u/AnArcOfDoves9902

▲ 3

Most Red Dead Redemption fans consider Dutch in RDR1 to be a shell of his former self compared to how he was at the beginning of RDR2. They say he's now a monster, a wild animal to be put down, unlike the honourable Dutch before he was hit in the head during the trolley crash in Saint Denis, which made him go crazy. But Dutch was never really a good man to begin with; from before the events of RDR2 even began, we know that he was responsible for shooting a random woman in a botched robbery. He's a bandit who sees himself as a revolutionary fighting against the system, but his fantasy that he so desperately tries to achieve is to run away from the system and settle down in a French colony in the Pacific Ocean. He's more of a libertarian than a revolutionary, someone who sees himself as better than Cornwall because he chooses whom he robs and kills, but they're two sides of the same coin, as both are driven by a desire to make profits that can never be quenched. The fall of Dutch's gang in the game is a straightforward allegory for the decline of family businesses that are swept away by monopoly capitalists like Cornwall.

But Dutch in RDR1 is no longer motivated by money anymore. The game takes place after the epilogue of RDR2, where he walked away from the Blackwater money and allowed John to take it. He isn't trying to escape the country to retire anymore; his sole drive is to fight against American "civilization," which, as you should know, was built off the back of genocide and mass slavery, and Dutch has allied with Native Americans again and is leading a pan-tribal insurgency, not as a mercenary like when he fought the military with the Wapitis in RDR2. They're now united by a common enemy. Dutch targets banks as an institution rather than to enrich himself, and he targets racist academics like the anthropologist that John was sent to protect. He's much more of an anarchist than he was before. And Dutch is a lot wiser too than he was in RDR2, when he let himself be easily manipulated by Micah, predicting that John Marston would be betrayed by the bureau, while Marston naively believed that everything would return to normal. I dare say that John in RDR1 has the same flaw as Dutch in RDR2, believing that if he commits enough violence and necessary evil, he'll get to retire on a farm and put away the gun. Beecher's Hope for John was like Tahiti for Dutch.

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u/AnArcOfDoves9902 — 15 days ago
▲ 38

One of the reasons why I prefer the Dark Side ending of KOTOR is because I think that blowing up the Star Forge is a waste of potential. It is a shipyard, but it could theoretically create anything. It has a massive production capacity, is fully automated without the need for labour beyond having to make quotas for it to produce, and it uses only solar power. If used correctly, it could end poverty and material scarcity in the galaxy.

It is claimed that the Star Forge is inherently a dark-side artifact that makes anyone who uses it evil, but the claim for that comes from Rakatan priests and Malak; they could simply be wrong. The Star Forge simply seems to just a 3d-printing dyson sphere, I don't see why it'd inherently require the Dark Side to work.

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u/AnArcOfDoves9902 — 16 days ago