"Synthetics will destroy organics" theme

If they spun off of the reproduction idea, wow. That'd be a "HOLY SHIT!" moment. Reapers harvest species to ensure their own survival.

Well they wouldn't even need to spin off to it would they ? Why give us all this information in ME2 about *how* they abduct humans, then *why* they abduct humans, then *how* they process them into raw material and then the end product of a Reaper?

That IS a very solid driving force for them to *go* to Earth as it's established they like processing humans (possibly for genetic diversity, maybe we'd make meatier Reapers ).

I'd just add so much to the reaper character if they did that instead of destroying the entire reaper character. Like in ME1 when you talk to sovereign and Joker says, "Commander you better get back here. Whatever you did, Saren's ship just made a maneuver that would shear any one of our ships in half." That's really when it hit me for the first time that these "reapers" meant business. Then came along starchild and......we'll essentially put the reapers out of the picture totally.

I hate starchild so much. I already called ghost busters to see if they could deal with him but they said they only deal with ghosts and not space magic.

now you got me all confused.

At first playthrough i totally locked out the Starkid's statement regarding him controlling the Reapers. I thought he is just the creator of the first generation or something. Somehow the concept of those massive entities working perfectly together on a single goal of exterminating every organic was more awesome than when you put a single leader, yet alone a f*cking kid in control of them. Im sorry, i know its form is supposed be symbolic, but the mere fact that it takes the form of a kid just nullifies anything good about the reaper's concept. How am i supposed to take him seriously?

Regarldess, at this point in time i consider every single child appearence in video games as a cheap way to get emotions out of the audiance.

I wish the chain reaction destroying the mass relays would destroy this ending too, but that wuld be a paradox that should shatter a reality with no time-travel concept..

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...(Wait for it)


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...Yeah, still a better ending.

Oh I'll just put this up here for cuteness .

Ah SHODAN, those were good times.

While I find the idea of Reapers using other races to reproduce themselves terrifying, I still prefer to leave that on the background, hinting other, more mysterious reasons, without revealing them. The Reapers may use other races to bolster their numbers, but there has to be something scarier behind.

The whole reason the Cthulhu mythos are so disturbing is that there is no other reason behind the monsters motive beyond alien, unscrutable madness. I'm no Lovecraft fan, but I admit the idea works. So I don't understand why Bioware embraced the concept early on, only to throw it away in the end. Reapers were scary BECAUSE you could not fathom their motivations. The moment you know what they're up to, the moment you realize their motive is lame, they lose all the mystique and scariness...

In the beginning you think you can't beat the Reapers because they are godlike. In the end you realize you can't beat them because they are beyond stupid, and against an idiot you can't win, he'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

At the end of ME 2 i thought the reapers do what they do becouse they see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution, and in a twisted way they want to ascend us to their level. Like if we were to grind all dogs into a paste, put the paste into a humanoid bodies and go out together looking for another inferior species that we think has so much to offer to us in such a new form.
Its not a perfect motivation, but it reflects well on humanity's urge to make everything like us without considering the other's point of view.

And im yet to see a proper world-threatening villain who does evil just for the sake of galactic unity forming against them.

But im fine with maddening and unknowable too.

I also thought that the Reapers were trying to make us "ascend" to be like them. There might have been more to it, like the dark energy thing, but I liked this as one of their motivations.

Me, too!

Yes, it just seemed "out there" enough to be real.

It's simple, it's horrifying - everything you need in a good villain.

I always thought that maybe the Reapers started as an accident, like the race in the first cycle wanted to avert catastrophe by uploading themselves into a supercomputer. Along the way they decided that everyone would benefit from their ascension (or evolution into a new lifeform) and it became a crazy reproduction cycle.

You took the words right out of my grey matter. It was like they thought they were "saving" us before we could destroy ourselves or each other.

One thing we seem to be forgetting (I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here), the reapers and the catalyst have presumably existed for a long time. It could be that across the untold cycles they've both seen, synthetics wiping out organics is something that happens a lot. The cycle that the game takes place in, as well as the Prothean cycle could have just been exceptions to the rule. If synthetics wiping out organics is what happens more often than not, the motivations of the reapers are justified.

Now, given that the reapers and the catalyst are part synthetic, it stands to reason that they would apply machine logic to the situation. The moral philosophy Utilitarianism basically boils down to "The greatest good for the greatest number." If we have to kill a million people so that two million survive, so be it. Viewed through the lens of utilitarianism, it's an ethically clean act. Now, the catalyst and reapers would say, "Sure in YOUR cycle things are peachy, but in the four hundred thousand six hundred and eighty before, synthetics were a huge issue. The only reason something is left of the organic cultures that spawned them is because they're us now."

Seen from this angle, I can accept the motivations and explanations of the catalyst. I'm not defending the endings, they were still crap. But, given this viewpoint, the explanation is slightly more palatable.

That is a legitimate point you have brought up, if you apply machine logic the death of a few trillion organics so that organic life as a whole continues is what they were trying to portray with the catalyst. The main problem was with the lack of context and foreshadowing of this fact. We are left to 'speculate' and fill in massive gaps on our own which should have been explained in much more detail in the final conversation with the catalyst (also replace him with saren because I cant stand that insufferable child). I'll quote Mordin here "For this fight, want personal connection. Can't anthropomorphize galaxy. But can think of favorite nephew. Fighting for him"...When we have made personal connections with Legion and other peaceful geth who have always wanted to get along with us, it is difficult to think of the overarching and incomprehensible history of the galaxy and the fate of organics/synthetics in the distant past.