"Mass Effect is bad because Shepard is a space cop, and if we allow the existence of a single bit of fiction that suggests cops aren't evil that means the nazis win" is.....uh, quite a take.
Like, there is a point to be made about mass effect and the idea of using unaccountable operatives who are set above the law as enforcers of an even less accountable galactic government, and what that premise says both about the setting and about us that we just nodded along with it and went "cool, that sounds fun", but the article completely misses it because it's so monomanically focused on the current year narrative about police.
Sheppard is not a cop. Cops have rules they have to follow, superiors they have to answer to, elected officials (and through them, they public) that they are accountable to. Shepard does not, he can do basically whatever he wants and face no reprocussions for it whatsoever. During Thane's loyalty mission, you can execute a hostage in order to protect the hostage taker, an assassin that was trying to kill that guy, because you want to help Thane reconcile with his son and letting his son eat a murder charge would be inconvenient. You face zero reprocussions from doing that, you are in fact legally allowed to do that. You get a Badsss one liner for doing that.
You could write an amazing essay about how mass effect conceptualizes power and how it portrays its use, how we'll overlook a horrifyingly authoritarian system so long as it's sold to use as being done by the right people, how some surface level crap about equality and tolerance hoodwinked progressive players into not seeing the inherent flaws of the overall system.......but no, we get "space police man bad".
