Reapers are actually … really fuck-ass creepy.

What you have to remember is that the Reaper form we see is much like … mm. A salarian Shieldbreaker, I guess. Only Harby is actually the entirety of his form. Every other Reaper is a stylized form of their race, sealed into the Leviathan form (for the Greater Reapers) or a mass of commingled racial slurry shoved into a pre-built warform (lesser and destroyer Reapers).

Harbinger claims it is an efficient shape, but of course he’s the arrogant intelligence of cuttlefish so fucking arrogant they actually thought they were God. In reality, he’s too stupid to figure out how to alter the forms the Catalyst came up with, since he doesn’t really UNDERSTAND the Godpower or Leviathan technology. (The process of turning a bunch of Old Ones into a Reaper robbed him of about ninety percent of their intellectual capacity, but left their arrogance and hubris intact.)

A Reaper is not an AI… nor is it organic. The best way to describe it is that the process that converts things to Reaper Slushy has several steps. The entirety of every being’s mental abilities — memory, knoweldge, and outlook — is scanned and mapped using Leviathan technology. The biological slurry is used to create a large scale organic supercomputer, which is then augmented heavily by Reaper technology, and the organic components ‘grow’ over and around this framework.

Using a form of time compression, teh entirety of the race’s gestalt intellect is shoved into the computer framework and aged — usually hundreds of thousands of years pass. The Reaper components perform a kind of indocitrination and brainwashing on the mass, carefully adjusting the collective memory and knowledge of the race. Each Reaper only has one personality — that of the exemplar of the species that was used as the most basic template.

Almost all of the time, this exemplar is the person who lead the fight against the Reapers. Nazara? Bastard used to be a champion of light before the Reapers beat him and his people down and made him into that.

Just like Javik. Just like Shepard.

But it’s worse than that. Harbinger, as part of the conversion process, exposes the newly formed Reaper mind to the full, mindshattering truths of the Godpower, forcing changes onto the gestalt to ‘see’ multiple dimensions. Even with the mental strength of entire races, many Reapers simply cannot handle such, and are driven insane.

The AI component, on the other hand, is modeled after Harbingers own mind…and basically rampant from the get go. Melded together, the resulting ‘mind’ is immensely powerful, highly emotional, tormented by fragments of a billion souls and driven by impulses it rarely understands.

As time passes, the ‘gestalt’ personality tends to warp further. Reapers believe themselves to be gods, and yet live in fear of the Darkness. This scism between thinking themselves allmighty and yet knowing they aren’t has only further made them unstable.

Understanding the mindset of a being so mentally twisted is … hard. Their ‘morality’ is so large-scale that even the survival of entire galaxies is not really worthy of their attention. Muddled by having to deal with seeing future and past events mixed with the present, with viewing dimensions and energies very few of the orignal species were ever meant or evolved to see, most end up lost in internal musing.

Harbinger’s control over them is shaky at best. The Catalystt could control them on both a mechanical and intellectual level, but the best Harbinger can do is fuse each Reaper with a copy of his own mind and rely on his greater control of the Godpower to warp their emotions and focus to what he wants.

Ultimately, the Reapers are masses of emotion and confusion, sealed behind emotionless bars of a prison of indoctrination and mind control, confused and frightened and arrogant by turns.

That’s pretty neat – story-telling-wise. Twisted as hell but also awesome at the same time. Tch, poor Javik. Dude dodged a bullet.

Javik was aware of the threat. Vigil did warn him of that much.

When his ship was taken over, the only reason he didn’t fully give into complete despair was that he was a raging badass…and one other reason I won’t spoil. I will say he dropped five great Reapers in his battles, including killing one with an eezo infused asteroid strike, and two more by overloading and detonating a Relay.

Javik is a bad ass, it’s going to be fucking epic when he teams up with Sara 😛

But i have to say some where in my head a reaper that is shouting “PRIMITIVE!” constantly is a funny idea.

But on topic:
Reapers sound really FUBAR to me. I do have to wonder why none of them ever rebelled against harbringer.

Godpower mindjack.

Himura-dono got it in one. There are tricks of the Godpower only Harby can use, and even with their brains full of eldritch crazy, he still holds the whip hand.

Javik as Reaper…would be even more trolltastic than Harbinger.

I was wondering lately how many megatons would it take to destroy and damage a main line Reaper like Sovereign/Nazara and how many would be needed to destroy a destroyer-class Reaper?

I blame the Stargate universe for this kind of questions;). They were throwing turbo-nukes around like confetti in that series.

On the other hand in canon the rich of Illium bought nuclear devices and used them against destroyers.

It really depends on how well setup the Reaper is and how much Godpower they’re willing to pull out.

Mainline dreadnaught guns shoot a variety of slug weights. A 20kg slug, according to the wiki, hits at around 38 kilotons. As we can see from in game, those didn’t do dick-all to most of the Great Reapers, but could destroy lessers (like the one on the quarian homeworld) in masse even at lower weights.

Since tech is slightly more advanced in the PV, we’ll go with a base rating of 2.2 kilotons per KG of slug weight. Most lighter ships fire slugs weight 1 to 5 kg, midrange from 4 to 15, heavies and what not 13 to 25, and dreadnaughts 15 to 40 by the time ME3 rolls around.

Your average Dreadnaught, one on one with a Destroyer, will need at least a dozen clean shots to wipe it out, so roughly (assuming a 30kg slug) around 790 – 800 kilotons.

Destroyers are mass produced, have no real Godpower, and are designed as attrition units. A single harvested race can produce fifty or more of the things.

Great Reapers (I.E., not one of the Big Three) have a much thicker, tougher hull and a form of impact shielding that makes most kinetic weapons ineffective. Overloading the shielding would require sixty to seventy megatons of combined firepower, and the Reaper itself could asborb a blast of upwards of 500 megatons before being destroyed.

Upgrading technologies helps. A slug of equal size of degnerate matter would blow a Destroyer away in a single shot, as would two kyle torpedoes. Thanix guns do roughly eight to ten megatons of damage per apeture width of stream, so a 30cm Thanix cannon is hitting for something like 240 megatons a second.

Inusannon phase disruption beams and Tho’ian antiplasmatic borers do even more damage, although the energy requirements are problematic.

Taking out Harbinger/Uhl, Niquasa or Tanthor would be … problematic. Harbinger/Uhl is the most severe test, but all three would not hestiate to draw on Godpower to shield themselves. I’m not sure even gigaton or petaton weaponry would crack that in a frontal assault. Of course, such shielding stops them from using their own weapons , but not other Godpower attacks.

Once past a Reapers defenses — breaching its insides — internal damage from even conventional explosives can wreck any Reaper in short order.