Note: The following blog post contains spoilers for a good portion of Grand Theft Auto V.

Among GTA V’s colourful cast of characters Trevor seems to have become a bit of a fan favourite, and it’s easy to see why. It’s fascinating to watch his psychotic and unhinged behaviour and interactions, but it’s his ability to at times think rationally and take control of situations that make him especially dangerous, and while his penchant for violence and taste for crime set him up in many ways the perfect fit for a GTA protagonist, there’s also an interesting line of separation between him and the other two protagonists. It’s easy to group Michael and Trevor together due to their history, but at his core there’s something fundamentally different about Trevor.

The San Andreas Psychopath

The way we’re introduced to Trevor is key in establishing this difference, right down to the fact that he’s the last character the game turns its spotlight to. The game opens by putting us in the shoes of Franklin as we see him and the people around him trying to get by in Los Santos’s poorest neighbourhood, dreaming of wealth and luxury. The immediate switch we then make to Michael not only highlights the wealth disparity between the two characters, but also shows that despite him living the kind of life that Franklin and most of Los Santos idolise, it hasn’t made him happy. His family seem simply spoilt and self-entitled from having such ready access to all that money. With these two characters representing the two ends of the wealth spectrum it might not seem like there’s room for a third kind of character, but Trevor manages to be that character, openly saying that he’s opted about of the modern, consumerist society entirely. The partition between the characters only becomes clearer when we look at their sanity in relation to the world around them.

Franklin is a character trying to stay alive and keep a level head as the people around him attempt to pull him into dangerous and ill-advised criminal work, while Michael has settled into fairly regular family life, but with a wife and children who are loud, erratic, and lost in their own little realities. These are straight men lost in a crazy world, Trevor by comparison is a crazy man invading a straight world. His introduction takes us from the civilised and ordered city to a ragged dog-eat-dog desert that is reflective of his own attitude. While it takes a little time to get a feel for Franklin and Michael’s personalities and the basics of their lives, there is far less ambiguity with Trevor. His aggressive up-front nature means that he’s going to make it known exactly what he’s about from the get-go, and we’re immediately shown the way he delights in brutal violence and murder, lacks empathy, and uses fear to control both his friends and enemies. The other people living out in Sandy Shores are hardly normal, but they’re nothing compared to Trevor.

In fact, while Franklin and Michael are your pretty standard GTA characters, Trevor feels like your standard GTA player. Even at their most reckless, it’s hard to imagine Michael or Franklin driving into oncoming traffic just for kicks, or kidnapping a prostitute and driving her into the ocean for the fun of it, but these are absolutely things that Trevor would do. This distance and isolation is also made clear by the way that throughout Trevor’s introductory segment you are prevented from switching back to Franklin or Michael. Those two get on with their own activities in the background as we get a clear idea of the circumstances of Trevor’s life, and so by the time the three characters’ paths converge we’re familiar enough with Trevor to know the destructive kind of effect he’s going to have on their lives. It becomes a story of this horrible man crawling out of the desert to inject a large dose of anarchy into the world of the other two protagonists. Franklin and Michael struggle to stay out of the crime game to begin with, but it’s Trevor that acts as the catalyst to start pushing them down the path into many of their boldest acts of criminality.

You could almost frame Trevor as the spirit of Grand Theft Auto. He wants to do what he wants to do unbound by the restrictions of the world, and a lot of the time what he wants to do is get into car crashes, drive-bys, and heists just for the sheer fun of it. As memorable as Trevor’s big, crazy moments are however, he wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a character if he was on all the time. Rockstar know that without quieter, subtler moments he wouldn’t seem human, and his effect would be largely diminished, as it ends up being with many hyper-destructive action game characters. Occasionally Trevor will even act subdued and reserved as part of a mind game he plays to intimidate other characters, and our expectation of him being explosive and uncaring often makes it funny when out of nowhere he shows deep affection for certain people and things. His frequent lack of restraint and regard for other people also mean that he’s regularly making the snide jokes and speaking the truths that other characters won’t, at least the truths as they appear from his perspective, and ultimately, he would be devoid of meaningful motivation if he didn’t care about people like Michael and Brad on some level.

At a point, Trevor’s psychosis makes him a liability to himself, as he becomes obsessed with Michael, a man who he also hates deeply, and despite being very vocal about not wanting money or recognition, he performs a long succession of major heists and thefts in a desperate attempt to relive his glory days, his treasured memories apparently being those where he was threatening people with firearms and running from the police. When what you enjoy is sprinting head-long into danger and destruction, it’s only a matter of time before you land yourself in some serious trouble. Trevor is a consistently enjoyable character, but to take this down a slightly different path, there is one scene with Trevor that particular attention has been paid to.

Torture

To say that the torture scene isn’t at least a little controversial would be inaccurate, but it’s more complicated than that. I don’t want to go into every nook and cranny of the objections to this scene, but this isn’t the same wide-scale “Ban GTA, save the children” controversy of Jack Thompson’s days. That’s not to say all of the objections to the game are valid, there’s a worrying lack of acknowledgement out there for the fact that the game is obviously trying to portray torture as a negative thing, but I am firmly behind the statement that this scene makes the game especially unsuitable for minors. It’s kind of crazy that it’s become a bit of an expectation that so many teens and kids are going to end up playing Grand Theft Auto without a parent looking in and asking “Is this really something my son/daughter should be experiencing?”

Personally, I don’t have a problem with the torture scene in principle. Really, I have to praise Rockstar for attempting to tackle the topic seriously. They were trying to shock and unsettle, but unlike the large majority of games depicting something potentially controversial, they were doing so in a manner that had meaning behind it and was positive for video games as a medium. Obviously, one of the reasons we don’t usually empathise with characters being the victims of violence in games is because we’ve become desensitised, not just by video games but also other media, however, our reasons go beyond this. Subjects are often dehumanised, or we get to spend no time with them before we put a bullet through their head, the surrounding circumstances can seem unrealistic, or their suffering and death is never communicated to us in any detail. Not that I think there’s an inherent problem with any of that, but the torture scene allows us a rare moment where we can clearly recognise suffering and get the very direct sense that we’re causing that suffering. It’s an approach to violence that’s far removed from other instances across gaming where identical soldiers just spurt red goo and fall down.

The fan reaction to the scene has been mixed, with some saying they were left shocked and uncomfortable, while others said they didn’t find it impacting at all. When I played the scene it was a disconcerting experience, but I think it was executed on far from perfectly, and that maybe GTA V was the wrong game for this kind of moment. One thing that took the edge off for me and probably quite a few other people was that it wasn’t a million miles removed from the brutish, insane acts that Trevor was committing outside of the torture anyway. I don’t think anything he did elsewhere was as gruesome as taking a pair of pliers to a man’s teeth, but this the torture scene only feels like it goes so far when it comes from a man who is first shown to us curb-stomping a biker to death.

The mission also has a little, dare I say it, ludonarrative dissonance. The moral of the story is meant to be that torture doesn’t give you reliable information, and from a story perspective this kind of works out, but within the context of the gameplay you do actually get what you need to identify a valid target and be told that your mission was completed as successfully as any other. On top of this, it’s just bizarre that Trevor of all people is the one who becomes the voice of morality in this situation. I can understand why he takes up that role given the structure of the mission, I can see how it makes Trevor more fucked up that he tortured someone knowing that it was pointless, and I don’t think Trevor as a character was trying to be particularly moral. Still, none of this changes the fact that you can see the authorial intent behind the scene to deliver a serious ethical message, and you can see the mouthpiece for that message is someone as wildly unethical as Trevor.

I understand that to a certain degree these are going to be views shared by me and a limited number of people, but I also think that we’ve gotten so used to video game stories lacking any real meaning, that when a situation like the GTA V torture scene comes along and we see a game genuinely trying to make an important statement, we throw praise its way almost blind to execution. So while I can commend what Rockstar for the message they were putting out there, and I think they got somewhere, I just wasn’t feeling the torture mission in all the right ways. Still, Trevor is a great character and Grand Theft Auto V is a great game. Thanks for reading.