this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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RDR2 is about a man realizing he and his ilk were sent by the American bourgeoisie to colonize land only to then have it stolen again from them in turn. It’s about the remorse from realizing you’ve been wrong your entire life, and desperately wishing to undo it. Arthur is scum, he even vocalizes this - he hates himself. He then realizes he does in fact, have a soul but if only too late.
Most of this isn’t written explicitly which is why I would argue the writing is good, actually.
Also you get to kill Klan members.
You get to kill Klansmen, pinkertons, us army, sheriffs, italians, confederate dead enders, oil men, and a great variety of other late closing of the west scum.
100%
You can surmise some of what Arthur’s values are by who he perceives as his enemies.
He also really hates debtors considering his relation to ~~Herr Muller.~~ Strauss.
Does the debtor thing change over the game? I remember that incident early on being what gets him really thinking about who he is. It's a lot more personal than robbing banks and running cons, and it seems to be his shooting the albatross moment.
I think his antagonism towards mueller helps highlight Arthur's hypocrisy in trying to think of himself as some kind of principled robber. Mueller robs people ruthlessly with less blood spilled, while Arthur shoots people left and right, while trying to consider himself noble or at least better.
Like, I think that's a theme - they're all crooks with various levels of pretension about it. Josiah and that card sharp are gentlemen thieves running clever cons. Arthur's a simple thug. John's kind of a dumbass brought up in the life. His wife is ujst kind of stuck with it all for lack of alternatives. The younger women have the freedom of a mostly egalitarian comrades at the cost of the violence and uncertainty of their lifestyle. Lenny and Charles get a place where they're respected and valued they wouldn't find in white society. Micah's a stone psychopath who show's all their pretension's of better or worse thieves and killers to be empty. And Dutch is the what no theory does to a motherfuckers ideologe who brings all these lost souls together but whose hubris and lack of grounding drives them towards destruction.
They're a mish-mash of all kinds of people alienated from mainline society for many different reasonns whose membership in the gang grants them a very precarious and temporary freedom from the violence of the world, at the cost of being predators who feed on the vulnerable people of that world despite whatever pretensions they might have about what they do.
There's definitely something there about the cost of freedom being a life of war. You can be free from society, but that inevitably puts you outside of society as a criminal and an outlaw, and severely limits how you can earn your daily bread. You can be free and wild, but you're gonna die young and die hard. And most people don't choose that life, but are stuck there by circumstance and the violence of society. And then the "closing of the west" brings the violence and control of the state to the liminal space between the alleged wilderness and the alleged civilization, sort of reflecting how the cops have encroached in to every single moment of our lives.
Major spoilers for RDR2.
spoiler
The entirety of the debtor storyline pretty much sums up Arthur’s entire character arc. He loathes working for ~~Muller~~ Strauss in the (first?) collection mission he contracts the illness that eventually wakes him the fuck up. Over the course of the game when you accept missions from Muller, Arthur snipes at him over the nature of his work and grouses about having to be his attack dog. When he finds out he is dying, he starts wrestling with his mortality and with it his morality. This culminates with him giving ~~Muller~~ Strauss the boot from the camp. (Or I think outright killing him? It might be a decision I can’t remember.)My biggest criticism of the games writing is it saying “Arthur doing these shakedowns is the thing that literally kills him” It’s a bit too on the nose but overall the writing is great.
Sorry if I don't get involved in this discussion as I don't know the game enough. I just think that it's cool that you two are really hashing this out.
This discussion shows one of the main reasons why it's such a good game though. It has a depth that very few other games have achieved, not just in terms of the world and lore, but as a genuinely human kind of story that also manages not to turn all its social commentary into tepid, lib-friendly clichés.
However I don't know why people in this thread keep calling the loan shark character "Muller." His name is Strauss.
Yeah that’s on me.
spoiler
he doesn't kill him he basically runs him out the camp with a "GO ON GIT!" kinda thingThere is literally nothing wrong with this? What exactly is the criticism?
Its a minor criticism, but my issue with it is it’s not subtle. Like working for a debtor was obviously killing Arthur spiritually and metaphorically, making it also literally killing him seemed unnecessary.
Oh I get you, but I don’t think that was because they couldn’t be subtle, that was because it was a prequel and there is absolutely no mention of Arther in the first game, so he kinda has to die.
Oh no I agree he has to die, the story is a tragedy, just the manner of his death in this way was a little silly.
Agree to disagree. But I would like to hear an alternative if you have one.
spoiler
I don't think you can kill him you just get the option to run him out of camp eventuallyArthur sees himself as a simple thug, and in practice, is a simple thug. But when they’re not robbing he’s actually quite complex, but as OP points out, he hates himself.
There are several moments in the game where he talks with the women in the gang, and they all compliment him for being thoughtful, intelligent, and handsome compared to the other male members, but he dismisses them and says he doesn’t know anything about anything. He also talks about how much of a bad and ugly person he is in his journals.
Dutch, his “father,” and some of the other members such as Micah and Bill see Arthur as the enforcer and nothing more. They never ask him about his thoughts on plans or life and in fact tell him to shut up and shoot, so Arthur just goes along because father knows best. In addition to everything else mentioned in these threads, Arthur also has low self esteem. He’s aware of the harm he brings, but doesn’t believe he has any good in himself until he gives up his life for the gang.
Uncle sings both John Brown’s Body and Dixie at the campfire
https://youtu.be/gUo9XpuPYaA
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Damn, I'm in!
I disagree. The Van Der Linde gang was somewhat anarchistic before Dutch recruited Strauss and hit his head. And even then, they didn’t extract rent on the behalf of anyone except themselves.
They didn’t colonize any land, and in fact, the gang resisted the settlers in the form on being outlaws and grasping onto the last pieces of “wildness” as modernization creeped in. Arthur only realizes the gang’s struggle for freedom was shared with other marginalized groups at much more intense and existential levels, such as the Guarman slaves, the Indians, and even less “grander” groups such as the sex workers, and Arthur himself from the very gang he considered his whole identity.
I agree with everything else, but him being “wrong his entire life” isn’t necessarily about land or colonization, but him realizing that he’s one of the few people in the gang who still truly wants freedom whereas Dutch - his father figure - and his faction (who he considered much of them as family) are clinging onto a delusion of freedom and holding him back, no different than how the government’s colonization of land and people is a delusion of freedom and holding other people back.
tbh I didn’t mean the gang specifically, the cowboy mythos was created and perpetuated by the bourgeoisie to colonize land indirectly and Arthur’s story is kind of a recognition of the farse that it was
Oh yeah in terms of deconstruction it definitely recognizes the mythology.