Okay, at this point, everyone knows there’s been tremendous backlash against Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, some legitimate, some not legitimate. As Olivia pointed out in her commentary on #Yasukegate, claims that featuring a black samurai as a protagonist “erases” Japanese men ring false when the “stranger in a strange land/ foreign dude becomes one with Japan” trope gets minimal pushback when the foreigner is white. But this is par the fucking course in entertainment these days, what with The Witcher “fans” on Reddit and elsewhere now pissing and moaning that Ciri will be the protagonist in The Witcher 4 despite her being 1) female and 2) older than in The Witcher 3. I thought everyone took it as a heavily telegraphed given for most of the past decade that Ciri would, in fact, be the protagonist (did we play the same game, bro?).
As I wrote here, there is effective diversity and ineffective diversity, political diversity and apolitical. When stories (and in this case also gameplay) entertain with compelling narratives, they tend to inoculate media against the whining of white supremacists, incels, and so forth. When they don’t, this throws creators and critics alike into the awkward conundrum of having to either defend diversity as a principle despite its embodiment in a bad product, or lie and say the product is good simply because it’s diverse. While I reject the second approach on principle (looking at you, The Witcher Netflix), I’ve done the 1st before and will likely have to do so again. Hopefully, that will not be the case with Assassins Creed: Shadows, but I’m afraid it will be, for one very unfortunate reason.
Milquetoast and Mid
Assassin’s Creed as a whole is honestly kinda bad. I mean, we can agree on this right? It’s just midlevel at best, and always has been. Bloated with meaningless and repetitive fetch quests, cartoonish combat, Skyrim-style weapon weights, and groan-inducing dialogue, Assassin’s Creed, since shedding its stealth-centric gameplay sometime around Origins, has often reminded me of Dominos: delicious in small doses, but ultimately bad for your arteries and full of empty calories. That, or a low-rent The Witcher 3 re-released every 2-3 years with a new coat of paint.
Considering some head-scratchingly pusillanimous decisions in AC Valhalla (You can’t kill civilians during raids? Wait…vikings believe in war crimes?) it’s ludicrous to start raging at Ubisoft as “woke” when their MO has always been about producing inoffensive fluff for the widest possible audience. I’m honestly not in the least surprised to read in a recent article by Paul Tassi that Ubisoft seems to be making some ambiguous gestures towards backtracking on diversity, because honestly, when a gaming company posts a notice about the multiplicity of racial, religious, and gender identities that contributed to making their product before the loading screen even appears, I aware I’m either in the presence of something painfully earnest or being sold a bill of goods. They want your money. It’s not complicated. Just make something good, please.
But now that Elon Musk has overthrown the formerly left wing Twitter mob and supplanted it with his own X-tremist outrage factory, the suits are proving once again that Cyberpunk 2077, for all its brilliance, is basically wrong about the nature of corporate power. Today’s corporate boards and captains of industry are by and large not ruthless, globe-trotting demigods like Saburo Arasaka who shape public opinion to their will. Mostly, they’re milquetoast, captive to every negative headline or one-day fluctuation in share price, or more concerned with half-assed election interference than colonizing Mars.
Stick to Your Swords
At The Path we’ve striven from the beginning to write with courage and integrity on your favorite media, including when we disagree with prevailing attitudes on the internet and even with each other (cf. Gladiator II). Free speech in a democratic society requires the ability to be offensive at times, because uncomfortable truths always offend someone; but when it devolves into bad-faith vitriol or, inversely, a cowardly desire to accommodate all opinions, however bankrupt, we’ve left the sphere of productive dialogue behind and are now just yelling at each other.
The saddest outcome of the entire AC Shadows controversy is that Ubisoft apparently put inadequate thought into its decision to choose Yasuke as a protagonist, inadvertently lending credence to racist charges of tokenism. Instead of articulating a coherent vision for why Yasuke served as a suitable protagonist from the beginning and pushing back vigorously once the backlash materialized, Ubisoft has given the appearance of choosing a black protagonist “just because” and then failing to stand by their values when put to the test. This weakness sets representation backwards.
An Untold Story
We know that Yasuke was a historical person, that foreigners were present in Japan in significant numbers during this time period, and that the documentary record attests clearly to Yasuke’s place at the court of Oda Nobunaga and his legal status as a samurai. At a time where Africans and the black diaspora make up at least 25% of the world’s population, there is still very little African representation in gaming, despite more prominent roles in gaming being given to black people from the U.S. and U.K. While I’m no AC Stan, let’s hope that in Shadows, Ubisoft has thought about and elaborated on the history of Yasuke in a compelling way, one that erases neither African nor Japanese cultures but engages with the meeting of the two constructively, much as Shogun and The Last Samurai did for English and American characters with varying levels of efficacy. At minimum, Ubisoft has made its bed. They should have the balls to lie in it.
Photo: Ubisoft
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