I am hyped for God of War Laufey and I am tickled to death by all the edits of Faye air-juggling monsters while her husband and son tearfully mourn over her corpse. But it’s time to put all the funny new memes aside for a moment to have a real conversation. I really hope we don’t see Kratos again in God of War Laufey.
He made a brief cameo in the 20-minute gameplay presentation that capped off PlayStation’s State of Play event this week. And though his name is more or less still in the marquee, his appearance in Laufey worried me.
The opportunity to play as Faye is exciting. The God of War franchise hasn’t been very good to its female characters—all the important women in Kratos’ life exist only to die, often by Kratos’ own hands. There have been attempts to address those issues by introducing characters that actually get to stick around and do stuff like Freya, Angrboda, and Thrúd. Faye, a character with a wealth of consequential history ripe for exploring, feels like the natural extension of that idea. She’s certainly capable of taking care of herself and has goals that don’t seem to have anything to do with her husband. Having Kratos around, even as an occasional voice-in-the-sky as he was in the gameplay trailer, would undermine the whole project.
The new God of War series seems to focus on Kratos’ reckoning with his violent past and how that past influences his current identity as a father. We got a good resolution to that story with Ragnarok. With Laufey on the horizon, it seems like the next turn in the tale is to go beyond Kratos to examine the lives (or afterlife in Faye’s case) of the people around him. But in order for that story to hit the way I think it can, the way I’ve seen Santa Monica Studio tell incredible God of War stories, Kratos shouldn’t be involved. I want Faye’s journey to exist completely outside of the influence—as benign and sweet as it seems to be—of her husband.
There’s also one more thing I want—let the wives meet, please. Something that’s typically missing from bad guy redemption stories is the victims’ perspective—usually because they’re almost always conveniently dead. God of War has always had a built-in narrative device that allows characters to reach across what is normally the impenetrable veil of death, but we’ve never really seen Kratos meaningfully interact with his first family. Yes, there have been moments in which he’s had to hug or not hug them, but nobody’s having a real conversation in the midst of a quick-time event. Laufey represents my best chance to see a quick debrief between Kratos’ two wives. I imagine the things they would say to each other would make for a damn good conversation.