Saturday, May 30, 2026

Fury Of Darksiders III

The third Darksiders game introduces Fury as a playable character, the first female horseman of the four loosely modeled after Revelation's—and I do mean very loosely, since the names War, Fury, and Strife are not even used in Revelation 6, unlike how Death is explicitly mentioned as the name of the fourth horseman (6:7-8); at least War is still named after the function of the horseman in verses 6:3-4, who removes peace so that people kill each other.  Not even he gravitates so naturally and so passionately to conflict as his sister.  Burning with rage and quick to pursue violence, Fury certainly lives up to her name as she hunts down and defeats the Seven Deadly Sins.

In fact, near the beginning of the game, Fury says to her horse in quiet moment that if she didn't love him so much, she would kill him just to alleviate her sheer boredom.  This is rather extremely antithetical to the utter myth that women are calm, passive, delicate beings that can only instigate harm of a lesser kind than "men's" or gravitate towards nonphysical harshness.  At the very least, women are fallaciously considered naturally more likely to have these traits by the typical religious and secular complementarian.  The conjoined, philosophically inseparable myth is that men are inherently or more likely to be angry, brutal, and physically violent than women.  Each of these stereotypes, though logically false, would necessitate the other.  If men were prone to anger or violence because they are men, then women would have to be prone to the opposite because they are women.

Fury might not have been intended to exemplify the errors of gender stereotypes, but as a far more aggressive and emotionalistically (not just emotionally) volatile character than her brothers War and Death from the first two games, she certainly accomplishes this.  It is not that the other characters in the game scoff or marvel at her ire because she is a woman, though even this could have been used by the game's creators to push back against false ideas.  She is presented as physically and magically powerful and emotionally fierce, but also as lacking almost any self-control or recognition of how her emotions do not dictate the nature of reality, such as matters of strict logical truth or moral correctness.

Of course, nothing can be portrayed in fiction unless it really is true or possible (though something being possible is still a truth)—as opposed to characters or real-life storytellers claiming something contrary to reason.  It is true that one man's or woman's mental traits do not mean another person of the same gender also possesses the same characteristics.  It is true that having one kind of genitalia or chromosomes does not logically necessitate having an irate or demure personality.  These things are true due to reason's inherent veracity; it does not matter what someone wishes or feels or believes!  Wherever a man or woman is not reflecting their true natural personality, they could only be bowing to the nonexistent authority of social conditioning, perhaps mistaking the fallacies and errors other people tell them for logical facts.  If personality is not dictated by gender, it can only be individualistic.  There can be nothing unrealistic or impossible about Fury's intense disposition.  Furthermore, Fury's characterization is not an affirmation of the stereotype of women as unstable, but an example of how women do not "normally" or inevitably lack ferocity.

As distorted yet artistically excellent as the elements of Revelation are in Darksiders, the franchise is still based on Biblical theology to an extent, and the Bible does not discriminate against men and women as victims or perpetrators of violence.  Beyond an utter absence of this discrimination which is rather popular in some American communities (against each gender in varying ways), there are in fact many direct statements of gender equality regarding physical and verbal violence (Exodus 21:15, 17, 20-21, 26-32, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 12:31, 18:10), as well as related passages that do not exclude the same egalitarianism (see Exodus 21:22-25 and Leviticus 24:19-21).  This alone clarifies that the passages which do not overtly emphasize gender equality without contradicting it, including murder laws outside of Exodus 21 (for examples from various categories, see Exodus 21:18-19 and Deuteronomy 19:11-13), would be applicable to men and women as Genesis 1:26-27 and 5:1-2 also necessitate on their own.

Do I think that the developers of Darksiders III had any of this in mind, logically or Biblically?  No, because even if this was the case, I have no way of knowing.  It is still fitting that a game series that borrows some concepts from Judeo-Christianity—and from popular misrepresentations of it, like Lucifer and other demons ruling in a hell that does not even have any inhabitants yet when hell is not a place ruled over by the sinners condemned to die within [1]—would reflect its teachings on a matter very neglected in the church.  Women are no less violent than men because there is no such thing as a gender-specific psychological bent.  They are repeatedly and sometimes forcefully given less opportunities to show their true selves as individuals, which would in some cases, as with men, entail them being violent and even sadistic.  Men who are violent are not this way because they are men, and the women who truly are naturally nonviolent or emotionally calm, as opposed to those who have only been culturally conditioned to not express anger, are not of this personality because they each have a vagina.


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