User blog comment:James12708/What I expected The Reapers to be when I first started playing Mass Effect/@comment-4950455-20120719030015/@comment-1388547-20120719182417

The Collectors being what they were was actually a bit of a disappointing twist for me -- with their emphasis on biotics and biological experimentation, I spent most of ME2 thinking that they were another great power like the Reapers, but oriented toward biotechnology instead. They were opposite what we'd seen of the Reapers in a lot of ways -- the aforementioned biotechnology and emphasis on biotics, plus living in the galactic core rather than out in dark space. I was expecting the story arc to become a war between the Collectors and the Reapers, with the present cycle's civilizations caught in the middle, and I was surprised the Collectors really were just Reaper slaves.