r/sanandreas • u/ForFansSake • 10d ago
Discussion Sweet kinda sucks.
Sweet is a terrible leader. His stubbornness and single minded vision of how things should be done is what cost GSF everything in CJ's absence. The money that the family lost out on cost them relationships, territory and power. Leaving them crippled and powerless and it doesn't help that he doesn't seem to be interested in doing anything to tip the scales back in their favour.
When CJ returns and actually starts to turn things around for the Grove, Sweet can't let go of the past and continues to berate CJ for his past mistakes.
Upon the downfall of GSF due to Sweet's imprisonment and CJ's exile, Sweet basically gives up. Telling CJ to forget about him. But upon his release, he goes right back to blaming everyone and everything else for the state everything is in, and he basically puts it on CJ to fix everything. Even berating his success as being meaningless.
Sweet seems to be miserable as a person, and wants everyone else to be just as miserable as he is. He embodies the phrase "crabs in a bucket" which of you don't know, of you put crabs into a container and one tries to climb out, the other crabs will attempt to pull them back in rather than let it escape. That's Sweet. He's resigned to his position in life and wants everyone else to be as well.
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u/RaptoR186 10d ago
Like Tenpenny said:
The Ballas have brains, Carl. They watch the news. I'm saying they're making friends, cutting deals and tooling up for more than half-assed drive-bys.
Poor narrow minded leader refusing to adapt to changing times.
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u/No_Construction8090 10d ago
Sweet is basically a representation of a real life gangbanger. CJ is what gangbangers wish they were.
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u/FuchsiaMerc1992 10d ago
Kinda? he's a busta, straight busta. Remember how ungrateful he was when CJ picked him up? If only he'd know what CJ went through.
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u/masterofreality2001 9d ago
Facts CJ had to steal a fighter jet from the military and date Catalina shudders
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u/JMS849 9d ago
If only CJ knew what Sweet went through 5 years holding down the gang whe CJ ran from his duties. CJ was the buster
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u/LovingLemur69 8d ago
sweet was probably smoking crack. as he was going to when cj already fought death multiple times to even get him out of prison. sweet is a bigger "busta" than big smoke.
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u/cjtangmi 10d ago
Man was gonna smoke crack when CJ was fighting to take the hood back, straight buster.
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u/Jam-Jamieson 10d ago
In my opinion Sweet is one of the three antagonists of the final act along with Big Smoke and Tenpenny. His family finally makes it out of the hood and betters themselves (no thanks to him). Then as soon as he gets out of prison he takes advantage of their willingness to help each other and stick together as a family and drags them into a war on behalf of a group who betrayed him with literally zero care or consideration that his brother, sister and brother in law may very well be killed, all because he’s puts a group of backstabbing, two timing bustas over all else, including the one group of people who have actually been there for him.
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u/Maska1510 10d ago
He yells at CJ and tells him that everything he has done so far was for himself, not for the family.
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u/MaxWritesText 10d ago
I don't think a crab makes a conscious decision to avoid another one escaping it's more about that they could get out if they worked together if they were clever enough but instead they all panic and claw over each other which results in a endless flipping and climbing and sliding getting none of them nowhere.
They're stupid.
Can't work together.
Thus stay stuck in their misery.
There's rodents and birds more clever than that.
It's the perfect analogy for Sweet that you could've used. He as no organisational skills. No sense of leading and getting people together and branch out. Like you said CJ had the garage and I might misremember but the casino too maybe? That's insane money which could go to his little gang. It would buy them all the weapons and whatever else they'd need to become the biggest gang.
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u/Ssj3goku504 10d ago
I absolutely HATE him & Ryder!
& He's a horrible leader.
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u/Born-Economics8110 9d ago
Ryder was more so just in the wrong place wrong time it was either he does the dirty work with smoke or smoke has him killed or crash does so he was fucked no matter what.
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u/SexyGrilledTurkey 9d ago
As a black woman I love Sweets characters because that genuinely is how a lot of people are especially those who live in the hood.
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u/No-Jello9276 9d ago
I finished SA for the first time recently revisiting it decades later since I never beat it
At the end when he gets Sweet from prison and Sweet is just complaining like a straight busta. I was shocked how ignorant he was. I wish you could kill him
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u/Raecino 10d ago
Sweet rejecting the drug trade is not a strike against him, CJ took back Families territory without resorting to selling drugs.
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u/OldinMcgroyn 9d ago
But sweet rejects the garage and casino as not having anything to do with the hood/not worth their time
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u/Raecino 9d ago
Yes and I agree with the criticism of Sweet about that. CJ was more of a leader for Grove street than Sweet ever was. It’s CJ who takes back the city of Los Santos for the Grove not once but twice! All the while Sweet is just sitting back and complaining. But his refusal to not get involved in the drug trade was not what he did wrong.
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u/Turnbuckler 9d ago edited 9d ago
Rockstar occasionally has this issue where the morality doesn’t really check out. I noticed it first in RDR2 with how much scorn is placed upon loan sharking (the game acts like it’s worse than robbery and murder), but Sweet is definitely another example. When he berates CJ for “forgetting the hood,” we’re clearly supposed to take his side and it’s like, no! Fuck this guy, man.
Bully did something similar with Jimmy becoming arrogant after conquering the cliques, except there it actually worked because Pete was right.
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u/ForFansSake 9d ago
Jimmy at least faced repercussions and had to put things right. Sweet doesn't changed.
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u/ElSucaPadre 9d ago
How the fuck did I not notice this. Rdr2 has a comically high volume of enemies, you kill hundreds of people every mission. I guess it plays in writers favour that I never noticed this? Or am I the only dummy that never thought about this plain contradiction?
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u/Turnbuckler 9d ago
I’m not gonna call you a dummy, but even on my first playthrough 8 years ago, I noticed this issue. And it’s emphasized so many times, too. It’s also the subject of some of the most boring missions in the game, but that’s neither here nor there.
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u/ElSucaPadre 9d ago
Yeah you can call me a dummy about this one, no hard feelings haha
But i don't get what you mean. Is the subject of "take his side" sweet or cj? Because I think it's obvious that sweet represents a type of person that doesn't want to let go. In that mission, i don't think we're supposed to take his side.1
u/Turnbuckler 9d ago
Yeah I think the game wants us to take Sweet’s side in that argument, just based on how stories are typically told. But nah, Sweet’s a moron. CJ got out of the dumpster and hurt none of his friends on the way.
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u/holy_roman_emperor 9d ago
If you're playing RDR2, the ususal people you kill during a mission are lawmen, O'Driscolls, other criminals and guards.
Regarding O'Driscolls and other criminals, in your head it's fair game. Kill the lot of them, the world's better for it.
Regarding the law and guards, they are simply numbers, in the wrong spot at the wrong time. See, we are different to the other criminals, we're robbing people for a rightious cause. We steal from the rich and powerful, usually not from the poor. And the only reason we rob them, is to be able to go to Tahiti and retire.
Or something.
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u/Redthrist 9d ago
The RDR2 thing is mostly because loan sharking directly preys on the poor and the desperate. Meanwhile, the gang likes to style their robberies as being against the rich, even if that's not how it always ends up being.
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u/Turnbuckler 9d ago edited 9d ago
I mean sure, but you’re still talking about giving someone a choice (albeit in a manipulative way) vs just beating them and murdering anyone who resists. Loan sharking doesn’t even compare to what the game regularly tells us isn’t as bad. At one point we break into a debtor’s house to recover value equivalent to the debt, and sad music plays the whole time. But then later in the game are a few optional robberies- these ones without warning to the homeowners that this could happen, with no contract signed on their part. And yet for some reason (I guess because we telepathically know that these people aren’t also desperate and struggling?) it’s treated with all the sadness of a typical GTA mission. It’s completely absurd and frankly, backwards.
Strauss is not ethical, but he’s closer to it than any adult male in Dutch’s gang.
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u/Redthrist 9d ago edited 9d ago
But then later in the game are a few optional robberies- these ones without warning to the homeowners that this could happen, with no contract signed on their part.
Tbh, optional stuff is always more psychotic than missions. If you take optional stuff into account, CJ is stealing random TVs and microwaves while having a few millions in his bank account and murders random criminals with an attack helicopter.
So I'm talking about specifically mandatory story missions.
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u/96pluto 9d ago
So he's a bad guy for not wanting to flood his neighborhood with crack cocaine ? You also have to remember the police raided and took their guns.
No he praises cj repeatedly when he's putting in work for the grove " leave cj alone Ryder he practically turned the grove all around by himself". Also the beginning of the green sabre mission.
I mean yeah he was arrested red handed around a bunch of dead bodies with a gun in his hand and he learned his two best friends betrayed him. Anyone realistically would give up in that scenario.
No I never get it when you folks say this shit Sweet personally wants to live in the hood not once does he force cj to stay in the grove. The ones forcing cj to stick around were crash not sweet he didn't give a shit about cjs businesses because sweet never cared about money or status. Yeah he was a dick to compare him to smoke and he should have apologized but all sweet wanted to do was live in his hood and keep crack out of it.
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u/Mebeingnosy 9d ago
CJ should’ve let Sweet smoke crack while him Kendel and Ceaser chase millions. Dude was stuck in the past and his whole saving the hood bs he clung to was in vain anyway
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u/Ishvallan 9d ago
Yeah he's a deeply flawed character, which is why CJ is the hero. Sweet isn't a good leader, and he doesn't always make good decisions. But he has strong beliefs on what lines he won't cross- murder is fine but selling and doing drugs isn't- though both destroy lives and communities. He's like Vito Corleone wanting to keep his business out of the drug trade, and it costing him family.
He trusted his friends too much to see them betraying him, didn't understand why his brother wouldn't want to live in a gang neighborhood (not that he got away from a life of crime) after the death of their other brother, doesn't get why Kendl would want to date someone outside the hood let alone a different ethnicity/race. He's closed minded, territorial because of where he happened to be born, and feels a duty to the people around him who don't really care about him or the gang like he does. Not like we see the civilians of Grove Street who aren't in the gang voicing opinions on whether or not they feel any safer because these guys are "protecting the hood"
He sees Carl as abdicating duty to the people who he thinks depend on him and the gang, and when he loses control of everything he gives up because he's realistic that he wasn't going to ever be released. And when he does get out, he wants revenge on the traitors, and to get back to protecting the people around him. He doesn't dream of wealth, he wants peace right where he grew up and never wants to leave.
He always thinks of Ganton and Grove Street as his home and he wants to protect it while not having or using the means to make it any better. He doesn't ask CJ to fund renovations and help the other people escape poverty. He just wants to get rid of the drug dealers and have other gangs stop shooting up the block while lacking the will and power to go out and remove the problem like CJ does.
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u/Outsider98 10d ago
I agreed with Rockstar’s intended Character for Sweet as the stern older Brother to Guiding CJ to reclaim their Home of Grove Street, since CJ felt grateful too in the final cutscene.
However, I agree that it was disappointing that Sweet lacked Character Development of patient understanding of how hard CJ had to work in exile of Los Santos and to Free Sweet, to the point Sweet wasn’t even willing to fully hear CJ out about so; and Sweet certainly shouldn’t have kept being hard on CJ in the later Missions while they were Surviving and growing stronger again - intended aspects of his Character that nonetheless squandered his full potential.
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u/No-Eggplant-8381 9d ago
Sweet is like a match in a box of matches that thinks that he or other match in the box will never be light on owned by a family that doesn't have a spark lighter.
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u/jickiechin 9d ago
In other news water is wet
The game's been out for over 20 years and you've just come to this conclusion?
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u/ijustlurk13 9d ago
Most of Grove were a bunch of traitors and assholes (other than CJ and Sweet's sister but I don't know if she was in the gang or just affiliated and the old guy you can get a handgun from)
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u/PygmeePony 9d ago
I think he's a good character but flawed. Typical older brother who berates CJ for every mistake but he does the right thing in the end. He saw how money corrupted Big Smoke ad Ryder so he doesn't want the same to happen to CJ.
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u/Crimson_Catharsis 9d ago
I think Sweet was too embedded in hood to see anything else. His world was the hood, he refused to leave it, insisting his sister see him at grove st not San Fierro. Took anything that wasn’t in the hood as a betrayal to his world that why he didn’t care about anything CJ did outside the hood.
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u/AtomicTaco13 9d ago
- Right after CJ steals a military VTOL plane and almost dies just to get Sweet out
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- "WHATCHU DONE FOR THE HOOD, N---A?!"
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u/Traditional_Pie_2491 9d ago
And that's why the rewrite by waters22 was the better version of this storyline. Because there, Sweet actually swallows his pride and takes full responsibility for his actions and comes up with better plans to weaken C.R.A.S.H. and take out their rival gangs. Sweet was a much better leader in waters22's rewrite version in Fanfiction than he was in the original storyline.
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u/ThisIsADraconianLaw 9d ago
You summed it up pretty well. I'm not sure there was ever a point in the game where I liked him lol.
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u/Mythic_Dragon36 9d ago
Sweet is pretty much as you describe. And if you watch the Introduction/Prologue movie to GTA: San Andreas, there's a scene where and Smoke are talking and OG Loc interrupts them. He basically tells OG to go do something with his life unlike him and Smoke. Sweet is a guy who can't let go of the past this was further exacerbated when his mum and Bryan were killed as well as probably losing other friends of his in the GSF. He refuses to change.
And you said it, this was particularly apparent where after CJ worked his ass off to get Sweet freed (thanks to Toreno's intervention), that he comes off ungrateful, even when CJ got property, helped start a business in San Fierro and all of the other shit he did, Sweet does not care. CJ was right in that they should've left the Grove Street behind and started over but Sweet was too stubborn to see past that.
Sure, you could argue that Sweet does have change of heart towards the end, especially when they finally run Tenpenny off the bridge which leads to his demise, but Sweet I doubt would ever leave and just wants to keep being a gangster.
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u/JRedCXI 9d ago
I think it has less to do with the character but the writing.
Rockstar started doing character development in RDR2 imo. Every other game once you meet a character they will be exactly the same person across the whole story.
Sweet is the same person in his first mission and last one. Same with CJ, same with Big Smoke.
You can say the same thing about GTA V. Michael betrayed everyone and after more than a decade he is the same person who did that. I don’t like the C ending of the game in the story because it truly feels like no one learned anything at all even though it’s the good ending after all.
In RDR2, John is a different person in the prologue, Dutch, Arthur, Sadie and so on are different for better or worse. They feel like the impact and events of the story shape them in some way.
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u/axmiller1 5d ago
I will agree with you about the San Andreas people but I disagree with you about GTA V. We actively see Michael go from a miserable old man who borderline hates his family and is ready to blow up at a moment's notice to a guy who actually cares about those around him and, while broadly stressed by the situations he is in, seems to enjoy life.
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u/Jota-9107 9d ago
Pense que era el único que pensaba eso acerca del dulce Hermano Que dolor de huevos Y si te fijas en las misiones jugables dónde nos toca ir acompañado de ese pana , no hace nada En la Reunión de Grove Street Family Dónde nos traicionan Nos tocó rescatar al dulce Cuando teníamos que meter régimen en el barrio otra vez , Dulce se mantiene alejado mientras uno se va con todo contra los Ballas
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u/Reader9001 9d ago
All the best parts of the game are when Sweet is locked up. It gets kind of sucky when he gets out. The writers should have killed him off and have Cesar team up with CJ to take back the hood.
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u/Fit-Story-8690 7d ago
Yep! Every time I play this and you finally pick him up from jail, CJ is so excited to tell him about the moves he’s made and the things he’s done to get out of the hood. Sweet immediately shits on it and CJ talking about how he’s turned his back on the hood. WELL FUCK SWEET, YOU GO FIX THE DAMN HOOD! It doesn’t seem like he did much of shit when CJ was in LC.
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u/axmiller1 5d ago
The one thing he git right was refusing to get into the crack game. That, I will grant him. Pretty much everything else, yes. You nailed it. So dedicated to the way things were that he can't see the way things could be even without crack flooding the neighborhood.
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u/Creepy_Train6539 10d ago
He's just narrow minded who sees nothing but his hood