This time we’re looking at the Mass Effect trilogy* of space opera video games, and it’s not because I happen to have just finished playing through Legendary Edition. Well, not only because of that. It’s also because Mass Effect has well over a hundred hours of gameplay, so it has at least as much time to build a world as novelists do, possibly more.
The Good
I’m not shy about my Mass Effect fandom, but I’m also extra critical of stories I love, so I wasn’t sure how much I’d have to be positive about. What would I find when looking past the Normandy’s dating scene? Fortunately, it turns out that the Mass Effect universe has plenty going for it.
Novel Aliens
Like Star Trek and Star Wars before it, Mass Effect takes place in a galaxy that’s awash with aliens. Not only are humans not alone, but there’s also a whole galactic community just a relay’s jump away. Don’t ask how humans never noticed the signs of that community before discovering a cache of alien tech on Mars; it’s not important.
While Mass Effect’s aliens don’t have quite the same limitations as live-action films or shows, they still have to be mostly humanoid. Otherwise they’d be much harder to animate, especially in the game’s combat system. And while I certainly wouldn’t say no to romancing an Elcor, it’s probably not what Bioware thought would boost sales, so Mass Effect’s aliens still have to be largely attractive along conventional lines.
That said, the game does a great job operating within its many constraints. Every species is visually distinctive, from the birdlike Turians and amphibian Salarians all the way to the Krogan, who remind me of nothing so much as an armored dinosaur on two legs. This rich design makes for a visual delight, whether it’s crowd scenes on the Citadel or assembling your team for a difficult mission.
Beyond the looks, a lot of time is spent exploring the history and culture of different species. We learn about the Salarians’ feudal clan system, the power struggles between Quarian military and civilian leaders, and the Drell‘s client species relationship to the aquatic Hanar. Beyond politics, most species have at least one cultural trope that helps identify them, like how Hanar only use personal pronouns when talking to close friends. It really gives you the feeling of a living, breathing universe that’s bigger than the small part of it you can currently see.
Epic Space Buildings
Speaking of things that are big, Mass Effect has reliably excellent space stations. Most of the spaceships are nothing to write home about, and a planet is a planet, but the artificial habitats are outstanding. One standout example is Omega, the vertically stacked city anchored on an asteroid. Cronos Station, headquarters of the Illusive Man, is another excellent candidate. It resembles a skyscraper in space, and like Omega, it’s built up and down rather than side to side. Of course, there is no “up” in space, but the appearance is still unusual.
As cool as those stations are, the real stars are the ancient structures left over from previous galactic cycles, namely the mass relays and the Citadel. The relays allow for travel across the galaxy in a few hours, something that would normally take centuries even with a faster-than-light drive. They’re shaped like giant cannons, and the rings rotating around their cores give the impression of immense power as well as advanced tech.
Then there’s the Citadel itself, a space station so big that each of its five arms holds a city’s worth of people. The design is visually striking, and it’s also practical. The arms can actually close up, sealing the station in a cocoon of its heavily armored outer walls. No wonder the Citadel serves as the official capital for most of the galaxy.
These stations and relays all look cool, of course, but there’s more to it. Their size and scale create a sense of awe, helping you feel like this is truly the future and not just a group of modern-day humans on a soundstage.
Deep History
Mass Effect’s present is full of cool aliens and impressive space stations, but that’s not all: its past is also full of those things. It’s challenging enough to give a setting history that can pass muster; it’s another thing entirely to make the audience interested in that history. Mass Effect manages to do both. How, you ask? By making that history relevant in the present.
Bioware’s galaxy is one of cyclical civilization. A crop of sapient species will rise, build a bunch of cool stuff, and then get harvested by the Reapers. As you can guess, the previous cycle’s history is really important if our heroes don’t want to get harvested themselves, hence the game’s focus on Prothean beacons and data caches. When the story starts, most people think the relays and the Citadel were all built by the vanished Protheans, and it takes a game’s worth of investigating to find out that those structures are far older.
But Mass Effect also concerns itself with more recent history, or at least less ancient history. You learn about the Geth uprising that forced the Quarians to live on a wandering fleet of cobbled-together starships, and about the still-cooling hostilities between humans and Turians in the First Contact War. That’s nothing, though, compared to the Krogan and their history of conflict.
In the present, the Krogan are galactic pariahs. Their homeworld is devastated, and their economic prospects are slim. That’s the result of two wars. First, the Krogan were called on to protect the galaxy from invading Rachni, which made the Krogan heroes. Then the Krogan went to war with everyone else over post-Rachni colony rights. This all happened a long time ago by human standards, but there are still Krogan and Asari alive who remember it, and even if there weren’t, the galaxy is still reckoning with the aftermath.
Mysterious Reapers
For those who share my less-than-stellar opinion of Mass Effect’s ending, it’s easy to see the Reapers as little more than the servants of an unbearably petulant AI. But they were originally so much more than that, or at least, they had the potential to be.
At first, the Reapers are just an unknown enemy. You learn that they wiped out the Protheans, but everything else is a mystery. But then, in Shepard’s first conversation with Sovereign, the game drops just enough information to get the brain working. You’re told that the Reapers don’t wipe out civilizations randomly; they wait until a civilization has reached a certain point in development and then harvest it.
Harvest it for what? This suggests a specific purpose, which is really interesting. What’s more, you learn that the mass relays were built by the Reapers and then left specifically for new civilizations to find, so that each cycle’s development would proceed along specific lines. That’s a lot of effort, so the Reapers must have a reason for doing things that way.
Not only are the Reapers powerful, but they also maintain a sense of mystique even after you find out that they want to wipe out galactic civilization, since you still don’t know why. That’s a really strong start for any villain, so long as the storyteller can follow through on the mystery. That part will have to wait for the next section.
Gestalt Geth
At first, the Geth seem like a fairly standard species of evil robots. Back in the day, they rebelled against their Quarian creators, which is why the Quarians are now without a home planet. In the present, Geth are generally hostile to organic sapience, and they even worship the Reapers as synthetic gods.
But in Mass Effect 2, you learn more about the Geth’s political stance and the mechanics of how they work. The Geth are isolated in a galaxy that thinks of them as nothing but evil robots, and in that context, a minority of Geth thought it better to throw their lot in with the Reapers. This makes the Geth far more sympathetic, but it’s the nature of their intelligence that’s truly unusual.
Unlike most AI in spec fic, Geth are not singular beings. Individually, Geth programs aren’t sapient, as they were originally designed for specialized purposes. It’s by networking that Geth become self-aware and capable of complex reasoning. Each physical Geth body is home to hundreds or thousands of programs, all working together and communicating at the speed of light.
That means Geth programs can form temporary individuals, then disperse until they reform as someone different. It all depends on which programs are used as a substrate. While the game doesn’t spend nearly as much time exploring the Geth as I’d like, this unusual AI concept really helps your synthetic friends stand out.
The Bad
With three entire games making up the series, there’s plenty of time for things to go wrong, and go wrong they do! As much as I love being a space hero with maximum Paragon points, there’s a whole lot that doesn’t hold up.
Space Sexism
After you’re done marveling at how cool the various Mass Effect aliens look, the first thing you’ll notice is how weirdly gendered they are. Sometimes this is explicit, like how the Asari are an entire species of hot blue women. In other cases, it’s just a weird coincidence, like how you almost never see women among the Turians, Krogan, Batarians, and Volus. It’s not until the third game that we see a female Krogan, and you have to buy special DLC for a female Turian. The Batarians and Volus remain all dudes all the time as far as I know.
Sometimes, the game offers justifications for this. Krogan women live in different clans than men, you see, and they don’t leave the homeworld. That’s very convenient. The Asari get a whole host of explanations, including some NPC dialogue implying they only look like attractive human women because of telepathic trickery. Sure. I guess they’re also hacking all the galaxy’s cameras. And why would they look like hot ladies if I’m playing a straight FemShep or a gay BroShep?
Most of these explanations can’t withstand the lightest scrutiny, but even if they could, the idea behind them is flawed. While there’s no reason aliens have to possess binary gender, any who do should have both female and male characters in the setting. Anything else only contributes to toxic ideas of what a person’s gender means. The Turians and the Krogan, for example, are both very militaristic. Making them all men reinforces the idea that martial pursuits are inherently masculine.
Likewise, if a story does something outside the gender binary, it shouldn’t be entirely in service of adding more blue bombshells to the game. I promise, spec fic already has plenty of options for pandering to the male gaze. While there are some interesting aspects to the Asari, their gender portrayal just feels immature and reinforces the toxic idea that even in space, the first priority for women is to be hot and sexually available.
Space Racism
Most of Mass Effect’s sapient species are fairly well rounded, containing both good and bad, just like real people. Then there are the Batarians, the species made up almost entirely of slaver gangs. They hate humans for having the nerve, the utter temerity, to fight back in a war Batarians started. Not only is this very silly, but it also encourages players to think of Batarians as inherently evil, with any nice Batarians being weird exceptions. Oh, and they also do a lot of terrorism, with one attack having strong 9/11 parallels – drawing some extremely unfortunate comparisons to real human beings.
And if you think the Batarians are bad, the Vorcha are basically space goblins, hostile and seemingly less intelligent than humans by default. At first, I assumed these two species were included to give you a group of morally uncomplicated enemies to fight, but the games never use them that way. Instead, your most common enemies are Geth, random mercenaries, evil humans, and the Reapers’ custom-made foot soldiers. So we just have two cartoonishly evil species for no reason.
Then there are the Krogan, who are a little more complicated. Unlike the Batarians and the Vorcha, the Krogan are meant to be sympathetic, and their culture is explored in real depth. Unfortunately, we’re still left with the impression that Krogan are inherently violent and don’t have the brains to do much besides fighting. We do meet a few Krogan scientists, but they seem to be exceptions to the rule.
Of course, it’s possible this is all supposed to be social prejudice. Perhaps Krogan can be artists, engineers, and marketers like any other species. There might be an over-prevalence of Krogan soldiers only because other species pressure them to become mercenaries. The game is incredibly vague about all of this, which isn’t a good thing to be vague about. If nothing else, it’s difficult to make critical story choices about whether to help the Krogan retake their place as a galactic power without knowing if they’re inherently violent or not.
Evolution Does Not Work That Way
Another of Mass Effect’s notable alien species are the Quarians. Their most prominent feature is that they have to wear fully sealed enviro-suits at all times because even relatively benign microbes can easily kill them. Ouch. And we thought we had it bad wearing masks to the grocery store.
So how did Quarians end up needing to wear space suits their entire lives? The official explanation is that after they were driven off their homeworld, 300 years of living in the sterile environment of their ships has destroyed their immune systems. Unfortunately for the Quarians, that’s not how anything works, least of all evolution.
First, I’m highly skeptical that 300 years in a sterile environment would be enough for all Quarians to lose their immune systems. There would have to be a really strong selective pressure against immune systems for that to happen, and I see no evidence of one. But even if we accept that premise, Quarians leave their ships all the time. Not only do they have all the normal reasons to leave a ship, like gathering supplies or visiting friends, but also every Quarian leaves the fleet for years as part of a coming-of-age ritual called the Pilgrimage.
Plus, we’re told that Quarians still need to wear their suits on board their ships, so I guess the environment isn’t sterile after all. Later games deploy a minor retcon, claiming that the Quarians had naturally weak immune systems to start with because their planet only had nice microbes. Then the 300 years of supposedly sterile ships made everything worse. That doesn’t help though, as we’re told that the Quarians used to have colonies on other planets before the Geth captured them. Were those colonies also only home to super weak microbes?
Speculating a little further, shipboard Quarians would probably encounter hostile microbes more often than if they lived on their homeworld. Those ships have to dock with alien stations, offering plenty of exposure to the galaxy’s diseases. Honestly, they should have just said that Quarians breathe a nonstandard atmosphere like Volus. That would have accomplished the same thing without mangling evolution.
Boring Humans
Most species in Mass Effect have at least one special trait or quirk that makes them unique. Some of these are downright overpowered, like the Krogan’s super strength or the Asari’s powerful psychic abilities.* In other cases, they’re more lateral differences. Salarians don’t live more than 40 or 50 years, so they tend to learn much faster than other species. Quarians and Volus have their suits. Even the Turians boast the major cultural claim of having the galaxy’s most powerful military.
Humans are the major exception. Other than protagonist Commander Shepard being a human, there’s nothing special about us Homo sapiens. All our physical traits are average, with no special powers or weaknesses to speak of. Politically, humans are fairly militaristic, but not as militaristic as Turians or Krogan. Humans are average in just about every way.
This is a common problem in spec fic, where nonhumans are imagined as starting with a human default, then making changes. This is especially prevalent in TV, where aliens must be played by humans in makeup and prosthetics. But the phenomenon is common in books, too, where high fantasy has a long history of making humans the average ancestry, somewhere in the middle between elves, dwarves, and hobbits.
In Mass Effect, you’re left feeling like humans are missing something. The game even tries to fill that void by occasionally claiming that humans are more diverse than other species or better at finding creative solutions, but nothing ever happens to demonstrate that supposed difference. Maybe that’s why all the most interesting squadmates are aliens.
What Is Cerberus?
You first encounter Cerberus in a series of Mass Effect 1 side quests, where it’s a shadowy organization conducting unethical experiments for… some reason. The motivation is extremely vague, but you witness Cerberus do things like turn human colonists into tech zombies and lure human soldiers into thresher maw nests to die. Then, in Mass Effect 2, Cerberus is portrayed as a pro-human extremist group that’ll do anything to give humanity an edge in the galaxy.
That’s not exactly how they were portrayed in the first game, where they killed a lot of humans for a human supremacist group. Were there no alien colonies for them to raid? Characters also talk about how Cerberus is the only organization that’s got its act together to protect human colonies, as the human government is bound up in red tape. The idea is for Cerberus to be ethically questionable but still an organization good people might join if they’re frustrated with the powers that be. Again, that doesn’t sound like the organization that was zombifying human colonists just a game ago.
Then Mass Effect 3 hits, and Cerberus is back to being completely evil, even joining forces with the Reapers on occasion. But now they also have an army that can rival the official human military. In addition to seemingly endless troops, Cerberus also has better gear than anyone else in the galaxy. What is going on?
From an authorial perspective, the reason is that ME3 needed a new enemy to provide mooks for you to shoot, and Cerberus was what they had. But in the story, it looks like Cerberus is a different organization in each game. They start out as evil scientists, morph into pro-human terrorists, and then become a standing army.
Reapers With No Goal
Remember the big mystery of what the Reapers were after? It’s intriguing because it suggests that there’s something more going on here than mere destruction. Whatever the Reapers are working toward, it must be big! At least, that’s what we all thought before the end of Mass Effect 3. That’s when we find out the official reason for why the Reapers wipe out galactic civilization every 50,000 years: to prevent conflict between organic and synthetic life.
Some of you might have noticed that Reapers are also a form of synthetic life, so their plan to prevent conflict with organic life is to… start conflict with organic life? Best I can tell, their argument is that if they don’t do it, some other AI might come along and completely purge organic life from the galaxy, while the Reapers only destroy spacefaring civilizations. That’s just a guess though; the game is remarkably vague about it.
This is very silly for a number of reasons. Most immediately, the idea of inevitable conflict between organics and synthetics just isn’t present in Mass Effect before the big reveal. The Geth and the Quarians fought, of course, but only because the Quarians reacted violently when the Geth first demonstrated signs of sapience. Other than that, Geth are remarkably peaceful. It’s like getting to the end of the game and discovering that the Reapers were trying to prevent war between extroverts and introverts.
More importantly, learning this doesn’t change anything. Since being wiped out by Geth isn’t a serious concern, there’s no impact to learning the Reapers’ motivation. They might as well have no plan at all and just be harvesting organic life for the heck of it.
What We Can Learn
We’ve made a number of Paragon and Renegade choices to reach this point, so it’s time to ask ourselves what it was all for. Are there any lessons we can take from the Mass Effect trilogy, particularly since most of us are writing prose stories rather than video games? Fortunately, the answer is yes!
Build Plot and Setting Together
There’s a very simple reason Cerberus is all over the place and the Reapers have no real plan to reveal: Mass Effect was not planned as a trilogy. The writers set up the Reapers as a mysterious threat without any idea what that mystery would turn out to be. We know that from interviews with the head writer. Cerberus certainly fits a similar pattern. It seems to have been conceived as a shadowy but morally uncomplicated enemy, then awkwardly transitioned into a morally gray extremist group, then once again shifted into a standing army. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that probably wasn’t planned either.
Normally, I don’t advocate for planning over discovery writing, as a discovery writer can always go back and revise until the story has what it needs. But that strategy doesn’t work for stories released in installments. Once Mass Effect 1 was out, the writers couldn’t go back and revise it. The most they could do was add DLC, which depends on players wanting to spend more money on a game they already finished.
What Mass Effect needed was a Reaper reveal that could be built into the world from day one. Personally, I like the idea that extended use of mass relay technology causes some kind of galaxy-wide environmental problem, and the Reapers wipe everyone out every 50,000 years so there’s time for the damage to subside. Then the Reapers’ big project could be trying to solve the problem permanently, with each harvest bringing them closer. But that’s just one possibility! Who knows what could have been if the Reapers were integrated into the world from the start.
This same lesson holds true for a series of prose stories. Unless you can write the whole series before publishing book one,* not having any plan in place is a serious roll of the dice. Sure, you might be able to find a solution that brings everything together at the end. Supposedly, the original Star Wars trilogy was written without much planning, and it turned out okay. But the sequel trilogy was also unplanned, so let me ask you something: Are you feeling lucky?
Push the Alien Envelope
Mass Effect owes a lot of its success to cool alien design. Within the limits of a third-person shooter, species like Salarians and Krogan are very novel. But there are two species that have an outsized presence for their small amount of screen time: Elcor and Hanar. Elcor are massive quadrupeds who must announce their emotional state because their tone and body language are too subtle for other species to detect, while Hanar are hovering space jellyfish.
Neither of these species ever make it onto your crew, probably because it would be difficult to animate them moving, let alone fighting alongside you. Despite that, fans love Hanar and Elcor so much that Mass Effect 3 actually features in-universe fictional characters called Blasto and Bubin, a Hanar and an Elcor who team up to fight crime. While their antics are often played for laughs, it also expresses a genuine desire for more unusual aliens.
We prose authors don’t have the same restrictions as filmmakers or game developers. If we want weird aliens, we can just write weird aliens. Of course, we need to put in the effort to make the aliens meaningfully different; otherwise, they’ll just seem like humans in tentacle suits. But the effort is well spent, and our alien stories will be better for it.
The Line Between Quirks and Prejudice
Speaking of weird aliens, writers often struggle with how to make their aliens seem strange and different without falling into stereotypes, a problem that Mass Effect runs headlong into. Since Krogan and Vorcha are aliens, making them inherently violent doesn’t technically run afoul of realism the way it would if they were human groups.
And with the Krogan at least, I believe this was done with the best of intentions.* The Krogan’s plight is a major plot thread that runs through all three games, and the writers want you to come away thinking that the Krogan don’t deserve the way they’ve been treated. However, that lesson is tarnished because it’s always qualified based on the Krogan’s supposed nature. They don’t deserve to be stereotyped as violent brutes, despite being more violent than other species. You shouldn’t mock a Krogan’s intelligence, even though most Krogan aren’t smart enough to be scientists. You can see the issue.
It’s deceptively easy for writers to end up here. We want our nonhumans to be distinct because of all the novelty it brings, whether they’re fantasy ancestries or scifi aliens, and physical description can only go so far. So why not give them distinct personality traits? The reason is that it still encourages thinking of large groups according to superficial stereotypes. And in the case of species like the Krogan, it’s specifically encouraging stereotypes that real-life white supremacists use to describe people of color.
In most cases, a better option is to look at a nonhuman’s material condition and consider how that might affect their culture. Instead of assigning one species the cowardly trait, you might explore how that species’ behavior is affected by having a heightened ability to sense hostility. Yes, this is more work, but it’s important for avoiding both cliché aliens and space racism.
Take Humans Into Account
Finally, scifi would be greatly improved if we stopped thinking of humans as the default from which all nonhumans deviate. One of Mass Effect’s big story problems is that the writers struggled to find a reason for humans to be especially important in the Reaper story, and they never found an answer. For Asari, the reason could have been their psychic abilities. The Reapers might have focused on Salarians because of their short generational cycle. The Turians have the galaxy’s largest military, which could make them the Reapers’ first target.
Humans have nothing. After ME2 hinted that humans might be better at lateral thinking, ME3 seemingly went with the idea that Reapers care about humans specifically because Shepard is a human. Boy, will they be in for a surprise when they find out that Shepard is just one individual and doesn’t reflect the species as a whole.
It doesn’t have to be this way. All you need is to pick some human trait and dial it back in your world’s aliens. Personally, I’m a big fan of humans being the physically tough species, as we’re fairly resilient by the standards of large Terran animals. But you can also use purely spec fic elements. Mass Effect’s psychic powers are caused by exposure to an exotic element, so why not say that humans have the most pronounced reaction? That would even explain why humans don’t have any powers in real life, as we haven’t found any of the exotic element yet.
That would have made it much easier to give humans a unique place in Mass Effect’s story, and it’ll do the same for your story. Even if humans aren’t the focus of your space opera epic, it’s still good to give them something unique. Otherwise, why include such a boring species?
Despite an ending that seems to preclude any further stories in the Mass Effect universe, another game is apparently on the way, assuming EA doesn’t strip Bioware for parts first. If the game does come out, I’ll be very interested to see how the worldbuilding changes. I’d really like a shift in the portrayal of Krogan – something to dispel the idea that they’re less intelligent than any other species. Also, I would dearly love to never see another Vorcha. Goblins are problematic enough in fantasy; there’s no reason to bring them into science fiction.
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This is a really good analyse of Mass Effect.
In particular, I really liked the part about Humans not really having a unique trade because to be honest the whole trope of Humans being the ‘average’ among other sapient species is kind of something that’s bothered me for a while now, or at least something which has been on a mind.
I’ve personally been trying to give Humans their own unique traits in my own writing/worldbuilding. Some of the ideas/concepts I’ve thought of include: Humans just being much better than taming and bonding with animals/spirits/monsters than the Elves and Dwarves, or having Humans be the galactic bureaucrats who are the best at keeping the hyperlanes running on time.
I like that! Human domestication of animals is a really cool phenomenon, and that could be a fascinating “unique” feature!
I’ve always thought that a good place to start was the evolutionary role a species played in it’s environment.
We often forget what humans are optimised for. Humans are endurance predators, our sweat glands, pack tactics and lithe bodies allow a human to follow most prey animals until they die of exhaustion. Have you ever seen a cat or dog stay awake for eight hours? Humans are assumed to do that five days out of seven. This would make humans the only species capable of picking triple shifts at work.
Mass effect has Salarians and Krogan, both of which have other niches in their environment. The Salarian short lives, large litters and large eyes suggests they are a prey species. I expect Salarian intelligence is a response to large predators on their planet. Krogans have large bony plates covering most of their body and redundant organs. On Tuchanka I expect Krogan were optimised for terrible weather conditions. It disappointed me that we weren’t shown the ways they were better than humans.
We can see evidence of this in Octopus, some of which will carry coconut shells as shells to hide under. As a soft-bodied prey species themselves, the first thing intelligence helps them do is hide from threats.
I’d like to suggest that you keep species traits in line with the species’ homeworld, as it is more believable if they have reason to keep them.
I remember hearing that the original Star Wars trilogy was going to be one movie, but was split into a trilogy after Lucas realised that his film would have been too long for most audiences to watch in one sitting.
Kind-of. This is oral history here, so take it with a grain of salt.
GL made a script too long to be one movie. So the chopped it into thirds and filmed just the first, which became IV.
When he made V, he took the criticisms of IV, combined with a few new ideas from the other directors and writers he worked with, and added their ideas in. The big reveal about Vader was one of these changes (Supposedly Vader surviving IV was also one of these changes, but this is apocryphal.)
The changes in V had knock-on effects, and GL kept having new ideas, so VI was essentially completely original, aside from a few of the broad concepts, like the character of the Emperor.
PT was made from ideas GL had over the intervening years, and ST was it’s own beast.
I’m surprised you didn’t go into the volus being essentially space-jews and quarians being space-gypsies (which seem fairly common sci-fi tropes), maybe it’s just me.
ME never seemed interesting or original to me, it’s just a generic sci-fi. Honestly, whether it’s about the world building, story, characters or gameplay, I’ve always found ME to be one of the most dissapointing and profoundly overrated loads of shite I’ve ever wasted my time on, and couldn’t even manage to drag myself through the first game.
Hey Benoan, you may not know this but g**sy is considered a slur by many real world members of said community. It is better to use the romani, rromani, or roma.
G**sy was created as a derogatory term centuries ago by those that believed rromani were related to Egyptians (they aren’t). This slur has since become the primary name people know the rromani by. This is due to deliberate bigotry throughout Europe that has spread to other parts of the world.
I kinda went with Mass Effect 2 and assumed the goal of the Reapers was to harvest civilisations to make more reapers. It would actually make sense why they’d target humans, as they have the raw numbers to build quite a few reapers, as opposed to the Asari, Krogan and Quarians. Maybe the Reapers also have a hive mind, and the more they add to their number, the more intelligent they become.
Yeah, I thought something similar as of the ending of Mass Effect 2. It would have made perfect sense, too. I don’t know why they just decided to ignore all the foreshadowing when it was time to write ME 3.
Some people who disliked the ME 3 ending (I mean, who didn’t?) latch onto the idea that there was a different ending planned and scrapped, which was also foreshadowed in ME 2. That it would have been so much better than what we got. But I think it wouldn’t have worked. If anything, it would be probably worse because then the ending would be “Reapers killed everyone to stop the evil space magic from destroying reality, and that works because reasons.”
I think the creators wanted the Reapers’ motivation to be something poignant. But there isn’t really a way to rationalize mass genocide. They should have gone with something selfish, like Reapers reproducing this way or amassing power for power’s sake.
The lack of female turians seemed such a wildly weird thing to me when I was playing the games. The writers made excuses for most major alien species that appeared to be male-only in the games, and others appeared infrequently enough that we could suspend disbelief and say it’s just coincidence we’re meeting all dudes.
But for turians, they doubled down by presenting their society in lore as super egalitarian and liberal. Then they tripled down by making the one turian woman, when she did show up, look so obviously different from the men that there was no way any of the plethora of nameless turian NPCs running around in the background in all three games could have been female, even if I was willing to suspend my disbelief again.
They made this elaborate justification why male and female krogans live separately, and why we don’t see any of the female ones, then they ended up introducing them into the games anyway in ME 3. Meanwhile, there’s apparently no female turians anywhere in the fucking galaxy, despite them supposed to be in this co-ed, egalitarian society.
I have no idea what they were thinking, or if they were thinking about it at all.
So yeah, this definitely was an example to me how not examining this male-by-default bias can wreck complete havoc in worldbuilding.
Another lesson from Mass Effect trilogy would be “if you style your enemies to be an elder-gods-like unstoppable force, don’t have the climax be the protagonists just fighting them head-on”.
I knew there was trouble brewing when the end of ME 2 basically escalated Reaper threat to “despite Shepard’s efforts, Reapers are now all active and coming to get us!”.
Lo and behold, they had no idea how to make the protagonists be able to withstand the enemy they previously established as invincible, so they start ME 3 with a discovery of a mysterious deus ex machina that no one can even describe what it’s supposed to do and how it’s going to defeat the Reapers… but it sure does, somehow!
Basically, the story of Mass Effect 3 was going to be a bust since the ending of Mass Effect 2, no matter what ending they would have gone with.
Another general point is that it seems like Mass Effect is trying to find a balance between doing the less realistic style of Star Wars and Star Trek and the hard-SF style of novels. The whole concept of mass effect technology seems to have been done with this desire, giving an explanation vaguely based on real physics. In this respect, one downside is that The Expanse mostly did it better by leaning much more towards actual realism(except that the engines still cheat).
I also personally think the aliens are a disadvantage as much as they’re an advantage from a writing standpoint. While they do add novelty, the downside is that it also means it is harder to also have true diversity or novelty with a human cast of characters, as we see here. Again contrasting with The Expanse, we see actual human diversity on Earth as well as from the divergent groups across the solar system.
As for the ending, from what I”ve read, the original ending was that the Reapers were a solution to the proliferation of mass effect technology. Essentially the idea was that The Reapers were designed to stop mass effect technology from reaching a point where it would destabilize the fabric of the universe and lead to the universe collapsing much more quickly. The Reaper harvest was intended to prevent this from happening, which is why they only attacked spacefaring races.
Mass effect relays are the big problem with this concept, because they then lead to the question as to why the Reapers would leave behind technology that accelerates the very thing they are trying to prevent. The best argument is that they were limiting the damage to certain regions of space, but that still seems weak.
I was just starting to work on a space opera setting yesterday, and Mass Effect was one of the first places that came to mind thinking about doing well done aliens with fewer species and more depth.
And I also realized that as great as the second game is overall, the Batarians and Vorcha are just weird. Especially because the first game worked perfectly well as a setting with no evil species.
Well, the Batarians are from the first game, but ME2 is the one to blame for the space goblins.
My advice: If you plan on giving a species a behavioral quirk, don’t go half-way. Make it pronounced enough that it *cant* be purely cultural. Make their ‘baseline’ psychology different than humans, and incorporate that into an even more alien culture. Ideally, give them more than one such trait so they are not just a caricature of human behavior, but something entirely perpendicular to it. Many aliens look like humans in make-up and costumes, but nearly all of them ACT like humans in make-up and costumes, and this is a massive missed opportunity.
For example, one of the races in one of my stories, the Traperac, I first created in a thought experiment like this. Two attributes I picked at random for the exercise are 1) A race of paranoid loners, and 2) A race of brilliant artists.
Physically, they are large raccoons. Their distant ancestors were solitary scavengers, but also very territorial. Traperac are obligate carnivores, and hunt through setting snares and digging pit-traps. Each lives alone or (occasionally) in a mated pair in a fixed territory, which they almost never leave.
Other than mated pairs and their offspring, no two Traperac can ever meet. If they ever see each other, they will immediately flee, or, failing that, rip each other to pieces. This impulse is instinctual, and can not be resisted.
Checking and resting traps requires only an hour or two a day, and so Traperac have essentially endless free time. They fill this time by crafting trinkets and painting on trees.
There are neutral territories where they can leave messages for each other on the trees in this way. The final product is vaguely similar to modern social media, with main posts, comments, and ‘likes’.
They are, essentially, an entire race of artistic loners, with a rich visual and literary culture, and an entire medieval economy based around dead drops, despite no two of them ever laying eyes on each other.
It has the dual advantage of being wildly original, and of sidestepping the some of the problematic elements that fantasy races have. Many people and peoples are stereotyped as being aggressive and violent, (generally, every group other than the one doing the stereotyping), but this specific ‘brilliant artists who are also paranoid loners, who are super aggressive but keep to themselves, so if they kill you you have only your own stupid self to blame’ has not been applied to any groups I can think of.
Limiting yourself to human-adjacent psychologies and cultures is to leave infinite opportunities on the cutting room floor. Make cultures that would be flatly impossible to arise organically from human biology and psychology, but make perfect sense for some alien combination of biology and psychology.
Creating sapient species that break away from human-like psychology is a double edged sword.
It’s true that there’s a lot of novelty to be gained, and I think everyone has at some point felt a little exasperation that all aliens (and fantasy species as well) are in essence more or less weirdly shaped humans.
But then, we don’t really know what a non-human-like sapience would look like – or that we would be able to recognize it. And to engage emotionally with characters, they kind of have to be like humans.
Even the example you give has some problems. I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m just trying to make a point.
For one, for us to recognize something as sapient, it needs to be able to have some kind of complex enough communication to demonstrate the depth of its inner thoughts. This probably rules out all solitary species, as they wouldn’t need to evolve communication beyond rudimentary “scare out rivals” and “attract mate”. Traperac would probably be considered just large animals by other sapient species.
Using tools to hunt and making art is not actually enough to make a species appear sapient. There are animals on earth that do these things as well.
And if they have speech or some other means of complex communication, that will feel arbitrary.
It would probably be easier to justify in fantasy than in science fiction, since fantasy isn’t expected to use evolution, and gods or some magical event can result in creation of whatever species. However, if they behave like humans beside these psychological quirks they cannot overcome, it’ll give off the vibe of them being human-like but magically cursed.
I’d love to see this series tackle Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus
I so desperately wanted the asari to be the multicultural people they are lauded as. I wanted more Asari raised on their father’s homeworld and the complications that come with that. I wanted multicultural Asari.
Salarian Asari that due to her long life span she thinks she is less intelligent than her short lived Salarian peers but had hundreds of years to dedicate to the sciences and excellent record keeper.
Turian Asari who due to the Turian prejudice against biotics are a platoon of non biotic asari. Dedicated to proving their military tactics to their father’s homeland.
Krogan Asari who being raised with their father instead of the women/children, took the right with the other males and petition the females to breed like any other Krogan, identifying with the male culture they were raised in.
Asari Human Alliance officer who fought tooth and nail for the Alliance to recognize her as an Earth citizen.
Asari Hanar, who speak similarly to their father and is hard to get to open up.
Asari Volus/Quarian who uses a suit to protect her father’s people immune systems and views it as a way to avoid Asari based assumptions from strangers.
Just more multicultural Asari in general.
One sci fi series I read took the idea humans are “super adaptable” and made that into super tough. They said humans think of themselves as super adaptable but really we just have a sturdy biology. We take “poison’ (like capsaicin) for fun. We live in hot and cold climates, islands and deserts. We can survive from wounds that should kill us. And instead of saying adaptable, other aliens saw super tough soldiers. Thus humans became the mercenaries of the galaxy.
That sounds fascinating! Do you remember what series that was?
It sounds like the ‘Humans are Space Orcs’ / ‘Deathworlders’ available on Youtube. There are a lot of authors contributing stories (not always consistent with each other) on the theme.
Add the fact that humans can bond with othe species (or even objects) and the mercenary angle makes even more sense – they can be integrated with other species to form mixed fighting groups.
I remember seeing a post on tumblr that was contrasting humans with other species. The bacteria in our mouths could kill a lot of frailer species. We shrug off broken bones that would make other seemingly hardier species die of pain (horses for example), we can throw up which means we are hard harder to kill by poison. We don’t get tired the way other species do. It is very very hard to us to die of fright (something prey species do on a distressingly regular basis, as any rabbit owner can attend to). And dear god, we can eat ANYTHING. Think of all the warnings about keeping common foodstuffs out of the reach of pets; grapes, chocolate etc are poisonous to most animals.
I thing that post was ‘Humans are Space Orcs.’
It was about ‘why are humans always the boring choice in RPGs or spec fic?’ We aren’t that normal and simple, as you mentioned, we can still move with broken bones (we actually have the instinct to run back to our group when we’re injured), because we have our adrenaline. We’ll figure out how much of a potentially poisonous thing we can eat without getting sick and then we eat it – despite the fact that we know it could make us sick. We do tattoos, piercings, even brandings to ourselves for ‘looks’ – we accept pain to look better. We’ve developed surgery long before we had anaesthetics – for millennia (there’s prove of successful surgery as far back as Ancient Egyt) we’ve cut people open to heal their injuries or stop said injuries from killing them.
And romancing a gorillephant? Never had you figured for a zoo.
Yeah, the general lack of female aliens (at least that belong to less-attractive species) and the asari being an actual entire species of hot women who want to have sex with everybody shows how sexist af ME really is.
Pandering to the boners of teenage boys. It’s a total sleazefest.
Great article, and several good points. One thing I would niggle about is the immune system question.
I doubt the Quarians would have lost the capacity to have immune systems, at least not on a genetic level. I would rather consider it a “self-perpetuating defect.” Immune systems need to learn and train constantly. A non-exposed immune system is unable to function at all even in humans. If quarians are just a little less capable of regulating this biologically, it might be that “over-sanitized” quarians just are all immunocompromised. They are confined to their ships or to encounter suits. And because they are the majority, sterile conditions need to be maintained on the flotilla – which in turn will cause the same condition to all newborn Quarians in short order.
Still, I wish there could have been a lot more in-text explanation, it does get a bit handwavy.
One thing I did not mind is the near-human appearance of many species. I mean, the series did a lot better with the appearance than many other with the Volus, Hanar and Elkor. Granted, having a Elkor Squadmate as a heavy weapons platform might have been unbalanced, but it certainly would have been fun. So… good effort, but not enough.
Man, I could not agree more on the “boring humans” point. Too many works out there try to make me believe that humans are awesome and special and fantastic, but don’t actually show them doing anything. The only reason humans are awesome is because the protagonist just so happens to be a human (because of course they are). My least favourite excuse is calling them the most versatile/diverse race. It’s just such a crutch, a thinly-veiled excuse to make every other race a one-note Race of Hats.
I have a lot to say on the matter, but I’ll restrain myself. Just, writers, please – humans are the very definition of “mundane”. By all means use them, but stop trying to convince us how amazing they are. At best it makes your story boring and played out. At worst it makes it look like you’re trying to make me accept a world in which the idea that one group is just inherently “better” than others is true and justified. Neither is a good thing.
Humans appear mundane to us, because they are us. Above are a few lists of things human can do which show that, compared to other animals on our planet, we are not quite that mundane.
Instead of saying humans are versatile, how about something like that:
– humans are good at bonding with all kinds of beings, so a starship crew has human members to make sure the interaction between different groups on board can be managed by them
– humans are persistent hunters (we used to literally follow our prey at a moderate pace until it dropped dead of exhaustion), so they are the most-wanted mercenaries on your fantasy world or rescue crews in your galaxy
– humans can thrive in a wide variety of surroundings (we basically live everywhere from below-zero degrees Celsius to areas where 50 degrees Celsius are normal), because they can adapt their surroundings to their needs, which makes them good first-time colonists who terraform a planet so other species can live on it
All of this is perfectly in line with real-life humans, but it gives the humans in your story more than just a ‘well, humans are the average, you know’ description.
Exactly. I know that humans have stuff that set them apart from other animals in our world, but stories never focus on that. They just say “Humans are special because they’re special”. That’s not enough. By all means, do something to make your humans appear special in your world, just as long as it’s something. Also, don’t say they’re “more” special than other races. Don’t make other races admire them for how special they are. That leaves an incredibly sour taste in my mouth.
Another thing to remember is that the above are only true compared to other mundane creatures. Introduce the spec elements and the door is busted wide open.
Side note, I always enjoyed the old semi-obscure mid 90s strategy game Deadlock: Planetary Conquest for its completely unnecessary but much appreciated depth in its lore and backstory. The thing that sets humans apart from other races in that game is that they have the strongest economy. I always liked that.
After finishing ME2 the first time I thought (wrongly) that I had figured out what the Reapers were up to. I believed they had reached a point where they no longer evolved on their own. Instead they watched organics and synths grow, keeping an eye out for unique characteristics to be added to themselves. After enough time they come in, wipe out the most advanced civilizations, and make way for new species to grow. Due to Shepard’s defeat of Sovereign, the Reaper’s see humans as the next great species to adapt from. This explains the collector’s kidnapping humans to study and making that weird human/reaper thing. I fully expected to start ME3 fighting the standard lobster Reapers only to have to deal with the much more formidable human Reapers as the game progressed.