Assassin's Creed

Yeah I'd like my (probably never gonna happen) genderfluid rep to not be an absolute shitstain.

Ubisoft's fake wokeness shows again.

Yeah, the thing is, they just didn't want a woman fronting the marketing campaign.

And the disconnect is showing especially in this case. The game just flat out contradicts the marketing.

The whole pick your gender approach is clearly a half-assed attempt so they don’t have to actually design a female playable character.

Eivor and the Eagle Bearer are very much a different case from a character whose gender is set like Evie and Aveline.

In this case, having the Animus decide your gender makes sense in context, and is a rather clever storytelling device. That part is not the problem.

The problematic part is giving the player to option to decide the gender for themselves, which undermines that particular plot point, and confusing matters with misleading marketing.

Doesn't "letting the Animus decide your gender" fit as a Watsonian explanation for the developer's choice of "letting people choose their gender"? How do they contradict?

Edited by fredhot16 on Apr 28th 2021 at 11:02:01 AM

Because letting the Animus choose means the game will select "male" Eivor whenever she remembers certain memories that are from her male ancestor. Though admittedly that doesn't make much sense either, and it should have just turned Eivor into that ancestor for those memories.

I honestly would like for Ubisoft to throw all Pseudo-RPG elements the hell out of this series and be done with it.

I'd also point out that this un-does any male-male romantic representation, doesn't it? Because the male version doesn't exist?

Ugh. Ubisoft. WHY IS GAY SO DIFFICULT FOR YOU DAMN IT!!

You can't have everything, and not every character needs to be gay.

...I'm not asking for every character to be gay? Don't apply such hyperbole to me. I just want this series to have a gay character that isn't total cringe. And, if they're going to do this whole 'RPG Choose Your Love Interest' shit, then yes, I'd like for that not to fall into Unfortunate Implications either.

"Surprise! It was hetero the entire time!" is so dumb. Like... wow, that's probably the strangest depiction of Queer Baiting I've ever seen.

Sorry, I meant impersonal you, not you specifically.

Well, Kassandra could be roleplayed as gay. But I guess she wasn't actually gay, or straight for that matter, until it actually came up in the plot.

That's the problem with these RPG elements: you can roleplay being gay all you want, but eventually the story will take precedent over whatever story you roleplayed in your head. Kassandra's straight love interest and family was a very painful reminder of how that sort of roleplaying is generally treated, and how that doesn't really fit these games in the first place.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 28th 2021 at 2:10:27 PM

I still feel like there are ways to do it, even with the DNA precedent of the franchise.

Like... we've evolved passed even the need for these characters to pass on their DNA at all; Origins has Layla getting DNA from Bayek and Aya's mummies. There's absolutely no need for them to be straight anymore.

Or, if you REALLY want to do the 'genetics' thing which kinda feels a bit eugenic-y sometimes, there are still ways to do that. Like... idk, they sire a kid from an earlier relationship only to then go onto a new one? Or bisexual people exist...? They have a socially understood position to be married and have a kid but the marriage is an 'arangement' and neither are bothered by the other's promiscuity or whatever?

There are so many historical precedents for all of these options and... it feels so oddly unexamined? You could even make the frame work of the romances they have right now work to that end if they just put a little effort in and let the love interests exist outside of their storylines.

Honestly, it starts to feel like "Fine, we'll do a gay storyline, but the straight people can opt out of it and it's not canon" at a certain point...

...What characters do need to be gay? I'd really rather not let that can of worms get shaken up.

Edited by fredhot16 on Apr 28th 2021 at 6:20:05 AM

The main point here is that the Animus is The artifact of the whole franchise, and continuing to use it in the games only contrains what Ubisoft can do.

And according to Ink (I haven't played the new games so far beyond Assassin's Creed: Origins up to the first assassination so I have to take him at his word and it seems accurate), we're already moving past the constraints of the Animus to need genetic descendants as a narrative way in? Origins and "Odyssey both had us play as characters we had no genetic connection but just use a direct'' connection to the body of the protagonist.

I don't even remember if Unity, and Syndicate had us as play as the genetic descendants of the protagonists.

The constraints of the Animus are not unshakable obstacles to keep you on one path and one path only. If blood on a spear or a mummy is now enough...

Edit: I think this has been suggested before but why not invoke the genetic connection through one's relationship with the "beard?"

Edit^2: Or Stronger Animuses that don't need a direct connection from the father or mother. A descendent from a cousin or sibling would do.

Edited by fredhot16 on Apr 28th 2021 at 11:06:36 AM

The genetic descendants thing was stopped as of AC III. The reward for 100% completion was the Templars unlocking all of Desmond Miles' DNA, which is something so random I felt cheated.

So its not been a thing for awhile.

Hence why some random programmer is doing Haytham Kenway.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 28th 2021 at 11:01:40 AM

Besides, "Kassandra is gay" and "Kassandra has a baby" are not mutually exclusive. It's not even mutually exclusive with "Kassandra marries a guy", historically speaking. That was basically what gay people had to do anyway for large parts of history in many places.

I'm not sure if the Animus now being able to read any random DNA is such a great improvement. Reliving the memories of your own ancestors specifically was part of the appeal, after all. It makes it more personal when the present and past characters are related, and it makes it easier to tell a cohesive story about the present character's past.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 29th 2021 at 12:25:06 PM

Oh, I agree that there's a really cool personal element that it's not just any historical figure that you're following but your own ancestor who witnessed and changed history. Problem is, we haven't done that for so long now.

So, if we're not doing that aspect anymore, why can't we explore more interesting storylines and, idk, acknowledge gay people exist? I point this out every time this comes up, but Origins is set in Siwa, Egypt. One of the only locations in the world where Homosexuality was utterly banal and accepted up to even the fairly modern era.

And it NEVER comes up in Origins. Ever. Best we get in that entire game is a dumb easter egg of two soldiers fucking in some random room. Bayek grew up in GAY CAPITAL OF THE ANCIENT WORLD and we're really not considering he might have had a male lover at some point?

Or, hey, let's talk about how that 17th Century Caribbean was an extremely homosocial society and there were legit problems of all these men hanging around and very very few women. And all of them wanted to get drunk and have sex when they were in port. Yeah, lotta these pirates were pretty gay when it came down to it. And that pirate culture also had same sex unions with your 'matelot' and that was often a pretty sexual relationship?

And this is the big problem with historical depictions of gay people; we've been hetrowashed for so long or removed from the narrative so completely that there are legit people who think homosexuality is some modern concept that only started existing in the last 50 years when Stonewall happened. We were code breakers during WW 2 or industrialists who dominated a male only field and married our girlfriends at the same time or we were warriors on battlefields. But no one ever really knows about these things because of both our history books and our media. Our history has been erased constantly.

So, when new media comes a long as perpetuates those exact trends, it's a problem.

History is so much more fascinating and different and yet these games rarely do anything interesting with it. If you're not going to... actually depict interesting aspects of history and cultures and the people who made it and the ones who were forgotten and buried by years of discrimination or marginalization, then the fuck are we actually doing here???

And then it feels like, even when we can get those storylines, we get bullshit that undoes it or halfasses it. "Op! You wanted to be gay in ancient greece? Sorry. Gotta get that baby bloodline going so get out of that gay phase and spreading/collecting some seed!" Or, "You wanted to be gay in Norse times with hunky viking men? Sorry! You were actually canonically a woman the whole time! I know we showed you a dude getting it on, but that was a lie! Secret Hetrosexual!" It's half-assed every time and like they want a gold star for it.

It's so frustrating. Why is this so fucking hard to do???

I'm not sure you can equate "men are fucking each other because there aren't any women around" with "these men are totally gay" like that. That sounds more like settling for what's available rather than what you love most.

Heterowashing, love it. Want to write a paper on it so that we can add it to the academic lexicon?

Also, while you are of course correct that gay people existed in the past, homosexuality as a distinct concept only really emerged in the 19th century. It actually slightly predates the concept of heterosexuality, at that. These terms actually came about as a reaction against existing homosocial and homosexual relationships between men in the Victorian age. People basically started defining the concept more clearly so it became more easy to push back against it. Before that, there wasn't a really clear demarcation between gay and straight people.

Also, you can argue that homosexuality as an openly cultural movement only started around 50 or so years ago, when the LGBT movement started gathering steam and demanding emancipation. Before that, gay people had no other option but to hide in the closet.

As for the baby, that does make sense from a story perspective, and I don't mind it in that sense, but I agree they were very condescending about it towards the gay community, if not outright offensive. Probably can be chalked up to the toxic culture at Ubi as well.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 29th 2021 at 3:01:51 PM

Yes, I'm very very well aware that "homosexuality" as a concept did not exactly exist for a large portion of human history. While I could sit here and type out 'We had men who had sexual and romantic relations with other men' every single time I need to refer to that grouping of people... or we could just cut that down and just say "gay" with the understanding that we're aware that that concept didn't exist historically, k?

The histories of Alan Turing or Anne Lister or the 'matelots' of Tortuga and the acceptance of homosexuality in Siwa are still part of our LGBT history as the concept evolved to now. But please present more pedantic arguments on what is/isn't actually gay history. Tell the actual LGBT person what I can or cannot be offended about.

And you and I both know that Ubi isn't excluding gay characters out of some preverse presentist stance on historical accuracy of sexuality concepts. It's because Ubisoft is fucking lazy when it comes to any actual interest in the historical time periods they depict and representing the interesting peoples of those times.

As for 'hetwashing', I didn't name the term. People like Jim Stirling specifically started using it in reference to Odyssey when that DLC came along and Gay Kassandra suddenly had to get a baby and a boyfriend. I could say that they 'straightened out' some chracters, but we're again getting into a pedantic argument about terminology rather than what actually happened; we have the option to have gay leads and that's constantly being un-done in a franchise that barely has any good gay rep as it is.

Edited by InkDagger on Apr 29th 2021 at 5:16:12 AM

Hey, don't take it so personally, that's not how I meant it.

Might have just been the text, but it just read as very... snide to me? The internet has been rather on edge all week for some reason and I haven't been in the mood for sarcastic jabs. I apologize if it's harsh, but I've dealt with the same conversation of "But gay didn't exist in most of history, checkmate libs" so many times now...

I admit, I was also...put off by it, too. I wouldn't say "snide", so much as...just another thing where people say something like "nobody cared about this before" and it just made wonder if that was even actually the slightest bit true. Flippant, maybe?

I was about to post that meme video where John Cena tears a greenscreen, saying "are you sure about that" before Ink gave his response.

Oh, not at all. I'm just an academic who tends to notice and comment on things like that. It's a fascinating idea that something that seems so natural to us now was perceived very differently in the past. And perhaps that fuzziness of the past was better in some ways too. After all, that binary division between gay and straight was created precisely to divide people, to clearly define gay people to then persecute them. Such a binary division is not very natural, and doesn't really conform with how humans experience sexuality; a sliding scale would make much more sense.

... I seem to be misunderstood a lot today.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 29th 2021 at 2:38:44 PM