Assassin’s Creed: Postscript (and Haystack Challenge)

So it turns out that the Brotherhood really are watching you.

I rolled in to work today, sleep-deprived and with a quiff resulting from three days’ worth of hair product build-up, to find that the Ubisoft Workshop had linked to my previous post about sex Assassins.

Now, I’ve told you previously that the Assassin’s Creed franchise is my opiate. As anyone who has met me can confirm, the mere brush upon the subject of the games is enough to send me into a dreadful foam. My boss’s son, a kid of only 11, paled when subjected to my enthusiastic anecdotes of dumping masses and masses of dead guards into haystacks. I’m stupid over it.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found out I’d been linked to by the Ubisoft Goddamn Workshop! Imagine the shrieking. Imagine the foaming. Imagine the looks on my poor, long-suffering co-workers’ faces as I explained the situation to them in what increasingly became a sort of hyperactive semaphore. Ubisoft Workshop!! Where most of my paypacket goes each month! Where you can, for the princely sum of five Canadian dollars, order a copy of the spin-off comic Assassin’s Creed: The Fall and have it arrive on your doorstep in an Ubisoft envelope and then die of glee.

You know, hypothetically. Er.

Anyway, I’m pretty chuffed. But I think, therefore, that’s it’s time to iron out a few kinks and go into the depth I couldn’t plumb in my first article because I had a wordcount to stick to and a point to make. Ready? Good. Let’s go.

Characters get to leap over other things. Pawns get to wear silly hats that look a bit like nipples.

I still haven’t played Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, yet. I know, I know. I’m spewing all of this from the stand-point of someone who’s mashing contentedly through Assassin’s Creed II like a boss and is wondering whether or not we’ve been treated to a better representation of women in the next one.  Reasonable, no?

My boyfriend, bless him, bought me the Extra Super Mega Ultra Holy Shit A Box Edition of AssCreed BroHo for Christmas, and in the extremely ostentatious box, you get picture cards of all the character classes! After wrenching myself down off the ceiling, I was extremely pleased to note that quite a few of the classes that you get to spew forth into the throats of Templar Scum are indeed ladies, and not all of them are courtesans. This is good. We have a nice library of stabby-bastard women to chose from, and they’re believably solid and real-looking, and I’m totally convinced that they could fuck guards and Templars up just as well as everyone else you’re given to play with.

I’ve also had fellow Screed Freaks telling me that, it’s okay!  Brotherhood is awash with gender equality and I’ll love every minute of it (what am I, some kind of gender equality bomb?) (no wait, that is EXACTLY what I am) – but the Assassins you recruit and send on missions aren’t characters in their own right, are they? These are wordless, voiceless pawns that you fling merrily into the faces of your enemies. The female characters in Screed are still looking rather few and far between.

There are a few bit-parts in the historical Animus sections in Assassin’s Creed II (I’m sorry, people who haven’t played the game; you’re just going to have to keep up) and there certainly appears to be a recurring theme of everyone shagging Ezio.  Which, I’m going to have to admit, I would (he probably likes boys too, right?) but it is really amazingly prevalent.  That said, there are a couple of female characters in Assassin’s Creed II that delighted me out of my fucking tree. I was deeply heartened to see Caterina Sforza and was even more heartened to see that her backstory’s in the database. She’s brilliant! Her story is at once completely heroic and deeply upsetting, and I’d begin a rant right now about how many strong, independent women in history and fiction have often run the risk, or faced the reality, of sexual assault at some point or other, but I think that’s an axe we all have to grind (right?).  But yes; she’s intense and I’m really glad she’s in the game with as much face time as she gets, because now a whole generation of people will know about her who may not have done previously.  Yes!

Rosa, a bit-part thief in… the Venice section, if I recall correctly, has the potential to be amazing, too – but this is undermined somewhat by the fact that the first time you meet her? you have to rescue her. I mean, come on. The only person I want to see Ezio rescuing, knight-to-the-aid-of-a-damsel-style, is Leonardo. But that’s probably just me.

The main characters that we get to see actual progression and agency from – and not just flavour – in are the ones that aren’t in the historical sections. I’m talking Lucy Stillman and the fucking brilliant Rebecca, and I was a little bit sad that Assassin’s Creed II gives us far fewer outside-the-Animus sections for us to enjoy her in! I want a spin-off game of just her, kicking people in the face (which she notably never does) and forming emotional attachments to machinery.

Assassin’s Creed II does some things wrong (it’s quite a lot like a courtesan-and-victim smorgasbord, and anyone arguing that “that’s what women were in those days!” will get an internet punch, because they weren’t and to assume otherwise is stupid) and some things right (REBECCAAAAAA, REBECCA I LOVE YOU REBECCAAAA, SHAUN AIN’T GOT NOTHING ON ME, REBECCAAAAA, etc.), and is certainly doing a whole lot better than the first game, which had Lucy and Maria, the Robert du Sable cosplayer and… well, that was that.

And then Brotherhood, apparently, does it all better again, and I am deathly excited to see how, given the mixed success of the previous games. This franchise, as I will shout until I’m blue in the face to anyone who’ll listen, is one that’s going from strength to strength and is (perhaps most importantly) the child of people who give a shit about representation and who’s playing their game – as my previous article getting picked up on shows. I just wanted to reassure you that Assassin’s Creed isn’t a franchise swamped and blinded by the Frank Miller Effect wholesale. Don’t rule it out. And especially don’t rule it out where the Brotherhood can get to you, because they will.

• The author would like to take the opportunity to inform his readers that the most guards he’s ever stuffed into a single haystack in Florence was 21, and challenges you to do better.