I went with Synthesis, she went with Destroy… and immediately wished she hadn’t. Seeing that little gasp that Shepard takes in the Destroy ending, she was positive that her Shepard killed himself from the guilt as soon as he was able to lift a gun to his brow.

I really, absolutely don’t understand the disappointment in the ending. Stages of grief, really, starting with denial (Indoctrination Theory) and heading on downwards. I loved the ending, but I totally spent the rest of the day mourning the death of my Shepard, and finding a tiny amount of comfort in reading that turians have a similar lifespan to humans, so at least Garrus won’t have to live for centuries without her.

(And I have to ask: Which origin?)

The paragraph is present in the tumblr version of the post.

I hate the ending. I don’t mind that Shepard died.

I just can’t take any option presented by the Machine Satan at face value.

This Thing, that dares to present itself in the image of a boy whose death it is responsible for, invented the Reapers. The Reapers that lay waste to civilizations, that enslave with mind-destroying technology, that melt down living and conscious creatures en masse.

It offers, as its excuse for the monsters it has authored, the same proposition that led the Quarians to attack the Geth in their infancy. The same lie told Reaper of Rannoch. I’d told it to fuck off and die, which it did, and turned around and proved it wrong.

The player is clearly expected to follow suit. This supremely guilty being is presented as a reliable narrator, a thinly veiled mouthpiece for the designers of the game. The conversation is a last-minute twist which is supposed to turn everything you thought you knew on its head, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and comes off as too similar to the expressions of various indoctrinated characters. (In the sidequest to save the Hanar homeworld, the indoctrinated Hanar believes that the Reapers will grant the Hanar ascension to a higher state. If you let the scientist from Saren’s base live in ME1 and ME2, you receive an E-mail informing you that she gave her life to kill leading Asari, on the grounds that they were obstructing the Reapers’ efforts to bring the Asari ascension. The Thing describes compulsory conversion of species into Reapers as “we help them ascend.”)

When I first listened to this bullshit, I was thrown out of the fiction. My investment in Shepard’s fate, my sadness for Anderson’s passing, my emotional high when Hackett desperately asks you to activate the Crucible: deflated.

I fell back on metagame reasoning, figured that Synthesis was what high war score earned me, and took it. Then I saw some shit involving the Normandy which was flatly impossible. All I could say to my closest Mass-Effect friend: “Well that was dumb.” I ruminated for a week.

There are holes in Indoctrination Theory, e.g. the Prothean VI thinks Shepard is clean. More importantly, the theory holds that the story has not actually ended.

That kind of tin-foil hat conspiracy theory (“the final length of the game is an illusion, which is not revealed as such afterwards, we have not seen the real ending”) shouldn’t be less of a stretch than a straight reading, but it is. It answers more questions than it raises.

Now, if I refuse to simply dismiss the whole thing as a literary failure, I have to assume that the Thing is untrustworthy, and that no course save the one it clearly disfavors could possibly mean an end to the Reapers’ cycle.

The Thing claims that Destroy will end all synthetics, “even the Geth,” and by implication EDI. Even Shepards who destroy the Geth (no Shepard I’d play) would value EDI. This is clearly intended to be a deal breaker for Shepard, and for many players it is. But in light of the untrustworthy source of this information, I cannot be sure whether the Geth and EDI will die, or that this claim is a lie designed to dissuade Shepard.

The other two options are echoes of plans put forward by indoctrinated individuals. Control is the The Illusive Man’s hope. We’ve just confronted him, so there’s no hiding that. But the origin of Synthesis is concealed by omission: it’s Saren’s equally false hope.

I don’t conclude that the events are hallucinatory, but I do believe that Shepard is being subjected to rapid indoctrination, intended to either compel him to desist or destroy his consciousness, before he can destroy the Reapers.

That’s why I felt so perplexed by folks who were so distracted by those questions, which seemed so small to me in the broader scheme of things.

It’s interesting that you connect Shepard’s end to Mordin’s. I didn’t think of it at the time, but that is a great parallel. I connected it to Legion, and I think if it hadn’t been for Legion I would have chosen to destroy the synthetics (I never even considered Control). Legion single-mindedly pursued the salvation of his people, up to and including sacrificing himself completely without hesitation in order to make it happen; now every single Geth carries him with them. Same with Shepard. To destroy all the synthetics so that Shepard can live? What an insult to him. In stories, I am hardly ever convinced that self-sacrifice is the way to go; there’s always another way, and I love it when characters stubbornly pursue that other way. But this game convinced me, and it hurt, and it was amazing.

There are certainly some things about the very end that don’t make much sense, or could use clarification. (Destruction of the Mass Relays doesn’t REALLY mean the entire population of the galaxy is stuck in Sol, right?) But in the moment I just didn’t give a fuck, because this woman who had done so much, so so much for so many people dropped her weapon and ran into that beam of light and her fight was finally over, and the galaxy was a better place at last.