Just off the top of my head:
- Why is Joker running away with the Normandy through a Mass Relay Jump?
- How did your squadmates that were just with you running towards the elevator get onto the Normandy?
- If the Star Child was on the Citadel the whole time, what was the point of Sovereign?
- Why did Harbringer fly off when clearly Sheppard was still alive and lurching towards the elevator?
- The argument is that synthetics will inevitably rise and wipe out the organics. The solution: Develop synthetics to wipe out the organics. Why not just make the Reapers wipe out the synthetics?
- Why won't his "solution" not work anymore now that Shepard walked there. The Star child could just kill Shepard and everything would have been fine.
- Why did the organics over millions of years build the Crucible when they didn't even know that the catalyst was the Citadel. How could you even develop something like the Crucible without knowing that? The Citadel is the main part. It's like developing a brake without knowing was a car was.
- We already know that when a Mass Relay is destroyed, it causes a supernova wiping out the entire solar system it's in. So when you see those waves cascading across the galaxy, hasn't this effectively killed off untold trillions of people across the galaxy?
- The entire theme in Mass Effect has been getting wildly different people to work together, and that diversity is awesome. The arguably best ending basically causes everyone to be exactly the same.
- Why did the Reapers even assess the Geth for purposes of reapearification if their goal was to absord all the intelligent organic life?
- Why would they record history's organic life in reaper form when a lot of them die trying to wipe out the galaxy every cycle?
I'm just quoting Divvy as he summed up all the other points. Also, keep in mind that I'm not trying to dis anyone, this is all in fun for me as I enjoy the universe and talking about it.
- totally agree with the Normandy & crew scene, especially since the squadmate I took with me showed up in the end scene. Although, one could argue that Joker was back up in space during the final fight, and started to run when the Citadel opened up. But that's a bit of a stretch.
- Was the starchild ON the Citadel? In my 2 viewings, he said he WAS the Citadel. So if the Protheans altered the Keepers, would they not have also altered the Citadel and subsequently the starchild? Maybe the starchild race 'ascended' themselves into the Citadel after creating the Reapers and then sat back and took a passive role throughout the cycles?
- good question, why did Harbinger fly off?
- Just to nitpick: Reapers are not pure synthetics, they are created from organics, so they are a hybrid (intermediate step in the evolution that the Starchild talks about?) Another good question re: why not just destroy synthetics? Well, what good will that do if it's inevitable that synthetics will be re-created again anyways? The cycle has been going on for at least 37 million years (740 cycles), and presumably organics have created synthetics that brought them to the verge of total annihilation every time.
- Shepard was the first organic to reach the inner sanctum of the Citadel. Ever. In 37 million years. Once the cycle was 'broken' a new contingency had to be accounted for.
- People make alot of things that they don't know what the full repercussions are. Take a look at nuclear weapons in our own history. If we are also to believe that organic evolution was 'guided' somehow by Reaper/Starchild technology, maybe it was inevitable that organics would eventually construct a Crucible-like countermeasure. Remember, organic = chaos, and that's hard to predict.
- Yeah, the relay destruction is tricky, the only thing I came up with is that the only relay destroyed to date was by a ginormous asteroid colliding with it. Perhaps the Crucible induced deactivation is less destructive, and only affects the lifeforms that you chose to save/destroy?
- Well, I dunno if the theme of the entire series is about 'United Colors of Benetton'. I saw it more about order vs. chaos, creator vs. creation. And are they all 'the same' now? They are all similar being that they are fused with synthetics, but does that mean Turians can eat human food now? Will Volus no longer need pressure suits? Will I finally be able to pro-create with a Hanar?
- I never got the impression that the Geth were ever assessed to be 'ascended' by the Reapers. I only saw they were being used as tools by them. Keep in mind that Nazara (aka Sovereign) came to them and offered them technology to further their own goals, and that caused the schism.
- not sure I understand that last question. They were pretty far along creating a human Reaper at the end of ME2, so at that point, who cares how many more of them die? They were making husks, cannibals, ravagers, brutes, banshees and marauders too. Maybe instead of making multiple Reapers from a wide variety of lifeforms, they make multiple Reapers from the dominant one.
Has anyone touched on the obvious Lovecraftian influences on ME? I had read a bunch of his works, but never made the connection until recently. His whole philosophy was that humans are totally inconsequential in the cosmos, and that the workings of the universe are unfathomable to us. Also, a race of super beings from outer space that come every now and then to wreak havoc on us sounds a bit familiar no?\
So maybe I made some salient points, maybe I didn't. And I'm not outright dismissing all the points that you made either. The indoctrination theory definitely holds water in my book, I'm just not entirely convinced it's THE answer.
Regardless, as I said, it's all in fun for me to discuss these things. I read the ME wiki alot too, so I'm probably picking up some details that aren't in the game. If there's something I'm missing - and there probably is, because there is so much stuff in the ME universe - let me know.
