More God of War 3 Hate: In Defense of Hera

Editor's note: Think you have it bad? Just wait until you read about the life of Hera, recounted here in hilarious fashion by Evan. No wonder she was so bitter towards Kratos in God of War 3. -Brett

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This article contains major spoilers for God of War 3.

I thought I'd managed to get all the bad feelings out in my last God of War 3 post — but that was before I read the June issue of GamePro, which includes an interview with game director Stig Asmussen. In the interview, Asmussen says:

I had problems with killing Hera. She's a woman, she's pathetic, she's sort of a drunk, and I didn't want people to think Kratos was the kind of character that would do this to women, but what she represented was so important.

Let me stop him there.

Having played the bulk of the God of War series, I can safely say that the idea that there's some line players hope Kratos doesn't cross is nothing short of laughable. Remember that this is a guy who sets prisoners on fire. And what's this about women?

Maybe Asmussen just means pretty women, women who are not there for Kratos to have sex with, or Poseidon's princess in God of War 3, who is essentially a key with giant boobs. (Also? That princess dies…and it's Kratos's fault.)

So what exactly aren't we supposed to think Kratos would do to women?

Anyway, this post isn't about Kratos being a raging box of dicks; it's about Hera. Asmussen had problems with Kratos killing her, despite her gender handicap and penchant for unmixed wine.

Asmussen continues in GamePro:

Every time we killed a god in the game, it was what we called a "world-changing event," and when [Hera] died, all of the vegetation and wildlife in the world died too. That was such an important symbol, so we had to make her die in some way. But…she was a bitch. She was a total bitch, and she needed to die.

To recap: Killing Hera was hard, but it was also easy.

I can't argue with the necessity of Hera's death, given the purpose of God of War 3 — to usher forth the literal death of Greek mythology — but I take issue with Asmussen's justification: namely, that Hera needs to die because she is a drunken bitch. Even a cursory glance at the mythology calls this into question.

The moment Hera was born, her father Cronos ate her. In fact, he did this to almost all of his children (and a rock, which, in his defense, he mistook for Zeus), so she did not suffer any especial indignity there. Still, one must admit that as childhoods go, hers could have started better.

Hera and her siblings hung out in Daddy's tummy until Zeus was old enough to come back and cut them out. Obviously this took a while, so that entire generation's childhoods were pretty much a wash, or at the very least the stuff of terrible Golden Books.

Like this, but with more baby eating.

Upon assuming control of the universe, the Olympians divvied it up amongst themselves. Hera became the goddess of marriage, which is not only less cool than ruling the ocean or Underworld, but also proved to be a sick cosmic joke. If Poseidon had taken control of the ocean only to discover that every whale, dolphin, octopus, and Aquaman had waited until that exact moment to take the biggest collective shit ever, he certainly would have called foul. Similarly, the newly anointed goddess of marriage soon found herself in the single worst marriage of a mythology filled with terrible marriages.

Hera's husband-brother Zeus wasted no opportunity to cheat on her with anything that wasn't nailed down (although I don't remember if that situation ever came up in mythology — I'm sure he would have given the opportunity). So frequent were Zeus's forays into bedrooms not his own that he eventually had to find new and unprecedented ways to cheat on his wife. And so Zeus got super freaky, seducing Leda in the guise of a swan.

Zeus also invented the golden shower.

Due to the fact that in the ancient Greek equivalent of Rock-Paper-Scissors, lightning always beats marriage, Hera was mostly powerless to fight back against her husband directly. She could, however, make life very difficult for Zeus' illegitimate children. Most famously, she set Heracles on a life path cleaning up epic amounts of shit from immortal horses and capturing an assortment of increasingly ridiculous animals.

How did that story end? Zeus made Heracles a god. Honestly, if anyone deserves a drink at this point, it's Hera.

So can we really blame her for being a little bitchy to Kratos? Not only is he yet another one of her husband's bastards, but he also punches her brothers to death and impales her father on his own bondage gear. All she has left at this point are her dying gardens. And then, faced with the man who has done all of this, she says something kind of mean and he snaps her neck. It's not even a boss fight; Hera's death is as pathetic and hapless as the rest of her life.

She deserved to die, though, right? I mean, what a bitch.