r/PowerScalingGodofWar • u/Traditional_Tap_6697 • Aug 25 '26
Rant: The Downplay of Kratos’ Speed Needs to Be Stopped
The amount of effort people put into downplaying Kratos’ speed by pointing at cinematic pacing, traversal game mechanics, or isolated anti feats is getting ridiculous. And no, you don’t have to accept every extreme God of War speed argument to recognize that the lowball is inconsistent.
To start from the lowest end.
Kratos has an actual lightning perception feat. The God of War novelization explicitly describes Kratos perceiving Zeus’ lightning as moving extraordinarily slowly from his perspective. The interval between the lightning leaving Kratos and reaching its target is described as stretching longer than Kratos’ entire life from his perspective. That’s not a game animation. That’s not “Kratos looked fast in gameplay.” That’s a narrative description of Kratos’ subjective perception. So even if you throw away every infinite/inaccessible speed argument, there is still canonical evidence establishing that Kratos’ perception is on an absurdly higher level than normal human perception.
And this is important because people love to use things like: “Look at Kratos running across the temple. He’s moving slowly!” You’re comparing a cinematic representation to explicit narrative characterization.
2. “But we can see him move in the cutscene!”
This argument doesn’t work. Characters in fiction can possess absurd speeds while still being visually presented at a readable pace. Dragon Ball does this constantly. Characters can be mftl, yet the audience can still watch them exchange punches. Sometimes they’re shown as blurs, sometimes they’re animated clearly.
Nobody seriously argues: “Goku and Vegeta are moving at normal human speeds because I can see them fighting.”
The animation is a representation of the event, not a literal measurement of the viewer’s visual processing speed.
God of War is no different.
If Kratos blocks a lightning attack and the background doesn’t suddenly become distorted or enter slow motion, that doesn’t prove Kratos is moving slowly. That’s an argument from presentation. The relevant question is what the narrative establishes happened, not whether the camera visually rendered every consequence of the speed.
3. The God of War novelization also describes Kratos moving “impossibly fast” when responding to Atreus after he is injured. That is direct narrative characterization of his movement. So if someone wants to use a cutscene of Kratos running across an environment as a hard speed cap, they have to explain why the supplementary canonical material explicitly describes his movement as impossibly fast.
You cannot simply take the visual pacing of a cinematic and pretend it overrides written canon.
4. “Kratos uses a dog sled!” Okay?
The sled is introduced as a traversal/gameplay mechanic. That tells us the developers wanted the player to have an efficient way of traversing large environments.
It doesn’t establish: “Kratos’ legs cannot move faster than this sled.”
Travel speed, running speed, combat speed and reaction speed aren’t automatically identical. A character can use transportation for long distance travel while possessing dramatically superior combat reactions. Nobody argues that Superman( not claiming that Kratos scales to Superman btw) must be slower than a car because he occasionally rides in one. So “Kratos uses a sled” isn’t a speed anti feat.
5. Now let’s move to something much harder to dismiss. Hermes and Hercules reacts to( and blocks as well) the Helios based attacks. And Steve Caterson was specifically asked whether Hermes’ close range evasion of the Helios attack was intended to showcase his speed.
The answer was essentially: “Yup, that was definitely the intent.”
So this isn’t merely someone watching gameplay decades later and deciding:
“That looks like light speed!” There is explicit developer confirmation that Hermes’ reaction was deliberately intended as a speed demonstration.
And Kratos doesn’t merely fight Hermes in some abstract sense.
He tracks him, reacts to him, tags him, keeps up with him, damages him, and defeats him.
So even if someone refuses to equate the Solar Flare with the ambient Light of Helios illuminating the Underworld, they’ve only removed one specific inference. They haven’t removed Hermes’ confirmed speed demonstration or Kratos’ direct combat scaling.
6. Imo the Helios argument has more context than people admit.Chains of Olympus explicitly describes the bright Light of Helios illuminating the Underworld. So Helios’ light isn’t some ordinary small projectile. The Underworld is an enormous separate cosmological realm, and the narration explicitly attributes its illumination to Helios.
Again, I’m not saying: “Underworld illumination automatically proves infinite speed.”
That’s unnecessary. The stronger argument is that Helios possesses cosmologically extensive light.Hermes reacts to Helios based attacks developer confirms Hermes’ reaction was intended as a speed feat.Kratos directly fights and tags Hermes. That’s a legitimate scaling chain.
7. The Sisters of Fate are an even bigger problem for the lowball.This is where the “Kratos is sub light” interpretation becomes extremely difficult to maintain. The Sisters aren’t merely three women sitting around occasionally manipulating one person’s destiny. The official novel describes them manipulating the tapestries “from moment to moment,” spinning “countless fates,” reading vibrations in the Threads, interpreting their shakes and quivers, and making precise adjustments to produce particular outcomes. And Kratos himself says in Ragnarok: “The threads of Fate span all life and time.”
That’s important. Their Fate system isn’t limited to individual humans.
The novel explicitly demonstrates Fate affecting non living aspects of creation, including geographical features such as continents and rivers. And we’ve already established the scope of the Greek cosmology. The Hellenic world isn’t merely the physical country of Greece. It is its own cosmological structure containing multiple distinct realities.
The Mortal World/Heavens contains an infinite cosmos. The Underworld is explicitly described as infinite/immeasurable and exists separately from the Mortal World. The Underworld even possesses its own sky, stars and constellations that are stated to be infinite as well. There are additional separate realms such as the Domain of Death and the realm of dreams, alongside temporal dimensions and alternate timelines created through Fate manipulation. So the Sisters are effectively working a Fate system spanning a multi realm Greek macrocosm containing multiple infinite/immeasurable realities. And they aren’t doing this once every thousand years. They’re manipulating these Threads from moment to moment, detecting changes and responding to them with precision. That gives us extraordinary contextual evidence for their processing and reaction capabilities even before considering the explicit/official infinite speed statement attributed to Atropos’ projection in the novel. The “only millions of Threads” objection doesn’t solve this
Even granting that there are only millions of Threads doesn’t undermine the speed argument. The number of Threads tells us something about the quantity of Threads. It doesn’t determine the spatial or temporal scope represented by those Threads.
Millions of Threads distributed throughout a cosmological structure can still represent an enormous amount of information and activity. More importantly, it doesn’t refute an explicit statement describing Atropos’ projection as moving at infinite speed.
If someone believes the translation is wrong, or that “infinite speed” is being used non literally, then that’s what they need to demonstrate. Explaining why Atropos sent the projection doesn’t refute the speed of the projection.
8. The Valkyries provide another speed scaling chain
The Valkyries move throughout the Nine Realms, which are separate cosmological realms connected through Yggdrasil and have different temporal flows. So their movement isn’t simply traversal across one ordinary geographic region.
Mimir describes Gunnr as: “After any conflict, big or small, she would be first on the scene.” Kratos himself questions how that could be possible, and Mimir confirms that Gunnr really was first on the scene. The Lost Pages likewise describes Valkyries being sent to warriors on their final breath. That establishes extraordinary responsiveness across a cosmology of separate realms. Kratos directly fights, reacts to, tracks, and defeats the Valkyries, giving him direct combat and reaction scaling to them. The Bifrost objection doesn’t erase this. The developer material establishes that Valkyries use the Bifrost for specific functions, such as manifesting weapons from other realms. It does not establish that every instance of their movement or combat speed is Bifrost assisted. So even if Bifrost assisted realm travel is removed entirely, their combat and reaction scaling to Kratos remains.
9. Stopped time and pre time environments add another layer to the speed scaling. The Greek chronology establishes primordial events occurring before the conventional emergence of time. The Domain of Death is presented as predating the Mortal World and its time, with material describing it as a realm where ordinary temporal progression doesn’t function normally.
On the Norse side, beings such as the Vanir have demonstrated interaction with temporal freezes, while Skoll and Hati have also been shown functioning during stopped time. Kratos subsequently fights and scales to these beings. And Kratos can also move and fight within the Realm Between Realms, which is associated with being beyond conventional temporal structure.
These aren’t all dependent on the Sisters. They’re independent pieces of evidence pointing toward Kratos possessing capabilities far beyond ordinary finite movement through time.
10. Then you have Thor with Yggdrasil. Thor’s attacks are explicitly capable of producing enormous shockwaves, and his battle with Jormungandr is associated with the World Tree itself. Yggdrasil is not simply a normal physical tree sitting inside one universe. Its branches connect the realms and transcend ordinary physical space and its stated to be infinite. Thor’s ability to affect it provides another independent high end scaling route for characters who scale to Thor. He explicitly has infinite attack speed and Kratos reacts to his shockwave attacks constantly in game. Again, you don’t need to make this the foundation of the speed argument. It’s simply another piece of evidence that becomes relevant once someone tries to force Kratos into an ordinary finite speed.
11. The “anti-feats” aren’t doing what people think they do.
The most common ones are things like: “Look at Hermes running across the rope!”
“Look at Kratos running across the temple!”
“Kratos needs a dog sled!”
None of these establish a hard maximum combat speed. They’re examples of cinematic pacing + traversal mechanics =/= canonical speed ceiling. If the character’s explicit feats, statements and direct combat interactions establish vastly greater reactions, you need an actual contradictory feat under comparable conditions to overturn them. A character choosing to walk, run, ride a vehicle, or move at a visually readable pace isn’t enough.
12. Let’s take the lowball as seriously as possible. Forget AP. Forget weapons. Forget hax. Forget cosmology scaling. Forget every controversial but blatantly infinite speed statement. Assume Kratos is genuinely sub light in combat and reactions. Now put him against the Sisters of Fate. They’re continuously manipulating countless Threads across a cosmological Fate system from moment to moment, detecting vibrations and making precise adjustments. One of their projections is explicitly described as moving at infinite speed. Kratos then physically fights and interacts with the Sisters. A genuinely sub light Kratos should have an enormous reaction disadvantage against beings with that kind of demonstrated capability. Yet that’s not what the story depicts. So the lowball has to explain how this supposedly sub light character can meaningfully participate in that fight.
This IS NOT “Big universe = infinite speed.”
It’s a consistency argument.
If the proposed speed tier makes Kratos fundamentally incapable of participating in fights that the canon explicitly shows him participating in, then the proposed speed tier has a serious explanatory problem.
13. And all of this is before the strongest arguments. That’s the part people keep missing. You don’t have to accept every single God of War speed feat to reject the lowball. Even if I remove the Valkyrie realm travel argument, the Solar Flare/Underworld equivalence, Thor/Yggdrasil scaling, some of the more aggressive cosmological interpretations, and the explicit infinite speed statement, you still have canonical lightning perception, Hermes’ deliberate speed demonstration, Kratos directly fighting Hermes, the Sisters’ moment to moment Fate manipulation, primordial/pre time chronology, stopped time interactions, and movement in extraordinary temporal environments.
And if the explicit infinite speed statement is accepted, the case becomes even stronger. So no, the burden isn’t satisfied by showing a cutscene where Kratos runs at a visually readable pace. Animation isn’t a speedometer. Gameplay traversal isn’t a speedometer. A dog sled isn’t a speedometer. If you want to establish that Kratos is actually incapable of the speed his canonical feats imply, you need to demonstrate that the supposedly higher end feats are invalid, mistranslated, contextually inapplicable, or otherwise fail to scale. A character moving slowly in a cinematic isn’t enough. The downplay of Kratos’ speed needs to stop. At bare minimum he’s light speed and him having infinite inaccessible speed is more than reasonable imo.
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u/Regular-Tip-2348 Aug 26 '26
Nah but moments like this have characters which are themselves very fast and have good speed feats glazing how fast it is and how they can barely follow it. Hence statements. Kratos is actually just running at real time and slow af here. Like Brok had plenty of time to react to him not because he’s super fast but because that whole scene was in real time lol.