Quote Originally Posted by Callos_DeTerran View Post
The issue DOES crop up in the current cycle with the quarians and the Geth, y'know one of the big over-arching story lines? Cause without Shepard intervening and even then they have to do all the right things, the Catalyst is exactly right about the path the Geth/Quarian conflict goes. One side or the other is completely annihilated and if you DO choose the Geth, its a fairy tale to believe the rest of the galaxy is just going to accept the Geth after fighting the Reapers (whom the Geth have aided in the past) and finding out securing their aid killed off the quarians.

You want to talk about being foolish, its Shepard thinking the Geth won't be in a fight for their lives once the other races have caught their breath.

And if you choose quarians and the Geth died? Congrats, every AI able to access the Extranet has shining examples that coexistence is impossible and the only options are either to hide from organics or fight them. Which you already see with the gambling AI. The game flat out tells you that true understanding between synthetics and organics is very difficult if not impossible because what the two desire is so different from one another just at the base level. What a synthetic might view as the most important thing in the world, an organic might not value at all because its meaningless to them and vice versa. Which makes diplomatic relations between the two very difficult when its starting base is basically nonexistent and this is before you go into the very real fear organics have about creating AI and what that means for the world and for them.

The Catalyst at the core of its argument, before you account for Shepard, is not wrong about the cycle it describes because it is panning out as of the start of the trilogy. The big difference is that Shepard can make the Catalyst wrong over the course of the games which, imagine that, is crucial for opening up different endings! Especially Synthesis.
No, it is not panning out at the start of the trilogy. The Geth let the quarians go in the Morning War, after the quarians shot first. They were then perfectly content to remain in peaceful isolation until *the Reapers* stirred them up, and even then, most wanted nothing to do with that. And even if the Geth do wipe out the Quarians--because the Quarians *forced* them to--they *stop there* and immediately join the effort to preserve organic life from the Reapers, even though they've just been given every provocation to go wholly isolationist again or even join the Reapers. At every turn, the Geth demonstrate that they want peace.

And the alternate ending unlocked by proving the Catalyst wrong involves--not making even a token effort to point out how you have proved it wrong, and then accepting the premise that making peace with difference is not enough, that the Geth can't pursue the self-determination they value so highly, they have to become the same as everyone else.

Incidentally, how does Synthesis even solve the problem, from the Reaper's perspective? Nothing stops the new hybrid beings from making new fully synthetic servants--in fact, one would imagine that their new hybrid capabilities would only speed the process of them being able to 'create synthetics that the Reapers couldn't stop' (not that the Reapers have ever actually tried to 'stop' synthetics, of course...).