|
|
"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | My dear, I'd love to give you some anesthetic to grace your experience, I really would, but I have quite run out of it, and anyway, there is something less aesthetically pleasing about sculpting an unconscious patient. If they are unconscious, the blood hardly spurts at all, their eyes don't have that look of possession by the god of terror, and how satisfying could that be, now I ask you? I may have to stop and have some more ADAM and a touch of EVE myself ... Oh do try to accept this, my dear, appreciate it as a sacrificial aesthetic experience. A sacrifice to Aphrodite! | „ |
| ~ Doctor J.S. Steinman preparing to mutilate a woman he kidnapped. |
Doctor J.S. Steinman is a supporting antagonist and POV character in BioShock: Rapture, a prequel novel to the science fiction video game series BioShock.
He is a renowned plastic surgeon who came to Rapture to practice his morbid, twisted view on physical beauty on unwilling patients. He kidnaps and mutilates numerous "patients" and splicers to death as his frustration with his perceived failures and ADAM addiction drives him insane, becoming more and more obsessed with creating physical beauty as he overused ADAM. However, unlike his video game counterpart, the novel version of Dr. J.S. Steinman was already a ruthless, sadistic serial killer before he went completely insane.
What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]
- He came to Rapture with the intention of putting his extremely twisted, "artistic" view on beauty into practice through cruel experiments on living people. Steinman does this by kidnapping various unwilling patients or splicers and performing live surgery on them, agonizingly carving his victims' faces and bodies apart with a scalpel. When unhappy with his results, Steinman gives his "patients" ADAM to regrow their flesh, only to torture them even further to keep them alive and fix his mistakes, prolonging their suffering. He rinses and repeats this method until his patients die from blood loss and shock.
- Shown to kill a paralyzed splicer and a blonde woman in his chapters, Steinman is confirmed to have taken many more lives with his agonizing surgery when he reveals that he has collected numerous skinned faces of his victims as trophies, making him stand out from the rest of BioShock's more powerful and ambitious villains as a particularly vile serial killer.
- When his assistant Nurse Chavez reveals she intends to turn Steinman in to Rapture's police for his crimes, he responds by detaining and torturing her to death in the exact same way as his previous victims.
- Unlike in the games, BioShock: Rapture portrays Steinman's psychosis in a much different light. In BioShock, Steinman's mind has become so shattered that he is reduced to a raving lunatic constantly acting on the instructions of a hallucination of the Greek goddess "Aphrodite", making it hard to determine if his moral agency is clear. In BioShock: Rapture, however, this incarnation of Steinman had already consciously planned on mutilating people to death before he lost his mind from ADAM addiction. In addition, Aphrodite is never presented as an ever-present physical force guiding Steinman in his work, but rather a fragment of Steinman's ego he witnessed during an ether and cocaine-induced drug trip giving him the final push into acting out on his inner desires.
- Steinman is also portrayed as a more unambiguously malevolent character in BioShock: Rapture. He claims he intentionally withholds on giving his "patients" anesthetics during surgery because he is satisfied by seeing more blood spurt, and enjoys seeing his patients in fear while he operates on them.
- Although he insists on wanting to make his patients "beautiful", this is all proven to be delusional and ego-driven: Steinman shows no true care for his patients' well-being. He possesses a God complex where he believes his surgical skills give him the gift of a God or an artist to make people "beautiful" by his standards, while looking down on those who are too "ugly", "fat", or "plain" to the point of misanthropy.
- He displays no true loyalty to Andrew Ryan, Rapture, or anything other than himself. He is willing to help Ryan's archenemy Frank Fontaine in his plot to fake his own death behind Ryan's back as long as he is rewarded with money and ADAM. He cuts all ties with his friend Sander Cohen for being a "looney tune" despite not being any better than Cohen in regards to sanity and morality. And lastly, despite being rumored to be in a relationship with Ryan's mistress Diane McClintock, it is made very clear he doesn't care about her when he fantasizes about mutilating her face in the same way as his "patients".
- After losing his mind to ADAM addiction in his deluded killings, Steinman continues to mutilate countless more people to death in the Medical Pavilion until Jack kills him in BioShock.
Trivia[]
- His novel counterpart qualifies even more as Pure Evil as it was shown that he was a serial killer even before he went insane, while there's no indication that his game counterpart was already evil before he became addicted to ADAM, giving him moral agency issues.
- He's the first PE in Bioshock franchise who isn't a psychopath, followed by Zachary Hale Comstock.
External Links[]
- J.S. Steinman on the Villains Wiki
- J.S. Steinman on the Bioshock Wiki
[]
 Pure Evils
| ||
|
Video Games Books | ||