Poll: How did you feel about learning the Reapers' motivations?

I recently got into a mini-discussion in another forum about the Reapers and their motivations. That got me curious about how most people felt about the subject, so I created this poll. It's the same one I put on the BSN a while back, but I just wanted to see what people in this corner of the internet thought.

Feel free to comment and explain your choice or point out anything I messed up!

Indifferent. I didn't really need one, because they worked well as mysterious unexplainable and incomprehensible. Knowing them would've been nice, but the ones we got diminish their scare factor by a magniture of a googolplex, which is not a good thing to do to your main villains.

Agreed but I'd word it differently:

Or maybe more like:

Meh. *cough*

I wanted to know the motivation, because I had assumed it had been planned from the beginning and was going to be mind blowing. It is possibly the most wrong I have ever been.

I think the only time I really ever read a race of aliens that were even approaching "alien" - rather than just a PLANET OF THE HATS - was in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy... the Tyrathca could superficially sound like another generic insectoid race but there's a whole lot of stuff that they do that to both the reader AND the human character that is just... alien.

For example, when a Tyrathca dies, they seal up its house and just kind of... ignore it, lots of other stuff too but that's the main example. It goes beyond mere ignoring but really, I'd only do a poor job of describing it though but you really got the sense of a race that wasn't just humans with a rubber forehead.

That's not to say I didn't like the aliens in Mass Effect, I did actually but when it came to the Reapers who the writers REPEATEDLY go out of their way to explain both directly and indirectly are just too advanced, too fundamentally different for us to even BEGIN understanding, the notion anyone could ever give us an explanation of their motives that was satisfactory is ridiculous... as I've said, even the whole dark energy scenario sounded pretty stupid to me - better than what we got but seriously... turning humanity into a terminator baby that goes inside a giant cuttlefish is going to save us from dark energy (that apparently arises from the use of mass effect technology...) ugh.

I suppose it's a bit like Lost - even if it hadn't just been basically a hugely expensive and elaborate exercise in trolling, it's unlikely explanation offered would have been satisfactory because when you explain something, you take the infinite number of possibilities of what it could be and then you narrow it down to just one and it's a bit like a will-they-won't-they couple, when it happens... you've predicated most (if not all) of their interactions and character on an ambiguous relationship which has now resolved, so you really need something to move onto.

Except of course, there was nowhere for Mass Effect to go, the Reapers idiotic plan and their idiotic motivations for their idiotic plan are revealed with just a few minutes of the game left. That's it, all there is left for you to do is sit there and be in awe at what an anti-climactic piece of fuck wittery this was and then joined forces with 49,999 other people on the internet and tell the world you're as mad as hell and you're not going to take this anymore.

So, writing 101 - don't establish the motivations of a character or race as beyond human comprehension until the last page and then go "Oh, here's what their motivations were all along!"

They didn't HAVE to give one (especially the circular logic one given, terrible) but I would welcome an explanation that was both terrifying and mysterious. Say something like, they were created by an unknown race to purge the galaxy every fifty thousand years from an unknown catastrophe that would have done far more damage.

Starbrat is thematically revolting, and everything derived from it is thematically revolting.
Serves EA for liking a comic book author, and serves SPECIALLY Bioware for sacrificing their integrity to please EA.

I didn't need a reason beyond "they are bad and we need to find a way to kill them." The Reapers (and god that names sounds sillier and sillier as people keep saying 5,000 times per game) didn't need a total background explanation by StarChild McEffHead. A few theories by Liara or others could have been brought up to try and give the Reapers purpose, without proving any of them or disproving them. Reveal a little but leave a bit of mystery to them. Instead they pulled the curtain back and you were like "sooooo they are just tools."

I have to agree, the explanation was really weak. It was not compelling enough. There should of been a greater purpose. I mean if you could explain it in a few minutes after being told repeatedly we wouldn't be able to comprehend it....really? that is the best you got? I thought each Reaper was a 'nation"...

Say... look at this YouTube VID I posted here:

http://www.holdtheline.com/threads/mass-deffect-10-reaper-cockalorum.2650/

It should of been something that we could not have easily understood or would of taken more time to explain. If there was a greater danger lurking.. and thing the Reapers were trying to stop and were harvesting everyone to help them fight this even worse danger, how compelling would that have been? It would of been really fascinating.

How can you go through 3 games and give us this explanation as the next one you had? It totally felt like they didn't have a CLUE what they were going to do for three games. It's like "Ok boys we got enough money for 3 games, what can we do?"

They had so many other interesting directions they could of taken this, like Dark Matter, or come up with an even greater threat that was on the horizon to why the Reapers were looking to build their forces. I could simply looked at the past 2 games and come up with ideas that would at least TIED IN to the story's 'supposed' plot.

Honestly, ME1, ME2, and ME3 all seemed disjointed in so many ways, literally they were making it up as they went along.

Another poll option would have been nice : "They didn't necessarily need an explanation, though a good one may have made the cut, but the one given in the game was the poorest writing ever". We started with an ancient, unknown threat and we ended with an invasion of star-roaches controlled by win98 (blue screens included). Nice one, really

It was hard for me to choose between saying no and voting indifferent....mainly because I never thought Bioware would give us an answer, especially not on a silver platter held by a glowing AI with a god complex. I voted indifferent, because some part of me would've always longed to know and as far as I'm concerned that part of me still exists, because BW abandoned their own damn Reaper lore from ME1.

I really expected BW to not explain the Reapers true motives. In ME1 Vigil tells us our goal lies in defeating them, not understanding them. Add in dialogue from Sovereign, Harbinger and the Rannoch Reaper telling us they're beyond our comprehension and how powerful they are and that we will inevitably fail. Then the ending happened and their motives were actually really simple and made them seem as dangerous as a kitten playing with a ball of yarn.
Instead of attempting to explain their motives, BW should have just stuck with dropping hints of a greater threat that could have led into ME4 with(maybe) a new protagonist.

I am not voting. My answer would be
"No, this is bad writing." Cant find this.

Agreed.
Yet they surely seemed at the time to be doing so from their perspective from a moral high-ground you know. The stuff "harby" said at times sounded like a an adult scolding an ignorant kid. You just knew that their motivation was sound from their perspective and I for one was cool with it being so complicated we would never understand it and we were never going to to actually get an answer, at least not a full one.
Alas, we were mistaken. Mac Walters thinks we don't get it, that it's beyond our comprehension. Sadly, it's him who doesn't get it.
If we ever really got an explanation, to me it wouldn't be as transparent and imbecilic as this shit but, it still would be something we could understand but not accept. We would never be able from a moral and/or logical standpoint to accept the Reapers as anything but giant psychopathic killers but we would be able to understand the reasoning.
Say, for example modern art. I can't wrap my mind around it. To me it's just nonsensical but I do understand why some people find it appealing. This is of course way to mainstream and mundane an example to actually be on the level of what they should have pulled off. It pains me that they tried so hard to emulate the endings and the core thematic of Deus Ex (while I do love those games and the storylines/themes I know they don't in any way belong in the Mass Effect lore) and other modern sci-fi (the matrix also pops into my mind) instead of using Asimov or Stanislaw Lem as inspiration. We had an epic sci-fi saga that touched core classic themes in a sensible way and they abandoned them for illogical clichés and deus ex machinas. Someone please tell Casey Hudson that the Deus Ex behind the name of the series of games is way more metaphorical (or literal ) than he thinks...

That's perhaps a tad too specific

As I've said, the notion that this was pre-conceived as a trilogy with a beginning, middle and end all at least vaguely planned out at the start is like saying the Matrix trilogy was planned. Or Star Wars, for that matter.