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I mean I think it's just a by-redditors, for-redditors kinda deal where it's also the passion project of somebody with a lot of money behind them and might have had some soft astroturfing/aligned nicely with the kind of stuff that videogame journalists liked. 'We're in the past but the protagonists somehow land on every social value of a medium-woke 2025 Westerner' barely even merits mentioning as a thing any more. It's dumb, it will always be dumb and yet there's never gonna be a great way of extricating it from media. Atleast weird punk kids being a bit more adventurous sexually is less incongruous than Red Dead Redemption 2's 'I may be a murdering 1800s outlaw but I draw a hard line at racism'
It's not like Mixtape is gonna do COD or Madden sales numbers even if it's the Indie darling, and there's no real glory in chasing a VGA the same way there is in an Oscar or whatever.
I don't know if it's really that incongruous. The average outlaw was probably quite racist, but the average outlaw was also unlikeable in tons of ways that don't apply to Arthur Morgan. One thing about stories is that even if you take the world they're set in as real, they're a selection effect of the world they tell.
You don't hear about all the heroes who set off on their quest to slay the dragon, only to get eaten by a troll hiding under the bridge. You don't get the guy who is just farming all his life except for the one day the dragon came to his town and he hid in some hay until it flew away and then went back to farming. You get the hero who has a likeable personality, interesting relationships both in friendships and rivalries, and fights an intense but ultimately winnable battle against the dragon.
There could be tons of really racist and otherwise unlikeable outlaws in the RDR2 world. Their stories aren't being told. Arthur Morgan, the rare (but still possibly existing!) generally caring, decently although gray in complex ways moral, fair treating outlaw cowboy with an interesting life is the one that gets told.
Yeah but this is retarded since having all of those values at roughly the degrees that makes them equivalent to your 2020s medium-Left player makes him a massive outlier from the social norms of his day. Plus completely overlooks the whole 'there are reasons why historical people had the views they had, they didn't just wake up one morning and decide to be dicks by overriding their natural, god-given 2020s medium-left moral instincts'.
You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.
Let's say in the heroes story, over the course of a thousand years we have one million people who tried to fight against the dragon and failed. Is it an outlier that our story has the one guy who wins? Yes. His story gets told because he's the outlier of the world. And of all of the potential worlds with stories to tell, this world was done because the hero is likeable and had an Epic Quest with Adventure and Challenges, rather than just an easy time beating the dragon and then living a normal life. This potential story world is may be an outlier of worlds, but it is the one being told.
That is the selection effect of storytelling, and complaints about "oh but that's rare or unlikely!" just fundamentally doesn't get that basically every good story, even realistic ones, falls into that. Even the ones that try to be about normal everyday people in everyday situations are typically more interesting lives than the typical everyday person actually has.
Now it's true that he'll probably be going around saying some words that were considered normal at the time that we in the modern era now consider to be slurs, but vocabulary changes and RDR2 is not unique. Stories about the far future don't have an English (if they even work speak it millions of years from now) completely unrecognizable from ours. A story set in 1500s France will still inexplicably have them speaking modern English (or whatever the dub language is in) and stories about the past like RDR2 also do this.
It's not just things like slurs and swears, tons of words shift in meaning overtime. "awful" means bad now instead of "full of awe" so characters mean it to use something is bad. "Gay" of course meant to be happy or carefree. "Artificial" used to have a more positive nuance to it. "Propaganda" didn't gain the negative connotation to it till after the world wars. There are tons and tons of other examples you can find, because vocabulary shifts naturally like that. Writers aren't going to accurately portray how people really talked back then, they're going to portray how the character would seem to be talking in modern dialects transposed onto the time period.
You aren't going to hear "He was a silly, awful, and gay man who regularly engages in intercourse" to mean "He was a harmless, inspiring and happy man who regularly partakes in social conversations" in most modern dialogue.
Yes, but what they're doing is also transposing modern attitudes onto the time period, and that's the problem. Okay, it's a silly, fun game that makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, so having a bunch of thieves and swindlers who would never do a bad, awful thing like use a slur is fine. Shoot a guy dead for the fifty cents in his pocket? Sure! Call him a [bad no-no name]? Heavens to Betsy, no nay never!
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Obviously, because the goal is not to be a past-simulator but to hit moral and emotional valence. If the message is that he is a good guy, it has to register to the player as being a good guy. "He is saying evil stuff but back then being evil was considered good actually, hence you should feel positively towards his evil behavior and should respect and like him for it" just doesn't work. Either he's good and then he has to be good regardless of whatever circumstances, or he's not. This is how it shows that moral relativism isn't really internalized by woke. There indeed is a universal moral standard that applies across time and space, which is a Christian-inherited idea, but they don't really reflect upon where that comes from, it's just self-evident, as the bill of rights also says.
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