Voost Kain
Banned
And then the second episode of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s DLC, Legacy of the First Blade, landed and ruined everything in one of the most egregious video game storylines I’ve ever seen. Episode two is called Shadow Heritage; it continues Kassandra’s exploration of her feelings about life as a mercenary and allows her to go adventuring with Darius, the first assassin, and his son, Natakas. Unlike the main game, Kassandra can’t ignore romantic storylines completely in Shadow Herritage but she can rebuff every single one of Natakas’ romantic overtures — which I did, of course, because my Kassandra is a lesbian. Despite turning him down repeatedly over the course of the DLC, once we defeated our final enemy, a scenario played in which I was sent to the market to buy groceries and then returned to a formerly abandoned home in the game that had been completely refurbished by Natakas’ so we could comfortably live there together with our son, Elpidios.
I played an entire game as a woman romancing other women, played an entire DLC saying no to the man who was trying to have sex with me — but the game still forced me to have sex with him, have his child, and settle down to be his wife! I cannot overemphasize how jarring it was, what a sucker punch it felt like, to spend 60 hours playing a game as a lesbian, only to have her decision-making ability and lesbianism stripped from her, despite the promises of the game makers and the gameplay up until that point!
The message this sends to the millions of men — especially young men, so many of whom experience the majority of their socialization in gamer culture — is, frankly, shocking. Choice, choice, choice, choice was Ubisoft’s main selling point of Odyssey, aside from the fact that it was an RPG first (and an Assassin’s Creed game second). So either it never occurred to the developers that a woman character wouldn’t want to end up with a man, or it did occur to them but the player’s (and therefore Kassandra’s) choice didn’t matter. Either “no” wasn’t an option, or “no” didn’t mean no. I honestly almost couldn’t even believe what I was seeing when the ending of Shadow Heritage played out.
Presumably not a single lesbian was consulted in any capacity about this highly touted potential lesbian character.
Odyssey‘s creative designer ultimately issued an apology(??) that made me even angrier. He told EW, essentially, that Kassandra didn’t have to love Natakas to have sex with him. Choosing to rebuff his romantic advances was actually choosing a “utilitarian view” of “ensuring [the assassin bloodline] lived on.” I’ll hand it to him: That’s a way to say “forcing a lesbian to have sex with a man”(??) that I’ve never heard before.
I’ve watched almost every show featuring a lesbian or bisexual women in TV history. I’ve been playing video games my entire life. I have scarcely come across a story that felt like a slap in the face. The best Dumont could offer, in terms of future story, is that Kassandra won’t have to stay with Natakas in the next Legacy of the First Blade episode. That doesn’t matter to me; for the first time ever, I won’t finish a video game I started.
If you have played Mega Man 3, you'll notice the robot master named Top Man. Top Man was known as the master of spin and could do so at a fast pace. But this "writer" lady can spin 8x as fast!!!! Never before has spinning been spun so much!