Character Information
Name: Grace Holloway
Canon: Bioshock 2
Age: 51
Sex: Female
Occupation:
Household:751 Partridge Drive
'Husband': Atticus Finch || foureyed_lawyer
'Children': Yuki Nagato || bogusmagicker
Regains: None
Personality:
Grace is a woman who has lived a hard and gritty life, therefore she's grown to be tough-as-nails. She is tenacious, but has seen her share of bad luck and bigotry. While she tries her best, she's not ruthlessly ambitious enough to rise to the top of Rapture's elite. Some might consider her a hard-eyed skeptic; she knows the rules of the game are usually bent against her, and she's been through periods of heavy depression. She's pragmatic before romantic, and has only been in true love once.
However, she does put her full heart into all that she does and says, so that whether she's voicing her opinions over the PA system or nightingalin' in a Jazz club, people listen. She has a powerful voice, worn down but still toughened with age and experience, and that soulful potency carries through her music. Simply put, Grace was born to sing the blues and act as a voice of the community. When she rallies the locals to the call, they hound the targets of her bitter tirades without question.
For an aging woman, she carries herself with a remarkably dignified presence, despite her humble standing. Standing tall and unarmed while looking death in the face, Grace has never resorted to using Plasmids in Rapture to modify her body of give herself enhanced abilities. She has seen the devastating effects of "Splicing", junkies violent and desperate for their next hypodermic hit. Very few remain "unspliced" in Rapture by the time of Bioshock 2, so this is something of a testament to her values, that she has stayed true to the self she was born with. She may also refrain from splicing because she finds the city's dependence on little-girl ADAM gatherers particularly repulsive.
Grace is not without her share of regrets: She is a barren woman; has never had children of her own and this has been a private point of grief. She has a special fondness for families, for little Eleanor Lamb, and for the innocence of most children. That she lost Eleanor to kidnappers remains her deepest guilt and shame. She harbors a wicked grudge against the Big Daddies, particularly Subject Delta, considering them soulless tin monsters. Following her encounter with Subject Delta, she has only begun to realize her misjudgment and prejudice.
Finally, it is important to note that her values rest with the people from the 'wrong side of the tracks'. She has grown up knowing the plight of the poor, and she embraces The Rapture Family's collectivist, altruistic values of standing up for one another, toughing it out through hard times, doing your share and helping those in need. She knows that extended Family will always be her backbone of support.
History
Grace Holloway was born into poverty in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1920s. She and her folks struggled through the worst of the Great Depression era, and she grew up in a Hooverville shantytown with the radio on, listening to the best of the blues.
She later started singing at the local jazz clubs, and became something of a local celebrity. In the late 1940's, she was invited down to the underwater "free city" of Rapture, and took a leap at the opportunity to live among progressive-minded people, to sing and a start a family in a city of hopeful new enterprise.
For the first few years of Rapture's golden age, life was sweet. She performed in Fleet Hall beside stars like Anna Culpepper and Sander Cohen, although the elites who came to see her sing at the top dollar venues didn't really understand a word of the blues. Disheartened but determined, she kept to her style, until "times got hard, and all our old bigotries bubbled right back up." Cast out of the toast of the artistic scene, Grace landed in the Drop. Pauper's Drop, under the tracks, was the worst slum neighborhood in Rapture, where she spent every saved penny to open up her own Jazz club, The Limbo Room. Blues singing was well received among Rapture's laboring poor, and Grace finally felt at home, albeit somewhat defeated. Still, she found her only love in a stage door Johnny, a labor organizer named James who "liked hearin' songs about what it's really like to live in this town." Unfortunately, Grace was barren and could not start a family with him.
Enter Dr. Sophia Lamb, a social-psychologist with a radically different vision for Rapture. A firm preacher of a socialist agenda and selfless altruism, Lamb began offering free counseling sessions down at the Drop's clinic on Sundays. When Grace's pride finally broke and her depression drove her to seek help, Dr. Lamb became a trusted confidante. She invited Grace to join with her and "The Rapture Family," a cult of collectivists. With new found faith in a brighter, fairer future, they began a subversive movement that would eventually take over the city when Rapture's paranoid founder and tyrant Andrew Ryan's vision failed and fell.
As her fevor for the Rapture Family movement grew stronger, Grace began promoting Lamb's ideals and became something of a neighborhood spokesperson, handing out Lamb's pamphlets at the Limbo room in between songs, spreading her message. Eventually, Ryan blacklisted her, along with several other artists critical of Rapture's failing society. Then one day her lover James went missing, rounded up by Ryan's men. She began to grow even more bitter and hateful towards Rapture's exploitative elite.
Finally, Dr. Lamb herself was jailed by for her outspoken stance against Andrew Ryan, but not before leaving her daughter little Eleanor Lamb in Holloway's hands. Grace was overjoyed to be gifted the role of caretaker, barren and childless herself, and so she felt even more deeply indebted to The Family. Riots uptown and the resultant economic crash forced Grace to close The Limbo Room, but she managed to scratch together barely enough to get by.
But then came the hardest blow of all. One moment her back was turned, and in the next Eleanor was "babysnatched" by sleezy news reporter and Ryan's mole, Stanley Poole. Grace despaired that she'd lost Lamb's child for good, until she saw the girl one day, transformed into an ADAM harvesting Little Sister, accompanied by one of the "Big Daddies". This was a man who would come to be known as Subject Delta. When she tried to approach the girl and take her hand, Delta flung the woman to the floor and broke her jaw.
When Lamb's followers broke her out of prison and took control of Rapture, following Ryan's death, Grace remained a loyal follower of the Family...it was the least she could do.
Grace was well into her 50's when Subject Delta reawakened, a well-respected local leader in Pauper's Drop after she kicked that poorhouse-leeching mogul Augustus Sinclair out of his own hotel. When Delta showed up in her district on the Atlantic Express, he found the station on lockdown. Unable to go further, he was forced to progress through the Drop while Grace threatened and goaded him venomously over the PA System for daring to show up on her doorstep. She sent the local splicers his way, to give him all the trouble she could muster.
When he finally found her alone in her safe house apartment at the Sinclair Deluxe, she was ready to face down the Tin Daddy proud, cold and unarmed, with only her righteous bitter grudge and a cold stare down. She told him to take the override gate key to the train station and "finish the job" of ending her, sure in faith of The Family that they would not let him "stroll out alive". To her dismay, the 'monster' did not stoop to the latter.
With her life spared, she has a change of heart and comes to an understanding that Subject Delta is not a baby-snatching monster but good and "thinking" man, not cruel but desperate to find his surrogate daughter. After sending him on his way with two security turrets for aid, Grace begins to doubt Dr. Lamb's word.