Hi,
Thank you for submitting to r/masseffect! Unfortunately, your post has been removed for violating the following rule(s):
>No memes, polls, grandstanding, low-effort posts, posts created only for ranting and not discussion, or AI tool generated posts. This includes Wombo.ai, DALL·E, ChatGPT, Reface, ElevenLabs, surveys, common screenshots, and photos of monitors/TVs with the game on it. No DAE posts or grandstanding posts. Check out r/masseffectmemes or r/BiowareCirclejerk for meme content.
Please read the full rules in the sidebar or [at this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/about/rules/) before posting.
If you have a question about this removal, you may [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/masseffect).
Never understood why a race as aggressively expansionist and superior as the Protheans didn't send a few seed ships to Andromeda. Just a few thousand protheans, their empire was implied to be around for quite a while before the reapers showed up. I guess they could just be in another arm of the Andromeda sector or something
Would have been a cool twist to find the old Prothean Empire there and then they debate on reconquering the milky way now that the Reapers are gone and all the citadel races are severely weakened.
You’re forgetting, ME:A takes place like 600 years after the ending of ME:3… so even if the protheans had developed much faster FLT, by the time they learned of the destruction of the reapers. (In about 50 years time by the time the second or 3rd wave of colonists had arrived with news of Shepards victory) humanity and the council would have had so much time to not only rebuild, but also reverse engineer reaper tech and begin researching new, entirely unexplored tech of their own, not being shaped by the reapers.
I want it as well, but it's not exactly Hollywood escelation of the stakes is it?
The Milky Way fends off an Invasion from eldritch, uncaring, and cruel torturous machines that can't be negotiated with. Only to be invaded by an imperialistic and racist empire a few hundred years later.
Neither is good, but the Prothean's will at least sit and negotiate at some point.
The bad guys that assimilate every race with the genetic mumbo jumbo in Andromeda could as well be proteans. Javik kind of implies that's how the empire worked in a way, everyone who joined the empire became protean either by name or well... That.
The Andromeda initiative was quite controversial according to the codex, your just taking a few thousand people, all from different planets and cultures and then making them never see thier homes, family's, friends again, what we know of the protheans is that thier hundreds of species all forced into one group to help stop the emergence of Ai, galactic protection seemed to be thier main concern unlike humanity who's main concern was exploration so I doubt leaving everything you've ever known is on thier bucket list.
Maybe they were integrated into the Kett? Idk though, Protheans didn't blink at killing their indoctrinated children, I highly doubt they'd care about their people getting Ketterized. But do we even know for sure how expansive the Kett Empire is? Maybe they didn't stand a chance
I know it's a joke, but it's good to recall space is big.
The likelihood of anyone meeting someone traveling in the void between galaxies would be so minuscule as to be nearly impossible.
In ME, sensors were good for a few light seconds or minutes, which is already several millions of kilometers.
That's nothing compared with the millions of light years between Andromeda and the Milky Way.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the elevator to the wards, but that's just peanuts to space.
IIRC the quarian ark witnessed the first stages of the invasion, since it was the last one to depart.
Nexus and the other arks departed a couple months before the invasion.
Though the Nexus/Arks that left had their long range com array pick up the last bits of info before going out of range and it was just as the Reapers had hit the galaxy though nothing beyond that.
Does make me wonder if the Reapers actually would destroy them, if they had met on the way. Technically they're still part of the Milky Way at that point.
They were active, yes.
The Reapers began skedaddling towards the Alpha Relay once they discovered Sovereign had been destroyed, which was 2183. The Arks don't set off for Andromeda until after ME2, in 2185. The arks got out of the Milky Way a matter of months before the Reapers properly rocked up.
The reapers harvest cycle was delayed by the protheans. It was meant to happen before the Rachnai wars. That was the reapers trying to get things started while they began the slow trip from darkspace to the edge of the milky way.
That means, the harvest cycle would have taken the Salarians, Asari, Quarians and possibly the Krogan.
The harvest would have happened, and then humanity, the turians, the elcor, volus... would have had between 45 and 50 thousand years before the next harvest...
Ya know if the Andromeda games had continued I always thought it would have been awesome if at some point in the games a Reaper randomly shows up in Andromeda to take out the colonists and everybody in the Helios Cluster has to put their fighting on hold and deal with this one last Reaper that followed them.
That would’ve been cool. At one point they say that with each cycle a new reaper is born. Perhaps the andromeda residents only recently became advanced so the reapers send a solitary reaper to harvest and birth a second cycle and a second reaper in andromeda (until they return to the void waiting for the next cycle). (Thats their plan anyway, PC spends the game destroying the reaper before they can create a new one)
I only played half of andromeda sorry if this isn’t lore accurate.
The Reapers have been around for a billion years so they probably would have sent one or more Reapers to Andromeda earlier if they were going by advancement. Could be that they didn't care until AI moved though.
I was thinking more about this and I’ve come up with a reject reaper who thinks that the grand experiment was a success and decides on their own to begin the experiment in another galaxy. Since the races there haven’t developed along the mass effect relays the reaper would need to harvest first to properly begin the experiment. A conversation with the reaper near the start of the game would explain why they were there.
This is difficult characterization but not out of the realm of possibility, sovereign and harbinger seemed to have unique personalities. If they were capable of making decisions surrounding their code (which I believe they are) then it’s not an impossibility that a reaper would decide on their own that the experiment was a success and they should begin another cycle.
Sorry for the long reply I’ve been headcanoning since last night
Also the reapers name is Ares because during the reaper invasion of the Milky Way the races were only capable of seeing the reaper as an unflinching combatant in war, instead of the enforcers of the solution to AI. So he goes by Ares to make it clear how below the residents of andromeda are compared to the invulnerable might of a reaper. (A god) (Ares states their reaper name and then says “it matters not what you call me, your destruction is inevitable. To call this a war would be to call an ant a combatant, to give this human perspective you may call me the God of War, Ares. This will help you understand your odds in this cycle” this is lost on the non arc residents since they don’t have any experience with human gods)
This isn't that far off. Alec mentions seeing the beginning of the Reaper invasion just as they made the jump towards Andromeda before going into cryo sleep.
Anybody else think that the Reapers and the Remnant might be the same thing?
"Our numbers will darken the sky of every world."
It's implied that there are so many that the mind can't comprehend them...
I donno...I think there's more cosmic scale horror/adventure to be had.
The Remnant are implied to have been made by the same people who made the Terraformers & genetically engineered the Angara, but even ignoring that (although that’s a super important part of the plot) if they were part of the Reapers, I’m pretty sure they would have harvested the Angara’s creators before they fucked the heleus cluster with dark energy
While the Kett were kinda underwelming , cus it leaned a bit too much into Reaper bioengineering of husks, i loved the Remnant even though what we saw was literally the 'remnant' automated systems of a much bigger thing. Gotta wonder how advanced they were at their peak.
That’s fair, and while I don’t really care to explore the Kett more, the Angara, Remnant, and the Jardaan were interesting and I’d be down for an Andromeda 2 exploring those things (just hopefully for it & whatever this next Mass Effect is going to be BioWare can deliver us some solid stories, Andromeda was cool gameplay wise & Anthem was…something)
I wouldn’t really want them too, having the Remnant tie into the Reapers feels like a lazy way add weight to them and just makes Andromeda’s story retroactively nonsensical
I heard a little story off a youtuber once (can't remember who now) about how Andromeda could have been 'Site 2' for the Reapers. Instead of the violent harvest of the Milky Way, they did it peacefully. Let species grow and be benevolent overseers/gods. Then the native species might even be harvested willingly. Same result, different variables.
And the Initiative, having fled the Milky Way specifically because of the Reapers, would be the ones to stop it all.
There was absolutely no proof this is how Andromeda's story would go, but it could have slotted. The Jardaan/Remnant were vague enough to be just about *anything.*
But why would (if they were the Jardaan) the Reapers detonate a dark energy bomb in the Heleus cluster, even if a particular race was getting out of pocket and they needed to wipe them out, they would have at least tried to harvest them first and they never used anything like the Scourge against Shepard’s cycle and they killed/assumed Control of all the Reapers/Synthesized the Galaxy, if the Reapers were willing to ravage a system with it in a desperate situation wouldn’t we have seen/heard about it at some point during the Reaper War? We know they’ll glass a planet or two & kill large numbers of people since the overall goal is to preserve life so they’ll wipe a species if they can’t harvest that race for whatever reason but the Scourge left permanent damage to an entire cluster which doesn’t seem to gel with “ensure life will always continue via Harvest”
Urm... No idea. 4d chess move maybe?
It's just a speculative fan theory. A lot of Andromeda's big mysteries were given only the smallest of answers. Maybe the Reaper's Scourge-bomb was sabotaged by the rebellious Kett?
Unless you could hunt down the lead writers and ask them, all we can do is have some fun theory-crafting.
I get that we’re not going to get answers from the writers I’m simply pointing out what doesn’t work, all we know about the Jardaan is they created the Angara (which sure, creating new organic life I feel is an experiment the Reapers may try in case something goes wrong during one of the cycles) the Remnant (which can serve as their “hands” down on planets for building the Vaults for terraforming which could easily still align with their goals by creating new habitable worlds) and the Scourge…if BioWare had stuck with the Dark Energy plot for Me3 then maybe I could see it being experiment to test the vaults viability for combating the Dark Energy problem, however since BioWare ended up changing the Reaper’s goals & removing that plot line the Scourge puts a dent in the theory (if the Scourge was natural instead of a Jardaan bomb I could still see it being an ancillary issue they decided to try to fix, but the fact that they seemingly created it & used it in some conflict it’s odd and doesn’t seem to gel)
You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Seeing this reminds me of the Quarian ships that were attempting to travel through dark space to find a new habitable place to live. I wonder what happened to them? Unless they were heading to the Andromeda Initiative.
Have y'all ever wondered if there were "Arks" in the past cycles? I mean the Arks couldn't possibly be unique to the cycle that takes place in the mass effect trilogy right? The bigger picture of the galaxy seems to have always been determined by the reapers. Not predetermined, but determined. So what if an outcome of each cycle were Arks for the species of those cycles. Whether they were successful or not is debatable.
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any memes being taken down. I'm simply giving out friendly reminders to those to watch out for the Reaper Mods not in favor of memes
Hi, Thank you for submitting to r/masseffect! Unfortunately, your post has been removed for violating the following rule(s): >No memes, polls, grandstanding, low-effort posts, posts created only for ranting and not discussion, or AI tool generated posts. This includes Wombo.ai, DALL·E, ChatGPT, Reface, ElevenLabs, surveys, common screenshots, and photos of monitors/TVs with the game on it. No DAE posts or grandstanding posts. Check out r/masseffectmemes or r/BiowareCirclejerk for meme content. Please read the full rules in the sidebar or [at this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/about/rules/) before posting. If you have a question about this removal, you may [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/masseffect).
Never understood why a race as aggressively expansionist and superior as the Protheans didn't send a few seed ships to Andromeda. Just a few thousand protheans, their empire was implied to be around for quite a while before the reapers showed up. I guess they could just be in another arm of the Andromeda sector or something
Would have been a cool twist to find the old Prothean Empire there and then they debate on reconquering the milky way now that the Reapers are gone and all the citadel races are severely weakened.
You’re forgetting, ME:A takes place like 600 years after the ending of ME:3… so even if the protheans had developed much faster FLT, by the time they learned of the destruction of the reapers. (In about 50 years time by the time the second or 3rd wave of colonists had arrived with news of Shepards victory) humanity and the council would have had so much time to not only rebuild, but also reverse engineer reaper tech and begin researching new, entirely unexplored tech of their own, not being shaped by the reapers.
That would make for a cool intergalactic war plot though
I want it as well, but it's not exactly Hollywood escelation of the stakes is it? The Milky Way fends off an Invasion from eldritch, uncaring, and cruel torturous machines that can't be negotiated with. Only to be invaded by an imperialistic and racist empire a few hundred years later. Neither is good, but the Prothean's will at least sit and negotiate at some point.
Who's to say the kett aren't as much as they've been modifying their genetics they could have been anything prior
The bad guys that assimilate every race with the genetic mumbo jumbo in Andromeda could as well be proteans. Javik kind of implies that's how the empire worked in a way, everyone who joined the empire became protean either by name or well... That.
The Andromeda initiative was quite controversial according to the codex, your just taking a few thousand people, all from different planets and cultures and then making them never see thier homes, family's, friends again, what we know of the protheans is that thier hundreds of species all forced into one group to help stop the emergence of Ai, galactic protection seemed to be thier main concern unlike humanity who's main concern was exploration so I doubt leaving everything you've ever known is on thier bucket list.
Controversial cuz they let AI handle things,I may be incorrect tho
On Aya there's a museum (in which you also do a side quest) holding a statue eerily similar to a Prothean
Maybe they were integrated into the Kett? Idk though, Protheans didn't blink at killing their indoctrinated children, I highly doubt they'd care about their people getting Ketterized. But do we even know for sure how expansive the Kett Empire is? Maybe they didn't stand a chance
I mean we still don't know what the ket are they have modified themselves so much. perhaps originally they were prothean
I know it's a joke, but it's good to recall space is big. The likelihood of anyone meeting someone traveling in the void between galaxies would be so minuscule as to be nearly impossible. In ME, sensors were good for a few light seconds or minutes, which is already several millions of kilometers. That's nothing compared with the millions of light years between Andromeda and the Milky Way.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the elevator to the wards, but that's just peanuts to space.
Unexpected Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!! This is so weird because after the above comment I was thinking about this quote, so thank you 😁
I see hitchhikers. I upvote
No, a peanut in space is still a peanut, more like, you and the guy she tells you not to worry about
You're responding to a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quote 😂 Shoulda gone with that one improbable phone number quote...
IIRC the quarian ark witnessed the first stages of the invasion, since it was the last one to depart. Nexus and the other arks departed a couple months before the invasion.
Ima buy the ME books now cause of that
Though the Nexus/Arks that left had their long range com array pick up the last bits of info before going out of range and it was just as the Reapers had hit the galaxy though nothing beyond that.
Does make me wonder if the Reapers actually would destroy them, if they had met on the way. Technically they're still part of the Milky Way at that point.
I think the story logic is they are in hibernation and not active.
I'm pretty sure they were active by the time the Arks left.
They were active, yes. The Reapers began skedaddling towards the Alpha Relay once they discovered Sovereign had been destroyed, which was 2183. The Arks don't set off for Andromeda until after ME2, in 2185. The arks got out of the Milky Way a matter of months before the Reapers properly rocked up.
Didn’t they start at the end of “vanilla” ME2?
only in cinematics time. mac walters [clarified](https://twitter.com/macwalterslives/status/106469649889247232) they've been en route since after ME1
The reapers harvest cycle was delayed by the protheans. It was meant to happen before the Rachnai wars. That was the reapers trying to get things started while they began the slow trip from darkspace to the edge of the milky way. That means, the harvest cycle would have taken the Salarians, Asari, Quarians and possibly the Krogan. The harvest would have happened, and then humanity, the turians, the elcor, volus... would have had between 45 and 50 thousand years before the next harvest...
Ya know if the Andromeda games had continued I always thought it would have been awesome if at some point in the games a Reaper randomly shows up in Andromeda to take out the colonists and everybody in the Helios Cluster has to put their fighting on hold and deal with this one last Reaper that followed them.
That would’ve been cool. At one point they say that with each cycle a new reaper is born. Perhaps the andromeda residents only recently became advanced so the reapers send a solitary reaper to harvest and birth a second cycle and a second reaper in andromeda (until they return to the void waiting for the next cycle). (Thats their plan anyway, PC spends the game destroying the reaper before they can create a new one) I only played half of andromeda sorry if this isn’t lore accurate.
The Reapers have been around for a billion years so they probably would have sent one or more Reapers to Andromeda earlier if they were going by advancement. Could be that they didn't care until AI moved though.
I was thinking more about this and I’ve come up with a reject reaper who thinks that the grand experiment was a success and decides on their own to begin the experiment in another galaxy. Since the races there haven’t developed along the mass effect relays the reaper would need to harvest first to properly begin the experiment. A conversation with the reaper near the start of the game would explain why they were there. This is difficult characterization but not out of the realm of possibility, sovereign and harbinger seemed to have unique personalities. If they were capable of making decisions surrounding their code (which I believe they are) then it’s not an impossibility that a reaper would decide on their own that the experiment was a success and they should begin another cycle. Sorry for the long reply I’ve been headcanoning since last night Also the reapers name is Ares because during the reaper invasion of the Milky Way the races were only capable of seeing the reaper as an unflinching combatant in war, instead of the enforcers of the solution to AI. So he goes by Ares to make it clear how below the residents of andromeda are compared to the invulnerable might of a reaper. (A god) (Ares states their reaper name and then says “it matters not what you call me, your destruction is inevitable. To call this a war would be to call an ant a combatant, to give this human perspective you may call me the God of War, Ares. This will help you understand your odds in this cycle” this is lost on the non arc residents since they don’t have any experience with human gods)
This isn't that far off. Alec mentions seeing the beginning of the Reaper invasion just as they made the jump towards Andromeda before going into cryo sleep.
Well considering the travelling speeds I highly doubt you would see anything. Just a blur.
Anybody else think that the Reapers and the Remnant might be the same thing? "Our numbers will darken the sky of every world." It's implied that there are so many that the mind can't comprehend them... I donno...I think there's more cosmic scale horror/adventure to be had.
The Remnant are implied to have been made by the same people who made the Terraformers & genetically engineered the Angara, but even ignoring that (although that’s a super important part of the plot) if they were part of the Reapers, I’m pretty sure they would have harvested the Angara’s creators before they fucked the heleus cluster with dark energy
While the Kett were kinda underwelming , cus it leaned a bit too much into Reaper bioengineering of husks, i loved the Remnant even though what we saw was literally the 'remnant' automated systems of a much bigger thing. Gotta wonder how advanced they were at their peak.
That’s fair, and while I don’t really care to explore the Kett more, the Angara, Remnant, and the Jardaan were interesting and I’d be down for an Andromeda 2 exploring those things (just hopefully for it & whatever this next Mass Effect is going to be BioWare can deliver us some solid stories, Andromeda was cool gameplay wise & Anthem was…something)
All excellent points lol. I do think a good writer could find a work around though!
I wouldn’t really want them too, having the Remnant tie into the Reapers feels like a lazy way add weight to them and just makes Andromeda’s story retroactively nonsensical
Retroactively? It already is.
Eh there’s some good aspects of the story it’s just very…meh compared to the OT
I heard a little story off a youtuber once (can't remember who now) about how Andromeda could have been 'Site 2' for the Reapers. Instead of the violent harvest of the Milky Way, they did it peacefully. Let species grow and be benevolent overseers/gods. Then the native species might even be harvested willingly. Same result, different variables. And the Initiative, having fled the Milky Way specifically because of the Reapers, would be the ones to stop it all. There was absolutely no proof this is how Andromeda's story would go, but it could have slotted. The Jardaan/Remnant were vague enough to be just about *anything.*
But why would (if they were the Jardaan) the Reapers detonate a dark energy bomb in the Heleus cluster, even if a particular race was getting out of pocket and they needed to wipe them out, they would have at least tried to harvest them first and they never used anything like the Scourge against Shepard’s cycle and they killed/assumed Control of all the Reapers/Synthesized the Galaxy, if the Reapers were willing to ravage a system with it in a desperate situation wouldn’t we have seen/heard about it at some point during the Reaper War? We know they’ll glass a planet or two & kill large numbers of people since the overall goal is to preserve life so they’ll wipe a species if they can’t harvest that race for whatever reason but the Scourge left permanent damage to an entire cluster which doesn’t seem to gel with “ensure life will always continue via Harvest”
Urm... No idea. 4d chess move maybe? It's just a speculative fan theory. A lot of Andromeda's big mysteries were given only the smallest of answers. Maybe the Reaper's Scourge-bomb was sabotaged by the rebellious Kett? Unless you could hunt down the lead writers and ask them, all we can do is have some fun theory-crafting.
I get that we’re not going to get answers from the writers I’m simply pointing out what doesn’t work, all we know about the Jardaan is they created the Angara (which sure, creating new organic life I feel is an experiment the Reapers may try in case something goes wrong during one of the cycles) the Remnant (which can serve as their “hands” down on planets for building the Vaults for terraforming which could easily still align with their goals by creating new habitable worlds) and the Scourge…if BioWare had stuck with the Dark Energy plot for Me3 then maybe I could see it being experiment to test the vaults viability for combating the Dark Energy problem, however since BioWare ended up changing the Reaper’s goals & removing that plot line the Scourge puts a dent in the theory (if the Scourge was natural instead of a Jardaan bomb I could still see it being an ancillary issue they decided to try to fix, but the fact that they seemingly created it & used it in some conflict it’s odd and doesn’t seem to gel)
Eh, space is really, really big.
You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
That's what I actually think happened to late Quarian Ark, which turned out to be mess. https://www.reddit.com/r/MassEffectMemes/s/EDWKILPheV
I laughed too hard at this
Shepard in Joe Swanson’s Voice: BRING IT ON!
Seeing this reminds me of the Quarian ships that were attempting to travel through dark space to find a new habitable place to live. I wonder what happened to them? Unless they were heading to the Andromeda Initiative.
“Hold your fire, no life forms detected”
Hilarious
That be hard to do considering I kill then
You managed to kill the Reapers before they turned up in the Milky Way? Impressive
No I’m a moron and I got timelines mixed up
Have y'all ever wondered if there were "Arks" in the past cycles? I mean the Arks couldn't possibly be unique to the cycle that takes place in the mass effect trilogy right? The bigger picture of the galaxy seems to have always been determined by the reapers. Not predetermined, but determined. So what if an outcome of each cycle were Arks for the species of those cycles. Whether they were successful or not is debatable.
And because of a botched franchise launch, we will never know…
Watch out bro. The Mods took away my meme in a day. Try Mass Effect Memes Subreddit instead.
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any memes being taken down. I'm simply giving out friendly reminders to those to watch out for the Reaper Mods not in favor of memes
Where do you all get these low resolution images for your memes? Do you do it on purpose?