She not ony interacts with Sovereign in the first game and Harbinger in the second, but also spends some time within a Reaper corpse. Shepard has been exposed to Reapers quite a bit throughout the series. Still with me? Let’s start testing this process against some game events. In extreme cases, the Reapers may “assume direct control” over the body of an indoctrinated individual, making it an undeniable agent of the Reapers.

The person being indoctrinated may feel like he or she is being watched, and eventually will begin to believe that the Reapers are sympathetic creatures who deserve all devotion. It begins usually through the exposure to a piece of a Reaper or other Reaper object, such as Object Rho. While the games never fully explain the exact methods employed by the Reapers to achieve this, through reading the codices and conversations with people who have been “liberated” from indoctrination, the experience is similar to that of hearing a whisper that you can’t ignore, compelling you to do things that you do not want to do. Indoctrination is the special brand of brainwashing that the Reapers employ in order to “convert” organics to their cause. I can’t mark them because they make up the entire article… Please note: I’ll be talking about the Mass Effect 3 endings, so beware spoilers. So I’m going to go through some ideas the IT poses, and then pose my patented “Athena’s Theory of Shepard’s Indoctrination.” While my ideas are a little different than those imposed by the IT (of course they are), there’s quite a bit of information out there on it, and a number of YouTube videos.

Imagine my delight when I searched the interwebs for any information on the possibility of an indoctrinated Shepard and saw that I wasn’t completely crazy other people thought this, too, and gave birth to the Indoctrination Theory (IT). More strange things started happening, until I played through the ending sequence (of the original, and then extended, endings), sat back, and thought to myself: And then I started (gasp) remembering events from previous games. And then a few more odd things graced the screen. But I tucked the information away and continued playing. So there I was, playing through Mass Effect 3, and I noticed some strange happenings in the game that didn’t really make sense. When I first started playing Mass Effect, I was very careful to not spoil the plot for myself, other than finding out that seemingly everyone hated the endings.

Mass effect 3 indoctrination theory