The Reapers are a fictional fleet of sentient starships that serve as the main antagonists of the Mass Effect trilogy. The design of the Reapers was inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos deities. Within the series, the Reapers are cosmic horrors that cause galactic-level mass extinctions every fifty-thousand years. The Reapers have never once needed to "defeat" a civilization that they could persuade to surrender itself; they and their technology are capable of brainwashing organic life, and true synthetics subverted through digital means, through a mind control process called indoctrination. The Reapers employ servants who are often altered into synthetic-organic life forms. The Citadel at the heart of the relay system is a massive trap set by the Reapers; they guide rising civilizations along the same technological paths and encourage them to set up a central government on the Citadel itself. All this makes it much easier for the Reapers to harvest the galaxy, because everyone is dependent on the relays that they control. Notable Reapers include Sovereign, first mentioned in the 2007 novel Mass Effect: Revelation, and Harbinger, a major antagonist of Mass Effect 2, and leader of the Reaper invasion on Earth in Mass Effect 3. Sovereign and Harbinger are voiced by Peter Jessop and Keith Szarabajka, respectively. The Reapers were generally well received by critics, and regularly feature on lists of the greatest video game antagonists.
Background The Reapers are colossal entities which reside in dark space, the vast, mostly starless space between galaxies, where they hibernate and remain dormant for recurring cycles of fifty thousand years. As part of their perpetual plan for the galaxy's organic species, the Reapers set up the Citadel and created the docile Keepers as its caretakers; it is in fact a giant mass relay, the mass transit devices used by starships to traverse the galaxy in the Mass Effect universe. The Reapers allow organic life to develop, with the Citadel serving its purpose as a hub for the intergalactic species of the Milky Way galaxy, until they are ready to harvest it. Upon invading through the Citadel at the conclusion of every extinction cycle, the Reapers quickly deliver a decapitation strike to the major population centers and leaders of organic civilizations, crippling their ability to react. The Reapers then isolate each star system by controlling the galaxy wide mass relay network and engaging a war of attrition with the remnants of galactic civilization, hunting down any survivors via records kept at the Citadel. In dialogue with Commander Shepard, Sovereign states that they do not refer to themselves by the term "Reapers", but rather it is a name given to them by the Protheans, who lived in the cycle immediately preceding the current one. Mass Effect 3's Leviathan DLC reveal that the Reapers' origins began more than one billion years before the events of the Mass Effect series, when the Milky Way galaxy was controlled by a species called the Leviathans. Observing a repeating cycle in which their contemporary civilizations would collapse after creating synthetic lifeforms that turn on their creators, the Leviathans seek to break this cycle by, ironically, creating a synthetic intelligence called the Catalyst. The Catalyst was intended to bridge the differences between organic and artificial life, and to preserve organic species at any cost. The Catalyst eventually came to a conclusion that conflict is inevitable, and decided to achieve this by harvesting organic civilizations at their peak, shortly before they are responsible for their own downfalls, and absorbing their genetic material into new lifeforms that it can maintain and preserve forever. The Catalyst begins with its own creators, the Leviathans, transforming them into the first Reapers and beginning the war its creators had tried to avoid. Much like the Leviathans, each Reaper possesses some kind of mechanism which enables them to subtly influence: synthetics can be forcefully subsumed by a galaxy-wide "Reaper code" broadcast, and the minds of any organic individual within range through a mind control process known as indoctrination, gradually rendering them incapable of independent thought.
Development
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