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How God of War Ragnarok Handles the Effects of Alcoholism in a Family

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9 pointsmattficke13 comments

Ah yes, God of War, who are so unable to get any level of mythology correct their “Germanic” story is the equivalent of Jesus and a Chinese Emperor teaming up to defeat Hitler, who then reveals that he is simply a pawn of the Kellogg’s Cereal Company.

Does that sound confusing and nonsensical to you? It /should/. God of War gets all of the details wrong and then opines about its own stupidity. If they do God of War: Bible, Jesus will be swigging wine from a bottle in each hand, almost incoherently drunk until you eventually discover that secretly he’s being controlled by a dark spirit known as Charizard.

Not sure that anything so off the mark is capable of handling any real themes because it cannot handle being consistent with the story it pretends to care about.

Personally, as I am Danish, this is still the religion of many people and it was ultimately a disgusting, juvenile, and false telling of the overall story.

I really hope they do God of War: Jesus and make him a homosexual drunkard who is only into communism and continually says he doesn’t believe in god.

It does make my blood boil, but basically in the same way that your blood would boil if a movie about “hackers” consistently showed them doing no actual hacking.

Id personally be fine with a take on Jesus that showed him as flawed. I kinda enjoyed Records of Ragnarok which was an anime/manga that brought in every religions icons too[1].

I don't think god of war ever sold itself as a faithful interpretation of the various religions they showed.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_of_Ragnarok

I’m also fine with a game/movie about Jesus but my point isn’t so much that the figure is a sacred cow (Passion of the Christ proved there’s a lot of interest, amongst other media) but rather that /when/ he is depicted the depictions tend to run along the respectful side because it is the religion of others.

And it’s not about “faithful”. I’ve played the original games and obviously “Kratos” isn’t a historical Greek figure anyway, but the original games weren’t about /story/. They were hack and slash games with a bit of backdrop in the form of naked Greek women and ionic columns.

To me the problem is when you want to /act/ like you’re a story game with a big dramatic plot and worldbuilding, why bother using a mythology if you’re going to piss all over it and get it entirely wrong? It’s like doing a “Sesame Street” game and Big Bird has PTSD from wasting too many people in Vietnam and then shoots up a building. I really don’t have enough analogies for how much I hate the game’s story and plot… and characters. And setting.

But also, it’s a very good game despite that. It’s like playing a version of DOOM where you help out Hitler and everyone pretends Hitler is a decent guy and that Hitler is misunderstood. You’re playing DOOM, so that’s great but why am I wading through a pile of horseshit to do it?

By extension of that analogy, why should I have to wade through a hack writer’s truly awful fuckup of a story just to play the hacky and slashy bits people are buying the game God of War for. Why should I have to see dumb articles written about a dumb version of a story. Again, it’s like playing a game where Hitler is the good guy and then an article comes out “ways Hitler was misunderstood”. It’s such a fundamental fuckup of the reality it is astonishing to me.

(Sorry, I know being passionate is basically illegal here)

Be passionate all you want, I don't mind. I do disagree with most of your points though. For instance

>To me the problem is when you want to /act/ like you’re a story game with a big dramatic plot and worldbuilding, why bother using a mythology if you’re going to piss all over it and get it entirely wrong?

Not following the original story is orthogonal to having a big dramatic plot and worldbuilding. Its also just a reinterpretation, that's an extremely common thing in art. On a smaller time scale look at how batman went from campy comedy in the Adam West era, to a brooding action hero with Nolan's trilogy. And these are stories that are hundreds/thousands of years old.

>By extension of that analogy, why should I have to wade through a hack writer’s truly awful fuckup of a story just to play the hacky and slashy bits people are buying the game God of War for.

That's just like, your opinion man, to quote another piece of art. I happen to have found the story compelling and given the rave reviews it got, that's not an uncommon sentiment. The story not being for you is a lot different than it being _truly awful_

Ok but you’re apparently not caring that it is sensitive and meaningful to me.

Would you make these games:

-Hitler game where you murder Jews and it is very sympathetic to Hitler.

-Mohammed game where he runs a gay nightclub that sells more alcohol than any other club on earth and in his spare time poses for nude portraits the player draws

-Slavery simulation, you play as a slave ship and it shows how you go from a poor family with a small farm to a big happy family with lots of slaves on a big farm!

-Judaism simulator! You orchestrate a large international conspiracy and the game shows every single Jewish person as conniving and evil

-Mongol horde simulator, go through china and rape until you die, textures are randomly generated and you see the Chinese that you kill have cheated on their taxes so it’s fine

The common thread between all of these awful experiences being they would show great disrespect to the material. If you truly believe “no sacred cows man haha!” Please make one of the above.

You can even make it a god of war game!

> It’s like doing a “Sesame Street” game and Big Bird has PTSD from wasting too many people in Vietnam and then shoots up a building.

As someone that grew up watching Sesame Street I would love to play this game.

I know it wasn't your intention, but... That sounds rad as hell.

Also, Kratos is absolutely a figure in greek myth. Just not like in the games. The games have always loosely adapted mythology.

I'm kind of curious what specifically they did that you dislike. Would you mind sharing?

Lots of the details are incorrect. Let’s use the “Sesame Street” analogy because I’m glad you don’t think it sounds bad… my intention was to illustrate a concept that’s realistic and might be interesting to explore but uses a character that makes no sense to do it.

It’s like making a remake of Rambo with Elmo as the deadly killer man. Of course there will be people who are amused of the absurdity in that scenario and in general there isn’t much I can say to your taste, but if you’re going to make a story about Elmo Rambo, let’s not make a follow-up about how the Prophet Mohammed runs a gay club next.

Things I really hated: Odin is never a bad person in the mythology. A complicated one but he doesn’t trick people or deceive people, that’s Loki.

They didn’t understand that Freyja and Frigga are two different people. Yes, I know that Tim and Jim do sound similar but I assure you that doesn’t make them a single person.

Dwarves are wrong. Just, plain wrong.

Yggdrasil is completely wrong. It’s a metaphor, not so much a literal place.

And I can go on for every detail and gripe for hours.

Again, it’s because this is my religion that it is more deeply held as something to respect, but beyond that I don’t feel comfortable having others pretend to “draw lessons” about something which has been done incorrectly.

In other words, go ahead have your Elmo Rambo but don’t tell children that Elmo was born as a hard killer and then show them a machete.

From someone who doesn’t share the same religion, this really comes off as you telling me we need to treat your story better than other stories. If I was amenable to that argument I likely would already be an adherent of your religion. As I’m not they’re both on the same category for me.

Saw your flagged comment, but I have actually seen several games like this. Think I recently saw “Sex with hitler 2” trending on steam for instance. My suggestion for you if you don’t like that content, is to not consume it. For instance I chose not to use play “Sex with Hitler 2”

Do you have any references about what they got wrong and what the more traditional stories are?

I expected they took some liberties for storytelling purposes, but if it’s as egregious as you make it out to be, I’d love to hear the common versions of the stories.

Ok so the main plot point is entirely wrong because they didn’t bother translating anything enough or caring about the mythology.

Odin’s wife is Frigg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigg

This is known kinda like, Luke is Leia’s sister, Mary is the mother of Jesus that type of thing. But the way you pronounce the name is nearly identical to Freyja. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freyja

Freyja is then in the game pretending to be Odin’s wife.

They get this fundamental detail wrong because they have such a poor understanding of the mythology. I’m trying to think of an equivalent for how wrong it is… like maybe using Mary Magdalene instead of Mary, Jesus’ mother as the Virgin Mary. She really wasn’t no virgin…

This is amazing. Now I’d really like to see that Jesus game too.

Mythology and religion are remixes of remixes of remixes. Some iteration may be sacred to you, and therefore later mixes offensive to your sensibilities. That doesn't make newer works objectively bad.

When source material goes out of copyright then all bets are off.

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