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This Isn’t Progress
By Corvus | June 26, 2008
I will be the first to admit that the myths of my Scandinavian ancestors probably weren’t the most equitable, gender-wise. The woman were described as strong and beautiful and brave and true… and then were mostly kept at home in order to tend the golden apples of immortality, or have their hair stolen. It’s quite possible that the tales of Sif, Freya, Frigg, Skaldi have merely been lost over time and that they once played a more prominent role in the culture, but the stories I cut my teeth on were of Odin, Thor and Loki.
So when Viking: Battle for Asgard (V:BA) cast Freya, the warrior goddess whose function it was to carry the fallen to Valhalla, as the motivator of the game’s events, I was impressed. Historically, Freya was actually one of the Vanir, a different and possibly older race than the other gods, who were of the Aesir. She wise and powerful and it is said that many tribes held her in higher esteem than the entire pantheon of Aesir. In V:BA, she refuses to carry Skarrin, the player character, to Valhalla when he falls in battle, but instead returns him to life as her champion to fight Hel’s undead legions.
It’s right about there that things started going terribly wrong with the game’s cosmology.
Historically, Hel was the third of three children that resulted from Loki’s dalliance with a giantess named Angrboda. Now Loki was also the son of two giants, although he was blood brother to Odin and spent a lot of time hanging around tormenting the Aesir. Hel is described as half living flesh and half dead flesh. Some texts divide her appearance to the left and right, others top and bottom (with the bottom half being the undead half, which is far more interesting from a metaphoric standpoint). Hel’s older siblings were Fenrir the wolf and Jormungand, the world serpent. When the Aesir decided to “deal with” Loki’s evil offspring, Hel was cast into Niflheim where she presided over those who did not die in battle.
In the game, Hel is a beautiful goddess who is, for some vague reason, stripped of her beauty by Odin and cast out of Asgard. It is intimated that Freya may have had a hand in trumping up charges against her. Hel has somehow managed to reclaim her beauty, at least for the fist few cut scenes, and makes an appearance with her champion. While Freya’s outfit is hardly appropriate to the climate, or the battlefield, Hel is wearing an outfit so skimpy as to be highly improbable. All right, fine. Skimpy clothes seem to be endemic in the world of video game design. I don’t like it, but I have come to expect it.
What I didn’t understand is a long cut scene describing the origins of Hel’s champion. Evidently he was initially Freya’s champion and when he proclaimed his love for her, she rejected him and cast him aside. It was then that Hel took him as her champion and slowly corrupted his body and mind until he was more beast than man. I suppose we were meant to draw parallel’s between Hel’s champion and our avatar, Skarrin. But what really happens is that we’re left with the impression that Hel and Freya’s real conflict is over some mortal man.
Great. Two powerful goddesses… squabbling over a mortal man. How… empowering.
The game’s official web site, while still taking liberties with the source mythology, doesn’t refer to any of this sub-text at all. If the descriptions of the characters there are to be believed, this is all about trying to unleash Ragnarok, the end of the world. But within the game itself–this isn’t so clear. Perhaps it’s bad writing, but it’s certainly bad storytelling. If the sub-text wasn’t intentional, then it was a reflection of the designers’ perceptions of women. I don’t know which is worse, but the end result was an emotionally unsatisfying plot attached to an emotionally unsatisfying game.
Which is too bad because, when handled intelligently, Norse mythology is a rich playground.
Tagged:gender issues, Mythology, plot, viking battle for asgard. |
