Domino's Pizza UK jumped into the God of War: Laufey culture war discourse and nobody needed this

Domino's Pizza UK decided to wade into the God of War: Laufey backlash on X, posting that a God of War game without Kratos is like their Pepperoni Passion pizza without pepperoni. Santa Monica Studio replied with the flattest possible energy: "ok thanks for the feedback, dominos pizza corporate account". And here we are.

God of War: Laufey follows Faye — Kratos' wife — as she fights her way through the gods' afterlife, dealing with the fallout from her husband's very long career of divine murder. The comments under this little X spat are exactly what you'd expect: complaints that the game shouldn't carry the God of War name without Kratos, and at least one AI-generated sexist video depicting Faye doing housework. The whole thread is a radioactive waste pit, and no, you don't need to go look.

Kratos already has two multi-dozen-hour games from the 2018 reboot, a full anthology before that, and a remake of the original 2005 trilogy on the way. The franchise trying something different with a different protagonist isn't a crisis — it's just a franchise doing what franchises do when they don't want to repeat themselves forever. Whether Laufey turns out to be a great game or a bad one will have nothing to do with its protagonist being a woman.

The odds of the internet handling this calmly are, obviously, zero. But it would be nice if major brand accounts stopped handing megaphones to the worst-faith critics in the room. In the meantime, the more interesting conversation is the one about how Santa Monica did motion capture on a cube.