I actually found Past-Me's rumination on the game quite interesting. It is somewhat written like a review so I thought maybe people would find it interesting (it is quite long though).
(April 2020)
I just finished Red Dead Redemption almost 10 years after it got released and 3 years after I bought it. I had the time now since losing my job in the virus pandemic that affects the planet, so I just sat down and finished it in about a week. And unfortunately, I must say that I wasn’t having the best of times. Maybe it is because I’m playing a game that started development for the PS2 and original Xbox before moving to the next generation and that is now displayed on a 4K television, but the game looks raw. Slim things, like fences and poles, sort off vibrate or shimmer when you walk towards them and John Marston, our cowboy protagonist, moves like an old train: heavy and slow. Now, had I played it on a 720p TV in year of release and not dashed for the main missions all the time, then maybe I would have had a different experienced. I did after all have a great time playing Uncharted 2 that way, but it didn’t quite shine as bright when I played the Uncharted remaster earlier this year.
Either way, I did enjoy what eventually felt like the aftermath of a large and earlier story between John and his sort of old family of outlaws the government has forced him to hunt down. John doesn’t hide his dislike for his former comrades, but also doesn’t hide that they used to be family. They took him in when he was an abandoned and illiterate orphan and gave him the tools to later become a self-made man. He met his wife while in the gang of outlaws. And he only gave up that life when the gang’s leader, Dutch, started losing his sanity and left John for dead.
That isn’t some light history between John and the outlaws he hunts. Imagine being forced to hunt down your old babysitter that also was your schoolteacher. However you feel about them, that would feel strange. The information we get about the gang and the agent types that has recruited John is light, but straight forward: Dutch spun a tale of them being Robin Hoods, but that was really just a story they told themselves to justify their destructive ways.
After the gang splintered, and John had been left for dead, John took his wife and son from the gang and tried settled down as a rancher, but was found by what the game often refers as “them government agents” and told to capture his old outlaw comrades or else he wouldn’t ever get to see his family again. This threat doesn’t imply that John will be incarcerated or executed, but rather that they have kidnapped his family and are holding them at some threat. Would they actually kill John’s family? Unknown, but despite being lawmen the two agents John interacts with are consistently portrayed as morally compromised. They want crime to go down in the fictional State of New Austin, but as lawmen nothing they do can be considered crime. That includes kidnapping John’s family, covering up Dutch’s eventual suicide as a forced killing by the law and, presumably, a lot more. After all of John’s old outlaw comrades have been caught or killed, John gets to reunite with his family and starts his quiet ranch life. He teaches his son to hunt elk and helps his neighbor with their lost harvest. It is then that the agents’ moral corruptness reaches its height, for they return in force and guns John down on his farm. And his death is by far the bloodiest in the game. He gets shot by a dozen barrels, falls to his knees and can’t breathe properly for a few moments before he falls down completely and covers the ground in blood.
Despite knowing John’s gruesome and sudden demise in the end, the scene still felt novel. Maybe it is because John is just talking to his family when his farm hand suddenly comes and interrupts him, yelling that soldiers are coming. Maybe it is because the normally so collected John’s voice now sounds filled with distressed, or the fact that his actions suggest that he knows that this is the end for him. No fast gun or ally is going be able to save him in the last minute. The only thing he cares about is being able to save his family.
John dies in a gunfight he never could have won. And that is probably what anyone could have told him would be his end for every year he had been alive since joining Dutch’s gang, but still John clearly thought that his life could have gone otherwise if he changed enough. If he broke with his old ways and repented, then eventually he could have redeemed himself. But no.
Despite often being seen as the ending of the game; it has the climax, the conclusion and the death of the protagonist, the game actually goes on. After John’s death we switch to Jack, John’s son, who is riding away from the farm with his mother when he suddenly urges them to return to make sure that John is all right. They find bodies spread all around the farm from all the fighting, and John lies in a bloody pile outside the farm. The scene changes to the hill above the farm and there, a grave for John. The day turns to evening and the camera moves back, revealing another grave next to John for his wife, who has died just a few years later. And looking down at both of them is a young man. We now get to play as Jack. He has turned from the boy wearing clean shirts we trained as John, to a cowboy, with all the same guns and tools as his father. He now wears rough and practical attire, similar to John, and even wears the same hat.
At first it is unclear what we are supposed to do here. There is no icon on the map that suggests a mission and Jack doesn’t give any hint of his goals. You can still do everything you could do as John, help people in side-quests, gamble, hunt, etc. But you can’t even interact with the farm anymore than any other house in the game. It appears that Jack has no desire to be a rancher or live a quiet life. What you eventually can do is stumble upon a character dressed as the agents and inquire about the agent that killed John. The agent will say that he retired and lives near a lake. This interaction is only labeled on the map a as a side-quest, same as several others I’d already done in the game as John. But if you follow the tracks of this agent you can finally find him out by a river, duck hunting. You meet his wife and brother during your path, where you’d tell them that you are trying to deliver an important letter to him. When you finally meet him and tell him who you are and why you’d come, he doesn’t seem very interested. “Go away, before I kill you too” is what he ends with. But Jack doesn’t go away. Instead the game enters dueling mode, where you face off against an opponent and must draw faster than them to not get killed. Jack, being filled with desire for vengeance and at least 30 years younger than the retired agent, of course wins. It is only here that the title appears, and the credits start rolling.
It is here the game considers the story as having ended. With Jack killing the man responsible, or at least most responsible, for his father’s death. I got to thinking during the credits of how the violence and choices in Red Dead Redemption so often seemed to be inherited. John doesn’t want to go out and kill his old comrades, he wants to live with his family, but because he was a violent criminal earlier in his life he must do these further violent (and often criminal things) to repent himself in the eyes of the law and get to return to the life he wants.
The agents, from what I can gather, doesn’t loathe John or anyone else, they just want to get their jobs done, and preferably without endangering themselves, even if that means doing criminal things themselves. Jack only wants revenge because of something that outside of his control happened. And it clearly shaped him, going from someone who can’t shoot a rifle properly and has his nose in books to a rough gunslinger in a few years. And now? Jack has gotten his revenge, does that mean that he will retire and become a rancher, just like his parents did? It seems unlikely. You don’t need to become a cowboy to get revenge. The agent doesn’t know Jack and he could still have killed him while being a rancher, or anything else. It appeared to me that Jack is permanently changed. Maybe he doesn’t trust government anymore because of what “it” did, even if the agents may very much have acted out of bounds and against their mandate. If Jack has turned against the government, that may mean that he eventually will turn against all its agents, including all lawmen.
In that case, what choice would he have except retreating to the wilderness and making a living of the land and robbing people? And since safety comes in numbers, he might recruit some equal-minded. And now you have something that looks quite like what Dutch was operating when he took in John. An outlaw gang that sees themselves as good and the government and lawful society as evil.
I, of course, don’t know that this would be what happens, but I see it as a possibility. And since Red Dead Redemption’s developers aren’t making a sequel (there is an RDR 2, but it takes place before RDR 1) we won’t now for certain.
I always find those kind of story treads interesting, where legacy shapes characters and where characters trying to end something may in actuality create the cycle anew. How do we know that Jack’s actions won’t create a vengeful lawman who won’t stop hunting him even if Jack settles down and becomes peaceful? Maybe Jack’s revenge just started the cycle of violence again?
Another game that delved directly into this was 2018’s God of War. Unlike Red Dead Redemption, there we actually know exactly what the protagonist, Kratos, had done in his earlier life, since those where the focus of the God of War franchise between 2005 and 2013. We not only saw, but played as Kratos when he blamed the gods for his dead family and misfortune in general, and in revenge killed the entire Greek pantheon, thus ending the Greek world. In the new 2018 game, Kratos have put vengeance aside. He has a son for whom he cares greatly, and wishes to protect from becoming like him, especially since Kratos hated and eventually killed his own father. I couldn’t help but to compare God of War to Red Dead Redemption after finishing it. Both have a father figure returning to his old life to try and protect his family, while trying to get his son to avoid taking after him. The most major difference being that in GOW, Kratos’s son comes with him on his journey and doesn’t know his Kratos’s past. And, of course, that when Kratos sees another son trying to kill his godly parent, he steps in and interrupts. “The cycle ends here” he says determined and kills the son.
We are all shaped by our past, but very few aren’t also shaped by the decisions that came before us. The choices parents and even grandparents made. One could push the same argument further and include the forebearers to whichever community one belongs to. The message I think stories like God of War and Red Dead Redemption leaves, and this doesn’t need to be intentional from the authors of those works, is to be aware of how decisions shape people, both in regards to your past and your future. Jack is out for revenge because of the decision others made in his past, but I don’t think he has any thoughts on what his legacy to the future will be, and how it might shape people.