Mass Effect 5 'The Return of Shepard'

Bit off topic, but the MEHEM mod is awesome if you prefer a more positive ending, love that mod. To me it's what the ending of ME3 should have been in the first place. At least one of the endings anyway.

Aw man. Starchild is an orphan that needs to be "tragically" sucked out of a "malfunctioning" airlock.

That's not how you kill a hologram, guys. Just trip the circuit breaker.

Yep for me it isn't even about having Shep live or having a "happy" ending.  I like MEHEM because it removes the ridiculous parts of the ending and delivers on what the whole rest of the game and series set up.

I like to headcanon that both Shepard and Ash made it to Starbrat, and while Shepard was keeping it busy blathering about the inevitability of robot uprisings, Ash  was busy reformatting its hard drive.

Plot twist - the Shepard you play as in ME2 and 3 was in fact a clone and the real one was unsalvagable. Cerberus is the mysterious silent benefactor and they planted another Shepard clone in cryo aboard the human Ark.

I would play the shit out that MEA2

Ignoring the obvious continuity problems beaten into the ground by now, if Shepard were to return I'd rather it not be as the protagonist but a more enigmatic, or even dubious major character. Maybe even as a villain?

I don't think such a story would fit within continuity. It'd have to be a remix/reimagining. Which could be fun, it could be a chance to (re)introduce a whole bunch of favorite characters in ways we haven't seen before.

Or you know, another clone.

No thanks. No canon ending, ever. And the Milky Way post Reaper War is best left in our minds. It'll never be as good.

Prequels-interquels, or a completely different reimagining. I don't know if there's a word for what I'm thinking of but if you know the Stephen King/Richard Bachman novels Desparation and Regulators, something like that. Same characters and villain, entirely different settings, circumstances and relationships. Though I'd advocate changing the villain in this case. I don't think anyone wants more Reapers, particularly post-holokid.

Heck the Shepard VI was almost destroyed by someone spilling a drink on it. Shepard should have tossed a bottle of ryncol at the power conduit. 

You use "canon" is a way that's never made sense.

What do you mean?  The Leviathan DLC gave an explanation for the reapers.

Get rid of the whole "capitulate to your enemy to 'win'" angle?

If you must make the Reapers nothing but killbot the Leviathans made, I'd also remove the Skynet angle. Instead make the hypothesis about cultural stagnation and mortality- each species that rises reaches some apex but then starts to decline and their civilization ultimately crumbes and fades. Originally the Leviathans, masters of all they saw thought they were above this. But when it started to happen to them, they sought a solution because they feared their civilization would also fall and be forgotten. So instead they created a perfect machine to upload themselves into, made into their image. Within that machine their civilization would be eternal to be enjoyed by all who mattered- themselves. Not all Leviathans saw it that way and most of the dissenters were killed or forcefully uploaded, though a few escaped. This new machine, Harbinger, then sought to bring this same perfection to the thrall species. They fought of course but lost and were uploaded into forms like Harbinger itself. From that day forward Harbinger and its kind watch the galaxy for species worthy of adding to their network and thus preserving them for all time. They built the Citadel and Mass Relays to make the "harvest" more efficient but also as a legacy to the physical galaxy they left behind.

Meanwhile the Leviathans that escaped did so with a copy of the master key to the Harbinger network- a way for organic species to take control of the Reaper network and therefore their fate. This idea would grow over time, becoming what we know as the Crucible.

The main idea behind the above reworking is if you're gonna have flawed logic, might as well give it a reasonable source- the Leviathan's dickish ego. Not to mention the relative novelty of the idea compared to "oh noes the bad robots" yet again. Plus it's more poetic that the now significantly named Reapers are in fact harbingers to an afterlife of sorts but on an aggregate scale, and not as reward/punishment, but as an ultimate fear of death.