So, as we all now know from playing the games through multiple times, the Reapers are in the image of their creators, who were apparently giant underwater cuttlefish the size of a small city. These cuttlefish larger than any other lifeform seen since were extremely concerned that synthetic life would wipe out organic life in the universe, and so they created giant cuttlefish synthetic life to catalogue all organic life in case they needed to be brought back using DNA or whatever deus ex machina happened to be on Casey Hudson's desk that day. Of course, the first thing the Reapers did was to catalogue their creators, using the giant death rays that the cuttlefish kings had thought so necessary to cataloguing (Librarians, rejoice, your death-rays are in the mail). And so, the vast majority of the Reapers are in the form of a giant flying cuttlefish. Of course, we know now that the cataloguing process involves creating a new Reaper, in the form of the race being catalogued. Unfortunately, we never see a single reaper who is a different shape to the normal fishy one, with the exception of the half completed human fought at the end of Mass Effect 2. This is strange, as we are led to believe the cycle of creation has happened thousands and thousands of times, accounting for the thousands and thousands of Reapers capable of besieging the entire combined galactic forces simultaneously during the events of Mass Effect 3. Fine, we'll stop pointing out the myriad plot holes, unexplained mistakes and strange occurrences surrounding a big bad that clearly wasn't as well thought out when the series started. But that's our point, the Reapers were scarier when we didn't understand their motivation, when we had spent a whole game attempting to stop just one Reaper, only to learn that there are thousands upon thousands waiting in the dark space between galaxies, swarming around our galaxy like wolves stalking a sheep. And in Mass Effect 2, the Reapers are shown to be evil, without compassion and corruptive of other races, which is fantastic! They're powerful robots without souls, go organics! They are as evil as Darth Vader and so we can justifiably hate them! Then it all falls apart! Backstory starts muscling to the front of the queue, gesturing for his ugly friends Lore and Contrivance to join him. We were hungry for answers, for reasons and for backstory, but in giving us what we so foolishly demanded, BioWare ruined the bad guys. They're just tentacled generic evil robots now, with no real motivation beyond "That's what Reapers do, they reap". Frankly, it's not good enough from a company that has the experience to know better.
