rip sinclair you would have loved taking eleanor and delta on a "sorry i essentially ruined both of your lives and traumatized you" vacation to margaritaville
There are a lot of spots in Bioshock 2 where they're inverting a beat from the initial game, but one of my favorites is how the opening completely upends the dynamic established in the previous game surrounding the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters. The first game constantly beats the drum of how goddamn awful it was that so many children were ripped from still-living but economically-impotent parents and stuck on the Omelas express, to the point that there's an entire enemy subtype consisting of working-class mothers who fell to madness while desperately, fruitlessly searching for their stolen children. So if it had happened in the first game, Lamb's stunt would almost certainly have been an uncomplicatedly-triumphant moment, which Delta would be the clear-cut antagonist of. At long last, a Biomom who made it through the rapture gauntlet against all odds, who formulated and flawlessly executed a plan to rescue her kidnapped daughter from her mindless superhuman captor representing The Man! A light in the darkness! What a Girlboss!
Except that it quickly becomes clear- from her bearing, her tone of voice, from her power-play with the pistol against something she doesn't even view as a sentient person, from the totally-unremarked-upon 75 percent casualty rate sustained by her people while they're fighting Delta- that her priority here was never rescuing her child so much as recovering a child that belongs to her- the canvas onto which she projects an extension of herself and her goals. She's miffed because she lost her favorite toy. It's a sci-fi exaggeration of a real type of abusive parent-child relationship. And it turns out that the "mindless" superhuman captor acting as an Agent Of The Man is ultimately a lot more invested in the kid's ability to self-actualize and make her own way in the world than Lamb could ever be. As a little sister she actually got to go out on walks!
I fucking love the Bioshock audio diaries so much. The characters just literally recorded themselves bitching at/about each other and left the recordings around for any passing weirdo to find. It’s like 60s social media with slightly more fish.