Civil War
From BioShock Wiki
The power struggle in Rapture between Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine was the largest conflict in the history of Rapture. Occurring before and continuing during Jack Ryan's arrival, the conflict serves as the driving force behind the events of the game, and is the reason why Rapture turned from a utopia to a dystopia.
[edit] Beginning
Frank Fontaine, whose power rivaled Andrew Ryan's due to his control of the ADAM through Fontaine Futuristics, which had become the true currency in Rapture, was initially seen as an example of how someone could come from nothing to everything in Rapture in the eyes of Ryan. However, when Ryan started to hear about Fontaine's smuggling ring, which was operating from his business Fontaine Fisheries in Neptune's Bounty, doubled with the fact that Fontaine seemed to be building his own army of Splicers in his poorhouses, whose residents saw Ryan as an elitist and had full support for Fontaine, led Ryan to eventually send his security forces, led by Sullivan, to investigate.
Through the torture and murder of many smugglers, Ryan's men could not link any evidence to Fontaine until Peach Wilkins, Fontaine's main smuggler, tipped them off. Ryan's security force overcame Fontaine's army of working class Splicers and apparently killed him in a fiery shootout. Despite this, some civilians of Rapture, especially the lower class who had supported Fontaine, realized that Ryan was becoming everything he had fought against before: a tyrant.
[edit] The Civil War
Having not only publicly hanged the smugglers, Ryan had now nationalized Fontaine Futuristics, which was antithetical to his beliefs. Adding to this, Fontaine's "own demise didn't overly inconvenience him", as his spliced up followers, now led by the enigmatic Atlas, a proletariat and family man, revolted and attacked high-class establishments such as the Kashmir Restaurant on New Year's Eve, 1959. This ignited a sweeping panic throughout Rapture, causing chaos and weakening the city, physically and psychologically, as the upper class citizens lived in fear of being targeted by Atlas' forces.
To try and control this civil war Ryan put in many new laws which went against his original view of the city, such as curfews and reducing the amount of groups allowed to congregate to four. Instead of stopping Fontaine's cause, however, it fueled it, giving the working class even more evidence that their promised utopia was false and that its leader had become a tyrant. To try to curb this, Ryan then started barricading certain places off from people in the city so Fontaine couldn't spread his message, but this was not effective. The civilians who were terrified of being attacked and wanted to adapt to the tense climate were allowed to do so by Plasmids such as Electro Bolt or Insect Swarm which were produced by Ryan Industries, or the Power to the People stations set up by Fontaine.
Eventually, when Ryan realized that Atlas had gained too much support, he agreed to Suchong's idea to use pheromones to mind-control citizens so that they could become part of his own spliced army to combat Atlas's. This worked, and even though it went against everything Ryan believed in, Atlas' resistance was cut off from ADAM due to Ryan owning Fontaine Futuristics, and could only launch guerrilla attacks against Ryan's forces. Eventually, Ryan became so obsessed with protecting his city that he spliced his forces to a huge degree, leading to a shortage of ADAM even for his own people, despite his deployment of the Little Sisters and Big Daddies.
[edit] Aftermath
This eventually made Rapture reach a point where the civilians who had used ADAM in response to the war ended up killing the sane population, except for those who managed to barricade themselves in hideouts, such as Tenenbaum or Julie Langford. Splicers roamed Rapture, desperately searching for ADAM, while crazed inhabitants such as Sander Cohen and Steinman were given the opportunity to freely try to achieve their twisted ideals. Atlas and Ryan both were locked in a stalemate behind their own defenses - at which point Atlas summons Jack to finish the war.
