User blog comment:The Milkman/Madness and Genius/@comment-2076032-20121209105806

Mass Effect 3 was the catalyst for the Great Nerd War of 2011-2012, a conflict that left thousands of forums trolled and almost twice as many feelings hurt. Some basic facts:

1. Mass Effect 3 is a game involving shooting, talking, and making decisions about shooting and talking.

2. Approximately 30 hours of well-written gameplay were immediately overshadowed by the fact that Shepard was not able to simply destroy the most powerful beings in the galaxy with the touch of a button, leading to one of the worst outcries of butthurt fanboys in history.

3. Seriously, people did not respond well to this ending. Analysis shows that more people bitched about the endings on Bioware Social Network than actually bought the game. (this last one is my favourite, and I'll say more on that later).

We all know the story. BARRING the ending fiasco, though, Mass Effect 3's story takes up nicely from where the second game left off, which means that Shepard, the only human in the galaxy who knows how to fight Reapers, has been thrown in jail just before their invasion. Apparently, killing an entire system's worth of Bataarians on purpose made him look bad.

Shepard has been warning the galaxy about the impending Reaper invasion for four years, but pretty much everybody is caught with their pants down, and now you get to say "I told you so" to anyone in any position of power. So Shepard has to fly around the galaxy, solving everybody's problems for everyone, which for some reason involves flying into Reaper-controlled space and picking up forgotten lunch pails.

After curing the krogan genophage, uniting the geth and the quarians (What, you didn't unite them? Didn't have enough reputation points for the paragon option? Guess you should have fetched more lunch pails), and taking down Cerberus, Shepard leads an assault to take back Earth, which starts out pretty awesomely...

And ends with some overly-intellectualized, "overly-stylized, much-too-short-for-the-thousand-hours-we-put-into-our-perfect-saves ending".

Nobody knows why Casey Hudson locked out his writers and churned out his own ending, but the prevailing theory was that he was indoctrinated. His public execution did nothing to pacify fans, though, and the Retake Mass Effect 3 movement was born.

In fact, a variety of coping mechanisms were implemented to deal with Mass Effect 3's ending, from the memeriffic Marauder Shields, to the face-palmingly desperate attempt at explanation in the Indoctrination Theory, to several million Bioware Social Network posts to the effect of: "I did not much care for this ending, and I will tell you that I did not much care for this ending."

But the focus here is the IT. The IT was the result of cognitive dissonance, just like any conspiracy theory. And just like any conspiracy theory, it gives people a justification for their fear, paranoia, or basic lack of ability to logic (yes, I used logic as a verb - sue me). People who claim to know ME lore and still get it completely wrong are no different from people who claim to know something about chemistry and stand outside spraying vinegar at the sky to "defeat teh ebil chemtrails". Why is it cognitive dissonance, though? What is the discomfort they are feeling that they need to justify the ending by pretending it's something else?

Just like anyone else getting to the end of a good thing, they want it to keep going. Barring no other option to continue the story, they want to continue it in their own way. Shepard can't be dead. It's just not fair. Surely this isn't the end?

It's not because the ending was shit. Which it was, initially, but not because of any flaw in the story. The flaws in the ending were in the presentation - purely cosmetic. No. The IT was the result of our final farewell to Commander Shepard, and nothing more, and the grieving process for those who clung too tightly to their alternate reality (instead of getting a life) clearly hasn't ended yet.