This article is so my shit. I also disagree with most of it and I'll explain why. https://twitter.com/FanbyteMedia/status/1293740846546919425

For the better part of the last decade, I believed that the ending of ME3 was ultimately good--the reaction against it was so extreme, at times hysterical, and even farcical (threatening to sue Bioware or report it to the SEC) that I defensively essayed against it.

How could it be anything other than tragically misunderstood art?

One day, one of my partners and I talked about ME3 and she lamented an ending she called "choose your colour genocide." The phrase went right like an arrow through me but I couldn't argue against it.

Destroy means genociding the Geth; Control means kinda sorta enslaving a whole race? (The nature of the Reapers' consciousness is unclear; Shep becomes their animus but it still rankles). Synthesis means *non-consensually* forcing everyone in the galaxy to change their bodies.

The "hard choices and sacrifices" of the series more often than not felt forced. They're trolley problems and that's what makes them irritating to so many. Scenarios painfully obvious in their artificiality.

Mordin's death was an exception; but that's because it was the culmination of a satisfying story-arc that began in ME2, one of atonement for everything he had done. That was genuinely artful, and while it was sad to see him go, he had *such* an end.

But it felt like in ME3 there was a belated effort to redefine the whole series as being about the horrors of war. Random death can be artful in a work where it's thematically consistent (The Walking Dead, e.g.) but ME wasn't that type of story.

ME was a fundamentally optimistic, bombastic space opera; ME3's ending was more like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, again, without the thematic resonance. It was wildly inconsistent with where the series was pointing.

Because "having your cake and eating it too" *is* the main fantasy of these games. The author of that Fanbyte article pointed to Legion's death as an example of sacrifice, but you can reconcile the Geth and Quarians! What's that if not a "true ending" to that plot?

Yes, Mass Effect touches on "the horrors of war" but anyone who seriously understands them knows this series doesn't come close to that horrifying reality, even in pantomime. It's not actually trying; it's a soft-focus 'big hero/badass saves the day' story.

There's a lot of room for creating art that challenges conventional storytelling, refuses the audience/player easy answers, and admits wide interpretation. But good art of that kind is built from the ground up. ME3's ending felt almost bait-and-switch.

The fantasy one indulges in this series is that it's possible to save the day with grand gestures, for courage and decency (or being the biggest badass) to win out and win big. For gritty deconstructions of such fantasies, one needs to look elsewhere.

And so, yes, in the end there should've been a choice available that harmonised with that theme. But the more I think about the endings we did get, the more depressing they appear to me. It's almost bleak.

I am not a critic who disdains any work of art for "acting above itself" or whatever. Quite the opposite. Like Lindsay Ellis, I'm a firm believer in letting trash be trash, letting it be its best trashy self. It doesn't need to be more in order to be great.