Bioshock | A Sea of Hypocrisy

science are an industry are all essential to building any society but mix their own way they can destroy one just as easily [Music] each bathysphere location and Bioshock acts as a chapter and each chapter carries its own message for that reason we'll be looking at each chapter in sequential order starting a course with the introduction from here on out I'm going to assume you know about bioshock's big twist and the basic motivation behind and rewrites actions last chance to leave before spoilers I chose rapture so to cover the ending twist in case it's been a while our protagonist is essentially a sleeper agent given fake memories to mask his birth and rapture when he's activated he uses the gun that's hidden in this package to kill the pilot taking down the plane above rapture this is scrubbed from his and therefore the players mind but back to what the player knows this early in the game we've just been in a plane crash and upon swimming to the lighthouse we walked through its doors and were officially inside of rapture the lights go dim and were greeted with an impossible to ignore image of the hypocrisy the rapture was founded on and that would help in its downfall no gods or kings only man well whoever this gigantic golden statue depicts he clearly sees himself as being above man Andrew Ryan while he allowed himself to be outplayed economically by Frank Fontaine he is without a doubt the king of rapture in spite of his clear statement against that sort of ruling body jumping ahead we here as propaganda against Frank Fontaine blasted over the rapture intercom and nobody else's back to where we were right off the bat we know that this place is run by a hypocrite one who perhaps has good intentions but a hypocrite nonetheless with this in mind we advance down the stairs on either side of the room and see three emblems on the walls science industry and art the three cornerstones of raptures society Brian one of these three concepts to be completely unlimited by laws he sees them as free of any long-term evil and essentially sees them as his gods they may all lead to evil in the short term but it's all part of an in perceivable master plan a law of nature that will ultimately lead to the greatest good so as we think about the meaning behind these three emblems we hop into the bathysphere and we hear Andrew Ryan's voice for the first time as a pre-recorded message explains his motivations for leaving behind the surface world America says the sweat of your brow belongs to the poor russia says it belongs to everybody and the church says that it belongs to God Andrew Ryan says he chose differently he chose rapture this is our first time hearing the name rapture which of course has some religious meaning to it that name rapture it implies that there is indeed a God of this place either Andrew Ryan as his giant statue implies or the three cornerstones of society that he places his faith in science industry and art well as Ryan says rapture the projector backdrop pulls up and we get our first view of rapture proper and this place really does look like heaven and the sea its completely beautiful save for all the advertisements were bombarded with maybe rapture is a fitting name then we get inside rapture and we realized that our optimism was misplaced immediately we're thrown around like meat between wild dogs as a spider splicer murders of begging man right outside of our bathysphere before running off as we leave the bathysphere the spider speiser is chased off by Atlas's security drones clearly whatever sort of vision Andrew Ryan had for rapture has completely fallen apart while the city mace totally beautiful from the outside it's hell in here we keep going forward finding ourselves a wrench to kill a couple of hi lunatics with and we're advised or more like commanded to use the needle that's laying in front of us probably the same stuff that turned all those people we've killed into lunatics we pass out after our first dose of the stuff and a big Daddy and little sister passes by seeing as we aren't dead yet we have no idea what's going on in this place but it clearly isn't as good as a first seemed by this point we've also seen some imagery of another godly figure in Andrew Ryan's eye the great chain of industry and by extension art in science the great chain binds us maybe you can infer what this means so early on that if everybody pulls the great chain in their own direction the chain is tight and strong altruism is the root of all wickedness but even if you don't infer what it means this early when you have your first splice you realized that you have chains tattooed on your wrists you might not know what the great chain is yet but you're bound by it the chains on your wrists of course representing shackles that link you to the great chain and now the game's biggest question is asked how is our character linked to rapture based on what we've seen so far we can infer approximately what happened to this once beautiful city some bigwig invented a way to give humans what is essentially magic powers and the inhabitants of rapture got addicted to the stuff and went crazy maybe 15 minutes into the game its themes have already been hinted at incredibly well unrestricted industry mixed with unrestricted science and it led to a whole lot of evil well how does that third cornerstone fit in unrestricted artistry the next chapter happily fills that gap and shows us how that idea plays into the fall of rapture transhumanism the medical pavilion a place of science where artistry is surely not at home well as I said in the introduction artistry Science and Industry are all great you just have to be careful how you mix them an artistry should never be mixed with medical science as we explore we find two audio logs explaining that a woman named Diane McClintock was in love with Andrew Ryan and after being rejected by him she sought facial reconstructive surgery from dr. Steinman until we enter his office we don't know that Diane wanted reconstructive surgery so let's step back to look at how we're introduced to dr. Steinman Adam denies us any excuse we see written on the walls as we venture closer to stinemans office rapture clearly had a problem with transhumanism and that they were advancing too quickly for their own good again artistry has little place in this exact world of science this man Steinman says in graffiti that with Adam there's no reason we shouldn't all be beautiful and godlike well there is a reason we haven't yet evolved to be worthy of that power we had in the 60s and we still haven't today thanks to the combined artistry of dr. su Chun and dr. Tannenbaum the plasmid was invented and their artists she drove them to push the human body to its limits and sure enough it cracked that same scientific artistry runs through dr. Steinman a facial reconstructive surgeon science and art combining can be a great thing just look at video games however medical science and art is a very dangerous combination as we can see in Steinman's lab the more literal meaning of Adam denies us an excuse is Steinman saying that we should all be totally beautiful he sees his facial reconstruction as art and he gets bored with his realism pieces comparing his newer works to Picasso's abstract faces needless to say that his newer works are incredibly cruel mutilations of his subjects relative to the rest of the game the medical pavilion is a simple chapter thematically but we're just getting started Neptune's bounty as soon as we enter Neptune's body were greeted with another more abstract example of Raptors hypocrisy the first thing we see is a man who's essentially been crucified with the label smuggler written above him upon further inspection we see that he was smuggling Bibles and other religious paraphernalia for a society that's willing to publicly execute a religious man they sure are fine with performing a religiously visualized execution this man was crucified by Raptors God the great chain and as we explore further a spider splicer sneaks out past our field of vision asking who crawls in my garden with this and the pun remembering some of the things we've heard the generic splicers saying it becomes clear that religion has been spread to the people of rapture at one point which perhaps explains the incredibly harsh execution of the smuggler has a fear tactic to counteract this so who gave rapture religion Fontaine and it was all part of his master plan to overthrow Andrew Ryan the audio logs in this section explained a lot of the story of how Fontaine started a civil war with Ryan Fontaine began hiring people to smuggle in Bibles and other religious paraphernalia because he knew the Andrew Ryan would crack down hard on the smugglers making Ryan looked more like the thought police only out to help the rich as Frank Fontaine puts it in one of his audio logs later in the game somebody has to clean the bathrooms and he takes all of raptures downtrodden and gives them religion and a place to live Fontaine's home for the poor and getting them all riled up to overthrow Ryan before using the hallucinogenic properties of Adam splicing to essentially turn them all into his own personal brainwashed army a lot of this chapter is given further context by the later chapter Apollo square everything involving Fontaine's home for the poor and all of that is explored in that chapter so by bringing it up now that chapter will suffer as a result in this video moving on the levels of Bioshock can essentially be divided into two categories historical and parabolic levels like Neptune's bounty fallen to the historical side as they mainly focus on the biggest political events that contributed to the fall of rapture while levels like the medical Pavillion fall into the parabolic side focusing instead on a microcosm of the sort thing to happen enraptured to contribute to its death the parabolic levels generally focus on a combination of those three cornerstones of rapture science art an industry in the case of the medical pavilion there was a combination of science and artistry so now let's move on to raptures personal greenhouse an oxygen tank arcadia arcadia in keeping with the trend of the parabolic levels is about the dangers of combining science with industry one of the earliest audio logs in this level is all about how ryan wanted to take advantage of julie Langford's research into growing trees underwater and sell attendance to the pleasure spaces of arcadia rather than making them free for all to visit and the second audio log we find reveals the darker more insecure and even childish side of andrew ryan that led to this kind of monetization back on the surface ryan bought a forest at one point and after the government demanded that he make public spaces within it and the church said that it was god's forest and not his he burned the entire place to the ground not wanting it to be infected by the parasites of government or religion well Ryan sees us as a parasite as well marauding and stealing what we can never build for ourselves because Fontaine our puppet master is trying to use us to steal rapture from Andrew Ryan so with the parasite once again wandering in Ryan's forests he burns the place to the ground only this time using chemicals there are much greater implications here than Ryan simply destroying the most beautiful part of the city it's not just as forest he's destroying here this is Ryan acknowledging that he might lose this fight and showing all of rapture to keep the parasite from plundering it if Arcadia is destroyed then rapture will be devoid of oxygen within hours with how many fires are burning inside Ryan would rather nobody have rapture or by extension anything unless they built it for themselves Ryan can be a cold jaded man and as twisted as his morals are he firmly believes them and he will give up a lifetime of work to uphold them while he can absolutely act hypocritically when everything is going fine if push comes to shove he'll die for what he believes in that every man should choose her themself and make their own wins and there's definitely something admirable about that jumping ahead to his death he was willing to let himself be killed purely as punishment for something he did that we're about to discuss when we're searching for ingredients to make the Lazarus vector a chemical that will reinvigorate the trees mark aadya we head to the farmers market and inside we find out what Tenenbaum and Ryan were cooking up to combat Fontaine's army of brainwashed poor he would start using his superior plasmids to brainwash the better off secretly injecting messages into them using his propaganda intercoms taking away all the free will from those who hadn't already lost it Fontaine what will not be able to effectively control the actions of the citizens of Rapture free will is the cornerstone of this city we are indeed in autonomy while this is only one of a dozen things that led to the fall of rapture this is what caused the fall of Andrew Ryan and of course it was an act of hypocrisy rapture was founded on the idea that every man should have the right to choose what is done with the sweat of his brow and while Andrew Ryan agrees to tendon bombs brainwashing plan because as he puts it desperate times call for desperate measures I'm fairly certain that this is why he ultimately lets himself be killed by you he sees it as poetic justice the only thing he valued above all else was freedom and he enslaved people so you a slave in every sense of the word are the only one that can give him some closure by killing him he wanted to be killed by the product of his own failures as a philosopher which if you agree elevates one of the greatest scenes in all of gaming even further but I'm beginning to get ahead of myself let's move on to the next area after Arcadia port frolic fort frolic is especially interesting to me as someone who values humans ability to combine creativity with emotions above all others it's interesting to see a negative example of artistry run rampant I've often thought that the job of an artistic creator was to control the sort of thoughts of viewers having you can't control them directly but you can influence them by extension I've always thought that if I could construct a house however I saw fit I would frame all of its rooms in a way that drew attention to certain subjects to influence the tone of the room upon entry essentially the same sort of artistic work that goes into level designing in games sander Cohen apparently has a similar mindset while he can't rebuild his section of Rapture he can decorate it in a ton of interesting ways and his section of the game is the most linear tightly directed section of the game and when I say tightly directed I don't mean by bioshock's director ken Levine I mean directed by Sandra Cohen like any director sander Cohen controls our emotions by controlling what we see when and as a result this chapter is much more linear than the rest Sandra Cohen's madness has beyond me so rather than attempt to analyze the message behind his experience let's keep in theme with the rest of this essay and examine what Cohen's madness has to say rather than what Cohen has to say for frolic doesn't seem so much to be about artistry gone rampant more about an artist gone ramen do lack of an audience he rots in that Neverland waiting for someone to come and tell them however there's a lot more to this chapter than a simple message that artists will go to major extremes that they aren't being noticed I think it's also an examination of freedom as much of Bioshock is the freedom humans have when compared to other animals is what allows us to create art and so when Cohen cuts off the transmission from Atlas he's giving us freedom from atlases mind control freedom to create art it's no coincidence that Cohen replaced atlases transmission with classical music Cohen seems to see us as an actor in his play as soon as he cuts our transmission we gives his introduction the bathysphere Bay in which he announces with a ton of fanfare that we're in for an evening with sander Cohen and our first scene takes place immediately outside where we find that the once empty room has been filled with traps in a matter of seconds not unlike a set change into play and we're forced to kill a set number of spiders spiders before Cohen will unlock the door and let us move on to the next scene and as we step into the atrium the spotlight is literally on us like a lead actor and it follows us wherever we go inside of this atrium here we're told to meet Cohen and flee Hall but we find he as a pianist held Captain playing a piece for him before executing the man for making one too many mistakes for his magnum opus and were told to take a picture of the man's dead body and upon doing so Cohen tells us that her collaboration begins with this act and that he wants us to put the picture in a frame on his magnum opus as he puts it the burden of the artist as to capture and in his opus it seems to me that he wants to capture us in our act of artistic creation he says that our canvas is to be painted with Andrew Ryan's blood so he wants to capture how we go about murdering people he has three pupils who he wants to capture us murdering and he says that the common thread between them is that they're all betrayers starting with Martin Finnegan who we find in the pathway to Poseidon Plaza I won't bother with going into detail on the three other subjects of Cohen Squad tick as what's more interesting is what happens once we complete it in Cohen's own words the purpose of the photos on the quad tick was to immortalize his subjects mortality a true disciple of Cohen would have shared this obsession with mortality and would have killed him the fact that they didn't in spite of Cohen attempting to code into it son of a [ __ ] left me to freeze is as I see it the betrayal the Cohen mentions of them so in the end when Cohen teases us with his grand prize that's only for his greatest pupil if you who had become my one and true disciple you might have been worthy of seeing inside the box the only way to get it is to kill him and to take the key from his body and if you share his obsession with death he might photograph his body as he probably intended the true final piece to his magnum opus a photograph of his body killed by his greatest disciple on a quest to destroy the man who made Cohen's vision possible Andrew Ryan that's the real reason that Cohen didn't kill you he wanted to see if he was good enough to make him murder him and photograph his corpse if that isn't dedication to using art to influence people's thoughts then I don't know what is anyways regardless of our choice we actually make a choice here other than the little sisters we have no choices throughout the game and through Sandra Cohen's art we finally get to make one and isn't it fitting that as soon as we're done with Cohen Atlas is able to reach us again and he immediately says would you kindly leg it to the sphere and get down to the faces so on we go to Hephaestus to confront Andrew Ryan and our darkest secret Hephaestus while many of the chapters covered so far were the sort that focused on one or more of the three cornerstones of rapture Hephaestus is another historical level and Andrew Ryan's philosophy in particular is that subject as we enter Hephaestus the first thing we see is one of raptures familiar banners saying the strong shall not be limited by the weak maybe I'm just seduced by Ryan's silver tongue this late in the game but I really start to sympathize with Ryan by this point sure we'll soon learn that Fontaine is the real building and that all he wanted was to own rapture for himself but it's never explicitly stated that Ryan is innocent that's part of why Bioshock always hits me so hard it respects your intelligence and poses questions that are genuinely difficult to answer was Ryan's vision for mankind's salvation doomed from the start due to his hypocrisy was his philosophy about social trends only good on paper but not in practice is someone like Fontaine inevitable someone who's drawn to the potential power of a clever mind in rapture and grows to want more and more power was Fontaine really just power mad or was he disgusted by the hypocrisy on display all over rapture while we don't know enough about the story to be asking these questions at this point in the game during the last chapters we'll be thinking of many of the things we learn about Ryan here have faced us as we ask them to ourselves the biggest question relates back to our questions about the practicality of Ryan's philosophy if you firmly believe in a philosophy how much proof should you accept before resigning that it's failing [Music] all the things I say that rapture was founded on can all be summed up in one word philosophy this place was built because one man thought his philosophy was the be all end all correct philosophy and as I see it Ryan took too long before accepting that his and raptures philosophy needed to adjust for the Fontaine situation Ryan says in the Nadia log that he thought it would be impatient to put an end to splicing as soon as it became problem the way he sees it the great chain is mightier than any one man's understanding himself included and he thinks that cutting off one of the many hands pulling in their direction but only weaken in the long run however once Fontaine's boys were practically on Ryan's doorstep he gave in and he faltered in his philosophy by taking away the freedoms of those splicing Ryan industry plasmids and using them to fight Fontaine's armies there's two ways of looking at the problem here the first is that if Ryan had stepped in earlier and put an end to the plasmon industry rapture would have survived the blow to its philosophy and the second is that Ryan should have never given in and stooped to Fontaine's level either way things probably would have ended better for the common people of rapture and while I already have an explanation that I'm happy with this would give Ryan even more reason to finally let you a puppet of Fontaine kill them which brings us to the finale at the fastest rapture central computing and this is the area in which this game goes from being incredibly thought-provoking to a work of genius for me we're all familiar with the plot twist that's revealed here so I only play it up with some of its deserted fanfare after a brief one-sided conversation with Andrew Ryan he says that there's a time to build and the time to destroy knowing that he's about to let himself be killed by Fontaine he begins to destroy rapture preferring that fade over it being twisted by another man's philosophy and in his final hours Ryan arranged himself an incredibly meaningful death would you kindly a phrase that everyone in this game likely thought of as an easily recognizable speech pattern from Atlas however there's a much more sinister meaning behind his use of the phrase we're much more closely related to rapture than we've been told by now we've probably gotten used enough to the chains on our characters risk that we stop thinking about the ultimate question they posed how are we chained to rapture well in the elaborate display supposedly set up by Ryan shows us how dr. su Chong stole our character from his mother at birth and under Atlas's orders made us a sleeper agent for his cause to kill Andrew Ryan and get the keys to rapture for himself and the code phrase that controls us is would you kindly herein lies the meta element to bioshock's plot twist that takes it a notch above what it would have been without it but I'll get into that after I cover what happens next Andrew Ryan's death and what may very well be the most interesting and impactful cutscene to date for its length I don't want to retread old ground but I'd like to talk about why Ryan sets up his murder by you the way that he does he wasn't trying to defeat you through his death by showing you that you have no free will he was trying to atone for what he sees as his greatest sin compromising in this philosophy that he values so much rapture was founded on total freedom and when he decided to brainwash the users of Ryan's plasmids he takes away their freedom and it seems like as far as he's concerned this is what ultimately led to the fall of rapture so to be killed by you a product of those experiments would be the ultimate poetic justice in his eyes he doesn't see himself as dying by Fontaine's hand he sees us dying by his own mistakes so with that out of the way we have a chance to talk about the games meta-narrative while it isn't nearly as complicated as praise meta-narrative it's interesting nonetheless and the presence of one even as simple as this can add a lot to a game so Bioshock is a linear game right if you take a look at its most raw bare-bones story elements it's a game in which you're a character in a strange place and a more familiar character bosses you around throughout the game with phrases like would you kindly it's a fairly cliched story element no different in Spartan function to show Dan Colonel Campbell GLaDOS or Admiral Havelock all characters who boss you around for most of the game before revealing their true identity or showing their sinister side before you continue following their orders regardless it happens in a lot of games and it puts into question the concept of free will in the linear game Bioshock System Shock Metal Gear Solid all of these games are strictly linear while still giving the player tons of freedom and how they tackle different problems but there is no changing the plot or if there is it's very basic like bioshock's little sisters or into ocelots torture mostly just affecting which mostly similar ending you get by and large your destiny has already been decided for you in these games and every time in ad lists or a show dan tells you to do something it just solidifies that fact characters like Solid Snake where the hacker from System Shock might as well be brainwashed like our protagonist is in Bioshock no matter what the player wants for them they're destined to follow showdowns orders until they eventually get to break free and rebel I think it's fair to say that the brainwashing subplot of Bioshock is a direct reference to that idea after all Atlas still lies about his identity and takes his family's death that would have worked just as well if they figured out some other way to explain the plane crash but the fact that they include that this tells me that they're commentating on the cliches of this type of linear game this is driven home pun intended by Andrew Ryan's death as he orders us to kill him we realized that it could have just as easily been him ordering us around on the radio and we wouldn't have questioned it any more or less than we did with Atlas like I said nothing is complicated as praised meta-narrative but in a central part of the game nonetheless so moving on we take the keys to rapture off of Ryan's body and when we insert them into the central computer the atlas reveals himself to be Fontaine and he takes control of rapture for himself stopping Andrew Ryan's self-destruct protocol so when Fontaine sends his security box after us as a reward for a job well done we've run away and a restored little sister signals for us to crawl into an air duct and depending on how we treated the little sisters it's either a trap or a helping hand either way it gets us away from Fontaine spots and puts us at the mercy of Tenenbaum the mother figure to the little sisters Apollo square for the purpose of brevity I'll cover what happens next as I saw in my most recent playthrough I had chosen to harvest the little sisters on this playthrough and so Tim Baum asked me to redeem myself by saving any I saw in future before removing the first level of Fontaine's brainwashing and the objective of the next chapter Olympus heights is to find the serum to remove the final level of it as Fontaine is still able to keep us from reaching him oh he'll not bring yours to keep you from getting close so the main idea of this rapture history theme chapter is learn about how Fontaine built up his army and to break away from Fontaine's chains not to disappoint but there really isn't that much more to this chapter than that especially when compared to fantastic chapters like pork frolic Arcadia or Ephesus and like I said earlier a lot of what we learn here I've already mentioned in earlier sections to get further context to certain points I've already gone over how Fontaine used raptures downtrodden to poorest Andrew Ryan's hand he started with his home for the poor then had his goons smuggle and religious paraphernalia giving the port religion and forcing Ryan to crack down on him causing the normal people to sympathize with Fontaine further and having more of them uses plasmids before getting dr. su Chun to help him flip the switch and turn all the fontain plasma users into a slave army along with the homeless and the shelter I wish I had more cause to stay at Apollo square but again I've already covered most of what's revealed here I will say before moving on that this section solidifies a new tradition in O 4-5-1 games like Bioshock a living quarters area in which we get a visual understanding of all the characters we've met through audio log I'd wager that most attentive players could guess whose room is who is based solely on what's found inside this moment can also be seen in System Shock 2 pray spread out through Tacoma and a handful of other games that follow the system shock lineage it's a great way to reward players who get to know the audio log characters but again not much else to add to this chapter the final chapter however is full of interesting things to note point prometheus being the final chapter and makes sense that point prometheus would be one of the most important parts of the game all of the philosophy the rapture was founded on unrestricted artistry industry and science the right to the entirety of the fruits of your labor the desire to grow beyond what civilization restricts humanity to it all leads back to one key word freedom whether your freedom was taken from you by Andrew Ryan and directly or by Fontaine directly the mind programming is gone you can finally decide for yourself there's just one issue with that Bioshock is still a linear game and sure enough even after the most liberating moment in the game freeing yourself from Fontaine's mind programming you're still stuck taking orders from Tenenbaum functionally she's done nothing other than replace Atlas she's the one bossing us around now and we may as well still be mind programmed this is especially apparent in the light of all the horrible things we have to do to herself by her orders in order to get to Fontaine Fontaine even points this out as we transform into a Big Daddy [Music] [Music] here's another example of an oboe or 5:1 tradition one that we've been taking part in since the beginning and a lot of o45 won games or other genres that nonetheless take inspiration from the o45 one lineage we see our character come closer and closer to being consumed by the cause of the game's problem and system shock to the hacker might choose to research exotics and be wearing armor made of the minis larvae and using the minis weapons and prey we might choose to invest more and more in exotic neuro mods until security systems begin confusing us for an alien and half-life we have to use the be launcher or whatever it's called that we attach the Gordon's hand in Deus Ex we get more and more bio mods until we're completely detached from a normal human with drones coming out of our head constructed my microbots even in theif Garrett's mechanical eyeball can be seen as him being consumed by the metal age which threatened to destroy that game's world and at Bioshock we get more and more spliced up until we're literally turning ourselves into a big Daddy herein lies one potential plot hole but one that's been explained away on forums in a way that I can get behind Fontaine says that there's no going back after transforming into a Big Daddy but in this ending cutscene slide we see Jack's hands perfectly normal again well we haven't had the mind programming necessary to completely turn us into a Big Daddy so I'll buy it it's just funny to picture Jack walking the little sisters down the wedding aisle with the Whale voice of a Big Daddy but what's more interesting than a nitpick is again what our paradoxical willingness to become a big Daddy says about player choice in the linear game not to repeat myself too much but like in System Shock and Metal Gear Solid we have all the power in the world to approach situations however we see fit but we're still stuck in a story where the endings already been written furthering this idea of the pointlessness of our decisions is the fact that regardless of how we handle the little sisters they give us an atom syringe and drain the Adam out of fontaine regardless but I'm getting ahead of myself in the previous chapter Fontaine mentioned that he's just now started splicing and he quickly gets addicted to it seeing as being the owner of two plasmid manufacturers he has access to more atom than the entirety of Rapture combined so as we begin this chapter we get our first glimpse of the newly spliced up monster that is Fontaine the first thing he does is pull the great chain statue off the floor and throw it at us Fontaine pulled on the great chain just as Andrew Ryan wanted but he pulled harder than anyone could have predicted and now the great chain serves as nothing but another advantage ready to draw from Fontaine lived his life by the great chain and as his last words suggest he broke it and is disappointed with the results of what he saw as Fairplay in essence Fontaine is Ryan's greatest disciple surpassing him and Creed and pushing his philosophy to its breaking point so as he dies he has nothing to do but lament the death of his and Ryan's philosophy he has nothing to say for himself choosing instead to complain about how something he dreamed up in bankroll ended up being his downfall the difference between Ryan and Fontaine is that Ryan saw the impending doom of his philosophy and chose to die with it hoping to wash himself of his failures whereas Fontaine took it to his grave taking and screaming he was the ultimate parasite stealing Ryan City and more importantly his philosophy and being so afraid of creating his own that he would rather die clinging to someone else's dream Bioshock is one of the densest games of all time I probably could have done an entire commentated walkthrough and not run out of things to talk about while I think Ryan is the more interesting of the two antagonists it's interesting to see how Ryan's dream was indeed destroyed by the ultimate parasite rather than take a percentage of Ryan's business ventures Fontaine tried to take everything that was Ryan and sure enough rapture died because of it however I think Fontaine's manipulation of the legal systems of rapture doesn't speak to Fontaine's failings but to Ryan's again rapture was founded on hypocrisy or perhaps misunderstanding would be the better word while Ryan wanted to escape the parasites of government in church that infested the surface he didn't realize the parasitism as part of human nature he didn't remove the parasite he simply replaced it everybody in rapture was a parasite the poor the rich the business owners and the artists they all survived by sucking the blood out of each other and following the tradition set by the formation of modern society the biggest most powerful parasite rose to the top and thing you know the world of rapture resembled everything that Ryan wanted to escape philosophically how was a large company like Ryan industries selling addictive plasmids to citizens any different than a governmental body taxing citizens sure Ryan built it up on his own and gave that opportunity to everybody in rapture but that opportunity was nothing other than to grow and do a greater parasite man was unlimited in rapture like it was on the surface and in the end that only served to bring out the parasite in all of us [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 863,695

Keywords: Bioshock, analysis, essay, discussion, postmodern, metanarrative, sander, Cohen, Andrew, Ryan, frank, Fontaine, rapture, atlas, plasmid, big daddy, Eve, splicer, Ken Lavine, chapter, immersive sim, 0451

Id: j-uAev7QcGc

Length: 33min 24sec (2004 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/UpgradeTech]

The song at 33:00? It’s from the Garry Schyman score “Welcome to Rapture” from the opening scene in Bioshock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAkxDyKOe0k