Space Heroes and Super Spies: The Miranda Lawson Thread

Needing Shepard to come in and wreck the place is a funny definition of control. And beating David down was never the problem. It's Cerberus' utter disregard for basic safety precautions that frankly borders on retardation.

You don't see how a technozombie is different from a kilometers long sentient spacecraft filled with the liquified remains of an entire race that it uses for go-juice? You hacked a pocket calculator. Now try that on a supercomputer. It's not about fanwank when the objects being compared are blatantly different in every way.

If it was only "replicating a signal" then why so many husks, over three years? At best they were criminally inefficient in their trials. Also Tesla FTW.

Supposition is fine, so long as it's stated as such, and not taken as fact. And, meh, I needed something snappy and I figured your jimmies aren't easily rustled.

Well we can start with the failure to completely isolate the David hybrid AI system from any other base system, specifically the ones with access to external systems. The first thing you need to do in Overlord is blow up the satellite dish. Fuck Hollywood hacking, we're talking physically block off access from your systems. Air gap between David and everything else. Even geth technobabble isn't magic, it needs some sort of connection to infect the other systems. Hell we do that at work if we think a computer has a virus, let alone if we tried hooking up an autistic kid to alien programs.

Still, I can get behind your reply, but if you insist on going only by what the games show, then you must realize it is your interpretation that is the more outlandish one. The games clearly portray Cerberus as off the rails mad science for the evulz with all of the associated tropes that implies. Everything they attempt turns against them, including the only two irrefutably positive examples- Shepard and EDI. They ask if they can but not if they should- and not in some feel-good moral sense, but in a very basic "is this going to blow up in our face" sense. Recall the engineering deck of the SR2. Oversized core for more speed and power is great and all- unless it overloads and vents right into engineering, killing everyone there and they don't have so much as a gas mask on hand. Or the Hammerhead that provides great speed, firepower and maneuverability but has "tissue paper armor". The point is overall they're portrayed as careless. So sure you can come up with a view that justifies all the excesses and makes them seem smarter than the writers made them. But I think you have to put in way more effort to come to that conclusion than I do in mine- that they're horribly inept and a logical result of what you get when you let unscrupulous people run amok off the leash. Not every leash is a quaint and naive chain against progress. Some are there to ensure you don't blow up more people than you're trying to save.

Another thing I never got with Cerberus supporters is how many of them argued that Cerberus was good because they did things the Alliance wouldn't and the Alliance was soft- implying you had to choose one or the other. But you don't have to. The Alliance are idiots, fine. Cerberus is a different kind of idiots. We need to choose a third option. Which is why I really wanted to go independent in 3. All the pieces were there...

Old resentments crystallized by the arrogance and ego of a certain poster.

Basically, that Miranda thread always prized her pragmatic "get the job done" side and the fact that she could be cold and calculating while reserving her emotions for private occasions and still be warm and devoted to those few worthy of her (her sister, Shepard). Basically we liked her shooting Wilson as much as we did her opening up to Shepard. After ME3's dumbing down of our favorite operative there emerged some people who welcomed her being more emotional. We all hated how she had been sidelined and the criminal way she was removed from the Cerberus plot when she should've been center stage. But those who had been on the "pragmatic Miranda yay" train were even more pissed and some felt that in additon to the sidelining because "fuck ME2" there was a deliberate dumbing down of Miranda's ediger qualities and a targeted attempt to make her more family friendly and thus boring. The people who embraced her being more warm and emotional pushed back against this more extreme view.

Enter a certain user, already (in)famous for belligerently promoting Miranda in the story and lore boards. He reportedly wanted to represent the dominant Miranda interpretation on the forum. He took it upon himself to take a number of users on the "warmer Miranda" side (most of them female) and form them into a clique via skype. Suddenly they and a few older posters who were still bitter about earlier arguments with other older posters regarding Miranda's sexuality all suddenly decided the mostly harmless back and forth we've been having thus far was suddenly "irrenconcilable differences" on the scale of Israel-Palestine and they went off and made their own thread (where it was against the rules to make multiple threads for one character). Priestly was notified, and the other thread was locked. Unfortunately that gave him the excuse he had always wanted to shut down the whole romance forum.

Hence why we Miranda fans are always blamed for it. But we didn't cause Priestly to close that section. We were just the last to enable him.

The magic of technobabble is unfortunately something that isn't so easily eliminated; What I think is odd is how it was able to technically hack multiple systems at once, which is of course the indication of Hollywood hacking. We see this countless times in the trilogy; your exasperation with that method is largely indicative of the faults overall. Either BW didn't put in the effort to enable the more realistic elements of technology, or everyone in the entire universe is a moron. 

As I said, Russell's teapot; get back to me when what I'm doing comes to you. I'm not being coy or arrogant (at least, not towards you) but I do hope you see the aspects of philosophical plundering I'm attempting.

You do sort of have to, because there really aren't any 3rd party ideologies to browse beyond the Shadow Broker (Liara)... who consistently shows her own ineptitude. Cerberus may be a different kind of idiot, but their idiocy is practical (and reversable) compared to, as you say, the quaintness and naivete of the alliance with their constraints. Even if I were to be independent, I'd be largely the same as Cerberus, being a human-centrist who wants to have a powerful, advantageous position over the other species. In function, I'd simply be Cerberus with the practical constraints... which is what I'd argue for. Put on practical measures and disregard the moral/ethical concerns and bam, you probably have the best organization possible. 

Bioware clearly didn't put in the effort. Though to be fair, there is also not a single character that doesn't hold the idiot ball at one point. Except maybe the space hamster.

I do get what you're doing. My intercession was more of a lazy cat swipe at some of the claims you were making, not the motivation behind them. I sometimes have the same aim, though I put forward more earnest claims to instill doubt in the prevalent opinion. You should check out the "Not curing the genophage: the reason you're a heartless monster" thread in Story/Lore. It's gone on to the double digits by other people's arguments by now but for the first couple of pages I was arguing for sabotage even though I've cured it every time.

The Yahg Shadow Broker has been around longer than Liara, and his is a methodology I can certainly get behind. Manipulate everyone from the shadows to stay on top. Works for me perfectly. You know that's my vision of a post-game organization. And I see no reason to be human-centric or favorable to any other group other than my chosen individuals. Humans are strong or weak, valuable or useless just like any other being. There's power and those who can wield it. And power doesn't give a shit for species boundaries or any other kind.

I tried to be accurate in listing the points of grievance from either side. Beyond that I have no interest in being charitable towards the actions of the aforementioned individual or their consequences.

Russell's Teapot, dear boy. With a lack of observable evidence for what happened, we have no evidence to say that it wasn't useful for anything either. We are left with a value judgement; I choose to believe that Cerberus' actions were beneficial in the long-term, though off-screen and unseen.

Shepard was one of the Marines dispatched to the Colony to find out what happened, not one of the colonists.

My Shepard is a survivor of Akuze. He also had Toombs commit suicide, and the whole Cerberus relation to the event was swept under the rug.

IMO, it's their craziness that makes them so useful. They create inventive solutions to problems and aren't afraid to get their hands dirty to get the job done. They aren't bothered by moral or ethical leashes, focusing only on the problem, and solving it. They do have the admitted fault of holding the idiot ball when it comes to the equivalence of OSHA compliance, but that seems to be the rule of law for the entire ME Universe.

I couldn't agree more. I believe in the idea of "necessary evil", but Cerberus went way beyond that. Being an independent in ME3 - co-operating with different factions on a case-by-case basis, and perhaps gaining some independent resources from all that stuff you picked up and creating your own project - would've been great. But that would've been player agency. Can't have that in a story dedicated to Mac Walters' ego... 

People are crazy. This is a fictional character, after all.

Cerberus as an idea i had no problem with, it's why i envision a future where Miranda takes the ideal she believes in and applies it with less of the stupidity and recklessness of TIM.
I'd have loved independence in ME3, making deals with factions, and factions responding to the deals you've made.

How?