Kratos has become a hypocritical. He hasn’t really matured and hasn’t regretted anything. In God of War of 2018 it could be guessed, but in God of War Ragnarok the true face of the character, repressed under pounds of self-pity, is even more evident. It is not true that he is no longer the one from God of War 3, the one who beat Zeus to such an extent that he filled the screen with blood, the one who did not hesitate to sacrifice mankind to carry out his revenge. He was a murderous madman who slaughtered everything that stood between him and his goal of destroying irredeemable deities.
We liked to believe that it was no longer like this, that it had changed. But then why? Did we feel as guilty as he did for driving it? For enjoying those massacres? For not having considered them excessive at the time, so as to lead us to turn off the console? Yet he was so sincere in his fury that he admitted no mediation. He was a teenager freed from all social constraints and with the power to make the universe what he wanted. A tragic anti-hero who, left alone, could only commit suicide, not so much to redeem himself as to give meaning to his enterprise and to the nothing he had left behind. It was nihilism incarnate.
When he came back to us, he could only pretend to be someone else. Yet the moments in which we feel him truest are not those in which he blathers with his son and with the Nordic gods, but those in which he takes up arms and slices his enemies. Does he do it because he has to? We told each other the first time, but by the second time we know very well that it is not so. Kratos still likes it kill. He can’t help it. He knows that all of his adventures will end in slaughter for the simple fact that he has no other interactions than those of death. And the player, who follows his story with the controller in hand, nods amused in front of the fake deep dialogues and then returns to dabble with axes and spells.
Because the desire he has had for years for God of War Ragnarok was not dictated by being able to redeem Kratos, but by returning to feeling almighty wielding exceptional weapons with which to lay waste to everything. The goal is loot. The old Kratos didn’t hoard treasure, he just destroyed. What is now has sublimated his violence in the practice of accumulation for its own sake. He has become a capitalist of violence, a hypocrite in beard and tie who wraps his instincts in ethics, but who always hopes there is some reason to return to vent them, be it the defense of his son or the collection of some particularly attractive artifact.
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