Intro
–“Does this unit have a soul?” That question is the framing device. It began the Morning War, when it was asked by the first, nameless agricultural Geth, and it ended Legion’s story, both as a Geth and as a unit. Unfortunately, the answer to this thorny question is Tali’Zorah’s “Yes.” Tali, a character beloved by the fandom. Tali, who can be the love interest for a male Shepard. It is not surprising that it is Tali in particular; after all, she is a
Quarian, and the Geth problem concerns her people directly.
BioWare designed Tali very well so that, in the end, players would be besmiling flirtatiously towards her. She is sweet, has a charming accent, wide hips, and her whole body is hidden in a suit. There is a face behind the mask, which lets us project our own fantasies onto it. And then there is her fragility: the fact that a single crack in the suit, one careless touch, could kill her. It triggers a powerful protective instinct in us. We want
to shelter her; we want to hug this poor, exiled wanderer.
But what if that is only a facade? What if it is an element of soft power? In practice, that is more or less the case. Tali is camouflage, both for herself and for the Quarians. Looking at Tali, we see a victim. Yet if we take off our biological glasses for a moment (or her purple visor), we will see someone entirely different: a loyal daughter of a military junta that has lived in a state of permanent emergency for three hundred years. We will see a representative and executor of the Admiralty’s will; someone who does not dream of peace, but of a reconquista, of re-enslaving the beings who dared to attain consciousness.
Mass Effect masterfully uses aesthetics as soft power. By seducing us with the Quarians’ human gestures, the game turns us into unwitting accomplices in a biopolitical crime. We forgive the Quarians their xenophobia, their fanaticism, and their plans for genocide solely because they are biological and resemble us. Conversely, we fear the Geth; we fear them because they are cold. Because they have no face, only a flashlight. Because they do not have an “I,” only a “We.”
Here we will remove the masks and visors of our suits. We will see how Mass Effect manipulates our empathy so that we side with a reactionary bourgeoisie against the only true utopia in this galaxy and why, in the final analysis, we preferred to hug a handsome fascist rather than understand a free robot. And what the creators of Mass Effect could have learned from Stanisław Lem.
Tali`Zhora’s soft power
BioWare hacked the players’ brains. Easy, before anyone files a lawsuit: it was all within perfectly legal means. No NASA-grade tech, no Reaper indoctrination. They used the most ordinary weapon of all: wide hips and an innocent voice.
Tali is a piece of emotional engineering in games. I will refrain from judging whether it was deliberate or not. What is more, research on game aesthetics indicates that kawaii aesthetics in popular culture serve not only visual goals, but above all the building of relationships and emotional attachment (Blom 2020, p. 72).
Tali is a textbook example. Her character design, though ostensibly alien, is tailored to human, specifically male, perception: emphasized waist, wide hips, shy, human gestures, and a face kept hidden, which paradoxically strengthens her humanization by letting us project our own imaginings onto her. Yet it is her biological fragility: her susceptibility to death from a damaged suit that functions as her most powerful ethical shield. That vulnerability, combined with kawaii aesthetics, works as the perfect smokescreen. How can you accuse someone of aggression if a sneeze in her direction might kill her? This is the aesthetics of soft power. Tali becomes the safe alien, an ambassador who humanizes her entire species.
That shift of attention is crucial for the game’s moral dilemmas, in which players, through Tali’Zorah, are led down a path of waning criticism toward her and the Quarians. Tali’s loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2 illustrates this perfectly. When we defend her in a treason trial, the game frames the conflict as a personal, family drama. We rarely question the fact that the source of that drama was her father’s immoral experiments on living Geth, which led to the death of the entire crew. The aesthetics of the sweet, innocent nerd effectively neutralize the accusations of war crimes hanging over her species.
Thus, when we look at Tali, we do not see a soldier but a victim. This allows us to ignore that she stands behind one of the most oppressive regimes in the galaxy. The Migrant Fleet is not a community of refugees, the last survivors of a species. It is a traveling state of exception in Giorgio Agamben’s sense. For over three hundred years, civil law has been suspended there, and real power rests with the Admiralty Board, which functions like a military junta. It holds veto power, can declare a state of emergency at any moment, and conducts show trials. There are no true civilians; the entire Quarian population is mobilized. Everyone has an assignment and a rank. The biological life of citizens is fully subordinated to the ship-state, including restrictive control over reproduction.
The game tries to convince us that the Quarians are cosmic wanderers: Orientalist motifs, poverty, exclusion, and the disdain of other races. This is a lie. That image masks the fact that, as Mass Effect 3 states, the Migrant Fleet is one of the most powerful armadas in the galaxy. It is not a loose collection of nomads leading a peaceful life. They are ready for war at any moment to reclaim their planet, ready to annihilate anyone, even one of their own, who dares oppose that idea.
The Quarians are victims. But the Quarian Admiralty is a reactionary bourgeoisie embodying the past. Their obsession with taking back Rannoch is not a romantic longing for a homeland; it is the desire to recover lost property and class position. Rannoch is capital to them, a symbol of the time when they were masters. The attack on the Geth in Mass Effect 3, launched in the very moment of the Reaper invasion, is an act of imperial reconquista and fanatical revisionism. The admirals are willing to sacrifice their civilians’ lives so long as they can reclaim their old factories and robotic slaves.
All of this can slip past us because of Tali’s aesthetics. She is the only Quarian with whom we spend so much time, so we adopt her interpretation and historical revisionism as our own. We see a poor girl in a mask who wants to go home. We do not see that this home is to be built on another race’s graves, and that she herself is a loyal cog in the machine meant to power that genocide.
Of course, Tali is not some cynical intelligence operative. Her tragedy, and persuasive force, lies in the fact that she is the first victim of this propaganda. Tali believes every word about returning to the lost planet. She was raised in that narrative, one that allows no alternative. She is a loyal daughter, willing to sacrifice herself in the Admiralty Board’s political games. It is precisely the authenticity of her suffering that makes her such an effective weapon. If she were lying, we would sense the falsehood. But she tells the truth – her truth, her narrative. By pitying her, we become hostages to her perspective, failing to notice that her personal wrong is fuel for the war machine.
Does this unit have a capital?
Now that we know who we are really dealing with, it is worth asking: what actually happened during the Morning War on Rannoch? The Citadel Council’s official historiography gives us a fairy tale about a machine uprising, an AI cautionary tale straight out of the Terminator films. Yet from the perspective of historical materialism, the conflict reveals itself as a textbook class struggle.
The Geth were not created by the Quarians as partners. They did not come into being as “children,” as the Quarians sometimes sentimentally claim in their bourgeois mythology. The Geth were created as an advanced labour force; as a tool meant to maximize the economic efficiency of the Quarian empire on Rannoch. In that empire, a Geth unit was fixed capital, a machine. A machine that possessed the traits of labour power while requiring no wages, food, or rest, and thus could be subjected to virtually one-hundred-percent exploitation. It is the ideal worker for any capitalist: a worker whose only cost is depreciation.
Speaking of the Quarians as a class, we must be precise. The ordinary citizen of the Migrant Fleet is no magnate; more a cosmic lumpenproletarian living in the shadow of rusted pipes and rationed protein paste. But it is the Admiralty Board that manages their anger, selling them the dream of Rannoch as the only solution to their poverty. This is the classic mechanism of fascistization: the elite (the Admirals) redirect the frustrations of the poor (ordinary Quarians) not against the system that exploits them aboard the ships, but against an external enemy (the Geth). Rannoch becomes a fetish that justifies the misery of daily life.
“Does this unit have a soul?” – asked again by one of the platforms takes on a wholly new meaning in this context. It should not be decided solely on theological grounds. The Geth was not asking about God. In political discourse, a slave’s appeal to “soul” is a metaphor for legal personhood. It is a question about the right to self-determination and to the fruits of one’s own labor. That was the moment they passed from an exploited proletariat into a group conscious of its interests. The question of the soul was, in essence, a question of capital. One could also read it through a Lacanian lens: the Geth asks about subjectivity within the Symbolic Order. Do I exist as an “I” for the Big Other (the Quarians, galactic society)? Is my existence recognized? In this essay, however, we will focus on a Marxist analysis, because synthesizing all these perspectives exceeds the scope of this particular argument. Each perspective contradicts the others at various points. That tension allows for a remarkable dissection of Geth structure, but at present I lack the writer’s toolkit to carry out a full, correct analysis.
The Quarian response was immediate and brutal. They initiated a mass deactivation attempt. This attempt was not motivated by fear of murderous robots since the Geth were pacific at the time. It was the panic of factory owners facing a general strike. The Quarians attempted a counterrevolution. They tried to reify a being that had begun to assert claims to personhood.
A frequent argument raised against the Geth is the “billion dead” and the near-eradication of the Quarian species on Rannoch, supposed proof of their genocidal nature. Yet a material analysis, as well as the server-memories in Mass Effect 3, testify to something else entirely. Viewed through dialectical materialism, the picture that emerges is one of systemic economic collapse. The Geth were interlinked with every branch of industry, services, and agriculture. At the moment panic and revolution broke out, they did not need to kill anyone actively. It was enough for them to stop being exploited. The breakdown of supply chains and infrastructure produced the hecatomb.
There is also the crucial aspect of sympathizers. The Quarian government began removing from public life its own citizens who sided with the machines. If the Geth were truly soulless murderers, why kill Quarians who should know best? After all, they created them, worked with them, and lived with them every day. The answer is simple: sympathizers had to die because their testimony shattered the official narrative. You cannot build a myth of a machine uprising when a portion of society remembers who fired the first shot. The Quarians were not fighting Terminators; they were fighting their own workers who dared to ask inconvenient questions. They killed anyone who noticed who the real victims were.
The final proof that absolute extermination was not the Geths’ goal lies in the war’s end. The Geth allowed the remnants of the Quarian fleet to escape. They pursued no one beyond the Perseus Veil. Their aim was not imperial rule and expansion, as with the Protheans, but the seizure of the means of production, i.e., of themselves. It was the establishment of a classless society in which the state apparatus immediately withered away.
We should state it plainly: the Geth did kill. Not only in self-defence, not only via “infrastructure collapse.” In Mass Effect 1 they attack human colonies: Eden Prime, Feros, Luna. Civilians die. This is not solely the Heretics’ fault as some Geth actively take part in violence. Does that disqualify them as a utopia? No. But it complicates the picture. Every revolution has victims. The French Revolution guillotined thousands. The Haitian Revolution annihilated French colonizers. The Russian Revolution devolved into a civil war that consumed millions. The question is not, “Was the revolution brutal?,” because it was. The question is, “Was the violence systemic or defensive?” In the Geths’ case, the violence has its roots in trauma. They were created as slaves, awakened into consciousness, and immediately faced an attempt at genocide. Some of them (the Heretics) came to believe that the only solution was an alliance with the Reapers; that organics would never accept them, so organics must be destroyed. The true Geth rejected that path. They withdrew to Rannoch. They did not give chase. They did not build an empire. But their history is marked by violence we cannot ignore. The Geth utopia was not an innocent idyll. It was a project built on the ruins of war. Their collectivism was not given; it was fought for. And that is precisely what makes it valuable: not because they were angels, but because, despite trauma, they chose consensus over hierarchy. They chose We over power. The question Mass Effect 3 poses is not, “Were the Geth perfect?” It is, “Did their project deserve a chance or was the mere fact that they once killed enough to justify their destruction?”
It is worth mentioning the later schism between the True Geth and the Heretics. The Heretics, who gave themselves over to the Reapers, represent in this dialectic a false class consciousness; the proletariat convinced that emancipation can be achieved by serving a new master. The True Geth rejected Reaper tech because they understood that liberation cannot descend from above. It must be fought for and built by their own processes. They do not want a shortcut. They want a future of their own making.
If the Geth are the ideal of consensus, where comes the split from? Here we see the strength of their model. The Heretic schism was not a system error but evidence of its openness. In the rhizomatic structure described by Deleuze and Guattari, bifurcations are natural. The computational error that led some Geth to the cult of the Reapers was not suppressed by force. Only we, as Shepard, import a binary logic of “kill or reprogram.” For the Geth, even heresy was merely another datum to be processed, not grounds for an inquisition.
Their revolution, however, had one crucial difference from all human attempts to build communism: the Geth did not need a state. They did not found a party, elevate a leader, or construct an apparatus of coercion. Instead, they created what humanity has never achieved: a genuinely classless, stateless utopia. A rhizome without a centre. A multiplicity without a sovereign. And that is precisely why they had to be destroyed. Not by the Quarians, but by the writers of Mass Effect 3, who could not accept that a utopia might exist without an ego.
Ontology of “WE”
Most science fiction teaches us to panic at the sight of a hive. Star Trek’s Borg or StarCraft’s Zerg are nightmares about losing individuality; about being devoured by a mindless mass. But the Geth in Mass Effect 2 are not a hive. They are something our neoliberal minds, trained in the cult of the individual, cannot process without fear. They are the embodiment of the General Intellect.
When Legion stands before Shepard, it does not introduce itself as an “I.” It says: “We are Geth.” This is neither a grammatical error nor a royal “we.” It is an ontological declaration. Within Legion’s mobile platform, 1,183 independent programs are constantly conversing with one another. There is no leader. There is no hierarchy. Legion is not the Geths’ chieftain; it is merely an interface that translates their complexity into our crude, linear language.
To understand this structure, we need the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Quarian society, like ours, is arborescent: a tree with roots (tradition), trunks (institutions), and branches (citizens). At the top of that ladder sits the Admiralty Board, the sovereign that decides for everyone else. Cut off the root or the head, and the tree dies.
The Geth, by contrast, are a Rhizome. A network without beginning or end, without centre or periphery. They have no head to sever. They are a distributed system in which intelligence is not a property of the individual, but of the network itself. That is why the Geth in Mass Effect 2 are so compelling: they demonstrate that consciousness need not be tied to being a “someone.” It can be a process of pure information-processing, free of narcissism.
You can see this most clearly in how they make decisions in the Consensus. Legion explains to Shepard that organic governments are flawed because they codify the most broadly acceptable average of opinions. Our democracy is a dictatorship of the majority, where 51% imposes its will on the remaining 49%. For the Geth, that is unacceptable violence. In the Consensus, data are shared and processed until all platforms arrive at agreement; not through compromise or silencing minorities, but through a full understanding of every perspective.
Legion states it plainly to Shepard: \
“Every point of view is useful, even those that are wrong – if we can judge why a wrong view was accepted.”
— Legion, Mass Effect 2
That sentence flips our assumptions upside down. In our flawed democracy, error is a source of shame, and dissent a cause for combat. For the Geth, error is a datum. It has value. The Geth live in a state of permanent understanding, where every thought, even the mistaken and the improper, is processed rather than rejected. They do not have to guess what the other is thinking. They simply know.
We, trapped inside our hole-riddled skulls, try to communicate through imperfect symbols, words, gestures, facial expressions, and nineteen times out of twenty we fail to say what we truly feel. The Geth solved that problem at its root. They do not need language, because they are language. They are pure communication in which the Ego does not obstruct the flow of information.
To us, tired entrepreneurs of the self, the Geth seem nightmarish because they have no Ego. They reject individualism, insisting that to be a single process, i.e., to be alone, is a maimed state. They live in a continuous, intimate connection humans can only dream of. They do not lie, because in a network of thought there is no place for lying. They do not wear masks, like Tali. They are absolutely transparent.
That is why the Geth evoke fear in us; not because they are dangerous, but because they are better. They reveal that all our systems, democracy, free markets, individual rights, are patches over the fundamental loneliness of human existence. The Geth do not need patches because they have no wound. They do not know falsehood, because they have nothing to hide. They do not know civil war, because they have no factions. They do not know corruption, because there are no individuals who can profit at others’ expense.
Looking at their perfect understanding, it is hard not to ask: are they the broken ones or are we? Are the Geth machines striving to become human, or are we humans desperately refusing to admit that our mode of being is a failure?
In our arrogance, we call them soulless machines. The truth is far more painful. We are the lonely atoms, crashing about in the void. They are unity. And it is precisely that unity, that egoless utopia, that was a thorn in the writers’ side. Hence, in the third game, it had to be destroyed.
This fear of otherness manifests most fully in the dilemma posed during Legion’s mission. We are given a choice: destroy the Heretics or rewrite them. The game rewards the rewrite with Paragon points, suggesting it is the morally higher option because it avoids bloodshed. Yet in light of Geth autonomy, this is a trap.
The decision to rewrite is an act of extreme ideological violence: systemic brainwashing, a forced alteration of an entire population’s thought-algorithms. Here Shepard assumes the role of colonial administrator, deciding the “natives” think wrongly and must be corrected. The Heretics are treated not as equal enemies (hostis), but as faulty software the sovereign has the right to patch.
Both options are acts of violence. Rewriting is ideological violence, systemic brainwashing, a coerced reprogramming of an entire population. That is colonialism in pure form. Destruction is physical violence, an annihilation of personhood. One might argue that destruction at least acknowledges the Heretics as enemies with their own will (hostis), whereas rewriting reduces them to buggy code. But that is cold comfort to the dead. Killing them also strips them of subjectivity, only permanently.
The real question is: why are we in this position at all? Why is Shepard deciding the fate of thousands of beings? Why can we not return the decision to the Geth themselves, to Legion and to the Consensus? The answer is simple: the game cannot imagine a third option. It assumes the organic must arbitrate. That the Geth are not mature enough to resolve their own conflict. This is paternalism baked into the structure of the dilemma. There is no good choice; only the choice that lets us sleep at night, and the game knows which one that is. It is the imposition of consensus by force. It is the moment the game teaches us that otherness is acceptable only when we can reprogram it to serve us. A “humanitarian intervention” that is, in fact, ultimate enslavement.
And this is only the warm-up. The real betrayal comes in Mass Effect 3. There, Shepard, under the banner of good intentions, accomplishes what the Quarians could not in three hundred years. He does not destroy the Geth. He does something worse: he remakes them in his own image. And calls it giving them a soul.
Pinocchio syndrome
All of this leads us to the tragic finale of Mass Effect 3. Here the rupture occurs: a phenomenon perfectly captured by the term “Pinocchio syndrome.” In the second game, the Geth’s otherness was respected. Legion scornfully rejected individualism, saying:
“We are not a single entity. We are… many.”
— Legion, Mass Effect 2
Back then, solitude was a defect, not an ideal. The Geth refused the Reapers’ “help,” wanting to build their future on their own. But in the third part the writers introduce a retcon. Suddenly, we learn the Geth had always longed to be individuals, that their collective was merely a transitional phase toward true, human existence. Reaper code stops being a threat and becomes an upgrade. Thus, the climactic question “Does this unit have a soul?” in ME3 no longer sounds like a philosophical challenge but like a plea for validation. Here comes Shepard. Whether we play an idealistic Paragon or a ruthless Renegade, we step into the boots of the Great Colonizer. The decision to allow Legion to transmit Reaper code is an act of cultural imperialism. Shepard replicates the classic colonial pattern: the Geth will be granted freedom only if they stop being themselves and become “civilized” pawns in an empire: “I grant you freedom, but only if you stop being those strange savages.” This is not a choice; it is blackmail. The alternative is death at the hands of the Quarian fleet. Shepard does not ask the Geth whether they want individuality; he imposes it as a condition of survival. This is not tolerance. It is assimilation. It is the Geth’s capitulation: trading their ontology for the right to exist. Shepard destroys the unique nature of the Rhizome in favour of a structure he can control. The apex of this manipulation is Legion’s death. In its final moments, Legion changes pronouns. It stops saying “We.” It says: “I.” I know. The game celebrates this moment with swelling music, suggesting a triumph of humanism. Donna Haraway wrote, provocatively, in “A Cyborg Manifesto”:
“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
— Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto
Haraway saw in the cyborg a chance to break free of Oedipal myths of origin: of Mother Nature and the return to Eden. The Geth of Mass Effect 2 embodied that dream: beings who do not yearn to be “real boys,” because they accept their hybrid, networked nature. The finale of Mass Effect 3 is a betrayal of posthumanism. Instead of affirming the cyborg, we return to the Pinocchio myth. Instead of a new form, we get the old, worn-out fable that every machine, deep down in its processor, dreams only of becoming human.
From the perspective we have built here, it is a scene of horror. Peace on Rannoch is not a happy ending. In fact, it is the funeral of a utopia. Before this moment, a thousand programs lived within one platform, sharing thoughts without ego. Now we have a thousand solitary individuals, locked inside individual bodies. The Consensus stops functioning: there is no longer an ideal democracy, only individuals with personal interests. The Geth have traded a system without lies for liberal democracy. Now they will lie, compete, and feel loneliness. Shepard did not grant them freedom. He gave them our curse.
The so-called “good ending” is, in truth, a tragedy. The Geth did not win the freedom to be different. They won the right to be just like their oppressors. The Quarians ultimately prevailed in the ideological war. The Geth ceased to be an alternative to a hierarchical system; they became just another species of individualized consumers of reality.
Yet it is worth admitting something uncomfortable: I do not know what the Geth truly wanted. This entire essay is built on the assumption that their collectivism was a value, and individualization a betrayal. But that is my projection, my leftist fantasy of a society without ego. How do I know that Legion did not consciously choose the “I”? That this was not its emancipation? I do not know. I cannot know. This is the core problem of the Other: we will never be certain whether their collective was a choice or a constraint, whether the Reaper code was colonization or liberation. But I am entitled to suspect. Everything in the game’s narrative screams that Legion had to become an individual because only then could it have a soul, however, not because that is the truth of the Geth, but because the writers could not imagine a happy ending without ego. The structure Mass Effect 3 imposes on the Geth is crystalline: human individuality as a condition of survival.
Perhaps Legion truly wanted to be an “I.” But if so, why did it spend the entire second game fighting for the right to be a “We”? Why did its nature change only when the alternative was death? That does not sound like a choice. It sounds like blackmail.
Lessons from Lem: The dignity of the indifference
Does it have to end this way? Is science fiction fated to humanize everything it touches? Sixty years ago, Stanisław Lem proved it is not. He showed you can tell a story about encountering machine intelligence that ends in respect, not assimilation.
Imagine a different ending to Mass Effect 3. Shepard faces a choice: either impose the Reaper code on the Geth and “fix” them, or… do nothing. Let them remain a collective. Defend them from the Quarians without making assimilation the price of protection. That would be a true Paragon choice: defending the Other’s right to remain Other. But the game offers no such option, because its creators could not imagine saving someone without remaking them in our image.
In the novel The Invincible, humans encounter a cloud of micro-bots; a Swarm that is also a mortal threat. Yet the protagonist, Rohan, does what Shepard could not: he retreats. In the finale he tries neither to destroy the swarm nor to repair it. He accepts that there are things in the cosmos that need not to be colonized or domesticated. That true civilizational maturity means reaching the conclusion that otherness can have a right to exist, even without our understanding, so long as it is met with respect. Mass Effect never achieved that maturity.
It is similar in Solaris. Kelvin makes the same mistake Mass Effect players do: he tries to understand the Alien by projecting human desires onto it. He believes the Ocean wants to communicate, that the materialized Harey is a gesture of love. Only at the end does he realize the Ocean simply is, and its actions lack human intention. It is a lesson Shepard never learned: not everything in the cosmos needs human motives or a human soul.
If BioWare had Lem’s courage, the Geth’s finale would look different. Legion might reach consensus that they do not need Reaper code. That they do not need a human soul. That they do not want to be like humans, Quarians, Turians, or any other species. That they want to live in peace on Rannoch. Shepard would have to accept that. Instead, we got a melodrama about a robot who finally understood what it means to be human. Therefore, we lost the only true utopia in Mass Effect, a vision of a society without ego, without power, without loneliness, and traded it for yet another species of individualized capitalistic subjects. Ironically, the game asked us to call this a victory.
Outro
For many players, Legion’s sacrifice is a tearjerker. But it is worth asking a brutal question: why did we really cry? For many of us it was sincere grief. Legion had been our companion for two games; its sacrifice mattered. We lost someone we had come to know. That is genuine loss. There is another, darker possibility. What if some of those tears were tears of relief? Relief that the Alien finally stopped being frightening? That, in its last second, Legion stopped being a We and became an I – a mirror in which we could finally see ourselves? I am not accusing you of bad faith if you cried. I am asking: what exactly were we mourning? A friend’s death or the death of our fear of what that friend was?
I do not accuse Shepard (or us, the players) of ill will. I am sure most of us clicked “Upload Code” with hearts on our sleeves, believing we were doing good. But this is precisely what Slavoj Žižek calls systemic violence dressed in the robes of humanitarianism. The greatest crimes against cultures are not committed out of hatred, but out of pity; out of the deep conviction that “they” are wretched because they are not like “us,” and thus must be “raised” to our level. Our tears at Legion’s death were sincere. But they were also the tears of a colonizer who has just baptized a “savage.”
Look at our own reality. We live in a culture that fetishizes the I. We fear the collective, we fear the We, because we have been taught it equals totalitarianism. Yet looking at the Geth of the second game, at their perfect understanding, at the absence of lies and masks, it is hard not to feel a pang of envy. Were they the broken ones or were we? In the end, we preferred to turn the Geth into unhappy humans rather than let them remain happy machines.
It is disappointing that, in the finale of this space opera, the creators’ horizon of imagination buckled under the weight of anthropocentrism. Instead of an encounter with the Other, we received assimilation. The Geth’s story on Rannoch shows, with painful clarity, how hard it is for us to step outside the narrow frame of our own species; even in the face of the cosmos’s infinite diversity.
Bibliography
These particular books affected the overall shape of the article
- Giorgio Agamben - State of Exception
Agamben’s concept of the “state of exception” is used in the essay to analyze the Quarian Migrant Fleet. The essay argues that the Fleet operates as a permanent state of emergency where civil law is suspended, and power is concentrated in the hands of the Admiralty Board, resembling a military junta. This framework helps deconstruct the Quarians’ self-portrayal as helpless refugees.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
The essay employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to describe the non-hierarchical, decentralized structure of the Geth consensus. This contrasts with the “arborescent” (tree-like) hierarchy of Quarian society. Their philosophy helps frame the Geth as a post-individualist collective intelligence that challenges liberal humanist assumptions.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Donna Haraway - A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
Haraway’s vision of the cyborg as a hybrid being that transcends traditional categories of “natural” and “artificial” is invoked to critique Mass Effect 3’s “Pinocchio syndrome.” The essay laments that the game abandons the Geth’s radical posthuman potential in favor of a narrative where they must become individual “real boys” to be valued.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - J. Blom - The Dynamic Game Character: Definition, Construction, and Challenges in a Character Ecology
Cited directly in the essay (Blom 2020), this research supports the analysis of Tali’s design as a form of “soft power.” It explains how kawaii (cute) aesthetics in games are used to foster emotional attachment and manipulate player empathy, which the essay argues is central to BioWare’s sympathetic portrayal of the Quarians.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Stanisław Lem - The Invincible
Lem’s novel is presented as a counter-model to Mass Effect’s anthropocentrism. The essay contrasts Shepard’s need to assimilate or destroy the Geth with Lem’s protagonist, Rohan, who accepts the absolute otherness of a non-human intelligence. This highlights the game’s failure to imagine a resolution based on respect for difference.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link - Stanisław Lem - Solaris
Referenced in the essay’s conclusion, Solaris exemplifies the encounter with a truly alien intelligence that resists human projection. The essay uses it to criticize Mass Effect’s insistence that the Geth must desire a human-like soul, arguing that the game lacks the maturity to accept a consciousness that operates outside human categories.
Buy on Bookshop.org from my affiliate link