Trevor Philips: GTA 5's Most Sentimental Psychopath

Why the most despicable, unpredictable man in GTA 5 is also the most honest and sincere.

Minor spoilers ahead.
Trevor. Has there ever been a more polarising character in gaming history? Depending on who you ask he’s either a lovable psychopath or the most dislikeable video game character since, well, ever. Love him or hate him, this controversial, virtual scumbag has already had many things written about him since Grand Theft Auto V’s release, and I’m sure there will be many more after I’ve added my two cents as well.
There are two very distinct sides to Trevor Philips, though. On one hand, he’s an unhinged, spiteful bastard. The first time you meet him in-game, he does something so sickening that you just know you’re going to spend a lot of time feeling uncomfortable when playing as him. He doesn’t disappoint either; his obvious taste for the distasteful only snowballs the further you get. On the other, he’s a man with strange sense of morality, a man with a layer of depth not obviously apparent at first.

Trevor shows real vulnerability, even if it’s played out for laughs at his expense.

Unlike anyone else in the game, Trevor is the one character that’s somewhat respectful towards women, berating his subordinate, Wade, early on for “disrespecting women” after he calls a woman he was just fornicating with a “bitch”. He’s also the only one of the playable trio to harbour any real feelings of love towards someone else in the game; a result of an unexpected infatuation later on. In opening up, Trevor shows real vulnerability, even if it’s played out for laughs at his expense.

You feel that he genuinely mourned Michael’s apparent death, not only from his reflective timeout on the way to Los Santos where he yells as such at the Los Santos skyline, but in more subtle ways throughout, such as his ‘RIP Michael’ tattoo. He’s clearly hurt by the lies surrounding Michael’s resurrection. Despite this, at times he’s deeply protective of Michael’s family. Not in a weird, ‘One Hour Photo’, stalker way, but in a protective way. The way he pushes Michael into protecting his daughter’s dignity or the way he tells Jimmy via email post-mission that he wouldn’t take him drinking as he’s too young; he does both of these things with his heart in the right place, but neither are what you’d really expect from him after the violent first meeting. He takes his uncle duties very seriously, even if it’s not wholly appreciated by the kids come the end.
In all these moments he’s actually slightly heart-warming in the weirdest kind of way. Still, as you know yourselves from nearly every other action he takes in the game, he’s clearly not a nice man. Not at all. In fact, he’s wretched.
And while he is almost everything else that people have said of him so far – nasty, deranged, spiteful, dangerous, offensive – out of everyone in the game, to me, he’s the one with his head most screwed on. That’s simply because he’s the only one who recognises what he is.

“I’m just honest, alright. You’re the hypocrite.”
Michael for example, a self-confessed “terrific thief” who concedes that he has done terrible things throughout his life, still manages to convince himself that he’s the good guy. Driving down to the beach for a bike ride with his son, he openly acknowledges everything he’s done without shame but is surprised when his own boy thinks of him as a “bad guy; a crook, a killer, a liar”. In fact, he’s almost positively offended by the suggestion.
Franklin too keeps trying to convince himself that he’s a better man than those around him. In the early portion of the game, his aim is to get out of his area, to get legit, stop being dumb and getting bogged down by petty hood disputes around him, his friend Lamar often at the brunt of these rants. Yet, despite his constant remonstrations, he takes any unlawful opportunity presented to him and when the bullets start flying, he openly enjoys it. As he lets slip to Lester as they plan an assassination, he “enjoys blowing motherf--king heads off just as much as the next psychotic a--hole”. Doesn’t exactly sound like the type of man that wants to live his life smart, does it?

Trevor... is the only one not trying to convince those around him that he’s something he’s not.

Michael and Franklin aren’t special in this case; they’re typical of the makeup of Los Santos. The entire city is swarming with fakery, people pretending they’re young, trendy and happening. Everyone in Los Santos thinks that they’re good people. It’s all a façade, though. Beneath the glitz and glamour, we all know that there’s a very ugly, seedy side to even the nicest areas in Los Santos and you can witness it every time you take one of the protagonists for a wander.
Trevor, then, is the only one not trying to convince those around him that he’s something he’s not. Trevor absolutely knows that he’s a monster but just doesn’t care. He enjoys causing misery and harm, lives for it and embraces it and – much like Heath Ledger’s Joker – he exists purely for unadulterated anarchy. It’s obvious that he’s not in the crime game because he wants to be rich or because he wants to rule a criminal empire; look at the way he dresses and consider his willingness to take on crazy jobs with zero cash on the table. His only reasoning for hurting people and messing everything up around him is simply because it’s just too much fun not to. From the way he delights in gratuitous torture or how easily he takes to hurting someone when asked, it’s clear that the world through his eyes is already royally broken and he sees no harm in messing it up some more.

It’s Trevor himself that manages to sum this up in the simplest of terms during the game. In a mission where he’s tasked with ‘dealing’ with a kidnapped celebrity, he’s asked by his soon-to-be victim why he would take the job without pay. “I’m a bad person,” he states in the midst of his ensuing rant, with an unapologetic, sickening honesty. It’s clear he’s doing it only for the kicks and he’s not afraid to say it. He is a bad person, chaos incarnate in fact, but he at least admits it.
It’s true that his take on the world is confronting and hard to stomach at times, and he’s so unpredictable that even as the player controlling him, moving him around this world, you feel like you have no idea what he’s going to do next, what he’s capable of, or even what his limit is. Yet when you compare Trevor to the other inhabitants of Los Santos – not just his partners in crime and mission givers, but also the city’s ugly, superficial population trying desperately to fit in – his simple ability to accept what he is somehow makes him the most honest character in a game about dishonest people. In-spite of all the horrific things this despicable man made me do, despite the way his sense of morality changed on a whim, it was his sense of accountability and self-awareness that made him the most fascinating in my eyes.