u/linkenski — reddlx

I just saw a video about how our modern World Map is being put into question by the African Union, because the scale of continents is inaccurate. And it created a little paradigm shift in my mind about what a new map would look like. Then I thought about Mass Effect and how, before it settled as a more goofy "Action Movie" narrative, the first game especially felt like a very serious depiction of humanity of the future.

Right now the world we live in is kind of reorganizing itself in many ways, and I used to be so capitvated by Mass Effect because of how un-fictional parts of it was, and how it contemplated a little bit about how humanity would actually look if it exited Earth and found space. Because it can't all be white people, and the quest with Samesh Bhatia in ME1 always struck a chord with me because BioWare recognized that if we had to live with other species on a shared "Global" space station, there would definitely be a multiculture.

But I get a little pissed off thinking about that now, because I find that as the series progressed it also regressed more and more into contemporary pop-culture. It became less interested in hypothesizing on the real world, and more about just representing whatever a "Modern Westoid Media Product" has to look like.

I definitely miss the more open-minded approach to writing the franchise had in the beginning, and I would actually only be more interested in ME5 if it dropped its obsessions with established character-canons, and re-emphasized its Futurist roots, but because of the canonical baggage, the 3 "magic" endings, and the awful 600 timeskip associated with Andromeda, I feel like we're kinda forced to stay committed to the future of the series as just a "Space Fantasy" plot. But I liked Mass Effect more when it was a mix of a Sci-fi Fantasy along with some delicious Near-Future Sci Fi pontifications. It's why I even bothered to read the Codex.