[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[MyRedNeptune]

I disagree quite severely about the characterization being implausible. Mandus' actions boil down to a mixture of obsession, repressed hatred and class warfare, all bound together by the cultural context of the industrialized Victorian period.

That is made rather clear by the narrative. But where did it come from? Why does he hate the world? Why is he obsessed? I still haven't been able to find the answer to those questions.

Class warfare, sure, but that alone doesn't spawn irrationality of such magnitude. Otherwise humanity would have long destroyed itself.

He's certainly insane, but it is an insanity that can be understood much more than, say, the Joker from The Dark Knight. He's not to be dismissed as generically crazy, given that a significant portion of the story is about understanding his motivations.

Well, thank god he's not like the Joker at least, lol.

We get to understand the motivations, but not the cause. These "motivations" are just a rationalization created by Mandus himself.

Also, Alexander was driven by desperation and lost love, not because he was an inscrutable Cyclopaean horror.

So first they say that he's driven by love, then they try to claim that he doesn't care about torturing humans because he's an alien and can't empathize?

It all boils down to how much thought you're willing to invest into the story. If you didn't enjoy it, then you won't spend much time trying to make sense of the information you were provided. You may call it over-analysis, I just call it part of the fun. Making logical sense of gaps in a horror story can make it more enjoyable. If I apply your surface-level reading to Daniel, I can say that there's no logical reason why he jumps from 'scared archaeologist' to 'gleeful torturer/child-murderer' when given little evidence for the value of his crimes other than the word of his friend.

I'll have you know that I spent a considerable amount of time after release reading all 75 pages of this thread and others, looking for possible explanations, debating with people and trying to apply analysis of my own, all to find something to latch on to. I found nothing and came to the conclusion that the character was poor. My level of investment is hardly "surface-level", as you put it.

Let's try to have a constructive conversation instead of resorting to baseless claims and accusations.

[Alardem]

That is made rather clear by the narrative. But where did it come from? Why does he hate the world? Why is he obsessed? I still haven't been able to find the answer to those questions.

Class warfare, sure, but that alone doesn't spawn irrationality of such magnitude. Otherwise humanity would have long destroyed itself.

Mandus lived in the East End of London, which at the time was an extremely overcrowded, impoverished slum. The industrial revolution only exacerbated the misery, cramming in hundreds of people living in the streets, resorting to crime or prostitution to survive. So I wouldn't be surprised that Mandus' perspective would be quite warped by where he lived - he pities and hates the impoverished 'whores, beggars, orphans, filthy degenerates' who he literally sees rutting on the streets, yet as an industrialist is forced to exploit them if he hopes to retain his status.

Knowing all this makes the lack of people on the streets all the more unsettling.

We get to understand the motivations, but not the cause. These "motivations" are just a rationalization created by Mandus himself.

And what exactly is the difference between motivation and cause? Mandus commits horrible atrocities under the guidance of his murderous alter-ego, is wracked with doubt throughout the entire process, and eventually can't handle his own madness. His rationalizations are ultimately unconvincing.

There is a cold yet absurd rationale for each atrocity Mandus commits, although listing them all might take a while. I'll give a few anyway:

-He kills his sons in the immediate aftermath of his vision of their death, justifying it afterwards by claiming it preserved their innocence.
-He uses orphans as child labor because they will not be missed, and kills them if they discover his secrets. He does not care about them because they are not his creations.
-He turns the mentally challenged and poor into pigs as a means of reducing them to a pure, animal state - and to create 'children' to care for once more. They also provide manual labor.
-He turns rich guests into food for other rich guests to devour, as a form of poetic justice and in order to get more funding.
-He takes advantage of the church to bring more people over to his own idea of salvation

So first they say that he's driven by love, then they try to claim that he doesn't care about torturing humans because he's an alien and can't empathize?

I, personally, don't believe that he lacks empathy. If he did, he would not have been disturbed to witness Daniel's growing sadism.

It's just that Alexander is selfish enough to prioritize HIS needs over anyone else's. Just as Daniel was led to believe that human sacrifice was necessary to protect himself, Alexander was aware that members among the Prussian council were anxious to kill him. The baron thus does horrific things and rationalizes his actions as necessary to get what he is entitled to.

I'm ultimately not sure how 'rational' evil acts need to be. I usually hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as Mandus is quite literally a genocidal maniac it's fair here to consider how Nazi ideology and its perversion of 'science' (eugenics) works. Or, hell, just how the prevailing social attitudes of the time could be taken to their "logical" extreme.

[MyRedNeptune]

That is made rather clear by the narrative. But where did it come from? Why does he hate the world? Why is he obsessed? I still haven't been able to find the answer to those questions.

Class warfare, sure, but that alone doesn't spawn irrationality of such magnitude. Otherwise humanity would have long destroyed itself.

Mandus lived in the East End of London, which at the time was an extremely overcrowded, impoverished slum. The industrial revolution only exacerbated the misery, cramming in hundreds of people living in the streets, resorting to crime or prostitution to survive. So I wouldn't be surprised that Mandus' perspective would be quite warped by where he lived - he pities and hates the impoverished 'whores, beggars, orphans, filthy degenerates' who he literally sees rutting on the streets, yet as an industrialist is forced to exploit them if he hopes to retain his status.

Knowing all this makes the lack of people on the streets all the more unsettling.

As I said, I severely doubt that class warfare is enough to provoke the kind of violence that Mandus commits.

Simply living in a bad neighborhood doesn't make you a genocidal maniac. In fact, situations by themselves mean nothing, because everything - and I mean everything - rests on how the individual interprets the situation subjectively. What produces one or another interpretation is what really matters, and is the true cause. And that is not something that AAMFP addresses.

And what exactly is the difference between motivation and cause? Mandus commits horrible atrocities under the guidance of his murderous alter-ego, is wracked with doubt throughout the entire process, and eventually can't handle his own madness. His rationalizations are ultimately unconvincing.

There is a cold yet absurd rationale for each atrocity Mandus commits, although listing them all might take a while. I'll give a few anyway:

-He kills his sons in the immediate aftermath of his vision of their death, justifying it afterwards by claiming it preserved their innocence.
-He uses orphans as child labor because they will not be missed, and kills them if they discover his secrets. He does not care about them because they are not his creations.
-He turns the mentally challenged and poor into pigs as a means of reducing them to a pure, animal state - and to create 'children' to care for once more. They also provide manual labor.
-He turns rich guests into food for other rich guests to devour, as a form of poetic justice and in order to get more funding.
-He takes advantage of the church to bring more people over to his own idea of salvation

You answered your own question. AAMFP gives us a whole cluster of weird, shaky rationales, the only purpose of which is to be used by Mandus to justify his crimes to himself so that he may continue in his behavior, and I guess they kind of work as such. But they do not reflect the cause of his actions because they are nothing more than an excuse.

The cause is the initial force that pushes the character into a certain behavior. I have not been able to find one in Mandus. I *think* the game tries to sell the death of his wife as the significant turning point in his life, but I can't see how it ties into anything.

I personally like to separate the words motive and cause because a motive is usually seen as something conscious, but that's not that important.

Also, why does Mandus have an alternate personality? That is just absurd.

So first they say that he's driven by love, then they try to claim that he doesn't care about torturing humans because he's an alien and can't empathize?

I, personally, don't believe that he lacks empathy. If he did, he would not have been disturbed to witness Daniel's growing sadism.

It's just that Alexander is selfish enough to prioritize HIS needs over anyone else's. Just as Daniel was led to believe that human sacrifice was necessary to protect himself, Alexander was aware that members among the Prussian council were anxious to kill him. The baron thus does horrific things and rationalizes his actions as necessary to get what he is entitled to.

I'm ultimately not sure how 'rational' evil acts need to be. I usually hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as Mandus is quite literally a genocidal maniac it's fair here to consider how Nazi ideology and its perversion of 'science' (eugenics) works. Or, hell, just how the prevailing social attitudes of the time could be taken to their "logical" extreme.

That's a rather human version of Alexander which I like as well, but that is not how he is presented by the narrative. In the text he is rather contradictory. Concerned for Daniel on the one hand and distancing himself from humans as a species on the other.

[rotten]

t's the part where the Machine explains that the turd-water can be used to drive turbines, or something.

I guess it may be a voice from the Stone Egg that Mandus claims to hear.


Also, he goes insane because all the visions which the Orb, or some deity, puts into his head.
In recent posts you all tend to ignore those visions. They didn't come from nowhere and even if Mandus' personality is split, he still wouldn't be able to predict the horrors of the coming century.

[Alardem]

Simply living in a bad neighborhood doesn't make you a genocidal maniac. In fact, situations by themselves mean nothing, because everything - and I mean everything - rests on how the individual interprets the situation subjectively. What produces one or another interpretation is what really matters, and is the true cause. And that is not something that AAMFP addresses.

You answered your own question. Mandus is an individual who, in the context of a severely repressed society obsessed with class, morality and progress all topped off with a good deal of hypocrisy, snapped.

Also, why does Mandus have an alternate personality? That is just absurd.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - a great example about the dichotomy between the upstanding public figure and the depraved beast within.

[VaeVictis]

I'm ultimately not sure how 'rational' evil acts need to be. I usually hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as Mandus is quite literally a genocidal maniac it's fair here to consider how Nazi ideology and its perversion of 'science' (eugenics) works. Or, hell, just how the prevailing social attitudes of the time could be taken to their "logical" extreme.

I'd like a moment to expand on this a little bit, because this isn't altogether a single parallel.

In WWII, Hitler had camps and ghettos for Jews, and tried to fool the world into believing he was doing good by them (should sound familiar). Mandus's dinner parties parallel Hitler's Theresienstadt, which was referred to as 'the Paradise Ghetto.' Here, a faux community of Jews was established: with 'Elders' (prominent Jews forced into leadership positions), theaters, and even a 'cafe.' At almost random times, Jews were selected would be 'transported' out of the 'community', you can assume their fate.
The SS ensured that, by all outside appearances, this community looked like a haven in the midst of the war, they even allowed a neutral Red Cross staff inspect it, sweeping all the abuse, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and starvation level rations under the rug.
In terms of putting on a show to disguise an atrocity, Mandus seems to prefigure Hitler in a very haunting way.
Just thought that this would be interesting, intentional or not.
Carry on.

[Alex Ros]

As for what happened at the end of the game I think Mandus just decided to kill himself as long he was the only one creator of that evil machine. Thus no one else would ever rebuild it. So he set into the specific chair and let some mechanism to cut-off his own heart and just died. Machine is already dead or dying, so there would be no profit from cutting another one heart. There will be just 3 hearts (others 2 are children hearts) sacrificed to the Orb, but nevertheless the machine is dead and its ingenious creator too. And, yeah, I think that sacrificing hearts is nothing to the machine its only an Orb evil disturbance that is hungry for blood and hearts especially, nothing more. As for that drowned man "Iron Lang" he could be anyone, it does not really matters as I think. I think that Mandus was always a solid person physically, psychically no (for some period of time he was obsessed by the Orb influence), but physically there was always just one Mandus. As for losing his memories at the beginning of the game, I presume he simply drank Laudanum which he was using for calming pigs and humans before cutting them into pieces inside of the machine.

[emblemparade]

It seems I have a different understanding of the meaning of the final scene, and the identity of the man in the "iron lung."

In an important sense, there were never two Oswalds: there is only one narrative thread that "really" happened. Most of you figured it out already:

Oswald went to Mexico with his twin children after his wife died, and it's there that the children found the orb (they say this in the voiceover in the cemetary). Once back in England, his depression mixes with the disease he caught in Mexico and he goes mad. The orb's power is over time (more on that later) so it provides Oswald with visions of the future. The 19th Century was already awful, but it seemed that the 20th would be worse. And so he breaks, and begins a project to transform his pig-slaughtering machine into one that slaughters humans. But he, Oswald, is not to die in the coming apocalypse, and neither are his children. He has found a technology to make them immortal (a promise/curse we remember too well from A Dark Descent). He will not have to endure loss again, as he did with his wife, Lily.

And so, minutes before midnight of the last day of the century, he creeps down to machine's heart, taking his children with him.

This is his plan: they are to be transformed first, which means he has to kill them, remove their hearts, drown them in the compound, use electricity, and thus reanimate them. And what about him? Well, he took care of that, too: the machine will do the preparation. That's what that complex chair thing you see in the end is for. On its two sides you can see his children's corpses impaled on their own, smaller chairs. And that "iron lung"? That's where the machine will immerse him in the compound and reanimate him. The machine will take care of the rest, and start a new century of death.

(Some of you thought he already killed the children in Mexico, because the voiceover says he killed them "on the temple steps": but actually it's this last chamber that is the "temple" he's referring to.)

But the orb lies. Even without this infernal machine, the new century would still be one of death, wouldn't it? And in order to make his children immortal, Oswald would have to kill them, wouldn't he? All those promises were lies. As he descends in these last minutes of the 19th Century, Oswald is feeling doubt. And so, in his madness (or is it an inkling of sanity?) he sabatoges the machine he built as he descends. But it was a hurried, half-hearted sabotage. He doesn't know what he wants. He kills his children, but they are not reanimated: the machine has been sabotaged. Regret, again ... regret upon regret. Go back, un-sabotage the machine, "save your children"...

And so we get to the game: Who are we, the player? We are that doubt. We are regret. We are Oswald retracing his own steps down to heart of the machine, rethinking, remembering, wondering if he can change the course of events, go back to his original plan, or perhaps end it all. We fix the sabotage, then break the machine again ... in a constant game of "what if." It's not really amenesia he is experiencing: it's denial. Denial of his culbability. Denial of his wife's death. Denial of humanity's despicable treatment of itself, now and in the future.

So what did Oswald really end up doing? Did he "prepare" his children, as we see them attached to the machine in that last moment? Did he go ahead with his plan to make them all immortal? Did he activate the machine? Or did he climb back up, fix the machine, and go ahead with his original plan?

We do see images of the dead children, staked to the two chairs on his side. And we do see him lying in the tank of compound. We see him activating the machine at the last moment. But we also saw him sabotaging it ... So is this actual history we're seeing and regretting? Or is this a possible future, one that Oswald can stop right now if he chooses?

It's all of these, I think. This is the power of the orb: in normal life, we have daydreams and meandering, dark thoughts. But the orb makes these dreams real, turns our fantastical fears (and hopes) into actual consequences. At this last moment of the 19th Century, 12:00 AM (the time frozen on all the clocks), all timelines become possible, all Oswalds. Immorality, but only for a moment. Immortality, in that you can keep replaying the game as many times as you wish.

And the orb wins either way, lying its way to victory: Oswald and his children would not achieve true immortality, only a shadow existence. And the 20th Century would be one of death, with or without the machine for pigs. (The actual "machines for pigs" that we have built were far more horrible than anything in this story: Auschwitz-Birkenau was only the biggest.) The orb has the last laugh.

But we don't need mystical orbs or video games to know all that, do we? We know our thoughts have consequences, just as much as we know that we can replay history in our mind, as well as we can imagine futures dark or bright. Can we ever redeem ourselves if we make mistakes? Can we redeem the madness and evil of the 20th Century? Perhaps that, gentle readers, is the reason that storytelling exists.

[PutraenusAlivius]

I'm actually quite surprised how in the hell can you fit an entire temple below ground? I mean won't the lack of pillars supporting the landmass above make it all fall down? (I'm judging there are no pillars since I didn't see any that supports the land up there IIRC).

@Tesbull
Dang it man can you actually be a little mature?

[Ghieri]

*snip*

I'm going to go with that because that resolves so much confusion I had so I can stop thinking about it already oh god.