I Am Legion, For We Are Many

Legion is one of my favourite characters in Mass Effect, though then again I could say the same for almost every character in Mass Effect (Except for Ashley...cause Ashley sucks). But Legion's storyline or in fact the entire species of the Geth has always stuck out to me as one of the best in the series and probably the best analysis of the self-aware robot storyline that we've seen been done so many times in things like The Matrix or Terminator. Now I should say this post is gonna contain multiple spoilers for Mass Effect 3 so if you haven't played the games then prepare to have a lot spoiled for you without much context to go on.

So we all know the basic robots take over storyline; people create robots, robots become self-aware, robots rebel, all hell breaks loose. But in Mass Effect, the story is told differently. Now it starts off fairly similar, people (In this case the Quarians) invent robots (The Geth) and the robots become self-aware, but here's where the story changes...the Geth don't initially rebel, the Quarians become aware of the....self-awareness...and decide to strike first, the Geth then fight back to defend themselves and for the most part, they won, but to everyone else's view the Geth are the bad guys because...well I guess they've seen Terminator, it's a fair enough assumption.

Now for the first two games, we buy it too, after all we've really only ever heard the story from the Quarians side and the Geth have been shooting us for 2 games straight. But in the third game, we learn the Geth's side of the story, we learn that they didn't strike first and they were just defending themselves, the Quarians just got paranoid because they probably saw Terminator too (good to know that's still a popular movie 150 years in the future). Now the Geth still don't technically have independent thought, as Legion puts it, the Geth are just one collective group of data that all use the vessels to move, hence the name Legion. But that doesn't mean they don't seek individuality, and that is Legion's goal, it wishes for the Geth to have their own Independence, from both the Quarians and from each other, it even goes as far as sacrifices itself so the rest of the Geth have independent thought just like an organic being. And this is so powerful that even the something as simple as a pronoun can completely change a conversation, Legion always referred to itself as "we" but just before it dies it says "I must go to them" and oh god, it is just so effective and goes to a level of depth that we don't get to see very often in these type of stories, and this isn't even the main storyline in ME3!

And the best part of all? Is that this entire storyline opens and closes with just one simple question that can create debate after debate of the deep meanings behind it and the question that Legion finally gets an answer too. "Does this unit have a soul?".

-Danny