I’m going to be busy this weekend, and July is Camp NaNoWriMo, so there was some question if there was going to even BE a Saturday Note this week. But it appears that there is! Albeit maybe a short one. We’ll see.
I have a lot of thoughts about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and I’m going to be writing more and more about it as I can, but right now in a rush this is a thing that came to me.
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Excalibur in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla takes place during the Viking invasion of England. You play as a Viking. For whatever reason, the game tries to play it as if you’re the good guy in this, and drawing deliberate parallels to the immigrant experience despite, you know, being required by the game to burn and pillage churches in order to build up your settlement. Because why not!
One of the longer side quests you can complete leads you to the “Treasures of Britain,” small caves with puzzles and traps that reward you with a small stone marked with an image of one of the Treasures of Britain. After you collect all the stones, if you go to a certain cave, marked as ‘Myrddin’s Cave’ on the map, you find a massive cavern with a First Civilization site, and some exploring will lead you to find Excalibur in a stone.
[Excalibur in Assassin’s Creed is, of course, a Sword of Eden.]
Put the stones in the right slots, and you can draw Excalibur. “Is this the sword that Britons call Excalibur?” Eivor will say with wonder in his voice. And then you can wield Excalibur, a massive greatsword that can release bursts of light that will stun your enemies.
And that’s… kind of it. It felt really hollow to me.
Excalibur doesn’t mean anything to Eivor. Eivor isn’t English, or Welsh, or any sort of British. It’s not as if we ever see him hear about the stories of King Arthur and show interest in learning more, or acquiring his sword. It’s not that King Arthur gets much mention in the game at all. The sword is there because it takes place in England that the makers thought it would be a fun little bonus. But it doesn’t mean anything.
I remember seeing that in-game, it was revealed that the Assassins left the British Isles at some point in the 5th century. I thought it was going to be a running mystery sidequest that you’d unlock answers to as you investigated the abandoned Assassin Bureaus throughout Britain. That you’d get answers. And this all lined up, roughly with both the fall of the Roman Empire and the time when King Arthur stories were supposed to take place. And according to the novel Assassin’s Creed: Heresy, Arthur was a member of the Templars/Order of the Ancients, the enemies of the Assassins (albeit a very idealistic one). I thought that there would be a reveal that in the wake of the Roman Empire’s collapse and absence from Britain, the Order of Ancients under Arthur would have wiped out the Assassins to the best of their abilities, cementing him in the backstory as an important figure and justifying Excalibur in the game.
Except none of that is there. The Assassins left because they were fighting Roman imperialism but didn’t have good PR, and after the Romans left they had very little reason or motivation to stay. Nobody wanted them around, and they weren’t very popular, so they left.
That’s it.
And so we have Eivor, the man or woman (depending on what the player chooses) who came to this land specifically to conquer and subjugate its people, take one of its most famous legendary treasures for him/herself for the sake of having a cool new weapon, after stumbling onto all of the clues leading up to it. Eivor doesn’t want it, Eivor doesn’t need it, Eivor has only kind of heard of it, but it’s there for player recognition.
To be clear of what happens here: Eivor the colonizer comes in and takes a sacred treasure that holds no personal value to him/her, but because it looked cool takes it up and is now his/her personal artifact.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is full of examples of the writers being completely oblivious to the implications of playing as an invader, saying “Most of our sources were written by their enemies, so mustn’t have been so bad.” The fandom’s mostly pretty clueless about it too, acting like it’s perfectly fine because “Of course it’s from the Vikings’ perspective, obviously they see it differently.” The fact that you’re actively oppressing other people, taking their land and wealth, burning their holy sites--all things that are explicitly shown in-game--is handwaved and barely mentioned by the sympathetic Saxon characters, who are tolerant towards you doing all of this. Very rarely is it even hinted that those are exactly the people collaborating with the colonizing armies.
Excalibur is the example that sticks out to me because I did that part recently, and it baffles me that there’s no story attached to the artifact in-game. It’s just another doodad for players to pick up. It doesn’t mean ANYTHING to our character. It’s just a colonizer who doesn’t care about anyone else’s culture or lifestyle grabbing someone else’s shiny artifact because it looks cool.
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