The elephant in the room

There is dialogue with the starchild about the control option and if Shepard refuses the idea, the starchild will actually say they don't look forward to being replaced but they'd be forced to accept it.

Careful, if it's a parody of Lovecraftian horror, our minds will explode from thinking about it too much!

If you're going to go out, go out with a bang!
I gotta hand it to those who choose Control; If the intention is to troll the Reapers for the rest of eternity, I can see the appeal. Too bad it feels just too risky for me.

And that's perfectly understandable. I choose Control, and yet I'd be lying if I said that there aren't any risks with the choice. Unfortunately, Destroy and especially Synthesis are more unappealing to me (I'm not even going to acknowledge Refuse). The best I can do is headcanon that nothing bad comes out of it.

Of course, there's always ME3HEM mod... I'm starting to think that I should download it at some point.

Plenty of reasons. More reasons in fact than for the opposite.

Do you really? Let me tell you a couple stories. One for each side to make it fair.

Somebody tripped an alarm at an American nuclear site. They hit the high alert button so all the other bases knew to keep an eye out for Soviet spies. But some silly bastard wired the alarms wrong at one of the bases. That base didn't get the "watch for intruders" alarm, they got the DEFCON 1 alarm. DEFCON 1 is confirmed nuclear war. They went with the policy for this: make your peace with God, and unload on the USSR. A bomber was loaded with thermonuclear weapons. It was taxiing for take-off when the mistake was discovered and someone drove a car in front of the plane to prevent its takeoff. The bomber was ordered to maintain radio silence. If they had discovered the mistake a couple minutes later and the bomber was airborne, there would've been no way to stop the "counter"attack. Oh, remember the intruder? Just a fucking bear looking for food.

Despite the cold war being over because the USSR collapsed a few years prior, Russia immediately shat itself when they detected what appeared to be an ICBM headed toward them. Then it got worse. The missile split off into multiple pieces. If you're not familiar with doomsday weapons, this is endemic of a MIRV, or (M)ultiple (I)ndependently targetable (R)eentry (V)ehicle. A type of ICBM that splits off into several smaller missiles in mid-air and each seeks out a different target. So Russia has what appears to be a MIRV headed for it. They had 10 minutes to make the call on whether to launch their own nukes back at the United States. See, you have to launch before the other guy nukes you because your ability to counterattack is removed along with tens of millions of lives. This is the only time the USSR/Russian "nuclear briefcase" was ever opened. That's how close they were. With less than a minute left to make the call, the incoming MIRV dropped harmlessly into the ocean. It was actually just a test rocket from NASA that was studying the northern lights. Why would NASA do something so stupid? Well they had warned the Russians, extensively, about it because they knew what it would look like. Somebody in the Russian chain of command thought this message wasn't worth passing along.

There's quite a few more stories like this. We're not still here because mankind "peeking behind the curtain" isn't a bad idea. We're here because of sheer dumb LUCK and nothing else.

Much like debates about Loghain, Anders, and Solas over on the Dragon Age side, I have tried to stay away from trying to justify my ME3 choice online, but for what it's worth, my only playthrough that was completed was Destroy. I felt like it was a fitting end, and since our choice doesn't matter, might as well walk away from an explosion like a badass. Well, metaphorically. And in the fanfiction I will probably never write.

They were in this cycle for the galaxy to have a chance to defeat them

*1,000,000,000+. That's how old the Leviathan of Dis was dated.



A shitload of stuff went wrong for them this cycle, without any number of unlikely scenarios in succession they'd have won. The Protheans hacking the keepers, Shepard turning out to be impossible to kill in combat and highly resistant to indoctrination, Sovereign getting bested at the Citadel, the Collectors being destroyed, the Alpha relay being destroyed... victory hinged on so many highly improbable events happening. Law of averages always wins in the end though.

The reapers win by numbers alone even with the galaxy having the plans to the crucible

- the detroyer destroying the two shuttles instead of the Normandy
- the destroyer firing vertically instead of horizontally at Shepard on Tuchanka
- the destroyer on Rannoch firing vertically instead of horizontally at Shepard
- not shutting off the beam in London
- not posting a few reapers to guard the relays
- not going to the Citadel first

For the reapers being so high and mighty, they sure come across as complete idiots

The only way to defeat them is to find the plans to the device, build it, then use it before the reapers enter the galaxy

A lot of them are fine if you figure that the Reapers don't want Shepard dead, they want him indoctrinated, they want him part of the human Reaper. I'm not saying IT, I'm just saying that they wanted to harness Shepard's power. Sure, they could kill him, but they want to give him a fighting chance. If he survives, he's worthy of being part of and perhaps leading the next Reaper. If he doesn't, "the dead are worthless." The biggest plothole then is the fact the Reapers never took back the Citadel to lock down the relays. They did say there was a mission to explain that but it got cut for time along with things like the alternate "if the rachni queen is dead" mission. We can only speculate on it but at least BW did acknowledge this flaw and had plans to fix it. I just headcanon that the Protheans broke it so badly that it'd take them a long time to fix it and they'd have subdued the major resistance by then anyway.