User blog comment:Dragon-Fox 7/Character Sheet/@comment-27775853-20161107044318/@comment-4867780-20161108032353

Actually, the Prototype comic mini-series makes the transition between the first and second game, and you can see how Alex Mercer's world view came to change so much.

He was using his powers for the greater good by taking down warlords and crime syndicates behind the scenes, but he gradually came to realize that humans only care about themselves in the end. They feel relieved from getting their safety and freedom back thanks to Alex's actions, but they don't care about the less fortunate and just walk right past them like they didn't exist.

Eventually, he came to the conclusion that humans simply don't deserve to be protected, and the saddest part about it is that it's really hard to argue with his logic. His genuinely good intentions slowly crumbling to dust by lack of good people to fight for is a painfully realistic deconstruction of the heroic archetype, and it's really hard not to share his feelings as you read the comic.

His loss of faith and loneliness led him to live a life of seclusion in an isolated snowy cottage, where he met two kind-hearted people (a retired father and his young adult daughter) through which he slowy rebuilt his faith in humanity, befriending the old man and eventually falling in love with the young woman. Until he discovered that the first used to be a sociopathic crime lord and had a barrel of innocent blood on his hands, and that his sweet daughter actually took after him when she blew his brain out to claim the stash of money he had just revealed.

This last-straw betrayal is when he snapped and the glove came off for good. Since mankind (at least his experience of it) was so consistently ruthless and self-serving, then holding onto his humanity and trying to find his place in the world was a mistake all along. And since they were so hopelessly cold, he came to think that Elizabeth Green had the right idea, and that turning humanity into a hive-minded species was the right thing to do ("Think about it -- no more conflict. No more disease. No more suffering. Don't you see? I'm giving it a second chance" - right before the final battle, and James is still just roaring like an angry gorilla).

That's the reason he was so apathethic and indifferent to his own death ("Huh. Welcome to the top of the food chain." - famous "don't give a fuck" last words ^ ^;) : because he can't make a safer and united species then he's better off dead anyway, so it's really not much of a loss in his eyes, and I suspect he even feels sorry for James.

Alex was the villain of the second game, because James didn't give a damn about the subject and only wanted his daughter back, and the players are humans so characters seeking to end mankind as we know it are by definition bad guys. But whether Alex was actually wrong or not is an entirely different question, and one that will most likely never be answered.