The elephant in the room

That's Harbinger killing people, right?  We should make friends with that guy.  I mean, he's only wiped out a significant portion (if not entire populations) of every planet it's sent forces.  Clearly, we want to make friends.  I remember Shepard asking Vigil why the Protheans didn't surrender.  Vigil said it wasn't an option, that surrender wasn't something the Reapers wanted.  You have to assume that if you walk up to Harbinger for a chat that a) he'll outright kill you, he'll indoctrinate you or c) he'll turn you into a husk.  That's all he's ever done.  So, yeah, kill him and every single Reaper in existence whose singular goal has been to kill us.

I'm not expecting to change your mind at all. If you feel your mind being changed about something then that is a side effect. Been alive on this world, on the internet in general and specifically on this forum for to long to ever even consider the possibility of the concept of changing someone's mind on something.  If we could turn people's opinion about this game into a physical property a single round if fired from a Frigate would be so solid and unyielding it would have gutted Sovereign from stem to stern in one shot even when it was fully powered up. You could enclose a Mass Relay in it and detonate the Relay and while normally it would have the capability to wipe out a solar system wouldn't even cause a ripple in the metal and you would have no idea if the Relay was even gone or not.  And that metal shell is so solid and unyielding that even after the heat death of the universe it will continue to exist unchanged and unchanging.

Of course he withheld vital information he is in a room full of Quarians that with the exception of possibly Tali and maybe Admiral Koris would soon as give a lobotomy/dissect or simply blow into smoldering chunks of metal. And frankly would happily see the Geth burn into ashes then risk a single Quarian armpit hair to even vaugly help them. Geth keeping his cards close to it's chest while frustrating when Shepard is trying to help it and the Geth is kind of understandable to me. As for the upgrade the Reaper code is rather analogus to sodium and Chlorine. Separate they are toxic to you but combined and they become salt.  Because Legion doesn't just take the code and copy paste it. Legion works with and alters the code to allow the upgrade effect but without the mind control portion of it.  Reaper code (Chlorine) plus Legion modifying code (Sodium) makes salt.

Events of ME 2 and ME 3 are slightly different. In ME 2 the Quarians never developed their anti Geth weapon which is basically a DDos  attack on their visual capabilities. Legion explicitly tells you about the effect of the Quarian surprise attack. How so many programs were lost how the Geth's over all intelligence dropped how the inquiries about what to do became over whelming as the Geth started to panic over their very survival. That in that moment of panic and worry they turned to the Reapers in an attempt to save themselves from death at the hands of the Quarians. And the Reapers rather to form treated it like a monkey's paw effect. They made it so the Geth were able to fight back against the Quarians and win against them but at the cost of their free will.

The Geth are enslaved by their need for collective intelligence. They want to build a Dyson sphere and have all Geth programs housed in it to fix this issues. It isn't that they don't want to be alone it is that they are incapable of being alone. Being alone means they know they becomes slower and stupider. I mean how would you react if your intelligence was directly related to how many people were around you? When you are at a convention full of people you are as smart as Albert Eisenstein and Steven Hawking. When you are alone in your house/appt you are about as smart as a bearded dragon.   The Geth normally are ok with that. They accept it and are willing to make it work and then the Reapers show up and are capable of exploiting that weakness. That fighting them will result in the destruction of thousands of Geth programs.

I asked vanity so I will ask you this question. How many lives is an idea worth? Because the Reaper conflict is an extinction level event and the choices are adapt to it abandoning your ideology to survive. Or keep your ideology in tact and die because it prevents you from acting in a way that would allow you to survive.

I'm all big on non violence and a lot of that hippy crap because I think violence is how ignorant people solve problems. But if some people broke into my house and tried to kill my family and I had a gun and my two options were go against my ideology of being against violence to save them or stay true to my ideology against violence and lose my family. I would pull the trigger every god damn time. And I would do the same thing if it was random strangers as well. Because life is far more precious then any ideology ever will be.

That is why I can't fault Legion or the Geth for taking the Reaper upgrade to allow them to fight and survive the Reaper War.

And that is the irony because the Reapers are hated for that same logic. They find fault with Organic life and give it the same chance you do. They even choose to destroy organic life because of the off chance something might go wrong.

In that moment not only do you validate every single thing the Reapers stand for but you in fact follow the exact actions of the Reapers. 

I like the Reapers dead.  Not because I'm opposed to synthetic life.  I like EDI, I push for her to have a romance with Joker, I also like Legion and take the road they seem to prefer in ME2 (kill the heretics).  I also try to broker peace between the geth and the quarian.  I feel loads of sympathy for the geth in watching the videos from the early days of the Morning War.  Yet, the idea of keeping these killing machines around is just more than I can bear.  I can only imagine that, after the war, people would be terrified seeing Reapers and husks still around in any capacity for any reason.  

The Catalyst says Synthesis will bring peace but how does he know?  The Reapers still end up being more powerful than anyone and there's no reason that once freed of the Catalyst's control that they still won't be a threat to all life.  The reasons would only be different.  Mind you, I'm not saying they will be a threat; I'm simply saying that their belief in their superiority (which, as far as I can tell, would still be true) might lead them to be less than friendly toward lesser beings.  Sure, they're all synthesized together, but that doesn't make them equal.

As for Control, again there's these creepy Reapers around.  Putting Shepard in charge doesn't necessarily put my mind at ease.  Enforced peace sounds a lot like a dictatorship.  Even if Shepard starts out nice, the longer s/he exists the less removed from the concerns of mortals s/he will be.  Just sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Refuse just kills everyone and everything we know.  Sure, the Stargazer scene tells us that the Reapers are defeated in the next cycle but I hate the idea of life as we knew it being gone for good. 

That brings me to Destroy.   The lack of Reapers would almost certainly put more minds at ease.  The aftermath wouldn't be easy to overcome but we know we'd be safe from at least that threat.  (Leviathan are still out there, though, which is a plus point for Control.)  Also, I had no doubt more AI will be built in the future.  It's futile to pretend otherwise.  However, instead of constantly trying to subjugate and control them, why not encourage their growth and development?  Welcome them into society?  Not an easy task for sure but I think Alec Ryder was onto something when he felt integration was a better path.  Sure, he meant it on a deeper level, but I figure that if you're a regular part of society you're going to find fewer reasons to rebel.  Doesn't mean it won't happen but it also doesn't mean we can't try. 

the thing says "synthesis is the final evolution of all life". How would it know that? Did the crucible tell it to say that? Did Leviathan put that in its programming so that when it was talking to an organic it would say that? Or did it say that to butter up the ending so that it remains instead of being destroyed or replaced? Don't know. Don't care.

Destroy the reapers. Let the galaxy have a future without the threat of the reapers. If problems arise in the future, let the galaxy deal with them. Don't need the reapers. Never did.

Do you not think they'd be aware of what happened to them? Of what they were and how they were turned? I mean it's not like how the collectors were changed thousands of years ago where it could be considered normal, these are all recent changes.

Throughout the trilogy they are essentially mindless, I'm 99% sure they're not aware of what they are or were. What I'm saying is that if Synthesis is chosen, then the result could be that they all do become aware, husks, brutes, cannibals, all of them could realise what they were and what happened to them.

Cannibals, scions and praetorians are also disgusting, borderline horror shows. I'm not talking just looks but actual composition. They were designed to induce fear because, yes, the Reapers wanted us to be terrified. They wanted to mentally torture us by putting these things around us.

Keep up with the analogies. I enjoy a good laugh