History TearJerker / Bioshock2

[[caption-width-right:300:''Father, I miss you...'']]

* The failure of what Sofia Lamb promised the people of Rapture is pretty miserable in it's own way. After Andrew Ryan's promised {{Utopia}} where everyone could accomplish their own dreams and pursue their own EnlightenedSelfInterest fell apart into unrestrained greed, selfishness and chaos; Sofia Lamb promised the opposite sort of {{Utopia}} to the survivors of Rapture. She promised a world where everyone cared about each other and helped each other, a world where everyone would have love and friends, a world where people were all bred to be [[AllLovingHero compassionate to everyone]]. In the end, Rapture just turned into the opposite {{Dystopia}} from what it was before. Instead of people hurting each other to get ahead, they made no decisions for themselves and relied on others to influence their decisions, especially that of Sofia Lamb, who hypocritically took on a leader role in her world of supposed kindness and equality. Even worse, many grew to hate and repress their own "selfishness" and independence to the point they could no longer take care of themselves or were even happy to kill themselves for Lamb's twisted religion. Making this all even worse is that it is heavily implied that Sofia Lamb didn't even believe in her own vision of genuinely helping people like Andrew Ryan originally did with his own ideals, and was merely conning the survivors of Rapture to get the resources to force her ideals on the surface world and would leave them to die, despite their belief in her.

-->'''Sinclair:''' "Poor things...what a life. Marchin' around playin' Daddy until some splicer manages to kill off their Sister...and then if the coma doesn't take'em they turn maniac...nothin' left to do but scream."

-->'''Nina:''' The children have noticed the condition I'm in, of course...what'll happen once I'm gone? They'll be...all alone...

* And there's "Minerva's Den", a new single-player story mode, available as DLC. After the twist revealing that Subject Sigma is Porter, and that it was The Thinker impersonating Porter's personality in order to guide you, it gets even sadder; Sigma/Porter, optionally, finds an Audio Diary where Porter has put his recently-deceased wife's personality into the machine so she can still be with him... but he realizes that he can't live with a fake wife. In the end, Porter follows Tenenbaum to the surface, where not only is his human self restored, but he visits his wife's grave one last time to leave a letter saying he's ready to "let her go her way" on her tombstone, accepting the fact that she's gone.

** "Life after sisterhood." The bright, cheerful girl with dreams of escaping to the surface now just sounds...empty.

** "*horrible choking cough* So long, kid *cough* ... an' thank you." Then Lamb starts in, saying how you didn't care about Sinclair anyway...

--> "Daddy...y-you're never gonna hurt me, right?

--> *gasp* "A-are you gonna....?"

* When the Lady Smith splicer isn't being hilarious she dips into Tearjerker territory, believing herself to have been evicted from her estate, rambling about how it was inherited from her parents and how she raised her children there. It's MoodWhiplash to hear her go from insulting Rapture's interior decoration to wondering if her three little angels miss their mommy. [[FridgeHorror They're all gone.]] Adds another level to Lady Smiths going after Little Sisters, since they think they're "saving" the girls and say things like "Let go of that poor child, she's helpless!" or "Unhand that child, you monster!" [[FridgeHorror Did her own children just grow up, or... ?]]

-->My mother's pearls..! You bastard!

-->Sometimes I drift away and feel I'm back on the old estate...(sigh) but then I open my eyes.

-->Hmm, will Eternity be hot or cold? I wonder...I'll bring my shawl.

* Poor, poor, Sammy Fletcher. [[HopeSpot He and his girlfriend managed to get a bathysphere and get out of Rapture...]]...[[JerkAss then Lamb shot a torpedo and]] [[http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Escape_from_Rapture destroyed it.]] It's bad when you find their bodies in the water next to the Bathysphere... they were so close...

** Living in a city without morals, it's possible that the girls that became Big Sisters, if the conversation between Elizabeth/Anna and Dewitt/Comstock from [[VideoGame/BioshockInfinite Burial at Sea Episode-1]] is anything to go by, suffered further psychological damage after Sander Cohen sold them to pedophiles.

** The ending monologue, where Milton finally says his goodbyes to Pearl. He genuinely sounds like he's choking back tears.

* One of the loading-screen quotations in the multiplayer mode of the sequel is from a man who tried to protect his home with Geyser Traps. Someone close to him named "Ditty" apparently tried to mop them up, thinking they were puddles, and the quote is of the man holding the dying woman and begging her not to leave him...

* Harvesting Little Sisters. In the first one it's pretty sad. In the second one it is absolutely ''heartbreaking'', with the girl screaming "Daddy, no!" the entire time. (the comment section [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iKOuIXpcJE here]] is downright just people saying they're relieved not to have done it in their playthroughs... and [[WhatTheHellPlayer calling out the very few who appear to say that they chose to harvest]])
** Should you choose to harvest most or all of them, then the Little Sisters will spend the rest of the game utterly terrified of you. It's bad enough that they recoil whenever you approach them, but the things they say are heart-shattering.

* Harvesting Little Sisters. In the first one it's pretty sad. In the second one it is absolutely ''heartbreaking'', with the girl screaming "Daddy, no!" the entire time.

** Made worse by her audio logs, where you learn that she volunteered to chaperone them so their parents could have a night off for New Year's. She loves them, even if she was at her wit's end looking after them all, and spent two weeks looking after them all. And then there's her final recorded thoughts.

* The failure of what Sofia Lamb promised the people of Rapture is pretty miserable in it's own way. After Andrew Ryan's promised {{Utopia}} where everyone could accomplish their own dreams and pursue their own EnlightenedSelfInterest fell apart into unrestrained greed, selfishness and chaos; Sofia Lamb promised the opposite sort of {{Utopia}} to the survivors of Rapture. She promised a world where everyone cared about each other and helped each other, a world where everyone would have love and friends, a world where people were all bred to be [[AllLovingHero compassionate to everyone]]. In the end, Rapture just turned into the opposite {{Dystopia}} from what it was before. Instead of people hurting each other to get ahead, they made no decisions for themselves and relied on others to influence their decisions, especially that of Sofia Lamb, who hypocritically took on a leader role in her world of supposed kindness and equality. Even worse, many grew to hate and repress their own selfishness and independence to the point they could no longer take care of themselves or were even happy to kill themselves for Lamb's twisted religion. Making this all even worse is that it is heavily implied that Sofia Lamb didn't even believe in her own vision genuinely helping people like Andrew Ryan did with his own ideals, and was merely conning the survivors of Rapture to get the resources to force her ideals on the surface world and would leave them to die, despite their belief in her.

** It's also implied that the Big Sisters' insanity may not be entirely the result of ADAM exposure, but rather the result of their mental conditioning failing over time. Seeing the world you thought was a bright, peaceful paradise decay into a hellhole like Rapture would likely drive anyone insane.

* The 'Big Sisters' are ''Little Sisters'' too mentally broken to adjust from being in Rapture. As if the concept of being turned into one wasn't bad enough.
** Living in a city without morals, its possible that the girls that became Big Sisters, if the conversation between Elizzabeth/Anna and Dewitt/Comstock from [[VideoGame/BioshockInfinite Burial at Sea Episode-1]] is anything to go by, suffered further psychological damage after Sander Cohen sold them to pedophiles.

** There's another tearjerker part in here that not a lot of gamers would have caught, but there's a Mills Brother's song in the game called "Daddy's Little Girl", a peaceful song about a man talking proudly how much his daughter means to him. That's right, read all the lyrics, remember Marks' struggle and possible end and all are complete tearjerkers with a heavy dose of FridgeBrilliance and [[FridgeHorror Horror]].

* In the second game, at Ryan's Amusements, you find some audio diaries from a woman named Nina Carnegie. She chaperoned a children's sleepover at the park on New Year's, 1959, when the Rapture civil war broke out. Her last tape is next to her corpse. She helped the children hide from the Splicers for weeks until she starved to death because she gave the children all the food. You don't know what happened to the boys and girls she was watching, but you get a hint from the fact that her body is carefully hidden on a ledge, laid out on a rug and surrounded by decorations and chalk drawings of smiling little girls.

** Most of them don't look too spliced up either, meaning they might have been the few sane people left in the insanity that is Rapture.

* The ending of VideoGame/BioShock2, when Delta is dying, and it takes every last bit of energy for him to crawl to the top of the craft to be with Eleanor. Oh, god...

-->'''Sinclair:'''"Poor things...what a life. Marchin' around playin' Daddy until some splicer manages to kill off their Sister...and then if the coma doesn't take'em they turn maniac...nothin' left to do but scream."