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female assassins, and gave it a friendly shoutout, which was nice to see (sadly, when I try to find the shoutout, it’s been archived and doesn’t seem to have the hyperlinks anymore.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

Batman: Arkham City

There were ‘issues’ with Arkham City (as you can read in my previous article), but there were still some good things to say as well.  The styling and the graphics were great (as they were in Asylum), and I enjoyed the noir feel that they went for, although it didn’t feel as gritty as the first game.  I suspect that may be because once you’ve seen something for the first time it loses its special impact.

City felt a bit too big coming after Asylum without the storyline longevity to really back it up.  There’re a lot of side quests and other bits to do and investigate, so the game has expanded in width as opposed to length.  Personally, I tend to let the side quests fall by the wayside as I power through the story.  It was a fairly competent and engaging(ish) story until the ending (I won’t spoiler but it sucked) despite the near ‘deus ex machina’ way in which they ended the stories of four key characters.

Playing as Catwoman was novel to begin with, but in the end wasn’t a big enough plus as one might have hoped.  Adding to the boiling pot were even more gadgets and even more complicated combat moves that you had to remember in order to beat certain baddies.  Overall, I think they over-complicated a sound concept that could’ve done a lot better.  If you played the first game and are thinking about getting City, wait until it comes down in price first or until they release a copy with the DLCs included.

Assassin’s Creed II

This may seem an odd choice considering Revelations came out at the end of last year, but I played Brotherhood before AC2 so I had a whole 22 years of story to catch up on before I went on to the newest instalment.  This is another game series I was late getting into, as evidenced by me still not having completed the first game(s), but I enjoy it nonetheless.

The graphics and world design are always fantastic with these games; they build entire cities before your eyes.  The characters are ones that you can invest in; ‘sandboxing’ can be just as fun as the main story; the controls aren’t always the easiest (on PC) but you can get there in the end.  This game is super fun, and now I’m clued in on Ezio’s pre-Brotherhood story I can look forward to Revelations.  My only quibble is that there are only so many times I can listen to passers-by shouting “He’ll break something, the idiot!” (or any of their repetitive comments) before I’ll consider risking desynchronisation just to kill a few civvies.

Machinarium

A cute little indie puzzle game, Machinarium was a little bit of a distraction in between Arkham and AC2 to cleanse the palette of my brain, as it were.  It’s a clever little offering set in a robot city, in which you have to stop some bad robots from killing the King robot and free your girlfriend from the evilbots’ grasps.  Various puzzles and stages lead you all over the city until you finally save the day.  Artistically it’s simple but charming and my only issue was the overused-in-indie trope of saving a damsel in distress.

Other gaming from January 2012

Those three are, admittedly, the only three games I have completed, but I’ve been dipping in and out of others too! Serious Sam 3: Before First Encounter has so far been good nostalgia-laden fun, but my brain really has been in Open World mode recently and my FPS-ing has suffered as a result.  Sonic Generations on PC has also been providing me with some chilled gaming – apart from when I get stuck – as it is bright, colourful and cheery, even in the face of a big baddie who is destroying time.  Finally, not one I have been playing, but Skate on Xbox 360 has been my favourite Let’s-Watch-Someone-Else game as I curl up on the sofa and watch my partner switch nollie heel something-or-other around San Vanelona – it is a good game, but the controls can be a bit pesky for a PC purist, and the complete and total absence of any female boarders is a bit dull.

Plans for February

So far, I don’t have any hard-and-fast plans on games; I might revisit Brotherhood as I enjoyed AC2 so much (and I lost my Broho save game).  I may also stretch to buying Revelations as I would like to make sure March is clear for Mass Effect 3.

What has everyone else been playing so far in 2012?

I laugh. I cry. I shriek like an excited child. I hurl insults, groan and grip the hand of the person sitting next to me, and I just can’t help it. The film, in that darkened, magical room full of equally hypnotised people and their rustling sweets, is my entire life for the hours that it runs.

Now, if a film is uniformly delightful, I’ll get used to the level of delight it’s producing in me and be relatively quiet. If it’s uniformly miserable, I’ll just cry quietly to myself for the duration. If it’s completely terrible, I’ll start out shouting and then my fury will dull into silence, while I glare at the screen with the cold, dead eyes of a shark. But if a film varies, and has parts that I love and parts that I hate, I’ll react anew to the different levels of content as they emerge.

Paul WS Anderson’s The Three Musketeers was, therefore, a big problem for everyone else in the cinema.

**** WARNING: spoilers from here on out!****

It’s a film with its pros and cons, as most films are, but the problem with this film for me was that the pros and cons were both very forthright in how pro-y or con-y they were, and they constantly vied for supremacy. The result was a sort of see-saw effect, whereby the quality of the film yo-yoed wildly from start to finish, and my face was sort of like this:

So at the end, I looked a bit like this:

Oh my god you guys, what was this film. It was obvious that they knew what they wanted to do with it, but really weren’t sure how. As you can tell from the title, it’s ostensibly based on Alexandre Dumas’ lovely book, but much in the same way that every time I take a trip to Tesco, the journey is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. I read The Three Musketeers when I was young – so young, in fact, that the memory is a mere rose-coloured blip on the horizon of my literary consumption – so have possibly unrealistic recollections of how ludicrous it was. But I’m pretty sure the bloody thing didn’t have zeppelins designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

The whole thing’s meant to be set in the year 17-whatsit, and the costume department and set designers have had a fucking ball with it. The clothes are divine, and the interiors are spot-on. It’s really lush to look at, the attention to detail – even in the weaponry – is sublime, which makes it all the more bloody baffling that they saw fit to sledgehammer shit like rotary platform mini-cannons and clockpunk crossbows on top. The final straw for me was the sudden, rage-cage-inducing appearance of modern stringed instruments at the end.

The way I see it is this: if you love 18th century France so much, don’t spend oodles of obvious love and affection recreating that amazing period of European history in all its gaudy, beautiful, corrupt and hilarious glory and then promptly drizzle congealed green-screened steampunk on top! And if you want it to be a full-on, anachronistic love-in with airship-mounted flamethrowers, stop pretending it’s in any way historically accurate! Go the whole hog! Have a mechanical Tyrannosaur! Stick Cardinal Richelieu in leather!

…Ooh.

And the dialogue. Oh, god. The dialogue. It was clearly written by a team who thought they were far more witty than they really were (Alex Litvak and Andrew Davis, I’m looking at you) and while the cast, bless them, did their best, no one – not even Christoph Waltz, doing a staggeringly attractive turn as Richelieu – could redeem the continual stream of steaming cat vomit.

This brings me on, neatly, to the casting, one of the film’s only saving graces. As I say, Waltz is charismatic and delicious as usual, but it isn’t just him carrying the show. The Musketeers themselves (Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson) are fun to watch¹ with good interpersonal chemistry (OT3 FOREVER) and King Louis XIII, (played by Freddie Fox, characterised as basically me in a sparkly hat) is a gigantic hilarious fop. To balance out the prevalence of heroes, I was personally foaming with delight to see that we had not one, but three and a half whole villains to choose from! Milla Jovovitch, who is my future wife by the way, does a truly spectacular turn as demi-villain Milady de Winter (but more on that in a bit), an eyepatched Mads Mikkelsen (who you may remember as the blood-weeping, testicle-flogging villain in 2006’s Casino Royale) as the Cardinal’s captain of the guard, swanning about in red brocade being all leg and blades, and Orlando Bloom.

… Orlando Bloom. Now. I hate Orlando Bloom. I’ve found him phenomenally unremarkable in everything he’s been in to date, and in every case his universal expression is the perplexed discomfort of a dog that’s been instructed to sit on snowy ground. Here, he’s the villainous Buckingham – a tarted-up-to-the-nines fop with a pearl earring and a 24-carat smirk, and he’s fucking perfect.

I’m terrified that – after his Oscar-guzzling performance as Hans Landa in Quarantino’s most recent romp, Inglourious Basterds – Christoph Waltz will be forever cast by English-language cinema as villains, and Musketeers certainly doesn’t abate my fear. But please, please, gods of cinema, if there is any justice in the world, please let Orlando Bloom be typecast for life as a scenery-chewing villain off the back of this film alone. He’s having so much fun! He’s more camp than a goth Mardi Gras! The facial hair suits him and everything! I never want to see him doing the beleaguered hero act ever again.

So the casting’s great. Except, sadly, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), who’s irritating, boring, and frankly too young to carry the role off with any gravitas. But all of his shortcomings pale in comparison to the humanoid plankton² cast as his love-interest, Constance (Gabrielle Wilde). She has one facial expression:

This is her expression for all things. Delivering sarcastic put-downs, being dangled from the prow of an airship, stumbling along a boardwalk a million miles from the ground and being held at knifepoint. All that face, and a monotone to match. It’s awful. It’s not even as if she gets nothing to do. She gets herself captured on D’Artagnan’s behalf by dressing as him and acting as bait³ and that could be amazing! But she does it with the charisma and presence of a bowl of cold soup.

Readers will be surprised to learn that this film does actually get a technical Bechdel pass. There are actually quite a lot of women in the film, serving – on paper – very important roles. The Queen (Juno Temple) has an entire contingent of ladies-in-waiting, of which Constance is one, and the Bechdel pass comes when she asks for her jewels, only to find that they’ve been stolen. It’s only one line, though! She spends the entire film surrounded by women, having a fun time in the garden and calling Richelieu on his bullshit to his face, but she never gets more than a meagre handful of lines. Why? It feels as if the lines she does get – there are literally only about four – and the placement of them are lip service to having to write her a part. So, in an entire French fucking court of women that practically fills the screen, they only get six lines between them. WHY? Is there a LAW against women advancing the plot? The Queen has a vital fucking ROLE in the plot, as she’s one of the chief pawns that Richelieu fucks about with!

But yet, she’s completely out-parted by… Milla.

Oh, Milla. I love you so much. You’re the lizard-eyed, carved-bicepped, bullet-dodging action queen of my dreams. This role is a fucking gift for her. Milady is a double-agent, assassin and spy! She’s a fucking Swiss army knife of bad-assery. She’s got a lockpick haircomb, icy-cool emotional control to spare, and abseiling stays. She can dual-wield a pistol and a rapier, has no problems selling people out or killing them, and appears to be literally invincible. I can’t say enough brilliant things about her. It’s all going so well! And then her clothes fall off and she becomes a lingerie model on a clock, complete with lascivious camera pan. Because, obviously, men won’t understand or enjoy a woman being badass unless she’s got as few clothes on as possible (even in a culture where the collars were big and the dresses bigger). I cried. Sex assassin, ho!

Speaking of assassins, the opening action scene is in Venice. “VENICE, ITALY!!” we’re told (to differentiate, presumably, from Venice, Barnsley). A guard stands watch on a dark canal edge. Something bubbles in the water at his feet. Suddenly, a dart is fired straight from the water into his gullet. Athos emerges, wet and masked, armed with some kind of automatic crossbow.

Meanwhile, Aramis, hooded and billowy, synchs up a viewpoint before Leap-of-Faithing down onto a gondola.

Porthos manages to get a kill-streak of 15, fighting off soldiers in a basement, earning himself a new trophy!

They have basically made Assassin’s Creed II: THE MOVIE, and split Ezio into three people.

The rage-cage descended over my eyes. HOW DARE THEY, I announced, being restrained by the two people who foolishly accompanied me to the cinema. GET OFF MY ASSCREED, I declared. People had started to stare. PRESS X TO AVOID MY ACID VOMIT OF WRATH, I continued. I was out of control. It was of great relief to everyone when the scene changed and I could be pacified with Mads Mikkelsen’s gorgeous cheekbones and mile-long legs.

All in all, a mixed bag. Like reaching your hand into pick ‘n’ mix and being unsure as to whether you’ll get a fizzy cola bottle or an enraged musk rat.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It is so blisteringly camp and sparkly that I came out wearing glitter that I didn’t go in with
• The sets and costumes are lush beyond compare
• The casting’s brilliant, with few exceptions
• It’s one for the Eurofilm nerds, with excellent performances from Mikkelsen, Waltz and a motley crew of Brits – and an unexpected, hilarious cameo from Til Schweiger, who starred alongside Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
• VILLAIN PORN!!! VILLAIN!!! PORN!!! YES!!!

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It just doesn’t know what it’s doing, with anything, ever, especially the women
• “What? You mean… just having them on-screen isn’t good enough? :(“
• The dialogue’s an experience quite a lot like snorting crushed glass
• I’d rather deep-throat a live conga eel than watch the scenes with D’Artagnan in again
• Who the hell thought model battle-maps would make good scene transition material?
• Why is D’Artagnan glaringly American, when everyone else at least tries to be pseudo-British?
• MODERN FUCKING INSTRUMENTS HRRGHNH WHY GOD

1. Aramis is a priest. I will fight anyone going for Aramis. And I will win.
2. No offence to plankton.
3. with the laziest drag I have ever seen – SHE WEARS HIS HAT! That’s not drag, that’s what I do in the hat section of John Lewis for fun.

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.

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.