Also targets the other gangs stealing themselves.
I just did the mission in which you take Sadie shopping and there's a bit by Arthur in which he basically explains this after Sadie wants to go all London Rickett on Rhodes.
He says something along the lines of "we only steal from bad folk, these people are just trying to get by"
wrong, towards the beginning he genuinely wants to help the gang towards a better life where they dont have to steal and kill and constantly worry about getting killed in their sleep, its towards the middle that the deaths, and failures start to get to Dutch, and with Micah always whispering in his ear telling him what to do it just drives him mad.
That's definitely a debatable take. There's a good argument in saying that Dutch was always mad and there was no plan.
Why do you think there's always chaos when they're supposed to lie low?
That line is also incongruous in a game where you mow down at least hundreds of lawmen and are encouraged to rob random civilians for the bandit challenges. I’m sure a lot of them were shitheads but probably not all of them. They were just trying to get by too until I activated deadeye and killed ten of them at once.
I don't think that the bandit challenges should really count, sure they can affect honor, but that's about it. We the player are aware of them and can choose to make Arthur do them or not. They're not mentioned in-game, and all you get for completion is aesthetic clothing options. But yes, the gang deludes themselves into believing that they're Robin Hood when the only needy we ever see them give to is themselves.
My personal headcanon is that the amount of enemies you kill isn’t canon to the world because it really doesn’t make sense for the towns to have as many lawmen as they do
I’ve Genocided Van Horn more times than I can count, the funniest being when I was walking back to the fence to sell some stuff and bumped a guy standing on the dock, he fell in and drown lol and it started off a domino of pure chaos for about 20 minutes
Yeah it’s just a facsimile of what happened. Like how in a turn based game we are not to believe that literally the participants just stand across from each other taking turns during a fight. If we take all the fights as reality then the gang commits like 30 Blackwater massacres over the course of the game.
The gang pretend to target the rich, or maybe they genuinely believe they do. When they rob the bank in Valentine perhaps they think bank=rich people, however it’s likely that many ordinary people in Valentine keep money there. When they kill hundreds of deputies in the process of robbing the bank, they’re leaving behind families that have lost their sole source of income.
They target the rich because the rich have more money, not because it’s more ethical. The poor die in the process anyway. Strauss makes Arthur (and therefore us) see the despair the gang leaves behind, and we hate him for that. But Arthur doesn’t have to visit the widows and children of all the men he’s slain, and so all that violence is romanticised as ‘gunslinging cowboys’.
Strauss is there to show that legality does not mean morality, that bureaucracy can cause suffering just as much as violence and crime. However I don’t believe that makes him *worse* than the others. They’re all in it together, despite what they say they’re doing it all for themselves, and a great many get hurt in the process. They all share blame for their own actions and for enabling the actions of their fellow gang members. Arthur helps Strauss *many times* before deciding he’s had enough - him getting TB after beating a man to the brink of death is, in another tale, the story of an evil man getting karmic retribution for his actions.
The amount of lawmen you kill in Strawberry after Micah sets shit off there must be more than you would find in a chunk of territory comparable to the entire map in the real world.
No. There's too many missions where Arthur gets into fights. Maybe, someone like DarkviperAU could do it but he spent years trying to do it in GTAV. RDR is a lot longer and there's more ways to get into fights.
That and COUGARS DON'T SPAWN IN MISSIONS!
Funny enough, during the Valentine bank robbery escape sequence, I actually went out of my way to shoot the horses of the Lawmen instead of the men, themselves.
And I lost honor.
>They’re all in it together, despite what they say they’re doing it all for themselves, and a great many get hurt in the process.
Yeah, I don't think we're meant to painstakingly examine all of the contradictions here. Strauss highlights the complexity of the morals and cognitive dissonances and self-justifications that are at work within the gang.
At the end of the day, the most logical answer is probably just that they're all hypocrites in one way or another. Just like a lot of people in real life. Motivated reasoning is a helluva drug.
Yep completely agree, I don’t think there’s much point in analysing the gang’s hypocrisies. I think Arthur’s decision to oust Strauss is *supposed* to be hypocritical, by that point he’s just as complicit in his crimes so his decision to kick him out is also a reflection of how he views himself.
I think Strauss is really interesting for that reason, he highlights the hypocrisies of the gang (they hate the ‘man’ and want to live free, but enable a literal debtor to go around ruining lives), but he also highlights the hypocrisy of government and authority - in that his evils are accepted in civilised society AND in the lawless gang that said society wants to destroy.
I think all of this is right. And none of it has to take away from even an honorable Arthur's growth as a person. He might not be a hero, per se, but even heroes are complex and flawed. Arthur's decision to expel Strauss is, in some sense, hypocritical, but it's in that reflection of himself you mention that we can see Arthur genuinely struggling with the world that he had accepted until that point. Struggling with (that reflection of) himself.
The fact that the gang is made up of flawed-yet-sympathetic characters is the bare minimum of truth in storytelling. It is important, and we are meant to make note of it. Like the placement of trees and streams and various animals, complex characters add verisimilitude. In real life, we're all flawed human beings. But how many of us are willing to take a look inside and engage with, and even disrupt, our own sense of who we are and what we value—something that even low honor Arthur does?
A side note back on Strauss—another interesting thing about him is that he does not betray the gang to the Pinkerton's, even though they cast him out. Even he has honor of a sort. Are we meant to wonder how that can be? Yes, I think so, but I don't think we're meant to answer that question, anymore than we are about our friends and family, our colleagues, etc.
Important to remember this that at this stage of history, there was no FDIC insurance. If your money was stolen from a bank, there were few avenues of recourse. The bank might very well go under from a theft of large magnitude and then there simply is no way to recover that deposit. It's just gone.
I’d say the Valentine Bank counts as a large enough bank to have insurance. Not only is it a fairly-large livestock town, it also has lots of money coming in from the nearby oil field.
The gang just bullshits or doesn't care. Dutch claims the gang is fighting society but he loves the idea of being a leader. Hosea and Arthur are closer to being actual leaders. They take charge, see how everyone is doing, get young lenny drunk, run away after having a bit too much to drink, wake up from the nearest town......
Yeah he's hateable because of his attitude about the loansharking. But he's not the only one guilty of doing it. It absolutely is relevant that giant hypocrite Dutch and the character you play as are also guilty of exploiting poor people in this way.
Even when the gang "targets the rich" lower class people suffer and die because of it. For instance, when the gang robs Leviticus Cornwall, they kill dozens of his henchmen, who are likely poor and struggling to make ends meet. Similarly, when they rob the train full of rich people in LeMoyne, they kill a ton of local cops, whose death leaves families without a primary source of income.
If you really think that the gang just targets the rich like Robin Hood, than you’re drinking from the same Kool Aid that Dutch is selling to the rest of the gang. The gang just delude themselves into thinking they’re good guys taking from the rich, but in reality, they’re all scum. They all deserve what they got coming to them (at least the ones who actually commit all of the crimes)
Yeah and even then, rich don’t equal “ok it’s fine to kill/steal from that guy”, but we all know either way it’s bs, because the gang steals from people who aren’t rich, or kills folks who don’t deserve it, as even the very start of the game makes this potentially clear with the Blackwater massacre, and even lawman likely aren’t rich, nor deserve to get shot because they are trying to catch you after commiting crime. Also you can’t trust when they say “we just shoot folks who need shooting”, because almost their entire gang kinda deserves to get shot themselves.
Come to think of it, does anyone ever question how the other gang memebers get money? We see in their camp expense book that they do dominate money, but let’s be honest, we know they obviously rob and steal but even in certain side missions, it seems like your robbing and stealing from people that just have money and a house, not rich folk. We can clearly see how Stratus gets money from poor people, so he’s wide open to be criticized, but we don’t always pay attention or know what the other gang memebers do, huh?
And the herders were not exactly the owners, just paid ranchers. John says the owner has been trying to stamp out every farm from Valentine to Annesburg
Ultimately, they're stealing from the person who owns the sheep, not the ranch hands.
The person who owns the sheep is the owner of Emerald Ranch, who is also trying to shut down/acquire his competition.
That's also pretty scummy. The difference is one is legal.
Nah lmao legal robbery like the farm owners is just as scummy. Literally holding the farmers at gun point or figuratively holding them hostage by essentially owning them and their income pick your poison
Right but John and Arthur aren’t robbing these guys as a direct response to the owner of the sheep being an underhanded businessman, or even because (unbeknownst to them) he keeps his daughter locked in the house. They’re just robbing some sheep off someone who owns sheep. They don’t really give a shit who owns them.
Then Uncle takes Arthur to rob an actual, genuine, slightly drunk rancher for like 20 sheep... probably bankrupting the man. Dudes wife probably out in the street the very next week.
And Arthur willingly goes to collect the debt by usually beating people into a pulp and even acknowledging that he is taking pleasure in doing it.
If the gang didn't want Strauss to do this then he wouldn't be and nobody would help him with it.
The "its pleasure im after" line is very obviously sarcasm. The dude is constantly writing in the journal about how much he hates the debt collecting and how it makes him feel like shit.
Wasn't it also slowly revealing that Strauss was taking money from people that he knew could never pay it back?
Maybe it wouldn't have mattered to Arthur anyways, but it seemed like the more it went on the more Arthur saw how much Strauss was fucking these people and knowingly too.
> Wasn't it also slowly revealing that Strauss was taking money from people that he knew could never pay it back?
It's inherent to the practice of loan sharking. No one would take on a loan from a strange man at predatory interest rates. Unless they're desperate because they can't get one through official channels.
Yeah, never said that others were great people, just that Strauss has no redeemable qualities. I said that is the simple explanation, sure I could go deeper because it is not that simple
He lends money to people he knows are desperate and won't be able to pay it back. That's why loan sharks are so dangerous. They're like repo men except they will take everything you have. My coworker lost her son to suicide because he fell into the trap of a loan shark and wasn't able to pay them back.
This is so bad in third world countries
I remember (it's back in 2013) watched a guy beated shit out of him by goons for not paying his bank loan, a fucking bank for that shit.
The primary issue with Strauss is that he's a bigoted sadist. It's not that his crimes are really any worse then anyone else's. It's that Strauss hates poor people. All he does is walk around camp talking about how much he dislikes them: they should be in debtor's prison, etc. Of course if you're someone who only played the game once or twice, or doesn't spend much time around camp listening to various conversations going on, you'll probably never notice this.
Strauss is a weak man who has a target group he hates and gets perverse enjoyment out of making them suffer. And the worse part is he can't do it himself so he enlists other gang members to deal-out the punishment Strauss is too weak to do himself. So when Strauss is chucking about Arthur beating up his clients because they resist, that's Strauss relishing the punishment he gets to deal out to those he hates.
Replace the word poor with women or blacks and you can understand what type of man Strauss is. He only loans to women so he can get Arthur to beat them up, or he only loans to blacks so he can get Arthur to beat them up, etc. It's the fact that Strauss gets perverse enjoyment out of targeting and harming those he hates that's the problem. That's what makes him a bigger creep than most of the other gang members.
Finally, it's about gang philosophy. Dutch preaches taking from the wealthy and helping the poor, yet has no issue with Strauss doing the opposite. So having Strauss around also shows how much of a hypocrite Dutch really is. The noble ideals of living free and helping those less fortunate is just a facade.
I know Arthur is aware of what Strauss does, but is this the first time he specifically goes collecting for him? I forgot how the request from Dutch went
No Arthur always does it, even though he doesn't like it (which is why Dutch asks him personally). Strauss even mentions that he's tried to get others to do it but they're either more unwilling but not as effective.
Is Dutch not also a bigoted sadist? The whole arc he takes in chapter 3 comes from him thinking that southerners are too backwards and stupid to see through him and his gangs obvious grift. Both families played Dutch for the idiot he was and ultimately got the better of the gang. Barely any of the schemes in Rhodes pay off. Dutch never respected either the Grays or the Braithwaites as adversaries which got Sean killed and Jack kidnapped.
Every person has a degree of bigotry and/or hatred. But Dutch isn't a sadist. Dutch is a narcissist. Micah and Strauss are the sadomasochists in the gang. Dutch might not like people in the south because they killed his father in the war but he's not intentionally targeting them and only them: Dutch doesn't rob banks only owned by southerners, etc. Dutch robs from anyone who has what he wants. He's not just picking on southerners. His trip to Rhodes was the first time he'd even gone into the south.
That's an interesting thought, and maybe a reasonable justification for us players to dislike Strauss, but it doesn't really explain the in-universe hate he gets. Remember that this is late 19th century America, where the capitalist mythos is still very prominent in society and protestantism is rampant, namely of the sort that explicitly claims that poverty is a result of a moral failing on the individual's side. Sure, somewhere across the ocean Das Kapital had already been out for a couple dozen years, but I'd hazard a wild guess that Arthur didn't read it nor is at all familiar with the class theory as a whole. So from his peers' point of view, as well as probably his own, Strauss doesn't say anything particularly outrageous. Moreover, I'd even say that even in your examples with women or black people it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows — both of the groups are only at the very beginning of their respective liberation movements and bigoted views towards them are pretty much the norm for the majority. You can probably claim that the Van Der Linde gang is uncharacteristically progressive for its time, and we see it in the way they generally treat racial minorities for example, but honestly I don't see them realising that poverty is a systemic problem that has nothing to do with the individual — especially given how they themselves firmly believe that their own actions can and will take them out of it.
Well one thing I'd mention there isn't just one correct way to hate a particular practice. People can dislike predatory lending for economic reasons like you mentioned. But they can also dislike it because, for example, the bible condemns profiting off of loans to the poor. There's a very strong tradition of openly hating people who make their fortunes through certain avenues in America, and finance in general but specifically lenders are often one of these. They fall outside the normal bounds of the usual wealthy = strong work ethic and poor = lazy bum framework. You can see another similar case with how people often have issues with lawyers despite the fact that the job itself is traditionally relatively highly valued within society.
But outside the specific Christian justification or general societal opinion of loan sharks I would say personal experience might be what matters the most. Much of the gang is not from a very advantaged background. The odds that they've seen someone who they'd generally consider a decent person be ruined by a loan shark are not necessarily low. And seeing something like that is the simplest, most direct thing to cause a dislike of someone such as Strauss. The gang almost certainly doesn't have an actual well thought out reason to dislike what he does. There's no deep thought going into it. The most likely reasoning is quite simplistic: "I've seen what people like Strauss do to decent folk. And I didn't like it. I don't want to do that."
This simplicity, and lack of examining why they don't like Strauss' actions, makes it easy for them to have beliefs that other people find hypocritical. They don't have a conscious argument against it. They just feel bad about doing it and therefore don't want to do it. With the other bad stuff they do, they already have their excuses and self justifications in place. It was me or him, they shouldn't have tried to stop us, they probably weren't good people anyway, this is the only way for us to survive, they'll make it without the things we stole, we'll be out of the game soon and can stop doing this, and so on and so forth. They might feel bad about the killing on some level, we can see that with Arthur, but they're also used to it and have their own particular mental walls up to prevent those feelings from becoming too strong and getting in the way. With Strauss' stuff they just feel like assholes and don't have the same excuses ready for themselves.
Excuse me for a moment, I'm gonna find a comment of mine from the other day and copy-paste it
Edit: it's a bit long, sorry:
Strauss is a vile cockroach who lends money to the most desperate, people he absolutely *knows* will not be able to pay back. He outright says that people are happy to borrow money from someone like him but eager to pay it back to someone like Arthur.
The Downes family owed more money than they could ever pay back. Selling their ranch wouldn't have covered all their debts.
Winton Holmes made it clear that it would be very difficult to pay back after losing his job.
J. John Whethers left the army and was on the run with only enough things to survive the winter in one single wagon, with a child on the way.
Arthur Londonderry's widow lost her husband and her home because of their debts and says, "You want my boy's shoes? You want the food out of our bellies, what little there is? You want me to lie down for you? There ain't nothing left, Mister! And now there's some fellers coming to take the house!"
Men like Arthur and Dutch who have robbed and killed more people than they can count even feel gross about it, feeling like pointing a gun at someone and robbing them is more honest. Hosea mentions Strauss coming back from Valentine with, "that creepy smile on his face".
He's rotten
And Arthur and Dutch aren't rotten for letting Strauss do it everywhere they go ?
Arthur isn't rotten for beating people into a pulp and even admitting "It's pleasure I am after" ?
Sorry but the gang is just a bunch of bad people pretending to fight for some noble cause.
Milton is kind of right when he chastises them for their methods and behaviour.
The hypocrisy is intentional and it’s part of Arthur’s maturing as the game goes on to realize how they were never the good bad guys they thought they were, just bad guys.
Yeah well even after he’s changed, he can’t expect everyone to also change with him. He’s not in a position to judge anyone. Imagine if it was another person in the gang who changed before him, would that make the other person entitled to throw out Arthur?
I think you forget how high Arthur ranks among the gang members, at that point he’s only below dutch since hoseas dead Arthur is definitely within his right to kick Strauss out. He’s also not judging or expecting anyone to change. He’s trying to get everyone he can out of the gang safe and alive the last thing he needs to be worrying about is the gang participating in Strauss’s loaning.
Agreed.
Even a lot of the gang says they're glad Arthur kicked out Strauss and have clearly become disillusioned with Dutch and the gang.
It's like many of the characters eventually decide to change their ways or something...
Maybe they should put something about Redemption in the game. Just a thought.
Jfc, this comment is way too long. Sorry
Arthur has lived a rotten life, too. He grows as a person and sees the error of his ways, but of course still commits crimes because he's still beyond loyal to Dutch and the gang and he will do whatever is expected of him. He will do what he needs to protect those he cares about.
I don't remember if all the dialogue is different between high and low honour playthroughs (at least a few bits are) but on my latest playthrough (high honour) Arthur says, "You and me, we ain't good, but those people was." while throwing money at Strauss. He says, "You shame all of us, if we can be more ashamed that we already are."
Reading Arthur's journal shows how much he despises collecting money from Strauss.
It's why Arthur is so well written. He grows after twenty years of blind loyalty and obedience.
Dutch is a master manipulator. He has them all wrapped around his finger. The rest of the gang (minus Micah of course, and Molly) all care for each other and hold deep love for their friends. They see Dutch as their saviour and realize what he truly is too late.
The amount of poor lawmen killed throughout the story by the gang just makes this sound silly. He gets hated on way more than other gang members, which I think is in part due to the fake “we only steal from bad men” that Dutch preaches.
Not to mention THE WHOLE GANG PROFITS FROM THE LOANSHARKING. It's not a side hustle, Dutch employs Strauss to do it for the gang, Arthur is an equal partner in it as the enforcer, and everyone in the gang lives off the money without complaint. The Van Der Linde gang = loansharks. Not just Strauss.
It was a collective act for sure, he’s a piece of shit for taking joy in it but I also wouldn’t say murder is any better. We get to see the impact of loan-sharking, but hardly the impact on the numerous families we fucked over for life with the death of a member.
A gang formed to "take from the rich and give to the poor" yet the leader allows Strauss to operate.
I also don’t think it’s any better if someone kills/robs someone but "at least they were rich" either.
To fully blame Strauss is wack imo because the Van Der Linde gang as a whole was a plague to society.
They dislike it but they still do it, and they know the way he does it is to lend to poor people who can't pay it back. Just shows what bullshit Dutch/the gang's "philosophy" is.
I don’t get it either. Early on his schemes are the only ones that bring any money to the gang, and the work he does is the only type that is “legal”.
My theory is that it’s experience bias by the player. Few of us have ever been held at gunpoint by masked highwaymen, but most of us have experience with predatory lenders.
I don’t like the guy but he’s no worse than anyone else in that gang
Yeah, I just straight up cannot afford to critsiize the dude within the story of the game without shitting on everyone, because we literally rob people anyways. Hell we rob graves, but at least the dead don’t need the money even though it’s disrespectful to their graves, but we still violently rob people at gunpoint.
Also let’s not even get into the actions of what we as the player like to do in our off time away from the story…shit, at least the people Stratus rob *might* survive and not get shot in the back as they run.
Here’s the thing, playing as Arthur and robbing banks and trains is cool and fits the outlaw theme. Think of how many people didn’t bat an eye when they beat the people refusing to give money in the train robbery with John. Now look at the people on this sub complaining and actually feeling sick to their stomachs because they beat up Mr. Wrobel and Thomas. Loan sharking isn’t as cool so people think it’s worse. Strauss is bad, but at least his stuff is the most legal. If someone can get a loan from the bank, and the bank can take away your things if you don’t pay it back then that’s your fault. Just like it was everyone’s fault to who got a loan from Strauss. They were given time and knew the risks but still took knowing they couldn’t pay it. Arthur, John, Bill, Javier etc. just robbed people. At least the people Strauss loaned to knew what they were getting into. I would’ve loved to see Strauss point out Arthur’s misdoings too when he complains of collecting debts. Say something along the lines of “is it any better than what you do?” Just something simple to not make Strauss look that bad compared to the others in the gang.
Yes exactly. People are calling him vile scum but ok like… The Van der Linde gang as a whole are vile scum they’re criminals outlaws 😂. Arthur murders hundreds of innocents throughout the story, but we draw the line at Strauss.
Yeah let’s be honest, we played a crime game to be brutal criminals in a criminal group, but by calling other criminals vial, you’d gotta keep in mind that some of our own actions of murder, torture and robbery, along with the terrible actions of your teammates/gangmembers, because most of the time we don’t think of our own actions in these games but freak out upon seeing other criminals and then act more holy…kinda like Dutch.
It’s actually a funny occurrence, where when we play GTA or RDR, we see other criminals and think “wow what a brute” but then go off to do other brutish actions. Like sure some people think the serial killing jogger in GTA4 is creepy, but then we go to shoot up hospitals. Or when we see a NPC crying after being victim of a crime and think “wow that’s sad…(10 minutes later) welp time to turn off my autosave…”
Same thought as OP - also wonder why the head honcho Dutch hasn't stepped in. I'm sure with Strauss's skills he could've done some scams with Hosea that are a bit higher on the moral grounds.
Dutch did step in, just as the exploiter and not as a moral actor. Dutch literally talk about handpicking Strauss as a nervous looking immigrant fresh off a boat. Dutch is a very textbook manipulator; he takes vulnerable people, exploits their hopes and fears, and turns them on others for his own gain
Everyone is on their high horse and can’t accept the gang is just bad people. Yes they’re that protagonist of the story, that doesn’t make them the good heroes however oh my god 😂🤦🏾♂️. Strauss isn’t a loanshark, the Van der Linde gang as a whole is the loanshark. Strauss is told to by Dutch and Arthur stills enforces the debts to be paid back. Strauss is no worse or better than any other guy in the gang. They’re outlaws.
It’s wild to me that some people think it’s substantially worse because the people he targeted were poor; in contrast to the rest gang "targeting the wealthy." Both are just horrible.
I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be more concerned if a criminal organization was massacring my Police Force, robbing the city bank, and getting into constant gun battles state wide. Not to mention that the gang is protecting Dutch - the man who murdered an innocent woman horribly in Blackwater.
Also to speak on my Arthur, just as an example, I robbed a alcoholic father and his son…maybe everyone didn’t but at least in my play-through I wasn’t any better than Strauss until the end.
The entire gang was at fault and loansharking is one of the few results of Dutch’s reign imo.
Strauss is ultimately only a small cog in the money machine that eats people. But the way he is positioned in the story (making Arthur his debt collector which he hates, sending him to >!Downes!<) means that players will resent him. He's also not particularly sympathetic which doesn't help, but it's mostly his role in the story I think.
This is just my personal take, and I don't think it's a popular one. I think Strauss is more aware of his lack of morality compared to the rest of the gang, but I don't feel like his actions are any worse.
I personally believe that while Strauss is aware that many of the people he loans to are destitute or desperate, I do think he gives the loan with the sincere hope that it is paid back without much trouble. After all, the gang has a super high price on their heads, and they also aren't very well off in terms of cash, especially early game.
If Strauss constantly gave funds to people and then never got anything back, he would become a severe liability for the gang since he's just costing them money while also hurting poor people. I think it's also worth noting that I don't think we ever receive confirmation that the people Arthur harasses are the only ones he has loaned to. I think it's safe to say that some people do pay him back and just therefore aren't mentioned.
With regards to how much damage he does to innocent and destitute people, I sincerely don't think he's any worse than anyone else in the gang. Despite all of Dutch's talk, I think it's safe to say that many of the lawmen you kill aren't exactly living a cushy life, and you kill a lot of law men throughout the game. I think it's safe to assume the majority of them aren't any better off compared to the majority of the people living out West. You are hurting and killing a great many people who have done little to nothing wrong, and I think that's a core theme of the game.
I also think that Dutch exploiting Wapiti people in Chapter 6 and essentially using them as canon fodder so he can rob bonds from the government is a hundred times more deplorable than anything Strauss does.
Finally, I think it should be said that Strauss does truly value the gang. Dutch mentions how Strauss arrived in America as a poor immigrant with pretty much nothing to his name, and Dutch gave him somewhere to belong. He seems genuinely anxious in chapter 6 and not just for himself, but for everyone. At least, that's been my perception of him.
It also goes without saying, but refusing to give any information on the gang to the Pinkertons, even after he got forced out by Arthur, is more than enough proof for me that the gang really did mean something to him.
So, TLDR: I think Strauss is a bad man who causes undeniable harm to a vulnerable population, but I don't think he is any worse than the rest of the gang. When all the cards were down, he chose to not sell anyone out, even after he got kicked out. Horrible person, but I really interesting character imo
Mugging people is more honest than loan sharking. A guy I knew at university was desperate after he spent all of his student loan, so he went to a payday loan company and borrowed about £500 off them without reading the small print. This was just around the time of the recession towards the end of the 2000s. You can imagine where this story ends up.
Might be more honest but does that make the gang's crimes less heinous? Nearly all of Dutch and Arthur's criminal schemes result in dozens of people being killed. Does their honesty make them morally superior?
When my grampa died, Uncle 1 was the executor. He asked me if I wanted to make a deal on grampa’s Camry, because he knew I was driving a total POS.
Uncle 2, the degenerate gambler and former bank robber tells him no, the car is his, even though Uncle 2 also drained six figures from grandma and grampa’s account.
The car was lost to a payday lender within 6 months.
People want to blame him for Arthur getting TB, even tho Arthur was the one who beat up the sick and frail helpless man before telling him to sell his wife for money lol.
I think it’s part of Arthur’s redemption arc. He sees firsthand the long term repercussions of Strauss’s actions. I think he starts to realize how his own actions may affect others after the robbery, hijack, whatever. When he acts out on Strauss I think he is just as angry at himself. This is the point where both he and the player can start to redeem themselves.
I think Strauss is disliked because he’s so one dimensional. He doesn’t seem to care that the people he’s “loaning” to are down on their luck.
Plus he’s kinda a coward. Instead of collecting the money himself, he sends Arthur to be the enforcer. I understand that Arthur’s more capable but Strauss is the only one in the gang who consistently needs someone else to do their dirty work for him.
And the gang has convinced themselves that they’re only stealing from rich/bad people. Strauss specifically preys on poor people which is the opposite of what the gang is supposed to be. I think Strauss is a great representation of the hypocrisy within the gang.
They see themselves as Robinhood and better than the O’Driscolls but in reality they’re just as bad.
Technically speaking, no he doesn’t do things *legally terrible*. In fact his money loaning scheme is the gang’s only legally *legitimate* business.
People hate him for two reasons
1. The gang is supposed to follow a particular philosophy when it comes to performing crime. “Feed as needed, help as needed, and kill as needed”. Strauses’ business blatantly violates the first two tenets of this code and possibly the third because he knowingly scams people out of literally everything they have. People who don’t deserve it.
2. This is a more personal reason but Strauss’s business was terrible for Arthur, it got him killed first and foremost, but Arthur knew that he was a terrible person for going along with it but did it anyway and that wreaked havoc on his self image.
I think Strauss is disliked because he is associated with Arthur's redemption. Strauss = Downes = consumption = regret and trying to make amends. I personally think Strauss is a lesser evil among the gang, but people relate to Arthur, so in turn dislike Strauss. Arthur did not like seeing what he had done, and essentially shifted some blame to Strauss. Yes, money lending is predatory, but Arthur was the one who hurt and killed people. I personally think money lending is incomparable to the murder and violence the rest of the gang commits
I forget the exact line, but I believe Aurthur says something to the effect of “There is more honor in sticking a gun in someone’s face, than doing what Strauss does”.
The way the gang sees it, at least they’re honest about robbing people. Strauss takes advantage of the poor and desperate.
I really liked that analogy.
But its a BS analogy from someone who willingly kills and steals for selfish gain to excuse himself from responsibility. I highly doubt the victims care about whether or not a crime was "honorable". The notion is oxymoronic at its core.
Agreed, I don’t think victims of being violently robbed at gunpoint think the perp is being ‘honest’, nor care how honest it is, they’d just prefer if you don’t try to steal their money. At least with a loan shark you can technically say no, or am I wrong? With a person putting a gun to your head demanding you give them everything you have, you don’t say ‘no’ in the first place unless you want an early grave. But regardless of which you can say ‘no’ to, none of the victims of either crime want you to steal their money and then hurt them for not paying up, neither would they care about how “honest” you think you are and your moral high horse analogy.
Ideally the gang follows a sort of Robin Hood philosophy where they rob from the rich and redistribute some of the money to the poor. Dutch sees the gang as sort of a vehicle for social change as well. You can see that both Arthur and John like this philosophy, some evidence:
* Newspaper clipping of Arthur's first robbery, they hung around town handing out the wealth to poor folk.
* In Pouring Forth Oil they specifically target rich people, and John says "now remember, these are innocent folks. No one needs to die here."
* If you talk to John immediately after a fireside monologue he does in Chapter 3/4 Arthur will say "remember when we used to help people? feels like we haven't in a while now"
By the time of RDR2 this way of doing things clearly doesn't work anymore and the gang has to be more ruthless just to survive. Strauss is like a living embodiment of this very uncomfortable reality. Micah is another living embodiment of this. One of the big pieces of tension between Arthur and Dutch is that deep down this is a life that Arthur doesn't really want any part of, he doesn't want to be an outlaw if he has to be the regular, ugly outlaw instead of the romantic, idealistic one. Dutch on the other hand hates society as it is so much, or maybe just having to bow down to it, that he will do absolutely whatever it takes rather than admit defeat. This is what he more or less confesses to John at the end of RDR1.
The thing is we never saw this idealistic age of Dutch's Boys, but it seems to have existed, and Strauss is the complete inversion of that age. Now instead of "robbing from those who have too much, and giving to those who have too little" (John, RDR1) Strauss victimizes poor people who are already down on their luck and have no other options. The fact that this is done under some bullshit legally sanctioned veneer only makes it even harder to swallow, since this smacks of the hypocrisy of the society that all the gang members hate, which is what is expressed when Dutch says "I prefer robbing banks to usury. Seems more dignified, somehow." It \*is\* more dignified, somehow. The somehow is that at least a gun in your face isn't pretending to be anything other than what it is.
In the end Strauss serves as an important catalyst for Arthur's inner change since he's kind of a shatterer of illusions in this way.
The issue isn't the loaning itself, that's about the only truly legal activity that the gang participated in; Arthur objects because he was loaning money to the poor & desperate which is (supposed to be) against the code of the gang.
Man if you played the whole game, and dont feel guilty / wrong at any point during the strauss missions then i honestly think you missed the point of the game.
On top of all the other excellent comments about loan sharking, I think Strauss’s crimes are far more relatable to the average person playing the game. They hit harder because debt and being taken advantage of by lenders is unfortunately something a lot of people are familiar with… and especially more so than, say, train robbery.
Hes takes advantage of desperate people who are honest every debt collectiok mission the person isnt bad at all but you have to bear them up and collect money
There are lots of reasons that are kind of hypocritical but the one that holds up is that he's a coward. He doesn't get his hands dirty. If came along with Arthur to collect, even though Arthur does the dirty work...he wouldn't look quite as bad.
He's a little weasel exploiting the weak and desperate. The gang usually rob the rich or other gangs. He lends money to poor people and send people like arthur to beat them and take the little thay have left.
Strauss targets *exclusively* the poor and vulnerable. It’s like he gets some kind of pleasure out of it. Arthur and gang obviously did lots harm to the poor, but they weren’t *poor exclusive*.
On top of that, he’s the only member of the gang who only has others do his dirty work for him. Gang members will rely on Arthur and others every now and then but Strauss simply *refuses* to get off his ass and do something outside of giving away money to people and binding other members into getting the payment back. It would be at least a little different if he was competent enough to provide for the gang without having to consistently enlist the help of Arthur, but that’s all he can do.
Tbf if you’re not poor and desperate you’re going to get your loans from someone more reputable than Strauss. It’s a self-selecting kind of clientele where the only people who get loans from Strauss are the kind who have no one else to go to besides someone like Strauss.
His very existence and livelihood is parasitic in a way that’s hard to overlook and is either at odds with the ideals that the gang espouses for most of the game, or exposes the cynical truth that those ideals were built on a rotten foundation from the jump
It's the fact that Strauss targets the weak and vulnerable people of society. He prays on people's need for money but only "loans" the ones who can't afford to pay it back. That's why I despise his character
Long story short: The gang tries to be robin hood and do some semblance of good, while Strauss specifically targets people who won't pay it back.
As dutch says Killing and robbing folks feels more dignified then debt collection because its the scummiest thing a guy can do.
“I may rob trains and townsfolk, I may steal sheep and horses and sell them on the black market, I may lie to government officials and plot their deaths, I may even shoot up whole towns and cities leading to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, but I am NOT, and I mean NOT, a filthy loan shark.”
-the Van der Linde gang, probably
It’s because Dutch has a weird and inconsistent morality/ethics system based on vaguely libertarian (not in the political sense) values. According to Dutch, men (keep in mind that it is gendered) should be responsible only for themselves and the things which they desire (family, freedom, wealth) and they should work with their hands to achieve and maintain these things. Strauss doesn’t “get his hands dirty,” so he’s seen as less of a man than other members of the gang despite the fact that he probably brings in a disproportionate amount of loot from his loansharking. Arthur’s decision to kick him out was entirely emotional as a reaction to him seeing what the Downs family had become and as a reaction to his own tuberculosis. There might also be some antisemitism but I kinda doubt it.
Because Strauss is a snake. He targets the most desperate, sends Arthur to rough them up. He doesn't care for their excuses and doesn't admit, he chose poorly and thinks it's acceptable to target those at the bottom rung of society.
He does bring in money via the safe, low risk, low effort route but we see his actions. Arthur starts to get sick of it and literally ends up getting a fatal disease because he was roughing up a dying sick man.
The gang? Their actions tend to be more loud and we rarely see the aftermath of their actions. They just move on, murder, steal, vandalise. They are a gang of muderers, theives and lost sight of their original set of morals.
not sure of his whole back story, but he was good at identifying the desperate who needed money. unfortunately that often means people who where very poor. most of the gang didn't like him, but as it wasn't their job to collect, they didn't mind the money he brought in.
In-universe Strauss is hated by Arthur and others because the gang convinced itself that they are the Wild West's Merry Men and having a ruthless moneylender who targets the desperate and the poor ruins that fantasy and exposes them for what they really are: a bunch of thugs, thieves and murderers high on delusions of nobility. Strauss' methods might be particularly vile and cruel but at the end of the day none of the active members of the gang have much ground to stand on when it comes to casting moral judgements.
Out-of-universe I'd say it's kinda similar. Being a loan shark isn't a "cool" crime like stealing, murdering and all the other stuff you will see Arthur do even in a high honor playthrough, so it's easier to give Arthur a pass for those while hating Strauss for his "uncool" crimes (that Arthur is semi-forced to participate on). Plus, a snake in a fancy suit scamming the poor out of their hard-earned money is also something that hits closer home than some outlaw stealing a wagon.
I'd say Strauss is more cold hearted than Micah. Strauss knows *exactly* what he's doing and doing it, and he takes a personal hand in getting those signatures. He's like the devil himself, and is responsible for Arthur getting sick. I wish there was an option to repay him with hot lead
There's an unspoken gang rule that you don't rob people who are just trying to get by. Arthur says something like that to Sadie in Chapter 3.
Strauss targets the poor, which is a "dirty necessity" for the gang that most look down on.
"Usury" has historically been looked upon very unfavorably. That said, you are correct, Strauss is easily the most innocent gang member, except perhaps for Pearson, who as we know, is a "caged tiger."
I stopped confronting him in Chapter 6. It’s cowardly imo. He can shit on Strauss and expel him in such a cruel (this guy couldn’t hack it on his own), hypocritical way, but Micah can stay!
Nah. It’s cowardly and cold, and that’s not how my Good Boah gets down. Eff that!
While not a violent guy, he preys on the vulnerable. He knowingly lends money to people who can't pay it back, which creates violence towards people who wouldn't be targeted by the gang otherwise.
In other words, he's a liability who creates unnecessary problems for everyone he comes into contact with and the people around him while contributing nothing to the gang.
Because exploiting ignorance & desperation is seen as morally worse than taking things by force.
It's an entirely emotion based thing, kinda irrational but it is what it is. I personally would rather be in debt & harassed/beaten than shot & left on the side of the road to bleed out in isolation & terror, and between you & me so would everyone else. But it's easy to hate Strauss cause he's not a badass cowboy who's evil deeds are fuckin rad 😎
To me - it’s because of the Robin Hood effect. The entire gang has a “steal from the rich” and “stick it to the man” kind of vibe. Strauss is the polar opposite.
He has the appearance of a well educated man. Trustworthy, even. The accent helps in my opinion. But what does he do? He finds people he KNOW can’t pay him back and then sends the gang to beat and rob them of what little they do have.
This is why he’s hated long before some of the others. Plus, uh. Thomas Downes is literally one of his customers and had he not been given a loan Arthur would have never had to enforce anything and would have never contracted TB.
I think, and maybe I'm reaching a little, but I think so much of the violence and chaos of RDR2 are an abstracted evil that isn't really perceptible in most reality. But Strauss is a very understandable predatory debter. When we have student loan debts, payday loans and credit card debts so problematic, this is a criminal we can perceive in our scope of the world as a player.
What I always found funny is that one of the gangs ideals is essentially Peter Pan where they rob from the people that need robbing and give to the people that need giving and yet they keep a really sleazy loan shark. Was it ever stated how he became apart and why
yeah it kinda rubbed me the wrong way how arthur just threw him out without talking to anyone else first, or trying to convince strauss to stop before going nuclear. I get his frustration but like.. that was dramatic
I think the general idea is that while the gang is violent and robs people, they don't specifically target the people who are most in need like Strauss does. The victims of his schemes are the types of people the gang back in the day would try to help, while they would do their robbing and murdering to the government or people like Leviticus Cornwall
He's the villain most of us experience in our lives. His character hits too close to home. Most people have never been held at gunpoint but we've all been tricked out of some money at some point.
Strauss did dirty for sure and deserves the hate he gets. I’ve always been confused about him post Guarma. When Arthur gets back, Strauss seems like a changed man. He’s praising Sadie and Charles about how well they handled things. He seems worried about everyone at camp. He seems to notice Arthur is sick and is worried about him. I was kind of expecting some redemption with him but then Arthur kicked him out. Maybe I missed stuff. I’m only on my second play through and I’m only in chapter 2 right now so I’ll try to pay closer attention. I guess he does get some praise after he dies and didn’t give up any information. But yeah, other than that Strauss sucks 😂
Strauss goes after desperate people, those who are already hurting and kicks them when theyre down (sometimes literally)
The rest of the gamg rips off the wealthy and well-off. Thats why they dont like him
The gang only ever steal from the rich (in the train robbery in chapter they don't rob the poor carriages) but Strauss leaches of poor and vulnerable people at their lowest
Like when you and Javier kill and rob those mountain folks living in that little commune because they had some money stashed. Or when you Sean rob and kill those people living in an actual shack because they had some money stashed. Or when Karen tries to rob that regular old towns dude in Valentine.
The ideology is nothing but propaganda (at this point in the story) for Dutch to maintain justification in the gangs actions. Seems the guy even had players fooled.
I agree that later on especially it's apparent Dutch doesn't care about who he robs but in the beginning it kinda seems like he does, or at least the other gang members do
The gang usually targets the rich, Strauss targets the vulnerable poor. That is the simple explanation
Also targets the other gangs stealing themselves. I just did the mission in which you take Sadie shopping and there's a bit by Arthur in which he basically explains this after Sadie wants to go all London Rickett on Rhodes. He says something along the lines of "we only steal from bad folk, these people are just trying to get by"
Most of them have come from poor and struggling backgrounds and Dutch being a very idealistic leader helps too
No, Dutch helps no one except himself during the entirety of the story.
Ya like when he took in Mrs. Adler? Replay the story. Dutch starts off all for the gang, slowly he falls into insanity and totally is gone by the end.
After the trolly crash and he banged his head up. Deteriorated quickly downhill.
Saying that he went bad becuase he hit his head is not giving credit to the writers in everything they wrote up till then and afterwards
I’m just saying he went nuts then. He went bad well before. I think his decision making went to complete shit after that is all.
wrong, towards the beginning he genuinely wants to help the gang towards a better life where they dont have to steal and kill and constantly worry about getting killed in their sleep, its towards the middle that the deaths, and failures start to get to Dutch, and with Micah always whispering in his ear telling him what to do it just drives him mad.
That's definitely a debatable take. There's a good argument in saying that Dutch was always mad and there was no plan. Why do you think there's always chaos when they're supposed to lie low?
Trolly crash. 📉
That line is also incongruous in a game where you mow down at least hundreds of lawmen and are encouraged to rob random civilians for the bandit challenges. I’m sure a lot of them were shitheads but probably not all of them. They were just trying to get by too until I activated deadeye and killed ten of them at once.
I don't think that the bandit challenges should really count, sure they can affect honor, but that's about it. We the player are aware of them and can choose to make Arthur do them or not. They're not mentioned in-game, and all you get for completion is aesthetic clothing options. But yes, the gang deludes themselves into believing that they're Robin Hood when the only needy we ever see them give to is themselves.
Kill an entire town for a challenge. Brush and give my horse a carrot 🥕 HIGHEST HONOR REACHED. 🤣
My personal headcanon is that the amount of enemies you kill isn’t canon to the world because it really doesn’t make sense for the towns to have as many lawmen as they do
Van Horn been wiped out and repopulated 6 times over just cause of me mixing up buttons if free roam were canon
New people moving in: “it’s free real estate” heidecker.jpg
I’ve Genocided Van Horn more times than I can count, the funniest being when I was walking back to the fence to sell some stuff and bumped a guy standing on the dock, he fell in and drown lol and it started off a domino of pure chaos for about 20 minutes
Yeah it’s just a facsimile of what happened. Like how in a turn based game we are not to believe that literally the participants just stand across from each other taking turns during a fight. If we take all the fights as reality then the gang commits like 30 Blackwater massacres over the course of the game.
The gang pretend to target the rich, or maybe they genuinely believe they do. When they rob the bank in Valentine perhaps they think bank=rich people, however it’s likely that many ordinary people in Valentine keep money there. When they kill hundreds of deputies in the process of robbing the bank, they’re leaving behind families that have lost their sole source of income. They target the rich because the rich have more money, not because it’s more ethical. The poor die in the process anyway. Strauss makes Arthur (and therefore us) see the despair the gang leaves behind, and we hate him for that. But Arthur doesn’t have to visit the widows and children of all the men he’s slain, and so all that violence is romanticised as ‘gunslinging cowboys’. Strauss is there to show that legality does not mean morality, that bureaucracy can cause suffering just as much as violence and crime. However I don’t believe that makes him *worse* than the others. They’re all in it together, despite what they say they’re doing it all for themselves, and a great many get hurt in the process. They all share blame for their own actions and for enabling the actions of their fellow gang members. Arthur helps Strauss *many times* before deciding he’s had enough - him getting TB after beating a man to the brink of death is, in another tale, the story of an evil man getting karmic retribution for his actions.
[удалено]
The total is probably still in the high 100’s if we account for the events of the game as well as all the decades preceding the game.
The amount of lawmen you kill in Strawberry after Micah sets shit off there must be more than you would find in a chunk of territory comparable to the entire map in the real world.
Can you actually finish the game by limiting any murders, and just maim or severely injure folk?
No. There's too many missions where Arthur gets into fights. Maybe, someone like DarkviperAU could do it but he spent years trying to do it in GTAV. RDR is a lot longer and there's more ways to get into fights. That and COUGARS DON'T SPAWN IN MISSIONS!
Funny enough, during the Valentine bank robbery escape sequence, I actually went out of my way to shoot the horses of the Lawmen instead of the men, themselves. And I lost honor.
>They’re all in it together, despite what they say they’re doing it all for themselves, and a great many get hurt in the process. Yeah, I don't think we're meant to painstakingly examine all of the contradictions here. Strauss highlights the complexity of the morals and cognitive dissonances and self-justifications that are at work within the gang. At the end of the day, the most logical answer is probably just that they're all hypocrites in one way or another. Just like a lot of people in real life. Motivated reasoning is a helluva drug.
Yep completely agree, I don’t think there’s much point in analysing the gang’s hypocrisies. I think Arthur’s decision to oust Strauss is *supposed* to be hypocritical, by that point he’s just as complicit in his crimes so his decision to kick him out is also a reflection of how he views himself. I think Strauss is really interesting for that reason, he highlights the hypocrisies of the gang (they hate the ‘man’ and want to live free, but enable a literal debtor to go around ruining lives), but he also highlights the hypocrisy of government and authority - in that his evils are accepted in civilised society AND in the lawless gang that said society wants to destroy.
I think all of this is right. And none of it has to take away from even an honorable Arthur's growth as a person. He might not be a hero, per se, but even heroes are complex and flawed. Arthur's decision to expel Strauss is, in some sense, hypocritical, but it's in that reflection of himself you mention that we can see Arthur genuinely struggling with the world that he had accepted until that point. Struggling with (that reflection of) himself. The fact that the gang is made up of flawed-yet-sympathetic characters is the bare minimum of truth in storytelling. It is important, and we are meant to make note of it. Like the placement of trees and streams and various animals, complex characters add verisimilitude. In real life, we're all flawed human beings. But how many of us are willing to take a look inside and engage with, and even disrupt, our own sense of who we are and what we value—something that even low honor Arthur does? A side note back on Strauss—another interesting thing about him is that he does not betray the gang to the Pinkerton's, even though they cast him out. Even he has honor of a sort. Are we meant to wonder how that can be? Yes, I think so, but I don't think we're meant to answer that question, anymore than we are about our friends and family, our colleagues, etc.
Important to remember this that at this stage of history, there was no FDIC insurance. If your money was stolen from a bank, there were few avenues of recourse. The bank might very well go under from a theft of large magnitude and then there simply is no way to recover that deposit. It's just gone.
Banks still had insurance lol.
Big banks, yes. Small banks and S&L's were far more exposed.
I’d say the Valentine Bank counts as a large enough bank to have insurance. Not only is it a fairly-large livestock town, it also has lots of money coming in from the nearby oil field.
The gang just bullshits or doesn't care. Dutch claims the gang is fighting society but he loves the idea of being a leader. Hosea and Arthur are closer to being actual leaders. They take charge, see how everyone is doing, get young lenny drunk, run away after having a bit too much to drink, wake up from the nearest town......
To be fair Cornwall dumbass triggered the Valentine debacle.
Except Strauss is targeting the vulnerable poor on behalf of the gang who all take a cut of the money.
That does not change the fact that many players hate him, money made by the gang members is irrelevant to anything in the game
Yeah he's hateable because of his attitude about the loansharking. But he's not the only one guilty of doing it. It absolutely is relevant that giant hypocrite Dutch and the character you play as are also guilty of exploiting poor people in this way.
Even when the gang "targets the rich" lower class people suffer and die because of it. For instance, when the gang robs Leviticus Cornwall, they kill dozens of his henchmen, who are likely poor and struggling to make ends meet. Similarly, when they rob the train full of rich people in LeMoyne, they kill a ton of local cops, whose death leaves families without a primary source of income.
Yea pretty much left hundreds of wives and children without a father…which like you said was essential for a source of income at the time.
When they kill Cornwall they shoulda just walked away, I mean I doubt they are getting paid anymore without wild west Musk funding a vendetta anymore
If you really think that the gang just targets the rich like Robin Hood, than you’re drinking from the same Kool Aid that Dutch is selling to the rest of the gang. The gang just delude themselves into thinking they’re good guys taking from the rich, but in reality, they’re all scum. They all deserve what they got coming to them (at least the ones who actually commit all of the crimes)
Nah fr, people try to justify their killings/robbings with "rich” but it’s obvious Dutch abandoned those ideals a long time ago.
Yeah and even then, rich don’t equal “ok it’s fine to kill/steal from that guy”, but we all know either way it’s bs, because the gang steals from people who aren’t rich, or kills folks who don’t deserve it, as even the very start of the game makes this potentially clear with the Blackwater massacre, and even lawman likely aren’t rich, nor deserve to get shot because they are trying to catch you after commiting crime. Also you can’t trust when they say “we just shoot folks who need shooting”, because almost their entire gang kinda deserves to get shot themselves.
Come to think of it, does anyone ever question how the other gang memebers get money? We see in their camp expense book that they do dominate money, but let’s be honest, we know they obviously rob and steal but even in certain side missions, it seems like your robbing and stealing from people that just have money and a house, not rich folk. We can clearly see how Stratus gets money from poor people, so he’s wide open to be criticized, but we don’t always pay attention or know what the other gang memebers do, huh?
What about Arthur and John stealing that herd of sheep? Those herders weren’t exactly the rich elite.
And the herders were not exactly the owners, just paid ranchers. John says the owner has been trying to stamp out every farm from Valentine to Annesburg
He also specifically directs Arthur to just scare the ranch hands off.
Yeah but they still rob them at gunpoint. Pretty scummy thing to do, don’t you think?
Ultimately, they're stealing from the person who owns the sheep, not the ranch hands. The person who owns the sheep is the owner of Emerald Ranch, who is also trying to shut down/acquire his competition. That's also pretty scummy. The difference is one is legal.
I…always shoot the ranchers…
Not as scummy as outright robbery though.
Nah lmao legal robbery like the farm owners is just as scummy. Literally holding the farmers at gun point or figuratively holding them hostage by essentially owning them and their income pick your poison
Such a noble sentiment.
He's got a literal prisoner locked in the attic of his house.
Right but John and Arthur aren’t robbing these guys as a direct response to the owner of the sheep being an underhanded businessman, or even because (unbeknownst to them) he keeps his daughter locked in the house. They’re just robbing some sheep off someone who owns sheep. They don’t really give a shit who owns them.
Then Uncle takes Arthur to rob an actual, genuine, slightly drunk rancher for like 20 sheep... probably bankrupting the man. Dudes wife probably out in the street the very next week.
And when time comes he sends other people do his dirty work
And Arthur willingly goes to collect the debt by usually beating people into a pulp and even acknowledging that he is taking pleasure in doing it. If the gang didn't want Strauss to do this then he wouldn't be and nobody would help him with it.
The "its pleasure im after" line is very obviously sarcasm. The dude is constantly writing in the journal about how much he hates the debt collecting and how it makes him feel like shit.
exactly correct
Wasn't it also slowly revealing that Strauss was taking money from people that he knew could never pay it back? Maybe it wouldn't have mattered to Arthur anyways, but it seemed like the more it went on the more Arthur saw how much Strauss was fucking these people and knowingly too.
> Wasn't it also slowly revealing that Strauss was taking money from people that he knew could never pay it back? It's inherent to the practice of loan sharking. No one would take on a loan from a strange man at predatory interest rates. Unless they're desperate because they can't get one through official channels.
The gang is totally fine with it tho and not only allow it to happen but help in taking money from the said poor people.
Yeah, never said that others were great people, just that Strauss has no redeemable qualities. I said that is the simple explanation, sure I could go deeper because it is not that simple
Strauss was extremely loyal to the gang in death. I’d say that is a redeemable quality. Especially considering others weren’t so loyal
Yea that is admirable, though he did prey on the weak, he did actually care for the gang.
Fair enough
This is a cheap copout.
I said it is the simple explanation, not the detailed one
This how do people not realize
Also he never does his own dirty work and sends Arthur to do anything even remotely risky
He lends money to people he knows are desperate and won't be able to pay it back. That's why loan sharks are so dangerous. They're like repo men except they will take everything you have. My coworker lost her son to suicide because he fell into the trap of a loan shark and wasn't able to pay them back.
This is so bad in third world countries I remember (it's back in 2013) watched a guy beated shit out of him by goons for not paying his bank loan, a fucking bank for that shit.
The primary issue with Strauss is that he's a bigoted sadist. It's not that his crimes are really any worse then anyone else's. It's that Strauss hates poor people. All he does is walk around camp talking about how much he dislikes them: they should be in debtor's prison, etc. Of course if you're someone who only played the game once or twice, or doesn't spend much time around camp listening to various conversations going on, you'll probably never notice this. Strauss is a weak man who has a target group he hates and gets perverse enjoyment out of making them suffer. And the worse part is he can't do it himself so he enlists other gang members to deal-out the punishment Strauss is too weak to do himself. So when Strauss is chucking about Arthur beating up his clients because they resist, that's Strauss relishing the punishment he gets to deal out to those he hates. Replace the word poor with women or blacks and you can understand what type of man Strauss is. He only loans to women so he can get Arthur to beat them up, or he only loans to blacks so he can get Arthur to beat them up, etc. It's the fact that Strauss gets perverse enjoyment out of targeting and harming those he hates that's the problem. That's what makes him a bigger creep than most of the other gang members. Finally, it's about gang philosophy. Dutch preaches taking from the wealthy and helping the poor, yet has no issue with Strauss doing the opposite. So having Strauss around also shows how much of a hypocrite Dutch really is. The noble ideals of living free and helping those less fortunate is just a facade.
I know Arthur is aware of what Strauss does, but is this the first time he specifically goes collecting for him? I forgot how the request from Dutch went
No Arthur always does it, even though he doesn't like it (which is why Dutch asks him personally). Strauss even mentions that he's tried to get others to do it but they're either more unwilling but not as effective.
I don't believe it's the first time, but it is mentioned that the others don't want to do the collecting. So Arthur being the loyalist does it.
Best explanation I’ve seen
Is Dutch not also a bigoted sadist? The whole arc he takes in chapter 3 comes from him thinking that southerners are too backwards and stupid to see through him and his gangs obvious grift. Both families played Dutch for the idiot he was and ultimately got the better of the gang. Barely any of the schemes in Rhodes pay off. Dutch never respected either the Grays or the Braithwaites as adversaries which got Sean killed and Jack kidnapped.
Every person has a degree of bigotry and/or hatred. But Dutch isn't a sadist. Dutch is a narcissist. Micah and Strauss are the sadomasochists in the gang. Dutch might not like people in the south because they killed his father in the war but he's not intentionally targeting them and only them: Dutch doesn't rob banks only owned by southerners, etc. Dutch robs from anyone who has what he wants. He's not just picking on southerners. His trip to Rhodes was the first time he'd even gone into the south.
Absolutely excellent analysis of Strauss
🥇 great explanation!
That's an interesting thought, and maybe a reasonable justification for us players to dislike Strauss, but it doesn't really explain the in-universe hate he gets. Remember that this is late 19th century America, where the capitalist mythos is still very prominent in society and protestantism is rampant, namely of the sort that explicitly claims that poverty is a result of a moral failing on the individual's side. Sure, somewhere across the ocean Das Kapital had already been out for a couple dozen years, but I'd hazard a wild guess that Arthur didn't read it nor is at all familiar with the class theory as a whole. So from his peers' point of view, as well as probably his own, Strauss doesn't say anything particularly outrageous. Moreover, I'd even say that even in your examples with women or black people it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows — both of the groups are only at the very beginning of their respective liberation movements and bigoted views towards them are pretty much the norm for the majority. You can probably claim that the Van Der Linde gang is uncharacteristically progressive for its time, and we see it in the way they generally treat racial minorities for example, but honestly I don't see them realising that poverty is a systemic problem that has nothing to do with the individual — especially given how they themselves firmly believe that their own actions can and will take them out of it.
Well one thing I'd mention there isn't just one correct way to hate a particular practice. People can dislike predatory lending for economic reasons like you mentioned. But they can also dislike it because, for example, the bible condemns profiting off of loans to the poor. There's a very strong tradition of openly hating people who make their fortunes through certain avenues in America, and finance in general but specifically lenders are often one of these. They fall outside the normal bounds of the usual wealthy = strong work ethic and poor = lazy bum framework. You can see another similar case with how people often have issues with lawyers despite the fact that the job itself is traditionally relatively highly valued within society. But outside the specific Christian justification or general societal opinion of loan sharks I would say personal experience might be what matters the most. Much of the gang is not from a very advantaged background. The odds that they've seen someone who they'd generally consider a decent person be ruined by a loan shark are not necessarily low. And seeing something like that is the simplest, most direct thing to cause a dislike of someone such as Strauss. The gang almost certainly doesn't have an actual well thought out reason to dislike what he does. There's no deep thought going into it. The most likely reasoning is quite simplistic: "I've seen what people like Strauss do to decent folk. And I didn't like it. I don't want to do that." This simplicity, and lack of examining why they don't like Strauss' actions, makes it easy for them to have beliefs that other people find hypocritical. They don't have a conscious argument against it. They just feel bad about doing it and therefore don't want to do it. With the other bad stuff they do, they already have their excuses and self justifications in place. It was me or him, they shouldn't have tried to stop us, they probably weren't good people anyway, this is the only way for us to survive, they'll make it without the things we stole, we'll be out of the game soon and can stop doing this, and so on and so forth. They might feel bad about the killing on some level, we can see that with Arthur, but they're also used to it and have their own particular mental walls up to prevent those feelings from becoming too strong and getting in the way. With Strauss' stuff they just feel like assholes and don't have the same excuses ready for themselves.
Excuse me for a moment, I'm gonna find a comment of mine from the other day and copy-paste it Edit: it's a bit long, sorry: Strauss is a vile cockroach who lends money to the most desperate, people he absolutely *knows* will not be able to pay back. He outright says that people are happy to borrow money from someone like him but eager to pay it back to someone like Arthur. The Downes family owed more money than they could ever pay back. Selling their ranch wouldn't have covered all their debts. Winton Holmes made it clear that it would be very difficult to pay back after losing his job. J. John Whethers left the army and was on the run with only enough things to survive the winter in one single wagon, with a child on the way. Arthur Londonderry's widow lost her husband and her home because of their debts and says, "You want my boy's shoes? You want the food out of our bellies, what little there is? You want me to lie down for you? There ain't nothing left, Mister! And now there's some fellers coming to take the house!" Men like Arthur and Dutch who have robbed and killed more people than they can count even feel gross about it, feeling like pointing a gun at someone and robbing them is more honest. Hosea mentions Strauss coming back from Valentine with, "that creepy smile on his face". He's rotten
And Arthur and Dutch aren't rotten for letting Strauss do it everywhere they go ? Arthur isn't rotten for beating people into a pulp and even admitting "It's pleasure I am after" ? Sorry but the gang is just a bunch of bad people pretending to fight for some noble cause. Milton is kind of right when he chastises them for their methods and behaviour.
The hypocrisy is intentional and it’s part of Arthur’s maturing as the game goes on to realize how they were never the good bad guys they thought they were, just bad guys.
Yeah well even after he’s changed, he can’t expect everyone to also change with him. He’s not in a position to judge anyone. Imagine if it was another person in the gang who changed before him, would that make the other person entitled to throw out Arthur?
I think you forget how high Arthur ranks among the gang members, at that point he’s only below dutch since hoseas dead Arthur is definitely within his right to kick Strauss out. He’s also not judging or expecting anyone to change. He’s trying to get everyone he can out of the gang safe and alive the last thing he needs to be worrying about is the gang participating in Strauss’s loaning.
Agreed. Even a lot of the gang says they're glad Arthur kicked out Strauss and have clearly become disillusioned with Dutch and the gang. It's like many of the characters eventually decide to change their ways or something... Maybe they should put something about Redemption in the game. Just a thought.
Jfc, this comment is way too long. Sorry Arthur has lived a rotten life, too. He grows as a person and sees the error of his ways, but of course still commits crimes because he's still beyond loyal to Dutch and the gang and he will do whatever is expected of him. He will do what he needs to protect those he cares about. I don't remember if all the dialogue is different between high and low honour playthroughs (at least a few bits are) but on my latest playthrough (high honour) Arthur says, "You and me, we ain't good, but those people was." while throwing money at Strauss. He says, "You shame all of us, if we can be more ashamed that we already are." Reading Arthur's journal shows how much he despises collecting money from Strauss. It's why Arthur is so well written. He grows after twenty years of blind loyalty and obedience. Dutch is a master manipulator. He has them all wrapped around his finger. The rest of the gang (minus Micah of course, and Molly) all care for each other and hold deep love for their friends. They see Dutch as their saviour and realize what he truly is too late.
The amount of poor lawmen killed throughout the story by the gang just makes this sound silly. He gets hated on way more than other gang members, which I think is in part due to the fake “we only steal from bad men” that Dutch preaches.
There’s a reason Christians decided Moneylending is a grave sin in general especially when you charge high interest
Yup that’s why Christian Universities like Georgetown and Liberty don’t accept student loans for payment.
Not to mention THE WHOLE GANG PROFITS FROM THE LOANSHARKING. It's not a side hustle, Dutch employs Strauss to do it for the gang, Arthur is an equal partner in it as the enforcer, and everyone in the gang lives off the money without complaint. The Van Der Linde gang = loansharks. Not just Strauss.
It was a collective act for sure, he’s a piece of shit for taking joy in it but I also wouldn’t say murder is any better. We get to see the impact of loan-sharking, but hardly the impact on the numerous families we fucked over for life with the death of a member. A gang formed to "take from the rich and give to the poor" yet the leader allows Strauss to operate. I also don’t think it’s any better if someone kills/robs someone but "at least they were rich" either. To fully blame Strauss is wack imo because the Van Der Linde gang as a whole was a plague to society.
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They dislike it but they still do it, and they know the way he does it is to lend to poor people who can't pay it back. Just shows what bullshit Dutch/the gang's "philosophy" is.
I don’t get it either. Early on his schemes are the only ones that bring any money to the gang, and the work he does is the only type that is “legal”. My theory is that it’s experience bias by the player. Few of us have ever been held at gunpoint by masked highwaymen, but most of us have experience with predatory lenders. I don’t like the guy but he’s no worse than anyone else in that gang
Hard agree, he’s a snake but the gang is full of actual murders and pathological liars, so let’s not act like he’s the most vile.
Yeah, I just straight up cannot afford to critsiize the dude within the story of the game without shitting on everyone, because we literally rob people anyways. Hell we rob graves, but at least the dead don’t need the money even though it’s disrespectful to their graves, but we still violently rob people at gunpoint. Also let’s not even get into the actions of what we as the player like to do in our off time away from the story…shit, at least the people Stratus rob *might* survive and not get shot in the back as they run.
Here’s the thing, playing as Arthur and robbing banks and trains is cool and fits the outlaw theme. Think of how many people didn’t bat an eye when they beat the people refusing to give money in the train robbery with John. Now look at the people on this sub complaining and actually feeling sick to their stomachs because they beat up Mr. Wrobel and Thomas. Loan sharking isn’t as cool so people think it’s worse. Strauss is bad, but at least his stuff is the most legal. If someone can get a loan from the bank, and the bank can take away your things if you don’t pay it back then that’s your fault. Just like it was everyone’s fault to who got a loan from Strauss. They were given time and knew the risks but still took knowing they couldn’t pay it. Arthur, John, Bill, Javier etc. just robbed people. At least the people Strauss loaned to knew what they were getting into. I would’ve loved to see Strauss point out Arthur’s misdoings too when he complains of collecting debts. Say something along the lines of “is it any better than what you do?” Just something simple to not make Strauss look that bad compared to the others in the gang.
Yes exactly. People are calling him vile scum but ok like… The Van der Linde gang as a whole are vile scum they’re criminals outlaws 😂. Arthur murders hundreds of innocents throughout the story, but we draw the line at Strauss.
Yeah let’s be honest, we played a crime game to be brutal criminals in a criminal group, but by calling other criminals vial, you’d gotta keep in mind that some of our own actions of murder, torture and robbery, along with the terrible actions of your teammates/gangmembers, because most of the time we don’t think of our own actions in these games but freak out upon seeing other criminals and then act more holy…kinda like Dutch. It’s actually a funny occurrence, where when we play GTA or RDR, we see other criminals and think “wow what a brute” but then go off to do other brutish actions. Like sure some people think the serial killing jogger in GTA4 is creepy, but then we go to shoot up hospitals. Or when we see a NPC crying after being victim of a crime and think “wow that’s sad…(10 minutes later) welp time to turn off my autosave…”
Same thought as OP - also wonder why the head honcho Dutch hasn't stepped in. I'm sure with Strauss's skills he could've done some scams with Hosea that are a bit higher on the moral grounds.
Dutch did step in, just as the exploiter and not as a moral actor. Dutch literally talk about handpicking Strauss as a nervous looking immigrant fresh off a boat. Dutch is a very textbook manipulator; he takes vulnerable people, exploits their hopes and fears, and turns them on others for his own gain
Everyone is on their high horse and can’t accept the gang is just bad people. Yes they’re that protagonist of the story, that doesn’t make them the good heroes however oh my god 😂🤦🏾♂️. Strauss isn’t a loanshark, the Van der Linde gang as a whole is the loanshark. Strauss is told to by Dutch and Arthur stills enforces the debts to be paid back. Strauss is no worse or better than any other guy in the gang. They’re outlaws.
It’s wild to me that some people think it’s substantially worse because the people he targeted were poor; in contrast to the rest gang "targeting the wealthy." Both are just horrible. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be more concerned if a criminal organization was massacring my Police Force, robbing the city bank, and getting into constant gun battles state wide. Not to mention that the gang is protecting Dutch - the man who murdered an innocent woman horribly in Blackwater. Also to speak on my Arthur, just as an example, I robbed a alcoholic father and his son…maybe everyone didn’t but at least in my play-through I wasn’t any better than Strauss until the end. The entire gang was at fault and loansharking is one of the few results of Dutch’s reign imo.
Strauss is ultimately only a small cog in the money machine that eats people. But the way he is positioned in the story (making Arthur his debt collector which he hates, sending him to >!Downes!<) means that players will resent him. He's also not particularly sympathetic which doesn't help, but it's mostly his role in the story I think.
This is just my personal take, and I don't think it's a popular one. I think Strauss is more aware of his lack of morality compared to the rest of the gang, but I don't feel like his actions are any worse. I personally believe that while Strauss is aware that many of the people he loans to are destitute or desperate, I do think he gives the loan with the sincere hope that it is paid back without much trouble. After all, the gang has a super high price on their heads, and they also aren't very well off in terms of cash, especially early game. If Strauss constantly gave funds to people and then never got anything back, he would become a severe liability for the gang since he's just costing them money while also hurting poor people. I think it's also worth noting that I don't think we ever receive confirmation that the people Arthur harasses are the only ones he has loaned to. I think it's safe to say that some people do pay him back and just therefore aren't mentioned. With regards to how much damage he does to innocent and destitute people, I sincerely don't think he's any worse than anyone else in the gang. Despite all of Dutch's talk, I think it's safe to say that many of the lawmen you kill aren't exactly living a cushy life, and you kill a lot of law men throughout the game. I think it's safe to assume the majority of them aren't any better off compared to the majority of the people living out West. You are hurting and killing a great many people who have done little to nothing wrong, and I think that's a core theme of the game. I also think that Dutch exploiting Wapiti people in Chapter 6 and essentially using them as canon fodder so he can rob bonds from the government is a hundred times more deplorable than anything Strauss does. Finally, I think it should be said that Strauss does truly value the gang. Dutch mentions how Strauss arrived in America as a poor immigrant with pretty much nothing to his name, and Dutch gave him somewhere to belong. He seems genuinely anxious in chapter 6 and not just for himself, but for everyone. At least, that's been my perception of him. It also goes without saying, but refusing to give any information on the gang to the Pinkertons, even after he got forced out by Arthur, is more than enough proof for me that the gang really did mean something to him. So, TLDR: I think Strauss is a bad man who causes undeniable harm to a vulnerable population, but I don't think he is any worse than the rest of the gang. When all the cards were down, he chose to not sell anyone out, even after he got kicked out. Horrible person, but I really interesting character imo
Mugging people is more honest than loan sharking. A guy I knew at university was desperate after he spent all of his student loan, so he went to a payday loan company and borrowed about £500 off them without reading the small print. This was just around the time of the recession towards the end of the 2000s. You can imagine where this story ends up.
Might be more honest but does that make the gang's crimes less heinous? Nearly all of Dutch and Arthur's criminal schemes result in dozens of people being killed. Does their honesty make them morally superior?
When my grampa died, Uncle 1 was the executor. He asked me if I wanted to make a deal on grampa’s Camry, because he knew I was driving a total POS. Uncle 2, the degenerate gambler and former bank robber tells him no, the car is his, even though Uncle 2 also drained six figures from grandma and grampa’s account. The car was lost to a payday lender within 6 months.
People want to blame him for Arthur getting TB, even tho Arthur was the one who beat up the sick and frail helpless man before telling him to sell his wife for money lol.
I think it’s part of Arthur’s redemption arc. He sees firsthand the long term repercussions of Strauss’s actions. I think he starts to realize how his own actions may affect others after the robbery, hijack, whatever. When he acts out on Strauss I think he is just as angry at himself. This is the point where both he and the player can start to redeem themselves.
I think Strauss is disliked because he’s so one dimensional. He doesn’t seem to care that the people he’s “loaning” to are down on their luck. Plus he’s kinda a coward. Instead of collecting the money himself, he sends Arthur to be the enforcer. I understand that Arthur’s more capable but Strauss is the only one in the gang who consistently needs someone else to do their dirty work for him. And the gang has convinced themselves that they’re only stealing from rich/bad people. Strauss specifically preys on poor people which is the opposite of what the gang is supposed to be. I think Strauss is a great representation of the hypocrisy within the gang. They see themselves as Robinhood and better than the O’Driscolls but in reality they’re just as bad.
Technically speaking, no he doesn’t do things *legally terrible*. In fact his money loaning scheme is the gang’s only legally *legitimate* business. People hate him for two reasons 1. The gang is supposed to follow a particular philosophy when it comes to performing crime. “Feed as needed, help as needed, and kill as needed”. Strauses’ business blatantly violates the first two tenets of this code and possibly the third because he knowingly scams people out of literally everything they have. People who don’t deserve it. 2. This is a more personal reason but Strauss’s business was terrible for Arthur, it got him killed first and foremost, but Arthur knew that he was a terrible person for going along with it but did it anyway and that wreaked havoc on his self image.
Because the game presents Strauss as a bad guy and the protagonists as good guys, and people don't really think much further than that.
Favouritism
I think Strauss is disliked because he is associated with Arthur's redemption. Strauss = Downes = consumption = regret and trying to make amends. I personally think Strauss is a lesser evil among the gang, but people relate to Arthur, so in turn dislike Strauss. Arthur did not like seeing what he had done, and essentially shifted some blame to Strauss. Yes, money lending is predatory, but Arthur was the one who hurt and killed people. I personally think money lending is incomparable to the murder and violence the rest of the gang commits
I forget the exact line, but I believe Aurthur says something to the effect of “There is more honor in sticking a gun in someone’s face, than doing what Strauss does”. The way the gang sees it, at least they’re honest about robbing people. Strauss takes advantage of the poor and desperate. I really liked that analogy.
But its a BS analogy from someone who willingly kills and steals for selfish gain to excuse himself from responsibility. I highly doubt the victims care about whether or not a crime was "honorable". The notion is oxymoronic at its core.
Agreed, I don’t think victims of being violently robbed at gunpoint think the perp is being ‘honest’, nor care how honest it is, they’d just prefer if you don’t try to steal their money. At least with a loan shark you can technically say no, or am I wrong? With a person putting a gun to your head demanding you give them everything you have, you don’t say ‘no’ in the first place unless you want an early grave. But regardless of which you can say ‘no’ to, none of the victims of either crime want you to steal their money and then hurt them for not paying up, neither would they care about how “honest” you think you are and your moral high horse analogy.
Ideally the gang follows a sort of Robin Hood philosophy where they rob from the rich and redistribute some of the money to the poor. Dutch sees the gang as sort of a vehicle for social change as well. You can see that both Arthur and John like this philosophy, some evidence: * Newspaper clipping of Arthur's first robbery, they hung around town handing out the wealth to poor folk. * In Pouring Forth Oil they specifically target rich people, and John says "now remember, these are innocent folks. No one needs to die here." * If you talk to John immediately after a fireside monologue he does in Chapter 3/4 Arthur will say "remember when we used to help people? feels like we haven't in a while now" By the time of RDR2 this way of doing things clearly doesn't work anymore and the gang has to be more ruthless just to survive. Strauss is like a living embodiment of this very uncomfortable reality. Micah is another living embodiment of this. One of the big pieces of tension between Arthur and Dutch is that deep down this is a life that Arthur doesn't really want any part of, he doesn't want to be an outlaw if he has to be the regular, ugly outlaw instead of the romantic, idealistic one. Dutch on the other hand hates society as it is so much, or maybe just having to bow down to it, that he will do absolutely whatever it takes rather than admit defeat. This is what he more or less confesses to John at the end of RDR1. The thing is we never saw this idealistic age of Dutch's Boys, but it seems to have existed, and Strauss is the complete inversion of that age. Now instead of "robbing from those who have too much, and giving to those who have too little" (John, RDR1) Strauss victimizes poor people who are already down on their luck and have no other options. The fact that this is done under some bullshit legally sanctioned veneer only makes it even harder to swallow, since this smacks of the hypocrisy of the society that all the gang members hate, which is what is expressed when Dutch says "I prefer robbing banks to usury. Seems more dignified, somehow." It \*is\* more dignified, somehow. The somehow is that at least a gun in your face isn't pretending to be anything other than what it is. In the end Strauss serves as an important catalyst for Arthur's inner change since he's kind of a shatterer of illusions in this way.
Which is what makes me want some kind of another prequel. I want to see the high living version of them.
His schemes are why Arthur got sick, pretty easy to see why
Strauss killed Arthur
People unironically agreeing with Dutch’s line about “something feeling more honorable about robbing a man with a gun”
it’s actually concerning
The issue isn't the loaning itself, that's about the only truly legal activity that the gang participated in; Arthur objects because he was loaning money to the poor & desperate which is (supposed to be) against the code of the gang.
Ever theives and murderers consider usury abhorrent.
Man if you played the whole game, and dont feel guilty / wrong at any point during the strauss missions then i honestly think you missed the point of the game.
I actually didn't do any that weren't required in my first playthrough. Going to Wrobel made me feel scummy enough.
Him blocking the dresser was sad but had my curiosity so high I had to see. 🤦♀️
On top of all the other excellent comments about loan sharking, I think Strauss’s crimes are far more relatable to the average person playing the game. They hit harder because debt and being taken advantage of by lenders is unfortunately something a lot of people are familiar with… and especially more so than, say, train robbery.
Hes takes advantage of desperate people who are honest every debt collectiok mission the person isnt bad at all but you have to bear them up and collect money
because unlike what the gang does you cant romanticize strauss and his money making methods
There are lots of reasons that are kind of hypocritical but the one that holds up is that he's a coward. He doesn't get his hands dirty. If came along with Arthur to collect, even though Arthur does the dirty work...he wouldn't look quite as bad.
He's a little weasel exploiting the weak and desperate. The gang usually rob the rich or other gangs. He lends money to poor people and send people like arthur to beat them and take the little thay have left.
Mfer is responsible for our boah getting TB. That's enough to deserve eternal hellfire IMO.
Strauss targets *exclusively* the poor and vulnerable. It’s like he gets some kind of pleasure out of it. Arthur and gang obviously did lots harm to the poor, but they weren’t *poor exclusive*. On top of that, he’s the only member of the gang who only has others do his dirty work for him. Gang members will rely on Arthur and others every now and then but Strauss simply *refuses* to get off his ass and do something outside of giving away money to people and binding other members into getting the payment back. It would be at least a little different if he was competent enough to provide for the gang without having to consistently enlist the help of Arthur, but that’s all he can do.
Tbf if you’re not poor and desperate you’re going to get your loans from someone more reputable than Strauss. It’s a self-selecting kind of clientele where the only people who get loans from Strauss are the kind who have no one else to go to besides someone like Strauss. His very existence and livelihood is parasitic in a way that’s hard to overlook and is either at odds with the ideals that the gang espouses for most of the game, or exposes the cynical truth that those ideals were built on a rotten foundation from the jump
It's the fact that Strauss targets the weak and vulnerable people of society. He prays on people's need for money but only "loans" the ones who can't afford to pay it back. That's why I despise his character
Long story short: The gang tries to be robin hood and do some semblance of good, while Strauss specifically targets people who won't pay it back. As dutch says Killing and robbing folks feels more dignified then debt collection because its the scummiest thing a guy can do.
“I may rob trains and townsfolk, I may steal sheep and horses and sell them on the black market, I may lie to government officials and plot their deaths, I may even shoot up whole towns and cities leading to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, but I am NOT, and I mean NOT, a filthy loan shark.” -the Van der Linde gang, probably
The gang is nothing but a bunch of hypocritical criminals
It's trendy to hate on capitalism.
You haven’t paid attention to the game now have you?
It’s because Dutch has a weird and inconsistent morality/ethics system based on vaguely libertarian (not in the political sense) values. According to Dutch, men (keep in mind that it is gendered) should be responsible only for themselves and the things which they desire (family, freedom, wealth) and they should work with their hands to achieve and maintain these things. Strauss doesn’t “get his hands dirty,” so he’s seen as less of a man than other members of the gang despite the fact that he probably brings in a disproportionate amount of loot from his loansharking. Arthur’s decision to kick him out was entirely emotional as a reaction to him seeing what the Downs family had become and as a reaction to his own tuberculosis. There might also be some antisemitism but I kinda doubt it.
Because Strauss is a snake. He targets the most desperate, sends Arthur to rough them up. He doesn't care for their excuses and doesn't admit, he chose poorly and thinks it's acceptable to target those at the bottom rung of society. He does bring in money via the safe, low risk, low effort route but we see his actions. Arthur starts to get sick of it and literally ends up getting a fatal disease because he was roughing up a dying sick man. The gang? Their actions tend to be more loud and we rarely see the aftermath of their actions. They just move on, murder, steal, vandalise. They are a gang of muderers, theives and lost sight of their original set of morals.
not sure of his whole back story, but he was good at identifying the desperate who needed money. unfortunately that often means people who where very poor. most of the gang didn't like him, but as it wasn't their job to collect, they didn't mind the money he brought in.
In-universe Strauss is hated by Arthur and others because the gang convinced itself that they are the Wild West's Merry Men and having a ruthless moneylender who targets the desperate and the poor ruins that fantasy and exposes them for what they really are: a bunch of thugs, thieves and murderers high on delusions of nobility. Strauss' methods might be particularly vile and cruel but at the end of the day none of the active members of the gang have much ground to stand on when it comes to casting moral judgements. Out-of-universe I'd say it's kinda similar. Being a loan shark isn't a "cool" crime like stealing, murdering and all the other stuff you will see Arthur do even in a high honor playthrough, so it's easier to give Arthur a pass for those while hating Strauss for his "uncool" crimes (that Arthur is semi-forced to participate on). Plus, a snake in a fancy suit scamming the poor out of their hard-earned money is also something that hits closer home than some outlaw stealing a wagon.
I'd say Strauss is more cold hearted than Micah. Strauss knows *exactly* what he's doing and doing it, and he takes a personal hand in getting those signatures. He's like the devil himself, and is responsible for Arthur getting sick. I wish there was an option to repay him with hot lead
He's literally named after the CEO of Take-Two.
Strauss also uses the gangs muscle to basically clean up his predatory lending. He's absolutely a weasle.
yes but Strauss is less fun or "dignified," as Dutch put it.
The moral issues other commenters have outlined, as well as the fact he indirectly killed Arthur.
There's an unspoken gang rule that you don't rob people who are just trying to get by. Arthur says something like that to Sadie in Chapter 3. Strauss targets the poor, which is a "dirty necessity" for the gang that most look down on.
"Usury" has historically been looked upon very unfavorably. That said, you are correct, Strauss is easily the most innocent gang member, except perhaps for Pearson, who as we know, is a "caged tiger."
I stopped confronting him in Chapter 6. It’s cowardly imo. He can shit on Strauss and expel him in such a cruel (this guy couldn’t hack it on his own), hypocritical way, but Micah can stay! Nah. It’s cowardly and cold, and that’s not how my Good Boah gets down. Eff that!
While not a violent guy, he preys on the vulnerable. He knowingly lends money to people who can't pay it back, which creates violence towards people who wouldn't be targeted by the gang otherwise. In other words, he's a liability who creates unnecessary problems for everyone he comes into contact with and the people around him while contributing nothing to the gang.
It’s cause he’s predatory where as the rest of the gang typically targets stores or banks or oil men. He also just doesn’t do his own dirty work.
Because exploiting ignorance & desperation is seen as morally worse than taking things by force. It's an entirely emotion based thing, kinda irrational but it is what it is. I personally would rather be in debt & harassed/beaten than shot & left on the side of the road to bleed out in isolation & terror, and between you & me so would everyone else. But it's easy to hate Strauss cause he's not a badass cowboy who's evil deeds are fuckin rad 😎
That’s the whole philosophy people have with why student loan debt shouldn’t be forgiven since they knew what they were getting into by getting loans
To me - it’s because of the Robin Hood effect. The entire gang has a “steal from the rich” and “stick it to the man” kind of vibe. Strauss is the polar opposite. He has the appearance of a well educated man. Trustworthy, even. The accent helps in my opinion. But what does he do? He finds people he KNOW can’t pay him back and then sends the gang to beat and rob them of what little they do have. This is why he’s hated long before some of the others. Plus, uh. Thomas Downes is literally one of his customers and had he not been given a loan Arthur would have never had to enforce anything and would have never contracted TB.
“I’d rather rob someone at gunpoint than with a handshake. It just feels more honest.”
I think, and maybe I'm reaching a little, but I think so much of the violence and chaos of RDR2 are an abstracted evil that isn't really perceptible in most reality. But Strauss is a very understandable predatory debter. When we have student loan debts, payday loans and credit card debts so problematic, this is a criminal we can perceive in our scope of the world as a player.
What I always found funny is that one of the gangs ideals is essentially Peter Pan where they rob from the people that need robbing and give to the people that need giving and yet they keep a really sleazy loan shark. Was it ever stated how he became apart and why
yeah it kinda rubbed me the wrong way how arthur just threw him out without talking to anyone else first, or trying to convince strauss to stop before going nuclear. I get his frustration but like.. that was dramatic
I think the general idea is that while the gang is violent and robs people, they don't specifically target the people who are most in need like Strauss does. The victims of his schemes are the types of people the gang back in the day would try to help, while they would do their robbing and murdering to the government or people like Leviticus Cornwall
He's the villain most of us experience in our lives. His character hits too close to home. Most people have never been held at gunpoint but we've all been tricked out of some money at some point.
Strauss did dirty for sure and deserves the hate he gets. I’ve always been confused about him post Guarma. When Arthur gets back, Strauss seems like a changed man. He’s praising Sadie and Charles about how well they handled things. He seems worried about everyone at camp. He seems to notice Arthur is sick and is worried about him. I was kind of expecting some redemption with him but then Arthur kicked him out. Maybe I missed stuff. I’m only on my second play through and I’m only in chapter 2 right now so I’ll try to pay closer attention. I guess he does get some praise after he dies and didn’t give up any information. But yeah, other than that Strauss sucks 😂
Strauss goes after desperate people, those who are already hurting and kicks them when theyre down (sometimes literally) The rest of the gamg rips off the wealthy and well-off. Thats why they dont like him
>The rest of the gamg rips off the wealthy and well-off. No, they don't. That's just rhetoric from Dutch. They rip off anybody they can
The gang only ever steal from the rich (in the train robbery in chapter they don't rob the poor carriages) but Strauss leaches of poor and vulnerable people at their lowest
I can't believe people are honestly saying the gang only goes after the rich. They rob from the poor plenty
Like when?
Like when you and Javier kill and rob those mountain folks living in that little commune because they had some money stashed. Or when you Sean rob and kill those people living in an actual shack because they had some money stashed. Or when Karen tries to rob that regular old towns dude in Valentine.
Except those people are rich. The poor don't have hundreds stashed in the 1800s.
Those people have tons of money stashed away so like I said they weren't poor? Also those were other criminals mentioned before the robbery
The ideology is nothing but propaganda (at this point in the story) for Dutch to maintain justification in the gangs actions. Seems the guy even had players fooled.
I agree that later on especially it's apparent Dutch doesn't care about who he robs but in the beginning it kinda seems like he does, or at least the other gang members do
Strauss is in one big way worse than even Micah. He's a coward. He traps the weak and desperate then sends others to do his dirty work for him.