Characters / BioShock: Andrew Ryan

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Andrew Ryan

Voiced by: Armin Shimerman (English)^note Other Languages:Andrey Yaroslavtsev (Russian)

"I chose... Rapture."

^{Click here for his in-game model} "Would you kindly? Powerful phrase... Familiar phrase?"

"I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction."

The creator and ruler of Rapture. Born Andrei Ryanovski in Soviet Russia, he emigrated to America at a young age, eventually becoming one of the country's richest and most powerful industrialists. However, he became increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. after the enactment of FDR's social policies, which reminded him of the country he had fled. The dropping of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the last straw since Ryan saw them as the corruption of science and industry into making a weapon that allowed "parasites" to destroy what they couldn't seize. Wishing to flee said "parasites" and fearing all out nuclear war, Ryan created Rapture so that he and what he saw as the best examples of mankind could live in peace.

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# — B

• 0% Approval Rating: His public reputation in Rapture only gets worse and worse with his hypocritical actions to remain in power, even to the point of half the entire city population rebelling against him. The few who were still loyal to him even after he crossed the line either stab him in the back eventually, or get stabbed by him.
• Accent Relapse: His native Russian accent, which has been naturalized and kept in place with a very controlled, thespian oral posture, wobbles at times, with him sometimes using more Slavic pronunciation on certain words.
• Actor Allusion: Besides just having a really cool voice, Armin Shimerman's casting as Ryan certainly rings familiar to his performance as Quark in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a man who comes from an ultra-capitalist culture where free enterprise and screwing people over for your own gain comes above all else.
  • The manner of his death may also count, as he played a golf caddy on Seinfeld.
• Affectionate Nickname: Do you have a nice set of boobs? Then you may call him Andrei.
• Alas, Poor Villain: In spite of what he's done, his death is one of the most somber moments in the first game; partially because of the sheer horror of it, but mainly for the fact he spends his final moments painfully trying to reach his son through the brainwashing.
• As the Good Book Says...: Though Ryan is an outspoken atheist — even referring to the Bible as "the book of lies" — he considers Ecclesiastes 3 to be pretty apt for this situation.
• Authority in Name Only: Civil society in Rapture is in utter shambles to the point that nothing responds to his orders other than the automated systems. The most Ryan can do to direct the Splicer population against Jack is rouse them with an enticing Adam bounty.
• Bad Boss: It’s suggested from many characters via Audio Diary that Ryan is such a case of this it led to his downfall. His inability to handle criticism means he'll rarely take any suggestions to heart, often spouting some philosophical nonsense instead as a retort at best. Suchong also constantly complains Ryan pays poorly and limits practical funding solely because he’s a cheapskate.
• Badass Boast: "Though my physical defenses fall, you'll not defeat me. My strength is not in steel and fire, but in my intellect and will. You hear me, Atlas? Andrew Ryan offers you nothing but ashes!"
• Badass Creed:
  • No Gods or Kings. Only Man.
  • "A man chooses, a slave obeys!". He continually repeats it as you wail on him, each time struggling back to his feet. By the end, he's shouting "A man chooses!" through a mouthful of broken teeth.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: When we meet Ryan in the flesh, he's impeccably-groomed, wearing a crisp double-breasted suit, and is the calmest he's ever been. It’s likely that Ryan knew his number was up, and wanted to look his best.
• Badass Normal: One of only three characters in the entire game that aren't spliced, and he's somehow survived in Rapture this whole time.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Let's run down the list, shall we?
  • Ryan knew he couldn’t compete with Fontaine's business empire, so he used state power to absorb it instead, thus becoming the "Big Government" he founded Rapture to get away from.
  • Despite having built a city "where the artist would not fear the censor," Ryan eventually ordered the death of Anna Culpepper, a composer who wrote songs critical of Ryan's regime. Ryan Amusements also wasn't originally a shrine to his ego, but he insisted that it serve a purpose, a fact which is hypocritically highlighted in the tour itself.
  • He didn't give a toss about the Cold War, and wanted to safeguard the world's finest minds from the threat of the atomic bomb. In his zeal to defeat Atlas, he pitted his citizenry against the rebels over and over and over again until there was hardly anyone left alive.
    McDonagh: There's an arms race on here in Rapture. But it's not about who can build the best guns and biggest bombs, it's about who can become less of a man and more of a monster!
  • At long last, Ryan began filtering pheromones into Rapture's air supply, giving him control over his loyalists' minds, therefore eliminating their self determination, which Ryan considers sacred. His rationale was that, if he does nothing, the people of Rapture lose their freedom in either case.
  • He believed that the scientist should not be constrained by petty morality, but he himself was revolted by all the mad science in Rapture, for undoubtedly petty reasons (because the Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and Splicers were ugly and smelled bad, not because the experiments were cruel and dangerous).
• Benevolent Boss: He started out as one. But when Fontaine pushed him, he ultimately broke like glass.
  Transcript: I met Ryan the day me and the lads were installing the bathroom plumbing up in his posh Park Avenue digs. "Oi!" says he, "What's with all the brass fittings? General contractor had me down for the tin." "Well," I says, "I supposed it's the contractor then who'll be bailing out your loo once a fortnight, is it? If it's price you're worried about, I'll be picking up the brass, so not to worry, squire." "And why would you be doing that?" says he. "Well, Mr. Ryan, profit or not, no man bails water out of privies built by Bill McDonagh." The next day I finds out, I'm Ryan's new general contractor.
• Big Bad: As the leader of Rapture and the one controlling the Splicers, it’s clear he is the main obstacle to surviving the city. He actually shares the role with Frank Fontaine, who takes over the role fully in the third act.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Both him and Frank Fontaine are equally responsible for the conflict and the state of Rapture yet are enemies. Fontaine becomes the main villain in the final act after Ryan’s death.
• Blaming the Victim: This is the main reason his ‘Great Chain’ fails; he fundamentally refuses to believe that there is a difference between someone being unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps or being unable to do so due to circumstance; for example, anyone poor in Rapture is a failure who deserves no pity (even though, as Fontaine puts it, "someone's gotta clean the toilets"), and splicers are at fault for their mutations, even when they were forced into it to defend themselves and their families. His final speech even has shades of him blaming Jack for being a slave when he was sold to Fontaine by his mother before he was even born and brainwashed by plasmids since his infancy.
• Brutal Honesty: Ryan never learns tact or how to engage in diplomacy, an essential trait for any leader, and is unable or just interested in hiding his open contempt for anyone he deems beneath him and his lack of concern for their problems, even when he is the one directly responsible for them. This comes back to bite him as the population of Rapture rightly see him as a cold-hearted autocrat who doesn't give a rat's ass about anyone but himself, opening them up to manipulations from Frank and Sofia who are savvy enough to at least ''pretend" to care and exploit Ryan's callousness for own benefit.

C — E

• The Caligula: Ryan winds up governing an insane asylum, pumping a Hate Plague through the air supply system while he plays miniature golf in his office.
• Calling the Young Man Out: Having learned of how Jack was sold to Frank Fontaine and remolded into a Manchurian Agent to help him take over Rapture, Ryan judges Jack his "greatest disappointment," and spends most of his final monologue lambasting him for oblivious compliance with Fontaine's orders, before using Jack's conditioning to commit suicide just to prove a point. Despite none of Jack's circumstances being his fault.
• Can't Take Criticism: Explored in detail in the novel; Ryan (at best) ignored any criticism anyone had to the system of Rapture and was dead-set against any alterations to his initial rules. Even basic capitalistic safeguards such as workman's compensation, unions, or a minimum wage law were written off by him as people being too afraid to take control of their own destiny. Fontaine (and later Atlas) became a major force in Rapture purely by way of exploiting this tendency and taking advantage of issues in the system Ryan refused to fix.
• Casting Couch: The only sure way to get ahead in Fort Frolic is to woo Ryan or his lickspittle, Sander Cohen (good luck with that one).
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: In addition to being a Mr. Alt Disney and Howard Hughes Homage, he closely resembles Vincent Price and Django Reinhardt (to some extent), and his voice is quite similar to that of Orson Welles.
• Composite Character: Is a combination of Howard Hughes (mad industrialist tycoon), Walt Disney (union-hating capitalist and builder of a theme park in his image), and Ayn Rand (hypocritical objectivist).
• Control Freak: It's no exaggeration to say Ryan built Rapture because he felt that only he could manage, train, and safeguard the greatest minds of his generation. In the end, though, it turned out he liked to be in control so much that he'd kill anyone who crossed him.
• Corrupted Character Copy: Aside from various real life figures Ryan and Rapture are effectively a less idealized take on John Galt and Galt's Gulch, as a visionary who creates a secluded utopian community based on Objectivist ideals with miracle science populated by those he deemed the best and brightest minds of the time. Said ideals end up promoting a culture of greed and selfishness that caused everyone to self-destruct as well as the fact that even a society of geniuses will still need a labor force, creating severe class disparity.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Ryan didn’t curb his competitive streak once Rapture was established. Until Fontaine Futuristics came along, Ryan Industries remained the sole economic powerhouse, making life difficult for other business owners. Even as he praised Fontaine's guile, Ryan secretly plotted to run Fontaine's business into the ground and seize his assets illegally.
  Ryan critic: How is Ryan taking Fontaine's business any different from, say, eminent domain?
  • It says a lot about Ryan that he adopts Frank's corrupt business practices once Fontaine Futuristics goes belly-up. In one diary, he gushes over the "marketing" possibilities of the Little Sisters. Later, he grumbles that the ghoulish children and the "palooka" accompanying them are having the opposite effect on consumer confidence...
    "I understand the need for such creatures. I just wish they could make them more presentable."
• Cutscene Boss: He proves that you’re a slave instead of a man by hypnotically compelling you to bludgeon him to death with a nine iron, with the player helpless to watch.
• Dark Messiah: Atlas later challenges him for this title and wins.
• Dead Guy on Display: His office wall in Hephaestus is decorated with the moldy corpses of would-be assassins, some of whom were once loyal servants. He plans to mount Jack on the wall next, once he gets a hold of him.
  "A worm looks up and sees the face of God! But look around ... it's a regular convention of worms in here. They all had mothers, fathers, people who loved them. They got married, fucked their wives. What makes you think you're any different? I haven't chosen a spot for you on the wall yet. Let me know if you have a preference."
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Ryan's ambition was to create an Objectivist utopia, where the greatest minds in the world could live and work free from big government, religion, and people he deemed "parasites." Of course, as Fontaine points out, all these great minds still need people to do menial labor for them; as he puts it, "someone's gotta scrub the toilets." This utter oversight regarding the working class allowed Fontaine an easy in when it came to gaining followers.
  • Ryan also seemed to forget that cutting off the supply will not decrease the demand. In this case, forbidding all contact with the surface only allowed smugglers and organized criminals to make a fortune bringing contraband into Rapture, such as beef, tobacco, movies, and bibles.
  • Ryan seems to take it for granted that people will think Rapture is by definition better than the surface world and be grateful for the freedom it provides. He's completely blindsided when Fontaine gains a following with the simple strategy of listening to people and acting to fix their complaints.
  • Ryan is so enamored of his Objectivist utopia, he fails to realize that a lot of society's laws are in place to make it harder for people like Fontaine to exploit others. Fontaine was a nobody on the surface partially because he had to be careful to avoid being caught and punished for his activities, but in Rapture, he could build an outright drug empire and no one could stop him short of resorting to violence.
  • Ryan is openly dismissive about the field of psychology, but eventually brings Sofia Lamb into Rapture simply to fulfill market demand. The Rapture novel reveals he didn't read any of her papers or research and simply hired the first big-name psychologist who could be trusted to keep their mouth shut about Rapture. If he'd vetted her at all he would've immediately noticed that she was an extreme collectivist who desired to create a perfectly selfless society (and had published at least one book explaining her views), exactly opposite of what Ryan wanted, and had the potential to be a dangerous rival.
• Disappointed in You: He lets Jack know how disappointed he is upon entering Rapture's Central Control room. Made more ironic given that Jack didn't exactly know what he was doing at the time, or where he even came from.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Though you don't fight him directly.
• Disposable Sex Worker: Woe to the call girl who is indiscreet about Ryan's comings (erm...) and goings, as Jasmine Jolene learns after selling her embryo via Ryan to Tenenbaum, resulting in him beating her to death with a lead pipe in her room.
  "I... visited Eve's Garden today. It ended poorly."
• Drunk with Power: Ryan degenerates into a stereotypical tyrant once things stop going his way, but it's okay as long as he technically doesn't pass any laws.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Once he realizes that Jack is his biological son, he finds that he can't bring himself to kill him, even when knowing Jack's trigger phrase. He instead uses the phrase to compel Jack to kill him on his own terms.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He's personally disgusted by the Little Sisters, and Minerva's Den revealed he attempted to have robotic Little Sisters built, but the Big Daddies would not imprint onto them. In the sequel, he's shown as disturbed by what he turned Ryan Amusements into, but accepts the fact that it puts the fear of the surface world into children. He also says he could never raise his hand against Jack, after realizing Jack is his son. He was present for the murders of all the Dead Guys On Display outside his office, except for Bill McDonagh, as he still considered Bill a dear friend despite the fact that he was coming to kill him, and couldn't bear to watch him die — he also implicitly allowed his men permission to grant Bill's request that his wife Elaine and young daughter Sophie be let go to escape Rapture as a final kindness to him.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Ryan only seems to have a surface-level understanding of selflessness, altruism, or compassion. To him, everyone only thinks of their own interests and will do whatever they can to achieve their goals at the expense of others. Any claim otherwise is either the result of cultural brainwashing to make obedient drones of the state or a lie to let "the parasites" leech off of the work of "the greats" of society, instead of looking at the reasons people disagree.
  • He saw the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as madness and parasites trying to destroy what they couldn't claim. He apparently forgot that there has been a world war for the past six years that had already claimed the lives of at least 50 million people by that point, and that the US government obviously wanted to end the war as quickly as possible. Not to mention that he truly expected for the nations to immediatly start nuking each other once everyone got access to nuclear bombs until the entire world was a radioated wasteland.
  • As far as he knew (at least at first...), Atlas' movement had legitimate grievances, and Atlas himself is a blue-collar family man who wants Fontaine Futuristics to be divvied up amongst the people. He refused to give an inch, believing that everyone was trying to wrestle Rapture away from him.
  • When he offered to give Elizabeth another Little Sister in exchange for an alliance, completely ignorant of the fact Sally was not viewed by Elizabeth as a bargaining chip.
  • In general this is a big reason why Frank Fontaine and Sophia Lamb were such major threats to his control of Rapture. Lamb's history as a psychologist gave her insight into how people think and how to appeal to their emotions which let her trounce Ryan effortlessly in a series of public debates and build up a benevolent image. Fontaine, while a cutthroat criminal, was also a veteran confidence man and huckster who at least knew how to fake being trustworthy. Ryan, by contrast, was so deaf to the problems he was causing or the people's justified anger with him that any attempt to stop the complaints were easily capitalized on by Fontaine and Lamb to make them look better by comparison.

F — I

• Face Death with Dignity: In the end, Ryan gracefully accepts his end, calmly tearing down Jack for what he is and dying on his own terms via Psychic-Assisted Suicide rather than try to escape his fate. The gruesome sequence of him being beaten to death, however, makes the situation seem more nightmarish than inspiring.
• Facial Horror: He remains unscarred by splicing for the entire game. It takes three sharp blows with a nine iron to end him, symbolically making him resemble a splicer.
• Fatal Flaw: Hypocrisy. Ryan constantly makes claims that he believes in the "Great Chain" of the free market more than anything else — no gods or kings, only man. But the moment this belief had to be genuinely tested with the advent of ADAM and competition from Frank Fontaine, Ryan backtracked on everything he supposedly believed in so that he could maintain his grip on power. In the end, what Ryan really wanted was to be a Control Freak that made everybody else do what he said at all times. Ryan consistently showed his true colors as pressure mounted from Atlas and Fontaine, the "free market" he supposedly believed in so strongly, to silence everyone who disagreed with him and enforce his rule. This gradually kept making things worse for Ryan; by the time Player Character Jack arrives in Rapture, the entire city is on its last legs.
  • Ego is also one of Ryan's core failings. It's hardly a surprise that he fails to consider his own part in Rapture's downfall, he's too busy lecturing about how 'the parasites' are trying to steal from what he rightfully earned. He can't admit to himself that his philosophy could be wrong and ultimately, chooses to die out of spite and ego, believing he had been vindicated by the fact that his own son was being used to kill him.
• Fedora of Asskicking: Ryan's screen avatar wears one.
• The Fettered: Ironically, part of what does him in is how rigidly he applies Objectivist principles to his life; refusing to give charity because objectivism believes in helping yourself before others, ignoring potential competitors because it's their right to do whatever they need to enrich themselves too, and refusing to live off of others' work. Fontaine, meanwhile, proves to be the better Objectivist because he's The Unfettered and is willing to do anything to get himself ahead, including exploiting others via con artistry.
• Fiction 500: The in-universe equivalent of Howard Hughes, and was partly based on him. He is rich enough to build a city underwater and in absolute secrecy.
• Foil: Received an excellent one in the form of Sofia Lamb. Probably even moreso in the case of Fontaine. Fontaine builds up a company from simple foodstuffs to high technology, catching Ryan off-guard when Fontaine Futuristics surpasses Ryan Industries. This he admired. What caused Ryan to have a panic attack was discovering that Fontaine was smuggling surface-produced goods into Rapture, setting off his paranoia that the "parasites" would come nationalize his Hidden Elf Village. Fontaine was also the only man to ever challenge him and win; had a thirst for power that was equally great; wanted no trouble or competition from the likes of Ryan. They were bound to be enemies.
• Freudian Excuse: The novel gives him one in the opening: when his family fled Russia during the Communist revolution, he watched his father's cousin and said cousin's wife get gunned down by the Red Guard because they didn't have enough money for a bribe.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: For a certain value of "good"; Ryan believed with every fiber of his being that humans could accomplish anything if given freedom to do so: Offer a Better Product, The Market is Patient, Great Chain Moves Slowly. This means he failed to realize what H. L. Mencken did; "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." He's completely blindsided by how easily Fontaine is able to exploit Rapture's ideals simply by having fewer scruples than Ryan.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: As seen in the introductory video, Ryan smokes a pipe.
• Hard on Soft Science: In BioShock 2, Ryan was opposed to the idea of having a psychologist delivered into Rapture and doesn't think much of the science, most likely out of a belief that psychiatry was just a form of social control by "the parasites." When large swaths of the population experience hysteria and depression as a result of living on the bottom of the ocean without sunlight (the children are even terrified of trees because they've never seen one), he eventually relents to the market demand by allowing Sofia Lamb in the city despite his distaste for her craft.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • By the time Jack crash-lands in Rapture, there is virtually no difference between Ryan and the drug kingpin he fought to destroy. He's also become more violent, beating his mistress to death with a pipe (much like Atlas did to Diane, Ryan's other moll.)
  • The Rapture novel starts with Ryan fleeing Russia alongside his father from the oppressive Soviet regime, losing his father's cousins in the process. The book ends with Elaine and her daughter Sophie fleeing from Rapture, who had slowly become an oppressive dictatorship under Ryan, and losing their husband/father Bill in the process.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: Ryan's strident belief in "the Great Chain" backfired on him in the end. Someone else put him out of business. Ryan's men were clearly aware of this habit and recorded audios warning the council not to underestimate Fontaine or Atlas, but those memos were either thrown in the to-do pile or didn't get through. Two undercover agents, both of them trapped in Atlas' penal colony, sent word that Ryan's "asylum" program wasn't working out, and that they'd better send a squad to mop up the place. Most of the messages came back as undeliverable ("insufficient postage"). Ryan finally dispatches a wet team after Elizabeth is caught snooping about the gulag... not long before it rejoins with the rest of Rapture, spilling the violence into the city and freeing up Atlas to work his magic.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Twice over. His ideals and determination built a business empire unheard of in reality, and Rapture itself was a true Objectivist Utopia... for a time. However, its ideals eventually backfired on Ryan specifically, as while Ryan was a billionaire businessman, both his rivals were relative unknowns who were able to exploit Rapture for their own power... which was exactly what he wanted, save the bits where they started exploiting Ryan himself.
  • Frank Fontaine's crime empire only came about because he exploited inherent flaws in Ryan's own system that Ryan himself utterly refused to address; he gained most of his goodwill by providing charity (hollow though it might have been, he was still helping people when Ryan wasn't), which Ryan never gave as he saw it as a weakness, and his original business before discovering ADAM was smuggling contraband into Rapture, which was only lucrative because of Ryan's insistence on Rapture staying a Hidden Elf Village. Ryan also let Fontaine expand his powerbase unmolested as he saw it as an embodiment of Rapture's ideals... only to do a quick about-face when Fontaine Futuristics became powerful enough to effectively challenge Ryan Industries, which just fans the flames of revolution as people notice the obvious Double Standard of approving of Fontaine's business practices when they weren't hurting him.
  • The one flaw of Rapture that Fontaine didn't go after was its lack of attention to residents' mental health, which caused yet more problems due to the stresses of living in an isolated city under the ocean and never seeing sunlight. His hatred of psychology and extreme reluctance to address this problem meant that when he caved to popular demand and invited Sofia Lamb, he never bothered to vet her at all beyond making sure she'd keep Rapture a secret, simply assuming that she couldn't be a threat because of his disdain for her profession. Not only did Sofia hold collectivist ideals that Ryan hated (and would have immediately noticed if he'd read any of her papers), she was able to use her understanding of psychology to sway people even better than Fontaine. He capped that off by falling for her bait and exiling her to Persephone- which, in a single stroke, made her a martyr and allowed her a safe spot to hunker down and weather the civil war, easily escaping afterwards with her power base mostly intact since a lot of her followers were sent there with her.
  • Another misstep was exiling Atlas and his capos to a makeshift prison in Fontaine's tower block. Among those swept up in the dragnet were Splicers and store clerks who had traffic with Fontaine. Ever the opportunists, Atlas' men immediately set out to swell their numbers, offering the survivors amnesty, safety, and revenge. With Elizabeth's help, the towers are converted into a miniature Columbia and float back up to the city, just in time for New Year's Eve. Boom.
• Homage: In his confrontation with Jack and subsequent death scene, Ryan is echoing Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Specifically, the way Kurtz admonishes Willard for just following orders ("an errand boy") is similar to Ryan's speech.
• Howard Hughes Homage: As a mid-20th century Eccentric Millionaire with grand personal ambitions who became driven to reclusion in his later years, Hughes is a clear inspiration of his.
• Humiliation Conga: From his enemies one-upping him at every turn, sacrificing all his other ideals at the altar of egoism, and watching his beloved city fall apart before him... Pretty much nothing goes right for Ryan after ADAM is discovered.
• Hypocrite: As the civil war gets worse and Fontaine starts beating him at his own game, Ryan starts betraying his stances, citing it was for the good of the city. But pretty much everyone who knew the man could tell Ryan was becoming no better (and in some ways, no different) than the people he was fighting against. Indeed, Ryan's Fatal Flaw is the fact that he's a massive hypocrite, and what he really wants, deep down, is for everyone to just do what he says, all the time, without ever questioning him.
  • In the book, he's even worse. He claimed to allow freedom of enterprise but then took over Fontaine Futuristics by force. Indeed, he's the one responsible for all those vending machines on the streets. He did this with the claim that if everybody had access to them, then they wouldn't dare to use them - ironically the idea behind the Cold War, when everybody was building nukes but not daring to use them.
  • Ryan despised the idea of taxes, but then created a surcharge for oxygen on the rationale that they were his trees. He then proved immensely difficult about maintaining plumbing in the poorer parts of the city, despite how it is also his, and despite the advice of his engineers.
  • For that matter, his incessant habit of cost reduction in the name of personal profit. As impressed as he was by Bill McDonagh personally picking up the tab to ensure his work wouldn't leak, Ryan would soon be repeatedly ordering that same man to cut corners across the city, ensuring constant plumbing and infrastructure failures — all because he clung to his grand ambition of a fully realized underwater metropolis, rather than taking pride in a smaller, more durable construct that could've withstood the elements. By the end, the place he calls "his" city is a crumbling wreck.
  • He claimed to allow freedom of speech, but he was the owner of the Rapture's newspapers and always kept a tight leash on everything written on it, and anything close to resembling unions was banned. Later on, you can hear public announcements informing you that in Rapture, gatherings of more than four people in a public place is an offence. This is actually a real law in some dictatorships that by its nature outlaws strikes, protest rallies and even restricts the reporting media (since multiple people are needed to broadcast any event, with more if you want to interview a bystander).
  • In the book, he claims to be a Self-Made Man, but it is also added that he made his initial fortune because he unexpectedly struck oil.
  • He refuses to kill Jack face to face, but doesn't have a problem with sending out Splicers by the dozen.
  • His belief in there being 'true' self-made men who make their own success by their own hands (i.e. himself), and 'parasites' who just want to leech off the successes of said true men. He did not build Rapture or its wonderful inventions on his own, and he often took ownership of other people's creations through legal loopholes, the way a parasite would.
  • Nobody was ever allowed to leave Rapture. Despite everything Ryan ever says about freedom, he is clearly a Control Freak, and he turned Rapture into a prison — a prison that only he and his relatives were allowed to leave since he had the bathyspheres keyed to his genetics.
    • For that matter, he stated to Bill that he had no respect for quitters, mentioning those who wanted to leave Rapture after growing disillusioned with its system, and even began a policy of executing anyone who attempted to do so. However, one of the main reasons that made Ryan want to build Rapture was because the United States didn't turn out to be the perfect society he expected, and so he decided to abandon it and create his own.
  • He promoted individualism, free will, and freedom to determine one's own life, and yet ultimately stood by and allowed a Mad Scientist to make cosmetic experiments on people against their will, eventually resulting in the creation of the Splicers. (Regardless of the implication that Fontaine was the "mastermind" behind the experiments, Ryan at best didn't take any steps to ensure that the scientist's work remained respectful of individual rights.)
  • He said Rapture would be "a city where the artist would not fear the censor", but once in power, he had a satirist murdered to indulge a favored sycophant.
  • When Bill McDonagh suggested banning plasmids due to the problems it was causing, Ryan rejected it, saying that the Prohibition didn't work, so banning plasmids wouldn't either. This is despite the fact that Ryan already forbade all sorts of goods from the outside world in Rapture, therefore creating a black market of smugglers for them. This becomes even worse once it's revealed that most of Ryan's expensive belongings, such as his drinks and furniture, all came from outside of Rapture.
  • Ryan decried the "parasites" for drafting people to wage their wars. When civil war broke out in Rapture, he declared anyone who didn't fight for the city a traitor, before resorting to Suchong's Mind Control pheromones to make them fight.
  • He was furious when he found out that Jasmine sold his child to Fontaine and murdered her in cold blood. This comes from the guy who started kidnapping children, even attempting to kidnap the daughter of Bill, his friend and most loyal employee, all to create new Little Sisters and increase the plasmid production.
  • Ryan thinks of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as the ultimate act of parasites perverting industry to 'destroy what they could not seize', but Ryan also destroys things he can't own- he burnt down a forest in the backstory because the government wanted to make it a national park, and he pulls the self-destruct on Rapture when it seems like Atlas will finally succeed.
  • The US government wanted to nationalize a park Ryan owned and turn into a public park? Ryan deemed it the work of parasites trying to take something that rightfully belonged solely to him, so he burned it to the ground. Ryan taking over Fontaine Futuristics? It's not nationalization because it was necessary and Rapture, (and everything in it) belonged to Ryan from the start.
  • He grows tired of Diane McClintock due to her ​possessiveness and jealously towards him. First of, keep it mind that Diane was his fiancée, and yet Ryan was having an affair with Jasmine Jolene since Rapture was founded. Second, Andrew Ryan is the last person to have the right to call someone possessive, since he refused to pay taxes, burnt a forest he owned to prevent it from being turned to a park, "killed" Fontaine to keep his control over Rapture, and tried to sink Rapture once it was clear that Jack, under Atlas' orders, was going to kill him.
  • Ryan is very vocal about his atheism and even banned religion in Rapture. At the same time, not only does he rely heavily on Religious and Mythological Theme Naming for Rapture and its various locations and features, he preaches his own ideology about "the Great Chain" which unites all people and will lead all mankind to a better state if people behave in a certain way, and says the Chain is "too powerful and too mysterious" for governments to control. The idea of such an invisible, transcendental and ultimately unknowable force guiding people to a better future is divinity in everything but name. Sofia Lamb points this out explicitly in the second game.
    • As much as he frames it as a paradigm of mutual self-interest, the Chain is, ultimately, a collectivist metaphor for the greater good — which also makes it a dictatorial edict, given that Ryan is the one defining what that greater good is. Like the rationales of "state" he so despises, those deemed cooperative with his interests are working to pull it, while those against him, or just competing with him, he denounces as saboteurs of the very market itself.
      Ryan: Mr. Porter! Let me be the first to congratulate you on the founding of Rapture Central Computing. The Great Chain only grows stronger with each pair of hands laid upon it. I trust that you and I will choose to pull Rapture in the same direction.
    • His belief in the Great Chain is also disgustingly fickle. When he was the top dog of Rapture, he was fine using the Chain to justify his callousness and sense of superiority. But when Fontaine supplanted his position by being a better player at the same free market Ryan claimed to worship, he had Fontaine eliminated.
  • Ryan could be said to be a subversion as well, especially when one considers the very likely idea that he's taken Objectivism to its logical if excessive conclusion: that he did everything for his own benefit. Add in the idea of altruism being considered anathema to personal self-interest, and the emphasis on "looking out for number one", and it suggests that Rapture wasn't meant to be a refuge for the world's elite — all that mattered to Ryan was himself and his own self-interest, arguably the one thing he wasn't hypocritical about to the end. Everyone else in the city was simply invited to try their luck in his glorified playpen, and he threw a tantrum when they started breaking it.
• If I Can't Have You…: Did this to a forest that he owned, burning it to the ground when the government tried to nationalize the land and turn it into a public park. He tries doing this to Rapture itself to prevent Atlas from taking control of it. Fortunately, Jack stops him in time.
• Ignored Epiphany: The only time Ryan shows any kind of self-doubt is in the final diary. Even then, his vendetta with Atlas won't allow him to capitulate. He'll destroy Rapture rather than let his enemy have it.
  "Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me. But the city... it is collapsing before my... Have I become so convinced by my own beliefs, that I have stopped seeing the truth? Perhaps.... But Atlas is up there — and he aims to destroy me, and destroy my CITY! To question is to surrender — I. Will not. Question!"
• Immigrant Patriotism: He started out like this, vastly preferring America's ethic of free enterprise over Tsarist, and later Communist, Russia. Then the New Deal and the Manhattan Project changed his tune.
• Informed Ability: In the Rapture novel, it's mentioned that he was a brilliant investor. However, in Rapture, he was quickly surpassed by Fontaine, a con man, and, in order to gain some sort of upper hand, started to resort to tactics such as forcing people to pay in order to walk on parks that were meant to be public, and even creating a tax for oxygen. When that didn't work, he resorted to kill Fontaine and take over the latter's business.
• Irony:
  • Creates an Objectivist utopia, but subverts it as soon as he realizes he's being beaten in fair competition with a "parasite".
  • For all his paranoia regarding the world outside of Rapture, his "perfect utopia" fell apart due to the actions of both himelf and people he not only allowed but even invited into Rapture (Fontaine, Lamb, Suchong, Tenenbaum, Cohen, etc).
• I Reject Your Reality: As Rapture declined, Ryan became increasingly detached from reality and convinced of his own superiority. He couldn't handle the idea that his dream could actually fail because of his own mistakes, so he convinced himself that everything would sort itself out as long as he killed off anyone who threatened his power. As Jack gets closer and closer to breaking into his office, he spirals even further into this, beginning to insist that Rapture is, at this present moment coming back to life, with children returning to the schools, despite the fact that nearly every man, woman, and child in his city is dead or completely mad.
• It's All About Me: At the core of his worldview, and he believes that everyone else thinks like this too. He seems to actively disdain the idea of selflessness as a virtue, seeing it as nothing but manipulative brainwashing to drag down the "great" from reaching their potential.
  "In the end, all that matters to me... is me. And all that matters to you... is you. It is the nature of things."
• It Will Never Catch On: Ryan confessed he wasn't paying attention to the Plasmid craze or the warnings of his council. ("I'll go spend an hour pretending to pay attention to the poor fellow...") He later kicks himself for allowing Fontaine to beat him at his own game.

J — O

• Join or Die: In Burial at Sea, he gives this exact option to Elizabeth, who refuses his offer. He calls her a "rube" and writes her off as another parasite. The newly-unemployed Suchong was a bit more accommodating; when he shot back, 'How much?', Ryan laughed his head off.
• Karmic Death: He beat Jasmine Jolene to death with a lead pipe, he's beaten to death by her son with a nine iron. The fact it was by his own command may have been an in-universe invocation of this trope.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All:
  • For a man that apparently never went to college and that earned his first fortune by finding oil in his property by sheer luck, Ryan sure acts like he knows how economy, society, and even civilization itself should function better than every government on Earth. And once his "utopia" starts falling apart, he believes that it was because everyone else couldn't follow his example.
  • After seeing that Sofia Lamb was causing unrest, he decided to engage her in public debates in order to show the people of Rapture that she was a Marxist instigator. Sofia, who had at least two college degrees, was quick to turn the tables on Ryan by showing how hyppocritical his beliefs were, like, for example, his faith in the Great Chain was no different from the Christians' towards crosses. Ryan, noticing that this didn't have the planned result, decided to arrest her instead and make everyone else believe that she had abandoned his followers.
• Lack of Empathy: Worse about this than Fontaine; at least Fontaine was able to convincingly fake empathy for the poor and realized that their problems were real, while Ryan never bothered and eventually grew actively contemptuous of the populace of Rapture for daring to "whine" about the increasingly obvious issues in his city. Naturally, this resulted in swathes of people deciding to follow Fontaine over him. This is most explicitly shown in BioShock Rapture.
• Large Ham: Starts out as more of a Cold Ham but slips into this as he becomes more frustrated with his constant failure to stop the player character.
  "...and a TIME to DEESTTRROOOOOOOY!"
• Mayor of a Ghost Town: Even when the city is a Splicer-infested warzone on the verge of physically collapsing, he still clings to the idea that Rapture is in recovery. This is largely due to his perception that his opponents will win if he were to say otherwise, making him cling to his delusions out of sheer stubbornness. It's almost akin to a Villainous Breakdown.
  "Rapture is coming back to life. Even now, can't you hear the breath returning to her lungs? The shops reopening, the schools humming with the thoughts of young minds?"
• Mayor Pain: The guy rubbed out most of his own City Council!
• Megacorp: Ryan Industries was formed during the construction of Rapture. It was to be the Standard Oil of its time, rolling all of his smaller businesses into one. The result was that Ryan owned most of the city's infrastructure and raked in all the utility costs, including the parks (citizens had to pay to get in), the oxygen produced by the trees, Rapture Radio (his propaganda arm), the law enforcement and security apparatuses, the Vita-Chamber, and The Gatherer's Garden vending machines.
• Misanthrope Supreme: For all his talk about leading humanity to a new golden age, Ryan seems to view basically anyone he deems a "parasite" (that is, anyone not fabulously wealthy and/or who doesn't serve him unquestioningly) with utter contempt and makes little effort to hide his disdain for the very concepts of altruism, duty to one's fellow man and social responsibility as a whole and sees everyone not named "Andrew Ryan" as at best a necessary evil.
• Moral Myopia: Ryan only shows flexibility when his own interests are at stake.
  "In the end, all that matters to me ... is me. And all that matters to you ... is you. It is the nature of things."
• Mr. Alt Disney: Ryan's basic appearance includes a mustache similar to Walt's. Rapture also shares a lot in common with Disneyland and especially the Epcot Center's retro-futurist utopian fantasies.
• Narcissist: While Andrew Ryan genuinely cared about some people, he displayed clear signs of being obsessed with his own image, even at the expense of others. For starters, he had the tendency to name companies, ships and even the material used to build Rapture after himself. He also filled the city he built with a lot of posters and statues of himself, and there was even one scene in the novel where Ryan felt awed at looking at a gold bust of himself. Also, and much like several narcissists, Andrew Ryan wasn't one to take kindly to any sort of criticism, even going as far as imprisoning or downright executing those that showed discontent, and he always blamed others for the problems caused by his short-comings or lapses of judgement. It also didn't take long for others to realize that Andrew Ryan cared more about his own vision of Rapture than the thousands of people living in it.
• Naturalized Name: Born as Andrei Rianofski, changing it to Andrew Ryan when becoming an American citizen.
• Never My Fault:
  • After building up his own mob of Splicers, he blames them for their own deformities, citing their "carelessness" in overusing his Plasmids. Same goes for the Little Sisters.
  • By the time the game proper starts, Ryan has become completely boxed in by the tenets of his philosophy, is unable to admit that his costly experiment has failed, and finally starts embracing a comforting delusion rather than confront the awful truth of what he's become. Now that his objectivist "utopia" has fallen apart and is on its last legs, Ryan blames everyone else for not following his example of Rapture strongly enough. He'll blame Atlas and Fontaine for creating competition, blame the "parasites" of the world who couldn't make it in Rapture, blame the Splicers for causing their own downfall when he helped create and feed their addiction, and blames anyone who tried to help him for secretly plotting against him. Ryan never blames himself, save for a single moment in the last audio log of him that you can find. And even then, he refuses to question his beliefs now because to even question them at this point would mean that his enemies win in Ryan's eyes, and he can't give them the satisfaction.
  • BioShock: Rapture delved into this even more as he views any (very serious and economical) complaints to him as people "refusing to be self-sufficient" when it's his own rules that are keeping many of the less fortunate people from getting ahead in Rapture and his refusal to make concessions to help them.
  • He has the gall to be furious once he finds out that his fiancée Diane left him to join Atlas. Ryan had been cheating on her with Jasmine Jolene for years by that point, he admitted to have grown tired of her, and he never bothered visiting her, not even once, while she was recovering from the New Year's Eve Riots. And yet, despite all of this, Ryan is shocked that Diane left him!
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: Ryan is based on the real life Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, in addition to sharing her background as an immigrant to America fleeing the Soviet Union, and also her highly domineering and authoritarian leadership of her own circle of Objectivists. In terms of physical appearance, and the fact that he built an entire city in his image that has a giant statue of himself greeting incoming guests, is clearly meant to invoke Walt Disney. His history as a industrialist and passion for engineering sciences is also based on Howard Hughes.
• No Social Skills: Ryan is extraordinarily obtuse when it comes to people, and it played a big part in his overall failure. Between not realizing that banning things would create a black market, not considering that people need assistance in adjusting to an underwater life they are not allowed to leave, and refusing to accept that he actually needed a case for himself to keep his position, he helped Rapture sink like a rock.
• Non-Action Big Bad: He chooses to talk with Jack instead of fighting him.
• Obliviously Evil: Ryan is incapable of seeing any flaws in his behavior or morality. In his mind, his status as an evolved human means he can't be judged by mortal standards and anyone who is critical of him is at best unenlightened and at worst, a parasite out to destroy all he holds dear. The mere idea that he or his beliefs could be wrong is simply unfathomable to Ryan.
• Office Golf: Does this while Rapture collapses around his ears.
• Offing the Offspring: Subverted, once he realizes Jack is his offspring, he can't bring himself to kill him, despite knowing Jack's trigger phrase and being easily capable of stopping him with it.
• Older Than They Look: According to the Bioshock wiki, Ryan was born in 1911, which would make him 48 or 49 at the time of the first game. From his pictures on the audio diaries he looks like a healthy man in his mid-thirties, and while he seems older when you meet him at the end, he certainly doesn't look nearly 50. It's justified. In Rapture, you'll often see ads for a gene tonic that makes you look 'twenty years younger!' Apparently, they actually work.
• Original Position Fallacy: Was a devoted proponent of Objectivism... until it looked like Frank Fontaine would outcompete him. Then he threw a fit and had Fontaine assassinated. Not that it worked; Fontaine faked his death and eventually outlived Ryan, ironically proving that he was, in Objectivist terms, the better man.
• Our Founder: A bust of Ryan greets newcomers to the city.

P — S

• Papa Wolf: In a twisted way, he displays this attitude near the end of his life. While he apparently had no qualms about using security or splicers to slow down Jack, he still could not bring himself to raise his hand against his own son.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He has an extremely negative view of the poor and working class, varying between seeing them as lazy and looking for handouts rather than willing to work their way to success and openly seeing them as parasites and leeches out to take away his fortune. As such, he refuses to help them out, not even to provide basic maintenance services to their parts of Rapture. It's his blunt dismissal of those who make his city possible and get no respect for it that allows Frank Fontaine and Sofia Lamb to undermine him.
• Psychopathic Manchild: For all his success and refinement, Ryan's whole experiment never amounts to more than a glorified tantrum from a grown man incensed that he was expected to pay his fair share and choosing to abandon a game rather than submit to the same rules as everyone else. When running the city, he refuses to listen to criticisms of his methods, ignores problems from those he deems unimportant, treats anyone who opposes him as a "parasite" and removes those who beat him at his own game and destroys anything he has to cede any control over in the same manner as a child tossing a game aside when it becomes clear they are losing. In the end, he'd rather see all of Rapture burn than see it changed from his vision and it becomes clear his entire worldview was always completely self-serving and immature.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Technically, he could be considered the winner of the Rapture civil war, as by the time of the first game, Atlas's loyalists have basically ceased to be. Ryan meanwhile controls the security systems of Rapture and is able to exert influence on the splicers to do his bidding. This comes at the cost of Rapture reduced to a madhouse. And Atlas/Fontaine still manages to win control of Rapture without his army anyway.
• Playing with Puppets: When you confront him, Ryan begins using WYK to order Jack around his office, controlling his every move to emphasize just how much of a slave he is to his conditioning.
• Principles Zealot: Had a very rigid belief system that took him far, but started to break down when he applied it to governance.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives Jack one when they meet in person, deriding him as nothing more than a pawn of Fontaine, while also making it clear that while he's choosing to die at this moment, he could have used the Trigger Phrase to kill Jack if he wished.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Ryan inserted an "in perpetuity" clause into the tenant agreements for prospective citizens. Roaches check in...
• Rich Genius: Ryan claims to be this and built Rapture specifically to cater to this kind of person. He seems to have made his fortune by putting together his own oil drilling operation, but the implication seems to be he only struck big because of good luck.
• Rich Recluse's Realm: Absurdly-wealthy Ryan created Rapture out of disillusionment with the state of the world post-World War II, and established its society based on his unique philosophical beliefs. Unfortunately, his Objectivist system proved too ideologically blinkered to maintain stability: a lack of workers' rights allowed opportunists like Frank Fontaine and Sofia Lamb to foment rebellion, while a deregulated market with no government oversight resulted in a highly addictive Psycho Serum becoming endemic throughout the city. Add to that Ryan's growing obsession with controlling his paradise and open refusal to allow anyone to leave the city, and it wasn't long before a civil war broke out. Consequently, Rapture is little more than a monster-infested ruin by the time you stumble in, and Ryan is just barely running the show from a heavily-fortified panic room deep within the industrial district of Hephaestus — a recluse in his own city.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: His feud with Fontaine. Ryan despises him because he thinks he's trying to take Rapture from him. While he is ultimately right about this, his suspicions come from his own paranoid delusions making him lash out at any potential rival businessman in "his" little utopia. He went to his grave having no idea of Fontaine's real plans for Rapture.
• Salt the Earth: When the Federal Government threatened to lease a fragment of Ryan's vast estate as a national park, he torched the entire forest as a form of protest. Years later, this becomes his solution once Atlas is on the cusp of seizing Rapture.
• Sanity Slippage: Ryan started his tenure of ruling Rapture as a flawed, yet ultimately fairly reasonable man who, while still lacking a degree of faith in his fellow man, still believed in them enough to listen to reason. However, as the escalating violence between he and Fontaine, then later Atlas begins to get to him, he slowly becomes more paranoid and unstable until he sells out his belief in free will to forcefully conscript the citizenry into waging war against his enemies, with anyone refusing being put to death. Eventually, this culminates in him betraying or murdering the members of his inner circle, bending the spliced-up populace to his will with mind-controlling pheromones and cutting Rapture off from any remaining contact with the outside world, killing anyone attempting to leave or enter the city.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: That, plus power and influence, seems to do more of the talking in his life even after he set up the ostensibly egalitarian rules of Rapture.
• The Scrooge: Even though he was one of the wealthiest men in the entire world, Andrew Ryan always had a problem with giving away his money.
  • Despite the fact that the US welcomed him, a refugee from Russia, with open arms, provided him the means to get a better life and become a tycoon, Andrew Ryan decided to leave it because they expected him to pay taxes. This was actually shared by his father, the latter even going to jail because he refused to do so.
  • The first thing that made him like Bill McDonagh was that the latter asked a very reasonable bill for his work as a plumber.
  • In Rapture, his relunctance to provide more money to finance Suchong's and Tenenbaum's research is what made the two decide to work for Fontaine. This came to bite him hard, as their work on plasmids is what allowed Fontaine to gain a lot of income and have the opportunity to supplant Ryan in terms of being the most successful businessman.
• Self-Made Man: He makes a big deal about this as part of his personal philosophy, though primarily his wealth seems to have come from his lucrative investments.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: Once Fontaine got a foothold in the plasmid market, Ryan realized his mistake and began plotting ways to absorb Fontaine Futuristics into Ryan Industries. However, with Fontaine dead, Ryan lacked understanding of how to properly manufacture them, and rushed a line of faulty plasmids onto the market.
• Significant Anagram: Andrew Ryan = We R Ayn Rand.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Andrew envisioned that his idea of an utopia wouldn't just outlast civilization on the surface, but even expand until Rapture became the capital of the world itself. However, he couldn't even make a city built on his ideals, which had less than twenty thousand people living in it, endure longer than 20 years without it eventually tearing itself apart. Even the USSR, that Andrew not only utterly despised but even saw as the epitome of madness, lasted around seventy years and that was covering one sixth of the world's landmass.
• The Social Darwinist: Anyone who complains about city conditions is deemed a "weak link" in his chain. As much as Ryan loves humanity, he doesn't seem to like people very much.
• Start My Own: He was born Andrei Rianofski in the USSR; Belarus, to be exact. Though the free market of the United States allowed him to make his fortune, Ryan grew disillusioned with Roosevelt's New Deal and decided to uproot himself again. Rapture was carefully (indeed, pointedly) constructed off the coast of Greenland, giving it equal distance from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
• Start X to Stop X: Betrays the cornerstones of Rapture to 'protect' it, seizing Fontaine Futuristics in the bargain. Against the warnings of McDonagh, Ryan starts building his own army of splicers to combat Atlas'. Meanwhile, everyone and his mother is splicing like crazy, desperate not to get caught in the crossfire.
• Straight Edge Evil: In spite of all the dangers in Rapture, he doesn't appear to have made use of any Gene Tonics or Plasmids to defend himself. In fact, it's very likely that he's only used one gene tonic (anti-aging) in all his years spent in Rapture.
• Stubborn Mule: His overconfidence and a string of bad decisions led to the uprising. Ryan believed that he could deal with any contingency.
• Suicide by Cop: He does this to prove that Jack is a slave, not a man. Also counts as a bizarre example of Better to Die than Be Killed, since Jack is a tool in his eyes, not a man with free will.

T — Z

• Taking You with Me: Before dying, he set Rapture to self-destruct, though you quickly remedy that.
• There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: "A man, or a slave?"
  • His lecture on the difference between parasites and true men, like himself.
  • It gets worse:
    Diane McClintock: I asked Ryan how can he do such things to innocents! He said, "Innocents? If they haven't chosen to defend Rapture, they've chosen to side with Atlas and his bandits. No, there are no innocents. There are heroes, and there are criminals."
• Too Clever by Half: Ryan is far from stupid, being a savvy businessman who was able to create a vast fortune and later construct a whole city underwater. But he regards himself as an economic genius who deserves a whole nation to himself and proves hopelessly unsuited to leadership, leading to the disasters that followed.
• Übermensch: He rejected the world and its moralities entirely, and built the outrageous city of Rapture to have his way. Subverted in that for all of his keeping with appearances of sophistication and industrialist enlightenment, his Objectivist ideals broke down under practical application and a citizenry that didn't fully embrace them. He also doesn't appear to be as intelligent as he thinks he is: while building Rapture was a miracle of engineering and enough of an undertaking to qualify as a world wonder, he had terrible people skills, which opened him up to rivalry by charismatic troublemakers such as Fontaine or Atlas. Ryan also embraced the hypocrisy of going completely, uncompromisingly authoritarian without a hint of irony or self-awareness, bringing into question his integrity or his actual capacity for philosophy. Late in the game, it can be read that Ryan was completely fine with the system being unfair, so long as it wasn't unfair to him. The moment it was, Ryan revealed himself for the Control Freak that he really was.
• Two First Names: Invoked, he renamed Andrew Ryan as a translation of his real name "Andrei Ryanovski" to conceal his Russian roots.
• Undignified Death: Despite choosing to be Defiant to the End, it still stands that Jack killed him with a freaking golf club.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Due to his staunch Objectivist beliefs, Ryan struggles with gratitude, believing everyone is simply following their own best interests and so doesn't deserve thanks for helping others. It's his continued disrespect of the working class in Rapture that leads Frank Fontaine to gain power and undermine Ryan. He's even this on a national level as he was able to become extremely wealthy and influential in the United States but was so offended at the notion that he owed the country anything in return, even something as simple as just paying taxes, that he left in anger to start his own nation.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: For all he knew, World War III was right around the corner. He couldn't risk allowing the existence of Rapture to be known.
• Verbal Tic: Calls anyone who opposes him, no matter how slightly, 'Parasites'.
• Villainous Breakdown: It starts after Jack enters Hephaestus and gets worse as Jack gets closer and closer to breaching his defenses, raving about how horribly Jack is going to die. When he enters Rapture Control, Ryan lapses into Tranquil Fury just before he triggers Rapture's self-destruct system.
  "Even in the book of lies, sometimes you find truth... There is indeed a season for all things. And now that I see you flesh to flesh and blood to blood, I know I cannot raise my hand against you. But know this: you are my greatest disappointment. Does your master hear me? Atlas!? You can kill me, but you will NEVER have my city! My strength is not in steel and fire! That is what the parasites will never understand. A season for all things: A time to live, and a time to die. A time to build... And a time to destroy!"
• Villain Has a Point:
  • His last words to Jack are meant to be this, showing that he was a pawn of Fontaine. He's right about this, but Jack couldn't have helped it.
  • While Andrew Ryan's politics played a huge role in the social degredation of Rapture, he does have a point that the majority of the people that were complaining about not being paid enough to have a better lifestyle were spending most of their money in buying plasmids and ADAM. They bought these things because it granted them a momentary period of ecstasy and power, apparently not caring that this was only temporary, would make them eager for more and eventually financially broke.
  • Ryan's justification for nationalizing Fontaine's business is that Atlas is really just attempting to take control of Rapture and will use the ADAM and resources that belonged to Fontaine to do so. He's right. The problem with this "point" though is that as far as Ryan knows Atlas really IS just an honest family man with legitimate problems. Ryan wants to keep Fontaine's business out of greed and his suspicions on Atlas are paranoid wonderings that just happen to be right.
• We Have Reserves: Preserving 'his' city is all that matters. He greatly expanded Fontaine's harvester policies, even leaving dead splicers lying in the streets for Little Sisters to easily find, prevented anyone else from leaving, and imprisoned or killed anyone even suspected of working with Atlas (making the dissenters even more irate) He seems to have given no thought to the distress this was causing his citizens. This further fed into the general panic.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In his own mind, he probably had the best of intentions, perceiving the outside world as morally bankrupt and parasite-infested.
• Wicked Cultured: A cultured Utopia founder.
• With Us or Against Us: One of Diane's diaries implies that, by the end, Ryan was forcibly rounding up un-spliced citizens and enlisting them to fight Atlas.
• Why Won't You Die?: Ryan's question to Jack about a third of the way into the game.
• You Have Failed Me: He sees nothing wrong with murdering a woman in cold blood for selling his unborn child, or gassing a scientist who was trying to save Arcadia from his poisons, or with decorating the entrance hall to his office with the grimly mutilated corpses of his enemies.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Ryan doubled his assets overnight once Fontaine took his dirt nap — pure coincidence, obviously.

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"A man chooses! A slave obeys!"

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