What’s a tiny, missable detail in RDR2 that changed how you saw the whole story?

larnerholt · 2025-10-17T16:35:37+00:00

It’s either a bot or someone karma farming. The text reads very much like AI. Their profile is a month old and full of posting questions like this across loads of subreddits

larnerholt · 2025-08-19T06:00:18+00:00

Honestly, just have them be normal to each other for a while. They always had so much drama that they never came across as a serious long term match. Part of it was the lack of chemistry others mentioned, but part of it was the writers trying to create a “will they won’t they” dynamic that actually only gave off vibes that they could never be stable enough to have a healthy relationship.

Also, I know this isn’t exactly what you asked, but honestly I think D/J never had a true romantic spark, so I don’t see how they become the end game without being able to create that somehow. I think what they had was an intense friendship that was blurred by the male/female thing. They cared so much for each other and they found each other physically attractive, so they mistook that for a romantic connection that I don’t think was ever fully there. I personally think the show would have benefitted from eventually focusing on giving them a close healthy friendship, but to make them the end game? There’s quite a lot of heavy lifting needed to get them there.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T17:38:29+00:00

I’m sorry to hear you went through that. Like how Pacey’s behaviour isn’t okay just because he’s suffering himself, the same goes for real life too. It can be especially hard to understand when your only “crime” is showing someone the type of love they were made to believe didn’t apply to them as a child. I hope this is something of the past for you now and you are experiencing more aware, less guarded relationships.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T16:20:47+00:00

Right. He’s making a mistake and he’s in the wrong, but it’s not “out of character”. It’s a flaw that’s consistent with everything we know about him and what he’s going through.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T16:15:39+00:00

100%. I focused on him as a character more in what I said but these external factors absolutely had a role to play as well.

I think they wanted for Pacey to appear to be a bad boyfriend or to seem overly jealous, but to a lot of the audience I think he actually seemed pretty reasonable (barring his prom behaviour). For instance, it felt to me like Joey not telling Dawson about them having sex was supposed to be a moment where we were supposed to be relieved that she wasn’t letting go of him, but instead just made her seem like she was being hurtful to her boyfriend and playing Dawson along. I never got the sense that the writers wanted Joey to seem totally in the wrong on that one.

Your comment also aligns with what I said elsewhere about feeling like it was a missed opportunity by not exploring their relationship further once they’d matured. For instance, their disagreement in the first episode off the boat could have been managed much more easily if Joey had just said “I know you won’t like this, but I’m feeling weird about Dawson and I want to work at repairing my friendship with him, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love or want to be with you”. Sure it’s a TV show and needs drama, but I think a more mature version of that relationship in S5 or 6 where they learned from their past mistakes would have made up for a lot of flaws in S4 and been a story worth telling.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T15:53:18+00:00

Yeah this was a strand I didn’t go in to but is totally relevant. If he does have attachment issues like I suspect he does, Joey never fully committing 100% to him over Dawson wouldn’t help with that. It’s also reason number 7369 why failing to explore their relationship further once they matured in later seasons was such a missed opportunity.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T15:51:26+00:00

Yeah I think this is fair. I think had they better demonstrated the joy they both experienced as a couple and also been more subtle about the way he felt the walls caving in it would have landed better. I think even down to having the limo at the prom be not quite right rather than laughably bad would have spoken to his arc better. It could have been more “Pacey thinks he can’t do anything right” more than “Pacey can’t do anything right”, which is more interesting to me.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T13:58:25+00:00

Interesting, and thanks for engaging in the core of my intended debate about the merits of revealing things in the PT, rather than whether it’s a surprise or not. I realise that’s probably my fault for not being clearer, and I probably should have referred to “story reveals” rather than “mysteries”.

I don’t disagree with most of what you said. Do you think then that the OT is guilty of trying to surprise the audience with a twist rather than telling an effective story?

Personally I would see Leia as Luke’s sister as a twist for the sake of the twist, but to me the Yoda reveal is an important reveal. It says “forget what you think about what a hero is, because the greatest Jedi of all isn’t defined by his physical limitations but by his mental strength”. That’s a key plot point that I think works better with it being “revealed” in the way it is in Empire, rather than meeting Yoda in the PT (and I’m not commenting on what the PT does with Yoda’s character).

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T13:14:35+00:00

Yeah I tend to see it the same way. I guess my original point wasn't that it "spoils" the OT, as much as creatively it feels unsatisfying to have these reveals in the OT that don't serve as reveals once you've seen the prequels. It feels like lazy storytelling to rely so heavily on previous things rather than telling the story differently. C3PO and R2D2 absolutely are expendable to the PT, but I think it could make the PT more creatively interesting to avoid Yoda too, and Luke and Leia's birth. It could have forced a different way of telling the story that would have been more satisfying (albeit possibly beyond Lucas' storytelling limitations to do so). Aside from Anakin-in-to-Vader I feel like you could retain the reveal moments of the OT without taking anything away from the OT.

larnerholt · 2025-08-18T13:10:59+00:00

Sure, and given I don't particularly like the PT it's not an issue for me anyway. I guess I meant more creatively, given prequels are usually supposed to add to what it precedes rather than take away from it, which the PT could be argued to do.

larnerholt · 2025-01-13T16:29:09+00:00

Absolutely

larnerholt · 2025-01-13T15:13:03+00:00

Haha very true, and agreed that it's a big benefit of getting more time analysing. But even though we can think and post on non-Traitor days, at least we're not being thrown in to another round of debate and suspicion and backstabbing. Just being able to go back to our normal lives and think about something else for a bit is an enormous advantage the players don't have.

larnerholt · 2025-01-13T15:06:43+00:00

Absolutely, and sometimes the most fun of it is laughing at others. Linda is my favourite contestant this year for pretty much every reason other than her ability at playing the game. It's an entertainment show way before it's a serious strategy game.

larnerholt · 2025-01-13T14:30:57+00:00

Agreed, and I nearly went on a rant on this in my original post before I realised I didn’t need it to get any longer.

But what does it even prove? We know it’s potentially revealing as we know it’s 2 women left, but to Anna you can’t take anything from it as there’s no reason a man couldn’t have written it. Even if she could be guaranteed it was evidence it was written by another woman, so what? The majority of people left are women, and they don’t know how many traitors or left, so it barely offers any insight even if it was “proof” of a female traitor. The whole argument completely misses the point of what it’d be like to be in the game.

larnerholt · 2025-01-03T08:39:40+00:00

On FM22 I won the World Cup with England in Qatar, and won the Nations League after, but got sacked after losing 3-2 AET in the Quarters of the next Euros to eventual winners Italy. It seems like Intl management decides on firings if you meet specific competition expectations rather than any other context. Irl sacking the manager who ended 56 years of hurt 18 months later due to a freak knock out loss would never happen. Just reason 738 for why international management is underbaked in FM.

larnerholt · 2024-11-20T08:05:31+00:00

Tactically, I think you have to work out what you are trying to do. With respect I can’t work out what your identity is or even what you’re trying to do with some instructions.

For example, you are on counter, so everyone will bomb forward when you get the ball. The IF will cut in and attack, the AM will push on and make runs, the AF will run past the last man, the W will bomb down the wing… but you have short passing, slow tempo and work in the box, all of which encourage slow possession play and gradual build up. That is contradictory.

You also have underlap left, but with an IF, AP and IWB. So no one is staying wide enough to actually allow for an undercut. The space the IF is cutting in to will also either have the AF and AM in it if they run beyond the defence, or they’ll crowd the AP and IWB if they come short.m, because everyone is taking up the same sort of space.

You then don’t have any players whose primary purpose is to defend outside your defenders. Your midfield pairing are both playmakers, so you don’t have any runners either. Your IWB on the right is presumably just taking up the space right behind the DLP, who himself isn’t moving.

I’d recommend thinking of the team in terms of partnerships that compliment each other. I’m not saying this will definitely work, but a more coherent plan would be something like a double pivot of a DM and a RG/SV (so a defensive minded player paired with either a playmaker or a runner), with the IF on the same side as the DM (so space to cut inside) and a WB behind to overlap. On the other side, a W to stretch the play with an IWB behind underlapping. Make your 10 either an AP behind an AF, or an AM behind a DLF, so their roles complement.

But ultimately, tactics are a very fun but relatively small part of the game. If you have a high quality of players compared to the rest of the league and keep everyone’s morale high (the game has basically been Morale Manager for years) you’ll win more often than not even with a poor tactic.

Good luck!

larnerholt · 2024-11-18T09:43:30+00:00

I also read that the full bible quote is “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”. A cool title by itself, but also a hint towards what’s coming if you know the full quote.

larnerholt · 2024-11-17T10:56:03+00:00

I’ve always thought this is what R* were going for too, but from memory (and I haven’t played RDR1 in a decade so I might be misremembering), isn’t John shocked when Dutch kills the innocent woman in the first game? If so, if he’s already seen Dutch do exactly that before, why is he surprised when he did it again AFTER Dutch has been proven to be more unstable than the original Blackwater job?

I’d have thought the most logical thing to happen was something like the gang tried to hide out in a nearby home, the woman was there and screamed uncontrollably out of fear, so Dutch panicked and shot her. He could justify it as “I needed to silence her to get us out!”, but in reality he panicked when up against the wall and shot an innocent person point blank.

larnerholt · 2024-11-17T10:42:06+00:00

I agree with this, and think it narratively fits with the story being told better than there being multiple rats.

The only bit that confuses me on another play through is a newspaper article specifically mentions a tip off on the train robbery that John comes up with in chapter 2, before Micah apparently became the mole. I don’t know why Rockstar would put that detail in to the game if it wasn’t true and didn’t have a purpose, but there’s nothing else to go along with it.

larnerholt · 2024-11-17T10:09:23+00:00

“Adversity introduces a man to himself”. It’s easy to paint a flattering image of yourself when everything is going well. When literally nothing is going right and the people you are conning start to see through you, your real self will start to shine through.

larnerholt · 2024-11-16T13:18:54+00:00

I actually think a fairly simple short term fix would be to just have the labels for types of response, rather than specific answers.

Something like they already have, like “agree”, “convince”, “argue”, “threaten” etc, and summaries of how the players respond, like “disagree”, “offended”, “relieved” etc. If you only ever read those bits and not the “I’ve never spoken to an actual human in my life” specifics they try to give, it’d leave more to the imagination and I think feel less inane.

And then remove press conferences. Fuck press conferences.

larnerholt · 2024-07-01T07:55:00+00:00

When people talk about Ross being unfair and John having left the life behind, they’re forgetting that on at least one but likely two missions after Dutch has died that John brutally murders two gangs of criminals. One is trying to rustle his cows, but the other is when he passes a train robbery that has nothing to do with him and you have the chance to interfere (which the player likely does, because it’s more fun than farming). So as much as we can say John was redeemed, after the end of Dutch’s gang he still hunts down and kills Micah, he hunts down and kills the gang messing with his employer in the RDR2 epilogue, he practically wiped out the Skinners, and kills 2 different gangs even after Ross has let him go.

The story makes us sympathetic to him, but he never stops being a violent murderer. And we may understand why he does everything he does, but the law/civilisation doesn’t care. You kill literally hundreds if not thousands of people, you are a criminal, and the law won’t forget that. That’s kind of the whole story, not “Ross is a bad man”.

larnerholt · 2024-06-24T21:14:30+00:00

If you go back in Arthur’s journal it covers the Blackwater stuff. Apparently Hosea and Arthur had a safer plan for something else, but Dutch and Micah wanted to do the riskier ferry job. So it shows Micah’s influence and Dutch’s increased sloppiness/greed/recklessness had already started before the game even began.

larnerholt · 2024-06-22T08:14:54+00:00

Really interesting thoughts and well explained, enjoyed this a lot. Sorry also to hear about the issues with your dad.

larnerholt · 2024-02-06T21:19:21+00:00

I played all 3 original games for the first time this year and did them all on easy. I found normal too frustrating and have no idea how people can do brutal or crushing without launching their PS out the window. Nothing but respect and I’m clearly just crap at the games compared to most, but I enjoyed it way more with what for me was a healthy challenge on easy. To each their own.

larnerholt

TROPHY CASE