

Alright, something just occurred to me, so I'll ask you guys, as you seem like the likeliest candidates to at least try and make sense of this.

So you're the Reapers. You're an advanced form of Synthetic, or Synthetic/Organic hybrid life. you've decided on this Cycle theory, and you set about laying out the Mass Relays and Citadel as elaborate honey traps so you can direct the growth of organic life to make things easier for yourself when it's harvesting time.

Why on earth would you not prepare them? Indoctrinate them, in a way? You're clearly familiar with the concept. Why not instill in them the idea, the religion, that every 50,000 years they're going to "ascend" or something? Why not make it positive? Why not present yourself as a friend? As a god? As a benevolent force? A protector?

Furthermore, why not make it painless? Why not make yourself appear noble? Why create the most menacing looking vessels imaginable, and then crash around exploding everything with giant lasers, while sending monstrosities bursting through doors to violently savage people? Are you not just maximizing hostility and resistance and making your job unnecessarily difficult, not to mention extraordinarily traumatic for the species you are ostensibly working to protect?

 

[OldNewNewOld]

Yes and no.

I agree with them, but I wouldn't like that to happen when I'm alive. Although... I would actually. That would imply that we have space travelling which would be really cool. ^^

Now, people say look at the Quarian/Geth.

First of all, that peace was forced on the by the Reaper and Shepard. In a normal situation, there would be no peace between them.

The Geth never wanted the war, but they had to save them self. As Shepard said, they saved them self as any organic would have. The Geth are logical being, they see everything in math. What is better for the, a meaningless war, or peace where they could develop even more?
Ofc. it's peace.

But we organics aren't so. We do shit because of shit. We will do something even tho it's completely irrational and illogical. Just look at our past. Wars over a single women, slavery, hate, wars because of skin color... Even tho war was the worst option, we picked it over and over again.

Peace between the Geth and the Quarians would last until few generations later when it's forgotten why they accepted peace. A new generation will want to enslave the Geth, to reprogram them. But next time the Geth will choose to kill every Quarian. If the Quarian stat a war again, it proves that peace isn't possible. So what is better, to just push them of your world so that they can come later again or to kill every Quarian to prevent them from doing the same thing again? It's only logical to exterminate the root of the problem. As long as Quarians exist, Geth will not be safe no matter how they want it. So instead of fighting a small war over and over again, they will go all out and simply solve the problem for all times.

How will the galaxy react? You think they will accept them after doing something like that? Sooner or later someone else will start a war against the Geth. They will exterminate them also.

And if at some point the Geth become to strong for anyone else to fight them, they don't have a logical reason to keep organics alive because they will just waste the limited resources.

That is at least how I look at the situation.

I love the Geth, but coexistence isn't really possible on the long run.
Logical being can't live with illogical. We humans would start a war for some dumb shit and they wouldn't tolerate us. As I said, it's logical to solve the problem once and for all, not just for the time being. So if that means killing every entity of one species, so be it.

The only thing that could save organics from the Geth is Shepard. They don't forget the real history. We learned that during the cyber mission with Shepard. Even with the Quarians attacking them all the time, they didn't want the war. But they had no choice.
But I don't think that would keep them for too long. At some point it wouldn't be possible to stay loyal to the past if the present is trying to kill you.

it is the safest and most sound plan to just kill everything over and over.

It's the easiest plan. There's no effort in that plan and there's no understanding of the value of life.

Which makes sense for the Reapers, but it's also why I believe that the Reapers were so incredibly wrong in their solution.

Actually, it's opposite of that.
The Reaper are the one which now the real value of life, which is the reason why they try to SAVE it. As I said, at some point, it's not possible to have Synthetics and Organics live in the same universe. First because we, organics, aren't logical beings and we will repeat some mistakes and go to war, second because resources are limited and it's not logical to stop your development for someone else shake. It makes sense to sacrifice your self for someone else only if you use your emotions instead of brain. Unless your sacrifice is for your races own good (i.e. Legion dying to improve all Geth).

We humans aren't able to accept someone we created as our equals. Hell, we can't accept other humans as our equals. How are we going to accept a machine that we created? We will not allow our creation to surpass us even if it means a full scale war. It's human nature to do shit.
And by human nature I mean nature of all organics.

And if the Reaper wait for too long, maybe it will be to late and even they won't be able to stop that cycle's synthetics. And by just talking with the Citadel AI, you could feel that they don't like they idea of what they are doing, but they know they have no other solution. It's not an easy plan if you have to do something that you don't want to do.

That's why they also create Reaper out of the organics they harvest. They let them "live" in Reaper form. Some sort of "sorry" for what they did. That and the fact that they need resources and wasting them isn't really smart. But they could use the resources on other, more effective ways, but they choose to keep the advanced organics "alive".

 

[him over there]

Well the reapers, at least what I took away from them was they're essentially the anti spirals. So no I don't agree with them, especially since most of the games proved Shepherd showed he could break the cycle.

Seriously anti spirals, did anyone else get that?

 

[T.D.]

Well if the Indoctrination theory is correct then they are trying to make you agree with them. I'm personally of the opinion they're just trying to trick you.
However leaving that aside.

I still disagree with the Reapers that organics and synthetics can't coexist. It would depend on the programming of the AI as really organics and synthetics have less reason to fight than other forms of life. They don't need food, water or oxygen, merely electricity, so its not like we need to compete with them.

However the programming or way of thinking could quite plausibly cause problems for organics, but if it is true AI then it shouldn't be any different to another form of life, albeit an immortal one.

 

[The Heik]

What the game actually presented us as the Reapers' motivation was so lackluster and flat, that I don't even deem it worthy of discussing whether or not I agreed with it. It was fucking stupid, and it never should've been there in the first place.

If the explanation had been as simple as "we are the top of the food chain and we harvest organic civilizations to reproduce" that would have made sense, so why they decided to go in that direction is beyond my ability to comprehend.

They spent the first two games saying that the Reaper's goals are incomprehensible.

Most people can't comprehend the Reaper's goals. Bioware went meta.

No, I comprehend that the reaper's goals don't make a lick of sense.

They may not make sense to you, but they do to me. If you factor in that the Reapers as a whole are flawed.

Synthetics kill organics so some god child invented other synthetics to kill organics before organics invent synthetics that kill organics.
Very sensical and well thought out.

You already know it's not as simple as that. This thread has some good discussion about the Reapers motivation. It's more nuanced than that simple sentence. It just seems like you've already made up your mind.

Why should we believe the starchild? What makes it better than the other AIs? If all AI are bound to betray organics as he says, who says he doesn't betray us? Why are we forced to accept a short explanation at the very end of the game without having any option to question his goals?

Alright, so you don't believe the Catalyst. The Reapers destroy galactic civilization and the cycle continues. Do you think that would be a better ending?

I'm saying that the whole explanation of the starchild is flawed. To many informations are withheld and we are forced to suddenly believe an entirely new character. We don't know what consequences our choices have and for all we know we might just have doomed everything we fought for anyways.

That's... pretty much the point of all the games in the series. If you already knew what consequences your choices would have, what's the point in providing a choice at all? Take the rachni queen. Saving her could possibly doom the entire galaxy to a new rachni invasion. You don't know. That's what makes a choice relevant.

In fact, I'd go so far as in saying the Catalyst provides you with a lot more information than the aforementioned rachni queen. The Catalyst explains what happens after each choice.

This is very much an information vs knowledge situation

The Rachni, though we are not told too much about them directly, are subtly shaped for by events that we as a player see in the game in little tidbits, allowing our minds to form our own image on the situation. Thus when you actually get to the actual decision, you have a clear understanding of the implications, giving the choice weight.

The Catalyst on the other hand, comes right out of nowhere and dumps a whole lot of exposition and detail on to you, overwhelming and confusing the player with data that doesn't mesh with the world they've been exploring for the past 100 or so hours. As a result there are no implications that the player can garner, and no one choice will seems better than the others to the player (and considering that they're all pretty much the same in action, they are even less clear).

For games the first example is by far the better option because it meshes with an interactive medium. We as a player are new to whatever game world we enter even if our PC is not, so we need to be shown the world we're a part of and the effects of the decisions we make, not just bold-facedly be told them and expected to roll with it.

 

[XMark]

I think the Reapers were selfish in their motivation. The "kill organics with synthetics to prevent organics being killed by synthetics" argument actually makes sense - they're only wiping out the advanced civilizations, and allowing less advanced ones to continue to live, whereas just letting synthetics take over the galaxy would mean a final permanent end to ALL organic life.

I'm guessing that during the time of the original race which created the reapers, this was true. They were likely facing a much more hostile version of the Geth that necessitated the whole crazy Reaper plan just like the Flood necessitated making the Halos in Halo.

But a cycle or two later the Reapers gained an identity as their own race and a superiority complex to go with it. No longer truly concerned with the protection of organic life. They basically turned into harvesters breeding high-tech organic life only to consume them to create more of themselves, at the same time ensuring that no race ever reaches a technology level high enough to challenge them.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Is it terribly cynical of me not to trust someone who's trying to convince you not to kill him in self defence?

Nooo....that's rational. If at the crux of a conflict your enemy cheerfully points you towards something he assures you is the means of his destruction, you should at the bare minimum greet this with a healthy dose of skepticism.

 

[Terminate421]

Nope, entire civilizations have died to them. I did not regret smiting them

 

[SajuukKhar]

Legion wasn't build to find Shepard.
Legion was the one Geth, who fought back against the Quarians, when they wanted to kill all geth.
Or am i missing something?
And btw: The Geht NEVER wanted to kill all quarians, which makes the theory of the godchild wrong nontheless.

Play Me2 again, Legion was a special Geth platform designed to operate outside of Geth space alone to find Shepard after he disappeared.
.
.
Also just because Geth don't WANT war doesn't mean they wouldn't have gone to it had they felt sufficiently threatened by a organics group.

The desire for peace =/= negate the possibility for war.

 

[Texas Joker 52]

I thought it made a strange sort of sense, but it certainly didn't feel... Right for that to be the Reapers motivation. Throughout Mass Effects 1 and 2, I always felt that the Reapers used to be a race much like Humans, Turians, or any other that exist in-game, only they felt that the logical course of evolution is to fuse themselves in mass numbers to machinery, forming the first Reapers.

After, their immortality probably twisted them mentally, as well as having the logic of machines, until they decided to harvest all sufficiently advanced organic, and even synthetic life, as their way of propagation and reproduction. Their circle of life, as it were. Their periods of self-imposed exile would be almost like their version of bears hibernating in the winter, or simply a way to pass the time before organics were advanced enough to be harvested again.

The rest would simply be muddled mystery. Or at least, that's how I would have written them.

 

[Savagezion]

No, synthetics who kill organics every cycle to prevent synthetics killing organics is retarded and they need to update their OS as they are clearly outdated. If this was their intention, why wouldn't the reapers just stay local and crush any synthetic uprising, or stay local and destroy life on planets that did create synthetics? What exactly is the point of retreating to deep space? One could only assume they are off in other galaxies terrorizing them with moronic logic.

I'm guessing that during the time of the original race which created the reapers, this was true. They were likely facing a much more hostile version of the Geth that necessitated the whole crazy Reaper plan just like the Flood necessitated making the Halos in Halo.

I have though of this before too but it still begs the question of how they built all this stuff when they were under the threat of extinction. The most logical conclusion is that it was a fail safe, but that meant they had enough time to plan ahead and this whole thing was not thought through. It makes more sense as an act of desperation but then you have to wonder how they designed and constructed all this in such a short time.

But a cycle or two later the Reapers gained an identity as their own race and a superiority complex to go with it. No longer truly concerned with the protection of organic life. They basically turned into harvesters breeding high-tech organic life only to consume them to create more of themselves, at the same time ensuring that no race ever reaches a technology level high enough to challenge them.

I think it would make more sense to call them synthesis organisms that have been driven mad due to the process of synthesis. The way organics think and feel clashes against how synthetics would and it could easily be seen as "maddening" and would also explain their screwed up logic. Whoever it was that built this would think that organic + synthetic provides immortality. Then you begin to see how this screwed up perspective actually falls in line with what the Catalyst is talking about. It is a half baked scheme but to this dumb kid, it is perfectly rational as he has been driven insane. The reapers are then essentially an abomination of organic's quest for immortality. An abomination that feels it made the right decision and is truly enlightened and the next step in evolution.

 

[Savagezion]

I thought it made a strange sort of sense, but it certainly didn't feel... Right for that to be the Reapers motivation. Throughout Mass Effects 1 and 2, I always felt that the Reapers used to be a race much like Humans, Turians, or any other that exist in-game, only they felt that the logical course of evolution is to fuse themselves in mass numbers to machinery, forming the first Reapers.

After, their immortality probably twisted them mentally, as well as having the logic of machines, until they decided to harvest all sufficiently advanced organic, and even synthetic life, as their way of propagation and reproduction. Their circle of life, as it were. Their periods of self-imposed exile would be almost like their version of bears hibernating in the winter, or simply a way to pass the time before organics were advanced enough to be harvested again.

The rest would simply be muddled mystery. Or at least, that's how I would have written them.

Haha, you ninja'd me.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

PATHETIC SELF QUOTE

Alright, something just occurred to me, so I'll ask you guys, as you seem like the likeliest candidates to at least try and make sense of this.

So you're the Reapers. You're an advanced form of Synthetic, or Synthetic/Organic hybrid life. you've decided on this Cycle theory, and you set about laying out the Mass Relays and Citadel as elaborate honey traps so you can direct the growth of organic life to make things easier for yourself when it's harvesting time.

Why on earth would you not prepare them? Indoctrinate them, in a way? You're clearly familiar with the concept. Why not instill in them the idea, the religion, that every 50,000 years they're going to "ascend" or something? Why not make it positive? Why not present yourself as a friend? As a god? As a benevolent force? A protector?

Furthermore, why not make it painless? Why not make yourself appear noble? Why create the most menacing looking vessels imaginable, and then crash around exploding everything with giant lasers, while sending monstrosities bursting through doors to violently savage people? Are you not just maximizing hostility and resistance and making your job unnecessarily difficult, not to mention extraordinarily traumatic for the species you are ostensibly working to protect?

Nothing on this? No one? I thought this was a reasonable observation. I figured Nimcha would at least take a crack at it.

 

[SajuukKhar]

No, synthetics who kill organics every cycle to prevent synthetics killing organics is retarded and they need to update their OS as they are clearly outdated. If this was their intention, why wouldn't the reapers just stay local and crush any synthetic uprising, or stay local and destroy life on planets that did create synthetics? What exactly is the point of retreating to deep space? One could only assume they are off in other galaxies terrorizing them with moronic logic.

Because that isn't the logical solution.

Destroying only synthetics still leaves the organic races at a technological level that would allow them to remake AIs. Leaving organics alive means the rate at which The Reapers have to war is drastically increased, as would be their resource requirements, and their need to harvest organics to replace numbers lost in these wars, which would inevitably piss of organics to the point that they atack and the Reapers have to kill them off anyways.

Not only that but destroying only synthetics, along with the increased resource needs and organic harvesting would lead to a exponentially increased rate at which worlds are mined dry. Meaning less habitable worlds at a faster rate.

It is safest, and most resource effective, to just destroy organics before they make synthetics in the first place.