Assassins creed odyssey gay

Can you be gay in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey? Yes, yes you can. You can also be bisexual, or even a lesbian. It gives you the options to play however you want. You may play your Alexios or Kassandra as asexual, or just someone who is sex-repulsed in general, but want to get to know someone more romantically. In the realm of gaming, a medium that often lacks for robust LGBTQ visibility, Assassin's Creed Odyssey stood out for queer gamers by introducing options to pursue same-sex.

There is an important difference between characters like the gay couple on Lesbos, and the blacksmith in Lokris who could be either straight or bi if you picked Kassandra, or gay or bi if you picked Alexios (and in both timelines, he is exactly the same person). You’ll be able to make your Assassin’s Creed Odyssey homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual or even asexual, Ubisoft has confirmed with Stevivor.

The sky is really the limit when it comes to the game’s new romancing system, Narrative Director Melissa MacCoubrey told us. There are multiple romanceable characters in Odyssey, both men and women, and you can shag them all regardless of who you are playing as. From careless throwaway lines, horribly written characters, offensive plot points, these are all well and standard things and you can hardly throw a stone at a game without hitting a really shitty moment.

It felt like real care was put into quite a bit of the queer elements of the game. To understand any queer representation in games, you have to understand the general context in which queerness is shown in media. Nothing about this is in a vacuum. Being queer means being subjected to a barrage of dehumanization and stereotyping. This generally extends to media, as well, sadly.

The most common way in which queer people are shown in media is… not at all.

See Rocky Horror Picture show for a clear example of this: queerness is the other, in media. The weird, the other, the evil, a group to be laughed at, hated, or ignored. The stereotyping of queerness as pedophillic and wrong makes using that shorthand for a villain perpetuate nasty and hurtful stereotypes, and will probably tick your queer audience off majorly. Stories reflect reality, and the reality is not happy for many.

Your writing inherently needs to be more sensitive around this topic because of all this. And that is the lens I want to examine Assassins Creed Odyssey through. So with all that preamble out of the way, what are we looking at here? It was pretty neat, honestly! You so rarely get to see that, and I will give the game praise for even having it.

That said. Odyssey is remarkably less successful when it does anything beyond what is essentially just genderswapping one party in a heterosexual relationship. When it actually tries to do anything with queerness, explicitly gay characters, or write queer stories, it tends to fall flat on its face. I knew this might be a problem with the first gay couple I encountered.

Well, couple in past tense, because one of them was already dead, and the quest was based around discovering this fact and reporting it to her lover. Gay people have a much higher mortality rate in stories than anyone else, and the trope of using that tragedy as storytelling is played out, hurtful to representation, and reflects a mindset where queer people are more disposable and not as worthy.

Oh, and did I mention you get introduced to him drunk and nude, with several other men, while a goat… walks out of his… room. That is, um. Incredible in how terrible of a joke it is in every single way. I guess not. There is a context to the tropes, characters, and storytelling you choose to use. Another notable issue throughout the game is the lack of transgender characters, or, well at least a refusal to show any playing with gender.

However, what is telling is their utter refusal to engage with the subject, and the refusal to even broach the topic of gender.

assassin's creed romance options

It is ridiculous. To acknowledge the first but not the second is a gross rejection of this fact, and giving the cold shoulder to almost every trans and intersex person who plays it now. It could have been something great, a small part of the game where Ubisoft showed how gender can be played with and how it has been. But they instead chose to just, ignore it.