{"id":1576,"date":"2011-01-19T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T09:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2011-01-19T09:00:20","modified_gmt":"2011-01-19T09:00:20","slug":"assassins-creed-the-frank-miller-effect-strikes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/01\/19\/assassins-creed-the-frank-miller-effect-strikes-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Assassin\u2019s Creed: The Frank Miller Effect Strikes Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh, BadRep.\u00a0 How I wish I didn’t have to write the article I’m writing now.\u00a0 How I wish that everything we fall in love with in the entertainment industry was miles and miles from feministic reproach.\u00a0 How I wish that something, somewhere would just do everything right<\/em> and not suck in sudden and unexpected ways.<\/p>\n

Today, I’m subverting my own trope and writing about a game.\u00a0 I do love a good computer game.\u00a0 I like ones with excellent, flawed characters, and even more excellent, bizarre plots.\u00a0 I like them big and sweeping and mind-bending, ideally with some kind of stealth element and something freaky and supernatural in the mix.\u00a0 So naturally, I love the Assassin’s Creed<\/strong> franchise.\u00a0 Dear god do I love the Assassin’s Creed<\/strong> franchise.<\/p>\n

“Love” is probably not the right word.\u00a0 It’s not enough to convey the level of brain-melting, nose-bleed-inducing obsession I have with it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 “Love” just doesn’t cover it.\u00a0 My affection for it is worrying.\u00a0 It feeds my soul with the purest, shimmering godlike joy from on high through a glee tube<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So please understand how hard it is for me to criticise it in any way.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Most of the characters are male.\u00a0 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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

You already know.\u00a0 It’s the Sex Assassin.\u00a0 The one that lures in the victim with sexual desire, and then! when they’re at their most vulnerable! murders them with stabbing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This trope is old.\u00a0 The Sex Assassin is inevitably female.\u00a0 She’s the Battle Whore; a sexually desirable object of cunning, guise and stabbing, and it’s exciting because there she is! \u00a0Subverting regular heterosexual intercourse by penetrating the man she’s seduced!\u00a0 With a knife.<\/em> Do you see what they did there!\u00a0 Surely we are all undone with the inventiveness.\u00a0 Women being all deadly and effective!\u00a0 But only if couched in the narrative device of being used as a sex object.\u00a0 That is the only way they can be empowered, apparently.<\/p>\n

I desperately hoped that my beloved Assassin’s Creed<\/strong> would break free of this trope and give us some hard-ass, female battle bastards, but it doesn’t, really.\u00a0 I looked at the line-up of playable classes for the most recent massive release, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood<\/strong>, and there’s an array of interesting traditionally male roles: you’ve got a tank<\/span> hangman, a plague doctor and a priest… and then there’s the woman.\u00a0 There she is, at the back.\u00a0 You can tell that she’s The Woman because there’s an awful lot of cleavage going on.<\/p>\n

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One of these is not like the others.<\/p><\/div>\n

She’s a Sex Assassin.\u00a0 That’s what she is.\u00a0 Because she’s a woman.\u00a0 What else<\/em> would she do?\u00a0 She’s special<\/em>!\u00a0 She has breasts, unlike all the other people in the world, who are apparently all hard, breastless, cisgendered men.\u00a0 Women and their breasts are magical and rare, much like unicorns.\u00a0 So naturally, she’ll be a Sex Assassin because goodness me, we can’t have any of the guys doing that.\u00a0 Because they don’t have breasts.\u00a0 And men are not sex objects for anyone ever<\/em>.\u00a0 Also, that’d be gay.\u00a0 And that’s terrible<\/em>!<\/p>\n

There’s also a female harlequin, available as an optional extra.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 But – an optional extra?!\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a> than me because it is massively less drooling<\/em>) is no better.\u00a0 Ezio, our hero, has to learn how to be stealthy and to pickpocket people.\u00a0 So, he learns from a female stealth expert.\u00a0 Guess what she is!\u00a0 Correct!\u00a0 A concubine.\u00a0 Because, of course, there is no other sort of dangerous woman.\u00a0 All other women in Assassin’s Creed II<\/strong> are either harrowed victims in a revenge cycle, or Ezio’s passive, faceless lovers.<\/p>\n

And what’s the deal with sex workers being cast as “dangerous”, anyway?\u00a0 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”?\u00a0 Or is it some kind of “trap” issue?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

However!\u00a0 It’s not all bad news.\u00a0\u00a0 Sidestepping any spoilers, Assassin’s Creed I <\/strong>and II<\/strong> have “framing” characters away from the time-travelling stabbination who are female Assassins.\u00a0 They don’t stab anyone up, but are actually totally brilliant, stealthy and clever, and<\/em> frequently save the (male) protagonist.\u00a0 There!\u00a0 That’s the juice without any spoilers.\u00a0 The modern-day framing narrative characters rock my entire world, even though they’re not as action-entrenched as Alta\u00efr or Ezio.<\/p>\n

Recently, one of the wonderful Ubisoft community developers I follow on Twitter linked to some beautiful Assassin’s Creed-related artwork.\u00a0 “Sexy Assassin!” they said.\u00a0 I exploded with joy all over the internet and clicked through, hoping, as I always do, to find hot male pin-up.<\/p>\n

Well.\u00a0 I found this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I mean, look at it.\u00a0 It’s gorgeously done.\u00a0 I can’t paint even remotely<\/em> that well.\u00a0 Hats off to the skills there!\u00a0 It’s completely brilliant!\u00a0 And who doesn’t<\/em> like stockings?\u00a0 Nobody.\u00a0 Stockings are a sure-fire winner.\u00a0 And, you know, I’m a fan of knives and stockings.\u00a0 So that’s good.<\/p>\n

But do you see the point I’m making?\u00a0 Women apparently can’t be Assassins unless they’re some kind of Sex Assassin.\u00a0 No!\u00a0 Please!\u00a0 It is perfectly possible to have scary, efficient, ruthless, politically-minded, devoted, armoured Assassins who are women.\u00a0 Please give your female gamers someone to identify with who is tough and awesome without<\/em> the over-riding message that the only way for them to be so is to give themselves sexually to men.<\/p>\n

And, you know, I know this has been said before but – what’s with the lack of male pin-ups?\u00a0 Why can’t we have male Sex Assassins?\u00a0 What’s going on there?\u00a0 Ezio is certainly meant to be sexy, and there’s lots of handsome portraiture of both him and the lovely Alta\u00efr from the first game in the fanart-producing sector of the fandom.\u00a0 But nothing quite like the “Sexy Assassin” I’ve linked to above.\u00a0 Where’s all the ludicrous cheese and posturing?\u00a0 I love cheese and posturing.\u00a0 Ezio is one of the cheesiest posturers of any videogame character I have ever seen.\u00a0 So where’s the pictures of him in just the hood draped all over Florence like it’s a city-sized chaise longue<\/em>?<\/p>\n

So, Ubisoft, if you’re reading, I gift to you the following three illustrations:<\/p>\n

NUMBER ONE<\/span>: the battle-worn avenger who kills for her beliefs and her Hashshashin family.<\/p>\n

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NUMBER TWO<\/span>: the wise, old Master who is not to be under-estimated despite her years.<\/p>\n

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NUMBER THREE<\/span>: Alta\u00efr (artist’s impression thereof) in stockings doing a cheesecake.<\/p>\n

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

OTHER NOTE TO READERS: <\/strong>Anyone who suggests that I wrote this article as an excuse to draw Alta\u00efr in lingerie is a heretic and liar and probably a Templar.\u00a0 The Brotherhood are watching you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Image credits for the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood box art lie firmly in the hands of Ubisoft.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n