Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Damselhood in the Assassin's Creed Series: Part One!

Lately I’ve been getting into Anita Sarkeesian’s superlative commentary on feminism’s awkward relationship with videogames (and, by association, the women who play them).  Sarkeesian has a deft hand for investigating the oft-counterproductive tropes behind video games without manifesting a scolding genderist tone (all too easy to do when engaging with the frequently frustrating way that video games construct their female characters).  She lays out tropes and, with a handiness that comes from truly loving the medium she’s discussing, calls them out on their varied and prolific unconscious sexism.  Her video on damselhood as a trope in video games was particularly compelling for me, as someone who concerns themselves with women in narrative and the conceptualization of objects, objectives and objectification in literary work, and it got me thinking: can games, with their application of agency-as-authority, ever escape conceits of damselhood (or inverted damselhood) as long as their narrative structures turn on temporarily disempowering powerful figures in order to construct a narrative shorthand?

Games with female play-able characters certainly can – while I haven’t played it, I understand that Beyond Good and Evil doesn’t make Jade a damsel at any point, Bayonetta is one of the most fascinating feminist narratives I’ve seen constructed in any genre, and games that allow you to play as a woman (though they often operate on the supposition that a male character will occupy their focal role) like Skyrim and Fallout 3/New Vegas, don’t operate by explicitly impressing female characters into damsel-like roles.  But these examples are the exception, and far more often than not video games will end up failing the Bechdel test.  Sometimes they fail even when they pass, constructing female characters that stand in for men rather than operate as women, female arbiters of masculine authority and power who combat enemies either through an active de-sexing (a la Samus Aran of Metroid, most of the time) or with explicit male consent and aid (a la Alyx Vance of Half-Life 2).  It’s the rare game that features a male main character which does not, in some measure, actually fetishize, marginalize or damsel-ize (to coin a term) its female characters.

But I have hope.  So this morning, like most mornings, I ran through the catalog of video game narratives and asked myself, “are there any games that use women in a respectful way without making them into objects of desire or fetish, focusing on them as actual characters?”  This morning, Assassin’s Creed popped into my head and I realized that, by and large, the Assassin’s Creed games actually illustrate a male protagonist interacting with characters who are not merely incidentally female without fetishizing or marginalizing them.

Let me explain.  I’m ignoring the PSP Vita Assassin’s Creed title where you’re a lady for this article, because I haven’t played it, and instead I’m thinking about how Assassin’s Creed features women, historically contextualized, who could theoretically pass the Bechdel test (if we weren’t simply being offered a single male characters perspective, that is): they do not simply exist to forward the interest of male characters, they possess their own thoughts, needs, motives, histories and worldviews that engage with and conflict with male characters, and occasionally even involve romance with them, without inherently forcing them into submissive roles.

Since Assassin’s Creed operates on the conceit that the world itself is being filtered through a male perspective (that is, that you are occupying a male body and exerting an ungendered, though implicitly male, gaze upon said male body in order to generate that body’s gaze) there aren’t interactions in any AC titles that explicitly remove themselves from male attention or issues of the male gaze.  But Assassin’s Creed does present a conceptualization of body-politics wherein the quest-objects represented by bodies (that is, the people who you are assigned to capture, kill, and rescue) are, more often than not, male.  The conventional construction of female body as quest objective is eschewed in favor of a violent, homosocial quest structure that focuses on the objectification of the male body in narrative.  By placing men in these spaces, Assassin’s Creed only marginalizes its female characters in the narrative sense of the word, pressing them into supporting roles or roles as collaborators or NPCs.  This de-objectification of women means that the ladies of Assassin’s Creed are established not in terms of their relationship to men, but their capacity to act upon their world.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

In the first Assassin’s Creed game, women are, for the most part, absent.  And why wouldn’t they be?  It’s the 12^th century, and women had little, if any role in politics.  Here they appear as besieged sisters, mothers, daughters, exemplars of the downtrodden who require assistance.  They’re as close to objects as any of Assassin’s Creed female figures, but they’re stripped of their sexuality and the act of eliminating the infrastructure oppressing them (through both sidequests and the primary assassination objectives) is your primary interaction with them.  You’re acting as (granted, a male) agent of female agency, protecting women and establishing a sustainable infrastructure for their continued protection (in microcosm).  This is eschewed later in the game, when on a quest to kill Robert de Sable, Altair instead encounters Maria Thorpe, his steward, sent to fight Altair and draw him into a trap.  Thorpe is no damsel, however: she is a fighter (in fact, she forms the focus of what could be considered the most challenging fight in the game) and while she does eventually become a sexual partner for Altair, this partnership encompasses all aspects of their lives: she is also a collaborator in shaping the future of the Assassins as an organization, in shaping Altair’s ever evolving world view, and in constructing the plot of Assassin’s Creed as a series, not as a damsel, but as a mother (and a martyr which, admittedly, raises some concerns that can’t be readily dismissed).  Her conspicuous place as the only named female character in Assassin’s Creed’s past-narrative is then noteworthy, for she is neither damsel nor particularly distressed: she is an opponent, and future ally.  Altair’s choice to release her can certainly be perceived as sexist, but alternative readings present themselves (Altair’s growth as a character for one) and forms the basis for a relationship between male-bodied animus gaze enforcers and women that, even when it is sexualized, is rarely sexualized in a manner which enforces the conceit of the female body as quest-object, which Sarkeesian rightly calls the bulk of games out for.

Assassin’s Creed 3 is more in line with this presentation of women as allies and aids than Assassin’s Creed 2 and its interim games (which I’ll get into discussing next week).  Connor meets female characters and aids them, but women are rarely presented as objects for him to conquer and acquire in order to sustain progress or complete a mission.  Instead they’re valuable collaborators who help him shape the world, equals who can exercise authority over the world around them and whose wooing, if it occurs, occurs not with the woman serving as an object or objective but rather a series of objects serving as a means by which to contextualize aiding another character (male) as a means by which to interact with his female desire-object as a human being.  That this wooer’s progress is slow moving is rather telling: in a sense, he’s being presented with a conceptualization of the quest narrative and the female-body-as-object-or-commodity trope as bunk and slowly coming to terms with it.

I’m not claiming that Assassin’s Creed 3 is radical by any stretch.  The bulk the women in its narrative exist in heteronormative roles, and they’re still objects of male gaze and male desire.  However, they’re not damsels, which why I consider their place in this narrative distinct.  You’re far more often called upon to rescue a lumberjack from the rapids than you are to save a woman from redcoats.  Sure, most of the women are wives and mothers (or potential wives and mothers) but even in these roles they act as agents of and vectors for desire (quest-givers and reward-distributors) rather than objects receiving desire.  They’re outside the damsel trope, even as they exist in a historically accurate, gameplay critical role.  They’re characters with wants, needs, desires, and they’re not simply there for a man to rescue.  In fact, they’re not there for a man to rescue at all: they’ve got their own lives, and they’re looking to commoditize Connor’s time and effort in order to fulfill their own goals (I stop short of the prostitution parallel there because I think it’s exceedingly weak).

This isn’t a perfect reading by any means – few are with video games. But I hope it served as an effective introduction to an investigation of the complex relationship that the Assassin’s Creed games have with the trope of women-as-objects and women-as-damsels in video games.  There are lots of examples of women being portrayed poorly or overly self-consciously in games, but there are precious few of games where the overarching mentality is both unprecious in its treatment of women, unselfconscious in its treatment of women, and unsexist in its treatment of women.  I think Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 3 both constitute effective examples.  Assassin’s Creed 2 and its related titles are considerably more complicated.