Assassin’s Creed: Origins Should Not Have Been a Revenge Story

 I am almost at 100 books for this year on Goodreads, and I am super stoked because at this rate I will surpass last year’s total. And that would be cool! But I can’t keep reading more and more books every year, I think, so I don’t know how to approach this going forward.

Also, uh, don’t be surprised if I’m not on Facebook much in the next few days.

Anyhow.

Last weekend was the free weekend of Assassin’s Creed: Origins and I played it! And I had fun. But I was reminded of things I had thoughts about. So I thought I should go ahead and start writing about it!

I also considered talking about Assassin’s Creed and uchronia, but, hm, maybe next time? Or another time. I can’t keep constantly talking about AC, or else my readership (all three of you) will tune out.

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist Season 1 Discussion

 This has been an interesting week–had the sister’s birthday!-- and next week is supposed to begin with a pizza lunch at work. I need to start writing a bit more, but I have a few things I need to get done first. There are also a few books I need to read.

With this free weekend of Assassin's Creed: Origins I have now played every main release in The Assassin's Creed series!

Also I’m somewhat obsessed with this blog post explaining what a doof Saruman is.

Anyway, we’re going to talk about this series I’ve watched a season of. Not sure what series is next? I’m sort of rewatching both Leverage and Elementary but I think I will maybe pick up something else? Perhaps 10th Kingdom on Roku? Fullmetal Alchemist on Netflix? We shall see.

Eldest & the Elves

 I finished Mossflower on Friday! I really should have gotten into this Redwall thing earlier. Expect that to appear in the Book Diary soon!

I think I might get back into Ghost of Tsushima again. I finished “Dawn of Ragnarok,” and while there are things I want to do in AC: Valhalla, in truth I don’t want to get too stuck in it so that I don’t move onto other games. I’m sure as soon as I do though, Ubisoft will drop new free content and I’ll get sucked back in.

We’ll see!

[There was going to be a Hugo Dyson joke, of the “Oh not the elves again!” variety, but I couldn’t think of how to work it in. So I’m putting that here.]

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Eldest, Elves, & Condescending “Wise” Characters

A lot of people quit the Inheritance Cycle after the second book because, unlike the first one, which is a straightforward if derivative fantasy novel with lots of action. Dragons! Sword fights! Monsters! It’s there. The second book is much less of that. A huge part of it is exposition and training montages, and a lot of people didn’t like it. But another huge part of why people didn’t like it was the elves.

Oh dear, those elves.

So in Inheritance Cycle, the elves are all immortal, as well as being stronger and faster and more perceptive than the other races, especially humans. We’re told that while they have more spellcasters than other races, they’re still a low percentage of the population, but I’m pretty sure every important elf character the reader meets is a magic user, so that falls flat. They in fact speak using the language of magic.

Because they’re so long-lived, and magically powerful, and also they’ve been bonded to dragons longer than the other races, they know a lot more about the world than everyone else. Which means that they like to talk about how much they know about the world more than everyone else. It’s told to us quite a lot that they’re right about seemingly everything, and in cases when it’s ambiguous (like the afterlife and whether there are gods), no one can really mount a persuasive argument against them.

Essentially, here’s a race of beings who are super powerful, condescending, and always right. The protagonist picks up on their culture and basically learns it as “This is the right thing to do,” right down to vegetarianism. They’re generally presented as being wiser and cleverer than all the others.

It’s especially aggravating because Eragon gets elf-ified in the story. It makes sense that the elves continue his education as a Rider. From a reader perspective, it’s a chance to flesh out a race that had only been described in the previous book. From a story perspective, they are the ones who have the most knowledge and power, and the deepest ties to the Dragon Riders, since they were the first ones to become Dragon Riders.

But Eragon, who is suffering from evil seizures from a wound he gained fighting a demonic sorcerer in the last book, gets cured of his disability (I have… thoughts about that too) by being transformed into a much more elf-like being. He was already going to be long-lived, if not immortal, and have pointed ears and magic, from being a Dragon Rider. But now he becomes stronger, faster, more magically powerful, and he’s able to perceive things that he couldn’t before. All of his struggles are now (at least, in this book) easily solved. Even the little puzzle ring he carries around he solves in seconds now, because elves are just better at puzzles I guess.

Readers did not like this. They didn’t like it at all. At least, a large chunk of them didn’t. I saw the elves of the books being accused of being an entire race of Mary Sues, and the mouthpieces through which Paolini is preaching vegetarianism and atheism. At one point someone on the Inheritance Forums suggested that Paolini was actually a nihilist, though no one took that seriously. They took up so much of the book and were received so badly that a lot of people started rooting for the Empire because  they just hated the elves that much.

To be fair, later books do sort of walk back on some of this. Eragon is okay eating meat if he needs to, and starts to admit that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t right about everything else either. And Eragon’s ‘Elf Yourself’ transformation isn’t the win-all it seems like it will be in later books either, as we see him struggling with more opponents. I don’t know if this was always the intention, because it’s an aspect of Eldest that got a lot of criticism, so it’s possible that Paolini saw the critics and decided to do some course correction. Things did change from the planning stages to execution–the transition from a trilogy to a quartet proves that. But at the time, in Eldest, it often feels like this is a race meant to convey his ideas on certain topics and be the biggest kids on the block in the setting.

The thing is, elves aren’t always like this. People like to say Tolkien’s elves were like this, but they weren’t, especially if you’re familiar with The Silmarillion. The elves are far from perfect, and very often it’s shown that elves being more powerful actually means that the mistakes they make have bigger consequences and make things even worse for the world. So much trouble would have been avoided if there weren’t these centuries-long blood feuds and grudges, for starters.

I also think about the Obsidian Trilogy, in which the elves are seemingly perfect at everything, but while Kellen admires them, he’s also annoyed by them. When he’s told by an elder elf that humans just aren’t as good at making choices or thinking about things, he stays quiet, but his narration tells us he realizes exactly how condescending it is to be talked to like that. It’s also shown that they aren’t perfect–they’re stuck in their own ways of doing things, which the Endarkened take advantage of. The elves have perfected open warfare, so the Endarkened don’t face them in open combat and instead rely on raids, skirmishes, and ambushes through proxy forces.

These are much healthier balances to portray in fantasy fiction. You absolutely cannot have one be the fantasy race that is always right, always more powerful, and our protagonist (who is not of that race) has to emulate and become one of them in order to win. Your readers will assume you’re trying to thrust your views upon them and take it as terrible writing. And it’s sure as heck not great writing.

Unless you’re actually trying to write, say, deities or saints, from a religious perspective (and you need to be careful about that–I should maybe do a Note about that!), you shouldn’t be portraying any group of characters as being better and more powerful than everyone else in every way. It’ll come across as preachy, annoying, and will tune large chunks of your readers out who don’t want to be preached at with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

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Wanda Maximoff's Characterization

 I’m rereading Eldest and what the fudge the elves are annoying. Given later books, I don’t think that Paolini meant for them to be necessarily preaching all of his views at you (or maybe he saw criticism and dialed it back), but in this text they’re never called out for being so full of themselves. AND they’re the most powerful beings in the setting. Unlike Obsidian Trilogy in which Kellen points out in narration how condescending elves can be.

Anyhow I’m still not over Multiverse of Madness so let’s talk about that.

Spoilers, obviously.

Geralt's Day Job

 I’m reading Blood, Sweat, & Pixels which is about the video game industry, and everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound like it sucks to be a video game programmer? I’ve also come to the realization that I’ve been re-reading a lot of books, so I’m thinking I’m going to try to read some new stuff for the next three or four Book Diary entries.

And I’m concerned that my Facebook is getting eaten by the Book Diary. Oh well; it’s not like most people much cared what I posted before anyway.

I don’t know what my computer’s doing? It was acting like it needed an update (being slow, taking half an hour to do anything), and then it didn’t? Which usually means it needs to update and won’t tell me, but now it’s working mostly smoothly. Hm.

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Geralt’s Day Job

Alright, I realize this is such a non-issue, but for some reason it bugs me, so I’m putting it out there: Geralt being a witcher has so little an effect on the Plot of the Witcher novels that it might as well not be there.

Okay that’s harsh. 

But.

So many years ago I tried reading the books of The Witcher before I’d picked up any of the games. It didn’t go well. This is not a reflection of the books’ quality. It is, however, a reflection of how confusing it was to figure out which one was first. I think I tried Blood of Elves first, because that’s the one that is listed as  the first book in the editions in Barnes & Noble. That’s a mistake, by the way. While it’s the first novel, it’s not the first story in the series. You’re much better off if you pick up The Last Wish first, and then Sword of Destiny, both of which have short stories that set up what happens later in the novels.

The short stories are actually the parts where Geralt actually does his job on the page. The idea behind the original stories was that Sapkowski had the idea that in a fantasy world, in which there were monsters, there must be someone whose job it was to deal with monsters. The short stories often featured twisted and dark takes on well-known fairy tales and legends, with Geralt acting like an experienced veteran surrounded by people who don’t understand the magic circumstance they’ve found themselves in.

One of these stories features something called ‘Law of Surprise’, which basically has Geralt lay claim to Princess Pavetta of Cintra’s unborn child. A sort of ‘Take your firstborn as payment’ thing witchers do. When the child is born, Ciri, and her parents die and her kingdom perishes in fire, Geralt ends up protecting her as a surrogate father figure. In the first actual novel, Geralt takes Ciri to Kaer Morhen (Witchersville) where she trains for a bit before the Plot really picks up.

After leaving Kaer Morhen, Geralt’s job as a witcher, who hunts monsters? Is kind of… not a part of the story at all. It doesn’t go away completely, not yet–when he and Ciri first get separated he’s wandering for a bit and takes witcher jobs to get by. We don’t actually see these happen for the most part. The most we get is Geralt riding after dealing with a manticore, and a quick rundown of jobs he takes while he’s on the road. After that? Welp… not really. He identifies a couple of monsters, I guess. He’s able to tell one of the characters is a vampire, but he’s shown to be wrong about a lot of the features of vampires.

And I understand that once the Hero goes on his Quest, that he’s supposed to be out of his comfort zone. Things change as the story goes on, and as the story pushes Geralt forward, he’s put in situations different than what he’s used to. And I get that the story establishes that witchers are starting to become obsolete as there are less and less monsters in the world. It’s not as if you always expect protagonists to always use their day job when they’re going on a Quest to save the world or rescue a family member or whatever.

But you know what? That’s kind of dumb.

Look, this is a fantasy series set in a fantasy world, in which our main character is of a profession specifically created for this world. And so it’s more than a little silly that said profession isn’t a large part of the story, and the author has deliberately written the story in a way that our lead doesn’t really have much chance to do his actual job.

This is something that the games kind of fix–his job as a witcher isn’t a huge part of the main Plot there either, but it does come up more often, especially since more of the foes faced are supernatural rather than mercenaries and bandits and such. And because The Witcher 3 is a massive RPG with sidequests, there are contracts you can take to kill monsters for local villagers. The designers made it so that, wandering around the game world, you can’t really swing a cat without hitting some kind of monster.

And a book is not a game. I get that! But by the end of Tower of the Swallow Geralt basically admits he’s not a witcher anymore. And that’s annoying. Because a part of why I started reading these books was that the idea of a guy who hunts monsters for a living is a great concept for a fantasy story, and so that the books more or less abandon it once the Plot gets rolling is frustrating.

I’m not saying that The Witcher is bad, by any means–I don’t think that. But I think that the novels should have incorporated actually being a witcher into more of the stories, rather than it becoming an artifact to make the books more recognizable to fans.

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On the Multiverse

 My throat is feeling mostly better, but I’m scared that in a couple of weeks it’ll just go bad again! Because that’s a thing that happened. And I don’t like that idea.

Last day of the local Greek Festival! It’s not the full festival, just a drive thru of the food, but it’s good to support the local Greek Orthodox community and so I recommend you check it out if you’re around!

There are some spoilers from Multiverse of Madness in this Note. Hope you don’t mind. Surprise! I wasn’t that huge a fan of the movie.

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On the Multiverse

Alright I’m kind of tired of movies about the multiverse. Scratch that, it’s more like I’m tired of movies using the multiverse and using it badly. It comes down to this: a bunch of stories use the multiverse to show off characters and ideas that fans are interested in seeing, but the writers have no intention of using beyond saying, “Look! You like this thing! It’s on screen and it exists somewhere in the multiverse! Isn’t that cool?”

It’s cheap fanservice, basically.

Not every story about the multiverse is like this. Into the Spider-Verse is notably not–most of the characters who are important to the story are either from Miles’s dimension or are developed enough as characters that they are fully parts of the narrative. And The Flash television show is guilty of doing dumb stuff with the multiverse, but there are important characters who are developed and become important recurring figures in the story.

And I get that movies don’t have time to necessarily develop characters over a long time like most television shows do. But they can do better. For them, the multiverse is a way to answer fan wishes but not actually have any accountability over it or make it work too strongly with the story and characters. It’s a cheap way to get something done quickly.

We want the MCU Spider-Man to fight Doc Ock. Okay, fine. But in No Way Home, instead of going through the effort of introducing a new character to the storyline, a character established in another movie from another studio over a decade ago arrives and tries to kill Peter because… he happens to dress like the guy he actually wants to kill. The villains in the movie don’t have any history with this Peter Parker at all, and so their enmity with him is as contrived as it could get. And while I think overall it’s a compelling narrative that Peter, because of who he is, decides he wants to save them despite them being villains who tried to kill him, it would have been stronger if these had been actual enemies of the MCU Peter Parker.

Likewise, Multiverse of Madness includes the Marvel Illuminati, including some characters that fans have been wanting to see in live-action, like Mr. Fantastic, Captain Carter, and Professor X. Except they’re from an alternate universe, one that’s separated from the one the main Marvel Cinematic Universe characters inhabit. AND they all get horribly murdered within a few minutes, meaning it’s not as if they’ll come back and be important characters. They don’t mean anything, really–and to be honest, they’re not really like the comics Illuminati anyway, they’re more like an alternate version of the Avengers.

And it’s really bizarre that they’re trying to act like all of these movies and shows about the multiverse are all in the same continuity. No, I don’t think that there’s anything between them that directly contradicts each other, but they don’t exactly fit either. Multiverse of Madness asserts that dreams are actually viewing the lives of your alternate selves across the multiverse, which is weird. And a large Plot Point is that America Chavez is the only one who can physically travel through the multiverse… except we’ve seen that it is possible in No Way Home since different characters make their way through the multiverse. Mind you, by nearly breaking reality, but it is technically possible.

In this case, it’s an awkward result of shuffling things around. Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness was originally scheduled to come out before Spider-Man: No Way Home, and America Chavez was supposed to appear in both. But with the pandemic, along with a strike among crew members across Hollywood, Marvel shuffled their slate around leading to one move featuring characters leaking in from the multiverse, followed by one claiming there’s only one way to travel the multiverse.

And the Darkhold. It’s clearly not the same book as in Agents of SHIELD but that’s not related to the multiverse thing.

[Also random side note on a thing that bugs me: I keep seeing articles about how Marvel plans to use characters and ideas that don’t quite fit in the setting and they usually say something like, “Well, No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness and Loki opened up the multiverse, so it’s easy to get it all together!” as if the multiverse has been combined in the MCU the way it was at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths? Except it hasn’t. It plainly hasn’t. So they’re just making stuff up for clicks.]

If you’re going to include the multiverse in a story, you absolutely shouldn’t just have it for cheap fanservice. You shouldn’t use it to throw in tons of characters you don’t actually intend to do anything with other than show you listened to fan concerns before tossing them aside. And you shouldn’t just use it to lazily bring in characters without doing the groundwork, giving them a reason to care about the protagonist or be in the story. Elements brought into the story, especially something as big as the multiverse, need to matter. To the story, to the characters, and to the audience.

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On Hob Gadling

 I am still coughing quite a bit, but less than I was a few days ago. And unlike last Friday, I don’t feel dead! That’s an improvement. I think that I’m slowly getting better, but the parents are freaking out every time they hear me cough.

I was between this, and writing a Note about the Greek goddess Athena and why she should be in more mythology stuff. But I have been reading The Sandman again so I figured I might as well talk about this, considering there’s supposed to be a Netflix series this summer. Let’s hope Netflix doesn’t completely collapse before that happens!

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On Hob Gadling

I know I have written about this character before, but I don’t know if I’ve ever dedicated an entire Note to him.

So in The Sandman comic series by Neil Gaiman, one of the recurring characters is Hob Gadling. Dream first meets him in England in 1389 when he goes with his sister Death. She thinks he should get out more and talk with people. They encounter Hob Gadling in a tavern talking with his friends about how dying is for losers, and he’s not planning to die. Dream and Death make an agreement, and so Dream approaches Gadling and tells him that he’ll meet him in that exact same tavern in a hundred years’ time. And so the introductory story is Dream meeting Hob in the same establishment every one hundred years. Several times, Dream lets Hob know that if he gets tired of living, he just needs to say so and Death will come and get him. But every time, no matter how bad his life gets, Hob declines the offer.

Towards the end of the story, in 1889, Gadling wonders to Dream why they do this, and concludes it’s because Dream’s lonely and wants a friend. Dream is very offended by this, the idea that one of the Endless wants a mortal friend, and gets up in a huff, but Gadling tells him if they meet in a hundred years again then he’ll know that he was right. And sure enough, in 1989, Gadling looks up to see Dream coming in, admitting that they’re friends.

I think a thing that bothers me with immortals in fiction is that there is a tendency for them to always go through the same character arc: they want to die, but have no way of doing so (there is a Sandman story that goes like this, but it’s a one-shot). It gets old after a while? The times when this isn’t the case is when it’s a supervillain or something. There are times when the author can make it work, I suppose: for instance, in The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo tells Frodo that his longevity is actually uncomfortable, not because he’s tired of life but because it feels wrong somehow, like being stretched out. And we see what happens to mortals who have their lives unnaturally extended by a Ring of Power–the Nazgul have gone on so long that their physical bodies have rotted away. Then you also have characters like Zasalamel in SoulCalibur III who live forever through reincarnation, but his character bio tells us that every rebirth is actually quite painful, and it gets worse every time, so of course he wants off that ride.

[I should note: in later games Zasalamel, upon finding a vision of the future and what humanity will accomplish, changes his mind and decides to stay in the game. In the reboot that we see in SoulCalibur VI, I think the ‘He just wants to die’ aspect of his character has been removed entirely.]

But most of the time authors go with: this character is tired of being alive, has seen it all. And so he or she just wants to die. And that gets boring, seeing the same character arc over and over again. It’s especially frustrating with characters who didn’t become immortals on their own, but were born in a culture or species where it’s normal for this character to be immortal. This person should be used to it!

And something that strikes me is that it isn’t as if Hob Gadling is afraid to die. He very well could be, I suppose, and that’s a valid interpretation of the character. But that’s not what the text seems to point towards. More than anything, here’s a character who just likes being alive. Several times when he’s at the lowest point he’s asked if he wants to keep living, and he does. He just wants to see where things go.

What’s curious is that Neil doesn’t try to paint him as someone who is really savvy and necessarily agreeable to modern audiences throughout his history. He frequently makes calls that turn out to be wrong. He doesn’t think the printing press will ever really lead to anything big, nor does he think anything of William Shakespeare upon meeting him (although to be fair, Shakespeare makes it big because of Dream). And we find out at one of the meetings that he made money on the Atlantic slave trade, which Dream is quick to tell him to get out of. In appearances at later dates, Gadling admits that it was a bad move, but at the time, he isn’t as if he would have worked this out at the time.

He easily could have gone the route of having a historical character who happens to have modern views on different issues of the past, for no discernible reason, but he doesn’t. And I appreciate it.

Gadling does not have that big of a role in the overall storyline of The Sandman. There are characters introduced that have a much larger role than you expect when they first appear, leading to bigger storylines and important events as the story concludes. Not that his character or story is meaningless, but if you cut out Hob Gadling there isn’t actually that much of the overarching Plot that would change in The Sandman.

But dang, he’s such a good character. He’s one of the most memorable characters in the story, the man who’s just immortal because he feels like it and the Endless gave him a chance. The story wouldn’t feel the same without him there–Dream certainly wouldn’t, as a character. And it’s another example of Gaiman subverting expectations, with an immortal character who doesn’t want to die, who wants to keep living just to see what happens next, because he enjoys living that much.

I just think he’s an interesting character to have a story about.

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