Awesome: 'Awesome: 'Mass Effect 3: There Goes The Neighborhood...&#0...' by Jacobkosh

Jacobkosh

  dporowski likes this Thread written by Jacobkosh

about a year ago

"It's... Dude, it just is. There's a reason everyone thinks it is."

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Some nonspoilery, very general thoughts on the ending. Prepare for an essay!

Spoiler:

The frustrating thing with the ending for me is that it suffers from a problem so common in science fiction that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an entry for it - "sense of wonder." The sense of wonder is the thing that appeals to people about sci-fi when they're young, and it's what a lot of sci-fi writers spend their careers trying to replicate. It's an addictive sensation. The problem is that while trying to blow your mind with the revelation of some heretofore unguessed-at universal truth is an awesome idea for a story, it's hard to just invent transcendent universal truths out of thin air.

Some sci-fi writers cleverly cheat a sense of transcendence into their stories through a dirty trick called "conceptual breakthrough," which is a flavor of plot twist that involves the sudden, shocking realignment of the narrative's perspective, so the story you thought you were reading becomes something else entirely. That moment in Book of the New Sun where the reader finally catches on that the castles and towers are actually old rotting spaceships is a good one - holy shit, this fantasy story is actually science fiction! The bit in ME1 where you find out Sovereign is actually a Reaper is a good example as well - suddenly, your sense of the entire plot and the stakes involved become completely realigned. Or there's an infamous last sentence in an otherwise not actually very good book called The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. van Vogt where the story, which to this point has been a third-person narrative about a heroic human space badass (kind of a proto-Shepard), suddenly ends with the line "This much we know: This is the race which will rule the Sevagram." Bear in mind that that is the first time that word has appeared in the book. It blew a bunch of 1950s kids' heads wide open as they argued about what it could possibly mean: was the story being told to us by a third party within the story? What is the Sevagram? Has someone been watching the hero this whole time?

Basically, the vibe you're going for with conceptual breakthrough is this:



It's a good way to generate the sense of wonder, but it suffers from the usual caveats involving any plot twist - it has to be surprising but feel fair, it can't invalidate what has come before, and so on. There are plenty of bad examples of it, like some of the cheesier Twilight Zone twist endings.

Other writers try to achieve the sense of wonder by sheer scale, often by literally just throwing a big object like a Dyson Sphere or Alderson Disk into the story. Which is cool, I like that crazy stuff as much as the next guy, but the sense of bigness and scale only works for so long, and often the actual stories being told are incredibly prosaic and don't reinforce that sense of bigness at all. Often they involve heroic space marines fighting evil aliens for control of the object.

Other writers try to go for the sense of wonder obliquely, deploying powerful symbols and appealing to the emotions with hints and suggestions rather than actually delivering explanations that can't possibly satisfy. I like this approach a lot, and I think it's part of the reason Dan Simmons' book Hyperion works so well - he used to be a horror writer, so he just sticks a bunch of vivid, memorable imagery in his sci-fi and leaves it to you to guess at the meaning rather than sitting down and going "well, robots and humans hate each other, and..."

very specific, spoilery discussion about the end:

Spoiler:

I feel like with ME3 they felt some crazy pressure to deliver a mind-blowing ending and just kind of flailed at a bunch of ideas that hadn't really been given much significance up to that point. The sad thing is I don't think it was necessary! If the crucible had blown up the Reapers, Shepard had sacrificed himself, and there was a cutscene showing geth and quarians living happily together etc etc - if everything had fallen into place exactly as we all kind of expected it would - that would have been basically mission accomplished right there.

There were some moments in the main game of ME3 that did trigger that fantastic, tingling sense of wonder, and ironically they used all three techniques successfully on Thessia:

Learning that the Crucible wasn't a Prothean device but an ongoing project worked on by thousands of races over millions of years was fantastic. That was an example of the sense-of-scale approach actually working, because suddenly you're entrusted with not just a rinkydink Prothean laser but the collected heritage of all life in the galaxy ever.

The Asari were secretly hoarding Prothean knowledge to ensure their preeminence as a species? Wham. That's conceptual breakthrough - a plot twist that makes you reassess everything that's come before, but also makes perfect, seamless sense in context.

The cycles repeat each other down to something as specific as machine uprisings and deluded Reaper collaborators? That's a great example of the less-is-more, oblique approach. It's a suggestive idea that hints tantalizingly at a larger, unfathomable cosmic order behind events without actually explaining anything and ruining the magic.

The ending, though, is like a perfect storm of trying all those things at once and accomplishing none. Conceptual breakthrough: the Catalyst is actually the Citadel, and it's actually alive, and the Reapers are actually working for it? That's plot hopscotch. It's not that it's a bad idea - I firmly believe that there aren't really bad or good ideas so much as appropriate or inappropriate ones - the problem is that it's not suggested, hinted at, or supported anywhere in the text. It comes completely out of left field and doesn't illuminate anything that came before.

Sense of scale: EVERYTHING BLOWS UP. Including everything you had been invested in accomplishing for the previous thirty hours - effectively trading away all the personal, small-scale choices and relationships you'd made in hopes of impressing you with the apocalyptic scale of events. Except we've already gone through one apocalypse and fatigue has set in.

Oblique: it's a ghost kid and he's speaking cryptically and you're not actually going to get any meaty answers about motivation or even just the basic, nuts and bolts mechanics of what's going on. Why does taking choice A do this one thing that doesn't seem to logically follow at all, and taking choice B does this other thing that doesn't seem to logically follow at all? Why are these the choices being offered to us instead of other things? Who knows?

I need to emphasize that I did really, really love the game. I think in many ways it represents the apex and fulfillment of what Bioware have been trying to accomplish with their mode of storytelling since Baldur's Gate. The game was filled with payoff after payoff and made me think and feel. You can't ask for more than that.

In a way, that's kind of the irony here. All the ridiculous hatemongering and bullshit coming from the internet quarters turned out to be just bullshit and hot air. EA didn't ruin ME3: the multiplayer was great, Ashley having her hair down wasn't the end of the world, the DLC character didn't mug me in an alleyway and take my wallet, and the collectible preorder guns did not violate the essence of my being. The problem with ME3 was a problem of writing, straight up. No soulless corporate executive could have asked for that. Just as I give Bioware credit for their successes, the stumble at the end is theirs and theirs alone.

Echo

Dude. You awesome'd an awesome'd post. It's... right here.

Jacobkosh

I dunno, Echo. I think we should entertain the possibility that I have too much awesome to be contained in one thread.

Echo

It's awesome'd posts all the way down.