GTAV’s split personalities, and why Trevor should have been Rockstar’s leading man in

[wraggster]

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-characters.jpg (http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/10/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-characters.jpg)Early-ish in my GTA V playthrough, Boy-In-The-Hood Franklin was sitting on a bench with tubby criminal fixer Lester. Not a lot had happened in the last hour – I’d been photographing a boat as Trevor in preparation for a heist, which inexplicably required me to drive a big forklift around the Los Santos dock three times (I kept running over oblivious dock workers), then shift some shipping containers with a crane. I was bored, and itching to blow something up. Lester obliged with a mission to take out a suit and his entourage in a hotel car park with a grenade launcher I’d just bought – much more like it.But during the conversation – on a park bench, eyes-front, just a couple of strangers making polite conversation – Franklin said something that threw me. Something along the lines of “I like shooting people in the head as much as the next guy, but…” I’m not attempting what he actually said, for fear of straying into some spectacular racism, but that was the gist. And it just made me think, ‘really?’ That didn’t sound like the Franklin I’d got to know in the past few hours – it sounded like an excuse for some extreme, out-of-character massacre.This is the problem I have with GTAV: the uneasy compromises it has to make between the character stories it wants to tell and the series’ stealing-cars-shooting-cops DNA. I like the stories – I feel for Michael, constantly maligned by his whinging, bitchy family and struggling to escape his bank-robbing criminal past. It’s just much harder to do that when, apropos of nothing, he stops his stolen car in the middle of a freeway and start firing grenades into passing motorists. It’s not dissonant, in the usual sense – my problem isn’t that Michael and Franklin step out of character whenever free-roaming controls are passed to me. It’s that the sort of thing I’m doing runs directly counter to their characters’ goals. Michael’s laying low, so shooting down LSPD choppers for a laugh makes no sense. Franklin’s trying to escape the hood, so wasting businessmen in broad daylight so Lester can make a quick buck betting on a competitor’s stock makes no sense.

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