Plz share your thoughts on the Mass Effect Endings (Both from a Watsonian perspective of "which ending choice is the best" and from a Doylist perspective of "were any of those endings a good way to end the trilogy?")
When the third game first came out and I reached the ending, I immediately shot the glowy kid because I thought he sucked, and then when nothing happened I decided to blow up the Reapers. Apologies to my new friends The Geth and the lovely EDI, but I’m hittin’ destroy every time lol. My dad, Captain Admiral Keith David Anderson, told me to do it.
After the DLC update however, now when you shoot starkid he gets real pissy and throws a tantrum, locking you into what is simultaneously the worst and best ending. The refuse ending is interesting to me because it really is the developers saying, okay, you didn’t like our endings, huh? Well here’s one where everyone dies instead, happy now??? And like, yeah! Even though everyone dies and the content is significantly, significantly truncated, at least it’s a real ending? At least it makes sense?
All three crucible endings are terrible because, let’s face it, the crucible suxs. From your Doylist perspective, it was dead on arrival, a dud the moment it was introduced into the plot on Mars. Really, all the crucible endings are bad because the whole set-up for ME3 is bad. It turns Mass Effect into a story about building a magic machine to make all your problems go away. No matter how the crucible ended up working it was never going to be narratively satisfying, because it’s just an enormous machine that beats the Reapers for you.
When you spend 2/3rds of your story writing your characters into a box, it’s bad form to start act three by handing them a box cutter.
So if the crucible sucking is the one of the one, two punch that is ME3’s terrible ending, the second punch is surely that we’re going into this game with the goal of explaining the Reapers. This gets even worse when you consider what they add in Leviathan, but even without that, making the Reapers a force with whom Shepard can discuss both the nature of life and the Reaper’s plan in relation to it at the end of the game is just pathetic. Both for Shepard AND for the Reapers.
When Sovergin says “You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it,” that’s all I need from the Reapers. When he says “rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance,” THAT’S ALL I NEED FROM THE REAPERS. When he says “there is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it”
That’s it, baybee. That’s the whole thing.
I don’t need the Reapers to be any more scrutable to me than an 8 year old child is to the ants that live in his ant farm. They work all day, living their little ant lives, toiling in obscurity, oblivious to the fact that the giant beyond the glass is even alive in the same way that they are. Oblivious to the fact that they are utterly at his mercy. And then one day he turns 9, and decides he’s too old to have an ant farm any more, so his parents come in with the pesticide, and then later they tell him the ants went to a farm upstate. The ants live and die, they build a civilization only to watch it fall, and the whole time they are utterly unaware of the factors that motivate the beings that control every part of their entire universe.
That’s the Reapers. Eternal and unknowable. Alive in a way organic beings can barely understand, motivated by forces that defy our every way of thinking.
Except of course, it’s not. The Reapers were built by the space squids who still, miraculously, live at 2181 Despoina Drive. They have incredibly simple motivations that can be explained in a single conversation. They want to pull a John Conner and stop the Terminator future, so every once in a while they come kill all organics before synthetics can do it first, even though if you’re not a loser you already made peace between the Geth and Quarians so their entire point is entirely refuted before the starkid has even started explaining it to you. Glowboy says "synthetics will always end up destroying organics," and Shepard is like, "my ship’s AI is alive, and I can't get her to stop boning my pilot. The only 'destroying' of organics she's wants to do is pulverizing Jeff's brittle-bone-disease pelvis!" Everything the starkid says about organics and synthetics being incompatible instantly rings hollow the moment he says it, and that's the entire basis for what the Reapers have been doing for like a hundred million years. It’s just so weak.
And then this weak ass kid who has given you no reason to believe he has any idea what he’s talking about gives you three options, none of which makes any sense. Grab these exposed wires and you’ll turn into a big blue reaper? Jump into this hole to give everyone in the galaxy magic green cyber eyes? Shoot this machine until it blows up nice and red hot, which is somehow the intended way to turn it on???
Why would I, or my Shepard, want to do any of these three things? All I want to do is shoot the starchild. He’s literally in charge of the Reapers, the bad guys who have been killing everybody for three games now. He seems chill with whichever crucible ending you pick, only becoming upset if you pick the refusal ending. Which is good, I hate him and I want him to be upset.
Look, if you wanted me to say which color ending is best, like I said at the start, it’s red. Illusive Man wanted to do blue, and he’s a chump, so I’m not picking blue. And I don’t really believe in green, it sounds too much like made-up space magic, and I’m not a hippy. I like EDI and the Geth, I really do, but the Reapies gotta go, my dudes. I’m sorry to all the robots out there, y’all we’re the real ones.
So yeah, the endings all suck individually and they also all suck collectively. Mass Effect 3 succeeds in a lot of ways, it has the best set pieces of the trilogy (2 has the best characters and 1 has the best narrative) and it has lots and lots of amazing payoff for narrative beats that have been set up throughout all three of the games. But the Reapers aren’t one of them. Best to just play Citadel DLC and end things after the party, pretend the writers decided to keep the ending ambiguous. That Shepard, they always keep you guessing. How are they gonna get outta this one? I guess we’ll never know.
