Bioshock endings1/31/2024 Kneeling and looking about her dazedly she saw the Little Sisters, cowering back in a tight group behind father's dead body. Hearing the screams of the little sisters in response to the harsh English-accented feminine voice, Eleanor forced herself up straight. "Get back! Get back you filthy little vermin!" On her hands and knees, Eleanor shook her head desperately, trying to clear her of the clogging buzzing and shake off the encroaching blackness. She was so disoriented by this process, virtually in an ecstatic trance, that her normally acute senses didn't pick up any warning of danger until something heavy and metallic slammed into her temple with stunning force. She briefly couldn't see, hear or understand anything except the sudden rush of the entire life of Subject Delta, Johnny Topside, her father in any meaningful way, into her mind. The side-effect of this was, of course, several moments of delirium-like disorientation. I mean, the rest of it is basically a monster killing other monsters but when you removed the Adam-conditioning-whatever, in the middle of that Biblical halo.that's the only -good- you can do in the game.Eleanor had just finished transferring her father's ADAM into her system. View image here: -Edit/postscript: rescuing the Little Sisters was far and away the most emotionally moving part of the entire game. Don't like being a megalomaniacal monster? Don't kill little girls, you asshole. Because after all, if you can justify to yourself the killing of one little girl for your own convenience, what else could possibly give you pause? It -is- a binary, Dark-Side-of-the-Force sort of philosophy, but it fits with the world that Bioshock is describing. The game seems to be saying, unless you can suppress even the urge to listen to Fontaine's commands or the curiosity to harvest "just one" Sister, you're going to succumb to the plasmids. It is, after all, the only choice you're genuinely allowed to make on your own before Fontaine's conditioning is removed. It's easy to imagine Fontaine or Ryan deciding to do exactly the same thing.So I think the thing with the Little Sisters isn't a "how good/evil are you" continuum, where if you 'only' harvest half, or 1/3, or 1/10, you're still considered "good." Instead, avoiding harvesting any Sisters seems to represent your ability to avoid taking the Fall-your ability to avoid becoming a monster like every other (living) Plasmid user. The idea that you -could- wage war on the surface is perhaps a stretch-as opposed to simply dying in the middle of a nonfunctioning, collapsing, uninhabited Rapture-but it's certainly the mental direction your character goes in. That whomever ended up controlling Rapture, be they Ryan, Fontaine, or you, is inevitably going to become a psychotic supervillain due to the combination of plasmids and whatever 'evil nature of Man'/darkness-of-the-soul that Bioshock is also positing. Unless he chooses not to be.So it's not difficult to see the 'bad' ending as actually being the 'default' ending. And, as you eventually find out, he's probably been subjected to Adam/plasmids from childhood. So, from the beginning of the game, your character has been shooting up every plasmid he can get his hands on. Every 'splicer' you meet is a raving, homicidal fucking maniac. Plasmids make people physically monstrous, and seem to bring out violent psychosis. How and why, and how universal it is, is debatable but the clear narrative thrust of the game is that the spread of Plasmids and genesplicing among the populace either triggered, or massively accelerated, the violent anarchy that destroyed Rapture. However, I do think it actually makes a fair bit of sense in terms of Bioshock's internal world:Plasmids drive people insane. Okay, I do basically agree that Bioshock's "bad" ending is oversimplified and rather unsatisfying in that respect. What about those of us like ScottyP who did some combination? I harvested at most 3 little sisters, but I "gave them what always did. White, black or a tinge blacker than black.
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