The God of War games have always been a great match between form and content. Mythic Greece was violent, characterized by murderous rage, monsters and revenge. Kratos, Spartan warrior and unwitting son of Zeus, was the perfect distillation of this brutality – Achilles, Theseus and Orestes all rolled into one.
Through six games, Kratos made his way through the entire Greek pantheon and bestiary. Now, for his return, he sought snowier pastures up north in the land of Odin and Thor. This is an obvious shift on many levels, since the Norse canon (or what little we have of it) is even more focused than the Greek on tales of big men slaying giants. However, the results exceeded our expectations.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
God of war (2018) makes masterful use of Norse mythology, and not just because of how directly it translates the subject and spirit of the Norse canon. The interpretive liberties lead designer Corey Barlog and his team have taken with the source material embody a truer engagement with the mythic storytelling mode than if they had simply performed a seemingly more faithful version of the stories.
Spoiler alert: Our analysis includes several key plots of God of War, including some mid-game plots and the identities of several key characters. Proceed at your own risk!
Killers will kill
Compared to the body of Greek myth, very few Norse stories have survived. Most of what we know comes to us through the epic Prose and Poetic Eddas, and an inordinate amount of the stories contained therein revolve around Thor, the giant-slaying god of thunder. Right off the bat, Kratos is a good protagonist for the position. Although Thor is usually portrayed as more benign (especially in his jokey, Marvel iteration) than the villainous Kratos, both default to murder as the main solution to problems.
Kratos’ new weapon, the Leviathan axe, highlights the comparison; like Thor’s famous hammer, Mjölnir, Leviathan’s ax returns to Kratos’ hands from any distance when he summons it after throwing it. The resemblance is no coincidence: Brokk and Sindri dwarves forged both.
One fact about the world in God of war it becomes obvious the longer you play: There are almost no people in this world. Early on you’ll encounter a few cannibals trying to make a meal of Kratos and Atreus, and you talk to wandering ghosts the whole time, but most of the people you meet are undead Draugr, and all the corporeal characters you talk to are dwarves or gods.
On one level, this makes sense in a world based on Norse mythology, since humans are actually largely absent from those stories. While Greek myths often revolve around encounters between humans and supernatural forces, humans are almost entirely secondary to the concerns of the Norse gods, who instead tangle with giants and each other, while their human creations only indirectly deal with the consequences. As a god who slays monsters and other gods, Kratos fits the bill perfectly.
As a god who slays monsters and other gods, Kratos fits into other Norse mythology.
The game doesn’t directly state its case in these terms, but it does provide a specific explanation for humanity’s absence. At some point, Kratos and Atreus discover that something has caused Helheim, the realm of the dead, to stop accepting newly deceased spirits, causing the souls of the dead to rise as undead warriors called Draugr, who in turn kill more people. It’s more or less a Nordic zombie apocalypse.
More than a convenient excuse to give Kratos a world full of enemies he can kill without hesitation, the story reflects the eschatological idea of Ragnarok, the inevitable world-ending battle of the Norse pantheon.
What is crucial here is that Ragnarok is not the result of external, cosmic forces, but is the gods’ compensation for eternal cruelty to giants and monsters. For example, the gods tricked and imprisoned the wolf Fenrir for fear that he would overpower the gods and destroy the world, but in the end Fenrir wants to do just that because the gods thus betrayed him. Odin’s prophecies are often suspiciously self-fulfilling.
#NotMyGods
If God of war it’s starting to sound critical of the gods, that’s because it absolutely is. As a general rule, pagan pantheons were often as much feared as they were revered. God as a benevolent force that primarily cares for people is a mostly Christian conception, while for ancient people gods were usually personifications of a cruel and uncaring universe, extremely capricious in the way they treated mere mortals.
Memir, Atreus and Kratos. Image used with permission of the copyright holder
God of war he goes even further with an explicit hostile attitude towards Odin and the Aesir gods he leads. When the wise god Mimir eventually joins Kratos and Atreus on their travels, he regales you during the intermission with the myths of the gods, which are mostly an opportunity to ignore Odin.
“Relentless? Barbaric? Heartless? It’s Odin,” he mocks, calling the All-Father a “little, greedy tyrant,” who has stolen everything he’s ever had, starting with the very world he created by killing the giant Ymir. One of the main ways players learn about the world is through Jötnar (giant) shrines.
“Relentless? Barbaric? Heartless? It’s Odin!”-Mimir to Kratos
These comic book-style storyboards relay the myths as told by giants (who Mimir is quick to point out are more like humans than monsters), the constant refrain being that someone tries to resist the gods, and then Thor comes and kills them. Mjölnir is rightly feared as a weapon of mass destruction, keeping the nine kingdoms under the strict rule of the Aesir.
To paint Odin as a selfish and manipulative conqueror whose reputation as a benevolent All-Father is just good marketing is not too much of a stretch. Scholars suspect that the Aesir-Vanir war, a key event in the Norse canon mentioned in the God of war, could reflect a historical conquest whose victors wrote their own mythic history, so digging into the implicitly brutal colonialism of the Aesir is an interesting and worthwhile approach. It is also not uncommon to: Thor: Ragnarok makes the same point when Hela reveals how Odin ruled the nine kingdoms with blood and iron.
Baldur’s Bubble
Maybe God of warThe most interesting mythic interpretation is how he deals with Baldur, the universally beloved Aesir, son of Odin and Freya.
Jose Cabera/The Art of God of War
According to tradition, Baldur began to dream of his own death, so his mother went out and extracted from almost everything in the world a promise that nothing bad would happen to her son. Thus protected, Baldur would stand before his fellow gods and laugh as they threw every possible weapon at him, which would deflect harmlessly.
Freya missed one promise though: she thought the mistletoe was too small and harmless to bother. Upon learning this, the trickster god, Loki (who was always trying to cause trouble) made a mistletoe spear and gave it to the blind god Hodr and tricked him into killing Baldur.
God of warBaldur appears very early in the game, initially identified as the Stranger. (Astute players, however, might be able to figure out who he is from his constant insistence throughout the fight that he feels nothing). In this version, Freya’s bargain to protect him from all harm also protected him from all sentience. Confident but numb, Baldur goes mad with isolation and begins to hate Freya for denying him a real life. It’s a pretty bold interpretation of the conventional Baldur story, but it retains all the key elements of the myth.
Meanwhile, it also ties in with the primary theme of God of War – the ways in which parents and children shape each other. Baldur’s condition raises questions about how a parent’s desire to protect their children can actually harm them, or how being so universally loved and beautiful can actually be terribly isolating.
Mythos
Baldur is the best example of how God of war deals not only with the content, but also with the form of the myth. Contemporary media is very preoccupied with originality. Even as we end up telling the same stories over and over again, it’s crucial to clearly delineate them as sequels or reboots. Fandoms often argue over which version of a story or character is the most accurate and what constitutes canon.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
What can confuse modern audiences about the concept of “myth” is that there is no correct version of it, and no one owns it. The defining quality of myth is that it is shared and revived through its myriad variants. New versions of the story that change some details or offer a new perspective do not contradict the canonical truth, but are what keep the myths alive and so powerful. Italian writer Roberto Calasso probably described it best Marriage of Cadmus and Harmoniaa modern retelling of the Greek mythic cycle:
“There is no such thing as an isolated mythical event, just as there is no such thing as an isolated word. Myth, like language, gives itself in each of its fragments. When myth brings repetition and variants into play, the skeleton of a system, a latent order, appears for a while, covered with seaweed.”
God of war is an exemplary dealing with myth precisely because of the liberties it takes with its depictions of the gods. These stories should be alive and relevant to our lives, and Barlog et al do a fantastic job of exploring the issues of parenting and breaking the cycle of intergenerational violence by digging into the Norse (and Greek) canon without taking it too far. — Atreus’ name is almost certainly an allusion to one of the most notorious tragic families in ancient Greece).
Kratos himself is something of a modern myth. Now that the gods in popular culture have come to often represent the dangers of unbridled power, Kratos is truly a god to humans who recognize that the only way forward is to eliminate the gods altogether. The iterative approach of this reboot feels particularly mythological: this is the same Kratos we’ve seen before, but different. The essence is still there, but reconfigured to find new nuances and new relevance to our lives today.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
There is a valuable lesson here for all of pop culture. The widely derided rise in sequels, reboots and revivals means people express a clear desire to tell certain stories over and over again, but we’re held back by contentious IP owners or overprotective fans who cling to the idea of originality as a virtue. Myth teaches us to give up, that the most important stories do not come from individual authors, but from the emergent voice of countless people who think and feel together across generations.
We may have written Kratos off as a transient creature of his anxious, early moment, but if he can look back and move forward with such clarity, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.
Editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn