The endings (again)

<not sure if I'm the boring one>

I have to admit, when the final season of GoT aired, and I remembered how bad Bioware fucked up Mass Effect, I knew how bad D&D would fuck up GoT. My friends and I were watching it together. I had seen the spoiler threads on Reddit and it was hilarious watching them meltdown during the shit show. I laughed my ass off. "What are you laughing at," they said.

"I know how this whole thing is going to pan out. It's gonna suck ass," I said.

"How do you know?"

"I read some stuff, but I won't say anything. You think it's bad now? Get the booze. It gets worse."

The entertainment industry primary objective is to, uh, entertain. They forgot this in the past decade, the writers swallowed by their shallow understanding of current politics, their writing driven by the naive ideological zeitgeist.

I was not entertained by TLJ. In fact, not even TFA. Didn't even watched Game of Thrones season finale. Not entertaining. I can say this for much of Hollywood's film industry in the past 10 years.

Mass Effect 3 endings doesn't even enter in this category. It does the opposite of entertainment for me. It gives me feelings of disgust and abhor. In Spec Ops you expect this feelings, the authors create the atmosphere for it. In ME3 I doubt the writers wanted to guide my feelings in this direction, which for me screams bad writing.

No, not disgust. Contempt.

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Funny thing how words actually mean things...

This. I heard an audible thump of a mic being dropped. To be honest, I stopped reading at this point to quote this, because it hits that hard. Thank you for speaking my mind, clearly.

You are right. I'm not the target audience for most AAA shows and games of 2010 onwards. That's why my entertainment is procured far away from that. Mass Effect was one of the last "mainstream" entertainment I had, and I loved it. If you still love it, more power to you. I don't want to steal your joy or appreciation of it. For me, the endings are "eye rolling pretentious", badly written and executed.

One of the things I digged in the past three years was Critical Role, a live playing of D&D, with a great cast of voice actors. Great stuff!

Tru that. I really wanted to play, but time constraints really detain me. So, I hear them while commuting. Them and Lex Fridman's podcast are my main forms of entertainment nowadays.

It's really sad that in 2012 Call of Duty Black Ops II had a better "your choices matter" ending than ME3 did. 

I agree with you. Entertainment's job is to entertain. It always has been. That doesn't mean that stories they tell won't be thought provoking. That doesn't mean the stories they tell won't be full of political propaganda one way or another. It doesn't mean that a movie or TV show won't serve to push a particular agenda. Some shows will be to our liking, others will not. Critics will tell us which ones they like. We get to vote with our wallets. What I find disheartening these days is that very little new of quality is coming out of Hollywood. Instead rewriting the old to suit the "correct think" is what's getting noticed. I've been dragged to a lot of movies and have not been impressed in the past 10 years. Maybe I wasn't the target audience. Maybe I was and just saw through the bad writing. There are some that I have enjoyed a lot.

Some writers are better than others. GRRM is IMO a very good technical writer. I find his style of writing very cumbersome; it's too descriptive for my tastes. GoT fell apart when it got past his outline. Martin got involved in too many side projects and I think burned out on his own story. He will never finish it. The last volumes will be left to fan fiction. So essentially make up your own ending is as valid as the shit storm we got. If you want a better ending go to Youtube and find The Drinker Fixes: A Game of Thrones. John Grisham on the other hand, I like. I don't need sequels, although some can be entertaining. Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series I enjoyed. Simon Green's Nightside series was a guilty pleasure. 

But back to ME3. I don't know how they'll resolve the elephant in the room without a massive retcon all because they had to use a pick your favorite color (atrocity) ending and never mind the meaning. We weren't supposed to think much about that. Using the crucible would destroy the mass relays. We had a difficult choice to make and little time in which to make it. 

I can't tell you about your laptop and what you do with it. Who told you the Conduit is broken?

Mass Effect 1 and 2 are riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies, not better or worse than ME3. ME1 can be "forgiven" because it's the first installment, ME2 because its a big side mission. What's ME3 excuse? The way it was advertised at the time, the crescendo it got from the first two installments, the expectations got too high for its own good. The story too big to be dealt with in any form whatsoever, with the time and hardware constraints.

Anything I'm saying here was already said in the first year after ME3 launched. I daresay it got whole essays and dissertations on the matter, more than any game that existed before.

Another thing you are on the right trail as well. I suspect the endings of Mass Effect 3 exacerbated pre-existing illness in a subset of people who were invested players. I know I was depressed when I played it, and the endings did make me feel worse. Not the game itself, mind you. The endings specifically, the jarring narrative shift, and lack of closure. An unhealthy obsession appeared, and affected negatively my everyday life. I don't know if my ego is big, but it was certainly "frail" at the time. All this means that the endings are in fact, good and I can't perceive then as it is because of my diseased mind? In my opinion, no, they are still hot garbage. I just couldn't get over them at the time.

Nowadays, I'm in a far better place physically and mentally, and I can just say "meh" to ME3 as a whole and "bleh" to the endings. There are far better war stories, and the atrocious endings sour the entire experience since ME1 (Chtulu turned misguided AI in the last minute).


I'd like to discuss this things lengthy, but It seems you like "being right on the internet" more than human connection. It's a bore. It reminds me of Facebook or Twitter and the reasons I got out from those cesspools. It's a silly game, one that I not wish to partake.