kelpiekidd

[kelpiekidd]

Yay!!! Thank you for the treat, I'm glad you had fun :)

I think John handles grief quite similarly to Arthur.. given how hard it is for him to speak of it

How the Old Guard Deals with Grief

How about headcanons on how the old guard deals with grief/loss? They've all experienced significant loss and we see glimpses of how they deal with it.. Dutch channeling each loved one's death into justification for his anger, Hosea's fond reminiscence of Bessie, and how Arthur avoids it, buries it and only speaks of it to his journal or in passing.

Requested by @kelpiekidd

Thank you for requesting this! I had fun writing these (fun!?!) it was very challenging but also extremely rewarding. I may have wordvomited all over this ops! I hope it makes sense.

TW: talk of death and grief.

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Arthur

When the wound is fresh he won’t cry about it. Not unless he’s sure he’s completely alone. Even then he would feel watched all the same, not realizing that feeling is his own pesky mind. If it happens, though, he’s not too pressed about it. The tears are already out, what’s he to do? Trying to wipe them off would just make him feel more guilty (of what? Nobody knows)

Isolating is not quite the word. He can’t very well take his sweet time coddling his aching heart, not when there’s people that needs feeding and depend completely on him. He will keep to himself more often, though. He will avoid the campfire and retire to his tent earlier, and he will eat at odd hours so nobody else is around the table and he can avoid their worried looks. He doesn’t like to be looked at like he’s broken.

Mostly, he talks to his journal. All those words he feels he can’t string together with his voice turn out not so daft once he writes them down. He’ll be honest with himself in there, nothing to hide from those pages, they’ve seen all of his ugliness already, they may as well see his sadness. He will write their name and a short goodbye, draw sketches of their face before time washes away the memory of it. Sometimes he will return to the page when the ache of loss comes biting in the night, or when he’s to far to go visit their grave. He’ll sketch a small flower then, to make up for the one he couldn’t bring in person.

He won’t talk about it with others for a while, but when it does finally happen, is only with Hosea. (and maybe Mary-Beth, but only if he doesn’t feel too much like a pathetic beast that day). He won’t tell him all that his journal gets to see. He’ll be pragmatic about it, practical. He won’t talk about feelings, he will talk about tasks. He’ll express frustration he can’t shoot as good as before because sometimes his hands shake, or anger that he hadn’t found the will to walk too far from camp to hunt them some better game. He won’t link those things with his grief, but he doesn’t need to. Hosea knows.

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Dutch

Somewhere down the line Dutch forgot that not everything he does needs to have a purpose. Grieving shouldn’t need other purpose than to stop feeling broken. But he can’t live with it if he doesn’t turn it into something he can do. Vengeance is the easiest and the one that serves him better anyway. He’d rather fantasize about Colm’s undoing and call it grief than lay in his bed at night and reckon with the fact he can’t feel as broken as he should about Annabelle. He'd rather wander a cave and ramble about all the way everyone is wrong, than admit he’ll never again get to ask Hosea what he should do.

His grief manifests only among his closest ones, and once Hosea dies the number of those closest ones is drastically reduced. Mostly, he will talk about how much he misses. What he’s lost, what was there and now is gone. He’ll miss their voice the most. Their face, that was their own, he will live with forgetting it eventually, but their voice– when they spoke to him, in that moment their voice was for him. That was his. Most of his longing comes from the fact voices are easier to forget than words, so all he’s left with is his own voice, parroting the words back at him.

Dutch has a hard time coming to terms with the fact not everything can be taken back once it's lost. America steals his freedom and he takes it back, Bronte steals his dignity and he takes it back. How is it fair that he can’t take life back from death as well. Dutch doesn’t think himself a God, not in the biblical sense at least, but it’s hard to accept how powerless he is in those situations.

Raw, unguarded emotions are something reserved in the close aftermath of the moment. There’s something in death being so close that makes him feel raw, like there’s nothing he could possibly hide anymore. He’ll get angry before he gets sad, and they’ll both be as equally destructive. He will break things, leash out on what he’ll perceive as guilty; his gun if it didn’t fire quick enough, or their deathbed for not keeping them alive. And only once the fury has simmered down he’d cry. Not always, sometimes crying doesn’t feel like enough. Sometimes all he wants is sit in the ruin of what he just destroyed and think of how to turn the hollow in his chest into something with a purpose.

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Hosea

Hosea is open in how painful Bessie’s death was, in how much his life changed before and after her. The exact same difference goes for his grieving. He will never feel a pain as profound as he felt when Bessie passed. It’s not a lack of love or fondness, he will still feel sorrow. But now he is just incapable and unwilling of letting those feelings consume him, not again, not after her. Somehow selfishly, he’d like for that pain to only belong to her, no one else. Sometimes he fears going through the same with another would cheapen the feelings he had for her.

As soon as it happens, he’ll ask to be left alone. Which is unsettling for the man always on the first line to comfort someone, but he’ll mean it, and he’ll be adamant about it. He needs the time to process what happened, he’s too dazed in the wake of it. Even before Bessie’s passing, death had an effect o him, like something utterly alien washed over the Earth and he got left here to deal with the mess. Loss is unsettling, as is the feeling of helplessness that washes over him in those moments. How does one cope with a thing so massive as the end of someone’s time.

He won’t cry, not after Bessie. Sometimes he’d joke he cried all his tears back then. Jokes. Yes, of those he still has plenty. Now the punchline has turned inwards, though. He’ll become the butt of his own jokes, the humor twisted meaner somehow, like he can’t let himself the benefit of too much pity. He’d hate if anyone pitied him, if he can help it, he’d rather they called him an idiot and moved on. Still, only because he’s flippant about it, doesn’t mean he will take it kindly if they take it too far. God help you Bill keeps testing him on that.

After, once the sharper edge of the pain has gone, he’ll come looking for comfort. An ear that would listen, a hand on his shoulder, just something to keep him grounded as he reminisces. He loves talking about the ones he’s lost. He may not had become a priest like he wanted, and never actually believed in any god up there, but that part of him that still long to celebrate the immortal soul is still there. And what better way to do that than telling stories, keeping their memories alive.

[kelpiekidd]

He's shown at least slight distaste to Dutch's cradle robbing, going after someone younger once his current partner gets too old. Personally, I don't think he would actively pursue something with anyone much more than a decade his juniour (realistically, he isn't pursuing anything with anyone LOL)

Actually, I do think we see a bit of his attitude towards age gaps during the Billy the Kid quest. He was quite fond of Black Belle, and said in his journal something along the lines of, "She's a fine woman. If she were 10 years younger and I was in the market for a woman to go killing with, what a pair we would be." Although this is an older woman in this example, he seems more comfortable with people closer to his age.

I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on this:

How young is too young for someone to be romantically involved with Arthur? What do you think his minimum age cut-off would be for a partner?

For context, if anyone is wondering how far behind tiktok is on rdr conversations, I’ve been debating with a woman who is adamant about the fact that Arthur had feelings for Abigail simply because he said he would marry her in his journal. But that’s not what surprised me.

How this conversation started you ask? They made and edit of Arthur and Mary-Beth with the caption saying they would have made such a cute couple. To which i commented “they’re cute because they act like siblings. But Arthur is way too old for her.” Ofc they pointed out that in 1899 she would not have been too young. And i answered by saying Arthur specifically, wouldn’t date someone that young.

We both agreed that Mary Beth is younger than Abigail, who is 22. But they think Arthur would have no problem dating someone as young as 20. Which blows my mind because Tilly is not much younger than Mary-Beth, and both Arthur and John see her as a little sister.

Aside from those x readers where there’s a huge age gap (which obviously those are just for fun and not canon)

I feel like there’s a huge mischaracterization going on here. Arthur is not the kind of man to date a girl who is 16 years younger than him. Obviously I dont know the guy personally but that just feels so…icky?

Like, that’s just not who he is? I don’t even know how to properly defend this argument bc tbh it feels gross to imply that he would do that.

Arthur Morgan is an intelligent, deeply empathetic man who feels the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he is far from blind to the struggles women face, particularly in the harsh realities of his time. Having witnessed firsthand the hardships and injustices endured by the women in camp and beyond, he carries a profound understanding of their experiences.

His loyalty and responsibility make him more than capable of protecting and providing for a young woman, but romantic involvement with someone significantly younger just doesn’t align with his character.

Arthur would never take advantage of an imbalance of power or maturity in a romantic context.

[kelpiekidd]

"I know you like to hide behind the angry moron act, but it's a thin enough veneer." Hosea

VS

"Even you could understand it, Arthur." Dutch

Hi! I genuinely really appreciate all the time and care you put into your analysises of the characters and the world surrounding them, and they genuinely make me love the red dead franchise even more than I already did!

I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts about how and why Arthur plays up the act of being nothing more than a ‘dumb brute’? I know that he does it to cope partially with his own guilt and such, but I was just curious to hear your take on it, if that makes sense haha? What also intrigues me is the fact that Hosea seems to always poke fun at Arthur for being ‘stupid’ but at the same time seems to see through Arthur’s act?

Sorry if this doesn’t make any sense haha <3

It makes sense, don't worry! And also thank you! I put a dumb amount of time into this, like underneath the rdr2 fan wiki it said "you visit a lot" like okay thanks PFT.

But as to why Arthur plays a dumb brute, it is due to the way Hosea raised him. Hosea raised him to put on this mask because those are Arthur's good traits, he is big, intimidating and with the canon fit does look kinda dumb, he plays exactly into a role that people already know and fear. Dutch himself says that the sight of Arthur would make even statues talk and it would be dumb for them not to play into that, even Stauss plays into it. They don't have a lot but they play into what they have.

Arthur himself did not do this, Arthur when he joined the gang he was an angry little kid but he was raised into acting dumb, you can actually observe Hosea's way of raising by looking at Sean because the exact same thing is being done with Sean:

As to why Hosea plays into it at some times and doesn't in other. See it like acting, when Arthur was young Hosea put this mask on him and told him to play a part, Hosea was his stage partner and now they need to convince everyone else that Arthur is in fact this character and not jsut acting. That would be utterly impossible if Hosea, as his stage partner (because we know the two made a lot of jobs together) did not refer to Arthur like that.

Imagine you go to see a movie but one of the side characters keeps treating the main character like the actor who plays them and not the actual character, it would be so hard not just for the viewer to get into the story but it would also be hard for the main character's actor to get into the character because they are pulled out.

So Hosea plays into it because he needs Arthur to keep that mask, but why does he then go out of it? This is best explained by using the interaction where Hosea, Lenny, Tilly and Arthur talk about how they want to be buried. Arthur says he doesn't think much about it but Hosea says "I know you aren't that dumb" or similar. Here Hosea is not asking the brute, he is asking Arthur behind the mask, he is asking the actor and not the character.

[kelpiekidd]

Doodle based on the below image by @monochromereflections :)

[kelpiekidd]

Molly O'Shea. Am I cooking or not.

[kelpiekidd]

something quick because I felt inspired

SONG

[kelpiekidd]

I was touched by this scene.

[kelpiekidd]

Arthur takes after Hosea and John takes after Dutch.

I find a lot of people see it the other way around. They definitely carry traits from both their father figures, but there's something striking to me about John's brutality.

I really do wonder how John would have turned out if he didn't have Arthur to look up to.

I kind of want to make an in depth post about how they ultimately are foils of their fathers, the parallels between Hosea's sickness and Arthur's, but lord knows if I'll do that.

[kelpiekidd]

[kelpiekidd]

Doodled this

[kelpiekidd]

Johnny Boy's Bones

I might just be talking out of my ass. But something that’s been lingering on my mind lately is the aftermath of Arthur’s death on that cliffside. Specifically, how long Arthur’s body may have remained there before Charles found him—if he even found him at all.

I see a lot of fanart and fiction often depicting Charles finding Arthur’s body within hours or days of his passing, and giving him a proper burial. But when I was revisiting the later chapters of the game, I was reminded that Charles left the gang to help the Wapiti tribe. He had no way of knowing exactly when or how Arthur’s end would come, only that the gang’s days, and Arthur’s, were numbered.

Realistically, Charles may not have stumbled upon Arthur’s remains for weeks, maybe even months. By then, time and nature would have taken their toll. Left exposed to the elements, scavengers would likely have picked Arthur’s body clean, leaving behind only bones. Rain, wind, and sunlight would have further eroded what was left, leaving a weathered skeleton, possibly unrecognizable as the man Charles once knew.

The game itself offers a glimpse of what a decayed body looks like in its world. Arthur occasionally stumbles upon long-abandoned homesteads or corpses, their identities erased by time, with only bones and scraps of skin or hair remaining.

Imagining Charles finding Arthur in such a state is heartbreaking. I can’t help but picture the overwhelming guilt he’d feel, seeing his friend reduced to a pile of remains, knowing Arthur had died alone and was left without a proper burial.

At this stage of decomposition, Arthur’s body would have already begun to return to the earth. The natural process of decay means that as soft tissues break down, they nourish the surrounding environment. Fungi and bacteria consume what remains, transforming flesh into nutrients for plants and animals. Perhaps, by the time Charles arrived, Arthur’s body was already entwined with the landscape—grass and wildflowers sprouting where his blood had soaked into the soil.

It’s a grim yet oddly beautiful image. Arthur Morgan, a man who spent so much of his life trying to redeem himself and do right by others, becoming part of the natural world he loved dearly. A man who gave everything he had to the people he saw as family. Always giving, giving, giving. Until there is absolutely nothing left but his body, and yet he gives that to the Earth too.

I imagine Charles, determined to honor his friend, carefully gathering what remained—bone fragments, perhaps even a few lock of Arthur’s hair and bits of clothing. Wrestling with the forces of nature to reclaim his friend from the earth. Despite the difficulty, Charles would have ensured Arthur’s remains were laid to rest properly, in a place where the flowers could bloom in his memory, and the earth could cradle him in peace.

Call me morbid, but there’s something hauntingly beautiful about this idea: that Arthur, a man shaped by the rugged wilderness, would ultimately be reclaimed by it. His story, his legacy, and even his physical form returning to the land he roamed freely.

Don’t even get me started on his reincarnation as a Buck.

[kelpiekidd]

i'm using this platform as my wip dumpster now. its decided

i can't finish this, its too sad even for my limits

[kelpiekidd]

Arthur and my son being adorable together.

I've been craving hugs lately

[kelpiekidd]

some molly pics i’ve taken! i love my beautiful wife xx

dutch…when i catch you dutch…

[kelpiekidd]

CERTIFIED BANGER

jack marston loving his father but also hating him for leaving. feeling distant towards him but desperately wanting to do better so john wont leave again. john assures him he wont, but he does. without wanting to.

[kelpiekidd]

Rip Dutch Van der Linde you would have loved toxic hierarchal polycules and queer communes

[kelpiekidd]

Miscellaneous Narrator stuff