The Scheduled Murder of Men’s Entertainment

The latest God of War game assassinated one of the strongest male characters in modern storytelling.

I’ve been a longtime fan of the franchise. It’s pure escapist entertainment. You load up the game, slaughter your way through countless men and monsters, bang a few goddesses, and generally stomp the earth into a shape more pleasing to your badass self. Kratos confronts enormous titans, grunts like a gorilla, and impales them on the nearest sharp stake.

Women everywhere swoon the moment he walks into the room and hurl themselves at him with crazed abandon. When he’s done with them, it’s back to wading through an ocean of blood.

I enjoy all of this crazed bloodlust and male power fantasy even as a devout Catholic because I recognize the value of inspiration beyond the story itself.

Is Kratos a moral character?

NO.

But God of War 1, 2, and 3 plus a spinoff give us a character with the guts to live up to his own principles and desires rather than bow to anyone, even the gods of ancient Greece, whom he systematically disembowels and tosses aside. Kratos eventually slaughters his own abusive father, Zeus, and while I don’t condone patricide, enjoying a story where another man fully lives out his own principles inspires young men to live out their own principles.

Stories like God of War 1, 2, 3, and the spinoff encourage young men not to bow to the powers-that-be and to question anyone who forces them to violate their principles, their dignity, or their honor.

This is the value of storytelling. It’s the reason Beowulf kills both Grendel and Grendel’s mother. It’s the reason all our stories are handed down: Because they inspire us. Men need inspiration.

Are God of War fans going out and murdering their own fathers? Hardly. If a young man plays God of War and then has casual sex with an actual goddess before slaughtering a legendary beast, you let me know.

But what that inspired young man may do is stand up to an abuser they’ve tolerated out of fear. They may punch a bully in the mouth while protecting another child. They may speak a painful truth instead of cowering in silence.

The point of male power fantasy and male escapist entertainment is to inspire the male audience to live fully to their own principles just like the heroes in the stories.

The newest God of War is the opposite of this.

Kratos slinks away from Greece in shame, finds a wife, has a son, and then neglects and abandons them both. When he is around them, he spends all his time agonizing over how ashamed he is of himself and everything he’s ever done. He’s hiding from the entire world and from himself. The makers originally intended to show him fat and out of shape. His (now dead) wife lays out a plan to reunite the verbally abusive deadbeat dad with his resentful son but she has to trick them both into doing it.

Kratos is slow. He hardly moves along in the world, preferring to powerwalk as everyone else moves at the speed of light. He complains about being old. He groans his way through the adventure like an old man, despite being A LITERAL GOD and displays the power to heal every physical infirmity.

The lesson at the end is that Kratos acknowledges he’s been stupid and selfish and his wife was a saint and now he’s going to stop being a deadbeat dad by collapsing completely into his son’s life, and we end with a vision of Kratos dying in the future with his son mourning him.

If this recipe of deadbeat dad grappling with depression sounds familiar, you’ve seen it before.

In the new Disney Star Wars films, Han Solo’s son turns to the dark side. Han abandons his principles and his family and turns into worse scum than he’s ever been. A long-suffering woman has to come along and reunite him with his long-suffering wife.

Luke Skywalker stands firm against all the darkness of the Sith and saves his father but collapses completely from one bad vision, tries to murder a child, abandons everything that’s ever meant something to him, and a long-suffering woman has to come along and reunite him with his long-suffering sister.

Mark Hamill famously declared he had to pretend he was playing an entirely new character because this Luke felt nothing like the original character.

007 fans are used to being lectured about how Bond needs to “grow up” and make way for a new character who’s more in touch with modern sensibilities.

And that’s really what’s at the core here: A world telling men to grow up.

The problem is that the creators are espousing a very specific post-modern nihilistic outlook brought about by weak fathers or absent fathers. Modern creators supported by Hollywood and big corporations have crushing attachment problems and broken relationships with their own fathers for a variety of reasons. They’re used to their saintly single mothers conditioning them to despise their own fathers. Men grow up worshipping their mothers, and women grow up seeing all men as worthless children incapable of real love.

Male creators of these stories want to see their own depressed, fat, unloved, regretful selves splashed up on the screen and then redeemed. They need to see a man just like them, a disappointment to his wife and kids, finally prove he’s worth something. Everyone in the story hates them, even the character’s own children, because that’s how these male creators feel. Their fathers didn’t teach them self-reliance, so the only way they can imagine being redeemed is by a long-suffering woman who represents their own long-suffering mother.

Female creators grew up with their moms telling them all men are scum. They despise men and demand ALL MEN “grow up” and start pulling their weight, the way they wish their own fathers had. The long-suffering women finally get listened to and put the carefree male characters in their place. The male characters hug while the female characters who did ALL the work stand in the background and roll their eyes.

The truth is that men do need to grow up. But they have no idea how. The old rites of manhood have been stripped away. Talking about honor makes people cringe. Everything powerful about men is deemed toxic. Fathers are stripped away from their children by courts and raised by bitter single mothers who raise those sons to hate the parts of themselves they got from their father.

We are a civilization of frightened boys afraid to grow up because we’ll be as weak and stupid as we’re told our fathers were. And we’re afraid growing up means our mother won’t love us anymore. So we stay small. We stay weak. We don’t speak up. We find people to save us.

And the State is all too happy to step in and take that power away from men.

Men need to grow up and become men. The State pours money into helping these damaged creators convince us manhood is evil. Instead, they want us to grow up into useful subjects for the State to farm taxes and maintain power.

Why do these stories get funded? Because the global elites want weak men. They don’t want men inspired to live out their principles. They want scared men who believe they’re too stupid to know right from wrong, so they cower on the floor and let the State rest its boot on their family’s necks.

There is tremendous power in emasculating an entire nation of men and convincing the young men that there is no better life out there, that all the heroes of old regretted their principles, and that only listening to (socially more passive) women will save them.

There is tremendous power in convincing every man in America that his crushing depression is the expected normal and that there is no such thing as a better life.

That’s what these stories represent. That’s why they get made. That’s why they pick a famous masculine character and neuter him in public.

What can men do against such reckless hate?

Four steps:

We start out by being better men who fly in the face of this weakness. We live as examples to others of what men should be, by fully embracing the classical masculine virtues of honor, courage, love, strength, and personal responsibility.

We support creators telling stories with good male inspiration. GIVE THEM MONEY SO THEY CAN CREATE MORE AND GET MORE PUBLICITY. You don’t have to agree with everything in the story. As an example, male harem novels have the male character sleeping with multiple women, and that’s not in line with Christian principles. But you should make sure the story is inspiring young men to live out their own principles in a more courageous way. And to that end, I have little problem with male harem novels, because at least they also showcase the male character protecting those women, caring for them, taking personal responsibility, standing up for the downtrodden, and embracing the classical masculine virtues.

Read my own story of classical masculine virtue Maxwell Cain: Burrito Avenger right here. Max Cain gets fired for killing too many dirtbags, which just frees up his schedule to slaughter even more dirtbags.

And when you’re done reading a masculine story, leave an honest review. This increases the shiny gold stars next to the title and increases the audience confidence that it’s popular and worth checking out. A review actually helps out better than paying the cost of the book.

We stop giving money to people who hate us. The global elites want to indoctrinate your children with the idea that fathers are weak and stupid and not to be listened to. My own family member asked me just last night if I’m going to show How To Train Your Dragon to my children. I told him, absolutely not. It’s a story centered around a father adhering to tradition and how utterly stupid that is. His son sets out and learns a new doctrine (mirroring the Marxism our own children will learn in public school and especially in college) and then brings that new teaching home and beats it into his stupid father’s brain until he finally surrenders and accepts the new ideology.

If you struggle to disconnect from franchises that are poisoning your kids, check out Brian Niemeier’s powerful book Don’t Give Money To People Who Hate You.

Maybe you want to make your own stories with your own values and principles. Excellent. We need more people on the front lines. Check out my course right here for a system that will start you off at maximum speed.

The point is to stop accepting this as normal. Speak out. Find stories to share with your sons and nephews and grandsons to inspire them to manhood. Create new rites of passages.

Help men become men.

And stop accepting degeneracy as normal.

The future depends on you.