Where are you buying the legendary edition?

Yep. 9 years, 1 month, 6 days.

Which era? Showa, Heisei, Millennium, Monsterverse, Godzilla Earth, what?

That's what you think of me after years on this board? Forgetting codex entries means I'm "making stuff up"?

My understanding is that Destroy targeted Reaper code.

No, it’s more just what I think of the argument you’re making about Synthesis being galactic genocide and enslavement. There is no evidence behind it, just your subjective bias.

It targeted synthetics, not just Reaper Code. “It will not discriminate.” as it said.

Wrong. Same DNA with butterflies and caterpillars. Otherwise you're saying that the egg that had just been fertilized by sperm does not contain the same DNA as an adult human. Synthetics do not, and cannot, share the same DNA because they are literally something else. Not form, because that's the same (green aside) as it was before, but something melded. If you took uranium or plutonium and bombarded them with neutrons in a nuclear reactor you end up with Americium, a synthetic element. It is no longer uranium or plutonium. Doesn't share the same properties any longer.

You're unlikely to "get" me on this for no other reason than that your biology in this instance is fundamentally wrong. I don't really care one way or the other. Neither of us are changing positions on the subject.

Particularly if they're the "final evolution". That terms is crap but supposing it's true it has stopped change from happening. That's a hallmark of organic life. Ergo, we no longer have organics. FTR, I've never said AI isn't "life". It's not physically alive but it has emotions and independent thought. I thought it was criminal that C-Sec killed the AI that inhabited LOKI mechs and wanted only to be recognized as sentient beings. The geth only became violent when the quarians tried to destroy them, and then only spread outward when the Reapers corrupted them. I would quantify EDI as intrinsically good. I'd say SAM is good. The one AI on the Citadel and the one in Andromeda were evil. The Zha'till were held a symbiotic bond with the zha. Things were fine until the Reapers corrupted the zha-till and turned them against the zha. I don't have any ill will toward AI as a whole. The Reapers and the Catalyst are a beyond evil. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" seems appropriate. I don't imagine that will change, even when the Reapers don't have the organic/synthetic war.

I agree, their actions are beyond evil. I will never defend them on that. Understand sure, since it makes sense logically and I’ve even seen other villains do it, but never defend. But that leads to the problem: Destroy is saying they were right, in that you are using their methods against them. At the cost of countless species with an unfashionable amount of individuals. A billion Virtual Aliens, enough Geth that their mind would be the size of a galactic arm, tons of individuals like EDI, etc. Then of course all the lives lost as the galaxy enters a galactic dark age. So it’s not to forgive the Reapers that I choose Synthesis, but for everyone else. They survive, and are even better than before. Many diseases cured, a new level of understanding among each other, and so on. All while still being people, not murdered and turned into mindcontrolled puppets

Yeah, that fairy tale is BS. Understanding is all well and good but if it comes down to my family or another's starving it's an easy choice. Lack of resources drives conflict more than anything else. When the synthetics start harvesting all the best eezo deposits (and they'll do it better and faster) will the organics just sit by because of this new found connection? Not damned likely.

That's for sure, and it's better than committing genetic rape on every organic in the galaxy.

I'm pretty attached to the idea of organic sentient life. I don't care if you give a toaster eyes and make it as - or more - complicated than a human brain. It's still just a toaster. There's no reason whatsoever to think that there's something real looking back out at you from behind the eyes the way we can more or less trust that there is with other organic life, even if its programming evolves to the point of mimicking someone who thinks they're alive. In my mind, it's a bona fide miracle that we're even allowed to experience existence and that the universe isn't just a completely lifeless series of chemical reactions.

From that perspective, choosing the Synthesis ending is gambling all life that there will ever be in the galaxy on organic beings hopefully retaining that spark of true living experience regardless of whatever totally unspecified changes the synthesis effect has on our bodies and brains, on the word of a VI that has no way of knowing and no reason to care what that spark even is. In order to save a comparatively tiny amount of lives and a whole bunch of uppity toasters.

Personally, if I was standing in that room with Shepard, I would blow his/her brains out and let the Reapers have their way with a hundred more cycles of advanced space-faring civilizations before letting him/her take that chance with so much at stake for so little.

In comparison, the Control ending is just rolling the dice on the Catalyst telling the truth and fixing everything, at least in the short term, or leaving them as they've been for millions of years. And the Destroy ending is the same, except that the ultimate outcome is both more predictable and less ideal if we aren't being lied to, with a few more lives lost in the long run.

I think I picked Synthesis once in my first or second playthrough, before really thinking about it. Definitely never going to pick it again. I find it hard to pick between Destroy and Control though. Both could ultimately turn out pretty catastrophic in very different ways.