@bladeofcreation: Sorry, but everything you stated, I've already refuted and explained why that isn't the case in my eyes. Saying the women are a bundle of tired tropes is looking at what the story presents to you in a very shallow way that willfully ignores all the positive aspects in order to paint some picture that just isn't true.
LiquidPrince's forum posts
@imhungry said:
@liquidprince: Faye was the last of a dying race yet we actually know nothing about the circumstances of her death. Sure she didn't commit suicide but it also sounds like she was well enough before her death to do some family bonding in a constructive way. Instead, we're presented with the implied image of a woman who is secretive and manipulative who leverages her death as apparently the only possible solution to having Atreus and Kratos grow.
Also, yes I'm aware that characters in the God of War series are based around mythological figures. I mean, really? I'm not actually sure why you brought this up because at least in the specific context of the Frigg and Baldr story, Frigg isn't at all a villainous figure. She is, in fact, largely the victim (alongside Baldr) to Loki's schemes, she doesn't hurt Baldr at all. You're right that the overprotective mother trait is ripped straight from the myth but it was absolutely a choice by the writers to change her story the way and emphasize her negative characteristics the way they did.
Finally, I don't know what else to say about the Valkyries other than to repeat that having a flimsy lore justification does about as much for me as Quiet breathing through her skin. The way a developer can 'win', as you put it, is to not write your subplot in such a way that involves Kratos brutally killing these women and then having them thank him for it. It doesn't matter that in-universe they aren't really dying because that doesn't change what is literally happening on screen and the themes that come along with it. Writing your subplot in such a way as to not lean on tired tropes isn't that hard.
We're clearly reading the game fairly differently and that's fine, doesn't make either experience less valid.
Not fully fleshing out Faye's backstory in a game that is primarily about the relationship between a father and son doesn't make her a poor female character. You get plenty of information about the kind of person she was, the skills she possessed and the things she accomplished all through out the game via the Lore Markers, Mimir and through Kratos and Atreus themselves. To say she was a poor representation of women in the game because she wasn't ever present is kind of a weak argument to me. Do we have more to learn? Sure. But what we know is she was strong, capable, loving and nurturing.
As for your Valkyrie argument, you can twist anything to seem more perverse or gross if you try hard enough. There is a big difference between them thanking them for him killing them, and them thanking him for helping them get released. I remember one of my English professors back in the day making a comment that the words fuck, sex, love, bang etc... all referred to the essentially the same action, and yet the meaning behind the use of each term was vastly different. Making love and fucking someone are in action two similar things, and yet context is everything. How that applies in this conversation is you're choosing to take an innocent moment of the Valkyries thanking Kratos for helping them get free, and twisting it to sound creepy and perverse. Kratos as a character doesn't even want to engage with the Valkyries if you remember and it is Atreus and Mimir begging to help them go free that makes him do it.
So then would the solution just be to have the Valkyries not thank him for what happened? Kratos frees them and they just go alright peace out? Would that somehow drastically change the actual fact that the Valkyries both in terms of lore and in terms of gameplay are some of the most formidable opponents around? It's honestly nitpicks like this that drive a lot of game developers to prefer not having female characters in the first place. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. "The Valkryies thanked Kratos for helping them go free, how despicable. A proud Valkryrie would never stoop so low as to thank the man who helped them. Now if Lara Croft was the one ripping off their wings, we're in business."
@efesell said:
Well... "They'll do better in the next game" does not do anything to change my current opinion of the character.
There feels like a real theme of counting on things that aren't actually there in this discussion.
I mean, for a character that was unseen, there was PLENTY of back story that was plainly expanded upon in the game, on top of what was more subtly implied. If you want to argue that wasn't enough, that's not something I can really try and change your mind on, but for a character you don't actually see, you still get plenty of explicit history, back story, character traits, personality etc...
@efesell said:
I just don't think you can hide an entire character between the lines and expect everyone to care about them at all.
As for Freya that ending may well fit within the arc but I don't think it's good enough for some folks to overcome just the pure optics of what is going on.
Sure, I could buy that. But that doesn't make her a bad character in the way that she was being discussed in the podcast. Just one that needs to be fleshed out in future games. What we know of her so far indicates a strong and loving character and I think it's a bit cheap and unfair to call it out as straight up bad or poor representation, simply because the focus of this first game was to establish the relationship of father and son while laying the ground work for more.
@imhungry said:
People can take away all sorts of different readings when engaging with any media, so just as I understand that you came away with your thoughts written above, you should probably understand too that other people, myself included, came away from this game with very different feelings on the women and are not 'fundamentally misunderstanding' anything.
Everything that you've written, in fact, to me reads as precisely hitting on some of the big problems with the women! It's true that by the end of the game we know Faye isn't a woman-in-a-refrigerator in the typical sense of the term in that, as you say, it isn't really a revenge story. What we learn instead is that she's essentially orchestrated the entire events of the game which, to me, makes her even more poorly written. She isn't killed in service of a revenge plot, instead she sets it up so that her death will bring Dad and Boy on a journey of manhood. Only by taking down her protective warding around the home can the game, and by extension the lives of Kratos and Atreus, continue. It's the game's writing saying flat out that only through her death can Dad and Boy grow and, worse still, that this idea was something Faye herself bought into too (apparently, since we never actually get to see her).
On the flip side, Freya is then laden with all the typical tropes of a manipulative, toxic mother negatively affecting her son's life for her own personal gain (by her own admission!). Look, it's great that you viewed her as a primarily loving and self-sacrificial character but she's such an obvious collection of 'overprotective mother' traits in the worst way. She's manipulative, incredibly secretive, desperate, and exerts her power on her son by her own will in a ultimately twisted and negative way.
All this is made even worse by having these two be the only women in the game, blatantly asking you to compare them. You have Faye, the mother who knew her place was to disappear from the life of her son, painted as a hero and a great woman. Then you have Freya, who was overly controlling of her son's life and couldn't let him go, eventually being presented as warped and twisted, tragic, villainous. The underlying message there being that these women have no place in the lives of their children after they grow up, if they want to be remembered fondly they should know their place.
As for the Valkyries, I'll just say that creating an in-game lore justification doesn't really make me feel any more positive about using tired imagery of women thanking someone for killing them.
Again, I'm not here to disagree with you or invalidate your opinion, just to say that other opinions do in fact exist and to write them off as somehow misunderstanding the game seems pretty strange. It's fine if you don't agree with anything I've written.
You could look at Faye like that. Or you can look at it as Faye was inevitably going to die, since all the Giants were slowly dying out, (with the world serpent literally being the last living giant) and instead of Faye, who could have very well shaped a positive relationship with her family if she were still going to be alive, letting her family crumble after her death, she proactively sets them upon a mission that she knew could help them grow. It's not like Faye purposefully committed suicide in order to jump start the adventure. She was one of the last of a dying race.
As for Freya... You do realize that the character is based on a pre-existing mythological figure right? This is literally the character that went around and made every living thing in existence promise they wouldn't harm her son. She is flawed, twisted, villainous and warped by design. It's what makes her character tragic. If they were gonna change those traits, they probably wouldn't have used Freya and Baldur in the first place, which would mean an entirely different game.
As for the Valkyries, again, they're literally not being killed. They're being freed from their corrupted physical bodies. You can put a negative spin on anything if you really want to. And in this case there really doesn't seem like a game developer can win. The strongest enemies in the game are female, cool, but why does Kratos actually have to kill them?
@chaser324 said:
Faye is almost the definition of a MacGuffin. She's barely a character at all. A few little details about her are revealed along the way, but trying to hold her up as a good character seems like a huge stretch.
Freya is a pretty solid female character throughout most of the game, especially given this franchise's history of some truly awful treatment of women, but it is really undercut by the turn at the end.
Like I said above, I think a lot of what makes Faye a good or interesting character is read in between the lines. It's the affect that she has had on Kratos and Atreus. Having seen Kratos in multiple games prior and seeing him in this one as an actual character with pathos says a lot about the female influence in his life. Is Faye the greatest female character? No, not even close. But what we know of her is a good basis for what we can expect of her in future games.
As for Freya, I honestly don't know what more to say then I have above. If you or anyone wants to tell me how they would change the scene at he end there and have it maintain the same level of emotional tragedy, I'm all ears. For the record I'm not saying, it's your duty to write a better ending or anything, but I thought the ending was handled pretty well, but there are people twisting and turning the end calling it bad, but not really saying how it could be better.
@simmant said:
@liquidprince: I don't disagree with the premise that you can have strong female characters who are feminine or maternal, but I think a woman thanking her child for trying to kill her and getting enraged when you stop him is an awful way to illustrate that character's maternal nature.
I think the flaw in your argument is... that that never happened. You are remembering something that never happened in the game in order to make what was actually a heartbreaking and tragic moment fit into your narrative of how God of War treats its women poorly. She never thanks him... She says she loves him and is willing to die for him if that means that he can move on from the torment that she had inflicted upon him. There's a big difference between someone being choked out and thanking the person doing it, then just taking it and with your final moments telling them that despite events transpiring, you still love them. Like I said in my write up above, Freya's story was the a dark mirror of Faye's and was meant to be tragic all around.
Loading Video...
@simmant said:
I think claiming anyone, except possibly Dan who seems to have no clue what was happening in the story, had a fundamental understanding of the women in that game is incorrect and insulting. If you go back and look at the discourse around this game when it came out, this was one of the most frequently brought up criticisms and was written about extensively. It isn't something that some of the staff just invented for the GOTY discussions.
Faye isn't a character, she is the implication that at one point there was a character and the idea that she is a strong female character because there are implications that she knows what would come out of her husband and son's journey is nonsense.
As for Freya, I honestly liked her for a lot of the game and thought the had a lot of room to make her a strong and dynamic character, which is what makes that ending such a total bummer. The strangling scene plays off a long history of imagery of violence against women in media. And the way the the whole ending is presented, for me at least, removed any subtly or intrigue around her character in favor of some ham fisted point that Mom's can be just as shitty as dad's, just in different ways.
All your points are just rehashing exactly what the game tells you, like you assume no one else was paying attention to it's explanation. But that isn't problem. The problem is that the games's explanations for the actions of its very, very few female characters are often bad or half baked and none of them are actually written as strong characters.
This really depends on what your definition of a strong female character is then. Because it seems to me that in a lot of discussions similar to this one, a female acting feminine or maternal is often considered bad writing nowadays in favor of just having women as reskinned men. I remember the following video making some points that I feel are relevant to this discussion.
Loading Video...
@efesell said:
I don't just want to be told how great and amazing characters are.
Hopefully I'm not coming off as dismissive of your opinion or anything but the case I made above isn't about being told she was great. It was about reading between the lines and seeing what the influence of that character had over Kratos and Atreus. There was never a line of dialog that was needed that was like, "man, Faye was just such a badass. You shoulda seen her." My whole argument was that the characters strength could be seen through every other aspect of the characters growth and the importance of their journey.
If you want to argue that how she propelled Kratos and Atreus and the intentions she had that were hinted at at the end of the game wasn't enough to make her a distinct character in her own right, I could buy that. But that doesn't make her a weak character. Just one that has more room to be fleshed out in sequels.
@efesell said:
My primary issue with Faye as a strong character is really just that she isn't a character at all. It's all informed, it's all trust us she's really great. The player is given very little actual insight of their own and they designed the game in a way that was impossible to allow it.
Show us characters being awesome, let us see how rad she was.
But that's where the subtlety of the character development comes in, in my opinion. Faye is not a great character because she's running around ripping off Ogre heads, but rather she's a great character because of how she has affected the people in her life. The fact that she has set up this grand adventure and the two protagonists are set on honoring her final wishes says a lot about the person she was.
Could she have been a demon slaying badass? Sure, why not? In fact it was implied that she was, considering the Axe Kratos wields belonged to her originally. But an awesome character is more then just someone running around ripping off heads. The fact that her influence single handedly makes Kratos come off as more then a rage monster says a lot about what type of character she was. And the mystery and empty spots we have with regards to her back story can always be expanded upon in future games.
Log in to comment