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Spoiler Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*
PathOS Offline
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RE: Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

Necro-bumping this because I just finished the game again and it's fun to discuss the plot.

I always liken Oswald Mandus to Daniel Plainview from There will be Blood. Plainview is a very troubled man, he has a deep hatred for people and a competition within him that demands no one else can succeed above himself. But there's also something within him that can come out to care for his "son", albeit brief and short-lived it is.

Mandus from what I can piece together did start out rather "decent" by I suppose the standards of the industrial age. Like any entrepreneur of that period (or any) he had his vices and ambitions, but seemed well off and happy from what we know of his time while his beloved Lily was alive. After she died he clearly was no longer the same man, and something dark began festering within him, but he was able to pay it no mind while he had his boys. Still he seemed to have let his ambition get the better of him nonetheless, spending his family's fortunes trying to automate his meat plant to provide even greater output for the city to match how other industries were slowly becoming autonomous. But clearly his financial burdens were straining an already stressed soul to the brink with the thought of losing everything for himself and his sons. Obviously everything became undone once he discovered the secrets of Brennenberg and made his fateful sojourn to Mexico.

It's certainly an interesting take on coming into contact with an Orb. Displacement of space-time was certainly something Daniel experienced as he mentioned feeling only minutes had passed where hours had, so Mandus having "visions" of the future seems plausible. The divergence is in him not being haunted by "The Shadow" as Daniel was, unless you subscribe to the theory that the entity that became "The Engineer" was spawned in part from The Shadow, for it certainly acts like it, becoming a harbinger of death to all around him and is only satiated by the sacrifice of lives to it. But suffice to say, Mandus was no longer the same man after retrieving the Orb, and if you infer from the cut journals, it's possible his personality was overtaken by the new one to the point where it "fell asleep" and unaware of the atrocities that would be committed in his name.

Regardless, Mandus' love for his children had become twisted to the point where he felt it better to kill them as a sacrifice than let them live for their supposed fate in The Great War. Rationalizing this as salvation, he at first seem to began trying to justify his upcoming actions as saving humanity. Though if one reads his journals one can see that the hate and rage within him was building to a point where deep down he knew no one truly deserved to be saved. His contempt for everyone was clear, from the poor who he thought were unclean and worthless, to the wealthy who he loathed even more for their slovenly ways and how they were the real "pigs" of humanity. He threw lavish parties for the rich to trap them in their beds and feed them to the machine. Even children weren't spared as he used them for labor in the plant and had no issues with them being killed in accidents or being fed to the other pigs. Apparently at some point the "Product" became people instead of pigs, and the meat the plant was outputting was just that, though it seemed no one was the wiser, as many complimented Mandus on the quality of his product, becoming an industrious Hannibal Lecter.

At some point he felt he should create better workers using the methods began by Alexander in the creation of Gatherers. He created Compound X made from Vitae and other components which could reanimate the dead and fuse organs from different bodies and species. He would begin by force-feeding the compound to the subjects, causing them to hemorrhage internally and vomit/excrete their blood and internal organs and sneeze out their teeth. Then move on to grafting parts and pieces of pigs onto them.

Eventually somehow Mandus, at least by Christmas Day ironically, somehow comes to his senses and realizes just what Horrors he has unleashed and the Hell his creation is likely to bring to the world. At first he seems to try to kill himself, but it doesn't work, and he sets to sabotaging the Machine as best as he could do before eventually winding up back in his bed (perhaps having been carried there by one of his workers) suffering short-term Amnesia of all that happened since he encountered the Orb, believing that the Fever had kept him bedridden. And well, we all know the rest.

I guess the big unanswered questions involve whether the whole thing was real. Was Mandus dreaming it all in death? Was he already dead having used his own Heart to power the machine? One theory is somewhat SOMA-ish in that maybe Mandus really is that body wired to the Machine and he's just a ghostly spectre traversing the plant, or that maybe he's possessing a manpig. What did his final act actually do?

I suppose TheChineseRoom will probably not answer those and likely leave ambiguity on the story to stand. Still fun to think about.
08-17-2015, 06:00 AM
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Messages In This Thread
RE: Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert* - by PathOS - 08-17-2015, 06:00 AM
The birth of a new century - by Integria - 09-27-2013, 01:32 AM



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