History Fridge / MassEffect

* This Troper noticed that Hackett often stated "We're sending in a team to hold the area". Seems to be a throwaway official line, until you play Multiplayer for a while. Turns out, you are the ones holding the areas that Shepard has cleaned up!

* The Reapers are very compelling villains, and the fandom seems to agree, but after ME3 many people started complaining that they seemed less "godlike" with the reveal about the Leviathans and the Catalyst. However, after thinking about it for a bit, this troper thinks that the Reaper's origin story makes them even MORE godlike. Specifically, greek-god like. The parellels are so omnipresent it's almost scary. Think about it: The Leviathans believe that synthetics will always overthrow their creators, Kronos believed that their children would rise up and kill them. So, to stop synthetics from killing their creators the leviathans create the Catalyst, which ends up causing their predictions to come true, Kronos ate his children as they were born, which ended up causing his prediction to come true. The Catalyst, controlling the Reapers, destroys life as it becomes intelligent, the gods kill off the Gold and Silver races of men. However, the Protheans manage to defy the Reapers long enough to FlingALightIntoTheFuture, breaking the cycle, However Prometheus (Notice any similarities?) stole fire from the Gods, changing humanity forever. The Protheans were turned into the Collectors, AFateWorseThanDeath, Prometheus was chained to a rock and had his liver pecked out every day, AFateWorseThanDeath. More evidence: The two most important people who are indoctrinated? Saren and The Illusive Man. Saren is a Turian, a race which the developers have admitted is based on ancient Rome, and The Illusive Man is the leader of an organization called CERBERUS. If the Reapers are the greek gods, than who is Shepherd? Heracles of course. Shepherd died, and was brought back by Cerberus, the human terrorist group, Heracles went down to the underworld and brought back, the three-headed dog. In the Control and Synthesis endings, Shepherd dies and ascends to a higher plane existence by merging with the Reapers and becomes FamedInStory, Heracles dies and ascends to a higher plane of existence by becoming a greek god, becoming FamedInStory. I'm not sure what the Destroy and Refuse endings represent, maybe it represents somebody playing GodOfWar or something?

** The reason the teammates got back on the Normandy was because they leave during the final confrontation. This is clearly shown in a cutscene beforehand.

** An interesting caveat to the Morinth situation is that a full PARAGON Shepard also has the choice to take Morinth instead of Samara, which raises the question what Paragon Shepard in their right mind would pick Morinth over Samara? Well, going on the logic that there has to be *some* explanation for it, Paragon Shep could see Morinth as what the galaxy actually needs. No wait, hear me out. Samara is sterile in every sense of the word, Morinth is entropic. Reapers are sterile, life is entropic. -Shaxarok

** An interesting caveat to the Morinth situation is that a full PARAGON Shepard also has the choice to take Morinth instead of Samara, which raises the question what Paragon Shepard in their right mind would pick Morinth over Samara? Well, going on the logic that there has to be *some* explanation for it, Paragon Shep could see Morinth as what the galaxy actually needs. No wait, hear me out. Samara is sterile in every sense of the word, Morinth is entropic. Reapers are sterile, life is entropic. Of course, if you do find some justification for choosing Morinth, what happens to her in the third game is something of a Wallbanger. -Shaxarok

** An interesting caveat to the Morinth situation is that a full PARAGON Shepard also has the choice to take Morinth instead of Samara, which raises the question what Paragon Shepard in their right mind would pick Morinth over Samara? Well, going on the logic that there has to be *some* explanation for it, Paragon Shep could see Morinth as what the galaxy actually needs. No wait, hear me out. Samara is sterile in every sense of the word, Morinth is entropic. Reapers are sterile, life is entropic. Samara is the definition of LawfulStupid and she knows it, and has racked up just as high a body count as Morinth, making the two of them two sides of the same coin, and Shepard's personal philosophy could tip the scales in Morinth's favor. Of course, if you do find some justification for choosing Morinth, what happens to her in the third game is something of a Wallbanger. -Shaxarok

** The point being that {{Bioware}} did it [[{{Troll}} intentionally]].

** And then FridgeBrilliance kicks in when you realize that the Elcor don't use those prefaces themselves, the TranslatorMicrobes do that for them (as evidenced by the Elcor who hacked his translator to allow him to fake the emotional descriptions).
*** Well, if they're smart enough to read all the eclor's extremely subtle body language, why ''can't'' they tell when one elcor is speaking to another?

* The principle villains of ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' are [[spoiler:The Collectors. You could buy a limited Collector's Edition, whereupon you got The Collector's armor as a bonus. It's not an edition for collectors. It's the edition OF The Collectors. Of course!]] -- @/JackSlack

** EDI's dialogue indicates that she is constantly tweaking the Reaper IFF, so this is probably just a case of various factors, including the ship's stealth systems, the Reaper IFF sending off false flags, and of course the wide spread chaos of the Reaper invasion. Even the Reapers must be having a hard time keeping track of everything going on in all of that, and the Normandy just slips through their gaps in focus. It does raise questions about whether the Reapers see the same way humans do. Perhaps their visible range of light falls deeper into the Infrared, meaning that the thermal-masking stealth used by the Normandy renders them effectively cloaked? Or the Reapers just don't utilize windows.

* From Mass Effect 3, while at the Salarian base you see a yahg being transported. The implications alone are disturbing enough but later you come across an STG report that outrights ''says'' they intend to uplift the yahg and use them for covert ops. And it's entirely possible that Shepard is dead at the end of the game and his teammates might be stuck on Earth, which means that there's no one to warn the galaxy. And the galaxy will be exhausted by a war that had more devastation in a matter of months than the centuries of the krogan rebellions. Odds are good that the galaxy's going to be overrun in under a century.

* When you look at Aria's War Assets, it turns out the Council was not kidding about war with the Terminus systems. Adding some Terminus assets in Council Space, this would have indeed gotten extremely messy and would have fallen into the Reaper's plans by dividing both political entities. Saren hoped they would start a war in hopes of weakening both sides even more.

* Apparently, the encounter with über-fanboy Conrad Verner on Illium where he claims you treated him like crap whether or not you really did in the first game was caused by a bug that prevents the more positive dialogue from triggering on imported saves. However, there ''is'' another way to look at it in context: Conrad says you were a big jerk to him because, one way or another, you derailed his heroic fantasy when you convinced him not to try to become a Spectre. The Paragon option had you tell him what he needed to hear, and let's face it, hardly anyone ''wants'' to hear the things they ''need'' to. And then when you get killed by the Collectors, Conrad, obsessive that he is, restarts his fantasy in an attempt to fill the void left by your death (for a bit of bonus Fridge Sadness, Conrad's dialogue about his wife's support of his new galactic crusade implies that she's actually glad to be rid of him and his delusions of grandeur). The bit about you sticking a gun in his face (the final Renegade option from game one) can even be explained, too: In your second encounter with him in the first game, you can let him take a picture of you with your pistol drawn. When he's talking himself up to the bartender on Illium, even if you didn't actually point the gun at him, you did have your gun out if you let him take the picture, and now he's embellishing his story to make himself sound more badass than he actually is. The best part, though? If you resolve the situation with the weapons dealer that's conning him with the Charm option, you convince him that he unwittingly helped you stop a terrorist plot, and he apparently gives up trying to be like you and ends up founding a charity in your name. By telling him what he ''wants'' to hear this time, and letting him think he's an actual hero for once, you allow this otherwise somewhat pathetic man to make an actual contribution to the wellbeing of the galaxy.
** Then he turns out to be a CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass who has a doctorate in xenotechnology and dark matter integration that makes use of those Ancient Asari writings you thought were nothing more for a 100 percent completion.

*** It is mentioned that the Reapers do leave advanced civilizations without space-flight alone. It's stated that they're leaving the Yagh alone and that they may become the dominant race of the next cycle. Also in one of the Cerberus dailies there is a mention of a recently discovered civilization that took one look at the Reapers and said "screw this" and destroyed all their advanced technology in the hopes they'll just pass them buy.

This was my (Kodemunkey's) Fridge combination (logic, horror etc)