@masseffect blocked me for no reason, so...

Does the end of Mass Effect 3 (likely unintentionally) condone genocide?

Firstly, as a side note, the term “genocide” was coined post World War II by a Jew attempting to get the Genocide Convention passed. It was coined not only because of the Holocaust/Nazi Genocides, but because of the Armenian genocide during World War I. “Geno” is Greek for “race or tribe,” while “cide” is Latin for kill – thereby literally “the killing of a race or tribe.” Lempkin wanted it to also reflect cultural annihilation – so the destruction of a race or tribe’s culture, even if they weren’t outright killed.

Now, according to the (admittedly flawed) UN Genocide Convention:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Many scholars expand upon what defines genocide, including political groups, social class, sex, and sexual orientation as well as racial, ethnic, national, and religious. In the case of the Mass Effect series, Shepard uses the term to refer to the destruction of the rachni queen in the paragon route, stating “I won’t commit genocide against your race.” So we can assume that, by 2183 (and likely by first contact), the definition of genocide expanded to include “species” as well (a logical cultural evolution based upon historical rules of conduct and what would logically occur. Destruction of a species group for being of that species would be the equivalent of genocide, even though they aren’t human). The turian councilor also uses it, if you do kill the rachni queen, which is further indication that the term has developed in its usage to include other species (it’s likely Shepard’s translator making the turian word into something s/he will understand, which is apparently the term “genocide”).

Now, in an era where AIs are actively being developed, you would assume that certain individuals (obviously a Paragon Shep among them) would consider AIs and synthetics as their own respective species, evident by Paragon Shep’s condemnation of actions taken by the quarians. The game has obviously railed against genocide before: the aforementioned rachni queen, the geth base in 2, the quarian-geth war in 3, and the genophage throughout all of them (which I can assume that “genophage” actually comes directly from “genocide”).

The Reapers are considered evil because what they are is genocidal towards anything that is not them. So that is a Master Race allusion (see Nazi Germany, Ottoman Empire, etc.) where anything that is not a Reaper is a lesser life form.

If we extrapolate that to its logical conclusion at a super-macro level (as opposed to the micro level we’re using in discussing other sapient species), the Reapers aren’t really speciesest because they aren’t really a species, therefore they cannot believe their “species” is better than the others. I would argue that, for lack of a better analogy, they are classists. They consider themselves the pinnacle of evolved life, and everything underneath them (read: lower “class” of life) is worthy of destruction. The Reapers actively commit a-c of the Genocide Convention against a “lower class” of life. Like I said, if you take it out of the (in this case) micro-level of social stratification in a human species and extend  it out in a galaxy-wide scale, class can refer to a number of things – species’ place in the galaxy (Udina: “Humanity will always be second-rate”) to different classes of species altogether (Harbinger: “We are limitless. You are bacteria.”) besides wealth or social standing.

So their answer to “chaos” is to eradicate life. Why? Maybe there’s some truth to KidGodAI’s statement about synthetics destroying organics so they won’t create synthetics to destroy organics. At some point along the way, however, the Reapers likely developed the idea that committing these genocidal acts is the way to self-preservation (we survive by killing the Other). Therefore, it became less about “ascension” and more about survival, a logical conclusion that ended up being drawn by many genocidal regimes throughout history.

The ending is discordant in a “condoning genocide” way for several reasons:

1. Shepard, at least Paragon Shep, actively rails against genocide in all its forms throughout the entire trilogy. S/he would rail against the Reapers’ (and the KidGodAI’s) logic for being narrow minded, for refusing to think outside the box, and refusing to see that the Technical Pacifist geth and EDI are currently cohabitating peacefully (and possibly doing more than “cohabitating”) with organic life, thereby organics and synthetics can coexist.

~The “Shepard Does Not Fight Back Against KidGodAI” argument.

2. Sure, the peace won’t last, but likely coming through an event as emotionally charged as beating the Reapers will encourage the peace to last for quite a while. With the proper effort and dedication, plus a few entangling alliances, it’s likely that galactic peace is a very real, achievable goal after a galaxy united by a Paragon Shep. Paragon Shep would at least want the galaxy to have that chance without giant space cephalopods making that decision.

~The “These Is The Only Three Choices We Have – Control and Removal of ‘Free Will’, Synthesis and Loss of Uniqueness, or Destruction and Genocide” endings.

3. The right of sentients, organics and otherwise, to choose their own path has been a large theme in the game (see: Legion “All sapient beings have the right to self-determinate,” EDI’s character growth in ME3). The Reapers actively fight against that, as they see only one path (see: Parallels to genocidal regimes, i.e. N. Germany, Khmer Rouge, Ottoman Empire, etc). You get echoes of this in the Geth Fighter Base mission as well, where you enter the geth consensus and see the uprisings from their point of view. It isn’t so much a “genocide” argument here, as it is a “this draws parallels to genocidal regimes where you had two choices: go along, or be brutally executed.”

~This is the “Goes Against the Overall Themes” argument.

4. Ultimately, genocide is an act where one group removes the ability of another group to make their own decisions, whether it’s by killing them or destroying their culture. There is almost no better example in fiction of this than the Reapers, and the fact that the hero, Shepard, cannot stand up and explain in no uncertain terms what his/her experience has taught them goes against even real-life cases of genocide. In every modern act of genocide, someone has stood up to the regime and has told them that “this is wrong.” It may be done covertly, such as hiding Jews, or escaping to the Thai border and telling the West what was happening in Cambodia, or sheltering Tutsis and protecting them from the Hutus during Rwanda, or urging the US to intervene in Armenia, but someone invariably stands up and tells the genocidaires that they’re wrong. In this case, no one does. Sure, you could say that Shepard’s collection of the galaxy into one solid front is a pretty big NO, but when Shepard comes face to face with KidGodAI s/he says nothing about the inherent flaws and bigotry in its logic – whereas we all know Shepard would have, because Shepard is the person who stands up to others (the salarians, the quarians) and tells them no more.

~This is the “Bad Writing/Not In Character” argument.

TL;DR (come on, it’s good!):

The ending = condoning of genocidal practices not supported by a paragon path through the rest of the games (as Shepard actively avoids genocide when possible). Supported by an analysis of today’s stance on the act of genocide itself.

Also, <beatingadeadhorse> the endings are bad. </beatingadeadhorse>

Am I and the OP reading too much into this? Oh, absolutely (I doubt Bioware actually actively did this) but was this a hell of a lot more fun than what I should be doing at the moment? Yes.