The Appeal of Ragnarok

 So I think I’m close to finding POSEIDON on Horizon Forbidden West. A bit of a bummer that the “Burning Shores” expansion is not going to be on PS4, though. I am still of the opinion that melee combat in this game is… not good, but I still love taking down robot dinosaurs with nothing more than a bow and some trick arrows.

Also! I finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood! I could write half a dozen Saturday Notes on just that alone, but I’m going to hold off on that because I need to form those thoughts more. That, and you guys would get tired of that pretty quickly, I think.

I have had a lot of thoughts about things this week, like AI, and Ukraine, and Greek mythology, but instead we’re going to do this one Note idea that I have been considering for a while. 

On the Appeal of Ragnarok

I know I said we’re overloaded on Norse mythology but I have something to talk about here since I’ve been randomly thinking about God of War: Ragnarok so we’re doing this! My hypothesis is this: part of the reason Norse mythology is so popular with a lot of storytellers is because of Ragnarok, the end of the world.

Greek mythology has a lot going for it! For starters, it was written down by the people who believed in it in records that survived down through the ages. It’s got loads and loads of characters that writers can use in a lot of ways. But one thing it doesn’t have is an apocalypse. There is no end point, really. There’s the vague notion that one day, one of Zeus’s children will overthrow him, the way he overthrew his own father, who overthrew his grandfather. But if you dislike Zeus and hoped he would get his comeuppance? Well you have to make something up. There’s no great big trial he has to face in the future, where gods and men and monsters duke it out.

Norse mythology provides an alternative.

For the people in the audience who don’t know, Ragnarok goes like this: some time after Baldur’s death (unclear how long afterward), there will come Fimbulwinter, a winter three years long. After that, Ragnarok begins. Loki will free himself from his imprisonment, and go to his daughter Hel to become captain of a ship crewed by the dead and built from the nails of dead men. They, along with giants of frost and fire, will invade the gods’ realm of Asgard, breaking the sky. On the field of Virgrid, the gods and the honored dead of Valhalla will meet their enemies in combat. Many of the more prominent gods will be killed in combat with their enemies, the worlds will burn, and out of the ashes a new world will be born.

[Also some silly people out there think that Ragnarok is actually a really deep metaphor for the conversion of Norse pagans to Christianity. I don’t understand how that works, precisely, but I’ve never found it convincing.]

Ragnarok provides an end point to the story. Norse mythology is all going somewhere. There’s some wiggle room in what characters are doing up until then, and there are some characters whose fates are ambiguous, but for the main players (Odin, Thor, Loki, and such) we know what’s going to happen to them in the end. If you know where characters are going, then you might conceivably build up character arcs when you’re telling their stories. If you write a novel about Loki, you can work out his motivations and relationships based on where you know it will go when Ragnarok rolls around.

In mythology, when the characters are generally the personifications of elemental forces or parts of civilization, having a way to mark character arcs is a really handy thing.

So it’s a little weird to me how often people are using Ragnarok as a storytelling device and then ignoring its events. The “Dawn of Ragnarok” expansion of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla ends with Odin killing Surtr before the actual battle (in the myths Surtr fights and kills Freyr, and there’s no mention of him getting killed). Thor: Ragnarok does its own thing entirely, which I suppose is par for the course of Marvel’s take on Norse mythology. And God of War: Ragnarok does not end with Odin being swallowed by a giant wolf, who is then torn apart by his son Vidarr.

There is pretty much a play-by-play right there, guys! I understand in some cases why they don’t use it, but you would think that more people would, considering it’s already written out for them. Ragnarok is a really useful tool to have in storytelling, and one that not every mythology will give you. 

Plus, it’s a giant awesome mega-battle and it’s lots of fun to imagine how that would look.

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