[ SECRET POST #3611 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3611 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Mass Effect]


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03.
[Once Upon a Time]


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04.
(Overwatch, John McCain)


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05.
[Arrow]


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06.
[Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford]


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07.
[Supergirl]


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08.
[The Graham Norton Show]








Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #516.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

02. http://i.imgur.com/ZW2Bne1.png
[Mass Effect]

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I believe the majority of people who hated on the endings did not hate them because they weren't "unique" enough or elaborate enough.
I think it's because there was no happy ending for Shepard. I know most of my friends chose DESTROY only because Shepard got to live, even though they loved EDI and Legion, some even saved the Geth.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting a happy ending, I really wished for one myself, but I think it's a real shame to hide behind the excuse.
I consider what happened pre-choice incredibly well done (and just as valid part of the ending), but it gets glossed over only so people can feel legit when complaining.

[dethtoll]

Was there ever a time when that WASN'T why people were mad?

[(Anonymous)]

The Starchild and the Crucible were bullshit and no amount of fluff would have made it go away. Synthesis happens to be an EXTREMELY happy ending, but it didn't make any goddamn sense as it was implemented.

[(Anonymous)]

Synthesis was THE most fucked up utopia ending ever. Like. When you really stop and think about it, it was objectively horrific.

[a_potato]

I think a lot of people think it doesn't make sense because it didn't seem to fit into what had already been established.

Hell, the only reason it made sense to me is because I'd read 'Revelation Space,' which I'm 95% sure is what ME was based off of (it features a race of machines that exists solely to wipe out starfaring intelligent life, and that gets triggered when a species reaches a certain point in its development, and which appears in the first book to be driven to stop inevitable war between organic and synthetic life).

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yeah, there was a whole lot of missed development. Reaper technology indoctrinates, and indoctrination is bad, so why is everyone still using Reaper tech to jet around the galaxy and hosting their center of government inside the largest piece of Reaper tech discovered? There are two characters willing to connect some of the dots there, Javik and the Bartender.

It doesn't help that the rest of ME3 was a trainwreck of inconsistent writing. Shepard gets an entire hospital of cliches. Hackett spouts contradictory gibberish about the Illusive Man. Starchild is barely foreshadowed as the Big Bad behind the reaper plan.

[(Anonymous)]

Back then no one was ashamed. We didn't even think we had reason to be.

It honestly always seemed weird to me how direct this was, and how they didn't seem to really acknowledge it?

[(Anonymous)]

I fucked up my copy-paste job. Meant to reply to the bit about Revelation Space.

[ariakas]

Nah dark endings are my favourite kind of ending. If the problem had been that, I would have loved whilst munching popcorn and reveling in schadenfreude (the ending to The Mist is one of my all-time favourites).

But ME3's endings weren't dark. The Green Light Ending is as sappy and floofy as it gets. The problem is that they were narratively inconsistent with the rest of the story. Repeating "baw you just hated it because was sad" at detractors ad nauseum - which is all I ever see fans of the endings do, never addressing any of the arguments detractors make re: plot or tone - does not actually make it true.

[dethtoll]

Synthesis was actually very much in line with my overall goal in the series. Of all the endings, that was the only one that worked for me. So I wouldn't say it was narratively inconsistent, at least in my case.

[ariakas]

My Shepard had literally solved the conflict between the Geth and their creators and they were total bros now so when the Starchild was all MACHINES WILL ALWAYS RISE UP TO DESTROY THEIR CREATORS IN AN ENDLESS CYCLE I was like... but I literally already solved that problem last Tuesday, also, that was a subplot among many in the series thus making it the ultimate focus of the entire narrative is weaksauce in the extreme

ALMOST as weaksauce as introducing a major and game-changing character (such as the Starchild) in the final act.

Just terrible, non-adaptive, shitty writing all around. Indoctrination Theory please, or else the story was just fucking ruined.

Plus you have Bioware writers on record saying that ID Theory was going to be canon until the lead writer unilaterally changed it because "too many people figured it out" and the slapdash railroading multi-hued horseshit was the result >>

Yeah son, not that I'm bitter or anything. But it is now impossible to think of a series that was once one of my favourites without a very bad taste in my mouth. I mean DXHR had an Endingtron 3000 pull-the-lever device, but it somehow didn't sour the whole thing because it was narratively consistent, and didn't betray core themes along the way.

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't even notice the ending being bad; the whole plot of ME3 was just a bunch of random shit happening. They really had no idea where to go with the reapers after the first game.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

True, on the other hand, DA:I is on sale for $16 this weekend, so it might rebuild my trust in Bioware again.

[(Anonymous)]

You and every other fan of the endings who's butthurt that general fandom opinion is not with you.

You're demonstrably wrong, but nothing's going to pop your smug little bubble.

[(Anonymous)]

Personally I love grimdark, the more tragic the better. But the Mass Effect ending was a badly written pile of hacky tripe that abandoned character focus and narrative coherence for some quasi metaphysical conflict pasted on to make it seem deep. I'm glad you enjoyed all the pretty colors, OP, but some people hold Bioware to a higher standard.

[(Anonymous)]

Seeing as paragon!Shepard is basically space Jesus, and whatever alignment Shepard canonically sacrifices themself for Joke at the start of ME2, I don't think Shepard being unable to survive the ending would be that much of a problem. People probably would've ate that up if it was any good. The problem is it's badly written pure and simple. The Synthetic vs Nature battle was a subplot that got elevated to the main plot in a rushed rewrite, and that subplot is ended on Rannoch already and has no effect on the ending at all. Really, ME3 as a whole was disappointing, because they chickened out on the potential that was set up. You kill the Rachni in ME1? You're still fighting Rachni in ME3. Mordin dead in ME2? Suspiciously similar substitute fills in, those sections are essentially the same. Miranda dead? Her sister takes her place. It started with ME2 really, you're moved away from the reapers directly, introduced to a new enemy and don't really effect any decisions made in the first game. Why? To keep the branches down, stop the choices from getting too messy in the third game. That was forgivable, but then they didn't even run with the choices you did make. ME3 should have been noticeably different based on whether you gave the collector base to Cerberus or not. Instead, that doesn't matter. Did you destroy the geth base or rewrite them? Slightly easier to choose a different ending. Dead teammates? Mission plays the same, just a new but similar character.

Even worse is the star child, just infinitely annoying, and a cop out to introduce something like that to explain the reaper's purpose, and even then it doesn't ring true because in the first game there were plenty of hints that the geth were not just plainly evil. Even the evil AIs you do encounter are acting out of fear rather than malice. The entire 3 games have been subverting the always chaotic evil AI trope. That you must acquiesce to that, and with three choices that stretch beyond any science presented in game at that is counter to what most people felt playing the games. The crucible itself is somewhat a deus ex machina, a superweapon introduced suddenly in the final game? It's weak. Things had been foreshadowed since the planet descriptions in ME1. The Beings of Light on Klencory. The Great Rift of Klendagon, and the mass accelerator proven to have disabled a reaper. Dark Energy. Causing a supernova level explosion by destroying a mass relay. The games promised many ideas, random secret prothean superweapon (that is an ai that looks like a child you saw for 5 seconds) wasn't one of them.

What happened pre-final choice, earth to the relay, Anderson and TIM, was incredibly well done, yes, but it's part of the whole, and really ME3 has many great parts, but the writing is disjointed, separated into neat little segments that don't effect each other too much to make lots of work for the writers, nor do the different paths traveled in previous games change a thing. ME3 is almost episodic, and ME1/2 had that, but never quite so disjointed. As others have said, ME3 is a mess. The good parts would look quite different surrounded by a better plot, and the ending probably wouldn't take place on Earth at all.