https://www.resetera.com/threads/i-have-problems-with-my-father-and-i-think-about-god-of-war-2018-all-the-time.528238/
Guess who
Love each other or die trying.
My father and I do not speak. By my count we have spoken once in five years and it was a terrible blowout. I had attended that conversation with the hopes of beginning to reconcile, but all it did was cement our hostility and alienation from each other. While I know mutual excommunication is the right decision given the state of things, it is not the outcome I wanted. I chose this; this was the decision I made. But there is no world where I would prefer to have no relationship with my family. It is just the decision I had to make. I stand by this decision. But I wish this was not the outcome.
I spent much of my life trying to figure out how to talk to my dad. We had lots of problems when I was growing up. There was a lot of animosity and resentment. There were a lot of problems with expectations and communication conflicts we never got over. My father was like an armored tank that rolled up to conflict with its treads still muddy from the last time he rolled over me. Even at rest, his engine roared. I was terrified of him and I was defenseless against him. The older I got and the longer we knew each other, the worse things got because nothing ever actually got resolved. Every issue was just another iteration of existing problems that never went away. I moved out Christmas Day 2016.
I still spoke to my mother on an inconsistent monthly schedule in the years that followed. She often urged me to fix things with my father. She would encourage me to talk to him and just start the conversation and we could work on it. I resisted for a long time, but I still thought about what a conversation with my dad would look like. I did not know where to begin the conversation we would need to have. It was unimaginable. Fixing our relationship would be like doing a puzzle in the dark. Even if I had the right piece I wouldn't know where to put it. I wouldn't even know what I was working towards. Our problems were impenetrable. For a couple of years, I preferred not to try and instead just enjoy the isolation I'd gained since moving out.
In April 2018, I took a shot to play the new God of War. I had never played God of War before, but it was a series I'd absorbed plenty information about through its cultural presence. It was a series I believed to be crass and juvenile. I did not believe I could connect with a character like Kratos, a relic from an era of gaming I disliked, but evidently GoW2018 was a triumph that proved people like me wrong and I wanted to see for myself. In the end I did connect with Kratos, and I think Santa Monica did an incredible job interpreting their character in a new way, and I really resonated with the character drama and the new world of God of War. At the heart of everything I enjoyed, I most connected with the relationship between Kratos and Atreus.
To cut right to the chase with the predictable purpose of this thread, God of War (2018) reminds me a lot of my father and our inability to communicate. This was probably obvious to you when you clicked the thread. But it's kind of more complicated than just that.
Kratos, like my father, is a hulking, angry, inexpressive patriarch. They are both distrustful and suspicious of everyone around them. They express themselves physically and violently or not at all. They both hold an unshakable conviction in what they believe is the right thing to do and do not care if other people are hurt enforcing that. Kratos and my father both experience tension and difficulty connecting with their son, who did not turn out how they wanted. What playing as Kratos allowed me to do is play a character who is defined by all the same things I perceive my father to be. For a while, I got to be "the dad" with Atreus as my stand-in.
The conceit of God of War is of course that all of these traits Kratos has are flaws. They are problems he must overcome. They are limitations that are ruining what should be an important relationship with someone close to him. After 20 hours with Kratos and 10 more grinding the platinum, I had connected with the fatherly analog in a way I could not connect with my father. I was able to see Kratos' flaws as a burden he has self-imposed, as a consequence of trauma he cannot acknowledge, and as a victim of his own cruel masculinity. I was able to see his strained relationship with his son as his punishment, as the tragic cost of his lifelong malice, and I was able to understand that all of these things were things he must overcome if anything were to change. But most of all, I saw Kratos as someone who wanted things to be different but did not know how to get there. By the end of the game, Kratos had taken his first steps in making amends with Atreus. It hit me really hard in the heart because that is what I wanted. I wanted my dad to want to be different too. I wanted to take those first steps.
I thought about this for a long time. For a year and a half, actually. For months I meditated on the fact I did want things to be different. I wanted my father to overcome himself and try to connect with me. I decided that if this ever happened, I would be receptive to it. I had to open myself up to resolution if resolution could occur. But as much as I benefitted from a story from the perspective of Kratos, the truth is I am still Atreus. I am still the small boy who sees his father as a massive mystery and a frightful presence. I did not know what my father actually wanted. I wanted him to want to change, but my father is not Kratos. Instead I had to just hope there was something in my father that wanted things to be different too. Because it was true for Kratos, maybe it could also be true for my father.
This was how I fooled myself into that fated and failed attempt to reconcile. After three years of silence and standing my ground, I went back to the house I grew up in for the first time since I'd left to try to talk about the problems we had and what had to happen if things could ever improve. It was such a disaster. My father was worse than the day I left him. My mother had been lying for a long time about his supposed willingness to work on things. I left that day with things much worse than they were when I arrived. I do not speak to either of my parents anymore because they do not want things to be different - they just want me concede. I blame my mother for misleading me and wearing me down to trick me to come back home under the pretense of mutual goals. But truthfully it is not my mother that really convinced me to go back, it was Kratos and the possibility he represented that maybe my mother was not lying. I should not have believed her. Now we don't speak either.
It's been a few years now and I still think about God of War a lot. I have not replayed it and instead just hold it in my mind as this weird, misty memory that is partly fictional and partly biographical. I view Kratos as a sort of tragic ideal. For all the things Kratos has done, for all his irredeemable choices and negative qualities, for as terrible as he has always been and as bad as he still is, he wants to be different. I could forgive my father for so much if only he wanted to be different. I could let go of so much pain, so many memories, if that were the case. Kratos ends up filling this space in my mind of what I wish my father was. I do not wish I had a completely different father. I do not wish none of the things we've been through never happened. But I want him to change. I want him to humble. I want him to be open to what I could teach him and gain some perspective other than what he's always clung to. To call to use an "old internet" meme, "if Kratos was my dad, things would be different."
But the other thing I got from God of War is that by embodying Kratos and casting Atreus in my place is that I was also able to experience the cathartic release of just... loving me. I am able to be my father, let go of my conflicts, and love my son. Through Kratos I am able to show Atreus the love I wish my father would show me and feel the eventual respect and approval I wish my father would feel for me. I feel such a gentle sadness in longing for that shred of love and approval. The way I connect with these characters and their story is not consistent. Sometimes I am Atreus. Sometimes I am Kratos. Sometimes I am me, sometimes I am my father. I gain so much from this because it gives me the faintest taste of what things could be like if things ever got better for me and my dad. It does not overpromise. It doesn't show me a world where everything is right with us. But it demonstrates that moving forward together could be possible.
But we would have to both want it the way I want it. And that's not what he wants. My dad is not Kratos. So that's not what we have.
At this point, I do not believe my father and I will ever reconcile. (I am focusing on my father in this topic, but the same is true for my mother. Unfortunately there is no video game that captures the anxiety of my relationship with my mother.) He has qualities that are inexcusable, believes things that are untenable, and has said and done awful things that he will not even acknowledge. For my father and I to ever reconnect he would need to transform himself and I don't believe he ever will. I do not mourn the loss of my father as the man he is right now, but I mourn the relationship with the man my father could be - the one that only exists in my hopeful imagination. So all I've got is Kratos and the lesson he imparts: We all have the capacity to change, we all have the ability to be better people, if only we can muster up the humility to want that for ourselves. Things do not have to be as they have always been. Even if we cannot make up for the past, we can still try to do better for the future. That is the ideal of Kratos - that even the worst of us are capable of better things. We just have to want that. It is such a terrible shame when people don't. They cannot be saved. They can only save themselves.
God of War is obviously not the only story about fathers and sons who cannot communicate. I think there are even other video games that explore stories with similar themes in better ways. But the succinctness and simplicity of this story and the active role I was able to take in it still affects me a lot to this day. A lot has already been said about the way the game depicts and unpacks the restrictions of masculinity, so I didn't talk about that here, but I think God of War is a good story well told that really succeeded in what it was trying to do. I am glad Santa Monica did not give up on Kratos, even if I've given up on my dad.
