The history of the Wild West is so enshrouded in myth, lies, obfuscations, half-truths, and rumor that once these delicate layers are peeled back, the definite facts they're mounded on seem scant enough to be scattered by a breeze — if they weren't weighted with blood and gold. Famous figures like outlaw Emmett Dalton and Wyatt Earp's wife, Josephine, intertwined the bare facts of their lives with legend. In the attempt to immortalize themselves, they erased themselves: it is not always clear whether something really happened, let alone how it happened or who did it.
As should be apparent by now, RDR2’s use of literature ranges from deep and extensive to brief and glancing. Sometimes, the writers allude to a work broadly rather than dealing with its themes.
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is the first science fiction novel. Famously, it was conceived as part of a contest between Shelley, her husband Percy, and their friends Lord Byron and John William Polidori. The group was staying in Geneva, where Byron rented a house called Villa Diodati. They were “delighted to learn that Milton had once stayed there, an astonishingly good omen for this group who by now saw themselves as fallen angels, like Milton’s Satan: rebellious and misunderstood” (Gordon 168).
Allusions to William Shakespeare's The Tempest are among the most obvious references in RDR2 — and yet, other allusions to the Bard's work are so subtle we almost have to guess at them. The game doesn't make direct allusion to King Lear or Othello, but the influence of those dramas is clear. Those plays feature a scheming villain spitting poison in the ear of a noble-but-tragically-flawed leader and a loyal but hapless child or follower who dies as a result of the leader's weakness: a plot that RDR2 reworks beautifully. However, this is an influence felt, not named. Other Shakespearean works are alluded to more directly. We’ll begin by discussing…
Finishing our journey through the intertwined Eden and Hell of RDR2.
The relationship between RDR2 and the Bible is an odd one. The game seems thoroughly secular on the surface, but its ideas about sin and redemption are not unchristian — perhaps because it relies so much on Paradise Lost to shape it. But the use of that text doesn't entirely account for the use of Biblical material in the game, which indicates a broad familiarity with that body of work.
More allusions to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in Red Dead Redemption 2, including themes, character and mission names, and more.
On the face of it, the writers' choice to use Wuthering Heights to shape the narrative of Red Dead Redemption 2 was a promising one. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, is “a radically corrective ‘misreading’ of Milton . . . with the fall from heaven to hell transformed into a fall from a realm that conventional theology would associate with ‘hell’ (the Heights) to a place that parodies ‘heaven’ (the Grange)” (189). RDR2 attempts a similar project, with Arthur’s fall into knowledge being not the path to sin, but to redemption.
The flawed beliefs about gender that Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries demonstrate through RDR2 harm their efforts to write characters of both the genders the game depicts. They dismiss the women and damn the men rather than allow them to act in ways the Western codes as feminine. If they were able to understand that women are not lesser beings, perhaps their minds would be broad enough to imagine other endings for their male characters. But they aren't: women are not written well in RDR2.
Homophobia often shares roots with misogyny: patriarchal constructs define male homosexuality as inherently feminine, which patriarchy believes is bad, because, naturally, women are less than, other, prone to evil, etc. Rockstar's portrayals of women in Red Dead Redemption 2 don't significantly diverge from this viewpoint.
