Assassin's Creed and Female Leads

 This has been a bit of a rough week for me, and I’m not sure how I feel about this whole ‘working’ business now that I’m doing it. But overall it’s better than not working, because I’m getting paid! Hooray!

I have this idea for a short story about fighting a boo hag that came to me yesterday so we’ll see if that goes anywhere.

Also it’s the weekend, and you know what that means: turn on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and playing some GWENT MOTHERCLUCKERS

Ahem.

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Assassin's Creed and Female Leads

Ubisoft, the game studio that makes Assassin’s Creed (and several other games but that’s the series I care about so that’s what we’re talking about here today) has recently had some shake-ups in their management, because it turns out that there were quite a few sexist douchebag harassers in there and it’s all coming out like a hot garbage vomit. There’s a lot going on there, but we’re going to focus on one Serge Hascoet, the former Chief Creative Officer, who in general was apparently a garbage human being.

[I suspect he is still a garbage human being, but I don’t exactly have people monitoring his activities right this second, nor do I want to.]

However, the allegations that have come out against him that he sexually assaulted female employees(!!), or that he held business meetings in strip clubs (???), or that he gave unwitting employees baked goods laced with drugs as a prank (?!?) are not the reasons I’m writing this Note. I’m just throwing out those fun facts because when I find out weird things while doing research, I just have to share them. No, what we’re here to talk about is that apparently there were several occasions in the past few years in which Assassin’s Creed was going to feature female characters more heavily, and this man vetoed it at every turn because he’s a chuckmuffin.

To wit:

-Elise de La Serre, the love interest of 2014’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity was going to have a larger role, and was considered for having playable segments, and Hascoet vetoed it. This indirectly led to the infamous “women are too hard to animate” debacle that happened that year.

-In 2015, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate featured two story leads in twin brother and sister Jacob and Evie Frye. Both were playable, and in free roam and in sidequests they could be switched on the fly; but in story missions, while Evie had some content, almost the entirety of the story centered around Jacob, as did the marketing, despite there being no reason not to include Evie in as much playable story content. Evie was the main character in the (short) DLC. Turns out Hascoet actively vetoed giving Evie more of a major role in the story, and the character’s voice actress Victoria Atkin confirmed that there was a culture of sexism at the time when she was working there.

-The protagonist of 2017’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins was originally not going to be Bayek, but his wife Aya. Though she has some playable story missions, including the game’s finale, and has had an actual long-running place in series lore since 2009, Hascoet shot that idea down.

-The protagonist of 2018’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was going to be Kassandra, and only Kassandra, as reflected in the tie-in novelization. Hascoet forced the game to give the player a choice so that you could play as aKassandra or her brother Alexios.

-I can’t prove this, because I haven’t seen anything about it, but there was a rumor that one of the ideas for a DLC for Black Flag in 2013 was a story centered around Mary Read that never materialized.

What was the reasoning for all this? Hascoet apparently is just a dickbag who thinks women won’t sell in video games.

On the one hand, finding out some of these things feels a bit terrible. Most of these games are very good, and I’m not knocking what we got. But at the same time, it’s troubling to know that there’s a lot of great content, featuring more female characters (which is something the series has kind of struggled with) that got cut because there was a jerkbutt calling the shots, and making all the wrong calls in game design, artistic merit, workplace etiquette and general life choices.

On the other hand: we been knew. Like this isn’t actually that much of a surprise. Assassin’s Creed: Unity already feels halfway like Elise’s story, for instance, because the entire thrust of the Plot hinges on trying to find the guy who killed her dad. Arno feels half-baked compared to Elise’s revenge quest.

And Aya? Aya gets the final word on the story. One of the biggest issues I had with Origins was that despite Bayek being a well-written, fantastic protagonist, it has little to do with the overall story of the founding of the Hidden Ones/Assassins, and the game ends with Aya triumphantly proclaiming a new identity after organizing the most famous assassination in history. She is the one invested in the story of Cleopatra’s civil war. Aya is the one who believes in Cleopatra. Bayek only sees putting Cleopatra on the throne as a means to an end--getting vengeance on the Order of the Ancients (who back her brother Ptolemey) and put their son’s soul to rest in the afterlife. So when Cleopatra wins her war and then works with the Order, and becomes as corrupt as anyone else (in the heroes’ eyes, anyway), it affects Aya more. It hits her the hardest because she’s the one who believed in this queen. And in the end, she is the one who establishes the Hidden Ones as an international organization, and seemingly gives orders to the other bureaus. But the game tries to make this Bayek’s story. He’s a fantastically-written character, but for his story--which the founding of the Brotherhood clearly isn’t.

Getting to Odyssey also feels like it’s kind of obvious in hindsight that Kassandra was meant to be the main character. When you pick your character as you begin the game, the sibling you don’t pick is kidnapped and brainwashed by the villains, the Cult of Kosmos, into becoming their weaponized supersoldier, Deimos. A name that is very clearly masculine, you’ll notice, making it pretty clear that it’s supposed to be Alexios who becomes Deimos, not Kassandra.

It’s frustrating, because the official reasoning for these decisions is because “women won’t sell as the leads of video games.” This is a demonstrably false premise, as proven by Horizon Zero Dawn, Control, Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Mirror’s Edge, and friggin’ Metroid. It was the same reasoning executives used to not make female-led superhero movies, only to change their tune once Wonder Woman made money.

When will stupid executives learn? When will entertainment industries stop putting terrible men in charge of their companies? When will we get a full female protagonist in an entire Assassin’s Creed game?

Part of the whole point of Assassin’s Creed is that the Assassins often recruit from the people in society who are sidelined or ignored by the mainstream culture--and through a lot of history, especially in the periods that are covered, women fit that bill. And no, the series isn’t always good at that. It often forgets that’s what it’s supposed to be doing. But they set up these complex female characters and just… don’t make them the leads, even when all the work is pretty much already done for it to happen.

It’s just stupid at this point.

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