First off: go check out the trailer if you haven’t seen it already.

Stephen B: Well, I’m a Brit, and that probably colours my reaction to the setting. I’m just not invested in how glorious the War of Independence was, and killing the dastardly English isn’t really as exciting to me as Assassins vs. Templars.

My first reaction was concern for the fighting: is going up against guns with a small hand-axe really going to work?  The moves lacked the skill and finesse of previous styles, although they’re better on a repeat viewing.  Plus, I am a bit disappointed that no-one else is following Mass Effect 3‘s lead and doing female version trailers. Or… having even one female in the whole trailer.

All this grand posturing is about English vs. American white guys only and the protagonist is of Native American descent, so while you’re blowing all those trumpets you’re ignoring the incredible ongoing & future genocide. The game might highlight how his people are treated as part of the story, but that’s not clear from the trailer.

Miranda: Would it be possible to have a leading lady in this franchise? I’d love that – I like the Orlando-esque idea of the protagonist being different genders through time – but isn’t Desmond always the person, er, “wearing” the history? So I imagine we’d have to lose him as well; they’d have to create a female equivalent? Even without that leap, I’m personally hoping there are less Sex Assassin type ladies this time around, and more, y’know, female characters.

Readers might remember the last time we covered Assassin’s Creed on here and talked about the Sex Assassin NPC thing – Ubisoft Workshop staff actually read the post, which featured Markgraf’s own designs for female assassins, and gave it a friendly shoutout, which was nice to see (sadly, when I try to find the shoutout, it’s been archived and doesn’t seem to have the hyperlinks anymore. Shame, that – we were originally hyperlinked from “we thought this would quell some people’s fears on where we stand on important subjects”). We then had a bit of feedback from people who pointed out that there are female assassins in ACII you can deploy places, so then we made another post to address that a bit, because the point is, we’re aware of that, but it’s not like there isn’t room for a good deal of progress.

Rai: I too am concerned about how they’ll fit this protagonist into the grand scheme of things: after all historically it’s one set of oppressive zealots complaining about being oppressed (by the English) without a shadow of irony as they murder and destroy the indigenous population.  Given the protagonist’s ethnicity, one has to wonder how he’s on either side of this war, given the racist sentiments aimed at Native Americans (in that era and beyond).

On the anti-Brit theme, I have my doubts that it’ll be handled appropriately or even accurately – there are tendencies when anything American is involved for Brits to be portrayed as some sort of devil spawn (which is getting pretty dull).

I’m pretty peeved it is still a dude.  What happened to all the stuff at the end of Brotherhood when Minerva was telling Desmond to go and find this ‘other assassin’ he’d need to beat the Templars?  Minerva was using female pronouns to talk about this other assassin – so, where is she?

Changing tack slightly: the trees(!) – in the trailer we see the guy free-running among the branches. This could be an interesting switch from the buildings we’re used to thus far.

Also did anyone else hear the theory that AC3 would be set in the Far East?  If so… would Far East have been a better setting than 1777 America?  I think so, but then America is of very little interest to me as it all feels quite egomaniacal: could the setting of AC3 be a ploy to get more US fans?  Or to bring the centre of attention back on to the USA, as is the tendency of so many games?

Stephen B: Well, I suppose the previous games were quite brave in that the first one had you playing a medieval Arab, and the second went to Italy with no mention of the US. So it could be okay that they do one in the USA… but the Far East would have been a lot more exciting for me.

Markgraf: As per Rai’s reaction, I’m baffled as to why our hero isn’t a woman, still – I mean, come on, it’s 2012, surely we know that women exist by now and that it’s fine to have them as protagonists?

But my angle is this one: I’m keen to see people of colour represented as actual hero-y heroes in games, because it’s damn rare, it’s still damn rare, and that’s frankly an embarrassment to civilisation as a whole.  So I’m delighted, actually, to see that Ratohnhaké:ton is mixed race and doing his bit for First Nations people in games.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise is doing itself quite proud of multiculturalism in games: it started the series with you playing Altaiir ibn La-Ahad, who is a Syrian Arab, born and raised, which is literally one of the only examples I can think of where the playable protagonist is Arab.  But you’ll all remember that Altaiir had an American voice, and if you peered under his hood, it was Desmond doing an Altaiir cosplay.  So, you had a character with the right sort of name for the place he was in, but without the right sort of voice, and not really the right sort of face, either, which was pretty much ethnicity-trimming, if you ask me.

No-one can possibly have any problems with the representation of First Nations people – they’re under-represented and it’s uncontroversial to represent them as heroes – and that’s great, but I do feel bad for Altaiir, the Arab hero that never really was.

I’m not that thrilled by the setting, either, to be honest.  For all the reasons we’ve mentioned (yet another America-centric game) but also because… I just want to see a more diverse range of ethnic backgrounds to playable characters, really.  So couldn’t we have wandered further afield than America for the third?

(And raise your hand if you’re bored of having The English!!! as villains in things…)

Oh, and I’m also excited that YOU CAN CLIMB TREES!!!!, yes.

Rai: I too am more than pleased that the AC franchise has done good things for protagonists of diverse ethnicity and to have another character in that trend is good; even better if he is actually his own self and not just Desmond-in-a-hood!  Their failings with portraying Altaiir appropriately will always stick in my mind though.

It is a shame it’s not a woman though, and it is a shame it’s in America – if previous form is anything to go by, we may end up with a trilogy of games in that period, and I suspect they’ve brought it home to America so they can more easily blend into Desmond fighting Templars himself in the present/future.  So I have no idea where on earth this ‘she’ assassin Minerva was banging on about is going to come from.  I truly hope they don’t just let Desmond find her and then she’s an unplayable sidekick character.

Conclusions:

Miranda: “Hurrah for more beautiful vertigo-inducing rendering, but let’s hope there are some women NPCs at least in this that are written as characters, not damsels and sex machines!”

Stephen B: “Potential racial sensitivity GOOD, provided they stick to it. Setting’s a bit blah; hoping the general ‘Assassins vs Templars’ struggle is enough of a hook to keep me interested.”

Markgraf: “I BET THE FANDOM ARE MORE HAPPY TO ACCURATELY REPRESENT THIS GUY’S ETHNICITY THAN ALTAIIR’S BECAUSE HE WON’T BE ALL WHITEWASHED IN-GAME LOL”

Rai: “Where is my she-assassin?!  Good to see an appropriately portrayed non-white protagonist, but the American setting feels like a bit of a disappointment, and definitely poked my inner cynic with a very pointy stick.”

Today, I’m subverting my own trope and writing about a game.  I do love a good computer game.  I like ones with excellent, flawed characters, and even more excellent, bizarre plots.  I like them big and sweeping and mind-bending, ideally with some kind of stealth element and something freaky and supernatural in the mix.  So naturally, I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  Dear god do I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

“Love” is probably not the right word.  It’s not enough to convey the level of brain-melting, nose-bleed-inducing obsession I have with it.  It doesn’t illustrate the way I dissolve into a twitching heap when exposed to the soundtrack, or that I screamed at the ending of the first game and spent the next week – avoiding spoilers – sleeplessly deciphering it with the aid of the internet.  “Love” just doesn’t cover it.  My affection for it is worrying.  It feeds my soul with the purest, shimmering godlike joy from on high through a glee tube.

So please understand how hard it is for me to criticise it in any way.

The franchise is, as the title may suggest, about Assassins with a capital A: not hitmen-for-hire, but the original Hashshashin, a devoted army of politically-motivated killers locked in a battle against the Knights Templar in an exciting tangle of conspiracy theory fodder that gets increasingly bizarre as the series continues.  Most of the characters are male.  This is partially a reflection on the time period in question (mid-Crusades era Syria and the Italian Renaissance) but also because, according to trope, there is only one type of female assassin.

“What type is that?” I hear you cry, perplexed that there should be more than one type of Assassin at all.

You already know.  It’s the Sex Assassin.  The one that lures in the victim with sexual desire, and then! when they’re at their most vulnerable! murders them with stabbing.

This trope is old.  The Sex Assassin is inevitably female.  She’s the Battle Whore; a sexually desirable object of cunning, guise and stabbing, and it’s exciting because there she is!  Subverting regular heterosexual intercourse by penetrating the man she’s seduced!  With a knife. Do you see what they did there!  Surely we are all undone with the inventiveness.  Women being all deadly and effective!  But only if couched in the narrative device of being used as a sex object.  That is the only way they can be empowered, apparently.

I desperately hoped that my beloved Assassin’s Creed would break free of this trope and give us some hard-ass, female battle bastards, but it doesn’t, really.  I looked at the line-up of playable classes for the most recent massive release, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and there’s an array of interesting traditionally male roles: you’ve got a tank hangman, a plague doctor and a priest… and then there’s the woman.  There she is, at the back.  You can tell that she’s The Woman because there’s an awful lot of cleavage going on.

One of these is not like the others.

She’s a Sex Assassin.  That’s what she is.  Because she’s a woman.  What else would she do?  She’s special!  She has breasts, unlike all the other people in the world, who are apparently all hard, breastless, cisgendered men.  Women and their breasts are magical and rare, much like unicorns.  So naturally, she’ll be a Sex Assassin because goodness me, we can’t have any of the guys doing that.  Because they don’t have breasts.  And men are not sex objects for anyone ever.  Also, that’d be gay.  And that’s terrible!

There’s also a female harlequin, available as an optional extra.  And that’s brilliant, because the harlequins are terrifying, androgynous, lithe and competent (exactly what you want from an Assassin, really) and it really is nice to see a deadly, dangerous female character that isn’t a sex worker.   But – an optional extra?!  Why am I having to look for female characters who aren’t clinging desperately to the Lady Sex Assassin trope like a koala bear to the last damn eucalyptus tree on earth?

The second game (well, of the big platform releases; there’s been numerous spin-offs and blah blah blah, massive nerd dump on the series goes here, honestly, you’re better served asking Wikipedia than me because it is massively less drooling) is no better.  Ezio, our hero, has to learn how to be stealthy and to pickpocket people.  So, he learns from a female stealth expert.  Guess what she is!  Correct!  A concubine.  Because, of course, there is no other sort of dangerous woman.  All other women in Assassin’s Creed II are either harrowed victims in a revenge cycle, or Ezio’s passive, faceless lovers.

And what’s the deal with sex workers being cast as “dangerous”, anyway?  Is it yet another embodiment of Evil Female Sexuality, wherein a woman in control of her own sexuality is deemed “savage” or “out of control”?  Or is it some kind of “trap” issue?  The normative dialogue is that Mr. Cisgendered Manly McHeterosexual takes the first step towards initiating sexual contact; our Ms. Sex Assassin twists that by being the one that does the seducing instead.  The assumption, then, is that the seducer is the dangerous one, being as that men are the ones to usually instigate sex, and I’ve dropped my monocle in horror.

However!  It’s not all bad news.   Sidestepping any spoilers, Assassin’s Creed I and II have “framing” characters away from the time-travelling stabbination who are female Assassins.  They don’t stab anyone up, but are actually totally brilliant, stealthy and clever, and frequently save the (male) protagonist.  There!  That’s the juice without any spoilers.  The modern-day framing narrative characters rock my entire world, even though they’re not as action-entrenched as Altaïr or Ezio.

Recently, one of the wonderful Ubisoft community developers I follow on Twitter linked to some beautiful Assassin’s Creed-related artwork.  “Sexy Assassin!” they said.  I exploded with joy all over the internet and clicked through, hoping, as I always do, to find hot male pin-up.

Well.  I found this.

I mean, look at it.  It’s gorgeously done.  I can’t paint even remotely that well.  Hats off to the skills there!  It’s completely brilliant!  And who doesn’t like stockings?  Nobody.  Stockings are a sure-fire winner.  And, you know, I’m a fan of knives and stockings.  So that’s good.

But do you see the point I’m making?  Women apparently can’t be Assassins unless they’re some kind of Sex Assassin.  No!  Please!  It is perfectly possible to have scary, efficient, ruthless, politically-minded, devoted, armoured Assassins who are women.  Please give your female gamers someone to identify with who is tough and awesome without the over-riding message that the only way for them to be so is to give themselves sexually to men.

And, you know, I know this has been said before but – what’s with the lack of male pin-ups?  Why can’t we have male Sex Assassins?  What’s going on there?  Ezio is certainly meant to be sexy, and there’s lots of handsome portraiture of both him and the lovely Altaïr from the first game in the fanart-producing sector of the fandom.  But nothing quite like the “Sexy Assassin” I’ve linked to above.  Where’s all the ludicrous cheese and posturing?  I love cheese and posturing.  Ezio is one of the cheesiest posturers of any videogame character I have ever seen.  So where’s the pictures of him in just the hood draped all over Florence like it’s a city-sized chaise longue?

So, Ubisoft, if you’re reading, I gift to you the following three illustrations:

NUMBER ONE: the battle-worn avenger who kills for her beliefs and her Hashshashin family.

NUMBER TWO: the wise, old Master who is not to be under-estimated despite her years.

NUMBER THREE: Altaïr (artist’s impression thereof) in stockings doing a cheesecake.

NOTE TO READERS: I really do love Assassin’s Creed more than anything; please don’t let this article lead you to believe otherwise.

OTHER NOTE TO READERS: Anyone who suggests that I wrote this article as an excuse to draw Altaïr in lingerie is a heretic and liar and probably a Templar.  The Brotherhood are watching you.

Image credits for the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood box art lie firmly in the hands of Ubisoft.

• Postscript: So then Ubisoft actually read this post, and Markgraf wrote a follow-up. You can read that here.