Because my original is not cooperating right now, I've been at work on my Doctor Who/Mass Effect 3 crossover. The general gist is that, post-Midnight, the Doctor and Donna land on Mars. Cerberus takes the Tardis, which means they have to catch a ride with Shepard.
What happened last night was I'd written up to Eden Prime. By 'up to,' I mean that they're currently starting to wake up Javik.
Then the anthropologist in me got like this:
Now, in Mass Effect 1 Shepard received something called the Cipher, with the intent of using it to understand the vision from the damaged beacon. For reference, here's the video describing it (start at 2:11 to skip all the other stuff).
The Cipher is the essence of being a Prothean, which necessitates an understanding of culture. Culture is socialized into us from a young age, which is why Americans are Americans and the Chinese are Chinese and so forth. And in a lot of places, like America, you can get multicultural families -- families who share cultural traits from two or more cultures because or relocation or intermarriage.
So what is culture? Tylor's definition is still the most widely used, and it states: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." So by definition this means that the Cipher made Shepard multi-cultural. While s/he still possesses all the hallmarks of human culture and likely still abides by it, s/he also is now culturally Prothean.
However, this change would not have occurred consciously. Taking what we know of Prothean culture from Javik in ME3, I (at least) can conclude that several things happened:
1. A paragon Shepard unconsciously absorbed the idea of the Prothean one-empire concept, and that was what drove him/her to make everyone work together to stop the Reapers. This would have stopped short of insisting everyone unite under one banner wholly, as the Protheans did.
2. A renegade Shepard unconsciously absorbed the idea of the Prothean one-empire concept but, unlike a paragon Shepard, would have insisted on that empire-like coming together, with humanity at the front.
These would have been the side effects of Shepard's enculturation by the Cipher.
"Yes," you might say, "but the Cipher was only intended to give Shepard an understanding of the beacons." Well yes, but as seen in this video, it transferred an understanding of the Prothean language as well.
Language is a product of culture. I have a previous blog post on here that talks about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or "linguistic relativity". If you want more detail, skim that section, but the gist is this: either language determines thought, and linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive ones (strong version) or that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of behavior.
Back a long time ago, and by "long time" I mean "I played these games in middle and high school so early 2000s," there were a series of games called Avernum. Avernum 2 introduced these guys called the vahnatai -- basically, a race of cave-dwelling hyperadvanced alien beings that end up helping out your faction in a really nasty war. There's a long backstory here that I won't go into because I could write a whole other blogpost on how awesome these games are and how I'm about to shell out approximately $150 for all six at the current moment to get over my lack of desire to touch console games and continued sadistic playing of ME3 (though, actually, I might go for some Portal later ...). But basically, when you finally reach the vahnatai lands, they make you go through a ritual. This is what it does:
What this is is an enculturation. The party is essentially made multicultural, able to understand the cultural nuances of the vahnatai language along with the language itself. This is always the way I saw the Cipher working: it aligns itself into Shepard's head, making an understanding of Prothean culture subconscious.
This does not mean that Shepard would know everything about the Protheans. We don't really "know" all of our culture, do we? Even as an anthropologist-sociologist-criminologist type person, I can't look at a given aspect of American culture and say "yep, that means this that or the other thing." But it's likely that, if you presented Shepard with a Prothean artifact or something s/he would look at it and know instinctively what it was, because his/her subconscious recognizes it.
Of course, this is not perfect. We don't always recognize something instantly even if we've seen it (see the ferret comment above). But this would explain why the visions were still jumbled. Unless Shepard was able to clearly focus on the vision, s/he wouldn't necessarily be able to come to a 100% conclusion. However, we see Shepard focusing on Virmire, and s/he sees and understands quite a bit without Liara's help.
This isn't necessarily bad writing, and in fact I don't think it is. I think it's just the fact that you're always going to have one person who thinks too hard about things, or one person who knows something about something you don't and just comes in and analyzes the shit out of it. That just happens to be me in this case. Anyway, that's it for that. I'm off to finish a project due Tuesday that I haven't even started yet. Ta.
The Cipher is the essence of being a Prothean, which necessitates an understanding of culture. Culture is socialized into us from a young age, which is why Americans are Americans and the Chinese are Chinese and so forth. And in a lot of places, like America, you can get multicultural families -- families who share cultural traits from two or more cultures because or relocation or intermarriage.
So what is culture? Tylor's definition is still the most widely used, and it states: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." So by definition this means that the Cipher made Shepard multi-cultural. While s/he still possesses all the hallmarks of human culture and likely still abides by it, s/he also is now culturally Prothean.
However, this change would not have occurred consciously. Taking what we know of Prothean culture from Javik in ME3, I (at least) can conclude that several things happened:
1. A paragon Shepard unconsciously absorbed the idea of the Prothean one-empire concept, and that was what drove him/her to make everyone work together to stop the Reapers. This would have stopped short of insisting everyone unite under one banner wholly, as the Protheans did.
2. A renegade Shepard unconsciously absorbed the idea of the Prothean one-empire concept but, unlike a paragon Shepard, would have insisted on that empire-like coming together, with humanity at the front.
These would have been the side effects of Shepard's enculturation by the Cipher.
"Yes," you might say, "but the Cipher was only intended to give Shepard an understanding of the beacons." Well yes, but as seen in this video, it transferred an understanding of the Prothean language as well.
Language is a product of culture. I have a previous blog post on here that talks about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or "linguistic relativity". If you want more detail, skim that section, but the gist is this: either language determines thought, and linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive ones (strong version) or that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of behavior.
Back a long time ago, and by "long time" I mean "I played these games in middle and high school so early 2000s," there were a series of games called Avernum. Avernum 2 introduced these guys called the vahnatai -- basically, a race of cave-dwelling hyperadvanced alien beings that end up helping out your faction in a really nasty war. There's a long backstory here that I won't go into because I could write a whole other blogpost on how awesome these games are and how I'm about to shell out approximately $150 for all six at the current moment to get over my lack of desire to touch console games and continued sadistic playing of ME3 (though, actually, I might go for some Portal later ...). But basically, when you finally reach the vahnatai lands, they make you go through a ritual. This is what it does:
This does not mean that Shepard would know everything about the Protheans. We don't really "know" all of our culture, do we? Even as an anthropologist-sociologist-criminologist type person, I can't look at a given aspect of American culture and say "yep, that means this that or the other thing." But it's likely that, if you presented Shepard with a Prothean artifact or something s/he would look at it and know instinctively what it was, because his/her subconscious recognizes it.
In other words, if that JIF jar was a Prothean artifact, Shepard would not be reacting like the fat ferret. At least, I think that's a ferret. Could be an opossum? Pretty sure it's a ferret though.
Of course, this is not perfect. We don't always recognize something instantly even if we've seen it (see the ferret comment above). But this would explain why the visions were still jumbled. Unless Shepard was able to clearly focus on the vision, s/he wouldn't necessarily be able to come to a 100% conclusion. However, we see Shepard focusing on Virmire, and s/he sees and understands quite a bit without Liara's help.
Though I don't think we ever figured this out.
So here is the crux of the question that bothered me last night:
Why was Shepard, when confronted with the one-empire-maybe-but-maybe-not-bordering-on-slavery-aspect of the Protheans, surprised? The more likely reaction would have been something like this:
Just sayin'. Just sayin'.
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