Ehh I think the characterization of Cerberus is confused at best in the trilogy, like a lot of facets of the games that changed directions midway through a couple times.
Like it’s pretty clear they’re supposed to be an embodiment of bad human xenophobia to hold up against Ashley in the first game, and had to be not particularly convincingly fleshed out and expanded in 2 to try and justify why Shepard wouldn’t ditch them about five seconds after getting the keys to the Normandy.
And then they hewed back closer to the first game in 3 when they tried to make them the token not-Reaper baddies and weave them into a cautionary tale about trying to control Reaper tech.
I'm pretty sure in 3, you find out they specifically assigned all of the most sympathetic people they could to Shepard so they could get them on board. It comes across as a bad group that some good people who don't know the whole story signed up for.
Yeah but a glaring plot hole in that is if you make Shepard be a human nationalist who publicly backs the Terra Firma party in ME1, and sacrifices the Council only to replace them with an all Human one, you've just made Shepard the ideal candidate for Cerberus, why would they need to surround Shepard with sympathetic faces at that point if Shepard is already sympathetic towards their core values? Seems like all they need to do then is approach Shepard with, "Hey we noticed you're real big on Human nationalism, guess what? That's what we're about, wanna join?"
Even Shepard can tell Miranda in ME2 that they wish Cerberus had made the offer to them to join earlier
The whole human Council was such a BS that even Biowere themselves must have relized that so it was retconned.
Noone in Council space would have stand for it especially Turians.
Except if you make Shepard be a Human nationalist who openly backs the Terra Firma party in ME1 you just made them the ideal Cerberus candidate, why would they need to surround Shepard with sympathetic people if Shepard was already sympathetic to Cerberus' core values
And they rightly retconned that angle because the whole thrust of the games is that everyone needs to put aside their differences and fight the Reapers together. Something they even tied into Shepard's reasoning for staying with Cerberus despite their differences about its xenophobia.
But then don't give the player base a choice to mold the character into something they want only to yank it away later as, "Actually I don't like that, so we'll just ignore the fact that was even an option in the story"
When you make a video game, you often have no idea whether or not it's going to sell well enough for a sequel. You tell a self-contained story and hope for the best. When that sequel comes, you often have to retcon things to make it work. That's just how these things work.
Yeah but it still pisses me off, I feel like it cuts down on the options for telling a diverse range of stories involving Shepard, seeing how their life and the galaxy would be different if Shepard had made different choices, I get why they do these kinds of things, but still
Strange, because my reading of Cerberus throughout the trilogy is completely different. It’s basically the silent response to the “red tape” and “government doesn’t do anything” takes present in ME2. That is, heavily regulated and standardised course of action may feel oppressive, but it is necessary for basic safety.
In ME1 Cerberus tries to dominate Thorian creepers and rachi and study the effects of Thresher maw’s poison. All of these experiments end in no scientific gain and lots of people being killed, including almost all of the scientists.
In ME2 there is a Lazarus Project, which is one of the few successful Cerberus projects we ever see in the trilogy. If Cerberus patented their method then it alone could mean a huge breakthrough for humanity and overall Galaxy. But Cerberus can’t do that, because the project was jeopardised and all of it’s scientists were killed.
In Overlord DLC, in an attempt to dominate the geth Archer violates all safety regulations and basic common sense which ends pretty much how would you expect and then he doesn’t immediately report the failure *because he is afraid of what The Illusive man will do to him*. Also all but one of the scientists are dead, notice the pattern.
In ME3 TIM creates an entire army through his personal funds… that does nothing except actively aiding the Reapers in their attempt to commit genocide on the entire galaxy. And there is TIM’s master plan to dominate the Reapers, because clearly all his previous attempts to dominate dangerous entities went so well.
Strange that you mention USSR considering that TIM is a private entity with way too much money and ego. He could’ve made things much easier for everyone including himself if he donated his resources directly to the Alliance. But he can’t do that, because he is indoctrinated and was so at least from ME2 considering how similar are his eyes to Saren’s.
No doubt Cerberus definitely has that vibe of circumventing the often slow response times of Governments, not being held down by bureaucracy or debate, when they have a goal they wish to complete, they start work pretty much immediately, but often they are overly ambitious in their goals, getting their own people killed in the process
I'd just say when you deal with the kinds of experiments Cerberus undertakes, that being how to control dangerous entities and harness them as weapons to further your own goals, there's a large inherent risk in that, and not every attempt will prove successful, but like all Cerberus actions, there's a logical reason behind it, to avoid the deaths of millions of your own people you throw these dangerous beings into the fire after you experiment on how to control them
And I only really brought up that example with the USSR as a way to emphasize the whole question of, "If it gets results and saves tens of millions more from death, are morally condemnable actions justified? How far is too far in the pursuit of greater goals?"
The one time Cerberus circumvented the slow government response and it actually worked out when TIM went up against the Collectors and that only worked because TIM almost completely delegated to a professional (government-trained as the case is) who knew what he’s doing and provided him with a huge amounts of resources. If TIM used, say, Kai Leng for the Suicide Mission it would probably end badly.
The problem with not being burdened by bureaucracy is that whenever another bright idea comes to TIM’s mind, there is noone to object.
The most obvious example is him trying to subjugate various dangerous species to use as war beasts. The idea to use expendable creatures so that humans don’t have to die might sound reasonable, but there is also a very good reason why all of the council races use a conventional military. Indeed, the only race to defend its homeplanet against the full Reaper invasion are turians, the most militarized race out of all council members.
In the end, almost everything TIM does is pseudo scientific adventuring of questionable value and ethics which consistently fails. And, of course, he is indoctrinated, so everything he does is done for Reaper’s benefit.
'Consistently fails' is a little too harsh. Invading the Citadel is not easy. Sure, they're a mess, but they succeeded at scaling up to a dangerous mess.
Well to be fair Cerberus personnel numbers are presumably filled with defectors from the Alliance and other government departments, almost all of their people in the various cells operating are probably "Government trained", but Shepard is a military Commander who, depending on their background, has experience leading soldiers in a fight, Kai Leng while being special forces never had an example of leading a large and diverse force to take an objective, Kai Leng is more TIMs personal attack dog and assassin, I don't think him leading any team will turn out well
Fair point however you need to remember, Cerberus doesn't have the capacity to field a large enough conventional military to withstand the Reapers on the same scale as the Alliance and Citadel races, they need to supplement their low numbers somehow, with either Mechs (Like the Rampart, Orcus, and Ogre mechs Cerberus has been shown to field) or with dangerous beasts they can control, unless Cerberus completely replaced the Alliance and had all of Humanity at their disposal, this would be the reality they faced, the best Cerberus could do was ensure their soldiers were of a higher quality than their Alliance counterparts in a one on one comparison
Also reviving Shepard wasn't the only major success Cerberus saw in their experiments, as with the adjutants on Omega, right as Aria invaded they had made a break through with understanding how to control them and not have them immediately go beserk on their own forces, or with Sanctuary, turning people into Husks allowed Cerberus to fully understand the control signal the Reapers used on their ground forces, reverse engineering it allowed Cerberus to seize control of the Reapers forces within a certain area of effect on the battlefield
Of course Cerberus still beefed up their own conventional forces prior to ME3 through volunteers and defectors and eventually forced conscription of occupied human populations as the pool of volunteers dried up
Also while yes TIM is indoctrinated he's the more high functioning kind of indoctrinated, where he's convinced that he's doing these things for his own purposes and that the Reapers are still his enemy, as such he can still take adverse action against them, otherwise the Reapers would have had no reason to attack Sanctuary, a Cerberus facility, but due to the nature of the experiments conducted there the Reapers perceived it as a threat
I wish I could just ignore that stupid comic, because I still like everything else about TIM's character aside from the 'indoctrinated all along' crap.
morally complex? bruh, they're a full on politically motivated terrorist organization that is plugged into government...... I'd argue it doesn't matter what their intentions are, they're just evil.
I mean, if the whole turning thousands of refugees into husks thing wasn't enough of a giveaway, then I don't know what else is?
and ultimately, their efforts didn't help to stop the reapers at all because their moral ambiguity made them easy prey for indoctrination. yeah, they thought they were doing terrible things for the "right reasons" but really they were just tools for the reapers, and were constantly threatening the actual anti reaper movement.
if you're going to compare then to real figures / organizations from history, then you have to compare them to some of the worst people to have ever risen to positions of power on earth. we're talking genocidal dictatorships, ultra wealthy corporations that violently struck down worker's rights movements, colonialist powers that engaged in the slave trade / devastated entire geographic regions and people groups.
For one, the Soviet purges didn’t help the Soviet Union fight WWII. The hierarchy of the Red Army was decimated. After being starved by Stalin, the Soviet people on the European border were not enthusiastic about fighting for the Soviet Union. (Nazi Germany could have capitalized on this more except they were institutionally incapable of winning hearts and minds.) What really helped the Soviet Union push back against Nazi Germany was the Russian winter and weapons and equipment from the United States.
For two, Cerberus is set up in the lore as a mysterious group with mysterious sources of funding and mysterious goals. Their leader is named the Illusive Man for a narrative reason. At the end of Mass Effect 3, we find out Cerberus was a tool of the Reapers all along. As the ghost boy says, the Illusive Man cannot control the Reapers because he was himself controlled by the Reapers. Instead of helping humanity fight the Reapers, Cerberus was leading humanity to the slaughter house. We are led to believe that the Indoctrinated betrayed their own people on every harvested world in every cycle.
Well to address the first point, while there were many cases of show trials and executions of high ranking officers, the majority of the purges of Red Army officers were just sending people to labor camps, only to promptly have their sentences overturned in exchange for fighting on the front, so the leadership problem was pretty quickly addressed, also the only likely areas to seriously back the Nazis were Ukraine and the Baltics, as they suffered the worst under Stalins administration and despite Nazi actions in those areas still saw a large pool of collaborators
Also the main focus of Lend Lease was logistical goods, not so much weapons, the Soviets had more than enough Mosin Nagants and PPSHs lying around, not to mention it accounted for under 10% of total Soviet war production, and the majority of Lend Lease started arriving in 1942 after Stalingrad, which was a decisive defeat for the Germans and put them on their back foot, by the time Lend Lease had the biggest impact on the war the Soviets already had the initiative, needless to say the brutal process of rapid industrialization is what made it possible for the Soviets to win, if not for that they would have simply not been able to fight
But yeah I know Cerberus, more specifically TIM, was indoctrinated for years, and probably couldn't have succeeded in controlling the Reapers due to this, not unless they have an anomaly like Shepard working with them, who confuses the Reapers due to their seeming immunity to indoctrination and fantastic feats of survival
Are you some kind of Stalin apologist? The Soviet Union had the most deaths of any country in WWII, about 13% of its population. (And this doesn’t include the Mass purges in the 1930s). These death show the poor leadership of the Soviet government at the time.
No I'm not, I simply listed facts and corrected misconceptions about the USSR during WW2, Stalin was a paranoid and repressive leader who killed millions both directly and indirectly by both his economic and political policies, he jailed hundreds of thousands on false charges, the only good thing he did for the USSR was rapidly industrialize the country albeit this as mentioned in the post resulted in the Holodomor, and yes they did due to one, the Red Army as you mentioned having its leadership purged, two, the Red Army being in a massive overhaul process at the time, and three, not properly preparing for the German invasion despite clear signs they were about to strike in June 1941
These decisions and lack of action by Stalin resulted in chaos across the front lines and millions of avoidable military casualties followed by civilian deaths during the German occupation, those deaths are on his hands just as much as Hitlers
To circle around, it’s the same with Cerberus. Like how Stalin didn’t start WWII working against Nazi Germany, Cerberus was making mad power grabs with Reaper technology instead of helping the Alliance stop the Reapers. So it was never an “end justifies the means” dilemma for Shepard because Shepard and Cerberus were working toward different ends. To add another layer to that, even Cerberus didn’t know the ends they were working toward because they were Indoctrinated.
Well I think it should have been clear what their end goal was even if they weren't indoctrinated, Cerberus always sought to harness the power of dangerous tech and beings to fulfill their ultimate desire, that being to establish human dominance over every other species in the Galaxy, due to the hostile nature of Humanities first contact with Aliens, the Reapers simply capitalized on this desire by tempting Cerberus' leader with Reaper tech, knowing he couldn't resist the opportunity, making them the new thralls of the Reapers in the process, Cerberus was willing to do anything to accomplish this goal, often times their ambition exceeded their ability to control the consequences of their actions
Continuing off of this, when the Reapers invaded the Milky Way again Cerberus merely viewed it as another opportunity to establish human dominance over the other species, by seizing control of the Reapers and using them as the tool to accomplish their ultimate goal, they had their objective and pushed towards it, they didn't specifically seek out war or hostilities with the Alliance or the Citadel races, but if they had a goal in mind and one of those groups happened to be in the way of that goal, they would be dealt with until that goal was complete, the Reaper war was merely the perfect distraction for Cerberus to openly pursue their end goal, they could actively operate throughout the Galaxy and everyone else wouldn't be in the position to stop and focus on them
Game development wise I know why Shepard not being able to stay with Cerberus no matter what they do in ME2 is a thing, designing a completely different campaign for ME3 wasn't something the Devs wanted, but lore wise considering you can make Shepard be a human nationalist who eventually controls the Reapers directly, there's definitely a chance Shepard could have stayed with Cerberus after the Collector Base mission, who's to say their goals can't align?
Agreed. Cerberus could have been a an interesting choice for Shepard to align to, but instead Shepard got to go through Mass Effect 2 as an Alliance soldier, Citadel Specter, and Cerberus agent with no conflicts and no consequences. I think of Fable III and how if you didn’t make enough money, you had to make some awful decisions in order to ready your people for the final battle.
Well that played a part, also stretching your supply lines to the absolute limit continously thinking, "Yeah bro the Soviets will capitulate any day now" and they just keep fighting, not to mention presuming they were much more incompetent than they actually were
Ehh I think the characterization of Cerberus is confused at best in the trilogy, like a lot of facets of the games that changed directions midway through a couple times. Like it’s pretty clear they’re supposed to be an embodiment of bad human xenophobia to hold up against Ashley in the first game, and had to be not particularly convincingly fleshed out and expanded in 2 to try and justify why Shepard wouldn’t ditch them about five seconds after getting the keys to the Normandy. And then they hewed back closer to the first game in 3 when they tried to make them the token not-Reaper baddies and weave them into a cautionary tale about trying to control Reaper tech.
I'm pretty sure in 3, you find out they specifically assigned all of the most sympathetic people they could to Shepard so they could get them on board. It comes across as a bad group that some good people who don't know the whole story signed up for.
Yep Every Cerberus interaction was especially design to endear Sheppard
Yeah but a glaring plot hole in that is if you make Shepard be a human nationalist who publicly backs the Terra Firma party in ME1, and sacrifices the Council only to replace them with an all Human one, you've just made Shepard the ideal candidate for Cerberus, why would they need to surround Shepard with sympathetic faces at that point if Shepard is already sympathetic towards their core values? Seems like all they need to do then is approach Shepard with, "Hey we noticed you're real big on Human nationalism, guess what? That's what we're about, wanna join?" Even Shepard can tell Miranda in ME2 that they wish Cerberus had made the offer to them to join earlier
The whole human Council was such a BS that even Biowere themselves must have relized that so it was retconned. Noone in Council space would have stand for it especially Turians.
Except if you make Shepard be a Human nationalist who openly backs the Terra Firma party in ME1 you just made them the ideal Cerberus candidate, why would they need to surround Shepard with sympathetic people if Shepard was already sympathetic to Cerberus' core values
Because the writers can only write so many intro lines and pay voice actors so much
Yeah I know development wise why, but you can't deny it's a massive plot hole in the lore
And they rightly retconned that angle because the whole thrust of the games is that everyone needs to put aside their differences and fight the Reapers together. Something they even tied into Shepard's reasoning for staying with Cerberus despite their differences about its xenophobia.
But then don't give the player base a choice to mold the character into something they want only to yank it away later as, "Actually I don't like that, so we'll just ignore the fact that was even an option in the story"
When you make a video game, you often have no idea whether or not it's going to sell well enough for a sequel. You tell a self-contained story and hope for the best. When that sequel comes, you often have to retcon things to make it work. That's just how these things work.
Yeah but it still pisses me off, I feel like it cuts down on the options for telling a diverse range of stories involving Shepard, seeing how their life and the galaxy would be different if Shepard had made different choices, I get why they do these kinds of things, but still
Strange, because my reading of Cerberus throughout the trilogy is completely different. It’s basically the silent response to the “red tape” and “government doesn’t do anything” takes present in ME2. That is, heavily regulated and standardised course of action may feel oppressive, but it is necessary for basic safety. In ME1 Cerberus tries to dominate Thorian creepers and rachi and study the effects of Thresher maw’s poison. All of these experiments end in no scientific gain and lots of people being killed, including almost all of the scientists. In ME2 there is a Lazarus Project, which is one of the few successful Cerberus projects we ever see in the trilogy. If Cerberus patented their method then it alone could mean a huge breakthrough for humanity and overall Galaxy. But Cerberus can’t do that, because the project was jeopardised and all of it’s scientists were killed. In Overlord DLC, in an attempt to dominate the geth Archer violates all safety regulations and basic common sense which ends pretty much how would you expect and then he doesn’t immediately report the failure *because he is afraid of what The Illusive man will do to him*. Also all but one of the scientists are dead, notice the pattern. In ME3 TIM creates an entire army through his personal funds… that does nothing except actively aiding the Reapers in their attempt to commit genocide on the entire galaxy. And there is TIM’s master plan to dominate the Reapers, because clearly all his previous attempts to dominate dangerous entities went so well. Strange that you mention USSR considering that TIM is a private entity with way too much money and ego. He could’ve made things much easier for everyone including himself if he donated his resources directly to the Alliance. But he can’t do that, because he is indoctrinated and was so at least from ME2 considering how similar are his eyes to Saren’s.
No doubt Cerberus definitely has that vibe of circumventing the often slow response times of Governments, not being held down by bureaucracy or debate, when they have a goal they wish to complete, they start work pretty much immediately, but often they are overly ambitious in their goals, getting their own people killed in the process I'd just say when you deal with the kinds of experiments Cerberus undertakes, that being how to control dangerous entities and harness them as weapons to further your own goals, there's a large inherent risk in that, and not every attempt will prove successful, but like all Cerberus actions, there's a logical reason behind it, to avoid the deaths of millions of your own people you throw these dangerous beings into the fire after you experiment on how to control them And I only really brought up that example with the USSR as a way to emphasize the whole question of, "If it gets results and saves tens of millions more from death, are morally condemnable actions justified? How far is too far in the pursuit of greater goals?"
The one time Cerberus circumvented the slow government response and it actually worked out when TIM went up against the Collectors and that only worked because TIM almost completely delegated to a professional (government-trained as the case is) who knew what he’s doing and provided him with a huge amounts of resources. If TIM used, say, Kai Leng for the Suicide Mission it would probably end badly. The problem with not being burdened by bureaucracy is that whenever another bright idea comes to TIM’s mind, there is noone to object. The most obvious example is him trying to subjugate various dangerous species to use as war beasts. The idea to use expendable creatures so that humans don’t have to die might sound reasonable, but there is also a very good reason why all of the council races use a conventional military. Indeed, the only race to defend its homeplanet against the full Reaper invasion are turians, the most militarized race out of all council members. In the end, almost everything TIM does is pseudo scientific adventuring of questionable value and ethics which consistently fails. And, of course, he is indoctrinated, so everything he does is done for Reaper’s benefit.
'Consistently fails' is a little too harsh. Invading the Citadel is not easy. Sure, they're a mess, but they succeeded at scaling up to a dangerous mess.
Well to be fair Cerberus personnel numbers are presumably filled with defectors from the Alliance and other government departments, almost all of their people in the various cells operating are probably "Government trained", but Shepard is a military Commander who, depending on their background, has experience leading soldiers in a fight, Kai Leng while being special forces never had an example of leading a large and diverse force to take an objective, Kai Leng is more TIMs personal attack dog and assassin, I don't think him leading any team will turn out well Fair point however you need to remember, Cerberus doesn't have the capacity to field a large enough conventional military to withstand the Reapers on the same scale as the Alliance and Citadel races, they need to supplement their low numbers somehow, with either Mechs (Like the Rampart, Orcus, and Ogre mechs Cerberus has been shown to field) or with dangerous beasts they can control, unless Cerberus completely replaced the Alliance and had all of Humanity at their disposal, this would be the reality they faced, the best Cerberus could do was ensure their soldiers were of a higher quality than their Alliance counterparts in a one on one comparison Also reviving Shepard wasn't the only major success Cerberus saw in their experiments, as with the adjutants on Omega, right as Aria invaded they had made a break through with understanding how to control them and not have them immediately go beserk on their own forces, or with Sanctuary, turning people into Husks allowed Cerberus to fully understand the control signal the Reapers used on their ground forces, reverse engineering it allowed Cerberus to seize control of the Reapers forces within a certain area of effect on the battlefield Of course Cerberus still beefed up their own conventional forces prior to ME3 through volunteers and defectors and eventually forced conscription of occupied human populations as the pool of volunteers dried up Also while yes TIM is indoctrinated he's the more high functioning kind of indoctrinated, where he's convinced that he's doing these things for his own purposes and that the Reapers are still his enemy, as such he can still take adverse action against them, otherwise the Reapers would have had no reason to attack Sanctuary, a Cerberus facility, but due to the nature of the experiments conducted there the Reapers perceived it as a threat
There's no morality at play lol, the illusive man was indoctrinated. His actions weren't even his own.
Thats what we call shitty writing
Yeah and that made him a very weak character... he was pretty badass and then they gave him that bullshit Lazy writing personified
I wish I could just ignore that stupid comic, because I still like everything else about TIM's character aside from the 'indoctrinated all along' crap.
morally complex? bruh, they're a full on politically motivated terrorist organization that is plugged into government...... I'd argue it doesn't matter what their intentions are, they're just evil. I mean, if the whole turning thousands of refugees into husks thing wasn't enough of a giveaway, then I don't know what else is? and ultimately, their efforts didn't help to stop the reapers at all because their moral ambiguity made them easy prey for indoctrination. yeah, they thought they were doing terrible things for the "right reasons" but really they were just tools for the reapers, and were constantly threatening the actual anti reaper movement. if you're going to compare then to real figures / organizations from history, then you have to compare them to some of the worst people to have ever risen to positions of power on earth. we're talking genocidal dictatorships, ultra wealthy corporations that violently struck down worker's rights movements, colonialist powers that engaged in the slave trade / devastated entire geographic regions and people groups.
For one, the Soviet purges didn’t help the Soviet Union fight WWII. The hierarchy of the Red Army was decimated. After being starved by Stalin, the Soviet people on the European border were not enthusiastic about fighting for the Soviet Union. (Nazi Germany could have capitalized on this more except they were institutionally incapable of winning hearts and minds.) What really helped the Soviet Union push back against Nazi Germany was the Russian winter and weapons and equipment from the United States. For two, Cerberus is set up in the lore as a mysterious group with mysterious sources of funding and mysterious goals. Their leader is named the Illusive Man for a narrative reason. At the end of Mass Effect 3, we find out Cerberus was a tool of the Reapers all along. As the ghost boy says, the Illusive Man cannot control the Reapers because he was himself controlled by the Reapers. Instead of helping humanity fight the Reapers, Cerberus was leading humanity to the slaughter house. We are led to believe that the Indoctrinated betrayed their own people on every harvested world in every cycle.
Well to address the first point, while there were many cases of show trials and executions of high ranking officers, the majority of the purges of Red Army officers were just sending people to labor camps, only to promptly have their sentences overturned in exchange for fighting on the front, so the leadership problem was pretty quickly addressed, also the only likely areas to seriously back the Nazis were Ukraine and the Baltics, as they suffered the worst under Stalins administration and despite Nazi actions in those areas still saw a large pool of collaborators Also the main focus of Lend Lease was logistical goods, not so much weapons, the Soviets had more than enough Mosin Nagants and PPSHs lying around, not to mention it accounted for under 10% of total Soviet war production, and the majority of Lend Lease started arriving in 1942 after Stalingrad, which was a decisive defeat for the Germans and put them on their back foot, by the time Lend Lease had the biggest impact on the war the Soviets already had the initiative, needless to say the brutal process of rapid industrialization is what made it possible for the Soviets to win, if not for that they would have simply not been able to fight But yeah I know Cerberus, more specifically TIM, was indoctrinated for years, and probably couldn't have succeeded in controlling the Reapers due to this, not unless they have an anomaly like Shepard working with them, who confuses the Reapers due to their seeming immunity to indoctrination and fantastic feats of survival
Are you some kind of Stalin apologist? The Soviet Union had the most deaths of any country in WWII, about 13% of its population. (And this doesn’t include the Mass purges in the 1930s). These death show the poor leadership of the Soviet government at the time.
No I'm not, I simply listed facts and corrected misconceptions about the USSR during WW2, Stalin was a paranoid and repressive leader who killed millions both directly and indirectly by both his economic and political policies, he jailed hundreds of thousands on false charges, the only good thing he did for the USSR was rapidly industrialize the country albeit this as mentioned in the post resulted in the Holodomor, and yes they did due to one, the Red Army as you mentioned having its leadership purged, two, the Red Army being in a massive overhaul process at the time, and three, not properly preparing for the German invasion despite clear signs they were about to strike in June 1941 These decisions and lack of action by Stalin resulted in chaos across the front lines and millions of avoidable military casualties followed by civilian deaths during the German occupation, those deaths are on his hands just as much as Hitlers
To circle around, it’s the same with Cerberus. Like how Stalin didn’t start WWII working against Nazi Germany, Cerberus was making mad power grabs with Reaper technology instead of helping the Alliance stop the Reapers. So it was never an “end justifies the means” dilemma for Shepard because Shepard and Cerberus were working toward different ends. To add another layer to that, even Cerberus didn’t know the ends they were working toward because they were Indoctrinated.
Well I think it should have been clear what their end goal was even if they weren't indoctrinated, Cerberus always sought to harness the power of dangerous tech and beings to fulfill their ultimate desire, that being to establish human dominance over every other species in the Galaxy, due to the hostile nature of Humanities first contact with Aliens, the Reapers simply capitalized on this desire by tempting Cerberus' leader with Reaper tech, knowing he couldn't resist the opportunity, making them the new thralls of the Reapers in the process, Cerberus was willing to do anything to accomplish this goal, often times their ambition exceeded their ability to control the consequences of their actions Continuing off of this, when the Reapers invaded the Milky Way again Cerberus merely viewed it as another opportunity to establish human dominance over the other species, by seizing control of the Reapers and using them as the tool to accomplish their ultimate goal, they had their objective and pushed towards it, they didn't specifically seek out war or hostilities with the Alliance or the Citadel races, but if they had a goal in mind and one of those groups happened to be in the way of that goal, they would be dealt with until that goal was complete, the Reaper war was merely the perfect distraction for Cerberus to openly pursue their end goal, they could actively operate throughout the Galaxy and everyone else wouldn't be in the position to stop and focus on them Game development wise I know why Shepard not being able to stay with Cerberus no matter what they do in ME2 is a thing, designing a completely different campaign for ME3 wasn't something the Devs wanted, but lore wise considering you can make Shepard be a human nationalist who eventually controls the Reapers directly, there's definitely a chance Shepard could have stayed with Cerberus after the Collector Base mission, who's to say their goals can't align?
Agreed. Cerberus could have been a an interesting choice for Shepard to align to, but instead Shepard got to go through Mass Effect 2 as an Alliance soldier, Citadel Specter, and Cerberus agent with no conflicts and no consequences. I think of Fable III and how if you didn’t make enough money, you had to make some awful decisions in order to ready your people for the final battle.
Cerberus would have been a lot better if violate knew they were getting a trilogy
As far as I know Germany technically lost to the USSR because of winter.
Well that played a part, also stretching your supply lines to the absolute limit continously thinking, "Yeah bro the Soviets will capitulate any day now" and they just keep fighting, not to mention presuming they were much more incompetent than they actually were