Mass Effect’s iconic antagonists are masterpieces of design.

HEAVY MASS EFFECT SPOILERS (LIKE, SERIOUSLY).

Sound the inception horn: the reapers are coming.

And make no mistake - they are coming, whether you like it or not. Mass Effect’s antagonists are as relentless and inevitable as the tide, the seasons and death itself. There is an undeniable sense of dread that accompanies the omnipresent threat of these sentient spaceships, one that Bioware has expertly cultivated from a diverse pool of cultural and mythological ideas. The end result is a sci-fantasy pastiche of purest terror, an instant icon of villainy on par with Darth Vader and the Eye of Sauron.

In the Mass Effect universe, the reapers are a race of artificial intelligences. Their bodies are spaceships, kilometers in length. They are technologically superior to every other known race by, oh, a few hundred million years’ worth of advancement. They show up every fifty thousand years, “harvest” all civilization in the galaxy worthy of the name, then disappear. Fifty thousand years later, once organic life is sufficiently sophisticated, they return and begin the cycle all over again.

They are fucking terrifying.

The Fermi Paradox

If you’re not familiar with the concept of the Fermi Paradox, take a moment to get acquainted with this awesome video by In a Nutshell.

The (heavily simplified) essence of it is that if there were other sentient life in the galaxy, we’d have encountered it by now. There are several possibilities outlined in the video as to why we haven’t, but one stands out as particularly horrifying: an incredibly advanced (type 3) alien race exterminates civilizations once they reach a certain level of sophistication.

As a society we’ve been preoccupied with the idea of an alien invasion of Earth since H.G. Wells’ seminal “War of the Worlds” first captured the public imagination. Since then it's seen countless iterations. It plays on our fears of the unknown, of war and technology, and of being entirely outmatched in a life-or-death situation; the invasion of a type 3 species is pretty much the worst conceivable scenario.

All the more terrible because of the hint of plausibility implied by the Fermi Paradox, the reapers are at their base a crystallization of these fears on a massive scale.

The Lovecraft Factor

The anxious fiction of H.P. Lovecraft pioneered the cosmic horror genre. Its tenets are founded upon an overwhelming fear of the unknown and unknowable; the assertion that on the cosmic scale, we are so insignificant as to be meaningless, and if we ever were to gaze into the abyss, to come face to face with the incomprehensible horrors that exist outside of our own limited time and space, we would surely be driven mad.

The aesthetic influences of Lovecraft are plain to see in the reapers. Compare this image of Lovecraft’s most famous creation, Cthulu:

… with this one of Mass Effect’s own cosmic horrors:

Note in particular the tentacles, which provide an instant “otherness” that sets us ill-at-ease.

The Lovecraft factor goes beyond mere aesthetics, though. Consider this transcript from my favourite passage of dialogue in the game, the player’s first encounter with a Reaper (named Sovereign):

Sovereign: Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding.

Teammate: I don't think this is a VI*…

Sovereign: There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Sovereign.

…



Sovereign: Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything.

…



Sovereign: My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation - independent, free of all weakness. You cannot grasp the nature of our existence.

Commander Shepard: Where did you come from? Who built you?

Sovereign: We have no beginning. We have no end. We are infinite. Millions of years after your civilization has been eradicated and forgotten, we will endure.

*Virtual Intelligence.

The dialogue here illustrates that it’s not just how big, ugly and dangerous the reapers are that scares us... it’s the fact of their fundamentally unknowable nature. The fear of the reapers is the fear of a universe beyond our grasp, the fear of the infinite void, the fear of nothingness and death and the possibility of worse, lurking just outside of our perception. It’s the fear of madness, and the fear that madness is simply the only reasonable reaction to seeing the true, awful face of reality.

It’s worth noting that the delivery of these lines is excellent - the words wrap around the nervous system like cold hands, sending shivers down the spine.

This unsettling texture is layered upon the foundation of “plausible hostile alien invasion” fears, with the result of elevating them and colouring them truly frightful.

Galactic Skynet

There’s yet another level on which the reapers play with our collective cultural fears: they’re a classic example of the “A.I. gone wrong” trope.

There are countless examples in contemporary science fiction of artificial intelligences turning on their creators. They reflect the fear of usurpation by our children, of creating something beyond our control or understanding, of accidentally changing something we had supposed intrinsic to our nature or rendering ourselves obsolete, of becoming the source of our own doom - layer after layer after layer of anxieties are all meshed together in an implacable, resilient nemesis.

Mass Effect actually has more to say about artificial intelligence than “it’s scary”. Much more, in fact, which it explores wonderfully through the Geth… but that’s a discussion for another time.

The Grim

The cherry on top of this abominable layer cake is an age-old metaphor for death. The Grim Reaper is one of the most recognisable symbols in western culture, and it’s no coincidence that Mass Effect’s force-of-un-nature antagonists share its name. They simply can’t be stopped - even at the series’ much-maligned climax, it’s not a question of defeating the Reapers so much as coming to terms with them.

Thematic connections between the Reapers’ harvest and the Grim Reaper’s scythe aside, the real crux of this particular influence is inevitability. The game goes to great lengths to show that the Reapers are, above all, inevitable. They are death personified, and just as death comes for everyone eventually, the Reapers are coming for you.

And that’s why you should fear the Reapers.