BioShock (series)/Characters

BioShock 1

Jack

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"They told me: Son, you're special, you were born to do great things. You know what? They were right."

The protagonist of the first game, an American of rural origin who ended up in a plane crash over the Atlantic ocean in early 1960. He is later revealed to have been Andrew Ryan's bastard son by way of Jasmine Jolene, donated to Dr. Suchong, who engineered Jack to be a Laser Guided Tykebomb. Voiced by Adam Sietz.

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• An Ice Person: Winter Blast.
• Anti-Hero: Type III mostly, as the player will probably kill many splicers in a most painful way (but What Measure Is a Mook?). If you choose to harvest little sisters, Type V. Of course, when he harvests all of them, he'll no longer be an Anti-Hero, but worse than that.
• Badass Normal: He begins the game as this, then becomes more of a Badass Abnormal as he becomes more and more spliced. And ends up partially becoming a Big Daddy, to boot.
• Bee-Bee Gun His insect swarm plasmid.
• Blow You Away: Cyclone Trap and the free Sonic Boom DLC plasmid.
• Elemental Powers: Some of the plasmids, specifically Electro Bolt, Incinerate!, Winter Blast and Sonic Boom.
• Featureless Protagonist: As the Player Character, naturally.
• Heroic Mime: Aside from grunts of pain, he speaks a grand total of 19 words in the entire game, all of them in the opening cutscene. So, surgically altering himself to sound like a Big Daddy may not have been that bad for him after all. He is also heard as a child, in one of the audio diaries.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: If the player chooses to be a Sociopathic Hero, but still decides to rescue all the little sisters. Jack could be this; even if the player isn't a lunatic, Jack has to take many measures to get through the game, and kill a lot of people (crazy murderous people, but still).
• Kleptomaniac Hero
• Laser Guided Tykebomb
• Manchurian Agent: For Fontaine/Atlas, against Ryan.
• Pet the Dog: Every time he rescues a Little Sister right next to the defeated Big Daddy and behind his back leaves a long, bloody trail of dead Splicers.
• Playing with Fire: Incinerate!
• Psychic Powers: Again, some of the plasmids:
  • Brainwashed: Hypnotize Big Daddy, which makes the Big Daddies protect Jack.
  • Mind Over Matter: Telekinesis.
• Shock and Awe: Electro Bolt.
• Trigger Phrase" "Would you kindly" (which makes him obey the speaker) and "Code Yellow" (which tells his brain to tell his heart to stop beating.
• Villain Protagonist: Potentially, if the player chooses to harvest the Little Sisters.
• Wrench Whack: His first weapon is a wrench.
• Younger Than They Look: An audio diary says he has the body of a fit 19 year old. He was only a year old at the time of the recording. Probably due to genetically-programmed Rapid Aging. His passport lists his birthday as 1936, meaning he had the appearance of a 24 year old in game [1].

Andrew Ryan

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"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."

The creator and ruler of Rapture. Ryan fled from society after becoming dissatisfied with America and its 'parasites'. Voiced by Armin Shimerman/Unsho Ishizuka.

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• Archnemesis Dad
• Badass Moustache
• Big Bad: Subverted. While he's certainly a villain, it turns out that Fontaine is the true Big Bad in the game.
• Control Freak
• Disc One Final Boss: Though you don't fight him directly.
• Distaff Counterpart: He's essentially Ayn Rand's exaggerated male counterpart.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He's personally disgusted by the Little Sisters. In the sequel, he's shown as disturbed by Ryan Amusements, but accepts the fact that it puts fear of the surface world into children. Well, he still sees the Little Sister as an excellent business plan... He also says he could never raise his hand against Jack, after realizing Jack is his son.
• Evil Overlord: His disapproval rating only gets worse and worse with his hypocritical actions to remain in power, even to the point of the entire city population rebelling against him, which leads to the other Big Bad, a magnificent Rebel Leader taking advantage of it. The few who were still loyal to him even after he crossed the line, either stab him in the back later eventually, or get stabbed by him.
• Fake American: In-universe: he was born Andrei Rianofski in the USSR; Belarus, to be exact.
• Foil: Recieved 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 colossal freakout 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.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: As seen in introductory video, Ryan smokes a pipe.
• 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. Isolating Rapture from the surface created Fontaine: his own personal Al Capone to run the resulting smuggling black market; worse still, after Fontaine was killed, he nationalized his business in an outright betrayal of Rapture's guiding philosophy, and rushed ADAM onto the market without bothering to regulate its sale or use... thus leaving the blame for the many thousands of addictions and the civil war squarely on his head. All downhill from there, but he might have been able to salvage things if he hadn't taken Sofia Lamb's bait and thrown her in prison with all his other enemies... giving them a leader, his own personal Bolshevik.
• Hypocrite: And how! He acts like a stereotypical tyrant once things stop going his way, but it's okay as long as he technically doesn't pass any laws.
• Lack of Empathy/The Unfettered: He sees nothing wrong with murdering a woman in cold blood for selling his unborn child or with gassing a scientist who was trying to save Acadia from his poisons, or with decorating the entrance hall to his office with the grimly mutilated corpses of his would-be assassins.
• Meaningful Name: Not only does his name contain all the letters to spell out Ayn Rand, you can also get the joke by transposing the first letter of his last name: Rand[rew], Yan (pronounced the same as Ayn).
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Immigrant from Communist Russia, develops a fiercely individualistic philosophy promoting self-interest, dreams of building a hidden libertarian utopia where men of ability and independence can live free from the predation of government and moochers...
• Older Than They Look: According to the BioShock wiki, Ryan was born in 1892, which would make him 67 or 68 at the time of the first game. From his pictures on the audio diaries, he looks like a healthy man in his mid-forties, and while he seems older when you meet him at the end, he certainly doesn't look nearly 70. It's justified. In Rapture, you will often see ads for a gene tonic that makes you look 'twenty years younger!' Apparently, they actually work.
• 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 societal rules of Rapture and ended up breaking them when Fontaine and Atlas proved to be formidable enemies.
• Self-Made Man
• 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 in all his years spent in Rapture.
• Suicide by Cop: What his controlling Jack to test whether he's a man or a slave, according to his binary thinking, turns out to be.
• Ubermensch
• 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

Atlas

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"I'm Atlas, and I aim to keep you alive."

An Irish fisherman who guides Jack over his shortwave radio. He brought his wife and son to Rapture in search of a better life, but is now desperately trying to get them out. He is gradually revealed to be the leader of the Anti-Ryan rebellion. 'Atlas' is later revealed to be a persona adopted by Frank Fontaine, who has been manipulating Jack even before the game begins. Voiced by Karl Hanover.

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• Arc Words
• Deadpan Snarker
• Line-of-Sight Name: He names his fake son and his fake wife "Patrick and Moira". It is the title of a musical by Sander Cohen, for which the player finds some posters in two places: Fort Frolic and the Atlas Headquarters.
• Mission Control
• The Mole
• Rebel Leader
• Voice with an Internet Connection

Brigid Tenenbaum

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"What makes something like me? I look at genes all day long, and never do I see the blueprint of sin. I could blame the Germans, but in truth, I did not find tormentors in the Prison Camp, but kindred spirits. These children I brutalized have awoken something inside that for most is beautiful and natural, but in me, is an abomination... my maternal instinct."

A high ranking scientist of German-Jewish origin within Rapture, who mothered the Little Sister project and later came to view them as her surrogate children, in atonement for removing them from their parents and experimenting on them. Voiced by Anne Bobby.

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• The Atoner
• For Science!: Her initial outlook on her work, even to the point of collaborating with her Nazi captors.
• Germanic Depressives: A rather justified case.
• Grandma, What Massive Hotness You Have!
• Heel Realization: One day, she got a good look at a Little Sister and felt hatred like she never felt before, and not towards the children.
• Hot Scientist
• Les Collaborateurs: Despite her Jewish heritage, her love of science led her to become an aide to the Nazi scientists of Auschwitz.
• Mission Control: After The Reveal in the first game.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The first twenty minutes of BioShock 2 imply she'll have as large a role as she did in the first game, then after meeting up with her, she flees from Lamb, sending Delta off to Sinclair. She came back in the Minerva's Den DLC.

Frank Fontaine

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"Spent the morning jawing with that Kraut scientist. She's damaged goods, all right. Just like all those chumps they scraped out of them prison camps. But she's no crackpot... she's gonna make me the kinda scratch that'll have Ryan look like he's runnin' a paper route. She just needs some supplies to get the ball rolling... and a friend to watch her back."

An infamous New York mobster and former business rival of Andrew Ryan's whose rise to prominence and power through the marketing of plasmid technology proved instrumental in provoking Rapture's civil war and downfall. Voiced by Greg Baldwin and Karl Hanover (in Bioshock 2).

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• American Accents: A clear case of Joisey/Da Bronx, to more clearly ram home that he's a gangster.
• Badass Moustache
• Bald of Evil: Quite a shiny dome he's got there. One wonders how he was able to pass so well as the fully-haired Atlas. BioShock: Rapture reveals that he shaves his head because "the ladies like him bald."
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: In his final appearance.
• Big Bad
• Brooklyn Rage
• Con Man: Both as Atlas and as the runner of Fontaine's Home for the Poor, where he turns the poor into an army of splicers.
  • He mentions having spent six months as a chinaman once.
• Consummate Liar: There is no doubt that Fontaine is a lying bastard from beginning to end.
• Dead Person Impersonation: BioShock: Rapture reveals that he murdered and stole the identity of the real Frank Fontaine in order to take over Fontaine Fisheries and gain access to Rapture. While his real name is in fact Frank, his real last name is unknown (and it's stated that only a handful of people in the world know it).
• Diabolical Mastermind: He eventually gains a lot of power within Rapture, even rivaling Andrew Ryan's because "he's got the ADAM, and that makes him the guv'nor."
• Drunk on the Dark Side: After overdoing a self-defensive splicing.
• Eviler Than Thou: The Rival and The Foil: to Andrew Ryan. They're polar opposites.
• Evil Gloating: It's practically endemic to the man. After The Reveal, he divides his time between stopping your heart with code phrases and pontificating about how awesome his (admittedly, rather impressive) accomplishments are. He even brags to himself in his audio diaries, which at one point almost gets his cover as Atlas blown.
• Faking the Dead
• Functional Addict: Prior to the boss battle, Fontaine has clearly been using ADAM, but only enough of it to survive the dangers of Rapture. Unfortunately, when Jack corners him, Fontaine splices up with all the ADAM he's been able to gather, driving himself mad in the process.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He had Jack created to kill Andrew Ryan... only for Jack to turn on him when Fontaine showed his hand and tried to kill him. He was also partly responsible for creating the Little Sisters, a group of whom swarm him to deliver the killing blows.
• The Man Behind the Man
• One-Winged Angel: He confronts you after splicing himself into a hulkish superman with multiple plasmids and more than a passing resemblance to the mythical Atlas. It's twice as ironic when you realize that in the end, he's defeated by a bunch of little girls.
• Posthumous Character: As one of the main instigators of the uprisings against Ryan, Fontaine was gunned down by Ryan's men prior to the game. Except not. He used that opportunity to fake his death and return as the Rebel Leader Atlas.
• Super Strength: One of the few gene-tonics he's been willing to use before the final boss battle; during the climax, he uses it to create obstacles that can slow Jack's pursuit.

Sander Cohen

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"I know why you've come, little moth. You've your own canvas. One you'll paint with the blood of a man I once loved. Yes. I'll send you to Ryan, but first, you must be part of my masterpiece. Go to the Atrium. Hurry now! My muse is a fickle bitch, with a very short attention span!"

Artist, writer, actor, director and composer, famous for writing Rapture's national anthem "Rise, Rapture, Rise", as well as many other strange and eccentric works. Notably hostile towards those who question his art and/or closeness to Andrew Ryan. Jack first encounters him in Fort Frolic, after Cohen jams Atlas' radio transmission and blocks the exists; welcoming Jack as a fellow artist, he gives him the task of killing his former disciples and photographing their corpses..

• Affably Evil: Weirdly friendly towards Jack throughout their time together, often complimenting him on his fighting style or his talents as a photographer. Also, he apologises profusely after launching a horde of splicers at him.
• Berserk Button: Just try questioning his art. He could even rise from the dead to attack you if you hit his Quadtych.
• Celebrity Survivor: One of the most active media personalities in Rapture prior to the civil war, now thriving in the anarchy of the city's collapse.
• Depraved Homosexual: If the audio diaries and the novel are to be believed: rumors about young men 'never returning from his dressing-room' circulate pre-Rapture, not to mention his 'living sculptures' of scantily-clad proteges portraying Caligula. Splicing and post-Rapture drugs don't help.
• Into Musical Theatre
• Large Ham: Very large.
• Laughably Evil: Sure, he's a complete monster, but damn if he isn't a ton of fun to listen to and watch.
• Mad Artist
• Not Quite Dead: Given that it's possible for you to not kill him and that he could come back from the dead, don't be surprised if you hear him laughing maniacally in Cohen's Collection in the sequel.
• Playing with Fire: If he ever gets pissed off enough to attack you in person, a lot of fireball-tossing will be involved.
• Precision F-Strike: "Screw you! Screw all you fucking doubters!"
  • Also very notably, in one of his audio dairies: It's my curse! It's my fucking curse!
  • "I'm SANDER FUCKING COHEN!"
• Sophisticated As Hell: He doesn't talk like a scientist, but come now, we all must admit the sheer beauty of his vivid expressions strike one as Wicked Cultured...
• Villain Teleportation: As a Houdini Splicer, Cohen performs a lot of paranoia-inducing teleports.
• White Dwarf Starlet: His reputation has already waned by the time Ryan recruits him for Rapture, with his comeback production receiving less-than-stellar reviews; Cohen, of course, talks of nothing but his "projects" and his admirers. Being the only headliner in Rapture helps get him to prominence again.
• Wicked Cultured: Yes, it's true that most of his sculptures and poems range from crap to utterly mad, but there's no denying that he's also a very talented composer.

Dr. J.S. Steinman

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"There was a time, I was happy enough to take off a wart or two, or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight. But that was then, when we took what we got, but with ADAM... the flesh becomes clay. What excuse do we have not to sculpt, and sculpt, and sculpt, until the job is done?"

Before Rapture's societal collapse, J.S. Steinman was one of the city's most famous medical professionals: already a highly innovative plastic surgeon, he used ADAM to sculpt his patients to the highest possible standard of beauty. Unfortunately, he also tried a few of these new techniques himself. As such, by the time Jack meets him, Steinman has degenerated into a splicer, and now sees his patients as little more than human-shaped canvases on which to practice his skills as an artist: specifically, cubism.

• Apocalyptic Log: His audio diaries, especially "Not What She Wanted", which records the moment in which Steinman finally loses his mind and begins performing a facelift on a patient- who'd only been scheduled for a nosejob- while a nurse screams for help in the background.
• Berserk Button: By the time Jack meets him, Steinman is a very strong believer in Beauty Equals Goodness, and considers anything ugly to be offensive to the point that he's willing to kill and/or mutilate it on sight.

What's this, Goddess? An intruder? He is ugly! Ugly! UGLY! (opening fire) UUUUGGGLLLYYYY!!!

• Blue and Orange Morality: Good luck trying to determine his standards of beauty.
• Deadly Doctor
• Dressed to Heal
• Mad Artist
• Mad Doctor
• Manufacturing Victims: By using ADAM in his treatments, Steinman unwittingly ensured that any of his patients that weren't already addicted had a pretty good chance of becoming addicted after leaving the surgery. And given that excessive use of ADAM tends to result in disfiguration, quite a few of his patients would have returned for further treatments.
• Professor Guinea Pig: His audio diaries reveal that he was more than willing to use his experimental techniques on himself.
• Punctuated Pounding: "She (stab) WON'T (stab) STAY (stab) STILL!"
• Room Full of Crazy: Most of the Medical Pavilion has been turned into this under Steinman's watch, with numerous messages from the man himself smeared on the walls in blood.
• Sanity Slippage: Unlike many of the splicers, Steinman's audio diaries clearly show his descent into lunacy, beginning with his feelings of dissatisfaction in spite of his success, then his thoughts on cubist art as applied to surgery, and finally his hallucinations of the goddess Aphrodite... though she apparently encouraged him to go to Rapture in the first place. BioShock: Rapture explained this by revealing that Steinman had a drug habit on the surface which caused his first hallucinations of the "Goddess".

Peach Wilkins

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"We all come down here, figured we'd all be part of Ryan's Great Chain. Turns out Ryan's chain is made of gold, and ours are the sort with the big iron ball around your ankle."

Initially just a worker in Neptune's Bounty fisheries, Peach was drawn into becoming the leader of Fontaine's smuggling ring. As Fontaine started to take advantage of his employees and the Rapture Death Penalty was introduced, he found himself trapped between a rock and a hard place. He became paranoid and reclusive, refusing to believe Fontaine was really dead.

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• Large Ham
• Properly Paranoid
• Sanity Slippage

Yi Suchong

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"War. A terrible thing. Japanese kill every man in my city. Except for Suchong. Suchong have opium. Very good opium. This was, terrible thing too. But not for Suchong."

Dr. Yi Suchong was one of the leading scientists in Rapture, who worked for Fontaine on plasmid tests, as well as designing Little Sisters and the first of the Big Daddies. He and Dr. Tenembaum were also responsible for creating Jack and the mental conditioning that would be used to control him.

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• Child-Hater: Suchong hated children, and scarcely bothered to conceal it in any way. One of his big dreams was to find a way to make children age quickly to make them more efficient and "domesticatable". Eventually, he succeeded in this by creating Jack.

"Before ADAM, you could no more domesticate a child than a boa constrictor. They eat and drink like pig, and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process."

• Death by Irony: Minutes before his death, he complained that the Big Daddies didn't seem to be especially protective of the Little Sisters; after he made the mistake of slapping one of said Little Sisters in the face, he ended up getting drilled to a desk by one of the supposedly neglectful Big Daddies.
• Evil Genius
• I Fight for the Strongest Side: As the quote illustrates, Suchong has a habit of making himself valuable to the enemy. In fact, after Fontaine was killed and his company seized by Ryan Industries, Suchong's only major complaint was that Ryan didn't pay as much as Fontaine.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice
• Karmic Death: After going into so much detail as to how much he despised children and how responsible he was for the creation of the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, Suchong finally dies as a direct result of slapping a Little Sister in the face and angering her Big Daddy.
• Kick the Dog: Suchong has a very literal example in one of his audio diaries. While Jack was still being prepared, Suchong gave him a puppy to play with; after seeing that the boy had gotten quite attached to it, he activated Jack's mind control and ordered him to break the dog's neck.
• Lack of Empathy: He might not be an obsessive control freak like Andrew Ryan or an exploitative megalomaniac like Fontaine, but Suchong manages to make himself just as bad as them via his most obvious character trait: he couldn't care less about anyone but himself.
• Mad Scientist
• Third Person Person
• You No Take Candle: Suchong tends to talk like this, although it seems more a force of habit than any inability to speak the language.

BioShock 2

Subject Delta

The protagonist of BioShock 2 and the Player Character, a Super Prototype Big Daddy.

• Can't Live Without You: As an Alpha Series Big Daddy, Delta will either lapse into a coma or die unless he is reunited with Eleanor soon.
• Elemental Powers: Same as Jack:
  • An Ice Person: Winter Blast.
  • Blow You Away: Cyclone Trap.
  • Playing with Fire: Incinerate!
  • Shock and Awe: Electro Bolt.
• The Faceless
• Heroic Mime: Justified, since Big Daddies can't speak.
• Made of Iron: Subject Delta endures a lot, even by the standards of most Alpha Series. In the cutscenes alone, he's hit by a wall of high-pressure water when a Big Sister shatters a bay window; he's trapped in a room and pelted with gunfire and molotov cocktails until the floorboards under him break, sending him on a three-story fall; the train car he's riding gets torpedoed by Father Wales; Sofia Lamb floods Siren Alley, nearly crushing him to death when a metal door's slammed into him by the resulting water pressure; his link to Eleanor is disrupted when Sofia half-suffocates her with a pillow, leaving him on the brink of death; a corridor of demolition charges explode in his face, and he has to ride to the surface while hanging onto the side of Sinclair's escape pod, being battered and crushed by intense pressure on the way.
• Papa Wolf
• Psychic Link: With Eleanor.
• Psychic Powers: Again, some of the plasmids:
  • Brainwashed: Hypnotize.
  • Mind Over Matter: Telekinesis.
• Spirit Advisor: In most of the endings, Eleanor injects herself with Delta's ADAM, allowing him to live on inside her mind.
• Super Prototype: He moves faster than the Big Daddies in BioShock 1, and can use plasmids. Dr. Suchong also mentions that it's superior to what is to come, but they had to Nerf the following versions to the point of "mediocrity", mostly because they would be too dangerously overpowered.
• This Is a Drill
• Was Once a Man: Apparently, he was known as Johnny Topside, a deep-sea explorer who found Rapture whilst exploring the sea-bed. At least that's what Stanley says.

Dr. Sofia Lamb

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"Until ADAM, the human animal was a slave to the gene... the inner Tyrant. Lust... greed... rage; self obsession was etched into our DNA. We were not pulling the 'Great Chain of progress,' as Ryan believed - but shackled to it. But now, in theory, we can redraft the human blueprint. Serving the common interest can become as natural as breathing."

The Big Bad of BioShock 2. Doctor Who fans may recognize her as Agatha Christie, played by Fenella Woolgar. An idealist as obsessive as Ryan, but with a philosophy that's diametrically opposite. She believes in absolute collectivism, denouncing individuality and. indeed, sentience as a curse. She plans to use her daughter Eleanor to set the foundations for Utopia, whatever it takes.

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• Abusive Parent
• Big Bad:
  • Non-Action Big Bad
• Berserk Button: She couldn't stand Eleanor rejecting her ideology and went to increasingly erratic and extreme lengths to stop Subject Delta. Finally, she smothers Eleanor in a last ditch attempt to stop Delta; she had no way of knowing this wouldn't kill Eleanor as well, but it's quite clear she didn't care.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Despite her calm demeanor and utopian views, she is clearly a cold-hearted sociopath at heart, ruling Rapture with an iron fist.
• Blondes Are Evil
• Blue and Orange Morality
• Blue Eyes
• Break the Haughty: Suffers from this in the semi-good ending of the game, especially when Eleanor makes it clear that she only saved Sophia's life to make sure that she'd go on living in the knowledge that her Utopia had failed and her daughter had betrayed her.
• Dirty Communists: While never identified as one per se, Ryan remarks the very presence of her collectivist ideas will cause another Kremlin to spring up in Rapture. He was right... except if he hadn't betrayed his principles and thrown her in prison with the rest of his enemies just as she planned, she'd never have been able to build her army. Just like how his anti-smuggling laws created Fontaine.
• Evil Matriarch: Is she ever! It's clear from the opening cutscene that she possesses no love for Eleanor as a human being, only possessiveness.
• The Evils of Free Will: She believes that individuality is the root of all evil.
• Foil: Her collectivist outlook makes her one to Andrew Ryan.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul
• Freudian Excuse: In the form of her strict upbringing as a psychiatrist following in her father's footsteps, and in the form of her volunteer work in post-bomb Hiroshima.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Chain-smokes cigarettes- apparently as a result of stress, as the only time she's seen doing so is when Delta is standing right outside her door.
• Hypocrite: For all her collectivist idea she can be pretty damn possessive. This was true even before she came to power as she leaves the surface because she believes others have corrupted HER collectivist ideas.
• Light Is Not Good: Blonde, pretends to be nice, symbolic name, leads an evil cult, and will screw the world over to make it "better". Yee-up!
• Manipulative Bitch: She engineered her own jail conviction to gain popular support as a martyr and place herself in a facility far from Rapture where she could turn the inmates into an army. Even Fontaine is impressed.
• Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: She's a psychologist brought to Rapture by Ryan to shut the mentally fragile up.
• Moral Sociopathy: A curious case in that she probably did not began as this, but by the time of BioShock 2, she has definitely become a sociopath obsessed with her philosophy.
• Nothing Personal: She goes as far as to say she loves Subject Delta just as much as anyone else, before sending a pack of splicers to kill him.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Attempts to do this with Subject Delta at the beginning of the game by using a mind control plasmid. Fortunately, he gets better.
• Straight Edge Evil: Much like Ryan before her, she doesn't indulge in Plasmids and Gene Tonics, to the the point that the abovementioned mind control was administered by one of Lamb's splicers.
• Totalitarian Utilitarian
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: But not in the way most would think: her actions and audio diaries quite clearly reveal she never had any intention of saving Rapture. Her real goal is to create a "Utopian", who would be able to serve the common good with no concern for their own desires, and gradually convert the rest of the world into similar beings.

Augustus Sinclair

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"You do business as long as I have, and you learn to pick a brand name from the writin' on the wall."

A friendly, charming and somewhat amoral businessman who aids Subject Delta in his quest to reunite with Eleanor Lamb. Voiced by Doug Boyd.

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• Affably Evil: Amiable and without scruples from the word "go".
• Apologetic Attacker: Gets turned into an Alpha series Big Daddy near the end of the game and forced to fight Delta, desperately apologizing to him and Eleanor along the way.
• The Barnum
• Big Damn Heroes: Attempts one of these to free Delta from captivity. It doesn't go well for him.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive
• Freudian Excuse: Apparently, his grandfather was a strong believer in working in the name of "The People", and "The World Entire", and drowned in the construction of the Panama Canal... thus giving Augustus Sinclair an early bias against altruism.
• Functional Addict: He's apparently indulged in ADAM-based plastic surgery, but evidently not enough to drive him to Splicerdom.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Can be seen holding a cigarette holder on the one occasion Delta meets him face to face. In defiance of convention, however, Sinclair's not truly evil, just mercenary.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: An absolutely heartbreaking example.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sure, he's an exploitative sleazebag who wants to sell Rapture's biotechnology to the highest bidder, but he goes out of his way to help Delta and prefers him showing mercy.
• Mercy Kill
• Southern-Fried Genius: Born in Panama and raised in Georgia, Sinclair is a shrewd businessman, and according to some, a brilliant scientist. He did help develop the Vita-Chamber, after all.
• Voice with an Internet Connection

Eleanor Lamb

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Sofia Lamb's daughter and Delta's former Little Sister. Constantly in sedation, as part of Lamb's master plan. Voiced by Sara Bolger and Sydney Unseth (as a child).

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• Acquired Poison Immunity: Apparently, due to her exposure to large amounts of ADAM as a child, Eleanor can tolerate extensive splicing without any of the side-effects. Unfortunately, this makes her the perfect candidate for her mother's experiment...
• Action Girl
• Apocalypse Maiden
• Black Eyes of Evil: Not confirmed, but in some unfocused moments after absorbing Delta's conscience in the bad endings, her eyes seem to turn pitch black. It's quite unsettling.
• Blue Eyes
• Brainy Brunette
• Child Prodigy: Highly intelligent even in her earliest years, dismantling electronic devices and reassembling them for fun. She also had a tendency to disable her mother's security systems so she could sneak out of the house (not that this approach always worked).
  • Teen Genius: Masterminded the plan to resurrect Subject Delta.
• Corrupt the Cutie: As Eleanor is watching virtually everything you do, harvesting the Little Sisters and killing defenceless characters will result in her becoming just as ruthless and violent.
• Curb Stomp Battle: When you summon Eleanor to fight with you in Persephone, she pretty much stomps all over the splicers.
• Daddy's Girl
• Daddy's Little Villain: In the bad endings.
• Human Sacrifice: Basically what her mother is planning.
• Messianic Archetype: Gloriously torn apart and vaporized.
• Noodle People: As a result of Lamb's experiments, she is somewhat malnourished.
• Playing with Fire: She can shoot fireballs out of her hands.
• Psychic Link: With Delta.
• Psychic Powers:
  • Mind Over Matter
  • Telepathy
• Rebellious Princess
• Statuesque Stunner: Upon donning the Big Sister suit, Eleanor stands eye to eye with Subject Delta. Big Sisters in general are also around 6'10".
• Teens Are Monsters: Unless you work at it.
• Teleporters and Transporters: Teleportation is another one of her powers as a Big Sister.
• Took a Level in Badass: Near the end of the game, the frail teenager you've been trying to reach for the whole game gets in a Big Sister suit, and proceeds to wreak ungodly havoc upon her mother's regime with the powers given by the ADAM injected into her.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Or, more accurately, a telepathic connection.

Dr. Gilbert Alexander

File:Gil Alexander 1713.png

"October 9th, 1967. Hello. My name is Gilbert Alexander, and by the time you hear this, I will be clinically insane."

Another one of Fontaine Futuristic's leading scientists, Gilbert "Gil" Alexander replaced Dr. Suchong as head of the Protector Program: in this position, he created the Alpha Series and the symbiotic bond with their Little Sisters- making him indirectly responsible for Johnny Topside's conversion into Subject Delta. Following the collapse of Rapture's security police, he also designed the city's automated security system. However, he eventually fell in with Sofia Lamb and the Rapture Family, assisting in their development of a "Utopian", even submitting himself to the first attempt to create one. Unfortunately, the experiment resulted in him being horribly mutated and deranged by mass amounts of ADAM, ultimately reducing him to a nightmarish aquatic monster kept within a tank in the basement of Fontaine Futuristics.

---

• Apocalyptic Log: How his still-lucid self communicates.
• The Atoner: Dr. Alexander was genuinely ashamed that he'd been responsible for Eleanor's transformation into a Little Sister, and worked for many years to undo the conditioning he'd forced on her.
• Bad Boss: Following his descent into insanity, "Alex the Great" has assumed total control of Fontaine Futuristics and declared himself CEO; given that there's no way of creating new products and no paying customers anyway, most of his time is spent torturing his splicer "employees".
• Body Horror: We don't see his transformation take place, but given that the monster inside the tank looks like a cross between a fetus and a squid, it wasn't pretty.
• Crazy Prepared: He might have been undergoing a horrific mutation and almost half-insane at the time, but Dr. Alexander was very careful in setting up a way for Delta to Mercy Kill him: first, he left several pre-recorded messages throughout the Fontaine Futuristics building, containing useful advice and essential passwords to restricted areas; secondly, he planted a cache of weapons and security bots to assist anyone who might come to the rescue; finally, just to make sure his rescuers would be sane enough to outwit his insane alter-ego, he programmed a bio-scan to exclude any visitors who weren't mentally up to the job.
• Evil Brit: Apparently English (or at least he speaks in a Received Pronounciation accent), but not actually a villain until massive doses of ADAM administered by Sofia Lamb drive him insane.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Not only did he mastermind Rapture's security systems, but after his mutation began, he also modified the branches of it around Fontaine Futuristics to provide help to anyone answering his Distress Call. After his mutation drove him insane, he also equipped numerous security drones with monitors and speakers to carry his voice and face- part of it, at least- to his "employees".
• Hopeless Suitor: One of his audio diaries indicate that he has something of a crush on Sofia Lamb- even referring to her as a "Secular Saint"... though he admits that her Love You and Everybody philosophy means that he can't be given preferential treatment.
• Kick the Dog: In one of his earliest scenes, Alex the Great has his modified security drone electrocute a pair of terrified splicers.
• Large Ham: In every single audio diary in the game, he's heard speaking as quietly and carefully as possible, so it's a bit of a shock to hear him start hamming it up as Alex the Great, chewing the scenery to a pulp and spitting it at Delta.
• Mad Scientist: As one of Rapture's scientific elite, this is a given.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: When Delta finally meets Dr. Alexander's horribly mutated self, he's not much of a threat without the splicers he employs; true, he may be a gigantic monster with the combined powers of hundreds of different splicers implanted into his body, but his reliance on his tank prevents him from physically attacking, and the bright light means that he can't even see Delta clearly enough to fight back in any other way.
• Meaningful Name: The man's nickname is "Gill", and he ends up as an obvious aquatic lifeform.
• Mercy Kill: His lucid self requests this from you, while his insane self begs to be spared; the decision's up to you.
• Sanity Slippage: By the time he recorded the messages, he was in the latter stages of this.
• Shrinking Violet: In most of the footage taken of him, Dr. Alexander comes across as nervous and painfully shy prior to Lamb's experiments: in his audio diaries, he speaks in a halting, shaky voice, sometimes barely louder than a whisper; in the "Rapture's Best and Brightest" photo, he's at the very back of the group, looking as uncomfortable and agitated as possible.
• Sinister Surveillance
• Talkative Loon: After becoming Alex the Great, most definitely.
• Tragic Monster
• The Voice: Subject Delta never sees Gil Alexander's entire face at any point in the game except in old photographs. Unless you're playing the PC version of the game, and you're prepared to use noclip.
• Weakened by the Light: Dr. Alexander's new body can't stand bright light, and naturally recoils when Delta switches on the overhead lights in his chamber.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: After it was found that the attempt to transform him into a Utopian had failed, Lamb abandoned Dr. Alexander.

Stanley Poole

File:Stanley Poole 5137.png

Stanley Poole was a reporter for the Rapture Tribune newspaper. He was hired by Augustus Sinclair on the behalf of Andrew Ryan to infiltrate the Rapture Family, and gather evidence so that Sofia Lamb could be imprisoned. It all went downhill for him from there.

• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Let's just say that there are very few people in the game that haven't been backstabbed by him at some point.
• Cower Power: Poole spends most of his only level hiding in a booth while forcing Delta to clear up his dirty business.
• Dirty Coward: Poole's only real concern is keeping his ass out of the fire, and he's willing to go to the most repulsive lengths to ensure that nothing bad happens to him: this includes having Eleanor Lamb kidnapped and converted into a Little Sister, sabotaging Dionysus Parl so that the entire population drowned, and ordering Delta to harvest any Little Sisters that might discover what he'd done. And when things start getting out of control, he quickly lapses into spineless begging.
• Evil Uncle: When Sofia Lamb was arrested, she ordered Stanley Poole and Grace Holloway to take care of Eleanor; as such, Poole ended up being called "Uncle Stanley", and proved his credentials in the evil uncle field by having Eleanor kidnapped to prevent her from ratting him out.
• Functional Addict: Flashbacks show that Poole has been splicing, but he's obviously been able to keep his habit under control for now.
• He Knows Too Much: From Poole's point of view, everyone in Dionysus Park knew too much, so he found a way to Kill'Em All.
• Hero Worshipper: One of his audio diaries reveals that he's come to admire Subject Delta- or, as he was known when he was still a human being, Johnny Topside- after interviewing him for the Tribune. Poole also went on to frame him as a spy and have him imprisoned in Persephone, where he was transformed into a Big Daddy, so he obviously didn't admire Topside that much.
• The Mole
• Mole in Charge
• Oh Crap: At the end of his level, Poole suffers a doozy of an Oh Crap moment when Sofia Lamb remotely opens the door to his booth and informs Delta just who was really responsible for his conversion into a Big Daddy.
• Paid Harem: One of the flashbacks shows Poole during one of his parties, which he financed by using all of Lambs money, and he has two girls next to him, obviously both slightly spliced, and he appears at least as he hopes to have his way with them both.
• Paparazzi
• Smug Snake
• Unreliable Narrator: Take anything he says with a small ocean's worth of salt.

Subject Sigma

The protagonist of BioShock (series) 2 DLC Minerva's Den and the Player Character, another Super Prototype Big Daddy.

• Elemental Powers: Same as two previous protagonists:
  • An Ice Person: Winter Blast.
  • Blow You Away: Cyclone Trap.
  • Playing with Fire: Incinerate!
  • Shock and Awe: Electro Bolt.
• Genius Bruiser: He is C.M. Porter.
• Heroic Mime: Justified, since Big Daddies can't speak.
• Necromantic: His main motivation for humanizing the Thinker was to bring his dead wife Pearl back to some degree with the Thinker's advanced approximation of Pearl's personality. Although the Thinker is successful in its emulation, Porter realizes that it isn't Pearl and stops.
• Psychic Powers: Again, some of the plasmids:
  • Brainwashed: Hypnotize.
  • Mind Over Matter: Telekinesis.
• Super Prototype
• This Is a Drill
• Tomato in the Mirror: Inverted. It is revealed at the end of Minerva's Den that Subject Sigma is C.M. Porter; C.M. Porter who has been assisting him turns out to be The Thinker.
• Tragic Monster: Subverted in the end where he is back to an unspliced state.

Reed Wahl

The antagonist of the Minerva's Den DLC, Porter's former partner who betrayed him to take control of The Thinker alone, believing that it can be used to crack a perfect equation that can predict everything. Voiced by Keith Szarabajka.

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• Authority Equals Asskicking: For a skinny mathematician, Wahl is remarkably strong even by Splicer standards when you finally fight him, as he can take almost as much damage as a Big Sister (though since he lacks Big Daddy damage resistance and effect immunity, it's pretty easy to juggle him to death with your plasmids and weapons).
• Boss in Mooks Clothing: He is a reaused buttons splicer, with a Nice Hat.
• Deadly Euphemism: "Sigma must be removed from the equation".
• Final Boss
• Foreshadowing: After realizing that Sigma is Porter, Wahl hints to Sigma that he knows it, by pointing out the inconsistencies of Porter suddenly returning from Persephone, the Hellhole Prison over them all, and completely sane and normal.
• Mad Mathematician: Minerva's Den is full of equations scrawled on the walls in chalk, paint and even blood, all presumably Wahl's work in his efforts to find the "predictive equation", an equation he believes can be used to predict the future.
• Nice Hat: While not a hat per se, the headgear he wears is intriguing.
• Villainous Breakdown: When Sigma approaches closer and closer, and he runs out of Mooks, he gets mroe and more angry, constantly telling Simga to turn back and stop. Ending with him attacking Sigma in a battle he could have told himself would end in his death.

Overall Tropes

• Axe Crazy
• Body Horror: All of the Splicers have been hideously disfigured as a result of oversplicing: many sport visible infections, massive tumours, club feet, distended stomachs, Tainted Veins and distorted facial features. The Crawlers manage to top all of this by way of a complete complete skeletal overhaul: their skulls are horribly misshapen (and noticeably cracked), their limbs are long and twisted, they've got only one eye left for each of them, and the skin has pulled almost completely away from their teeth
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Prior to becoming addicted to ADAM, most of the splicers were likely average, everyday citizens of Rapture.
• Inelegant Blubbering: When Splicers cry (and given how broken they are, that's more often than you think), they don't cry prettily.
• Laughably Evil
• Laughing Mad
• Malevolent Masked Men: All Splicers wear masks to cover their deformities, with the exception of the Brutes.
• Mook: Thuggish and Leadhead Splicers.
  • Elite Mooks: Nitro Splicers.
  • Giant Mook: Brute Splicers.
  • Superpowered Mooks: Spider Splicers and Houdini Splicers.
• Nightmare Face
• Talkative Loon

Brute

"I'm an 'ard man, mate. That's how it is down 'ere: survival of the 'ardest man."

Self-styled top of Rapture's food chain, the Brute has spliced himself into a musclebound gorilla of a human being; on top of being overbuilt, he's also aggressive, pugnacious, coarse, violently homophobic, and very very vocal about it. Appearing exclusively in the second game, he also seems to be the only member of Sofia Lamb's "Rapture Family" who isn't motivated by religious fervour, but an addiction to violence.

• Armoured Closet Gay: In spite of all his homophobia, the Brute can be heard making a few interesting remarks to the opposite effect when alone, and when he's under the effects of the Hypnotize plasmid...
• Baddie Flattery: Of course, while hypnotized, he starts complimenting Delta a great deal.

"I'd look a poof in that suit, but you carry it."

• Bald of Evil
• Blood Knight
• Boomerang Bigot
• The Brute
• Cluster F-Bomb: Prone to these.
• Country Matters: The Brute is notable in that he's the only Splicer to use this particular expletive.
• Famous Last Words:
  • "Fuckin'... poof..."
  • "I feel... nnn... nothin'..."
• Hair-Trigger Temper
• Hates Being Touched: Apparently a side-effect of his homophobia.
• Hot-Blooded
• Jerkass
• Large and In Charge: With the exception of Sofia Lamb and the other lieutenants, the Brutes are generally the highest-ranking members of the family.
• Large Ham
• MacGyvering: Apparently, the Brutes are created through a mixture of leftover Gene Tonics, Sports Boost and Armoured Shell being the most obvious components.
• The Mean Brit
• Monster Progenitor: Leo Hartwig, a Genius Bruiser and Professor Guinea Pig who created the process of creating the Brutes to survive life in Pauper's Drop, before joining the Rapture family and becoming a bodyguard to Gloria Holloway.
• Screaming Warrior
• Sir Swearsalot: Out of all the Splicers, he undoubtedly uses the most foul language. In fact, when charging, his only line is a deafening roar of "FUCKEEEEEEERRR!".
• Smarter Than He Looks: There are few hints that the Brute is a lot cleverer than most of his dialogue would imply: he can be heard talking about the necessity of bone density to back up the muscle mass he's gained, and some of his dialogue can be surprisingly eloquent. Plus, Leo Hartwig, the original Brute, cobbled together the Brute-splicing formula himself, and goes into battle accompanied by hacked security bots.
• Super Strength

Crawler

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH! HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"

Though the Crawler is a Spider Splicer by default, he tends to offset the stealth aspect of the character by being the noisiest of all enemies in BioShock 2, with the possible exception of the Big Sister. More disfigured than any other splicer in Rapture and even more deranged, the Crawler is very vocal about his problems, screaming and wailing with every move, sometimes even accusing the player of being a figment of his imagination.

• Anti-Villain: Out of all of the Splicers, the Crawler is one of the few that just seem pitiable and sad more than anything else.
• Famous Last Words: "Finally... sleep..."
• Hallucinations
• Happy Place: The Crawler reacts to the hypnotise Plasmid very differently to other targets in the game: while most Splicers under the influence see the player as a friend, the Crawler sees the whole experience as one of Sofia Lamb's therapy sessions, where he evidently feels most comfortable.
• Hearing Voices
• I Just Want to Be Normal: "I splice up strong, fast, tall. Why can't I splice up normal?!"
• The Insomniac: Type C: it's driven him even further into insanity.
• Madness Mantra: "I hear 'em when I'm asleep... when I'm awake... when I'm asleep, when I'm awake, when I'm asleep, when I'm awake, when I'm asleep, when I'm awake, when I'm asleep when I'm awakewhenimasleepwhenimawake ARRRRGGHHH!"
• Manufacturing Victims: Apparently, as a very devout member of the Rapture Family, he's hopelessly addicted to Sofia Lamb's therapy.
• Nervous Wreck
• Noodle People
• Please Wake Up: The Crawler sometimes treats dead bodies as though they're only sleeping, often recommending they join the Family when they wake up. Also, one dialogue option has them do this for the player.
• Screaming Warrior: Yeah, anyone who goes into battle screaming "help me" has serious problems.
• Wall Crawl

Baby Jane

"Came here to be a star! Came here to be a star- Not too late, not too late!"

Evidently in show business before the Civil War, the Baby Jane splicer is still trying to find work in the theatre, and can often be heard insisting that she's a star. Sometimes she experiences moments of lucidity when she realises that Rapture is no longer fit for theatrical performances and her face has been ruined by constant splicing; unfortunately, she uses these moments to take out her frustrations on the player.

• Chorus Girl
• Cute but Cacophonic
• Cute Monster Girl: Undoubtedly the most attractive of the Splicers, even though she's just as disfigured as the others.
• Shout-Out: To What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, of course.
• Small Name, Big Ego
• Uncanny Valley Makeup: Close examination shows that her makeup consists of a layer of greasepaint and lipstick smeared Jokerishly over her face.
• White Dwarf Starlet

Breadwinner

"These assholes don't get it. I'm a winner; gonna show Ryan and all of 'em."

A businessman of some sort, the Breadwinner is under the delusion that Rapture's steady collapse is "just a bad quarter", and he still has a chance to make it big... when he isn't under the impression that he's already made it to the top.

• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Well, he certainly was at some point.
• Determinator: "Came down here with a dream... That dream's gonna happen..."
• I Coulda Been a Contender: Thoroughly averted: the Breadwinner may waver a bit in his convictions, but he never really stops believing that his fortune is still on the rise.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: While being frozen, the Breadwinner starts muttering about how he needs a hot toddy... or a vodka.
• Perpetual Poverty: In spite of his insistence to the contrary, it's not likely that the Breadwinner will ever have the wealth he wants... or claims to have.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Still wears an expensive pinstriped suit.
• Small Name, Big Ego
• White Dwarf Starlet: In the corporate sense, anyway.

Ducky

"They want what we got. And we gotta defend what's ours!"

An elderly security guard, Ducky differs from most of the other Splicers in that, rather than being delusional or lost in his own private fantasy, he's just aggressive and paranoid... not to mention insanely nationalistic.

• Badass Grandpa
• Berserk Button: In spite of his nationalism, Ducky has a very obvious hate-on for Rapture's leaders, especially exploitative ones like Ryan and Fontaine.

"You can't take it from me, Ryan! I earned it, I EARNED IT!"

• Conspiracy Theorist
• Cowboy Cop
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: At one point, exclaims that Fontaine isn't dead and that Atlas and Fontaine are the same. And towards the end of the first game...
• Politically-Incorrect Villain
• Properly Paranoid: At times.
• Racist Grandpa: Can be heard snarling furiously about "parasites", papists and race-mixers.

Dr. Grossman

"I swore an oath to do no harm, and I... mostly... meant it."

A surgeon in the mould of Dr. Steinman (they share the same basic model), dialogue reveals that he's not exactly the most professional in the business: freely admitting to making up answers to questions posed by concerned patients, and forgetting what his various medical supplies actually do. And worse still, he's a germophobe.

• Back-Alley Doctor: In the sense that if he ever qualified for a medical degree, he's long since lost the qualifications to splicing-induced insanity.
• Child-Hater: Despises children on general principle, claiming that babies are born "covered in death", and professing utter loathing for the Little Sisters.
• Deadly Doctor
• Dressed to Heal
• Dr. Jerk
• Expy: Of the William S. Burroughs character Dr. Benway, possibly.
• Kryptonite Is Everywhere: Taken to ludricrous levels with his rampant germophobia:

"There's semen on everything! EVERYTHING!

• Mad Doctor
• The Mean Brit
• Neat Freak: Can often be heard grumbling about how dirty or unhygenic the room is... regardless of just how filthy it actually is.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them: "When is a fever not a fever? WHEN I SAY IT ISN'T!"
• Slipping a Mickey: Occasionally admits to putting things in his nurses' drinks.
• Trust Me, I'm an X: When searching for a character in hiding, he can be heard yelling, "Don't worry, I'm a professional!".
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: His germophobia, which has him claiming that he can see death floating in the air... and that bacteria aren't microscopic.

Pigskin

"Where are you?! They'll kill me if I don't find you!"

A member of one of Rapture's football teams, Pigskin is more lucid than most of the Splicers... apart from his slightly desperate belief that his parents are somewhere in the area. Nevertheless, he still suffers considerable pain, both from the deformities induced by ADAM overdosing, and from his fellow Splicers.

• Anti-Villain
• Apologetic Attacker
• Jerk Jock: Thoroughly averted.
• Madness Mantra: "They make me hate everything I see! They make me hate everything I see! THEY MAKE ME HATE EVERYTHING I SEE! They make me hate everything I see..."
  • "I do what I'm told! I just do what I'm told! I always just do what I'm told!"
  • "I just wanna go to sleep... Just wanna go to sleep, I just wanna go to sleep..."
• Sympathetic Murderer

Overall Tropes

• Berserk Button: All of the Big Daddies have been programmed to fly into a rage if a Little Sister is harmed in their presence. The Alpha Series was programmed with a much more specific version of this.
• Clingy Costume: To varying degrees: Alpha Series Big Daddies can remove their helmets, but that's about it; most run-of-the-mill Big Daddies are little more than organs and tissues welded to the inside of their suits; the Big Sisters are the only Protectors who can remove their suits, and most of them are too busy to do so.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: When friendly, the lights on a Protector's visor are green; if indifferent, the lights are yellow; finally, if it's about to attack, the lights are red.
• Elite Mook
• Gentle Giant: To the Little Sisters.
• Implacable Man
• One-Way Visor
• The Unintelligible
• Walk, Don't Swim: Most Big Daddies are far too heavy to swim, but as they don't need to breath, and they're immune to the crushing pressure on the ocean floor, Big Daddies are perfectly capable of marching across the sea bed.
• Was Once a Man

Alpha Series

• Axe Crazy: Apart from Delta and Sigma, the only Alpha Series encountered in the game are maddened killing machines, apparently having been driven insane by the death of the Little Sister they were bonded to.
• Can't Live Without You: Up until Delta, most Big Daddies lost interest in their charges the moment they were no longer in any danger; so, Gilbert Alexander countered this by creating an intense emotional bond between each Alpha Series and the Little Sister that was assigned to them. This was enforced by a physiological countermeasure that sent the Alpha Series into a coma if their Little Sister moved out of range.
• Flawed Prototype: Costly, overpowered, and only capable of bonding with one Little Sister (with catastrophic results if she dies) they were retired with good reason.
• Glass Cannon: The most offensively powerful Big Daddies, but also the most fragile (they're still pretty tough by human standards though).
• Gone Horribly Right: The Pairbond: it worked exactly as planned... it's just that Alexander wasn't able to predict what would happen if the Splicers actually succeeded in killing a bonded Little Sister. The result sent the entire Alpha Series to the scrapheap.
• Heroic BSOD: Upon the deaths of their Little Sister, the few Big Daddies who didn't immediately lapse into a coma or die suffered horrific mental breakdowns; Gilbert Alexander recalls seeing one kneeling in front of a Gatherer's Garden, in tears. It only got worse from there...
• Psycho Prototype: The result of these flaws.
• Super Prototype: The fastest Big Daddies, capable of using multiple weapons and the only model able to use plasmids. Doctor Suchong even mentions that they are superior to the newer models, and had to be retired partly because they were so overpowered.

Bouncer

• Guest Fighter: Made a playable character on Play Station All Stars Battle Royale.
• This Is a Drill: Their primary weapon.

Rosie

• Cyber Cyclops: Invoked by the one-windowed helmet.
• Mighty Glacier: The slowest Big Daddies, but also the toughest.

Big Sister

• Armour Doodling: Some of them sport crayon drawings on their armour, apparently from the Little Sisters they've been escorting.
• Bishonen Line: By far the most human (being able to actually remove their armour), and the most powerful of all the Protectors.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Played with: as Little Sisters, they were under the influence of mental programming for much of their childhood, even leading into adolescence; however, following adolescence, the programming broke down, leaving them aggressive and dangerously unstable. So, Gilbert Alexander put them through another round of specialized brainwashing to channel their violent instincts in a productive direction.
• Cyber Cyclops: Similar to the Rosies in this respect.
• Dark Action Girl
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Big Sisters represent this more than any other Protector in the game; prior to their rise to physical maturity, they were all near-harmless Little Sisters.
• Lightning Bruiser: By far the fastest and most agile enemies in the game, and they can dish out quite a lot of damage.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: The Big Sisters announce themselves with a piercing shriek that actually distorts Delta's vision, but thankfully, it doesn't actually hurt him.