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- Exalted Legendary Member
Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Posted by: Colonel Watts
Posted by: ROBERTO jh
Basically. The Protheans, initially believed to be the innocent and enlightened victims of fate, are revealed through the DLC to have forcefully subjugated the rest of galactic civilization.
Like the Forerunners.Yes, but Forerunners did not assimilate
other species into their society.
So OP, the Reapers were basically made like the Flood. If I recall, Gravemind was talking about the Flood's purposes as far back as Halo 3. He called the Flood the ultimate stage in biological evolution, just like how the Catalyst says Synthesis/Reapers is the ultimate evolutionary step.Sovereign also described Reapers as the pinnacle of evolution and existance in ME1. The Rannoch Reaper's justification was also pretty much a paraphrase of Sovereign's line, "we impose order on the chaos of organic evolution." And to be fair, there are plenty of science fiction factions who desire peace through assimilation--such as the Borg.
@Top, yes but it's the same concept: turning the enlightened Ancients into the highly advanced dicks.
@Below, of course nothing these days is 100% original. But I'd like to point out that the "evolution" part was an after thought. The Rannoch Reaper's justification, which hadn't been strictly explained before, is exactly like Primordial's. Life will destroy itself unless it can brought into a singular wisdom. I just find it extremely hard to believe that BioWare's writers didn't read Human Weakness.
Hell, even the Reaper's methods of waging war are exactly the same: as they kill, their armies grow.
I really don't think the writers of Mass Effect would have had to have read Human Weakness to have come up with this idea. This is a pretty common philosophical concept used quite a bit in genre fiction. On a really basic level it's much like the Batman villain Ra's al Ghul who believes humanity will continue to destroy itself and the planet until there is nothing left unless he significantly culls the herd and rules over the remaining population himself to bring order to it. It's really like the justifications of a LOT of dictator style characters over the ages just brought to science fiction stage and on a biological level.
The first Ghost in the Shell movie deals with similar concepts in a bit more nuanced way. Basically for the puppetmaster in the movie the next logical step in evolution is for human consciousness to merge together on the net. The concept is all over genre fiction, I don't think Human Weakness is likely to have been a factor in the Mass Effect author's storytelling at all really. I mean, it's POSSIBLE, but there are so many other more commonly known sources for this concept to draw from that it seems unlikely this was the inspiration.
[Edited on 03.20.2012 7:01 AM PDT]