[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[aquilantiqua]

There's something about the major symbolisms and references in AMFP that I haven't really seen many people touch on so I decided to make an account to add to the discussion.

Honestly, the whole story seems like it's based around a specific type of delusion called the Influencing Machine, stemming from the psyche of an insane Nietzsche fanboy.

Spoiler below!

To sum up as neatly as possible, Mandus himself makes several references throughout the game to the case of James Tilly Matthews. The first that I can see is from a journal entry in the church:

It appears I have no choice. Thus I descend and may God have mercy upon my soul. If this is my Bedlam, and I am to be cast as Matthews, then I will wear that mantle for the sake of my boys, and face whatever horrors lie beneath the altar.

James Matthews was a man, committed to Bedlam Psychiatric Hospital, who is to be considered the first medically recorded case of paranoid schizophrenia and had vivid delusions of a Machine that was designed and operated by unseen, unknown enemies to torture him psychologically and physically through bizarre advanced scientific means. It is now known that this type of delusion of an extremely complex torture machine is fairly common among schizophrenics. Matthews called his machine the Air Loom. You may have seen Mandus mention the Air Loom by name more than once:

Mandus, you clever old goat, I can feel this horror, this grief, this betrayal buil into fury. I will not stand, I will not be undertrodden. If this machine is my air loom, I am the overman.

I believe he also announces through dialogue that he "beat God to death against the Air Loom". Mandus also references the specific types of torture that Matthews claims the Air Loom performed, including something called Lobster-cracking which stops blood circulation:

I cannot pass without fear of scalding. I am a lobster, cracked, my circulation stagnated, my vital motions impeded. The steam will boil my whole unless I can find a way to shut it off.

There's clearly very heavy allusion to Matthews and his Machine, waving a big colorful flag that a whole lot of this could really just be in Mandus' head. Or it's more abstract that, but I do not know.

Moving on to how I called Mandus a "Nietzsche fanboy", references to Nietzsche and his philosophies and ideas are littered everywhere in this story and I don't think I can catch them all. But, the ones that stand out most are his repeated references to Nietzsche's famous themes of "God Is Dead" and "Übermensch". I linked the Wikipedia page to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" above (here it is again). If you have time, have a read and see if anything looks familiar in the context of AMFP. Time and time again Mandus refers to rejecting God, killing God, replacing God. From the section titled The Madman from Nietzsche's The Gay Science:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche philosophises a lot about man themselves becoming gods or god-like after the Death of God, most prominently through the idea of the Übermensch. An Übermensch is one who has become more than man, moved on from weakness and has become a master of the self. To an Übermensch, humans are animals who have no control over themselves, who look to otherworldly God/gods because they are weak. The Übermensch becomes the new "worldly" God who wants to bring about a civilization of people that are truly self-aware and not weakened by animalistic feelings and urges. Much the same way Mandus sees people as pigs that he would bring up out of the filth.

Mandus even uses Nietzsche's terminology (the English translation of Ubermensch is "overman" and Mandus uses that word as well several times), most recognisably in the note where you all probably giggled (well I did...):

I stand and look at myself in the mirror, penis in hand and my reflection grins at me and his mouth is full of the sulphur mustards. "Vain fool", he sneers, "Are you really so very different? Do you genuinely believe your works of evil are any greater than the rest of them? You are simply a weak man, a product of his age, the same as any other. This is Empire, cretin, this is the killing idiocy, the natural result of this social Darwinism. If you are evil, then this world is evil. You just let the blood run in the street rather than hiding it in the poorhouse. You hold the blade and slide it home yourself, you do not pay a man to do this for you where you cannot see it. If you are evil, at least yours is an honest evil and that alone makes you Ubermensch". And thus I wash my hands and take to bed.

(There's some crazy references to WWI (and WWII?) Germany in there and I honestly don't know what to make of that. It's like he's seeing the future through someone else's eyes like some sort of prophetic episode.)

It looks like Mandus got in a craze over and abused the philosophies of Nietzsche in a similar way to that which a certain Nazi party would just a few decades later. Result: Mandus committing genocide to prevent a genocide inspired by similar ideas. An irony that most people caught anyway, but perhaps more interesting when you dig a little deeper.

The last theme philosophised about by Nietzsche that I'll bring up is "Eternal Recurrence" which is basically the idea that everything recurs, all events happen over and over and all actions done by a person will be repeated. Just something I thought was comparable with Mandus having to start up and to sabotage his Machine twice and he willed for a way to end the circle of events.

Oh and did I mention Nietzsche was struck the idea for all of this after gazing upon a huge pyramid-shaped stone? Weird, man...


All these themes and references are so pervasive, I don't know if I should take them more literally, or accept them to be just literary undertones. I kind of enjoy the idea that the events of the game were him battling his way through his own fractured mind and through his Influencing Machine. Anyway, just wanted share with you guys some of the stuff this story seems to be built on that I haven't seen much talk of. :3