The Wikia makes a valiant attempt at forging a coherent narrative, but when you actually play the games (especially back-to-back) you can't help but notice how

The Wikia makes a valiant attempt at forging a coherent narrative, but when you actually play the games (especially back-to-back) you can't help but notice how their characterisation swings wildly between each title: - In ME1 they're a rogue bunch of moustache-twirling villains who feed humans to thresher maws to find out exactly how much of a crunchy sound they make. You're supposed to happily shoot them on sight without the slightest care. - In ME2 they're a cynical and wealthy "the end justifies the means" organization of human patriots who trample over ethics in pursuit of a greater good, such as kidnapping kids to turn them into biotics and give humanity an edge. You're supposed to feel conflicted and hate the means they employ while recognising you do need to work with them. - In ME3 they're back to moustache-twirling, but now they're also a giant army trying to take over the entire galaxy, and worst of all they also have Kai Leng as a poster boy. You're supposed to treat them as the secondary but unambiguous villain of the story (even if in ME2 you role-played as a fellow human supremacist). In hindsight, Bioware should probably have kept the ME1 version as cannon fodder and put Martin Sheen in charge of a different, non-moustache-twirling but still ethically questionable human-first organization. What they actually ended up writing was a narrative trainwreck.