Live-Action Kratos Needs To Be Black

thegamer.com:

It appears we’re getting a God of War TV series, as Sony continues to ramp up its film & television production. In a way, it’s strange it has taken this long - Sony has long been a major player in the cinema space through James Bond, Rocky, Spider-Man, and Ghostbusters, while its video games have coveted movies. Sony’s triple-A hits are mostly action-oriented third person adventures with stoic protagonists and late-game emotional beats, because hey, if it's good enough for Hollywood, it’s good enough for gamers.

I’m not entirely sure we need a God of War TV show. It’s more or less a playable TV show already, right down to the fact one of the most interesting elements about it is the camerawork. Most successful video game adaptations have ignored much of the source material, and God of War feels like one of the hardest games to do that for - but I’m also not sure the original narrative, frequently praised as one of our medium’s best, stacks up against the depth and variety of film.

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That’s a debate for another day. Instead, I want to talk about something that definitely shouldn’t be a debate but almost certainly will be - Kratos should be played by a Black actor.

When you look at Kratos, you see a white person. I don’t mean Caucasian or light-skinned, I mean he’s literally white. Kratos is covered in ashes, meaning a casual observer might not realise the inherent Blackness that has always been attached to Kratos. In the brief scene where his skin turns to ash, it is clearly Black underneath. Terrence C. Carlson and Christopher Judge, the two actors to have played Kratos, are Black. White is so often seen as the default for everything from casting to medicine to