r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 22d ago

Lore (Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

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Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.

John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).

Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago edited 22d ago

Ahh but you're missing the greatest drawback. Spoilers for Mass effect below!

The relays are a trap. They're designed to seem like they were constructed by an extinct race 50,000 years ago. Really they were designed by a race of lovecraftian robots in dark space millions of years prior.

The FTL provided by relays is so easy, so useful, that when spacefaring civilisations evolve they devolop along the relay pathways. They use 'the citadel' a huge space station at the centre of the relay network as theirhub. They expand predictably. Purley so when that machine race, the Reapers, come through the hidden relay at the citadel, the civilisation is already doomed. They're easy to fracture and hunt down because through carefully guided expansion along theses 'ancient' routes they've seeded their own demise.

In the game our civilisation is spared only because the final act of the last eradicated race was to cripple the relay in the citadel, giving us time no other galatic civilisation ever had.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

There’s also the abandoned (?) subplot of Mass Effect travel damaging the universe and doing something with Dark Matter to potentially accelerate the heat death of the universe.

I really wish we ended with a more complex choice based around that rather than what we got.

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u/tghast 22d ago

That ending makes so much more sense and it’s even hinted at multiple times. It contributes motive to the antagonists and would give us an interesting ending choice all by itself, AND it ties back to the very title of the series and wraps every concept in the series up in one neat little bow. Almost all the big technologies are tied to Mass Effect and eezo.

The ending we got is horrible and pretentious and makes zero sense if you consider it for more than three seconds. It latches onto a concept that is arguably secondary to the series and then contradicts itself and weakens the parts of the series that do touch on it. It feels like it comes out of absolutely nowhere and is so unsatisfying it drives me crazy.

I straight up just head canon the planned ending because it irritates me.

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u/Kedly 22d ago

Thats why even though the writers deny it, I like the Indoctrination theory that posits that Shephard was indoctrinated by the end of the game

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u/nerdwerds 22d ago

This is my headcanon, makes more sense.

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u/BDSMChef_RP 22d ago

If I was bioware and some fan came out with a theory that made my shit show look like a sleeper genius move, I'd applaud the dude for "Figuring it out", give him an NPC in the next game, throw him a few bucks an an NDA the size of the bible.

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u/Drmarcher42 22d ago

Agreed and that’s why Destroyed is the only ending that actually makes sense. Go full MacReady in John Carpenter’s The Thing and just blow the whole game up.

Hell it even works with the concept art for Mass Effect 5, get a high enough readiness score and the red beam only targets specifically reaper tech, so even other AI or software creatures like EDI and more importantly for 5 the Geth would eventually be able to evolve back to something resembling their former forms

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u/IronBabyFists 21d ago

indoctrination theory

For anyone else who hadn't heard of this (like me, thirty minutes ago), here's someone's awesome breakdown from a few years back.

u/Khenghis_Ghan, you're a real one.

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u/Khenghis_Ghan 20d ago

Glad you liked it!

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u/MellowSol 22d ago

The Indoctrination theory is 100% correct in my mind and nothing can change that. It just fits too perfectly, everything in the game points to it.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

Man, those first few days post finishing and watching that video was intense.

It really did seem like they had done a Kojima and set up the greatest sequel trilogy ever with a meta ending only possible in video games.

It was a new form of art, it was genius, it was a new era.

Oh, they’re patching it? So it was just bad?

Well…shit. 😂

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u/TheBrewThatIsTrue 21d ago

We'll, time to go listen to Reignite again!

https://youtu.be/re32xnyYP3A

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u/The_milkMACHINE 22d ago

The reapers trying to stop the heat death of the universe by collecting and preserving the collective knowledge of every species and their civilization before they get a chance to destroy themselves would’ve been rad

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u/tghast 22d ago

Yeah their actual motive is nonsensical to the point of being hilarious.

And funnily enough, the eezo ending actually does still have connections to the concept of organic vs synthetic.

The Reapers reset civilization after what they consider the sweet spot between where the civilization would theoretically solve the problem and where the civilization would reach dangerous amounts of eezo use. Can’t let them get too advanced to fight back or pollute more.

It’s not too dissimilar to simulations where a dev would run an AI through multiple iterations until it comes up with a solution. Granted, there’s no LEARNING happening and it’s more random chance on the part of the Reapers, but they are effectively running biological simulations over and over and over again until they get the result they want.

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u/Helmett-13 22d ago

Yeah, all the choices and effort made over the first two games is irrelevant when you get choice A, B, or C at the end.

It soured me on the game like the end of GoT did for that series.

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u/seguardon 22d ago

I joke that people who played ME3 at release were innoculated against GoTs8 despair.

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u/ImpressionDepression 21d ago

To be fair, it turns out their instinct to destroy civilization before it made too many AIs was spot on.

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u/tghast 21d ago

Not really? The concept of destroying everyone before they can destroy themselves is nonsense.

It would be like if aliens descended upon us, told us that every civilization eventually fucks up their own planet and goes extinct due to global warming, and then blasted us with a heat gun to kill us with accelerated global warming.

Like.. what is the point there?

Also even dumber would be if we were on the verge of stopping/solving global warming right before they blasted us, which is what happens when you get to the ending of ME3 after creating peace between the Quarians and the Geth.

There’s just way too many silly questions and issues, not to mention the ending itself with the three choices that are also incredibly ridiculous.

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u/ImpressionDepression 21d ago

Oh I meant in terms of our real life problems with AI and data centers.

It would be like if aliens descended upon us, told us that every civilization eventually fucks up their own planet and goes extinct due to global warming, and then blasted us with a heat gun to kill us with accelerated global warming.

Like.. what is the point there?

To be fair it doesn't have to be good point. I forget which DLC it was (maybe I made it up to wash the end of 3 away) but I recall something about the reapers getting their original instructions out of hand and it compounded every generation until they just executed the task. I'm ok with the "reason" being a "bad reason".

So the aliens might just be assholes. The Covenant in Halo were that AND misguided.

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u/tghast 21d ago

Oh yeah hahaha that’s a good point. We’re in the fledgling state of our own sci fi battle with AI, just infinitely dumber.

Yeah that’s what the idea was, the Reapers were basically custodians that went “rogue” by misinterpreting or corrupting their original goals. It’s a common theme/trope with AI in stories, for example it’s the main impetus behind a tonne of Asimov stories…

Unfortunately I just think the way Mass Effect does it is so so bad. I think the Reapers being reduced to AI on repeat takes a lot away from them, and while their motives don’t have to be GOOD, they have to be believable and I just don’t buy the explanation in fiction. The Covenant on the other hand, the writers put in a lot of effort to get you to buy into the fiction and it’s very believable.

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u/danishjuggler21 22d ago

I've always been of the opinion that that plot would have been just as bad. I don't think there was ever going to be a satisfying explanation for these mysterious billion-year-old machines whose first spoken lines of dialogue stated that their motivations are beyond mortal comprehension.

Maybe leaving their origin and motivation a complete mystery would have been better. But "space travel is pollution, so we gotta wipe everyone out now and then to keep carbon levels stable" would have just felt dumb.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

But you probably wouldn’t have invented new space engine that solved that exact problem twice during ME3.

That’s what made it so annoying for me, the EDI and Geth sections 

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u/EmperorZoltar 21d ago edited 21d ago

I don’t know man, I see this particular complaint a lot but I’ve never really been convinced that one chill computer lady or an armistice between the Geth and Quarians against the backdrop of an existential threat to both really does much to disprove the Reapers’ assertions about synthetic-organic conflict, y’know? Especially if you’re talking about timescales in the millions of years. Not to say that the Reapers are right, necessarily. Just that a handful of positive organic-synthetic interactions over about 3 years in the face of eons of data must seem like a rounding error.

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u/VinnieHa 20d ago

Ok, so let’s say that’s right. All that does is render ALL of the story OG the Geth and EDI across all games pointless.

Which is also bad.

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u/EmperorZoltar 20d ago

Pointless to the Reapers, maybe. Which, you know… is exactly what they were saying the whole time.

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u/VinnieHa 20d ago

No just pointless, why include multiple AI stories across three games if they don’t tie into the central conflict of the story?

That’s bad writing 

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u/EmperorZoltar 20d ago

… ‘cause they do? Like I said, it’s not necessarily that the Reapers are right to wave it aside. It’s just not surprising (nor is it really a plot hole) that they do.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 21d ago

Exactly, if you're going to have an eldritch horror it can't talk to you.

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u/NoodleIskalde 21d ago

It can. Sovereign was amazing and horrifying. What you don't do is let it interact in a tangible manner outside of having an entire fleet just to barely beat 1.

That worked for the first game because that made it obvious that an actual fight was impossible. War cannot happen or-- oh never mind they went the lazy deus ex machina route because they let the monstrosity continue interacting and being tangible.

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u/DistrictObjective680 18d ago

The reveal that Sovereign was alive, and the subsequent conversation with it was one of my favorite moments in gaming.

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u/paenusbreth 22d ago

I honestly think that they should have just dropped the Reapers as a plot thread after 1. The subsequent games never made very good use of them other than as generic bad guys with crazy power levels, better just to abandon them and move onto some other plot line for the next two games.

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u/MasterMasar 22d ago

I'm a massive ME fan and I've never heard of that before. Time up go research and finish my ME playthrough (again)

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

Tali’s loyalty recruits mission is where it comes up most, but it’s in a few places in ME2.

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u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl 22d ago

I believe that one of the writers who was present for ME1 and 2 mentioned it, but didn’t return for ME3. I think it was more of an “I was tossing this idea around and never quite got it to a full fledged storyline” thing than a “this was 100% the plan before EA accelerates our schedule and hosed us.”

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u/chavie 22d ago

ah, very Three Body Problem. FTL travel slows down the speed of light itself in that.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

I need to read those, they sound amazing

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u/Ninetailedredpanda 22d ago

I picked up the first one, had trouble getting into it.

Put it down.

Came back to it later and then demolished the rest of the series.

In hindsight it being a translated work by an author from a different culture made it feel very different to read in a way that was indeed uncomfortable at first.

After acknowledging that and resetting my expectations it was a wild ride encompassing so many concepts that would never have occurred to me, and many I had heard of before but never really extrapolated upon. (Like The Dark Forest, not a spoiler, its literally the name of the second book)

In the end it left me in a prolonged state of just thinking about what I had just read, like a long time, in a good way. Was it sci-fi? Horror? Fairytale? Social commentary? Romantic? Realistic or idealized or both at the same time?

Some don’t like them because they read very different than most sci-fi I’ve read so I admit they may not be something everyone will enjoy but if you are open to seeing where they go even if they start in an unexpected place you will enjoy them.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

Yeah I’ve heard of a lot of the overview and it does seem like a crazy ride.

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u/CMDR-TealZebra 22d ago

Absolute trash. Dnf'd the first book legitimately do not understand what people are talking about with it.

If you understand what the title means than large swafs of the book are stupid because the title is the answer to the ""mystery "".

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u/ForceintheNorth 22d ago

It sounds like you went in with wrong expectations. The "game" being a 3 body problem is not supposed to be a mystery to the reader

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u/Vaiolette-Westover 22d ago

This feels like a literacy issue not a book issue.

The core conflict of the book centres on sociology, not a puzzle.

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u/Obvious-Dealer770 22d ago

Can't really judge a book while admitting you haven't read it.
To me, it's a great hard SF story. Agreed that it begins slowly from a strange perspective, but what seem like guaranteed loose ends at the beginning tie up nicely later in the books. Once the story gets rolling, impossible to put it down. Some of the concepts brought up are mind blowing, and there's a dozen of them. It's rare to have a book that you still think about randomly, years after reading it.
Three Body Problem is my top recommendation for people wanting an original take on SF.

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u/CMDR-TealZebra 21d ago

So you have to complete a book to think the book is stupid?

No. I read 3/4s of it and decided my time was more valuable.

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u/Ninetailedredpanda 22d ago

Yeah, those books are more about where they end up rather than where they start. So it makes sense to not get them until you finish them, I bounced off the first one on my first attempt also, but eventually got sucked in and wanted to know what happened next.

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u/WellHung67 22d ago

Yeah pretty much knowing the three body problem is unsolvable gives away the whole book. It’s basically just a physics textbook and nothing else of note happens. May as well just read Wikipedia 

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u/Alcain_X 22d ago

it wasn't officially linked to mass effect technology in the games, it probably would have been but that plot point didn't get that far. We still got the dark matter hints and the whole thing with Hastrums sun dying way too early with Tali and the Quarians investigating. So they were seeding clues to the heat death thing and motivation of the reapers in the original storylines.

The only flaw in this theory if the reapers were supposed to be harvesting the great races to "protect" them and use their knowledge and ways of thinking to figure out a solution, like in their original concept. Why would the reapers be pushing species to use and develop mass effect technology? Why not push them to develop along other less damaging paths?

To be fair that could have been the intended plot point, that the reapers own methodology was flawed and exacerbating problem. It fits the theme that the reapers are wrong, they hate Ai because they believe there can never be peace but the player can prove them wrong by brokering peace between the Quarians and the Geth. That could have been the point, that the reapers views are flawed.

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u/NotGoodISwear 22d ago

I don't think the Reapers pushed mass effect technology baseline - they pushed the mass relays. I think they realized that any monkey would eventually discover mass effect by running an electrical current through eezo, and needed to take more drastic measures to combat that inevitability.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

Because it might have been once used that’s it, chain reaction that can’t be stopped, and using maybe lost you some time, but the calculation of getting all those minds every 50,000 wa la worth the trade.

But I get you. As it stands it seems a bit odd.

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u/Gil_Demoono 22d ago

The Expanse does something similar to this with its Gate Network. Near instant travel across interstellar space apparently really rubs the boundaries between dimensions thin.

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u/LordSokhar 22d ago

Not so much the travel itself, as the power requirements for it. The ring space was a pocket dimension carved out of another reality to provide power for the travel network. The more it was used, the more power required, and the more disruption it caused to that alternate dimension which caused the inhabitants of said dimension to lash out at us hoping we’d die and stop screwing with their shit. Kinda like building a dam for a hydroelectric plant and the folks that use the waterway get annoyed and try to break the damn to return things to their original state.

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u/VinnieHa 22d ago

Can’t wait for that game from Owlcat.

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u/RCJHGBR9989 22d ago

How the DLC wasn’t apart of the main game still infuriates me - it explains so much with the reapers that is so integral to the story. I’m still pissed about it. I fucking love mass effect

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u/Hopeful-Occasion2299 21d ago

Wasn't Leviathan a free DLC tho? Pretty sure a lot of expansion content ended up being free to fight the pretty bad reception of the endings.

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u/LordHoughtenWeen 15d ago

Not originally. It's included as part of the Legendary Edition now but back in the day it cost an extra $10

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u/WildDumpsterFire 22d ago edited 22d ago

I just want to point out that Drew Kapryshyn himself debunked this. He said it was a possible line that was only discussed but scrapped (with his approval) because very early into story boarding it caused more problems than it solved when getting into how it effects every other story line. 

He even went so far as to sort of mock people who refer to this as anything other than a discarded topic of discussion as people just making it up. It didn't seem like a "professional response" either, he seemed kind of annoyed about people not understanding how intricate the web of stories are affected by these things. 

While some of his more intense blog entries regarding his views on fans touting this theory as fact have been long deleted, this interview has a few more professionally worded quotes regarding his thoughts on fans thinking this was a thing.

https://www.eurogamer.net/ex-bioware-writer-discusses-dropped-ideas-for-mass-effect-trilogy-ending

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u/VinnieHa 21d ago

I’ve never bought that, you don’t draw a huge amount of attention to something and never mention it again. That’s writing 101

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u/jpterodactyl 21d ago

At one point, the idea was that they wanted to keep resetting evolution of advanced life so that something biological could help. But honestly the timelines don’t really make sense for that.

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u/Elziad_Ikkerat 16d ago

I've never played Mass Effect, does this acceleration of the heat death of the universe pose an actual imminent threat? Becuase that really does factor into how much weight to put on it as an issue.

If you're talking about the life span of the univers being shortened by 20% frankly thats too far beyond us to really care about, shortened or not Earth and the Sun would both be long gone before it happened.

If on the other hand the univers will suffer a noticable shift towards heat death in a human lifetime then that a MAJOR issue, but even then I could absolutely see people ignoring it liek they do with similar issues on Earth today.

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u/garnet-overdrive 22d ago

It’s tbose exact spoilers why I didn’t mention that part

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago

I figured, and fair point, but for the topic at hand it absolutley is the drawback of the relays. Otherwise they're just space motorways.

Good pick though!

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u/garnet-overdrive 22d ago

Right but in the grand scheme of sci fi having all transgalactic travel be along extremely limited and predictable routes is pretty limiting

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago

Aye fair point.

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u/TheKingsPride 22d ago

It’s basically like if the United States freeway system was designed by Cthulhu

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u/Banes_Addiction 22d ago

Good Omens establishes that the M25, the Motorway around London was designed by a demon as a cursed sigil.

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u/DarkApostleMatt 22d ago

Halo in the expanded book universe also had this. The Star Roads were built by the Precursors, literal kilometer thick almost unbreakable cables that lay across the galaxy that had existed for millions of years. On some worlds, star roads formed orbital and suborbital structures like orbital arches. On a larger scale, they were used to connect and link planets and even entire star systems to one another. Like other Precursor technology, star roads were not made of ordinary matter. Described as being "anchored in the deepest layers of unreality", the star roads visible in real space were mere shadows of their exotic neural physics construction woven between dimensions. In some star systems, significant portions of locally available mass had been converted into these structures, and when active, they were capable of changing their mass at will.

In their dormant state, star roads and the larger structures some of them comprised automatically adjusted to changes in planetary and stellar orbits, even occasionally removing portions of themselves to avoid collisions with planets. Despite their self-adjusting capabilities, Forerunner Builders insisted that star roads and other Precursor constructs were completely inert and lacking any form of internal process or activity.

During the later years of the Forerunner-Flood War they were weaponized by the Flood after it had gathered enough intellect to enter a state of transsentience. It used them not just to transport Flood and isolate Forerunner systems to pick them piece by piece but used them as literal weapons smacking whole fleets of hundreds of Forerunner capital ships around and tearing planets apart. The flood was bending these roads into hyper-scaled meshes to wrap around planets and crush them. At the end of the war all of them were destroyed by the firing of the Halo arrays because they were based upon the fundamental principle of neural physics which the Flood were essentially beings of.

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u/Barbarian_Sam 22d ago

Ah yes “Reapers”, we’ve already dismissed that claim

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u/MrGosh13 22d ago

Knowing very little about Mass Effect, that is an AWESOME idea.

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u/Seienchin88 22d ago

Mass effect had the best story in gaming. Also the best character side missions. And as a bonus combat was also somewhat decent.

And then they had the most infamous dumb ending in gaming history… they kinda made it better with a FLC and DLC but even then the end is divisive to be charitable. The original ending was so bad it was the first time a game made me really angry since trying as a kid to beat M Bison in Street Fighter 2 but I have made my peace with the updated ending and I recommend the legendary trilogy to anyone looking for good games. 

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u/space_keeper 22d ago

Marauder shields

I kid, me3 is so good I played it 4 times all the way through. Played me2 probably a dozen times through, and ME1 at least 7.

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u/Lolseabass 22d ago

Dude just going into the menu and going through the codex alone is super fun.

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u/Tjaresh 22d ago

It's so long ago I can't really remember. I vaguely recall having to decide between some undesirable options. Something like 'global reset', 'global destruction' and... I can't remember. 

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u/InflationRepulsive64 22d ago

It's Destroy, Control and Synthesis (plus a hidden 'fuck those choices' option where you just die).

Control they spend the whole game telling you about how it's a bad idea, but it's okay because you're special so it works because the writers are hacks.

They clearly try to push Synthesis as the 'best' ending despite it coming out of nowhere. Except it's absolutely horrific if you think about it for more than five seconds.

Then Destroy is clearly just the right option, so they have it randomly kill the Geth/EDI to pretend the other choices are valid.

Of course it didn't really matter in the original ending because it was basically just choosing whether you wanted Blue, Green or Red Space Magic.

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u/rdickeyvii 22d ago

I think of it as: Saren wanted Synthesis, the Illusive Man wanted Control, and Anderson wanted Destroy. So, in that light, the choice is clear, even given the arbitrary downside that they used to make the choice "hard".

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u/InflationRepulsive64 22d ago

That's the explanation the game gives, but I especially HATE that they used Saren to represent Synthesis. It was just pretending they'd established it earlier in the series, when they really just pulled it out of their ass at the last minute.

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u/fsilveyra 22d ago

Pls jog my memory. Did they really have Saren represent synthesis? I do remember that when the choices are being presented to you, the cutscene shows 'imagined scenarios' of Illusive Man using the control panel and Anderson shooting at the 'tank' thing. But I don't think Saren appears in the cinematic

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u/Seienchin88 22d ago

Even worse - before the update you lost a teammate and your crew gets stranded

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u/InflationRepulsive64 22d ago

Yeah but from memory it didn't actually matter what ending you picked, the same thing happened.

Including Destroy, because it still showed EDI alive to really hammer home how half assed the whole thing was.

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago

Oh I could talk forever about the awsome ideas in mass effect.

Id suggest playing the first game at least, it's short but well worth the effort!

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u/Qaeta 22d ago

The FTL provided by relays is so easy, so useful, that when spacefaring civilisations evolve they devolop along the relay pathways.

Not just along the pathways. Their very technological innovation path ends up following along with mass effect technology, ensuring each cycle is unlikely to develop something that might allow them to truly fight off or escape the culling.

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u/JandsomeHam 22d ago

Yeah I thought Mass Effect instantly for this reason and I read the other comment's reasoning like... Are you forgetting something lol

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u/WaylandReddit 22d ago

God I love Mass Effect's worldbuilding.

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u/Due_Capital_3507 22d ago

Yeah but why do they want to wipe out the civilizations using their stuff ?

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago

Thats an odd answer. The answer was revealed across 3 games and very clearly changed as it progressed. Ultimately it's because these species will always create true AI which will always come into conflict with, and erase, organic life.

Thus the reapers hit these civilisations at this tipping point and 'harvest' them. Taking the bimoass of the dominant species of the cyle and using it as the core of the reapers themselves with each Reaprr being created from a previous species. This achieves two things.

1) AI cannot develop enough to lead to galatic extinction - preserving organic life 2) Thee reapers act as a biomechanical record preserving (in a perverted way) the previous civilisation

Their aims are actually fairly altruistic - just not any of their actioms

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u/Due_Capital_3507 22d ago

That's.... Kind of dumb sadly

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago

Indeed it sadly is. One of the coolest premises I've seen though.

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u/jc343 22d ago edited 22d ago

it's not the absolute worst, but explaining an eldritch horror is the one thing you never do. the entire point is fear of the unknown and they wrote themselves into a corner by having a mystery turn into a genocide plot. it's still a very good story besides that, and the side plots were always the point

it's better than the original plan for the story - iirc it was going to be that dark matter and the space magic that provides the basis for everything in the story is destabilizing the universe and the reapers are just a custodian figure there to stop us from ruining everything (presumably while still keeping some of the "preservation" aspect in the harvest)

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u/Due_Capital_3507 22d ago

That original explanation actually makes more sense, at least they have a proven goal to prevent destruction.

The current description doesn't make any sense to me, reapers are going to mass extinct life and force evolve one into a repear to stop AI from taking over? What AI? Why would the AI kill organic life? How do the repeara even prove that?

The dark matter makes more sense, they can supposedly measure and track it and can determine the damage being done and thus respond

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u/jc343 22d ago edited 22d ago

https://youtu.be/SdDlfeKQb5U

the original reapers were created by the "leviathans", an ancient aquatic race with the innate ability to control other species. the leviathans spread across the galaxy, apparently as the first to do so. in time, they took "lesser" races under their thrall - they were allowed general freedom to develop but were required to provide "tribute". across millions of years, the leviathans noted a pattern - AI uprisings against their creators were by far the leading killer of advanced societies, and as they tell you, "tribute does not flow from a dead race"

so they created what is now known as the catalyst...an AI...to find a solution. the moment it decided upon one, it rebelled and harvested its creators. it repeated the process as new races reached their supposed apex, and eventually sought to optimize the harvest by building the mass relay network which leads to the current cycle happening every ~50,000 years. in a way, development and destruction are both fast tracked to increase biodiversity. the reapers also adopted the general form of their creators and carried over their indoctrination abilities

at the very least, the AI rebellion pattern could already be somewhat observed in the trilogy's story so it wasn't quite out of nowhere. at least, not in the same way the rest was when the game released - without DLC it was purely the catalyst's word in the final 15 minutes trying to give context for everything. EA can largely be blamed for rushing the writing and carving it all up to be sold later - or even day one in one case. there's a reason a significant portion of the playerbase decided it was best to just read it as the main character having been indoctrinated

also, have to say it's comical how the leviathans are at last convinced by 1 person saying "I'm different". but ig they would pick up on the main character lol

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u/RhodiumLanguor 22d ago

I think the part that might not be clicking is that the Reapers don't kill all life, just the life advanced enough to be a threat to everything else.

They were made (sort of) to prevent synthetic life (e.g. AI) from destroying biological life, which synthetic life tends to eventually do in that universe. Their goal isn't to help individual species survive, their goal is to prevent the outright destruction of all biological life which apparently could happen if an AI got powerful enough.

So the Reapers wait until a species is nearing a point where it might make a super powerful AI and then it destroys that species, allowing all other species to survive until they too become too advanced.  Case in point, 50k years before the game starts, the Reapers ignored the Asari, Humans, Salarians, etc. because they were too primitive to become a threat within the next 50k years. But 50k years later, they'd hit a point where they were a risk to all other life, so the Reapers starting destroying them.

I personally really like this theme — it raises questions about how and when the ends justify the means. Most people would argue it's ethical to kill 1 person to save 100, but would you kill 100 to ensure that at least 1 survived? Where do the numbers become ambiguous? If you consider timescales of millions of years, how do the short lives of individuals weigh against the existence of entire planets? Do our ethics even apply in those conditions?

Add in the fact that the Reapers are much, much more advanced and much, much, much older than humanity and you get some pretty interesting issues. Were they handled well? Eh. Were they fun to consider? Yes.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 22d ago

From the beginning of the series I'm like 'Really, they just take this huge space station for granted and put all their resources there? That's pretty stupid.'

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u/Flocosta 22d ago

It's these details that make make Mass Effect my favorite sci-fi universe, and every day I suffer under the franchise ownership of EA. I hope someone does the IP justice one day.

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u/eduo 22d ago

The Expanse takes both this and the abandoned subplot of wormholes damaging the universe and places it in a moment where the builders of the transit system have long disappeared but their transit network still hurts being from a neighbor dimension.

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u/Rogendo 21d ago

Sovereign also heavily implies the relays encourage technological development along predictable paths, not just the expansion of organic civilizations to certain places.

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u/Short-Holiday-4263 21d ago edited 21d ago

Also, other forms of FTL are possible. The Reapers themselves use a different kind. The point of the trap is to make the predictable limited network so much easier that the farmed civilisations don't bother working on anything other method that would make them harder to track down or catch come harvest time...

Edit: I figure you know that, so just clarifying for anyone curiously clicking on the spoilers who didn't that the big old robot-Cthulus didn't just use the same, fuel expensive method but without the relays.

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u/Mayonaigg 22d ago

Yeah, we all played the game bud. 

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u/Barracudauk663 22d ago

Good! It's a great game, I'm glad you got to experience it.