[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[randeh]

randeh
Regarding the kids - I had this theory as well that he reanimated his children, but there is a catch - one of the letters from kids who were cleaning pipes said they meet "2 gents looking kids", which refers to Mandus twins. And they didn't note anything extraordinary about them, not a single trail they were mashed u[p from different bodies.

Also:

This is hinted at when you ride the pigline at the end of the game that leads directly to the temple - you see Enoch and Edwin standing with a ManPig directly behind them, arms held out like a proud father holding his sons. This is also why you wake up in a caged bed where the ManPigs slept. This is why people run from you and slam their doors when London is burning as if they do not recognize you as the rich industrialist philanthropist who treats them all so well.

The Machine, the man in the iron lung, is Oswald Mandus' body. But you... you are Oswald Mandus' clockwork soul remade into a new body to carry out his last wishes. This is why it refers to you as Mandus, and why Mandus via the Chapter title refers to it as Oswald (leaving himself described as "I" to remain vague). In all actuality, Oswald Mandus's original personality, his original soul, was completely dead and replaced by the entity who had assumed full control of his body by the time we play the game.

Also, I mentioned this one before as well, om pages 17-18. But someone pointed out that the hand that hold lantern is perfectly human.

This is easily enough explained if you stop thinking of the ManPigs as some sort of technical limit of what Mandus can reanimate, but instead it's a grotesque form he chose on purpose.

If you'll note the first Documents on April 30th: "So it can be done. We can reshape the body into a tool, accelerate the processes of Mr Darwin's evolution. But here my great uncle and I part company. He chose men as the subjects of his experiments, but men are difficult to control and rotten with sentimentality. No, we require a new creature for our chattels: loyal, clever, strong, easily sated."

I've never seen anything to indicate that Mandus couldn't bring back a man wholly intact and resembling a human. In fact you get direct evidence of him being able to bring a man back to live without melding him to pig parts in the August 19th Document where he resurrects a severed head.

Additionally if you read the process described in August 20th - "Into the manipulator they file in silence. I hear the hissing of gas. I hear the dull groaning as teeth are removed, as bones reset. I hear the pigs screaming." - it seems to indicate that he mutilates the humans, douses them with Compound X to keep them alive during the process, and then affixes them with pig and mechanical parts.

So it isn't Mandus' ability to reanimate a humanoid form that gives the ManPigs their form. Instead it is Mandus' obsession with pigs that causes him to re-craft them into the forms he chose for them - something befitting the world he called a "machine for pigs"... After all the world makes pigs of us all, so why shouldn't he? This idea that the pigs are simply his personal preference is also showed to us again when he brings the dog he killed with strychnine back to life without the aide of pig parts.

So there's nothing to say that the boys appearance would necessarily be grotesque, but that they simply would be unnatural and tainted by the otherworld. This, and the fact that they're actually plugged into the machine (likely still alive in some form) gives them the ability to manifest and manipulate the environment in some form.

Again, I point out the fact that the Cook they speak of in the October journals instantly murdered an animal in front of them with a cooking utensil. According to the timeline this is around the time Mandus starts gathering the insane from the asylums, the children from the orphanages, and the poor from the streets, and hosting extravagant orgies for the rich... all to be turned into ManPigs and power his machine - the house they live in makes no pretense of civility at this point.

For the boys to just be playing casually around the house during this time would indicate they see the horrors around them. This doesn't unsettle them as they are horrors themselves, but only on the inside where Mandus has trouble restoring their souls correctly. This is why they "fill [him] with terror, not love". He doesn't know how to bring the SOUL back properly, ala the Clockwork and the Soul document: "Subjects still require severing of frontal lobes to reduce emotional distress upon reactivation. Damn, damn it. Damn this wretched soul. If only it were clockwork."

So, while Mandus could bring people back intact, their souls were always incorrect somehow... Very Pet Sematery. This is why he seems so unsure in his last Journal entry where he likely is describing the process he uses to duplicate his soul into a constructed body but is unsure if it will work: "if not, then surely better to die amongst my creations than to continue to live as a monster."

This goes back to the quote we see at the beginning: "He who makes a beast of himself removes himself from the pain of being human."

So naturally if Mandus can create a living form that appears human (when he desires it and doesn't simply wish to covert them into pigs), then there's a good reason as to why our playable character's left hand appears quite human, yet why he's clearly represented as a ManPig in the ending sequence standing with the boys - it's not telling us that we're literally a ManPig, but that we are some kind of flesh construct created by Mandus all the same, regardless of our exact pig percentages.