History Headscratchers / BioShock2

** That, and, in the first game, when you played as Jack, you're more "distant" from the goings of Rapture but, here, you're more closely involved in Rapture's goings.

!Sophia's Plants

** The Little Sisters in this game seemed to be made to pair-bond with a specific Big Daddies, so there's more of an emotional connection (inasmuch as one can be) betwixt the two beyond pheromones. In the first game, this wasn't exactly the case.

*** Technically, the question is how Poole survived UNTIL Delta got there TEN YEARS AFTER HE FLOODED THE PARK. Although, in this case, I assumed he realized just how destructive his plan was going to be this time (even if he didn't give a damn about the morality), and stocked up on food and water CrazySurvivalist style before locking himself in the booth - the reason there's little evidence of it when you get there is because, [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome after ten years, he's just about used it all up]]. This would also help explain why he [[{{Railroading}} Railroaded]] Delta from his little quest - seeing as he was going OneManArmy against Lamb's tyranny, Poole thought that Delta was his only shot at getting out of the park, even though he repeatedly screwed him over in the past. This would be especially true in a Good playthrough, as Poole would've thought that, since Delta was so merciful to the Little Sisters and Grace Holloway, [[TemptingFate surely he'd have some pity for poor Uncle Stanley, right?]] This makes less sense in an Evil playthrough, since Delta's slaughtering his way through all of Rapture no matter what, but it's still possible to chalk it up to desperation on Poole's part for any break, no matter how suicidal, from just starving to death.

** Because Delta was dying of heart failure and there was no way for Eleanor to save him. Preserving his memories was the best she could do.

** The plot had significant changes made to it fairly late in development. Originally it was going to be focused on the same Big Sister hounding you throughout the game, kidnapping little children to keep them 'safe', developing - thematically at least - alongside Tenebaum's own involvement in the creation process. We instead got the current plot arc, for good or for ill, with most of the original elements being exorcised.

** Maybe when Delta was ressurected, Elenor incorporated it into his structure.
** Tenenbaum probably did it. Elenor conspired with her to bring Delta back from the dead, since Bridget had the genetics experience and Elenor knew who to revive and where their corpse was, so it wouldn't be out of the question that Tenenbaum asked her to include the non-lethal slug killing plasmid into his genetic code as a requirement for her cooperation.

** I believe a recording told that the butterflies were "paper" of some sort.
*** In the part where you see the world through the eyes of a Little Sister, the various corpse-eating carrion are replaced by butterflies. Perhaps there is something in Rapture's air that causes minor hallucinations to all of its denizens/visitors?
*** Maybe it’s a modified version of Insect Swarm that summons butterflies instead of bees?

*** The things he has done, including him going along with Lamb and him begging for death, may be the result of Project W-Y-K (Fontaine's "Would you kindly" treatment). He may have had no choice.
*** At no point is that implied. Ever.
*** Actually, there's an audiolog from Sofia Lamb stating that she also gave Gil a bit of W-Y-K-based conditioning to "promote the common good." Now, if you ascribe to the theory that Gilbert's suicidal behaviour was due to the W-Y-K, it would make sense that Lamb would want Gilbert dead- after all, he was a living example of how badly her experiments could go, not to mention insane. The conditioning was supposed to ensure that he would kill himself immediately after it became apparent that he was a failure; however, with the ADAM injections steadily turning his mind and body into unidentifiable mulch, the conditioning only partially worked: instead of just shooting himself, Gilbert went the most longwinded route possible, setting up all the cues to allow a rescuer the chance to kill him. Then of course, both his old personality and the conditioning was overwritten, turning Gilbert Alexander into "Alex the Great." What do you think?
*** I didn't see it as the morally correct choice, but the merciful one. If you killed Gil, then you're sending Eleanor a different message - that it was perfectly fine to kill people if you said so.

*** He also begs for his live if you hesitate to push the button. Even if he was slightly crazy, he still was sentient enough to consider his life worthy to be lived. Think about it: A person permanently lost his memories but is happy with his life. Now you find a message from that person, which reads "Kill me If I will lose my memories " Does that give u the right to kill that person?

** Part of it is also an oversight in programming. The developers meant for the proper choice to be killing him, but the kill or spare choice was programmed just like the others.
*** Do you have any source for that? That would be a pretty big oversight if true.
*** Or maybe the programmer agreed with us that sparing Alex ''was'' the correct choice and they made the call.
*** Yeah, I could believe a programming oversight, but I doubt it. The statues in Elanor's mind (things they had to specifically plan and design) are either (a) you pulling a man out of a monster if you release Gil or (b) you smiting the same monster if you kill Gil. If it was a programming oversight, I could see pulling a man out of a monster as symbolic of honoring Gil's last human request, but I don't see how killing the monster would connect to releasing Gil instead of, well, killing him.
** The biggest reason it's a bad idea to kill Gil is that he's a great SequelHook. If he stays out there in the ocean someplace, he'd make a really interesting case for Tenenbaum & her pals to deal with as they try to handle the fallout from Rapture responsibly. After all: If the story of Rapture simply ended here, then letting a murderous, psychopathic maniac like Gil go free would be a serious risk for the world... Not to mention, such a bizarre, genetically-warped creature would be a danger to the ecosystem as well. There's nothing except vague, idealistic hope that suggests things will turn out happily with Gil. Sparing him is only a good move if the story later continues and provides an actual positive outcome to this psychopath's arc. Of course, who knows if they ever will continue the Rapture saga, but this may have been the developers' rationale at the time.

* Why'd Tenenbaum just...disappear so soon? I'm barely in an hour into it, and it's implied that she'll help me like she did for Jack...only to hand mentoring over to Sinclair! Why waste a good character for this deadpan snarker? (did I describe him right, btw?)

*** And, let's face it, she'd be ''a lot'' sour if you harvest the Little Sisters instead of saving them, to the point that it'd make little to no sense to have her tutoring you. Sinclair, like Atlas, cared a lot less about that matter.

** It's mentioned in a log that Alphas would sometimes "save" their little sisters in order to give them a proper life. Although I'm not sure why alphas were given this ability. Some sort of failsafe? I dunno.

** Depends on whether you think Andrew Ryan is dead or not. He's [[spoiler: [[LukeIAmYourFather Jack's father]]]], and the Vita-Chambers are triggered by DNA keys, so it's possible he came back.
*** Andrew Ryan disables the Vita-Chamber in his room. That's a pretty strong argument in favor of him deliberately going to his death. Considering that he himself has betrayed his ideals in every way possible, I see no reason for him to have chosen anything other than to die to make a point. As for Rapture, hard to say. The Little Sisters do offer you the city, but what is there left? A domain of crazed mutants? Are there even any normal people left there to keep the city going?
*** He could have turned off his Vita-Chamber so that he would regenerate further away from the player.
*** Vita-Chambers don't work like that. Fontaine's apartment on Prometheus Point has no Vita-Chambers in it, so if you die there you're just dead (and have to reload a saved game). Moreover, it's pretty clear that the regeneration of the Vita-Chamber literally teleports your body to the Vita-Chamber's location, which is why if you play the game with Vita-Chambers you don't find Jack corpses littered all over the floor from your countless deaths, and why the stuff on your person (your shortwave radio, your guns, your ammo) reappear at the Vita-Chamber. The fact that you can see Ryan's corpse just lying on the ground, not shrouded in writhing green lightning and being sucked away, is evidence he's not going to regenerate.

** This is a fairly ridiculous FanWank which I haven't seen any evidence for in the series, but it's possible that the Alpha Series don't have the stinky smell that later Big Daddies do. Instead, they have a unique pheromone that only their Little Sister will hone in on. The Little Sisters would recognize you as their Daddy once they saw you because of their connection to Eleanor, but they weren't physically able to recognize your smell like she could. They only leave their vents when they smell the later Big Daddies, otherwise they'd all be eaten by splicers pounding on the vents. Incidentally, this is why NPC Daddy/Sister pairs don't get swarmed by splicers while gathering like you do; the stink masks the smell of the raw ADAM that seeps from the corpse when its most ADAM-rich parts are punctured. So why did Jack get swarmed in the last level of ''[=BioShock=]''? Because... shut up.

* Why does Sofia Lamb almost feel like a self insert character? Or, at the very least, kind of badly written, all things considered. She's in all these pictures, she's apparently won all these debates against Andrew Ryan, yet, in the first game, you hear absolutely nothing about her. I just wish they would've made her not that important pre-Rapture's fall rather than this huge figure. It makes the lack of any sign of her in the first game really hard to believe.
** Ryan had Sofia unpersoned after she threatened his reign of power. Rather then kill her, over the course of years he slowly eliminated her from Raptures history and with that her influence. Think of how the Soviets covered up all the deaths involved in their space program by airbrushing the dead out of photos, to the point that you have a group sized photo with one dude in it. When she finally came back it was after a long stint in prison to find her cult of personality at best dormant and her existing obsession with the common good pushed to the level of a violent fanatic.
** It bothered me too. She's ''way'' too important a character to have only been heard of now. It would have made more sense if she had been a minor agitator that Ryan locked up before she could get prominent enough - the first game spoke of political prisoners, so it wouldn't be so bad if she was simply one of those.
*** She was one of those. Ryan had Lamb locked up in Persephone. She only got out after Jack's departure.
*** She was locked up, but she was a major player prior to that, if the second game is to be believed. The point is that it's strange for such an important figure to never come up in the various audio logs expanding on Rapture's history in the first game. Also, while she's an obvious {{Retcon}}, I seriously doubt she's a self-insert.
*** While she's not actually one, she sure does feel like one at times.
*** An audio log from Ryan states that he didn't just want Lamb locked up, he wanted her erased. Apparently, his secret police did their job well on that call.
** What you also have to remember is that you only explored a small area of Rapture in the first game, and it was largely the more prestigious areas - even areas like Apollo Square were still a huge step up from the slums of Pauper's Drop or Siren Alley. As a radical collectivist who fought against "the elite", Lamb's support was mostly based around the poor, working-class areas of Rapture, so it makes sense that her presence would be mostly felt there, while, as mentioned above, Ryan's police would erase any records of her from the pristine "face" of Rapture that its elite citizens would see.

*** So? It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I simply assume that Delta is pulling off his helmet when he eats, but the game's not showing it to keep up the game flow, the same way it doesn't show either Delta or Jack slicing open Spider Splicers' chests for their hearts or show them rummaging through an entire box for items inside. It's one of several AcceptableBreaksFromReality.
*** I always assumed that he had some system specifically designed to transfer food to him. There's no indication that Big Daddies don't need to eat, and Delta is designed with delivery systems for EVE and medical supplies into the hole where his nose used to be. Why not food too after processing it into a paste?

** Plus, according to official sources, Suchong was killed in 1958, evidently some time before the New Year's Eve attacks; given that Gilbert Alexander took his place ''and'' created the pair-bond between Delta and Eleanor, Delta being up and about on New Year's Eve '58 is very possible. In fact, it's safe to assume that the war Suchong was talking about was the ongoing gang war between Ryan and Fontaine, which produced plenty of corpses and had plenty of people scared (both of Fontaine and the possible results of working with him).

* One of Eleanor's messages to Subject Delta seemed to imply that [[spoiler: something had gone wrong with her mother's face. But when you meet her mother later on, her face looks fine]]. Or was I just mishearing Eleanor?
** I can't remember what she actually said, but I took it to mean something figurative, not literal. Perhaps she saw [[spoiler: a hint of the ruthlessness and fanaticism that dictated almost all of Sofia's actions-- something that would look "wrong" on a person who was supposed to be Eleanor's loving mother.]] I could also be misinterpreting Eleanor's words, though.
** If we are thinking of the same message, then I think you're just misunderstanding Eleanor. Eleanor mentions her mother's face as in referring to her expression- not her actual physical condition.
** You misunderstood. Eleanor is panickedly telling Delta that Sofia is looking right at her, even if there should be no way for Sofia to know what Eleanor is doing. "Her face" refers to the presumed expression of seething disappointment Sofia is experiencing as she figures out that Eleanor has been consciously guiding Delta since day 1 and it dawns on her that no matter her efforts, Eleanor refuses to let go of Delta.

** Tenenbaum supplied Eleanor with her antidote plasmid while they were conspiring to bring Delta back from the dead and they integrated it into his genetic makeup. It makes sense since Tenenbaum wanted to save them and Eleanor needed her genetic engineering experience to trick the Vita chambers. As for Sigma Tenenbaum convinced him to take it, or tricked him, before he headed into Manuever's Den again to serve her agenda.

* Why, precisely, is everyone treating a Big Daddy as though it were a sentient, self-determinating person? Eleanor I could understand, given she was indoctrinated so severely as a Little Sister and would simply be seeing a father figure who wasn't really a father, but everyone else, from Tenenbaum to Sinclair to Sofia Lamb, Stanley Poole and Grace Holloway? What's all this "get revenge on those who wronged you" and "you and me, kid, we're gonna be rich on the surface" crap? I'm a Big Daddy. I don't give a shit. I want my Little Sister so things can go right back to the way they were.

** A possibly greater source of contention arises from the existence of the Big Sisters, Little Sisters that have grown up. Tenenbaum knew a great deal about the Little Sisters, being the one responsible for their creation, and presumably had records of all subjects. So how come she didn't notice that several of them were missing, having already been taken in by Sofia Lamb? Maybe you could argue that she believed them dead, harvested by Splicers... but does that really make sense? If [[MamaBear Tenenbaum]] felt such devoted motherly instinct for all Little Sisters, wouldn't it be natural for her to keep looking for them on the ''off-chance'' that they may still be alive? [[NotSoDifferent Guess that Tenenbaum wasn't quite such a good mother in comparison to Lamb after all...]]