(as someone who is training in dressage I honestly love rockstar for adding leg yields and piaffes. I really wanna train in western too one day so bad though!) love love love thiiiiss
as a fellow horseback rider i really appreciate the realislm levels rockstar went to with our equine brothers and sisters in this game
Why does Arthur cross out words that are perfectly spelled, did he look at his H’s and think “hmmm, this ain’t swirly enough” and rewrote the entire thing just so the ‘H’ can have a bigger loop, Rockstar explain
Read Dead Redemption 2 is about a group of middle-aged men, along with the women and children they’ve shanghaied into their lifestyle, living as outlaws due to their refusal- and truthfully their inability- to follow the rules of polite society. Wherever the Van der Linde gang goes, they leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake because they cannot resist the urge to rob every stagecoach they see or scam every wealthy fool they see, until they end up in a massive firefight with the entire town which they’re then forced to flee from.
No matter how many times Dutch claims their end goal is to start fresh and be honest, good people, this simple thing is treated as some far-off pie-in-the-sky ambition. It always requires “more money”, which translates as “more crime”, which in turn sets them farther away from the objective. They always have the opportunity to become decent people, but actively refuse it, choosing to do whatever they please to whoever they please and simply expecting to never face consequences for these actions. They get numerous chances at redemption and sabotage each and every one simply because the local townsfolk are “stupid inbred rednecks” or similar lessers that ‘deserve’to be robbed or played for suckers or flat-out murdered. They act as if their misdeeds are just the natural order…unless they don’t go as planned, in which case it’s just some endearingly bumbling antics rather than literally decimating a community. They act as if bad luck is to blame for the situations they find themselves in, rather than their own wanton disregard for human life and decency. All of this is doubly true for Arthur Morgan specifically, the missions involving his ex-fiancee Mary serving as a reminder that his direction in life is the result of conscious decisions that he’s made and continues to make. Dutch’s promise of a better life for his gang is a farce, a pipe dream. Nothing will ever change for the Van der Linde gang because they live by the gun and (spoiler alert) will die by the gun.
Additionally, the gang refuses to accept that their halcyon days are a bygone age. Times are changing: train robberies are considered old-fashioned, all the famous wild west gunslingers are washed-up has-beens, and industrialized cities are becoming the new face of the country. Even the face of crime has changed, as slick urban mafiosi run Saint Denis with the sort of status and success the likes of Dutch Van der Linde could only dream of. The way of life they have become accustomed to is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and the more they reject the “modern” age in favor of clinging to what’s familiar, the harder it is for them to integrate the way they allegedly want to. In fact, even if the gang did manage to cut their shit and live peacefully, the Pinkteron Detective Agency would still probably catch up to them because- big shocker- information travels around now since the United States is becoming a cohesive country rather than a loose dispersal of settlements with no clue what’s going on in the next one over. Now when you rob a train, you get people pursuing you that aren’t dealt with by moving your camp a few miles away. You see, the Van der Lindes aren’t fighting people, they’re fighting the march of society: a society that’s rapidly evolving which they cannot keep pace with by sticking to the same script that worked decades ago.
By and large, looking at the story in broad strokes makes it seem like an allegory for the folly of conservatism.
whitemanning critical 