  |
This article's content is marked as Mature The page contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page. |
So it turns out that the recent proposal on Fontaine was actually created by a user who isn't on the whitelist, so I thought I'd do a proper one since I'm familiar with Fontaine as a character (that and the previous proposal simply copied Fontaine's article). This proposal is also being made in celebration for the BioShock remastered collection officially getting ported to the Nintendo Switch in nearly exactly a month's time.
So, are any of you familiar with the term "transorbital lobotomy"? Don't worry, you'll learn exactly what it is in this proposal.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN THE SERIES. THIS PROPOSAL WILL SPOIL ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC PLOT TWISTS IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY.
ADDITIONAL WARNING: AN UNCOMFORTABLE TORTURE SEQUENCE WILL BE DETAILED BELOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
What's the work?[]
BioShock is a series of science fiction first person shooter games mixed with RPG elements set in a retrofuturistic world with a timeline ranging from the dates of 1912, 1946-1960 and 1960-1968. For the candidate, we will be mainly focusing on the first game and BioShock: Infinite's DLC, Burial at Sea.
Take a moment and imagine this: it is 1960. You are Jack, a young man who grew up on a farm just minding your own business on a flight to England to visit your cousins until the plane suddenly takes a nosedive into the ocean. Naturally being the only survivor of the plane crash, Jack swims over to a nearby lighthouse in the middle of nowhere. The lighthouse actually houses a secret automated bathysphere system that sends Jack fathoms below the ocean where he discovers Rapture, a secret underwater city that has been around since as early as 1946, built to escape the post-World War II world and the "government jackals" that run it, with Andrew Ryan, the city's founder and ruler, believing that world is morally bankrupt beyond repair. Rapture is a city built on creating a capitalist society of like-minded and free individuals whose lives benefit from free market without any "parasitic" governments, religious folk or communists snooping in and hampering their business: your profession, hobbies and livings you benefit from in Rapture is yours to keep and nobody can oppress you from meeting those ends. No censorship, strict bounds on "petty morality", no obstructing one's rights. As long as you're a hard worker, Rapture sure seems like a good place to live in!
Actually, no. Once Jack arrives, he very quickly discovers that something horrifically awful has happened in Rapture: the city has been completely torn to shreds from an ongoing and seemingly never ending war that has left most of the population dead. At least 90% of Rapture's remaining population are left mutated, disfigured, utterly rabid, and willing to slaughter anyone they happen to come across. Big, hulking cyborgs known as "Big Daddies" wander around the city protecting these creepy, brainwashed little girls with glowing eyes known as "Little Sisters" who extract a strange red substance from corpses that litter Rapture. The substance, known as ADAM, seems to be the driving force behind the ongoing madness in Rapture, as it is being used as a fuel for Plasmids and Gene Tonics, drugs that can genetically rewrite whatever you were born with, but of course come with side effects that can render you insane, mutated, bloodthirsty, or all three, and everyone wants it (but at least you can get cool new super powers from said plasmids). Rapture is simply a nightmare come to life, and now Jack is being hunted down Andrew Ryan himself, now a power hungry dictator. Good thing a mysterious Irishman named Atlas is there to help guide Jack through the hellish world of Rapture though. So how can anyone in this horrible city count?
To nobody's surprise, building a city on free will and commerce may happen to invite quite a few sociopaths along the way, and that's exactly what happened. Aside from Ryan himself and many other core issues with the city, Rapture's downfall was engineered by one man.
Who is he? What has he done?[]
This is gonna be pretty long, so I'll split the proposal up into subheadings to keep track.
Backstory[]
Frank Fontaine was once a Bronx conman before he set his eyes on Rapture. Greedy, manipulative and with no hesitation to exploit people for his own benefit whatsoever, Rapture seemed like the perfect place for Fontaine to score big money and wanted to take advantage of Rapture's philosophy so he can gain wealth, power and influence as quickly as possible. Long story short, he did.
One of Fontaine's earliest businesses was "Fontaine Fisheries", a company that started out as an ordinary but efficient fishing business used to supply Rapture with fresh fish with the use of submarines, but Frank had other plans for Fontaine Fisheries. Over time, he forms a smuggling ring dedicated to peddling goods that are otherwise forbidden, hard to get or unavailable in Rapture while using Fontaine Fisheries itself as a cover up. Fontaine was only doing this because where there is a lot of demand, there is a lot of profit. Fontaine, a cutthroat businessman at heart, kept his smuggling operation financially stable by ruling his smugglers with an iron fist to the point that all of them were terrified of Fontaine and had many criminals in his pocket as extra muscle.
Fontaine eventually hired the unscrupulous scientist Yi Suchong and oddball Brigid Tenenbaum after the latter of which discovered a sea slug in Neptune's Bounty (the home of Fontaine Fisheries). The slug was producing a powerful liquid substance that miraculously healed one of the smugglers' war injuries and after experimenting on it for a while, it was discovered that the substance, nicknamed ADAM, can be used to genetically rewrite the human body to whatever means available. If these sea slugs are implanted into the body of a little girl, said girls form a symbiotic relationship with the slug that allows them to produce ten times the amount of ADAM that an ordinary slug would. However, ADAM has seriously deadly side effects that, when consumed, can lead to withdrawal symptoms, insanity, mutations and even death. Unsurprisingly, Fontaine didn't care about all of that and was only concerned with making money off of it, wanting to turn the miraculous effects that ADAM has on the human body into a large scale business.
By using his smuggling ring as a racketeering operation to help fund ADAM research, this lead to the foundation of what would become Fontaine's most powerful business conglomerate: "Fontaine Futuristics". Free market wasn't so bad at all for Fontaine: he had scientists using ADAM to produce genetic drugs known as Plasmids (in-game mechanics-wise, they are super power abilities) and/or Gene Tonics (in-game mechanics-wise, they are bankable passive effects) and was selling them to the public en masse, since it wasn't against Rapture's free market law at all to build a drug empire. From cosmetic changing tonics to fire producing plasmids, everyone wanted what Fontaine was selling and it made him filthy rich. Fontaine even enabled the mass production of plasmids by creating the "Little Sister's Orphanage", which was actually a front to convert little girls into "Little Sisters" (girls with sea slugs implanted in their bodies) and then forcibly extract tons of ADAM from them over time, with Suchong in charge of operating on them and keeping them brainwashed (furthermore, Fontaine and Suchong don't treat Little Sisters as human beings at all, even though they behave like and still are children). Fontaine gained so much influence that he went on to create "Fontaine's Home for the Poor", a charity organization to support the poorer citizens of Rapture when in actuality, it was all but stated to be a scheme for Fontaine to recruit the gullible to his cause while getting them high on plasmids; and "Fontaine's Department Store", a huge mall specializing in retail, household and other businesses etc. Fontaine was easily the most successful man in the city (next to Andrew Ryan himself) by this point: he had the wealth, the resources, the goons on his side and the trust of the people, just like the most successful crime lords in history.
Andrew Ryan, being the founder and ruler of Rapture, took notice at how powerful Fontaine was becoming and was getting worried at how much he was transforming the city. He absolutely hates the charity angle Fontaine is playing (and charity in general: he abhors altruism), but he saw a weak link in Fontaine's empire that he thought could bring Fontaine down: the smuggling racket. Ryan knows it exists, but can't get any concrete evidence to prove what Fontaine's up to, but nonetheless, what Fontaine was doing in the fisheries was illegal by Rapture's law by one principle: Fontaine's submarines were making contact with the surface, which is a no-no for Ryan, as secrecy is important for Rapture. Ryan sends his secret police to crack down on Fontaine's smuggling ring, which, long story short, all but kicks off a power struggle and gang war between Fontaine's thugs and Ryan's police. During this time, Fontaine blackmailed his smugglers by harshly penalizing their paychecks to keep extra cash on his own hand while threatening to turn them over to Ryan to be lynched if they don't cooperate with his decision. Any smuggler who tried ratting Fontaine out to Ryan's men wound up getting murdered on Fontaine's orders.
Meanwhile, Fontaine conjured up a backup plan in case things got a bit awry: in 1956, he had Tenenbaum approach Jasmine Jolene, a stripper who was pregnant with Ryan's child, and bought off Jasmine's embryo. On Fontaine's orders, Suchong used ADAM technology to speed up the growth of Ryan's illegitimate child. Once grown up, Suchong horribly mentally conditions the child into responding to orders which are given when the phrase "Would you kindly" is spoken, with which one such experiment involving Suchong forcing the child to snap his own puppy's neck with the trigger phrase. Also at Fontaine's behest, Suchong utilizes a backup trigger phrase known as "Code Yellow" which would slowly stop the child's heart from beating when spoken to him. So why was Fontaine doing all of this and why steal Ryan's child away from him? Well, Fontaine was molding Ryan's child into a sleeper agent so that he could one day use to assassinate Ryan, and needed someone with Ryan's blood so that, when the child is actually travelling around Rapture, could genetically bypass Rapture's security system. And the name of Ryan's child is, spoiler alert: Jack, the player character of BioShock 1. Fontaine fabricates a backstory for Jack, makes Jack believe in being a farm boy living with his (fake) parents and sends him to the surface in a bathysphere for when he needs him to take out Ryan as an emergency.
By 1958, blood sheds between Ryan and Fontaine's factions and eventually, Fontaine is killed in a gunfight with Ryan's men at Neptune's Bounty. This lead to Ryan hypocritically absorbing Fontaine Futuristics and all of the company's employees and assets, sinking Fontaine's Department Store to the depths of the ocean so Ryan could use it as a makeshift prison for Fontaine's loyalists, and over time reigns over Rapture as a tyrant. So why am I still talking about Fontaine? It seems like an awfully long proposal for a posthumous character. Well, spoiler alert: Fontaine's not actually dead. He faked his own death and assumed another identity: Atlas (for the sake of convenience, I'm going to keep calling him Atlas from this point forward). It turns out Fontaine is actually an excellent actor (handy skill for a con artist), so he reemerges as an Irish proletariat who simply calls himself Atlas. Seeing the citizens of Rapture oppressed by Ryan, the charitable Atlas seeks to start a revolution by rallying the poorer citizens against Ryan, believing they deserve better rights than being screwed over by Ryan. Of course, Atlas doesn't believe any of his own words: he's just manipulating Rapture's population to his cause, and especially the citizens holding up in Fontaine's Home of the Poor. Eventually, Atlas' propaganda and speeches against Ryan come to an end when he and many of his loyalists are apprehended and imprisoned in Fontaine's Department Store. This is where the events of BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea begin.
BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea[]
While scavenging the department store, Atlas and his crew plan on executing a young woman named Elizabeth until she strikes a bargain that she'll help Atlas get back to Rapture, claiming that she is Suchong's lab assistant. In the process however, Atlas kidnaps Sally, a Little Sister who Elizabeth is trying to save, and holds her hostage so that he can force Elizabeth to work for him. Atlas even threatens to "harvest" Sally so he can supply his splicers with ADAM if Elizabeth doesn't get the job done ("harvesting" is when a Little Sister has her sea slug forcibly removed, a process that horribly kills the Little Sister; "splicers" are extreme plasmid addicts). Elizabeth does manage to find a way to raise the department store back to Rapture, but Atlas has his men chloroform and abduct Elizabeth. The reason? Because Elizabeth claimed to be Suchong's lab assistant, Fontaine needs Jack's trigger phrase ("Would you kindly"; aka the Ace in the Hole) as soon as possible, as Fontaine has yet to be informed by Suchong what it is for the sake of secrecy. Elizabeth, Suchong's supposed "lab assistant", is Fontaine's best bet to get the info.
Conveniently for Atlas, he manages to get back to Rapture on New Years Eve of 1958, where a party is being held at the Kashmir Restaurant. Atlas launches a violent terrorist attack on the Kashmir Restaurant, where his men slaughter the people there while screaming "DEATH TO RYAN". This kicks off a chain reaction where splicers break out of Fontaine's Home of the Poor, leading to Atlas' loyalists rioting all over Rapture. These events trigger a massive civil war and within two weeks into 1959, Atlas has managed to engulf a good portion of Rapture in flames. Meanwhile, Elizabeth has been comatose for these two weeks during a botched interrogation section.
We are then treated to a lovely torture sequence, so if you are squeamish, you have been warned. Atlas is in desperate need for the Ace in the Hole, so he threatens to lobotomize Elizabeth to get her to fess up, even though she truly has no idea what he's talking about. And how does Atlas plan on lobotomizing Elizabeth? By sticking a pick into her eye socket and hammering it through her skull and into her brain. Atlas only stops torturing her when Elizabeth plays him for a sap by saying that lobotomizing her will only make her forget about the Ace in the Hole. Frustrated, Atlas spectacularly breaks character and instead tries to lobotomize Sally right in front of Elizabeth. It breaks Elizabeth up completely, so with the use of her "Tear" powers (it's complicated and irrelevant to Fontaine's story), she figures out that the Ace in the Hole is at Suchong's clinic and fesses up. Atlas would have otherwise lobotomized a little girl if Elizabeth hadn't done that soon enough and is the only reason why Atlas stops himself. He sends Elizabeth to the clinic, who obtains the Ace in the Hole ("Would you kindly" coded on paper) and hands it over to Atlas as long as he lets Sally go. He indeed does let Sally go, but forces Elizabeth to decipher the code and then bludgeons Elizabeth to death with a wrench. Now knowing that "Would you kindly" is the trigger phrase, Atlas only then has to get Jack onto an airplane to England to get him to Rapture. And that's the end of Burial at Sea.
Rapture Civil War[]
From there, Atlas continues to lead his forces against Ryan's while using Fontaine's Home for the Poor as a base of operations for his revolutionaries. From people slaughtering each other all over Rapture to Big Daddies being brought down by splicers and their Little Sisters getting harvested, Rapture was literally going to Hell and the entire war is built on a giant lie that Atlas is in it "for the people" when the man behind the character, Fontaine, just wants the gullible to conquer Rapture for him. He wins the loyalty of Andrew Ryan's former mistress Diane McClintock, who even participates on one of the many raids going on throughout Rapture. One day though, she unintentionally walks in on Fontaine speaking into an audio diary out of character. Fearing that the truth behind Atlas' identity has been discovered, Fontaine turns off the audio diary and brutally murders Diane to silence her.
By 1960, Rapture's society has been completely eradicated by the war Atlas instigated:
- Both sides of the war kept splicing the hell out of themselves with stronger plasmids to the point that they were all mutated and driven insane and very few people left in Rapture's constantly dwindling population remain unspliced, but wound up getting butchered anyway due to not standing a chance against splicers.
- J.S. Steinman and Sander Cohen have become insane serial killers slaughtering people for their own agendas.
- Suchong spiked many plasmids with brainwashing pheromones, ensuring that many splicers will turn against Atlas and support Ryan instead.
- Even after Suchong's death, his ugly legacy lives on in the form of the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, who are doomed to walk the ruined streets of Rapture recycling ADAM from corpses and warding off splicers hungry for ADAM until they expire.
- Structurally, Rapture will eventually collapse completely (though it's uncertain when it will happen, since the city was still "stable" by 1968, the latest point in Rapture's timeline)
With the civil war looking grim for both sides of the war, Atlas decides it's time to get Jack to Rapture, and how he does it is pretty brutal, as it involves the plane crash I mentioned at the beginning: while Jack is booking a flight to England, Atlas smuggles out a gift with a note on it, claiming it's from Jack's fake parents. It says that Jack should not open the box until he is at the approximate coordinates of Rapture while on the plane to England, complete with "Would you kindly", ensuring that he will open it. Inside the box is a gun, which Jack uses to hijack the plane and crash it into the ocean where Rapture approximately is. Everyone on board the plane dies except Jack; even outside of Rapture, Atlas causes dozens of pointless deaths for his own agenda. And so begins BioShock itself.
BioShock[]
Atlas makes contact with Jack via radio the moment he reaches Rapture in the bathysphere. Throughout BioShock, Atlas secretly controls Jack against his will by utilizing the "Would you kindly" trigger phrase to ensure that he will blindly follow Atlas' orders. Atlas even eggs him on to splice and potentially harvest Little Sisters (depending on the player's choice). To gain sympathy from Jack, Atlas claims that he has a wife (Moira) and child (Patrick) that he needs to save in Neptune's Bounty. While Jack and Atlas are being hunted down by Andrew Ryan in the Smuggler's Hideout, the bathysphere supposedly containing Moira and Patrick explodes (it's heavily implied that Atlas rigged it to blow up). Atlas fakes a convincing mental break down, pins the deaths of his wife and son on Ryan and promises to let Jack escape from Rapture if he kills Ryan.
Long story short, Jack eventually makes it to Ryan's HQ and Atlas deliberately ensures that Jack will kill Ryan no matter what by giving this order: "Now would you kindly head to Ryan's office, and kill the son of a bitch?" Ryan activates Rapture's self-destruct sequence and reveals to Jack that he is being controlled by Atlas by using the trigger phrase against him to make a point and, knowing that he will die anyway, chooses to die on his own terms by forcing Jack to beat him to death with a golf putter. Atlas "kindly" orders Jack to use Ryan's genetic key to stop the self-destruction sequence. And at that moment, after being thought to be long dead, Atlas reveals himself to be Frank Fontaine and assumes control of Rapture with giddy delight. Everything Fontaine said about him having a family was a complete and utter lie meant to guilt trip Jack into trusting him.
With Jack no longer serving a purpose to him, Fontaine tries to dispose of him as soon as possible, first by sending a swarm of security bots after Jack. When Tenenbaum cures Jack of Suchong's "Would you kindly" mental conditioning, Fontaine activates "Code Yellow" upon discovering that "Would you kindly" won't work on him, leaving Jack in agonizing pain as he makes his way through Olympus Heights and Apollo Square as his heart progressively stops beating. Fontaine cruelly taunts Jack about his existence and his "fake family" and "phony dreams" while he is slowly dying and makes a dark, heavy implication that he will bring the plasmid business to the surface once he has killed Jack, Tenenbaum and all of the Little Sisters, something that will ensure complete chaos on the world above. Luckily though, Tenenbaum notes that Fontaine and Suchong created a secret antidote known as "Lot 192" that will 100% cure Jack of Suchong's mental conditioning (Fontaine had it created in case Jack was controlled against him and kept it a top secret). Jack cures himself from his slowly impending cardiac arrest with Lot 192, much to Fontaine's frustration.
Growing desperate and determined to kill Jack, Fontaine starts destroying his own body by pumping ADAM into his body to make himself stronger all while sadistically taunting Jack. After Jack fights through wave of splicers to get to Fontaine, he discovers that Fontaine has turned himself into a giant, statuesque monster, who savagely hurls as many plasmid abilities, security bots and splicers as he can at Jack. Unfortunately for Fontaine, the human body becomes reliant on ADAM if you take too much of it due to withdrawal symptoms, meaning that Fontaine can be killed if all of the ADAM in his body will be drained. Jack drains as much ADAM from Fontaine as he can with a Little Sisters' needle and the rest of Tenenbaum's Little Sisters finish him off by extracting ADAM from Fontaine by stabbing him repeatedly with their needles. A fitting end to a manipulative bastard, considering Fontaine put their lives through Hell.
Freudian Excuse(s)/Redeeming Qualities?[]
As heinous as Fontaine may be, there are a few things to make a note of. The biggest thing to mention of course is this line near the end of the first BioShock:
| “ | I remember when me and the Kraut put you in that sub. You were no more than two. You were my ace in the hole, but you were also the closest thing I ever had to a son. And that's why this hurts. Betrayal, kid. Life ain't strictly business. | „ |
This implies that Fontaine might care for Jack to some degree by mentioning that he sees him as his own son, but at the end of the day, his words are empty. Throughout the whole series, Fontaine shows no genuine love or care for everyone and only sees people as tools or chess pieces used to help him get ahead in life. The biggest tool and chess piece of all though is Jack. Apparently, Fontaine's definition of "having a son" is taking the embryo of Jasmine Jolene and Andrew Ryan and then having his psychopathic scientist minion Suchong mold it into a genetically engineered and horribly brainwashed sleeper agent and guinea pig. Fontaine literally puts Jack through Hell and constantly taunts him about being a "genetic freak of nature" without a real family with sadistic delight. Even after Fontaine speaks this line, he has the petty gall to hurl abuse at Jack, including this line: "I paid good money for you, and this is what I get?!" Fontaine calling Jack "family" is just completely hollow overall, especially with how he cruelly mocks Jack about his lie about Atlas having a family. Fontaine also follows that part up with the fact that he'd only get a real family as an excuse to play on the sympathy of his "suckers" (slang for victims of confidence tricks).
Other than that? Fontaine is sorely lacking in this department, as far as the games are concerned. Dude's a stone cold, manipulative psychopath who cares for one one but himself. He saw every person he manipulated and every atrocity he committed against Rapture, as well as the city's inevitable collapse, as nothing but a "long con" for him and never batted an eye at how many people's lives he screwed over for money, power, self-gratification and, to a somewhat lesser extent, sadism (as far as Jack is concerned). Not to mention that all of the Little Sisters are human ADAM factories to him and views them as less than human. It's implied he had a sexual relationship with Brigid Tenenbaum, but the keyword here of course is "sexual". He didn't give a rat's ass about Tenenbaum and only wanted her on board for her scientific knowledge. Fontaine even had his men ransack her apartment once she, in his own words, "grew a conscience". Burial at Sea also really goes out of it's way to make Fontaine look as irredeemable as possible by torturing Elizabeth and trying to do the same with Sally. The only reason why he stopped with both of them was due to getting what he wanted, and even though he spared Sally, he still murdered Elizabeth in cold blood (something not part of Elizabeth's deal) and basically left Sally alone to die (she does get rescued by Jack though, so I dunno). Furthermore, all of the altruistic qualities he preaches while he is in his "Atlas" character are giant lies used to exploit people's trust in him and outright admits that charity and making people think they're "worth a nickel" are what helped him build up an army in the first place.
Now I will admit that the book, BioShock: Rapture, tries to remedy his blatant antisocial personality disorder by giving him a few humanizing moments:
- Firstly, he's given something of a Freudian Excuse in the book: He grew up an orphan on the streets until he became a child actor for theaters (not portrayed as mitigating; growing up as a homeless orphan doesn't justify running an entire city into the ground).
- Fontaine is initially shocked to see the side effects of ADAM at it's absolute worst when Tenenbaum and Suchong show him a person who has been transformed into a huge blob of flesh plastered onto a wall (this still didn't stop him from creating the Plasmid business to begin with though, and anyone would react with shock if they hadn't seen a human plastered onto a wall like clay before).
- In the book, Fontaine is pretty creeped out by Suchong (then again, it takes a sociopath to know a sociopath).
- Treats his bodyguard Reggie like a good buddy for the most part (in the book, Reggie is the guy who helped Fontaine fake his own death to begin with by being Fontaine's body double; he's yet another pawn for Fontaine at the end of the day).
- Fontaine is disgusted when Ryan accuses him of being a child sex predator due to how he keeps the Little Sisters hidden away (Well, Fontaine indeed was exploiting the Little Sisters by extracting ADAM from them as a means to fuel his Plasmid business, just not in the way Ryan was thinking of. Plus, Ryan was merely trying to sting Fontaine's ego, since Fontaine was doing the same thing to Ryan).
On the other hand: BioShock: Rapture may be a direct prequel to BioShock 1 and 2, but the book is basically a different continuity to the games for two reasons: the games themselves don't acknowledge the book as canon and the book has several continuity errors in the series' timeline (made worse by the fact that Infinite, and by extension Burial at Sea, wasn't out yet), so the details listed above can't really be applied to Fontaine as a whole, even though a good portion of said details aren't really that mitigating.
Humanizing moments or not, my description of Fontaine as a "stone cold, manipulative psychopath"? This is what his character boils down to at the end of the day.
Heinous Standards[]
Do I need to say anything here? Fontaine's the biggest monster in the series and is the sole reason why BioShock's heinous standards are high, because he really, really goes above and beyond. The man drove an entire city into the ground because all he wanted to do was con it. Whether it was the smugglers he oppressed and murdered, the people he drove insane with his huge, unavoidable drug empire, sanctioning the horrible treatment and experiments of the Little Sisters, manipulating the people of Rapture into supporting him, the cruel birth and treatment of Jack, murdering anyone who accidentally learn of Atlas' true identity, instigating a destructive civil war built on a lie, orchestrating the deaths of dozens of civilians in a plane crash just to get Jack to Rapture, forcing Jack to assassinate his own father, trying to dispose of Jack through unusually painful means, the implication that he'll introduce ADAM to the surface once he slaughters Tenenbaum and the Little Sisters? That's an impressive rap sheet, period. Almost every atrocious thing that happened in Rapture can be laid directly at his feet. And that transorbital lobotomy sequence in Burial at Sea is such a special bit of cruelty that pushes him beyond the point of redemption. The fact that he tortured Elizabeth in that way and was willing to do the same to A LITTLE GIRL was simply horrifying.
The best part about all of this though is that technically, none of his biggest crimes are really offscreen villainy. You get to see how far Rapture has collapsed as a result of the civil war he started with all the deaths and destruction, the plane crash gives you a sense of just how many people died in it, we see in full how much of a negative effect ADAM has on people, Peach Wilkins' paranoia gives us a glimpse at how scared the smugglers truly are of Fontaine, we get to see how the Little Sisters live such awful lives as a result of Fontaine's plasmid business, and most importantly: the audio diaries themselves give so much insight into how Fontaine caused Rapture to fall so far from grace.
Now Fontaine's biggest opponent, Andrew Ryan, is not a saint. Like, at all. The more problems that began to arise in Rapture, the more Ryan kept betraying his ideals to the point that he became a hypocritical and egomaniacal dictator. People were oppressed under his thumb, treated Apollo Square like a concentration camp, made Persephone a terrible prison to live in, had assassins who made attempts on his life spiked onto walls outside his office, continued Fontaine's plasmid business, sanctioned the Big Daddy program and the abduction of little girls for Little Sister conversion and killed anyone who turned against him (like how he gassed Julie Langford). Ryan does some terrible things and is a bad dude in his own right. But, unlike Fontaine, Ryan in some twisted way had the best intentions for Rapture by truly believing in his city's future and generally has redeeming qualities that hold him back from being truly pure evil (such as being affably evil, somewhat remorseful and possibly honoring agreements; he even has a solid Freudian Excuse in the novel). Even though he betrayed his ideals and became the very thing he hated, Ryan still saw the world as a morally corrupt Hellhole that he needed to help get the best and most productive minds in the world away from. Fontaine has none of those redeeming qualities at all and, while sharing the same amount of resources as Ryan, arguably ends up being worse through his sheer destructive, manipulative and callous disregard for human life. In a way, Fontaine is half the reason why Ryan became rabid, because he just couldn't risk another "parasite" becoming as powerful as Fontaine again (even though it didn't work out). Plus, it was Fontaine who introduced plasmids, not Ryan, and started the Rapture Civil War that made Rapture crumble, not Ryan (though Ryan's own behavior helped him kick start it in a way).
Final Verdict[]
There's apparently going to be a new BioShock game several years from now and we don't really know if anything new will be done with Fontaine's story (which I hope doesn't happen, since his story arc is over and perfect as it is), but until then, Fontaine is always going to be an easy keep for me. Despite being one of the worst excuses of a human being in a video game franchise full of morally black characters, he at least gave us a great plot twist.
Now, Would You Kindly give your thoughts below?