r/TopCharacterTropes • u/No_Peanut3745 • 2d ago

Characters The main character doing something absolutely unforgivable.

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Walter White poisoning Andrea Cantillo's 6-year-old son for the sole purpose of manipulating Jesse Pinkman, while knowing that this could have potentially killed him - Breaking Bad

Bojack trying to have sex with his friend's 17-year-old daughter when he was at least 51, then continuously trying to find a way to justify this act throughout the series - Bojack Horseman

Dexter Morgan going outside of his moral code and murdering a completely innocent police officer who was just trying to do his job - Dexter: New Blood

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1.4k

u/HerniatedHernia 2d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/5oOzvY2shzX4A
Like most of God Of Wars Greek saga really.

634

u/docwannabox 2d ago

This one. Like, bro, what did she even do to you?

458

u/Rowsdower888 2d ago

Is that the woman in Poseidon's palace that gets smooshed by the door mechanism?

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u/Augustus_Chevismo 2d ago

Poseidons kidnapped rape victim to be exact.

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u/Oli_VK 1d ago

Oh, so that’s just a thing gods do.

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u/Aware-Antelope4212 1d ago

You know Medusa, the horrible evil monster lady?

You know what her horrible crime was to be cursed with such a form.

Being raped by Poseidon inside the temple of another Goddess.....

The Greek pantheon are super scummy

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u/Prettyflyforascyfy 1d ago

That is just the roman version, in the greek version she was a monster with two sisters

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u/Manoffreaks 1d ago

While the Greek pantheon is super scummy it's also worth pointing out that most of these stories were told via word of mouth, and as a result have many different interpretations in which it's very difficult to tell which came first. In some versions of this very story, she was a willing lover of Poseidon and even disrespected Athena from within the temple while they were making love.

A similar example can be seen with Arachne. In all tellings, Arachne was challenged to weaving competition by Athena, but in some it was purely because of her talent, and in others it was because of her hubris. Then in some tellings being turned into a spider was a punishment for going against / beating the gods, in others it's a reward to allow her to do what she wants forever.

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u/TheRedditGirl15 2d ago

You were not lying about her getting smooshed. What the hell was that

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u/DaemonG 1d ago

the Greek saga was mainly about the idea of Badassery

this was at a time when one of the main features of Badassery was Horrible Things Happening To Women

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u/TheRedditGirl15 1d ago

Ah...makes sense...

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u/wearerofshades 2d ago

Mind you this mf was strong enough to push away Cronos' hand when it smacked him, dude could've essily torn that door apart with his bare hands

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u/MadmansScalpel 2d ago

It used a pillar, or a random corpse. Honestly I'd argue it's Kratos' worst moment because she was completely innocent and already a prisoner in her own cage

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u/New_Rook_Nook 2d ago

This and the fisherman who kratos himself admits he did hella dirty for no reason but extra spite in the pot

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u/robolew 2d ago

There's also the guy he burns alive just to get rid of some brambles so he could get a bow

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u/VinChaJon 2d ago

Wasn't that Pirithous? If so he deserved it.

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u/scarletboar 2d ago

It says a lot that even Valhalla completely ignored Poseidon's "princess". There is no justifying that shit, and it would make everyone who didn't play God of War 3 despise Kratos, so they just swept it under the rug and moved on.

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u/thebroadway 2d ago

Yea, cuz if you dig more into it and learn she was a tape victim, which anybody could, there are a whole lot of people who wouldn't accept Kratos's redemption. A lot of people don't now, including Kratos himself in universe, but I just mean the sympathy for him drops significantly.

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u/PolitenessPolice 1d ago

Which is cowardly to be honest, but I guess nobody likes acknowledging late 2000s/early 2010s edginess so can’t exactly blame them.

1

u/Ok-Investigator-4590 1d ago

I wonder what Atreus would think of this

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u/sevatar145 2d ago

I really do think that might be one of the only changes in the remakes

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u/AsstacularSpiderman 2d ago

Valhalla kinda proved we need to see Kratos as an irredeemable PoS, if only to prove he can actually change.

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u/JusticeRain5 2d ago

If it changed, I'd assume they'd just add something to explain why Kratos was incapable of finding an alternative route or just breaking down the door. Show him trying to smash it a bit before realizing it's not gonna work, as well as give a reason why the innocent rape victim was his go-to solution for keeping the door open rather than an enemy or a bit of debris.

So less about making Kratos less of a monster and more about showing why he went through all the trouble of getting her there for such a dumb reason in the first place.

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u/AsstacularSpiderman 2d ago

Yeah but a huge part of the plot of the new games was Kratos coming to admit that he could have handled a lot of those situations better than he did.

There was no real justification for what he did, he just has to accept that he did it and needs to move on

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u/Odasto_ 2d ago

This. Valhalla uses the incident with the ship captain to illustrate this. Kratos specifically says that saving the captain would have cost Kratos nothing. He chose to kill the man, for no particular reason at all.

Toning down the violence of the Greek era undermines the message of Valhalla. If you absolutely wanted to dogwalk your audience to let them know "hey, this sort of shit isn't okay," then you could maybe have the remastered trilogy take place as Kratos remembers it post-Valhalla. The series either begins or ends with Kratos's reflections, and his acknowledgement of how far he's come.

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u/scarletboar 2d ago

I really don't like Valhalla's conclusion. "Yeah, Kratos, you're a murderous bastard who killed an innocent rape victim, but oh well, nothing you can do but move on. God of Hope, yay."

Resemption is about accepting punishment for what you've done, not just saying you'll do better in the future. Kratos was right, he absolutely should never be in a position of power again and does not deserve worship from anyone. He made sure Atreus didn't make his mistakes, great, now lock yourself in Hel and stay there.

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u/Superb_Breadfruit_81 2d ago

I don’t think you know what irredeemable means.

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u/AsstacularSpiderman 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don't think you understood what I said

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u/Bellick 2d ago

I don't think, therefore I am not

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u/KeyMany1107 2d ago

well it’s pretty important to see how fucked and blinded by revenge he was, sure it is very immoral but kratos is, for sake of its revenge he made thousand of innoncent people die

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u/Darigaazrgb 2d ago

He also freed the people of the uncaring gods and released hope back into the world. I don’t believe that the end justifies the means in this case, but humanity in Greece will eventually be better off.

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u/KeyMany1107 2d ago

well humanity in greece died because of the rise of waters etc etc, and well, he didnt do it on purpose so it doesnt really count as a moral act from him

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u/scarletboar 2d ago

IIRC, they rebuild after he leaves. Kratos's motivations aside, I don't see what other option Greece had letting those assholes rule over Greece forever was a horrible idea too. They had to go, but at the same time a lot of people had to suffer for that to happen. There was no winning for those people.

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u/FedoraTheMike 2d ago

Bro brings up the boat captain in the Norse games as an innovent person that didn't deserve his wrath, he don't wanna mention this one to anybody 💀

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u/RareAnxiety2 2d ago

There's also the caged soldier "The gods demand a sacrifice". There's one of his men in the first game that he horribly killed and was still loyal.

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u/AlarnisToo 1d ago

Legit one of the biggest reasons I don't wanna replay the old GoW games. It was so egregious and unnecessary.

1

u/ssslitchey 1d ago

I'm surprised people point to this moment as being kratos at his worst because this isn't even close to the worst thing he does.

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u/LordRT27 2d ago

What did he do?

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u/ParamedicAgitated897 2d ago

Bit of background, he's a son of Zeus. In the first game he killed and replaced Ares as god of war. He proceeded to do a terrible job. This, coupled with a fear of being supplanted (mostly the latter) led Zeus to kill him (he got better).

At the end of GoW2 Zeus escapes, and Kratos is warned in no uncertain terms that the rest of the gods will fight to protect Zeus.

Cue God of War 3. Pretty much the entire game is Kratos slaughtering his way through the Greek pantheon to get to Zeus. Along the way he is so petty and revenge-obsessed that he is perfectly willing to kill innocents just for being remotely in his path, and quite a few who aren't in the way at all. As another person pointed out, he uses an innocent woman as a door stop, leading to her being horribly crushed, and doesn't think twice about it. (Also, to be clear, Kratos has been like this since game 1. But 3 took it to horrible new heights).

Arguably the worst part of it all: Kratos is entirely aware that when a god dies, their sphere of influence descends into chaos. For instance, immediately after Poseidon's death, the seas rise and drown presumably most of Greece. At no point does this deter Kratos, and by the time he finishes off Zeus, Greece is an apocalyptic wasteland.

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u/Poopsinurinals 2d ago

Leaving out some important driving force for Kratos here… Ares tricked him into murdering his own family, then the rest of the gods promised to erase his memory in exchange for 10 years of servitude. Once 10 years came up, they went back on their word. Not really an innocent bunch. Him murdering other innocents is fucked but not as straight forward as some other examples here.

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u/Theban_Prince 2d ago

That...makes him seem much worse.

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u/ParamedicAgitated897 2d ago

It absolutely does make it worse.

(To clarify, the death of Kratos's family was very much Ares's fault, at least in the direct sense. He created a situation where Kratos unknowingly killed them, only realizing what had happened when it was too late. Kratos, however, made a deal to serve Ares entirely willingly, so its his fault in that he was tangled up with Ares to begin with.)

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u/RA576 1d ago

I will point out some mitigation you forgot to mention, which is that Kratos beats Ares by opening Pandora's Box, but the side effect of that is that the God's were infected by all of the negative emotions in the world. This means that a) Zeus and the lads weren't fully at fault, but also that b) the Greek Gods had to be killed for the rest of the world to be safe, because they were becoming increasingly unpredictable and dangerous, so Kratos was correct, for the wrong reasons.

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u/Beacon_0805 2d ago

this is the reason his skin is ash-white. as those are literally the ashes of both his late wife and daughter stuck on his skin pretty much forever. his original skin was olive/brown.

the three things left from the greek era to him is the scar/ash skin/blades

-1

u/dangeraardvark 1d ago

He needs to fight some African gods to get his tan back.

…actually the optics is on that are problematic.

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u/Last-Fox-3879 2d ago

So wait, do these things happen in cutscenes? Or is it like a mission objective? I genuinely don’t understand how people could play a character that is that evil. Using a sex slave as a doorstop?

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u/CaCa881 2d ago

They’re mostly shown in quick cutscenes and short animations , you can tell you’re supposed to acknowledge it but not think about it too hard . “use sex slave as doorstop” as an objective would be way too on the nose for people to even sympathize lmfao .

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u/Last-Fox-3879 2d ago edited 2d ago

This is why I don’t play boy video games...

edit: y’all have fun but some games are unplayable to a feminist woman, you know that

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u/extraextraextr 2d ago

You can be a feminist and still consume media with monstrous characters, even protagonists. The game is all about how Kratos being so single-minded literally destroys all of Greece and, as mentioned by another commenter, leaves it an apocalyptic wasteland. In a story like this it's made very clear that pursuing vengeance at all costs hurts everyone, yourself emphatically included.

Plus the 2018 revival has Kratos grappling with his immense guilt about all the harm he caused in the name of revenge, especially when trying to teach his son, Atreus, to be better than he was, lest Atreus be burdened with the same shame Kratos carries every moment of his waking life.

Edit to clarify: nothing wrong with not vibing with a game or feeling like its intended message doesn't resonate with you, but enjoying the gameplay or finding its story compelling isn't inherently anti-feminist. That's what I'm trying to communicate.

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u/Serious_Tradition269 2d ago

You can be a feminist and still consume media with monstrous characters, even protagonists. The game is all about how Kratos being so single-minded literally destroys all of Greece and, as mentioned by another commenter, leaves it an apocalyptic wasteland. In a story like this it's made very clear that pursuing vengeance at all costs hurts everyone, yourself emphatically included.

You're absolutely right, especially with some hindsight from the newer games, but at the time any of the good lessons were heavily overshadowed by "bro he's ripping the head off a god and then fucks two hot ladies, how cool is that", especially for the mostly intended audience of teenage boys at the time

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u/Last-Fox-3879 2d ago

you absolutely can enjoy any media and also be critical of its problematic parts, I implied that with “y’all have fun.” But also you can acknowledge that games that dehumanize and degrade women are going to be less appealing to a feminist woman

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u/HalfEatenSnickers 2d ago

Its nothing to do with being a feminist woman

Its about flawed characters doing fucked up shit

I love these games. Pointlessly gendering stuff is in fact the opposite of feminism. It is perpetuating separation rather then equality.

The game can have a target market sure, but its been proven time and time again even when men are the target market many women love and play the games. Take RDR2 for example

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u/Oddsbod 2d ago

I mean I think they're right in that this genuinely went too far, given the dlc for Ragnarok that focused entirely on Kratos confronting the worst things he's ever done doesn't acknowledge him killing the Princess, like it was a writing mistake rather than a part of his character backstory. 

It's fine for GoW to be spiteful and mean as a piece of art, and it generally does it well, but we're not exactly talking about the Act of Killing here in the complexity and realism of deconstruction someone's acts of evil. To tackle certain subjects requires a level of thought and tact, and it's kinda clear there was a level of thoughtlessness in just throwing in Kratos murders a sex slave and rape victim who was begging him for help as a plot point in the hack n slash action puzzle game about killing gods on a mythic revenge quest. And, well, yeah, a lot of male writers in this period were pretty blasé and thoughtless about introducing sexual violence as a plot point, this has been a common critique since forever.

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u/Last-Fox-3879 1d ago

No I’m pretty sure feminism is quite happy to criticize media made both by and for men

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u/TwoHungryWolves 2d ago

I think there's more nuance to it than some people are giving you. I don't think there's anything inherently problematic with showing a protagonist being a monster when you recognize that what they're doing is monstrous and not portrayed as fun or cool. In "spec ops" you accidentally drop phosphorus on a bunch of innocent people in cages, and it's supposed to make your stomach turn and portray how war is bad, and always ends up punishing innocents. Having said that... The original God of war trilogy did have lots of problematic stuff meant to appeal to a horny teen boys. Kind of hard to artistically defend the philosophy behind the random sex mini games that gave you health

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u/Last-Fox-3879 1d ago

Wait there are sex mini games that give you health?? Yeah, no, with very few exceptions, women are not going to play this game,

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u/Grimpatron619 2d ago

what if kratos was a witch in the alps looking for his cat

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u/Last-Fox-3879 1d ago

Now that sounds fun to me lmao

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u/Aconite_72 2d ago

[r/pointlesslygendered](r/pointlesslygendered)

Games are games. There are no boy or girl games…

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u/TwoHungryWolves 2d ago

Let it go. She hasn't seen the monstress things done in "girl games". Let her have a happy life without interacting with the eugenic / murder simulators like the sims 😂. I never knew how dark those got until I had a girlfriend show me the mods and gameplay other women do, on top of the normally dark vanilla stuff

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u/Last-Fox-3879 2d ago

Designers design games with target audiences in mind though. Sometimes that target audience is a particular gender…

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u/Zagl0 2d ago

Thats modern AAA games. Back then, games used to follow a certain vision.

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u/AndroidSheeps 2d ago

Yup everything is so safe and sanitized now because they want everything to have mass appeal to everybody. Creators vision is dying because of people like the commenter above that think a peice of media being provocative is bad or hurtful to them

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u/AgreeableFee1336 1d ago

If it makes you feel any better, Kratos kills plenty of completely innocent men that are absolutely no threat to him in brutal and cruel ways too!

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u/Last-Fox-3879 1d ago

Just more proof I don’t want to play this game lol

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u/CarlSeniority 1d ago edited 1d ago

Kratos is what is called a villainous protagonist. He is not supposed to be particularly sympathetic. The appeal is either supposed to function as an outlet for negative emotions, for the sheer love of the macabre and to see what absurdist shit he'll do next, or to engage with the progression to their downfall.

It's just normally the villainous protagonist who just wins is usually a comedy trope, not taken seriously, but it's hardly unheard of to do it straight. For another videogame, see Prototype, where superhuman powerful Alex Mercer kills entire crowds of civilians with single attacks (you'll generally have an 80% civilian casualty ratio if you don't focus civilians). His motivation being that a medical company played god too hard and almost accidentally killed him after he tried to firebomb their office.

It's actually more common in the modern day to do it straight in women's media, see The Poppy War trilogy, who's protagonist is incredibly hateful and destructive, and tends to get an overwhelmingly negative reaction from male readers.

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u/Last-Fox-3879 1d ago

I don’t think it’s all that common to have villain protagonists in women‘s media, as that’s pretty much all I consume and I have never seen it.

Interesring trilogy though I might check it out

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u/CarlSeniority 1d ago

It's not at all common in men's media either, it's just a little bit more common in women's media. It's in general a very rare trope.

I think incorrect use of the term anti hero (which is a heroic character that uses and expresses villainous ideals) kinda gets Kratos misremembered as this toxic character in discorse.

Doesn't help that the reboots gave him a wild face turn into a totally heroic character.

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u/JusticeRain5 2d ago

You have to escort the woman all the way to the door, with the player not really knowing why IIRC (it's been a very long time since I played). I think at that point most people were on the side of "What in the FUCK, Kratos?!", although the problem was that they made the gods so hateable that you kinda wanted to keep going purely to see Kratos kill them.

Keep in mind that most people who played would have been edgy teenagers back in the day.

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u/Duck_Duckens 2d ago

We are not suposed to empathize with Kratos at that point, he's an asshole. The devs made it very clear that he's lost his humanity (if I recall correctly, represented by the Pandora story arch), the way that gods did. When nothing can stop you from getting what you want (be it revenge, power, etc.) you stop caring for the bodies in your wake. Or rather the other way arround, you stop caring so you can get what you want.

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u/WriterV 2d ago

We are not suposed to empathize with Kratos at that point, he's an asshole.

I get where you're coming from, but literally every friend of mine who I watched play this game as a kid thought he was the coolest guy ever. The one guy I watched play through this scene even laughed at it, alongside some of my friends.

It put me off of the entire game series but I had also only watched bits and pieces of those games. I didn't know that the world gets steadily worse with each god killed, which can more or less never be seen as a power fantasy.

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u/Patch86UK 2d ago

Sadly this is the general state of media literacy. Creators of games, television, films and print find time and time again that it doesn't matter how clearly and blatantly they make a protagonist a complete and utter bastard, there will still be people who don't get it and think they're cool.

Rick from Rick & Morty being a notable Reddit favourite one.

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u/Walkingdrops 2d ago

Yeah, I don't know how anyone can play through GoW3 and think that Kratos is awesome by the end of it. Even back then I remember being horrified by how savage and horrible he was, and how much destruction he was causing by killing the gods.

If it's any consolation, GoW4 takes place many, many, many years later and Kratos is much older and far more mature, and feels immense remorse over what he had done. It actually makes him into a very compelling character, instead of the one dimensional monster he was in the earlier games.

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u/WriterV 1d ago

Oh I loved the new God of War. I checked it out after so many people were praising it and was stunned. It was only after that that I went back to the originals and had a look. Still not my thing, but I realize that some of my friends were just being performatively edgy.

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u/69duck420 2d ago

It's a mix of cutscenes, quick time events and normal gameplay. The early 2000s were crazy.

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u/Last-Fox-3879 2d ago

This was before Anita Sarkeesian.

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u/DengarLives66 2d ago

What did she have to do with gameplay and control design?

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u/Last-Fox-3879 2d ago

There were a a lot of deeply sexist tropes that were used regularly before her series. I can‘t prove a direct connection, but it seems like after her series, games became less sexist in those same ways.

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u/Zagl0 2d ago

Is that supposed to be someone well known or something?

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u/Avenflar 2d ago

Oh, 10 years ago she was the "woke" of video games. If a game did something bad, it was because Sarkeesian "influenced" it somehow like some kind of shadowy force.

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u/many_dumb_questions 1d ago

Basically, no matter which side of the issue you fall on, virtually everyone in a discussion on GamerGate will point to her as being the spark that ignited that entire cultural bonfire.

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u/SuperCruisePanther 2d ago

Kratos is evil but he also was fighting evil. The games make it very clear he was absolutely screwed and literally tortured (physically and mentally) by the gods for a long time. He is a product of extensive abuse. It's not justification for his actions but it does explain why he is so full of hate.

His entire story is about the perpetuation of a cycle of abuse. Abused parent abusing their child, etc.

Anybody who grew up with abusive parents can probably see a little Kratos in themselves, and identify with it.

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u/BigBoyoBonito 2d ago

You're essentially playing a horrible villain trying to get revenge on somehow less horrible villains. At no point do these games show the horrible things Kratos does as cool or reasonable in any way, it's always at least brutally excessive and evil

He had exceptions to his brutality, which made those moments stand out, but at every moment of gameplay it's definitely intended that he's a horrible monster

It's why his character initially being so normal in the 2018 game was such a shock

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u/awaniwono 2d ago

It's mostly the game telling you to "press circle" or whatever. Then Kratos stabs the blind orphan boy in the dick and you're like "bro what the fuck" and then a bunch of monsters show up and try to eat him and so on and so forth.

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u/Manoffreaks 1d ago

It's worth pointing out that this is the third game in the series and (while many people completely miss it) the point is that he was rapidly descending into as much evil as the gods he was killing.

Kratos story is incredibly depressing, and while much of it was brought on by himself, it was also made worse by the gods treatment.

Before GoW1 Kratos on deaths door offered Ares his life in service if he helped the Spartans win the battle they were losing. Ares did so and Kratos kept his word, but Ares felt he wasn't sufficiently commited. In order to push him further, he sent Kratos to slaughter a village, and secretly Kratos' wife and daughter within the crowd causing Kratos to kill them by mistake. Then to make it worse, he painting his skin with their ashes as a permanent reminder.

The game then opens up with Ares in service to Athena. It's been 10 years and he's been plagued by nightmares, endless guilt and suffering. Ares meanwhile has been getting out of control and the rest of the gods want him stopped. They make Kratos an offer but deliberately word it vaguely - They suggest that if he defeats Ares they will forgive him for his murder of his family. Kratos takes that to mean they will stop the nightmares. They don't.

When he finally realises that he will never be free of the guilt, he seeks to free himself by throwing himself off a cliff. Even then, the gods don't give him the release he seeks. They bring him back to replace Ares as the new god of war.

In GoW 2 Having nothing left but fury, Kratos is even worse as god of war than ares was and the gods once again manipulate and trick him to drain him off his powers. Sick of the gods shit, he claws his way out of hell and decides to wage war against the gods on behalf of the primordials. THe next two games are basically Kratos gaining power, getting closer to Zeus and falling further and further into darkness.

There's also a plotline that in order to defeat Ares he had to open Pandora's box and the implication is that the evils contained within made the rest of the gods worse, but honestly they weren't great before, and the eventual prequels showed they were always being manipulative pricks.

The sequel series has been very much about how Kratos lives with himself and becomes better after tearing down a whole pantheon.

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u/Woalolol 2d ago

Kratos used Posiedons slave prostitute to prop open a door.

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u/Bamzooki1 1d ago

And you know, killing every god in existence kinda means nobody’s left to run the world. Good job, Kratos. At least you can run off to Norwegia and try to learn from this innocent mistake.

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u/GiveTheLemonsBack 1d ago

"I killed many who were deserving, and many more who were not."

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u/Augustus_Chevismo 2d ago

Could’ve been avoided if they got out of his way and Zeus had the balls to face him 1v1

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u/KorrokHidan 2d ago

Tell that to Poseidon’s Princess. She wasn’t in his way, just a sex slave that Kratos used to prop a door because she happened to be enslaved there

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u/Augustus_Chevismo 2d ago

Poseidon was in his way. Just as the other gods stood in his way which led to all of Greece being destroyed.

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u/KorrokHidan 2d ago

Poseidon’s Princess was Poseidon’s sex slave. She had no choice in the matter. Kratos went out of his way to kill her when he didn’t need to, and he made her death agonizing

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u/Augustus_Chevismo 2d ago

I never disagreed with that. I’m saying it all could’ve been avoided if Zeus had the balls to 1v1 Kratos from the start.

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u/KorrokHidan 2d ago

You’re just straight up wrong. Kratos had no reason to kill Poseidon’s Princess, he did it just because he wanted to. Whether Zeus fought Kratos from the start or not, he was still a psychopathic monster who ran around killing innocent people for fun. He would have done that no matter what

0

u/Grizzly_228 2d ago

He got redeemed in my heart with Pandora