I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I'd try it with the Steam summer sale.
Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that's interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn't stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I'm checking this shit and it was released in 2018!
If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with ~~good dialogue~~ a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.
I apologize to once again to keep my bullshit going but to your point about Dutch’s characterization (which I think nails him to a tee) I think he was written a faux (some kind of) radical intentionally but not because of some lack of theory (but this could still also be true) but for both finishing up Arthur’s arc when he realizes he’s full of shit and setting his character up to make sense retroactively for RDR1 as a villain for Marston.
Agreed. I think Dutch is brilliant. He is absolutely an Egoist and has essentially recontextualized American self-mythology to justify doing the same shit that the bourgeoise do. Not in a "revolutions are bad cause they just become the tyrant" way, but in the sense that Dutch witnesses real suffering and horrors, takes note, on some level does care, but still cannot kill this BS idea of the American Dream. He is "I'm not like other girls" but as a gunslinger. We see it in how he never really interacts with the workers we see suffering, he never really interacts with the immigrant communities, he never really interacts with the Natives. He cares on some level for their plights, but he will use them as excuses, as cover for his own schemes.
he is like those people in the early days of the Russian Revolution who joined anarchist orgs just to be criminals and had to be purged by said orgs and led to a bunch of distrust