- They didn't cause the metastability: if the most recent conclusions
about the Higgs Boson hold true, the new universe could simply be a spontaneous occurence
- Considering the fact the Vasari make heavy use of nanotechnology, this sounds plausible at first, but when you really think about it long enough, it is pretty unlikely. Only a single Vasari warship ever survived contact with whatever this enemy is, with the ship's crew was driven made with fear. Think less Cylons/Geth and more along the lines of Cthulhu and the Elder Gods. Whatever the Vasari are running from ain't pretty and is far more dangerous than anything you or I could fathom.
- Ah, so it's the Reapers, then.
- Once again, probably not. The Vasari use nanotechnology all the time. Getting bit in the ass by it wouldn't drive anyone insane, though it might be slightly surprising at first. If we humans who haven't even begun to master nanotech can see its possible dangers, so can the Vasari. They've probably already figured out how to root out that nasty "destroy all life" bug. Anyway, the Reapers are basically a race of ancient sentient capital ships, little more. A reaction to them would be more along the lines of "oh shit, we're f***ed" as apposed to clawing one's eyes out. The Reapers barely manage a collective BOSD among the Citadel races, coming nowhere near mind rape territory. Yes Reapers are big, bad, and powerful, but they are still perfectly acceptable within a reality filled with space battleships. The Vasari are up against a big unknown, something that violates their views on reality so totally that it drives them mad. This troper stands by his original claim: the Vasari are running from something with powers beyond imagination; something having more in common with a black hole, supernova, or pulsar than a simple armada of warships.
- Now, this is a late entry, but given the timeline for these posts, it's pretty clear that at *least* this is obsolete, and the above Troper *seriously* underestimated the power the Reapers are capable of. Especially given the time lapse involving at *least* Mass Effect 3 coming out which shows that the Citadel races *aren't* exactly limited to a collective BSOD. It also plays up the Eldritch part of them. Yes, a setting featuring massive numbers of massive spaceships means that huge sentient capital ships aren't outside of reality as the Citadel species understand it, but the Reapers do *plenty* more than just that. Are the Readers the Vasari's enemy? No, not really for obvious reasons. But their MO is a lot more powerful than *just* being really old, really sentient, really big star ships.
- The mad crew does fit with Reaper indoctrination though.
- I'm not taking these particularly seriously, obviously, but as attempt number 3, I can think of a force of nature capable of driving its opponents into a frenzy with fear: the Oncoming Storm. Or the Doctor to his friends. While in recent episodes of Doctor Who he's viewed with almost supernatural fear by some of his enemies, it's implied by River Song that he'll grow still more terrifying to them as he continues to battle the evils of the universe.
- How about the Zerg swarm. The Vasari might have trouble wrapping their minds around a huge swarm of alien locusts devouring everything in their path.
- Or the Tyranids. Or the Necrons.
- If we're doing 40K, Eye of Terror, anyone? Maybe the Vasari made the same mistake as the Eldar.
- I was thinking the whole "one ship left, heavily damaged and driven mad" sounded pretty Chaotic. One must wonder if the remaining ship had its captain shouting ++++KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY KILLFRENZY++++ endlessly into the comms. Given the Vasari are all about slavery and control, though, they're not especially Chaotic. They're actually more like the Imperium. However, they have a mastery of phase space - basically, the Warp. Perhaps Tzeentch had something go Just as Planned?
- Or maybe the slave races rebelled and used similar weapon to the advent and drove that ship mad.
- Maybe it's the giant Space Whale from Star Trek: Voyager that causes hallucinations and drives people mad. It doesn't need to be Cthulhu. It just needs to be something that causes mass psychical fear much like the Advent's mind raping technology. However, you then increase the power of the armada by an order of magnitude. The immense strength of the fleet and the Vasari's fear and confusion would cause their fleet to be wiped fairly quickly. One ship of survivors seeing that destruction occur so quickly as well as being Mind Raped could drive them to madness.
- Ah, so it's the Reapers, then.
The swarm might have been created in a forgotten Vasari experiment gone horribly right, or by the accidental merging of Vasari nanites with a slave race that had latent psionic potential. Perhaps the nanites even absorbed some of the consciousness of that slave race, which is why they are so Hell-bent on revenge. Hell! Maybe their entire nature revolves around *eating* both organic and inorganic matter, as well the conscious minds of sentient beings, and reshaping all that is taken into some kind of amorphous super conscious super organism.
The swarm already devoured, and hence absorbed, the sum total knowledge and consciousness of the entire Vasari Empire. Now, they are pursuing the only "food" source they know to still exist.
- Doesn't work. The Vasari were attacked 10,000 years ago, the Advent were only exiled a thousand years ago. Could be a similar set-up from within their own society though.
- Actually, the intro stated they arrived ten years prior to the game.
- Literally All There in the Manual, the intro has an Unreliable Expositor. He isn't lying, but he doesn't know anything about the other factions either.
- Actually, the intro stated they arrived ten years prior to the game.
- the Elder things and Shoggi/ Shoggoths (what's the plural for those nasty gobs of protoplasm anyways?) are quite resilient. if they can survive unaided in space, I'm pretty sure they can royally fuck up the Vasari. besides, it would be pretty scary to watch 999 of your comrades ships being eaten by gobs of sentient tar from the ass-end of sanity and reason.
- Think about it. Subspace functions similarly to Phasespace (minus the wormholes), and the Vasari and Ancients both developed the means to travel through Phasespace and Subspace, respectively. Also, the Vasari had conquered and enslaved other less-advanced races just as the Ancients did. Perhaps the Vasari were refugees that had escaped the Shivan incursion and fled to the Inner Ring of the galaxy. They had developed Phasespace technology possibly because they had lost Subspace capabilities. The fall of their empire was probably because of a Shivan fleet that had tracked them to where they had fled, and it is the Shivans that have forced them into a nomadic state.
- It all adds up. Monstrously powerful abominations capable of snuffing out whole civilizations? Check. Mind-raping psionic powers that could drive Vasari warriors mad in seconds? Check. Advanced spacefaring capability, allowing them to chase the Vasari across the stars? Check (the Xel'Naga are able to build giant interstellar worldships). Hell, the TEC are probably just long-lost Terrans, and the Advent are human psionics descended from rogue Ghosts/Spectres. The mysterious Phasejump Inhibitors are leftover Xel'Naga tech that are inadvertently drawing the enemy right to the Vasari...
Think about it. Planets vanishing? Ships becoming lost? Survivors being driven batshit insane? It ticks all the boxes.
- It's vague enough to be a lot of things.
- WORSE. The Vasari enemy is really Matt Ward. The Vasari's backstory is going to be completely rewritten into something a five year old would find stupid. You'd flee in horror too.
So why were the Advent exiled? In the original game's opening cut scene, the narrator speaks of "a sinful society of deviants", there's a picture of what appears to be naked person hanging in some kind of creepy suspended animation. From what we can tell, The Advent are a trans humanist, Matriarchal Hive Mind. If Seeker vessels' voice actors are any indication, The advent start adding techological bits to their kids right from birth. Heck the game manual flat out tells you they do this to their children's brains to give them Psychic Powers. Most people in real life would find any kind of experimention on kids horrific. Assuming that the Pre-TEC worlds are patriarchal, Moral Guardians go apeshit and start a massive hate campaign to have the cult extinguished. Since children are involved, this creates Unfortunate Implications, plenty of fuel to build strawmen to attack the cult with. With their collective dicks threatened by this Borg like society of superwomen and children, they exile them. They don't outright kill the Advent because they're still humans, besides the powers that be have to prove their moral superiority over the cult. Naturally pissed off by this, the Unity takes their shit up to eleven and become what we know them as today.
While the Advent are zealots to their cause of revenge and psionic augmentation, and the Vasari are driven to desperation to acquire resources needed to escape the threat chasing them, both of their acts of evil and notoriety pale in comparison to the megacorporation-led TEC and what it is capable of.
The TEC who regularly nukes worlds as standard planet-invasion tactics. The TEC who are willing to grind their enemies down through sheer weight of numbers regardless of losses. The TEC who throw conscripts and untrained recruits into hastily built ships without even standard military training and organization unless the situation warrants the economic expense. The TEC who developed the Novalith Cannon, which amounts to a planet-scale FTL nuke cannon, and then are considering DEREGULATING it to build even more. The TEC who consider the ultimate weapon to win the war is a bomb capable of supernova-level output.
It is a noted omission that the TEC's society is not discussed even as detail is given on Advent augmentation and the reasons behind the Vasari's evacuation and strip-mining of entire star systems.
- The TEC are not the villains, well, no more than the other factions. the difference is the TEC's issues are things that we, the players can see the repercussions of from our own history. The Vasari's standard procedure is to enslave the locals from orbit, or wipe out the locals and import there own, the Advent use Cybernetics and Psyionics to create a hive mind focused on the destruction of humanity.
- If you think WMDs are worse than colonialism on a galactic scale and Mind Rape, then don't play the TEC, The whole game is set up to make you pick from the lesser of three evils.
This isn't my theory but I thought it had an interesting angle. Through the game's background, frequent mentions are made of the "Great Wars" that predates the Trade Order's founding. We don't know much about them but they were the reason why the forefathers of the Unity sought a spiritual escape. We know the following bits of information from the Exile:
1) Nearly all planets the Trade Order encountered had a similar culture, except for the one the Unity inhabited. They were clearly unique.2) The Trade Order reacted to the Unity with hysteria and unmatched moral outrage and the reasons for their outrage related to the Unity's transhumanist practices.3) An roughshod (game lore refers to it as "incomplete") report by a group of market researchers was enough for the Trade Order to exile them.
Why would they react so badly to the practices of the Unity? Because the Great Wars of the past involved heavy and unethical use of psychics, augmentations and transhumans and caused untold destruction. Near the end of the war, the surviving Colonies enacted a pogrom against psychics and transhumans and banned all sorts of augmentations. The subsequent peaceful rule of the Trade Order still carried these memories and equated transhumanism and psychics to war and destruction (think how Europeans react to anything to do with the Nazis). So, when the Order encountered the Unity (who may have been people fleeing such Pogroms or simply those who were distraught by the destruction carried out by their fellows), the sheer mention of transhumans and psychics was enough to cause a Freak Out and exile the Unity without looking further into their society.
1) Reunification of the factions, doing away with the rebels/loyalists2) New Faction3) Science!4) Customization of your empire (And possibly profile picture)
<<|Wild Mass Guessing|>>
