No questions, but the whole demise of the Mass Effect story rests on the difference between what we learn of the Reapers in that scene with what comes to be known about them in the third game.
[spoilers follow]
I suppose you can write it all off by saying that a Reaper (given its size and near invulnerability) is prone to being megalomaniacal/delusional about its own status in the universe, and that most of what's said is just "trash talking" based on how many cycles of defeating one batch of organics after another, but it was such a loss to start with such an ominous bad guy only to have it reduced to oversized robots in the end.
I mean, if a Reaper is supposed to be sentient, it really can't be subject to the control of another. However, that all the Reapers are under the control of The Catalyst (the AI that created and governs them), the whole argument about sentience goes out the window. A Reaper may have the combined knowledge/experience of the organics/synthetics it was made from, but it really doesn't have "free will."
Of course, philosophically, one can argue that organics don't really have "free will" either. Our decisions are made on a subconscious level before we are consciously aware of them, and one who understands the human psyche well-enough and has enough intel on a specific person could prod them to do whatever is desired by setting up a situation in such a way that the "free willed" person does what is desired...thinking it to be their own idea when they are just exhibiting a conditioned response without realizing it.
The whole concept could have led to pages of deep philosophical debate on what the Reapers really amounted to and if indeed organics were any different, but so many were put off by the deconstruction of the story's Nemesis that people just lost interest in the topic.
20 Dec 2014, 8:45 pm
