Critical Incredulity

ademska:

that’s discounting infant mortality, which even with a potential birthing care system in the immediate aftermath of the cure would still be sky-high. that number is just flat-out wrong.

I disagree?  Seeing as we’re both using abstract numbers neither of have access to regarding a species that doesn’t exist under conditions we can’t replicate, there’s not much more to it than that, is there?

that’s also discounting the fact that before the krogan were ‘uplifted’, even before they nuked themselves to death, there’s no indication that they were experiencing extreme overpopulation the likes of which modern krogan and salarians seem to think they will.

There’s also no indication that they weren’t, or that all the nuking was keeping the population down instead.  

Isn’t overpopulation and the resulting struggle for limited resources an obvious flashpoint for persistent, total war?

lebensraum assumes the land taken in the name of expansion already belongs to someone else. wrex and the krogan neither require nor ask for any such thing. despite the astronomical implausibility, within the game is a bigass galaxy with a lot of uncolonized/very minorly colonized worlds.

Wrex specifically refers to getting their old colonies back.  You are assuming that the krogan will exercise restraint when there isn’t much evidence that they will, and Wrex’s statements don’t give nearly as much indication of it as you think they do.

Would it be a bad thing if they just settled uninhabited worlds?  Naw.  But more than enough influential characters, including Wrex, show pretty clear instincts towards revanchism.

in that case, it’s exactly what every other spacefaring race does.

Well, the humans do it, at a rate that most other species deem annoying and the Batarians are constantly threatening war over.  Plus “everyone’s doing it” has never really been a good justification for belligerence.   

and whatever mordin’s motives, he still acknowledges the hard fact that the genophage has contributed to krogan cultural death. the solution was inherently flawed, as is any zpg solution.

And removing the genophage entirely and replacing it with nothing aside from wide-eyed optimism isn’t inherently flawed?

ademska:

upsettingshorts:

Mordin dies if you betray the Krogan too, you just shoot him.

Fooling Wrex was hard, but necessary.  The math is undeniable.

shorts, i’m surprised at you! with wreav the choice is extremely obvious, but with both wrex and bakara alive, i think the ethical question posed is much more gray. it’s certainly not so cut-and-dried to be ‘undeniable’

like, the entire point in the first place is that the salarians’ math was bad—or more accurately, incalculable. salarans didn’t take into account the cultural decay that the genophage caused, which meant that despite birth rates being exactly what they predicted, the krogan were killing themselves into slow extinction

that kind of cultural phenomenon is impossible to predict mathematically, and considering the revolutionary ideas coming out of clan urdnot, dismissing it yet again in favor of pure math is… at the very least, gonna net you an incomplete hypothesis

at worst, it’s needless genocide

I’m not talking about their “Krogan are warlike” math.  That is dubious.

I’m talking about their “unmodified krogans lay 1000 eggs per clutch and each krogan lives a thousand years” maths.

Before they were uplifted by the Salarians, the hostile environment of Tuchanka ended up killing off most of them, in amounts comparable to the ones the genophage kills off.  That’s kind of the whole point of the genophage, to re-create the hostile conditions that kept the krogan birthrate in check.

Even if the krogan suddenly become the least warlike species in the galaxy they’ll soon need to expand dramatically. 

And I really don’t think it’s as gray as you’re saying.  Wrex the “Revolutionary Moderate” makes repeated references to an imminent need for a policy of lebensraum. 

The genophage is, as Mordin argued in Mass Effect 2, an elegant and restrained solution to a really difficult problem they created.  But the Mass Effect writers love deploying pathos tactically when they decide they want us to feel extra bad about it.  Personally, Mordin’s new take on it in ME3 seems far more like it’s about an old man concerned with his legacy than any authentic re-evaluation of the policy.

Deciding to keep the genophage in place isn’t really something anyone ought to feel good about, but like I said, maths.

Mordin dies if you betray the Krogan too, you just shoot him.

Fooling Wrex was hard, but necessary.  The math is undeniable.