Baldur is the session's ongoing confrontation and the game's most sympathetic villain. He cannot feel anything — Freya's protection removed sensation entirely, left him numb to pain and cold and warmth and everything that makes experience meaningful. He does not want legend. He wants to feel something, anything, even if what he can feel is the end. The legend carved in his name is the one Freya wrote for him by trying to keep him safe, and he has spent decades trying to destroy it.

Kratos understands this more than he can say. He too has been shaped by a parent's terrible love, by the rage and violence that the Olympian gods made of him. The confrontation with Baldur keeps returning to this parallel — two men defined by what their divine inheritance cost them, meeting repeatedly in a world that has no good resolution to offer either of them.