Once Again, Some Men Are Angry a Video Game Character Isn’t “Hot Enough” For Them
It’s hard to fathom it out of context, but there actually exists a breed of gamer who can watch a 20-minute demo of a warrior goddess clawing her way out of the afterlife and waging cosmic war against three rival pantheons and walk away with a borderline neurotic takeaway: she really should’ve done her eyebrows first.
That’s roughly what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of Sony Santa Monica announcing their latest game in the God of War franchise, God of War Laufey, centering around Kratos’ deceased wife Faye as she makes her way through the underworld and unravels a conspiracy that involves different pantheons from across the world.
The visuals are discernibly improved compared to God of War: Ragnarök, the combat seems to have shifted to accommodate Faye’s unique physique and powers, and the cinematic are as immersive as ever. The premise is actually bold, and the heroine is a character we already seem to have an affinity with due to her huge impact on the first game — not to mention her influence on the new Kratos — while still being someone we’ve never actually played as, the stranger we’ve somehow been mourning for two games.
And the discourse, predictably, turned into a referendum on her face.
Someone even tried to frame the new God of War Laufey director, Ariel Lawrence, as the cause of this, immediately to be shut down by fans who noted that she was actually a producer on the original God of War trilogy back in the 2000s.
“No one wants to be a character that looks like your average 43 year old suburban mom,” wrote Asmongold.
Is there any validity to the grievance?
Let’s for a moment put aside the implications of having to debate this whenever there’s a gender swap in video game protagonists. Some gamers on social media have a specific grievance, and it’s that Faye’s in-game model doesn’t look enough like Deborah Ann Woll, the actor of Daredevil fame who handles her motion capture and voice.
One critic griped that the studio did Faye “dirty,” insisting the model looked rougher and more aged than its source. Another demanded to know why she looked “so haggard,” as though sunken eyes were a baffling artistic flourish rather than the obvious consequence of, you know, being recently dead and on fire.
Okay, that might not be entirely fair since we’re talking about gods who can heal and change their appearance at will anyway, but it’s worth bearing in mind that this isn’t a launch-day bikini render. Faye is a frost giant who got a funeral pyre at the beginning of the 2018 game. She’s stumbling through literal purgatory and nobody knows why, but the replies are mad she didn’t contour for it.
Fortunately, many players clocked the absurdity in real time.
We have, in fact, been here before
If this feels familiar, it’s because the drama is on reruns. In 2022, a contingent of players had a meltdown over Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West having a faint layer of peach fuzz on her jaw — a feature that might have resembled an actual human woman rather than a doll.
Then there’s all these other protagonists who have suffered the same fate to some extent, the most recent example of which was Atsu from Ghost of Yōtei. There are plenty of other victims, like Kay Vess from Star Wars Outlaws, or Abby from The Last of Us Part II.
In fact, practically every heroine runs the risk of being dubbed “too masculine” if she doesn’t look something like Eve from Stellar Blade. Whether you like it or not, that’s the golden standard right now, folks, and everything else is just “woke” garbage being shoved down our throats.
The thing that might disillusion you about this whole debate is what never sets it off. Kratos is a slab of scar tissue with a permanent scowl. Joel is a grizzled survivor in a post-apocalypse. Geralt might have lost a fight with a cheese grater monster at some point and never told anyone about it. Nobody drafts a petition demanding they be hot, because nobody ever asked them to be in the first place.
Their roughness reads as weight, as history, as something earned. It lends them character and identity. The same roughness on a woman reads as an assault on culture itself — an “agenda” that needs to be fought lest it become the norm.
Laufey should be critiqued on other grounds
It ultimately boils down to this. We’re allowed to find Eve from Stellar Blade gorgeous. We’re allowed to want that. What we’re not perhaps entitled to is the conviction that her silhouette is the only legitimate one that every other fictional creation should adhere to.
So, despite the fact that God of War’s creator David Jaffe piled on, and brands like Domino’s UK account lobbed in with tweets of their own just because God of War Laufey was trending the other night, there might just be far more important conversations to be had about this game and the industry — if ever we managed to stop squinting at the veil of surface beauty and political agenda long enough to notice there are other things behind it too.
(featured image: Sony)
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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