(31:51) BioShock Infinite - Part 12: Chen Lin

1. I don't know if this is worth worrying about or not, but I begin to wonder about the placement of these Kinetoscopes. Why would there be a special video-newsreel about the growing problems of poverty, panhandling, violence, and labor unrest in the entrance to a club in Finktown, especially one that portrays Fink himself as being unable to control the situation. You'd think Fink would want to cast himself as the benevolant all-father in perfect command of his labor force and protecting them from malcontents. Of course that also begs the question of why all the various Voxophones are wherever they are, but that way lies madness.
   
   
2. So I know Fink is a turn-of-the-century Robber Baron (effectively), but if he's facing labor unrest, why would he throw a private army at Booker? Amusement? However valuable Booker is to his operations as a strikebreaker, surely he doesn't have enough men to casually throw them away like this. Perhaps these guys are all politically or socially unreliable and Fink's taking the opportunity to be rid of them. Or maybe he's just crazy.
   
   
3. So Fink's brother is the reason for all the musical anachronisms we've been hearing. Oh god, does his brother run Columbia's RIAA?
   
   
4. I wonder who Vox Anarchist is supposed to be (from the wanted poster). Have we seen any such man yet? I suppose we wouldn't have, given that we just met Fitzroy in the first place.
   
   
5. There are Hispanic names on the cellblock list along with Chen Lin. I don't believe we've seen any hispanics in Columbia yet, though given everything I seriously doubt their position is particularly exalted around here.
   
   
6. This is less prediction and more observation, but I really like that Booker is open about the awful poo poo he no-doubt did as a Pinkerton whilst strikebreaking. After having already screwed up once by getting caught out in a lie regarding his intentions vis-a-vis Elizabeth, I like that he's forthcoming, even without being asked, about having done what he did. There's only so much "liar revealed" or "sudden buried past exposure" that I'm prepared to tolerate in an otherwise well-written work.
   
   
7. As usual, Cpl. Vivian Monroe's voxophone is endlessly fascinating. For one thing, it reveals that she came to Finkton on her own volition, out of a desire (it sounds like) for honorable, military service. Yet more evidence of Columbia's rather nuanced policy towards women relative to the wider society perhaps, as she could not find a means of fulfilling that desire on the ground, but felt she could in the air.
   
   But why, if Slate disillusioned her as to Comstock's real policies, would she choose to go to work for Fink? It's possible that her notions of honor were (as Sherman would put it) "all moonshine". Or it's possible there's more to Fink than he's letting on?
   
   EDIT: I can't believe I missed the obvious implication. She could also not mean Fink at all. After all, her Voxophone was found in a hidden alcove within Chen Lin's store. Maybe she went to Finkton to try and hook up with the Vox?
   
   
8. To play devil's advocate for a minute with Comstock's "cruelty" voxophone, he could mean a number of things by it, such that God was cruel to his children, and thus Comstock and the whites should be cruel to everyone else. But there's a sort of twisted implication therein. He mentions that "Cruelty can be instructive", which could be taken as meaning that the children of God were taught harsh lessons via the fall and the flood, and that his real intention is to "better" the other races by means of oppression and cruelty. This dovetails reasonably well with certain hyper-paternalistic colonial attitudes towards the subject peoples of the various European colonial empires at around the turn of the century. A more disciplinarian version of the "White Man's Burden", if you will. Akin to the Kulturkampf theories running about in Germany at the time, ones that would eventually inform another political movement you might have heard of...
   
   
9. I couldn't make out what that spreadsheet-looking blackboard in Chen Lin's cell was supposed to be. Did anyone get a better look?
   
   
10. Well, toss out all chances of Lutese and her sibling/husband/genderflipped clone having any sort of rational explanation behind them. But I believe this is the first positive confirmation we've gotten that we're actually dealing with alternate dimensions (albeit with heavy indications beforehand.
    
    
11. Hrm. I was wondering if this other Columbia might be drastically different from the first, perhaps even where the Blacks are on top and the Whites kept in misery and squalor, but it appears there's a sort of conservation of momentum within these alternate Columbias. The only major change so far seems to be the quantity of prisoners in lockup and the fate of Chen Lin. So far.
    
    
12. Mother of God, it's like the guards, dead in one universe and alive in the other, are in some kind of quantum superposition between alive and dead (like the infusions I suppose). It looks highly unpleasant. But doesn't that mean that Chen Lin will be in the same?
    
    EDIT: Well at least he's handling it better than the guards...
    
    
13. So in this world, Chen Lin's Brother-in-Law is Fink's head of security? But anti-miscegenation laws SHOULD have prohibited that, unless there's been a radical shift in Columbia's policies in this world.
    
    EDIT: Forgive me, I assumed that it was Fink's security chief who'd married Chen Lin's sister, not Chen Lin who married the security chief's. That still doesn't answer the miscegenation question however, though it does explain the shrine changeover.
    
    EDIT 2: Another thought occurs to me. We didn't see the original Mrs. Lin very close up, but the models look eerily similar. Maybe just a facet of the graphics engine and maybe my imagination. Or maybe this is Mrs. Lin in a more profound sense. Maybe in this world the same person is white instead of Asian?
    
    
14. Was Elizabeth's sleeve always torn? Or does the game track progressive damage to the main characters' models?
    
    

HGH fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Nov 6, 2013