Special:Badtitle/NS90:User talk:DocColress/The great big examples suggestion topic!/reply (16)

So over the past week, I was able to play Infamous: Second Son and I believe I may have found a potential contender, a woman named Brooke Augustine! The key word however is "believe", because she's a bit of an odd case. I'll go over it more in the effort post.

Who is Brooke Augustine?: Augustine is the head of an oppressive government organization which captures super-powered people known as Conduits, despite being one herself. She not only partakes in the oppression of people like herself, but normal humans as well.

What does she do?: When we first see Augustine, a security truck holding three Conduit prisoners crashes at a Native American reservation where protagonist Delsin Rowe lives. After Delsin who is a Conduit himself accidentally obtains smoke powers from one of the escapees, he stumbles upon Augustine as she apprehends the escaped Conduit by encasing him in concrete. It's here where we see Augustine's sadistic nature already on display: due to the fact that she suspects Delsin of being a Conduit sympathizer, she tortures him for information by growing concrete spikes from his bones to where they stick out of his legs, and even if he admits to being a Conduit himself, she won't believe him and subjects the rest of his tribe to this torture. But unlike what she did to Delsin, she grows concrete spikes IN their organs and flesh, which is shown to be very painful and will slowly kill them unless she removes them, and she absolutely refuses to do so, putting Delsin on a mission to absorb her concrete powers so he can remove them himself.

Later on it's revealed that she intentionally let loose the Conduit prisoners from the truck, intentionally allowing them to put innocent people in danger during the ongoing "War on Conduits" that she created, simply because her organization was doing too good of a job capturing conduits, having even gone out of her way to train two of the conduits to hone their powers and make them more dangerous.

Is she heinous by the standards of the story?: Definitely. She not only keeps humans in Seattle under an oppressive military regime and is willing to torture and slowly kill people who won't sell out one of their own, but also intentionally staged an escape where she let loose dangerous superpowered humans for the sake of keeping her organization running. Everyone who isn't one of her troops loathes her for good reason.

Any Freudian Excuse or redeeming qualities?: This is what I mentioned by Augustine being a weird case. It turns out that when her powers awoke in a past confrontation with a highly dangerous Conduit, normal people became terrified of Conduits and would murder them in broad daylight. Because of how Conduits were treated by people, Augustine decided that Conduits couldn't be able to co-exist peacefully alongside humans, which is the real reason why she captures them and is secretly trying to protect them... or so she claims.

Really, this is where it gets tricky. Despite her claims that she's trying to save Conduits from people, she's actually making their situation worse: whenever she captures a Conduit, they're kept locked away and are subject to torture and all sorts of inhumane experiments. And hell, the first Conduit she subjected to this fate was a little girl who trusted her! However, she also genuinely believes that this is the only way to protect her fellow Conduits as well, but is this redeemable? I know some Complete Monsters can genuinely believe that they're in the right such as Frollo or Admiral Akainu, so would this go for Augustine? The main reason why I don't think that she's a proper Well-Intentioned Extremist is that her actions speak far louder than her words: experimenting and torturing the people you claim to protect shows that her priorities are incredibly skewed, and there's also the fact that she knowingly doomed an entire Native American tribe to die and takes sadistic pleasure in growing concrete in people's bodies.

Verdict: I personally argue that she qualifies. It's really hard to sympathize with someone who takes a lot of pleasure in hurting others, intentionally causes more disasters to keep her little government project running, and experiments on and tortures the people she claims to care about and protects.