On the betrayal of hope in Mass Effect 3's endings.
I've been struggling in my own way to articulate why the ending of Mass Effect 3 invalidates all that came before. But I may not be doing a very good job of it.
The guy at the above linked post just FREAKING NAILS IT.
Please, please click the link and read what he has to say. He's MUCH better at getting to the heart of the problem than I've been so far.
Fair warning, it's a pretty big wall of text. But it's well laid out and he's broken it up into easy to read segments.
Edit:
I still think anybody would be well served by reading the whole thing, but I wanted to single out the central point. The actual hammering of the point home.
I've been struggling in my own way to articulate why the ending of Mass Effect 3 invalidates all that came before. But I may not be doing a very good job of it.
The guy at the above linked post just FREAKING NAILS IT.
Please, please click the link and read what he has to say. He's MUCH better at getting to the heart of the problem than I've been so far.
Fair warning, it's a pretty big wall of text. But it's well laid out and he's broken it up into easy to read segments.
Edit:
I still think anybody would be well served by reading the whole thing, but I wanted to single out the central point. The actual hammering of the point home.
Quote:The Betrayal
So here we are, standing at the culmination of three hundred hours of joy and tears, brought about through a profound exploration of the power of hope and inclusiveness in the unlikely form of a video game. We're watching every race in the galaxy: humans and turians, krogan and salarians, quarians and geth, and even the ageless, arrogant asari all come together in equal partnership to fearlessly face down an enemy of unimaginiable power and ancient evil, riding into a battle they cannot hope to win conventionally, prepared to fight and die for just the smallest hope of victory, fighting and dying to buy just the smallest chance that their friends and loved ones might escape utter and complete annhilation. And at the climax of that battle, we find ourselves confronted by the very avatar of intolerance, ruthlessness, cruelty, and arbitrary authority in the Starchild. And what does Bioware *force* us to do?
Bend our knee to it. We have to meekly accept the vile, unacceptable principle that there must always be winners and losers, that some battles are just too big to fight, some evils too powerful to defeat. That we must choose to bargain with the devil instead of spitting in his eye.
In other words, that everything Mass Effect has taught us is a lie. At the last moment, it strips of us of our unity, of our hope. It denies us the chance to pull together and win through to a glorious victory, or even to stand and die as free beings beside our brothers-in-arms. We must, it tells us, choose sides at the last. We must become the monster we despise, or accept a hateful amalgamation with an evil and soulless foe, or betray and sacrifice those who respect and count on us to achieve a broken and hollow victory.
And that, I believe, is what so many of us are *really* incensed about. Because we instinctively reject this insidious calumny as the end of the epic we've come to love. We reject the idea that we can't all work together to achieve greatness. That we can't stand together to become a whole and complete galaxy, greater than the sum of its parts and its petty daily grievances and indignities.
And that is what the "Retake Mass Effect" movement is really about, in my opinion, whether we articulate it or not. We are following the example Shepard sets. We are standing together in the face of a great philosophy that has been perverted to cynicism and division, and saying, "Dammit, give us back our hope."