{"id":148,"date":"2012-03-23T14:48:15","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T18:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/?p=148"},"modified":"2012-03-23T14:48:15","modified_gmt":"2012-03-23T18:48:15","slug":"losing-my-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/losing-my-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing my religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"dslc-theme-content\"><div id=\"dslc-theme-content-inner\"><p>Okay so on reflection I had more thoughts to share on the <em>ME3<\/em>\u00a0ending. There are spoilers behind the cut. Also, it&#8217;s worth reading through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/clavigne\" target=\"_blank\">a friend and colleague&#8217;s<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/getting-my-mass-effected\/comment-page-1\/#comment-27\" target=\"_blank\">comments on my previous post<\/a> which are also insightful (spoilers there too, natch).<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Right. So I gave some thought to this while I was talking it out with my friend <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/NathanDutton\" target=\"_blank\">Nate Dutton<\/a>\u00a0last night, and talking about my process of what to pick in the end. For me, it was a risk\/reward\/cost scenario:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The &#8220;Control&#8221; ending has <strong>massive potential rewards<\/strong>\u00a0in terms of a docile Reaper workforce, especially since the mass relays just blew up. The <strong>cost is also relatively low<\/strong>: the life of Commander Shepard, basically. However, the <strong>risk is enormous<\/strong>. What if it doesn&#8217;t work? What if it doesn&#8217;t last? Then the Reaper nonsense starts all over again.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;Destroy&#8221; ending has <strong>reasonable rewards<\/strong>. The relays are toast but the Reapers are gone. There will be a long period of suffering while people rebuild, but life goes on. Also, the <strong>risk is really low<\/strong>: you see the Reapers blow up so you know it works. They&#8217;re probably not coming back. On the flip side, the <strong>cost is tremendous in scale:<\/strong>\u00a0genocide of at least one race (the geth, and if you &#8216;saved&#8217; them with the &#8216;best&#8217; Priority: Rannoch ending, a newly sentient and friendly geth) and one significant companion in the form of EDI. There&#8217;s also the <strong>unexpected side benefit:<\/strong>\u00a0Shepard may (emphasis <em>may<\/em>) still be alive somewhere. So, that&#8217;s a thing. If you&#8217;re able to come to grips with the sacrifice, it seems like a better alternative than Control.<\/li>\n<li>And then there&#8217;s the Synthesis ending. Other than the Child&#8217;s enigmatic description of the result as &#8220;the pinnacle of evolution&#8221; and a &#8220;synthesis of organic and synthetic,&#8221; the real problem with this choice is <strong>we have no information about it whatsoever other than part of the cost<\/strong>. We don&#8217;t know if it will work, we don&#8217;t know what it will really do, and other than a certainty that Shepard will be no more, we don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s going to cost.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I came to the same conclusion that the aforementioned friend did: this is a leap of faith. If you think of a faith-based decision as one that you make without having all the evidence, but are making because something non-logic-based like emotions or morality or trust in other people compels you to make it, then the Synthesis ending IS a leap of faith in the purest terms.<\/p>\n<p>Now, granted, for those who haven&#8217;t seen the Synthesis ending, someone pointed out something interesting to me: the leaves on the trees, as well as Joker&#8217;s body, have traces of &#8220;synthetics&#8221; to them in the Normandy crash scene if you watch in HD and look closely. Observe:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"480\" height=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xg34E7pu9Vw?version=3&#038;rel=0&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;fmt=18&#038;autohide=2&#038;start=205&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>Now, sidebar: this is dumb. Their way of showing &#8220;synthesis&#8221; was to overlay circuitboard-esque glow onto anything organic (although I noticed EDI has it too) and to mess with Joker&#8217;s eyes. I understand they were trying to do this without text or dialogue so they had to rely on a visual cue, but<em>\u00a0come on<\/em>. There&#8217;s got to be something better than &#8220;visibly not touching the skin layer of circuit paths.&#8221; But it does show that the Synthesis ending does have some impact, even with a minor variation compared to the other two Normandy crash scenes.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow: Yeah. Leap of faith. Things changed for the future. Shepard demonstrably gone. Certainly, if you buy the notion of Shepard as a messianic figure, and the plot arc of <em>ME<\/em>\u00a0as a series being about how humanity adapts to a posthuman universe (recall EDI&#8217;s story about her discussion with Mordin regarding the salarian equivalent of &#8220;posthumans&#8221;), then this is a perfectly sensible ending with decent closure. On the flip side, it&#8217;s an ending that benefits <strong>most<\/strong>\u00a0from the game telling you what happens next, and it&#8217;s clear that they wanted to leave that ambiguous and open-ended in all three endings.<\/p>\n<p>What interests me is that there are things left behind to &#8216;ease your pain&#8217; in the Synthesis and Destroy endings. In the Synthesis ending, you can be secure in the notion that you didn&#8217;t kill off EDI or the geth just to save the universe, so these people you cared about can live on (MAYBE) even though you (well, &#8220;you&#8221;) are clearly gone.<\/p>\n<p>But the Destroy ending? This is where the contested scene of Shepard&#8217;s (MAYBE) potential survival comes into play:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"663\" height=\"373\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/prohgapL54Q?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>23 seconds, give or take. Obviously no face shot because it&#8217;s pre-rendered and you can change Shep&#8217;s appearance (though I will note, this scene is different if you played Fem!Shep; the shape of the body lying there is more &#8220;feminine&#8221;). Interestingly, everyone who&#8217;s ever mentioned this scene to me says that it&#8217;s London, though I don&#8217;t see a thing that suggests that other than &#8220;was recently blasted to dust.&#8221; And we don&#8217;t even know if it&#8217;s <em>really<\/em>\u00a0Shepard,\u00a0though it probably is; Shepard has long been associated with the N7 logo, and the game uses it as her &#8220;icon&#8221; in status screens in place of the face portraits used for squadmates. So most people read this as &#8220;somehow, Shepard lives.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this is also considered one of the biggest plot holes by the conspiracy theory wing, since the argument goes: how did a heavily-wounded Shepard who wasn&#8217;t in full N7 armor survive the point-blank explosion of the Citadel and Crucible, survive re-entry a second time (it killed her in the opening of <em>ME2<\/em>\u00a0after all), and then land somewhere amid Earth rubble ready to walk it all off? I&#8217;m kind of with them on this one, as even if you assume that Shepard was on a large-enough chunk of the Citadel to protect her from burning up in re-entry there&#8217;s plenty of other things that would do her in.<\/p>\n<p>Yet on the flip side, this scene is what gives indoctrination theory people in particular a kind if hope. It doesn&#8217;t hurt that, apparently, the file for it in the PC version is labelled &#8220;perfect ending&#8221; or something similar (<strong>can someone confirm or deny this?<\/strong>). They mention the implausibility of this scenario, and of the Normandy fleeing, as examples that something strange is going on. Maybe they&#8217;re right.<\/p>\n<p>If you ask me, though, this is a carrot, and it&#8217;s specifically a carrot for people (like me!) who just threw away a friend and committed genocide to save the universe. As I said to Nate last night, I think they could have omitted it with no real problem. It raises more questions than it provides answers.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay so on reflection I had more thoughts to share on the ME3\u00a0ending. There are spoilers behind the cut. Also, it&#8217;s worth reading through a friend and colleague&#8217;s comments on my previous post which are also insightful (spoilers there too, natch).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[33,28],"tags":[41,44,43],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3NfdI-2o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}