Characters / BioShock Infinite: Elizabeth

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Elizabeth Comstock / Anna DeWitt

Voiced by: Courtnee Draper

"Trapped in a tower with nothing but books and spare time? You would be surprised what I know how to do."

The main heroine of BioShock Infinite. Elizabeth is a young woman who has been locked in a tower in Columbia for most of her life, being isolated from the rest of the world and guarded by the mechanical Songbird. She jumps at the chance to escape her imprisonment, but her idealism is slowly hardened as she is faced with a number of truths about herself and the city she is in.

She has the ability to manipulate "tears" in reality that bring objects in from and often create passages to parallel worlds, though she is unsure about whether her power creates new universes (based on her own desires) or simply opens the gateway to pre-existing ones.

She becomes a playable character in the second part of Burial at Sea, which conclude her story.

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A-H

• Action Girl: In the second part of the Burial at Sea DLC.
• Action Survivor: While she generally doesn't participate directly in combat, Elizabeth is quite helpful in a fight, either by using her Tears to open up new combat possibilities for Booker or by tossing items for him to use.
• Adrenaline Makeover: Elizabeth, on account of Characterization Marches On and being Promoted to Playable for Episode Two. Further justified by having been Brought Down to Normal and focusing heavily on stealth rather than outright gunfights.
• Aesop Amnesia: After opening a tear into a new Columbia Elizabeth is disconcerted by the changes and admits that coming there might have been a mistake. A little while later, her and Booker's plan hits a roadblock with a conveniently located tear that would take them them to yet another Columbia and Elizabeth opens it without hesitation. Unsurprisingly, she comes to regret that as well.
• Alternate Self: She also is aware of her alternate Elizabeths, and even teams up with them in a combination of three incarnations to bring about Booker's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Analogy Backfire: Elizabeth is initially supportive of Daisy's revolution, even going as far to compare it to (what else) Les Misérables. She's forgetting a rather important detail from that book: namely, that the rebels got creamed... but there is a certain romance to overthrowing a government, and Elizabeth is a romantic at heart.
• Animal Motifs: She is consistently referred to as the Lamb of Columbia in Founders' propaganda.
  • She is also marked as a caged bird by the Luteces.
  • In late stages of the game, she is put on a "leash" and compared to Ivan Pavlov's dog.
• Apocalypse Maiden: She was being raised and groomed to become one, ultimately through sheer suffering.
• The Atoner: Elizabeth in Episode Two is consumed with guilt over the fact that she exploited Sally, in a brutal and painful fashion, in Episode One to lure one of the alternate reality Comstocks to his death. The irony certainly isn't lost on her, and she muses aloud to her Booker hallucination how she's part of the "wheel of blood" of exploited and exploiting. Episode Two is her having the Luteces take her back to Rapture so she can save Sally after she left her for dead.
• Authority in Name Only: The Elizabeth of the 1980s forsook Comstock House, just as she had forsook her father's beliefs. However, like Columbia itself, the stronghold kept right on ticking even without her involvement. In this future, it's little more than an asylum; every floor is dilapidated, and snow is pouring in through the windows.
• Badass Bookworm: Being one hell of a bookworm? Check. Willing to smack those books at an intruding stranger? Double check.
• Barrier Maiden: Played with. (i.e. It's hard to say whether this played straight or an inversion.) The epilogue of Infinite reveals that Elizabeth lost her pinky when an (artificially-created) tear closed over it. Her severed finger was left behind in another reality, causing a disturbance in the multiverse. Even in adulthood, the symptoms linger on: Elizabeth's mere presence causes tears to open up all across Columbia and Rapture. In Burial at Sea, she makes a return trip to the Rapture world after being overwhelmed and killed by a Big Daddy. Elizabeth knows full well what will happen if she returns to a world where she is dead: the restoration of the natural order, causing all of the tears to vanish.
• Barrier Warrior: She cannot project force fields, but Elizabeth can leap into tears to escape pursuit. She can also summon up items, obstacles (like TORNADOES), and NPC friendlies. The reverse is also true: Elizabeth finally brings down the Songbird by transporting it to the sea bottom near Rapture; the water pressure crushes it to death within seconds.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. As the game goes on, she gathers a nice array of cuts and bruises, including a rather vivid-looking shiner under her left eye, which she sports for the last portion of the game. Zigzagged in Episode Two, as both of her corpses are modestly lacking in gore.
• Been There, Shaped History: Comstock's goal for her in Infinite. She achieves this in two very different ways, once in a Bad Future and again in Burial At Sea.
• Best Served Cold: Elizabeth forces the Final Comstock to relive his killing of her infant self in Alt-1893. This took months and several (some might say obsessive) levels of planning to pull off.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • She's sweet, innocent, adorable, and the single most dangerous thing in Columbia. And then there's that Bad Future.
  • In the last act of the game, she graduates from being the single most dangerous thing in Columbia to being the single most dangerous thing in the multiverse.
  • In Burial at Sea, what she lets happen to that version of Comstock.
  • And of course in Burial at Sea Part 2, what she lets happen to the city of Rapture.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents:
  • After shanking Daisy Fitzroy.
  • And at the end of Burial At Sea, she gets blood splashed over her face when Final Comstock gets Impaled with Extreme Prejudice.
• Brainy Brunette: Elizabeth is very intelligent, and extremely book-smart, growing up in a tower with nothing to do but read, practice whatever skills struck her fancy, and repeatedly attempt and fail to break out. However, being isolated in that tower with no other contact also means she is very inexperienced at actually interacting with people.
• Break the Cutie: The game is not kind to her, especially in the later levels. She starts out rather perky and somewhat childish, but gradually grows shell-shocked and steely after much torture and bloodshed.
  • Symbolized by her losing her initial innocent Belle-like dress in favor of a more adult outfit, and along the way she gets a haircut, too.
• Brought Down to Normal: Her status as a living quantum superposition is undone when she returns to Rapture in Episode Two of Burial at Sea, due to entering a universe in which she has died. As further proof of this, her pinky is revealed to be restored.
• Can't Hold Her Liquor: In Burial At Sea Episode Two, Elizabeth gets drunk from a single drink, as opposed to Booker who can put down several before the effects kick in.
• Changing of the Guard: Episode Two of Burial at Sea features Elizabeth as the player character due to Comstock's death at the end of Episode One.
• Character Development: She starts off as a Wide-Eyed Idealist. She goes through many different changes throughout the story.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Justified. As she was trapped in her tower since she was a baby and doesn't know how the world works.
• Clothing Damage: Receives some over the course of the game.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Her Bad Future self eventually became Comstock's heir and declared war on all mankind in the entirety of the multiverse.
• Damsel in Distress: Booker needs to save her at the beginning of the game. She also willingly gives herself to Songbird towards the end of the game, and Booker needs to save her. However it is downplayed the second time, as she saves herself as soon as Booker turns off the machine and frees her.
• Damsel out of Distress: Save for her capture in the Bad Future, Elizabeth is capable of taking care of herself when captured. The game also makes a point of indicating to the player that during battles, Elizabeth does not need protection.
• Dead Guy Junior: She is named after her mother, Annabelle Watson.
• Deadpan Snarker: She has her moments, especially in Burial at Sea.
• Death by Irony: In the DLC, Elizabeth lures a remorseful Comstock to his death in a toy store, but the Big Daddy that killed him pounces on Liz next. See "Out of Continues" below.
• Determinator: It doesn't matter what obstacles are in her way, she'll never stop. She spent her entire childhood trying to find a way to escape the tower she lives in, and events in the main game just give her a new goal to focus on. And in Burial at Sea: Episode Two, not even being Brought Down to Normal and permanently trapped in Rapture will stop her from saving Sally and making atonement for her mistakes.
• Deuteragonist: Infinite is just as much, if not more, Elizabeth's story than Booker's. Just about the only things keeping her from Protagonist status are 1) The Reveal about Booker's nature (IE he's Comstock) and 2) the fact that she's not the Player Character. (At least until the DLC.)
• The Dreaded: According to Booker, the residents of Columbia fear her, or at least fear what would happen should she escape confinement. In her tower, all the warning signs refer to her solely as "Specimen." For that matter, so does Booker. Justified in that she's a multi-dimensional Reality Warper at her full potential.
  Elizabeth: Booker... are you afraid of God?
  Booker: No. But I'm afraid of you.
• DreamWorks Face: Her default expression for most of the non-fighting segments.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: She gives off this vibe sometimes, especially in Burial at Sea.
• Expy:
  • She bears a strong resemblance to Eleanor Lamb from BioShock 2, as the daughter of the villain who has built a cult-like following around her. She's even referred to as "the lamb" sometimes. Many players were surprised that she wasn't confirmed as an AU version of Eleanor (though going by Burial At Sea, it seems that BioShock 2 has been quietly Exiled from Continuity as much as possible).
  • Elizabeth is also strongly inspired by Disney Princess characters Belle and Rapunzel, so much so that Irrational had to cut a number of scripted animations to keep her from being too similar to Rapunzel's portrayal in Tangled.
• Face–Heel Turn: Both in the main game and again in Burial at Sea, Elizabeth, after being a faithful ally throughout, turns on Booker at the very end, causing his death both times. While her motives might be related to her desire to be The Atoner, it's still a turn.
• Fallen Hero: Changes for the worse in Burial at Sea: Episode 1, and seeks to rectify it in Burial at Sea: Episode 2.
• Fanservice Pack: Elizabeth is even more attractive◊ in Burial at Sea, judging by the amounts of fanart and screenshots.
  • Inverted in regards to pre-release trailers and material; Elizabeth's original design was noticeably more sexualized, with the first trailer in particular drawing attention to her cleavage.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: The thimble she wears on her fingored pinky.
• Fashion Dissonance: The corset under her blouse which she exposes later in the game is of the wrong style for the era the rest of her first outfit accurately dates from. This is likely intentional given all the other intentional anachronisms in the game.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • In the standard game, ignorance. She's never been outside of her tower, Gilded Cage though it may be. As such, while she's read about a lot of the world through her books and her tears, she's never actually experienced it first-hand. As a result, Elizabeth is easily manipulated, ignorant of social customs, and naive. It's this ignorance that leads to Elizabeth making a lot of situations worse by accident, such as escalating things with Daisy Fitzroy and the Vox Populi or getting angry at Booker when he knew that they were walking into a trap.
  • In Burial at Sea, vengeance. Her bloodlust over wanting to kill every version of Comstock across all worlds, no matter where they were or what they'd done shocked even her once the adrenaline wore off. And after it did, she realized that she manipulated a Little Sister named Sally to get her target killed, and that her target may ultimately not have been as bad as Elizabeth told herself that they were. It's this guilt that causes her to go back to Rapture after she accomplishes her mission, which leads to her loss of her reality-warping powers, and leads to her death once Atlas gets a hold of her and tortures her for the trigger phrase that he wants.
• Femme Fatale: Elizabeth in Burial At Sea, with a dash of AntiHero for good measure. It even turns out her entire purpose in hiring Booker was to get him/Comstock killed.
• Fingore: She's missing most of her right pinky finger, which she has not had since she was an infant. Specifically, she loses it to a closing Tear when she's stolen away by Comstock — as Anna DeWitt. Rosalind Lutece even theorizes that this may be why she's as powerful as she is, since a part of her exists in both her current and original timelines, and apparently "the universe doesn't like its peas mixed with its porridge".
• Flower Motif: Red roses.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: She's fascinated with all things French and Booker convinces her to leave Columbia with him by promising to take her to Paris. Part 2 of Burial at Sea opens with Elizabeth hallucinating about a highly idealized version of Paris.
• Friendless Background: She's been locked away her entire life with no one for companionship save for Songbird.
• Friend to All Children: In Shantytown, there's an optional scene where she sings Will the Circle be Unbroken while kindly offering an orange to a small boy who was hiding under the stairs. In addition, when Daisy Fitzroy attempts to kill Fink's son, Elizabeth fatally stabs her with a pair of scissors. At the beginning of Burial at Sea: Episode 2, the Parisian children know her by name and implore her to come play with them.
• Geeky Turn-On: In Burial at Sea, invokes this in the art and music stores to distract the owners long enough to allow Booker to sneak into the offices and look for the invitation mask.
• Girl in the Tower: Well, not exactly a tower, more like a very tower-like science facility inside of a tall statue, but since it's based in a literal flying city it's not like she can easily escape. The development team even refers to her as a girl "trapped in her tower."
• Go Out with a Smile: In Episode Two of Burial at Sea, upon regaining her memory after Atlas administered the deathblow to her.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Elizabeth and her counterparts choose to drown Booker to eliminate all the versions of him that would become Comstock, despite knowing that this would also erase them. After it's done, all but the main Elizabeth is shown to wink out of existence before the Fade to Black, leaving it ambiguous about her fate.
  • Burial at Sea suggests that the older Elizabeth in Rapture is the same as from the main game and despite this, somehow continued to exist and retain her memory of the events of Infinite. Additionally, in Episode Two she sets in motion the events that would lead to BioShock, knowing that she would die but the Little Sisters would be freed.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The end of Infinite saw her begin her mission to travel across the multiverse and kill every iteration of Comstock as to prevent Columbia from being created. But come the end of Burial at Sea: Episode 1, when we find out that the Booker you were playing as was a Comstock who reformed and went to Rapture after the accidental death of a baby Anna, you realize that somewhere along the way, what was originally her launching justified pre-emptive strikes became solely about revenge, even if that meant killing a man who bore no resemblance to who he used to be and using his young adoptive daughter as a means to an end to lure him to his own gruesome death. Burial at Sea Comstock posed zero threat to anyone, cared deeply for Sally and put everything towards finding her again, and when his memories were regained, he showed genuine sorrow and remorse for what he had done, but Elizabeth coldly rejected it and allowed him to be killed for what she believed was a crime against her younger self, completely ignoring Sally near-burning to death just a few feet away. Come Burial at Sea: Episode 2, she's begun to have nightmares about what she did to Sally, and although Elizabeth originally denies that she did anything wrong, it's revealed in the end that she came back to Rapture to save her, knowing full well that she herself would die in the process, but feeling the need to rescue Sally from a situation that wouldn't have happened if not for Elizabeth's desire for all Comstocks to die.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: As Episode Two of Burial at Sea reveals, the Elizabeth that took part in Episode One was promptly killed by the Big Daddy she had manipulated Final Comstock into aggravating, as in its rage, it considered her a threat to Sally and she couldn't get the chance to open a Tear and flee Rapture before it impaled her on some rubble. This, and her guilt over manipulating Sally to the point of injury, ultimately led to Elizabeth being Killed Off for Real.
• Honor Before Reason: Drives the plot of Burial at Sea: Episode Two: despite knowing full-well that returning to Rapture will strip her of all her powers as a quantum superposition, which means she will become mortal again, and be stranded in Rapture's universe forever, she still returns to Rapture to try and save Sally, even knowing it'll probably get her Killed Off for Real.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: She's around 5'6" tall. Booker is 6'1" tall. (Note: trope In Name Only; both she and Booker are above average height for today, much less 1912.)
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: When with Booker, she can pick locks if he has enough lockpicks for her, break codes pointing to hidden stashes, scrounge up ammunition, health packs, money, and Salts, and open tears that she is asked to open. She can also withstand point-blank RPG friendly fire without blinking an eye.

I-Z

• Idle Animation: The developers gave her a lot of these to make her more life-like. She examines furniture, inspects merchandise, looks inside pipes, reads books, leans against walls, sits on benches, sidles up to people to overhear their conversations... trying to find every one of her behaviors is almost a game in itself.
  • In addition to the above, there are also a number of occasions where, if Booker guides her to certain locations, complicated interactions with NPCs will result, such as the "medicine ball incident" on the beach. People find her first time eating cotton candy very endearing.
• Important Haircut: Cuts off her ponytail after she kills Daisy.
• The Ingenue: Due to her life of confinement and limited real world experience, she tends to treat even the most mundane of things with a sense of wonder, and those can lead to some really funny moments. On the other side of the trope, she's spent that life of confinement becoming educated in a variety of fields.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Considering the range of emotions she needs to exhibit, her big, sky-blue eyes are one of the most important aspects of her design. They serve as a form of visual shorthand. Her baby-self is instantly recognizable as Elizabeth by her distinctive eyes, despite lacking every single other distinguishing feature, and the scene being Deliberately Monochrome.
• Irony: Elizabeth initally was repugnant whenever Booker smokes, especially when she is near him but when she is older, she herself smokes.
• Jade-Colored Glasses: Post her killing Daisy, she pretty much drops her cheerful persona in exchange for being consistently brooding and tired. This gets even worse by the time Booker rescues her from being tortured and the events of Burial at Sea. Considering her relationship with Songbird, it's possible her upbeat personality was partially a front she put on to deal with her situation.
• Living MacGuffin: As the Arc Words say, "Bring Us The Girl and Wipe Away The Debt."
• The Load: Inverted. One of the selling points of the game is that Elizabeth can take care of herself, and she can. Enemies solely focus on (IE, shoot at) Booker, and she's Friendly Fire Proof for emergencies. In addition, she: throws you ammo, health and mana pickups if you're running low on those things; highlights Elite Mooks with a special cursor; alters the battlefield with Tears to give you additional strategic advantage; and resuscitates you if you die. There's only one section near the end where you're deprived of her company, and you will quickly notice how much you have come to rely on her for help.
• Luke, You Are My Father: She's actually Booker's long-lost daughter, Anna.
• Master of Unlocking: One of the skills she's picked up in the tower is lockpicking. As long as she has a hairpin, or a supply of lockpicks, she can bypass most locks.
• Men Act, Women Are: Enforced by the in-game mechanic: Earlier builds had her able to use weapons and vigors, but this likely proved too expensive to be feasible in the long-term. In the final build, Elizabeth is in more of an assistant role. In-Story, however, this trope is lampshaded and gradually subverted, especially in the game's final act.
• Mercy Kill: She's forced to do this to Songbird by drowning it outside Rapture.
  • At one point, she heavily implies that she wants Booker to do this to her if she is captured again.
• Mundane Utility: After gaining complete access to her powers she teleports several feet instead of climbing a ladder.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: She's extremely thin and has no muscle tone, but she can still keep up with Booker on the skylines, not to mention deftly chucking various firearms at him.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • After she kills Daisy.
  • Her Bad Future self also undergoes this. By the time that happens, however, she could no longer stop Columbia from destroying New York and the world, and instead helps Booker come through to her time to give him the musical notes to control Songbird so her past self can try and prevent the bloodshed, at least in one dimension.
  • Burial at Sea Episode Two has her realizing that her actions in Episode One, where she lured that dimension's Comstock to his violent death because of an accident that caused that dimension's baby Anna to die, were needlessly bloodthirsty and manipulative, both towards a man who was just trying to silently forget and atone for his past life's actions, and his adoptive daughter Sally, whose Little Sister status Elizabeth took advantage of to string him along to go find and rescue her. When they finally find Sally, she's in a Little Sister Vent and absolutely petrified to come out, to which Elizabeth uses to her advantage by putting Comstock in the Big Daddy's line of fire and causing his brutal death. She leaves the dimension without paying Sally a second glance, all the while she's trapped in the vent that Elizabeth cranked up the heat inside of until it was so hot that the metal glowed red. The beginning of Episode Two has her being hounded by visions of Sally and her screams, at first begging for Sally to leave her alone, and eventually asking the Luteces to take her back to Rapture so she can save Sally from the fate she almost condemned her to.
• Never My Fault: Played with in Burial at Sea. Played straight in Episode One, where Elizabeth refuses to acknowledge that this version of Comstock only exists because she interfered with his attempt to abduct Anna and caused her to get beheaded. Zigzagged in Episode Two where she starts off accepting some, but not all, of the blame for her actions in the previous Episode, including luring a Comstock that was just minding his own business in Rapture trying to silently forget and atone for Anna's death, as well as taking advantage of Sally to lure him to a death that was purely for Elizabeth's desire for bloodshed and then leaving her to burn alive in a Little Sister Vent, only to ultimately admit that what she did to Final Comstock wasn't justified and that she's become part of the "wheel of blood."
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Burial at Sea: Episode One reveals she inadvertently caused the death of one of her infant selves (Anna) by stopping the exchange between Booker and Comstock in 1893. She then uses another girl, Sally, as bait to draw out Comstock, who by this time has sealed himself away in the Rapture universe. Due to the fallout from her plan, Sally is turned into a Little Sister and carted away to be mined for ADAM.
  • In Episode 2, she is the cause of several events during the fall of Rapture, such as helping Atlas' army get back to Rapture, indirectly causing Suchong's death via Big Daddy and being the one who gave Jack's codephrase to Atlas in the first place. However, the latter is somewhat mitigated as it was part of a larger Thanatos Gambit to bring Jack to Rapture and ensure Atlas' eventual downfall.
• Nice Girl: Though she understandably gets mad at Booker a few times, because he keeps lying to her or acting in ways she finds morally repugnant.
• No Name Given: Her last name is never mentioned, but it's assumed to be Comstock, given that she's his heir and all. In reality, it's DeWitt.
• Non-Player Companion: To Booker.
• Not Afraid to Die: Elizabeth suffers a major case of Break the Cutie throughout the course of Infinite, eventually flat out telling Booker that she'd rather have him provide a Mercy Kill for her than go back to the tower.
  • It gets progressively worse during Burial At Sea: Episode Two, to the extent that even Atlas' attempt to torture her for information fails when she taunts him that she's really Not Afraid to Die and that killing her would be doing her a favour. During her final confrontation with Atlas, she remains Defiant to the End despite knowing that she's walking to her death, jeering Atlas to simply get on with it.
• Note to Self: After dying at the hands of a Big Daddy, she pops back into the Rapture universe to look for Sally, which collapses Elizabeth's life back into a normal quantum state. In addition to switching off her powers, she awakens with a gap in her memory; anticipating this, Head Booker is planted in Elizabeth's mind to keep her on track.
• Of Corsets Sexy: After being forced to change into a new outfit, Elizabeth comes out wearing her corset outside her dress. While a corset is a period-appropriate piece of clothing (and Elizabeth is in fact wearing one beneath her first outfit), it would commonly be worn as underwear rather than outerwear in that era, suggesting that it is for a bit of light fanservice. Justified in the same scene, where Elizabeth notes that the hijacked airship (which used to ferry the now-deceased Lady Comstock) had nothing else available. Lady Comstock is depicted in the same outfit only with a proper shirt, so it can be assumed Elizabeth couldn't find it and/or just didn't bother.
• Older and Wiser: Elizabeth's Xenafication in Burial At Sea is justified in that, in addition to looking the part of the Femme Fatale, Elizabeth spent her time in Rapture learning much more than lockpicking.
• Older Than They Look: Due to her petite build, somewhat adolescent personality (from having grown up locked inside a tower her whole life), and the schoolgirl-like outfit she wears for the first half of the game, it's very easy to mistake Elizabeth for someone in her mid teens. She's actually about 20 years old. Indeed, your subjective impression of her age goes a long way towards whether you see her as a daughter figure, or as a potential romantic interest for Booker, which can really affect your impression of the ending revelations.
• The Omniscient: After her Power Limiter is destroyed, she dramatically increases in power and ability. She claims she can see "through every door" into an infinite number of alternate universes, and is able to guide Booker through his own flashbacks.
• Out of Continues: Booker's a lame duck without Elizabeth around as his backup, but the opposite is also true. Elizabeth finds that out the hard way when she kills Rapture's Booker in Fontaine's toy store, immediately getting tackled by a Big Daddy. Her suspended consciousness survives, but the Elizabeth of the Rapture universe is dead as a doornail. The Luteces warn her that if she ever goes back to Rapture world, her quantum state will snap back into place and she'll be stuck there for good. No more immortality, no more Tears.
• Outside-Context Problem: For Rapture. There was no way Andrew Ryan could predict that a woman from an alternate universe would come to his city and free his rival using impossibly advanced quantum mechanics.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: Having been inadvertently given Reality Warper powers by Comstock and the Luteces, she then ultimately turns this power on Comstock, who'd hoped to use her to Take Over the World and "purify it".
• Physical God: She becomes this after the tower Siphon is destroyed, able to open tears any time she likes, to wherever she likes and whenever she likes, into any existing or even merely possible permutation of reality. She's also totally aware of single one of these, which lets her know where and when to open a tear to get the result she wants.
• Plucky Girl: At the start of the game, but she loses this trait as the events of the game grind away her naive optimism.
• The Pollyanna: Averted. She starts out as a really cheerful, optimistic girl, but becomes increasingly jaded and more pragmatic as the game progresses.
• Portal Cut: How she lost her pinky finger.
• Power Glows: Near the end of the game, as the Siphon is destroyed, her eyes and hair begin to glow a dazzling white.
• Power Incontinence: Early in the game, a kinetoscope shows tears appearing all over the city, with the populace confused as to their origin. This is implied to be a result of Elizabeth creating them unknowingly prior to the Siphon being brought online.
• Power Limiter: Her tower is designed to siphon off most of her power. When she is removed from the tower, her power begins to grow and she gains further ability to manipulate tears. Once it's destroyed at the end of the game, she reaches godlike levels.
• Power Loss Depression: In the Burial At Sea 2 expansion, Elizabeth dies and is revived by Luteces but loses her power to access alternate timelines. This results in her feeling very distraught.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Can get these if she uses her powers too much, though this only appears in the first gameplay demo. However, use of her power can cause others to have nosebleeds when her manipulation of Tears in reality re-aligns their background and hence their memories.
  • She gets one in Burial at Sea: Episode Two upon finding her dead self in Rapture. She's not pleased with being on the receiving end of reconciliation sickness.
• Raised in a Lab: Due to her ability to create portals to Alternate Universes, she was locked in a tower deprived of human contact and kept under observation by many scientists, who kept very careful watch over her to the point of invading her privacy. This started when she was an infant, and she only escapes in her early 20's with assistance from Booker. However, she was never subjected under direct experiments.
• Reality Warper: Has the power to manipulate space-time "Tears" to do anything from manipulating objects to Time Travel.
• Redemption Equals Death: To atone for using Sally as a bait to kill Comstock, Elizabeth gives up her powers in exchange for a chance to save the girl. Without them, Elizabeth is unable to survive her encounter with Atlas, but she makes sure to bring about his fall and the safety of the Little Sisters before her death.
• Red Baron: "The Lamb of Columbia" as she is referred to inside the city. Ironically, this leads to a Stealth Pun, as she appears to be the Columbia Alternate Self of Eleanor Lamb.
• Restraining Bolt: In the Bad Future Columbia, Comstock's scientists installed a device that would give her horrible shocks if she tried to use her Tear powers.
• Ret-Gone: Her other selves — well, possibly except for the player's Elizabeth — cease to exist once they help Booker kill himself in the dimensions where he took the baptism and became Comstock. However, Elizabeth still exists, but now as the normal child Anna DeWitt, since Comstock is now gone and thus never abducted her or exposed her to dimensional travel in the first place.
  • Burial At Sea suggests that the version of Elizabeth from the main game survived and retains her memory of the events of Infinite.
• Revenge Before Reason: This drives the plot of Burial at Sea: Episode One. Having caused one version of her baby self to get decapitated instead of merely losing a pinky by interfering with a Comstock's attempt to steal Anna, she then reacts to that Comstock abandoning his Comstock identity and all possible connection in Columbia to instead seek a new life in Rapture by setting up an elaborate ploy to get him to chase down and attempt to rescue Sally ^note an orphan girl he had adopted, only for her to get abducted and turned into a Little Sister only to be murdered by a Big Daddy when he finds her.
• Shared Family Quirks: The fact that she shows signs that she's a Deadpan Snarker even before becoming a Broken Bird is a hint at her relation to fellow snarker Booker, her biological father.
• Sheathe Your Sword: In Episode 2 of Burial at Sea, this is Elizabeth's rationale for using the tranquilizer bolts on splicers. Elizabeth (and, by extension, the figment of Booker on her radio) worries that she is treading the same path her father did.
• Shows Damage: Throughout the game, Elizabeth wears two fancy royal-blue dresses. Both of them get dirty and torn throughout the game. Elizabeth's hair and skin get dirty during the game as well. And later in the game, after Elizabeth is kidnapped and experimented on, the bruises of the torture she endured are still visible, most notably a shiner under her left eye as seen in the photo above. And of course there is the Character Development scene where she cuts her long hair (off-screen) and wears a short hairstyle throughout the rest of the game.
  • In Burial at Sea episode 1, Elizabeth begins showing scuffs and bruises after passing a certain point in the game. In episode 2, we don't see her face for much of it due taking on her point of view as the player character; therefore seeing the extent of her facial injuries in a mirror towards the end of the game is a bit of a shock.
  • Averted in standard gameplay, where she can't take combat damage: she's immune to Friendly Fire, and the enemies focus exclusively on Booker. (The Founders' soldiers would of course want to avoid harming the Lamb of Columbia; why the Vox Populi show equal politeness to her isn't particularly addressed, though Fridge Logic can easily be applied.)
• Silk Hiding Steel: Don't mistake her gentle appearance and sweet attitude, especially early in the game, for being weak.
• Social Engineering: Uses this to great effect in Burial At Sea, leading Booker to comment that she's a bit of a grifter. She acknowledges that she inherited her resourcefulness and ability to blend into a variety of roles from her father.
• The Scrounger: Searches anything useful for Booker, during and out of combat. She even calls it "scrounging".
• Stockholm Syndrome: Which explains why she gets mad if you hurt Songbird, even if she considers being captured by it to be a Fate Worse than Death. (Content was removed that depicted their relationship as having a greater emphasis on Songbird as an abusive spouse.)
• Stocking Filler: In Burial at Sea Part 1, Elizabeth wears fishnet stockings, complete with line down the back, as part of her Femme Fatale esthetic.
• Suddenly Always Knew That: Despite never seen handling a gun at all throughout either Infinite or Burial at Sea Episode 1, other than when throwing them to Booker, Elizabeth is an instant expert with every weapon she comes across in Episode 2. Considering her powers, this may be a literal case of this trope; if she can "see through every door" it's not hard to guess that she picked up the ability to handle firearms somewhere along the line.
• Super-Empowering: It's implied in one of the logs that Elizabeth has her Reality Warper powers, not because of an inherent trait, but because a part of her was trapped in another universe. Most likely her pinky finger. It's further implied that the Luteces are completely aware of how to make this happen.
  • In the Bad Future, Evil Overlord Elizabeth is able to impart some of her powers to her "children", the Boys of Silence and their minions..
• Superpower Lottery: It's made very clear that Elizabeth is the most powerful thing in Columbia, if not the BioShock franchise in general. The only reason she can't just mop the floor with everything on her own is because there's a Power Limiter in place. Once that's removed, she becomes deific in power and capable of perceiving time "as it is", essentially omniscient.
• Take Up My Sword: The ending to Burial At Sea does it backwards, revealing that Elizabeth lured Jack to the city in BioShock. Though Elizabeth herself is beaten to death by Atlas, Jack completes her mission of freeing the Little Sisters.
• Temporal Sickness: Elizabeth willingly gives up her omnipresent existence in the multiverse to go back and fix her mistake in Rapture. The shock of existing in one place and time creates an hour-or-so block in her memory. Booker is on hand to fill in the gaps.
• Thanatos Gambit: In Episode Two of Burial at Sea, Elizabeth willingly sacrifices herself to trick Atlas into bringing Jack to Rapture, dying content in the knowledge that she'd brought about his eventual downfall and that Sally and all the other Little Sisters would finally be free.
• Took a Level in Badass: Elizabeth goes from being your non-action backup to knocking out Splicers and using guns in Episode Two. (Though it's up to the player to decide how deadly she should be; it's possible to complete Episode Two without Elizabeth killing anyone directly, though it can be difficult to complete without Elizabeth using Possession to get Big Daddys and turrets do the dirty work for her.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Elizabeth is much ruder to the Burial at Sea version of Booker than she was in the main campaign, because this Booker is actually an alternate version of Comstock, who had the Luteces scrub his memory and send him to Rapture rather than face the guilt of being party to the death of Anna in his reality. Elizabeth realizes this about herself in Episode Two: by using Sally as a means to manipulate Comstock and then leaving her to rot in Rapture when she was done, she unintentionally became no different than Comstock, who would also discard people who no longer were of use to him.
• True Blue Femininity: Elizabeth wears clothes that reflect the changes in her character throughout the story, ranging from blue and white dresses of varying maturity to a sexy but serious ensemble of purple, red and black in the last DLC.
• Video Game Caring Potential: She and Booker end up getting split up multiple times and, while fighting, there's no way she can ever be captured permanently. When it comes to the buildup of the Bad Future, this is effectively a Player Punch.
  • This trope is used to ultimately heart-breaking effect in Burial at Sea.
• Vocal Dissonance: In the later parts of the game, when she's become quieter and more ragged-sounding when she speaks, when Booker asks her to pick a lock, her responses are still in her chipper Cheerful Child tone.
• Vocal Evolution: Of the tied-into-character-development type. She actually runs an impressive gambit of wide-eyed innocence, to disturbed acceptance of the violence and death Booker leaves in his wake, to barely-tolerant frustration, to a more cold cynical outlook, to a retention of warm belief, to post Break the Cutie vindictive Tranquil Fury, to creepy monotone omnipotence on the levels of Dr. Manhattan. It's especially noticeable because her mode of speech is unusual to begin with, archaic in word choice and poetic in cadence.
• What Have I Done: What kicks off the plot of Buried at Sea: Episode Two: when she realises that she's become as bad as Comstock by using Sally to get Final Comstock killed only to then abandon Sally to rot as a Little Sister in Fontaine Industries. She even starts to admit that, for all her hatred of him, Final Comstock at least was sincere in his drive to save Sally before she got him killed.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: According to her Bad Future self, Elizabeth didn't turn evil because she believed in Comstock's cause; instead, because the Booker DeWitt of her timeline was killed before he could rescue her from the Songbird, the specialists managed to convince Elizabeth that "The False Shepherd" had abandoned her. It was this sense of betrayal, more than any the tortures that had been used to indoctrinate her, that left her accepting Comstock's mantle simply out of a desire to see the world burn.
• Women Are Delicate: In Burial At Sea Episode Two, Elizabeth can't take as many bullets as Booker can, and doesn't carry as much weaponry; which is used as an in-game justification for Episode Two's stealth option. In Infinite and Episode One, however, she's indestructible. At least up until the gap between the two episodes...
• Xenafication: She gains this in Episode Two of Burial at Sea.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In Episode Two of Burial at Sea, after acquiring the "Ace in the Hole" for Atlas in exchange for Sally, Atlas kills Elizabeth.