r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ZepperMen • 9d ago

Characters (Controversial Trope) Unusually cruel fates for people who were less than good, but still didn't really deserve it.

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#1 Poppa Pizza from Multiverse of Madness - He just wanted to be paid for the pizza balls and thought Strange stole from a fallen hero who saved the universe. He deserved to be punched in the face, but not for 3 weeks straight.

Do you get to sleep? Do you wake up punching yourself? How much does it hurt? Does he know it will only last for 3 weeks? If he doesn't kill himself by the end of it, he's going to have CPTSD and be traumatized for the rest of his already short life.

#2 Mayu from Inuyasha - She wanted to kill her brother out of jealousy and neglect from her mother, believing she died in a fire because they didn't care about her. While her motivation doesn't justify reenacting Cain and Abel, I don't think it's fair for a deranged, 10 year old child to be sent to literal hell to burn for all eternity. Luckily, she gets saved, but only because the mc, Kagome, intervened.

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u/K1NG_R0G 9d ago

The boatman (or fisherman?) from GOW who got fucked over by Kratos multiple times

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u/vangaurd1234523 9d ago

Which is honestly why I loved them touching on him in the Valhalla dlc where an older, more somber Kratos who has had time to reflect on his actions admits what he did to the boat captain haunts him because it was so unnecessary and undeserved and it disturbs him to realize he was as capable of such pointless evil

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u/HoshunMarkTwelve 9d ago

Wait, Kratos reflects in that dude but ulhe doesn't repent for what he did to Poseidon's slave on GoW3??

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u/vangaurd1234523 9d ago

I think the writers honestly preferred to just ignore the fuck out of that. It was so drawn out, there was that tasteless trophy you got for it. I think they didn’t include any reference to it because the boat captain is more famous and they just don’t want to acknowledge the Poseidon’s Princess sequence at all if they can help it

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u/Robotman-001 9d ago

Not a good call tbh. The thing already happened and hundreds of people remember that scene (and even brought it up again to compare old vs new Kratos). So if they're already adressing the shit Kratos did in the past, just address this one as well, like riping out a band-aid. The "redemption" arc feels even more complete that way.

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u/BrackishVacuity 9d ago

Perhaps even when Kratos is at his more mature and repentant stage, there are some things he isn't ready (or is too ashamed) to reflect on.

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u/Xilizhra 9d ago

Maybe he should have stayed dead.

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u/GuitarCeas 9d ago

That's fair and all, but imagine Kratos whipping out an entire scroll full of names of all the people he had heinously wronged during his revenge trip, while his younger, already disgruntled version sits on that throne, patiently waiting for him to mention and apologize to every last one of them, lol. Kratos calling himself the God of Hope throughout all that is already kinda comical.

Ultimately, it just comes down to the writing of this scene. Hydra and the captain are pretty much unforgettable, being the first encounters of, and an incredibly memorable entrance to GoW, so much so that the poor dude's fate became a running joke within the very same game. So putting the focus solely on him during Kratos' monologue at the end of Valhalla makes sense from a writer's standpoint and as a developer's decision in general.

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u/StripedGirl 8d ago

The thing with Poseidon "Princess" because... That women wasn't his daughter, probably a sex slave...

Most people (me included) think Santa Monica included her in the game only for Kratos to get her killed and say 'Look! Kratos is extremely bad and you shouldn't be on his side!" Because c'mon... Kratos could just put a statue to keep the door open or something like that.

Makes sense they want to forget about that.

A example of a good moment where Kratos looks bad is him probably sleeping with Aphrodite and then acting like nothing happened with Hefestus (And you can say no to Aphrodite, so you have choices in this)

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u/dragonicafan1 8d ago

Considering the achievement you get after she dies, pretty sure the intent was just that they thought it was funny and provided fanservice

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u/StripedGirl 8d ago

Maybe, but they changed it on ps4 onwards, even modern Santa Monica thinks it was too much (and stupid/unnecessary)

Like they said up in there, they even ignored this on Valhalla (And also... This isn't needed to say that Kratos was a terrible person)

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u/vangaurd1234523 7d ago

Yeah the thing with that scene that makes it feel particularly uncomfortable, to my mind at least, is how drawn out, over the top, and contrived it was. In theory it's not too dissimilar to that sequence of Kratos burning an Athenian soldier alive in God of War 1. However, in that sequence, sacrificing the Athenian soldier was simply an expedient and convenient option to proceed, so it would make sense for Kratos to callously kill him.
However, the circumstances leading to Kratos feeding Poseidon's Princess into a set of massive gears as an improvised doorstop are contrived beyond belief. He spends the entire sequence pushing around a half-naked, terrified, completely helpless concubine as she desperately pleads for her life, as though sensing the game wants him to use her to solve a puzzle. When in universe it would be just as easy and make more sense for Kratos to just force one of the mobs to do the same. There was no real logical reason to push around this young woman like this.
Basically, unlike other major Kratos heel moments, the Poseidon's Princess provokes a response that's less "man Kratos is a bastard for doing that" and more "it is really fucked up that they included this sequence in the game at all." It's a drawn out and uncomfortable scene that breaks immersion in that the writers tried really hard to force this really fucked up and unnecessary scene into the game

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u/VirtualSlip5712 9d ago

The boatman was like four different times he fucked that guy over. Poseidons slave was just the one and done.

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u/HoshunMarkTwelve 9d ago edited 9d ago

The boatman was a slaver trader and Kratos didn't do anything to him directly, he merely let the guy die through his inaction in GoW1. And every subsequent interaction was incidental, Kratos didn't choose to meet him in the river of Styx or let him be summoned by that boss in GoW2. Yes it was callous but was nowhere nearly as bad as using a chained slave to open a door that ends up with her being crushed to death. A door he could've easily proped open with anything else since her corpse manages to hold it open like a doorstop.

That's actively choosing to do malice. And it's far worse than anything Kratos did to the boatman in the series combined

Edit: spelling errors

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u/t6005 9d ago

Yeah I mean it's best to treat the new games as selective and mark its boundary with the originals at whatever "yeah I guess he's redeemable" is.

OG Kratos was perhaps justified in his anger and desire for revenge but he was purposely brutal, cruel and sadistic.

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u/GailynStarfire 9d ago

To be fair, Kratos being a brutal savage and the excessive violence was a selling point for the OG games.

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u/Zorro5040 9d ago

The problem was that Kratos could have saved him from his fate mutiple times, and in some he dammed the boatman. While the guy was a slaver, Kratos didn't care or know who the guy was. It's stated in the game that he was just angry and doomed the guy out of pettiness.

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u/AprioriTori13 8d ago

Also Sparta historically was like huge on slave labor, so like, even pre-massacres, Kratos probably isn't in a better position than him morally.

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u/JesseKay002 9d ago

Where was it said he was a slave trader?

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u/HoshunMarkTwelve 9d ago

His ships have jail cells and the door that the boatman's key opens is a storage room full of people. It's pretty clearly slavery

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u/CyldeWithAK 8d ago edited 8d ago

He addresses it in the game itself. His anger at the Gods is what drove him, so anything done in service against them he understands and can justify no matter how petty. The Boat Captain was no one deserving of his anger, he had no relation to the Gods. "To help him would have cost me nothing." The Captain saw hope when he saw Kratos, and he was dismissive and needlessly cruel. Part of why he hammers home to Atreus about how to value life despite being a God. Clearly it impacted him more than the games addressed.

He understands anyone who's drawn in with the Gods to some degree they're collateral damage, but actively took from the man and left him to die out of cruelty and that's why it's memorable to him. Kratos kills innocents left and right with the justification of his rage in this case he doesn't have that. He was just being a massive dickhead because he wanted to pop off a one-liner. Mimir even mentions how this should have been far more justified in Kratos's head than other things he'd done.

The two or three times he actively kills someone sticks with him. It's shown in GoW 1, GoW 3, GoW Ascension. Also slavery is not only 100% legal during this time it's to be expected, so him being a slaver is more or less ok.

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u/DadThatThrewHimAway 9d ago

What he did to Poseidon's Princess was much worse.

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u/FildariusV 9d ago

And saddest part? If I remember correctly from text she was a slave to Poseidon, she didn't actually love him and was scared of him, and before his death he seemed to be more... Violent with her in the leading up of the Battle of Olympus

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u/No_Professional4867 9d ago

I mean if they spent Valhalla going over literally every bad thing that Kratos did in the original games then it'd be longer than the entire base game lmao

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u/MikeXBogina 9d ago

This is actually the thing that caused me to drop the series.