#hgkjfd sorry i was literally gonna be like 'yeah i agree' but then i ranted for like an hour

[sheparrrds]

dutch is... yeah he's basically a cult leader. and i don't wanna say when he took arthur in he indoctrinated him but yeah dutch absolutely saw a young impressionable mind who would owe him and exploited that for his own selfish purposes. sure it's not all quite as clear cut as that but yh that's the gist

he absolutely did that. arthur’s entire worldview is this.. existential conflict between what he feels in his heart, his artist’s soul, his softness, and the construct dutch brought him up to believe, the lieutenant dutch formed him into. dutch.. effectively collects vulnerable people. addicts (to both substances and to crime), outcasts, misfits, criminals. folks who don’t fit in with the society around them. 

whether that be because they’re an ex-serviceman struggling with living as a civilian after a life in the navy, not living up to any expectations of himself by his family, and coping with burgeoning alcoholism; the daughter of a freed slave who was kidnapped as a child and brought up as a gang’s plaything until she escaped by murdering her captor;

a clergyman with severe addictions to morphine and opium, both of which have stripped him of his career, his purpose, and his family; another ex-serviceman from an alcoholic family who was dishonourably discharged from the army due to his violent nature and alcoholism, who’s grown into an ignorant racist with a bad temper; a displaced revolutionary mexican freedom fighter who grew up seeing his family, community, and country being torn apart by despots, understanding firsthand what power does to people, an exile from his own homeland;

 a sickly austrian who found himself alone in new york city as a child and used his intelligence to become a remorseless loan shark; the son of a freed slave who saw his father murdered when he was barely a teenager, killed those responsible, and went on the run at 15;

a black native american who has relied on no one but himself in the midst of the white colonialists responsible for the continuing genocide of his culture and people, since the age of 13 when he ran away from his alcoholic father after the kidnap, abuse, and murder of his mother, leaving him with no concept of or connection to his own culture, heritage, and only family;

a conflicted career criminal whose penchant for scamming people was initially borne from his need to survive as a child alone, but since became a weary defeated addiction even lifelong love can’t break him from no matter how he tries; a young woman who so despises the world she lives in and that world’s treatment of women that she despises herself as a result, and turns to crime to punish that world, drinking herself through existence just to cope; a man who was his murderer father’s partner-in-crime all his life and has grown into an angry violent manipulative bigoted psychopath; prostitutes, immigrants, strays with nowhere else to go;

a 12 year old child due to be lynched by farmers in illinois

a 15 year old orphan whose petty criminal father left such a negative impact on him that arthur wishes he’d died years before he finally did

dutch collects vulnerable people. people who have, for one reason or another, failed at living in society. he preaches that there is no place in society for folks like them, and that by sticking with him, they will find somewhere they belong. a family. a safe haven outside of society’s laws and walls.

and because every gang member has.. Something that has made them an outcast in wider society, dutch’s politics and preaching appeal to them. to john and arthur, it goes even deeper. dutch is their only family. the father figure who took them in, taught them how to survive, fed them, sheltered them, supported them.

and at the same time, conditioned them into perfect gang enforcers. dutch took the fears and anger and confusion of two children and played on them, created a worldview where john and arthur would never be accepted outside his hold. in the beginning of the game especially, arthur believes there is no good in the world. he believes people and the lives people lead are inherently greedy, selfish, and violent. he expresses confusion and anger when he meets people who Don’t believe life is just Like That. the bad things they do, the things he knows are wrong, he believes are just part of the fabric of the universe. he’s damned, he’s a bad irredeemable criminal, and doing bad things makes little difference.

that’s the world dutch cultivated for him, in the end. perhaps not at first, when dutch span the tale of survival by any means, but that’s how it is when we meet arthur, and due to arthur’s familial loyalty to dutch, arthur doesn’t question it when dutch becomes less robin hood and more sheriff of nottingham. dutch has created two unerringly loyal soldiers. 

and even when arthur’s true nature conflicts with his hardened worldview, it takes his own impending death and knowing what’s in store for his brother john, for him to truly finally break out of dutch’s conditioning. to finally see the worth in the world around him. the beauty, the kindness. and to realise it does make a difference. that he has a choice, in all things. that being good is less about something innate that he was born with, and more about choosing to do good things from one moment to the next. to be kind, selfless, generous. to love. it won’t absolve what’s been done, and sometimes the world will be unkind and hard and painful no matter what, but good begets good. it does matter.

like.. i believe the events in game were the short term causes of dutch’s descent. but the wheel had been turning for a long while before we join the ride. dutch is a deadly cocktail of greed, anger, a messiah complex, a complete inability to deal with failure.. he was a ticking time bomb, and he always was.

and i believe dutch did genuinely believe in his ideal at first. he did reject society and did believe he could find the promised land and live free and easy, and if he had to steal a few things here and there to survive, that was forgivable, because his end justified his means. and i think it’s a human condition, to be.. unhappy with the world, to feel trapped by ‘society’, to long for some unknown unquantified freedom, the ever romantic ‘simple life’. i think many humans desire that, no matter where we are in history. and dutch managed to exploit that desire in people.

and we see how it ends, when that relatively simple ideal becomes a regime of violence and murder for the sake of violence and murder presided over by a maniacally out-of-touch dictator whose blind arrogance and paranoid hero complex get most of his ‘family’ killed.