The One Thing Everybody Gets Wrong About Kratos

[Music] man i love god of war it's easily one of my top five favorite franchises it's one of those things that never gets old with its sheer relentless brutality it's elegantly designed combat engine and fantastic level design it was so influential that it created an entire generation of imitators but you want to know what makes me grumpy well a lot of things actually i could write a list and it would look like chris jericho's list of a thousand and four holds but one of them is this weird narrative that's popped up in the past few years that kratos only started to become a good character when god of war ps4 came out now speaking of somebody who's been playing these games since 2010 i need to ask what franchise you guys are playing if that's your impression of kratos i think a lot of online journalists who wrote things like that have a very surface level understanding of god of war and seem to misunderstand and or forget a hell of a lot of context as to who kratos is and how he turned out the way he did actually most online games journalists have a very surface level understanding of gaming in general which is one of the many reasons why games journalism is the corpse that keeps on twitching in my opinion and personally i'm very sick of this idea that for games to be considered award-worthy these days they need to fulfill certain criteria and characters can't be considered good characters if they don't fulfill similarly arbitrary criteria the fact is i think that when you look at it it's pretty much undeniable that kratos is a good character and just because the original run of god of war games weren't for the lack of a better term oscar bait that doesn't mean that kratos is any less of a solid character if you dive into it and analyze his characterization with that said he's not 100 sympathetic especially by the time god of war 3 rolls around but that's kind of the point and we will get to that to start anybody who knows anything about greek mythology will know that the gods were dicks there was a theological consensus in ancient times that the gods were generally horrible and didn't care about you or your family and that was why life was so miserable as they understood it back then you had zeus's widespread infidelity hera's horrible jealousy in spite aries relentless brutality haiti's apathy and so on the personalities of the greek gods and the god of war games are fairly accurate to their personalities in greek mythology with some level of liberty taken for the sake of the story they're trying to tell at first in god of war 1 they seem to be on kratos's side but by the end of the game they show their true colors more later kratos is definitely not a hero in the traditional sense he's what i would classify as an anti-hero but he's also an anti-hero whose actions and deeds are shaped by the world in which he lived his brutal upbringing his ceaseless abuse at the hands of the gods the losses he suffered and so on he was born and raised in ancient sparta which as we know was a city-state in ancient greece known for its ruthless army having several notable historic battles with greece and persia as far as his origins he was the older of two brothers the younger being deimos i'm not sure how true to life his spartan upbringing was as i'm not a historian but as far as this universe is concerned all spartan youth were trained for combat and those who were deemed unfit for combat would be sent to the mountains to fend for themselves the earliest in the timeline that we go is the flashbacks and ghost of sparta which flashbacks to kratos in his youth where he incidentally looked unsettlingly like jimmy hopkins from bully him and his brother would train together and while he gave his brother a hard time he had a deep love for his younger sibling he gave him hell because he wanted deimos to be the best warrior he could be in fact it's established that the big reason that kratos developed such a mean streak and a lust for victory is the fact that he was unable to stop ares from kidnapping his brother so in tribute to his brother whom he thought he lost he vowed to never fall in combat again so from the beginning it's made clear that much of his personality is as a result of the losses that he's suffered the rest of ghost of sparta takes place between god of war 1 and 2 when kratos is the god of war but is only in the process of showing why that was a bad idea the entire game is about kratos going against the will of the other gods and tracking down his brother whom the gods believed is the prophesized marked man who would bring about the end of the gods ultimately kratos goes through hell to try and find his brother even inadvertently destroying atlantis at one point after it's all said and done he does manage to find his brother and does everything in his power to not have to fight him but doesn't really have a choice in the matter if the trophy name is to be believed the context of this game shows that kratos let deimos win because he didn't want to hurt his younger brother during this rescue mission he just wanted him back i will not lose you again [Music] eventually they do reconcile with kratos giving deimos a spartan shield and spear and they fight alongside each other for the glory of sparta but the reunion is short-lived as deimos loses his life while they're tag teaming thanatos the god of death kratos then mournfully buries his own brother the brother he fought in honor of and fought so hard to have back died because of him but if the gods weren't so fearful of the prophecy he would have never had to die at all because it was the god's fault for kidnapping deimos and trying to stop kratos from rescuing his brother that any of this had to happen this was only a little while after kratos was forced to kill his own mother when she transformed into a hideous beast in a short span of time he loses his only family that remained and it's all because of the gods and their insistence on making him suffer whether intentionally or unintentionally it's the things that make us human that stops us from crossing a line we might regret his mother and brother were two of the things that kept him from turning into the monster we see him become he didn't know they were alive but it's better to think someone's dead than to know they're alive and then when they do die have someone to blame their deaths on and both their deaths were partially as a result of the gods it was just another notch in kratos's badge that made him lose himself in rage hell probably the biggest moment of the gods being complete and total unnecessary dicks towards kratos is when after zeus kills kratos at the beginning of god of war 2 zeus decides out of some level of completely dumbfounding level of spite or as part of some sort of divine punishment to go to sparta and absolutely annihilate it which is actually this universe's take on the earthquake that leveled sparta in 464 bc but in this case it's zeus whom leveled sparta as continued punishment for kratos not doing the job he didn't want to do exactly as zeus wanted him to do it and kratos refusing to pledge himself to the gods when zeus showed his irrational fear for kratos betraying the gods kratos pride and love for his homeland is one of the things that drove him and now it's gone for next to no reason granted kratos did go back in time before that happened by the end of the game so i'm pretty sure sparta's destruction was retconned ultimately though his brother his mother and even his homeland were a blip on the radar when it comes to his characterization most of what makes kratos an interesting character centers around his wife lisandra and his daughter calliope the entire franchise is as a result of a single moment where a combination of pride and poor judgment as well as manipulation by aries caused kratos to murder his wife and child inadvertently i will say i've always found the presentation of kratos's wife and daughter's death scene kind of backwards he ransacked this town in which he did not know his wife and daughter were staying and as a result entered the temple and murdered both of them not knowing they were there they could have very easily made it to where kratos was acting on behalf of ares but was acting under his own power meaning his wife and daughter's murder was his own fault then from there they could have easily made it to where kratos blaming aries was his grief-stricken mind's way of trying to rationalize his own actions in an attempt to assuage guilt for something that crushed him emotionally that would have been very interesting but then after this scene aerys takes credit for kratos murdering his wife and kid in order to try and make him a perfect warrior to help him overthrow the other gods there was nothing about the ransacking scene that indicated that it was aries doing and had he not popped in like tim the tool man's neighbor that would have been the interpretation to make especially seeing as kratos has been known to not be able to take responsibility for his own actions tending to blame the gods instead the reason this is so backwards is because aries should have known that directly causing the death of the two people that kratos loved more than anything his wife and daughter would have backfired on him majorly and what do you know it did they even tried to lure kratos back by offering him the illusion of his wife and daughter meaning that even the furies knew that ares screwed up here so it was a really stupid thing for mr god of war to do but either way kratos undeniably murdered his wife and kid with his own hands and then had to live with his own actions as well as live with the gods and his fellow humans classifying him as a monster as a result the ashes of his wife and daughter were even fastened to his skin as a constant reminder to him and everyone around him of his misdeeds so he could never escape that's the framing device that the entire series bases itself around the event of kratos's life following his murder of his family chains of olympus as well as the first game are part of his ongoing trials by the gods at the end of which kratos has been promised a clean slate essentially kratos wants his memory of that day wiped because for as much death and destruction that kratos has wrought that doesn't affect him he was raised for that it's the visions of his wife and child dying by his own hands that haunt him but hold on for a second he's haunted by the visions of an incredibly traumatic event and then another thing to consider is that in the beginning of the first game they make it clear that he's been suffering for 10 years and has tried to numb the pain with alcohol and meaningless sex but no matter what nothing can take the pain away you know what that says to me that says to me that kratos is a man suffering from ptsd or some other form of guilt-induced mental trauma the dude lives in a waking nightmare due to the event of something that wasn't his fault at least as far as what the game will tell you and he's willing to do anything to be free then at the end of the game it's revealed that the gods were deceiving him the whole time even after doing what was asked of him they refused to free him from his visions they only decide to forgive him for all he's done like can we stop and just internalize what he must be feeling at this moment to get to that point especially considering how stoic and how emotionally headstrong he is what it must have taken for him to get to this point this is where his pledge of allegiance to ares in a time of desperation led him there's also another moment i want to highlight ascension is definitely the weakest of the original series and i believe the worst selling as well don't quote me on that there is some great storytelling that goes over people's heads as a result once again i feel people are desensitized to these types of things but this is the game where kratos is brutally tortured for at least two weeks prior to the events of the game because the furies wanted to try and break him and make him subservient to ares once more imagine the toll that would take on you to be tortured for that long and the amount of strength that it would take to overcome that so he had to cope with not only the mental but also the physical trauma of this period of his life for 10 years and he managed to do that simply off the back of a hypothetical carrot being dangled in front of his face as inconsequential as these prequel games are you do get a lot of great character building like that in fact one of my favorite moments from a storytelling point of view in this entire series is probably from the most inconsequential game in the series god of war chains of olympus is a prequel that came out after the fact so you know that nothing is going to be of any consequence but either way during a quest to rescue helios kratos is constantly haunted by visions of his daughter until he finds the forsaken tree in which if he relinquishes all of his power to he can be with his daughter in elysium the pleasant part of the afterlife in greek mythology but to kratos giving up everything is a small price to pay if it means being with his daughter again so he does this without hesitation and he's finally reunited with one of the two people he loved more than anything but then it's also revealed that atlas and persephone were going to team up to destroy the pillar of the world the destruction of which will end all of existence when i said this game was inconsequential i meant to the overall series narrative arc the possible destruction of all existence is a pretty big deal though not wanting to see his daughter die again he has to regain his power and stop persephone but the favorite moment i was talking about is this this little moment where kratos has to push his daughter off his leg is such genius interactive storytelling because usually the button-mashing mini-games that ensues when you're killing for example a minotaur looks like this essentially what you're seeing here is kratos using all of his strength to down a worthy adversary and the faster you press the button the more strength he puts into it kratos has to push his own daughter off his leg to leave her and go save the world or rather save her from ceasing to exist and this is what it looks like [Music] so the amount of strength that it would usually take to kill a menator is the amount of strength that it takes for him to leave his daughter behind that's how hard this moment is for him that is such great but subtle storytelling it takes him so much will to leave her behind and it's so tragic because it really illustrates just how much he loved her how much he wants her back and how much it pains him to let her go again so if anybody wants to claim to me that kratos is nothing more than a slab of meat with anger issues after this that is simply not true because even while he's fighting hordes and hordes of mythological creatures and even killing people who probably don't deserve it he's still just a human and he has human emotions he spends the entire series desperately clinging to his humanity clinging to the things that make us human while suffering daily and having the gods who are ostensibly his allies do nothing about it he's willing to move the heavens and the earth to save his brother he's willing to give up everything to be with his daughter and then further willing to give up that if it means saving her from oblivion you can't look at me and tell me that's not a complex human being and while his actions and deeds may be brutal even evil at times that's just the result of him losing his humanity throughout the series via everything that happens to him and the funny thing is you can see the contrast between how he starts out versus how he ends up towards the beginning of the timeline he's shown to be much less brutal and ruthless in god of war ascension he at first refuses to kill orkos but then relents when orkos insists giving him an honorable and dignified death then later in the first game his reputation as the ghost of sparta precedes him but his reputation evidently brings him great shame as that's not how he wants to be seen he does in fact give a damn about his bad reputation he even has respect for the gods in the earlier parts of the series but their role in the ruining of his life causes him to become very disenfranchised very quickly and each of these events throughout the series gradually chipped away at what grounded kratos and that culminates in god of war 3. by this point kratos has been betrayed by everyone he's ever trusted lost everything he's ever held dear worked for the gods for 10 years and even saved them on more than one occasion but has never gotten anything he wants most notably he was denied his one most desired wish to forget the sins of his past that haunt him so they forced him to live with his sins and wouldn't even allow him to free himself from his pain by taking his own life twisting his arm to become the new god of war ensuring that as an immortal he will forever have to live with his pain and misdeeds then they betray him when he didn't do the job exactly as they wanted him to do it combined with zeus's fear of inevitable betrayal he's died and come back multiple times had his entire homeland destroyed out of spite by zeus until it wasn't fought through hell and back both figuratively and literally so that by the time the third game rolls around whatever humanity he had has been thoroughly beaten out of him by everyone around him by the time he's betrayed by gaia and falls from mount olympus into the river styx he's so thoroughly consumed by his anger at all these things that have gone on around him that were beyond his control that he essentially snaps he loses touch with who he used to be and becomes worse than the very people he's fighting against he's in a mental state of not giving a damn who he has to kill even if they're 100 innocent the first indication of this is towards the beginning of the game when perethis offers you his bow if you can free him and then kratos decides instead of helping him and taking the bow to burn him to death and take the bow anyway i don't think that was an oversight on the developer's case i think the reoccurring theme of kratos murdering people for the things they're offering him is a deliberate narrative choice to show how far kratos has fallen the fact that he's doing all of this just to get revenge on zeus for killing him at the beginning of the second game is a point of confusion for some people because why would he go through all of this to get revenge on zeus for something that kratos got himself out of almost instantly no that's not the point it goes far beyond the need to kill zeus at this point this is years of pent-up rage of being constantly screwed over abused and even killed coming out all at once a lot of people point to the murder of poseidon's princess and god of war 3 as peak unlikability for kratos and more to the point peak misogyny and for the record no kratos is not a misogynist he hates everyone at this point but i also think the death of poseidon's princess is actually a beautifully brutal bit of storytelling you see at the beginning of god of war 3 if the player is on board they and kratos want everyone to die equally as much the player and kratos both equally want to kill zeus and stop anyone who gets in your way and once you're betrayed by gaia you want to destroy the titans just as much it starts out as a very deliberately gung-ho power fantasy but throughout the game the constant killing of gods and the subsequent worsening of the world to which kratos is absolutely apathetic about suddenly creates a disconnect between kratos and the player character it becomes more and more apparent to us that what kratos is doing is starting to take it too far and if i were to point to an exact moment when kratos takes it absolutely too far and crosses the line this is the exact moment i would pick the moment where he takes an unwilling innocent woman and murders her in the most unnecessarily brutal way possible all to further his own quest that is where kratos crosses the line from being a sympathetic and justified anti-hero to being a full tilt monster and it's one of those moments that kind of puts everything into perspective it's like a flashbulb going off in your face oh god what are we doing it starts to become undeniable that the damage we're doing to the world around us is unjustifiable because every single god that we kill causes the world around us to become worse causing the land to be swallowed by the ocean after we kill poseidon causing the world to be plunged into an eternal storm by killing helios bringing a plague upon the human race by killing hermes destroying all the vegetation by killing hera but the atrocity of his actions don't become apparent to the player until sometime into the game it becomes gradually uncomfortable after a while even with all the context accounted for and i don't think that was accidental i believe the key theme to this game is that nietzsche quote he who fights with monsters should take care lest he thereby become a monster which is way too wordy so i'm just gonna shorten it to fight ye not monsters lest you become one and kratos is a monster consumed with an anger and a need for revenge so strong that he's willing to destroy the world around him if that's what it takes because it's not even about revenge at this point but ultimately there's still a little glint of his old self within him which is brought out by pandora he sees his own daughter in pandora and once she enters the picture you can see that kratos is gradually starting to remember the person he used to be remembering his humanity culminating with the instance where kratos tries to stop pandora from sacrificing herself to open pandora's box even though she's insisting after it's all said and done he wants to save her from the same fate that his own daughter suffered seeing him brought back from the abyss that it took him six games to be pushed to is genuinely heartwarming in a weird way and in the end it was the power of hope that pandora's box gave him in the first game that saved him he doesn't redeem himself but in his final act in the trilogy he chooses humanity over the monster he had become when you take a look at all the context that is the final culmination of kratos arc after years of abuse beating the humanity out of him he's able to find his old self thanks to bandora and in the end he chooses to die a human rather than live as a monster although he doesn't die i think it's honestly undeniable at this point that kratos was a great character yeah he wasn't sympathetic by the end but i maintained that was the point even then some of the greatest fictional characters in history are tragic anti-heroes max payne the punisher hell even batman to a certain extent are all cut from this same cloth not everything in this universe is black and white but the fact of the matter is that kratos was a tragic character and every action that he ever took had a reason he wasn't just some characterless rampaging force of nature he had layers obviously bad things happening to a character in itself does not a good character make but it's how we respond in times of strife that defines who we are in spite of being a broken man with mountains of physical and mental trauma kratos is still a very proactive driven character who's capable of love and compassion in spite of being one of the most destructive people in this game's universe he's a man of contrast someone who refuses to lay down or do anything halfway someone who will stop at nothing to get what he wants someone who is a victim of circumstance someone who was brought up in a situation where problems were solved only with violence in spite of all that he maintains some level of morality and humanity for a time but a man can only be pushed so far and that's not even accounting for the things that i haven't seen like the comic book series which i don't have a point of reference for hell even in the ps4 game they retroactively add some depth to kratos from the old games wherein it's established that his son's name is attributed to a young spartan warrior that kratos respected who died in the line of battle and the thing about god of war ps4 i won't deny that it's good and i won't deny that kratos is a good character in that game but he's a very standard type of good character if that makes sense the only thing that i have against modern god of war is the fact that in them taking the easy way out with kratos's characterization that's what paved the way for all these no-nothing journalists to claim that god of war has finally grown up and kratos is finally a good character people who consider growing up to mean very rigidly designated things i find it very creatively stifling when maturity can only mean one thing critical acclaim can only come when you follow a very strictly determined set of check marks i think a lot of aaa gaming these days is a little bit too pretentious for its own good they seem to forget that we're in this to have fun and the prevalence of dramatic oscar-based style games is getting tiresome the obsession with being mature comes across as ironically immature i think this quote from cs lewis sums up my feelings quite well either way kratos was always a good character just not in the standard goody two-shoes hollywood sense it takes a lot more skill to make someone like kratos in his original portrayal sympathetic and even in the point of the story where he's no longer sympathetic you can at least see where he's coming from i think kratos is a very uniquely written but also well realized character with a lot of depth that's always been the case as long as you're willing to look into the context because as ever context is king if you like what you see here don't forget to like and subscribe and drop a comment telling me what you think is there anything i missed do you agree that kratos is a good character let me know you've been watching the king of snark style on tactical bacon productions saying what i want when i want and i will catch you next time peace

Channel: Tactical Bacon Productions

Views: 1,942,674

Keywords: god of war, cory barlog, god of war ps4, god of war 4, god of war 3, how strong is kratos, kratos was always a good character, tbp, tactical bacon productions, ghost of sparta, kratos kills, god of war analysis, god of war 2018, god of war iii, kratos vs, god of war explained, kratos vs zeus, kratos vs thor, god of war ragnarok, kratos rage, god of war 5, god of war ragnarok trailer, god of war 2, god of war theme, god of war 1, video essay, god of war trailer

Id: cwYUO4Rrw4A

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021