User blog comment:Damous/Why Bioware has NOT betrayed us/@comment-152.105.164.126-20120312133904

I agree with this completely. Not sure about the indoctrinating the player stuff, but the reaper manipulation makes so much sense. Playing it again in the mindset that the kid is a reaper trick makes it obvious to me. He says "You can't save me" then dissapears as soon as Shep looks away. It was the reapers trying to demoralise you, then and in dreams. The Citadel explodes dramatically, so Shep surviving seems more like waking up from a dream than "Hey cool, the hero survives" that you get in similar scenes at the end of fictional works. In most things insisting the ending was a dream is just clutching at straws and deluding yourself, but in this it seems plausible, and Bioware are good enough to pull it off, they've shown themselves to be great writes, both in other games and earlier in this. Also the stuff with the Normandy could be in Shep's happy place, which makes more sense than Joker picking up the whole squad and fleeing the system in the ten minutes Shep was on the citadel for no fathomable reason. My only problem with this is if Shep was unconcious in London instead of while reaching for the control panel (which is more likely), then Anderson's BEAUTIFUL death scene wasn't real, which makes me sadder than the scene did.