#I feel like the relationships that eivor has with all the npcs (not just Sigurd) could be so much more dynamic if you could speak to them | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alethiometry · 3 years

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How are you liking AC Valhalla so far? Any characters you love? Any characters you hate? Is there anyone as sexy as Brasidas?

hiiii thank you for asking!! i’m going to keep this as spoiler-free as possible.

i’m really liking it so far! i have my gripes about gameplay mechanics and the buggy launch, but at this point i have either grown used to them or am happily experiencing stockholm syndrome and am just enjoying the game for what it is (and hoping the stuff that needs patching gets patched soon).

here are some things i love:

the voice acting is so good. SO GOOD!!!

eivor! she stands out among the protags of other ac games i’ve played because she always has this community about her. she’s a loved and respected leader to her people, they’re always happy to see her return to the settlement, she’s got her crew to back her up at a moment’s notice, there’s always portions of the main quests where she has companions fighting beside her.

basically all the other characters in ravensthorpe! they’re a fun bunch and a loving community and they have their quirks and i love hanging out with all of them. petra in particular is an absolute sweetheart and not a day goes by where i don’t feel awful for breaking up with her bc my goblin brain decided “lol i want to fuck my stepbrother’s wife who looks like kassandra in sweatpants”

HYTHAM IS A SWEETHEART. we love an assassin who is also, to use 2012 lingo, a pure and sweet cinnamon roll, too perfect for this world.

petting dogs and cats!

how dynamic the settlement is. every time i go back there’s something new and interesting happening, whether it’s a new sidequest an npc wants me to help out with, or a dispute between neighbors, or new dialogue with npcs i repeatedly interact with. i love having a home base that i can upgrade and that i want to spend time in.

the minigames! orlog is fun and frustrating but mostly fun, and the drinking contest is AWESOME.

quick-time assassinations for higher-level enemies! it’s a good balance between the old games where you could just indiscriminately kill fucking anybody in one overpowered hit, and odyssey where you had to either stack your assassination damage to get that sweet OHKO, or straight up fight the polemarchs.

the relationship between eivor and sigurd. i’m only about 40-50% of the way through the game so i’ve only seen a bit of it, but as someone who generally gravitates towards sibling narratives (i.e. odyssey, fullmetal alchemist, and way too many of my prime years wasted on supernatural) i really love their dynamic. i think it was an excellent idea to have that become one of eivor’s central narratives from the very beginning of the game. also, i get to fuck his wife.

(forces through gritted teeth) the... modern... day. i HATED layla in odyssey, to the point where i don’t even remember what happened in the modern story at all because every playthrough except for my very first one i simply mashed the skip button until i got back in the goddamn animus.. and i do not remember a single thing she did in origins. and maybe it says more about me than anything else that i wasn’t able to care about her until ubisoft (finally!!!!) brought back shaun and rebecca to make me care, but... this is the closest the modern day has felt to the desmond games, and there’s post-odyssey continuity with layla’s struggle as the keeper of the staff or whatever, and i really like it!

when you hover over different things in the map, the sound effects change. you get chanting music when you hover over monasteries, and ocean noises when you hover over the ocean! IT’S SUPER NEAT.

taking damage when you swim in the cold cold waters of norway made me chuckle. i can see how it might get annoying, but it doesn’t really bother me that much and it’s not that much damage.

THE SOUNDTRACK GIVES ME CHILLS IT IS SO GODDAMN GOOD

things i’m ambivalent about:

fall damage? i’m peeved that it’s back, but it makes sense. i do love that the breakfall skill makes it so that the most damage i’ve ever gotten from taking a long fall is like... 5 hp lmao

kill animations. they’re really cool and i love seeing what new fun way eivor has to brutally murder her enemies. on the other hand, the shift in camera angle can be annoying in the middle of a massive battle, and if there’s an object in the way of the very specific camera angle then sometimes i can’t see the animation at all and have to just stare at some wood/stone texture for like 10 seconds.

environment puzzles. sometimes they’re fun but sometimes i’m too damn tired to try and figure out the 3895th way to break into a locked building.

side quests world events. they’re fun but also seem largely... pointless? i wish we had one or two longer sidequests; some of my favorite moments in odyssey were on long sidequests like mykonos or the battle of 100 hands. i feel like this was a reactionary mechanic to people complaining that odyssey had “too many” sidequests or something idk.

tattoo parkour. i would like it more if eivor didn’t feel so “sticky” if that makes sense. i like the return of parkour puzzles, and i like collecting tattoos (the tattoo shop is always the first place i visit when i return to ravensthorpe), but the parkour in the game often feels quite clunky.

social stealth. another excellent idea that they brought back, but executed clumsily. i just don’t understand how it works, or, more importantly, why it’s even necessary in the first place. but it’s also easy to ignore, so whatever.

animus glitch platform puzzles. they’re super cool but for some reason give me massive anxiety.

things i don’t love:

some combat mechanics, like having a stamina bar and losing adrenaline when you get hit. i’m not here for any of that *~*~sO gRiTtY aNd rEaLiStIc~*~* bullshit. i just want to have fun and hack shit up.

that motherfucking god damn terrible fucking skill tree/map/web. who the FUCK thought it was a good idea??? the incremental changes between the big nodes feel kind of meaningless, and it’s very difficult to see the (completely arbitrary) progression towards the big nodes because they’re pathed out on SKINNY WHITE FUCKING LINES

synin got nerfed real bad :(

dag is a massive chode. and not even in a fun way, like stentor was in odyssey.

don’t really care for ivarr either if i’m being honest.

i do not give a single shit about fantasy asgard, and i’m kind of peeved that i apparently have to finish that arc in order to finish the game. (i didn’t like the atlantis dlc in odyssey either—a couple hades sidequests notwithstanding—so go figure.)

congratulations on reading this far if you actually bothered to do that! i don’t think any game will top odyssey for me in terms of setting/storyline/general vibes. but valhalla is a great, solid game in its own right.

no npc will EVER be as sexy as brasidas, but eivor is definitely sexier. she and kassandra and aya hold the 3-way title of Sexiest Assassin’s Creed Characters But Not In Like A Creepy Incel Gamer Way.

#assassin's creed #ac valhalla #charlotte plays acv #anonymous #asked

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margridarnauds · 3 years

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So, I’m trying to articulate my thoughts on Valhalla and gender, which is sparked by the fact that, while Lagertha is prominently mentioned as the mother of the Ragnarssons (and you can find her axe), we never hear so much as a word about Aslaug/Thora, who is pretty much the real protagonist of Ragnar’s saga.

On one hand: Lagertha is pretty much at a high of popularity right now, courtesy of Vikings (derogatory). On the other hand: Aslaug is in Vikings (derogatory) too. We see her AS THE MOTHER of most of Ragnar’s sons. There’s no reason for her NOT to be recognizable enough to be included. (Lagertha’s inclusion is also problematic - Instead of being able to divorce Ragnar and have her own life, they went the cheap route by having her being shot by a Finnish arrow.) But, at the end of the day.....it feels like, while Valhalla DOES include a diverse range of women (including our protagonist), ultimately there is....some sort of hierarchy involved, where women who fight, or at least wield weapons are automatically seen as better?

Of our two longterm romantic interests, neither one wears a dress, both of them in traditionally masculine clothing, likewise for Ciara in WOTD. With Randvi, we’re first really invited to pity her/consider her as a really viable romantic option when we hear that she COULD have been a Jomsviking....had she not been married off to Sigurd. We see her taking down bandits, drinking ale, and we’re supposed to think, at that point, that she’s a worthy love interest.

There’s this rather confusing line from the artbook, which says:

“As a strategist, Randvi does not dress in a warrior’s outfit, but neither does she wear the typical women’s clothing of her time.”

Which...seems to imply that being a strategist (a role that primarily involves her being behind a table), is automatically at odds with wearing a dress. Even if 9th century Scandinavian clothing was restrictive (it isn’t - We’re well, well before the days of tightlacing here, and women had to be able to go about their daily chores, and even IN the days of tightlacing as the peak of fashion, plenty of women didn’t, or went about their daily chores), she’s not doing anything that involves intense manual labor. Putting her in pants is simply a way of saying “Look! Look at Randvi! Look at how independent she is!” which....actually doesn’t work, when almost EVERY OTHER major female NPC is ALSO in pants. Including Valka who, as a völva, ergo a non-combatant role that mostly involves eating shrooms in her huts, has no practical need for pants, even if, once again, the clothing was impractical. If I didn’t know What A 9th Century Norsewoman Should Look Like, I would just assume that this was something that all noblewomen did.

It’s very rare to see women actively weaving, as I’ve discussed before, with Eivor only weaving as one of the disguises that she can take to blend in. As a shieldmaiden who’s up and about constantly, I honestly wouldn’t expect Eivor to devote that much time to weaving, but it is a little jarring when the women who are constantly at the settlement don’t so much as mention it, since this was a great opportunity for women to get together, share gossip, tell tales, talk shit about the men, etc. in their own spaces. And there was a bit of an anxiety around it, because, while this was a necessary function for the creation of clothing (which, in the game, seems to just materialize in chests over the game world), it also was tightly associated with magic and sorcery. (Hence why there was a stigma against men practicing magic....unless you’re Odin, in which case Loki will talk shit about you but is anyone else? No. Because you’re Odin.) I want to emphasize that my issue here isn’t “STAY IN THE KITCHEN AND BE A PROPER WOMAN, EIVOR”, it’s more....erasing what the vast majority of women in the Viking Age DID.

The closest we get to more traditional, more conventional women would be in the form of the religious women, but, from the Anchoress to the one murderous nun in the mysteries event to Frideswid in the Lunden Arc to Acha in the Lincolnscire arc, they tend to be portrayed as either zealous and evil or confused and easily manipulated, which ignores the reality for many medieval women, which is that, for many women who didn’t want marriage for one reason or another (whether it was that they were facing the possibility of a forced marriage, or they had no dowry, or they were lesbians, or they were ace, or they were any combination of those things), it was their one chance at a life of their own. I’m not saying that it was IDEAL, or that the medieval church was ideal, but it did give them options (that, incidentally, in the pre-Christian times....you didn’t have. Which is why I don’t attach any real sense of horror to Christianity coming to Ireland, at LEAST from the standpoint of women’s rights. There are other aspects to that, but we’re here, in 9th century England, so I won’t go into it.) No, it has to come from some moral defect, otherwise, they would be independent, like Eivor, like Randvi, like Petra, like Eadwyn, like Valdis, or even like Fulke, who is a religious figure referenced, extensively, as mad and heretical, but who makes a large impact on the plot and at least earns some level of respect, as opposed to the others who make relatively brief appearances.

Now, when discussing women warriors, there tends to be some moral value attached to it: “Women warriors DIDN’T EXIST, and if you argue that they DID, you just want women to be men, ignoring that non-femme women might find comfort in the knowledge that they aren’t alone”, often with a sense of moral guilt-tripping over “Erasing women’s suffering” (which also falls into the trap of assuming that being a woman = suffering, or that that’s the defining experience of being a woman) VS “Women warriors EXISTED and they were #NotLikeOtherGirls and that’s ALL we’re going to talk about as far as women at the time, as well as ignoring any potential evidence for trans or otherwise nonbinary identities”. Both options have the potential to erase or diminish what either option can mean to people. I hate both options equally, and I find that the way they’re brought in is incredibly manipulative. I’m not interested in saying that putting an axe in a woman’s hand = setting back feminism for twenty years. I’m not interested in saying that having essentially no more conventional women in the main cast = feminism. Both are bad, but what I’m concerned about is the lack of nuance in Valhalla and how it seems to assume that there’s ONLY ONE WAY to have power. (I’d hoped that Lady Eadwyn would be cool, and she is....even though we only see her in armor, she’s kind of what I would expect from a medieval woman, in the sense that her husband was Ealdorman and now she’s following in his footsteps, defending her rights as his widow, but then we replace her with a dude.)

As someone whose relationship to gender is Weird, I actually really, really enjoy playing a female character who has the kind of independence that Eivor has - I enjoy getting to jump around, killing things in a gloriously rendered historical environment. I enjoy that, with the exception of Dag, no one really questions it (though I would have been down for a more in-depth examination of gender in the Viking Age). I enjoy that Eivor is compassionate, clever, and aggressive, and that she’s able to have romances with both sexes. I’m not trying to nuke her via historical accuracy here (especially since the historical reality of shieldmaidens is SUCH a hot topic, I feel like wading into either end of the historical accuracy pool is a recipe for disaster) because I actually really, really like her as a character. There are relatively few times where I really, really identify with and love a main female video game character, especially since, so often, even into the present, when things are supposed to be better, I can still TELL that they were made by and for straight men, and this is one. What I AM saying is that I hate that it comes at the expense of basically every woman who ISN’T a warrior or otherwise “independent” by the game’s standards. You do have merchant women, the tattoo artist in camp, Valka, as mentioned before, but it all goes back to that point - We never really see a prominent woman running the household, managing the money, giving orders, which was an immensely important, powerful job, and as a result, it always feels kind of halfway done, that we’re over-representing one relationship to gender at the expense of another.

#playing valhalla #long post

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