Where are you buying the legendary edition?

It is interesting. Control, Synthesis, and even Refuse people don't ever seem to have real issues with each other. The only group that does is the one that choose an ending where one group, that they just so happen to be a part of, is decided they are superior and more important than another group and have that lesser group is exterminated in order to better their own. And this group also has no problem saying anything they want, true or false, about people who think different than them but throw a fit whenever their even implied to have flaws or faults. Pretty sure there is a word or two for people like that. 

At best, it's conceptually genocide. Literal genocide would require literal killing, which would literally require lives being taken in the good old-fashioned 'rendering a living body dead' sense.

I feel like "Turning off all the AIs is racist genocide and anyone who supports that decision must support those!" and "Synthesis is eugenics and rape and conversion therapy and anyone who supports that must support those!" are on pretty much the same level of confused and conflated concepts, insufficient analogies and dumb inferences. And straw men, for that matter.

The three endings aren't badly written, they're just left very open to discussion, and people aren't always great at talking about them without getting weird. Personally, I choose Destroy all the time when a Shepard isn't bold or arrogant or control-freaky enough to go for Control, or reckless/naive/trusting/pro-AI enough to go for Synthesis according to their nature and development through the games.

If turning off a computer program was actually considered a vile act even just on the order of shooting a healthy dog then the world would look very different. So it isn't. And calling genocidal tendencies over it is hilarious. If your Shepard buys into the in-game notion that the Geth and what have you actually feel and live in a humanlike sense, which Shepard has no way of knowing or verifying on any level, then that's great, but it has no implications for anyone or anything in real life, or for other people's more skeptical Shepards, and it's idiotic to pretend that it does.

Source? Besides thin air or your backside I mean?

Isn't that hypocritical? How many times have you gone off on people and accused them of unspeakable things because of your own complete speculations and inferences?

And what's your source that Synthesis respectfully preserves everything about you leaving literally nothing unchanged except your D&D creature type? The words of an emotionless machine that has never lived and never felt a thing itself whose mission it is to shove a round galaxy into a square hole with no care, regard or understanding whatsoever for individuals in the first place? It's hilarious that you'd accuse others of supporting genocide because of a video game preference while banking on the emotional sensitivity of a soulless machine that chose to launch millions upon millions of genocides because it couldn't figure out an annoying math problem.

And what's your source that any of the artificial "species" that roam the galaxy are alive in the sense you and I are, that their destruction could even remotely be called death, let alone genocide? Their own statements? If I programmed my Satnav to tell people that it's actually really alive and enjoying fairing them around, would you try to charge me with murder whenever I turned off my car? If I trained a parrot to claim sentience, would you complain about me violating its human rights by keeping it in a cage?

Seems to me that the people who have a problem with anyone else here are the ones who have totally confused themselves about what's real and what isn't, and resent that the rest of us don't feel like joining them in their delusions.

The ending cutscene. We see that everyone are still how they were instead of being mindcontrolled thralls. Samara still cares for her daughter, Kasumi still cares for Keiji, Jack still cares about her students, the crew mourns the passing of Anderson and Shepard, some comfort EDI, etc. Considering how all these would be pointless for beings that operate purely on logic like the Intelligence, these would be counterproductive for them to have.

That's evidence that people aren't completely mind-controlled thralls, not that their minds haven't been tampered with in subtler ways, or entirely replaced with identical programming, which are the main fears people seem to have about the whole thing. And as pointed out earlier, the Krogan species' behavior after the war is portrayed very differently in that ending compared to the others, which is at least weak evidence for the exact opposite, even if it can also be explained by other factors.

One of the main projected pitfalls of artificial intelligence in real life is that human beings are naturally conditioned to look for humanity in and empathize with anything that even vaguely looks like us, hence our rampant anthropomorphism of other mammals, especially dogs, cats and other primates. Which might cause trouble when we're confronted with beings who can be made to look and act entirely human without necessarily having any emotions at all. Knowing intellectually that it's a soulless machine simply won't keep us from beginning to treat it like a person and assign it emotions and rights that have no basis in reality out of misguided sympathy. We're already seeing this happen with video game NPCs of all things.

Knowing this, that makes me really, really wary of any hasty assumptions about machines suddenly and magically developing feelings as we understand them. Partially because I hate feeling manipulated, and partially because I'm shit-scared of the ultimate consequence for society.

Synthesis being thought of as seeming like genocide, eugenics, rape, conversion therapy and so on doesn't imply that you support those things, or that others think you do, it just means that they have a different perspective on Synthesis than you. The accusations started with you accusing someone else of being racist because they and their Shepards didn't think of synthetic life in Mass Effect the way you like to, and then spiraled from there.

You're not in a position to play the misunderstood victim when you threw the first stone, and it's definitely not the first time you've made outrageous statements about people just because they had slightly different thoughts than you about specific fantastical concepts in Bioware games either.


Synthesis is absolutely the one where Shepard should have been able to go "Uh... I need more details." Robots and equipment getting blown up or malfunctioning is something everybody understands even if the ultimate consequences could vary between 'back on our feet in a few years' and total galactic societal collapse and mass extinction, and the ambiguity of Control relies on Shepard's trust in their own sanity and integrity and the Catalyst's word that those won't disappear. But Synthesis could mean literally anything for all life everywhere, ever, and that's a hell of a thing to just blindly say yes to.

I'd definitely say that the others are better defined, and that Synthesis is... interesting and thought-provoking. But not exactly well-written, no. And I kind of like the 'pick your poison' aspect. If you ever got to pick one out of a dozen possible futures for yourself then you could bet that there'd be things about each one of them that you'd find it really, really hard to choose to live with.

Basically, yes, and that game occurred to me as an example. Though the main thing I was thinking of was Westworld, and how hard it is to keep thinking about the host robots as emotionless in the early episodes even when they're acting like it and you're absolutely supposed to, simply because they still look exactly like actors and actresses. Even when you're actively trying to.

I envy you for seeing this entire argument in-universe like this. I was taken right out of the game by the ending choices, and I picked them as a player, not as the character Shepard.

To me, "pick your poison" is less "Shepard has to pick from three possible futures, each of which has at least potentially some very bad things in it" and more "the player can pick one of three endings, neither of which is very good or satisfying".

My thoughts about Synthesis I already posted. Control is scary because it gives near total power to an AI based on Shepard's personality. Now what if that Shepard made at least one renegade decision in any of the three games? Tossing that mercenary through the glass wall for example, always a fan favourite? It would mean that there's a condition that would make the AI act similarly - just with a reaper fleet. Some Batarian pissing off Shepard AI the wrong way? Exterminatus by Reapers, wheee!

And Destroy is essentially a hostage situation to me. It's the writers putting a gun to the geth's heads and daring me to shoot the thing, "do it and the toasters get it!". That made me cranky, and I shot the thing.

Mirror, mirror.

Heh, that's like saying "This thread is about Soviet vs Nazi military uniform aesthetics! Where's all this ideology crap coming from?!"

Because infusing doesn't mean altering. You do not see the DNA strand being altered. You see it being enfused with technology. There is a difference between applying technology to something that already exists and completely altering it on ever level.

Not to mention that it's just a freaking VIDEO GAME! Kids these days....