User blog comment:The Milkman/Mass Effect in Retrospect/@comment-3228423-20130417021124

First things first, in response to your memorial wall: Boo, Kaidan should never get to live. Boo.

Back on the topic of the blog, there are several things I'd like to point out. 1. About ME2, I think the purpose of Harbinger wanting Shepard is because they were the first notable person to directly confront a Reaper (albeit only a husk that was turbo-charged with its power) and actually kill it. Harbinger saw that Shepard could be a threat, and when it sent its Collector minions to destroy the first Normandy, Harbinger wanted needed to know that Shepard is truly dead so that it could see what makes Shepard superior to other humans. As for abducting Shepard's crew, I think it's to send a message that he/she's powerless to stop Harbinger. 2. For the baby Reaper and Arrival, I don't think they oppose each other in terms of story. For the baby Reaper, I'm guessing the reason that it looks like the a human skeleton is that it's the Catalyst's sick idea of what "preserving" organic species is. After the Reaper's core, ie baby Terminator, is completed it'd be encased in the outer shell that resembles Harby and all the others. As for The Arrival, there are a few things; sure the Mass Relays were capable of surviving a supernova, but there's a bit of a difference between a ton of energy hitting a structure that's at the edge of a system and a massive object going a fraction the speed of light hitting the core directly. Maybe it wasn't designed to take such massive impacts? Who knows? As for the Reapers using the Alpha Relay, maybe the Reapers were planning on bringing all of the humans they grabbed to the Collector base to finish its construction and it can begin by killing any surviving resistance of the current cycle before heading back to dark space. 3. As for the worst part of the trilogy, the Catalyst, you say its an super advanced AI. To be honest, it doesn't even begin to come close to an AI in intelligence, it resembles a mere VI, if one that is just "smarter" than other VIs like Avina. It only sees the non-existent problem of meatbags vs nuts and bolts is because it was programmed by the Leviathans to think that all interaction between the two would turn into machines revolting against their makers instead of the possibility of organics trying to destroy their peaceful creations or any chance of actual peace. I'm not going to go into the Crucible itself and what it does because they're all just stupid.