Headscratchers / Red Dead Redemption 2

On the Subject of Gertrude's Confinement

• So she was just locked in an outhouse in back of the Braithwaites' estate? Pretty sure that, being a half-crazed screaming lunatic, someone would hear her screams and break the news to the sheriff, and the Braithwaites' reputation would surely be in tatters by 1899.
  • Two things to realize here:
  This is the 1800s. Mental health back then was basically to lock the person away and pretend they don't exist. Sadly, those who were mentally ill were seen as social pariahs, a source of shame for their families. It wasn't until the last thirty years that we even started to realize that mentally ill people were, well, people who needed actual treatment that would help with whatever they had.
  The Braithwaites are an old regionally powerful family. No doubt any law enforcers would've been bribed to keep their mouths shut and feign ignorance if anyone came to them about a screaming woman locked in an outhouse.
  • When this troper asked, he meant that the Braithwaites' reputation as a proud Southern family would be tarnished. Like people would be saying, "Oh, the Braithwaites have a lunatic daughter? That's not proper at all!" Which was what they were trying to avoid by keeping her locked up and, you know, not sending her off to a sanatorium.
    • Not really. In that time period, family problems were considered family problems. People might whisper that the Braithwaites have a crazy daughter, and it would be an embarrassment to the family, but it's not going to ruin them. Especially since they're a powerful family in a hick town.
  • The Braithwaites live in a pretty big estate miles from anywhere (within the game world at least), most of the people on or who would arrive at the estate have some kind of incentive (be it employment, financial or just don't-murder-me) to not piss them off, the local sheriff is pretty much outright stated to be corrupt, and they're wealthy enough to spread the cash around to keep any authorities from asking too many questions. All of which is a pretty good recipe for keeping their embarrassing secret hidden on the property.
    • There's another loose end, though; the shack Gertrude is kept in is close to the lake, so someone boating by could see it and hear her.

Davey Callander and the coins

• When Davey's body is shown in the prologue, why are there coins over his eyes?
  • It's an ancient funeral custom, which even has an own page on this site: Coins for the Dead.
  • Put simply, the idea is that the ferryman who takes the soul to the otherworld demands payment. No coin, no going to the otherworld.

Kieran and the O'Driscolls

• How did the O'Driscolls find the Gang's hideout at Shady Belle? It's noted in gameplay and the lore that the O'Driscolls aren't active in Lemoyne. So, how did they find Kieran? Did Kieran betray the Gang's location like he did earlier with Colm?
  • Likely they caught wind of the gang operating in Lemoyne (as Arthur repeatedly points out, it's not like Dutch is making much of an effort to keep his head down) and went down and waited until they caught one of the gang, which means Kieran is probably the first one they recognized. As to how they found the location, many horses are able to find their way home on their own. It's likely they just gave Kieran's horse a slap on the ass and followed it to camp.
    • Yes, this makes a lot of sense when looking at it like that. I also remember Arthur mentioning that the O'Driscolls were active in Nevada for a short while, so it's reasonable to assume that they moved to Lemoyne when the pickings got slim in New Hanover. And Kieran does tend to hang out on the edges of every camp during his time with the gang. He probably got spotted and snatched up that way. Poor kid.
    • Additionally, the O'Driscolls were aware that Arthur is keeping the meeting between Colm and Dutch safe. It's reasonable to think they were tailing the gang around that time, since Shady Belle isn't that far away and the gang left after basically massacring two families.

Continuity Error

• John's anecdote about how he came to leave the gang does not add up in the timeline. The motivation for why is relatively consistent with what he told Bonnie in Red Dead Redemption. However, in 2, it's clear that he left the gang in 1899 when Dutch went all paranoid on everyone. So, why did John tell Bonnie that he left the gang in 1906?
  • I don’t think he specifically said the year in which he left the gang. All he told her was that he once ran in a gang who left him for dead, so he left and tried to take up farming.
    • Yeah, my mistake. You're correct. Looking at it again. A user on Wikipedia put the year of his leaving as 1906. Not sure why or how he/she got that year.
    • I think everyone assumed 1906 because of two points prior to the release of RDR 2. 1. 1906 was when the gang broke up after a botched robbery. 2. John was shot and left for dead after a bank robbery gone wrong. It seems that people assumed that these two points occurred in one singular event (basically "John was shot and left for dead after the final botched robbery of 1906 that broke up Dutch's gang, and afterwards he left with Abigail and Jack") when in reality, it was two entirely separate events, with the left for dead event occurring in 1899 and the event that led to whats left of the gang breaking up in 1906.
    • Honestly I don't recall year 1906 even being referenced in the first game. Or that John getting left for dead was in a bank robbery - just a general "robbery". Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was all either fanon or some obscure, semi-official source that Rockstar probably didn't even write.
• In the first game, John is tasked with tracking down ALL of the remaining members of his previous gang, so why aren't Sadie, Charles, the ladies, and Pearson also included? The Pinkertons had to have known about the other members ever since they picked up Micah who turned on the gang after Guarma. The Pinkertons also couldn't have gone after them themselves as the entire point of sending Marston to capture/kill them in the first game was so that they weren't made martyrs if it was the U.S. Government going after them.
  • Even if the Pinkertons/BOI were aware of the "camp staff's" identities, it's unlikely they were interested in them. It was the killers, the gunslingers like Dutch, Micah, John, Arthur, Bill and Javier whom they wanted. As for Charles and Sadie: if the Feds even knew where they had disappeared to, they were out of their jurisdiction. Mexico was a different matter: both in-game and in real life Mexico was in political turmoil during this era, and the US Government wasn't especially respectful of Mexican sovereignty (look up the Veracruz and Pancho Villa episodes). Note also that Mexico wasn't even a factor until after Marston's attack on Fort Mercer and the discovery that Bill had fled there.
  • Exactly. It’s mentioned that Charles and Sadie both left America so the US government couldn’t get to them. Not unless they wanted to start an international incident in both Canada and South America respectively over two people.
    • But that didn't stop John from crossing into Mexico for Javier and Bill, in which he had a direct impact in the death of the previous Governor and getting Reyes elected as the new Governor. Why couldn't he do the same for South America and Canada?
    • Distance and time. The Bureau let John go to Mexico because Javier and Bill have just moved there recently. The trail is still fresh and they can't have moved far. Sadie and Charles have moved to their respective foreign countries for years. Even if the Bureau wants to get them, what can they do? None of them tell John where specifically they are going to. Sadie doesn't even say which South American country she is going to. Both of them can be anywhere in Canada and South America. The Bureau may as well be sending John to look for a needle in an ocean if they want Charles and Sadie.
    • Bill moved there recently, but not Javier. I thought the entire point was to get the gang regardless of how long it took. Ross would just hold John's family until they got their criminals. Javier even tries bribing John in RDR 1 with Dutch's location in Colombia and John doesn't outright reject that proposition implying that he can go to these countries and is not on a time-table. John has to discover where Javier and Bill are in Mexico without the Bureau's help, and the Bureau doesn't even help him with Bill when he's in America. John has just as much of an idea where Javier is as he does for Sadie and Charles.
  • Bill, Javier, and Dutch were all still active criminals, while Sadie, Charles, Pearson and the girls had all gone straight. Plus, they probably had enough intel to determine that, while John could probably be coerced into going after folks who stayed loyal to the man who left him for dead (twice!), asking him to hunt down Sadie and Charles would have resulted in years of dragged feet and excuses.
    • Javier isn't an active criminal. In fact, he's working with the Mexican government. The gang is being captured for their crimes they already did, not the crimes they're currently doing. Unlike Bill and Dutch, Javier isn't even seen doing active crimes. Sadie had done FAR more criminal acts with Arthur than Javier, and the same can be said for Charles. Not to mention that John "went straight" and was still wanted for his past crimes which is the entire reason why Ross comes back at the end of the story for John.
    • "Sadie had done FAR more criminal acts with Arthur than Javier" — that's a massive stretch, considering that Arthur and Javier have been in the same outlaw gang for years and Sadie is an active member for, at most, a few months. You're acting like all we see in the games is all that has ever happened to these characters, forgetting a little thing called "backstory". We might not see Javier do as many crimes in the game itself, but that is purely because he's not a main character whereas Sadie is; by any meaningful logic, he almost certainly has a lot more violent crimes to his name than Sadie does. Also, Javier is not technically an active criminal in the first game, but he is working as a hitman/enforcer for a part of the Mexican government which is, at the very least, massively corrupt. It is only with the thinnest of thin veneers that we can describe Javier as "not an active criminal" in the first game; in all practical sense, he would seem to be a criminal in all but name.
  • In addition, Mexico is practically a stone's throw away from John's ranch. It would be relatively simple for him to cross over to hunt down Javier and Bill if they were hiding there. Not to mention, Mexico is probably familiar territory for John. Canada and South America are far beyond of his means and capability to reach and navigate.
    • The ranch seems as far away from Saint Denis as it was from the Mexican border (and this seems like artistic fudging of geography to make several states and a whole other country fit together), so I don't know why they couldn't keep going into South America, or even the opposite way for Canada. That's quite an assumption that it's out of both John and the Agents' ability to get there, especially since John can hunt and survive. It's another assumption for the player to assume John has gone to Mexico; if anything, the events of Red Dead Redemption 2 seem to point out that, due to their unfamiliarity with other countries, they never left the United States before. It also still doesn't answer the question of why John didn't hunt down the rest of the gang when they stayed in America.
    • It seems like we're getting a little pedantic here; while the distances are certainly compressed for gameplay convenience, it's pretty clear that John's farm is still nonetheless closer to the Mexican border than it is to either Canada or South America.
    • Sadie and Charles decide to leave the country in 1907, and the only people they tell about their plans are the Marstons. For all Edgar Ross and the FBI know, they could be anywhere in the world, as the Marstons wouldn't speak a word about Sadie and Charles to the FBI. Assuming they don't return to a life of crime, the FBI would have no leads on where they are.
    • But John knows about where Sadie and Charles are than he does about where Bill, Dutch, and Javier are.
    • Yes, but he wants to hunt them down much less than Bill, Dutch and Javier. He might have mixed feelings about hunting down Bill, Dutch and Javier, but they're still unrepentant criminals who betrayed him and left him for dead. It might not give him warm and fuzzy feelings to do so, but he can at least justify betraying and hunting them to himself with the (quite valid) argument that they are still murderous outlaws who should be taken down for the greater good of his family and society as a whole. Conversely, Sadie and Charles risked their lives for him and his family, remained true and loyal to him, and have turned their backs on crime for more peaceful lives. He has much less incentive to betray their whereabouts and kill them than he does the others.
    • Also, we are perhaps greatly overestimating exactly how much John knows about where Sadie and Charles are, here. For example, he knows that Charles is going to Canada. Great, that's just a country of (at the time) roughly 7.2 million people and 3.85 million miles someone has to comb through. Or Sadie, last he knows is going to "South America" which, even better, is a continent of then-twelve separate nations/territories, the fourth largest land mass in the world with a square mass of 6.8 million miles, and a combined then-population upwards of 20 million people. The phrase "needle in a haystack" starts to come to mind. The others, however, aren't exactly hiding or are within the government's or John's capabilities to track down; Bill Williamson is holed up in a fort not that far from where John lives, Dutch as it turns out is in the forests even closer to where John lives, and while Javier's maybe a bit tricker there in Mexico John has presumably learned some things about him over the course of their friendship that might, at least, give him a few clues where to start looking (old haunts and hideouts, names he can track down, etc.).
  • Presumably small fries like Pearson or Tilly wouldn't look nearly as impressive to catch for Ross as Bill or Dutch, so even if Ross remembered that they were associates they're not worth the effort to make a big show of killing. That or he could have easily dealt with them long before he contacted John.
    • Ross was willing to let Abigail and Jack go at the end of the first game after he killed John, even though we know from this game that Abigail was directly complicit in at least one of their robberies and personally murdered agent Milton (although Ross may not have ever found out about the latter) which would support the idea that he only really cared about the "big names". It's possible Sadie and Charles, both newer additions to the gang, didn't have high enough personal bounties to be worth trying to find.
    • Charles was in the gang longer than Micah, and Micah was in the gang only a little bit longer than Sadie. The entire gang is filled with wanted criminals who committed acts of robbery and murder, especially given that Agent Milton and Agent Ross have seen all of the members, and promised the gang that if they didn't give up Dutch, they would all be tracked down. Javier seems to have less crimes and notoriety than Sadie in Red Dead Redemption 2 (as opposed to Sadie actively shooting up the entire O'Driscoll gang's hideout, starting a gun fight after Colm's hanging in the middle of Saint Denis, or also being taken captive by Agent Milton).
    • Micah clearly also has a lengthy list of crimes to his name even before he enters the gang, and Javier has been an active outlaw for much, much longer than Sadie has. You're acting like we should assume that the things we see happen to these characters in the games are literally the only things that have ever happened to these characters, and that before the opening scene they are blank slates with no past at all. Which ignores the existence of backstory, and completely flies in the face of both common sense and, well, how stories work. Yes, we actually see Sadie do more horrible things than Javier in this particular game, but that is simply because she is a more central character to Arthur Morgan's journey than Javier is, not because Javier isn't an outlaw who has almost certainly done a lot more to attract the attention of law-enforcement in his life than Sadie has. We don't need to see him do all those bad things for basic common sense to suggest that, within the game, he is an infamous outlaw with a much more widely-known reputation, a lengthier list of crimes and bad deeds, and a much higher bounty to his name than a woman who, up until the beginning of the game, was a farmer's wife on an isolated ranch somewhere in the Grizzlies and spends a few months running with an outlaw gang before it dissolves.
  • A full three years pass between RDR 2's epilogue and the events of RDR 1. 3 years is plenty of time for the Pinkertons/Bureau agents to round up the low-hanging fruit like Pearson, Swanson or Mary-Beth if they so chose to go after them. Or vengeful gangs could have gotten them in that time frame (after all, the Grays have certainly shown their ability to hold a grudge against the Braithwaites, and they saw through Hosea's plan to play both sides, how long can Pearson honestly expect to survive in a highly visible role as proprietor of the Rhodes general store in the heart of Gray country?).
    • During the Clemens Cove chapter, Pearson was always back at camp and never interacted with the Grays or the Braithwaites. Considering this, I don't think either family would realize he was involved with the gang, especially considering most of the family members the gang interacted with are dead. Also, death from general ailments between RDR 1 and RDR 2 is possible considering the time period.
  • In addition to the above, while Ross is an unethical glory-hound, he's not a completely insane Knight Templar trying to stamp out any and all criminals everywhere no matter what the crime is. It's easy to overlook in the romanticising the gang tends to receive versus the game's cynical approach to authority and law-enforcement, but there are actually valid reasons why the federal government might make bringing the key members of the Van Der Linde gang to justice a priority; they commit massive and bold bank heists and train robberies, often killing huge amounts of people in the process, and gradually seem to be leaning towards becoming outright terrorists and insurrectionists. They're not just picking on these people because Ross is a power-hungry meanie; the US government has a valid reason for bringing in or stopping people like Dutch, Bill, Javier etc. because these men are genuinely violent, dangerous and powerful criminals overtly acting against the interests of the US government. But that doesn't mean that everyone who was remotely connected to the gang needs to be taken out with lethal intensity. Dutch Van Der Linde commits robberies that end with young women being shot in the face and leads Native Americans in armed uprisings, Pearson the Chef made stew and runs a grocery store, they're not exactly like for like. Even Edgar Ross almost certainly thinks that going after the guy who made the gang dinner, a drunken priest and some pickpockets who hung around them with armed soldiers given shoot-to-kill orders is excessive.
    • Sadie and Charles have committed just as many heinous and awful actions as Micah, Dutch, Bill, or Javier. Moreso if you look at the fact that Arthur and Sadie directly sprung John out of a federal prison and killed so many guardsmen. Milton and Ross know who these people and are on the warpath and Ross explicitly wants everyone who was apart of Dutch's old gang, making no distinctions that he just wanted the gunslingers.
    • Yes, but, with respect, so what? The fact that Sadie and Charles also have blood on their hands doesn't change the fact that Edgar Ross is unlikely to make bringing in Pearson or Mary-Beth a high priority. He's out for glory, but the glory comes from picking up the notorious bank robbers and outlaws, not the guy who made bad stew or the drunken priest who just kind of hung around them or the pretty-much harmless pickpockets. And even if he does decide to mop them up just for 100% completion, he's not going to send mercenaries or soldiers after them the way some here are fretting because that, frankly, would be insane overkill. He gets John to hunt down Bill, Javier and Dutch because they're still running around doing outlaw shit; they're leading gangs out of forts, or acting as an enforcer for a corrupt Mexican governor or, oh, leading an armed Native American insurrection against the United States. That kind of asks for a mercenary or a military response. But if anyone seriously thinks that Ross is going to use the same or even similar tactics to hunt and kill a woman who was once a pickpocket and now writes adventure stories, the wife of a lawyer, or the guy who runs the local general store but once hung around an outlaw gang making them dinner, then they're completely lacking in perspective.
    • Also, "as many heinous and awful actions"? In Sadie's case at least, that's a massive stretch. She's only an active outlaw for a few months, most if not all of the people she targets or kills are themselves heinous outlaws (excluding, admittedly, the prison guards mentioned before), and while she does end up doing some nasty things that would definitely attract the interest of law-enforcement, lifelong outlaws Dutch Van Der Linde, Bill Williamson and Javier Escuella can almost certainly give her a run for her money and then some. And frankly, trying to suggest that either Sadie or Charles, bad as they can be, are anywhere near the level of Micah Bell, a man notable even for the company he keeps for being a vicious murderous psychopath, is so ludicrously laughable as to be utterly unworthy of comment.
  • Sadie and Charles can be easily explained: they probably just weren't considered core members of the gang in the minds of Edgar Ross or the others. At one point at least, it is mentioned that members of the gang have tended to drift in and out, and there've been a few members who've joined, done a few jobs, and then gone their own way. For Ross, the "Van Der Linde Gang" he was dedicated to hunting down would be the surviving core members, the people who'd been part of it for years if not decades, but there were almost certainly plenty of other outlaws who just sort of drifted in, hung around for a few scores, and then went their own way again, and he's not going to waste his time and resources hunting down every single person who may have been affiliated with the gang for longer than a few weeks or months at a time. Charles, we learn, has only been riding with the gang for about a year by the events of the game, and before that was a bit of a loner, so it's possible he wasn't really seen as a real member but just someone who rode with them for a time, whereas Sadie is only an active member of the gang for at most two or three months, hardly long enough for her to cement in people's minds as a notorious outlaw who should be top of the FBI's list the OP seems to think she should be. In short, they may have just slipped through the cracks.
  • It's also a near-certainty that Edgar Ross didn't have limitless resources to work with, and so might have simply had to pick and choose his targets. Federal agent he may have been, he still would have had to work within the confines of a relatively limited budget that almost certainly didn't have the money or resources to be spent scouring the entirety of Canada or South America for just two separate individuals, or tracking down every single pickpocket and cook who may have hung around the camp at any point. He went for the bigger targets partly because, well, they were the bigger targets, but he likely also went for them because they were the most efficient ways to use the resources he was provided with. The others, even if he did want to bring them in, he just had to shrug and let go. Sometimes you have to let the minnows go so you can catch the bigger fish.
  • Also, with respect to the "minnows" of the gang at least, by 1907 and certainly by 1911 most of the crimes that they were culpable of while in the gang would have likely passed the statute of limitations. I'm not sure what the law was like at the time, but if it was anything like the modern day then federal charges for grand larceny — probably the closest that the pickpockets of the gang would fall under, and that's only if they happened to bag anything worth over $250 at a pop — would expire after five years, and while I'm not sure what making an outlaw gang stew would fall under, I would imagine that would have a comparatively swift expiry date as well. So even if Edgar Ross was fanatically devoted to bringing in every member of the gang, he likely didn't have any legal standing to go after most of them. Notably, the members we do see him go after are all guilty of at least one murder, which has no statutory expiry date.
  • For another point, the Pinkertons aren't just after every little two-bit criminal Dutch ever recruited. They're after the men involved in the Blackwater Massacre, and the big shootout on the steam boat that cost a young woman her life. That whole incident is the reason you can't get into Blackwater until the epilogue of the second game. Sadie wasn't even in the gang yet, and from dialogue about not knowing what happened on that boat, we can assume that whatever Charles' role in the botched bank robbery, he wasn't actually involved in the massacre itself.
  • For what it's worth, seeing that we obviously don't see them in RDR 1, it is possible that Tilly, Pearson, etc. were tracked down offscreen by the FBI, arrested and imprisoned. Seeing that they were weaklings, they weren't sent on the kill Javier/Bill/Dutch quest.
• In the first game, Dutch knows about John's marriage to Abigail, but he couldn't have actually known since John only proposed to her after he left the gang, and only finally married her at the very end of the game. I don't think it's "they were there together so long, it was basically marriage" since Dutch says during the bank robbery in the first game that marrying Abigail, despite being with all of the other members of the gang (although the gang culture of this doesn't even seem close to what John was alluding to in the first game), made him a "better man" than the rest of them, so it's implying that John married Abigail officially. He's also referencing marriage to people who weren't with the gang, so telling them that they were married to strangers wouldn't really imply that they were "together so long they were basically married."
  • I just figured that since Dutch knew that John spent a lot of time around Abigail and he sired a child with her, he was basically married to her despite it not being official.
    • He was saying they were married to the other officers who stopped the robbery, not to John. He didn't say "he stayed with a whore" or anything along those lines. He literally tells them he married Abigail and gives false praise for his decision, implying that the "marriage" was something real.
  • It's more than once brought up, even during the proposal itself, that John and Abigail are in fact married, but not "for real" or "in front of God". They are probably in a common-law marriage, officiated by Dutch or some other non-minister.
    • Except that's not what happened. Sadie asks Arthur about it, and he just says they've been together for a long time, with only Arthur and Abigail indicating that they're long-term relationship was "basically marriage." There's no indication Dutch or another minister officiated anything, and it seems like they only really recognized their marriage at the end of the game after the events of Red Dead Redemption 2.
  • A lot of time passed in between the first and second games. It's entirely plausible that Dutch heard about John's marriage.
  • They had to be at least informally married. Arthur and John both refer to Abigail as John's wife when talking to each other.
  • Marriage notices were and are frequently recorded in newspapers. It is hardly unlikely that Dutch managed to gain access to one at some point.
• Let's do a quick recap of everything Morgan did for the Marston Family: He broke John out of prison, helped rescue his son, was one of only two people (Sadie being the other one) that gave a damn about Abigail being abducted by Milton then he rescued her; All of this, and John never even mentions the guy in Red Dead Redemption? Okay, maybe Morgan was just not relevant in any conversation in part 1. However, during the attack on El Presido, why did John denouce the whole gang as just using the word family as a cheap alternative to what they really were: a gang of murderous outlaws. John takes this even further by saying that the family never meant anything in the first place. Wow, John must really be an Ungrateful Bastard to say that. Of course, the obvious answer is that Rockstar didn't plan ahead, but that's a lazy excuse. So, my question, because I feel like I've written enough, is why didn't John acknowledge all the sacrifices that Morgan made for John and his family?
  • Because Arthur Morgan wasn’t created back when the first Red Dead Redemption was in development. I do agree that it’s lazy/bad writing that Rockstar didn’t think of what John said in the first game when they wrote this game, but this is the reality. As to why John didn’t acknowledge it in-universe? Well, here’s a theory — everything we’re doing in Red Dead Redemption *is* to salvage basically everything Arthur Morgan left for John. John doesn’t mention it because the people he’s talking to either (1) already know about it or (2) he feels they don't need to know each and every detail besides that he left the gang after they left him which is true. It likely also pays to mind that John is too focused on trying to get his ranch back together that he doesn’t really have time to kick back and reminisce on the past and, well, then Edgar Ross decides to pay his farm one more visit.
    • You make good points, especially the part where John had too many things on his mind. I can accept that he may not have much time to reminisce, what with Abigail and Jack's kidnapping. However, like I said in my first part: John denounces the whole gang, and rejects the idea that they were ever a real family. I would be okay if John just said that to Javier, personally. But John made it clear that EVERYONE in the gang was just looking out for themselves. It really derails John's whole character, in my opinion. Nothing I say will fix that continuity error/plot hole, but damn, this kills the whole narrative. I have to view John as an ungrateful bastard because of this.
    • I think we need to realize that John has always been an ungrateful bastard. We see this in ‘Red Dead Redemption’ multiple times. Think of all the people who were willing to put their neck out to help him. Out of all of them, Bonnie and her family were the only ones spared his snark and implied threats of death and maiming. He was always a terrible person. Though you are right, it is very jarring to have Marston in the epilogue going on about how none of what they have would be possible without Arthur and then in ‘Red Dead Redemption’, he’s all, “No one in the gang cared about me!”
    • John doesn't seem like that. If anything he and Arthur seem to take an enormous amount of responsibility for their actions and themselves, and John seems incredibly grateful for the opportunity to take his family and live a better life.
    • OP, here: Like I said, John isn't that grateful in the first game. He denounces the whole notion that they were a family. I agree, in 2, John is eternally grateful and acknowledging of all the sacrifices Arthur made for him and his family. However, I'm not talking about John in 2; I'm talking about John's choice of words in 1.
    • Been a while since I played the game — when did he say the gang wasn’t like a family to him? Also keep in mind that Dutch, Bill, and Javier all turned against him — with Dutch leaving him for dead twice. He’s not exactly gonna be thinking fondly of them after that.
    • I believe there is a video with all of Javier's appearances in Red Dead Redemption. I'll try to put the link if I find it. It should be easy to find. But the gist is that John believes that all the gang members just called themselves family without actually having any loyalty to each other. John then goes on to say that the life they shared together never meant anything. Now, I agree, it's true that Javier left John to rot during the Army robbery, but John did not just scold Javier and Dutch; he's talking about the WHOLE gang. If he just directed those words towards them two, then I would be okay with it. But John didn't. https://youtu.be/AiWXLCnPaPY
    • The problem is that Red Dead Redemption 2 tries to ret-con a lot of story elements from the first game, making John more inconsiderate of his "gang" if you take Red Dead Redemption 2 into account, which seems like an odd move for Rockstar to do. It seems that the lifestyle of the gang in Red Dead Redemption 1 was thought to be more harsh and cruel than it is portrayed in Red Dead Redemption 2 (such as the idea that Abigail was "passed around" in the gang, whereas there doesn't seem to be any culture of that with any of the relationships in RDR 2). It seems like in RDR 1, the only gang members to actually survive (or kept out of prison) were Bill, Javier, Dutch, John, and Abigail. RDR 2 ret-cons John into being less considerate in the first game (despite the fact that RDR 2 takes place a few months, at most, before the events of the first game, given Jack's age). It's even weirder given the amount of time before the events of the first game in close proximity to Charles and Sadie's involvement with the journey going after Micah, and stranger still that Dutch talks to John at the Blackwater bank robbery as if it had been much longer than just meeting him at the mountaintop confrontation (alluded to by the dialog where Dutch has that one bank-teller woman hostage). It's also strange that we don't get much context to Dutch, Javier, and Bill (for some reason) "leaving John for dead", as all we see of John is him getting shot in the shoulder and Dutch trying to look for him, maybe. In RDR 1, it could be construed that the gang legitimately thought that John was dead, but in RDR 2, Dutch's history of leaving people behind sometimes and not other times (as well as being risk-averse sometimes, and then risk-prone at other times) is just confusing, especially since we don't get John's point of view on what happened.
    • Dutch is the only one who suggested Abigail was 'passed around'. And by that point he's nuts and trying to piss off John.
    • Bill also made some allusions to this. He says, "I fucked with Abigail!" IIRC, he says this in his assassination mission; However, you might be right, and both Dutch and Bill just said this to anger John..
  • ^ Therein lies the problem — we were given an idea of what the gang was like in the first Redemption — that of a cruel, uncaring gang so it was easy to explain why John would chalk all of them as heartless bastards. In this game, we’re given a clear picture of the gang and it’s nothing like what he described them as. They’re actually family who care about each other (to an extent) and Abigail is treated with a measure of respect. For some reason, Rockstar forgot the lore of the first game when constructing the prequel which is basically Writing 101: when writing the prequel, remember what you laid out and match the events to what the characters said happened. So now we have a disjointed storyline that accidentally paints John as a wholly ungrateful bastard to his own gang (in which several members — Arthur included — helped him escape to start a new life.
    • Well, you have to see it from John's point of view. He effectively lost all faith in Dutch after he left him for dead not once, but TWICE. And in the climax of the moment, Bill and Javier sided with Dutch even after all his shortcomings and Micah's duplicity were exposed. That bitterness has been simmering for over a decade, even if John wanted to put his past behind him. That will certainly color how he perceives his past interactions with Dutch, Bill, and Javier. The only people he DOESN'T demean or badmouth directly are those gang members who actually helped him, such as Arthur, Sadie, and Charles.
  • Here's a theory: Maybe John isn't trying to justify to others why he'd go after his old "family", maybe he's trying to justify it to himself. He's going after people who were near and dear to him for many years, so he's lying to himself to keep himself psyched to do what needs doing. That may be also why he omits Arthur's name: he respects Arthur's sacrifice too much to tarnish his name with lies, so John leaves him out when he tells stories of the old gang.
    • It's clear Rockstar wrote themselves a bit into a corner with how they portrayed the gang in 1, but this fits and there's evidence for this interpretation in 1. John has orders to capture or kill Bill Williamson, but when he goes to Fort Mercer, he doesn't infiltrate the fort or just start shooting. He asks Bill, politely and somewhat regretfully, to go with him, out in the open. It's easy to interpret this even as John trying to commit indirect suicide this way - particularly in light of how Abigail rails on him for constantly fixing problems with a gun and how it bookends the ending of the game, where John also lets go. If you kill Javier, John spits on his corpse, but he's also pained about the whole ordeal.
    • Another piece of evidence for this theory is when you help the Feds chase after Dutch. It’s quite clear John wants nothing to do with this, even going as far as saying he’d shoot Fordham and Ross a hundred times before he shoots Dutch once. He still cares about his old gang members so all the bad-mouthing might just be him justifying to himself why he has to take them out.
  • Two possible theories (beyond the likely "Rockstar did a dumb"):
    • Possibility one - Human nature causes us to accentuate the negative - an angry customer is far more likely to leave a bad product review than a happy customer is to leave a positive review. Consider that the gang was together for several years but this game's main story unfolds over the course of just a few months. John and Arthur have bad blood and their interactions are frosty for much of the story (at best, they tolerate each other in the first few chapters; antagonizing John leads to genuine animosity in return while greeting him politely frequently results in terse, less-than-friendly acknowledgements). Only at the very end do Arthur and John truly reconcile. Given that they're at odds for a majority of this story (and the years preceding), the few weeks of final harmony between them could easily be drowned out by negative memories in a moment of raw emotion. It's harsh, but it's human nature for John to sincerely hate Arthur or outright forget about him while lashing out.
    • Possibility two - John is talking about a specific iteration of the gang. For an ensemble whose roster is constantly changing with new recruits and sudden casualties, he could be talking about the final version of the gang (Dutch, Micah, Cleet, Joe, Bill and Javier). That Arthur, Charles, Sadie and others chose to leave could indicate that they're absolved or not considered to be "the gang" John is referring to. (Consider another Dutch ringleader who is notoriously hard to get along with: Van Halen - fans of the band usually fall into Roth or Hagar camps and hate the other version... and everyone hates the short-lived Gary Cherone version of the band. John's criticisms could be a version of this effect, where he hates the gang as it was at the end but doesn't hate its former members.)
    • As stated by the above troper John could simply consider "the gang" as Dutch, Micah, Bill and Javier which, by chapter 6 and after Arthur had "the talk" about loyalty with him is really what the Dutch Van der Linde gang was practically reduced to by that moment, simply put, he considers the other members, and Arthur specially as something above simple gang members, specially considering Arthur and John are placed as sort of brothers by the game's narrative.
  • Arthur and Sadie aren't "the family," the whole gang is, and throughout the game half that family all dies or leaves and almost always because of Dutch's poor choices. The rest are just what remains of it after chapter 6, Dutch, Javier, Bill, and Micah. He's not disrespecting the memory of Arthur, because at some point, at least after Dutch refused to help break John out of Sisika, Arthur had discarded Dutch's vision of "the family" in favor of actual family - that is, John's actual family, and the current or future families of the others. He was one of the first to leave in spirit, and he only stayed physically to make sure the rest got out before it all went to hell.
  • Consider also that the split in the gang is arguably caused by two different concepts of "family". Dutch's concept of family gradually becomes "I am thy Lord and Father, do as I say and follow me in everything, no matter what", and it's this version that Bill and Javier turn their backs on John for. Arthur's, however, becomes "look out for the people around you like they're your brothers and sisters, no matter what". It might not be seamless fit, but it takes only a few tweaks to suggest that John wasn't rejecting the entire gang as family; he was rejecting how Dutch, Bill and Javier defined the gang as family, which was indeed bullshit.
  • Ultimately, though, one has to remember that both the time-span, long enough for a lot of memories to become hazy and bitterness to become entrenched, and the context of events. In the first game, John understandably has a lot of anger at the situation he's been forced into, and the people forcing him into it — both the government agents threatening his family and forcing him to hunt down several of his old friends, and said old friends for acting like increasingly reckless criminal lunatics who need to be taken down and indirectly leading to situation (a). This is unlikely to lead to a lot of warm-and-fuzzy reminiscing about the good old days. And even with that taken into account, there is presumably an unspoken assumption that we can take that when John curses his old gang in the first game, he is implicitly leaving out former members like Arthur Morgan and Charles Smith and Sadie Adler and Pearson, all of whom ultimately did right by him and all of whom are either long dead or living quiet lives which don't involve acting like increasingly reckless criminal lunatics, and thus who have little to no responsibility for the circumstances he and his family find themselves in. There's no point in John either mentioning Arthur, whether to curse him or exclude him from the cursing, because Arthur is by that point long dead and has already settled any debt he might owe to John for the situation with his life.
  • Also, if memory serves, most of the time when John brings up his old gang the context is either him briefly outlining who he is to the person he's talking to or having an argument with someone he knows but isn't particularly fond of. He consequently doesn't spend a lot of time waxing lyrical about the various exceptions to his general "I hate the members of my old gang" rule because it's either irrelevant at the time he's bringing it up or he's talking to a stranger, and John generally plays his cards close to his chest when talking to strangers when it comes to his personal life and his feelings.
  • One also has to remember Rule of Drama; continuity aside, the game has to stand by itself on its own terms, not just on how efficiently it joins the seams with the other game. The producers felt that a story of a close-knit gang of outlaws who tragically tore themselves apart would be more compelling than the story RDR 1 hints at about a gang of outlaws who always were kind of assholes to each other, and gambled that most of the playing audience either wouldn't notice the relatively minor continuity snarls this caused with an almost-decade old game on another generation of console entirely or, equally fine from their point of view, wouldn't care because they found the prequel just as if not more compelling.
  • While it's perhaps not a complete answer to the question of Arthur Morgan's lack of mention in the first game, it is perhaps worth noting something that a certain well-dressed yet strange gentleman remarks to John when they cross paths: "Why should you remember me, John? You've forgotten far more important people than me."
  • While he does have good memories of the gang and fondly remembers a few, they were still a bunch of murderous thieves who robbed and killed thousands of people, including innocents, in the name of a narcissistic liar who was only after money. If John is even a little remorseful, he may be ashamed and regretful of being in a gang of thieves and murderers.

Character Inconsistencies

• Arthur seems very against the idea of anything even remotely racist, until he meets Angelo Bronte who he calls a "greasy-haired European" (Bronte is Italian), which seems incredibly jarring. Is he just racist against other white people?
  • Arthur isn’t racist toward white people — at worst he’s likely xenophobic. More than likely, though, he just detests rich people as a whole and figured that since this guy’s Italian, calling him a “greasy-haired European” would be a perfect insult.
    • If he doesn't like Italians, that can be seen as racist. However, he specifically mentions "greasy-haired European" (which is an really odd way of defining someone's race for the time as they'd usually refer to their country, kinda like Irish was back in Red Dead Redemption 1). Having greasy hair is a racial stereotype of Italians, and Arthur says this before he even meets Bronte.
    • Double-standards are a thing that exists, as is cognitive dissonance. He really hates Bronte so he used the first foul insult that came to mind, which happened to be sort of racist. Sometimes people just say things without thinking about it. I don't see what the inconsistency is aside from Arthur being slightly more of a jerk than usual in that moment.
    • Even then, it may not be much of an inconsistency. Remember, he’s not exactly friendly toward people the gang is openly hostile to, so given the context of what’s been happening, he’s not going to restrain the insults for this man.
    • Arthur can say some fairly discriminatory things towards Javier when using the Antagonize dialogue option, though it's reliant on player choice.
    • Don’t forget that he makes some Irish jokes toward Sean — he’s not above making offensive jokes about someone’s racial/national identity.
    • Arthur could have been biased against Bronte specifically, he abducted Jack and screwed the gang over several times.
  • This is a game set in the nineteenth century we're discussing here. There's two key things; first of all, racist sentiment towards Italians was a lot more common in the United States than it is today, as Italians were more recent immigrants and viewed more suspiciously. Second of all, casual racism in general was considered a lot more acceptable, or at least not particularly worthy of notice; even people who were by and large considered non-racist would likely express a lot of sentiments that would today be considered incredibly racist. In other words, Deliberate Values Dissonance; by the standards of his day, Arthur's arguably a pretty progressive guy, but that doesn't mean he's progressive by twenty-first century standards.
• Why does Dutch stay with Micah if he's emotionally distraught seeing Arthur being killed by him? Why does he stay with Micah? Why does he kill Micah? Why doesn't he kill John? Why does he kill Micah only when John shows up and after John had killed the rest of the gang?
  • The game makes it clear that Dutch had gone completely insane by this point — he’s not rational anymore.
    • But he still functions by logic, especially in terms of protecting "the gang" over anything else. He still functions by that logic at the end of the game with Arthur's story, and functions by a logic against the U.S. in Red Dead Redemption 1. He still has reasoning and logic to his actions, even if those reasons only make sense to him. If he's crazy, why didn't he also kill John and Sadie for their "betrayal" of the gang?
  • Micah's dialogue infers that he and Dutch had only recently teamed up to recover the money from the Blackwater heist. They were only together out of simple convenience.
    • But it wasn't recent. The money was back at the camp site, which, in one of the endings, you can try to get. They've had that since the end of Arthur's story (probably back longer given that Abigail knew about where Dutch was keeping it when John tells Arthur), and have lugged it around since then. Micah and Dutch seem to have been together for a while, and Dutch also just seems absolutely uncaring about his gang as John kills every single member, which really does go against his ideals that were previously established.
    • The money at the campsite was their savings that was built up from all the robberies done throughout the game. The money that you get at the end was the Blackwater money.
    • It couldn't be from their other robberies because they keep losing the money after every single robbery, like in Saint Denis.
    • It was from the other robberies, the Saint Denis bank was the only robbery shown in the game that was botched, every other robbery was a success.
    • Saint Denis was the only major heist in the game that they botched and lost the loot. There were numerous other heists and jobs the gang has collected money from over the course of the game.
    • The Army payroll train produced a huge amount of loot, which except for what Arthur gave Abigail wound up in Dutch's chest in the cave. Query- since Abigail got away with a big sack of money, why are she and John broke vagabonds in the Epilogue?
  • Dutch tells John same reason as you when John asks him why he's there. Whether you believe him is up for debate but it seems he wanted to kill Micah as well and wanted to wait for a good time. Seeing as Micah is faster than your deadeye it is sound to wait until a distraction arises.
• If the player chooses, why does Arthur go back to the camp at the end for the buried money? He's going to be dead soon and it seems incredibly pointless to do this now.
  • I think the idea was that he wanted to give the money to John and Abigail.
    • This. On low honor, it seems he's trying to spite Dutch, who basically betrayed all of them for that money.
    • On high honor too. The short cutscene right before you regain control has Arthur growling Dutch and Micah's names while the ambient music changes to something much more aggressive.
• Why does Dutch just wait in the cabin while John and Micah have their gun battle in the snow? If it was for a surprise attack, why do it so dramatically to draw attention to himself?
  • Insane people don't always think logically, and Dutch is nothing if not a showman.
    • But Dutch is shown that he has a logic to his plans, even if it only makes sense to him.
    • And I'm sure that in Dutch's insane mind, staying in the cabin to make a dramatic last-second entrance made logical sense to him. We could go in circles about this for days.
    • Dutch is a shitty planner with a flair for the dramatic. It doesn't matter if how Dutch thinks is logical, it's still fucking stupid - he probably thought it'll get him an element of surprise. His "plan" to tar and feather the US soldiers is a fantastic example of how poorly thought out everything he does is: he wastes explosives to scare the soldiers and trap them, but he doesn't account that just maybe there's another squad in the rear. Another one is the final train heist, which goes to shit because Dutch doesn't account for the simple fact that the train might not slow down.
  • It also appeared that he wasn't certain which side he wanted to be on, which is why he didn't initially join in.
  • He doesn't intervene until Micah is cornered by John and Sadie. Had they killed Micah, then gone inside the cabin and found Dutch, they probably wouldn't have been too happy to see him. Having a Mexican Standoff which he then wins for them endeared him to them a bit and gave him a chance to walk away without a fight.
• Okay, so what exactly was Catherine Braithwaite’s plan when she kidnapped Jack? What did she hope to accomplish by sending him off to Angela Bronte? If she wanted to hold Jack ransom in order to scare Dutch’s gang off her land, wouldn’t it have made more sense to simply hold Jack in her manor? They wouldn’t dare try shooting the place up, followed by setting it on fire if he were locked up somewhere in the house. I don’t think she thought her plan through by basically throwing away her only bargining chip.
  • It's very likely that Catherine just seriously underestimated how far Dutch's gang were willing to go to get Jack back. It makes sense for her to keep Jack somewhere the gang couldn't reach, since it prevents them from being able to stage a rescue mission, especially after it's proven how easily they can infiltrate her estate. After all, Dutch's gang had to jump through a LOT of hoops to get Jack back from Bronte.
• Javier: anyone who's played both games will notice a major difference in Javier's character. In RDR 2 he's presented as an idealist who took the fight to the wealthy landed elite in Mexico after his uncle was castrated and fed to pigs for asking for better wages. In RDR 1, he's a cynical killer who works for the government in Nuevo Paraiso, which regularly carries out atrocities against the same exploited lower class that Javier claimed to fight for in the second game. To demonstrate how much of a shift in personality Javier has undergone, Colonel Allende mentions that Javier's family worked on the land that his uncle owned. Allende's uncle was almost definitely responsible for the castration of Javier's uncle. This means Javier is working for the man whose uncle castrated his uncle, and Allende carries out very similar atrocities over the course of the first game. If not an inconsistency, Rockstar at the very least left a LOT to our imagination on how Javier was able to fall so far. Also in the first game, John mentions that Javier took Dutch going crazy worse than the rest of the gang, but the last time John saw Javier he was fighting at Dutch's side against Arthur and John. How could John know that Javier took Dutch going crazy hard? Even though Javier seemed hesitant to shoot at John and Arthur, it would be a stretch for John to even notice Javier was hesitant, considering the pure chaos of the game's climax, let alone make the connection that Javier's hesitance meant he had a falling out with Dutch.
  • You have to remember, a LOT of time has passed between the first and second games. It doesn't take much for a person to pull a complete 180 on their values after a serious fall from grace. Maybe after seeing the gang disintegrate and Dutch going mad, Javier concluded it was pointless fighting for the underdog. You also can't rule out that John and Javier may have had some sort of communication with each other over the years or John heard stories from his old gang contacts.

What is going through Dutch's head?

• So I just finished the game. My question is, what was his actual agenda the whole time? What does he hope to achieve, what is his end-goal? Why does he trust Micah over Arthur, why does he start killing people? Why does he walk away from John and Arthur when they are about to be killed when he could save them? I get that he is insane but there must be some kind of logic in his head to what he is doing, unless it's all just random acts of insanity.
  • I think at first his agenda was to basically save up enough money and head further west (or to Tahiti) but then he suffers a head injury during the last train heist which probably knocked some screws loose. It also pays to remember that they had just failed their big score in the St. Denis banking heist and lost Hosea — and, oh yeah, Molly O’Shea up and made a drunken confession that she told the Pinkerton what their plan was. Altogether, it’s no wonder he’s losing it and is desperately trying to retain some measure of control. As to why he trusts Micah and not Arthur? Because unlike Arthur, Micah seems to be sticking with Dutch and following along with his plans and ideas so he’ll listen to him. It also doesn’t help that Arthur is starting to act independently of Dutch’s command.
  • Dutch's main Fatal Flaw is his own ego. He's extremely charismatic and a bit of an idealist which are great assets for a leader, but he has the bad habit of buying into his own rhetoric about living free and thumbing his nose at civilization. Even though he says the gang should lay low to evade the law, he simply cannot help himself and make a scene, staging big heists that inevitably draw the attention of the Pinkertons. Dutch also begins trusting Micah more, especially after Hosea dies, because Micah plays to Dutch's ego while Arthur continually questions the rationale behind his plans. It's only natural for an egomaniac to show preference to the person who tells him what he wants to hear.
  • I would have to say one in camp conversation explains it best, while I was walking through camp near Dutch I noticed he seemed more paranoid than normal, this still being early in the game mind you. And Dutch was asking Arthur if he was making plans against him which just confused Arthur. Meaning even before the head injury Dutch was paranoid to an extent and didn't actually trust Arthur due to him being one of the more independent members of the group and thought Arthur in time will betray him. And the head injury just exacerbated his paranoia and condition into a minor form of insanity.
  • Additionally, it's heavily implied that Dutch doesn't want to retire at all. He wants his little make believe family to go on forever, just blowing things up and tweaking Uncle Sam's nose. At the very beginning of the game, the decision to go East is considered controversial and dangerous - not only because their plan was always to go further West, but also because there are too many big cities there. If you look at New Austin, it's clear the gang could thrive there for years, even with heat on them. Additionally, no one can offer a good explanation why Dutch shot the girl on the ferry - at best they say that it was pure chaos, but it's chaos he invited himself by doing the job in the first place.

Plot Holes

• If Dutch had the treasure this entire time (rather than it being in Blackwater) why did they have to do any big robberies? It makes the entire storyline pointless.
  • Because he didn't have the money from the Blackwater ferry job, that was hidden away in Blackwater the entire game. They had to do robberies because they had no money on hand.
    • But why didn't they just use the money they had from the robberies to go to a new country? There's over $20,000 there, which would have been plenty to start a new life.
    • Dutch does not care about money. He never had any intention of giving up his fight against the "system". He most likely assumed that the gang would not share his sentiment if they knew he had enough for all of them to retire. In short, Dutch is devoted to ideals, not money.
    • Except there's no evidence of him self-sabotaging things just so he can continue to fight the government. He was also trying to get enough money to travel far away enough for the gang. To say he assumed the rest of the gang didn't share that ideal is something that you have to invent as an audience member, especially since that first assumption that he kept the treasure away to justify continual robberies and crimes doesn't seem to be highlighted in the game.
    • He wasn't intentionally keeping the money from them (as others have indicated, it was actually out of his grasp for much of the story), but there's actually plenty of evidence of to suggest that Dutch may be sabotaging any efforts they make to break out of the life, even if unconsciously. From the very beginning, it's made clear that the gang's main priority and need should be to lie low, lick their wounds, and focus on making enough to survive but otherwise not rock the boat until the heat's died down a bit. So what does Dutch keep doing? Why, he keeps planning and executing a number of high-profile, high-risk jobs that at times seem almost intentionally designed to piss off a number of wealthy, influential and powerful enemies, all of which have the potential to backfire and create more trouble for them all. Now, Dutch does keep making the argument that it's all with the intention of making enough at a fell swoop so that they can all retire — but, of course, he would say that, and it's also repeatedly pointed out to him that they've already got a lot of people hunting them and there's no urgent rush to do these kinds of risky jobs — especially since they could just lie low, wait till the dust has settled from the Blackwater job and then sneak back and get the proceeds at a later date. He might not be consciously doing so, but there is a clear subtext that Dutch, despite his claims otherwise, actually doesn't want the exciting, independent outlaw life to come to an end.
  • IIRC, he doesn't have the Blackwater treasure. That's what you recover at the end of the epilogue, from its hiding place in the mountains. The money that Abigail gives you the key to in Arthur's final mission is just the gang's savings from all the other robberies you've pulled throughout the game's story.
    • Then why didn't they just use the money they've hidden away? There was more than enough for everyone to start a new life, especially in a new country.
    • It's been explicitly said that it wasn't enough for the whole gang. It would have been enough to ensure just a couple of people (like John and Abigail) could live comfortably off of the money, but not the dozens of people that formed the whole gang. To put things in perspective, the gang was only scraping by with a couple thousand dollars every heist, while the Blackwater heist they were forced to abandon netted them a whopping $150,000, which is the equivalent of $5 million in today's currency.
    • By the time the train heist in chapter six is done, they've got about $40k in the savings box. Now consider that they'd have to book passage to another country, that would be a hefty price as they're all outlaws with bounties on their heads. Then they'd more than likely have to pay people in the country they get to to forge identification papers so it looks like they've always lived there, assuming nobody died or left, that's 24 people they'd need documents forged for. Then they'd probably have to pay a few locals to say that they've always lived in that country in case anyone ever came along asking about them. Then there's supplies like food and medicine and clothes they'd have to buy. By the time that's all done, that $40k would probably almost be gone, leaving them with very little to live on until they found a source of income that could sustain them all. With the Blackwater money, they'd have $190k, with that money in their pockets, they could get to another country, forge their papers and pay off a few people and still have a sizable amount leftover to live on until they got a decent income to keep them all living comfortably.
• So in the epilogue, John and his family are living under the name Milton rather than Marston. It certainly makes sense for them to hide their identity, but Milton? As in, Agent Milton, the guy who Abigail shot in the face after he held her hostage? Wouldn't it be a little weird for them to take his name? Yeah, maybe John and Abigail wanted to keep their initials the same, but it's not like those are the only two names that start with the letter M...
  • To be fair, Milton isn’t exactly a rare name. No one outside John’s old gang and the Pinkerton/Federal Government even know that Agent Milton exists so as far as they’re concerned, this is just an ordinary family with ‘Milton’ for surname. My only gripe is calling Jack ‘Lancelot’. If John and Abigail kept their own names, why couldn’t Jack?
  • Actually, John and Abigail didn't keep their own names, they called themselves Jim and Agatha.
  • There's a bit of Truth in Television here; notice how John and Abigail assume identities which keep their initials. It actually turns out that many people who change their identities in order to create a new life for themselves actually do keep their original initials, simply because it makes things a bit easier to keep track of. So "Milton" was probably just the first "M" family name that John could think of, and it was most likely unconsciously in his mind simply because he'd previously encountered Agent Milton.
    • Back on point, remember: John's not that smart. He's going with whatever comes to mind and even then, he slips up a few times. Choosing those names aren't some homage or even names he picked before hand; he's winging it.
• Nearing the end of the game, several gang members start to leave the gang; and that's fine. This is acknowledged in dialogue and cutscenes. All but one, however. Karen. Where the hell did she go?
  • If you meet with Tilly she will write you and mentions that she's never heard from Karen but deep down knows that the drink killed her. Of course that's only her word and I wouldn't be surprised if Karen showed up in Red Dead Online or a DLC since she's the only character without a confirmed fate.
    • Thanks, I just looked it up. After killing Micah, we can meet up with the surviving members of the gang; Serves me right for skipping the end credits. As for Karen: that's depressing. But I hope you're right. It would be cool to see her as a drunken bank robber; kinda like Irish, but less of a pussy.
• In the scene where Arthur is diagnosed with tuberculosis, we see the doctor looking into his ear while Arthur explains his symptoms. What was he doing and why was he checking Arthur’s ear when it’s pretty clear his ears are not what’s the issue?
  • Probably giving him a general examination to give him an accurate diagnosis and checking on everything to be sure that his assessment of Arthur's health is as accurate as possible. For instance, if your ears are unusually red, it could be indicative of kidney problems.
• There was something about Charles and the mountaintop of Grizzlies East in the epilogue. It is said that Charles buried Arthur's body on said mountaintop in a grave that faces the evening sun (about southeast of the Mysterious Hill House). On seeing his grave on the cliffside, you start to realize that said grave is near the spot where he died (if you chose to "Go with John" in Arthur's final story mission). But there's kind of a plot hole here. Suppose that you chose to "Go for the loot" in said final story mission. If Arthur died at camp after his attempt to do so, then how on Earth did Charles choose the mountaintop in Grizzlies East for a burial ground in the first place? It kinda makes less sense here than if you chose to "Go with John", but that's my opinion.
  • Because he thought it would make a nice spot to lay an old friend to rest.

Charles Chatenay and Tuberculosis

Playing ‘The Artist’s Way — Part II’ with Charles Chatenay and I got to the part where he kissed Arthur on the mouth as a sort of distraction. Random question, does he now have TB? I’m assuming that TB is spread through the air whenever a person coughs on them, and he was in VERY close proximity to Arthur’s mouth so...he did he just screw himself over?

• Someone with far more medical knowledge than myself can most likely answer for sure. But from what research I've done, it could be possible that Chatenay was immune to the disease. Also, all of Chatenay's missions can be done in chapter 4, Arthur's TB doesn't get real bad until chapter 6. So it's possible that he wasn't contagious at the time. Yeah they can be done in later chapters but you can just handwave that and just assume the missions play out as if you're still in chapter 4.
  • From the perspective of someone who has had TB, but is not a doctor: TB bacteria are spread through the air, not through saliva. So kissing someone with TB for a moment is less risky than hanging out in a poorly ventilated room with someone with an active infection for a few hours (or having them cough directly in your face...) Also, someone with TB is infectious as soon as the bacteria enters their lungs and they exhibit their first symptoms, which for most people is the cough. So Arthur was contagious from his first significant in-game cough (which depends on the player’s choices, but for me, it was after doing the optional mission to rob the house with Javier in chapter 2.) So I think Chatenay was fine, and most of the gang would have been fine because they spent the majority of their time outside (and because Arthur never coughs directly in anyone’s face...) and Arthur rarely spends a lot of time sitting or standing immediately next to anyone, so they should be fine. People who sit near Arthur on a long train ride? That’s a different story.
  • Also: you can also have latent TB, where you have the bacteria within your body, but have not displayed any symptoms. People with latent TB are not infectious, but can become infectious at anytime, and can live with the latent infection for years before it becomes active. Some people can live their entire lives harboring the bacteria without ever getting sick. The TB bacteria also grows very slowly compared to other bacteria; Arthur’s infection developed relatively quickly, which was probably the result of some bad luc and an immune system weakened by his high stress lifestyle and smoking habit (and plot contrivance.)

Tuberculosis generally

• For plot purposes, the game has Arthur becoming infected with TB and dying of it within the span of a few weeks- the whole main story takes place in the spring of 1899. Tuberculosis doesn't work that fast; even after it becomes active rather than latent, the process of destroying lung tissue is counteracted by the body growing new tissue, and it took a tubercular on average three years, often longer, to succumb. If they did at all: about one-third of patients recovered even before modern medicine. "Untreated smear-positive tuberculosis among HIV negative individuals has a 10-year case fatality variously reported between 53% and 86%, with a weighted mean of 70%. Ten-year case fatality of culture-positive smear-negative tuberculosis was nowhere reported directly but can be indirectly estimated to be approximately 20%. The duration of tuberculosis from onset to cure or death is approximately 3 years and appears to be similar for smear-positive and smear-negative tuberculosis." My grandfather, who contracted TB in the 1920s before antibiotics, beat the disease within four years and lived to be 91!
  • Was your grandfather shot, beaten and starved? Was he stranded on an island?
• Of course, Arthur's life was the opposite of the only treatment available at the time, the "rest cure" as featured in the creator/Thomas Mann novel The Magic Mountain. The beating/shooting at the hands of the O'Driscolls, and then the shipwreck and Guarma episode, and his strenuous life generally, would have done wonders to aid the infection's progress.
• The majority of persons infected with the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium exhibit no symptoms at first, and in many cases never do; this is called latent tuberculosis. This appears to be Abigail Marston's fate: she seems to have contracted the disease from Arthur during the events of the main game but only started to exhibit symptoms (a chronic cough) eight years later during the Epilogue. By 1914 she was dead.
• It might not have been the TB alone that killed him. Arthur's final act in life was to get into a knife and fist fight with Micah. He could have just as well bled to death.
  • Also, simple Rule of Drama and Game And Story Segregation; the effects and timeline of the disease have been compressed for dramatic effect. The makers of the game have clearly done their research, but it's still a video game, not a medical treatise; the player probably doesn't want to control Arthur at length through a grindingly realistic progression of how tuberculosis kills a man.
• Do you really want to play a game where you slowly die a horrible death over three years? That doesn't seem like an enjoyable story to me. I think this is a justified case of Artistic License. The game is already too long anyway imo.

Abigail Marston’s Weak Arguments

• In the epilogue, it’s made very clear that Abigail has had it with John riding around being the hero, to the point where she even leaves him. My question is, does she even have a leg to stand on in their arguments? As far as I see, John’s trying to protect their ranch (and their livelihood) from outlaws, not attempting to re-live his days as an outlaw — indeed, Mr. Geddes, John’s boss, seems to really value his skills so where does she get off lecturing him about how he needs to stop ‘pretending to be some storybook hero’ when he’s actually just trying to protect their new lives?
  • Abigail says outright that this entire story has happened before. They settle somewhere, John does something heroic and they have to move and start again. They've been at it for 8 years at this point - it's understandable Abigail gets fed up with this, regardless of John's sound logic in this case. Additionally, John was hired as a farmhand and not a bodyguard. Mr. Geddes makes it clear that while the Laramie Gang is a danger, he doesn't expect his workers to risk their lives - the retaliation attack happens because Marston steps in.
  • Ah, good point. Don’t get me wrong, I can see where Abigail is coming from — I’m not trying to imply she’s being a bitch about it. Perfectly understandable that she’d be sick and tired of having to play out this rodeo over and over again. I just figured that the Laramie gang attacked first so John (understandably) had to intervene because this was their livelihood at risk. So they both have a point, just that Abigail is just tired of having to do this over and over again.
    • Part of the problem is that John isn't really willing to sit down and talk about it. He just uses the same excuse Abigail's been hearing for years now: "What choice did I have?" instead of really discussing the situation with his wife.
    • But that is the question - what choice do they have? Should he just have ignored his employer telling him to help defend the property he was hired to take care of while it burned? They have VERY few options as criminals who are lying about their identities to establish a new life for themselves.
    • And if the Laramie Gang keeps trying to antagonize the farm John and his family work in, what is he supposed to do?
  • Ultimately Abigail is right: the Way of the Gun never leads anywhere except trouble. Ultimately it's John's decision, over her tearful objections, to ride out after Micah which will put Agent Ross back on his trail, leading to his death and ruining her life. As Dutch said (but didn't practice), "Revenge is a fool's game."
    • I would argue, she's not inherently right. Especially when the gun is used to protect yourself from people who are the ones to initiate violence. And for some reason, she's more upset with him defending the property of his employer than she is about the idea of John, Charles, and Sadie going off on a vengeance quest against Micah. And in terms of the "Revenge is a fool's game" line, it means nothing in terms of Sadie's story. She kills Lord knows how many O'Driscoll men, and the game just treats it as totally justified, regardless of the fact that it is impossible that every single member of the gang was directly responsible for her husband's death (though she treats it as such), and that one of her own fellow gang members used to run with the O'Driscolls who was a generally good man which should have given her some pause in terms of thinking about the morality of killing scores who may just be decent men doing this for money. She commits more acts of premeditated murder than Micah and Dutch combined.
  • Did you miss the part where she tearfully begged him not to go through with this? She made it abundantly clear he wasn't to get anywhere near Micah. Sadie's her own woman, and whatever she does doesn't put the lives of Abigail and Jack, as well as their livelihood in danger. She can go on murder rampages to her heart's content. It's John she's having issues with.
  • Part of it was because he wasn't suppose John Marston, gunslinger, he was suppose to Jim Milton, some humble ranch hand.
  • But then we're back on the issue of how John was supposed to handle the Laramie problem, as they obviously weren't gonna go away.
  • Ultimately, Abigail is far from a perfect human being. She's tired of John constantly throwing himself into situations where the solution is violence, whether as the big bad gunslinger or the hero. She sees him as a man who can't swallow his pride for their well being, like when he chose to get into a fist fight rather than walk away, and she can't handle it anymore. Yes, they were good things to do, the right thing to do even, but from where Abigail's standing, John's always putting what he thinks is right over what's right for his family, and likely thinks that if he'd do a little more backing down from time to time, maybe they'd be in a better situation than they've been. And every time he runs off to do the 'right' thing, there's a chance he's never coming back. She's emotionally exhausted and she can't stand it anymore, so she takes Jack and runs away.

John Marston

• Is anyone else bothered by the fact that John Marston in this game looks nothing like the John Marston in ‘Red Dead Redemption’? He’s too thin, his face is too long and even if I grow his hair long and make his beard short he looks like some random dude wearing John Marstons’ clothing. It’s kind of distracting...
  • Given that John's been running with a gang that's been somewhat lean on food resources, it's possible he's so thin because he's not getting regular meals. The first game takes place several years after the events of the first game, and as bad as Abigail's cooking might be, getting 3 squares a day probably did a lot to bulk John up by the time Edgar Ross comes calling.
  • Updated graphics. If you want a more in-story explanation, well, twelve years is a LONG time.
    • But four years after the Epilogue isn't all that long. Also, why are John's brand-new pants, a gift from Abigail, already dirty and frayed around the cuffs as in RDR 1?
    • I thought Abigail just got John a new shirt.
    • John's been doing ranch work in all that time, including cleaning up all kinds of animal crap and labor. Four years is a long time for any new pair of pants to still look new but added with the work he does, wear and tear will set in in a very short amount of time.

Sadie's letter

• So after Arthur and everyone get back from Guarma, they find a letter from Sadie at their old base telling them where the rest of them went. Why didn't the Pinkertons find it? They were desperate to locate Dutch's gang, to the point where they tore the place apart and still had men watching it when Arthur arrived. But a simple letter sitting on the table somehow eluded them? Sure, Sadie didn't use anybody's real names, but she still put the location of their new base in the letter. It would have been incredibly stupid of them to not at least check the place out.
  • I was always under the impression the Pinkertons did find it, but because they wanted Dutch, they didn't actually move against the gang until the Guarma crew rejoined them. I always thought they found the letter, left it there and then staked out the old base until Dutch and the others found it and then followed them to the new base, OR they hid near the new hideout until Dutch made it there.
  • That – the letter is in a rather conspicuous place – or Sadie returned to Shady Belle after the gang's flight and the Pinkertons' trashing of the base.
  • AFAIK nothing in the game indicates they found it. The gang seems to believe Milton found them because Bill told too many people and caught their attention. Later, Milton all but outright says that Micah might told them. The letter isn't brought up.
  • When the gang is reuniting in Lakay after Dutch finally catches up, someone mentions that Javier found Sadie’s she sent to the post office. It’s possible this is another letter altogether, but maybe that letter was the same as the one that Arthur finds, and that Javier left it there knowing that Arthur was going back to Shady Belle soon. Since Arthur and the other men went to shore separately and at different times, it’s possible that Javier knew Arthur was following after him, and maybe, the letter was only sitting on that table for a few hours, in between Pinkerton inspections.

Saint Denis bank heist

• If Molly didn't tell the Pinkertons about the Saint Denis bank heist and Micah wasn't picked up by them until after they got back from Guarma, who did rat them out? The Pinkertons and the police force were clearly tipped off, showing up exactly on time.
  • A shitty plan. They are known in the city already.
  • I can't recall, was it explicitly said they picked Micah up after Guarma? I was under the impression that they'd gotten to Micah soon after the Blackwater job went sour. That, or they found him and cut a deal with him while he was in the jail in Strawberry, knowing Dutch was gonna spring him.
  • I was under the impression that they didn’t start planning for the bank heist until after Guarma.
  • Wait, how does that work? The Saint Denis heist going pear-shaped is what leads into the Guarma chapter. Heist goes to pot, Hosea and Lenny get killed, John gets captured and Abigail goes missing, Dutch and co. flee to boat, boat sinks, Guarma.
  • The exact quote from Milton when he reveals that Micah is the rat is "Micah Bell... we picked him up when you boys came back from the Caribbean, and he's been a good boy ever since." As for how the Pinkertons showed up, maybe they heard about the string of crimes that the gang committed in San Denis (the riverboat and trolley station robberies, shooting up Angelo Bronte's house and disappearing him), and knowing that the last place they saw the gang was in Lemoyne, it probably wouldn't take long for the Pinkertons to set up shop in San Denis and wait for the gang to poke their heads out again. Then one day they see an explosion happen. The Pinkertons arrive at the scene of the crime, find Hosea, recognize him as a member of the gang, and either interrogate him or deduce that the explosion is a distraction and that the bank is the most likely target, and then drag Hosea off to the bank.
• So...what was betrayed, then? If the Pinkerton already used deductive reasoning to conclude the gang would attack the bank, and Micah was picked up after their little adventure in Guarma, what was betrayed? Essentially, if it wasn’t the bank heist that was betrayed to the Pinkertons (despite heavily implication), and Micah seemingly got to the gang’s new hideout roughly at the same time Dutch did closely followed by the Pinkertons, why is it the bank heist everyone keeps saying ‘that’s where we got betrayed’?
  • The revelation that Micah turned traitor after Guarma and Molly actually being innocent do not come to light until very late in the plot. At that point, everybody still thinks a traitor was involved in the bank heist going awry.
• I think we should just chalk the Pinkertons being at the bank to be an unhappy accident. Remember, the running thread of the story is Dutch's descent into madness and paranoia. His biggest enemy (outside of the O'Driscolls) being present at a bank heist gone sour is just a Red Herring meant to further along his mental instability.
• Just an interesting tidbit people might wanna know, during the Saint Denis bank heist Micah is the only gang member dressed in white which could be either Rockstar trying to make it more obvious that he's the one who will betray the group or implying that he's dressing up distinctly as sort of a sign for the Pinkertons not to shoot him, maybe implying he's been involved with them for far longer.
  • It could be that Micah had been leaving breadcrumbs for the Pinkertons to follow, biding his time until he could get into their good graces (like with a tip-off of the bank heist) before officially making himself the rat right after they came back from Guarma.
• Throught the entire game, the gang draws too much attention to themselves. The Pinkertons were out in force to find and stop them, so when a crime and killing spree starts in a MAJOR city very close to their last known whereabouts, it's obvious they would connect the dots and look for them in Saint Denis. I think it's likely Milton and his agents were out looking for them in Saint Denis at the time of the robbery and thus were able to respond quickly to ongoing events.

…"Sweated Her"???

• During the final mission, we learn that Milton and the others, quote, "sweated [Molly] but she never said a word." What is he even talking about? Is this archaic slang that I'm not familiar with? How did they "sweat" Molly? Did they, what, yell at her a lot?
  • Yes, it's archaic slang, basically means they interrogated her. To "sweat someone out" was basically to interrogate them for long periods of time, and do so very aggressively. Not TORTURE, mind you, but basically put the fear of God into them.
  • It's hardly archaic. Might be a bit out of date by now but was still used popularly on TV in the 90s and 2000s. Lots of people still use it in this sense.

"No one takes a child to harm him!" ...Really, Dutch?

• When Jack Marston is kidnapped, Dutch comforts the gang, especially John that the boy is fine because, quote, "no one kidnaps a boy to harm him — they did that just to scare us!" I have issues with this. For starters, has he forgotten the O'Driscolls? The gang infamously known for torturing their captors? Or the Murfree Brothers? Why is he acting like Jack isn't being horribly abused by his kidnappers despite knowing quite a few gangs who actually do harm their kidnapped victims.
  • He probably knew it was bullshit, but he wanted to comfort John and Abigail.
  • Harming adult captives is completely different than harming a young child. Even in real life, people who go to jail for hurting kids are looked down on and targeted heavily by other prisoners. The O'driscoll's torturing their enemies is a million miles away from them hurting a child for no reason, and we have no reason to think they'd do that. The Murfree's are the ONLY gang that would torture a kid, but no one had met or even seen them. The Murfree's weren't in the story until AFTER Jack is already safely back in camp.
  • it's worth noting that "No one kidnaps a boy to harm him!" doesn't mean he's saying that no one would ever harm a kid. The gang knew that someone had snuck in near the gangs camp, waited there until Jack wandered off, and then kidnapped him and ran off. No one would co-ordinate that unless they were doing it for ransom or to get leverage, and harming him would compromise that. This is more what Dutch was saying, and it was true: the Braithwaites did take Jack as leverage, just to scare them, and kept him a happy, safe nd co-operative captive.
  • The answer to this is simply that Dutch isn't a complete moron. If the objective is to keep the gang, and especially John and Abigail, as calm as possible during what is an understandably difficult time, then listing any and all possible horrible fates that could be befalling Jack as they speak is going achieve the precise opposite effect. By keeping them calm, he is able to keep them focussed, and thus more effective at achieving the best possible outcome to events. Dutch is simply not boneheaded enough to launch into a Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die speech because he knows that doing so is a terrible idea and not what anyone wants or needs to hear at that moment, whether it's possibly true or not.

Colm's brother

• If Colm never liked his brother, why did he kill Annabelle in retaliation of Dutch killing his brother?
  • He hated Dutch enough that he probably just used his brother's death as an excuse to kill Annabelle.
  • Also, just because he hated his brother doesn't mean he wouldn't be pissed if someone else killed him. Dutch made it personal.
  • Avenging family even if you hate them might as well be a trope. It was directly discussed in 'Die Hard with a Vengeance.'
  • Already is. Even Evil Has Loved Ones is this trope. Here is the direct quote from the movie.
  "There's a difference, you know, between not liking one's brother and not caring when some dumb, Irish flatfoot drops him out of a window."
  Or edited for this scenario: "There's a difference, you know, between not liking one's brother and not caring when some dumb Yankee with a god complex shoots him in the face."
  • Also, remember that he only says that right after Dutch apologizes for it, to which Dutch not-so-subtly implies that he expects Colm to apologize too. On the one hand, he might just be saying it out of passive aggressive spite, and on the other because his plan needed that Arthur be tunnelvisioned on what's happening in the valley and not paying attention to his surroundings. Basically, maybe he did care, but only said he didn't because he knows in that specific moment it would get under Dutch's skin and keep Arthur's focus.

Micah and the Pinkertons

• Why does everyone assume Micah's body is what lead to Ross and Fordham finding John? When I watched the ending it seemed to me like they were already on his trail by then, but we just saw the investigation from them finding Micah's body on. Why would they be on the mountain in the first place if they weren't already on the case?
  • This tracks with Ross's motivations in the first game. He never really cared about John, he was just a puppet to use in finding Dutch and dispose of later. It's very likely that Ross has been after Dutch ever since he got away in Beaver Hollow and picked up his trail after he and Micah picked up the Blackwater money.
    • I understand Ross using John, but again, why would he be on the mountain in the first place if he didn't ALREADY have John's trail? Most people seem to think Micah's body is what DIRECTLY started their search for John.
  • Maybe they were told that someone matching John's descrption went up to the hills. And finding Micah helped confirm they are on the right trail. Afterall, not just anyone can kill Micah.
  • They never stopped looking for any of the gang, but Micah and Dutch were still active. When John and Sadie drag Cleet onto the gallows in Strawberry, a crowd forms to watch, and hears when Cleet reveals where Micah is hiding. When the Pinkertons find Cleet, maybe even responding to the same tip that brought Sadie, it's not a large leap for them to interview those townsfolk and have them identify John's picture. The rest continues from there.
  • Possibly Micah was simply working with the Pinkertons again after Dutch reached out to him. Not only would Dutch's arrest or death allow him to keep the Blackwater score for himself it would ingratiate him with the Pinkertons. When I watched the credits, Ross seemed to be shaking his head in disappointment when he found Micah's body. To me this implied he was there to arrest Dutch after Micah promised to keep him up at the mountain until Ross arrived. Ross's disappointment was due to him realizing he missed his chance to arrest Dutch. This then put him onto John's trail. Later in the end credits he goes around interrogating people which leads him to Beecher's Hope by retracing the steps of the survivors of the events on the mountain. As to why Ross would be willing to work with Micah, he can always deal with him later. As we see in RDRI, Dutch is his first priority and he's willing to betray the criminals he works with.

Abigail's Past

• Why do people think Abigail slept with all the members of the gang when she was a prostitute? I know Dutch taunts John about it in 1 but for all we know that could have just been to make him angry. And I know Arthur has a comment about Jack looking more like an Escuella or a Williamson but I figured that was just him giving John shit. I always thought it made more sense that Abigail offered her services to people OUTSIDE the gang and then brought the profits back in to split among everyone, in exchange for protection and housing; basically, the gang/Dutch was her pimp. I realize she of course could have offered her services to the members as well but that would just mean the gang giving their money back to the gang.
  • It's an unfortunate retcon to the implied events from this period that are discussed in I. I implies that Abigail still worked as a prostitute during this period, while II implies that she has long since left that life behind. The only real problem is that the way things happen in II would be unlikely to leave John with the impression that Abigail was "passed around", at least enough for him to lend Dutch's taunts any credence. However, he's had about a decade to brood on this by the time of I, so it's likely his memory of those days is colored.
    • That makes sense. Really when I say people, I mean RDR fans themselves. Honestly I've gotten sick of all the jokes about Abigail sleeping with everyone in the gang, when I thought she'd stopped long before 2.
    • She stopped whoring by the time of II, but she certainly hadn't stopped as soon as she joined the gang. An early conversation you might catch is her arguing with Ms. Grimshaw, who wants her to start whoring again for the money it would bring to the gang. And as for the gang giving money back to the gang... What each member does with his own nickel is his own business.
  • It pays to mind that by the time of Red Dead Redemption, Dutch, Bill, and Javier were antagonistic to John and were trying to piss him off.
  • We perhaps need to consider some context here. Even today a woman who works/worked in the sex industry will have to deal with a lot of stigma in her life due to her (former) profession, and back in the nineteenth century it was even worse. Frankly, it probably wouldn't make any difference if Abigail was as chaste as a nun around every single other man in the gang and only sold her services to men outside the gang; to some degree, even for the fairly progressive-for-the-time Van Der Linde gang, a whore is what she is and a whore is what she always will be. Especially if they're talking about her to her husband, a man they have all for numerous complicated reasons grown to utterly despise in the twelve-or-so years since their less-than-amicable parting of ways and even less amicable reunion. And John himself almost certainly wouldn't be immune to these stigmas; no matter how accepting and loving he is, it's not a huge leap to suggest that his former friends taunting that they had intimate carnal knowledge of his wife thanks to her former profession would still get under his skin a bit.

Cornwall

• When Dutch confronts Cornwall early in chapter 6, Why doesn't Cornwall have his men shoot Dutch the moment Dutch exposes himself, Instead, Cornwall and Dutch start bickering which ends with Cornwall's death.
  • Presumably he wanted to hold himself to higher standards than Dutch. A man who at least tried to talk out their issues first without resorting to guns.
  • Maybe he didn't want to start a gunfight with him standing in the center of it? He presumably hoped Milton and Ross would encircle Dutch and his allies and arrest them without risking his head in a shootout.
  • You're basically asking "why doesn't a wealthy nineteenth century robber baron who considers himself part of the civilised elite not behave with the same ruthless animal instincts as an outlaw gunslinger?" Cornwall doesn't live in Dutch's world and so isn't prepared to face it in the way that he perhaps should. He considers himself a civilised gentleman, and for better or worse in his mind a civilised gentleman doesn't simply gun his enemy down in the street like a sick dog at the very first opportunity.

The Braithwaite slaughter

• Does anyone find it a little odd that Dutch doesn't bring Micah. I know the importance of watching the camp. But why Micah? Call him what you want, but the dude is a friggin badass, surely he would be useful in something like this. I know it's hightly unlikely Micah actually cares for Jack. But the Blood Knight he is, surely he would love the fight itself.
  • You answered it yourself — someone has to stay back and protect the camp. Pearson might be able to put up a fight, but he isn't of the same caliber Micah is.
  • Just thought he'd put Lenny or something. Or even Sadie.
    • With most of the gang gone, the camp and the non-gunslinging members will be vulnerable. Kieran, Pearson, and the girls aren't really gunfighters (Minus Sadie but her status as a hellcat has yet to become common camp knowledge), so Dutch wants to leave someone he knows damn well can hold off against any attacks while he's away.
  • Also, probably because Micah doesn't really give a shit about Jack. Micah's already a bit of a loose cannon, and if he doesn't care about Jack he's more likely to go off-plan because he doesn't care about the outcome. The others are invested in Jack's welfare, and so are less likely to do anything that might risk screwing things up.

The Braithwaites nationality

• We know the Grays are Scottish, but the game seems to go out of its way to not mention the nationality of the Braithwaites, so what nationality are the Braithwaites?
  • American. Unless the character mentions it, or it's obvious (Javier, for example) they're American.
    • I know they're American, but what country did their ancestors come from?
    • We honestly don't know. :/ I don't think they ever say it. It's possible they're of English descent. Since the Grays pride themselves in being the descendants of (what they assume) to be Scottish rebels fighting against the English crown, the Braithwaites being descended from the English would do wonders to ratchet up the rivalry as now there's a bit of historical context between the two.
    • The Braithwaites are very stereotypical southern confederate money. Typically that means at least traced back to the Revolution, if not the founding of the colonies, so they're undoubtedly English descent, though any kind of paper trail probably stops before it crosses the ocean.
    • A quick check of the name Braithwaite says that it has origins in England around Yorkshire and Cumbria.

How did Favours get involved?

• Dutch explains that the Federal Government wants to leave the Native American tribes alone, so the state pays Cornwall to develop the land by proxy. But if the Federal Government don't want a conflict, why did they send Favours' regiment in? Surely the federal government would have control of the army?
  • He was stationed there to oversee the Wapiti reservation at some point prior to 1899. When Corwall finds out about the supossed oil below the tribe's land, he proposes Favours to drive off the Wapiti tribe through underhanded methods that are shown in the game. Also, by driving them off, he can claim some glory and dispell his bad fame earned in the Civil War.

Dutch is going crazy!...by actually doing the things he said he would?

• The whole game Dutch rants on about how Capitalism Is Bad and how he hates the racist and hypocritical policies of the US Government...and yet he never seems to act on these beliefs, just using them as a pretext for robbing banks and the like; they don't redistribute the money to the working class or anything. Fine, he's a hypocrite who appropriated a worthy cause to give his quest for power some moral legitimacy, that's an interesting character trait. But in chapter six, he actually starts revolutionary activity; he kills Cornwall (a man who was shown to treat his workers like utter crap and was willing to displace thousands of Native Americans just to expand his own profits) and then helps Rains Fall against the Army who are trying to actively genocide them. Yet his gang view this as him crossing the line. Sure, maybe his gang were only ever in it for the money and never wanted to join some quasi-anarchist terrorist organization, but if that's the case why do their arguments against Dutch always consist of some vague "this is morally wrong and I'll have no part in it"? Charles acts like he tricked Rains Fall into fighting Favours, but we're repeatedly shown Favours had no interest in peace and was just waiting for a pretext to wipe them out.
  • His reasoning behind those actions are utterly selfish. He kills Cornwall in order to cut the Pinkerton's funding (I don't think I need to explain why this did not work). Arthur says in a conversation with Bill that, yes, Corwall deserved to be killed, but not at that time as it will only lead to more attention, showing his recklessness. He tricks the Indians into fighting the army, so the government focus on the native problem instead of his gang. Rains Fall did not want his tribe to fight, but his tribe are – reasonably – very angry. Dutch exploits this anger through eagle flies and throws them into a hopeless fight, which is EXACTLY what Favours wanted. The gang only became a “quasi-anarchist terrorist organization” in the events shown in the game, becoming pretty apparent in the Beaver Hollow chapter. The original idea was showing people what was wrong with the encroaching civilization; robbing the rich and helping the poor, hoping it would lead to people realizing he’s right and join his fight. As noted by Hosea, they didn’t kill people for those ideals for a long while, but as time went on Dutch’s views started to get more extreme, culminating in the Beaver Hollow chapter. Most people that joined the gang bought Dutch’s philosophy, but in the end they all saw that Dutch’s motives are totally selfish, unbelievably reckless and not aligned with his so-called philosophy. Also, it’s not like their only arguments against Dutch only consist of “it’s morally wrong”, he abandoned both John, Arthur and Abigail to their deaths, manipulated Eagle Flies into a hopeless fight and did not stick around to help them finish said fight and so on… Is perfectly reasonable, in my opinion, their disillusionment with the gang and Dutch.

Ross's history with the Van Der Linde gang

• Doesn't this contradict what Ross represents on a thematic level in the first game: a self-righteous personification of the US Government, who cares more about "law and order" (in his favor) than the well-being of the people he's supposed to be protecting? Him going after Dutch because of him being The One That Got Away ruins the But for Me, It Was Tuesday of his actions.
  • If you take a look at the gang's actions over the course of the game, it's probable that they're among the most wanted man in the country - specially Dutch - Ross is charged with the newly created Bureau of Investigations, kind of like the real life FBI, so going after these dangerous criminals is something expected of him.
    • The fact is that Ross shouldn't have been in the prequel in the first place. In the mission "Great Men Are Not Always Wise", Ross asks John if "that's the great Dutch", suggesting that that was the first time that he has ever seen Dutch in person. Also, he mentions that John and Abigail are the only people that the Bureau know can appeal to Dutch, which is weird since Ross walked into the gangs camp a decade earlier and should know that they're a lot more surviving members of the Van der Linde gang.
    • Yes, they most likely did not write Ross as someone who met Dutch before, regardless, I think the "that's the great Dutch" line and subsequent conversation as Ross calling out Marston on still acting "friendly-ish" to Dutch, a man Ross sees only as a deranged murderer. If you think about the members that are still alive, the only ones that took an active role in most crimes are Sadie and Charles, but they're most likely far away from the U.S. The other ones weren't truly connected to the robberies and killings, which let them lead normal lives after the gang fell apart. Lastly, Ross only mentions Abigail as a mean to threaten Marston into action. You can see he doesn't care about her at all, because after John dies, she and Jack are left alone. It's clear, at least to me, he's after the main guys in the gang, the ones that actually took part in their most infamous heists.

Hosea's position within the gang

• While it was made pretty clear that Hosea is the number two in the gang, even though his illness and old age prevents him from being more active, I find it really strange that he sleeps on the outside in all camps (except the Shady Belle camp) I mean, he's ill, old and - most importantly - the co-founder of the freaking gang! All the other senior gang members get the best places: John, Dutch and Arthur all have pretty nice tents. So, I'd like to know what you all think about this. Was his character supposed to be less important in the gang in earlier stages of development, or there's another reason I'm failing to see?
  • Maybe he preferred not having a tent? If he requested a tent, I doubt Dutch, John, and Arthur would've objected to that.
    • To go off that, we know he had some sort of respiratory problem. He may have slept outside trying to get more fresh air than in a tent he may have found stuffy. And he might sleep on the ground because the hard surface feels better on his back than a cot. If his hunting trip with Arthur is anything to go by, he does enjoy a bit of roughing it in his old age.
  • Maybe they simply didn't have enough tents, and Hosea didn't want to be a burdon. Or maybe he did have his own tent, but it was left at the Blackwater Camp and he never bothered to get another one.

Butcher Creek

• Just what is going on with Butcher Creek? Aside from the sidequest involving it, I mean. Are they allied with the Murfree Brood? Because whenever Murfrees attack me in or around Butcher Creek, all its inhabitants seem to turn on me as well. Also, why do so many moccasin flower orchids grow there? About half of all moccasin flower orchids are in Butcher Creek. Why?
  • The sidequest shows that the mining company screwed up and ended up poisoning the river nearby their homes, with lead I believe, which explains their weirdness. There's no indication in the game that they are allied with the Murfree Brood; so, the reason they attack you might be related to gameplay reasons. For example, if you attack or threathen anyone there, they will all attack you due to being threatened. About the moccasin flowers, there's no indication as to why they're there.
  • There's a literal actual demon in the place. That certainly hasn't helped.

Dutch and Arthur's relationship

• Why does the game try to play up Arthur and Dutch's relationship as a father/son one? It just feels forced. The age gap between the two men (Arthur is 35-36, Dutch is 43-44) is just too close. It would make more sense if their relationship was akin to older brother/younger brother, rather than father/son.
  • I think it's more of how Arthur sees Dutch: a fatherly-like figure who got the whole world figured out and knows his shit.
  • While the age gap is pretty small (In Dutch's case), Dutch and Hosea certantly played a fatherly role better than Arthur's father, whom he describes as a no-good bastard. As Arthur points out, Dutch saved him when he was around 13-14, which would make him a teenager, while Dutch - already 22 - is a fully grown adult. Most importantly, Dutch had his set of ideals, his philosophy and the way he sees the world, which he would pass on to Arthur, in a sense, teaching everything Arthur knew. Hosea, in my opinion, played a more traditional father role, not only is he old enough to be Arthur's father, Arthur even mentions him as being more "human" than Dutch. In the end, both Hosea and Dutch saved Arthur and mentored him into becoming the man he is, akin to how a father raises his son, that's why Arthur sees them as surrogate fathers.

Revenge isn't a fool's game?

• One of the game's main themes is that revenge not worth your time, with Arthur's Arc Words being "Revenge is a fool's game". Except, in Sadie's character arc, this doesn't matter. She gets revenge on the O'Driscolls at Hanging Dog Ranch and got nothing of consequence for it. Not only that, but if you refuse to help her get her revenge and instead tell her to focus on things that are more important (helping John and his family get out of the gang) you get negative karma. Why does the game beat you over the head with the idea revenge is a fruitless endeavor, but then punishes you when you don't help someone with their revenge? Now to the epilogue. Sadie (and by extension, Charles) get away with killing Micah, but John doesn't. While Charles gets away with revenge, he is at least a hunted fugitive and will probably have to live in hiding for the rest of his life, doomed to repeat the same lonely lifestyle he had before he joined the gang. But Sadie? Unlike Charles, she isn't wanted by the law. After killing Micah, she just goes "meh" and (presumably) rides off to South America, getting nothing of consequence. If anything, she was rewarded for her vengeance, as she gained less of a deathwish and earned a lot of money.
  • The thing is, we don't know Sadie's story after the events of the second game. Maybe her vengeful attitude caught up with her... maybe not. First off, I believe the reason you get negative karma for not helping her is mainly because you're refusing to help her in an extremely dangerous task. I mean, she could've died there. Also saying that she was rewarded for her revenge is not 100% accurate. Her inability of letting go, in her own words, turned her into a monster. She'll never be able to live a normal life; a normal life she was very happy with before the O'Driscolls took her farm. While it seems like she got away with everything, her vengeful side turned her into a ghost, like Arthur said.
  • The problem is, Sadie presumably doesn't take revenge on the O'Driscolls at Hanging Dog Ranch if Arthur convinces her not to. Even if she did and got killed, why would that be Arthur's fault? Sadie is a grown woman, she can make her own decisions. And while she's not ecstatic, she doesn’t seem too disappointed with her life as a bounty hunter and doesn’t regret a thing, despite all the deaths she’s caused. She leaves Beecher’s Hope in high spirits, with plans to start a business, perhaps even “take up with a handsome revolutionary” as she puts it. She seems content with all that, so she’s hardly condemned to a life of loneliness and/or depression. Considering some of the consequences that the other characters got for getting revenge (The Wapiti Tribe being destroyed for getting revenge on the U.S Army, the gang being disbanded because Dutch got revenge on Bronte & Cornwall, and Jack dishonoring his father's sacrifice and becoming a gunslinger to get revenge on Ross), Sadie got off relatively lightly.
  • The point is "revenge isn't worth it", not "revenge will automatically lead to death and other terrible consequences for the person who seeks it without any exceptions whatsoever, as doled out by a higher power that specifically focuses on those who seek revenge with pinpoint laser accuracy and makes a point of ensuring everyone knows it was because they sought revenge." We seem to be overlooking the line Sadie delivers immediately after bloodily disemboweling the man who killed her husband in which she bitterly notes that her all-consuming desire for revenge has turned her into a "monster", and while it's not outright stated it's suggested that she hasn't really gained anything from it at all; okay, she's settled a score, but it hasn't brought back the only thing she wants (her loving husband) and she still has to live with herself, the person she's become and the awful things she's done to gain that revenge every day afterwards. It's suggested that while she might have found some measure of peace, she is far from truly happy or contented by the end (she is, after all, still unsettlingly quick to stab knives into people's hands; that's not the action of a woman who finally has found her fairy tale ending). Anything she gains is not through seeking revenge, but through focusing on the more important things that Arthur urges her to focus on; family, friendship, helping others. As for her fate after the series, her talk about hooking up with "a handsome revolutionary" is clearly just idle speculation, and her other suggestion of becoming a mercenary for a gold-mining organisation isn't exactly the stuff of Disney endings. In short, while Sadie might not have been struck down by the callous vengeance of a merciless God in punishment for her actions, it's hard to argue that seeking out revenge in and of itself really gained her anything she couldn't have otherwise acquired by simply turning her back on it and moving on with her life.
  • Reflecting that she has "turned into a monster" is not an objective punishment, it’s a subjective assessment of herself. In terms of what we see, her revenge on the O'Driscolls and Micah will not lead to her downfall, which it did with John, Dutch, and so on. Furthermore, she does not even attempt to seek redemption. All the other "good" characters like John, Arthur, Charles (even Abigail and Uncle, in their own ways) do attempt to redeem their life of crime, but Sadie instead wants more violence and revenge, and unlike villains like Dutch and Micah (who also don’t wish for redemption), she is never punished for it. Her new life as a bounty hunter is hardly a punishment when she's completely content with it, even if it isn't particularly ideal. And that's if you ignore the fact that she got a portion of the Blackwater money for killing Micah. That's the issue with her character arc. The theme should really be "Revenge and violence isn't worth it, except when Sadie does it, then it's badass".
  • I think Sadie getting of lightly is a case of the exception that proves the rule. Every single person that went after revenge got their comeuppance, and as I said, we don't know Sadie's full story... I'll not delve again into how emotionally traumatized she is. Also, Charles walks away free too, doesn't he? Considering he reaches Canada safely, he will indeed be able to marry and live a happy life, so he'll most likely be able to escape the violence he caused.
  • Well, unlike Sadie, Charles has a bounty on his head. Considering that he's not mentioned in Red Dead Redemption 1 and John doesn't hunt him down, he likely was killed sometime between 1907 - 1911. Being in a different country doesn't really mean anything, as John had to hunt down Javier who was in Mexico.
  • "Reflecting that she has "turned into a monster" is not an objective punishment, it’s a subjective assessment of herself" — yes, but again, you seem to be missing the broader point: the point is not that "revenge will always receive some unarguably objective punishment, as presumably determined by some all-knowing all-seeing arbiter", it is that "revenge isn't worth it". No, Sadie does not receive an objective punishment — but she still has to live with herself and a lot of horrific memories that her quest for revenge are directly responsible for. Which, as countless traumatised people will gladly sit you down and tell you, can be awful enough by itself, if not worse. Look at the woman she is immediately after killing the man who killed her husband; a blood-soaked Blood Knight staring blankly ahead with a Thousand-Yard Stare after viciously disemboweling a man muttering about what a monster she's become and (depending on your morality level) how the only other halfway decent man she knows is still a violent criminal — objective punishment or not, does that really look like a woman who thinks what she's done is truly worth it? Does that look like a woman the writers want you to think is a pure badass (which is also a subjective assessment, since we're going there)? She only "wants more violence and revenge" and is "content" as a bounty hunter because she is a deeply traumatised woman who can no longer see herself living a life without violence; you seriously think she's a better person that way? You seriously don't think that, deep down, she would rather be a humble farmer's wife with a loving, living husband and a head not filled with images of bloodshed and horror? She is only "completely content" in relative terms to the nadir of her quest for revenge, not to the life she lost, and she could have walked away from the gang and her pursuit of vengeance and pursued something closer to what she once had at any point before then. Through Sadie, the game is making the point that seeking revenge might not always have an "objective punishment" cost, but it nevertheless does come with a moral and spiritual cost. Her "downfall" is that she has lost any real chance of regaining something like the life she once had because she threw it away to pursue vengeance, no matter how much ill-gotten gold she's managed to acquire. Not all prices are paid in money.
  • Overall, we need to understand just who Sadie is: a traumatized woman who had to watch her husband be murdered, her ranch burnt, and herself subjected to whatever horror the O’Driscolls did to her. To say she’s traumatized is an understatement. Her line says it all — she can’t go back. She can’t just go back to a life of peace and quiet. Not after everything that happened. She knows this, no matter how much she tries to hide it underneath a bravado of toughness. She has to spend the rest of her life with this knowledge. You know how badly John Marston hated the man he once was? Well, imagine how badly Sadie must hate herself, how badly she misses the woman she once was. And unlike John Marston, she doesn’t see a way out of it. This is her life now, and she hates every minute of it.
  • Charles wasn't mentioned in red dead 1 because his character was simply not created by then. Also, there's a huge difference between going to Canada and going to Nuevo Paraiso which is a river away from New Austin.

There are other countries besides Tahiti, Dutch

• So, around the midway point of the game, Dutch gets the brilliant "Plan" of trying to get everyone to Tahiti but first they need a big score to pay for it. This is while the Pinkertons are slowly closing in on them, establishing narrative tension that increases as the story goes on. However, what nobody ever seems to bring up is that Mexico and the Caribbean are likely not that far away, particularly from St. Denis. It stands to reason that if the gang really needed to skip the country to evade the law, either Mexico or one of the Caribbean islands would be a hell of a lot easier to get the entire gang to then trying to pay for passage to the far side of the world, and once there they would just have to survive and be quiet until someone could get back to Blackwater and grab the money so they could go the rest of the way. Arguably, this wouldn't work very well with the open world nature of the game and Dutch is far too dramatic/unstable to consider the idea, but the fact it never seems to get floated at all feels like an oversight, especially since the idea of heading back west is mentioned numerous times and Dutch even talks about going all the way east to New York or north to Chicago to get a boat somewhere else. Arguably, it would have given Rockstar an excuse to put Mexico in the game, or perhaps was the original plan for Guarma before it became a very linear, limited series of missions, but as it stands, the concept is never addressed.
  • The only way to get to Mexico would be to go through New Austin and they can't do that because they're wanted in West Elizabeth, so they need a boat. But more importantly, they need to put a lot of ocean between them and the problems they caused in the United States, especially since the Pinkertons finest are after them. But even then, is Mexico a good place to settle? It's a poor country that struggles to feed it's citizens and it's government is very corrupt with the likes of Ignacio Sanchez and Colonel Allende. The entire gang would need to learn Spanish, except for Javier. Speaking of Javier, he is said to have a bigger bounty on his head in Mexico than in the United States. Are they just gonna leave him behind? Add rampant crime and the constant revolutions that take place there, it probably wouldn't be an ideal place to settle.
    • Leopold Strauss says the other option was Australia and that, frankly, it was a far more practical idea for multiple reasons. Not the least being that it was an English speaking nation that had at least a superficial similarity to the Old West that they had a near-religious awe of. The fact Arthur kicks Leopold out and sort of gets lost on Dutch's ideas is another sign they're losing all sense of Pragmatic Villainy.
  • Tahiti is basically just a stand-in for "paradise". It's not really supposed to be the most practical option, it's supposed to symbolise how the outlaws are gradually losing themselves to an increasingly remote dream rather than facing reality. Australia would be a more practical and sensible option — but it wouldn't fit the dream.
• It's not supposed to sound practical or sane. At this point, Dutch is starting to lose his mind and this is one of the clear signs of that.

So what happened to the rest of the Blackwater Money?

• At the end of the epilogue, John, Charles and Sadie find (presumably much of) the Blackwater haul in the cabin right next to where John kills Micah. Dutch wanders off, John grabs some of the money and then helps Charles and Sadie off the mountain. After the credits roll, John has $20,000 in his wallet and mentions he's paid off the ranch(which presumably includes the house and barn, etc). Four years later, when Red Dead Redemption 1 begins, John is pretty much broke. Aside from the idea Agent Ross might have confiscated the money when they grabbed Abigail and Jack, what happened to all of it?
  • I think you answered your own question. Agent Ross confiscated it because it technically wasn't John's money, it belonged to the Blackwater bank.
  • Alternatively, John may not have kept the money. Right after he mentions using it to pay off the ranch, Abigail tells him she doesn't want to hear about it anymore. They were put through a lot of pain over the years because of that money, and they themselved being former robbers and schemers who had a knack for finding out about hidden stashes of loot, may have been worried that keeping it around would eventually attract the wrong kind of attention. Which they got anyways, but not for a lack of trying.

How did that train get to Mexico again?

• At the end of "The Fine Art of Conversation", it's possible for Arthur to meet and have a heart to heart with Sister Calderón, who is waiting for the train to take her to Mexico. It's all well and good, except in 1907, when you can reach that of the map, there is no bridge to Mexico, train or otherwise. So how did she get down there again?
  • That train line goes to Saint Denis, so she's likely going there then getting a ship. This raises the question as to why she's taking the train there, since she lives in Saint Denis, but that might be a case of Contrived Coincidence, or, it's a developer oversight.
  • This is just Gameplay and Story Segregation. Mexico isn't there because the game developers couldn't figure out a story reason to include it (likely because a fairly large chunk of the previous game took place in Mexico and they didn't want to repeat themselves) and it would take up more time and resources to populate it than the developers presumably felt were justified, just like the rail lines aren't realistically interconnected and detailed for a similar reason. You're just supposed to just apply some Willing Suspension of Disbelief and assume that the world of the story isn't exclusively limited to what we see and that there are actually links to and things going in Mexico that the producers would have included had they time, resources and energy.

Why was Sadie's and Jake's ranch in the mountains?

• Title. I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be a ranch, right? What were they doing there? Did they plan to grow crops there, or keep livestock? That can't be right, it's the mountains with permanent snow, no plants would grow here, and keeping livestock would be very difficult. The only way they could support themselves is by selling lumber or pelts/venison.
  • The snow there isn't permanent (it just seems that way because that area only has one weather setting during the events of the game). At several points the characters note that the winter freeze has been unusually long, but there's presumably a thaw coming at some point. Presumably the harsh winters there are balanced out by good springs and summers, enabling them to grow crops and breed their horses.

Milton's teleportation?

• During "Fleeting Joy" Milton gives a large speech and then Arthur bursts out of a barn, however Milton finishes his speech like a second after the barn doors open and he is nowhere to be found, where'd he go and how did he escape so fast?
  • The reason is that he was not supposed to die there, so the game pulls an Offscreen Teleportation to save him for later. If you want an in game explanation, Milton is probably aware of the many notorious gunslingers in the Van der Linde gang, so he avoids getting into open conflict with them, instead sending large number of agents to overwhelm them. He does this in the Bank Robbery, Lakay, after Cornwall's murder. The first time he faces Arthur(in combat), he sneaks up on him. Depending on how you see it, he can either be a Dirty Coward or a Combat Pragmatist, or both!

Jack's Book

• Once again on the book. This kicks in on two accounts.
  • If the events of Red Dead Revolver are part of that book or not. After all there's no connection between Revolver and Redemption as far as character or stories go.
    • One of the campfire tales you could hear in Red Dead Redemption 1 has the storyteller mention Red Harlow by name. So at the very least, he does exist in the RDR canon.
    • No he doesn't. The campfire stories mentioning him are just easter eggs. Also, Dan Houser himself has said that Revolver and Redemption are two separate game universes.
    • Still doesn't explain a possible inclusion in the book if we're going with the "Red Dead series being biographical.
  • Assuming Jack added the part of him killing Ross in 1914, even if Ross is posthumously vilified, even if Jack isn't initially implicated, how is he gonna get out of that one by writing a killing confession into his book. One could argue that duelings where legal killings, but no one was there to witness the duel.
    • Jack killed him in a foreign country and he wouldn't need to reveal himself as Ross' killer in his book to extol on his crimes and hypocrisies
    • For all we know, Jack could have had the book published when he is already on deathbed.
  • How's the book available in GTA V if both franchises are separated by different universes? This is revealed by Dutch calling New York by its real life name rather than GTA's Liberty City.
    • Continuity Snarl? Miami gets mentioned in Grand Theft Auto III in lieu of Vice City; New York is mentioned in a radio commercial in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where Liberty City also appears, and both Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V have songs that mention New York and California respectively.
    • It may be that some of these names "New York" and "Liberty City" refer to the same place, it's just at some point they were changed, just like "New York" was "New Amsterdam".
    • According to an in-game TV show in GTA IV, that isn't the case. Liberty City was never named New York. It's possible, however odd and likely unintentional, that cities like Miami, New York and Los Angeles exist alongside Vice City, Liberty City and Los Santos. The fact that Red Dead frequently mentions real world cities and states while adding fictional ones is good evidence that the USA in this canon is bigger than in real life. Whether Red Dead and GTA are in the same canon, however, is not really proven and the book in GTAV could be an inconsequential easter egg.

Killing the Eugenicist

• In some towns you will find a man preaching eugenics and how black, Mexican, and native Americans are genetically inferior and should not interbreed with white people. Attacking him will not affect your Karma meter. While this isn't wrong in context (Given he insulted Arthur for having non-white friends and tried to physically assault him) and also reasonable since Arthur is not racist, America was generally racist at the time. As far as the police and public are concerned, Arthur was attacking a scientist who was simply bringing awareness to the "Problem" that is miscegenation.
  • The Honor bar in this game works differently from in its predecessor. In I it was a measure of how well looked-on you were by society, but in this game it measures Arthur's own conscience instead, possibly due to criticisms that the story in I presented John as fairly honourable regardless of the player's actions.
    • In that case, it begs the question of why it doesn't increase your honor, seeing as how killing Jeremiah Compson does.
    • While that bloke definitely has some repellent views, certainly by modern standards, the fact is he's not actually directly harming anyone, nor has he directly harmed anyone that we know of. A high-honor Arthur likely wouldn't be able to find a way to justify murdering him, even to his own conscience; while we can certainly question the possible/likely indirect harm of his words, that's not something that can be accurately quantified, and in a fair society you don't get to gun down people in the street just because they express opinions you find abhorrent (after all, everyone has some views that another person somewhere might be repelled by). Jeremiah Compson on the other hand, in addition to his repellent views and personality, in his younger days was a slave catcher who vocally "enjoyed" his work — he almost certainly harmed plenty of people. His case is a lot easier for Arthur to argue as a karmic balancing, even if just to himself.
  • Also, let's be fair, shooting that bastard in the face is satisfying and it wouldn't be fun to be penalized for it.
  • There's a certain level of Reality Is Unrealistic too in the fact that he chose the wrong town to be in given that Saint Denis is a Captain Ersatz of New Orleans. There's a much larger population of blacks and mixed race couples in that community around the time due to New Orleans French American culture being very different from other Southern states culture at the time. In other words, it's not unbelievable no one would give a shit or silently cheer.
  • It's possible that even if the populace agreed with his tommyrot, his constant shouting and needling of passerbys got on their nerves.

Returning to West Elizabeth

• In the epilogue, how come the Marston family decided to return to West Elizabeth? In fact, how come John decided that they should live right next to Blackwater, a town that was the site of one of the worst massacres in (Red Dead) history, in which John was a part of?
  • John went and got in trouble again so they had to relocate, and West Elizabeth must have been the easiest direction to move in. He might not have even intended to stay at first, he seemed to pick going to Strawberry on a whim to get Abigail to stop hassling him, and probably figured that after eight years, nobody knew or cared that John Marston the gunslinger existed. Especially in Strawberry, where apart from Micah's little rampage, the gang didn't really get involved in. As for why he chose land outside of Blackwater, he had a commendation from a well known rancher which let him get a loan at that particular bank, and again, probably figured nobody even remembered he existed. And honestly, would have gotten away with it if it weren't for that meddling Pinkerton.

Hosea's plan

• Even if the Grays and Braithwaithes didn't catch wind of their obvious plan, how did Dutch and Hosea expect to find their hidden gold?
  • Eventually, they hoped that they would be able to scavenge their mansions after both families destroy each other or they were going to hold a family member for ransom. Or they didn't have a real plan and were just winging it until an opportunity opened itself.

Man of Honor

• Why did Dutch even trust Bronte’s word that the trolley station was a good target? He didn’t even like him before the setup.
  • Because you don't have to like someone to do business with them. The way he saw it at the time, Bronte gives him a good tip off, he gets the money, Bronte gets an 'advisory fee', everyone goes home happy. Dutch didn't see any reason for Bronte to stab him in the back when they had a good business relationship going.

Greater Gloria

• Why is Arthur so uptight about Dutch strangling Gloria? Putting aside that she was about to stab Dutch, she was already cranky, greedy and unpleasant to them.
  • He probably expected Dutch to at least knock her out. I mean, you got a middle-aged guy built like an oak versus a small, feeble old lady. And Arthur still saw Dutch as somewhat honorable.
  • Also, while her dialogue in Spanish proves her to be near Hate Sink obnoxious, she only seems to be cranky and greedy while speaking English.
  • At least in High Honor, Arthur Would Not Hit a Girl who wasn't attacking him and avoids civilian casualties. And it's likely that Dutch espoused (and probably taught Arthur) a similar moral code on treating women with respect, which he was now breaking.
  • Dutch also previously needlessly murdered Heidi McCourt, so it's a pattern that Arthur just noticed.
  • Gloria only pulls the knife out after Dutch grips her shoulder. He was planning to kill her even before she threatened him.

Drunken Antics

• What did Molly expect would happen when she falsely confessed to being the mole? Did she expect that Dutch would fall back in love with her or was it a Suicide by Cop?
  • She was absolutely piss-drunk. Being in that state tends to muddle whatever logical part of your brain that would be screaming at you to not do whatever it is you're about to do. And she was interrogated by the FBI, so between that and god knows how many beers she had, she was living in a completely different reality at this point.
  • She just wanted to hurt him, plain and simple. Everything had gone to shit by that point, she had nothing left, not even the man who she'd given everything to.
  • At that point, Molly didn't care about what happened to her. She may have been fine with being shot or even wanted it. She just wanted a final "fuck you" to Dutch and his gang of incompetent assholes.

Guns Out

• Why didn't Arthur or Micah whip out their guns during their final fight rather than engaging in hand-to-hand or knife-to-knife? Only during the Low Honor Escape ending's ending does Micah pull out his pistol to put one between Arthur's eyes. Arthur's wrecked with TB and Micah kinda sucks, but they're both expert gunmen.
  • In Arthur's case, he couldn't. Micah jumped him and knocked his gun out of his hand. As for why Micah didn't just shoot him, the man is a sadist and a coward and it's been repeatedly shown that while he may be a good gunslinger, he can't hold his own for shit in a fist fight. This was his chance to knock Arthur down a few pegs, when he was so sick he could barely fight back.

General Issues

• Why Fussar and Favours both physically appear to fight Dutch's gang? Neither seem to be frontline generals.
  • Fussar may have been supervising his men at the fort when the gang stormed in. Favours may have wanted to redeem himself in the eyes of his men after the Monroe fiasco, ensure success by giving orders on the battlefield or take personal revenge on the Indians and the Van der Linde gang.

Not done anything wrong?

• Arthur angrily claims to Agents Milton and Ross that he hadn't done anything wrong aside from "not playing the games to your rules." What about the tens of robberies and hundreds of murders that he committed?
  • Arthur is an outlaw — being a hypocrite is kinda part of the whole gig.
  • His proclamation may just be a boldfaced lie that he is innocent of all his crimes.
  • He's spouting the same Dutch Van Der Linde manifesto he's been hearing most of his life. He robbed a few banks, so what? Those bankers have more than enough to go around and get fat off the poor man's labor. He killed a few people, what's the fuss? They probably deserved it, right? It's important to remember that, sympathetic though he may be, Arthur is still a hardened criminal. His personal sense of morality isn't going to vibe with the law abiding citizen's.

Outlaw Deputies

• How could Arthur still be a Rhodes deputy (or deputized civilian or whatever) if he has an active bounty (which he likely would if he hadn't paid off the one he gained from the train job)?
  • Gameplay Versus Story Segregation

Outlaw Deputies Part 2

• Secondary note: if Arthur incurs a bounty, how is he still allowed to be a deputized civilian or whatever? There may even be a captured cutscene where Archibald even taunts him with hanging, before Dutch busts Arthur out. Wouldn't the whole operation be over then?
  • Again, Gameplay Versus Story Segregation. The plot has Arthur laying low despite what you do outside the quests.

You've got two of these things, Micah.

• When his Mexican Standoff is briefly distracted with Javier's appearance and he shoots Grimshaw, why doesn't Micah shoot Arthur or John with his other pistol? It would probably lead to the other shooting him, but they could have done so even when he just shot Grimshaw.
  • A single shot may not have been enough to fatally wound Grimshaw and he couldn't risk aiming at the head and missing.

Worst prison guards ever

• Why do the Siska guards all surrender and capitulate to Arthur and Sadie's demands? They're two people and Miliken is just one nobody guard, not worth negotiating a prisoner over.
  • Likely these specific two may have been new recruits, and these two outlaws just steamrolled into their prison and are still alive. Clearly whoever they are, they're not to be messed with.
  • Just a nobody guard? He's a human being. What makes John Marston so important to let an innocent man get murdered in cold blood for him, when they could just let him go and, as they actually did, send out a group of armed men to gun him down afterwards?

Can't Charles help?

• Arthur says that only he and Sadie could help rescue John from prison. What about Charles?
  • Wasn't Charles helping the Natives?

Where does Uncle sleep?

• At Beecher's Hallow, there are two bedrooms, one for Jack and one shared by John and Abigail. Where does Uncle sleep?
  • There's a ladder in the kitchen leading to his bedroom.

Sadie leadership

• How did Sadie come to lead the gang during Dutch's absence? She's the gang's newest member and hadn't even become an official gunslinger as of yet, not to mentioned pretty hot-headed. Wouldn't Grimshaw lead instead?
  • Grimshaw's good at keeping the camp in order, and will shoot to kill to protect her girls, but that doesn't make her a leader. Sadie has the grit and the drive to keep everyone alive and moving while the head honcho and his lieutenants are away.
  • Sadie isn't explicitly said to have led the gang, she just raided the Lakay hideout with Charles which enabled them to move in.

Handcar

• During the railroad destroying mission, when the train arrives, why do Arthur and John bother to move the handcar to the end of the tracks rather than just climbing down the ladder or running to the other end? That way they would be out of the train's way without using the extremely slow handcar.
  • If the train struck the handcar, there's a good chance that it could derail. A derailment on a high bridge would lead to numerous deaths and cause a lot of additional heat; not to mention that Arthur and John would likely be killed in such a derailment.

Missing Knife

• During the Low Honor Money ending, as Arthur futilely crawls away, the knife Micah plunged into his chest earlier (Arthur's own knife) disappears. It wasn't seen or heard being pulled out and isn't seen anywhere afterwards. What happened to it, why isn't it seen lying around and why doesn't Arthur use it to attack Micah?
  • If you look close, after it cuts back from Dutch walking away, you can see Arthur putting the knife down before he starts crawling. He got it out off-screen.

Corpse

• Who’s the corpse at the creek where Arthur and Charles found the German family?

Cleet and Joe hate

• Why are Cleet and Joe instantly hated by Arthur and most of the gang when they arrive? They pretty much keep to themselves and don't antagonize Arthur unless provoked.
  • Probably just their association with Micah. They likely assumed Micah's friends would be as bad as he is (which Joe is, though Cleet later proves to be a case of Even Evil Has Standards). Even if not, they still hate Micah and don't want his influence in the gang growing any further.

Oleander Oddities

• Why does a single dose of Oleander Sage fatally poison the stranger and the moonshiner and kill them in a matter of seconds while Arthur and John simply vomit and lose a little health?
  • Arthur and John only eat a little of the sage before spitting it out while it is completely swallowed by the moonshiner and presumably the stranger. Arthur/John also have a stronger constitution due to their active lifestyle.

Telling Dutch

• Why didn’t Tilly tell Dutch that the Foreman brothers were nearby, or let Grimshaw tell him? At this point, he is still pretty genial to the gang, and even if he wasn't, he would at least appreciate a warning on nearby threats.
  • Tilly didn't want to trouble Dutch with any more problems until Jack had been rescued.

Trelawny’s makeover

• Why doesn’t Trelawny have Arthur take a bath before the heist? Considering his occupation and living conditions, he probably doesn’t smell too great, and Arthur was willing to get a new suit and shave at his request.
  • To some degree it's likely Game And Story Segregation; a bath was likely implied to the audience in the whole "get yourself more presentable" aspect of the mission, it's just not shown as it's redundant to the requirements of the mission and would take up more time. In-universe, however, there are likely some things that Trelawny is willing to leave to tact, implication or just simple self-preservation; while he suggests Arthur clean himself up in terms of getting a fancy suit and having a bit of a shave, going too far along the "Jesus man, you stink, have a bath or something" axis risks Arthur potentially getting annoyed or offended and slugging him. So he may also simply assume that, in being instructed to clean himself up and make himself look more presentable, Arthur will get any required hint about having a wash as well.

Trelawny’s makeover Part 2

• Why does Trelawny make Arthur get a haircut/shave? If he’s a oilman who struck it rich, wouldn’t he look a bit more rustic?
  • Having a gigantic beard might attract suspicion. And it'll also help if big oilman Arthur Callahan doesn't exactly resemble the murderous outlaw Arthur Morgan.
  • Plus, being an oilman doesn't necessarily mean he's out there with the guys doing the hard work. Look at Cornwall. He's a tycoon himself but he clearly doesn't look like he's been doing the heavy lifting.

So many scruples

• If Milton had (truthfully or not) stated that Tilly, Mary-Beth, Karen, John, Javier, Bill, Uncle, Pearson, Swanson or Trelawny was the rat, would Arthur have believed him as well?
  • Probably not, unless there was significant evidence suggesting he was telling the truth. Micah is transparently self-serving and manipulative. Arthur already suspects him of trying to bring down the gang for money, so when Milton tells him that Micah has been conspiring with him, it's kind of a "No shit" moment. It's exactly the kind of thing Micah would do and makes perfect sense to Arthur the moment Milton puts the idea in his head. It's likely the only reason he didn't make the connection himself is because Molly's fake confession had convinced him the matter was resolved. But -outside of Micah- Arthur is incredibly loyal to the gang. It takes a lot of wrongdoing and multiple outright betrayals just to turn him against Dutch. I think he'd have trusted the word of any of his friends over Milton.

Kieran's new horse

• Seeing that he never actually uses it outside fishing with Arthur, why does the gang let Kieran have a horse? Wouldn't they want to keep him from leaving?
  • Kieran specifically chose to stay in the gang to avoid being Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves by the O'Driscolls. He could use a horse to ride to town, go hunting or perform stick-ups. Seeing that Branwen's a Tennessee Walker, a cheap and common horse, Kieran or one of the other gang members probably robbed or stole him.

Sadie's old horse

• Sadie's first horse, Bob, is a Turkoman, one of the best breeds in the game. How did she get him? She isn't an active robber at the time she gets Bob so she couldn't have stolen him herself. She definitely can't afford him and she isn't important enough for the gang to splurge on a Turkoman for.
  • It's possible that Bob was owned and housed in a stable somewhere by Dutch or Hosea and was given to her as a gift.
  • Bob may have been a horse stolen by one of the gang members which they couldn't sell for some reason and passed on to her.
  • Or Sadie may have won Bob in a game of poker or something.

No body?

• Why did the Pinkertons leave Arthur and Grimshaw's bodies behind? They could at least turn them in for their bounties.
  • The Pinkertons may have left the bodies there to rot and got the bounty anyway by showing the lawmen the corpses. Arthur's also visibly sick and they won't want to catch TB.

Suits

• What is the in-game reasoning for some of the outfits being honor level dependent to buy?
  • The General Store vendors and tailors only offer their best suits to those with good reputations.
  • Maybe the suits are tailor-made and were specifically made to fit Arthur/John.

Ross is awfully patient

• Why did Ross wait 4 years after Micah's death to finally use John to kill his former gang? The credits clearly show him and Fordham finding out where he lived, so Ross could enact his plan soon after.
  • Ross may have felt some pity for John and let him live out 4 years in peace before arresting him and Abigail.
  • Ross might have spent the 4 years:
    • getting evidence and testimony to build a case against the Marstons.
    • tracking down Bill, Javier and Dutch's locations.
    • tracking down Sadie, Charles, Mary-Beth and the other gang members, or attempting to do so, and getting their testimony or arresting them.
    • crafting his master plan to manipulate and betray John.
  • It's possible that the open world gameplay portion only lasted a couple weeks before Ross found Beecher's Hope and arrested John and Abigail, and they spent 4 years in prison before John was sent to hunt down his buddies.
  • The final cutscene where Ross and Fordham find the house may have been set in a Time Skip in 1911.

Sean Timeline

• In Chapter 2 we find out that after getting separated from the gang in Blackwater, Sean was captured by Ike Skelding's bounty hunters. When Trelawny tells the gang about what he found out about Sean, he told them the bounty hunters were in the process of taking Sean to a federal prison. The game begins at least a few days after Blackwater, with Chapter 1 itself taking place for about a week or so. Then after the gang relocates to the Horseshoe Overlook camp, a title card appears telling us a few weeks have passed. So then by the time Trelawny tells the gang that he knows the whereabouts of Sean, Sean has been captured for the better part of a month by that point. Adding to that the in-game days the player waits to do the mission to rescue Sean, we see that Sean is only then being transported by the Bounty Hunters to the prison. So the question is, why did Ike Skelding's boys hold onto Sean for so long before either turning him into the Pinkertons or transferring him to the prison? We do know they were interrogating him during that time, so it's possible doing that delayed his transfer, but as we know Sean wouldn't speak a word about the gang to the bounty hunters. So why try to get Sean to talk for a month when it seemed to be a lost cause from the get-go?
  • The gang (and by extension, the player) knows Sean won't rat them out, but the bounty hunters don't know that. And considering the price on Arthur's head alone was already up to $5,000, they had every reason to hold onto Sean in the faintest chance he'd spill the beans (deliberately or inadvertently).

Strauss Out

• Why didn't anyone speak up in Strauss' defence when Arthur threw him out? Ethics aside, Strauss hadn't ratted out the gang or failed them in any way. What right does Arthur have to throw him out, especially considering he is not currently held in high regard by Dutch.
  • Strauss is The Friend Nobody Likes to the gang, and even Dutch (before he went insane) didn't see him and what he does in a positive manner (despite using him for profit). True loyalty didn't matter much to Dutch at this point if they didnt agree with everything he said, look at how Dutch behaved with both Arthur and John in Chapter 6, gang members he once considered his own sons, so he won't care if Strauss was there or not. The rest of them, they still partly believed that Dutch meant to help the needy, thus didn't act when an excuse readily presented itself so that Strauss leaves the gang.
    • The only one who apparently appreciated Strauss's contributions was Micah, who only does so after he's exiled to scold Arthur. Micah probably had the influence to order Arthur (or persuade Dutch to order Arthur) to stand down and leave Strauss alone, but he may have let Arthur throw out Strauss to give Dutch and the rest of the gang the impression that Arthur is a weak, self-righteous unstable loose cannon and traitor.

Abigail's Forgiveness

• Why was Abigail so forgiving after John stormed out of the house to face Micah while insulting her and Jack as she pleaded with him to stay? Of course she'll be happy that her idiot husband returned alive and with money, but she doesn't as much scold or smack him.
  • She probably feared Micah would kill him and come after them if he went for revenge (which to be fair, that is what Micah actually intended to do), and Micah and his gang being dead alleviated those fears.

Sadie and Pinkertons

• Why is Sadie so furious at the Pinkertons during the Lakay battle, even shrieking that she's going to kill all of them? All her opponents so far have been O'Driscolls, who killed her husband, and Lemoyne Raiders, who attempted to rob her. At least the soldiers later on could be explained by her sympathising with the Indians. The Pinkertons, right there and then, were only trying to bring in a dangerous gang and never done anything to her directly.
  • They're a threat to her new family, the Van der Linde gang, who she had been leading for a week or so.

Bearer of Bad News

• How is John immediately up and running after the bear attack? That bear basically ripped his guts out, it made Uncle's adventure look like Disneyland. Even if John survived the initial attack, he would have been paralysed with pain until Sadie brought him back to Beecher's Hope. But he didn't as much get a permanent scar from it.

How/when did the Braithwaites kidnap Jack?

• So, the Grays and the Braithwaites find out about their new mutual friend, and decide to act on it. So far so good. How did the Braithwaites find the camp, kidnap Jack while Dutch as well as Abigail are in the camp (at the very least)?
  • Kieran mentions that he saw a couple Braithwaites and thought that they were there for business purposes. Supposedly a couple men came by, convinced Jack to that Arthur or his mother told them to get him or offered him sweets and took him away.

Dutch shooting Micah

• Why did Dutch choose to shoot Micah in the epilogue? Was he planning on killing Micah for all the trouble he caused the Van der Linde gang or did he opt out of revenge, knowing that John was there for the exact same reason? Furthermore, was Dutch’s shot intended to kill Micah or just wound him so that Sadie could get free?

Arthur's grave

• How on earth did John (and Sadie?) manage to bury Arthur in concrete stone?

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