I'm mostly directing this to Herr Wozzeck and the other Mass Effect fans, but of course anyone with something to contribute is welcome to do so. I will warn you that the subject matter is a tiny bit incendiary for ME fans (and likely incomprehensible for anyone else), but since we're all a fair bit more grown up here than the average netizen I think we can keep it civil and constructive. I also wish this board allowed ITALICS, so that I could EMPHASIZE KEY PHRASES without sounding like I'm YELLING, but... well, one can't have everything.

Anyway. The POINT:

Many of the Mass Effect badfics we deal with here demonize Cerberus and its primary delegate, Miranda. And, being badfics, they do so in stark black, white, and urple morality. The are, as a result, roundly criticized by the PPC and other more discerning fans. This is, at the very least, consistent with ME2's canon, where Cerberus is, well, not REDEEMED exactly but at least upgraded from black to grey. But I for one think that this is the possibly unique confluence of events where Bioware's writers really, genuinely stuffed up (rare in and of itself) and the badficcers got it mostly RIGHT.

I'm all right with Cerberus taking morally gray actions (which I define rougly as anything a particularly Renegade-aligned Sheperd would be willing to do- the best example being the instant execution of "Wilson" at the beginning of 2). They're a morally gray entity, after all, and Sheperd is given a wide range of dialogue responses to either condone or condem what (s)he sees.

It's when Cerberus does something truly monstrous that things get weird- and by truly monsterous I mean truly MONSTEROUS. Experimenting on children, torturing people for relatively basic information, trying to enslave an entire race of sapient creatures... stuff even SAREN didn't do. Whenever these atrocities come up, the Illusive Man has the same answer: a branch of Cerberus went rogue, did something nasty without authorization, and was subsequently shut down.

I don't buy it. Cerberus is a powerful, centrally-led organization that more or less lives on information. Significant chunks of its constituency should not just be able to go out and commit, well, basically WAR CRIMES without authorization, and not be stopped until the damage is done. That would require a level of incompetence that TIM obviously does not possess.

Instead, I see only two explanations. TIM could just remain willfully ignorant of the goings on beneath him, either as a means of plausible deniability or because he just doesn't care enough to investigate: in that case, I'd still call him and his entire command structure culpable, because even if they didn't explicitly order atrocities committed they couldn't be bothered to use one iota of their significant power base to keep watch on their people or make the atrocities STOP. Alternatively, TIM may just be lying about the entire thing: we have NO independent proof that the war criminals weren't working directly for him, and the details of the "disavowal" (how did they manage to hide their activities, how much further they would have gone had they not been stopped, how the people involved were punished) are never revealed. Either way, the higher echelons of Cerberus are rotten, and you know what? The lower echelons of Cerberus are rotten too: the people directly involved in "rogue" activities seem to make up a substantial majority of all Cerberus operatives we see.

I cannot believe that Commander Sheperd would be fooled- heck, I saw through TIM in the first meeting with him, and Sheperd has WAY more experience with command ethics and war crimes than a 19-year-old kid with half a computer science degree. Given what they are revealed to be complicit in, even the orangest of Renegades would, I think, simply refuse to work with Cerberus. It certainly makes more sense than the existing denials, which I always found rather halfhearted.

Ok, from a gameplay perspective Cerberus vs. No Cerberus might be too big of a choice to make (although I think it could be done just by swapping Capt. Anderson for TIM in the debriefings and the Cerberus logos for Alliance ones), but 1) Forcing the choice to default to No Cerberus would I think exclude less of Sheperd's plausible moral spectrum than the alternative, and 2) Cerberus could always FORCE Sheperd to work for them (they had two years to install a kill switch of some kind), and it would still make sense so long as Sheperd called them out on both that and their actions. Ok, ok, this IS Commander Sheperd we're talking about here, so (s)he could probably defeat whatever coercion Cerberus employed with a minimum of effort, but that's just linear game-writing and doesn't require planning for different player choices.

So, to conclude all of this: Cerberus are THE BAD GUYS, still, and Sheperd should NOT be working for them. Still.

That includes Cerberus's resident operatives, Jacob and Miranda (I suppose also the entire Normandy crew, but I imagine that if they had to choose between Sheperd and Cerberus they'd almost universally pick Sheperd). Given that they are high-ranking officers in an organization that I'm convinced Sheperd would want no part in and actively oppose, I can't imagine they'd be allowed to operate as comrades the way they do in the game. My idea of appropriate choices for interaction would range from shooting either or both in the back at the earliest available opportunity to compelling them to quit through a good ol'-fashioned Paragon sermon. And since she's more loyal to Cerberus (and more important within it), Miranda would be more likely than Jacob to receive something along the lines of the former. Until they are converted or removed, Miranda and Jacob are the ENEMY, and should be treated with at least verbal hostility.

Let me close with this. I am not, by any means, condoning what the badficcers do to Cerberus, in which they pile on atrocity after atrocity in the most obvious manner possible, and then turn Miranda into a titanic jerk. Cerberus, and Miranda in particular, do not need to be MORE EVIL. They are plenty evil enough already. What they need is for more GOOD CHARACTERS to CALL THEM OUT ON IT.