![norse god of war norse god of war](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4f/be/80/4fbe80212c1f0feb02af115dc4e112e5.jpg)
The end of the game screams “here comes Ragnarok,” and it’s easy to get the feeling at the end of the game that Baldur really was just his function.
#Norse god of war upgrade#
It’s a kind of deathly cold, unbroken by summer, and the dwarves who serve as the game’s upgrade merchants will not shut the hell up about it after the final boss of the game is slain. Just like in the Prose Edda, the death of Baldur is followed immediately by the onset of Fimbulwinter. As players, we control a god who passes his time by fighting an invulnerable Baldur. And he’s still shot, stabbed, hacked at, and cut over and over again for sport, since that’s literally what the gameplay is. He’s still killed by mistletoe, since Atreus removes his magical invulnerability by putting an arrowhead made of the wood through Baldur’s hand. It’s still Loki who causes Baldur to be slain, since Loki is revealed to be what the giants call Atreus. God of War puts many twists on this tale. Loki puts a dart of mistletoe in the hands of a sporting god, the dart slays Baldur. He cannot be harmed, and so there is no reason not to.
![norse god of war norse god of war](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/16/66/68/166668f23daa129db51c8fd3575b38db.jpg)
They’re shooting Baldur with all sorts of weapons because it’s funny. Through a convoluted set of events, Loki manages to learn this information, and takes a sprig of mistletoe to where Baldur and many other gods are performing sport. Fire and water, iron and disease, all of them pledge to refrain from harming Baldur, all except for a tiny plant named mistletoe that is deemed too small and young to harm him. In response, his mother Frigg (transformed into Freya in the game), decides that she wants to protect her son, so she forces all of the natural world to promise not to hurt Baldur. In that mythological tradition, Baldur talks too much about the dangerous acts he wants to accomplish. In the Prose Edda, a volume of Norse mythology cobbled together out of the Icelandic oral tradition by Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century, Baldur’s death immediately precedes Ragnarok, an event that upends much of the world and causes the destruction of many of the gods. And his death matters, not just for the plot of this game but in the context of the mythology that the game is cribbing from in order to create its universe of gods and their worlds. He dies unfulfilled, unhappy, at the hands of the god-killer Kratos. It would be better to die than to live this way.īaldur does die. This inability to feel drove him to exact revenge on his mother.
![norse god of war norse god of war](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/G5tWrqMFRqS7BRrJrm6jFM.jpg)
Baldur was left immortal, pleasureless and painless. When he was born, Freya learned that he was destined to die in some horrible way, so she worked her powerful Vanir magic on him so as to make him immune to everything. He’s the product of a political marriage between Odin, head god of the Aesir, one set of Norse gods, and Freya, leader of a competing faction called the Vanir. Within God of War, Baldur’s immortality and inability to feel are explained in the context of a larger bit of lore. After all, he cannot die and he can feel no pain. Kratos is good at doling out violence, but Baldur is the perfect receptacle for that violence. Baldur is more a function than he is a character, and it’s his ability to keep returning to the fight that makes him such a powerful villain within the context of a God of War game. The game truly opens when he appears at Kratos and Atreus’s home, it’s his attack that causes Kratos to destroy the portal to Jotunheim that causes the back half of the game, and it’s his murderous rage at his mother that causes Kratos to step into the affairs of the Norse gods at the close of the game. His name is Baldur.īaldur is the fuel for God of War’s plot. This positive story happens in a context, though, of another child. This child, Atreus, is the root of a supposed sea change in Kratos, and God of War is about navigating the transition from annihilator of pantheons to educating father figure. This being of pure negativity who shuts things down with maximum violence has to mold a child into a being who can be something other than what Kratos has been. The turn in God of War, our newest entry in his tale, is that Kratos is tasked with adding something.