Talk:Kratos (mythology)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: JDC808 (talk · contribs) 03:53, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

I will begin this review within the next day. --JDC808 ♫ 03:53, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Done a little bit of copy-editing. Probably more of that to come with comments as well. --JDC808 ♫ 22:29, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Lead

• I'd suggest removing this sentence and let the second paragraph speak to this: "who is best known for his appearance at the beginning of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound."

@JDC808: Done. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

• I feel like this sentence is not completely necessary for the lead: "Kratos is only listed as one of these children and Hesiod gives no additional personal information about him."

Removed. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

• Suggested rewrite for this rather long sentence:
  • "Kratos and his sister Bia make a brief appearance in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, where in the opening scene, acting as agents of Zeus, they lead their captive, the Titan Prometheus on stage, and compel Hephaestus, the mild-mannered god of blacksmiths, to chain Prometheus to a rock as punishment for his theft of fire."
  • Suggested rewrite: "His most well-known appearance is in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, where Kratos and his sister Bia appear in the opening scene as agents of Zeus. They lead the captive Titan Prometheus and compel the smith god Hephaestus to chain Prometheus to a rock as punishment for his theft of fire."

I rewrote sentence and broke it up, but not exactly the way you suggested. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Ancient Greek literature and art

• Check for the correct tense in the first couple of sentences under Prometheus Bound.

I believe the tense is correct. It is using the literary present tense because it is describing the script of an extant work of drama. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

In modern culture

• The paragraph about the video game character, that Kratos frees Prometheus in the game God of War II. I think that would be an interesting thing to include since the mythological Kratos's most well-known appearance is his role in binding Prometheus. There was actually a documentary included with God of War III where professional historians talked about how the games related to the mythology, and that was one of the things mentioned. This paragraph also makes mention that "his strongest influence is the hero Heracles". In the games, Heracles (though they use Hercules) is his half-brother. Perhaps that quoted part could be expanded to say "his strongest influence is the hero Heracles (Roman Hercules), who is later revealed to be the character's half-brother." --JDC808 ♫ 04:04, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

The statement about his "strongest influence" being Heracles is from the classicist Sylwia Chmielewski, who argues that the video game character Kratos is essentially a darker, more violent, anti-hero version of Heracles. She also mentions in the same paragraph that many of the heroes that Kratos shows inspiration from also appear in the game and, ironically, he "encounters and fights many of them." I did not bother including that here, though, because I did not think it was important or relevant enough to the mythological Kratos. She does not mention anything about Heracles being Kratos's half brother in the game, though, so I would need a source for that if I were going to include it. I do not think it is really relevant in this article, though. I have tried to limit information about the video game character to just the parts that were directly relevant or similar to the mythological figure, since we already have a lengthy article about him and most of it is not really directly pertinent. I obviously made sure to mention Dunstan Lowe's guess regarding why the mythological figure and the video game character have the same name. I also mentioned the other mythological figures that influenced the video game character to make it clear that other mythical figures actually played a much stronger role in shaping the character's actions. I also chose to mention the video game character's violent nature, since the main, defining aspects of the mythological figure's personality as he is portrayed in Prometheus Bound are his violence and brutality.

The freeing of Prometheus is a task that Greek mythology and works based on it usually attribute to Heracles; its attribution to Kratos in the video game would certainly be something worth mentioning, since it is the exact opposite of what the mythological Kratos does in Prometheus Bound. Unfortunately, none of my sources mention that Kratos frees Heracles in the game, nor do they make any remarks about the irony of this fact. Personally, I find the situation interesting, but I suspect it is entirely coincidental, since there is currently no evidence that the makers of the game were aware of the mythological Kratos and the freeing of Prometheus is one of Heracles's many famous heroic deeds. I do not have access to the documentary you mention, nor would I know how to cite it if I did. Other ironic or interesting things we could possibly mention about the relationship between the mythological and video game Kratoi (that would be the Greek plural of Kratos) if we could find sources supporting them:

1. In Prometheus Bound Kratos is loyal to Zeus; whereas, according to this (which I am assuming you wrote), in the video game, he hates Zeus and eventually kills him.
2. In Prometheus Bound Kratos bullies Hephaestus into binding Prometheus; according to this, it sounds as though, in the video game, he bullies Hephaestus into making him a weapon and then kills him with it, which, if you think about it, is an interesting similarity, even though, like the Prometheus aspect, it is probably also merely coincidental.

I do not have sources for either of these comparisons, though, and I do not think either of them are really necessary, but they might be interesting to mention if there are any sources out there that make these comparisons. I doubt there are. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

I can check around for sources. I do have that documentary I previously mentioned. I will have to rewatch it though to get an exact quote, as well as a few other things that would be required of the reference (which I'll put the full reference here and format it so that you can just copy/paste it into the article). Sources for the other stuff should be available on the video game articles (God of War II and God of War III specifically), which I could dig through if you want to include them. --JDC808 ♫ 01:05, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: If you can provide the citation to the documentary that would be excellent. As for the other comparisons I made above, I think the article is fine without them; those would just be something extra that might be interesting to add if we had sources making direct comparisons on those points. I am not aware of any, however, and the sources in the other articles do not seem to make direct comparisons with the mythological Kratos, so we cannot use them here. As I said above, this article is about the mythological figure and I think I have pretty much covered everything there is to cover on that front. --Katolophyromai (talk) 04:20, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

That's fine. I'll try to rewatch that documentary tonight, or sometime this weekend. I'll also do another read over of the article and check a couple of other things, after which, this article should be good to go. --JDC808 ♫ 20:31, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: It has been eight days since you last responded here. I thought I would ping you to remind you that you still have not finished this review. Technically, a review is not supposed to go more than seven days without a response. If you think the article is ready, go ahead and pass it. If not, you should offer more suggestions for improvements that you think need to be made before the article can be promoted to Good Article status. You can also put the review on hold if you need to. --Katolophyromai (talk) 02:02, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I did not forget, this week just got very busy (on a side note, when you first asked me about reviewing, I did mention that this may be a slower review process due to my schedule). I will have more comments posted before I head to bed tonight. --JDC808 ♫ 03:00, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Below is the transcript from the documentary, God of War: Unearthing the Legend (2010). This is all of the dialog as it relates to the binding of Prometheus, and a little comparison between the mythological character and the video game character.

• Peter Weller (host), 00:35:33 - "From the fury of Typhon, Kratos then encounters one of Greek mythology's most tormented beings."

• Zoran Iovanovici (Cal State University Long Beach), 00:35:53 - "Prometheus was the Titan who was seen as the champion of humanity. He was always looking to help humans and develop their civilization. Zeus, of course, on the other hand, was typically annoyed with humans and he was constantly bickering with Prometheus."

• Susan Lape (University of Southern California), 00:36:08 - "At one point, he stole fire so that human beings would have fire to cook food. He concealed it in a fennel-stalk and gave it to humans. Unfortunately, after he did that, the king of the gods got angry, Zeus, and decided to punish him."

• Alex Purves (University of California, Los Angeles), 00:36:24 - "And so in punishment, this Zeus drives a great column through Prometheus and has a bird come and pick out his liver everyday, and at the end of the day, the liver will grow back and this bird will come back. So Prometheus is kept in eternal punishment."

• Alex Purves (University of California, Los Angeles), 00:36:46 - "In scenes in Greek tragedy that we have of the binding of Prometheus, we see two henchman of Zeus come to bind Prometheus, and they are called Kratos and Bia, two words in Greek that mean strength or force or violence."

• Zoran Iovanovici (Cal State University Long Beach), 00:37:00 - "Ironically, in classical Greek texts, one of Zeus's minions that chains Prometheus is named Kratos, where in the game [God of War II], we see the character Kratos freeing Prometheus from his endless punishment."

• Dr. John Madden (University of Montana), 00:37:18 - "At the beginning of the war of the gods and Titans, Kratos does the will of Zeus. He's simply a flunky of Zeus. He has no personality of his own. He can't see anything except for Zeus's perspective. He's just a thug who enforces Zeus's will."

• Stig Asmussen (Game Director, God of War III), 00:37:37 - "Of course our Kratos isn't like that, but he is a pawn, and a lot of times, when you're in a creative environment, you have things that we call happy mistakes, and I think that might be one of them."

• Stig Asmussen (Game Director, God of War III), 00:37:48 - "Kratos the character was completely fleshed out. The story was written and we hadn't decided on a name yet. So, that was one of the things that came very late. I remember a time when we had a vote on the team and there was like five different options, and like, what name do you like the best, and those were presented to the team. They were presented to marketing and then it ended up becoming Kratos."

To cite the documentary, you can copy/paste this (but without the nowiki-code part and replace that with the normal <ref>). The quote field is to quote any of the above (if you don't, then leave blank or delete the field).

{{cite AV media |people= Quinio, Charles (director); [[Peter Weller|Weller, Peter]] (host); Iovanovici, Zoran; Lape, Susan; Purves, Alex; Madden, John; [[Stig Asmussen|Asmussen, Stig]] |date= 2010 |title= God of War: Unearthing the Legend |medium= Documentary |language= English |time= 00:35:33 |publisher= [[SCE Santa Monica Studio]] |quote= }}

--JDC808 ♫ 06:36, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: Thank you so much! This actually tells me a lot and it confirms that the names were indeed a coincidence, which is what Lowe already suspected. I have added the documentary to the bibliography and added information from it to the last paragraph of the "In modern culture" section. --Katolophyromai (talk) 13:59, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

No problem, and looks good. However, this sentence is rather long and could probably be split into two sentences (with some reworking):

• "The video game character Kratos was given his name at a late stage in his development, after the character had already been fleshed out, from the same Greek word meaning "Strength", of which the mythological figure Kratos is the personification, without his creators being aware of the actual mythological god named Kratos appearing in Prometheus Bound."

• Possible rewrite: "The video game character Kratos was given his name at a late stage in the development of the original 2005 game, after the character had already been fleshed out. Unaware of the actual mythological god named Kratos appearing in Prometheus Bound, the creators coincidentally chose Kratos, the same Greek word meaning "Strength", of which the mythological figure Kratos is the personification." --JDC808 ♫ 18:40, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: I have done it exactly as you have requested. Thank you very much for the suggestion. Do you have anything else? --Katolophyromai (talk) 20:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Gonna read over the article one more time to make sure there's nothing else. --JDC808 ♫ 20:51, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

One lingering question. I've been thinking about this since I started this review, but wasn't sure if it was important enough, but then I thought if you decide to take this to FA later on, it may be brought up there. Is Theogony the only instance where his name is spelled with a C instead of a K? --JDC808 ♫ 21:01, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: Sorry. I should have explained: Kratos's name in Greek is Κράτος. There are different ways in which Greek names can be Latinized. Traditionally, the Greek letter κ has always been transliterated into Latin characters as c and the ending ος has always been Latinized as us, but, in more recent times, it has become increasingly more common to transliterate κ as k and ος as os, because those are the more direct equivalents. The quotation from Hesiod given here is taken from Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation, which renders Κράτος as Cratos because that is a more traditional transliteration. Newer sources and translations, however, all render the name as Kratos. The answer to your question, then, is not that Hesiod himself spelled the name Cratus, but rather that the translator of that particular quotation chose to render the name in English using that spelling. --Katolophyromai (talk) 21:18, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Okay. Maybe perhaps a note after the quotation that explains the translation to Cratos instead of Kratos? Doesn't have to be anything too long, just enough to clarify why it's different. Or even possibly just adding it to the note that's in the lead after Cratos. --JDC808 ♫ 21:29, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

The current note says: Ancient Greek: Κράτος Kratos, literally "Power"[1][2] or "Strength"[3]. Perhaps change it to: Ancient Greek: Κράτος, traditionally translated to Cratos, more commonly translated to Kratos, literally means "Power"[1][2] or "Strength"[3] --JDC808 ♫ 21:35, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: Done. --Katolophyromai (talk) 22:29, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Kratos, as an Embodiment, is actually considered a Demigod, not a God, and many sources cite him as the Embodiment of Strength and Demigod of Cruelty. In any event, Kratos is not considered to be any sort of good or benevolent deity. As one of Ares Dark Generals/Demigods, he was actually revered by the people of Sparta for the many acts of inhuman cruelty he performed in life, aligning with their beliefs that only cruelty and forcing their children to survive and without anything whatsoever other than their own teeth and hands to help them survive to return back to Sparta before they were permitted to become citizens of Sparta.

Frankly, while I can see the possibility of the Demigod of Cruelty wanting the power of Ares, from the characteristics presented in most mythology from different parts of ancient Greece, I have to say I was always shocked that anyone would want to present Kratos as any sort of "hero" or "benevolent figure". Frankly, I'd expect him to become an even more cruel, merciless and murderous God of War if he overthrew Ares.

As for the Cratos vs Kratos debate, it's exactly the same as the Chronos vs Cronos debate. None of them are wrong, or completely correct because the Ancient Greek Alphabet doesn't conform with the Arabic Alphabet English uses. There are missing letter/letter sounds as well as specific letter sounds represented by a single character where the English Language defines those sounds as combinations of letter.

My belief is that if one adheres to the belief that the King of the Titans is spelled "Cronos", then it follows that calling the Demigod of Cruelty "Cratos" would be in line with that.

In other writings, I have seen his name spelled as "Kratos" in his incarnation as Demigod of Cruelty, and "Cratos" as the Embodiment of Strength. None of those writings are official Greek Mythology, though. Darkeforce (talk) 11:29, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Verdict

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)
It is reasonably well written. a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists): It is factually accurate and verifiable. a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): It is broad in its coverage. a (major aspects): b (focused): It follows the neutral point of view policy. Fair representation without bias: It is stable. No edit wars, etc.: It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate. a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Overall: Pass/Fail:
· · ·

It was very interesting learning more about the mythological Kratos, as before you expanded this article, I, and probably like many others, only knew about his role in binding Prometheus and that was it. Great job! --JDC808 ♫ 04:32, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

@JDC808: Thank you so much for taking the time to review this article in spite of your busy schedule. I really appreciate it. I also really appreciate you providing the transcript of the relevant part of that documentary; that was also very helpful. --Katolophyromai (talk) 04:56, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

You're welcome The only annoyance going back to the documentary was that there was no closed-captions, so I had to transpose it myself (so pausing and rewinding to make sure I heard everything, then replaying it through). Other than that, it was interesting to go back and really listen to what was being said throughout that particular section. I'm actually probably going to add some of it to the appropriate section on the video game character's article. --JDC808 ♫ 06:44, 12 August 2018 (UTC)