#david jaffe

TWISTED METAL | Season 1, 2023

To David Jaffe, creator of God of War: I'm not even remotely sorry your rage fantasy attempt at a self insert grew beyond you. Your annoyance at where Kratos is as a character is incredibly amusing, because you do not seem to grasp the fact that you sowed the seeds for this kinder, less furious Kratos.

You established that Kratos's motives early on were revenge for the unintentional murders of his wife, Lyssandra, and their six year old daughter, Calliope. His motive out the gate was about someone else, despite attempts to make him seem a solely evil and self motivated man.

I find it incredibly interesting that you had zero issues before with Kratos showing love to his little girl in Chains of Olympus. Or to him taking a weak moment with Ascension to give an illusion of Calliope a goodnight kiss. Or even to him questioning himself and his actions with, "What have I done?", and "What have I become?" in the other PSP title, Ghost of Sparta when talking about killing his mother and the death of Deimos.

The plot points were laid for Kratos to develop into a kinder, calmer, and more considerate man as early as game one.

Hell, at the end of 3, he makes the ultimate gesture against the Gods, against Athena and for the people of a country he adored. He sacrificed himself to return Hope itself to the Greeks. Kratos was always thinking of Greece and it's people and what was best for them as far back as BEFORE his oath to Ares. He made the oath so he would be able to defend his people from an invading force.

Yes, Kratos was an angry son of a bitch. Selfish, cruel, arrogant, and sometimes just outright horrific as a person. But eventually you get tired of being angry, and that's what he did. He succeeded in killing all who wronged him or stood in his way. Eventually the fire fueling his hate burned away.

By 2018, we see an aged Kratos who still holds much anger and was trying his best to work on his temper. Hes once again in a position of grieving, but this time he's left alone with his eleven year old son. He's tired, he's grieving, and he's trying to handle his emotions on top of a rather volatile Atreus's. He's struggling to maintain calm because he doesn't think he should be that way, the old Kratos, towards his innocent son.

And here's a perspective: The angry teen boys who loved the series have grown up. They grew tired of the anger. Many of them are fathers themselves. They now get to see their favorite character grow up with them and develop.

You can't be afraid to approach material that originally had nothing to do with Nazis just because Nazi chuds partially appropriated some of it. Fuck them, they don't own it.

That said, Kratos himself is an issue since he was inspired by Edward Norton's Nazi character in American History X:

“It took a long time to figure out what Kratos would look like, and ultimately we took inspiration form Edward Norton in American History X, when he played a Nazi. There’s this scene in which the cops arrest him and you just see how buffed and built he’s gotten. I showed that to the artist and I said, ‘Okay, that sense of power and aggression that you just see in his face, can we somehow take that, the essence of what he’s exuding, and somehow turn that into a character that fits into this Greek mythology world?”

Kinda-sorta, the whole thing has a bit of a backstory to it, but I’ll summarize it as best I can.

Back in Feb of 2019, Pat made a joke at CliffyB(because of how Cliffy ran his company and treated his employees) which made Cliffy get super angry at Pat over, mainly because Cliffy was trying to be smug online and Pat likes to shitpost.

Skip to July of this year, and Pat makes another shitpost at Cliffy’s expense.

This, for some reason, got the attention of David Jaffe to start tweeting at Pat over his tweet and trying to get Pat to come on his podcast/go on Pat’s podcast to debate crunch in video game development.

Pat, seeing it as Jaffe just trying to get attention via outrage clicks and the like, had no interest in going along with it.

Jaffe proceeded to do his podcast about how Pat was super wrong and video game crunch is completely normal and should be encouraged or whatever, using Pat’s current Twitter avatar to draw people in.

“Let’s Us Discuss This”

He later changed the thumbnail to be less flattering of Pat and to act as if he was showing up Pat’s fans, as they had come into Jaffe’s livestream to mock the guy.

Meanwhile, Pat barely mentioned the interactions again save for a passing mention on the next podcast and one or two superchats in his stream directly following the tweets.

It's like I'm watching a grey-haired right-wing fundie caterwaul and rip their shirt open after a sedate, soft-spoken, considerate and intelligent Political Sciences lecturer makes a nuanced and textured declaration.

I'm becoming acquainted with the term snoy, to refer to "Sony Snobs", who perhaps forgot that the medium's maybe old enough so that not every property needs to be signposted to oblivion. He lists Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow as his example of a "true" Metroidvania. I can't entirely fault him for it; it's still a decent game - but it absolutely is one of the hand-holdiest entries in the Castlevania franchise.

Imagine being incensed because Metroid Dread pulls a Metroid and asks you to think of your blaster as less of a gun, and more of a tool...

I liked God of War's first entry well enough, but Corey Barlog's the one who had enough sense to add pathos to a character that didn't really feel like much more than a tattooed Grecian Vin Diesel expy, before his turn with the franchise.