#toohardtoanimate

With some of the building discussion about the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, which will, for the first time, allow you to play as a man and a woman (siblings, we’re told), it occurred to me that there wasn’t much follow up regarding the last game’s treatment of women.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity, you’ll recall, made headlines when a Ubisoft creative director claimed that women weren’t playable in the game because a woman protagonist would be too hard to animate. I wrote something at the time in response to that, and how Ubisoft were complicit in the erasure of women from the French Revolution.

So now the game has been out for almost a year, how’d they go? How were women, especially the key women of the French Revolution, depicted in Assassin’s Creed: Unity?

Not well. In fact, quite a bit worse than not well.

Let’s take a look at some of the women in the game. Spoilers follow.

Elisé de La Serre is the central fictional woman of the game, the love interest of Unity’s protagonist. She’s reasonably clearly sketched out, has her own agency, her own motivations. She also dies completely unnecessarily at the game’s climax because... because why? To graft some much-needed actual emotion into the game’s lifeless, characterless male protagonist? Ugh.

There’s also this lecherous scene featuring the Marquis de Sade. Because it’s ‘edgy’, I guess?

Marie Antoinette, almost certainly the most famous woman of this period of French history, very briefly appears in a co-op mission and for many players therefore would’ve been entirely absent.

Charlotte Corday, the most famous non-fictional assassin from the entire revolutionary period, is in the game. Great! But she’s not a major character or an assassin colleague, as many had thought she might be. In fact, you help arrest Corday in a murder-mystery side-mission. That’s right: you, master assassin, track down and turn in the best assassin from the French Revolution to the authorities because... again, I’m lost for a reason here.

And finally, how about Olympe de Gouges, the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen?

Well, she’s also in the game. You retrieve her guillotined head for Marie Tussaud.

You honestly couldn’t make this stuff up. When the ‘too difficult to animate’ controversy hit, you’d think Ubisoft would’ve scrambled to make sure what depictions of women they had in their game were at least not going to further fuel the flames.

Instead, we have the three most important women from the period as barely present, a severed head, and as a murderer to apprehend, while the central fictional woman of the game’s plot ends up being killed in order to cheaply import narrative heft.