YMMV / Culture of the Past

• Complete Monster:
  • Estefa Dora, posing as a kind yet eccentric inventor and businessman, is the true mastermind of the events in the story. Once a discriminated orphan named Raven Onyx, Estefa caused a car crash that killed two people, and used it to fake his death and change his identity. Estefa became a beloved businessman, while secretly plotting to use a flood and his new product, Water Block, to force all Inklings and Octolings into their cephalopod forms and retain their ability to think, while killing everyone not using it. Teaming up with Lewis, Eddie, Gabbie, and the Twins, Estefa gets Sebastian and Cynthia arrested, forcing Claudia on the run; brutally kills his old friend Oblia when she stumbles across his plans; and kidnaps Misa and Lily, murdering the latter and dismissing the former's experiences as a fellow Inktoling. Later, Estefa takes over the Off the Hook! building and reveals Cassie's amoral actions and the Splatoon covering them up, leading to a mass panic. Confronted by Misa after his plans fail, Estefa considers them no true Inktoling because they haven't suffered enough, and when they try to save him, he tries to take them down with him. In death, Estefa spends his last moments laughing and gloating about how the Splatoon is ruined.
  • Lewis Coltrane, once a scientist spurned for his amateurish, plagiarised inventions, turned to working with DJ Octavio and Commander Tartar out of bitterness, aiding in the mass torture of over 10,000 Octolings, with Isa Raines among the survivors left with PTSD from his actions. Later on, Lewis encounters Estefa Dora and helps him in his plan to flood Inkopolis and Octo Valley, creating two drugs to poison Inklings and mind-control Octolings, while aiding in the creation of Water Block. With sadistic glee in his evil deeds, Lewis sends thugs after the heroes to attack them and drug the Off the Hook! duo, but when one of his attacks fails, he snaps on his own soldiers, murdering one of them as a demonstration to the rest. Eventually, Lewis helps Estefa take over the Off the Hook! building with a mind-controlled Marina, and when Isa stops him from murdering people in Octo Valley, he forces his soldiers to kill them, only for them to snap under his abuse and open fire on him. In his last moments, Lewis shows no hesitation in brutally turning on them, taunting them about everything.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Lewis Coltrane is revealed to have assisted Tartar in his mass blending of octolings, including Michelle’s sister, Kara’s Mother, and Sarah’s best friend Jake, while also unethically experimenting and torturing Isa and dozens of other octolings.
  • Estefa Dora crosses it when he tries to flood the entire world, using water block to transform inklings and octolings into squids and octopus and keep them in water, essentially trapping them in fates worse then death. He even states that he was fine with killing other inktolings if they got in his way, showing he doesn’t even care about his own race, and would happily have killed humans if he didn’t like them.
  • Eddie Moss crosses the line by brutally beating Marina to the point of her almost dying, an act of sheer brutality that shocks everyone around him. While she survives, she is left blind in one eye, and is no longer able to talk.