Tear Jerker / BioShock

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• The whole game's premise, if you consider it. The best thing to happen to the adults of Rapture, formerly some of the best and brightest the world had who left everything on the surface to participate as part of Ryan's dream? They went into hiding if they somehow got lucky. Most died, became insane, or became Big Daddies.
  • It's even worse if you consider the fate of the children. The Little Sister thing is horrifying enough, but at least the girls got to survive if you Rescued them. The little boys and other girls? Yeah, ponder that.
  • Really, the Splicers in general are a sympathetic bunch when they're not trying to kill you. All of them probably had lofty dreams and people that they cared for before their minds deteriorated.
  • Even when ignoring death for a moment... One audio recording in Arcadia has a little girl get scared by the "monsters". Her mother is confused at first until she realizes: her child has never seen trees, never seen birds, never seen the sun.
• The good ending for BioShock. If you kill the Little Sisters, you kill the ones that save you and wage war on the surface world with an army of splicers. But if you save them, you take them to the surface, where they live happy, normal lives, and are with you at your deathbed. It's such a marvelous and human ending, especially after all the violence and Body Horror of the preceding game.
• Andrew Ryan: "A man chooses! A slave obeys!" and the fact that you really couldn't stop hitting him.
• Atlas' family being blown up by Andrew Ryan hits hard. Of course, when Atlas/Fontaine double crossed you, and you were forced to kill Andrew Ryan...
  • "I really wound you up with that wife and child bit: 'Oh, me poor Moira. Ah, me wee baby Patrick.' Maybe one day I'll get me a real family. They play well with the suckers."
• Listening to Masha's parents sob over her on the audio diaries was bad enough. Getting into their room and finding their two corpses curled up on the bed together next to a picture of their daughter and a bottle of pills that they had apparently overdosed on was heartbreaking.
  • There's another apparent suicide scene in the game, in Mercury Suites. There's just something about the fact that after downing the jar of poison, they apparently sat down to watch one last TV show together as a family before they succumbed to it. Oh, and by the way, God only knows if the kids actually realized they were taking poison.
• Near the beginning, you see a woman cooing to a baby in a crib. Once she sees you, she'll attack you, and you have to kill her. When that was done, you look into the crib and see that there is no baby in the crib. There never was. If you kill her before she sees you you find out that the "baby" is actually her revolver.
  • This section is even more horrifying than that - listen to what she says carefully (subtitles are your friend). She's not cooing. She's mourning. 'Baby and me, BABY AND ME'
  • Something even more horrifying: 'baby and me' implies the baby has also become a Splicer. Yikes.
  • Shortly after this, Atlas tells the protagonist that the plasmids are what caused the populace to become corrupted, including infants being strangled in their cribs, making it tragic in hindsight.
  • A possibility that makes it even more depressing in a bizarre way is that that woman may not have ever had a child in her life; she may have been seeing a ghost baby she would never be able to touch and hold. Someone else's baby. Someone who spliced up, died, and ended up harvested by a Little Sister, creating recycled Adam that was then injected into this woman; which carries with it traces of other peoples' memories. And she's simply too spliced and traumatized out of her mind to recognize that it's not her baby she is imagining. Rapture truly is a place of cyclic, mindbending horror.
• Sure, Tenenbaum might have had a dodgy past, but even before she mentions being involved in experiments in a prison camp, you have to realize something: if she was a 'Kraut' of Jewish descent, she probably was separated from her own family before being sent there. It somehow makes everything happening with the Little Sisters worse, especially since she grows such a pure devotion to them. Even then, listening to her narrate her maternal revelations is so moving. And then, if you didn't save ENOUGH Little Sisters for the good ending, but didn't kill enough for the bad, the fact that she sounds so sad while explaining your descent into spliced-up madness makes it seem like she thought she could've saved Jack, given that she was Fontaine's agent for buying the embryo off of his birth mother.
  • More specifically, it was Tenenbaum's 'Hatred' audio log. At the end, right before she cuts the recording, you hear her voice break followed by the briefest of sobs.
  Tenenbaum: What makes something like me? I look at genes all day, but never do I see the blueprint of sin.
  • On the topic of female characters in BioShock with sad stories, Diane McClintock. Her fiancee, Ryan, slowly goes crazy and probably spends more intimate moments with Jasmine Jolene, anyway. She's eventually left alone after the New Year's attack ruins her face (and from what the audio diaries and the 'ghost' outside his door imply, Steinman didn't help). Then she goes on to work for Atlas (and it sort of sounded like she was starting to fall for him too, or was at least very loyal) but she walks in on his longest con and he kills her before she can blab his true identity. It's sad because she seemed so normal; there was no hint of going insane. She was just a sad woman caught up in a nightmare. She might be the closest to The Woobie aside from the Little Sisters.
  • Even worse: listening to Atlas' diary makes it not unreasonable to distrust her, considering her timing and what she says. But she was recording herself during that moment and her recording shows: she knew of nothing. She was just talking to herself before seeing him, not even having heard anything but the last few words.
• Finding Jasmine Jolene's body on a second playthrough and working out that Jack is her child. Now that was a player punch.
• Sullivan's diaries are definite tearjerkers, especially once you start finding the ones where he's given orders to assassinate Anna Cullpepper simply because Sander Cohen hates her music. Then there's the one you can find in Cullpepper's apartment, where a broken Sullivan talks about finding a blanket Cullpepper was knitting, and how he took it, because it just didn't seem right, leaving it unfinished....
• Every time a Big Daddy who is protecting a Little Sister gets killed, the child tearfully pleads her fallen protector to get back up.

  Little Sister: Mr Bubbles... please, please wake up! Please!

• One of the recording late-game involves Suchong testing out the "Would you kindly" code on the Player Character as a child. How? By forcing him to snap the neck of his puppy dog.
  • Even worse when you listen closely to the Player Character. The kid clearly knows what the keywords are, and it's killing him inside to have no choice but to obey, his body essentially wrested from his control to do such a horrible act.
• Finding the Skinner boxes the Little Sisters were subjected to.
• Go to the Little Sister Orphanage. In one of the girls' rooms, there are two gravestones drawn on the wall. One says "Mommy" the other says "Daddy".
  • The Little Sisters Orphanage itself is a Tearjerker. It's an orphanage, parents probably gave-up their children because they thought their child would have a better life. Instead the girls that survived the process (and some didn't) were turned into Little Sisters. You even hear advertisements for it over Rapture's PA saying 'Give your little girl the life she deserves.' No child deserves that life...
• The Pigskin Splicer's dialogue is downright heart-wrenching. While most of the Splicers are just drifting through their own little worlds in between bouts of ADAM-induced psychosis, the Pigskin is vaguely cognizant of the state his body is in and as well the horrible pain he's feeling. All his lines sound like he's on the verge of hysterical sobbing, where he alternates between pleading that he doesn't want to fight anymore and saying he just wants to go to sleep, probably so he can find some release from his pain. He implies he's only doing this because he feels obligated to at the behest of his absent parents, who he occasionally hallucinates as having returned to take him home. It's clear he's a scared, confused kid who's been separated from his family, overwhelmed by the consequences of splicing, and swept up in the chaos engulfing Rapture, making it hard not to feel bad for him.
  • Especially since his lines seem to imply that he was pressured into taking plasmids to 'enhance his game,' several of them trying desperately to convince "Mr Ryan" and possibly others that he's "good enough." Not to mention a few seem to be addressing a girlfriend and may veer back into frightening.
    "Uh... Baby? I'm... I'm all calmed down now, okay? So... just open the—"
    "Hey, c'mon— Joey's gone, all right? You... You can come out now..."
• Sander Cohen. On the surface, he seems like a goofy sociopath with no redeeming traits, what with him turning people into statues and ordering you to kill other artists just because he doesn't like their artwork, but listen to his audio diary "The Wild Bunny". It starts off as an innocent poem about being a little bunny... but then quickly escalates into loud, screaming sobs. Just the thought of how this madman is trapped in his own chaos, and is possibly well aware of his own madness (the "Ears", as he calls it), but try as he might he can't escape it, certainly makes those white masks everyone wears all the more symbolic...
  I want to take the ears off, but I can't. I hop, and when I hop, I never get off the ground. It's my curse, my eternal curse! I want to take the ears off... but I can't! It's my curse! It's my FUCKING curse! I WANT TO TAKE THE EARS OFF! PLEASE! TAKE THEM OFF! PLLLEEEEEAAAAAAASE!
• Poor Baby Jane. Even before she became a splicer, she had a tragic life (being a failed actress and having to work as a prostitute). There's also one scene early in the game where you see her sobbing over a baby-sized coffin.
• "Know that you are my greatest disappointment." Yes, Andrew Ryan has not only accepted that Jack is his son, and in this realizes that he could never kill his own progeny, but has also ranked him as a bigger disappointment than Rapture. That stings. The whole sequence becomes a bit tearjerking once you know the truth. Ryan yells and screams at Atlas like he always has, but he lowers his tone almost to that of speaking with a child when talking to Jack. It's either sad because Ryan knows he is faced with the dilemma of being killed by or killing his own son, or it's sad because the father Jack never knew is forcing him to assist in his suicide. Either way when the horror wears off you're going to be depressed.
  • Actually, while we're at it, let's drive the nail in a little further: This is Andrew Ryan we're talking about. He's the guy who thinks that giving food to the poor makes you a parasite, the guy who murdered Jasmine Jolene for accidentally getting involved in Fontaine's scheme, the guy who created, encourages, and participates in a ruthless culture that encourages people to only give a damn about themselves. And despite all this, he still could not bring himself to kill Jack because Jack is his son. Damn.
  • Also, one could argue that Ryan's final monologue is him trying to break Jack's Mind Control. He patiently and calmly explains the situation, even proving to him that everything he says is true. His final words getting more and more angry and desperate could be him realizing that he is helpless against it.
• The Little Sisters themselves. When the sea slugs that produce ADAM were discovered, they didn't produce it in large enough quantities for practical use. Only when they were implanted into a host do they produce neatly thirty times more ADAM. However, the only viable hosts were little girls, between five and eight years old. As violence increased in Rapture, they were genetically altered and conditioned to harvest ADAM from the corpses around the city, feeding it back into the system and becoming the backbone of Rapture's entire society. When it got bad enough, Ryan's men started going door to door and taking them, saying they were going to "save Rapture." These children were stolen from their families, altered so that they live in a peaceful fantasy world, compelled to seek out and harvest ADAM, able to feel pain but unable to die, and the only things in the world they can talk to are their mindless protectors. They will either die when the slug inside them is harvested, go completely insane when they grow up, or be left completely aware of the horrors of the city, helpless without their healing factor, if they're "rescued." And it's your decision if they survive the ordeals in both games or not.
• One of the largest Cry for the Devil moments in the entire game is if the player encounters a Big Daddy after all the Little Sisters in an area have been rescued or harvested. If the player follows them around enough, they will approach a vent, bang on it to make a Little Sister come out, then get confused and angry when one doesn't come out. He'll bang on the vent one more time, let out a scream of rage... and then walk away until he finds another vent to endlessly repeat the process unless he's killed.
• Really, the fate of Rapture itself is pretty sad if you stop and really think about it. Yes, Ryan's philosophy is put in terms that sound selfish and arrogant, but when you get down to it, what he's proposing is a utopia: "let's get rid of all the things that unfairly hold us back from achieving our true potential, let's stop letting other people push us around and build a better world!" It's a dream rooted in idealism — and, like all such idealistic dreams, base human nature makes it impossible. Let's not forget, Rapture really did achieve amazing things, particularly with the discovery of ADAM and EVE... and then it all went to hell.
  • This one just gets retroactively worse when you get to see some of Rapture before the civil war in Bioshock Infinite: Burial At Sea. Even though the cracks are starting to show, Rapture is a beautiful place full of people who are genuinely happy — and while there are selfish assholes there too, there are also people who are true to the "Rapture Dream"; people wanted to be part of this for reasons that weren't just petty. Two of the most minor but poignant examples are some of the NPCs you encounter whilst making your way to Cohen's in Episode One: firstly, there's a rich, wealthy African man getting a shoe-shine from a white man. This is twenty years before the American Civil Rights Movements that would grant African-Americans the right to vote or to a non-segregated environment, and nobody even looks twice at them. You pass at least three implicit homosexual couples — two lesbian couples, one with a baby (and think about how homosexual couples are still struggling with getting the rights to marry and adopt kids even today!), and a gay one. This is around the same time period that Alan Turing, the British cipher expert whose codecracking abilities were instrumental to Britain's survival during World War II, received such harassment from his own government for being gay that he chose to commit suicide^note his alternatives were, essentially, imprisonment or chemical castration... and, again, nobody pays the slightest bit of attention. It really highlights how Rapture could have been great... and, instead, it became a rusting hellhole at the bottom of the abyss, filled with people warped into deranged, deformed monsters out of sheer desperation to survive.
  • Rapture also opened its doors to some of the best and brightest scientists in the world. Yes, it was a place where morality was seen as petty, but you really have to give them credit for their accomplishments. Even putting the discovery of ADAM aside, they created automatic doors and recording devices before they were available on the surface, biometric security systems, advanced robotics, a self-aware artificial intelligence with 60's-era computing tech, a vector that could reanimate dead plants, and even chambers that could bring back the dead. All in a self-contained city situated at the bottom of the ocean. Not only could Rapture have been great, it could've laid the foundations for advancing human society ahead even further than where we are today. Now all those advancements will lay abandoned and decaying under miles of water, along with the brilliant minds who created them. Whatever other contributions they could've made to the world will remain lost forever.
• The last audio diary you can find from Cohen, up in the projection room after you complete his 'masterpiece':
  I could have been the toast of Broadway, the talk of Hollywood. But, instead, I followed you to this soggy bucket. When you needed my star light, I illuminated you. But now I rot, waiting for an audience that doesn't... ever... come... I'm writing something for you, Andrew Ryan... it's a requiem.
• The fate of minor character Anya Andersdotter: a single mother with no combat training (she was allowed into Rapture thanks to her genius as a fashion designer) who becomes a self-taught assassin in an attempt to reclaim her daughter from the Little Sisters programme. She ends up on Ryan's "trophy wall", suggesting that against all the odds she got very close to her goal... and then was killed just before she could make a difference, and never saw her daughter again.
• The fate of Peach Wilkins becomes one after The Reveal. At the time, you thought you were killing a deranged lunatic who was too delusional to be reasoned with. Turns out you killed a Properly Paranoid victim of both Fontaine and Ryan, who might well have been among your best allies under any other circumstances. Just the injustice of killing someone for misidentifying you and having them turn out to be right is enough to induce both sadness and anger. Sure, you did what you had to do (both in-story to ensure Jack's survival and on a meta level to progress the game), but still...
  • "Atlas! He was ours - ours!" After Fontaine's scheming and Ryan becoming a tyrant, Atlas's revolution would have seemed like a ray of hope for men like Peach - and in the end, he turned out to be just another one of Fontaine's lies.
• Scattered throughout Rapture are the bodies of various cats. Originally smuggled into Rapture from the surface, they've long since passed after losing their owners. The out-of-the-way placement of most of them suggests they starved to death or succumbed to some health problem, though a few are surrounded with blood.
• While Ryan wasn’t aiming for a Social Darwinist society, he inadvertently made Rapture this by forbidding charities. Just imagine your child being the Littlest Cancer Patient, but you and your spouse don’t have enough money to afford the treatment. There’s no one to collect donations from citizens who are sympathetic to your child’s situation, and there’s no organization similar to Make-A-Wish that can allow your child to enjoy their last moments in life. It’s tragic enough to have your child die because there’s no one to give you the help you desperately need, but to have the implication that your child is a “parasite” because they need help from others for something they have no control over would enrage any parent. Fontaine may be a Manipulative Bastard who set up his orphanage to get his hands on children to use as guinea pigs, but he’s smart enough to realize that he needs to give the parents some form of reassurance that they’re child will get a better life.

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