CHAPTER 5
Amy L. Norgard
Introduction
‘For too long has my husband escaped the consequences of His actions … but together … we will take what is owed.’ Hera speaks these vengeful words in the 2D scrolling action platformer game Apotheon (2015) from independent developer Alientrap Inc. She addresses the player as Nikandreos, a mortal warrior grappling with the fallout of the gods withholding their gifts of food, protection and civilization from humanity.2 Hera conspires with Nikandreos to commit deicide, or the violent destruction of the (erstwhile) immortal gods. Yet, Hera’s allegiance to Nikandreos’ cause is manufactured to exact revenge on Zeus for years (or eons, perhaps) of pent-up rage over his infidelities. With every deity Nikandreos defeats, he collects divine trophies – Apollo’s lyre, Artemis’ bow, Poseidon’s trident, etc. – that confer new skills, bringing him closer to immortality.3 Armed with these amassed trophies, Nikandreos becomes more powerful than the gods themselves and at the conclusion of the game replaces the gods he has killed, thus embodying the meaning behind his name: ‘victory of man’,4 or even ‘victory of humanity’.
Apotheon can be classified as a ‘hero-based’ game, to use Dunstan Lowe’s terminology, which follows an individual protagonist in a mythological setting.5 As an ancient world game, Apotheon also represents ‘new forms of authenticity’ by ‘simulating the look and feel of the past’, but still maintains distance from a realistic portrait of classical antiquity.6 Apotheon’s story-world is authentic in that it embraces recognizable figures from the Graeco-Roman pantheon who mostly act in line with classical precedents. The in-game design aesthetic resembles ancient Greek black-figure pottery,7 further signalling authenticity by embracing what Ross Clare calls ‘cultural visual codes’ that a player would immediately associate with the ancient past.8 Clare argues that the Apotheon gameworld is ‘unconcerned with showcasing an actual typology’ by featuring images of notable ancient artifacts drawn from differing periods and locations; the game favours evoking a generically Greek experience for the player over portraying archaeological or chronological accuracy.9 However, by having the player interact and play within a world based on an ancient Greek artform, I see Apotheon cleverly suggesting that our contemporary notion of antiquity is constructed by (and perhaps confined to) the art it produced. The player can only experience the past through its material remains, thus recognizing the distance between perception and reality, but allowing meaningful interaction with the past to take place within that space. Furthermore, Apotheon’s gaming format as a Metroidvania, side-scrolling jumping-and-run platformer is a unique format for historical games.10 Reminiscent of older, classic video games, the platformer can convey gaming ‘pastness’ through evoking nostalgia for the player.
Although an authentic portrait of the past, Apotheon also incorporates decidedly non-ancient elements, like the depiction of a ‘post-apocalyptic and post-mythological’ archaic Greece, as Maciej Paprocki writes.11 Zeus, disappointed with humanity’s ‘mortal failings’, ordered the gods to depart from the mortal realm. ‘I have watched five Ages of Man rise and fall,’ he says to Nikandreos, ‘Each generation more flawed than the last. I loved you, long ago … But … how low you have sunk.’ According to Hesiod’s Works and Days, the progression through the five ‘Ages of Man’ (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron) represents humanity’s sacrilege, declining morality, foolishness and ultimate destruction (109–201), ending with the prediction that Zeus will destroy the current generation of Iron (180–1). Apotheon imagines an outcome for this unfinished mythology storyline.
In fashioning an adapted version of Ancient Greece that features contemporary interpretations of the past, Apotheon’s gameworld welcomes other avenues of creative storytelling, including the integration of deicide, a common trope in classics screen media. Although the killing of the gods may appear dissonant with ancient sources, Paprocki argues that ‘the ancient Greek mythic storyworld accommodated deicide’, with early traces of deicide evident in the gods’ generational wars and the succession myths of archaic Greek literature, like Hesiod’s Theogony.12 In agreement with Paprocki, I see further trace evidence of deicide in ancient sources through the presence in myth of theomachoi, or exceptional mortal heroes who dare to challenge the gods, like Diomedes fighting Aphrodite on the battlefield (Homer, Iliad 5.318–51), or through religious worship opposition, like Pentheus denying Dionysus’ godhood (Euripides, Bacchae).13 Although the result of human–divine conflicts is notoriously disastrous for mortals,14 Deborah Lyons argues that the tension surrounding these physical match-ups implies that a mortal could conceivably win a fight with a god,15 suggesting the gods feared defeat, if not death.
Unique to depictions of classical deicide in screen media, Apotheon’s take on the motif embraces a gendered reading of antiquity that re-evaluates the Greek goddesses’ place within the divine patriarchy, communicated both through narratology and ludology.16 In Apotheon, numerous female deities assist Nikandreos in subverting the divine establishment, citing the toxic actions of the male gods, making Apotheon’s narrative stand out for embracing contemporary standards of gender equality. Apotheon also offers complexity in characterization by depicting its female divine non-player characters (NPCs) with a range of opinions about the divine patriarchy and Nikandreos. Additionally, the fighting gameplay mechanics distinguish how the player battles – and thereby relates to – female versus male characters, thus reflecting how gender influences the dynamics of play. By portraying gender as a critical element to the deicide motif, a recurring trope takes on a new life in Apotheon: the only solution to a toxic patriarchy – even a divine patriarchy – is to dismantle it and start over again, a message tinged with contemporary feminist values that would resonate with the audience drawn to indie gaming subculture. Despite the strides it makes elsewhere, Apotheon still promotes a male-centric gaming model.
Surveying deicide in modern media
Classical reception scholarship has noted the ‘mutual influences’ that occur across film, television and video games.17 The dynamics of this crosstalk often lead to commonalities in narrative, action sequences, and visual elements across screen media; it has been recognized as an understudied avenue in classical reception, but potentially rich for understanding ‘independent responses to the same underlying trends in popular culture’ featuring antiquity.18 This section will trace deicide as a modern trope that moves across different screen media, reflecting the player’s/viewer’s changing relationship with antiquity. I hope to demonstrate the innovation of Apotheon’s gendered approach to deicide, but also show how gaming advances notions of antiquity from other screen media (and vice versa).
The death of an immortal god should be a paradoxical concept. From as early as Homer, the gods are considered ‘deathless’ and ‘ageless’,19 and they consume nectar and ambrosia, substances associated with divinity.20 And yet, in popular film, television and video games the gods are frequently killed as part of action narratives. By showing that the supposedly immortal gods can be killed, these stories ‘radically reconfigure’ ancient conceptions of the gods.21 By presenting the gods as vulnerable, the deicide motif highlights humanity’s physical and moral supremacy, thereby placing higher stock in modern values over ancient ones, and valuing progress over stagnation. In an analysis of classical screen texts, Vincent Tomasso distinguishes between two types of deicide: vanishing death and violent death.22 In the vanishing motif, the gods are suggested to vanish over time from existence as an indication of human progress, as in Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans (1981). Zeus (Laurence Olivier) declares the gods may ‘no longer be needed’ if humanity continues to exhibit heroism on par with Perseus (Harry Hamlin), thus exalting human achievement over divinity.23 Another example comes from Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–9), episode ‘Who Mourns for Adonais?’ (2.33), in which the USS Enterprise crew encounter an omnipotent alien (Michael Forest) claiming to be the Apollo who was worshipped on Earth by the ancient Greeks. Apollo’s fellow ‘gods’ willfully left Earth and vanished into the ‘cosmic winds’, a sort of death for long-lived beings. Consistent with his portrayal in myth, Star Trek’s Apollo acts without self-discipline, thus aligning immortality with immorality and technological stagnation, as George Kovacs argues, contrasted with the morally upright and technologically advanced Enterprise crew.24
Violent death deicide is more common, in which the gods are violently killed by an exceptional human, as in Apotheon, or by other gods, like in Tarsem Singh’s Immortals (2011), whose narrative involves a second Titanomachy. An essential feature of violent deicide is the blurring of lines between human and divine: through deicide, immortals can perish, and mortals can partake in immortality through their exceptional deeds and progeny.25 Violent deicide is readily adopted into video games, notably the God of War series (2005–present, hereafter GoW1–3), which arguably has had the most direct influence on Apotheon’s deicide.26 In GoW1 (2005), the protagonist is a Spartan warrior Kratos seeking revenge for his family’s deaths perpetrated by the malignant influence of Ares. With divine aid from Athena, Kratos ultimately ascends to godhood himself to replace Ares as the new ‘god of war’; later in the series, Kratos challenges Zeus and the Titans. With the GoW franchise featuring over-the-top gore, sexualization of women, and a hyper-masculine protagonist,27 the game has been accused of promoting toxic masculinity.28 In a gaming context, deicide is facilitated by the expectations of gaming mechanics. In a treatment of deicide in classical video games, Joel Gordon argues that ‘death is an obvious prerequisite’ for the type of hack-n-slash play featured in GoW and Apotheon, because an opponent player must die for the player to progress. Thus, the gaming format ‘required the mechanics of immortality to be re-written’ so that deicide is not only possible but expected.29
Although most examples of violent decide, including Apotheon, showcase male protagonists overcoming the gods, Gordon suggests that there is a ‘potential link between feminism and deicide’.30 This chapter explores this notion through Apotheon, which incorporates a strong female element even if the protagonist is male. A feminist reading of deicide would argue that killing the gods symbolizes eradicating outdated traditions to make way for new ones,31 like promoting the roles of women disenfranchized by the patriarchal system. One early screen source featuring a female protagonist killing the gods is Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), a television series set in a fictional ancient Mediterranean that embraces many different mythological traditions.32 The show’s eponymous female mortal hero embodies a worldview reflective of contemporary values, including the strength of women and female relationships, which work together to underpin this early portrait of deicide on screen led by female agents. In the episode ‘Motherhood’ (5.22), the warrior Xena (Lucy Lawless) is mysteriously granted the ability to kill the immortal gods to protect her daughter after an unfavorable prophecy. While on a god-killing rampage, Xena kills Poseidon, Hephaestus, Hades, Artemis and Athena, who until this point had been recurring characters in the series. While Tomasso emphasizes the connection between Christian monotheistic beliefs and Xena’s god-killing powers,33 the episode’s feminist currents magnify a gendered approach to deicide: a female protagonist commits deicide in her role as a mother; assisted by a female companion, they kill divine antagonist Athena, who is leader of the gods after the death of Zeus in a previous episode – itself an example of deicide with a female element.34
Female protagonists committing deicide has seen a boost in screen media post-Apotheon: in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017), Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) takes on Ares;35 Hera leads a divine revolt against Zeus in Netflix’s American anime series Blood of Zeus (2020–present); and Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising (2020) features an option for a female playable character to combat Typhon. While Apotheon’s deicide does not achieve this level of female agency – there are no playable female characters, after all – it stands out in its clear initiative to give a voice to female characters who are impacted in different ways by the divine patriarchy’s rampant oppression and mistreatment of women. Apotheon, released in 2015, played a role in magnifying a gendered approach to deicide in gaming, an element lacking in ancient world games featuring deicide. Particularly with the confluence of social factors garnered by the #MeToo movement during its breakout in 2017, it seems that Apotheon was released at a critical time leading up to the globalization of the movement when enhanced attention was being paid to the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, and the culture of silence they generate. In the following sections, we will observe how Apotheon embraces female voices (albeit through NPCs) who act as dissenters or facilitators to the divine patriarchy.
Women speak out in Apotheon
Nikandreos’ interactions with female NPCs adheres to the principles of mortal-immortal interactions in classical myth outlined by Deborah Lyons: ‘the distinctive features of the Olympian goddesses signal the ways in which mortals will come into conflict with them’.36 In so-called ‘boss’ battles, Nikandreos fights Athena in a contest of wits, Artemis in a deer hunt, and Aphrodite by-proxy through Eros – appropriate conflicts for each goddess’ respective domain. This specificity in depiction of the female gods, who exhibit unique characteristics with vastly different motivations, is applied consistently throughout the game. Even elsewhere in this volume, it has been noted that among ancient world video games, Apotheon is notable for exploring female characterization through primary character roles.37 This section will analyse three female NPC divinities – Daphne, Thetis and Hera – who aid Nikandreos in defiance of the male gods because they have long resented their actions, even calling them out for abuses of power.38 The motivations of these female characters have precedent in ancient literature and classics screen media, but the articulation of their motivations within Apotheon has been augmented to convey a message of women’s empowerment.
In Apotheon, Daphne appears as a woman with tree-shaped appendages under guard on a pedestal in the garden of Apollo. She becomes an ally of Nikandreos to take down her captor Apollo in a cut scene that affirms her story is a rape. After Nikandreos completes a quest to give Daphne water, she springs back to life and recounts her notorious encounter with Apollo that revises Ovid’s account in Metamorphoses Book 1.452–566, which itself contains undercurrents of violence and assault. In the ancient account, Daphne is described as an object to be desired: Apollo greedily praises her bare body and undresses her with his gaze, for ‘what is hidden he imagines better’ (502, trans. Lombardo). As Apollo chases Daphne, the reader is told ‘she was still a lovely sight’, fetishizing Daphne’s fear and lack of consent (530). Even after she is transformed Apollo still makes advances, ‘pressing his hand / Against her trunk’, ‘embraced her limbs’ and ‘kissed the wood’ (552–5). He says, ‘Since you can’t be my bride / You will be my tree,’ and he adopts the laurel tree as his divine symbol (556–7). In acceptance of her reality, Daphne ‘bowed her new branches / And seemed to nod her leafy crown in assent’ (adnuit utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen, 566).
Apotheon’s Daphne rejects Ovid’s suggestion of her ‘assent’ – or, more to the point, her ‘consent’ – to be Apollo’s tree. After her transformation, she says Apollo ‘tears me from the earth and plants me in his private gardens’, where he has unfettered access to continually ‘caress’ her unwilling branches with his ‘spidery fingers’, reusing imagery from Ovid. Apollo’s adoption of the laurel as a symbol of love has been twisted into a further violation, like a rapist taking a trophy of a rape. Through Daphne, Apotheon reinterprets Ovid with a feminist lens that sheds light on contemporary norms pertaining to sex and consent,39 and reflects real-world controversy about the inclusion of Ovid’s text in US college curricula in light of the #MeToo movement.40 Allowing Daphne to speak about rape, consent, and sexual assault makes her a champion for women’s rights. Daphne evokes pathos from Nikandreos (and thereby the player) and suggests that Apollo and the gods are worthy of destruction for acting contrary to modern moral values. Daphne gives her new ally Helios’ Sun Disc, a shield that reflects light, saying that ‘Apollo does not command all that is bright in this world.’ Nikandreos uses this shield to defeat Apollo in the boss battle that takes place in the dark, signaling that mortals possess moral enlightenment that the gods lack – particularly when it comes to the treatment of women.
Later in the game, the nereid Thetis appears in Poseidon’s waters as an ally to Nikandreos: ‘The Olympians have taken for granted their place at the top of the cosmos,’ she says. ‘Not everything in this universe bends to the will of the gods. There are things older and more powerful than even they’ – seeming to imply herself. In an echo of Iliad 1, Thetis claims to have ‘influence of [her] own in these waters’. According to the Homeric text, Thetis convinces Zeus to punish the Achaians on behalf of her son, Achilles, in an iconic scene of supplication (493–530). Although intent to remain neutral, Zeus grants Thetis’ appeal to payback a favor: ‘I shall arrange it … my word is not revocable / nor ineffectual, once I nod upon it’ (524–7, trans. Fitzgerald).41 However, Thetis’ position to thwart the Achaians undermines Hera’s interests after she sided against the Trojans and puts Zeus in a difficult position with his spouse (517–23, 536–69). Similarly, in the few examples of screen media in which Thetis appears, she tends to challenge the Olympian gods.42 In Clash of the Titans (1981),43 Thetis (Maggie Smith) boldly protects her son, the monstrous Calibos, by manipulating Perseus’ clay figurine avatar – and thereby his fate – in the ‘arena of life’, which is a privilege typically afforded to Zeus.44 Like in the Iliad, Thetis successfully navigates the divine patriarchal system by sidling up to Zeus to gain influence. In Apotheon’s (albeit short) cutscene, Thetis harbours a deep resentment of the Olympian deities – male and female alike – for their suppression of her primordial powers. As a result, she sides with humanity by providing a ship to Nikandreos for safe passage in Poseidon’s waters. Whereas Thetis’ aims have previously been at odds with Hera, in Apotheon she is newly aligned with the queen of the gods: ‘we have a … mutual understanding’, she cautiously says. Although they have different motivations, Thetis and Hera fighting on the same side highlights the cohesive aims of key female divinities as dissenters to male god authority.
Finally, Hera’s characterization in Apotheon evokes her ancient depiction as Zeus’ scorned spouse. Other screen portraits of Hera do not consistently recognize her vengeful tendencies. Whereas in some screen media her role is sanitized,45 or she is absent altogether,46 other media uses her role as a scorned woman to explain her destructive impulse.47 Apotheon channels Hera’s bitterness and anger about Zeus’ extramarital affairs into her role as instigator of deicide, adopting nuances in the divine couple’s relationship dynamic from ancient sources. Homer’s Iliad reveals the dysfunction and power imbalance in their relationship when Hera seduces Zeus to turn the tide of the Trojan War (14.153–351, 15.1–78). In the prelude to sex, Zeus undermines Hera by cataloguing his sexual exploits in a back-handed compliment of her beauty (14.313–28), and later he hurls threats when he realizes the deception:
Fine underhanded work, eternal bitch!
[…] You will be the first to catch
[…] a whip across your shoulders for your pains!
Did you forget swinging so high that day?
I weighted both your feet with golden cord
you couldn’t break, and there you dangled
under open heaven amid white cloud.
Some gods resented this,
but none could reach your side or set you free.
15.14–22, trans. Fitzgerald
In response to this, Hera ‘shudders’ in fear (34). This episode continues the trend from Book 1 of violence perpetrated against Hera by Zeus.48 There are also notes here that Zeus’ reign is ‘somewhat fragile to external circumstances’49 when Zeus alludes to Hera’s prior insubordination, her punishment of being strung up in chains, and the resentment of the other gods. He fears usurpation, as the generations of sky gods before him, since history has shown his wife can garner support from the other gods against him. We can see how this scene plants the seeds for Hera’s untold revenge narrative that Apotheon (and other media, like Blood of Zeus) comes to adopt.
Hera’s relationship with Nikandreos fits the mold of patronage between a goddess and mortal man, like pairs Athena and Odysseus, or Aphrodite and Aeneas. But relationship dynamics between mortal heroes and immortals exhibit what Lyons calls ‘paradoxical commingling of hostility and affinity’, even between a patron deity and their favorite mortal.50 This dynamic can contextualize Hera’s changing allegiances and fraught interactions with Nikandreos.
From their first interaction, Hera manipulates Nikandreos to take down the gods for her own private revenge: ‘Zeus, King of Gods and Men … my husband … has turned His back on your people. He has broken the sacred contract between deities and mortals. He has betrayed you.’ (See Figure 5.1.) Hera’s true motivations are personal, evident in her sneering aside ‘my husband’. At one point, Hera catalogues his many affairs, which she refers to as the many ‘daggers he has thrust into my back’, with a list recalling Zeus’ catalogue of sexual conquests in Iliad 14.51 Hera’s criticisms about Zeus’ mistreatment of her and failings as a husband are sympathetic, but she is portrayed as shifty and untrustworthy. Even Zeus can spot the misaligned motivations between Hera and Nikandreos: ‘I see in your eyes that you do not fight for her sake,’ implying that Nikandreos’ true alignment is with humanity. When Nikandreos defeats Zeus at the end of the game, Hera, whom Zeus has imprisoned in chains (perhaps like her anvil chains in Iliad 15), takes ownership of Nikandreos’ accomplishments, shouting, ‘I … I have done it!’ After Nikandreos has spent the game demonstrating he can harness divine power, the gods have become obsolete to him – including Hera. The player is then given the option to imprison Hera or kill her – with Zeus’ thunderbolt, no less – to complete the deicide. When Hera realizes Nikandreos will not save her, she lashes out, revealing her true feelings: ‘I gave you immortality! I gave you power! You are worthless without me!’ And so, imprisoned or killed, Hera becomes excluded from the fruits of the very deicide she instigated. Any righteous sentiments Hera expressed about Zeus’ toxicity are undermined because of her own manipulation.
Figure 5.1 Hera (r.) offers to help Nikandreos (l.) (2015). © Alientrap Games Inc.
Gendering hack-n-slash? Fighting female deities
Several female NPCs act as traditional opponents whom the player must defeat in either minor challenges or dedicated ‘boss’ battles: namely, Artemis, Aphrodite, Athena, and Demeter. This section will argue that the gameplay mechanics are differently executed for confrontations with female deities, which shapes how the player relates to – or, perhaps, sympathizes with – the female deities.52 Since ‘boss’ fights are the place where death or defeat of the gods occurs, nuances here reflect the game’s outlook on gendered relationships within the context of deicide. The fighting formula in Apotheon can best be described as ‘hack-n-slash’: the player hits, swipes, stabs, shoots and otherwise tries to kill opponents to progress through the game. Opponents have a health bar that is winnowed away with each hit until they are dead. Put another way, if the player persists with physical force for long enough, they will win. To facilitate hack-n-slash fighting, Apotheon features an array of traditional ancient weaponry common in historical games, like swords, shields, daggers, and spears, which the player upgrades to facilitate progress in battles. This fighting format dictates how the player engages with the world, but also governs how the gods are defeated in ‘boss’ fights.
Of the major seven ‘boss’ fights, three occur against female opponents: Demeter, Artemis and Athena. The remaining four take place against male opponents: Apollo, Poseidon, Ares and Zeus. There is also an optional encounter with Aphrodite that I will address here. The fighting formula with the male opponents is based on hack-n-slash, where the player must demonstrate physical domination over opponents with traditional game fighting. Certainly, there are some slight variations to present new challenges and maintain the player’s interest: for example, Nikandreos fights Apollo in the dark with the light of a special shield to guide his hits; a giant-sized Poseidon takes on Nikandreos in a water scene, while the player dodges hits by swimming under water and using a ship as a platform;53 and Zeus, waging bolts of lightning as weapons, needs to be defeated twice – once as regular sized, and again as both Zeus and Nikandreos appear larger-than-life, signaling their equalized divinity. As Nikandreos fights the male gods, they verbally taunt and belittle him: ‘Let me enlighten you’ (Apollo) or ‘Your head will be my trophy’ (Ares). When the male gods are defeated, their bodies dramatically fall and disappear, which suggests death in a descent to Tartarus.54
The confrontations with the female deities, however, feature fighting mechanics that go beyond the definition of hack-n-slash, or strive to avoid it altogether. The ‘boss’ fight with Artemis is the most physical and employs hack-n-slash throughout, but in a far more innovative presentation. As the deity of the hunt, Artemis transforms Nikandreos into a stag whom she then pursues (see Figure 5.2): ‘Does the master hunter make for master prey?’ she asks.55 Rather than attack, the player as a stag must escape the huntress and find checkpoints that reverse the transformation, turning Artemis into a doe and Nikandreos into the hunter. In this configuration, Artemis is vulnerable to injury.
Figure 5.2 Artemis (r.) hunts Nikandreos as a vulnerable stag (l.) (2015). © Alientrap Games Inc.
The Artemis ‘boss’ fight has been praised rightfully for its innovation by gaming reviewers.56 But even beyond its innovative mechanics, the deer hunt battle, in constantly switching the roles of hunter and hunted, allows the player to experience the fight from the perspective of both predator and prey. This creates an opportunity for the player to experience being in the vulnerable position of a powerless object that is hunted or pursued, which can be read as a metaphor for the role of women in ancient and contemporary society, particularly young women in modern media.57 It is also significant that the player only wins the battle when they are in the role of the dominant hunter, reinforcing the notion that traditional power structures will overcome weaker ones. The deer hunt battle, enjoyable to play in its own right, cleverly encapsulates the differing power dynamics between men and women, which recapitulates Apotheon’s attention to gender roles.
Like the Artemis battle, the side quest to Aphrodite’s garden embraces non-hack-n-slash fighting mechanics and leaves room for the player to develop empathy for the female NPC. The player first encounters a naked Aphrodite, evocative of Praxiteles’ statue from Knidos. In a condemnation of hack-n-slash, she beseeches the player not to molest anything in her gardens.58 If the player opts to break the garden’s statues, she turns to anger – ‘clumsy oaf!’ she shouts – and summons winged Eros to engage Nikandreos in battle with bow and arrows. Aphrodite herself does not engage in fighting, but rather flees across platforms, naked and vulnerable, avoiding battle.59 In Apotheon, the player can hit Aphrodite causing her to cry out in pain, but this does not progress the game: hack-n-slash does not work against this vulnerable opponent. Rather, the player must manipulate Aphrodite’s errant movements to put her between Nikandreos and Eros so that Eros will mistakenly shoot her. Having a proxy shooter in Eros means the player does not hit Aphrodite, thus presenting a softened portrayal of violence against women – particularly this naked and vulnerable woman. When shot – with love arrows, seemingly – Aphrodite declares her ‘compassion’ for Nikandreos. She then condemns Zeus for cutting off access to the mortal realm, which undermines her divine powers to make romantic unions between gods and mortals. She begins to doubt her place in the new order: ‘what share of privileges will I have when there’s no one left on earth to love?’ and offers aid to Nikandreos. In becoming a divine dissenter like Daphne and Thetis, Aphrodite questions the motivations of Zeus and the male gods in power, ultimately sympathizing with Nikandreos and humanity, out of concern for her own preservation.
The battles (or challenges, rather) with Athena and Demeter similarly de-emphasize hack-n-slash as the player does not ever strike these deities. In the absence of violent confrontation, the deities articulate their position on the divine establishment. Demeter is won over through a quest for her sheaf, but like Aphrodite she is not traditionally defeated through death. When Nikandreos completes the quest, she demonstrates sympathy for all humanity: ‘I do not wish to see your people die, as Zeus decrees.’ Demeter exhibits remorse for nearly causing the extinction of mortals in the emotional fallout of Persephone’s kidnapping, referring to the events of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (302–13). Similarly, in the battle with Athena, her protectors take the brunt of the physical abuse while the player finds their way through a maze (‘a trial of wit and alacrity’), a quest appropriate for the goddess of wisdom. In cut-scenes, Athena lauds Nikandreos’ heroism in identifying herself as the ‘protector of champions and patron to heroic endeavor’. While she does not condone deicide, nor the idea of a human trying to supersede the gods, she is not antagonistic toward Nikandreos as the male gods are. Rather, she ultimately accepts Nikandreos’ victory over her and entertains the notion that the Olympians’ time is over: ‘the world is changing, even stone walls will not stand forever’. Unlike other female deities we have seen, Athena does not seem to resent the divine patriarchy. In fact, as the favorite child of Zeus, it is likely she has a prominent role within the system. Her shifted viewpoint, bolstered by her role as the voice of reason among the gods, reads as a logical conclusion based on the natural transference of power throughout time, and not as a condemnation of the gods’ actions. When Apollo, Ares, Poseidon and Zeus are defeated, they fall to Tartarus in a clear signal of their justified defeat. In contrast to the male gods, the final image of Athena on screen shows her kneeling at Nikandreos’ feet.
As I have demonstrated, the fighting mechanics in Apotheon are executed differently for the gender of the divine opponent: the male deities must be overcome by physical prowess and endurance through hack-n-slash, whereas for female opponents hack-n-slash is put on hold or differently imagined. Instead, the female NPCs run away in vulnerable postures (like Artemis and Aphrodite) or they are not fought at all (like Demeter and Athena), which provides more space for the women to have meaningful conversations with Nikandreos. Conversely, when the male gods speak, they hurl only abuse. It could be argued that this different way of approaching fighting women treats them delicately and perpetuates a lack of gender equality through gameplay – and I think there are hints of this at work. But, when coupled with the attention to narrative and character elements articulated above, the variety in fighting mechanics reflects the gains Apotheon makes elsewhere to provide rich and varied character development for female NPCs. The female characters are uniquely different from one another, and so too is the manner of battling them. Furthermore, it can be difficult to generate empathy for characters when the player is ripping them to shreds with a sword, and so the non-hack-n-slash fighting mechanics better facilitate the player to listen to the female characters. Through the uniquely formatted ‘boss’ fights that de-emphasize physical fighting, the game communicates that the female deities are not the enemy – the male gods are – and aligns with the objective of taking down the divine patriarchy.
Conclusion: Just another creation story
In the final battle, Zeus asks Nikandreos, ‘Who do you fight for? All that you’ve known is gone!’ Arguably, Nikandreos would not belong with humanity any longer because he has acquired the powers of the very gods he has destroyed, elevating him beyond mortality. So, in response to Zeus’ question, Nikandreos fights for his only possible future: kill Zeus, complete the deicide, and take the place of the gods through apotheosis. With this, he joins an exclusive group of mortals-turned-immortals, including Ganymede, Tithonus and the Dioscuri.60 Nikandreos, however, stands out from this crowd for earning his immortality by killing the gods, rather than having immortality conferred upon him, which aligns him more with GoW’s Kratos than literary characters.
Apotheon features a slate of female characters that are substantially rendered and cultivate modern standards of gender portrayals. This has not traditionally been the case for video games set in classical antiquity.61 However, some aspects of Apotheon erase the gains made in depictions of women via narrative and innovative gameplay discussed above. The female characters, as developed and differentiated as they are, are still NPCs. There is no option for a playable female character, about which creative director Jesse McGibney has expressed regret.62 The female NPCs are not active subjects, but ancillary figures subjugated to a traditional, male-centric gaming formula. The gamer – statistically likely to be male – plays as a male protagonist, who unwittingly becomes the vehicle through which oppressed female deities communicate discontent with the divine patriarchal system. In some ways, the elevation of female voices is an unintended by-product of the player’s primary initiative. This point is underscored by the option at the end of the game for Nikandreos to kill Hera, an overt act of violence against a woman who has spoken out about the toxic behavior of men. To amplify the problematic nature of this act, Hera is chained and unable to defend herself, which starkly departs from how the female gods have been fought throughout the game. Hera’s death signals that Nikandreos’ new godhood, like the previous ones, begins from a place of devaluing women. Ironically, the more successful Nikandreos’ deicide, the closer the female gods come to their own downfall. Echoing Athena’s words, the system is broken and needs to be rebuilt. In providing aid to Nikandreos, the female deities are willing to take down the entire divine establishment, even as their own fates are tied to it. The game’s message, then, resonates with contemporary audiences familiar with the underlying circumstances of the #MeToo movement’s globalization in 2017, early traces of which were in the public consciousness in 2015: historically, women have had to accept sacrificing their own power and livelihood to voice injustices perpetrated by men
Apotheon teases hope in resetting the divine system, but this hope is short-lived. In the final cut-scene, after all the gods are vanquished and humanity is destroyed, a lone Nikandreos in his most divine posture begins to repopulate the earth. In a sunny spot, he molds a human out of dirt, just as the gods created the previous generations of mortals.63 Nikandreos evokes the iconic role of Prometheus, a human sympathizer who defied the gods by giving mortals fire64 and, by his own account, gave them reason, science and art.65 Nikandreos molds his creation to look like him: a man. As the camera pans away from this male god and male creation gazing at each another, we question how women fit into this new reality – if at all.
Notes
1.I extend my deepest thanks to the participants of the Antiquity in Media Studies 2020 virtual conference, where I presented an early version of this chapter, and to Maciej Paprocki and the anonymous reviewers for their crucial feedback.
2.Roy (2015) writes that Nikandreos as a typical action hero is ‘bereft of psychology’.
3.For a full list of divine trophies, their status effects and mythological inspiration, see Paprocki (2021).
4.Rollinger (2018: 18–19).
5.Lowe (2009: 68).
6.Ibid., 66. See, Rollinger (2020a: 5–6) and Clare (2018: 80–5).
7.This aspect of the game has been much lauded by gaming critics as ‘a handmade pot on every screen’ (Vore 2015) and ‘utterly enchanting’ (Whitehead 2015).
8.Clare (2021: 58).
9.Ibid., 59. See Clare (2021: 58–65) for a different discussion of Apotheon’s authenticity.
10.Rollinger (2020a: 27, 40).
11.Paprocki (2020: 194). Paprocki, a classicist, served as a ‘Mythology Consultant’ on Apotheon.
12.Ibid., 200.
13.Lyons (1997: 70–1).
14.Dione, comforting a wounded Aphrodite, says this about Diomedes: ‘He who fights the immortals is not bound to live for very long’ (ὅττι μάλ’ οὐ δηναιὸς ὅς ἀθανάτοισι μάχηται, Homer, Iliad 5.407).
15.Lyons: ‘While Greek myth generally tends to suppress the idea that a mortal might physically overpower a god, here we see traces of the idea that the hierarchy of power is neither self-evident nor immutable’ (1997: 81).
16.Lowe (2009: 67).
17.Rollinger (2020a: 40).
18.Lowe (2009: 73). Also see Serrano (2020: 48–9) and generally Clare for a transmedial approach to classical reception (2021: particularly, 7–9, 28–33 and 35–8).
19.ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήραος (Homer, Iliad 8.539). See, Clay (1981–2: 112–13).
20.There is scholarly debate whether ambrosia and nectar provide the gods with immortality, or whether immortality is an innate feature of their being. There seems to be agreement that consuming nectar and ambrosia is associated with a lack of aging. See Tomasso (2015: 147–8), Baratz (2015: 161–3) and Clay (1981–2: 115).
21.Tomasso (2015: 149).
22.Gordon (2017: 213) suggests the distinction could be relabelled as ‘historic’ (pre-early 1980s) and ‘modern’ (exclusively after 1990s), implying violent death is more contemporary and evolved from the vanishing death trope.
23.Vanishing death is also implied in the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans (dir. Louis Leterrier); violent death is featured in the remake’s sequel, Wrath of the Titans (2012, dir. Jonathan Liebesman).
24.Kovacs (2015: 209).
25.See Gordon (2017: 214–16) for a fuller treatment of Immortals, focusing on its Christian influences.
26.Here is a non-exhaustive list of other ancient-world games that feature deicide: Kid Icarus (1986), Age of Mythology (2002), Titan Quest (2006), Mytheon (2011), Smite (2014), Blood and Glory: Immortals (2015), Okhlos (2016) and Immortals Fenyx Rising (2020).
27.Clare (2021: 43–4), on Kratos’ characterization after classical Heracles.
28.Conway (2020).
29.Gordon (2017: 218).
30.Ibid., 222.
31.See, Tomasso (2015: 149), who observes the deicide motif stems from popular Judeo-Christian attitudes about the Graeco-Roman gods’ ‘moral failure as characters’.
32.Ibid., 151–3.
33.Ibid., 153.
34.‘God Fearing Child’ (5.12). Hercules (Kevin Sorbo), aided by Hera, kills Zeus with a dagger made from Kronos’ rib.
35.Gordon (2017: 219–21) treats the Wonder Woman comics.
36.Lyons (1997: 95).
37.In the present volume, see Chapter 3, Persyn (45, 50–1); also see Chapter 2, Orellana Figueroa, (37–8) who generally observes low numbers of playable female characters in ancient world games.
38.GoW’s Kratos also receives female divine aid to commit deicide from Athena, Pandora and Gaia.
39.See Morales (2020: 65–9) and Richlin (1992: 158–69).
40.Most notably at Columbia University, see Sottile (2019) and Miller (2015).
41.Thetis once ‘shielded the son of Kronos / from peril and disgrace’ (503–4, trans. Fitzgerald).
42.Thetis makes a brief appearance in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), notably the only deity to appear in the film, but her purpose is to aid Achilles’ character development and she is stripped of any clear indication of divinity.
43.Thetis was removed from the remake of Clash of the Titans (2010).
44.Curley (2015: 212–13).
45.Notoriously, Disney’s Hercules (1997), where Hera’s marriage with Zeus appears to be loving and she is Hercules’ biological mother.
46.Hera is not a character in Immortals (2011), and she is notably absent from the rogue-like video game Hades (2020), despite the rest of the Olympians appearing.
47.In GoW3 (2010), Hera appears as a sloppy alcoholic who drinks to blunt the pain of Zeus’ infidelities. And later, the Netflix series Blood of Zeus (2020–present) recapitulates the same model of deicide instigated by Hera after she learns of Zeus’ latest illegitimate child, Heron.
48.‘Sit down, be still, obey me, / or else not all the gods upon Olympos / can help in the least when I approach your chair / to lay my inexorable hands upon you’ (Homer, Iliad 1.565–7, trans. Fitzgerald), to which Hera ‘feared him’ and ‘bent her will to his’ (568–9).
49.Paprocki (2020: 197).
50.Lyons (1997: 90).
51.‘Leto … Demeter … Dione. Maia. Metis … Semele … Io. Europa … Leda. Ganymede – but certainly these are only a few of many.’ Cf. Homer, Iliad 14.313–28.
52.Also see Chapter 10, Chidwick, (147–8) in the present volume.
53.GoW3 (2010) also features a water fight with giant-sized Poseidon. See Clare (2021: 47–9) for a discussion of this battle, including how gaming elements facilitate player participation in violent deicide.
54.Hera taunts a defeated Zeus, saying, ‘Fall to Tartarus!’ As Apotheon’s mythology consultant, Paprocki (2020: 202) notes that the exact nature of the gods’ ‘deaths’ was left intentionally open.
55.Clare (2018: 83) notes that this boss fight can read alongside the Actaeon myth, in which Artemis turns Acteon into a deer and he is killed by his own hunting dogs.
56.Warr (2015) and Vore (2015).
57.Modern media’s paradox of the hunting girl fits this model: young, coming-of-age girls are portrayed as hunters (armed with bow and arrows, much like Artemis), but are often hunted down themselves by male antagonists, demonstrating the vulnerability of young women as they fight injustice (e.g. Katniss in The Hunger Games, 2012; and Tris in Divergent, 2014). See Oliver (2016).
58.Clare (2021: 62) notes the irony of hack-n-slash in Apotheon, where the player destroys artifacts within a game whose design is based on material culture.
59.In GoW3, Aphrodite similarly avoids battle, but is rather portraited as a sex object to the point of caricature (pivoting from her depiction in GoW (no 1)), as Kratos can bed her in a mini game by pushing buttons on the controller. For more, see, Chapter 9, Ciaccia in this volume; also see Clare (2021: 52–6) on constructions of gender in GoW.
60.Baratz (2015: 160–1).
61.See Introduction, Cook and Draycott (1–5) in the present volume; also Beavers (2020b) for treatment of gender stereotyping and objectification in Ryse: Son of Rome (2013).
62.Rollinger (2018: 19). McGibney cites logistic limitations in writing and voice work.
63.Cf. Hesiod’s Works and Days, where Pandora is formed from ‘earth mixed with water’ (γαῖαν ὕδει φύρειν, 61); and later the gods ‘made’ (ποιήσαν, 110) the generations of men.
64.Ibid., 47–58.
65.Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (442–506), culminating in the claim that ‘all of humanity’s arts come from Prometheus’ (πᾶσαι τέχναι βροτοῖσιν ἐκ Προμηθέως, 506).