When the achievement list leaked for Assassin’s Creed Vikings it was hard not to get hyped. It doesn’t happen often, but when a game aims to offer the full Viking experience with raids, warfare, kingdoms to explore, and settlements to manage, that just ticked all the right boxes. Thus with silent optimism, I hoped the wokeness would be kept to a minimum.
Alas, it is current year so that was a hope born to never bear fruit. At least if the latest leak from a French Streamer pans out to be true.
– Il/elle ne devrait pas s’appeler “Jora”
– La Scandinavie ne sera pas le seul territoire de jeu
– Toujours en mode RPG (+ qu’Odyssey)
– Beaucoup de “surnaturel”, de contenu en rapport avec la Première Civilisation
– Pas de coop
– Sortie toujours prévue pour la fin d’année— j0nathan⚡ (@xj0nathan) April 13, 2020
Ah et j’oubliais, le jeu devrait être révélé très bientôt (mais ça c’est pas vraiment une info puisque c’est souvent fin avril/début mai qu’Ubisoft commence son teasing).
— j0nathan⚡ (@xj0nathan) April 13, 2020
Translation by Google, touched up by me.
Some info on the next AC:
-It will be good with Vikings
-It will not be called Kingdom (nor Ragnorak)
-The Secret blade will be back
-The Shield too
-The Main character should be a woman (but we can still choose a man)
-He / she should not be called “Jora”
-Scandinavia will not be the only game territory
-Still an RPG (More so than Odyssey)
-Lots of “supernatural” content related to the First Civilization
-No co-op
-Still planned to release Holiday Season
Ah and I forgot, the game should be revealed very soon (but that’s not really any info since it is often in late April/ Early May that Ubisoft begins teasing games
Really there isn’t much to this leak that wasn’t in previous leaks. Disappointingly Ubisoft has not learned their lesson from their last interjection of identity politics into Assassin’s Creed and will continue with the notion of a canon female warrior protagonist.
What the game will likely use to justify this decision is the myth of the Shield Maiden. Female Warriors who supposedly fought side by side with their male compatriots in the various myths and odes of the Viking Era. The problem is they don’t exist outside works of fiction, but that isn’t stopping revisionist historians like Neil Price from arguing they’re real. Whereas his opposition who actually study evidence, historical contexts, backtracks and examine claims, cites the absolute lack of any evidence of trained female warriors as proof they didn’t exist.
Essentially it would be like someone a thousand years from now saying that our depiction of women in anime is proof of the innumerable amount of female warriors present during our times. That we believed many historic figures were in fact female because of their gender-swapped versions. Sadly that’s the state of academic research into history.
Given the game is an open-world RPG is there any real reason to even bother to designate a canon gender? In a game whereby lore the woman would at some point have to conceive a child because of how the animus reads history based on recorded memories in genetic material. It is sure to once again antagonize the SJWs who protested over the very same issue last time when Kassandra eventually hooked up with a guy since lesbians can’t procreate among themselves.
Call me crazy, but it would seem the best approach would be to avoid the political minefield altogether and just let players make their own head-canon, especially if it doesn’t really matter to the larger context of the narrative what gender the protagonist’s avatar is.
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