User blog comment:James12708/Possible real origin of the reapers?/@comment-1298029-20120328190008

Warhammer 40,000 fan, by any chance? :-)

Anyway, what you're suggesting is quite a lot more barbaric than present policy towards losers in wars. At a smaller scale, this is what happened with Germany - the war you described is not too different from WW2 except for scale. And as for scale - one death is too much, so I don't really think that "this is a billion times bigger" is a valid argument for the horrid punishment you describe.

Germany in the real world was rehabilitated (except for the leaders - it's a long-standing problem that many Nazi commanders were not punished at all, as the punished were in the hundreds while the guilty were in the tens of thousands or more - but that's a debate for another place), and though the Nazis committed crimes beyond imagination and killed millions, no one (except possibly some crackpots) blames current Germans and their descendants for all eternity for the crimes of their ancestors.

So, by using this analogy, I want to say that the motive for creating the Reapers is not very consistent. Of course, if it were barbaric revenge that later generations regarded as criminal itself, but that was first implemented immediately after the war when humanism wasn't exaclty thirving (as it unfortunately sometimes tends to be after large wars), that would make more sense. However, you would have to exaplain why, once the descendants of the punishers in the other galaxies realized that it was wrong, why they failed to be stop the Reapers later.

Also, personally I think the "neverending warfare" history profile in sci-fi universes is cliché, not to mention terribly pessimistic (which is my main qualm against Warhammer). But I was trying for objectivity with what I said above.