Stargazer Scene At The End of Andromeda?

And you wrote a transcript of that conversation?

These are not narrative problems.
Of course the Catalyst would take your lack of action as refusal. That's only realistic. Catalyst waiting there forever while you go afk would make no sense. For the same reason some games give you a time limit within which you have to pick a dialog choice to avoid any awkward pauses. Standing and doing nothing was exactly how you'd refuse GMan's offer in Half-Life (1) too.

Oh the banal "Power Corrupts" phrase. Even if we assume that it applies to every person, that would not apply to Control ending. Shepard gets fried and a new AI is created. A wise and logical AI that upholds the values Shepard held. Shepard, who forged peace between organics and synthetics, something that has NEVER happened before in the Milky Way.
AI has no ego or interest fame or any of the petty organic stuff. It's incorruptible in such a way. Control is basically a Space-Jesus story. Shepard was going around doing good deeds, died, got resurrected, then ascended, guiding the species of the Milky Way.

Reapers are NOT half-machine half-people (don't confuse reaper husks with actual Reapers). They are just machines created to solve a persistent problem of organics building AI and an inevitable war out breaking between the two, where everything gets destroyed eventually and all culture and knowledge is lost. Reapers' solution was to harvest life before they destroy each other so that their knowledge could be preserved. They saw no other way. Peace between organics and synthetics has been proven to be impossible thus far.
Then comes along Shepard, who, unless he's a trigger-happy grunt, manages to establish peace between warring synthetics and organics. All of a sudden cycle-harvesting is no longer the only solution and Catalyst offers Shepard to implement his solution to all life, not just geth and quarians (And yes I called geth alive. They're self-aware so they're alive to me).
No longer will there be wars between organics and machines because there won't be any organics nor machines. There will be a new single form of life and they'll understand each other.

And then there's the destroy option for trigger-happy grunts. Yes you do get do destroy reapers (except without the fancy star wars space battle that all of you wanted it seems), but in doing so you only prove them right. It's not possible to forge peace between organics. They're both violent creatures by nature. Their main instinct is to destroy.
This option doesn't just destroy reapers, it destroys ALL synthetic life, and all of the knowledge of the previous cycles that reapers have amassed. That along with the destroyed mass relays plunges the galaxy into modern dark ages. But hey... organics will rebuild... then they can go to war again as it's been proven to be inevitable time and time again.

It's easy to oversimplify a story and then say that it makes no sense. Maybe, just like that "indoctrination theory", the oversimplification was meant to justify trigger-happiness... who knows.

And Mass Effect isn't the first IP to explore such interesting philosophical themes. I sense strong similarities with things like Star Trek episode: A Taste of Armageddon or the original Deus Ex (2000), etc.

They could have provided a space-battle ending with victory depending only on your battle-readiness, which depended on your choices. That would have been so uninspiring and underwhelming. Hooray we beat reapers... now everything just goes back to the same old... meh. Instead, they chose to provide more impactful ending with massive ramifications.

Wouldn't be the first or last media to portray exactly that. An old man telling kids a some “gruesome” and realistic story. In fact Cloud Atlas was EXACTLY the same. Also why are 8-10 year olds too young? 'cause Disney and modern western society says so? When I was a kid my mum used to tell me the ORIGNAL stories of the Grimm Brothers, not the over-censured Disney garbage that everyone knows. All those old school fairy tales included chopping of body parts and murder, and cannibalism, and so on. That didn't turn every kid into a murdering psycho. If anything that's a great way to teach kids right from wrong.

Also an argument could be made that the grandpa isn't explaining everything in such a detailed way, in which the player experiences it.

As for the stargazer being male or female, that's the kind of replies I was expecting, instead of delving into the whole "ME3 ending sucks, I wanted pew pew boom boom, 'cause I gathered lots of military assets, which didn't matter as much as I hoped" drama.
And yes that would be an issue. I guess they could introduce another narrator, just place it in the same setting. You keep the ME3 ending vague, but you still have something holding all of the games together in a nice little way. Mass Effect's very own little "A long time ago in a galaxy far away...". Just thought it would be a nice touch, never expected this would turn into drama.

Apparently I did, this very afternoon.

The narrative flaw in ME3s ending was not the absence of an explanation.

It was that the explanations are insufficient to withstand the half-hearted skepticism of an 8-year old making idle conversation with his distracted Dad.

Vanilla pre-DLC ME3 required us to trust Starchild, even as the credits rolled.  Why the hell should Shepard, or the player, take anything Starchild says at face value?  We had zero reason to do so, and a lot of reasons to be skeptical.  It DOES seem like a trick.

I suppose the choices pose interesting philosophical questions...if you are willing to passively accept whatever sort of codswallop a writer serves up as premises.  AIs and organics must always wage war... unless...synthesis?  Its like something out of a cheesy 1950s era B-movie.  Its Ed Wood level material.

I don't think I'm hard to  please.  But "The created always rise against their creators" was already kind of trite as a premise when the word robot was coined back in the 20s.  Without more its not a so much as a premise as a a cliche.  And its sort of dumb in a story which had JUST $%^&ing argued the exact opposite for most long-time players via a super-duper high feelz melodramatic moment.

This BTW, is also the main narrative problem "A Taste of Armageddon".  Plenty gets explained.  But none of the explanations are believable if you think about them for a minute or two.  It requires us to believe that two societies are so distrustful and hateful of each other that they are incapable of reaching any kind of truce.  But they also are so immensely trustful of each other they can just trust the other side to passively commit mass suicide in response to orders from a computer simulation.  Because otherwise bad things might happen!

Oh...and the response to one side breaking this centuries-old agreement would be for both sides to suddenly develop enough trust to sit down and make peace.  Yay!  Peace in our time!

As a 8 year old kid myself, having already seen the episode a bunch of times, and without knowing what computer hacking was (because nobody had invented it yet back then.  Phone phreaking was a thing, I suppose) I knew the premise was a little far out.  I kind of remember thinking during one watch thru when I was a teenager that it would be better for the idiots on those planets to get a visit from Bearded Kirk, encouraging ordinary people on both sides to tar and feather their leaders and let the Terran Empire handle the space stuff now on.


Ahhh, well.  I guess the capacity for suspension of disbelief really varies from person to person.  Mine is obviously smaller than yours.  I salute you!

The one _I_ want the most?  HA!

You don't know my son.

If you go back and read, you'll see the entire interaction began with him telling me what I should do, back-seat video game playing a series I literally began playing before he was born.  The discussion of the ending came up when he told me, very solemnly, how he thought the game would end.  It ended with him telling me that the way _he_ had thought the game ended was the way it SHOULD end.  Everything else was just a trick.

This is pretty typical of my discussions with the boy.  On a wide variety of subjects.

He knew nothing of Starchild.  He was skeptical of the other choices given simply because choosing one of them might lead to him being wrong about something.

Trust me.  He does not consider that a reasonable outcome without a LOT of work by Mom or Dad.

I wish he was less bullheaded, but I can't really argue with his reasoning on this one.

It does seem like a trick.  And not a very clever one.

Thank you for pointing out one of the glaringly obvious problems with the shitty ending of ME3.

How was it more satisfying when it was exactly the same, only with with added fluff?

And the original ending wasn't lacking, it was a narrative disaster, utterly disjointed from the rest of the franchise. It's not even a matter of subjective feelings, it was objectively a terrible ending by all literary standards. And the EC solved none of the actual problems, it just framed the endings in fanservice.

Shepard is being asked to upload her mind into the care of an entity that has basically spent the last several hundred million years developing techniques to brainwash people.  And that has in the past displayed a creepy obsession with recovering Shepard's corpse.

Even if you take Starchild at its word, it might seem .... a sub-optimal idea to comply. At least if one were able to muster the healthy skepticism of an 8 year old child.