The psychology of RDR2's Arthur Morgan

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When I first started Red Dead Redemption 2, I wasn't so sure about Arthur Morgan. He seemed too quiet, too ignorant, too..... simple. He was very different than RDR1's John Marston; a conversely much more talkative family man with charisma, conflicting morals, and complexity. And in retrospect, that might just be a more extroverted, outward directed exploration of the same themes that RDR2 explores from an inward directed and introverted perspective. Let me explain.

Arthur Morgan is a quiet man, but this does not mean that he is simple by any means. If you play the game without paying attention you may not catch this, but there are several things pointing to a dichotomy within his mind. On one side there is his talented, sensitive, introspective, and intelligent traits. These are highlighted when you hear his inner thoughts from his journal. You can also see that his handwriting and words are quite sophisticated. When you explore the world, you can see a quite studious side of him which is integrated with the game mechanic of studying flora and plants as well as inspecting clues and buildings. Additionally, he is a quite talented scetch artist. Hosea implies throughout the movie that he is more intelligent than he presents on the outside. Unfortunately, his inward conflict due to his less nice traits results in an outward presentation of a simple brute.

Now, his bad side. The criminal, the outlaw. He had a difficult past that landed him under the wing of a narcissistic gang leader who had a way with words, and led him into a life of crime. In his time with the gang he has committed many atrocious acts, and depending on the mentality of the player he continues to commit such acts. Consequently, this side of him completely undermines his better side. And no more to anyone than himself. He feels that he is an irredeemable, ugly, and stupid man. This is reflected in his dialogue, and this causes him to repress his good side to fit in with what he fatalistically believes himself to be: a simple outlaw and outcast. But in his introspective meditations you can see that this clearly isn't the case despite his low self esteem. This is reinforced by the gang, who see his simple man act and believe it, consistently referring to him as an idiot despite him having more common sense than most of them.

In a way, the plight of Arthur Morgan may not be too different than us with ASD. We are often talented, insightful, and sensitive. And yet the world around us constantly tells us how defective we are and sadly, some of us buy into it or simply have a difficult time expressing that inward complexity, resulting in feeling misunderstood or underappreciated. Sometimes we take that negativity and turn on ourselves, maybe even acting like something we aren't really are just hoping that somebody appreciates us. Well I'm here to tell you, it you're in the shoes of Arthur Morgan, I appreciate you. Arthur is actually quite relatable to me, but I try to remind myself that I have value. I think he is a better protagonist than John.

If you read this long post, thank you. If you have any thoughts, please comment.

Arthur isn't particularly intelligent. Compared to us he may be, but for his time he is of rather average intelligence. Compare him to Josiah, Josea, and Javier, and you'll see that he's on par with the common man.

Arthur had a particular difficult start grew up on the street illiterate before he was picked up by Hosea and Dutch, who taught him how to read and look after himself as a man. Hosea might seem a teddy bear and Dutch have just recently started some sort of decline, but it is through hearing some of the stories that Hosea talked about the man he was when younger, that you can understand they always were kind of bandits. Dutch can spin a good amount of words and Hosea softened, but they did bad things and Arthur always knew it, it is why he feels unworthy of affection from the likes of his ex-girlfriend, and also tragic when you hear about how he lost his son and his son's mother, Arthur internalized it as punishment for the wrongs he did. But he also holds a good deal of loyalty to those who even made him the better man he was, the gang that was his family.

These games are all about the wild west coming to an end, where these gunslingers can't just get away with what they did, Arthur knows that the world is changing, and it is scary and confusing to him, he would rather feign ignorance and play up expectations of being a simpleton, rather than try and be the smarter and attempted more enlightened person that he could be, but somehow still come up short. The journey that the player has with Arthur is if you could take the chance to take the chance at doing the kinder thing despite how irredeemable he feels for his actions, catching TB from a selfish and evil act, or tell the world to screw itself and Arthur only ever did what he needed to do, and killing is just what he is good at.

I really did try and play the good guy, even dressed my Arthur up in a suit with a top hat, but even I could not argue against things like Arthur's confession of killing animals even if it was unnecessary. It feels right to use the tools at your disposal to interact with the world, and when your main tool are an array of weapons, that is how things tend to go.