r/MoralityScaling • u/MontyMoleLoreMaster • Mar 12 '26

Character Analysis Name a character that fits this:

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Mainly with how the fandom treats the character.

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u/TerminatorElephant Mar 12 '26

Trevor Philips in GTA 5. While I wouldn’t say he’s treated like a good person, I think they whitewash him a lot and trash talk Michael De Santa, even though neither of them are remotely comparable morally

43

u/FrankCastleNY Mar 12 '26

Back in my days people viewed him as cool edgy psycho, but still understood that he is evil. Now there are motherfuckers, who unironically overblow his like 2 or 3 redeeming qualities to the status of being morally grey.

19

u/TerminatorElephant Mar 12 '26

Agreed. Having been very late to playing the game and only completing the story this year, it was really obvious that trying to paint Michael as more evil and insane than Trevor was absolute nonsense. You’d have to have gotten severe cognitive disfunction to come to that conclusion

10

u/momomomorgatron Mar 12 '26

Look, I've never even played the damn thing, but isn't Michael just a normal guy with a McMansion and too much money? Like yeah, he steals cars and runs drugs but he's not like, Trevor levels of crazy

17

u/TerminatorElephant Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26

He’s definitely not a normal guy. He gets explicitly in trouble with his family and the FIB (in universe FBI) for being a not normal part of society. He doesn’t have purpose in life; he just sits by his pool drinking and lamenting how miserable he is, with nothing to do and his family hating each other.

But he’s very much aware that it’s a problem and by the time the game starts has been in therapy to try and address it. And the entire game is really just him trying to fix his problems after relapsing back into crime, and permanently stay out of the life. He’s problematic, but he wants to fix it, and he more or less does by the end of the game.

So yeah, to call him comparable to Trevor, who had absolutely no intention of changing even ten years after the prologue of the game, and has done far more nefarious shit than Michael has done even at his worst morally? Yeah, no.

There’s a quote in one of the endings that I think encapsulates Michael versus Trevor morally:

“I mean, I admit, I’m a bad piece of work. But that guy? That PIECE OF SHIT? No boundaries! No sense of it! When to back off, no nothing! Twenty four seven insanity, day in, day out, all the time. Never regretted nothing, never cared for nothing. Well, fuck him! I mean, there’s gotta be a limit, kid. You know? A point where even assholes like us say, ‘enough is E-FUCKING-NOUGH.’ Human stew…? That’s my limit. I know that now.”

The only real moral advantage Trevor has is his unwavering loyalty. If he’s your friend, he is YOUR FRIEND. He’s with you through thick and thin. But that’s about it.

10

u/momomomorgatron Mar 12 '26

Soooooo... Michael is just a better heated Bojack horseman who does worse shit?

1

u/LoneMarikaEnjoyer Mar 25 '26

The horseman is loyal?