[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[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.