The Brothers Rapture is a short fan film on YouTube that shows the perspective of Charles and Arthur, two well-known artists who lived their lives in the underwater city prior to its downfall.
The link can be found here
.
Tropes:
- Accidental Murder: How Arthur dies. But seeing how being a splicer in the main game is considered a Fate Worse than Death, it's probably a Mercy Kill for him.
- Afraid of Needles: While contemplating on taking the Plasmids, Charles mentioned that he was never fond of needles.
- All for Nothing: The brothers' entire reason for being in Rapture was to start a new life. Then by the time the events of the game came all that remains is Charles being alone and trapped in a broken-down society.
- Berserk Button: For Charles...Do not lecture me about sacrifice Arthur.
- Bittersweet Ending: In the end, Charles is all alone and stuck in an underwater city that's on its last legs, with no way to escape the place nor have a home to go back to on the surface. However, he seems to continue living on by sculpting ice to cope with his bleak situation, and hopefully be saved by Jack through a random encounter.
- Character Tics: Charles tends to hold onto his wedding ring whenever he's in deep thought.
- Dictionary Opening: The opener for the short film opens up with this line:"Our life is made by the death of others." - Leonardo Da Vinci
- Elemental Powers: Courtesy of the Plasmids, specifically Electro Bolt, Incinernate!, and Winter Blast.
- As Tippet demonstrates, he can light up his index finger like a lighter and create a ball of ice by rubbing his palms together. As a splicer, he scars Charles' face by superheating his palm in order to steal the Electro Bolt Plasmid.
- Charles creates ice through his hands to form ice sculptures and create a ice spike to kill Tippet, and accidentally Arthur, in self-defense.
- Arthur uses lightning to chisel and kiln clay, ice, and bronze for sculpting and to shoot a bolt of lightning at Tippet to prevent the latter from taking the Plasmid.
- Excellent Judge of Character: Charles is rightly skeptical of Andrew Ryan being a "pretentious elitist ass".
- Facial Horror: All of the on-screen characters eventually gained this to showcase their degrading sanity.
- Charles has a permanent burn scar in the shape of a hand on the right side of his face from a spliced Tippet. Even though he doesn't become a splicer, the guilt from accidentally murdering Arthur, the isolation he's trapped in, with having to fend off any stray splicers making their way near his home as Rapture is collapsing makes him one in all but name.
- Arthur's left face slowly becomes disfigured as a result of overusing Plasmids.
- Tippet's even worse off than Arthur as his entire face is now disfigured from Plasmid overuse.
- The Ghost: Andrew Ryan is only mentioned as the brothers start up their new home and workshop. Also, Frank Fontaine was indirectly mentioned by his company name through Tippet.
- Heroic Willpower: Despite being spliced, Charles never fell into insanity due to his sparing use of plasmids along with the memory of his late wife. Even when he's hit rock bottom after killing his brother and trapped in the fallen Rapture, Charles move onward by slowly carving ice.
- How We Got Here: The events that lead up to Charles' isolation and the broken down workshop happened four years prior to the game.
- Hypocrite: It wouldn't be Andrew Ryan if he wasn't one, which is something that Charles notes after meeting him.Charles: (about Andrew Ryan) "This Andrew Ryan boasts about this new city of Rapture as though he built it for us. Yet he wants us to build a 30-foot statue in his image for everyone to see?"
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: A spliced Tippet gets an ice spike stabbed through his chest by Charles, but Arthur was also accidentally stabbed as well.
- Irony: In his recording, Arthur states that he and his brother were sculptors, not philosophers. Then we get this little tidbit:Empires rise and fall. Oceans swell and then wither away into deserts. Men die, and their descendants forget them. (pause) But art... Art endures through time and hardship. It defines history. Defines culture and religion. Art endures through pain.
- Mad Artist: Arthur shows signs of becoming this as his sanity is slowly slipping away after overusing the plasmids, and if it wasn't for his accidental death by Charles, he would've eventually become a splicer.
- Mercy Kill: Charles' Accidental Murder of his brother Arthur can be seen as this. If Arthur continues living, he would eventually devolve into a splicer and later roam around in the fallen underwater city searching for ADAM until he's eventually killed in a more gruesome manner by the other splicers.
- Minimalist Cast: Only three characters are shown on-screen.
- Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: On the surface, Charles and Arthur were simple artists who were not very well known and not very rich. In Rapture, not only did they gain a reputation for themselves during the first three years but eventually attained fame thanks to the use of Plasmids.
- Only One Name: Besides Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine, everyone else only goes by one name.
- Only Sane Man: Charles is shown to be the only character who is rightly skeptical about his new home, and knows that Andrew Ryan isn't who he presents himself to be despite being given the "freedom to create art without boundaries". It says a lot that Charles never became a splicer despite taking Plasmids, as well as being able to survive in the present while his brother and Tippet are long dead.
- Original Character: Charles, Arthur, Tippet, and Charles' deceased wife Emma are all original characters in the short film.
- Rags to Riches: Deconstructed. Charles and Arthur were of lower-middle class due to their profession as artists on the surface, but made it big in Rapture. However, all of this came at a cost of sacrificing whatever home they had on the surface and eventually their sanity upon using Plasmids (moreso on Arthur's end) for the better quality of their work productivity. Charles even lampshades that while he is thankful to Plasmids for bettering their work and reputation, he wonders if it's worth their souls.
- Starving Artist: Played for Drama. In the past, Charles' late wife contracted an illness that could've been curable...if he could've afford it.
- The Teetotaler: A downplayed, Plasmid-injected version of this with Charles. Which spares him from the horrifying fate of becoming a splicer.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Something that Charles points out to Arthur when setting up their workshop in Rapture since the entire underwater city is a Hidden Elf Village, along with Andrew Ryan's Control Freak tendencies preventing others from leaving as well.
