does Arthur surpass John for you Albatross?
Yes, but I should preface it that while I like John and I'm a huge fan of RDR, I've never been enamored with him as a character... Or at least, I like him (love how the voice actor portrays him and he's a very likable protagonist), but John has major flaws in how simple he is that I think gets ignored because RDR1 is such a good game.
My biggest criticism of John as a character (and it's really a criticism of RDR) is that John is supposed to be a world-weary gunslinger, rough and tumble, whose led this life of crime but now has to do the law's bidding for a higher purpose ... but ... JOhn gets taken advantage of by every dumbass idiot in the West for ~40 hours of story. Like, every two-bit hustler, crooked grave robber, idiot shop keeper, low-level Mexican bureaucrat, and even up to the primary antagonists the G-men in the final chapter, they're all easily taking advantage of John to have him do whatever they want, and almost every encounter plays out the same:
John: "Hey you, I'm looking for this guy and I'm told you could help me. Don't trifle with me, because I'm a cold blooded killer."
Dumbass: "Oh, hello there, yes, I know about this guy and I will bring you to him, but you have to help me."
-- 5 missions go by with the same script where John is doing stupid tasks for them --
John: "Hey! You told me you'd bring me to this guy and you haven't I'm not going to help you anymore! I'm a cold blooded killer, remember!?"
Dumbass: "Oh, well now I'll really take you to him if you help me one last time!"
-- FInal mission with that dumbass that doesn't bring you to the guy, but introduces you to another dumbass who takes advantage of John again --
Nearly the entire game is this structure, from Nigel Wes Dickins, to Irish, to Seth, to the Mexicans government officials, to the Mexican rebels, to the Mexican towns folk, to the FBI guys in Blackwater, to the Yale college professor, and on up. There's only a tiny handful of major characters in the game that don't take advantage of John and who aren't idiots:
- Bonnie McFarland
- The Sheriff in Armadillo
- Landon Ricketts
- John's family, of course
Every other character just takes advantage of John, which would be fine, except prior to every encounter with these people John usually begins with some monologue about how he's killed people before, and he's done things he's not proud of, and he threatens them in some way to show that he's not someone to be trifled with. And then they trifle with him for 4 or 5 missions, before he's really like "Listen man, I know I've said it before every mission up to this point, but you've got to stop trifling with me and this time I really mean it!" And then, in that final mission, they stop trifling ... and the objective of his original encounter gets away, or something. I think it really sets in in the final act when John/the Player finally meets the FBI guys who have been forcing him to do all of these tasks for the whole game, and within one mission, you see how useless they are ... they bicker like idiots, their car breaks down, they get jumped by two-bit loser outlaws (TWICE, IIRC), Dutch's gang gets the jump on them multiple times, and the only thing that really motivates the final encounter between John and Dutch is that
Dutch comes for John. So, these G-Men who are these imposing characters, the invisible hand in John's life through the whole game and the reason he has to do the bidding of every idiot in the West, they're hapless idiots themselves who aren't imposing at all. They're not good antagonists and they never show you how they're dangerous, and really for nearly all of RDR1, Dutch never shows you how he's dangerous either... You're told he's dangerous, John tells you he's dangerous, the FBI tells you he's dangerous, but you don't really see how Dutch is dangerous until basically the last handful of missions (honestly, I'd say it's the encounter in that bank building in Blackwater where Dutch kills the bank teller woman).
For instance, I'd juxtapose Officer Tenpenny from GTA:SA against Dutch or the FBI at any point in RDR1 and he's 10x the antagonist of anybody in RDR, and Tenpenny being so good (he's everything that Dutch or the FBI isn't) is what makes CJ and his motivations so convincing. Tenpenny being so good is what sells you on guys like Rider and Big Smoke abandoning their family. But, up until Dutch in RDR2, I would have said that Tenpenny is my favorite character in just about any game, and now I think it's probably either Arthur or Dutch, but I also love almost all of the main cast of RDR2, I think they're all sooo well done and beyond almost anything else in any other game. There's only a few characters that I think should have more depth, Micah, for instance... He's just a dead give-away as a "bad guy" from the instant that you meet him.
Now... I get it... Rockstar games are generally structured this way, and it doesn't prevent me from still loving the original Red Dead Redemption, and still liking John, but I generally don't think John is a
great character even though he's a very likeable character, I think when you really break down his motiviations and choices from RDR1 alone, I think John's character is just one sided and kind of weak. He's a good example of how to do a bland character and still make that character very likeable. I also think that Red Dead Redemption 2 does a good job of making John in RDR1 a little more .. understandable. BAsically everyone in RDR2 constantly talks about how dumb John is, and I sort of wonder if Rockstar ever really thought about how everyone takes advantage of John in RDR1 and decided to make that a characteristic of him in RDR2 now that you see John from another perspective.
John and Niko from GTAIV are very similar characters. They're playing 'fish out of water' characters for most of the game, and despite that they have this history of being cold blooded ruthless gangsters/outlaws (Niko: "I've killed people... I've hustled people..."), they can get easily taken advantage of by, say, a necrophiliac grave robber or a steroid-junkie dumbass weight lifter, and ultimately there's not a strong motivating bad guy in either story (RDR1 is better at this than GTAIV for sure). Rockstar fell down a similar pit with Michael, Franklin, and Trevor in GTAV. I think Trevor has authentic motivations throughout most of the game, but Michael in particular, gets conned and hustled by characters who just aren't convincing like his FBI buddy, or the other head of the FBI, or all of these other kind of low-level losers; Franklin makes a little more sense, he is just in the pursuit of his vision of the American dream, which makes sense for him to go along.
I was so pleased with Red Dead Redemption II, and it's a total about-face for Rockstar. Since GTA:SA, they really missed the mark with character motivations for almost 15 years, and despite that I still really liked RDR1 and GTAV (I didn't really like GTAIV, and I'm critical of it now, though I enjoyed playing it for most of the game at the time), Red Dead Redemption II has really surpassed anything they've done before and, IMO, anything that any gave developer has ever done.
Excellent post all around, but I specifically want to comment on this bit. Our media is filled with stories of "protagonists" who are, frankly, evil people. And we view their stories from their perspective and see how the battle between the desire to do good and the nature of evil plays out within them. I was having trouble thinking of examples when I read the post you were responding to, but mob movies/tv is a great example. I'd also offer Breaking Bad; Walter White is the character we're meant to root for, but we also see him descend into a path that renders him almost irredeemably evil by the end. You've also got movies like Heat, where DeNiro plays a criminal who is softened in the audience's eyes because of his desire to be a "just" person; meanwhile, Al Pacino's detective is a deeply flawed individual who is ostensibly the good guy, and yet we don't necessarily want to see him win. The dichotomy between good and evil is a battle we see played out in iconic characters like Han Solo, or Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, or even Robin Hood (committing an evil act to benefit deserving people). The nature of individuals confronting this battle within themselves dates back to at least Odysseus, and probably long before that.
Yeah, totally agreed on Walter White.
Mobster and 'true-crime' movies are probably the easiest to find similar characters. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is another one, and RDR2 takes a lot of nods from Butch Cassidy as well (I mean, one scene in the game is near 100% replication of it, and I love that they did it... I just wish they said "ohhhh shiittttt" going down). Butch & Sundance are both more likeable and you never see them do anything genuinely evil in the movie, it's all mostly hijinx, two-bit bankrobbing, and I suppose general emotional abuse with their shared love interest, where as you watch Arthur, Dutch, and the gang do genuinely bad things to innocent people. Stringer Bell from the Wire is another, a guy who you can't help but root for despite that he's involved in really bad things, he does things that makes him a bad guy, but it's hard to not sympathize with him in some way.