The legacy of the final debate on ‘Stranger Things’ dates back to ‘Mass Effect’

I chose a strange time to start playing again Mass Effect 3.

I’ve been revisiting Bioware’s beloved sci-fi shooter series over the past month and a half, trudging along. by stopping Saren in the original game and recruit an elite team to the suicide mission In Mass Effect 2but my part of the trilogy saw me start Mass Effect 3 at Christmas, just as Netflix dropped out the second volume of Stranger Things‘fifth and final season. A few weeks later, I’m working to stop the Quarians and Geth from killing each other on their homeworld, and Stranger Things fans, following a controversial series finale falling on New Year’s Eve, found themselves wrapped in layers of post-release interviews and a fervent belief that in reality, if you follow the right clues, a ninth and final secret “true ending” episode is imminent.

That was pretty much the case, and maybe it still is now. Even though I’m not a big guy Stranger Things personally follower, cries of “Conformity Gate”-and now “Documentary Theory” before next week’s release of One last adventurea behind-the-scenes analysis of the filming of the final season that some have begun to believe is a metatextual show within a show — were unmissable this week. Anticipation of a theorized release date for this secretive final installment came and went, setting off new waves of dismay as true believers — and social media scammers aspiring to keep the attention cycle going — proclaimed that there was still a chance, that Netflix’s claims to the contrary weren’t the opposite at all, and that you only have to guess the right flavor of fandom bigotry from a number in a picture here or a word in an Instagram comment there.

This fervor has attracted a lot of attention, questioning how and why these kinds of illusions begin in the first place. Was it Stranger Things‘ fault, after spending the better part of a decade training his devoted audience to look anywhere for clues, or was there another pop culture root cause we could blame? After all, Stranger Things is far from being the first series to arrive at a Overall unsatisfactory ending for its viewers. It’s also not the first to end in such a way, with such a devoted fan base, to make it seem like the ending couldn’t be bad. on purposehis weaknesses are so obvious that he must be the sign of a “real” end to come which would compensate for everything.

Some commentators have turned at the BBC Sherlockwhich ended in 2017 so messily that it sparked a similar wave of belief, inspired by the show’s predilection for mysteries and clues, that a new episode would be on the way. Others turned to the release of Justice League that same year, a notoriously compromised production which saw original director Zack Snyder leave the project and Joss Whedon attempt to pick up the pieces with terrible effect– although in this case the campaign for what would become the “Snyder Cut” would be triggered not only by the theorizing of fandom, but also by the fact that Snyder himself spent years insinuating its existence (four years, million dollarsand a desperate need for exclusive programming on Warner Bros’ new streaming service later they got their wish).

But I didn’t mention the Mass effect series in my introduction – if you go back just five years before any of these inflection points until the release of Mass effect 3you will see many more parallels with the situation with Stranger Things we have today.

When the culmination of Bioware’s RPG trilogy released in 2012, it did so with an ending that quickly became a source of hotly debated contempt. Tricky narrative steps into the game’s final act, which sees you with the intergalactic army you spent the rest of the time in. Mass Effect 3 the recruiting assault on Earth itself in an effort to free and ultimately defeat it from the synthetic apocalyptic threat of the sinister Reapers – and the end of a choice-and-consequence-driven series that, by and large, steered you towards one of three turns on a broadly similar conclusion saw fans almost immediately begin to scoff and hope in equal measure that this wasn’t what five years and over a hundred hours of gameplay on three games had actually built.

Teeth were gnashed, cupcakes were delivered to Bioware – at the time, a divisive, insignificant gesture that now comes across as charming and quaint after nearly a decade and a half of increasingly hostile fandom movements that have happened since – but something has started to break through the noise: the theory of indoctrination.

Named for the method of insidious mind control that the Reapers were able to use to captivate swathes of galactic agents and populations to ensure that their harvest of organic life could take place with the least resistance possible, the theory of indoctrination posited that Mass effectthe heroCommander Shepard, had slowly but surely become a victim of indoctrination himself since his first encounter with the Reaper Sovereign in the original game. Culminating with the completion of the indoctrination in Mass Effect 3During the final battle, the theory held that the supposed lack of clarity and plot holes in the game’s ending sequences, as well as the final choice of color coding not matching the series’ preferred color palette for “Paragon” (altruistic, collectivist) or “Renegade” (aggressive, independent) moralities, were an indication that the Reapers were lulling Shepard into a hallucinated state, preventing the Commander from making the choice to destroy them once and for all.

Once the indoctrination theory was first floated, it spread like wildfire, as fans looked back at the entire trilogy. to find supporting evidence and took it as definitive proof that Bioware was planning to sell fans on a “real” ending, bringing together all the frustrations and outrage people felt behind this body of so-called evidence. Bioware remained silent until three months after release, when the developer announced the “extended cut” a free downloadable expansion for the game that added new cutscenes and changed others in Mass Effect 3The culmination of, as well as providing a new epilogue, both to address some of the lack of clarity in the original footage and to offer a chance to put aside months of debate and expose what the developers’ original intention was for the series’ ending.

A year later, after much of the controversy surrounding the endings had been blunted by both the Extended Cut and the passage of time, Bioware ended its support for Mass Effect 3 with a separate paid DLC called Citadela less maudlin and jovial farewell to Mass effectA cast of characters that allows players to party with their favorite party members one last time. But even if this controversy arose (and the indoctrination theory still has its supporters, even after Bioware rejected it years later as never being an intentional reading of the series), its impact is still felt today.

In a way, this is part of the reason why we still see situations like that of Stranger Things did – whether they saw it as such or not – Bioware give Mass effect giving fans what they wanted, wanting to make things exist that weren’t originally planned, even if it wasn’t the form those initial fan theories presumed. This helped lay the groundwork for the fact that with enough speculation and enough public pressure, an unpleasant finale could become a little more palatable, even if not entirely remade. Although, in the end, it could have been better for the Mass effect saga – although, overall, we are I’m still really waiting to see the future of the series beyond Mass Effect 3The end of – the question of whether the relationship between a fandom and the people who created the works they love has improved is still, as this week shows, a work in progress.

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