Year in Review 2018 Letter Series: God of War-Of Monsters and Men
Hey Caitlin,
I’m glad we found each other in the year 2018 to talk about how dissatisfied we are with the “game of the generation”, as so many were quick to slap onto it. I felt like every conversation surrounding God of War never failed to make that proclamation. Its “prestige aesthetics”, as Jackson puts it, have been a hallmark of a lineup of games that have failed to excite me for a long while now. I can’t help but feel like games are in the death throes of creative expression sometimes when the games largely considered successes couldn’t look or feel more similar. I know this isn’t actually true because I played Minit this year and that’s about as good as games get, but you try having that conversation with anyone without being laughed off. So yes, it’s been disappointing hearing the “conversations” surrounding God of War, a game that I think looks great and plays fine but comes off as everything but. Especially as a man. Let me tell you why.
I’ve been thinking about a scene in God of War since you sent over this letter. It’s always struck me as a scene only a man could’ve written.
Most of the way through the game, (Spoilers, by the way) Kratos finds himself on a boat granted to him by a goddess, a woman he’s treated with hostility since they met. This boat is meant to bring him back to his home, where this journey began, to find the thing he needs to be able to properly fight through literal Hell to save his son. It’s storming, the screen’s adopted a red tint and he’s alone and in his feelings…except for the manifestation of Athena staring him down. “Athena…get out of my head,” is about the only reaction she gets out of him before she’s gone again.
I’ve found it constantly falls on women to make Kratos aware of anything, especially his own guilt. After tearing through a pack of weird ice men outside of his home, he goes in and pulls out his Blades of Chaos, the iconic weaponry he used to slaughter literal millions across every other God of War installment. It’s a moment many of the men I know who played it love: it’s Kratos making peace with his past, confronting it head on in order to move forward. He solemnly begins wrapping the familiar chains around his arms, a metaphor lost on no one. Athena returns and berates him saying, “ You cannot change. You will always be a monster.”
“I know…but I am your monster no longer.”
And it’s here that everything disappointingly snaps into place. This isn’t the story of a man’s redemption. It’s the story of a man’s resignation, an acceptance of a defeat long foretold. It was never in the cards for Kratos to be a better person. Try as he might, he’ll always be terrible. It’s a rhetoric that’s well worn by male characters and the men who justify making them. It’s a harmful way to view your complicity in your own troubled past because it allows you to forget.
Taking up the Blades of Chaos again never rung out to me as a reconciliation, but as a reneging of any progress you could’ve argued Kratos made. It’s almost an insult that mechanically, he controls exactly the same while using them, solidifying that Kratos has learned nothing. To everyone who played through this game, this was the moment that made the experience. I couldn’t help but wonder how this could’ve gone so wrong.
That’s a lot of what God of War (2018) is: a promise of something that won’t actually come. When I think of all the promises made by the game and by the audience it’s reached, I can’t help but think of the game this could’ve been. A game where Faye, Atreus’ mom and Kratos’ second wife, wasn’t dead before it even started. A game where she didn’t have to die at all to give her character narrative heft. One where she wasn’t reduced to the observations of the men around her and the way they chose to see her. But of course in this landscape, that’s not what sells. She needs to be a mystery to unravel, not her own person.
I wanted to meet the woman who brought peace and love to Kratos. I wanted to understand the character that would take that on and see how she went about it. I’d like to have known how she felt raising Atreus basically on her own, as the game makes clear that Kratos did not have too big a role in his life. She’s been robbed of that voice though, all that’s left of her being the handprint on the tree and the guiding white light in Kratos’ dreams. It’s weird how often we like to recognize women by every other thing but their actual shape or form or even the words they say.
The end of God of War frames everything in a prophetic way, like it had to be this way. Everything that has come to pass was destined and so isl everything to come. Try as we might, we’re all unfortunately stuck in our places, set in stone. For Kratos, that seems to be his death at the hands of his own son. For Faye, it means recognizing a future without her. For Atreus, it means propagating the same cycle of violence and patricide his father went through, painting his father not as a redemptive icon nor himself as a hopeful future, but together a forgone conclusion. It also means he is not who he thinks he is, or even who he may want to be.
The prophecy bearing walls have a rune which bears another name for him: Loki, a name that weaves Atreus into this tapestry in an unbecoming way. It robs him of an identity, not that Kratos doesn’t spend the entirety of the game stomping it out of him anyway. By story’s end, as Dia Lacina puts it, “Atreus is a man now. Having been party to killing Baldur, he’s crossed a final threshold into manhood.” It’s evident he’s shaping up to be the man his father is and while Kratos will scold him for it, it’s entirely his doing. He’s sculpted the boy who will hypothetically be his undoing. Why? Because this is just who they are. Because he’s his own monster now.
