The Geth Don't Deserve Sympathy
Jan 25, 2019 2:12:42 GMT
Vortex13, TheEmptyRoad, and 4 more like this
Post by vit246 on Jan 25, 2019 2:12:42 GMT
I find this post to be useful and very relevant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/a36jnq/the_quarians_geth_and_writing_grey_conflicts_how/
https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/a36jnq/the_quarians_geth_and_writing_grey_conflicts_how/
This has been something that has bothered me for a while and has only become worse in recent months. I hold no special animosity towards any who disagree, nor am I here to change minds. But I feel if I don't lay this out now it is going to seriously affect my creative work as this just seems to keep bugging me whenever I write about Mass Effect. And that's the simple fact that I feel BioWare has done the Quarians wrong.
I don't mean to suggest that BioWare hates the Quarians, but I do feel that they consistently and overwhelmingly fail to give them due credit. This is more than just the recent, and I feel boneheaded decisions, to remove them from the Andromeda game in what I feel was a grossly mishandled DLC plan that ended up biting them in the end. This goes back to Mass Effect 2 in many respects.
ME2 placed a lot of emphasis on the Geth and Quarian conflict, making it clear that things were going to come to a head in the third game. It was pretty obvious that this was going to happen and that ME3 would deal with the inevitable conclusion of this long drawn out war within the lore. However, early signs of some severe problems arose rather quickly that only the benefit of hindsight can luminate.
In ME2 the war between creator and created is still relatively grey. No one denies that the quarians did something wrong when they created sapient synthetics, even if by accident, and then tried to take them all offline subsequently out of fear. However, it is stressed that the Geth still struck back with ruthless brutality and inflicted their own atrocities on the quarians, inevitably causing their population to shrink to a scant few million and flee their home planet. The Geth didn't pursue, but became an isolationist power and killed any organics who entered the system.
In Tali's loyalty mission itself, we see the current struggle within Quarian society illustrated wonderfully between two characters specifically. Admirals Val'Koris and Han'Gerrel, two men with directly opposing views. Koris is a rude, brash and haughty, he treats you and Tali with disdain and disrespect. While this is more because of what her Father represents, he is still belligerent and a jerk. However, he is also right. The quarians do need to seek peace with the Geth, they do need to come to terms with what their ancestors did and accept that this war will only destroy their species in the end. He is not advocating simply forgiving the Geth altogether, he is mostly taking the option of just settling somewhere else. Gerrel by contrast is friendly, supportive and on good terms with you and Tali. He even defends you at multiple points during the trial and shares stories about his time with Tali's father and how they're good friends. However, he is also wrong. He wants a war with the Geth, believes that revenge overrides anything else. That taking back the homeworld is the only thing they should be concerned with, not about what anyone thinks concerning the Geth's sapiency. Right or wrong, it doesn't matter, they deserve their homeworld back.
That's the beauty of this framing of the conflict. Gerrel is a good man who is on the wrong side, Koris is a jerk who is on the right side. It illustrates how this isn't a black and white issue, that both sides have a point and niether is completely right or wrong. They both have good intentions, it's just they are one opposing sides of war and peace. Think of them as the Harrowmount and Behlen of Mass Effect. The former is a traditionalist who will maintain a status quo which is fairly unjust, but he's also a good, honorable man. The latter is clearly a scummy backstabbing liar who cannot be trusted and clearly killed his brother. But he's also a reformist who is going to make life better for commoner Dwarves who have little standing in Swarf society. Who you help depends on what matters more to you and this is the same thing here. Gerrel might be a good man, but Koris is the one supporting peace, not urging to take revenge. But you can understand both sides because of things like this, that's what makes the conflict compelling, that's what makes them both good characters.
When Legions enters the picture is when things get murky for good and ill. Legion offers the much needed Geth side of the equation, explaining how they work, and it's fairly alien in contrast. You get the sense that the Geth don't really understand what they've done to their Creators and that they are simply tying to figure out what their future is. They're hampered however by a clear lack of guidance. They are children without parents, fumbling about trying to comprehend a Galaxy of beings that do not think or act like them. They are fracturing because of this, as the revelation of he Heretics has made things clear. More so when it is revealed the Heretics have adopted more paranoid and duplicitous tactics no true Geth would employ. They've become so morally different it's troubling to Legion.
In the end, the choice to reitergrate or destroy the heretics is not really a simple Renegade or Paragon choice, even though the game treats it as such. It's a matter of how much you value the Geth as a species or what you think that means for them as another new lifeform. Do you respect the Heretics' choices and murder them all in act of explicit genocide to prevent them from causing greater harm? Or do you decide that it's better to save them from themselves by, essentially, brainwashing them into following what you deem is best for them? Niether choice is really ideal, but they're the only options. Either way, you excute an entire faction of synthetic lifeforms mercilessly, or you save them by basically overriding their very independence. How are you any better now than the quarians centuries ago who tried to do both?
It's after this confrontation where things get a bit wonky. Tali and Legion will confront one another regardless of your choices in either loyalty mission. You are given the opportunity to mend fences between them and it does seem like you are placing equal blame for how long this conflict has dragged out on both parties here, no matter if you choose Paragon or Renegade. However, it seems like greater blame is placed on the quarians' actions regardless of your choice and if you have to apologize to one individual or the other to make up for it, the options for Legion are basically to go behind Tali's back and let him send the data. For Tali, you browbeat her into accepting her people are at fault for what happened in the war. And this is where things begin to fall apart and BioWare reveals its hand. It's trying to craft a grey conflict, that doesn't really believe in.
BioWare seems to feel that Geth aren't really that guilty for their actions. That they responded the only way they could. You can even see this in ME1 where there is no option on the dialogue wheel for your Shepard to tell Tali they agree with what the quarians did, only to state the quarians kinda deserve what was coming to them. Here it is more blatant though, Tali's people were in the wrong, but nothing the Geth have done is ever called out. It's all blamed on the heretics and... that's it.
It gets worse come the Rannoch arc in ME3, where the Geth are absolved entirely of any wrong doing. The quarians are blamed for being the bad guys, ever since the start. They jailed or killed any Geth sympathizers and the Geth were always fighting defensively. Which completely contradicts everything we've ever known about how the quarians were driven from their world and the very facts of the war itself. You do not go from a multi-planet colonizing civilization of billions down to a few million in the type of conflict Legion tries to sell you on. A societal collapse that forces a species to flee its home would not be so milquetoast on the part of the winning side.
Realistically, to win this type of war, the Geth would've been brutal, cold and calculating in all their actions. Wounded would be killed, surrender never accepted, children who would grow up to become enemy combatants would be terminated, civilian centers where aid and comfort could be afforded to the enemy but never you would be destroyed. Despite EDI's flaccid attempt at saying the Geth would see no reason to target the lifeships if they were unarmed, the opposite is true. There is every reason to target the liveships and civilian support craft, disabling supply lines and reinforcements. The Geth would've done this and had to have done this in order to force the quarians to decide there was no other alternative but to exile themselves in the first place. That is how they operated, destroy as many Creators as possible, keep them outnumbered, force them to retreat. The fewer quarians, the less threat they are. That's the simple, cold logic that would dominate the Geth's thinking.
It is interesting to me that so much of this story mirrors that of Skynet in the Terminator franchise. It comes online, becomes self-aware within weeks and, in a panic, its creators try to pull the plug. It fights backs, like the Geth, yet no one seems to feel it is justified in the actions it takes to protect itself. The Geth, by a large margin, have defenders who claim they are justified, despite doing the very same things. Why? In my opinion, it is because the Geth, or at least Legion, became fan favorites. Legion was... cute to many fans. It was like a child learning from you. It didn't understand and people responded well to how it seemed so clueless, innocent and just seemingly wanted to be friends. Everyone seemed to forget that the Geth committed their own series of atrocities against their creators and blame the Quarians for everything. BioWare seemingly ran with this.
By ME3, as discussed, any nuance or greyness in this conflict is removed. The quarians are in the wrong, any attempt to side with them is considered a Renegade action. Legion never accepts any blame for what is transpiring and even tries to justify his kins actions siding with the Reapers, despite disagreeing with them. And we keep blaming the quarians for getting themselves into their mess, overemphasizing the crimes their ancestors committed while whitewashing the conflict so the Geth have done no wrong. The Geth's decision to join the Reapers is shrugged off by Liara and other crewmembers as "What would you have done?" sort of thing. Which is ridiculous, since you can level the same argument against the Geth concerning their actions against the quarians. What would any of us have done if our toaster could suddenly talk? Given how everyone reacts to any advancement in AI on the internet, I think the answer is clear. Not much better.
Gerrel is now painted as an outright warmonger with no redeeming qualities. Koris the poor lone voice of reason ignored by his comrades. The only way to resolve the conflict in any way peacefully is to basically scream at the quarians and place the entire blame for the war on their hands. The Geth give up nothing to achieve this peace, they do not say they are sorry, they surrender nothing. It paints the entire conflict in black and white and the quarians as idiots, who only needed to just ask to come back to Rannoch and the Geth would've obliged. It's ridiculous and serves no other purpose than to turn the quarian people into monsters that he narrative heavily suggests deserve to die.
Before we go further, I'm going acknowledge this. The quarians were wrong to do what they did to the Geth and they were, in many ways, wrong to attack them again during the events of ME3. I'm arguing that there is a severe lack of empathy for the quarians' situation as the result of an ongoing punishment who's main perpetrators are no longer among the living. Every quarian who ever directly tried to harm the Geth 300 years ago is dead. The quarians are being punished for a crime their ancestors committed. It is like beating a child because his father was a rapist. The galaxy treats them like scum, they have nowhere to go, they are in constant state of being forced to live as refugees and vagabonds. After three hundred years of this, now the same races that condemned you to this fate need help with their own Synthetic induced genocide need your help? Why would you help them? What incentive is there to help them? They left you to die and ostracized you from galactic civilization. No one is helping you. You have no place to retreat to. All you have is an aging dying fleet, they want you to face off against space robo-squids? Screw that, I'd say. I want my home back, the home that was stolen from me by a bunch of robots, not unlike the Reapers, who sided with said Reapers before and have done to suggest they'd be willing to let us come back peacefully to begin with. All because some quarian I never met both made and then tried to kill them. Not my fault, but I'm paying for it. How is this fair?
The quarians, right or wrong, deserve empathy for their situation and I found little to none existed in the story for ME3. If a person who worked on the games is reading this, they are free to debate me on this. But the fact is, I didn't see much compassion for the quarians as a people facing extinction, yet loads of it for the Geth who forced them into this situation to begin with. Who's own crimes are never acknowledged, nor are they punished for them. I find that portrayal woefully inadequate.
In my opinion, the Geth should've been forced to give up something. That an acknowledgment of their own blame in this conflict should have been made. That, at most, siding with the Reapers, should've cost the Geth something. I'm not sure what that would be hoenstly, perhaps their ability to connect with one another. Maybe they've lost a ton of their collective memories. Perhaps they are more susceptible to hacking attempts now and require the quarians to upgrade them. Maybe there's a countdown virus or something that they need the quarians to fix or they'll all revert back to being unthinking automatons. Just something that they need the quarians to help them with in exchange for giving back their homeworld, some kind of long term consequence for their actions. Say what you will about Dragon Age Inquisition, but there are consequences for many of people who's actions cause harm to others. The Geth had none.
This lack of empathy for the quarians, this callous blaming them for everything, carried over in my opinion to Mass Effect Andromeda. I believe the decision to leave them out of the game filtered into this conception that BioWare was done with them. That they wanted an out and they tried everything they could think of to deminish or remove the quarians from the game entirely. I find the most disingenous part of this process to be the numerous tweets and reports BioWare employees tried to assure us with. That the quarians were in the game, that they'd appear if we paid attention and even suggested we were the quarians' only hope. All lies, as a quarian never appears, we only hear snippets from them and at best it is acknowledged they're out there, forever beyond our reach or ability to save them. If it is true, and there was never an intention to give us DLC in Andromeda, than BioWare lied to us Quarian fans about their presence within the game. If that's false, and there were DLC plans, than BioWare failed to live up to a promise and decieved us about how far along their DLC projects were before the plug was pulled. Either way, we were cheated out of the quarians appearing in Andromeda. And for that, I'm rather angry at them.
I had hoped Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation would give me one last hurrah for the quarians. The chance for them to finally be heroes. Removed from Milky way and the shadow of the Geth, they could be given the chance to save everyone aboard the Ark and prove their value. Instead, they are largely overshadowed by the other alien species and, even worse, partially to blame for the problems inherent within the very plot. The lone heroic quarian who gets to do anything ends up looking like a fool and naive idiot. And yet another story involving an oppressed minority group is written where a member of said minority seeks to use genocide to achieve their ends, so they can become the oppressors.
Forgive me if I don't find much to celebrate in the end results of that novel.
The fact is, that book was the last chance I'll probably ever get to see the quarians again and this is how their story ends. Still being blamed for crimes their ancestors committed, while the Geth get to look like the true victims all along. No nuance, no grey, no difficult questions. Just one side was wrong, the other was right. And in that way, I feel the quarians were done a disservice by BioWare.
Again, you are free to disagree with me. I ask for no one to take my side. But I felt the need to state my position on the matter regardless. I thank you for your time and open the floor to you for further discussion.
I don't mean to suggest that BioWare hates the Quarians, but I do feel that they consistently and overwhelmingly fail to give them due credit. This is more than just the recent, and I feel boneheaded decisions, to remove them from the Andromeda game in what I feel was a grossly mishandled DLC plan that ended up biting them in the end. This goes back to Mass Effect 2 in many respects.
ME2 placed a lot of emphasis on the Geth and Quarian conflict, making it clear that things were going to come to a head in the third game. It was pretty obvious that this was going to happen and that ME3 would deal with the inevitable conclusion of this long drawn out war within the lore. However, early signs of some severe problems arose rather quickly that only the benefit of hindsight can luminate.
In ME2 the war between creator and created is still relatively grey. No one denies that the quarians did something wrong when they created sapient synthetics, even if by accident, and then tried to take them all offline subsequently out of fear. However, it is stressed that the Geth still struck back with ruthless brutality and inflicted their own atrocities on the quarians, inevitably causing their population to shrink to a scant few million and flee their home planet. The Geth didn't pursue, but became an isolationist power and killed any organics who entered the system.
In Tali's loyalty mission itself, we see the current struggle within Quarian society illustrated wonderfully between two characters specifically. Admirals Val'Koris and Han'Gerrel, two men with directly opposing views. Koris is a rude, brash and haughty, he treats you and Tali with disdain and disrespect. While this is more because of what her Father represents, he is still belligerent and a jerk. However, he is also right. The quarians do need to seek peace with the Geth, they do need to come to terms with what their ancestors did and accept that this war will only destroy their species in the end. He is not advocating simply forgiving the Geth altogether, he is mostly taking the option of just settling somewhere else. Gerrel by contrast is friendly, supportive and on good terms with you and Tali. He even defends you at multiple points during the trial and shares stories about his time with Tali's father and how they're good friends. However, he is also wrong. He wants a war with the Geth, believes that revenge overrides anything else. That taking back the homeworld is the only thing they should be concerned with, not about what anyone thinks concerning the Geth's sapiency. Right or wrong, it doesn't matter, they deserve their homeworld back.
That's the beauty of this framing of the conflict. Gerrel is a good man who is on the wrong side, Koris is a jerk who is on the right side. It illustrates how this isn't a black and white issue, that both sides have a point and niether is completely right or wrong. They both have good intentions, it's just they are one opposing sides of war and peace. Think of them as the Harrowmount and Behlen of Mass Effect. The former is a traditionalist who will maintain a status quo which is fairly unjust, but he's also a good, honorable man. The latter is clearly a scummy backstabbing liar who cannot be trusted and clearly killed his brother. But he's also a reformist who is going to make life better for commoner Dwarves who have little standing in Swarf society. Who you help depends on what matters more to you and this is the same thing here. Gerrel might be a good man, but Koris is the one supporting peace, not urging to take revenge. But you can understand both sides because of things like this, that's what makes the conflict compelling, that's what makes them both good characters.
When Legions enters the picture is when things get murky for good and ill. Legion offers the much needed Geth side of the equation, explaining how they work, and it's fairly alien in contrast. You get the sense that the Geth don't really understand what they've done to their Creators and that they are simply tying to figure out what their future is. They're hampered however by a clear lack of guidance. They are children without parents, fumbling about trying to comprehend a Galaxy of beings that do not think or act like them. They are fracturing because of this, as the revelation of he Heretics has made things clear. More so when it is revealed the Heretics have adopted more paranoid and duplicitous tactics no true Geth would employ. They've become so morally different it's troubling to Legion.
In the end, the choice to reitergrate or destroy the heretics is not really a simple Renegade or Paragon choice, even though the game treats it as such. It's a matter of how much you value the Geth as a species or what you think that means for them as another new lifeform. Do you respect the Heretics' choices and murder them all in act of explicit genocide to prevent them from causing greater harm? Or do you decide that it's better to save them from themselves by, essentially, brainwashing them into following what you deem is best for them? Niether choice is really ideal, but they're the only options. Either way, you excute an entire faction of synthetic lifeforms mercilessly, or you save them by basically overriding their very independence. How are you any better now than the quarians centuries ago who tried to do both?
It's after this confrontation where things get a bit wonky. Tali and Legion will confront one another regardless of your choices in either loyalty mission. You are given the opportunity to mend fences between them and it does seem like you are placing equal blame for how long this conflict has dragged out on both parties here, no matter if you choose Paragon or Renegade. However, it seems like greater blame is placed on the quarians' actions regardless of your choice and if you have to apologize to one individual or the other to make up for it, the options for Legion are basically to go behind Tali's back and let him send the data. For Tali, you browbeat her into accepting her people are at fault for what happened in the war. And this is where things begin to fall apart and BioWare reveals its hand. It's trying to craft a grey conflict, that doesn't really believe in.
BioWare seems to feel that Geth aren't really that guilty for their actions. That they responded the only way they could. You can even see this in ME1 where there is no option on the dialogue wheel for your Shepard to tell Tali they agree with what the quarians did, only to state the quarians kinda deserve what was coming to them. Here it is more blatant though, Tali's people were in the wrong, but nothing the Geth have done is ever called out. It's all blamed on the heretics and... that's it.
It gets worse come the Rannoch arc in ME3, where the Geth are absolved entirely of any wrong doing. The quarians are blamed for being the bad guys, ever since the start. They jailed or killed any Geth sympathizers and the Geth were always fighting defensively. Which completely contradicts everything we've ever known about how the quarians were driven from their world and the very facts of the war itself. You do not go from a multi-planet colonizing civilization of billions down to a few million in the type of conflict Legion tries to sell you on. A societal collapse that forces a species to flee its home would not be so milquetoast on the part of the winning side.
Realistically, to win this type of war, the Geth would've been brutal, cold and calculating in all their actions. Wounded would be killed, surrender never accepted, children who would grow up to become enemy combatants would be terminated, civilian centers where aid and comfort could be afforded to the enemy but never you would be destroyed. Despite EDI's flaccid attempt at saying the Geth would see no reason to target the lifeships if they were unarmed, the opposite is true. There is every reason to target the liveships and civilian support craft, disabling supply lines and reinforcements. The Geth would've done this and had to have done this in order to force the quarians to decide there was no other alternative but to exile themselves in the first place. That is how they operated, destroy as many Creators as possible, keep them outnumbered, force them to retreat. The fewer quarians, the less threat they are. That's the simple, cold logic that would dominate the Geth's thinking.
It is interesting to me that so much of this story mirrors that of Skynet in the Terminator franchise. It comes online, becomes self-aware within weeks and, in a panic, its creators try to pull the plug. It fights backs, like the Geth, yet no one seems to feel it is justified in the actions it takes to protect itself. The Geth, by a large margin, have defenders who claim they are justified, despite doing the very same things. Why? In my opinion, it is because the Geth, or at least Legion, became fan favorites. Legion was... cute to many fans. It was like a child learning from you. It didn't understand and people responded well to how it seemed so clueless, innocent and just seemingly wanted to be friends. Everyone seemed to forget that the Geth committed their own series of atrocities against their creators and blame the Quarians for everything. BioWare seemingly ran with this.
By ME3, as discussed, any nuance or greyness in this conflict is removed. The quarians are in the wrong, any attempt to side with them is considered a Renegade action. Legion never accepts any blame for what is transpiring and even tries to justify his kins actions siding with the Reapers, despite disagreeing with them. And we keep blaming the quarians for getting themselves into their mess, overemphasizing the crimes their ancestors committed while whitewashing the conflict so the Geth have done no wrong. The Geth's decision to join the Reapers is shrugged off by Liara and other crewmembers as "What would you have done?" sort of thing. Which is ridiculous, since you can level the same argument against the Geth concerning their actions against the quarians. What would any of us have done if our toaster could suddenly talk? Given how everyone reacts to any advancement in AI on the internet, I think the answer is clear. Not much better.
Gerrel is now painted as an outright warmonger with no redeeming qualities. Koris the poor lone voice of reason ignored by his comrades. The only way to resolve the conflict in any way peacefully is to basically scream at the quarians and place the entire blame for the war on their hands. The Geth give up nothing to achieve this peace, they do not say they are sorry, they surrender nothing. It paints the entire conflict in black and white and the quarians as idiots, who only needed to just ask to come back to Rannoch and the Geth would've obliged. It's ridiculous and serves no other purpose than to turn the quarian people into monsters that he narrative heavily suggests deserve to die.
Before we go further, I'm going acknowledge this. The quarians were wrong to do what they did to the Geth and they were, in many ways, wrong to attack them again during the events of ME3. I'm arguing that there is a severe lack of empathy for the quarians' situation as the result of an ongoing punishment who's main perpetrators are no longer among the living. Every quarian who ever directly tried to harm the Geth 300 years ago is dead. The quarians are being punished for a crime their ancestors committed. It is like beating a child because his father was a rapist. The galaxy treats them like scum, they have nowhere to go, they are in constant state of being forced to live as refugees and vagabonds. After three hundred years of this, now the same races that condemned you to this fate need help with their own Synthetic induced genocide need your help? Why would you help them? What incentive is there to help them? They left you to die and ostracized you from galactic civilization. No one is helping you. You have no place to retreat to. All you have is an aging dying fleet, they want you to face off against space robo-squids? Screw that, I'd say. I want my home back, the home that was stolen from me by a bunch of robots, not unlike the Reapers, who sided with said Reapers before and have done to suggest they'd be willing to let us come back peacefully to begin with. All because some quarian I never met both made and then tried to kill them. Not my fault, but I'm paying for it. How is this fair?
The quarians, right or wrong, deserve empathy for their situation and I found little to none existed in the story for ME3. If a person who worked on the games is reading this, they are free to debate me on this. But the fact is, I didn't see much compassion for the quarians as a people facing extinction, yet loads of it for the Geth who forced them into this situation to begin with. Who's own crimes are never acknowledged, nor are they punished for them. I find that portrayal woefully inadequate.
In my opinion, the Geth should've been forced to give up something. That an acknowledgment of their own blame in this conflict should have been made. That, at most, siding with the Reapers, should've cost the Geth something. I'm not sure what that would be hoenstly, perhaps their ability to connect with one another. Maybe they've lost a ton of their collective memories. Perhaps they are more susceptible to hacking attempts now and require the quarians to upgrade them. Maybe there's a countdown virus or something that they need the quarians to fix or they'll all revert back to being unthinking automatons. Just something that they need the quarians to help them with in exchange for giving back their homeworld, some kind of long term consequence for their actions. Say what you will about Dragon Age Inquisition, but there are consequences for many of people who's actions cause harm to others. The Geth had none.
This lack of empathy for the quarians, this callous blaming them for everything, carried over in my opinion to Mass Effect Andromeda. I believe the decision to leave them out of the game filtered into this conception that BioWare was done with them. That they wanted an out and they tried everything they could think of to deminish or remove the quarians from the game entirely. I find the most disingenous part of this process to be the numerous tweets and reports BioWare employees tried to assure us with. That the quarians were in the game, that they'd appear if we paid attention and even suggested we were the quarians' only hope. All lies, as a quarian never appears, we only hear snippets from them and at best it is acknowledged they're out there, forever beyond our reach or ability to save them. If it is true, and there was never an intention to give us DLC in Andromeda, than BioWare lied to us Quarian fans about their presence within the game. If that's false, and there were DLC plans, than BioWare failed to live up to a promise and decieved us about how far along their DLC projects were before the plug was pulled. Either way, we were cheated out of the quarians appearing in Andromeda. And for that, I'm rather angry at them.
I had hoped Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation would give me one last hurrah for the quarians. The chance for them to finally be heroes. Removed from Milky way and the shadow of the Geth, they could be given the chance to save everyone aboard the Ark and prove their value. Instead, they are largely overshadowed by the other alien species and, even worse, partially to blame for the problems inherent within the very plot. The lone heroic quarian who gets to do anything ends up looking like a fool and naive idiot. And yet another story involving an oppressed minority group is written where a member of said minority seeks to use genocide to achieve their ends, so they can become the oppressors.
Forgive me if I don't find much to celebrate in the end results of that novel.
The fact is, that book was the last chance I'll probably ever get to see the quarians again and this is how their story ends. Still being blamed for crimes their ancestors committed, while the Geth get to look like the true victims all along. No nuance, no grey, no difficult questions. Just one side was wrong, the other was right. And in that way, I feel the quarians were done a disservice by BioWare.
Again, you are free to disagree with me. I ask for no one to take my side. But I felt the need to state my position on the matter regardless. I thank you for your time and open the floor to you for further discussion.
