The Boss, despite being the Boss, keeps getting back to the street to handle problems on their own. Seems like an egregious case of The Main Characters Do Everything, right? Why the hell a crime boss bother to dirty their own hands with street crimes when they have an army of criminals working for them? But then, it's revealed throughout the series that this is exactly what keeps the Saints together, with The Boss as their Boss. As long as The Boss proves willing to dirty their own hand, as long as they prove willing to take a bullet in the streets, the other Saints will rally behind them. The other Saints will stay loyal. In real-life, lower-ranking gang members are known to snitch their superiors, either to the cops or to other gangs, when they feel their superiors don't give them respect. The Boss' staying in the field averts such a fate: it proves The Boss as someone worthy to serve, thus keeping the whole gang intact.
Also, from a more cynical bent, it also serves to instill a bit of fear among the rank and file. Because The Boss is showing that they are, in fact, still very capable of utterly and completely demolishing any opposition, more often than not by themself. If The Boss isn't earning loyalty for being the first to fight the Saints' enemies, they are most definitely earning fear for being able to kill hundreds of enemy gang members or police without any backup.
In the series, the world is always portrayed as very cynical, greedy and generally crapsack. While it initially seems to be this for the laughs, there is no other way to explain why the Boss can waltz into a store and walk out with a rocket launcher, get away with killing thousands of cops and civilians with nothing more but a fine and a slap on the wrist, and generally get away with anything. In a more balanced and sane realistic world, the Boss would have been likely jailed after the first 10 murders, and probably executed soon after.note This is Truth in Television, the nature of American justice system means that even a Spree Killer with the highest body count can walk away like a free man
In fact, most Japanese crime sandbox games shows what happens when murder was committed, even between competing organizations, as both police and other criminals treats murder as the perpetrator crossing a serious line. Hell, fighting cops is not encouraged in Like a Dragon or Kenka Banchō, let alone murdering policemen.
Sleeping Dogs (2012), set in a supposedly modern-day Hong Kong, similarly follows that country's famously strict gun laws (you can't buy one and even the crooks generally don't have them). And don't go committing murder in broad daylight. It'll end poorly for you.
Gat's supposed death in the very beginning of Saints Row: The Third may actually have a meaning to it, to signify that this time, for once, the series no longer merely follows the leader but has gone completely Off the Rails.
It might be possible that the other ending, though, leads to an alternate storyline, in which the Red Faction plot is only a What Could Have Been speculation on the part of movie producers, as the final mission shows.
The whole series is a bit of Fridge Brilliance if you consider the standard course of games in its genre. In most gangster movies and games, the protagonist does one of the following: accomplishes their goal and either stops there, escapes the criminal life entirely, dies, or goes to jail. Here? You just keep going, taking on progressively bigger fish in the ocean. Took over the gang? Time to take over the city and one of the biggest corporations in the world. Done? Time to take over the largest crime organization in the world. Finished with that? Time to take over the most powerful nation on Earth. Who else can take you on? Enter aliens. The story keeps getting bigger and more grandiose because The Boss (and by extension, the player) just keeps winning.
There is a diesel tractor in the game called the Peterliner. Obviously, this is a Portmanteau of Peterbilt and Freightliner. Then, remember what a "Peter" is and what would line one. Oh, Volition. You sick freaks.
IV apparently setting up the Boss for a Heroic Sacrifice in the first mission might seem like a cheap way of milking some tears. A player "knows" that the player can't die in the first mission! Then you recall that the games have been steadily upping the Anyone Can Die stakes, and suddenly it looks a whole lot more plausible. It doesn't actually happen, of course, but the possibility is very convincing.
Why is Troy so adamantly opposed to the idea of investigating the Vice Kings and Benjamin King in particular when Julius assigns gang duties to his lieutenants in the first game (to the point where Gat has to take over)? That's because, as we learn later, Troy is a cop, and King is paying off the SPD to stay off his trail. In other words, Troy isn't afraid of King, he is afraid of Chief Monroe.
The second worst setbacks the Saints experience in the first gamenote only behind Sharp's capture of both Playa and Lin, and the latter's subsequent death is when Gat is captured by the Vice Kings while trying to take out Tanya. What makes it more understandable, however, is that the one who tipped Gat and Playa off on Tanya's location at that time was Troy... and that it happened soon after King requested Chief Monroe's help in dealing with the Saints. Add to it the fact that this took place at an abandoned police station, and it becomes pretty obvious that the whole thing was a trap by King and Monroe, with the latter using Troy to lure the Saints right into it.
Ben King's story in the first game sets up the next two games in a series. He started the Vice Kings to stop gang violence, lost his original goal when he got powerful and greedy, started to settle down when his legitimate businesses started to pick up and eventually he left his life of crime rather then continue fighting endless gang wars. Now what happens to the Boss? He joins the Saints to stop gang violence, decides that he is his own top priority and then starts losing his edge when movies, music and sponsorships start to bring in more money then crime did.
During the opening cutscene to the mission http ://deckers.die, Kinzie mentions to the Boss that dying in Matt Miller's virtual world means becoming brain-dead in the real world. It explains why Matt was so damn scared of getting killed after the Boss destroyed his avatar... But then you wonder: those dozen virtual Deckers you've been slaughtering on your way, were they nothing more than defensive programs? Or were they actual members of the gang, connected to the usenet ? If the latter is true, it basically means that you just rendered brain-dead dozens of teenagers. Granted, they are gang members and you can still kill them viciously in the "real world", but still, that's a pretty fucked thing to consider.
It's mentioned that the device Boss uses to enter the virtual world is one of only two, so the virtual deckers were probably... virtual.
, Earth, or at least the United States, is on its way to become a Dystopia Police State. Considering one of the endings for Saints Row: The Third involves Steelport leaving US jurisdiction, one can wonder if this kind of occurrence was what forced the government to cut down on personal freedoms. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.