#I’m replaying rdr2 again but I’m ACTUALLY trying to replay it

[scootkiddo]

something I don’t see discussed too often is the vein in which arthur morgan panics when being perceived. in one of the colter missions arthur mentions to charles the severity of their situation— riding out from blackwater, weathering the storm, etc. and charles aptly responds “you’ve had a lot put on you.” arthur then backpedals and is like “i didn’t mean it like that, just.. a lot to think back on.” or later in chapter 2, there’s jimmy brookes recognizing arthur from blackwater & calling him out. arthur denies the accusation repeatedly, but jimmy doesn’t let up. lying low is difficult with having any loose ends, so naturally arthur chases him down. after choosing to rescue the guy from the cliff edge, jimmy commends arthur for saving his life and refers to him as “a good man.” the look arthur gives to this is like a switch being flipped. again, he backpedals, despite the added risk of being recognized, now reaffirming that he was not only in blackwater but a bad man who kills people. it’s pocketed moments like these that really put a spot on arthur’s insecurities. ones that chip away at the armor. he’s the right hand man in a gang— a surrogate family— the one who’s supposed to project strength when tumult falls upon them. he can’t been seen as anyone buckling under the pressure. arthur also has an innate goodness that’s lost in the fog of his misdeeds he believes define him. he should never be called a good man. arthur has a reflexive retreat when people peer beneath the surface level. it challenges the narrative he’s built around himself, the identity he’s convinced himself he must uphold. he wraps that persona around himself like a warm blanket & stretches that blanket thin because that’s all he understands. that’s all he knows. that’s all his life has allowed him

[thecrusadercomrade]

If you have Ps4 or Ps5 or Switch Red Dead Redemption 1 is getting a release August 17. No word for X-Box. But yeah going to do another re-play of Red dead redemption 2 before I play the first. I never played it but I know Red dead 2 is a prequel. I know Arthur won't be mention as the game was made before Arthur existed but going to try to make Arthur proud.

Unfortunately, I only have a gaming laptop, so it’s a shame it’s not coming out for PC. I haven’t played the original, but I’ve watched playthroughs, so I know the story. It’s really good.

I’m actually doing a replay of rdr2 myself now. I haven’t played in years, so it’s nice to get back into it and spend time with this amazing world and all these fantastic characters again. Even if it’s going to take some time to learn how to fight again...

[reddeadreference]

Tiny Blog Progress Update

Drafts: 58 Queue: 3

Okay so I haven’t touched this blog or RDR2 in about a week. The queue (as you can see by the numbers above) has slowly been uploading mission posts (it had been doing one mission one POI for a few days but I had run out of POI - there are still a handful of POI I need to make posts for - so it’s been doing two missions a day until today it posted the final mission post.)

We’re gonna switch to one queued post a day until I get the queue filled up again. Tomorrow the final story-journal pages post will be up. Noon EDT/EST will be the post time.

I have all chapter 2 cutscenes recorded and half of them edited/transcribed. Those will be added to the queue and be the next things posted. (These are also what’s causing other posts to take so long because most of my time was replaying the same mission to get all choices and options recorded.)

What’s stopping me from completing the newspapers is I need to know which ones are only there after certain stranger missions/only there in certain issues/I need the actual transcripts for those that I don’t have yet.

What’s stopping me from posting character posts is I need a lot more photos and details, I’m going to try and get Abigail’s up before the end of the month to show what the posts will be like. 

What’s stopping me from posting the remaining POI posts is just I need photos of the things themselves and I had been busy with other parts of the game. 

What’s stopping me from posting certain location posts is that some locations change between the main game and the epilogue and I only have half the photos I need (one year or the other).

[squidproquoclarice]

Have you ever written about the timeline of Arthur and Mary's relationship? If so, could you please link me to it? I am replaying the game and I just don't get it ... was she living with the gang for a while? Or did they just "date" somehow? Before or after Eliza or on-and-off all the time? How would that be even possible in such a big country...

Anytime you get a huge sprawling canon, there tend to be internal inconsistencies in the writing timeline/facts.  For something like RDR2 where writing was being constantly updated and revised, it especially would make sense some artifacts of previous iterations and plans might still be in there and just didn’t get caught.  Arthur and Mary are no exception–while the way they talk around each other and their picture make it very clear it was a youthful thing and they act like they haven’t seen each other in a very long time, but then there are contradictory claims Arthur supposedly taught a now-teenage Jamie to ride and Abigail, who’s been with the gang only 5 years, supposedly remembers Mary playing dominoes in camp?So usually the only way to solve that is to pick the path that makes the most sense, work in what other mentions you still can without stretching logic too far, and then cheerfully ignore the utterly contradictory stuff that then makes zero sense.  For me, it makes the most sense that Arthur and Mary were together when they were very young.  They don’t act like two people who met at age 25 or 30 back in those days.  They act like two people who met as kids desperate to not live the lives they were living, who hung everything on this childish idea of the grand romance of escape with this person who’s so opposite to everything they know, rather than genuinely loving and accepting each other as people.  Even in their mid-30s, they’re still talking like that, and alternating spinning wild fantasies with exchanging bickering judgments about each other, because they never grew beyond it.Maybe you can work in the Jamie horse riding thing by saying Arthur gave baby Jamie some horseback rides and “taught” him.  The Abigail remembering dominoes thing, nope, that’s pretty much just gotta go.  (Also slightly skeptical about Mary coming into camp to hang out.)My personal timeline and HC that seems, for me, to make the most sense of the whole thing goes something like this.Arthur and Mary met in 1883 in California when he 20 and she was 17.  They were often a bit of an long distance relationship as Arthur was away with his “uncles” on “business trips”.  Arthur told her the truth, promised he was trying to be better, gave her the ring in late 1884 and they had an understanding of sorts, even if they weren’t exactly formally engaged.  Though I expect their understanding of what they each expected the other would do and the path they would take wasn’t in harmony because yeah, they were two young, dumb kids in love.  Mary expected he’d leave the gang entirely, and Arthur more or less expected that being a genial con man like Hosea would be enough.Spring 1885 saw a trip to Illinois and John joining the gang, and as I’ve discussed elsewhere, Arthur reacted badly in a panic feeling that he’d been judged a failure and been replaced.  Mary broke up with him, especially as some of Arthur’s actions to prove himself to Dutch came to Francis Gillis’ attention and he finally found out who and what his daughter’s somewhat roughspun suitor actually was.  He hastily arranged a marriage for her before word could really get out, and Mary didn’t have the courage then to defy him, just like Arthur couldn’t defy Dutch.  Arthur and Mary part ways again until 1899.Arthur falls apart even more, and the gang moves to Wyoming, where late that summer he and an equally lovelorn young waitress named Eliza McCready both get incredibly drunk one night and end up in bed together.  Arthur’s just turned 22, Eliza’s 19.  Eliza and Isaac are killed in May 1890, when Isaac had just turned 4.The Eliza/Arthur relationship is a very deep and rich vein to mine, I’m convinced, and we can make some pretty good speculation about things based on what else we know about Arthur, and what they imply about Eliza.  (Not bad for a single mention, eh?)  Because for one, if we know anything about Arthur, it’s how fiercely and loyally he gets attached to people.  He doesn’t seem the type to ever have been a callous “love ‘em and leave ‘em” carouser, so the fact that he and Eliza never married, and Eliza also didn’t join the gang, is also peculiar and seems to indicate against it being openly romantic between them given they both were unattached and they had a child together.  So a drunk mistake after being dumped by Mary seems to make the most sense there. I regard it more as an initial respect, then a friendship that they both assumed was for Isaac’s sake, then a slow growth of mutual pining and a missed opportunity they never got to set right before Eliza died.   They both were unmarried, and societal pressure at the time to get married for respectability with an unwed pregnancy was immense.  That seems to indicate it was a one night stand between two strangers who found themselves in an awkward situation, and possibly she was very hesitant to tie herself to an outlaw for the same reasons as Mary.  I can’t buy the view of Arthur and Eliza as this dreamy, gauzy filtered secret romance with both longing for their occasional times together.  Eliza had to be tough as hell, y’all.  Arthur was a sporadic babydaddy, so she was a single mother in the West.  She couldn’t be a lovesick girl making her whole life revolve around waiting for her prince to ride up on his steed a few times a year to play dad to his kid.  And if Arthur loved her so much, why didn’t he marry her if he was more than willing to propose marriage to another woman and had far more reason to marry Eliza than Mary? Anyway, I wanted to explain more of the relationship with Eliza given how it contrasts to the one with Mary, because this does circle back to timeline logic: I don’t see Eliza happening before Mary, or simultaneously.  There’s a schoolboy-and-schoolgirl smittenness and naivete to Mary and Arthur, even 15 years later.  That reads very, very strangely if he’d gotten another woman pregnant, not married her, and seen both her and their son murdered and been traumatized by it before courting Mary.  Even in other men, that would seem odd.  For Arthur, it’s damn near impossible, given that loss is what’s shut him down so completely to the notion of romantic love and fatherhood, even as desperately as he still longs for them.  Just doesn’t seem to work.