#i'm so fucking careful when writing kratos he is SO hard for me

[lazuliquetzal]

⭐️ for the latest chapter of Lie by Omission because I think I finally have time/energy to sit down and read it tonight! 🎉

HOOHOHO

After a brief pause, Atreus cleared his throat. “Mom said that fear is what keeps you alive.” The ashes weighed heavy on his belt. He imagined Faye— Laufey —on the run, hiding from the Aesir, the last of her kind. “It can.” “Then how do you know when to be afraid?” “You think. And act accordingly. We are gods, boy. Our fear will hurt more than just ourselves.” The boy fell silent. For the longest time, fear was not Kratos’s burden. He knew anger, shame, and sorrow, as intimately as he knew the scars on his arms. He knew joy, he knew love, and he knew loss, and he knew what it was like to be feared. But he did not have fear of his own until he saw his wife cradling a helpless creature in her arms, and it was only then that he understood how that emotion alone could reduce the king of the gods into a pathetic, child-killing tyrant.

God, I find writing Kratos to be embarassingly difficult. Embarassing because GOW was my actual childhood (Yes I was like six years old, yes I liked GOW before even reading PJO) and you'd think that I'd be able to get a handle on this guy having known this character for so long but haha no.

I think the hard thing is that it is so, so tempting to write Kratos as the typical repressed angry guy who doesn't know how to show affection to his son, so his arc should be about not trusting others and being vulnerable. But that's not really his story with Atreus--Kratos already had that whole plotline with Faye in the backstory for GOW 2018.

The reason why he's so awkward with his kid is because he is pants-shittingly terrified of hurting the boy. He killed his last kid; hell, he killed his entire homeland. He is so intimately aware of the damage a god can do, and the damage he, specifically can do, and Atreus is a very small and sickly boy. So his arc, to me, is less about learning to trust others, and more about learning to trust himself. Which is such a specific, subtle difference from the stock repressed character that it throws me off.

But anyway, yeah, fear! It's a theme. GOW (and by extension, my fic) is very much a fate narrative. I don't think fearing fate is a relatable problem to most of us. But the idea that the choices you make are ultimately pointless? The fear that you will never change?

Is your fear protecting you from making a mistake, or is it keeping you locked in a vicious cycle of bad decisions?

That's what LBO is about.