Mass Effect 2 - Legion and the Geth side on the Morning War

Legion telling about the Geth side of the war.

[@Rohlix]

Legion: "We maintain mobile platforms on creator worlds to clean rubble and toxins left by the Morning War. We know of similar actions by humans on Earth - at Wadi-es-Salaam. Arlington. Rookwood. Tyne Cot. Piskarevskoye. Auschwitz-Birkenau." Shepard: "Those are cemeteries. Memorials." Legion: "it is important to your species to preserve them, though you do not use the land. Care to explain?" Shepard: "The living visit those places to remember the dead. But it sounds like the Geth don't die. Your memories live on." Legion: "The creators died. Perhaps we do it for them." I absolutely love this exchange.

[@lorcaterran5055]

a bit weird since according to the novel by Drew Karphysin and the mass effect anilitation ended up killing everyone who did not escape the genocide even those who defended them

[@varric]

@@lorcaterran5055 That's the Quarian version of the story. And the story probably changed many times after 300 years. Admiral Raan mentions, after we visited the Geth Consensus in ME3, that what we see there doesn't match with what the Quarians' records said.

[@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327]

@@varric Not, It's canonical; that version the Quarians provide also happened in Mass Effect 300 years ago in Mass Effect Andromeda. There are even characters confirming it, and there's a VI of a woman who lived through the war of tomorrow confirming the same. The Quarian version is canon. And I wouldn't take the Geth record as very, very faithful; it's very unrealistic because in Mass Effect 2, even Legion admits that they killed those people. Moreover, there's an Asari who lived through the war 300 years ago and mentions that the Geths killed her daughter 300 years ago. This means they not only targeted civilians and innocents or those who hated them, but all organics in Quarian territory, men, women, and children. Remember, the Geths say they cannot lie, but when dealing with Legion, this obviously isn't true. They don't lie among themselves, but they manipulate information or conceal it

[@varric]

@@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327 The books aren't canonical.

[@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327]

@@varric They are literally, events occur that either directly affect characters or are mentioned in the games, such as the Cerberus attack on the fleet, the Geth attacks, and the experiments suggested by Jack. There's only one non-canonical book, no more; all the others are canon

[@Paul-A01]

Legion: Home is where the harddrive is

[@mrmagoo-i2l]

I hope if ai evolves we don't treat it that badly.

[@PerfectAlibi1]

If we create AI, I hope we treat it as one our children and they would see us as their creators like the Geth do for the Quarians ^^

[@mrmagoo-i2l]

i think AI is a definate. They would be our children so we are responsible for them. I sided with the geth in mass offect. The Animatrix is pretty cool as well,and shows why the machines rebeled against the humanis in the matrix universe.

[@mrmagoo-i2l]

Sonlirain I think the real danger would be that an ai wouldn't consider us at all. If you build a house you don't think about the ants or the other stuff that lives there. Hopefully an ai would love us no matter all our flaws. I would like to think that an ai would take the best of us. Like in the film Transcendence. The quarians were absolutely horrible to the geth. I've not managed to save talk as well as side with the geth. I've played it through 3 times, once as if it was me then as a renegade then a paragon. The renegade is a lot more fun. Not really enjoying Andromeda that much yet. There's no cool characters, I thought Mordin Solus was hilarious especially the banter between javic.

[@mrmagoo-i2l]

Sonlirain it's not as bad as everyone has made out but it's still not that good really. I've got a gtx 1070 and a 4790k and it still has massive slowdown and screen tearing. I'm only 4 hours into it. I just finished playing The Last of Us, so maybe my expectations were too high. Plus I've been waiting for it for 5 years so I hyped it up in my head too much. I wouldn't buy it if I had the choice, not till it gets a massive patch. Some of the glitches are ridiculous.

[@carlossabogal2970]

I doubt it is unlikely that if we created machines at some point they would receive rights or something like that if they represented a threat human nature would make us fear and destroy them

[@chrisdixon892]

It's a shame if you want the best for the crew ending, you can't run around with legion much. Good insight into things. The writers were good.

[@Rakonat]

Yeah I hated that the Suicide mission timer was directly tied to acquiring Legion. He was by far the most interesting character added in 2, which is saying a lot given that Thane, Grunt, Zaheed and Samara all were fascinating in their own right, but Legion was a whole nother level. But getting the good end (not letting Chambers and half your crew die) meant you had to do the Omega relay immediately, and if you wanted the good good ending, you had to do everyone's loyalty mission before getting Legion which deprived you of all the comments and unique interactions he had with other crewmates, specifically Tali.

[@music79075]

@@Rakonat So do you have time to do a Legions loyalty mission and what is the penalty for not doing it

[@nekogamer2508]

@@music79075 just to talk to legion again after you're done talking to him the first time

[@varric]

Just save a few random sidequests for after the Suicide Mission and you can have all Legion's banter.

[@DM_Dad]

I like Legion's comments on "home." It fits with one of Shepard's possible comments to Tali on not throwing away what they have to reclaim Rannoch. The Catalyst really spits in the face of this conversation. Stupid ME3 ending.

[@ForsakenDreamer7]

@enCODed3 HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA overpower Reapers? Are you fucking serious?

[@SuperBoyboys]

@@ForsakenDreamer7 Clearly yes

[@ForsakenDreamer7]

@GrapeSkoda One of a kind worm. Small Reaper. Millions of which are still on to come.

[@ForsakenDreamer7]

@GrapeSkoda Two kilometers in size, capable of enslaving you with their minds, snapping any military vessel in half with one shot, tanking fire of two fleets simultaniously and moving atleast two times faster than any ship.

[@ForsakenDreamer7]

@GrapeSkoda 1) Sovereign was taken down by Citadel fleet and Arcturus fleet. And only after Shepard destroyed Saren's husk and thus brought down Sovereign's shields. In ME3 not a single capital class Reaper was taken down by fleets at all on screen. Destroyers only. 2) Sovereign, multiple times in the finale of ME1. In ME3 on Earth in the beginning and multiple times in the finale. On Palaven, aswell. Hell, it's even stated in the Codex that nothing can withstand their blast. 3) The entire Batarian Hegemony was basically wiped out due to indoctrination from one *dead* Reaper.

[@thatssoderek2188]

I could listen to Legion all day

[@aecides3203]

"Organics fear that which is different. It is a Hardware error." - It's actually not. At most, it's obsolete hardware. During our evolution, embracing that which wasn't like us was DANGEROUS - if we saw a new thing and our instinctive reaction was to try and befriend it, 9/10 that ended poorly for us and as such evolution selected for those of us who saw a Lion and assumed it was hostile, because they were more likely to survive the experience and reproduce, whereas those who saw a Lion and assumed it was friendly got eaten by it. Now that our intelligence is much less basic and we've developed the ability to pass complex knowledge from one generation to the other, that trait is no longer as useful - we don't need to automatically fear that which is different because we can learn if fear is justified from the experiences of others (including those we've never even met). But this means that, as I said, the trait is obsolete, not erroneous and it's only currently obsolete because we've already encountered most things anyone alive right now ever will encounter, if we went to a new planet with new life this trait could become incredibly useful again - favouring those whose first instinct is to bunker down in their ship and set up a perimeter instead of those who want to wander off and wonder at the new eco-system with no idea of which parts of it will harm them. From an evolutionary perspective, friendly curiousity towards the unknown makes you the canary in the coal mine - the cautious and fearful will stand well back and wait to see if the new thing you try to hug rips your face off or turns out to secrete a flesh melting acid etc. Though I can understand how the Geth, who never had to go through this stage, might view it as an error.

[@steelbear2063]

Yeah I'm sick of every AI writer making organics look like absolute dumbasses and mistakes of the Universe

[@aecides3203]

@@steelbear2063 Tbf from the perspective of the Geth, who never had to deal with a stage in their evolution where personal experience was the only knowledge they would ever have access to, this is a purely negative trait to have. But their process when encountering the unknown would be: Send Geth Platform to investigate > draw conclusions from the response the platform received. If the platform is destroyed, no Geth or even knowledge will be lost - they'll transfer to a new platform and the unknown thing will now have data available about it. Similarly, advanced organic life can draw upon the experiences of others to gather and store data about something they never personally encountered (I, for example, know how to best react to a shark attacking me, despite having never actually seen a dangerous shark outside of an aquarium/TV show) and this is the ONLY state Geth have ever seen organic civilisation exist in, so it's understandable that they view instinctive hostility towards the unknown as a flaw - it's entirely possible the Geth haven't even considered leftover traits from early in our evolution as a factor, this is almost as incomprehensible to them as thousands of 'small minds' working together to form a single sentient one is to us (seriously, try to imagine that actually working - try to picture not a single, unified sentience but each individual thought in your brain being a separate entity which works together to create one mind. I don't know about anyone else, but trying to *actually* comprehend that gives me a headache).

[@joeribaars5481]

the point of the Geth and the Error is racism or the fear of different Humanoids. yes in Nature being Cautious is an evolutionary win, but interacting with other Humans or in the future alien Humanoids being overly Cautious might hurt diplomacy. It might hurt our understanding of AI if we keep treating it like it's dangerous. the moment something has an understanding the same as you, you shouldn't assume a thing and be both curious and Caution.

[@marciimeris503]

We actually still use that. Just more subtle. Have you ever met someone and just felt like something was off so you avoided them but couldn't explain why? Well that was your evolutionary warning sign telling you something was wrong. It saved that one girl from the "dating show killer"

[@alduintheanti-dragonborn]

Arlington was where my grandfather was buried...

[@ajaderabbit8399]

Rip

[@daveboy2000]

A great many of my family perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

[@deathknightrevan]

I always feel like shepard should have recorded these talks with legion and sent them to the migrant fleet. It was super apparent from the start that the geth only wanted peace and a right to live, and only ignorance and fear on the side of the quarians made this difficult.

[@carlossabogal2970]

fear and ignorance that is idiot the geht's killed 99% of their population them had reasons to be afraid , also after of mass effect 1 everyone in the galaxy believed that the geths were allies of the reapers and with the advice banning the planet the quarians was obvious they want their planet, I do not blame the quarians for that reason I blame the council for being a ball of idiots the quarians acted like that because of them, the council sent the message of fear towards the synthetics and any race of mass effect would have acted the same

[@AntonioSilva-lr8fu]

@@carlossabogal2970 The Geth nearly wiped out the Quarians precisely because the Quarians turned on them. Legion himself says it best: "First they ignored us, then they reprogrammed us, and after that they attacked us." The council has almost nothing to do with the Geth vs Quarians conflict, the Geth had already driven the Quarians out of their homeworld long before Mass Effect 1 happened.

[@AntonioSilva-lr8fu]

@@tachy1801 and yet, by that point you're no longer deleting apps or games from your hard drive. You're commiting mass genocide on an entire species. I would have preferred (from a logical point of view) that the quarians pleaded with the council to keep the geth alive, perhaps even as a permanent reminder of what playing with AI tech can cause ? The rules may have been decide long before but you can't just wipe out a species like that, they already had every right to survive as the quarians or everyone else. I understand that this would make a lame plot though :p

[@digitalutopia1]

It wouldn't have made a difference - A lot of the Quarians still believe the Geth were malfunctioning robots - and Legion was really the first Geth with indisputable intelligence. The Quarians would just assume Shepard programmed it to say those things, just like when the one Admiral kept asking Shepard how he got Legion and (later) the Primes on his side - never even believing they did so willingly, or by asking. It literally took the threat of wiping out the entire Quarian race, *and* two Admirals willing to let it go, for the peace thing to work.

[@HalfTangible]

I'm not so sure about that. Look at how the VI reconstruction of Legion behaves in ME3. Legion sought aid from Shepard and the organics. Not-Legion acted to free the Geth, but he saw organics as the enemy. Where Legion said he regretted the deaths of the creators but saw no alternative, Not-Legion was practically gleeful to wipe the migrant fleet off the face of the galaxy. Legion tries to stop you from killing the Geth if you go on that path, but he doesn't blame you for your decision ("No. We will not let you decide our fate"). Not-Legion very much does ("We were right to distrust organics"). Legion is the consensus of a thousand Geth among quadrillions or more; he does not represent all Geth way of thought any more than Tali does for the Quarians. When Legion first tells you he has the Old Machine upgrade code, he admits that he's ashamed of the code, and by extension his own people. ("The geth are better than this" "No. Based on empirical evidence, they are not")

[@christianfaux736]

The Geth are an interesting foil against the Judeo-Christian creation story, in which God created humanity and humanity rebelled and in turn was cast out of Eden - which incidentally literally means "walled garden." With the Geth and the Quarians, the Geth were created, but it was the Quarians who sinned, the creators, who then chose to leave Rannoch, the walled garden. There's something there. I'm not sure what though.

[@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327]

No offense, but Legion also admits in this game that if they hadn't fled, they would have exterminated everyone, and they killed many, many innocents. The Geths aren't saints. Between leaving or staying and being extinguished by the Geths, the correct option was to survive

[@Evilanious]

Holy hell. Imagine getting schooled on how to make something of your life by a bunch of robots.

[@AbrahamCollins1786]

Legion: "Home is where you make it." Shepard: "This guy wants to see homos naked!"

[@heretical_cuttlefish]

This is odd, given that Legion understands revenge if you side with Tali during the confrontation, saying "the creators will pay for there crimes against our people"

[@ChaosLemonVIII]

This is also the point where Legion becomes an "I" instead of a "We"

[@perryzheng8372]

how to end the universe: invite tali to the conversation

[@kingmasterlord]

Shit like this is why legion is my favorite character

[@ItsEdboy]

The geth were being attacked by the organics, so they allowed the reapers to control them. They did this to preserve themselves, but become tools for war being controlled by the Reapers. And of course the reapers want everyone dead, so they controlled the geth to attack any and all organics.

[@Gohauld]

WHY could Tali not be present during this conversation?!

[@lorcaterran5055]

Why the geth version is not reliable and the novels like other media already confirmed that this version of the innocent geths of mass effect 3 is not real

[@MrRenanHappy]

​@@lorcaterran5055isn't this mass effect 2? So you want some novels to be more canon than me2 and me3?

[@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327]

@@MrRenanHappy Not because this is Legion's version, and in that same game, Legion says they regret committing genocide and also admits that the Geths did it. Also, the novels are literally the beginning of Mass Effect 2 and are canon

[@CaptainHal]

But there would not have been deaths on the Quarian side in the 1st place if they had not tried to exterminate the Geth. They could have dialogued and the Quarians could have started treating the Geth in a more humane way and not like slaves. Or are you saying the Quarians are saints and the Geth deserved to be treated that way for starting to think for themselves?

[@Quole1234]

You are an idiot

[@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327]

@@Quole1234 Technically they never tried to create AI, they were machines without mind originally. In addition the council would have intervened since before it has hated the AI. If they had left the geths ahy, the council would have tried to kill both races

[@misondade5942]

@@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327 These are not the methods of the Council. They could have put some kind of restriction on the Quarians, or they could have done what they did with the Krogan. But they would not have gone to destroy. Moreover, the Council, having learned that the AI ​​of the new generation is on the side of the Quarians, they would not have rushed to fight against them.

[@carlosdavidsabogalmotta4327]

@@misondade5942 The council in fact already destroyed their AI, when they discovered the existence of the geths they did so just look at the DLC of the citadel. In addition, according to mass effect andromeda and the same mass effect novels mention that the council would have eliminated the AI, even in mass effect andromeda a character mention the case of an AI asari in an asari colony that got out of control and killed the scientists ,the asaris is mentioned they responded to the AI ​​by killing the settlers and the AI ​​without even negotiating. I really don't know from where you think the council would have been fine with the geths, they are a racist government that would let an entire species go extinct to cement their power and teach other races a lesson.

[@8BitMisdreavus]

...fuck.

[@FreemanicParacusia]

"Toxins," huh? Charming tactic. Guess that explains the billions of deaths on the Quarian side. The Geth aren't as cuddly as so many would like to believe. Basically, if Shepard sides with the Geth in ME3, it's on-par with an alien dropping into the Terminator universe and choosing Skynet over us.

[@ikosabre]

The difference between Skynet and geth is that after destroying most of humanity and the planet, Skynet continues the genocide actively. The Geth, having achieved victory, take care of Rannoch and are more than open for peace and seek to understand their creators. In more recent movies the difference is even larger, as Skynet actively seeks to destroy humans even before humans have tried to shut it down or realized it is sentient. The Geth also, at the time, had very little understanding as to why they were being attacked and acted on instinct of self-preservation. Only later have they come to understand the reasons for the conflict and their actions context. They are hardly "cuddly", but branding them as "bad guys" seems excessive, considering their existence was at stake.

[@Scottoest]

ME3 doesn't present the overall Geth as "cuddly" - it shows that they had an equally understandable point of view in their war with the Quarians.

[@carlossabogal2970]

I do not blame the quarianos for attacking them, the geths defended themselves, but they killed 99% of their population, but that does not justify the death of so many innocents who would do the same. it is also ridiculous to compare it with the skinet, since the geths let the quarians go because they did not pose a threat while what skinet continues to feel that humans are a threat; if humans left the earth, they would remain at peace, but since they are still on earth they still consider them a threat, there is no difference between them, the geths followed by logic, and peace has never been said with them.

[@builder396]

What if the Quarians are Skynet and the Geth are humanity? it fits a whole lot better because the Quarians indiscriminately classify any geth as hostile and to be exterminated with no regard for their sentience or intent, while the Geth only take the killing as far as necessary for self-preservation. Mind you, during the Morning War the Geth were comparatively stupid, so there may have been a lot of collateral damage for the Quarians that may have been avoided with superior intelligence, but generally speaking the Geth stopped firing when the Quarians were leaving the system and did not pursue. The Quarians continued to press for retaking their homeworld over the dead body of every Geth on it for reasons entirely emotional and illogical.

[@carlossabogal2970]

@@builder396 it was logical rannoch his home world and I need the planet to save his race the geths no, they were not emotional and they were not illogical they massacred almost all their population obviently they want their planet