#theodore levin

You can take the man out of the gunslinging but you can't take the gunslinging out of the man, or whatever

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

I have no missions left, apart from horsemen apocalypse, and I don't feel like doing it yet...

Probably the “Help a Brother Out” (Brother Dorkins/Sister Calderon) strand, and the “The Noblest Of Men, And A Woman” (gunslingers) strand. Dorkins/Calderon is deeply meaningful.  Arthur likes to grumble about religion--when you’ve got Dutch van der Linde establishing himself as your god and messiah to worship, he’s sure not going to stand for rivals--and how terrible he is.  But both Dorkins and Calderon are well written characters.  They don’t focus on religious doctrine, they focus on good works and charity and humanitarianism.  They both manage to appeal to the hefty streak of kindness and generosity in Arthur, and both of them have the attitude of “I know you have good in you, I won’t believe you’re lost to evil.”  They help show him that it’s not a matter of either/or moral purity or corruption, that you can still do meaningful things.  He sees that they live among the poor of the St. Denis slums, and interact with them daily.  He really can’t bring himself to see them as silly or naive do-gooders.  So he’s forced to confront the idea that having seen all this awful shit, all this despair, it’s still possible to want to help and that it’s not weak to do so.  And especially with Calderon, this becomes something really profound.  He sees her helping street kids, just like he used to be.  He admits he’s an outlaw to her, and she still keeps encouraging and believing in him without dismissing his regrets.  This leads to that truly beautiful conversation at Emerald Station where he’s scared and tired and vulnerable, and she manages to give him some faith.  Not in Dutch van der Linde, not even in his own future, but in the idea that the things he does, the love that he chooses to give, will have meaning, and that he’s capable of far more than robbery and killing.  “Helping people makes you happy” is about as direct a statement of the inner Arthur Morgan as you can get.  Open validations of Arthur in Chapter 6 aren’t all that common: I think only Calderon, Rains Fall, and Sadie fairly directly tell him that he’s a good person and they believe in him.  And it’s amazing that this woman who’s known him for such a short time can just get him so profoundly, and that she has such an effect on him. As for the gunslingers, it’s fun just because it tackles the idea of mythologizing the old West as it’s happening.  Pretty much none of the men are who their legend says.  They’re washed up, unimpressive, etc.  None of Arthur’s encounters produce some iconic High Noon gunfight.  None of their duels end up being something fit for a story.  The Grant/Calloway encounter is an absolute clusterfuck.  So Levin literally just ends up making crap up and furthering the myth.  There’s plenty of humor to it too, from dynamiting pigshit onward.  None of these “noblest of men” fits the bill, so it’s a delightfully snarky title.   But then you have “and a woman”.  It has Black Belle, and that whole encounter is pretty much a riot from start to finish.  She’s not a “noblest of men”.  She’s distinct.  She’s the only one of the gunslingers who lives up to her reputation.  She’s also the only one who survives.  You can tell she has a profound effect on Arthur too given how he writes with amused admiring respect, “What a woman”, and that if she was a bit closer to his age, a woman like that and him would make one hell of a pair.  (You then can’t help but notice how he then writes with that same amused admiring respect about a similarly fierce gunslinging woman around his own age, one Sadie Adler...) It’s just a good time.  Black Belle’s just amazing, the dissonance between larger-than-life stories and the actual experience of these men is humorous, and it really just shows off the process of the mythologizing of the West as the reality of it faded, and how much of it was probably untrue. Big honorable mention also to “The Iniquities of History” because that rolls quickly from “help out this sad drunk old man” whom Arthur only half-jokes about identifying with as he gets older in what seems like your standard NPC fetch quest.  It turns into this haunting, hard-hitting mission reminding us we’re in a place where the Civil War ended only 34 years prior, and another point alongside Lenny and Tilly’s unease that the legacy of slavery is still very much alive and well.  It’s something RDR1 declined to address, given at least the easternmost part of New Austin as an east Texas/west Louisiana expy could have dealt with a history of slavery, and RDR2 could have declined to address as well by politely pretending it away with “the war was over decades ago.” But the reality of Jeremiah Compson as a slave-catcher hits hard, and that line from Arthur about how some legacies are only fit to piss on is just spot on.