Essentials

I'm bored, my mind is full of thoughts, so here's a timeline I use to base my own headcanons off of, some fun history facts for the 1800s, and some RDR2 fun facts:

TIMELINE OF VDL GANG:

MID 1870s

Hosea and Dutch meet on the road to Chicago

1877

Dutch and Hosea con people in Kettering, Ohio, and escape the jail in March

Arthur is adopted into their group (he would be 14)

1883

The picture of Hosea and Bessie is taken

1885

John joins (he's saved from a hanging, he was 12)

1887

First major bank robbery done by the old guard (Dutch, Hosea, Arthur), they gave the money back to the poor

MID-1890s

Arthur, Javier, and Karen rob a bank in Arizona

1893

Bill joins (he was discharged from the army the year before)

1894

Abigail joins (Uncle brought her into camp, she was 17)

1895

Javier joins (he was stealing chickens and Dutch picked him up)

Jack is born

1898

Charles, Lenny, Micah, Jenny join (unknown order, though it seems Micah and Jenny were around the same time and the latest)

Copper died :(

(^^^^ This is the extent of what we know for sure that's canon as far as dates and when people joined, I use it to form my own headcanons)

Fun facts as far as historical stuff:

The Great Famine in Ireland lasted from 1845-1852

The Civil War in the U.S. ended in 1865 (I've seen this before, so just so everyone knows: Bill was born a year after that)

The Battle of Gettysburg was in 1863 (for anyone who likes that as the battle Dutch's dad died in: Dutch would have been ~8 years old)

Pony Express only existed from 1860-1862

The Gold Rush ended in 1858

Yellowstone National Park existed (it was the first National Park in 1872)

The first rabies vaccine was made in 1885

In 1886 Statue of Liberty was being constructed

The Wounded Knee Massacre happened in 1890 (this marked the "end" of the American Frontier Wars, but the conflicts/wars continued after this into 1924 <- this is what Bill was doing in the military).

X-Rays were identified in 1895

Handwashing was proposed in 1847 as a way to stop the spread of diseases.

1866 was the first documented train robbery!

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution had been written and published (most educated people/scientists were in agreement with this by the 1870s)

THINGS THAT EXISTED: (It is a good idea to look up the cost/look/implementation of these things if you want to use them in a story.)

Typewriters

Sewing machines

Bicycles

Anesthesia and antiseptics

Pasteurization

Telephones

Zippers

Blue jeans

Dishwashers

Soda (Coca-Cola)

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)

Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847), and Agnes Grey (1847)

FUN FACTS FOR THE GANG:

We have no idea when Bessie, Annabelle, and Susan joined the gang (or how they joined for that matter).

We have very vague/little knowledge about how Karen, Charles, Strauss, Uncle, and Swanson came to join the gang.

Most of the men give stories on how they joined or we're told how they joined through other sources (all easy to find on Youtube)

Karen has the least amount of backstory out of the younger girls (Mary-Beth's parents died and she became a pickpocket at some point, Tilly was kidnapped by the Foreman Brothers, Abigail worked in a brothel, Molly came from Ireland and affluence, but we know next to nothing about Karen)

The picture that Pearson has shows: Bill, Arthur, John, Hosea, Pearson, Dutch, Abigail (with baby Jack), and Susan. This is not indicative of who was actually in the gang at that time. Uncle was in the gang then, and he is not pictured.

Molly is from an affluent family, or "claims to be," and she has a camp interaction with Sean where they "argue" about this.

Tilly was 12 when she was kidnapped. The summary for her states that she ran with the Foreman Brothers (she says, "they ran with" her), so we don't know for how long she was kept there. (The age she was when she joined the gang is up for debate, but it likely wasn't 12)

Strauss's sister was sold, he was sent to America, and he was a sickly kid (a "weak heart").

Hosea had siblings!

Uncle was born sometime before 1849.

John's father and Dutch's mother died in the same year (1881)

We only know the canon ages of these characters (in 1899): Hosea (55), Dutch (44), Micah (39), Arthur (36), Bill (33), John (26), Abigail (22), Lenny (19), Jack (4).

Lowkey, the R* timeline is super hard to follow. Some things don't make sense and some things are contradictory. These are the closest things I know to be facts about the gang. If I'm wrong or you know other things that should be on here, feel free to share it in the notes!

we need to slow down a little I'm so serious. all these quick short videos on tiktok, ig reels, and youtube, artists releasing quick little songs for the trend, tv shows releasing episodes at once, people using chat gpt and google ai overview because they get answers quickly but no validation done for the source, we need to sloww downn i really do not think our brains should be running this fast

kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chat gpt to do it

Let there be love.

I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why Veilguard feels so hollow is because it makes an attempt to reckon with Solas’s fatal flaw, but completely fails at actually doing so.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I don't think pride is Solas’s fatal flaw. It's a symptom, not the origin point. Solas’s fatal flaw is his inability to trust others. It's a threadline all the way through Inquisition, from the things he says to you (I know that mistake well enough to carve the angles of her face from memory) to the very structure of his personal quest (which does not trigger if you're on low approval with him). He's tragic (in the literary sense) because even in the case of a high approval Inquisitor, the person most likely to listen to him and capable of acting upon it, he doesn't ask them for help. Hell, we know he was planning to tell a romancing Inquisitor, but chickened out at literally the last possible second, that's how deep it runs. That's why it's Tragic.

And I think Veilguard tries to contrast this with the Team™. Which is fine, I guess, until you realise that Solas’s original Team was the Evanuris. None of Rook’s Team™ can betray them. If they don't do the companions personal quests they die, rather than become disloyal in some way. They're all 100% in accord about their politics and what is Right, without real argument. Which is nice, but if your advice to someone with severe trust issues is 'skill issue' that's...unhelpful.

And yeah, Solas did have his rebellion, but he had the rebellion in the sense that the Inquisitor had the Inquisition, not in the sense that Rook has the Team™. And as he says, any powerful organisation inevitably falls to betrayal and corruption.

And he had Felassan, but Felassan also betrayed him (with good reason, but he did actively undermine an operation he was on on behalf of Solas. That is a betrayal), which can only have cemented the inherent trust issues.

But, thinking about it, there is actually a paralell with some of the companions having experienced some kind of betrayal. Lucanis and Illario, Bellara and Cyrion, Davrin and Isseya/the Wardens, Taash and Shathann. And pretty much all of these experience a last minute change of heart, or otherwise come to the companion's POV if allowed to. Is this what they were going for with Mythal in the Atonement ending? I can kind of see the logic.

The problem is, I don't really see why this suddenly turns Solas around. He doesn't overcome his fatal flaw in order to avoid his tragedy. It always comes down to the fact that Solas’s actual reasons for bringing down the Veil are never truly addressed, and likely changed at some point in production between Trespasser and Veilguard. The political and systemic issues of the setting are pushed aside by Veilguard's narrative for individual and personal issues, even well established issues like systemic racism and slavery. It's incoherent to say 'Solas was destroying the Veil because he couldn't trust people, so fixing the trust means he doesn't want the veil to come down', when the issue was 'Solas can't trust anyone else to help solve the harm caused by the Veil because of the betrayal'. The harm doesn't go away because the betrayal did, you know what I mean? And Rook, and by extention the entire narrative, never displays willingness to even acknowledge those issues as existing in the first place, let alone needing addressing in some way. Rook interrupts Solas when he tries to talk about the suffering of the Spirits. So why does he suddenly hand over the dagger, symbolically handing the matter over to Rook?

light in a shared wound.

[the two inquisitors, cadere & simultas]

too much monogamy in fandom in general

the heart yearns for ferelden

<Ir abelas,vhenan>