Mass Effect’s Reapers are one of the great villains of fiction: at the surface they’re a technocratic sci-fi refurbish of certain time-tested cosmic horror mores, but today we’re looking one layer deeper, at the truly chilling concept of Reaper indoctrination – their process of turning and, to use a somewhat crude fantastical term, brainwashing their thralls – and how it’s so effective and scary. Not because it’s something the developers and writers invented out of whole cloth.
No, Reaper indoctrination is scary because, to craft it, the writers didn’t have to invent a single goddamned thing.
What really gets me about Reaper indoctrination is that it isn’t instantaneous. The slowness of the process is actually one of its most insidious elements. “Hey join up with the machine gods that annihilate all advanced life every 50,000 years” on the face of it would be a hard sell for even the most nihilistic, but it’s the degrees of difference that get you there in the end.
The means by which Reaper indoctrination occurs is basically physical; the in-game codex lore states that Reapers and their artifacts imprint on their victims via electromagnetic fields, infrasonic and ultrasonic noise and other subtleties, but the result is something far more than merely physical.
It is a form of brainwashing, but not in the way that most media depict it; it is not a binary flicked switch between controlled and free. It dances in shades of gray that lead inevitably to pitch black. And the thing about indoctrination is that it’s not fantastical. It’s even less science or chemistry, and more dark psychology.
Indoctrination is not a manifesto; it is sustained suggestion, repeated whispers intended to alter the way you think. Its victims believe with surety that they are coming to their decisions by their own free will. Even when fully aware of the dangers of indoctrination, they will insist they’ve guarded themselves against it, taken precautions. Saren and the Illusive Man truly believe to the end that they do what they do in service to the galaxy and to humanity, respectively, even as they walk the paths their Reaper overlords shepherd them on.
Throughout the trilogy, we see characters who have come into contact with Reaper artifacts rationalizing themselves step by step closer to complete subordination. Even before we learn she’s been indoctrinated, doctor Kenson in the Arrival arc regards Reaper artifacts with a certain amount of reverence, a respect for their antiquity that disregards their extreme danger. We see in a mid-indoctrination log of hers that she’s started to think it’s “foolish to assume the Reapers mean doom for the galaxy” in the teeth of all available evidence. She speaks of simply not knowing enough about what the Reapers want, as though the answer is to give them a seat at the table and a soapbox in the discourse for the destroy-all-organic-life party.
First you’re clear-headedly believing the Reapers must be destroyed. Then, after researching Reaper artifacts long enough, you start to think, maybe there’s some grander reason the Reapers perpetuate this cycle of extinction. Imagine all we could learn from them and their technology. Then you start to think, maybe aiming to destroy them is the wrong play. Then you start to think, but that would have to mean that the people fighting the Reapers are in the wrong. Don’t they have to be stopped? And before you know it, you’re dying in a shootout after trying to sabotage an Alliance munitions depot because you’ve been indoctrinated as a Reaper thrall, all while reasoning to yourself that you’re making these choices with a perfectly clear head.
That’s a scenario I invented off the cuff, yes, but it’s really not different in any meaningful way from the numerous side characters in Mass Effect whose slow indoctrination ends only when they do.
Now let’s take it a step closer to home. Instead of machine gods and the destruction of all advanced life, let’s say we’re talking about people being onboarded to supporting extreme politics, like, I don’t know, let’s say fascists. I know, I said I wouldn’t get political too frequently on here, but I think we’re on to something here with this single question:
What changes at all between Reaper indoctrination and political propaganda?
Or, to put it another way, how can breaking down Reaper indoctrination help us understand real-world indoctrination?
Oh, sure, the delivery method is different – words instead of subtle electromagnetic signals. (But then, what are words but signals perceived by the other party?) But look beyond the delivery method and concentrate on what’s being delivered.
Fascists can’t get most people there by rawdogging them right to centralization of powers in the executive, brutal suppression of outgroups, concentration camps, wanton corruption and all the other hallmarks of an evil regime. They need their agents among us to sow the seeds: media moguls and talking heads who gradually move the discourse farther and farther in a certain direction, making the unspeakable slowly more speakable, until flatly anti-human ideas are relocated from the darkest fringes to the center of the conversation, ratfucked into pseudo-validity by actors who may or may not consciously realize the extent to which they’re enabling this.
Mass Effect sets in on what in cosmic terms is the eve of the Reaper invasion. Vigil, the VI on Ilos, final testament of the previous extinction cycle, posits that the Reapers likely had agents moving about behind the scenes or hiding in plain sight in years past, indoctrinated by Sovereign, moving pieces in place to see to it that the galaxy was exactly as ill-fit to receive the Reapers as they wanted it to be.
I wonder how many incessantly dogged ‘centrists’, on podcasts or on news programs or at your own dinner table, have convinced themselves that what’s happening around them cannot be fascism, because they kinda support some of it and they don’t think of themselves as fascist. And yet they spout so many ideas that are just verbatim messaging from the extreme right that they have simply accepted as normal, while still believing absolutely that they remain in control of how they perceive the world. They’re indoctrinated agents.
How many journalists and news organizations refuse to divest themselves from the social media platform owned by a man whose affinity for Nazi ideology was apparent by his likes and retweets long before he seig heiled on the world stage, led the destruction of USAid and in doing so murdered oceans of people in such a staggering number that it is set to double that of the Holocaust by the end of this decade, and became the world’s leading purveyor of extreme-right propaganda on a near-daily basis?
It’s where the conversation is, they’ll tell you. It’s the global town square. It’s where the discourse is happening.
It’s also where that same mass murderer and Nazi has ratfucked the algorithm to prioritize and amplify far-right propaganda, the biggest voice of which is his. These people really think they’re generally in control of their browsing experience on X in 2026. But using it day by day, week by week, it’s actively and provably changing their brains, slowly powering down the parts that flash red flags at ever more atrocious ideas, subtly massaging acceptance of horrible things into an outright embrace of those same horrors. And…jesus, we’re right back to machines literally changing the brain chemistry of their organic thralls to embrace an anti-humanity agenda.
They’re Saren, sitting in Sovereign’s gut or Jack Harper, augmenting himself with Reaper tech and insisting loudly, to no one more than themselves, that they’ve got a handle on this. That nobody influences their thoughts but them.
And those journalists are writing the articles that disseminate the ostensible news of the world to the masses, they and their bosses deciding what angles to cover, how to cover them, what to simply stop talking about and what to bang on about. You could say their political mindset has a mass effect on society at large.
In Mass Effect, the brilliance of Reaper indoctrination is, as I said, the degrees of difference. That’s the thing that makes the slow-burn of indoctrination hit so close to home, because we’ve seen it play out for real in the years since the trilogy concluded.
First you’re clear-headedly believing that fascism is an enemy of humanity and must be destroyed. Then after spending long enough watching, say, gaming videos made by grifters who spent the better part of the 2010s laundering alt-right talking points into everything, you start to think, jeez, these social justice warriors really are trouble. Then the culture around those video makers you watch leads you to osmose and consume deeper, algorithms subtly tickering away in the background to craft a bubble that emphasizes more of what it thinks you want. You still think fascism is bad, you understand that the leader and his minions are indefensibly abhorrent, but there’s an increasingly loud side of your mind whose inky black shadows say, aren’t the excesses of wokeness just as bad? And then you think, maybe if we work with the far right, if we listen to them, let them in on the debates and give them a bigger platform, that’s only good, right? You believe in democracy and free speech, right? Then the inky shadows keep whispering. Things that a few years ago would have been correctly perceived as ridiculous lies start to make perfect sense. You find every excuse for an attempted fascist coup, for the centralization of powers in the executive, for the brutalization and oppression of outgroups. The leader and his minions have become something beautiful to you, something you’re thrilled over. You are a fascist, while reasoning with yourself that you still believe in liberal democracy, that you’ve made all these choices with a perfectly clear head.
And in my experience, the people who have lost themselves to this truly have no idea why they’re losing friends over what they see as a mere difference in politics, even as they cheer for secret police disappearing people into brutal concentration camps. Remember how the Illusive Man reverts to a defensive little twerp when you tell him on Thessia that he’s gotten too close to the enemy and let them influence his thinking: he says that he “Just…sees things differently”. As though a difference in thinking demands equal validity no matter what that difference is in substance. Sound similar to anyone you’ve tried to get through to about all this?
They revert to victimization because they are so indoctrinated that they have lost the ability to step outside of themselves and understand that what they stand for is the villain in our story. Maybe Legion had it right when it stated of Reaper-following geth, “They judge that forcing an invalid conclusion on us is preferable to a continued schism.”
I didn’t have to do it this way, falling right back into the net of current politics. I could have been looking at historical Nazi propaganda instead, or really any historical example of repeated propaganda grooming a populace to vote for monstrous politicians promising horrors. Given all this a sheen of clinical, historical objectivity. After all, when you strip away the cybernetic sheen of the Reapers or, well, X, old-school propaganda is the same, immuring a populace in repetitive messaging to alter brain chemistry, even if a Goebbels of the past wouldn’t have worded it that way.
But I’ve noticed many of the people who would agree, yes, to hell with historical Nazis, are much more accepting of the current ones. Because given time and distance, they can see historical Nazi propaganda for what it was, and the horrors for what they are, but in the ocean of modern propaganda, they’re so deep in that they’re the fish that can’t tell it’s wet. Unlike historical fascists (hell, Italy’s fascists in WWII were literally called Fascists), many supporters of today’s fascism literally do not believe they are fascists. They’re indoctrinated, for precisely the reasons I’ve been discussing. That’s the key difference that makes the slow creep of Reaper indoctrination, and its slow murder of self-awareness, compare more sharply.
I recall Mordin ruminating on how the Collectors, after being ship-of-Theseus’d over generations into the perfect thralls for the Reapers, have “no art, no culture”. And isn’t that always the story? Hitler loved Wagner, but his usage of Wagner’s music was appropriation of a thing that existed before Nazism. (I am aware of Wagner’s own troublesome stances.)
In our modern day, explicitly far-right outlets invariably end up falling flat on their face when they try to permeate the artistic sphere. Their music is shit; their movies are shit that advances their horrific views (have…have you seen anything financed by the Daily Wire?); every decent artistic thing they glom onto is appropriated from either outside or before their own ideological bubble. I consider far-right movements, in this way, to be not a culture, but an “anti-culture”, defined chiefly by the cultural elements that they hate rather than anything they can be said to create. (In terms of video games, outside of things like Call Of Duty doing military-industrial-complex cheerleading where American war crimes are presented as awesome, I can hardly even think of any noteworthy “far right games”. I can only think of one, and while I shall not utter its name here, it only supports my thesis of the fascist right as an anti-culture defined chiefly by its hatred rather than any ability to convincingly create.)
I also think of Legion stating that the geth are outside the Reapers’ plans because they are different than the Reapers, and will not be spared the coming extinction. Almost like the pseudo-religious heretic geth who followed Saren and the Reapers said ‘pick me’, but as we know, nobody who is Different will ever, in the end, be picked.
It’s also very interesting, I think, that when we parse through the layers of dreamlike unreality given to us during the ending, when we actually drill down and close-read what the ‘Starchild’ is telling us at the final choice, what we’re really witnessing is the source of indoctrination doing anything to save its own hide. Presenting as confident, but in fact framing the entire conversation in a way that is meant to gaslight Shepard, and by extension the player, into conceding that the Reapers are, maybe, sort of, kinda, not wrong. Notice how the Starchild does everything it can to make the Destroy option sound like the worst one, while goosing up Control and Synthesis as better, even existentially transcendent options; but if we dig into what Control and Synthesis actually mean, they are respectively coded to Jack Harper/the Illusive Man and Saren, two characters who we know for a fact were indoctrinated. Hell, by the time he died, Saren was so full of Reaper tech that it’s debatable if there was actually any of him left. And then there’s the fact that Synthesis literally turns Shepard into a husk as they’re being absorbed. The game is screaming at you that this is Bad End City no matter what the Starchild says.
However, Destroy is the only ending that leaves Shepard breathing in the rubble in your golden-timeline ending. In a very literal sense, the only way to survive is to reject the source of indoctrination, utterly and absolutely.
But the real-world metaphor of Reaper indoctrination falls short in one crucial way. When it comes to the indoctrinated villains of the trilogy, making the right conversation choices with them throughout the adventure can culminate in making Saren and the Illusive Man not so much have a change of heart, but become more self-aware that they are not immune to propaganda, to use a phrase from our culture, and that they have in fact been indoctrinated. Alas, the realization in both instances only gives them enough time in stark lucidity to refuse the Reapers by taking one of their pawns off the board – shooting themselves in the head. They are beyond saving.
I would like to ask you, when is the last time your conversations with someone who has been fully indoctrinated into the fascism du jour have yielded anything beyond frustration?
Because once we transition from the trilogy’s exhaustive lore and into the realm of things that have to be integrated into the gameplay, we’re thrust back to the understanding that Mass Effect is at the end of the day a video game. And while all this is evidence enough of the power of stories to capture, analyze, reveal and mirror aspects of our Earthly life, at the end of the day the game needs to be programmed to do certain things at certain times to keep the story moving, and in that sense it’s less…maddening than real humanity can be.
Because barring some very fortunate exceptions that prove the rule, the endstage of this kind of indoctrination in real life isn’t wresting back control of your decisions at the last; it’s having your brain changed to such an extent that any thought that breaks against dogma is immediately treated as heresy. Even if evidence is plopped into their lap that they are wrong, they will immediately manufacture a new reason why no, this evidence too must be a lie.
I think of Cerberus forces in Mass Effect 3: outright sabotaging and fighting against galactic efforts to stop the Reapers at every turn. Augmenting themselves with Reaper tech while insisting they are thinking in humanity’s best interests. But you, the player, and everyone else in-universe correctly identifies them as Reaper-aligned and fully indoctrinated.
And then I think of real life, how we’ve watched friends and family insist they’re not fascists or racists or xenophobes or bigots, even as they say such jaw-droppingly bigoted and fascistic things that it’s astonishing they’re too blind to see it. They’ve been indoctrinated by the degrees of difference until there’s no daylight between them and the things that have indoctrinated them.
Mass Effect presents a world where it is impossible for us as players to ignore the fact that the propaganda is coming from a source that, if it can indeed be said to exist in a remotely ‘human’ mindset as opposed to truly unknowable blue-and-orange morality, is ontologically evil. With this surety, we can pick apart and parse through the layers of what Reaper indoctrination does to its victims, and the separation between story and player affords us precious objectivity as we analyze it.
But in real life, when interacting with people who are well and truly indoctrinated in this way, we need to be able to parse out the difference between having a reasonable conversation, and letting ourselves be drawn into the same all-encompassing web of propaganda just by letting them talk and trying to pull us over to where they are.
What is my point in writing this? Maybe simply that Bioware did an amazing job at creating a fantastical one-degree-removed metaphor for how real world propaganda changes the brain, and why it’s so hard to get someone back when they’re captured by it. And, well, the past decade has yanked this issue to the fore in ways it just wasn’t back when the trilogy was going live.
The Mass Effect trilogy truly holds up. It’s one of the defining science fiction sagas of my generation, but beyond being a set of immense, epic video games, it has things to say that would be vindicated in all the worst ways by our future to come. So I’ll leave you by reminding us of all the characters in these games who stood face to face with Reapers and remained strong. The ones who didn’t give in. Ultimately, there were more of them. Enough to win.
The Mass Effect trilogy is available on all major gaming platforms in a shiny remaster called the Legendary Edition, which contains the complete journey, including all story DLC, much of which is some of the best DLC ever made (never mind how Shadow Of The Erdtree totally broke the curve of what constitutes great DLC, ME2 and 3’s DLC are still phenomenal). It’s one of those sagas you really should experience at least once. All screengrabs are from fuschelfu’s longplay of the series of Youtube. The ME trilogy is one of the very few games I’ve actually triple dipped for, the only others being Metroid Prime and Night In The Woods, that’s how much Mass Effect means to me, but I’ve never recorded my own footage of it. So thank you to that player.