@Phant0m5 , I won't touch your comments about the Genophage; there's a lot to be said about it and I'm not interested right now.
Is irrelevant because it was the equivalent of a minor boarder dispute to the Turians that the Alliance committed half their total armada to counter, and they know it.
The only reason humanity is as "important" as they are in canon is because they're bluffing their asses off. As we already knew due to population (trillions serviced by individual comm buoys vs billions of humans), military commitment (trying to land grab like a galactic power stretched their patrols and defenses too thin, they couldn't even meet the minimum commitment to the Citadel Defense Fleet and probably would have voided their Council seat), and pre-first-contact gear and equipment (explicitly called museum pieces, known FTL speed of 0.14ly/day, and even that much was only possible because of the literal "how to uplift primitives: for dummies" cache they were sitting on).
I think you miss the point of
why the person you're quoting talked about the First Contact War.
Namely, that it's a criticism of the galactic order as established by the Council. The turians see a species that doesn't even
know about the restrictions on mass relays, that is utterly unknown and cut off from galactic space. And their first response is to open fire and launch a military invasion of these aliens' territory.
Also,
@Ithillid is under no obligation to use every little scrap of Mass Effect canon out there, including shit like "Reaper cultists in the turian military" if he doesn't feel like it.
Walking into other people's stories and lecturing them on what the Right and Wrong ways of doing things are is rude.
[The quarians' situation] was entirely their own fault and continues to be entirely their own fault.
More on that here:
EDIT in case it wasn't clear: I think everyone basically agrees the Quarians' situation sucks. Nobody should have to live like that. But this thread is about determining if they are or are not self-sabotaging and if it's their own issues keeping them the way they are, or if it's all the...
forums.spacebattles.com
Because I made a thread exactly for this purpose: collecting sources and evidence that the Quarians shit their own bed and continue to lie in it all on their own, no Citadel intervention required.
I mean, a large part of that thread consists of contentious debate and a mix of sourced and unsourced assertions on your side. Some people were busting your balls over perceived holes in your argument. The thread more or less shut down, with some significant issues never really being resolved.
So you really shouldn't be using it as your grounds to randomly pop up out of nowhere and pick a slapfight on another board, presenting this thread as a reason to say "as
clearly proven in this random thread where I
effortlessly dominate all doubters with
facts and logic."
Especially when a lot of the things you believe about the quarians are supported by obscure stuff and secondary canon materials that,
for purposes of this thread, might very well not exist or be heavily modified, because we only discuss
Mass Effect in the context of a prospective future crossover.
Was already dealt with as far as the Council could take it.
Look, I know the games like to present the Council as the prime leaders of the galaxy. I know the Mass Effect fandumb ate that shit right up.
I also know all of Mass Effect 3 made it extremely clear they were essentially the Space!UN, with no actual authority on galactic politics if their big three members weren't willing to back them up.
So unless the pirates and slavers were stupid enough to move against the Citadel Defense Fleet directly, or unless they presented vulnerable enough targets for the SPECTREs to deal with, the best the Council themselves could do was sanction the Batarians to hell and kick them off the Citadel. Which they did. Anything more than that is up to individual member nations and weather they were willing to go to war.
And I don't know if you noticed, but we don't go to war over real life slave rings either, much as we probably should.
Again,
missing the point of the criticism.
The point being that if the batarians are
de facto tolerated, it speaks quite a bit about the boundaries of what galactic society is willing to tolerate. There is something fundamentally flawed in the way the Council lets this happen. A cynic would note that the existence of batarian pirates on the fringes of galactic civilization is very effective at two things:
1) It makes it easier for the Council races to keep development restricted to their core territory (guarded by giant navies) and weakens any potential rival that might, say, arise from the Terminus stars. Tacitly encouraging the barbarians to pillage your rivals is a good way to keep your rivals weak and vulnerable to your soft-power hegemony.
2) It tends to limit expansion and keep sapients from poking remote places, places the Reapers would say they "shouldn't" poke. Since we have
good reason to think the Reapers tend to subtly influence the Council so that they make poor choices, it would hardly be surprising if this were going on here.
...
You likewise miss the point with the STGs and the Spectres. The reason GDI!Humanity would take a look at these things and go "NOPE NOPE NOPE" is precisely because they are a security-conscious civilization that's had bad racial experiences with things like "unaccountable alien agents fucking around."
The Council system is, and this is important,
not a good system. It's not all bad everywhere, and the Councilors are clearly mostly usually
trying to make the right choices that will be good for the galaxy. But it's not a good system.
