#gow saga

[reddeadredemptionrookie]

do y’all think that Athena in God of War 2018 might’ve been a hallucination of the Norns?

I mean, she says the EXACT same thing Verðandi says to Kratos in Ragnarök:

So, yeah, that’s my theory anyway.

[lullabyofthejotnar]

"We have met Freyr, the brother of Freya, in Vanaheim. He is an unusual god. Roguish, not as impressive as his sister... yet his allies seem loyal, and include many I would not expect to cooperate. He does not resemble any great leader I have known, nor does he share their strenghts.

What makes him so able to unite former enemies? And will it work on Freya?"

- Kratos

[breakintomyhead]

atreus and calliope as omori sprites

the omori and god of war brainrot has been going really hard recently, so have this! i might make more of these lil guys, btw.

[mhsdatgo]

I love them your honour. (if you care)

[ender-goo]

God of War hyperfixation is lurking in the corner........... I can feel it........

[ace-memelord]

I was gonna wait until I had more art but you know what, I’ll go ahead and post it. Here is my take on GOW Callisto, who had horrendously little screen time and deserved better. Now she’s my OC! 🥰

I’ll spare the rant but basically I wanted a little more historically accurate garb for her. This actually started as a redesign for her armlet (since my GOW oc wears it) but then I went ahead and decided to go all the way :) more art and headcanons soon if anyone is interested 👀

[existentialcrisisetcetera]

tldr: trying to figure out how the oresteia and GOW: Ascension work in a timeline is inherently really funny

so, the oresteia documents the events following agamemnon's return from troy, such as clytemnestra killing him with her boyfriend and then seven years later her son orestes killing her (and her boyfriend). this leads to the furies coming after him for matricide and the formation of the athenian legal system as a direct result.

after this the furies were renamed the kindly/venerable ones and were only supposed to go after people indicted by the law rather than just enacting vengeance on those they deemed guilty.

we know kratos fought in the trojan war but exactly how long he was in the service of ares is unclear, but we do know gow:ascension (where kratos kills the furies) takes place six months after he breaks this vow. so we dont know whether it canonically happened before or after the oresteia, which is an issue bc the furies Are major players in both.

but.

but.

that means we have three potential options for what happened.

option 1: the oresteia happened first, and kratos was indicted in a court of law for breaking his oath to ares.

option 2: the oresteia happened first, but ares used his alliance with the furies to convince them to break their deal with athena and go back to vigilante justice.

option 3: GOW Ascension happened first and kratos killed the furies before the oresteia took place. this obviously causes sme problems with the timeline bc now who's gonna get orestes' ass for matricide? one can only assume that it was kratos during his ten years of service to the gods, and that means i get to give all of you the mental image of kratos in the first athenian trial as the prosecution

see under the read more for me trying to figure out how the gow timeline works with the trojan war:

oh good, you're interested.

so, the trojan war takes places between 1194 and 1184 BC, give or take, but the specific date doesn't matter as much as that it gives us a specific anchor to work from.

we know kratos fought in the trojan war, and im gonna say this was at the start of his career as a soldier as a) it's not like sparta could spare its army for random warmongering during the trojan war, like we see when kratos is "spreading the glory of sparta" and b) it would be a very good opportunity for a young spartan soldier to prove himself and be made a general at an unusually young age.

after this it gets a lot more blurry. we don't know how long he was a soldier, we don't know when he made his vow to ares, we don't know how long he was in the service of ares. we know calliope was around eight when kratos killed her and lysandra, and while spartan men were only allowed to properly start families once they turned thirty they did marry around 18-20 and did have sex with their wives which. yknow. probably made more than a few kids.

but hey we can see that the family does seem to have their own plot of land so kratos is Definitely over thirty by the times we flash back to like him giving lysandra a pendant and carving calliope's flute.

so. so far we know kratos was in his thirties by the time calliope and lysandra die. we know the trojan war was likely early in his career as a soldier, which he would have become eligible for when he was 20. so we'll eyeball it at GOW: Ascension taking place around a decade or so after the end of the trojan war, probably give a few years.

after that we know for certain kratos serves the gods for ten years. we are now roughly twenty and a half years on from the end of the trojan war.

god of war happens and now kratos is a god, and this is where things get spicy because we know kratos knows about and wishes he had fought in the battle of thermopylae, which occurred in 480BC. which is about 700 years on from the trojan war.

kratos was, as far as we can tell, the god of war for around 700 years, because there had to BE a greece (or greek city states. you know what i mean) left to fight the battle of thermopylae which there Was Not Much Of after GOW III.

this means zeus took much, much longer to kill kratos than previously believed/assumed. maybe it took a while for him to decide kratos was actually planning to overthrow him like ares tried to instead of basically throwing a godly tantrum and lashing out at zeus for making him immortal and also the events of ghost of sparta by conquering much of greece. which he was.

also there was a massive earthquake that destroyed much of sparta and other city states with a death toll as high as 20,000, and also lead to a helot uprising that was only put down with the help of other allied cities and inadvertently caused the athenian-spartan alliance to break down, which in turn was one of the causes of the first peloponnesian war.

that sure would be a fun interpretation of when GOW II happened :)

[that-howlingdrakesng]

OH BOY HERE WE GO

[transorkos]

I think god of war succeeds where other Greek myth based stories fail is that it does not try to justify the morals of Ancient Greece. It’s just “well that’s fucked up, go kill a god”. It’s also greatly aided by the main character not really existing in Greek stories (at least not as he is in the game). Defanging Ancient Greece by desperately trying to bring it to today’s moral standards is inaccurate at best and really weird and misguided at worst.

[hobgobbin]

homophobic that the only ways for me to play the original GoW games are ps3 and ps5. motherfuckers said no no ps4 cant have these ones

[reddeadredemptionrookie]

Calliope <3

[mourn-and-watch]

sometimes fandomposting is about connecting the dots that were carefully placed here by the writers to give their work another levels of meaning. sometimes fandomposting is about connecting the dots that were never meant to be here because obviously nobody who wrote it cared this much but you want it to be super deep so bad you go delusional

[angstandhappiness]

I AM IMPRESSED

OP's tags @screechthemighty : #does. ANY of this make sense.#this is for real one of my favorite parts of the game now that I've 100%'d it#it low key makes me insane#like yes the stuff about growth and betterment is -chef's kiss- but I love a good#''prophecies happen but not in the way you think'' plot twist#god of war#game of all time tbh#also I'm sure this has all already been said but I'm saying it again! it makes me FERAL I love this game fr#and to be fair this did also play into the greece saga a bit#but they leaned more into the ''trying to prevent outcomes just causes them'' angle#which is CLASSIC ancient Greek storytelling#that shit was happening all the time#it wasn't so much ''the outcome is actually something completely different because you only saw it through a keyhole''#which is again a low key fave of mine

Okay so related to that reblog I did from @forgedobsidian but

fr an underrated element of the plot of Ragnarok is how everyone--EVEN FATE ITSELF--interprets prophecy using limited information and their own biases, and how knee-jerk responses to that only make the situation worse. It's actually wild on a replay how right but not right literally everyone was and how the parts where they weren't right completely changed the outcome. Had to put this under a cut because I am once again screaming for too long about God of War but think about it!!

Atreus is depicted holding a father with a marred eye in his arms as that father is badly injured and possibly dying, and he seems upset. Everyone assumes it will be his own father (and to be fair, Kratos has been killed like. so many times). It's actually ODIN, the All Father, not technically "dying" but getting soul pokeball'd, and Atreus is upset because his offer of redemption was shut down. Atreus is seen alone at the end of the mural prophecy not because he lost his father, but because he has decided to go his own way in the world.

War god with a spear will lead the armies at Ragnarok. Assumption is it's Tyr, because that's the cultural knowledge everyone has. NO ONE can guess that it'd be Kratos, who leads them into Ragnarok with the spear that Brok makes for him.

Surtr and Sinmara create Ragnarok. This is depicted as a romantic embrace that causes them to meld, leading Atreus to assume that both of them are needed to be there. In the end, their love DOES create Ragnarok, but it's Surtr's sacrificing himself so Sinmara doesn't HAVE to die and the fact that they literally gave each other their hearts that does it, not a crystal gems fusion dance.

And again, people's knee-jerk reactions to the interpretations are at best a misunderstanding, and at worst actually cause the situation to happen, possibly while creating new and exciting problems in the process. Atreus and Kratos nearly have this massive rift in their relationship due to the whole "fate says Kratos is going to die" thing. Atreus trying to find Tyr to fulfill the Tyr-at-Ragnarok prophecy lets Odin right into their hideout, and arguably leads to Kratos being in the situation where he's the war god with a spear (Brok's death being a big part of the push towards them starting a war with Asgard). And Freya's helicopter parenting did cause Baldur to die a needless death (his hatred of her and inability to let that go being a big part of what gets him killed).

It is only in the circumstances where people choose to just calm the hell down and live their own lives, trusting in themselves and others rather than fretting about prophecy, that the outcomes are fairly happy. Faye not telling Kratos about his and Atreus's fates gave them that freedom for a long time. Kratos and Atreus agreeing that they make decisions for themselves mends the rift between them. Freya was right to point out that Kratos didn't have malice in his heart when he killed Baldur because it does kind of change the outcome. It means that even if he's the guy who keeps ending up in situations where he has to kill gods, he's not a monster. Which is the big important thing here in terms of his actions, his character development, everything. If he had let himself become convinced again that he was a monster, who knows where that might've taken them? Nowhere good, that's for sure!!!

It's like there's this distinction in the worldbuilding between prophecy and fate. Prophecy is set in stone, and everything we see prophesized does happen. But there's not really such a thing as fate. Just people who use past outcomes and behaviors to try and interpret prophecy. And if they don't take into account that people can change, or that they might not have all the facts, then they're inevitably going to miss what's really being shown.

[amethystmoonart]

As soon as I heard Kratos saying he knew how to play the lyre, I immediately thought he’d play with Calliope, so this came into being. It’s probably one of the reasons he won’t play anymore.

Honestly, I’m just obsessed with creating art of Kratos with Calliope, before his deal with Ares. In the GoW games before the Norse saga, he showed his absolute love for his daughter. Making a flute for her, kissing her as she was sleeping (even though it was an illusion), giving up Elysium just so she could still live on. Like, I can’t stop obsessing over the love he has for her. It’s taking over my life. 😅

Side note: I took artistic liberty with Calliope and Lysandra’s looks, just cause I wanted to.

[accursedvoid]

While the Six hundred Strike song is a banger I can’t help but feel out of sorts with how the conclusion of the vengeance saga went, Poseidon, who May I remind you is one of the Big Three being able to be defeated and then beaten?? By a mortal??? It makes no sense - I would have at least been mollified if he’d had help from another god but he doesn’t.

The gods - especially the big three - are supposed to be massive presences and in the previous songs this was shown well and when it came to the big three they were shown to be unable to be surpassed, they were the immovable object, which is why it’s always cunning and guile to get by them or having to make concessions/pay the price (thunderbringer comes to mind) point being it’s never a straight fight because you can’t fight a god on that level and expect to win.

For Odysseus to somehow get an eleventh hour GoW/anime style ability to defeat a god of that calibre feels SO sudden and out of place where before everytime he tries to go up against the big guns of the gods, he can’t - he ALWAYS loses, always has to pay a price - so this sudden turn feels so strange? That it took me right out of it, I don’t think this is how Poseidon’s conclusion should have been handled at all.

Cause I mean look at God Games, Athena is up against her father and his games, she wins, Zeus throws a fit, she basically nearly dies and has to PLEAD with Zeus to let Ody go - and this was a god! And Poseidon is on the same type of level as zeus! - and in this song Zeus gets ‘defeated’ in a way but in a way that makes sense! That doesn’t disrespect his power or his status as king of the gods, that leaves his reputation intact and keeps consistent with what we saw earlier.

And yet Poseidon gets defeated and beat down in a way that feels really contrived? It feels like it doesn’t fit right with the story and how it’s gone so far, if anything it feels like it breaks it - at least in my view.

And it’s REALLY unfortunate because I do like the song (I can’t stress that enough, it would go GREAT with some OCs of mine) but now I can’t listen to it without being taken out by knowing this.