LogFAQs > #944241738

My overall thoughts will be up later in the day, but before that, I want to try my hand at an impartial narrative analysis of RDR, so here goes:

It's easy to romanticize things with a little distance. Pirates are a good example of what I mean. Kids dress up as them for Halloween, cutesy versions of them show up in puppet shows, and they're portrayed as suave, charming characters like Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. People who lived in the Golden Age of Piracy might find that a little baffling, because the real pirates were illiterate, rapacious, and disease-ridden to a man.

Red Dead Redemption is about that concept. It consciously depicts the old west as a land of violence and ignominy and cowboys as immoral, greedy, and corrupt. At the same time, its characters have already internalized that romantic vision of the frontier, and they chase it, only to find ruin and usually death. The stranger missions around Sam Odessa and Jimmy Saint reinforce this theme, but it might be most visible with Jack Marston, whose western novels end up foreshadowing his own quest for revenge.

The title is misleading to a small extent, in that it's not about redemption so much as someone trying to redeem himself when it's ultimately futile. There's the government's obviously-hollow pardon that even John doesn't see any value in, but he's also trying to make up for his past just by living a decent life, and toward the ending he's trying to make up for lost time with his family. He talks a lot about escaping his old life and putting it behind him. But the idea is that he can't escape. It always comes back to find him in one way or another. In fact, it even entangles his son. We don't see what Jack Marston does as he grows up, but it doesn't seem likely that he became a writer. Agent Ross is the same way - he's supposed to be retired, but that old life catches up to him.

In typical Rockstar fashion, the writers aren't really impressed with anyone, so although the old west is a lawless hellhole, which even the mechanics reinforce since you'll get harrassed by bandits just minding your own business on the road, the "civilizing" eastern city-dwellers are all clueless racists with an unearned sense of superiority. The U.S. government is arguably the real villain, more so than Bill Williamson or Dutch. John Marston and Nastas have a certain degree of comraderie because they are both left out and talked down to by the federal agents, which is why they can speak plainly and comfortably to one another.

If it were only the west that was shown to be so horrible, you could hope that the cycle of revenge would end with Jack Marston, once the old gunslinger way of life died off. I guess ultimately RDR doesn't offer a solution as easy as all that - it just shows you some of the evil that men do, and a much lesser amount of the good, and leaves you to make of that what you will.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 6/129
Currently Playing: Red Dead Redemption