mass effect and conversion to evil
This post contains heavy spoilers for Mass Effect 1, 2, 3 and Andromeda.
I love Mass Effect. I started playing the original series in 2014 and finished it, later I played the Remaster Trilogy, and now I'm 90 hours into Andromeda.
I think one interesting trope Mass Effect explores well and that greatly interests me is seeing your work, or even body, be appropriated and used for evil by another force as you watch on helplessly. It was not foreseeable by you and you thought you did good, but in the end, a switch flips and you have been inadvertently aiding evil, or will do so soon as evil swallows up your work or your body and mind.
In the original trilogy, there are artificial lifeforms called Reapers that harvest all advancements of aliens made in the Milky Way and eliminate all higher forms of life every fifty-thousand years, leaving the younger species to advance, create new technologies and thrive until the next harvesting cycle. What good you and your civilization create ends up in the hands of evil to gain further power and secure dominance over all alien species until it is stopped.
Two of the choices in the end underline it again: Control and Synthesis, which both more or less sacrifice Commander Shepard to become part of the game’s antagonist, but attempt to control it within to be less evil. With this, Shepard arguably becomes part of, and is complicit, in a being or culture built on genocide, and may even force the rest of organic sentient life into it.
In Andromeda, there are the Kett, a brutal alien race obsessed with adopting the traits of other alien species through a process called "exaltation". They capture other alien races, experiment on them, harvest their organs and most importantly, stick them in tanks to slowly turn them into Kett with the desired trait of the original alien race. The main antagonist, the Archon, claims to have inherited the traits of thousands of races due to this process, similar to how the Reapers acquired new tech and genes in the trilogy. Exaltation means through capture, you are turned into the enemy and turning your gun against your own people. They in turn, not knowing about exaltation or who you used to be before, turn their gun against you as well; each killing their own.
What gets me is that your work or body isn’t just ripped from you - it is flipped, integrated, perverted, absorbed, repurposed, and it's now suddenly serving causes you could not have seen coming. I see so many interesting real life parallels to this.
One example: You work for a company and agree with its mission and purpose. Maybe it even does good in your eyes, or at least no harm. But it gets bought up or the leadership changes and it’s no longer true. Your work gets stripped from you and lives on within the company when you decide to leave because of the change. They likely own anything you produced in that time and there’s little you can do about it.
That time Google dropped “Don’t be evil” as their motto is very on the nose for this; but how about all the Meta employees who are strongly disagreeing with the new decisions? Undoubtedly, their work is what made the platform possible and successful, but they also had to deal with helping all the unethical shit that happened and continues to happen. Even if they leave now, their past work is now feeding something they might not support and paved the way there, not having known this could happen. And how about all those Twitter employees who were sure to build something great or even necessary for public discourse and news, just to have it all destroyed and bastardized by an acquisition?
Another version: You work in the public sector, for the government or adjacent to it. If the government descends into fascism and nazism or the existing one is overthrown by them, now your job is suddenly aiding a Nazi empire. This might be an extreme example, but a real one might be how the FDA can be forced to peddle anti-vaxx information due to a new administration and replacement of key leading figures within it. As an employee within it, you’re stuck supporting that cause with your work unless you can leave.
When I think about the exalted aliens, I think of all the people who talk about having lost their loved ones to disinformation, extremism, conspiracy theories, cults and more. It’s one thing to hold different views, but another to become obsessed with it, unable to talk about anything else, and pushing away and harming everyone around you over it.
They’re changed; you barely recognize them anymore. Every move you might hope for that does something about the people and platforms that did this to them would be a shot against your loved one, too. Their exaltation is complete. Situations ensue that force you to either go against them or leave them forever, and they will not stop hurting the ones close to them because of who they have become.
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Published 21 Jan, 2025