In wait for the next pot of tea laced with rum, here is a bit of content from my Tumblr blog:

I'm going to express an unpopular opinion, but I don't like fluff very much. Sometimes it's nice to read something warm and fuzzy, without any pain or fear, but in such beautiful yet inevitably brutal worlds as Red Dead is (or Black Sails, or The Walking Dead), — worlds of hardship, violence and savageness, — it looks like some kind of laudanum-induced illusion. I mean, fluffy Red Dead's characters are like faceless ghosts, erased personalities. And it's certainly not what I'm looking for.

Fluff is enjoyable, but it can exist where relevant only, in stories where there is space for it, but RDR2 is not one of those. RDR2 is about blood, death and redemption. Not about fluff, no matter how much characters deserve it, no matter how much we love or want it ourselves.

I'm not saying that there can't be some tender things in the Red Dead's world (or in the Black Sails' one, or The Walking Dead's, for that matter). On the contrary, there can be a lot of ones, we saw it in the game itself. It's just that all this tenderness — care, comfort, love — will always be something harsh and hard, something like clenched jaws and dry, red-rimmed eyes from which tears will never seep, something sharp and piercing, like a gunshot wound, like tuberculosis.