this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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I’ll never understand how people see anything in Arthur as a protagonist. Whether you play him good or bad, the guy has no thoughts of his own. He’s just a male version of the born sexy yesterday trope. The big payoff at the end of the game is that much like a three year old, he suddenly gains consciousness and self awareness. But you have to play through 40 hours of being a big dumb unthinking Neanderthal first.
He acts that way since most of his life, the only thing that meant anything to him was loyalty.
Throughout the game he's forced to face the unenviable reality of what unwavering loyalty will net you. That unravels the fabric of his entire morality, almost personality.
That struggle is so well told troughout the game, making Arthur's characters developments one of the best of all time. That's what makes Arthur a great character!
I didn’t notice much character development at all over the course of the game. All that happened was that Arthur lost faith in one guy. I think most of us living humans have been burnt by somebody we trust and learned that lesson by age 20. How Arthur made it into his 30’s before facing his daddy issues is beyond me, but I can’t comprehend on what planet that incredibly juvenile lesson in “Other people don’t always have your best interests at heart” qualifies as “one of the best character developments of all time”. At the very least it doesn’t hold a candle to John Marston’s arc. I mean the same company made GTA IV and Nico Bellic who is another character that is just in a whole different league than Arthur.
Like I could see myself being moved by his character if I myself was 14 when playing through the game. But playing this game for adults in my mid-twenties, it was just not compelling to play this character that was both much older than me, and yet also somehow had the mind of a teenage boy who’s just figured out his parents don’t actually know everything in the universe, and dad’s been cheating on mom.
what are you talking about? Also, Roger Clark won best performance of the year for his role as Arthur Morgan, so you are pretty much alone in feeling way to mature in relation to the character
Did you not play the game? Dutch is a surrogate father to Arthur, having brought him into the gang when Arthur was 14. It’s brought up multiple times throughout the story and is the basis for their relationship. Dutch literally says to Arthur out loud “You’re like a son to me”. It wasn’t exactly subtle.
Also, Roger Clark won best performance for his voice performance as Arthur, which he did do a good job of. That has absolutely nothing to do with the writing for, or maturity of the character.
So is Hosea, it's not about the father figure.
Of course it does. He doesn't get rewarded because he read the lines correctly. He got the awarded since the character he portrayed came together so fantastically well.
Yes two diametrically opposed father figures. Thats literally what it’s all about. Thats… literally the whole entire thing. Asserting that RDR2 isn’t half centered around Dutch and his relationship to Arthur is WILD.
It’s a performance award, of course he was awarded for his performance. If they were awarding the character the award would go to the person who wrote the character.
Not what anyone's saying. But it's not about Arthur losing his father figures, lol the man is nearing his forties...
Lmao, you know RDR2 also won the award for best narrative same year...
That is literally exactly what it’s about, from start to finish. And the fact that he’s in his forties is exactly why I think it doesn’t really work, I’m glad you agree lol.
Yeah, no award for best protagonist though. Ah well.
If that's your interpretation of Arthurs story arc then, yeah, explains it.
No such category for the Game Awards 2018 so not sure what you're referring to.
Yes that is sorta the only way to interpret it, as it’s very explicit the entire way through, but yeah. There are things to interpret about the story of RDR2, but Arthur’s entire arc being primarily about his relationship with his surrogate father is not one of them.
That is correct. RDR2’s protagonist Arthur did not earn Rockstar any awards like you’re suggesting. There doesn’t even exist an award for that. Rockstar won an award for the overall narrative for the game, which includes an entire cast of characters, most of which are far more compelling than Arthur, and is also largely about the death of the “Wild West”. And then Roger Clark won an award for his voice performance.
Protagonist doesn't mean good guy, or smart guy. He's just the main character.
Problem is the game tries to paint him as either a good guy or a bad guy based on the honor system, but he’s not a good guy or a bad guy or complex guy either. He’s not much of a guy at all. His only driving force in the entire game is a blind trust in his father figure. The only internal conflict he has in the entire game is the extremely late realization in his forties that his “dad” isn’t an all-knowing benevolent entity, but is a flawed, self-serving human just like everyone else, and that he needs to learn to think for himself for once. And once he reaches the stage of independent thought, we’re already done playing as him lol.
I think his character would be much more compelling if Arthur made this transition after the first act, and not the final hour of gameplay. An RDR2 where Arthur has been freed of his entirely being’s reliance on Dutch and a conflict with Dutch taking a bigger role in the plot.
Agreed. The writing and acting of RDR2 are amazing, but as a whole, the story of the game kind of felt empty in the end. I think I might revisit the game later to see if I'll enjoy it more, but I just don't see Arthur as that great of a character from a narrative viewpoint. After the first couple times Dutch's "plans" failed I started to really question why Arthur, or any of the other gang members really, would continue trusting him so blindly. I think that may have broken my immersion even more than the restrictive mission design where I also murdered like a thousand people.
Yeah like the interactions between the side characters that you get to hear at camp or on missions were far more interesting than anything Arthur had going on. Dutch was a stand out as well. If you think about it, and given the context of the first game, RDR2 is really about Dutch. He might not be the protagonist but he’s more of a main character than Arthur was, and had a more compelling character arc, even if the “character growth” was the inverse of what you’d expect.
The only plot line with Arthur that actually portrayed any interesting development was the side plot of the mother and son whose father you basically killed. That plot line, and more like it should have been part of the main plot.
He is the protagonist because the story revolves around him as the main character. I'm not saying you should like the game or the character. Him being the protagonist is independent on whether you like him as a character or the game. Protagonist literally means main character of a story, which he objectively is.
I don’t think that Arthur being the protagonist of the game is in question here fella. He’s in the cover of the game.
Well, you were before you edited your comment
Incorrect lol. I never said Arthur wasn’t the protagonist. That would be silly.
He’s an antihero archetype through and through
I would say John is an anti-hero. A good man underneath who genuinely cares for his friends and family but doesn’t know how to live outside of crime. He knows what he wants and he has a goal in life but tragically, he just doesn’t know how to or is incapable of attaining it.
Arthur is more like an idiot ward of the state who does crime because he doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong. He has no goals, ambitions, or desires. He has no opinion or moral code. He doesn’t want anything and has nothing to work towards. The most humanizing thing about him is his journal, but his entire being amounts to little more than observations of the things around him. He’s like Data from Star Trek, but even Data had a goal, to become more human. Arthur doesn’t give a shit about being human. It’s so… uncompelling.
Interesting. When you really dive into conversations he has with gang members, you do start finding out more about him. He was thrust into the life of crime, manipulated by Dutch for his own ends, and disposed of by him. Dutch tried to turn him into a soulless killing machine, but you find out more about how Arthur sees the world the more you do engage with people.
Yeah, he is a vessel for the conflict between the bullshit about “living free” that Dutch preaches and the actual evil they do, but he has depth of his own as the story goes on.
I get it, he does seem to be unthinking, but as an engine for the story, he embodies the conflict. Maybe you see that as being an empty character, I see it as an interesting storytelling device.