Take a gamble that love exists and do a loving act

There are 109 missions in rdr2, one hundred and nine, and yet people really have it out for one character who only appeared in three missions out of that one hundred and nine, and apparently committed the world's most unforgivable crime by asking Arthur for help.

See, the irony in calling Mary out for "using" Arthur and "manipulating" him and "taking advantage" of him is painful when all three of those missions give you the option to just... decline. As in, you don't have to do it. You don't have to help her. Arthur doesn't have to help her. Players can literally choose to say no and walk away.

You cannot reasonably tell me that hating Mary solely for being in the game and asking for help is worth her being labelled as such when she isn't the manipulator or the one who takes advantage because if anything, that's Dutch. Not Mary.

(And Dutch as a character does not nearly receive the same amount of immediate hate when mentioned I'll tell you that).

There's a difference between saying "I understand why Mary acted the way she did, but I still don't really like her character" and "Mary only used Arthur and manipulated him for her own gain" because one is a fair opinion and the other is just factually untrue since, once again, you can just say no to her.

You. Can. Say. No.

Manipulation removes someone's agency (a person's free will and their capacity to make autonomous choices). Yet in the game, Mary wrote and Arthur chose to go. Mary asked for help, Arthur chose whether to say yes or no. Mary asked to run away with him, and Arthur truthfully said he couldn't. None of that removed Arthur's agency.

All the evidence of the complexity of Arthur and Mary's relationship is written right there in the journal. Arthur loved Mary, Mary loved Arthur, neither could part with their lives and families and it tore them apart with everything that followed. There's so much nuance to it.

It's not as simple as "Mary bad Arthur good" because Arthur wasn't the perfect man to Mary either. The whole point was that neither of them were perfect and they both wished things had been different because they wanted a life together. They never stopped loving eachother, even to the end.

Arthur had even proposed to Mary, that's how much he loved her!!! And Mary kept the ring!! She kept it for so long before returning it because she understood that Arthur couldn't change, and Arthur understood that he couldn't either.

Mary doesn't exist just to serve in Arthur's story, and I think that's why she's so hated. She had her own life, and her own wants and her own fears and her own limits and failures. She is a character in herself and people judge her as if she's some nuisance written to interrupt Arthur's life.

And you know what? Everything she asks for is incredibly reasonable and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. She didn't demand Arthur leave the gang and stop being an outlaw, she just asks for his help and tells him she cannot build a life with him if he can't change.

And Arthur agreed with that! He never spent time saying that she was wrong, because he very frequently said that she was right! And I'd argue that Mary was one of the few people who actually saw Arthur as a man before seeing him as an outlaw because they had so much history together.

Their relationship didn't fail because one was cruel and the other was manipulated, their relationship failed because they truly loved eachother at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances, and neither of them could be what the other needed.

That's not manipulation or abuse guys. That's fucking tragedy.

Arthur himself doesn't hate Mary, yet so many players do and it's so disappointing to see.