I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I'd try it with the Steam summer sale.
Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that's interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn't stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I'm checking this shit and it was released in 2018!
If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with good dialogue a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.
I disagree. The Van Der Linde gang was somewhat anarchistic before Dutch recruited Strauss and hit his head. And even then, they didn’t extract rent on the behalf of anyone except themselves.
They didn’t colonize any land, and in fact, the gang resisted the settlers in the form on being outlaws and grasping onto the last pieces of “wildness” as modernization creeped in. Arthur only realizes the gang’s struggle for freedom was shared with other marginalized groups at much more intense and existential levels, such as the Guarman slaves, the Indians, and even less “grander” groups such as the sex workers, and Arthur himself from the very gang he considered his whole identity.
I agree with everything else, but him being “wrong his entire life” isn’t necessarily about land or colonization, but him realizing that he’s one of the few people in the gang who still truly wants freedom whereas Dutch - his father figure - and his faction (who he considered much of them as family) are clinging onto a delusion of freedom and holding him back, no different than how the government’s colonization of land and people is a delusion of freedom and holding other people back.
tbh I didn’t mean the gang specifically, the cowboy mythos was created and perpetuated by the bourgeoisie to colonize land indirectly and Arthur’s story is kind of a recognition of the farse that it was
Oh yeah in terms of deconstruction it definitely recognizes the mythology.