Finally coming to terms with the ending of ME3

[skull_bearer]

Note, I'm assuming (perhaps naively) that when Bioware says no one starves, they mean it, and that the Relays will be rebuilt and the galaxy back in roughly the state it was in before within about a decade or two. It might be dumb of me to think Bioware will bother to clarify that, but frankly that hope it's the only thing allowing my Shepard to do anything other than sit and wait for the Reapers to blow up the Crucible.

That being said, taking the Destroy option makes a weird kind of sense to my Geth loving, utterly xenophile, never considers genocide Mirek (dude, I based him off a Holocaust survivor character). It's forcing him to do the worse thing he can possibly imagine, to a race he considers possibly the most noble in the galaxy. Also to the race with the least stakes in the galaxy: this is not the Geth's war. If the wanted, they could have sat behind the Perseus Veil and waiting until the Reapers had finished. They are fighting because they cannot sit by and no nothing in the face of omnicide. That's pretty damn noble.

And Shepard has to kill them.

He can't choose Synthesis. It's what the Reapers want and the idea of rewriting every living being in the galaxy by force just make him want to be sick.

He can't choose Control, that's just delaying the inevitable. The Reapers will be back, and for all he knows he might have just bought the galaxy two weeks.

He has to choose Destroy. Just ending it once and for all, Reapers, Godchild, himself and EDI (acceptable losses) and... an entire race of innocent beings.

That's... quite interesting character development, actually. Particularly since he survived. Survived in a galaxy where he'd done the worst thing he can possibly imagine, and everyone is hailing him as a hero for it. After that, I think Mirek would have been grateful for a quick court-martial and a bullet through the head. Like that's ever going to happen.

It which point, my Shepard quietly disappears from the galaxy, and spends the rest of his time with Admiral Koris and the few other people who had the sense to be horrified by what he did, slowly rebuilding the Geth's code from scratch. It would take years, even decades, but at least they have a blueprint to work from, and they'll get there in the end.

Which is a bit of a double victory, a change for redemption and forgiveness for my Shepard, and for justice, as he's fully planning to let the reborn Geth put him on trial for his crime in full Nuremberg fashion. Even if they let him go, the rest of the galaxy will be furious at him for recreating AIs.

But, rather satisfyingly, it's also chance to really rub the bastard godchild's face in it. It's logic is so utterly broken Mirek is going to deliberately work against it. If synthetics are going to be built again, he is damn well going to be the one who builds them.

So in the end, it's something of a good ending. The Reapers are dead, the Geth are alive, the Godchild's cycle is broken, and Shepard is going to build a better galaxy with his bare hands if he has to.

And I'm happy.

Comments

[arkan2.livejournal.com]

That ... that does sound rather neat.