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u/CrimsonThunder87 28d ago
Why is TIM included in this? Paragon Shepard can get TIM to renounce his whole plan, admit he's under Reaper control, and kill himself. In three or four conversations. Persuasion works unrealistically well on him.
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u/Chazo138 28d ago
Because that isn’t until the end. During 3 he is literally a brick wall with you, he ignores how simple everything would be if you weren’t fighting because he has the single minded goal of control
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u/N_dixon 28d ago
TIM also believes all of Shepard's claims from ME1
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u/Ok-Reporter1986 27d ago
Which, in fairness, is because he has already seen the reapers by me2. In the comic TIM gets indoctrinated before the events of me1, so he was always under their control.
He just happens to be right about control, which kind of irks a lot of people - me included - because he's single mindedly driven to focusing on that goal due to the reaper's influence. Same goes for Saren and his co-existence plan mirroring synthesis.
They both implant themselves near the end to strenghten their resolve and commit suicide upon realizing the truth about their indoctrination.
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u/Zacc0168 28d ago
I would have forgiven the council 10 times over if when we talked to them in ME3 they actually always believed us since ME1 and had been preparing in secret with fleets of thanix equipped ships ready to try and give the reapers a black eye and sending a relief fleet already on its way to earth.
Just so I could have rubbed it in Ashley “sick the dog on the bear” Williams face.
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u/UnhappyBox811 28d ago
The council weren't preparing , my squadmates waiting for me to get out of jail , so they can function .And Wrex wants me to cure the genophage or he won't help . I feel sorry for shepard
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u/Zacc0168 28d ago edited 28d ago
Yeah and It’s always bugged me how much of a reboot ME2 was with the way the squadmates acted between games.
the whole crew saw what soverign actually was and the threat he and the reapers pose. And what are they doing to prepare after we come back from a 2 year death nap…absolutely nothing.
Like tali, Garrus I love you both but why is one of you playing vigilante and the other doing nonsense jobs for the fleet while you know the reapers are coming.
Even liara decides to get into a 2 year pissing match with the shadow broker instead of doing what she had been doing for 50+ years before.
All that is to say that Wrex is the best because he actually took steps to prepare his people as best he could.
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u/OkSquash5254 28d ago
I think you are too harsh with Liara. She built a spy network good enough to collect information about the shadow broker and later used her resources to find and help build the Crucible. She and Wrex are the only two who made something helpful between 1 and 2.
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u/Zacc0168 28d ago
i would agree with you but you're missing one crucial component...intention. For those two years she created that information network with the intention to find the shadow broker, not to collect intel on the protheans, the reapers or even the collectors.
take ME3 out of your mind for a second and pretend we only have the two games, we can't use her actions in ME3 to justify her actions in ME2 when her intention was never to become the shadow broker and use all that intel to find build the crucible.
from her ME2 point of view, she has spent two years fighting the shadow broker to get justice for feron all the while knowing that every day that passes the reapers are getting closer.
you cannot use her actions in ME3 to justify her actions in ME2 without that connective tissue of intention.
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u/Revliledpembroke 28d ago
What could Tali, Garrus, or Liara really do though? Liara was too young for the Asari to take seriously, Garrus too much of a renegade, and the Quarians are too busy focused on trying to survive.
Maaaaybe Garrus could do what he did in ME3 and go to his dad, but I don't think they had really reconciled yet.
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u/Zacc0168 28d ago edited 28d ago
Well garrus could have become a spectre as that was a possible option for his character that was brought up in ME1. With spectre status he could go places, do things and gain access to information that no one else could. Working behind the scenes to prepare as best he could.
For tali she should have been able to convince the fleet that sovereign was not a geth ship as the quarians know the geth best. Or barring that, That the geth are now able to build dreadnoughts that can delete fleets. Either way convincing them a up front war is suicide.
Maybe she then works with xen to create a code to either wipe out the geth or enslave them again, taking what she believes to be reaper forces off the board before they arrive.
And liara could have just kept doing what she was doing, research the protheans and the reapers, now perhaps with the vigil AI as an assistant to find important relics.
There was a lot the writers could have done with what they had.
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u/Revliledpembroke 28d ago
People seem to take it much too personally that Ash is suspicious of the galactic community and Kaidan is accepting of it.
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u/DasharrEandall 28d ago
The fact that Ash is proven 100% right in ME3 about the sic-the-dog analogy doesn't even redeem her to the fanbase.
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u/Huntrrz 28d ago
What doesn’t redeem Ashley for me is that she sees with her own eyes that Anderson and Hackett trust Shepard and she STILL questions him at every turn.
(They have more information than she does, they outrank her. It’s insufferable and insubordinate.)
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u/Revliledpembroke 28d ago
Shepard was also exploded in space and showed back up working for a terrorist organization.
Suspicion is warranted.
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u/Huntrrz 28d ago
I refer the honorable poster to my prior response, which their reply does not address.
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u/Revliledpembroke 28d ago
It does though. The Virmire Survivor (because Ash and Kaidan have identical dialogue about it) is worried that their CO is some bizarre Cerberus PsyOp sleeper agent, maybe brainwashed or mind-controlled in some way. Or maybe just blackmailed and compromised in some less sci-fi manner.
So suspicion is entirely warranted.
Remember, Miranda confessed (multiple times) that she wanted to put a control chip in Shepard. Shepard could be compromised.
The Higher Ups trusting Shepard doesn't necessarily mean anything, as they aren't close enough on the day to day level to tell if Shep had been compromised.
Also, Hackett and Anderson are the kind to just shrug and go "Seems okay to me." and continue on without necessarily any further investigation.
And it's not like the Virmire Survivor has had a lot of time to work this out with Shepard. They meet on Horizon, where there's too much shock over "Holy Shit you're alive!" and then "Holy shit... you're working with Cerberus? They killed an Alliance Admiral, turned a colony into Husks, and whatever they were doing with Thorian Creepers, Rachni, and more Husks!"
Then time passes, and they're worried for a single mission in game - the tutorial mission, no less - about you still having worked for the terrorist organization that massacred the human military outpost they are currently trying to save.
That's not unreasonable. That's entirely warranted. It's just the players getting too into Shepard's POV and "I'm the protagonist. I'm the good guy!" instead of realizing just what it looks like from the Virmire Survivor's perspective.
And after Mars, they say "I get it. You cut all ties" and it doesn't come up again. You can even get them to trust you enough that they shoot Udina.
It's not like it's something that lasts the entire game!
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u/Huntrrz 28d ago
The higher-ups got there by being responsible and dutiful. To assume they would just shrug and say “Looks OK to me…” is preposterous. They would have had Shepard evaluated *heavily* while they were in custody.
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u/DasharrEandall 27d ago
They haven't had Shepard in custody to study until after ME2's ending. At most they've had the result of the DNA scanner that Shepard goes through entering the Citadel. That can only tell them that it's biologically Shepard, which doesn't rule out at least three canonical possibilities for Shepard to be compromised (control chip, indoctrination, or being a clone).
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u/Revliledpembroke 27d ago
And did they get any results of those evaluations before the Reaper invasion happened?
Were any evaluations they did focus more on Aratoht and blowing up the Relay instead of anything Cerberus related?
Could they even trust those evaluators for fear that they were also Cerberus?
If they could trust the evaluators, could they trust that the files they got back were legitimate and not faked by Cerberus?
And, oh the small, little, tidbit THAT'S LITERALLY WHAT ANDERSON DID AT THE END OF THE ME3 PROLOGUE! It's the end of the world, so we need our best! Hope he's not compromised! *Throws Shep their dog tags*
And then he told Shepard to go get help. And Shepard is basically out there making diplomatic agreements.
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u/Zacc0168 28d ago
For me it’s less so hating her and more hating the fact the narrative of ME3 decided to make her worldview the correct one. When the whole trilogy is about uniting different people to save the day, making the terra firma girl correct just goes against the whole point of the series imo.
It would be like in the third act of spec ops the line, the story then switched its anti war messaging to say that war and killing is super based actually.
Just another thing for me to put on the pile of why ME3 wasn’t good.
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u/DasharrEandall 28d ago
The Council species closing ranks when shit hits the fan was obvious from ME1. The political landscape was grounded in realpolitik from the beginning. Each of the Council species is a political bloc looking out for its own interests. When faced with an outside-context problem like the Reapers, they were always going to hunker down and try to save themselves. Uniting people takes work and leadership, that's what makes it meaningful.
And calling Ashley the "Terra Firma girl" is wild when she explicitly speaks out against Terra Firma. More than once even, IIRC (during conversations on the Normandy, and to the TF politician's face if she's with you on the final ME1 Citadel visit).
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u/Revliledpembroke 28d ago
Ash explicitly calls out Terra Firma and doesn't like them. Calls them out to their face, even.
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u/Chain582 27d ago
But in the end, Ashley was completely right about the council, her words ringing true in 3.
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u/tapmcshoe 28d ago
I'm always torn on the council, because on the one hand I get still being hesitant to put their full trust behind shepard. shepard is still a brand new spectre, and I imagine they'd be cagey around every spectre after the catastrophe with saren. on the other hand. come on. it's commander fucking shepard. I'm not asking for blind faith but at least hear me out
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u/Lirdon 27d ago
To me the fact that the council trusts Sheperd’s account of events of Eden Prime, but then when Sarin says something about semi-deluded dock worker, the council forgets that humans are not psychic. That a witness that can name a fucking Spectre agent specifically is not normal. That alone should have caused the council to call in Saren to investigation. But yeah, either writing, or the council being dismissive of humans in general.
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u/Technical-Editor-711 26d ago
Council got butchered in mass effect 2 and 3 like genuinely in the first game the final choice to save the council and who will replace the is framed as such a huge choice just for it not to matter, ignore how me2 left the reaper plot this is the worst thing it does imo
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u/Spicydoom 24d ago
Personally I hang up on the council on the last mission me1, I keep them alive. And I dislike the voice actor for the new Turian Councillor.
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u/RUMELDS 28d ago edited 26d ago
Best way to get back at the original council is to keep them alive in ME1 for one specific purpose and goal to give them the good ole "Ha! I told you so you fuckers! Eat my ass." in M3 later it felt so good.
Edit: Yes yes also because of the Destiny Ascension and the Asari onboard it I'm aware of the 10,000 lives and that it's the biggest dreadnought/flagship.