LookingOverMyShoulder

Everyone in every previous cycle was cut off and isolated before they even knew what hit them. If they didn’t even know the reapers existed, it might be years, even decades before they knew what happened at all! There would be no way to share intel, to warn others about reaper movements, etc. A society that developed to rely on the relays would be utterly crippled without them, and every previous cycle lost the relays in the opening minutes of an attack they didn’t even know was coming.

Except us. Our cycle kept the Citadel. When the reapers showed up we still had control of it AND the relays. We were the first cycle in the history of the reapers to keep that advantage - because of the prothean scientists on Ilos. It's really an incredible thing when you think about it.

The previous cycles couldn't evacuate, fall back and mount a defense with their allies. They couldn’t reach safety. Without the relays there was nowhere to go! All the reapers had to do was go system by system to wipe everyone out systematically, and all that any previous cycle could do was wait until they were next and fight the best they could with what they had available.

The crucible is such an insane concept because there would have been no way to pull it off. You don't have the resources, the labor, the logistics, to even begin to build it, because you don't have the relays to move the resources or the people where they need to be. And even more insane, the battery for the whole damn thing was the Citadel, which every previous cycle lost access to in the opening minutes of the initial attack!

Even if the protheans or anyone else could have found a way to build it, there would have been no way to use it. Why in the world would you base your MacGuffin on something so inaccessible?

If you had to use the Crucible as your win button, it could have been interesting if you looked at it not as something that everyone else ran out of time to build, but as something other cycles had conceived of and had no way to build - but we did. At a cost.

The reapers are here. We might still have comm buoys and the relays, but the reapers are still killing billions, destroying strategic locations and wreaking havoc with supply lines. So if you are diverting supplies to build the Crucible...who are you taking them from? Whose front collapses because you took what they needed to build that thing? Who gets fucked over because this ship had to mine minerals to build the crucible instead of run supplies to refugees? A war table like you had in DA:I could have been so interesting in Mass Effect 3.

The fact that the protheans reached through time and made one, small change that dramatically changed the way the reapers harvest a cycle had so much potential. We were different. We had a chance no one else ever had, not just because Shepard is a badass, but because a small group of people who had no hope for themselves decided to have hope for someone else. We weren’t better than other cycles – we were gifted something no one else got: the protheans broke the cycle. We didn’t. They did.

Vigil tells us exactly how all this works, it tells us point by point what we need to do to survive. Recognize indoctrination. Hold the Citadel, or at least distribute and create redundancy for power and information such that it ceases to be a single point of failure. Do not lose control of the relays.

In Mass Effect 2, we get a mission to retrieve a Reaper IFF. That stands for "Identification Friend or Foe" device, and is a common piece of communication hardware in secure environments, like militaries, that allows a vehicle to quickly and securely confirm its identity to allied forces. In other words, it is a device that tells Reaper technology that we are a Reaper.

If the Citadel races have IFFs installed on their ships, the Reapers cannot lock us out of the relay network. Even if they take the Citadel itself and lock down the network so that only Reapers can use it, the relays will look at Citadel ships, think those ships are Reapers, and activate anyway.

There is no single thing that any person did or could have done across the entire trilogy that should be more potent than claiming the IFF. It guts the entire Reaper strategy, it secures and protects the most fundamental logistic capabilities of war, it allows the good guys to continue to move and communicate at the level of the enemy instead of flailing in the dark. With enough research and luck, it could even potentially permit weaponizing Reaper tech against them, to some extent.

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

He returns one night to his humble apartment, which is known to have vermin, and comes across a rat, which he could easily kill or set loose on the street.

But the rat- it is special. It seems to speak to him. Promises him every little thing he desires- talent, fame, and fortune. Recognition and esteem like he has only ever seen from afar; fine company like the wealthy men and women whose scraps he picks at over the sink.

Put me on your head, the rat says. Put me on your head and think of nothing.

It is strange at first, yes. Strange to feel another take control of his life and live it better than he ever could. To see miraculous things created with his own two hands, to feel his feet move in graceful and fantastic ways with a confidence he has never had.

But the rat delivers as he had promised: he receives promotions, notoriety, admiration. He is noticed. Envied. Every day is a waking dream, rubbing elbows with beautiful women and handsome men and influential personalities who lavish him with praise. It is addictive, this lifestyle- never mind that he is only ever truly conscious of it as a passenger of in own brain.

It is when he has reached heights few can ever conceive, with all that the rat had ever promised- a beautiful wife in a beautiful house with all the world in his palm, in possession of all the wealth and success a man could ever want, that the rat says that it is leaving.

Leaving? The rat cannot leave. Everything he is, the rat has provided.

"I have delivered on our bargain", the rat says. "I have brought to you all that you have ever dreamed. What more could you desire? I must live my own life, now."

The man is furious. He is terrified. He destroys the rat, in all of the ways that a rat can be destroyed, until nothing is left of it but a fine smear of marinara sauce.

He returns to the restaurant the next day moving like the shell of something hollowed-out and brittle. He cooks well- his fingers remember the movements, his eyes recognize the patterns, his mouth knows without his asking what orders to speak and what platitudes make patrons smile pleasantly with their straight white teeth.

He retains the talents of the rat. The charm of the rat. All the worldly pleasures the rat had provided him.

Still, it seems, he is little more than a vessel for the talents of the rat.

But the rat is gone.