I recently saw a video talking about what Arthur Morgan meant when he said he was afraid, and although I agreed with his general interpretation of him, I did not agree with what he believed was the thought process behind the line, so I wanted to talk about it.
Arthur Morgan, throughout the game, is very open about the fact that he believes the deaths around him are for nothing, for a grandiose dream that Arthur doesn't actually believe exists. He knows that he is not a good person, even feels that he is incapable of good things without a twisted reasoning. He comes to know that they kill people for nothing, that the reason for their sins is meaningless, and that they've damned themselves for nothing. It would be crazy to say he's not afraid of this reality, but I don't believe that is the scariest thing Arthur had to face. I believe he was afraid of the possibility that his life could have been different. Arthur was born into this life of murder and crime, knows no other life nor any other version of himself. Yet, as he learns he is going to die, he finds himself growing different. He becomes a person he had thought was inconceivable; a man that questioned loyalty, questioned his way of life, and went out of his way to be kind even when it didn't benefit him. Him helping John leave with Abigail and Jack was a manifestation of this growth, especially when you consider why he resented John so much after leaving for a year. He didn't resent John for leaving because he left his family alone, though that must have been part of why he condemned him so severely for it, but because he broke the code of loyalty that Arthur lived by; the code of loyalty that set the basis for how his life ended up playing out. The loyalty to his camp, to Dutch, and to the way of life he had gotten used to. Arthur never got to live a different life, or even to choose his own. He spent the game thinking of himself as an inherently evil person, and the reason he was afraid, in my eyes, is because he was considering the possibility that it might've been a lie he told himself to cope. He never got to marry Mary, never got to live a normal life where his hands weren't constantly stained with blood, and it's easy to say it just wasn't meant for him. But what if it could've been? What if he could've been capable of that? Isn't that the most terrifying thing?
(NOTE): The more I think about it, the more I realize feeling like the terrible things he'd done and the lives lost were for nothing kind of goes hand in hand with the idea that he could've been capable of more, so I guess the two conclusions weren't as far as I originally thought they were.
