Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

They could just as well have been drinking in bar for two years because Citadel pulled funding and they never found any other evidence of reapers

The geth being sympathetic is not the same thing as the geth should be this angelic robot Na'vi expy when we do get to explore them.

Better writers would have been able to maintain an alien quality while keeping consistent with what we knew about them from 1.

Tying into my earlier comments about how it's hard to accurately rate video games due to the gameplay being a huge factor of overall enjoyment and thus difficult to separate from the writing:

I liked Legion because his upgrade was that he also gets a Widow sniper rifle.

I hate Legion because he is the shining symbol of the geth's unfortunate evolution into Creator's Pet.

I never really got the impression that the geth were being painted as "angelic robot Na'vi expies" or Creator's Pets.

Keep in mind that Legion is the only geth that we ever really get to know, the closest we get to knowing any others is the Geth VI, who is presented as pretty amoral. It's straight-up impossible to make peace with the quarians if the VI is present instead of Legion.

What exactly did ME1 do with the geth to "keep consistent" with? Because there's not a lot. The geth are basically just there to be mooks and are given little-to-no development at all.

The geth certainly get the short end of the stick in two of ME3's four endings: either they are specifically and arbitrarily marked for death, making Legion's sacrifice moot, or they are magically given sapience by the Crucible, making Legion's sacrifice completely unnecessary.

Not to mention several opportunities to screw them over before this. Not really what I'd call a Creator's Pet.

I'd say the fact that we only meet two Geth would heavily imply that they aren't creator's pets.

To be fair, I would say their conflict with the Quarians is a bit of a plot tumor. That's actually my main issue with the plot of ME 3 is that it gives more importance to the conflict between synthetic and organic life than I felt was consistent with the rest of the plot.

There's only one example of a major AI-organic conflict in the setting that I can think of, and the player has the ability to end it. This makes the idea of someone building The Reapers to stop it completely out of left field.

Reminder that the quarian are at 17 million, while the krogan, which have spent about a millenium complaining about going extinct, are at 2 BILLION.

Reminder that the quarians were in the billions as well.

Reminder that 17 million out of a population of, say 8.5 billion, is 0.2%.

Or, in other terms, out of every 500 quarians, the geth spared a single one and killed the rest.

They didn't do it out of malice, true. But they still decimated their creators. Who knows what could have happened if the Citadel were the ones to attack the geth first.

And, pretty much everybody but EDI treats the quarians winning as a good outcome, with the geth winning being a "oh well" one.

However, out of universe the opposite being true is... worrying.

Still, being able to end the quarian-geth conflict kinda works with the Reaper narrative: It IS a moral victory, a "your reason d'être is factually wrong". But try to tell a Leviathan AI (or a Leviathan) it is wrong. They won't listen. They will only listen to themselves.

Charming/Intimidating the Catalyst would had been a funny ending tho.

Edited by Eriorguez on Mar 18th 2019 at 7:24:52 PM

I mean, the control ending is essentially telling him "christ you're dumb. Dumber than a brick. And the worst part is that it's not even your fault because you can't fucking realize it. Thanks V Is. Ah well. Wanna protect the galaxy? Gimme those commands. You're doing it wrong."

Edited by Yumil on Mar 19th 2019 at 10:54:59 AM

Could've been worse... We could've SEDUCED the Catalyst.

But that'd only have worked IF they had used the Virmire sacrifice as the flashback / Catalyst form (Which, I'd argue, would've been far more effective to represent Shepard's trauma.)

With the geth... the only thing you REALLY get in ME 1 is the geth outposts having a video of a quarian singing (Which shows a quarian OUT OF THEIR SUIT - albeit only mentioned in text form)

This adds a weird layer to them - they seem to venerate the quarians and acknowledge them as a creator / precursor culture. But also don't feel beholden to them. The video casts a strange view on what motivates the geth. They are quasi-religious in that they look at Sovereign as the pinnacle. But Sovereign doesn't regard itself as SYNTHETIC in that respect, hence why it is insulted.

Legion added some depth AND some quirks to the geth. Their innocence. But also kept them strange and alien - their whole method of morality and sense of being (gestalt beings every single one of them)

And then 3 went and made them Pinocchio and stripped them of influence, essentially "pulling a cylon". All those gestalt programs with their own "selves" merging into a singular "I".

In a weird way, what you do to the geth is what the Reapers want to do to Organics.

AND 3 contradicts Legions motivations - geth want to achieve their own future, not be "given" it. And what do you do at the end? You basically give them it... using reaper tech.

That felt dissatisfying. Even reunifying the two (Which was nice) was undercut by how the geth were just portrayed. Why do the geth have platforms manning consoles on their ships?! Why do they need PILOTS? It seems there was this clash between the cinematics / gameplay team and the writers there.

The Catalyst is weird, as it is also technically not malevolent, yet the main antagonist for a billion years. Control and Destroy make it dissappear and the galaxy move forwards in a different way, to see if the issue would repeat themself, and Synthesis gets rid of the problem, in a way that changes everything.

I kinda like upgraded geth becoming an "I", a step between barely intelligent individual runtimes and the immense collective. It is a level of redundancy that improves effectiveness, allows for a far better relationship with most organic species, and can work with geth mysticism quite well: If an "I" made up of a precise combination of runtimes is born when the collective deems it, and dies when the collective deems it as well, but memories remain for everybody in there, you can get PLENTY of spiritualism out of that.

If it was a convenience for organics.... but interesting for us to then question the "self" of a geth - if the being "ceases to be" when it moves from a platform but the memory persists then their concept of "life" or "soul" will be fundamentally different to any other organic.

unless they are like the Reapers and refer to themselves as "I" but are just a specific collection of individual intelligences, still operating in tandem. And maybe, like in altered carbon, they can "fork".

They've had that problem before. The Reaper main weapon came about because the cinematics people didn't know that lasers are impractical in this universe. They retconned that to a high-speed stream of molten ferrofluids, which is awesome, but still.

Isn't that basically what they already had? Legion was a platform that was largely cut off from the rest of the collective because maintaining a constant connection at that distance would be impractical. They still used plural pronouns, but for all intents and purposes they were an individual, who would be reabsorbed back into the collective once they returned home.

Anyway, I liked the geth retcon in 2 for the most part, but the Pinocchio retcon in 3 was pretty bad since it contradicts basically everything Legion said. And they kept downplaying what the geth did in the Morning War. If forgiveness was a theme of the series, they could have made something of that, but it wasn't, so they had to sweep it under the rug.

Legion was 1183 different runtimes. Each single runtime has its own viewpoint, each of them is an individual, but a very limited one. What Legion became, due to operating independently of the entire consensus, was a collective that wasn't either a runtime or the entire consensus, but an entity by itself. A cohexive group within a larger group, which the geth seemed to lack.

But how intelligent is each individual runtime? Is it as intelligent as a mouse, or as intelligent as an individual neuron? And if they have perfect communication, does it actually matter for the purposes of identity how intelligent each one is, since they are basically acting as individual neurons?

IIRC the codex holds that individual geth runtimes are on the level of simple, non-sapient VI, and that only by networking can they achieve something equivalent to organic sapience.

So a neural ganglion each, or an ant. Remember, ant colonies are intelligent beings smarter than the ants that form them.

And hell, each of us is a networked intelligence to a degree, as each cerebral hemisphere is perfectly capable of reasoning by itself, yet they work better if two are connected and allowed to specialize.

Edited by Eriorguez on Mar 19th 2019 at 4:34:57 PM

Yeah, each geth is a superorganism essentially. But ones that can exchange component elements and therefore memories. Essentially, they are a hive mind but without some overarching intelligence.

The more platforms they have the more hardware they have to share functions and software to share decision making. But with each of those, then each individual run time becomes IN ITSELF more intelligent, as they are able to offload background processing as a shared task.

So, each individual basically can share memories as bits / component elements of it move around the geth collective. The "individual" you were talking to five seconds ago is, fundamentally, different now.

I don't think the scene writers at bioware are quite able to translate that to gaming as a format without a hideous amount of info dump.

So, here's what we know about the geth in ME 1:

1. They were created by the quarians as a way to get the benefits of AI without actually creating A.I.s; they're skirting the line between the VI and A.I.s.

2. The quarians tried to turn them off once they realized this. The moral quandary at play here is what do the geth count as at this point: are we meant to recognize them as already becoming sentient/sapients in their own right, or is this no different from turning off your Tamagotchi?

3. The geth resisted, and the ensuing war resulted in the quarians being reduced to a tiny percentage of their former population. The moral quandary at play here is whether this was justified self-defense, or disproportionate retribution?

4. The quarians in turn were reduced to wandering the galaxy in their Migrant Fleet, while the geth stayed around on the former quarian systems. Any ships wandering around the Perseus Veil get destroyed, no questions.

5. With the arrival of Sovereign, the geth have now ventured out of the Perseus Veil, and worship the Reapers as gods.

6. There are also some geth who were out there doing...something or other, requiring the acquisition of quarian opera tapes.

1's sensibility was ambiguity. Who's right? Who's wrong? What's to say?

Fast forward to 2:

1. Our insight into the geth war is now "quarians tried to kill us for no reason", caused by some cliched "do robots have souls" origin.

2. No addressing of how this war of self-defense involved killing like 99% of the quarian population, for some reason.

3. No addressing of "why do you guys blow up everybody who comes near the Veil?"

4. Those geth who supported Sovereign turned out to be tiny minority of the geth, considered heretics by the main geth.

5. The main geth feel real bad about killing like 99% of the quarian population, so they're staying there taking care of the old quarian buildings because maybe then they can believe daddy will love them (if daddy were still alive).

2's sensibility was, quite clearly, "the quarians were wrong."

ME 1 and 2 are consistent on the "do geth have souls" and "Oh shit they're actually ai"

Because the comment shows self awareness in what the quarians thought was their super sneaky loophole of AI but NOT REALLY CITADEL.

ME 3 also shows that the geth only STOPPED KILLING when the quarians got an arbitrary distance from their planet. Also it's a bit vague on whether they killed EVERYONE - as their memories show quarian sympathisers. But that quarians killed them.

Statistically, the quarians couldn't have killed ALL the sympathisers. So maybe the geth killed them off JUST TO BE SURE. And in ME 3 they are showing memories likely to sway Shepard to supporting their case.

Retributive genocide is awful; what the quarians were doing to the geth was awful, but arguably the wider population wasn't aware they were killing life - they thought they were dealing with malfunctioning V Is. PLUS they had how ever many years of Citadel propoganda about how evil AI is.

I imagine part of it has to do with in-universe Values Dissonance, humans (and presumably other sapient lifeforms) find things like killing children and noncombatants abhorrent due to both biological hardwiring and millennia of societal growth, things an A.I. (even a self-aware one) would lack. They are completely logic based in behavior and in survival mode and given the quarians were trying to wipe them out the most logical choice for them was to kill every quarian in a certain proximity.

https://youtu.be/3kjfJY-oULE?t=332

Mass Effect 1 treats the whole "holy crap the V Is are asking existential questions, turn them off before they get more self-aware" as a bit of background for how things got the way they were. 2 decides to move in the direction of rehabilitating the original decision, treating it more as a sin that must be atoned for, and never mentioning the whole "killed 99% of the quarians" thing and the "kills everyone who crosses the Perseus Veil" thing.

I would argue 3's inclusion of geth sympathizers who were also killed by their fellow quarians is but doubling down on poor writing decisions and further whitewashing what should have been an "atrocity on both sides" situation into poor innocent geth.

Whether a faction is a creator's pet does not have anything to do with how many named characters from that faction we interact with, but the extent to which the narrative bends itself to agree with them.

Well the Creator's Pet trope page explicitly mention the character mustbe hated by the fanbase to qualify and I'm not seeing the geth hate right now I'm not exactly convinced they qualify for that either.

Fun fact: Way back in the day, Creator's Pet used to be called The Wesley after Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a particular subtype of The Scrappy.

While the current name is more utilitarian, I also feels like it gets less information across on its own.

To be fair, if I remember correctly, the main source of information on the geth in ME 1 was Tali, who should be considered heavily biased. Furthermore probably almost all of the information on the geth are the quarians, who had every reason to paint them as monsters, so it is no surprise that other aliens hated them as well.

To say nothing of the pre-existing, Citadel-enforced, prejudice against A.I.s.

I honestly see the Geth and their difference from ME 1 to ME 2 is less 'They became a Creator's Pet' and more they explored the dimensions of what they had set the audience to believe in the first game and challenged those concepts. A mark of a good sequel in my book is taking something the audience thought to be truth in the first installment and challenge the audience on what their evidence was, who their sources are, and why they thought that the first time around.

It gives dimension to your setting and characters in a very simple way. It allows the audience to realize there are more perspectives that they are not getting, not for a lack of talking to people, but that that story isn't being told.

I have a similar feeling about the "Retcons" in Dragon Age: Inquisition about the Evanuris and other aspects of Elven Culture. Its not a retcon if its information we genuinely didn't have and/or the sources we did are unreliable for one reason or another.

Agreed. I liked the nuance the geth got in 2 - they weren't painted as victims, nor the quarians as monsters (Though the fleet scenes showed a more nuanced side to the quarians as just as politically flawed as everyone else.)

It actually took pains to paint how alien the geth really are - and that they are learning but still not QUITE there. 3 was the point where the writing team seems to have lost the characterisation notes.

They didn't at least "Borgify" the geth by giving them some single point of failure queen at least.

For the geth to have wiped out the quarians they would have had to have been killing EVERY demographic as well - children, the aged. That unspoken element does paint their actions as immoral and also as more malfunction that intelligence - they had no moral element, no ability to distinguish per se it seems.

It's frustrating that Shepard can't articulate that, nor challenge the geth on it as much.