Why the ending did not work (repost)

Probably, but it isn't always clear how much seriousness there may be included in a non-serious post....

You could take it as a dig at an "it was all a dream" ending instead of a simple joke. 

They make sense to me, as far as the ideas behind the choices go. I don't think Indoctrination theory has much going for it, but I do think Bioware -- and/or the Catalyst -- tried to be deceptive. I mean, Destroy became Red, Control Blue, and then this big tower of white light sitting pretty in the middle beckoning people to get closer.. lol. It's a cheap ass way to get people to pick Synthesis and not necessarily make an informed choice (or even have time to think). The human mind gravitates towards symmetry and balance. The choices win less on their own merits this way. Smoke and mirrors and all that.

Yeah, I don't have an answer for those lol. It'd be funny if this was actually Sovereign the whole time, when it uploaded itself in ME1..  Hence why nothing happened in ME1 until the end. "I am Sovereign and this station is mine!"

But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say the Catalyst is a separate entity.

I don't necessarily hate the ending myself, although I see it's flaws. I gripe more about other things in ME3, like the lack of ME2 squad time or the shitty Priorty Earth level (before the ending, that is). If they were gonna write such a bad finale, they could have at least made it fun and dramatic. But they couldn't even be bothered with that.

I could see them eventually doing a soft reboot and maybe redooing ME 3 one day. And this is someone who liked the game and is fine with the EC.

Except this is like even more removed and an even purer form of sci-fi. The other one was somewhat paying tribute to real history, with nods given to the Space Race, with geopolitical conditions mostly familiar on earth. It was like a fake/alternate continuity rather than pure fantasy.

Plus, the guy who came up with it is a pilot and engineer himself. He grew up idolizing people like Grissom, Gagarin, and Shepard. Now it's just some random shit.

All the endings made sense to me.

I remember one of the biggest complaints with the endings was the lack of choice. Now people are saying that they want a singular ending? That would destroy everything this series was about. People claim this whole series was about choice and now they want a singular ending? That makes no sense.

Same goes for the open to interpretation thing. Things being open to interpretation and letting the player decide kind of ties back into the choice thing. However, seems they don't like interpretation either. Everything must be black and white with everything wrapped in a bow with no questions and everything answered when the story finishes.

Shepard did technically get an ending. You put an end to the biggest threat in the galaxy, and it came to a resolution. The whole point of the trilogy was to stop the Reapers and you did that. Or they harvested or enslaved you and they defeated you.

It's not the complete definitive closure you were hoping for. Maybe some of the questions you have will be answered in a future game, but everything to do with Shepard and the Reapers is done.

I think the main question to ask is this: when did we stop going along with the story and start questioning? All stories have inconsistencies, but they can often get away with staggering levels of inconsistency if the story "just works" for the recipient. Once the spell of the story is broken, however, we start questioning, and then everything falls apart unless there's some truly impressive final act that saves everything that came before.

I started questioning early. In fact, ever since the dossiers in LotSB and the end of Arrival I suspected this story would have too much stupidity and scientific ignorance for me to accept, but I decided to overlook a lot of all that just in case the ending would make it all worthwhile. ME3 started putting nails into its coffin early. Shepard in the prologue, those stupid committee members, the dreams, exponentially increasing levels of biological nonsense, the redefinition of synthetic life as deficient, ignorance of lore in a dozen cases, including Legion's nonsensical "personality dissemination". For me, the straw that broke the camel's back was the Catalyst encounter. When Shepard was elevated into the Catalyst's presence, before it even had a chance to say anything, I knew that this story's ending would be dominated by a god-analogue and that human agency, if at all present, would be overshadowed by the message that we had to acquiesce to this "higher power"s outlook on reality and its visions for the future. That alone might've been enough for me to disown a story, but even then it was salvagable, I think. It might still have worked, if what followed hadn't been one of the biggest piles of nonsense and scientific ignorance I've ever experienced in an SF story.

It's not that the Catalyst's assertion was nonsensical as such. I could've made a somewhat convincing case of it, at least in scenarios without peace between the quarians and the geth. This story, however, didn't. I could've explained what Synthesis is about in a way that made sense, but the story didn't. It was as if the writer repeated ideas fed to him by rote without understanding a single word of them, and put his own ignorance in on top of it. In fact, that might've exactly been what happened, with Mac Walters being the ignorant executor of Casey Hudson's ideas (and then they masked this ignorance by talking of a "high level" conversation that omitted details. Yeah right. might've been convincing if they hadn't gotten the remaining details all wrong). Not that I liked those to start with, but if executed with a little more intelligence and finesse, I might not have felt intellectually insulted by the ending on top of everthing else. I may be in the minority in that I can live with emotional downers much easier than with intellectual insults. Shepard's death itself, well, I didn't exactly like it, sure, but it didn't break the story. The utter nonsense of how they died, however - walking towards that exploding tube, sacrificing their "souls" to enact a synthesis (exaclty how?), the nonsensical "new DNA" metaphor  - that, together with all the other other nonsense accumulated in the course of the story, that broke the scenario and irretrievably shattered my suspension of disbelief. After that happened, I was no longer willing to excuse the other nonsense in the story.

In the end, a lot of interpretation and headcanon was what *did* save the story for me in a way, but I lost all respect for the writers responsible for the nonsense. One of which is now project lead of MEA....
     

I don't necessarily believe they'll be back. The Catalyst starts off with a flawed premise. It's whole understanding of organics comes from Leviathan. Who are slavers of the highest order. There is something about this that is abnormal to start off with. Leviathan's minions probably got wiped out all the time because they were weak to begin with. They never lived up to their potential and couldn't fight off synthetic creations. And now every organic ever since has to be "protected". When what they really needed to be was free.

What does the Catalyst say about us though? He's finally surprised when you build the crucible and meet it face to face. "Clearly organics are more resourceful than we realized." It's the one moment when it's stop claiming to be so omniscient (unfortunately, it resorts right back to that, once you begin talking). If it can be mistaken about that, it can be mistaken about other things.

Fair enough. You can still ignore what I said about Leviathan. But the point still stands.. what the Catalyst said about organics being more resourceful than it realized. That's still in the main game. It's not the god-like figure some make it out to be.

The very fact that you get there at all shows it's flawed. It's not a god. It makes mistakes.. it's able to be surprised. It still has things to learn about organic life. That alone is enough to not take it at it's every word. That's a slavish thing to do in itself.. to simply just give someone the authority to dispense all answers about the universe. Luckily, the writers are still bright enough to recognize this. Because later Shep can tell the Catalyst "You'll never understand us."

You can play semantics about Leviathan, but images depict people on their knees. People don't thrive under that kind of rule either way you put it. This is not life at it's best. That's life at it's worst. And this is the premise the Catalyst is built upon.



Ultimately, the endings actually rest on this idea --- that the Catalyst doesn't understand and is "incomplete". Control uploads Shep to "complete" the process". While Synthesis shares.

But Destroy simply says "I don't give a shit if you understand. Now die."