WHAT RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 TAUGHT ME ABOUT STORYTELLING
Welcome friends!
Here it is: the blog post I’ve been wanting to write for months. The one I think a whole two people will care about. In April 2019, I played a video game that changed the entire way I thought about writing characters. Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 is incredible for a number of reasons. It offers almost-total immersion (and can be played as a farm simulator, a hunting simulator, a fashion simulator, you name it), a six-part plot with a lengthy epilogue, characters in major roles from diverse backgrounds, graphics to die for, killer voice acting, etc. WARNING – this post is going to include copious spoilers for RDR2. For those of you haven’t played and don’t plan to, here’s a quick recap:
The Red Dead franchise is a series of games that takes place in a re-imagined American West between 1890-1915. The thesis of all three games is that the Wild West era is coming to an end, and the time of outlaws is almost over. I’ve never played Red Dead Revolver, so I’m going to skip right to Red Dead Redemption 1, which takes place in 1911 following a man named John Marston. Marston has been forced by government agents to hunt down the old members of his outlaw gang – the Van der Linde gang - in order to gain his family’s freedom. Along the way, John is redeeming himself for the things he’s done in the past and trying to make a world his son can grow up in.
I love when titles make sense.
Red Dead Redemption 2, the game I’ve been talking about obsessively, has a similar theme. Since it’s a prequel, we start in 1899 following the Van der Linde gang as they retreat from Pinkertons after a failed ferry heist. We follow them through what feels like a thousand jobs gone wrong. John Marston, RDR1’s protagonist, is in the gang but he’s a younger, wilder John. This John isn’t on his redemption track yet. Instead of seeing the world through John’s eyes, we follow the gang’s enforcer and sole-provider, Arthur Morgan.
Arthur, like John, has a lot to atone for. And Arthur, like John, is approaching a world that doesn’t want outlaws anymore. But unlike John, Arthur wonders if there’s a place for him in the new world at all. Due to some unforeseen circumstances (contracting tuberculosis, a terminal illness that gives him a time-limit) he wonders if he can redeem himself. Arthur’s found family is falling apart as they run from the law and from their fate, and Arthur’s only got a few months to do something good that will outlast him.
Redemption is something John hoped he could earn; it’s something Arthur hopes to give to someone else.
But this post isn’t about the plot of Red Dead (even though I could talk about the brilliance of the plot all day). It’s about the characters, and especially Arthur Morgan himself. It’s about what Arthur taught me about protagonist writing, empathy, and the tough nuance of redemption.
When I play video games, I generally enjoy my protagonists. I love Bioware games because the characters can be whoever I want them to be. It’s my story and the protagonists are a vehicle for me to explore the world. On the other hand, I loved John Marston because he was a character with a ton of personality built in – often, it felt like I was watching a movie, just maneuvering John from scene to scene.
But Arthur was different. Arthur had personality, but the way he’s written encourages the player to sink into his mind. His fears are your fears, his anger your anger, his joy your joy. The gang matters to you as a player because they matter to Arthur. I found myself completely engrossed with Arthur’s worldview, and when I looked online, I saw that others who played the game felt the same way. Seasoned gamers said they’d never felt so deeply for a protagonist in their lives. They said Arthur changed them – made them more empathetic, made them think about the footprint they’ll leave when they’re gone, made them think about what their actions mean to their legacy and the world around them – and I wanted to understand how Rockstar did this.
I know all writers start at different places with character. I’ll be the first to admit that character doesn’t come naturally to me. This is something that used to make me feel like a failure as a writer; other writers talked constantly about how their characters came to them fully formed, speaking at length in voice-perfect dialogue about their motivations and goals and fears. And I was embarrassed, because that’s not me at all. Because of this, I’m always looking for characters that are done well to reference when I’m thinking about character construction.
So, here’s what I’ve got.
KNOW WHAT’S EXPECTED
“I ain’t a good man”
One of the first things I do when thinking up a protagonist is go for the most common archetypes. No story exists in a vacuum; every story has internal expectations before you even write a word. I used to think the first characters that came to my mind when I thought of a story were there because I’d invented them naturally, plucking them out of nothing. But what I’ve learned over the years is that these first characters aren’t particularly interesting or original. They’re usually the ones I’ve seen before. Your writer brain is driven to emulate the character it expects. They’re the characters your work will always be in conversation with, and the ones you need to be most wary of.
Do I think you should fully throw out clichés? No!
Working within archetypes is fun. Deciding what to subvert and what to play into when you’ve got a character like the Lone Western Hero with an Emotional Burden is what made Rockstar’s portrayal of Arthur Morgan so good. If they’d decided to throw out the whole hero cliché and start from nowhere, the point wouldn’t have rung true. It’s because we as consumers expected Arthur – and further, expected we already knew him – that his story punched us in the gut so hard.
Arthur is, by most counts, a stereotypical Western hero. He’s a gunslinger who’s spent years not caring about the world around him. He’s a lone wolf who wants a wife and family but is too afraid of hurting the people he loves to truly commit. Despite constantly robbing and murdering, he has a soft spot for marginalized communities and always tries to look out for people he sees getting screwed over. He borders on (and even teeters into) white saviorism. Over and over, he mutters “I ain’t a good man,” as though admitting it excuses him.
We’ve seen all this before. We see it in Clint Eastwood and John Wayne movies. The packaging of this character is nothing new. He’s a trojan horse – a subversive message hidden in a character we know, wheeled into the stone walls of our psyche just to ruin us.
KEEP OR TOSS CLICHÉ
“We’re thieves in a world that don’t want us no more.”
I imagine writing Arthur was a little like a Marie Kondo special – what about the Western hero sparks joy? What do we wish he was? What do we have too much of? What do we still need?
I mentioned all the things that Arthur maintains from his archetype, but there’s a thousand things he subverts, too. Unlike other Western heroes, RDR2 makes sure we see Arthur doing the bad things he talks about. He beats poor people within an inch of their life to get a few dollars. He robs trains, banks, and warehouses without regard for the people who die during the robbery. If you play him a certain way, he disregards the value of other people’s lives constantly, tossing people off cliffs, shooting them for no reason, wreaking havoc wherever he goes. When Arthur says he ain’t a good man, it’s not an allusion to a vague backstory that he has to atone for. He means he was a bad man, he is a bad man, and he will continue to be a bad man.
But the biggest subversion in Arthur Morgan is his aching self-awareness. In RDR1, civilization feels like a vague thing that slowly approaches. John doesn’t worry about it; he’s got a farm and a family and a ticket out of the gunslinger lifestyle. But civilization and the ‘new world’ are constantly on Arthur’s mind. He journals about the impending storm. He worries that there’s no place for him – what skills does he offer? What will he do? Will he be alone? He understands that his time is coming to an end, not just because of the illness I mentioned earlier, but because the world is restructuring before his eyes and he sees that the role he used to play has been written out.
It’s this subversion that creates nuance. Arthur steps out of the Clint Eastwood hard-grimace-wearing archetype and begins to genuinely worry about his fate and the fate of his family. Where will they go when there’s nowhere left for them? And if he’s gone, how can he make sure they stay safe? He wonders if he’s ever contributed anything good to this world. He wonders if there’s time to rectify his wrongs, or if he’s doomed himself to die and be forgotten. He worries his family will fall apart without him, and there’s nothing he’ll be able to do about it.
It’s a subtle decision made by Rockstar that gives this game the extra oomph. We know Arthur because of the old clichés they kept. We hurt for Arthur because of the new pain they gave him. And in the crossroads between the old and the new, we see the invention of a character that exists independent of archetype. This is the type of character that leaves a lasting mark.
Once you have that character, you get to flesh out the things that make people care.
THE THINGS THEY LOVE
“I gave you all I had.”
One of the comments I saw frequently once I finished RDR2 was, “I knew the gang would break up, but it still completely destroyed me.” Without getting too much into the tough job of a prequel, I’ll say that one of the hardest things is working within the constraints of canon.
Because of RDR1, we know that the Van der Linde gang falls apart. There’s no way to surprise the audience with that plot. Rockstar made a couple of canon-breaking decisions to spice things up (including the total rewrite of one character that appears in RDR1 to make him more sympathetic), but generally, they work within what they have. Instead of surprising us with plot, they surprise us with heart. The twist isn’t that the gang falls apart; the twist is that we wanted them to stay together.
This is brilliantly done by centering us in the character that cares about the gang the most. The Van der Linde gang all love each other, but for Arthur Morgan, the gang is all there is. Every minute of every day is spent getting money for the gang, getting food for the gang, running errands for the gang, going out on jobs with the gang, moving sacks of potatoes for the gang, breaking gang members out of jail. Arthur isn’t just the gang’s reliable uncle, he’s the gang’s backbone. He can’t exist without it and, whether they know it or not, they can’t exist without him. Arthur bases his entire identity around the well-being of his family. As the game progresses, we begin to feel like a frustrated older sibling trying to wrangle our 20+ younger siblings to safety.
The thing about a good character is that we don’t have to relate to what they love. Their motivations don’t have to be universal. People often make the mistake of thinking that a good protagonist is one that fights for something we all care about. That’s not true. You could give me a protagonist that would live and die for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and I will be fully invested as long as you can show me why.
The way Rockstar does this is making sure that we see why Arthur loves the gang. If they only showed us the demanding, helpless side of the gang that Arthur is always compensating for, I wouldn’t care. If they launched us right into the gang’s descent and eventual eruption, I’d shrug. If Rockstar focused only on the pain the gang caused in Arthur, people would’ve been upset with him for sticking around so long and caring so much. The gang would’ve split up and we’d say good riddance.
But Rockstar turns the table. It’s little parties at camp where everyone sings together and drinks and talks about their half-baked life philosophies. It’s nights in town with the gang’s youngest member, getting too drunk and causing a scene that the two characters laugh about for weeks. It’s fishing trips with Javier and home robberies with Sean and wagon rides with Hosea. These aren’t jobs-gone-wrong. All of these scenes are centered around Arthur, contextualizing him within the gang and, further, showing us what the gang means to him. We see why he cares, we see what he knows he’ll lose if he can’t get them to safety, we see what’s important to him and it becomes important to us, too. People don’t just talk about the heartbreaking scenes in RDR2; more often, I see people talking about the scenes that made them smile and laugh because these scenes break their hearts even more than the sad ones.
In the end, Arthur mutters “I gave you all I had,” and we’re livid and heartbroken because we did, too. It’s not just hours spent playing the game, it’s emotional vulnerability we offered up to this family that casts us out. As Arthur and as the audience, we gave the gang everything we had, loved them completely, laughed with them, and we’re left just as empty as Arthur when they’re gone.
Rockstar made us love, then they ripped the things we loved away. And we knew they would the whole time. But they delivered the heartbreak through a character that truly believed the gang could make it, so we believed, too.
THE STAKES OF WINNING
“We’re more ghosts than people.”
Once there’s a character with nuance and something to love, you get stakes. You get the things they fear they’ll lose, both rational and irrational, if they don’t achieve their goals. Love and fear go hand-in-hand, and no character is complete without them both. Arthur loves his gang, and with that love is the constant fear that he won’t be strong enough to save them. We constantly see hesitation in his happiness – Arthur is afraid to be truly happy with what he has because he knows he is always a step away from losing it.
Rockstar doesn’t hide this fear. The fear permeates his journal entries, his conversations with characters outside the gang, his moments alone, his talks with the people he’s trying to protect. We know that Arthur’s ideal world is a ranch somewhere in the untamed West with his massive found family, hidden from the law. And over the course of the game, we see that Arthur is the only one who understands that, if they don’t achieve this dream, they’ll all scatter to the wind. They’ll all be lost and alone. Slowly, they’ll all die.
Arthur fights tooth and nail to get the gang to safety before he’s gone, but the heart of the game comes when Arthur has to give up on this dream, settling for a little bit of good for the people he can still save. He knows that whatever world he creates, he will not live to be a part of. The stakes stop being about Arthur and start being about how he can do the most good in the least amount of time.
Arthur decides that it isn’t going to be about saving himself or even the gang. It’s going to be about getting John Marston and his family out of danger so that they can make a life in the new world, even if he won’t live to see it.
In a moment of unexpected vulnerability, Arthur asks a fellow gang member to get John and his family to safety if he doesn’t live long enough to do it himself. She asks Arthur why he’s not concerned about his own safety or hers, and he says, “Because you and me… we’re more ghosts than people.” That’s the stakes for Arthur; it isn’t about redeeming himself or righting his own wrongs. It’s about finding someone who can still do good and holding the door for them. It’s about throwing his weight behind one thing that will outlive him. Over and over, through Arthur, we feel what it’s like to lose pieces of our happy ending. We focus on the things we can win – the little slivers of hope – and we make that our new victory. Arthur is accustomed to loss, even numb to it, but that doesn’t stop him from being afraid that he’ll die for nothing.
He’s a cynic and a realist, but in the end, he wants his life to matter. That’s what’s at stake.
TWIST THE EMOTIONAL KNIFE
“I guess… I’m afraid.”
I feel like I haven’t talked much about the actual mechanics of fitting good character into good story. The last four points are specifically about the setup of a good character, but this is how to take all that setup and build the kind of scene people remember.
Every good story has rises and falls and RDR2 is no exception.
I start plotting most of my stories with the big emotional explosion. I think of where all my buildup is going to erupt and then work backward. I think of the moment where my protagonist finally breaks, and I set everything up to get them there. I think Rockstar did the same thing.
Because the nature of video games is worlds different from novel writing – a ‘quick play’ of RDR2 would take at least 60 hours – Arthur is not limited to only one of these moments. I can think of a dozen of these ‘emotional eruptions’ in RDR2 off the top of my head. But when I read a thread of people’s reactions to the game, one scene came up constantly. It wasn’t Arthur’s final scene; it’s a sneaky scene tacked onto the end of a larger story mission like a footnote.
It’s Chapter 6 and Arthur is on the verge of dying. Despite his clear terminal condition, he hasn’t told anyone in his gang that he’s been diagnosed with tuberculosis. He hasn’t told anyone that he’s days from death. He just keeps trucking through the story missions like it might go away if he ignores it long enough.
In this mission, Arthur is left alone at the train station when an acquaintance of his – a nun – appears. She’s on her way to Mexico and wants to talk with Arthur for a moment while she waits for her train. She asks Arthur how he’s doing, and it happens.
After hours of gameplay, trudging along despite Arthur’s depleting stamina and weight loss and emaciated face, he finally says it. He sits and he says, “Sister, I’m dying.” Reality strikes. He’s been told by doctors, by friends, by random passersby, but he finally says it himself. He tells the nun that he’s not sure what will happen when he dies, he’s not sure what he believes in, he’s not sure if he’s done a good thing in his whole life. He says, “I guess… I’m afraid.”
The thing about a good character is that they coax you into letting your defenses down so you end up walking totally vulnerable into a scene like this. We’re accustomed to Arthur’s dismissive hand-wave and assurances that he’s fine. We’ve had hours of it, sitting on the other side of the screen, begging Arthur to tell someone he’s dying.
We finally get the vulnerability we wanted, and it hurts.
Moments like this are the intersection between good character and good story. The slow pacing and unwinding of Arthur Morgan made it possible for us to be in his mind for 90% of this game and still be gutted when he finally admits that he’s afraid. He successfully hides the dread, even from us, unleashing it in a quiet moment that devastates. It’s masterful storytelling, and as a writer, I was taking notes.
TIE IT ALL TOGETHER
“In the end, I tried. I really did.”
We have a stereotypical Western hero, we have the ways he undermines that role, we have the things he loves, we have the things he fears, and we have the heart-wrenching moments where we can break those hopes and fears open. We have a really good character, but Arthur goes beyond that. A good character in a good story still has to mean something, and that’s the hardest part of writing. You can do everything right, but in the end, what is your story trying to say.
Arthur’s final croaked lines are harrowing: In the end, I tried. I really did.
I didn’t realize how far Arthur extended beyond a ‘good character’ until I went online. When I saw the comments saying that people’s lives were changed by Arthur’s story, I realized that Rockstar achieved their goals of creating a game that would extend past the time spent playing it. Beyond making people care, making them love, making them hurt, Rockstar made its consumers see the world Arthur saw. We begin as a man who doesn’t believe in good, and slowly, we empathize with the people around us. We care about the world we leave behind. Through all of the tough setup the writers established, we learned to believe in Arthur’s dream. We knew he wanted to do good, and we wanted to do good for him. When Arthur utters his final lines, we believe them, because we were right there with him in the end, trying to do something that mattered.
I finished playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in May. It’s been about two months now, and I still spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about Arthur Morgan. RDR2 didn’t present us with a character that wanted to change the world – he understood the world was an immovable thing and he was one person – but it gave us a person who wanted to change his world. He looked at the things he could change, and even if it killed him, even if it outlived him, even if he’d never see it, he wanted to create goodness.
I’m not going to pretend you can do all the things RDR2 did with Arthur in book form. Novel writing is a totally different ballpark, and your window of opportunity to dive into a character’s psyche is limited. Much of the development we get to go through with Arthur would have to be cut in a book, left in the blurry hazy of backstory. But I think this model is a good way to start.
One of the first things I learned about writing was that a good protagonist teaches us something. A good protagonist gives us a new way to look at the world. I’ve seen a handful of incredible protagonists over the years, and I think each of them can be broken into approximations of the categories I’ve listed above. I’ve walked away from RDR2 with a new way of looking at writing characters and a new way of looking at the world around me. Rockstar did an incredible job with this game on several fronts, but Arthur will stick with me for a long time. I’ll take the lessons I learned from this character and apply them to all the protagonists I write in the future, and if I can make a reader feel half as devastated and hopeful as I still feel now, I’ll know I did a good job.