Forum:Clues for why the ending makes sense

So when I beat Mass Effect 3, I was really confused as to why everyone was so upset about the ending - especially to the point of starting a petition and hurling threats towards the BioWare development team. The ending made sense to me, here's why.

The catalyst character was set up earlier in the game. Most people are acting like it came out of no where, but there is some foreshadowing in the games. It starts with some vague hints in ME1 and 2 saying that the Reapers are salvation through destruction. On Rannoch in ME3, the Reaper you destroy repeats this idea to you and alludes to a higher power orchestrating everything.

The Prothean VI expands a bit on this on Thessia. He tells you that the Reapers are servants, Shepard asks of who and the VI says that is unknown. By this point I thought it was almost obvious you were going to eventually meet up with some sort of "divine" like thing in control of everything.

So flash forward to Earth. BioWare does a good job throughout the final mission of really making you feel a sense of desperation and almost hopelessness. From the shuttle with heavy weapons that gets shut down to the missles that miss the reaper to Harbinger killing everyone - nothing seems to be going right.

That sets the stage for the ending. Shepard gets up after getting blasted by a reaper, armor torn off, he/she can barely walk and is barely conscious (the weird dream sequence behind him/her that people attribute to Indoctrination Theory).

Next, Shepard's almost there and its just the Illusive Man standing in his way of completing his mission. He convinces the Illusive Man to kill himself but uses every last bit of his energy to do so. That's made kind of obvious when he's sitting next to Anderson, exhausted, bleeding. Then the part happens that everyone hates- he meets the catalyst.

The catalyst in the form of the little kid tells Shepard about how organic life creates synthetic life which then destroys synthetic life. And the Reapers are its solution, as they harvest the organic life to preserve it before Synthetics completely destroy it (as the Geth do to the Quarians if you save them).

People point to that idea as not making sense. How is the Reapers killing everyone and indoctrinating them saving them? I think you have to understand that these are synthetics we're talking about. Haven't you ever talked to legion? Logic takes precedence over morals.

Logically, the Reapers are in a way saving the organic races by not allowing them to become completely extinct - instead preserved in reaper/indoctrinated form. The fact that they are massacring them to do it is just a means to an end, a necessary evil in their mind. As this would happen anyway at the hands of the synthetics the organics create, but they would not be preserved.

So the Catalyst gives Shepard the three choices. People have a problem with 1. the fact that Shepard doesn't argue with the Catalyst and 2. the choices themselves.

Shepard is exhausted, near death (dude just got blasted by a reaper), at a more desperate state that we've ever seen him/her before. How much energy does he/she really have here? The catalyst makes things simple for him/her. Destroy, Control, or Combine.

Now onto the choices. I've heard many have a problem with essentially, without using these words, the lack of a happy ending. There's no way to do what you sought out do do - save and preserve the galaxy. Each decision has a positive and a negative. Destroying the Reapers is the closest to your original mission- you kill them but you also destroy the mass relays, and you live. In the other decisions you don't kill the Reapers, but they stop killing everyone and you die/get turned into a husk.

I like that there's no perfect stereotypical ending. With something as massive and destructive as the Reaper invasion, its hard to imagine a way to get rid of them and have everything being able to go back to exactly how it was.

It's at this point (the catalyst part) that I start buying the indoctrination theory. When you talk to the Illusive Man you see the weird black things on the sides of the screen. The decisions you get are actually a way of you choosing whether to resist the indoctrination or not - with the destroy option being the only way to resist.

As for the problems with the lack of closure. What can I tell you? BioWare didn't want to make a 45 minute cutscene? A valid point but not valid enough to start a petition and threaten bioware team members.