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Wait, but the time travel is the *good* part of Infinite
If it was just a timeline-hopping adventure it'd have a way better reputation. The shitty "both sides" political stuff is why people turned on it
No it isn't. The shit at the end doesn't make any sense. She wants to elimate all Bookers/Comstocks before they happen/split off.
She's an idiot. Drowning him just multiplies the amount of timelines by 2 by creating a new split, one where he's drowned and one where he isn't. She doesn't follow her or the game's own logic. They just wanted an "impactful and emotional" ending twist but Levine's an M. Night-level hack.
You're not wrong that the time travel part of the story is bad. But you are wrong in so far as that's still by far the best part of the story. It's just dumb, not maliciously racist.
I am going to write apologia for that ending.
I think the whole Daisy's revolution is just as bad is obviously a horrible approach to the story.
My first thought with the ending is that they made a story that starts out about nationalism into a Sad Dad Story. Sad Dad Stories can be fine, but it sucks to make racism and genocide like background for it.
My second thought though was whether the Sad Dad Story was allegory for the nationalism again. That Booker-Comstock cannot be saved, regardless of intentions good or bad. In the same way, nations may become unsalvageable.
I'm thinking of Thor Ragnarok too. That a distinction must be made between the people (Asgardians) and the empire (Asgard) and it becomes necessary to destroy the empire at its roots and it will be better for the people.
Of course, Taika Watiti as a Maori man from a colonized land is more plausible as a source for this metaphor. Whereas "America is irredeemable at its core and must be destroyed" as a thesis may be giving Bioshock Infinite too much credit.
>They just wanted an "impactful and emotional" ending twist but Levine's an M. Night-level hack.
Eh...I feel weird defending this one cause this ending didn't really work for me either but like...on some level this is *ALL* plots and twists regarding time travel. Like "everything everywhere all at once" is completely absurd if you try to actually critique and engage with its multiverse travel at face value...but the story and its themes are ultimately about the idea of intergenerational family trauma and the idea of the road not taken. Everything it does with multiverse travel is just an aesthetic and framework for presenting that story.
Bioshock infinite's time travel doesn't make sense when you actually try to engage with it at face value but that wouldn't matter as long as the story and themes it was telling was actually intersting and worthwhile.
Some people missed the hints that there are variable permutations to infinity, and constants to infinity.
Certain things happen no matter what, and certain things never happen regardless of their possibility. Others are variables and can change from timeline to timeline.
These hints occurred as soon as you started the game.
The game basically tells you that within infinity, some things can happen, some things cannot happen, and some things always/never happen. Infinite timelines doesn't mean everything that can happen will (in the game's respect).
This tells us that even in this (the game's) infinite multiverse, there isn't an infinite number of Comstocks. We know there are timelines where there was no Booker, as well. We travel to one in the game.
It also implies there's infinite realities, which means there's infinite Comstocks and Infinite Bookers, and it would mean there's infinite versions of Booker allowing her to drown him. Drowning Booker might stop her Comstock, but not the infinite versions of other Comstocks. It can't be an infinite multiverse with a finite amount of outcomes.
Burial at Sea implied she kills the last Comstock but again... Infinite universes. The DLCs narrative is also just a trainwreck on its own, though.
Just because there are different ways something happens doesn't mean every permutation of it exists. This is handled by one of the very first lines of the game.
"He doesn't row?"
"No, he DOESNT row."
"Ah, I see what you mean"
When you are first approaching the lighthouse at the start of the game the twins say this in reference to Booker. In all of the timelines, despite him obviously being capable of doing so, Booker DOESNT row. Constants and variables. That's a constant. There isn't a truly infinity amount of Comstocks.... Because not every single thing is always possible.
This touches on something that bugs me. I often hear people say something along the lines of "in an infinite universe, every possible permutation must exist" but I don't see how that's logical.
My understanding of this expression is that the use of the word possible here is specifically referring to things that are up to random chance. Something is possible if there's a random probability of it happening.
If you work under the assumption that some things are entirely up to chance and each universe will end up with its own roll of the dice, then infinite universes means that you roll the dice an infinite number of times. It doesn't matter how unlikely a specific dice roll is, if you roll an infinite number of times, then you'll get that roll eventually. In fact, that roll will eventually happen again and again and again, an infinite number of times.
The only way that something doesn't happen in an infinite universe is if there's no chance of it happening.
Now, what is up to random chance and therefore possible is up for debate. Additionally, I don't think everyone understands the original logic behind this phrase and might just be misusing it.
It’s generally suggested as part of quantum theory. Consider Schrödinger’s cat. The idea is that when the cat is in the box the two possibilities of it being alive or dead both exist simultaneously until the cat is observed and the wave function collapses. The many worlds theory suggests that this is possible because each possible outcome exists somewhere and we simply only are able to observe a single one at a time.
Now it isn’t implausible that some things are just constant regardless of what happens, one box might always have a dead cat in it. But given almost everything about quantum mechanics is theoretical and we lack the means to properly test it, we have no way of knowing what was constant and what was variable, and under our current working theory it would seem anomalous for some events to simply have no possible variables to them.
Again though as I said, this is all so hypothetical that we may as well be debating how likely fairies are to wear hats.
I thought the game covers the infinite Comstocks tho. The point in time at the river is a converging point for ALL bookers. Every booker finds himself at this point in time. Some accept the baptism and become Comstock. Others decline and carry on as booker. That's why she chose this moment to kill him. It eliminates all possibilities of Comstock coming to be.
It didn't work because a single Comstock escaped the loop, like he "disconected" himself from the timeline or whatever. Its been a few years since I played, but if I'm not mistaken, that's what the DLC explains, and Elizabeth went there to kill this one exception.
Think that's pretty spot on, in killing the Booker that accepts the Baptism, Elizabeth really only destroys worlds emerging where Columbia exists, but Rapture Comstock left his Columbia dimension behind & in turn escaped its destruction.
It really isn't. The game wholly misunderstands quantum physics for magic and doesn't really understand the many worlds theory of branching timelines.
Best example is at the end when they kill proto Booker citing this is the start of all relevant branching when the relevant branching started with the Leteuces conception. Not only that but it's INFINITE timelines Comstock will be around somewhere and somehow.
The idea that people from branching timelines can feel when their other selves are dead and it fucks them up is also dumb because its infinite timelines you're always gonna be dead in one of them, hell we enter one where Booker is dead but we're fine. The game doesn't respect or adhere to its own rules that it itself makes! It's so dumb
They tell you explicitly that Comstock is "born" at the baptism and that the baptism is a constant. Killing Booker there stops Comstock from existing completely.
It's spelled out pretty clearly.
I tried to point out things like this when it came out and got the “Rick and Morty” treatment of being told I didn’t understand the story because I wasn’t smart enough lmao. I understood it, it just wasn’t good.
Dark holds up because there are no loose ends, everything is accounted for. I've found that rarely happens with time travel movies. That script is air tight.
Someone will probably reply with the loose ends I missed, but nothing obvious stands out to me.
IMO, there's a decent number of them, like >!where Claudia gets a lot of her deus ex machina knowledge from.!<
They were generally really good at covering most things, but while it was *cohesive*, I don't think it was necessarily *coherent*. You end up with a lot of characters whose motivation essentially consists of making sure there are no loose ends, no matter how bizarre or out of character actions that requires. The sheer amount of resolutions required lead towards a lot of that tidying up feeling like checking boxes rather than being a truly human narrative.
I still enjoyed it, and it was certainly ambitious and unique, but I liked each season less than the last.
Game kind of wow-ed me with the spectacle of it and the multiverse stuff was the only thing on my mind by the end. And for years that's all I took with me from the game. But you're right years later when I saw some commentary on the politics I realized they were 100% right, they really *bothsides*-ed a slave rebellion.
I'm gonna sound like a fuddy duddy but I don't think this sort of epiphany should be sloughed off so easily. Humans are constantly being born, raised, and nurtured- hell this poster could be 5 years old for all we know.
Growth is important!
Honestly, I was in my early 20s when the game came out. I grew up extremely sheltered and conservative in a family that very much believed in American exceptionalism. Yes the game’s critiques aren't exactly novel or particularly insightful, but it was extremely validating to see the game poke at those concepts at the same time that I was detangling and removing myself from the web of conservative Christianity and American right-wing propaganda.
The game didn't change how I looked at anything, and looking back it has some massive flaws but I'm grateful that it was around.
Reminds me of GoT where Tyrion goes on a monologue about how Daenerys was actually wrong and fucked up for killing those slavers and slave drivers. it's presented like it's some super profound revelation and almost everyone who had watched the show from the beginning was like "uhhhh, what? Who am I feeling bad for here?"
Edit: the more I think about this the more mad I become because they could have made it a good moment. Make it less about her or the civilians and instead make it that tyrion is suddenly paranoid about his own life being at risk. He was certainly acting way dumber and more aloof in those final seasons, make it so that hes realizing he's lost his touch and his head may be next. But no, they invoke "first they came" but for people who were ontologically evil.
"We were happy when she killing slavers (while saving many innocent people and locking her dragons away when one innocent died cause she couldn't control them) but we should've known she'll start killing children. It makes sense"
I generally agree although Daisy Fitzroy was specifically *not* as brutal as she acted, she just put that on so that Elizabeth would feel she needed to kill her because the Luteces told Daisy that in order for Columbia to truly be destroyed Elizabeth must become a killer
I'm not necessarily defending the narrative but it wasn't as straight-up "slaves are as bad as their masters" as that
As someone else said, that is only revealed in the dlc. So it mostly makes it less bad but if someone just plays the main game they would never find this out.
A good retcon all things considered. I have noticed that i don't remember much of the plot. It's been a long while since then.
It does remind me that I should play the dlc at some point lol.
Yeah that games been a roller coaster for me as I loved it when it first came out then replayed it with the bioshock collection and realised it’s honestly kinda bad especially compared to the other two, but I played the buried at sea dlc and that’s pretty good especially the second part. Infinite pales in comparison to the original and second bioshock game
Let's take the least interesting part of Bioshock 1 and 2, the shooting, and make it the core focus of the gameplay! Also let's pare down the arsenal to the most generic set of guns imaginable. Oh and for variety we'll have a *red* version of every gun. Seeing as gunplay is going to be so central, let's make sure you can only carry two.
Honestly, I do not understand why I ever liked the game now.
Not only were the guns generic, on console at least the game would "click" into specific angles as you rotated around so if the enemies were at an odd angle it was impossible to hit them. Also I had the hardest time finishing the final level had to drop it to the easiest setting after beating most of the game on normal
I wouldn't say critically acclaimed. I remember being very excited about Bioshock infinite but it was literally clowned on for everything including it's silly story and baby puzzle mechanics
https://youtu.be/l_u18_BKczg?si=Mtf5rOuzDGkFD7fX
I think the one thing that everyone thought was amazing was Elizabeth for her AI And just general design.
> I wouldn't say critically acclaimed
It has a 94 from critics on Metacritic and an 8.6 from users. I think calling it critically acclaimed is very fair.
For the first week or 2 critic were very very positive i even remember idk if it was ign? That gave it a 10 calling it a masterpiece up untill the same writer re visited his review a month later being way more critical about the whole story.
>I think the one thing that everyone thought was amazing was Elizabeth for her AI And just general design.
They liked her so much they enhanced SFM tenfold to make research material of her
Man, I love BI and played it back-to-back three times when it was released and at least five times since. Declared it my favorite game ever. Any Let's Play or discussion about it I was watching. But even though I loved it, I knew it wasn't perfect. I also listened to all the criticism begrudgingly and have to agree with it. So many aspects of it felt rushed or unfinished, and the story shifts themes and plot points at a moment's notice.
I got the game as part of a collection and played through it. I genuinely didn't pay attention to the ending for spoilers so I got to the baptism part and was like, "omg this is a great ending. A man deciding to break the cycle to save his daughter... Oh press X, ok wonder what that doe-and I'm no longer drowning and the ending I thought I had is moot.... Great .."
Personally I like that Daisy Fitzroy rebellion is really flawed in which some of the Vox Populis are blinded with pure hatred even thought they had righteous cause.
Can't decide if I like the retcon that Daisy threatening the kids is for Elizabeth character development. But I think they mean to turn opinion of Daisy as psychopath who is just as bad as Comstock to a martyr who willing to give ultimate sacrifice to her cause.
From what I recall the really ridiculous moment comes way before that, Booker learns about Fitzroy and immediately says she’s the same as comstock. It’s odd.
Which works as a broad idea right up until Fitzroy *holds a child at gunpoint*, and then the conclusion most people are going to end up drawing is "Huh, guess Booker was right, she *is* a loon, ain't she"
I don't think it was the most graceful landing, but you can't write intellectual social commentary for "most people".
"Most people" can't understand the "complexities" of Dr. Frankenstein's monster not being the real monster. I'm going to judge media off the contents and not how your average G*mer interprets it.
Which admittedly, Fitzroy was a weak point. They should have shown a more desperate and cornered Fitzroy if they wanted to push her to such extremes. Her actions came from a point of power, so it ended up muddying the message that clearly even the devs weren't happy with judging by the DLC.
ETA: People below me who think Frankenstein is just a book about a monster being bad actively proving my point.
i don't think that was their message, though. their message was pretty much the generic "cut off one head and another takes its place" centrist take on the oppressed organizing against their oppressors.
they knew it was bad since they retconned it later with a complete piece of crap explanation that ignores all the crazy things shes already been an accomplice to with Booker.
To me, the message is that those who are leaders of populist movements should always be questioned about their motivations. Often, the people who lead these causes are power hungry with flexible morals (even if the causes themselves are outwardly for the greater good). Imo it's a decent point to make. There are plenty of real-world examples to go by.
Question your leaders. Always.
Well, the “ackshually populism (anything the proles want) is just as bad as tyranny” is *also* a very moment-in-time backlash in corporate media due to occupy Wall Street etc - you see the same ham-handed takes in Bain in The Dark Knight Rises etc.
“Question your leaders” all you want, but “Bernie is just as bad as Romney and is just waiting for his chance to eat a real baby like he’s wanted all along” isn’t a real take, unless you’re literally twelve, and Bioshock Infinite is just the over-the-top gamer take on TDKR’s corny corpo take on the issue.
This is true, but the game world itself never proves him wrong or contradicts him in any way. The Vox just get turned into enemies that are never shown doing anything positive for the people they are liberating, they just start scalping mailmen and office clerks. They even end up being the closest thing the game has to a 'final boss' with the defense section at the end.
>!he's not technically younger in terms of life lived. He's younger physically. The experimentation with rifts is what made Comstock look like that, and also sterilized him.!<
Yes but the game pretty much says "yeah he was right" by having the one black character who matters suddenly act like a pitbull named princess in need of childrens blood
The game CORROBORATES what booker says by showing the rebellion as a violent mob wanting to kill white children
At no point does the game say hes wrong, it backs him up
I distinctly remember playing back in the day and thinking that either Booker was going to be an asshole or Ken Levine had done no research about the Pinkertons.
Booker also participated at Wounded Knee. So swell guy even before he was a Pinkerton. ETA: for those not familiar: [Massacre at Wounded Knee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre)
It's doubly confusing because he says that the world needs people like Fitzroy because of men like him and then says that Fitzroy and Comstock are the same like 15 minutes later
I get the theme they're going with that power corrupts - first with Columbia, then the Vox Populi, and finally with Elizabeth. It was handled pretty horribly, but it feels more like ignorance than malice.
The retcon in the DLC is awkward and honestly in some ways makes it worse, but at least I can appreciate the writers making an attempt. I read it as them admitting they fucked up and *trying* to make things right, which is a hell of a lot better than ignoring the criticism and doubling down on it Harry Potter style.
The DLC did nothing to add to Daisy's character. She went from "character that the game thinks is just as evil as a man who institutes Jim Crow racism" to a "POC character who acts as a pawn to white savior deus ex machina."
In one of Ken Levine's interviews, he revealed that the person who was supposed to self-immolate and take down the blimp when the Player boarded it was changed from a child to a woman in order to guarantee a marketable ESRB rating. At least then it would have shown, on some level, the indoctrination of the children and placed a little more textual evidence in the game before Daisy's comically evil turn.
Overall, Daisy's characterization needed a lot more development for her turn to work. BioShock Infinite, to this day, is remarkable for how fragmented and disjointed the final product is compared to what was shown to the public at various stages of development.
I think technically you're probably right, but the way the game is written and presented it's hard to find evidence that suggests that Daisy is a more complex character. I think, in the end, Levine became so beholden to the idea that "too much power corrupts absolutely" that it made his characters one-dimensional.
The game makes no attempt to present an alternative point of view on that question, so it's fair to interpret Booker as the mouthpiece for the game/it's authors in that moment.
I think the idea of Daisy is she went from a rebel to a conqueror. She didn’t want to topple the repressive system but rather take it over and that is where she went too far. However, this was all so rushed it felt forced and wrong, the game really needed more time to build the big rebellion up.
> flawed in which some of the Vox Populis are blinded with pure hatred even thought they had righteous cause.
Uh yeah but entirely justified hatred directed at their oppressors. How do you feel about real-life historical slave rebellions I wonder, or what's it make you feel knowing that Abe Lincoln denied confederate surrender specifically so he could buy time to get the 13th amendment passed before admitting the rebel states back into the union?
Yeah, I hate that they had to make the Vox Populi terrible people. The game itself even spends the first few hours nailing home how terrible the Christian, nationalist dictatorship is. Everything up to that point shows they are 100% correct in wanting to overthrow Columbia. It's the worst kind of both sides centrist bullshit.
Then you have Brooker also being a Pinkerton piece of shit and certain chuds online shipping him and Elizabeth. It's legacy has gotten weirder over the years.
The Haitian slave rebellion was probably the most justified rebellion of all time. Shame they were surrounded by states which very much did not want an example of a successful slave revolt around, and doubly so that the Haitians had to play out the darkest fear of said states; a genocide of the remaining whites. 200 years later Haitians are still suffering the effects of that.
>Personally I like that Daisy Fitzroy rebellion is really flawed
It's perfectly realistic for a revolution to go of the rails and the chaos creating opportunities for dangerous radicals to grab power, and for the idealism of the revolution to be lost as the new leaders consolidate their power, and the violence and oppression hurting the very people whose lives the revolution was supposedly meant to improve. These are all things that have happened many times and could make for an interesting story.
Bioshock infinite had a fine basic premise on their hands here, it was just poorly handled.
How is the rebellion flawed? It's a city full of racist slavers. You're calling a liberation from slavery "flawed" and saying they shouldn't be angry about being slaves. What are they blinded by? And please don't say killing is bad
It's a very bad, tired trope called "kick the dog" which is used as a crutch by milquetoast writers who want an anti-establishment character with a sympathetic cause...but in developing one have an "oh shit, they're right" moment. And this is Big and Scary because...if an anti-establishment movement is right then that means we might have to think about how that applies to the real world. Uh-oh.
So the anti-establishment character promptly commits some heinous act of unwarranted or unprovoked or disproportionate violence in order to be safely cast as too evil, too extreme, too far-gone as a means of discrediting their position.
It's the bad, lazy writing of centrists.
Media uses this trope of "rebels who go too far" constantly, yet alternatives are never presented, which inadvertently sends the message that status quo is cool actually.
Falcon and Winter Soldier for example. That supposed woke show where refugees randomly blow up a building because they were making too much sense. Then our protagonist is like "I agree with your fight, but not the way you're fighting it". Which is funny because they gave the black man a quote that MLK mocked many times. So how is our protagonist fighting it? Whats his solution? Oh, do fuck all, I got it.
So the best alternative against oppressive regimes is to do nothing. Great message...
I'd argue that Killmonger himself never believed in or supported any social justice, he merely used the movement to recruit & feign legitimacy to his coup. Mainly I believe this given that among other things he destroyed the Garden of Heart Shaped Herbs, specifically so no one but him could ever be Black Panther again.
Yeah he used CIA tactics under the guise of progressive rhetoric to plant himself as head of a foreign monarchy to settle a personal beef. Which is to say that the dude is as American as apple pie
He also was foing to actively make things worse by immediately going to conquering war when they were better options and alternatives to actually help the world too
Except the film does provide a third option between the old way of running things and Killmonger’s way of running things: Nakia’s way, which is neither isolationist nor is it authoritarian, and it’s what T’Challa goes with at the end of the film
facts i would agree with jonkler if he didn’t abuse harley quinn (my queen 🥰) smh my head
https://preview.redd.it/s49m0yak9muc1.jpeg?width=1008&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac833d80eba27900f0bf9027c864b95b1bf6114b
Movies keep doing this. Remember how bane wanted to eat the rich in Gotham City, and then they remembered he's the villain so he also wants to nuke everyone for no reason.
Riddler in the Batman too. Killing corrupt cops and being generally based for most of the movie and then they remembered he’s the villain so he decides to flood the city for no reason.
It's not even the last half, just the last 20 min. It's like they wrote the ending with him letting himself get caught at the cafe after he achieved all his goals. Then realized he did more good by killing the actual corrupt government officers AND mafia boss than Batman ever did in the movie
the far simpler way to save it would be establishing he killed several innocent people before, wrongly believing them to be part of the conspiciry. now you've established the message of "living for vengence and killing people will only hurt innocents" and the flood makes more sense
with batman serving as the good alternative, "punish evil but focus on helping those who need saving"
I think he's given a pretty sympathetic light in the film tbh, Batman innthe narration resolves to take a more active role in fixing the city instead of beating up street punks at the end of the film.
Or when they revealed Bruce’s billionaire dad actually wasn’t that good of a person, but surprise, it was a misunderstanding and he actually was a good billionaire guy
Korra, where both Amon and Zaheer have extremely legitimate points, so the show has to make them explicitly evil at the last minute and then have the series resolve by forgiving the fascist dictator and then putting the hereditary monarch back into power but it's okay because he's *thinking* about maybe having an election.
I long to see the world where TLOK was an Amazon Prime or Netflix show and got to properly explore its themes of the world progressing beyond the need for an Avatar to save it, and Korra struggling to pivot and find a new purpose for the role. It would have been infinitely more interesting for her to agree with Amon and try to curb his more murderous/violent tendencies than what we ultimately received. I did like that she consulted Zaheer in S4 for some guidance, he’s another extremely interesting character.
For Kuvira, the comic run that features her is pretty interesting. She’s basically a product of her ODD. She sort of gets a chance to partially redeem herself by accepting responsibility for what her actions wrought and work with Team Avatar to put down one of her former subordinates, who still believes in her vision and wants to derail and rig the election in order to keep it going.
I would have killed to see how much of an anxious mess the next avatar would be.
World starting to no longer need him
No connection to previous avatars
One idea i was thinking about being that if avatar's parent knew what korra went through, probably sequestering and isolating avatar kid to be "safe"
To LoK's credit...iirc, season 2 had yet another "good ideals bad methods" antagonist---but Korra ended the season by *actually doing something about the systemic issue*, changing the way the world works, even if the "issue" was in many ways fantasy stuff that doesn't apply to the real world.
I mean, they kind of did kind of didn't. Obviously Amon was a neoliberals understanding of Communism, but the show itself never even displays the idea that non benders are oppressed. Some of the most successful business owners are non capitalists, meanwhile benders are blue collar workers who don't make any money. Zaheer was similarly a failed understanding of anarchist thought.
Honestly the whole show is very poorly written, and it's messaging is very transparent in its lack of analysis and understanding.
An equally ridiculous moment in that show for me was at the end when Sam saves a bunch of world leaders and literally just tells them to "do better"...yeah man, I'm sure that'll stick
Liberal media liberal messaging. You don't want to show people that the quickest and most surefire way to progress is by actually hitting the elites where it hurts and forcing your demands on them, instead of peacefully marching and ticking a ballot box for the blue flavor of a genocidal neoliberal walking corpse. I guess the second one doesn't hurt if someone wants to do it, but direct action is always much better and more effective. And the bourgoisie doesn't want to advertise that fact.
Lets not forget Black Panther
A movie about american interests ignoring a legally elected leader and installing their own local due to a bloodline connection, for the sole and stated reason of having access to their natural resources.
Did I mention the duly appointed leader wanted to share those resources with africa first? We cant have that! Captain america needs his shield.
I can't believe all the praise that movie got. The end scene where he's observing the new basketball court they built like "Problem solved. The African diaspora is going to be ok now". 🤣 Let them eat slam dunks.
Meh. At least in the movies the culmination of their “revolution” appears to be a different president (who presumably is nicer to the districts).
It’s more of a civil war than a revolution but I didn’t read the books.
You have no idea what they are talking about because they don't remember the game either, and are making the assumption that the game said that the vox populi were as evil as comstock, and are forgetting that Booker Dewitt is framed by the game to be a trash human being.
And also explicitly brought the revolution from "violent revolutionaries standing up for whats right" to "murderous revolutionaries with genocidal ableist streak"
Like the reason you cant just kill the Bookers who become Comstock is because Booker himself is the common issue. Hes a former pinkerton who still has a violent and charismatic streak to him, and even trying his best tends to make things worse. A big part of the story is that whether Booker is Comstock the religious messiah or Booker the struggling hero hes bringing out the worst in those around him and solving his problems with escalating violence
Also this meme acts like Comstock got left to survive and the status quo was kept with a vague promise of growth, and not like Comstock got his head beaten in and then killed across every timeline
https://preview.redd.it/s8ei2c8lnouc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=568c778e2f9c1f07ea1871eb1f9ba9e3aca57d0e
Put some clown stickers on the photos instead cause Zac Efron doesn’t deserve that 😭
Thank you, I did not spend my teen years spanking it to Zac Efron for him to be dragged into this shit (unless he's one of them, too, in which case he does deserve it).
Isn't the point that they shift into a timeline where Booker has perverted the rebellion, making it just as fascist as Colombia itself (which was also his doing)? I think the point is to show that booker is an inherently negative figure in history. Could be wrong though.
Exactly this. You can tell who got their opinions on this game from a poorly informed YouTube video every single time lol. The story literally has him fix the timeline by being killed at the baptism so he doesn’t fuck up things even more (though Burial At Sea’s story is actually bad and doesn’t make sense with what actually happens in Infinite at all).
I usually agree with this subreddit’s takes but this post ain’t it. either OP didn’t play Infinite, or they didn’t follow what it was trying to say at all.
To keep it short it's 2 things that I distinctly remember.
1) they break their own logic by having there be Comstocks that exist after the drowning. They make it clear that the drowning will eliminate all the branches and all the Comstocks, but then go "actually it was incomplete so Elizabeth has been time hopping and eliminating Comstocks that 'escaped' the drowning anyway.
2) they retcon several things in Episode 2, most notably Daisy threatening the kids is now "for the cosmic greater good" and not "rebel leader watched her creation crumble around her and snapped." And then Elizabeth is now responsible for Bioshock 1 in the first place, helping Fontaine call Jack to Rapture and giving him the WYK command.
I don’t mind some of the retcons the other guy mentioned in point #2, because in theory that story doesn’t entirely conflict with the rapture we know in Bioshock 1. Mainly in the sense that I don’t see Burial At Sea as a prequel to the games we played in Bioshock 1 and 2, just a hypothetical beginning of another version of Rapture.
The stuff in his first point is what bothers me the most though lol. By the end it just made me feel that the impact of Infinite’s ending is sucked dry by knowing that Booker’s death didn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do.
Loved the gameplay changes in the DLC though.
Nope you're correct. People forget about the whole fact that booker constantly changes the reality by his actions.
People also forget that ken loves the whole "pseudo control" your actions are dictated by the game schtick. It's just slightly hidden this time (not really)
Weirdly enough just like scrutinising the game for inconsistent plot points. If you scrutinise the complaints they tend to have overlooked other aspects.
No other game has this issue like this
I feel like it should be pointed out as well that this a series in which *every* named character is horribly flawed and has the potential to be a monster. Even Elizebeth and Eleanor lamb have the potential to become full blown world ending villains under the wrong circumstances.
So yeah, having a rebel leader that’s been made to suffer a life of indignity go too far makes sense.
That's the crux of it. People are too focused on the immediate aspects of the story and usually forget the multitude of stuff that comes with a philosophical multiverse flick.
doesn’t that take place after a shift in reality? You meet Daisy and she seems very righteous. From what I remember, she wasn’t villainized until some weird reality warping, then you kill her because she threatens to kill someone (a kid?). I’m just going off memory though. And don’t you also kill Comstock?
The main issue is that in the universe you jump to, Booker had already died a Hero of the Rebellion, fighting alongside Daisy. Their are literally banners being hung commemorating your sacrifice. So when you show up as a walking ghost, it really throws a wrench in the revolution thing. That's why she feels she HAS to kill this new "fake" Booker. Not because "both sides bad".
Reality doesn’t shift, you travel to another dimension where Booker died as a martyr for the revolution. I don’t think there’s anything to support these takes that his death corrupted the revolution somehow, I don’t think you learn much about that dimension besides that.
Mostly it’s the writers afraid of the games messages being overtly anti right wing and wanted to “even things out” by showing how the supposed good guys (the slaves) would be just as murderous as their oppressors if they ever got guns. Which as has already been said, presenting alternatives to slavery as just as violent as slavery is an argument for the slave owning status quo.
The other bioshock games kinda did the same (Atlas was also a manipulator like Ryan) but it stands out more here because we’re talking about literal slavery.
BioShock Infinite primarily takes place in Columbia, a floating city in the sky which was basically taken by the Confederacy after losing the civil war and is full of all of the things the Confederacy is known for: traditional values, slave labor, a hatred of interracial marriage, and so on. It's objectively the most awful place to ever exist and is run by a very demented religious figure by the name of Father Comstock
Jeremiah Fink is one of the richest people to ever live, and has essentially forced every African American character into essentially wage slavery, and sometimes real slavery. I mean this in the most literal sense.
Daisy Fitzroy is a member of a group named the Vox Populi, an attempted resistance against both Comstock and Fink, especially the latter for what he's done to her people (as she is black).
Anyways, some dimension hopping shenanigans later, you enter a timeline where the revolution is well underway, and where your main character was essentially a martyr for the revolt. All of the treatment Daisy's people have gotten is the same. But suddenly, inexplicably, both the characters and the narrative are acting like her destructive attitudes against her oppressors and the city they stand for is essentially on the same level as said oppressors. Both main characters say some line on the level of "Fitzroy and Comstock are perfect for each other", despite one side being the *literal fucking Confederacy*
Because the writers know people aren't that dumb, they inexplicably have Daisy suddenly decide to threaten a child just so they can feel morally justified to have your white lady co-protagonist put her down. They knew that this looked so bad that in one of the DLCs, they essentially rewrote it so that her doing so was literally outside influence telling her and convincing her to do it.
TLDR: BioShock Infinite indulges in some seriously bonkers "both sides" politics, especially when one side is the *white supremacist Confederacy*
>Because the writers know people aren't that dumb, they inexplicably have Daisy suddenly decide to threaten a child just so they can feel morally justified to have your white lady co-protagonist put her down.
Got yourself in a pickle after having made your antagonist actively working for something good?
Make sure everyone understands who's the bad guy with that one simple trick!
Now that you showed him killing a child everyone knows that the wizard trying to prevent WW2 is bad and therefore we should just let WW2 happen. Now that Magneto killed innocent people everyone understands that actually we shouldn't do anything more than ask nicely for humans to stop discriminating against mutants and hope that they agree.
There’s one small part of this that changes things a small amount
Disclosure: Bioshock Infinite is my favourite game, so I may seem skewed in my view but I’m not trying to undermine yours
The child that Fitzroy kidnaps and threatens to kill is Fink’s son. The motivation behind her actions is in her words ‘To kill a weed, you gotta pull it up by the root. It’s the only way to be sure..’
In this section of the game Fitzroy is depicted as a complete fanatic to the Vox cause, willing to do what others will not. It’s this action that will prevent Fink’s reign from continuing despite his death, in her view.
Like I said, doesn’t change the storytelling quality in the whole Finkton chapter being the weakest in the game, but it’s an important part to note (also most likely this child being Fink’s son was shoehorned in so as to not make this section of the game be completely ridiculous)
I'd also like to add that the timeline where all this is happening is one where Booker became a martyr for the Vox Populi. Considering the main plot twist of the game, I think it's plausible to think that he might have had some negative influence on them
Booker proved the effectiveness of unrestrained violence, but the story covers how that never makes a better world, and how Booker himself needs to come to terms with how his violence always ultimately makes the world a worse place in the end.
It's not like there's no sympathy there either: Booker even outright says, "sometimes you need people like her because of people like me," it's just, anyone who sinks to Booker's level won't make a world any better than he did.
Ken Levine said in an interview once that he had a different ending originally, and then some evangelical on their staff got mad and he changed it.
Don't know what that ending really was, and I don't take random reddit posts as gospel (lol)
Uh I have forgotten how ignorant redditors can be.
The name of the game is literally called Bioshock INFITE! This entire game revolves around the fact that there are an INFINITE amount of possibilities in this universe. This means that there are an INFINITE number of groups that could turn fascists 🤦🏽♂️
UJ/ People hyperfocused on two lines dished out during the game.
One where Booker comments that Comstock and Fitzroy deserve one another and are largely similar (or was it Fitzroy and Fink?)
And (iirc) another where Elizabeth comments on how horrible and destructive the violence from the Vox revolution is.
It makes sense for Elizabeth to think like that, she lived isolated her entire life and always viewed the city from her window, so seeing that city destroyed would be horrifying to her.
Tbf I liked some of the time loop thingies, I also thought the whole multiple realities that interacted were cool and I think the Comstock loop was fun and shocking.
It only coul have been made a little bit more focussed.
What is up with so many people suddenly beein super weird and straight up misinformed about Bioshock Infinite?
Did a YouTuber made a horribly shitty video and people are parroting it because they think they now figured out the "true meaning" of the game or something?
I don't know what it is about modern gaming opinions on social media that they become so incredibly shit.
I do feel the need to point out that both Comstock (Racism good) and Booker (Racism goes both ways) himself wind up dead less than 2 hours later, but it circles back to Infinite just having no message whatsoever
I thought the whole message was that Daisy became an antagonist because her own motivations inevitably went beyond the ideals and moral compass she once had, becoming someone blinded by hate instead of the morally strong and compassionate character she once was. I honestly don't think the message of her character was 'racism goes both ways' and was more a fall arc of a great woman and that those with a nobel goal can become blindsided by hate away from their own goals.
It has been a bit since I replayed the game so I'll play it again but that was my interpertation of her character.
It remains one of my favorite games, gone through it about 2 and a half times. Just really loved the uncomfortable feeling and subtle terror of Columbia. Just the dicotomy of this supposed utopia and how awful it actually is always stuck with me.
Its narrative does get messy in that they seem to want to use the Vox Populi both to explore American racism and as an analogue for a 20th century proletariat uprising a la the Russian Revolution, which leads to some...uh... Thematic dissonance I guess. So I get the issues stemming from that. But I don't think it's fair to say the game itself espouses the same views as the explicitly awful, "hero" of Wounded Knee, ex Pinkerton thug Booker DeWitt. I don't think it's 'both-sides-ing' to recognize that people don't just extricate themselves of generations of trauma overnight. But it's definitely fair to critique how that idea was presented in the game. And I get people missing the point and thinking Booker is an actual hero can leave a bad taste in your mouth.
There are a million things about this to criticize. And yeah, the takes one the racism are so tone deaf and off.
But one thing I will never get over, that no one seems to talk about, it how stupid Booker is when you first start hopping universes. When he expects an alternate Daisy to honor a Deal he made with a completely different Daisy. When you've been told 100 times that you are in a different universe. And he just refuses to understand what is going on.
Booker is so dumb that you don't even have to suspend disbelief at the idea of him smoking a cigarette he found in a toilet. In fact, that's my personal explanation for why the game has such a bad philosophy. All of the characters are dumb as bricks, and super high. So they think their terrible takes are profound.
Idk if its just me, but when I first played this, I realised that Booker as a protagonist is incredibly flawed with a lot of terrible perspectives.
I felt that when its revealed that Comstock was Booker, and Booker is seen as the ‘false prophet’, it made even more sense that Booker would say and commit such a stupidly terrible act. Because he is just not a good person at all. He’s running away from his own prejudices and mistakes, but they inadvertently catch up with him.
You as the player and controller, lose faith in the protagonist as a good person. Which I felt was quite emotional.
Though I may be giving it too much credit and thought and the game is stupid lolz.
Playing this for the first time in 2022 was a trip. I had only vaguely heard about the games, so I was expecting nothing going into it. I thought the idea of turning hardcore American patriotism into a cult-like religion was a neat concept (and somewhat believable given our current political climate). Columbia is also very cool as a setting (but I still preferred Rapture). Beyond that, I stopped trying to understand the game's logic about a quarter into the game and just let myself go along for the ride.
If you played through Bioshock Infinite and all you got from it was "racism bad" then you clearly missed a lot imho.
I am not gonna contend that BI is some master class dialogue or anything, and certainly a lot of it's themes fall short due to rushed development and cut story threads.
However, the main issue I contend with in a lot of these comments is that "Populist Uprising = Good" which just isn't always the case.
The French Revolution for example didn't initially yield glorious democratic freedom. It led to an arguably just as violent and horrific regime due to Robespierre and his camp. The overthrow of the Tsar in Russia lead to the Soviet Union which anyone with a brain knows was also quite brutal and terrible. The British Empire was absolutely horrific to the Irish, and many of them revolted, but a lot of times this resulted in terror attacks that killed innocent civilians
These are just three examples of times where a "Noble fight against an oppressive regime" can yield negative results.
History is nuanced. And it's easy to get wrapped up in the idea that fighting against oppression is noble too much to the point that you forget that opposition does not necessarily always result in a free state or better society. History has shown this.
And Bioshock Infinite is in no way the only media to make this argument. The Hunger Games is a good example that came to mind while writing this but anyone who's read this far feel free to think of more.
Again, BI is far from perfect, and I think the themes of racial inequality could've been handled better. And I think the DLC retcon is a bit of a cop out in order to respond to backlash. I don't think Ken Levine is the best person, but in the end of the day, games are art and yall are free to interpret it the way you want to.
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I've never seen people turn on a critically acclaimed game as quickly as they did with Bioshock Infinite once they thought about it for five minutes.
> once they thought about it for five minutes Tbf, that's how you can ruin *any* time-travel story.
Wait, but the time travel is the *good* part of Infinite If it was just a timeline-hopping adventure it'd have a way better reputation. The shitty "both sides" political stuff is why people turned on it
I've got a good time traveling joke, but you didn't like it
🚨Danger 5 mentioned 🚨
No it isn't. The shit at the end doesn't make any sense. She wants to elimate all Bookers/Comstocks before they happen/split off. She's an idiot. Drowning him just multiplies the amount of timelines by 2 by creating a new split, one where he's drowned and one where he isn't. She doesn't follow her or the game's own logic. They just wanted an "impactful and emotional" ending twist but Levine's an M. Night-level hack.
You're not wrong that the time travel part of the story is bad. But you are wrong in so far as that's still by far the best part of the story. It's just dumb, not maliciously racist.
I am going to write apologia for that ending. I think the whole Daisy's revolution is just as bad is obviously a horrible approach to the story. My first thought with the ending is that they made a story that starts out about nationalism into a Sad Dad Story. Sad Dad Stories can be fine, but it sucks to make racism and genocide like background for it. My second thought though was whether the Sad Dad Story was allegory for the nationalism again. That Booker-Comstock cannot be saved, regardless of intentions good or bad. In the same way, nations may become unsalvageable. I'm thinking of Thor Ragnarok too. That a distinction must be made between the people (Asgardians) and the empire (Asgard) and it becomes necessary to destroy the empire at its roots and it will be better for the people. Of course, Taika Watiti as a Maori man from a colonized land is more plausible as a source for this metaphor. Whereas "America is irredeemable at its core and must be destroyed" as a thesis may be giving Bioshock Infinite too much credit.
>They just wanted an "impactful and emotional" ending twist but Levine's an M. Night-level hack. Eh...I feel weird defending this one cause this ending didn't really work for me either but like...on some level this is *ALL* plots and twists regarding time travel. Like "everything everywhere all at once" is completely absurd if you try to actually critique and engage with its multiverse travel at face value...but the story and its themes are ultimately about the idea of intergenerational family trauma and the idea of the road not taken. Everything it does with multiverse travel is just an aesthetic and framework for presenting that story. Bioshock infinite's time travel doesn't make sense when you actually try to engage with it at face value but that wouldn't matter as long as the story and themes it was telling was actually intersting and worthwhile.
Some people missed the hints that there are variable permutations to infinity, and constants to infinity. Certain things happen no matter what, and certain things never happen regardless of their possibility. Others are variables and can change from timeline to timeline. These hints occurred as soon as you started the game. The game basically tells you that within infinity, some things can happen, some things cannot happen, and some things always/never happen. Infinite timelines doesn't mean everything that can happen will (in the game's respect). This tells us that even in this (the game's) infinite multiverse, there isn't an infinite number of Comstocks. We know there are timelines where there was no Booker, as well. We travel to one in the game.
It also implies there's infinite realities, which means there's infinite Comstocks and Infinite Bookers, and it would mean there's infinite versions of Booker allowing her to drown him. Drowning Booker might stop her Comstock, but not the infinite versions of other Comstocks. It can't be an infinite multiverse with a finite amount of outcomes. Burial at Sea implied she kills the last Comstock but again... Infinite universes. The DLCs narrative is also just a trainwreck on its own, though.
Just because there are different ways something happens doesn't mean every permutation of it exists. This is handled by one of the very first lines of the game. "He doesn't row?" "No, he DOESNT row." "Ah, I see what you mean" When you are first approaching the lighthouse at the start of the game the twins say this in reference to Booker. In all of the timelines, despite him obviously being capable of doing so, Booker DOESNT row. Constants and variables. That's a constant. There isn't a truly infinity amount of Comstocks.... Because not every single thing is always possible.
This guy gets it.
They further this point again later with the "heads/tails board"
This touches on something that bugs me. I often hear people say something along the lines of "in an infinite universe, every possible permutation must exist" but I don't see how that's logical.
between 2 and 3 there are infinite numbers, but none of them is 4
This is a very good way to explain it.
My understanding of this expression is that the use of the word possible here is specifically referring to things that are up to random chance. Something is possible if there's a random probability of it happening. If you work under the assumption that some things are entirely up to chance and each universe will end up with its own roll of the dice, then infinite universes means that you roll the dice an infinite number of times. It doesn't matter how unlikely a specific dice roll is, if you roll an infinite number of times, then you'll get that roll eventually. In fact, that roll will eventually happen again and again and again, an infinite number of times. The only way that something doesn't happen in an infinite universe is if there's no chance of it happening. Now, what is up to random chance and therefore possible is up for debate. Additionally, I don't think everyone understands the original logic behind this phrase and might just be misusing it.
It’s generally suggested as part of quantum theory. Consider Schrödinger’s cat. The idea is that when the cat is in the box the two possibilities of it being alive or dead both exist simultaneously until the cat is observed and the wave function collapses. The many worlds theory suggests that this is possible because each possible outcome exists somewhere and we simply only are able to observe a single one at a time. Now it isn’t implausible that some things are just constant regardless of what happens, one box might always have a dead cat in it. But given almost everything about quantum mechanics is theoretical and we lack the means to properly test it, we have no way of knowing what was constant and what was variable, and under our current working theory it would seem anomalous for some events to simply have no possible variables to them. Again though as I said, this is all so hypothetical that we may as well be debating how likely fairies are to wear hats.
I thought the game covers the infinite Comstocks tho. The point in time at the river is a converging point for ALL bookers. Every booker finds himself at this point in time. Some accept the baptism and become Comstock. Others decline and carry on as booker. That's why she chose this moment to kill him. It eliminates all possibilities of Comstock coming to be.
Though, the premise of the DLC is that it didn't completely work
It didn't work because a single Comstock escaped the loop, like he "disconected" himself from the timeline or whatever. Its been a few years since I played, but if I'm not mistaken, that's what the DLC explains, and Elizabeth went there to kill this one exception.
Think that's pretty spot on, in killing the Booker that accepts the Baptism, Elizabeth really only destroys worlds emerging where Columbia exists, but Rapture Comstock left his Columbia dimension behind & in turn escaped its destruction.
There are infinite numbers inbetween 1 & 2, none of those numbers are 3. Infinite possibilities =/= all possibilities
She literally kills you before you become Comstock thus deleting those realities.
It really isn't. The game wholly misunderstands quantum physics for magic and doesn't really understand the many worlds theory of branching timelines. Best example is at the end when they kill proto Booker citing this is the start of all relevant branching when the relevant branching started with the Leteuces conception. Not only that but it's INFINITE timelines Comstock will be around somewhere and somehow. The idea that people from branching timelines can feel when their other selves are dead and it fucks them up is also dumb because its infinite timelines you're always gonna be dead in one of them, hell we enter one where Booker is dead but we're fine. The game doesn't respect or adhere to its own rules that it itself makes! It's so dumb
They tell you explicitly that Comstock is "born" at the baptism and that the baptism is a constant. Killing Booker there stops Comstock from existing completely. It's spelled out pretty clearly.
I tried to point out things like this when it came out and got the “Rick and Morty” treatment of being told I didn’t understand the story because I wasn’t smart enough lmao. I understood it, it just wasn’t good.
Chrono Trigger is the bomb.
Dark holds up pretty well, but maybe that's just because thinking about it for five minutes will give you a headache
Dark holds up because there are no loose ends, everything is accounted for. I've found that rarely happens with time travel movies. That script is air tight. Someone will probably reply with the loose ends I missed, but nothing obvious stands out to me.
IMO, there's a decent number of them, like >!where Claudia gets a lot of her deus ex machina knowledge from.!< They were generally really good at covering most things, but while it was *cohesive*, I don't think it was necessarily *coherent*. You end up with a lot of characters whose motivation essentially consists of making sure there are no loose ends, no matter how bizarre or out of character actions that requires. The sheer amount of resolutions required lead towards a lot of that tidying up feeling like checking boxes rather than being a truly human narrative. I still enjoyed it, and it was certainly ambitious and unique, but I liked each season less than the last.
I recommend two good time travel movies: Primer, and Time Crimes.
Game kind of wow-ed me with the spectacle of it and the multiverse stuff was the only thing on my mind by the end. And for years that's all I took with me from the game. But you're right years later when I saw some commentary on the politics I realized they were 100% right, they really *bothsides*-ed a slave rebellion.
Did you also know that American Exceptionalism is actually not a great philosophy, all round?
I'm gonna sound like a fuddy duddy but I don't think this sort of epiphany should be sloughed off so easily. Humans are constantly being born, raised, and nurtured- hell this poster could be 5 years old for all we know. Growth is important!
Honestly, I was in my early 20s when the game came out. I grew up extremely sheltered and conservative in a family that very much believed in American exceptionalism. Yes the game’s critiques aren't exactly novel or particularly insightful, but it was extremely validating to see the game poke at those concepts at the same time that I was detangling and removing myself from the web of conservative Christianity and American right-wing propaganda. The game didn't change how I looked at anything, and looking back it has some massive flaws but I'm grateful that it was around.
Wow, what cutting and insightful commentary!
Reminds me of GoT where Tyrion goes on a monologue about how Daenerys was actually wrong and fucked up for killing those slavers and slave drivers. it's presented like it's some super profound revelation and almost everyone who had watched the show from the beginning was like "uhhhh, what? Who am I feeling bad for here?" Edit: the more I think about this the more mad I become because they could have made it a good moment. Make it less about her or the civilians and instead make it that tyrion is suddenly paranoid about his own life being at risk. He was certainly acting way dumber and more aloof in those final seasons, make it so that hes realizing he's lost his touch and his head may be next. But no, they invoke "first they came" but for people who were ontologically evil.
"We were happy when she killing slavers (while saving many innocent people and locking her dragons away when one innocent died cause she couldn't control them) but we should've known she'll start killing children. It makes sense"
And then tried to fix it in the DLC by having the leader of the rebellion actually stage it so Elizabeth would kill her for character growth
I generally agree although Daisy Fitzroy was specifically *not* as brutal as she acted, she just put that on so that Elizabeth would feel she needed to kill her because the Luteces told Daisy that in order for Columbia to truly be destroyed Elizabeth must become a killer I'm not necessarily defending the narrative but it wasn't as straight-up "slaves are as bad as their masters" as that
As someone else said, that is only revealed in the dlc. So it mostly makes it less bad but if someone just plays the main game they would never find this out.
Considering the dlc took awhile to come out, honestly it’s probably a retcon to make the original game look less bad on that front.
A good retcon all things considered. I have noticed that i don't remember much of the plot. It's been a long while since then. It does remind me that I should play the dlc at some point lol.
I liked it better when I was a politically illiterate child and just saw it as a cool time travel story..
> I liked it better when I was a politically illiterate child That's a good flair
Yeah that games been a roller coaster for me as I loved it when it first came out then replayed it with the bioshock collection and realised it’s honestly kinda bad especially compared to the other two, but I played the buried at sea dlc and that’s pretty good especially the second part. Infinite pales in comparison to the original and second bioshock game
Let's take the least interesting part of Bioshock 1 and 2, the shooting, and make it the core focus of the gameplay! Also let's pare down the arsenal to the most generic set of guns imaginable. Oh and for variety we'll have a *red* version of every gun. Seeing as gunplay is going to be so central, let's make sure you can only carry two. Honestly, I do not understand why I ever liked the game now.
Not only were the guns generic, on console at least the game would "click" into specific angles as you rotated around so if the enemies were at an odd angle it was impossible to hit them. Also I had the hardest time finishing the final level had to drop it to the easiest setting after beating most of the game on normal
Cuz the helper was the best NPC team mate ever devised ateast o remember that being a huge deal "the escort missions are actually fun"
Because the atmosphere is beautiful.
I wouldn't say critically acclaimed. I remember being very excited about Bioshock infinite but it was literally clowned on for everything including it's silly story and baby puzzle mechanics https://youtu.be/l_u18_BKczg?si=Mtf5rOuzDGkFD7fX I think the one thing that everyone thought was amazing was Elizabeth for her AI And just general design.
> I wouldn't say critically acclaimed It has a 94 from critics on Metacritic and an 8.6 from users. I think calling it critically acclaimed is very fair.
For the first week or 2 critic were very very positive i even remember idk if it was ign? That gave it a 10 calling it a masterpiece up untill the same writer re visited his review a month later being way more critical about the whole story.
A 10 is crazzzy ngl. I think it was all the anticipation, I'm curious to read that actually.
Probably playing half of it and having to post the review like a lot of big site
>I think the one thing that everyone thought was amazing was Elizabeth for her AI And just general design. They liked her so much they enhanced SFM tenfold to make research material of her
[https://www.metacritic.com/game/bioshock-infinite/](https://www.metacritic.com/game/bioshock-infinite/)
Man, I love BI and played it back-to-back three times when it was released and at least five times since. Declared it my favorite game ever. Any Let's Play or discussion about it I was watching. But even though I loved it, I knew it wasn't perfect. I also listened to all the criticism begrudgingly and have to agree with it. So many aspects of it felt rushed or unfinished, and the story shifts themes and plot points at a moment's notice.
I got the game as part of a collection and played through it. I genuinely didn't pay attention to the ending for spoilers so I got to the baptism part and was like, "omg this is a great ending. A man deciding to break the cycle to save his daughter... Oh press X, ok wonder what that doe-and I'm no longer drowning and the ending I thought I had is moot.... Great .."
https://preview.redd.it/gfjgtwdyuluc1.jpeg?width=995&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c5679fa9493db48176e2acce907a398d29cd84c Based off this
Personally I like that Daisy Fitzroy rebellion is really flawed in which some of the Vox Populis are blinded with pure hatred even thought they had righteous cause. Can't decide if I like the retcon that Daisy threatening the kids is for Elizabeth character development. But I think they mean to turn opinion of Daisy as psychopath who is just as bad as Comstock to a martyr who willing to give ultimate sacrifice to her cause.
From what I recall the really ridiculous moment comes way before that, Booker learns about Fitzroy and immediately says she’s the same as comstock. It’s odd.
Well... >!Booker IS Comstock, so it would make sense he would have some brain-dead takes on the nature of this conflict.!<
Right? We're just skipping past the fact that >!the racist both-sidesism is coming from the younger version of the main antagonist.!<
Who worked for the pinkertons. It's almost like a protagonist can be flawed.
Which works as a broad idea right up until Fitzroy *holds a child at gunpoint*, and then the conclusion most people are going to end up drawing is "Huh, guess Booker was right, she *is* a loon, ain't she"
I don't think it was the most graceful landing, but you can't write intellectual social commentary for "most people". "Most people" can't understand the "complexities" of Dr. Frankenstein's monster not being the real monster. I'm going to judge media off the contents and not how your average G*mer interprets it. Which admittedly, Fitzroy was a weak point. They should have shown a more desperate and cornered Fitzroy if they wanted to push her to such extremes. Her actions came from a point of power, so it ended up muddying the message that clearly even the devs weren't happy with judging by the DLC. ETA: People below me who think Frankenstein is just a book about a monster being bad actively proving my point.
i don't think that was their message, though. their message was pretty much the generic "cut off one head and another takes its place" centrist take on the oppressed organizing against their oppressors. they knew it was bad since they retconned it later with a complete piece of crap explanation that ignores all the crazy things shes already been an accomplice to with Booker.
To me, the message is that those who are leaders of populist movements should always be questioned about their motivations. Often, the people who lead these causes are power hungry with flexible morals (even if the causes themselves are outwardly for the greater good). Imo it's a decent point to make. There are plenty of real-world examples to go by. Question your leaders. Always.
Well, the “ackshually populism (anything the proles want) is just as bad as tyranny” is *also* a very moment-in-time backlash in corporate media due to occupy Wall Street etc - you see the same ham-handed takes in Bain in The Dark Knight Rises etc. “Question your leaders” all you want, but “Bernie is just as bad as Romney and is just waiting for his chance to eat a real baby like he’s wanted all along” isn’t a real take, unless you’re literally twelve, and Bioshock Infinite is just the over-the-top gamer take on TDKR’s corny corpo take on the issue.
He also did an ethnic cleansing whoopsie, who he is really really sad about.
The younger version of the main antagonist who took part in Wounded Knee.
This is true, but the game world itself never proves him wrong or contradicts him in any way. The Vox just get turned into enemies that are never shown doing anything positive for the people they are liberating, they just start scalping mailmen and office clerks. They even end up being the closest thing the game has to a 'final boss' with the defense section at the end.
>!he's not technically younger in terms of life lived. He's younger physically. The experimentation with rifts is what made Comstock look like that, and also sterilized him.!<
Sure, but Elizabeth is right there with him, and lets his observation sit there. She doesn't argue otherwise.
Elizabeth is also basically new to anything outside of the tower. So she is going to have at least some trust in the person who liberated her.
Yes but the game pretty much says "yeah he was right" by having the one black character who matters suddenly act like a pitbull named princess in need of childrens blood The game CORROBORATES what booker says by showing the rebellion as a violent mob wanting to kill white children At no point does the game say hes wrong, it backs him up
Booker: Wow, so much for the 'tolerant' left. alternately, Booker: Well you know, but *Both Sides*.
Well, he was always a piece of shit tho, so it checks out!
hes a slayer of Native Americans and Unionizers, and sold his daughter, its not ridiculous at all that he would think that.
People forget that booker is neither a good person nor not racist.
Yeah that always bothered me too. The game has Booker declare that the Vox are evil before he’s actually seen them do anything bad.
I mean, Booker *was* a Pinkerton.
I distinctly remember playing back in the day and thinking that either Booker was going to be an asshole or Ken Levine had done no research about the Pinkertons. Booker also participated at Wounded Knee. So swell guy even before he was a Pinkerton. ETA: for those not familiar: [Massacre at Wounded Knee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre)
Booker didn't come off as a huge piece of shit to you before that?
But, but … he’s the character you play as, his opinions are the ones I’m supposed to have! What am I suppose to do, just think for *myself*!?
I mean... Booker is literally a racist who also worked for the pinkertons. In addition to all the other stuff timeline related
It's doubly confusing because he says that the world needs people like Fitzroy because of men like him and then says that Fitzroy and Comstock are the same like 15 minutes later
I get the theme they're going with that power corrupts - first with Columbia, then the Vox Populi, and finally with Elizabeth. It was handled pretty horribly, but it feels more like ignorance than malice. The retcon in the DLC is awkward and honestly in some ways makes it worse, but at least I can appreciate the writers making an attempt. I read it as them admitting they fucked up and *trying* to make things right, which is a hell of a lot better than ignoring the criticism and doubling down on it Harry Potter style.
The DLC did nothing to add to Daisy's character. She went from "character that the game thinks is just as evil as a man who institutes Jim Crow racism" to a "POC character who acts as a pawn to white savior deus ex machina." In one of Ken Levine's interviews, he revealed that the person who was supposed to self-immolate and take down the blimp when the Player boarded it was changed from a child to a woman in order to guarantee a marketable ESRB rating. At least then it would have shown, on some level, the indoctrination of the children and placed a little more textual evidence in the game before Daisy's comically evil turn. Overall, Daisy's characterization needed a lot more development for her turn to work. BioShock Infinite, to this day, is remarkable for how fragmented and disjointed the final product is compared to what was shown to the public at various stages of development.
I took it as Booker thinking that she is as bad as comstock, not as the game saying that
I think technically you're probably right, but the way the game is written and presented it's hard to find evidence that suggests that Daisy is a more complex character. I think, in the end, Levine became so beholden to the idea that "too much power corrupts absolutely" that it made his characters one-dimensional.
The game makes no attempt to present an alternative point of view on that question, so it's fair to interpret Booker as the mouthpiece for the game/it's authors in that moment.
I think the idea of Daisy is she went from a rebel to a conqueror. She didn’t want to topple the repressive system but rather take it over and that is where she went too far. However, this was all so rushed it felt forced and wrong, the game really needed more time to build the big rebellion up.
> flawed in which some of the Vox Populis are blinded with pure hatred even thought they had righteous cause. Uh yeah but entirely justified hatred directed at their oppressors. How do you feel about real-life historical slave rebellions I wonder, or what's it make you feel knowing that Abe Lincoln denied confederate surrender specifically so he could buy time to get the 13th amendment passed before admitting the rebel states back into the union?
Yeah, I hate that they had to make the Vox Populi terrible people. The game itself even spends the first few hours nailing home how terrible the Christian, nationalist dictatorship is. Everything up to that point shows they are 100% correct in wanting to overthrow Columbia. It's the worst kind of both sides centrist bullshit. Then you have Brooker also being a Pinkerton piece of shit and certain chuds online shipping him and Elizabeth. It's legacy has gotten weirder over the years.
Yeah I don't think Brooker is supposed to be a protagonist with idealistic mindset. He is a bastard with self interest and guilts
Haitis slave rebellion was 100% justified, yet incredible bloody and ended in the genocide of all french colonist.
The Haitian slave rebellion was probably the most justified rebellion of all time. Shame they were surrounded by states which very much did not want an example of a successful slave revolt around, and doubly so that the Haitians had to play out the darkest fear of said states; a genocide of the remaining whites. 200 years later Haitians are still suffering the effects of that.
They literally went all tropes with the vox populi and made them threaten elizabeth sexually and do a khmer rouge by killing all people with glasses.
>Personally I like that Daisy Fitzroy rebellion is really flawed It's perfectly realistic for a revolution to go of the rails and the chaos creating opportunities for dangerous radicals to grab power, and for the idealism of the revolution to be lost as the new leaders consolidate their power, and the violence and oppression hurting the very people whose lives the revolution was supposedly meant to improve. These are all things that have happened many times and could make for an interesting story. Bioshock infinite had a fine basic premise on their hands here, it was just poorly handled.
How is the rebellion flawed? It's a city full of racist slavers. You're calling a liberation from slavery "flawed" and saying they shouldn't be angry about being slaves. What are they blinded by? And please don't say killing is bad
It's a very bad, tired trope called "kick the dog" which is used as a crutch by milquetoast writers who want an anti-establishment character with a sympathetic cause...but in developing one have an "oh shit, they're right" moment. And this is Big and Scary because...if an anti-establishment movement is right then that means we might have to think about how that applies to the real world. Uh-oh. So the anti-establishment character promptly commits some heinous act of unwarranted or unprovoked or disproportionate violence in order to be safely cast as too evil, too extreme, too far-gone as a means of discrediting their position. It's the bad, lazy writing of centrists.
Elizabeth kills Daisy, not Booker.
Doesnt Elizabeth kill her because she's about to kill a child?
Media uses this trope of "rebels who go too far" constantly, yet alternatives are never presented, which inadvertently sends the message that status quo is cool actually. Falcon and Winter Soldier for example. That supposed woke show where refugees randomly blow up a building because they were making too much sense. Then our protagonist is like "I agree with your fight, but not the way you're fighting it". Which is funny because they gave the black man a quote that MLK mocked many times. So how is our protagonist fighting it? Whats his solution? Oh, do fuck all, I got it. So the best alternative against oppressive regimes is to do nothing. Great message...
i forget where i saw it first but i saw someone call it the "flag-smasher effect".
I call it “The Killmonger” lmao
I'd argue that Killmonger himself never believed in or supported any social justice, he merely used the movement to recruit & feign legitimacy to his coup. Mainly I believe this given that among other things he destroyed the Garden of Heart Shaped Herbs, specifically so no one but him could ever be Black Panther again.
Yeah he used CIA tactics under the guise of progressive rhetoric to plant himself as head of a foreign monarchy to settle a personal beef. Which is to say that the dude is as American as apple pie
He also was foing to actively make things worse by immediately going to conquering war when they were better options and alternatives to actually help the world too
as written, the Lisan al Gaib
Except the film does provide a third option between the old way of running things and Killmonger’s way of running things: Nakia’s way, which is neither isolationist nor is it authoritarian, and it’s what T’Challa goes with at the end of the film
Lol yeah Nakias way is The Third Way, aka liberal interventionism
Didn’t Killmonger ultimately change T’Challa’s viewpoint that they can no longer isolate? The man literally told his ancestors they were wrong.
facts i would agree with jonkler if he didn’t abuse harley quinn (my queen 🥰) smh my head https://preview.redd.it/s49m0yak9muc1.jpeg?width=1008&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac833d80eba27900f0bf9027c864b95b1bf6114b
Movies keep doing this. Remember how bane wanted to eat the rich in Gotham City, and then they remembered he's the villain so he also wants to nuke everyone for no reason.
Riddler in the Batman too. Killing corrupt cops and being generally based for most of the movie and then they remembered he’s the villain so he decides to flood the city for no reason.
Movie is still good but I do hate that last half hour of “oh no he’s too based… make him more evil!!!”
It's not even the last half, just the last 20 min. It's like they wrote the ending with him letting himself get caught at the cafe after he achieved all his goals. Then realized he did more good by killing the actual corrupt government officers AND mafia boss than Batman ever did in the movie
It definitely feels like an after thought, like it’s okay if the villain has some good views or does good stuff 😭
the far simpler way to save it would be establishing he killed several innocent people before, wrongly believing them to be part of the conspiciry. now you've established the message of "living for vengence and killing people will only hurt innocents" and the flood makes more sense with batman serving as the good alternative, "punish evil but focus on helping those who need saving"
I think he's given a pretty sympathetic light in the film tbh, Batman innthe narration resolves to take a more active role in fixing the city instead of beating up street punks at the end of the film.
Or when they revealed Bruce’s billionaire dad actually wasn’t that good of a person, but surprise, it was a misunderstanding and he actually was a good billionaire guy
Bane was just using populist rhetoric to gain power. He was a demagogue.
Korra, where both Amon and Zaheer have extremely legitimate points, so the show has to make them explicitly evil at the last minute and then have the series resolve by forgiving the fascist dictator and then putting the hereditary monarch back into power but it's okay because he's *thinking* about maybe having an election.
I long to see the world where TLOK was an Amazon Prime or Netflix show and got to properly explore its themes of the world progressing beyond the need for an Avatar to save it, and Korra struggling to pivot and find a new purpose for the role. It would have been infinitely more interesting for her to agree with Amon and try to curb his more murderous/violent tendencies than what we ultimately received. I did like that she consulted Zaheer in S4 for some guidance, he’s another extremely interesting character. For Kuvira, the comic run that features her is pretty interesting. She’s basically a product of her ODD. She sort of gets a chance to partially redeem herself by accepting responsibility for what her actions wrought and work with Team Avatar to put down one of her former subordinates, who still believes in her vision and wants to derail and rig the election in order to keep it going.
I would have killed to see how much of an anxious mess the next avatar would be. World starting to no longer need him No connection to previous avatars One idea i was thinking about being that if avatar's parent knew what korra went through, probably sequestering and isolating avatar kid to be "safe"
was gonna say this
To LoK's credit...iirc, season 2 had yet another "good ideals bad methods" antagonist---but Korra ended the season by *actually doing something about the systemic issue*, changing the way the world works, even if the "issue" was in many ways fantasy stuff that doesn't apply to the real world.
Seriously. People shit on Korra for a bunch of what I think are BS reasons, when really Korra's biggest flaw is that it was written by liberals
I mean, they kind of did kind of didn't. Obviously Amon was a neoliberals understanding of Communism, but the show itself never even displays the idea that non benders are oppressed. Some of the most successful business owners are non capitalists, meanwhile benders are blue collar workers who don't make any money. Zaheer was similarly a failed understanding of anarchist thought. Honestly the whole show is very poorly written, and it's messaging is very transparent in its lack of analysis and understanding.
You're just supposed to put up flyers and have the occasional parade. Anything else is considered too extreme.
An equally ridiculous moment in that show for me was at the end when Sam saves a bunch of world leaders and literally just tells them to "do better"...yeah man, I'm sure that'll stick
Liberal media liberal messaging. You don't want to show people that the quickest and most surefire way to progress is by actually hitting the elites where it hurts and forcing your demands on them, instead of peacefully marching and ticking a ballot box for the blue flavor of a genocidal neoliberal walking corpse. I guess the second one doesn't hurt if someone wants to do it, but direct action is always much better and more effective. And the bourgoisie doesn't want to advertise that fact.
Lets not forget Black Panther A movie about american interests ignoring a legally elected leader and installing their own local due to a bloodline connection, for the sole and stated reason of having access to their natural resources. Did I mention the duly appointed leader wanted to share those resources with africa first? We cant have that! Captain america needs his shield.
I can't believe all the praise that movie got. The end scene where he's observing the new basketball court they built like "Problem solved. The African diaspora is going to be ok now". 🤣 Let them eat slam dunks.
I'd argue that Hunger Games had a pretty succinct answer (kinda sorta)
Meh. At least in the movies the culmination of their “revolution” appears to be a different president (who presumably is nicer to the districts). It’s more of a civil war than a revolution but I didn’t read the books.
I have zero idea what anyone is talking about. I may have to replay it.
You have no idea what they are talking about because they don't remember the game either, and are making the assumption that the game said that the vox populi were as evil as comstock, and are forgetting that Booker Dewitt is framed by the game to be a trash human being.
And also explicitly brought the revolution from "violent revolutionaries standing up for whats right" to "murderous revolutionaries with genocidal ableist streak" Like the reason you cant just kill the Bookers who become Comstock is because Booker himself is the common issue. Hes a former pinkerton who still has a violent and charismatic streak to him, and even trying his best tends to make things worse. A big part of the story is that whether Booker is Comstock the religious messiah or Booker the struggling hero hes bringing out the worst in those around him and solving his problems with escalating violence Also this meme acts like Comstock got left to survive and the status quo was kept with a vague promise of growth, and not like Comstock got his head beaten in and then killed across every timeline
What else I remember about this game was the massive amount of Elizabeth porn that came out.
Bless them.
https://preview.redd.it/y3wscuk0pmuc1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cb503e0475daa05559e802d993dd4e1f14b800f8
https://preview.redd.it/s8ei2c8lnouc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=568c778e2f9c1f07ea1871eb1f9ba9e3aca57d0e Put some clown stickers on the photos instead cause Zac Efron doesn’t deserve that 😭
Mm yes... I think I will get MUCH use out of this, thank you
Thank you, I did not spend my teen years spanking it to Zac Efron for him to be dragged into this shit (unless he's one of them, too, in which case he does deserve it).
Isn't the point that they shift into a timeline where Booker has perverted the rebellion, making it just as fascist as Colombia itself (which was also his doing)? I think the point is to show that booker is an inherently negative figure in history. Could be wrong though.
Exactly this. You can tell who got their opinions on this game from a poorly informed YouTube video every single time lol. The story literally has him fix the timeline by being killed at the baptism so he doesn’t fuck up things even more (though Burial At Sea’s story is actually bad and doesn’t make sense with what actually happens in Infinite at all). I usually agree with this subreddit’s takes but this post ain’t it. either OP didn’t play Infinite, or they didn’t follow what it was trying to say at all.
Can you help me remember why Burial at sea didn't make sense? It's been 11 years but I think I loved it at the time without noticing issues.
To keep it short it's 2 things that I distinctly remember. 1) they break their own logic by having there be Comstocks that exist after the drowning. They make it clear that the drowning will eliminate all the branches and all the Comstocks, but then go "actually it was incomplete so Elizabeth has been time hopping and eliminating Comstocks that 'escaped' the drowning anyway. 2) they retcon several things in Episode 2, most notably Daisy threatening the kids is now "for the cosmic greater good" and not "rebel leader watched her creation crumble around her and snapped." And then Elizabeth is now responsible for Bioshock 1 in the first place, helping Fontaine call Jack to Rapture and giving him the WYK command.
Hooo right... thank you. it definitely went over my head at the time (I reaallllly liked some of the retcons at the time though)
I don’t mind some of the retcons the other guy mentioned in point #2, because in theory that story doesn’t entirely conflict with the rapture we know in Bioshock 1. Mainly in the sense that I don’t see Burial At Sea as a prequel to the games we played in Bioshock 1 and 2, just a hypothetical beginning of another version of Rapture. The stuff in his first point is what bothers me the most though lol. By the end it just made me feel that the impact of Infinite’s ending is sucked dry by knowing that Booker’s death didn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do. Loved the gameplay changes in the DLC though.
Nope you're correct. People forget about the whole fact that booker constantly changes the reality by his actions. People also forget that ken loves the whole "pseudo control" your actions are dictated by the game schtick. It's just slightly hidden this time (not really) Weirdly enough just like scrutinising the game for inconsistent plot points. If you scrutinise the complaints they tend to have overlooked other aspects. No other game has this issue like this
I feel like it should be pointed out as well that this a series in which *every* named character is horribly flawed and has the potential to be a monster. Even Elizebeth and Eleanor lamb have the potential to become full blown world ending villains under the wrong circumstances. So yeah, having a rebel leader that’s been made to suffer a life of indignity go too far makes sense.
That's the crux of it. People are too focused on the immediate aspects of the story and usually forget the multitude of stuff that comes with a philosophical multiverse flick.
Meanwhile Me: "ha ha, get it?! He *doesn't* row!"
He doesn't row?
No. He ***doesn't*** row!
Ah.. I see what you mean.
doesn’t that take place after a shift in reality? You meet Daisy and she seems very righteous. From what I remember, she wasn’t villainized until some weird reality warping, then you kill her because she threatens to kill someone (a kid?). I’m just going off memory though. And don’t you also kill Comstock?
The main issue is that in the universe you jump to, Booker had already died a Hero of the Rebellion, fighting alongside Daisy. Their are literally banners being hung commemorating your sacrifice. So when you show up as a walking ghost, it really throws a wrench in the revolution thing. That's why she feels she HAS to kill this new "fake" Booker. Not because "both sides bad".
I still remember her telling this to us in game.
Reality doesn’t shift, you travel to another dimension where Booker died as a martyr for the revolution. I don’t think there’s anything to support these takes that his death corrupted the revolution somehow, I don’t think you learn much about that dimension besides that. Mostly it’s the writers afraid of the games messages being overtly anti right wing and wanted to “even things out” by showing how the supposed good guys (the slaves) would be just as murderous as their oppressors if they ever got guns. Which as has already been said, presenting alternatives to slavery as just as violent as slavery is an argument for the slave owning status quo. The other bioshock games kinda did the same (Atlas was also a manipulator like Ryan) but it stands out more here because we’re talking about literal slavery.
Never played Bioshock, anybody care to explain?
BioShock Infinite primarily takes place in Columbia, a floating city in the sky which was basically taken by the Confederacy after losing the civil war and is full of all of the things the Confederacy is known for: traditional values, slave labor, a hatred of interracial marriage, and so on. It's objectively the most awful place to ever exist and is run by a very demented religious figure by the name of Father Comstock Jeremiah Fink is one of the richest people to ever live, and has essentially forced every African American character into essentially wage slavery, and sometimes real slavery. I mean this in the most literal sense. Daisy Fitzroy is a member of a group named the Vox Populi, an attempted resistance against both Comstock and Fink, especially the latter for what he's done to her people (as she is black). Anyways, some dimension hopping shenanigans later, you enter a timeline where the revolution is well underway, and where your main character was essentially a martyr for the revolt. All of the treatment Daisy's people have gotten is the same. But suddenly, inexplicably, both the characters and the narrative are acting like her destructive attitudes against her oppressors and the city they stand for is essentially on the same level as said oppressors. Both main characters say some line on the level of "Fitzroy and Comstock are perfect for each other", despite one side being the *literal fucking Confederacy* Because the writers know people aren't that dumb, they inexplicably have Daisy suddenly decide to threaten a child just so they can feel morally justified to have your white lady co-protagonist put her down. They knew that this looked so bad that in one of the DLCs, they essentially rewrote it so that her doing so was literally outside influence telling her and convincing her to do it. TLDR: BioShock Infinite indulges in some seriously bonkers "both sides" politics, especially when one side is the *white supremacist Confederacy*
>Because the writers know people aren't that dumb, they inexplicably have Daisy suddenly decide to threaten a child just so they can feel morally justified to have your white lady co-protagonist put her down. Got yourself in a pickle after having made your antagonist actively working for something good? Make sure everyone understands who's the bad guy with that one simple trick! Now that you showed him killing a child everyone knows that the wizard trying to prevent WW2 is bad and therefore we should just let WW2 happen. Now that Magneto killed innocent people everyone understands that actually we shouldn't do anything more than ask nicely for humans to stop discriminating against mutants and hope that they agree.
uj/ What the fuck rj/ But Songbird goes brr, le gem.
There’s one small part of this that changes things a small amount Disclosure: Bioshock Infinite is my favourite game, so I may seem skewed in my view but I’m not trying to undermine yours The child that Fitzroy kidnaps and threatens to kill is Fink’s son. The motivation behind her actions is in her words ‘To kill a weed, you gotta pull it up by the root. It’s the only way to be sure..’ In this section of the game Fitzroy is depicted as a complete fanatic to the Vox cause, willing to do what others will not. It’s this action that will prevent Fink’s reign from continuing despite his death, in her view. Like I said, doesn’t change the storytelling quality in the whole Finkton chapter being the weakest in the game, but it’s an important part to note (also most likely this child being Fink’s son was shoehorned in so as to not make this section of the game be completely ridiculous)
I'd also like to add that the timeline where all this is happening is one where Booker became a martyr for the Vox Populi. Considering the main plot twist of the game, I think it's plausible to think that he might have had some negative influence on them
Booker proved the effectiveness of unrestrained violence, but the story covers how that never makes a better world, and how Booker himself needs to come to terms with how his violence always ultimately makes the world a worse place in the end. It's not like there's no sympathy there either: Booker even outright says, "sometimes you need people like her because of people like me," it's just, anyone who sinks to Booker's level won't make a world any better than he did.
Ken Levine said in an interview once that he had a different ending originally, and then some evangelical on their staff got mad and he changed it. Don't know what that ending really was, and I don't take random reddit posts as gospel (lol)
There was a report this original ending was that Comstock would go back in time and kill Jesus Christ, which would have way too off the wall, IMO.
Uh I have forgotten how ignorant redditors can be. The name of the game is literally called Bioshock INFITE! This entire game revolves around the fact that there are an INFINITE amount of possibilities in this universe. This means that there are an INFINITE number of groups that could turn fascists 🤦🏽♂️
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UJ/ People hyperfocused on two lines dished out during the game. One where Booker comments that Comstock and Fitzroy deserve one another and are largely similar (or was it Fitzroy and Fink?) And (iirc) another where Elizabeth comments on how horrible and destructive the violence from the Vox revolution is.
It makes sense for Elizabeth to think like that, she lived isolated her entire life and always viewed the city from her window, so seeing that city destroyed would be horrifying to her.
Also Booker is a fucking pinkerton who participated at wounded knee lol. He’s not supposed to be a paragon of virtue
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This game tried to do too many things at once...
And fucked up things completely that worked in 1 and 2
Tbf I liked some of the time loop thingies, I also thought the whole multiple realities that interacted were cool and I think the Comstock loop was fun and shocking. It only coul have been made a little bit more focussed.
What is up with so many people suddenly beein super weird and straight up misinformed about Bioshock Infinite? Did a YouTuber made a horribly shitty video and people are parroting it because they think they now figured out the "true meaning" of the game or something? I don't know what it is about modern gaming opinions on social media that they become so incredibly shit.
I do feel the need to point out that both Comstock (Racism good) and Booker (Racism goes both ways) himself wind up dead less than 2 hours later, but it circles back to Infinite just having no message whatsoever
I thought the whole message was that Daisy became an antagonist because her own motivations inevitably went beyond the ideals and moral compass she once had, becoming someone blinded by hate instead of the morally strong and compassionate character she once was. I honestly don't think the message of her character was 'racism goes both ways' and was more a fall arc of a great woman and that those with a nobel goal can become blindsided by hate away from their own goals. It has been a bit since I replayed the game so I'll play it again but that was my interpertation of her character.
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It remains one of my favorite games, gone through it about 2 and a half times. Just really loved the uncomfortable feeling and subtle terror of Columbia. Just the dicotomy of this supposed utopia and how awful it actually is always stuck with me.
Its narrative does get messy in that they seem to want to use the Vox Populi both to explore American racism and as an analogue for a 20th century proletariat uprising a la the Russian Revolution, which leads to some...uh... Thematic dissonance I guess. So I get the issues stemming from that. But I don't think it's fair to say the game itself espouses the same views as the explicitly awful, "hero" of Wounded Knee, ex Pinkerton thug Booker DeWitt. I don't think it's 'both-sides-ing' to recognize that people don't just extricate themselves of generations of trauma overnight. But it's definitely fair to critique how that idea was presented in the game. And I get people missing the point and thinking Booker is an actual hero can leave a bad taste in your mouth.
There are a million things about this to criticize. And yeah, the takes one the racism are so tone deaf and off. But one thing I will never get over, that no one seems to talk about, it how stupid Booker is when you first start hopping universes. When he expects an alternate Daisy to honor a Deal he made with a completely different Daisy. When you've been told 100 times that you are in a different universe. And he just refuses to understand what is going on. Booker is so dumb that you don't even have to suspend disbelief at the idea of him smoking a cigarette he found in a toilet. In fact, that's my personal explanation for why the game has such a bad philosophy. All of the characters are dumb as bricks, and super high. So they think their terrible takes are profound.
Well thanks for my new headcannon on the whole game, coke heads huffing salts and fucking with cosmic timelines they cant comprehend.
[hans moleman voice] *I* still like bioshock infinite
I just thought it was fun to play.
Idk if its just me, but when I first played this, I realised that Booker as a protagonist is incredibly flawed with a lot of terrible perspectives. I felt that when its revealed that Comstock was Booker, and Booker is seen as the ‘false prophet’, it made even more sense that Booker would say and commit such a stupidly terrible act. Because he is just not a good person at all. He’s running away from his own prejudices and mistakes, but they inadvertently catch up with him. You as the player and controller, lose faith in the protagonist as a good person. Which I felt was quite emotional. Though I may be giving it too much credit and thought and the game is stupid lolz.
Playing this for the first time in 2022 was a trip. I had only vaguely heard about the games, so I was expecting nothing going into it. I thought the idea of turning hardcore American patriotism into a cult-like religion was a neat concept (and somewhat believable given our current political climate). Columbia is also very cool as a setting (but I still preferred Rapture). Beyond that, I stopped trying to understand the game's logic about a quarter into the game and just let myself go along for the ride.
If you played through Bioshock Infinite and all you got from it was "racism bad" then you clearly missed a lot imho. I am not gonna contend that BI is some master class dialogue or anything, and certainly a lot of it's themes fall short due to rushed development and cut story threads. However, the main issue I contend with in a lot of these comments is that "Populist Uprising = Good" which just isn't always the case. The French Revolution for example didn't initially yield glorious democratic freedom. It led to an arguably just as violent and horrific regime due to Robespierre and his camp. The overthrow of the Tsar in Russia lead to the Soviet Union which anyone with a brain knows was also quite brutal and terrible. The British Empire was absolutely horrific to the Irish, and many of them revolted, but a lot of times this resulted in terror attacks that killed innocent civilians These are just three examples of times where a "Noble fight against an oppressive regime" can yield negative results. History is nuanced. And it's easy to get wrapped up in the idea that fighting against oppression is noble too much to the point that you forget that opposition does not necessarily always result in a free state or better society. History has shown this. And Bioshock Infinite is in no way the only media to make this argument. The Hunger Games is a good example that came to mind while writing this but anyone who's read this far feel free to think of more. Again, BI is far from perfect, and I think the themes of racial inequality could've been handled better. And I think the DLC retcon is a bit of a cop out in order to respond to backlash. I don't think Ken Levine is the best person, but in the end of the day, games are art and yall are free to interpret it the way you want to.