Viking Culture and Revisionist History: How Do You Feel About This?

After playing through the game now, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that was new for an AC game and kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m wondering how other people feel about it.

What I’m talking about is this: The AC series has always woven a fictional narrative in amongst historical events and cultures that actually happened and existed. Now of course they take liberties because the pretty much have to to fill in gaps and tell their particular tale. I’m not going to claim that the AC franchise is some sort of historically pure representation, but they have never before presented us with a historical culture that was completely fabricated, and….that is pretty much what they did in this game.

This game presents Viking culture as a place where there were male and female warriors in nearly equal measure fighting side by side and on equal terms. The reality is: that culture never existed. It is a complete fabrication on the part of Ubisoft, and they’ve never done that before to this extent. We know from some recent archeological evidence that there might have been a small handful of women who were in fact warriors in this culture, and that is very interesting and something worth talking about, but that is it.

So why does this bug me?

1.)For me, I think doing this really shits on the reality of the women whose lives who actually existed in these cultures. As I mentioned above, there probably were a few women warriors, but this game says “your actual stories of rising to the top to be a warrior in an otherwise patriarchal culture are not good enough so we are going to discard you and fabricate what we want instead.” It also shits on the lives of the more typical women in in these cultures: “You weren’t actually Vikings warriors so you are boring. Bye bye, we’re going to make women be what we want them to be instead of dealing with your real lives in a historically accurate way.”

2.) The game could have had its cake and eaten it too without doing this. The game already has the mythical portions, and there WERE many women warriors(Valkyries, Shield Maidens, etc.) in Norse mythology, so there was already an avenue to have a female warrior culture present in the game play experience while still trying to more accurately portray historical reality on the “IRL” side of the game.

3.) With point 1 and 2 above, it is overall less interesting storytelling. Trying to weave a fictional narrative in amongst a historical culture while taking that culture as it was is much more interesting and compelling than just throwing it out and making things up from scratch to be the way you want for a video game.

Now Ubisoft is certainly not the first ones to do this. TV is full of Viking shows now with women warriors etc., but it is disappointing for them to go this far in that direction when in the past the franchise has made more of an attempt to portray cultures generally more accurately. I’m not going to tantrum over it but I hope they rethink going this route in the future.