Unlike my opinion on the genophage, it’s more difficult to take a side on the conflict between the geth and the quarian people. On one hand, the quarians did try to kill a newly sentient geth populace, but on the other, the geth did drive the quarians from their homeworld into a state of exile. Both responses were due to fear, and god knows humans have no room to point fingers there. We’ve done a lot of unconscionable things in the name of survival.

That being said, though? Fuck the quarians. Specifically their admiralty board. They chose to go to war with a technologically superior species when the Reapers were invading the galaxy for … reasons. If 1) I didn’t care about the war assets and, by extension, the final outcome of the game, 2) I didn’t care if Tali committed suicide out of grief while seeing her people being slaughtered, and 3) most of my Shepards didn’t believe in working together despite differences, I 100% would have sided with the geth in ME3. The quarians prove themselves to be too rash and short-sighted to be helpful (I’m looking at you, Han’Gerrel), and if the heretics were dealt with in ME2, the geth are consistently willing to fight against the Reapers with all of their might, given they weren’t under Reaper control.

Although my own attitude toward the geth started to change after meeting Legion in ME2, the recordings in the virtual geth city/construct are what sealed my opinion on this. Not only did the geth merely defend themselves during the Morning War, they allowed the remaining quarians to flee their system because no consensus could be reached on the short or long-term consequences of eliminating an entire species, something the quarians did not consider at any point.

If Shepard is able to broker peace, the geth offer an olive branch to help the quarians adapt to life on Rannoch, and the quarians are way more skeptical of this than they should be – it’s infuriating. Y’all remember you tried to kill them, right?

Art Credit: eTeknix