#the power of hyperfixation is keeping me afloat on the gow raft and goddammit i'm gonna start rowing

[transsexual-ghost]

ok i am now having coherent thoughts about the Guys:

so gow:r at its core is about fatherhood and learning to let go, even if it's gonna hurt like a son of a bitch. (to me, at least)

the scene where atreus tells kratos that he must find the remaining giants, alone, because he has to. because at his core, atreus is a victim of a genocide. (odin and thor had a vendetta, and as far as he knows, he and angrbroda are the only living giants left in midgard) he wants to connect with his culture, because he never really got that with his mother and the only other giant he knows is angrbroda, and they've only known each other for a short amount of time. not to mention that she's also fourteen and watched her parents and the people around her die until it was just her and her grandmother

and atreus is only fourteen, he's watched the end of the world nearly come to fruition, not to mention that he saw brok get killed by odin, posing as tyr. and atreus. atreus has to take this on because he has to.

and we saw that kratos at the beginning and for most of the game, he had accepted that he was going to die, so he pushed atreus. but he wasn't willing to let go of his son. so he refused atreus being the champion of the jotnar, because what if he lost another child to something that could be prevented?

and i am not going to go into kratos' guilt complex about his first family. (for now. might be a separate post or a tag ramble, who knows)

so when kratos, at the end of the game says, "Loki will go... Atreus shall stay." not only is it soul shattering and the emotional equivalent of a brick to the face, it highlights his growth as a character and a father and his reluctance to let go.

but he does. and yeah, it hurts. but atreus'll return.

and kratos and thor are two sides of the same coin. both of them had shitty fathers who insisted that they were destroyers. hell, even thor acknowledges that at their core, both he and kratos can very easily destroy things. they love their respective children to death, and are willing to kill for them. (even if thor didn't treat his sons well. like he beat the living shit out of modi because his brother was killed by a much older god who was stronger than him.) but kratos broke out of the cycle of sons killing their fathers. (or fathers killing their sons)

yeah, he killed zeus. but instead of hurting his son and restricting his growth, kratos encouraged that. and yeah, kratos wasn't the best with atreus in gow:2018, but he was fucking terrified that he would hurt atreus like he hurt calliope. but he didn't.

thor, unlike kratos, never got to break out of the cycle. from what we've seen, asgard had a "kill or be killed" culture. you couldn't afford to be soft and kind. you had to be a hardass, you had to hurt people. and odin cultivated that, to the point where it was his downfall.

from what we've seen, odin encouraged thor to be a violent and drunken monster.

"I think, you kill."

and then thor died, leaving behind a violent and bloody legacy for his only surviving child to unpack.

so at its core, god of war: ragnarok is about breaking the cycle and having good supports.