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female assassins, and gave it a friendly shoutout, which was nice to see (sadly, when I try to find the shoutout, it’s been archived and doesn’t seem to have the hyperlinks anymore.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.”

E

EMANCIPATE

She bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power. ‘I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?’

-Sojourner Truth speaking in 1851, as recalled by Matilda Gage in History of Woman Suffrage

Well in hand

Alas and alack, I have no Latin language linked tea-towel (or indeed any other lexical kitchenware). So I had to do some trans-linguistic dictionary groping (oh ho) to reveal that the verb ’emancipate’ can be broken down into not one but three etymological building blocks (oh, alright pedant, two words and one suffix).

Ahem. These are: ‘e-‘ (out of), ‘manus’ (hand), ‘capere’ (to capture, to seize). So to emancipate is, etymologically speaking, something like ‘to release something captured from your hand’. Its first meaning in the OED is ‘to release or set free (a child or a wife) from the patria potestas, the power of the pater familias‘. Most of those Latin words come back to the same idea: Big Daddy and his eternal potency, and it is here that, presumably, the ‘Emancipation of Women’ has its phrasal origins. To emancipate someone is to relinquish the (legal) power that you hold over them, and it is thus that, in its association with women’s rights, the word has come to be associated with first wave feminism and its fight for property rights, women’s suffrage and basic legal equality. It is presumably for this reason that it is no longer widely considered technically applicable to gender issues, as a quick look at Wikipedia will confirm.

Clemens in horto laborat

But emancipate also has a definitional cousin in the word ‘manumit’ (‘to set forth from one’s hand’), which means ‘to release from slavery’, and indeed, slavery – and emancipate‘s second definition – is where we must next turn. Of course the Romans who bandy these manii around were, if not exactly pioneers, at least great practitioners of the flesh trade. But, perhaps unexpectedly, they did have a sort of ‘liberal’ edge to their way of doing things: slaves could be legally freed, and, as ‘freedmen’, often enjoyed considerable socio-political power (the Vettii brothers in Pompeii were famous for having a rather rockin’ house).

Thus, emancipate‘s second meaning, ‘to set free from control; to release from legal, social or political restraint’, which, as the dictionary points out, has in modern use acquired a primary application to slavery, with ‘other uses felt to be transferred from this’. In ancient Rome, female slaves (‘libertae’), of course, had less options, and generally ended up marrying their former masters (oh, the liberalism), suggesting that they might need emancipation in the third sense – ‘to set free from intellectual or moral restraint’, and in fact getting into its fourth and final meaning, ‘to enslave’, via the explanatory quotation, ‘a wiues emancipating herself to another husband’. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

America, America

Here you are, love.

In the years following the Emancipation Proclamation of the early 1860s, which of course challenged the slavery widely practised by a more modern empire, emancipate starts to gain something of its modern sense, as the dictionary puts it, ‘primarily suggesting the liberation of slaves’. Turning briefly to said Emancipation Proclamation, it was an ambiguous document, widely criticized for freeing only those slaves its authors had no authority over and shying away from declaring slavery itself to be illegal. The more-than-hundred years of struggle leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prove the limits of technical ’emancipation’, and the battle that had to be fought over every remnant of restraint in American law, not least the abolition of slavery as a concept.

But where does this history take us, as followers of a gynocentric lexical trail? Well, one of emancipate‘s most interesting side-effects as a word-journey is to take us into the realms of historical figures who stood up for freedom in women’s rights as part of a wider struggle for racial – human – equality. These include Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton, alongside Sojourner Truth, ex-slave, abolitionist and women’s rights activist (reported to have an ‘Amazonian’ form, for those following the progress of this series intently).

Whilst technically ’emancipated’ herself (although in practice anything but, forced due to a contextually ironic hand injury to continue working for her master after New York had finished emancipating slaves in 1827), Truth set about challenging the sexism and misogyny rife in white society alongside the need to abolish slavery. She highlighted in her most famous speech, ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ (1851) how plantation owners would savagely beat their female slaves while simultaneously offering white women a hand into their carriages and over ditches. Ideally positioned to turn upon both injustices, Truth herself expressed the frying pan-fire of emancipate‘s fourth meaning when she said that “Man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.”

It is one of the recurring criticisms of modern feminism that it leaves groups behind. Emancipate is a word fraught with definitional hooks and barbs that the escapee can catch on – from legal to moral and social restraint, to, finally, re-enslaving. I chose the verbal sense for a reason.

NEXT: F is for … Female, actually. After the curveball of C Is For Crinoline, we’re going Obvious.