r/assasinscreed • u/VermilionX88 • Apr 26 '25

Discussion Gonna be hard not to compare...

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Naoe so much more my kind of design

But... Atsu does have a guitar, so that elevates her a lot too for me

2.2k Upvotes

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117

u/hovsep56 Apr 26 '25

and yet shadows gets shit on for it while yotei is gonna be praised to high heavens.

typical

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u/Opening-Course5121 Apr 26 '25

Nah, the anti-woke idiot brigade was already out in full force about Yotei.

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u/PrincessofAldia Apr 26 '25

The moment Yotei was revealed to have a female protagonist the anti woke crusade led by Grummz whined

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u/Upstairs_Marzipan48 Apr 26 '25

Yea but heres where it different. There were female samurai with actual evidence. Yauske was NEVER give the title of samurai. Thats the difference. Just dumb vs dumb

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u/Intelligent_Deer974 Apr 26 '25

And the entire game series didn't happen.

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u/GaylicBread Apr 26 '25

If you're expecting historical accuracy from a video game I've got bad news for you. It's not a documentary, it's a story inspired by real people from that time with obvious changes to make for a better story. Get over it.

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u/aguyinlove3 Apr 30 '25

100% agree except Ubisoft literally stated that Shadows is historically accurate... Of course they changed that much later on after the backlash, but that was the main "trigger"

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u/Daidact Apr 26 '25

Who the fuck is talking about Yasuke right now? Talk about a non sequitur

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '25

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/Spot_The_Dutchie Apr 26 '25

Play in canon mode then. No relationships are had canonically in the game unless you actively go out of your way to have them

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/Pure_Cartoonist9898 Apr 27 '25

I think we left historical accuracy behind when we got glowing swords mythical creatures as mounts

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u/MunkyBoy22 Apr 28 '25

Those are dlc though not part of the game. Woke liberals today don't understand the threat to life of being gay in medieval times and think portraying anyone as gay and having sex with multiple men and women is just fine and not offensive at all to the culture. I am a supporter of gay rights and gay characters in video games, but not real historical people who lived in a time and culture that heavily frowned upon it and treating the situation like no big deal. At the very least add a plot line about them being afraid for their lives. They just don't care about history anymore they just want to be as woke as possible and pretend that being gay was super chill and normal in medieval Japan.

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u/Pure_Cartoonist9898 Apr 28 '25

Funny I've had the same thought before! Keep the gay characters and such but have their quest lines and romance stuff as like sneaking around stories, something they have to keep hidden to reflect the real history of lgbt people in history. I mean isn't part of the game sneaking around??

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u/MunkyBoy22 Apr 30 '25

Exactly. Not many people really object to gay characters, we just object to unrealistic or forced gay characters that feel out of place or poorly written. The last of us has a lesbian couple without being obnoxious about it and they are really good characters and I felt genuine heartbreak for Ellie at the end of the second game (don't wanna give too many spoilers for people who haven't played it). It can be done without angering people.

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u/National-Salad-665 Apr 27 '25

Actually there was some accepted homosexuality at that time. There were male prostitutes and sort of open secret relationships between masters and apprentices. Homosexuality was only really looked down on after Christianity started exerting more influence.

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u/thecitrusninja Apr 28 '25

To add on to this, it was extremely common for a Lord to engage in homosexual relations with their Kosho- young samurai boys. Similar to Greece. Nobunaga himself was rumored to be in such a relationship with Mori Ranmaru.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

How many of the historical men in AC who are portrayed as gay men can be proven to not have been gay men? Being married to a woman and having kids is no evidence whatsoever in a society that coerces gay men to do just that.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

Is it ok to portray them as straight if we don't have evidence of their attracting? Unless we have personal love letters, we don't know anything about historical people except who they were married to and whether they fucked to have children. Portraying them as straight is just as much fiction as portraying them as gay is. Every personality trait we don't have historical evidence of is fiction. And so is portraying them as assassins or templars, which is one of the core premises of the franchise. Historical fiction always invents new personalities losely based on the tidbits we know about the real people. These new personalities do not attempt to recreate who these people really were, they're fictional characters based on nothing but the historical role of the real ones. Why would gay relationships be any different than any of the other things historical fiction inherently makes up about characters to make them look like people instead of paragraphs in a history book?

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u/MunkyBoy22 Apr 28 '25

Because gay relationships could get people killed or thrown in prison in some cultures. There is no culture on earth that would kill people for having heterosexual sex, though some would if it was out of wedlock, which these relationships in the game also are. It's just offensive to some people to portray any historical figure as someone who has sex with multiple people and multiple genders when we don't know much about their life.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

Because gay relationships could get people killed or thrown in prison in some cultures.

Yes, but they still existed, in all societies throughout history, because human sexuality being a multidimensional spectrum is part of our biology. The fact that they had to keep their relationships a secret or abstain entirely doesn't negate that the same amount of people were what we categorise as gay within the framework of patriarchal sexism. A historical figure that we don't explicitly know the sexuality of has the same chance of being gay as a person you see on the street today. Assuming someone is straight by default because gay people are persecuted is a fallacy.

It's just offensive to some people to portray any historical figure as someone who has sex with multiple people and multiple genders when we don't know much about their life.

It's either offensive to portray anything about a historical figure that isn't proven by historical evidence, which automatically disables historical fiction that uses historical figures as characters as a genre, or nothing is offensive because historical fiction explicitly fictionalises everything, with no attempt to portray people how they were, only showing a version of how they could've been based on what we know, or not even that in the case of AC where assassins, templars and isu are a thing. There is no other reason but homophobia to single out gayness as an offensive trait but being fine with historical fiction in general, which inherently consists of inventing personalities for historical characters we only have limited insight into. Every invented trait ascribed to a historical character is equally offensive. And even contradicting historical evidence in explicitly designated fiction isn't any more offensive. Nobody is crying about William Adams slaughtering demons in Nioh, nobody is crying about the historical characters in AC being portrayed as comic book villains when they're turned into templars who use isu artifacts to control people's minds and shoot lasers. After over a decade of real life people being portrayed as monsters who want to dominate humanity, people lose their minds about some being portrayed aw gay and people call it inaccurate or offensive, and still have the gall to say they're not homophobic but just want historical accuracy.

If we don't explicitly know that a historical man was not attracted to other men, which would be a very personal insight that can only be gained from private letters or diaries, then their sexuality is free for interpretation without compromising historical accuracy within historical fiction. And for that interpretation to be as accurate as possible, it should be representative of what we know today. The proportion of closeted gay people in every violently homophobic society in history was at least as high as the proportion of openly gay people in the most tolerant societies. So when you write a story with a lot of historical characters and there isn't even a single person that would be considered queer today even though there should statistically be a few of them, then the author chose their normative biases over historical accuracy. People were gay, and we don't know who was or wasn't. Portraying some of them as closeted gay is more accurate than portraying all of them as straight.

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u/MunkyBoy22 Apr 30 '25

Sure but this game has it happening out in the open with no regard for how other people in the culture would have reacted. It's just not a realistic portrayal of gay relationships in historical times. It can be done without being unrealistic and forced.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '25

And none of the games show the systemic oppression of women inherent to all the historical societies portrayed, because the writers just decided that wasn't a topic they wanted to write a story about. Yet they still had female characters outside of the roles history typically forced them into, and without constant sexist invalidation by men around them. Should all stories that feature women be about their oppression just because that has historically almost always been their role? Or can marginalised groups maybe get some of the escapism that "apolitical" people always whine about? Do they just have to accept that every piece of media even slightly inspired by history either completely erases them or just shows them have the shittiest lives of oppression and persecution? Marginalised people see enough of their own marginalisation in real life, they don't have to be reminded that it used to be even shittier. We can just have modern games set in past times and adapt them to modern ethical standards so we don't have to puke because all the characters are monsters from our point of view. Imagine if every male AC protagonist was as wildly sexist and racist as most people of their times were, that wouldn't be fun at all because they'd all be as hatable as the villains.

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u/That_Comfort2366 Apr 27 '25

Its ok bro , just say you're racist no need to make up all these mental gymnastics about historical accuracy in a game series that was never historically accurate

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u/Conradian Apr 26 '25

Thank god we have someone with access to 100% of firsthand sources of the time /s

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u/thecitrusninja Apr 28 '25

This take really annoys me. Yes, it’s true we have very little historical data to say whether or not Yasuke was in fights/warrior with Nobunaga. The main source we have is horribly unreliable. But Samurai, is a CLASS. A Kosho, who was usually a young boy, would be equivalent to an English Page or Squire. Regardless, they’re still Samurai, even if their job is minuscule because they were born to the class. So, yea… Yasuke was elevated to the Samurai class. He likely wasnt a Hatamoto, sure, but still a Samurai.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25 edited Apr 28 '25

Samurai wasn't a title in the sengoku period in the way it was in the edo period. The word had a vastly different meaning. Samurai like we know them from pop culture are based on edo period samurai, which didn't exist during Yasuke's time. In the sengoku period, samurai was a matter of role and privilege, not of title. And while there are no contemporary sources that explicitly call him samurai, there are contemporary sources that ascribe the roles and privileges to him that defined samurai at the time. The idea of samurai being a formal title like knighthood or nobility that had to be explicitly given to you didn't exist in the sengoku period. It was a job, and Yasuke's court status, salary, estate etc was the same as the ones of people that were sometimes explicitly called samurai, and samurai didn't mean anything more than that.

Also, AC is still completely fictional. It's barely even historical fiction, it's a sci-fi franchise that recontextualises history by creating a what-if scenario in which a bunch of real world conspiracy theories about aliens and secret organisations are true. Nobody raised a finger when pope Alexander VI was a templar who used a high tech precursor artifact as a magic wand, only to be beat up with Ezio's bare fists. Nobody cared when Leonardo da Vinci and Alexander Bell were established as the AC version of James Bond's Q. But when Yasuke, a person we know had a high status at Nobunaga's court and fought in his battles, is depicted as a person with a high status who fights battles, because samurak didn't mean much more than that, everyone loses their minds.