Spoilers for some early yet key story stuff in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Butch:

Oh no.  

Oh no no no no no. 

Whelp, you'll catch up in no time. 

It has photo mode. 

Feminina:

Who are you calling a whelp? I'm older than you! 

Hahahahaha.

So I collected some final bits of loot, paid for iron to improve my ration bag, upgraded all my gear, put four skill points into melee combat, and totally defeated Kjotve in a single attempt.

His moody death scene was interesting..."I've fought as hard as I have because I know darkness is all that's waiting for us." And the dramatic tree growing through him! Epic.

Then I went to the Althing, bummed around town a bit, revitalized the marriage of a raid-loving couple, did a pretend raid with some kids (that took a dark turn), went to the meeting, went back to Fornburg, agreed to leave Kjotve's loot for Styrbjorn, and headed to England! These are not people who equivocate over big decisions. 

"Shall we move our entire lives to England? Great. Pack everything you need, we leave tomorrow."

Then real-world stuff which I more or less understand but which is honestly too much to cover just now because work. We'll talk later.

Butch:

Age is not a number, it is how old you feel.  Thus, I am much older than you. 

WHAT? A single attempt??? On normal?  Without the magical appearing cloudberries?  Dude!  Respect to your parrying. I thought I had done pretty much all the dots, but I guess I missed enough that I was wimpy.  Or I just suck at parrying. 

Yeah, that death scene was weird, and brings up QUESTION ONE that we will talk about, later. 
Where do the Gods of various cultures stand on the whole Assassin/Templar thing? I know, in the early days, you were killing popes and stuff, which seems that assassins don't like religion, but Odin there didn't seem to like the Templar.  I'm confused.  This will be a question we keep coming back to, as there's religious stuff ahead. 

I did the same, except the kids?  Missed those!  Tell me about them! 

The move was rather impulsive, wasn't it?  But hey, Viking shit. I have a feeling we'll be back, what with fights we can't win and barriers we can't cross with dots on the other side. 

So....did you see the king kneeling coming?  I did not, gotta say.  And what did you do with Gorm? 

Did you find the gnome and/the mailbox?  Do you know where that is taking place? 

Did you listen to the audio of Desmond (remember, I have never played a Desmond game) in which he was talking about memories coming to him outside of the animus, and that one memory seems to be of a pirate?  That would be Edward from AC4, yes?  But, if I remember right, that WASN'T a Desmond game and he was dead during the events thereof.  Right? 

Feminina:

I noticed that--Desmond was having memories from someone whose memories he never actually accessed. Unclear what it means other than that this "bleeding" issue is more significant than we knew.
I did see the gnome and the mail! Concord! Right near your general area, or else in Concord NH: I'm not sure that's clear. But let's imagine they're camped in the field behind your house right now, because that's more fun.

The kids: you meet these kids playing raider on the road, and agree to join their game, and you go wreck this abandoned building and 'assassinate' some dummies and the main kid gives excited commentary about how gorily the defenders die and how you're left standing triumphant in the burning wreckage of this pathetic village, and then he says "yes! One day we will utterly destroy the Raven clan! That was great, just like in Jarl Kjotve's stories!"

Then they run off and Eivor mutters "we'll meet again on another battlefield, kid," and continues on her way. A bit grim, though. 

I was not surprised by Styrbjorn kneeling: he's been talking about wanting peace, an end to the generations-long feuds, etc. That's Harald's promise, so it made sense.

Religion... Kind of complicated. We'll talk later.

Butch:

So that was odd.  Glad I was right about Desmond and Black Flag. 

See my rage?  It's not conCORD, it's CONkerd.  SAY IT PROPERLY!!!!! Fallout 4 did.  If you're going to take the time to have it in a real place, SAY IT PROPERLY!!!! Also, what's with the mountains?  I live very near Concord, and I'm in a damn swamp.  My water table is about six inches under the lawn.  Mountains? 

I think it is Massachusetts, though, and here's why:  AC3, which I didn't play, took place in the American Revolution.  Indeed, the battle of Lexington and Concord was a story set piece.  Thus, if I'm right, Eivor wound up in the very place where whoever was the hero in AC3 will be in 1775.   Add to that that Desmond (who I think was the guy in AC3) is remembering shit that he didn't do, and maybe there's that bleed from Eivor to AC3 guy and back.  Or not.  But hey, WILD INTERNET SPECULATION!!!!

Did you play AC3? 

Whoa.  I totally missed that with the kids.  Yes, grim.  

I was sorta surprised by the kneeling.  And, as I know about templars, suspicious. 

What did you do with Gorm? 

Oh, we will talk later about religion.  Wait until you get to England.  There's some eyebrow arching stuff, for sure. 

Also...The fuck is with this end of the world shit?  The earth's magnetic field increasing 500 fold or something?  I....don't recall that from earlier games.  What did I miss? 

And remind me what that staff is all about. 

Feminina:

Yeah, there is certainly a potential connection with 3 at least in location. I don't recall Connor (in 1775) ever encountering a Viking gravesite, but it could have been off screen!

The staff was carried by Pythagoras until he gave it to Kassandra. Then Kassandra gave it to Layla in the present day in some extra content in Odyssey (if you defeated all the mythical monsters), and apparently it had a weird effect on Layla and she accidentally killed someone (there was a Victoria in the real world segments, I think?). Now it's doing...whatever it's doing, I'm not sure we know yet.

I didn't do anything with Gorm. I mean, I sneaked into his house, but people showed up to warn us not to break the king's peace, so he's fine.

Butch:

Didn't the new king ask if you wanted him killed or banished? For something? I let the king decide and the king was happy with me and banished him.  This was during the confab.  

Feminina:

Oh yeah, that. I also told the king he should decide, and he banished Gorm. See you on another battlefield later, Gorm! Or should I say Worm since that's what the king decided to name you.

I also thought it was interesting that the info on the computer specifically said Kassandra had the staff before Layla. But what if we'd played Odyssey as Alexios? What if you'd ended up fighting and killing Kassandra? Because I feel like that was an option for the end of the siblings' story.

I'm curious if there's some backstory we don't know where even if you play as Alexios, Kassandra ends up with it, or if they just decided to make Kassandra the canon character for that part of the story.

Perhaps this will become clear. Perhaps not.

Butch:

I did see that! And thought "oh, Femmy will know."   

Like….what's with the end of the world????

Feminina:

AC3's real-world story was set in 2012, trying to fend off the Mayan apocalypse people were worried about at the time. They managed it then--though Desmond died--but apparently it's back now in this game's timeline (or in this simulation: they're really teasing the 'the real world is also a kind of Animus experience' idea). 

That had not kicked in at the end of Odyssey as far as I played it (maybe was DLC), so you know as much about it as I do. I assume it had something to do with Layla taking the staff, but much remains unclear.

It is ever thus with the larger AC story.

Butch:

It's true.  Whenever pondering the overall ac story, the answer is "reasons, that likely aren't reasons, but there might be other reasons, or not."  

Feminina:

OK, so, you asked about religion. Here's the thing about religion as best we can tell: there were these godlike alien beings called the Isu or the First People way back when, and they either designed humans outright or tinkered with human evolution to create useful/entertaining creatures because of reasons.

Who knows exactly what reasons, right? We can't understand the minds of such beings.

Anyway, they built Atlantis and then what with one thing and another there was a terrible disaster (possibly a solar flare like the one presently in play?) and they all died. But they were around very early on and essentially WERE the early gods of humanity, and their traces lingered even after the disaster in various bits of code and technology, and they more or less became the Greek/Roman gods (and likely those of other cultures too, there were hints in AC3 that they had left traces in some Native American cultures) through centuries of legends. 

As far as I know, there is no "correct" religion in AC lore, because there are no "actual gods" (the Isu were extremely powerful beings but nevertheless have a naturalistic explanation). All religions are equally based on human lore and flawed understanding of these ancient, extremely powerful beings. As Ezio, it's true that we were trying to kill the pope, but not because Catholicism was any more incorrect than any other religion, and certainly not with the intention of promoting any other religion in its place: it's just that the Borgias were Templars, you know, so we had to fight them. 

We've encountered coded memories/avatars of what seem to be some of the Roman deities (who are actually Isu, as noted), and I would assume that Odin is similarly a remnant of some Isu personality, but I don't know for sure. 

That said, even though the early games handled some Christian stories, specifically the idea of Eden, we've never run into Jesus (or Mohammad) as an in-game character, so maybe the crew didn't want to poke those particular beasts, or maybe those figures post-date the Isu and are purely human inventions, OR maybe the possibility remains open that these (or at least one of them) are actually The One True Religion and the Isu are merely alien interlopers in the One God's eternity-spanning plan. They could easily map onto Christian traditions about the angels who challenged God and were overthrown, after all. 

Maybe God has just been mostly checked out and watching from afar for a lot longer than we thought!

But as far as I recall, the game doesn't have a specific take on religion other than that it's human stories about aliens. Or come to think of it, maybe super-evolved prehistoric earthlings--I'm actually not sure it's specified that they came from somewhere else, although I've had that idea in my head forever.

Butch:

Right.  And Layla and Abstergo and whoever the fuck else wants to know more about these beings, find their stuff/secrets/etc, right? 

As you say, we haven't really met any representative of any monotheistic religion.  Also, we're not only killing the pope, but, in this one, we've already seen them make fun of the cross (as they were travelling up the river there) and, as you now know, we're not raiding forts (which, while not very nice, at least was rather neutral), we're raiding MONESTARIES.  That's kind of loaded, no?  Couple that with the making fun of the cross, killing of popes, and that the Templars were, in real life, Christian, it does make you go hmm. 

We'll talk yet more once you build some stuff in your settlement.

Feminina:

Very true, but also, raiding monasteries is something Vikings were in fact known for (they had so much loot!), so they might be just recognizing the way things were/are. (Heck, I'd still raid the Vatican in a heartbeat if I were a modern-day Viking looking for loot.) And yes, they made fun of the cross, but--I thought--mostly in the way that someone who doesn't understand the symbols of another religion might poke fun at them. 

Because, yeah, if you're not Christian, it IS a little weird to adopt the instrument of your divinity's torture and murder as your symbol, isn't it? I took this as less a pointed jab at Christianity, and more a reminder that Christianity is still pretty new in this place at this time and it's not particularly familiar to these characters, and they don't feel the sort of token politeness towards another religion that we kind of expect today. 

But indeed the real Templars were Christian, and some of the earlier games I think made much of the idea that religion is a mind-control device or a way to impose obedience on people (which is what the Templars are about in these games), so AC as a story is sort of anti-religion in that sense, but I think not anti-Christianity specifically, unless it's because Christianity is the majority religion in a lot of countries where this game is sold and it's therefore more OK to jab at it. 

Because if they make a whole game about how Buddhism is a stealthy way to control the peasants and keep them downtrodden, it seems like picking on a group of people who don't have the power in (our) society, right? Like, "are you saying Buddhist monks are evil? What do you have against the Dalai Lama, you monster?!"

But maybe they figure Christianity is the giant robot on the playground of modern western civilization, so it can take some pokes as the representative of all religion. 

Butch:

Historically accurate, yes, but AC is not always about authenticity.  

What do you make of the fact that Layla, our hero and the one chosen to have the very important staff, is Muslim? We see emails about her celebrating Ramadan.  That's obviously intentional. 

Feminina:

Yeah, I wonder if that's an interesting way to maybe NOT poke at the other giant robot on the modern religion playground. Or maybe it will end up being a poke in the future! Unclear.

Butch:

Still, interesting they went there.  Sure, you gotta have Christianity and Norse mythology in the past, but there's no reason to specify Layla's religion at all, at least not yet.  

Feminina:

I don't remember Altair ever demonstrating any strong religious impulses, but the historic Assassins (on whom the first AC was slightly more closely based than the current storyline is) were a Muslim sect, so the first assassin in the series was probably Muslim. 

And as you say, they were fighting the Christian Templars. Maybe it's all coming back together!

Of course, you quickly learn in the first game that the Muslim/Christian conflict of the Crusades was a proxy for a longer-standing opposition between the very ideas of order and free will, so as I said, it's not that Altair was especially devout as far as I recall.

Still...maybe Layla is a descendent and that connection is important in ways that we can only speculate wildly about. Weirder things have definitely, definitely happened in this series.

Butch:

Oh good point! 

This series might lack on themes, but it's still fun to blog on.  

Wait....which one was Altair again? 

Feminina:

The first AC game, called simply Assassin's Creed. He only had one game, then it was all Ezio for the next three. He was--apparently--an actual Assassin with traditional assassin training. He went after a bunch of Templars during the Crusades, but also disliked bad people in general who were trying to crush human free will.

Couldn't swim. (You would have appreciated that: no swimming challenges whatsoever. I mean, he drowned instantly if he touched water, so that's an issue, but he was raised in a desert, so we cut him some slack.) Had a lot of hidden flags to track down that were never on any map and so I didn't come close to finding them all. A real jerk at the beginning of the game, with believable growth and character development so that I kind of liked him by the end. 

Known to have had descendants, because Desmond was one of them.

Butch:

Wow.  That's practically an antique.  It's hard to imagine an AC game that wasn't a sequel or a spin off.  

Though no swimming?  Through in nudity and a dress ball and I'm all over it. 

I encountered swimming the last time I played.  I was annoyed.  But the ability I got was SO COOL so I almost forgive it.  Almost. 

It would've prevented that truly spectacular fall I showed you.  Gotta love getting killed so spectacularly you get a trophy for it. 

Feminina:

At least now we can swim without also slowly freezing to death.

Butch:

That is a plus.  Though, now, it means....I shudder to say it....there can be LONG swimming sequences.  Tunnels and shit. 

I shall propose to Sigurd that we charge swiftly inland!  Or perhaps to north Africa!

Wait until you learn the next game mechanic!  Actually, the next two!

The tutorial phase of this game is longer than a lot of entire games. 

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