[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[Cybolic]

[...]Problem is that:

"June 24th 1899
(...)

I hear my children playing in the attic but it fills me with terror, not love. What desperate thoughts are these?"

The kids seems to be alive before the time of the previous note I quoted. Oh well. Anyway, I still guess the kids were reanimated somehow.

Mandus being terrified of his 'children' in the attic probably means that he's disturbed by them being zombified shells of their former selves. I don't know - personally, I thought the Man-Pigs (and the Machine) served as surrogate children...

I don't think the children were ever reanimated; we are only shown the children as ghosts/hallucinations, so must assume that this is what Mandus is referring to.

My interpretation is that they were killed in Mexico, either on purpose or by falling rocks. "and then I went into the garden and buried those tiny shattered skulls under the weeping bulges of the rhododendrons" - why else are they shattered?

I'm tempted to believe that their deaths were an accident and that the entire London Aztec pyramid, the jaguar-faced mask and the sacrificing of the children's hearts are only the fabrications of Mandus' dying mind, blaming himself for not keeping them safe and ending up mixing mythology into it.

---

One thing I haven't seen touched much is the sexuality of Mandus.
I got the impression that Lillibeth didn't/couldn't quite satisfy him, hence the spying on her in the bath and the drawings, but I wonder if there's a connection to Jack the Ripper here? Mandus seems most aroused, not when mentioning Lillibeth, but when talking to himself in the mirror about his "honest evil". Mandus probably wasn't The Ripper, but he might have found the killings arousing and possibly done a few himself (if "mouth is full of the sulphur mustards", means a grin of death and "thus I wash my hands and take to bed" is washing them clean of blood).
I'm not sure what the precise meaning is here, but I'm sure there's something.

As for what we've been playing, I'm leaning towards the game taking place in Mandus' mind and the pigmen, the destruction of London, the experiments with the Brennenburg compound and the scope of the machine all being representative of other things; with the exception of the Brennenburg compound and the Orb which I believe are mixed memories from what he knows of his uncle.