Hindsight Cleanup

• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment:
  • During his mini mission, Joker wonders if he's dooming the galaxy by hooking up EDI. At one point, he mutters, "...now I have to spend all day computing pi because Joker plugged in the Overlord." Then comes the Overlord DLC... Okay, so what happens in the Overlord DLC that makes what Joker said less funny in hindsight?
  • A YouTube user made a video that depicted the series ending like Neon Genesis Evangelion. That video has since been made private. I'm assuming this fan used content from Mass Effect 2 to make it? If so, then there goes your only link between what you're about to say and this game. It was meant to be a joke, but it turned out to be prophetic when the third installment came out and the fans' reaction towards the endings being similar to Evangelions 16 years earlier. This is the YMMV page for Mass Effect 2. Not for Mass Effect 3 or Evangelion. If your example were valid, it would've gone on the older of those two works, not here. But alas, it's not valid, because it was based on a fan video we can't trope, because it has since become unavailable for public viewing.
  • One of Jack's lines is "If I die, I'm haunting you, Shepard," a typical Badass Boast that shows her Hidden Depths that she believes in that sort of thing. In Mass Effect 3, those who have died haunt Shepard. Shepard watched somebody they knew die horribly at some point in every possible background they can have, so they were already haunted at the start of Mass Effect 1 by the memories of people who died. One of the main points of Shepard's personal story throughout the trilogy is how they become more haunted as time goes on and more people they care about get killed.

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Shepard initially baulks at Tali wanting to suppress evidence of her father's experiments on live geth. Tali says that revealing it would mean that her father would be held up as an example of a monster as a cautionary tale. You find Tali's dad dead and may even comfort her over it. Then you get to Project Overlord and see an even worse experiment performed on live geth. Feel like suppressing that evidence now? Yes, I do. Because the two scenarios are in no other way similar to one another.
  • So you convinced that asari on Illium to get back together with her krogan boyfriend, hopefully to get married and have kids and live happily ever after, right? Well, at least until Mass Effect 3, where you find out Charr died on a mission and Ereba will now be left to raise their daughter alone. So much for Good Feels Good... Maybe valid.
  • Shepard talking to Jacob may mention that he could always use "spare parts". In the Citadel DLC for 3, the clone who was made to supply "spare parts" for Shepard comes back to bite him in the ass. No context given for when "spare parts" was said between Shepard and Jacob, what they were discussing when they said it, or how it has anything to do with the Shepard clone in Citadel.
  • At the end of Overlord, Gavin Archer tries to justify what he's done on the grounds it could "spare a million mothers mourning a million sons." Pretty sure he's speaking metaphorically about stopping wars, but okay. Mass Effect: Andromeda has a character in a sidequest who was part of Overlord before she wisely managed to GTFO... because they tried to plug her son into the geth before David, and it's left her with a deep fear of AI of all kinds. Care to repeat that line, Dr. Archer? There might be a valid example of something here. However, the example is focusing on one line of dialogue for its context. Hindsight examples that do that have been pretty problematic so far. Given how messed-up what happens in the DLC is, the bar for how it can be made Harsher in Hindsight is set really far up. It might be worth putting in the time to expand on that context and better explain how that got accomplished.
  • The Horizon mission summary has Cerberus using front corporations to funnel aid and supplies to the colony. Come Mass Effect 3, Cerberus is behind Sanctuary, a refuge advertised as the only place safe from the Reapers, on Horizon. It is really a labratory studying huskification and indoctrination using the refugees as test subjects. Guess they were just setting up their atrocity factory under the guise of aid. This smacks of Fridge, not hindsight.
  • Omega is infected by an airborne plague, it has entire areas in lockdown, the plague spreads across species and seemingly resists attempts at containing it, with symptoms like respiratory damage that can easily be confused for something else until its too late. What few clinics are available are unable to help everyone. At the time of release, a dreadful prospect. At the time of the Updated Re-release... It hits very close to home no matter where you are from... It's a COVID shoehorn, Charlie Brown.

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Jack comes across like a sociopathic loner who can't connect with people and she can't fathom why Shepard (particularly the Paragon version) is the way he/she is. Courtenay Taylor would later voice the female vault dweller in Fallout 4, who is basically an everyman version of Shepard. Hey, look! It's actor stuff!
  • During Kasumi's loyalty mission, she mentions that part of the cover story she put together for Shepard was an article on them in Badass Weekly. This reference was part of the reason the author of Badass of the Week wrote an article for Shepard after completing the trilogy. In a way, Kasumi did get that article on Shepard written. The link needs to be fixed, because it doesn't link directly to the Commander Shepard article on the blog. Also not sure it fits under hindsight if the article in question was written in direct response to the Shout-Out given in the game.
  Badass of the Week Writer: [about the video clip where Kasumi mentions the article] Scroll ahead to 0:20 to witness what is either a cruel coincidence or the single greatest moment of my writing career.
  • After his loyalty mission is done, Grunt expresses his desire to rip out Uvenk's spine as a trophy. Five years later, his voice actor would go on to play Sub-Zero, who is infamous for doing that very thing. More actor stuff!
  • Jacob Taylor with his shirt off Hindsight Example with its context and punctuation missing
  • This game features a Phantom Thief named Kasumi who's not available in the vanilla version of the game. For extra points, Legion shares a voice with the aforementioned game's Starter Villain. What aforementioned game? The one potholed? Potholes don't count as context, bro. But at least we got more actor stuff.
  • The Lazarus project required Cerberus to take the original Shepard, keep what worked, and then rebuild & fix what didn't work without straying too far from the original - a challenge Bioware would also face about a decade after this game's release with the remastering process of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The developers themselves actually referenced the Lazarus project on the blog post about the remaster's visual changes and additions. Maybe valid? It looks like an example of something, but I'm not sure if it's Hilarious in Hindsight.

Jack

• Harsher in Hindsight: Take Jack with you on Legion's loyalty mission, and she'll say, "I'd never want to be brainwashed like that. Just kill me instead, please." If you don't go to the Grissom Academy side mission in 3, Shepard will have to kill a Brainwashed and Crazy Jack. Except that Jack's own loyalty mission goes into considerable detail about how this is precisely what Cerberus was trying to turn her into on Pragia before she escaped. So not hindsight.

Jacob Taylor

• Harsher in Hindsight: In 3, Jacob voices his skepticism when Shepard mentions that they'd eventually like to settle down. Over the course of the game, there is reoccurring implication that Shepard is Resigned to the Call and is slowly becoming a Death Seeker because of it. It's not hindsight if it's the overall theme of the character's personal story arc.

Mordin Solus

• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment: Sang "Major General's Song". Played for comedy. Then Mass Effect 3 came. Not so funny in replays. This one is everywhere on the Mass Effect pages, along with "Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong" and "My work, my responsibility". These lines are all things Mordin said in Mass Effect 2 that he repeated for dramatic effect in Mass Effect 3. These are examples of Meaningful Echo, not any trope related to hindsight.