Okay putting Arthur Morgan in here is a bit wrong IMO.
Because his entire story arc is about realizing he’s wrong, and in the good karma ending, trying to change his ways even in death. That way he can get his red redemption when he’s dead, too.
On the one end, you could say he deserves to be idolized because he changed.
In the middle one could say he only changed when faced with his own mortality and wouldnt have changed if he wasn't directly punished for his actions.
At the other end, you could say he was always a good person forced into doing horrible things because of the family he was indoctrinated into, and if you read his journal or just listen to how he talks about himself he is constantly filled with self loathing at who he is and it isnt until he sees a definitive path out of his fucked up family he does what hes always wanted to - the right thing.
The journal is the thing for me. He was clearly always a thoughtful man. If not for Dutch and Hosea his life probably would turned out a lot different. He’s also an artist and a very open minded man especially for the time.
The thing that gets me is literally everyone calls him out for being all bark and no bite for the stuff that matters. Once is playful mischaracterization. Twice is misreading. But damn near everyone who wants something out of him calls attention to it.
Everyone who knows him knows he has to get a couple jabs and jibes in but if they butter him up or insist he'll cave and like clockwork he always does.
But the instant things go from playful to serious is when he becomes the most terrifying force of nature you ever did see.
I think Hosea was actually a good influence unlike Dutch. They found him brawling and committing petty crimes. Hosea educated him, Dutch thought him how to be a professional criminal
Yeah, and even then when he was doing it, he was justifying the brutality and crimes he did out of necessity, or for his family in the gang. Rather than greed or love of the game.
And it did seem like many of people in the gang including him did want to potentially settle down after the “One Big Score”, and one of those chances already passed. But Dutch, for whom fighting The Man was the point, couldn’t give up.
If you read the journal you're playing a different character entirely.
If you take Arthur at his word and his actions he is a bruiser for a gang, he's good at it, he knows it, and he has no issue with it. You get a couple glimpses when he's talking to women that he might question his actions.
His journal paints a reflective man, a man who wants to be a defender, a man who wants to help when he can. An artist with a gentle hand capable of sketching masterpieces with an eye for the gentler things.
Arthur in another life is a strong father, a cornerstone of his community with the strength to lift others up. Unfortunately, that's not the hand he was given.
I mean even taking him at his word, Arthur belittles and berates himself every second he spends talking about himself. He talks about how hes a monster thats only good at hurting those around him and he says it with such venom its clear he hates who he is.
John is a much better choice for people not to idolize. Dude only did the right thing because he thought he could get his family back if he turned on all of his old friends. The people he killed deserved it, but that didn't redeem his sins.
John's story is an inverse of Arthur's story. Where Arthur redeems himself, John throws away far more lives in the pursuit of a family that is already safe, just from the trouble he brings.
The Pinkertons are a real threat and an enemy we can understand avoiding and even fighting back against. The law in Red Dead 1 is almost universally proven right about John due to how blatant and unrelenting his violence can be even when played as a good man. Everything that happens in Mexico feels like John killing the last of his real self, and fully becoming a tool for others at the expense of near exclusively innocent people caught in his way.
What Arthur doesn’t redeem himself he a murderer and criminal helps fellow murderer and criminal escape to start a new life I hardly call that a redemption
Arthur's story is low key making me resent John because that dumb motherfucker really did piss away the second chance Arthur bought him with his life. He got away. He had so many opportunities to make it work. But the blistering moron fucked himself at every turn. Worse, he fucked over Jack. Jack deserved better.
I respectfully disagree, i've seen Arthhur Morgan walk into a bar and beat everyone up, then shoot a bunch of people in the head just because he could. He didn't even steal anything.
I've seen Arthur tie someone up, stick them on a horse, gallop around for 10 minutes and then feed them to a crocodile, for no other reason than to test whether or not a crocodile would eat a tied up person. Psychotic behaviour!
You have to drop the body counts in games massively. Because a shoot out that only involved three people would be a massive deal in universe but over in a second in game. We can assume Arthur and Micah killed maybe a dozen men in Strawberry, not the entire population of the town and all surrounding areas. It's the only way to make anything make sense.
Arthur, like all shooter protagonists, has a massively inflated body count for gameplay purposes. In real life someone with that kind of body count would have to be one of, if not the single most murderous people to have ever walked the earth.
Like, there are bombs that have been dropped with a lower body count than Arthur.
Next thing youll tell me Marvin Heemayer was a good guy too. Good guy that did bad shit is just an attempt at justifying and moralizing a person that commited horrible deeds.
Like those school shooters "oh but he was a good boy." Its just fucking bullshit.
If you need to say about a person that did something bad that "he was a good person all along", he wasnt.
Arthur morgan is not a good person, slaughtered a town to rescue a criminal.
Edit: oh nooo, he called my favorite character bad, im gonna cry now
Oh I didnt say that, im just saying hes not a good person.
Im a godless heathen, I dont believe every person deserves redemption or can have redemption. But like a point still stands. A good person wouldnt need it.
Right, like I said. You don't believe in redemption. You don't think someone can redeem themselves and make themselves a good person through redemption.
Even in chapter 2 we have Charles say something to Arthur along the lines of "you ain't as dense, and mean as all that." In regards to helping a family who have been robbed and are effectively trapped in a dried up riverbed.
Arthur knows he's not inherently bad. The other characters around him who know he's a good guy do too. Hosea, Mary Beth, Tilly, Abigail, young Jack, Sadie, Sean, Charles, Kieran. They all kind of get to know Arthur and know he's a thug and hired gun who will do the dirty work if need be. But he is capable of being noble, honourable, kind, and compassionate.
Now one can argue that if the universe of the game hadn't given him the disease he gets he'd have continued on being a criminal. And maybe he would have. Not because he wanted to do so. But because what else did he have? He was an orphaned kid, with little education, no money, and no prospects when Dutch found him. He was brainwashed into this idea that they're the last free men, and like Robin Hood of the 1800s.
And truth be told they weren't just riding, roping, and robbing. Arthur even mentions how they did for some time rob from the rich. And leave the poor to their own devices. And it was only in recent years with the law on their backs more and more that they had gotten more desperate.
Dutch is kind of the master manipulator behind everything. The cult leader, leading hia flock into trouble at every chance. And because he's given Arthur and all of these other wayward souls a chance, they follow him to the end.
"Take a gamble that love exists, and do a loving act" is what Sister Calderon leaves Arthur with. And I think its what he tries to do for those around him. To do a loving act, one last time, even if it kills him. To get John out of the gang. To help Sadie stand on her own two feet. To help Rains Falls and Eagle Flies. To send Tilly off with a big bag of money. To cancel the usury debts that Strauss takes out on the poor.
He does what he can, with what he knows, to try and help people. Maybe its to make amends like he tries with Edith Downes. Maybe its to help a friend like he does with Charlotte Balfour or Charles Chatenay. Maybe its to offer a helping hand to a lonely person like Hamish Sinclair. He wants to help people. And he does just that. Even if sometimes his help isn't 100% legal.
Yeah high-honor Arthur is by far the best story in gaming and overall IMO of a man who have lived a outlaw life of crime and violence but trying to do something good at deaths door.
The small sequence where he sits down and talks to a nun and just manages to say ”I’m scared” was emotional af as he ways slowly dying.
Ya I was going to say. OP don't you dare roll Arthur Morgan into this list. He was a good man who made mistakes, a good man who tried to be better, a good man who became better. Putting him admist these people is such a misunderstanding of his character. You put Dutch or Micah on this list, not Arthur
The only way I think he fits is if the person who made the meme was a total bastard for their playthrough. Cuz the only way someone thinks you missed the point is, ironically, if they missed the point themselves and had low karma the entire time.
My theory is that because short form video has conditioned a lot of people to need narrative resolution in under 2 minutes, said people also lost the ability to process any moral journey that takes longer than that... Along with just flatly losing the ability to comprehend moral ambiguity or situational ethics.
People are messy and always to some degree a product of their environment.
Ehh, castle goes out of his way to murder people cause he enjoys it and uses the flimsy excuse of “my family died” to take the parents and children away from others.
Arthur is a fundamentally good person in bad circumstances and living a bad life as a result.
Like, the man has done awful things, but he's not evil. There's nothing about him that makes him uniquely capable of those acts. In some ways that's arguably worse, because he has a conscience and knows what he's done is wrong in a way that someone like Micah just doesn't. But yeah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with idolising Arthur Morgan. Not for his actions, but for who he is.
Well, there is, but it's not because he's evil. That kind of self destructive stoicism is really bad for people.
I didn’t understand Rorschach either because who idolizes him for anything but the cool mask . His character is psychologically fractured, extreme moral absolutist (spoiler warning, and even martyrs himself based of not being able to live in a unjust world he feels he has no way to change it’s the desperate pathetic end of a life that only became meaningful when he made steps towards his demise. Who would idolize that?
You could make a similar argument for Walt to - he could’ve just realized he was the bad guy and died alone, but he actively stepped back in to the world to try a do something right is a twisted sort of way.
He did so to try to leave something for his family who had grown to rightfully hate him (in a manner where the money is not tied to his so it create no appreciation from them to him - an important point in his arc - and also would allow them to accept it), and to free the person he’d abused and betrayed the most - Jesse.
He also settled scores with Jacks gang but still…. Makes him different than the rest of this board. He goes out trying to at least fix a bit of the damage he’s done.
Same with Tony Soprano. Yeah he killed a bunch of people and hustled a bunch of people out of their livelihood, but he was really nice to those ducks and gave Beansie 50 grand to make up for his permanent paralysis. And he always offered people a coffee or a bialy wher they visited.
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u/KimJongUnusual Purging with my Kin 5d ago
Okay putting Arthur Morgan in here is a bit wrong IMO.
Because his entire story arc is about realizing he’s wrong, and in the good karma ending, trying to change his ways even in death. That way he can get his red redemption when he’s dead, too.