Why the Alliance didn't care about the millions of abducted colonists in Mass Effect 2

Space colonization in the Mass Effect universe works in a way that part of humanity flat out refuses to live under the Systems Alliance umbrella.

People head out to the Terminus frontier specifically so the government stays out of their business, then act surprised when help doesn't show up in battalions the moment trouble hits.

That contradiction became the focus of an interesting breakdown looking at why the Alliance didn't show up for Horizon in Mass Effect 2. Going by in-game numbers, Horizon had a population of around 654,000, while Freedom's Progress topped 900,000.

With twelve colonies hit total, the theoretical count of people taken by the Collectors runs into the millions. Which raises a fair question: why does Cerberus end up being the only one who actually seems to care?

The answer lies in the status of the settlements themselves. These are wildcat colonies outside Alliance jurisdiction, founded by people who deliberately gave up military protection in exchange for autonomy.

It's a classic libertarian paradox: everyone wants all the benefits of security without a single obligation in return. On Horizon, an engineer openly grumbles about the Virmire Survivor's presence and the installed GARDIAN lasers, and even after the guns actually save the colony, he still finds something to complain about.

That said, the idea that "the Alliance doesn't care" doesn't hold up under scrutiny. A war hero gets sent to Horizon ahead of time precisely because the Collectors were expected to strike there, defense guns get installed on site, and Admiral Hackett later shields Shepard from the fallout of associating with a terrorist organization.

Everything TIM says should be treated as manipulation rather than an objective picture of events. Sending a fleet straight into the Terminus Systems would mean full-scale war and Council sanctions that would knock humanity's standing down to Batarian levels of influence.

A different inconsistency in the lore hits much harder, and it's the one the breakdown really digs into. In the first game, the pristine, uninhabited world of Virmire never got settled specifically because of its proximity to the Terminus and vulnerability to raids, while Terra Nova, the largest official human colony, had fewer than five million residents.

So where did the second game's dozens of independent settlements with populations in the hundreds of thousands come from, all sitting in the most dangerous region of the galaxy? And why couldn't the quarians find a single suitable planet anywhere? Those questions seem better aimed at the writers than at the Alliance.