Red Dead Redemption: Seth Briars and the Weight of Choices
Nothing could prepare me for Seth.
I think it was his hands honestly, they desperately needed washing. I work in a Library and I’m constantly washing my hands after handling books, DVD’s, and board games returned my patrons who sneeze or cough as they return materials.
I wrote in a previous essay how I’ve begun replaying Red Dead Redemption because my girlfriend is playing the sequel. As of this writing I’m finally about to storm Fort Mercer and I’m excited because that means we’re only a stone’s throw away from Mexico, arguably the best part of the game. Getting to Fort Mercer means playing several missions involving Bonnie McFarlane the ranch-owner plagued with misfortune, West Dickens the snake-oil salesman, Irish the alcoholic arms dealer, and Marshall Johnson the local lawman trying to maintain law and order with limited resources. Each of these characters is interesting for the way they inform the protagonist John Marston’s efforts to navigate certain moral gray areas in the effort to save his family. And Red Dead Redemption being a game published by Rockstar, each of these characters possesses a real depth while also being studies in how morality is often a fluid, gray area rather than a definitive black-and-white.
And then, there’s Seth.
By the time I first played Red Dead Redemption it was 2010, I was 21 years old, I still had not had sex with another human being, I had read every Stephen King book I could find, and I had watched just about every Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese movie I could get my hands on.
In short, I was a basic, jaded, generic white dude.
And somehow Seth still took me by surprise.
For those who have never played Red Dead Redemption, the character Seth Briars is one of a handful of non-playable-characters(NPCs) who are part of the main storyline. John is told to meet Seth in the graveyard of a local church by West Dickens, and when he arrives he discovers a gangly thin man with fingers stained black from digging in the earth. The man is dressed in a plain shirt that used to be white, a brown hat with a folded brim broken with a simple triangle, and a pair of battered, oversized gray trousers held up with a simple rope knot. With a sharp pointed nose, cheeks sunken in so that they resemble a skull, lips chapped and bloodied, a pencil mustache so pale it looks like a ghost on his upper lip, and a face stained crimson from sunburn and/or lack of nutrition Seth resembles a corpse.
And speaking of, when John first meets the man Seth is in a grave with a freshly buried one. This, we find out, is Seth’s chosen profession.
When I first played Red Dead Redemption grave robbing in and of itself was nothing new to me. Being a kid in the 90s, and having watched The Mummy and becoming briefly obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology I learned a lot about grave robbing. Writing today I found out there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject. In fact while researching for this essay I stumbled across an article from 2016 about how one of the pyramids of Egypt may have been designed to fool grave robbers. 2is all to say the fact that Seth was robbing graves wasn’t what made him so memorable.
Seth, as a character, was truly disturbed.
He was also a very sad story about how choices could impact a person’s destiny.
Seth, we’re told through his own words, was a man seemingly living a normal life before being informed of a “treasure” that would make him a wealthy man. Like most promises of wealth however it’s become clear that this was either a lie or some hyperbolic pipe dream. Seth has believed this lie however and has, over time, lost his wife, children, career, home, and even sanity. He even admits it to John during one of the missions:
Oh, I've lost it all partner. My wife, my children, my business. Good riddance to them all! I don't eat, I don't sleep, I don't wash, and I don't care!
Helping Seth on his treasure-hunt is practically a masterclass in depravity as it involves stealing horses from two local sherrifs, helping Seth threaten his former partner with torture if he doesn’t give up the map, listening to Seth discuss incest, and in the final chapter killing close to 50 men or more to find the inevitable treasure. The second-to-last Seth mission is particularly notable for the fact that it has John drive a wagon full of corpses that Seth is looking through for his missing shred of a treasure map. These corpses, for the record, will be casually dropped behind the moving wagon once Seth has searched them completely creating a rather morbid bread trail Along the way John is beset by other treasure hunters looking to capture and/or kill Seth. One of the unique details is that during this mission you can hear Seth muttering and whispering.
SETH: Have you looked in the cave, Seth? No, it's very dark.
JOHN: What you say?
SETH: Errr....I didn't say nothin'.
Clearly Seth is disturbed, and one of a long line of mentally unstable characters in a Rockstar game. The company responsible for titles like Grand Theft Auto, L.A. Noir, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne, and Manhunt often employ morally ambiguous and problematic characters, and while this point has often been used as a criticism against the company, my interest here is purely to understand how Seth further complicates the choices John makes in the game. Seth is a broken man because of the choices he made to abandon those close to him, and then push himself farther away from society and culture in the pursuit of a dream of wealth. This has moved him to the point where he is making choices that are, clearly, anti-social and often vile.
At this point a question I ask myself is: seriously, why not wash your hands. You don’t have to completely bath, but just washing your hands will be a start in the right direction. There’s science to back this up!
I also ask myself: how can we justify, as players, the choice to help Seth?
A simple answer is the player isn’t given a choice, and that reveals the larger end-game of Red Dead Redemption.
Playing as John, I’m effectively placed in the same difficult position. From a meta-game perspective I don’t have to play Red Dead Redemption, and could always turn the game off thus avoiding this difficult problem. But the game is fun damn it and I want to play it. By playing the game I have become complicit in the desecration of corpses, simulated or otherwise, as well as the crime of grave-robbing, and then one might add murder as I kill the treasure hunters that want to kill Seth. Red Dead Redemption pokes John with these tough moral judgements because it’s trying to follow the line of reasoning behind the journey: Are John’s choices moral ones? Or does it even matter since his decision to help his wife and son is itself a difficult moral choice. Honestly these kinds of existential and ethical quandaries can become an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, and can lead one nowhere rather quickly. And Rockstar games narratives are painfully great at demonstrating that existentialism is often a philosophy reserved for those privileged enough who don’t have to worry about the difficulty of choice.
Put another way, a gun to the head, or the head of your loved ones, can help clarify a person’s perspective.
In comparison, what’s troubling about Seth is he didn’t have a gun pointed to his head. He chose to believe the lies that put him on his path, and up until the last moment when he finds his treasure he is working from pure conviction.
While I was writing this essay I kept having a nagging thought in the back of my head: I should have written this as a comparison of Seth to Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Both characters are haggardly wretched souls who’ve been poisoned by a powerful source of corruption that they ultimately lose. Both of them are designed to create disgust or pity in the reader or player. And both figures have been driven to the depths of madness and malevolence through their own choices. Looking at Seth I’m reminded of a quote from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien. Gollum, a perfectly synonymous character in fiction is described painfully as he watches Frodo and Sam sleep:
Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist in him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee—but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing. (699).
I said before that Seth’s story was sad. And in truth the entire experience of Red Dead Redemption is plagued by sadness because repeat playing is a reminder that no one in this game comes away undamaged. Some don’t even survive the tale. I think ultimately Seth’s story shocked me terribly because by the end I recognised something of the man in myself. Or at least the possibility of what could be.
I don’t know what choices that I have made in this life that will come back to haunt me. I highly doubt that I will find myself a mentally broken man missing teeth digging through graves in the years to come, but no one can truly understand how their choices will end until they do. A player in Red Dead Redemption is not always given the choice of whether to assume a morally sound decision, and they’ll have to decide for themselves if the choice is something they believe they can live with.
Seth’s story offers one last important moral lesson: always make sure to wash your hands.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
10.31.2023
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