Outlawry, outrage and the attractions of doom

‘Outlawry, outrage and the attractions of doom’ revisits Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption 2 to understand the attractions of the revisionist western narrative. The game evidences two seemingly mutually exclusive contradictions – providing moral guidance for a protagonist in their last days, while identifying the requirement that they, as an outlaw, ‘get what they deserve’. This essay analyses how these two concepts can coexist and, in coexisting, how they continue to generate audience appeal seven years after the game’s initial release.