Where are you buying the legendary edition?

Its a shame. Despite Synthesis being such a tire fire 'convergence' is one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the series.

See, when you use phrases like "in reality" it gives the impression that you don't understand that it's just your own headcanon based on vague wording from an unreliable NPC in a video game that others are perfectly within their rights not to share.

To my mind, the nonconsensual installation of SAM is an incredibly invasive operation that would be hilariously insane, unethical and illegal to authorize on one's own children without their knowledge if one was actually held accountable for it, and the fact that Ryder isn't more shaken over it is one of the many, many things that weaken Andromeda's writing by undermining serious and traumatic and scary ideas with a vacuous, upbeat tone just because.

And Ryder absolutely isn't the exact same person afterwards. They're hackable, for one thing. They're under constant surveillance, for another. The chemicals in their body and brain aren't generated or dispersed naturally anymore, for a third. They can't claim personal responsibility for any achievement they ever accomplish again because those will always at least in some part be due to SAM. All of those things are going to affect how Ryder defines him/herself until they die.

That's not to say that SAM's addition to Ryder isn't a good thing in the long run. But it's certainly a violation of Ryder's body and self. And I'd say that Synthesis could be even worse than or only somewhat less monstrous than the Kett transformation depending on the specific details, which we don't have. 

I was just amused by it.

In Mass Effect world there's always an excuse to talk about the endings again.

(Personally I favour 'control' ...)

1: The Dominate ability isn't available to more than a handful of people in the entire universe so far as we know, whereas anyone can learn to hack, and omnitool implants don't allow people to close your throat remotely.
2: You mean turn off visual/auditory surveillance or stop monitoring Ryder's vitals and location entirely? Either are intimate breaches of privacy. If you can turn off everything then fair enough, and I'll take your word for it. 
3: You choose to use other abilities at your leisure after learning, earning, developing or otherwise acquiring them. SAM messing with your biochemistry is always going to make at least a small difference in how you process the world around you, because that's factually how interconnected your body and your brain are. You'll always be at least a slightly different person than you would have been without his influence, and you won't have any choice about it. Not unlike suffering the effects of a mild drug or subtle mental disorder, except Daddy forced it on you forever without even giving you a head's up. Pretty messed up by any reasonable standards, yeah?

4: Ryder is only capable of controlling that fleet due to unique experience they gained interfacing with the Remnants through SAM, and they only have the opportunity to do it on their own in the first place because SAM is forcibly taken away from them. Whereas Shepard can attempt any damn thing they want while telling their friends to back off, seeing how far they can go under their own power and being able to fairly pride themselves on that compared to everyone else.

A better comparison would be the fact that Shepard is forced to rely on the advantages of the Cerberus tech installed in their bodies between ME1 and ME2... except the only alternative to accepting that tech would have been remaining dead, and Cerberus obviously wasn't in a position to ask them if they'd prefer that. Not that they would have anyway, of course. Alec, however, could have had the discussion about SAM with his children at any point and respectfully asked each of them like adults to think about it and hopefully consent to the transfer if something happened to him.

You potentially had factual evidence to support one of your assertions, by my count. The rest are just more assertions. So far as I know you haven't even substantiated your base claim that Synthesis is more like getting the SAM implant than being transformed into a Kett. I don't see what evidence there could possibly be for that at all since we never see it in practice and never find out exactly how it works.

And see, based on the points you've made here alone I could build up a wild straw man accusation about you fundamentally having zero respect for the idea of consent, choice, personal achievement or power over one's own body and circumstances to the point of them not even occurring to you as issues. Except as usual, because I don't feel like believing that you're a shitty person just because we disagree about the hypothetical ethics of a goddamn sci-fi concept, what I'm actually assuming instead is that you just haven't given the subject a lot of thought from that particular perspective before, which wouldn't be weird or wrong at all.


Easy. Give Ryder some more existential angst dialogue about having a machine in his/her head and figuring out exactly what that means to him/her, make a point of Alec Ryder feeling more guilty and ashamed in some of his audio logs for potentially forcing that on his children forever without a hint of warning, and make some of the other characters in the know outraged over their former Pathfinder doing something so disturbing and reckless. Ryder comes off as deeper and more sensitive to and aware of his/her own situation, Alec seems slightly more responsible and respectful of his children's rights and choices, the stakes for Ryder's and SAM's relationship are raised, and the other NPCs get a chance to show support and empathy for Ryder as part of the transition to fully becoming his/her crew instead of Alec's. 


"Wreav is smarter than he used to be." is a factor that approaches Lovecraftian horror all by itself.

Personally I find the Synthesis slides horrifying because spontaneously turning people into half-machines without affecting their experience of being alive at all is just inherently ridiculous and impossible even by Mass Effect standards. Especially as performed by a creature that has never been alive itself. In which case you've doomed all life in the Milky Way to exist forever as... whatever the hell those things are. That's enough to creep me the hell out. If you want to be pedantic about it then we can clearly see that there are physical changes made, and we all know that doing that to someone else without their knowledge or consent is sick all by itself. But I find that to be pretty minor compared to the other thing.

Regarding the choice itself though, Shepard doesn't have the benefit of the ending slides when deciding what to do at the end of the trilogy. The idea is that s/he has to make a decision based on the facts s/he has available at the time of choosing, which in this instance is the Catalyst's vague and potentially unreliable explanation and whatever their own understanding and imagination combined can try to glean from it.

If a human representative for you and me is ever in that exact position in real life, I'd certainly want them to give the ramifications of each choice a good think and not just go with the most superficially nice-sounding option without considering worst-case scenarios. Basically, if you read the slightest bit into the implications instead of just taking it completely at face value then Synthesis quickly becomes potentially the most terrible crime ever committed against organic life, including the millions of genocides by the Reapers. So there's that. 

Personally I’m glad he didn’t do that, since it is a lot more like his ME2 character where he was actually smart instead of the character assassination he got in ME3 just to be a walking “Maybe the Salarians were right” sign.

Apparently post synthesis he is wearing a maybe the salarians had a point sign. He went from looking for revenge, not being able to wait until he could be unleashed on the galaxy, to peace is cool. It does not mean it was mind control but its seems a lot more than just getting an upgrade. Heck lots of the peace reactions are just weird. People can head cannon whatever they want for the why of it. But far more than getting internet access in your head happened.

The whole DNA thing is vague and weird as fuck in the end. If organics are not altered in terms of their DNA, then their offspring should, conceivably, not be “altered”, but we know that the MEU’s voodoo space magic would never allow that to happen. Thankfully, that clusterfuck’s probably stricken from any canon now that the Milky Way’s getting a follow-up. The fact that it’s referred to as the “pinnacle of evolution” is in itself braindead. 

Which I don’t think is very likely. I see BioWare taking the safe route in this respect, meaning no “special connection” to other people or synthetics, and no visual effect of synthesis like we saw at the end of ME3. More than likely we’ll just be shooting at regular old organics like we always have, so it won’t make a difference. 

What you're implying here, though, seems to be pretty invasive? If the difference of synthesis to non-synthesis was as simple as, say, installing a pacemaker, I would assume that most people, by 2186, would have some sort of cybernetic implant. Arguably, the omni-tool is a form of implant, isn't it? I mean, it isn't attached to a suit and seems to be powered by regular people. So, wouldn't simple being implanted with a hypodermal chip that connects you to the extranet be enough for the Reapers to simply disregard all organics as synth/organics, on par to themselves? The result of Synthesis would have to be radical enough and as distant to cybernetics, even by 2186's standards, as comparing a human to a single cell organism, for the Reapers to just stop from going on with the harvest. I mean, that is what supposedly happens, right? The Reapers view the cycle's sentients as no longer ... I don't know, why do they stop?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it just has everything reset like it’s all hunky-dory, and they default to a cured genophage and possibly even the geth still just existing. I don’t see a full commitment to any particular ending other than the reapers simply not existing anymore. 

Jinkys the endings again? I pre ordered through Origin (to stay on topic)