Mad_Dog_of_Fujiwara
She/Her- 9,828
- 12,425
Not gonna cover many abilities this time around because one of them is a convoluted mess that'll take a while to resolve.
Resistance to Absorption/Blade of Olympus/A Lot Of Shit [Zeus]
Let's start simple with this one. Zeus is said to resist his own lightning for the following reason:
Let's ignore the Cronos' Rage and Blade of Olympus stuff for now. Zeus resisting his own lightning relies on two scans, as shown here and here. In both cases, he fires a lightning bolt at Kratos, who reflects it, and... staggers Zeus and causes him to grunt in pain. He is explicitly not resisting these abilities. In fact, one of the scans cited in this justification even explicitly confirms Zeus can be harmed by his own lightning.
Onto the Blade of Olympus, then. In addition to the above, there's also the following justification for him resisting the blade's effects:
So all of this is pretty contingent on Zeus remaining immortal after getting stabbed by the blade, since the blade is meant to negate the immortality of the gods. So, what happens to Zeus when he gets stabbed by the blade? He dies. Like, canonically, this is where Zeus dies. He comes back, but he does in fact die. There is no way to spin this as him "resisting" the blade's abilities; Him resisting it would fundamentally break one of the most plot important moments in the entire series. Oh wait, I almost forgot about God of War 2. Yknow, the game where you clearly absorb magic from Zeus when stabbing him with the blade. Oh wait, forgot the part where Kratos stabs him through the chest... and Athena sacrifices herself to save his life. The implication is quite obvious; Athena interrupting Zeus' execution means he would not be able survive the blade impaling him had Kratos been allowed to continue. If he could, then Athena's all-important sacrifice means nothing. While you could argue that this doesn't matter because Zeus was impaled regardless, the novelization makes it clear that the blade's effects are not instantaneous; It is reasonable to conclude that Athena interrupting the absorption process is why Zeus kept his godly powers. To make matters worse, the novelization of God of War 2 outright confirms Zeus was getting his powers absorbed by the blade. There is no point in any of the games where Zeus resists the Blade of Olympus' abilities; In order of events, we have him get his magic absorbed by it, we have Athena sacrificing herself specifically to save Zeus from dying to the blade, and then we have Zeus Actually Dying For Real to the blade.
To make matters even worse, Zeus' accelerated development notes how his powers were in fact absorbed, and he just grew in strength to the point of being able to fight back against Kratos again.
If Kratos absorbed his powers and lifeforce with the Blade of Olympus, then Zeus does not resist its absorption. Conversely, if he did resist it, then he wouldn't need to "recover" from anything, thus making this part of his AD invalid. The GoW supporters are cognizant of this, yet have chosen to give him resistance to the very thing they say he didn't resist as a justification for a separate ability. I know yall are probably tired of me expressing my disbelief at the state of GoW, but the fact that stuff like this has continually slipped through the cracks is an embarrassment to the wiki, if not the entire VS community.
The first justification appears to explain away Zeus' actual, canonical death by saying he was merely pretending to be dead so he could catch Kratos off guard. Setting aside the fact that nothing indicates this was the case (ie; this is something GoW supporters just made up on a whim), there are two problems with this. The first one is uh, I mean... just fucking look at him?
Looks pretty dead to me, boss. The second problem is somehow just as bad. The guidebook explicitly confirms Zeus really did die here, referring to him as "mortally wounded" and stating that his spirit emerges to fuck Kratos up. Obviously, being mortally wounded and having your soul leave your body does not really read as "being alive". Fear Zeus' resurrection justification even says the following:
So there is an explicit acknowledgement that Zeus did die, he just came back to life. It is fucking staggering how frequently GoW pages will uphold two contradictory positions at the same time for the sake of upgrades.
Let’s move on to the Titans’ abilities, starting with Cronos’ Rage. This ability, when released, causes the user and the target to share enervation; In other words, if Kratos drains all of his magic in using Cronos’ Rage, so too does his target lose their magic. This, of course, requires Kratos to be actually exhausted by using the spell in the first place. His other uses of Cronos’ Rage throughout the novel do not display this property, for the simple reason that these uses don’t exhaust Kratos’ reserves of energy; Thus, Zeus’ “resistance” to its absorption is merely a byproduct of a certain facet of an ability not applying. As for Zeus resisting the other Titans’ abilities, this stems from him claiming Kratos cannot defeat him using their powers… immediately after Kratos successfully uses Atlas Quake against him. Zeus is simply boasting here. He does not actually resist the powers of the Titans.
Zeus does still resist the regular properties of Cronos’ Rage, but that’s only electricity manipulation.
Acausality [Type 2] [Sisters of Fate]
The Sisters of Fate all have type 2 acausality because, after Kratos killed them, he traveled back to the past and told Zeus they were dead. This implies that the death of the sisters in the present caused them to die across all of time, which is type 2 acausality. For starters, this isn’t even how type 2 acausality works. It is a state in which one exists in neither the past nor the future, only existing in the present. If the sisters really do span all of time, as their pages claim, then this would be the literal opposite of type 2 acausality. Spanning all of time might sound like type 3, but it can’t be that, either; Type 3 is reserved for characters whose death in any time will never affect them, because each instance of them in the past, present, and future is its own individual. The sisters dying across all of time is an anti-feat for every type of acausality there is, funnily enough.
The claim itself is also just, not very good. All Kratos says is that he killed the sisters (which is true), and Zeus remarks that this is impossible. There is no evidence to support that the sisters have some sort of timeline-spanning existence, or that their deaths reverberated throughout time; From the perspective of Kratos (the guy making this statement), he killed them in his own time and that’s good enough for him.
