Should Any Characters Have a Previous Connection to Shepard?

See, I pushed the green button the first time because I was like: OK, what the hell, I want to see what weird ass space magic this is supposed to be. HOW would it work? I need to see that!



Also, one needs to know that I wanted to save everyone SO BADLY. I wanted this to be real even if it was extremely creepy. I thought I can't have spent an entire game making peace with everyone for the Geth and EDI to die. I REALLY thought maybe Bioware was serious about this weird Space Jesus utopia where the only solution to the synthetic problem was merging. I thought this was supposed to be the good ending! See, I thought the logic of the Catalyst made perfect sense in a brutally cold sort of way. In the end their motivations were not way beyond our comprehension. Quite the opposite. So that was a bit disappointing even when I could appreciate the irony Bioware was going for. If you watch the same thing happen for millions of years, it's reasonable to assume it would repeat forever. And maybe it will! But that's where the narrative turns into a mess. Shepard proved that things can turn out differently. And yet you still get punished for it with the loss of the very synthetics you just made peace with. Who became your friends. Because of this, synthesis looks like the only real outstanding reward for your efforts. The symbolic ascension into a sort of paradise by injecting every living thing with Shepard's spirit of love or something outrages. That is the LITERAL message of synthesis. What the hell... But then Saren was right all along!? So yeah, it's not a good ending this way.

You hear Starbrat say that and you're like "riiiight". Didn't trust that thing at all. But then I just decided to check out all endings one after another, starting with the suspiciously happy one..

Then Shepard's face turned into a husk for a split-second and I thought, yeah, ok, it was a trap after all. Figures. But THEN everyone seemed happy. Was the ending not real, was Shepard dreaming this up? I was so confused. *g*
Of course the other two endings played out pretty much exactly the same way. So I had no idea what Bioware wanted to tell me. Was this real or not? Everything about the final 10min was so surreal, I decided the breathing scene needed to mean something. And so I found the IT. And suddenly it ALL made sense! I thought it was a brilliant idea to manipulate the player into pushing the green utopia button of doom. If something sounds too good to be true, it is! There is no easy way out of conflict, ever. Yup, IT made sense to me.



...well, except for ONE thing. With low EMS the only option you get is Destroy, right? Sooo, by being a poor diplomat and terrible human being you actually cannot screw up and get manipulated into becoming their slave. The reapers will let you destroy them. And so the IT sinks like a stone unfortunately. Which then implies that synthesis was really supposed to be awesome...



I'm one of those people who actually liked the original ending better. I don't mind it at all when something is open to interpretation. Let's you believe in IT and move on. It's not the ending I had hoped for, not even close. But I can live with it. In my head the only good ending is Destroy and my Shepard survived it and woke up. Because Starbrat was totally lying. And maybe synthetics didn't all get destroyed after all if everything we saw was what Shepard imagined before she woke up.
Good enough for me!

For anyone who still loves Shepard and the trilogy and who'd like some closure, a very good friend of mine wrote how the Milky Way might have looked after pushing the red button. It's the first finished part of a planned epilogue trilogy. It combines all three endings in a way and is extremely well written. Every character is spot on. I highly recommend it to those like me who still enjoy revisiting Shepard's story:
www.fanfiction.net/s/11434743/1/Reaper-Dreams
This is my headcanon now. Better written than anything Bioware ever gave us.
I wish Bioware had made a fourth game that deals with the aftermath of the reaper invasion. They could have pulled the rug out from under everyone by making the IT real and delivered a free DLC that picks up after Shepard wakes up in the rubble, the reapers still alive. Because it was all a sham. And then they could have given us the ending everyone wanted. Where the Milky Way kicks reaper ass by collective effort. Surely anything would have been better than some weird beam that needs Shepard's essence to function!  Instead they gave as the Extended Cut that only made it worse imo.

Thanks for the recomendation, first


Yes, that's the thing, you could see IT wasn't not meant to be real and that synthesis was somehow supposed to be the best ending... Which seemed completeley absurd to me O.o I remember picking destroy and feeling a huge disappointment about how wrong that went, like destroy was after all the wrong answer, and I reloaded thinking, "so... what? it's one of the other options the right one?" I tried control, and it didn't seem right, I tried synthesis and the same... I thought, so it doesn't matter which one you pick? this is all we get? I was in complete disbelief, totally shocked I went to google and I literaly typed "mass effect 3 absolute shit ending" (well, in my language the first time, later I started looking for answers in english too ) I was furious, I couldn't understand what was happening It's funny thinking about it now, a little "comedy is tragedy plus time"
Then I found the IT in the old BSN and I thought, hmmm, that would be great... As I said, I didn't really believe it, as in I believe a DLC is coming, but this way, when I replay it I feel fine ignoring the kid and the "all synthetics will die" and pretending that in fact no one dies