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It boils down to "control gravity and you control everything."
On the Shoulders of Scions (Mass Effect)
- Thread starter Karmic Acumen
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
taovkool
Forever Gone
- Location
- The Library, Department of General Works
But what about that weird shit with Grunt though?
I mean, you gotta admit, that was some weird shit.
Dude, I barely pass my highschool physics, but even I can tell that's not how gravity works.
bobnik
Memetic Warfare Specialist.
It may not be true in this universe. We'll find out when we actually manage to control gravity.
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That's something that the story will explore thoroughly, believe me. But I guess I can say some things...
The Aether is associative and atemporal. So if you will exist, you have always existed. Alas, Grunt never started out with the sort of temperament you need to enjoy heaven (the Domain Empyrean, because you shouldn't assume fictional characters know enough to use terminology properly, and Blasto has nothing on the real guy).
What Grunt did was drop out of whatever version of the totally-not-hindu personal heaven he was in while waiting to be born someplace. Then he ate most of the eezo Shepard had just shoved back into the aether and went on a roaring rampage of retribution on Shepard's behalf when Anderson decided to toss him into the collective identity of mankind for reasons that only make sense to him. Shepard had a black hole full of causality-overriding matter just sitting there in his new eye you know. And it was open on both sides!
Crushing foes while avenging yourself upon them on your battlemester's behalf like a proper krantt? It was an opportunity no krogan worth his plates would ignore. That the collective identity of krogan kind was in full approval only extended the time he had in the physical world.
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- East of Sun, West of Moon
Being atemporal also means it's acausal, which means that everything that could have or might one day exist, exists.
Well, that, or we're dealing with a deterministic universe connected to an atemporal one, and then shit gets real.
There's a reason it's called Dark Matter.
Edit: I think my fever is spiking, because this is all making way too much sense and now I'm giggling like a loon about poop jokes. SMH.
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Fixed that for you, because it's acausal, so there is no cause to perpetuate the emergence of shit that won't exist.
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taovkool
Forever Gone
- Location
- The Library, Department of General Works
Ugh, don't tell me that Stellaris blather about "What was, will be," and "What will be, was," actually has a point.
Oh great, I just realized that we're actually talking about physics in a way that is starting to makes sense in a bizarre Lovecraftian way.
That's it. I'm out. I prefer my SAN points where it is right now, thank you very much.
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Not that simplistic. The aether is acausal but the material is not. So there is no inevitability and cyclic mind-screw going on here, nor is the aether a place of "could be's" because only what will exist exists, not everything that could in imagination. If there is no cause for it, why would random things pop up?
Identity processes truth and deeds, not ideas, even if WE use ideas to process identity.
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- Hong Kong
...I think you mean deified here. Defied might as well be defenestrated otherwise.
I... I want to like this. I really, really do.
But having looked up the "original ending" plans? It's human-centric as fuck, which - given Mass Effect is otherwise so diverse and expansive as a setting - I find completely disgusting. I'm so happy Bioware dropped it.
No HFY for me please.
But having looked up the "original ending" plans? It's human-centric as fuck, which - given Mass Effect is otherwise so diverse and expansive as a setting - I find completely disgusting. I'm so happy Bioware dropped it.
No HFY for me please.
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What ending was that? The original ending was about Dark Energy destroying stars and accelerating the heat death of the universe, and the whole point of Mass Effect 3 was to figure out a way around that.
Or are you talking about how the key to ending the cycle lies with humanity one way or another (to reaper or not to reaper?).
That said, so what if it's human-centric? We're humans, and I see nothing wrong with us succeeding at something.
My issue was that the endings seemed to be predicated on "diversity solves everything" even though that's a fallacy if ever there was one.
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My issue was indeed with humanity being the key to the problem.
Imagine, for a moment, that humanity and, say, the Turians swapped places. First, they're an upstart race that had all your hard work handed to them on a silver platter.* Then, they're juuuust aggressive and expansionistic and loud and annoying enough to make themselves a disproportionately major player where they really shouldn't be.** But they still get along with everyone better than the Batarians. They get everywhere somehow.
And then? And then, despite being a completely unlikeable race, they turn out to be Space Jesus as a species.
Game over, guys. The Turians, the newest, smallest, most insignificant people, only even relevant because they both won the galactic lottery and were too quick on every draw imaginable for their own good... are the saviors of the universe.
That's a bad story, right? A story about a shitty Mary Sue civilization who has everything go perfectly for them and fixes the setting's biggest problem just by being in its general vicinity. They earned nothing, did nothing for themselves aside from being loud and obnoxious, and still ended up being the most important players on the board.
Now tell me how this is in any way better for having us, Humanity, in the pilot seat instead of the Turians.
The answer doesn't have to be "diversity solves everything", either. It just has to be anything but "humans are special".
*The Citadel got to where they are through thousands of years of development plus Prothean relic study. We literally had a "how to uplift primitives" cache right on our doorstep.
**Seriously, we're a bunch of blowhards. Humans expanded into the Traverse far enough and fast enough that they couldn't even adequately maintain their territory, which is why Batarian pirates are such a problem. And each of those colonies must be tiny, due to population logistics. We have a tiny, insignificant fraction the total population of any single other Citadel species, after all.
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Auto-correct strikes again!
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You seem to have strong feelings about this.
But hating the caricature that ME made of humanity is one thing. Hating the idea of human-centric narrative is another.
The only reason I ever write fanfic is because I feel the original story writers dropped the ball somewhere. But that doesn't mean I see something wrong with us being the protagonists.
You're wrong about some things, by the way. We didn't have an uplift package. We had some ruins, and a beacon we couldn't make sense of until Liara got a code from Kahje. Which is precisely the same as for every other council space race.
The only ones really guilty of having everything without earning it are the Asari. They're the only ones with a fully working beacon and their history reads like a Mary Sue's origin story. Their biology was written to both justify their exceptionalism (we live for 1000 years and look, it's the matriarch stage so +100 to all stats for free!) and excuse any deviant behaviour (it was just the maiden stage and and look, evolutionary impossible but convenient pansexualism!). All the while letting them have their cake of motherhood on the side (sacrifice anything for your kids? Nonsense, we have a whole life stage for that!). And did you forget how the only reason they're in charge of anything is because
1: they somehow mindfuck all races on a galactic scale to find them sexually attractive, including the egg-laying salarians with no biological means of even being sexually attracted. This is a cosmic horror story if ever there was one.
2: they happened to find the Citadel a few years before the salarians did.
What a pair they make. The race who never earned anything they have, and the race who cannot sleep if they don't get everything you have.
Other than the Hanar, the only vaguely respectable race in ME are Turians. It's ironic since they're basically a military dictatorship version of America idealized. And even they only got where they are by waiting to sweep in when the other factions in their race tired themselves against one another. It's basically the backstory of the Halo games humanity, only they turned out to have the biggest gun when they met other races.
Tl; Dr; Hating on the caricature of Mass Effect humanity and hating on all protagonist humanity are not the same thing. And the other races sucked in many ways themselves anyway.
Be careful not to fall into mysanthropy. It's a very stressful way to live.
That said, I am an out and proud writer of a human-centric story. If that offends you, I understand but will never apologise.
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Are we talking about the same thing here? Are you really trying to compare the Mars Cache, a Prothean facility with a working technology database, examples of Prothean vessels, and blueprints for the answer to the Reapers... to a single working Beacon on Thessia? A beacon that didn't even work right until an actual Prothean brain pattern interacted with it?
Yes, the Asari had an unfair leg up on everyone else. But they still had to work for it in a way humanity really, super did not.
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When that working 'beacon' was deliberately loaded with the totality of Prothean achievement and programmed for Asari ease of use? Damn right I am!
It's everything the Mars archive wasn't, seeing as we didn't get proper use of it until ME3.
Because no. The Asari had to work for precisely nothing at all.
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It didn't even turn on until Shepard interacted with it! Shepard who had the Prothean Cypher from the Thorian. As opposed to Liara, who you were forced to take with you. The Asari may have had the data, but we have no evidence they had access to it without long data mining and deciphering processes.
Compare with the Mars Cashe. It was always referred to that way, all the way back to Mass Effect 1. It was never a "ruin", or an "outpost", or even a "facility". From the very first reference, it was a cashe. A data storage unit.
I'm pretty sure Javik's mission was specifically tied to the Mars Cache, as well. I just don't remember where that tidbit came up. It was there so the frozen protheans could raise an army of primitives for the next cycle. It was literally and explicitly an uplift module. The fact that we didn't yet have full access is the only reason we were using "museum pieces" by the time the Relay 314 incident happened.
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You seem to have played a different game than I. The whole reason the Asari waited so long to ask for help with Thessia was because they didn't want to admit they were an entire species of frauds. Even the codex eventually updates to reflect this, iirc. Hell, even the wiki could't sanitise this.
One word: Vendetta.
Yes, they did that. But it's never stated that the Asari ever had full access to the beacon. Having an edge on everyone technologically is an entirely different beast than being a full tier or two above everyone and pretending to fit in.
Meanwhile, Vendetta was exactly what I was talking about. It activates for Shepard, who has the Cypher. Not Liara, who you claim Vendetta was keyed for.
And if you're still so sure about your stance, answer me this. If the Asari matriarchs had access to Vendetta, who's primary purpose was to be used against the Reapers, where were the Asari preparations for the Reapers?
So either the Asari are the most ridiculous, retarded species to ever exist in fiction (spoilers: they are not), or they did not have full access to the Beacon at any time in their history, let alone access to the built-in user interface VI. Getting anything useful out of the damn thing would have required long and complicated data mining of a completely alien computer with near-zero similarity to their own creations, followed by figuring out what that data actually says.
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Except Javik outright says the Asari were chosen to lead the cycle.
As you have now resorted to literal plot holes (of which ME 3 has many) in an attempt to prop up your Asari apologist argument, I shall gracefully accept this as my win.
What one character says and what actually happened can be different things. Who ever would have thought?
You take the setting, warts and all. If there are plot holes, either explain them or work around them. But do not pretend they do not exist.
Edit- hell, this is a fanfiction, you're free to retcon as you like. Just don't go pretending your setup is the canon representation.
Edit2- Anyway, I'm done now, since this has strayed into a significant derail. Not my thread, not my story, and not my thing. See you 'round.
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- Massachusetts, U.S
...I don't know if you flunked high school physics or something, but that's not how gravity works. There actually is gravity in space (and indeed, everywhere in the universe), but as Isaac Newton stated, objects in orbit stay in orbit because they have a high enough tangential velocity that they're falling around the earth rather than towards it. Gravitational force is only somewhat lessened, so that at low earth orbit the gravitational field strength is about 90% of that at the surface, so you get g=8.8m/s2 rather than 9.8.
This can be derived from Isaac Newton's equation for gravitational force, F=G(M1*M2)/r2, with G being the universal gravitational constant, M1 and M2 being the masses of the bodies, and r being the distance between the two bodies' centers of mass. This can give us g=(G*M1)/r2 for gravitational field strength (and note how g approaches 0 as r approaches infinity, meaning that nowhere in the universe is there no gravity) The sensation of weightlessness comes from the fact that when you're in orbit you're effectively freefalling around the earth.
I apologize something for the impromptu lecture in high school physics, but that combination of hypocritical ignorance of the Newtonian mechanics that you champion and disregard for repeatedly confirmed scientific observations seriously pushed my buttons, and offended my sensibilities as a mechanical engineer and high school and college graduate. Now that I've got that off my chest I suppose that I'll be going elsewhere. Have a good day.
UnfortuWatcher
(Verified Lovecraftian Horror)
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Reading this in the middle of the night does nothing for me trying to sleep. The fact that I can somewhat follow the higher-level "physics" being thrown about and yet still be barely scraping by in basic science does not help my mental state at all.
Also, Grunt decided to visit? Seems legit.
Flip side, I still think that the collective consciousness of humanity's constant outlook is "fuck you reality" and this story only enforces my opinion.
Also, Grunt decided to visit? Seems legit.
Flip side, I still think that the collective consciousness of humanity's constant outlook is "fuck you reality" and this story only enforces my opinion.
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Hey fellow man, this debate was over when you quietly capitulated in front of all my other arguments. Any one of them is enough to shatter the foundation of this pedestal you're so determined to put the Asari on. But did you do the sensical thing and surrender a position you yourself tacitly admitted to being indefensible? No, instead you pulled the blinders close until you only saw the lone sticking point at the heart of intersecting plot holes, in the hopes that you would be able to convince me and yourself that winning that one point would let you redeem the whole redoubt. In reality, you really chose the worst hill for your argument to die on.What one character says and what actually happened can be different things. Who ever would have thought?
You take the setting, warts and all. If there are plot holes, either explain them or work around them. But do not pretend they do not exist.
Edit- hell, this is a fanfiction, you're free to retcon as you like. Just don't go pretending your setup is the canon representation.
Edit2- Anyway, I'm done now, since this has strayed into a significant derail. Not my thread, not my story, and not my thing. See you 'round.
The idea that you think you can lecture me on how to deal with plot holes is, quite frankly, laughable. Of the two of us, one is looking through the whole franchise for explanations that stay most consistent with everything else that happened, while the other is choosing their preferred explanation for one and retconing whatever they need to justify it. I know which one I am, and I do not care enough to help you work through this obvious confirmation bias you have going on.
At the end of the day, the Asari are either the biggest frauds in space opera fiction, or they are so mighty and incredible that everything accomplished in ME before man appeared was entirely due to them: a string of failures only saved by Turian, Krogan and Salarian ex machinas. Fitting for the allegory to the absolute shitshow the EU is nowadays.
The parallels to one King Vortigern are strong in this one.
More like "fuck you ragnarok" because they like reality just fine. It's just some of the people inhabiting that they have a problem with.
Yes, I do know how orbiting works. But I'm thinking this wouldn't make a difference for the purpose of the experiment, and did you just admit that gravitational field strength was still changed? That's a pretty big change for something measuring such tiny units of timekeeping.
This physics talk has expanded here and on SB beyond what I thought that one fictional rant would have galvanised my small reading base too. As I'm someone with no actual credentials in physics, to draw commentary from multiple people like this is actually rather flattering.
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