The story could be about WIMP civs meet EEZO civs, how do they live with each other?
The problem with that is we pretty much already know the answer: They don't.
The two civs getting near each other is a, pretty resoundingly, bad idea. At the same time, absent some external pressure, there's also no real reason for them to interact. As this fic has done a good job of highlighting, there is a
lot of space in, well, space. The Eezo civs can easily stick to their lanes and the WIMP civs can go everywhere else and they'll never have a need to bother each other, outside minor curiosity or maybe some ethical concerns on the WIMP side.
@Yar, the point was that Literary Conflict does
not have to be combat. Take Lord of the Rings for example. Yes, there are battles. But the core conflict of the story is not actually the war against Sauron. It's the struggle against the corrupting influence of the One Ring. The war is important, but it's the corrupting nature of the One Ring that drives things forward. The heroes are trying to get the ring to the one place it can be destroyed, all while trying to resist it's insidious influence.
That is the central conflict of the story. And the age old idea of "if you give Frodo a light saber you must also give Sauron a Death Star" completely ignores that central conflict in favor of the flawed logic Conflict!=Combat!
Yes, if you take that quote completely literally it runs into problems at several points, not the least of which is that a single lightsaber isn't going to help
that much against an entire army. Thing is, it's an aphorism, not a detailed essay. It's trying to get the general gist of a concept across.
The general idea is if you drastically increase the power of your hero, then you need to do
something to ensure your story still has tension, even if the power increase is somewhat orthogonal to the main driver of the story. So, take the Lord of the Rings, for instance. You say the main conflict of the story is not fighting Sauron, but the corrupting influence of the Ring. Ok. I'll buy that, it makes sense. But what happens to that story if you give Frodo overwhelming military or martial power? The proverbial lightsaber?
Well, most of the setbacks the fellowship faces are either martial in nature or the result of having to bypass those other martial setbacks. If they can just make a beeline from the Shire to Mt. Doom, cutting a swath through any forces that try to stop them, then there's no reason for them to divert from that path and confront things like Mordor, the Ents, Aragorn's past, or basically anything else. Similarly, Frodo won't have to carry the ring for as long, so it will have less time to work on him, and he'll face fewer challenges and hardships that can wear down his resistance. That pretty much eliminates the central conflict you were talking about and, as an author, you need to take steps to either change the central conflict to something that will still work or change the setting so the original conflict can work with more minor changes.
Giving Suaron a Death Star works, not because it makes the fighting harder (how is an orbital battle station going to help with infantry fighting?), but because Frodo's new tool doesn't help with the new problems it imposes (how does a lightsaber get you into outer-space?). Well, now he needs to go questing to figure how to get where he needs to go, encountering new trials that he can't just cut his way through and carrying the ring while he does it.
I kind of hate this paradigm. The point of giving one side of a conflict more power is to change the dynamic. Why do people seem to think that you then must undo that work by evening the playing field? That line of thinking would only maybe be relevant if the focus of the story was the clash between humans and the Reapers, which it isn't. The (eventual) focus here is WIMP tech breaking every assumption of the ME species just by existing, and the fallout of that change. Why go through all that change and worldbuilding just to introduce an equalizer to maintain the status quo?
Evening the playingfield doesn't mean you've undone the initial change, nor does it mean you're returning to the initial status quo. The problem a lot of us seem to have is there's
no apparent conflict in this story. The Humanx can trivially solve anything that comes their way and that's about it. Even the fallout from the WIMP change is hobbled by this. Sure, we see the Humans and the Thranx doing crazy and fun things, but they could just as easily be doing it in a completely different setting, without any of the ME cast involved. Similarly, we've seen a few instances of the ME cast wondering at things the Humans have done, but that could just as easily be any other super-advanced human analog, or even something totally different. What's worse, it would be hard for things to go far beyond that, because the two groups have very little reason to interact and very strong reasons to stay away from each other and there's nothing to really change that.
Drastically increasing the power of the Reapers
would level part of the playing field and it would remove the Humanx from their new position as undisputed winners, but it would not return things to how they were. The Humanx would still be vastly more powerful than the ME races, the two sides would still have trouble working together, and making the Reapers a threat doesn't mean they have to outclass the Humanx in the same way they outclassed the ME races in canon. They could very easily be equals.
At the same time, that increased threat gives the Humanx a strong reason to interact with the ME races, either to get their insight on Eezo tech or simply to help protect them from their war with the Reapers and the latter's predations.
So, you're not getting anything close to the same story, and the focus may not actually be on the mechanics of war or the specifics of how the Humanx and/or the ME races fight the Reapers, but they are providing an important catalyst that allows other conflicts to work.
