I should start by saying that I have not played the God Of War games. It’s not my kind of playing genre. However, I have enjoyed PlayFrame’s full story playthroughs of the 2018 God Of War and the sequel God Of War: Ragnarok. I am aware enough of the original games set in Greece and the story of the franchise to some degree, and I did some research prior so I have some idea what I’m talking about. At some point I would like to watch a playthrough of the Greek adventures, but we’re talking just the Norse period of Kratos’ life, so I know what I need to for this article unless there’s another game in this period I’m not aware of. I know enough that when Kratos takes his weapons from the old games to use again, I get the significance of the event to his character arc beyond nostalgia and gameplay mechanics.
Also, I am incredibly behind in his videos, but not this series.
Geeks & Gamers has reported on a rumor concerning a new entry from Sony’s Santa Monica game studio of a new game in the series, currently unconfirmed by Sony. The rumor, and both G&G and I stress it’s ONLY a rumor and thus means little on the internet without official confirmation, is that the game will focus on Kratos’ second wife, the Viking warrior Faye, aka Laufey The Just. This could be a trial balloon or just someone starting trouble. Either way, it got a reaction from the game’s fanbase…and it was not a positive one. In just the tweets chosen by Geeks & Gamers fans were complaining that Kratos was being replaced in the franchise, one commenter saying that not being able to play as Kratos in segments of the Norse games was bad enough. I don’t really agree, but I was a story watcher, not a gamer.
Atreus goes through his own story arc in the game, and getting to play as him allows the story to focus on him when needed, but not at the expense of Kratos’ only storyline. Kratos had to find peace with his past and Atreus with his future, as well as them bonding as father and son. The games took liberties with the Norse gods to match their story to the Greek gods so that Kratos has a reason to off them like he did the Greek pantheon. Note that there will be spoilers of significant reveals in this article if you’re waiting on the games or upcoming Amazon Prime live-action series (because Zeus/Odin forbid there be an animated series in the game’s art style with the original voice cast). I was drawn to the story, Dan of PlayFrame was enjoying the gameplay switch-up, and it all seemed to work well to me.
But what about following Faye’s story? Is there a story to tell? Can it be told without coming off as another gender swap, replacing Kratos with his “clearly superior girlboss” wife? I actually think it can, but not as a full game, or maybe not a game at all. The truth is there is something to tell…but not much.
I didn’t need to know the full story of the original Olympus battles to follow along with the Norselands story. I guess Kratos went to another dimension or just traveled far away after wiping out the Greek gods as revenge for what he suffered during the games. Research tells me that the “Ghost Of Sparta” was a Spartan captain who made a pact with Ares, the original Greek God Of War, to be a better warrior. However, Ares decided that Kratos’ ties to his wife and daughter were a problem so tricked Kratos into killing them off, and leading to their ashes covering his body, giving him the skin complexion we all know. (Long story that isn’t important right now.) This plan backfired, and Kratos got his revenge, took over as the God Of War, then in the part I haven’t researched got tired of the other gods’ crap and cleaned the slate. Sick of what he had become, he left Olympus and went to the Norse realms.
In Midgard, Kratos meets Faye, a Viking warrior, and after an initial spat Marvel Comics style, they eventually fall in love. They have a son that Faye wants to name Loki, but Kratos pushes for Atreus, Greek for “unafraid” or “fearless” according to Google. Yes, in this altered timeline this is supposed to be THAT Loki, the trickster that in Norse mythology isn’t the villain he is in the Marvel universes but is still a jerk in his own right, typical of the gods I don’t follow. Odin in this universe, however, is a total power-mad dictator who wanted to wipe out the Frost Giants. As it turns out, Faye is a Frost Giant by birth, making Atreus a demi-god born of a self-replacement Greek God and a Frost Giant who took human form. That’s a part of Loki’s backstory they won’t tell you about in mythology class.
At least they fared better than his last wife and kid.
We’re never told in the games what Faye/Laufey died from. During the course of their journey to bring her ashes to her home, where they learn her true origins, and fighting the Norse gods to keep Odin from manipulating Atreus like he does everybody else, they learn of Faye’s heritage, that she once fought Thor (who like Loki is not the guy you know from the comics and movies, and is even morally questionable in the mythology, though not the washout warrior he is here) in a battle so huge it destroyed a village. We know that she was friends with the two dwarves who make your player characters’ weapons and armor upgrades during the game, the bickering brothers Brok and Sindri, who also gave Faye the freezing magic axe Leviathan. Kratos uses it in the Norse games even after reclaiming the burning Blades Of Chaos in Ragnarok, which he hid away to push back his past misdeeds.
We also know that Laufey had the gift of prophecy and foresaw the fate of her people, of Kratos’ coming to Midgard, and Atreus’ future as Loki. Whether or not she foresaw her connection to Kratos and being the mother of his son I don’t recall. Faye does show up in various dreams, giving us her personality when alone with Kratos, helping him to forgive himself for what Ares tricked him into doing to his first wife and daughter, plus his usual violent response to it. That’s Kratos’s story arc in the game, self-forgiveness and bonding with his son, while Atreus learns what it meant to be a man, a demigod, and to not make his father’s mistakes. This is the focus of the second series of games, and having Faye gone is not only a catalyst for events but important to the story of a father and son and what it means to be a warrior and a man. It’s their story, but she plays an important role even, and perhaps because of, her absence.
Given how modern storytellers throughout the various formats of media act these days, it’s not surprising that fans are concerned. Any form of masculinity is “toxic”, except for the girlboss feminist protagonist (and sometimes antagonists), and any form of femininity is “sexist”, except for the gay male stereotype that “represents” all gay men. If all gay men had the personality of a giddy 16-year-old girl, anyway. Maybe 15. We’ve already seen Galadriel turned from the wise and loving ruler (admittedly I know less about Tolkien’s Middle Earth than I do the God Of War realms) into a raging girlboss warrior taking out monsters that most men would have trouble with and getting kicked out of her community for being too awesome for them. This has become par for the course, with the female warriors only deemed important to the writers after replacing a man rather than fighting alongside him. Source material lore means nothing to them.
The real problem to me, however, it that Faye or Laufey doesn’t have enough interesting story to tell because she’s not a protagonist in the games. She serves as inciting incident and meter for Kratos and Atreus’s separate and combined character arcs. I’ve told you probably everything important about her: prophesying her destiny and that of her future husband and son, having a fight with Thor that destroyed a village that our heroes come across later and have to put to rest, and setting the stage for the games to happen with her passing and what she arranged to happen to save her people, while bringing the two most important people in her life together in the process. I don’t think there’s a big enough story for a full-length game, and doing so changes her purpose within the narrative. She’s more important as a presence than she is as a protagonist, hard as that is for certain parties to understand. She’s a stronger influence as a sort of mentor than as the hero.
So how could you give Laufey her own story? Presumably they’d want her warrior period and not her time with her family, so it would be Laufey and not Faye.
Well, there are two options I can think of. One is to take the events we know, of the battle with Thor, the fight to protect the Frost Giants from themselves as much as Odin, and her encounters with Brok and Sindril and make shorter games out of them. Maybe some kind of flashback DLC additions or something. This would tell us more about her and maybe her time with Kratos and Atreus. The problem is whether or not these new levels would be interesting enough since they’d essentially be minigames where you could use aspects of both male characters’ game mechanics. The axe was already hers and she taught Atreus archery, so you’d get both weapons from the same character, and maybe Laufey is more athletic than her family, using speedy strikes and targeting attacks as well as her magic axe to fight in her own unique way. Maybe you’d focus more on the puzzles than the combat. You’d fill in a few gaps of her history, like how she met the dwarves, and getting to live the adventures we know she had, but would it really add to her mythos or say anything about Kratos and Atreus’s journeys? If it can’t do both, prepare for rejection not because she’s a woman or even another girlboss but because it adds nothing to the games or their combined story.
The other is to forget the game and tell these stories in adaptation. We’re already getting a live-action God Of War series from Amazon, so this would be a chance to not make the same mistake twice after Rings Of Power. We can hear the stories of Laufey, especially the Thor fight, and see them in action, but with no knew information. The more info released about her, the less mysterious and interesting she becomes, and you risk ruining her reputation by insisting she be super duper important beyond what she already contributes to the stories of the game. There have been novels and comics about both periods in Kratos’ life. Somewhere in there you show us Laufey or Faye’s time fighting the gods or serving as a warrior for her new people, but it’s a sidebar, a form of “flavor text”, that adds to the lore rather than replacing any part of it. These games are not her story, and trying to force it to might technically be possible but it would take the right creative team to make it good, and I don’t see that team out there right now.
I understand the concerns, and they’re justified given the industry’s recent actions. On the other hand I do see some minor potential for a story even though if the rumor turned out to be good this might be more for a cash grab than the “Message”. Overall, though, I don’t see enough here to make anything major out of it, so it might just be better for Sony to let her rest in peace. There aren’t any more stories in this franchise to tell, at least in the form of a fun enough video game. In the end, maybe they shouldn’t try.
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