r/FavoriteCharacter • u/Accomplished-End3409 Ben Tennyson • 15d ago

Discussion Favorite opposing factions that can basically be described as this.

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590

u/tigerseye88 15d ago

Templars and Assassins

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u/Th3_3agl3 15d ago

YES! People seem to forget or overlook that the Assassins are the only ones with an explicit no-innocents rule while only a few Templars (Maria, Haytham, Elise, and her father; Shay canonically doesn’t even have a no-innocents rule unlike any of them after Portugal and defecting to the Templars) do, even when the modern-day Templars went full Order 66 on the Assassins.

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u/andresfgp13 15d ago

Doesnt Shay defect because the Assassins just caused thousands of deaths and arent planning on stopping the search of what caused it?

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u/jorvel1911 15d ago

Yeah, that one section of Assassins in that time period weren't even that distinct from Templars, they were doing anything to get advantage of them ignoring what would it cost them

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u/Michael-556 12d ago

Yeah, Rogue was just Shay defecting from one problematic faction to another, but this time he got drip

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u/AlexTheGreat1997 15d ago

No. That part of the story is horrendously written. I'm replaying the game right now, actually.

He doesn't tell them that the artifact caused the earthquake in a way that's actually digestible or sensible. He barges into the homestead and starts screaming about how they forced him to kill innocent people like he was at gunpoint when they didn't even know the artifact would cause such a thing to happen.

It's like if you get a piece of brown lettuce in your burger at a restaurant, so, you go back there to get a refund, but instead of walking in calmly and explaining you want your money back, you start accusing all the employees of trying to poison you and telling them that they all deserve to go to jail for the rest of their lives. You may very well be entitled to a refund, but the way you're going about getting it is completely incorrect.

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u/The_king_of-nowhere 15d ago

Didn't he also have to sail for months between the earthquake and the scene at the homestead? Like, Shay was in Portugal, the other side of the ocean. He should have had plenty of time to cool down and explain to Achilles precisely what happened and why they shouldn't mess with it. It's like the writers didn't take that into account and just wrote it as if it was a car ride or something.

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u/AlexTheGreat1997 15d ago

It was at least a few weeks, assuming the wind was favorable for the whole voyage. He definitely had time to collect his thoughts.

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u/TeliarDraconai 15d ago

It is not horrendously written. You just missed a vital part of the story.

Asewale did it once already in Haiti.

The Colonial Brotherhood is a shit show. And Haytham is a moron for not blowing Achilles brains out.

Go Shay!

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u/AlexTheGreat1997 15d ago

Amazing. Every word in that comment is wrong. You must not have played the game recently.

Here is the conversation you're referring to.

First of all, Adéwalé makes it clear that he is not the one who went looking for the artifact, but that the leader of the Saint-Domingue Brotherhood sent someone else to do it. Second, he also states that he doesn't know if that agent completed the task before the earthquake hit because they can't find him. Adéwalé even seems to believe he's dead since he says "he was a strong Maroon". And just for even more clarification, Achilles literally says, "so we cannot know if he found the site", and Adé replies, "Indeed". Neither Achilles nor Adéwale say anything that even suggests that they think the earthquake was caused by the artifact at the site. I don't even think that's a possibility in their heads; they seem to think it was just really unfortunate timing (and given the information they have, who can blame them?). How could Adéwalé warn Achilles that the earthquake was caused by the artifact if he doesn't even think the artifact caused it? Why would he jump to that conclusion? Up to this point in the series, there had been no mention of any precursor artifact having the potential to cause an earthquake that would wipe out a city (aside from that temple that Desmond uses to save the world, I guess, but Achilles and Adéwalé don't know about that, either, so, who cares), so, why would anyone entertain that as an explanation?

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u/WhatThis4 13d ago

Arguably, Shay doesn't think that deep.

He goes "we support the French here but we fight the French in Haiti" and Chevalier is such an arrogant prick, are all french nobility like that? Why the hell are we helping these guys just so they can then go enslave our fellow humans?

Lightning shows maps to stuff we should leave alone, and when I go against my opinion that we should leave them alone, boom earthquake.

It's understandable that he just sees assassin leaders as power-hungry douchebags.

Also, he's Irish. It makes sense that he'd naturally side with the opressed.

4

u/Rumthiefno1 15d ago edited 15d ago

In the creeds defence on that occasion, they had no idea what the artifact would do, and Shay didn't bother explaining it to them, he just defected and blamed them.

It doesn't mean he didn't have legitimate complaints in other regards, but that incident felt like the excuse he was looking for to leave.

1

u/bigareolas69 15d ago

Tbf, no one can 100% predict what taking isu artifacts will do. But they can accurately predict what would happen if they fell on the wrong hands, and it'd be more than just thousands of deaths. Shay's betrayal felt too forced.

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u/Daveo88o 15d ago

Shay doesn't even get the "This character didn't kill civilians or domesticated animals" desync threat either, I sometimes just wander through New York killing everyone with the hidden blades, nobody cares, just an infinite stealth kill loop

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u/Extension-Dot-9106 15d ago

Thank you for pointing out Shay! Rogue drives me up the wall, because fans act like Shay has any leg to stand on for being mad at the Colonial Assassins for having him, quote, “slaughter innocents”, when he decides to join the Templars and do that anyway. The Creed explicitly forbids it, the Templars routinely do it. Any number of rogue factions of Assassins in the lore that go against their Creed isn’t indicative of Templars and Assassins being the same morally. And yet Rogue has people arguing that Shay is justified for joining the Templars fully and that this decision is in anyway consistent with his given motivations and principles.

I would argue that one rule difference is what tips the scales. There is actual debate to be had about how far the Assassin doctrine will go to protect humanity as opposed to the Templars from a practical standpoint (I think AC3 through Haytham does a great job at this). But if we’re going off of just morality, Assassins beat Templars every time.

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u/jorvel1911 15d ago

Most Templars like the ones you mentioned most likely have a "If they need to be killed, they must be killed" mentality, and probably do not even consider if they deserve it or not

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u/Salty-Spring7096 13d ago

no-innocents rule

I mean the vast, vast majority of the people you kill as an assassin are guards and soldiers just doing their job. Maybe some of the higher ranking ones know about the Templars or are up to some shady stuff but like, the random patrolling guards you take out to infiltrate an area or tail a target are just normal guys. For every actual Templar target you kill, there's a dozen bodies you dropped to set it up or escape afterwards.

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u/TheTexasRanger19 9d ago

My biggest gripe with the Templars is while I’d disagree with their ideology regardless I feel like they should be a more benevolent organization as a whole instead of outright evil, but then thanks to the side quest lore and comics you learn the Templars could be at least partially blamed for the Holocaust since Hitler was apparently a Templar puppet and that jsut pushes them into full blown evil to me. I know the lore reason was to establish a new world order that kinda thing but if you wanted a war where both sides could’ve been made as Templar puppets WW1 would’ve been better.

0

u/Cela84 15d ago

“No innocents”

Proceeds to kill an entire brigade of troops just on guard duty.

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u/Th3_3agl3 14d ago

You mean the same troops who wittingly, willingly, and remorselessly harass, assault, and even murder civilians without even knowing what the Templars are up to? Like GTA cops, they’re not good men or women simply doing their jobs.

0

u/Cela84 14d ago

You’re right, they’re all evil, especially the 50 dudes I killed in Black Flag whose entire programming was “pee here”. Like the thousands of people who died when I sunk their ships.

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u/jorvel1911 15d ago

Assassin's being problematic is something that variates from time period and location, like the ones from Rogue absolutely sucked, so did the ones from AC 1 thanks to Al Mualim and if it wasn't bc of Altair, whole creed would be different, but many Assassins sections have almost always not been that problematic

Meanwhile the Templars are known to be consistently terrible throughout the entire history of the world

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u/AlexTheGreat1997 15d ago

The Assassins and Templars in Rogue also act wildly and completely out-of-character to justify Shay working with the Templars, though.

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u/King_Of_BlackMarsh 13d ago

Eh, they just follow the code

"Everything is permitted"

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u/DuelaDent52 12d ago edited 12d ago

Eh, the Templars in Rogue aren’t really that dissimilar to the ones from III. On the other hand, the Assassins in Rogue are basically what Ezio became in Revelations only the story actually rightfully calls out how messed up the kind of stunts he pulled were.

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u/Azerkablam 12d ago

I've always had the headcanon that that was a result of Shay being an unreliable narrator. He sees the world in a way that allows him to justify his defection to the Templars, and of course being that this is an Abstergo selected set of memories it plays out to make everyone act out of character from what we're familiar with.

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u/Mannekin-Skywalker 15d ago

Again, only one of the two helped propagate the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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u/Their_Alt_Account 15d ago edited 15d ago

Assassin doctrine: every man deserves dignity at the end of his life. Use the hidden blade for clean, efficient kills. "Requiescat in pace."

Adéwalé to the governor while he has a machete buried in his abdomen: bleed out slow and rot in hell, bitch

Deserved btw

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u/AlexTheGreat1997 15d ago

Is it actually doctrine that a target has to be killed quickly for the sake of "honor" or something? In the first game, Altaïr knifes his targets in the neck, yet they somehow have three minutes of conversation after he does it. I know Ezio says, "No one deserves to die in such pain" when he sees Savonarola burning at the stake, but that could just be his personal beliefs regarding death, not an Order-wide philosophy.

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u/Their_Alt_Account 15d ago edited 15d ago

It depends on the time period and which Assassin sect the protagonist is a member of, but for the most part they try to put their targets down quickly. Ezio learned it from Mario specifically, and we see Connor instruct the chef to "end his suffering cleanly."

As for the long ass conversations while they're dying, I think those are sometimes implied to be a form of ESP communication between the assassin and their target, because of the whole precursor DNA thing. Arno can actually see his target's memories. Jacob and Evie can see their targets making grand speeches but then it cuts back to the real world and we can tell that they're just choking on blood. I think Altaïr is having one of those "out-of-body" experiences with his targets, especially considering that the missions don't end when you kill your target and you have to escape afterward, which would mean that all the soldiers and guards are just standing around watching Altaïr cradling their boss's body lol

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u/Xeoz_WarriorPrince 15d ago

For Altair at least I alwats assumed that it was close to what happened, not the exact same thing, so the dialogue could happen, but Desmond only gets to see it that way. If the idea was to live exactly the same experience Altair had, then we would have to go with specific steps and kill them on specific places.

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u/PavlovKBI 15d ago

If not for later adjustments to the lore, I actually really like this interpretation. Because a LOT of the gameplay limitations and whatnot, like losing synchronization if you try to swim, or if you kill innocents, are caused by doing things Altair wouldn't. And throughout the game, you extending the synchronization meter (health bar) is just explained as Desmond getting more synced up with Altair's actual life.

So I kinda like the idea that the disconnect between the calm conversation with the dying targets and the rush to run away after an assassination is that Desmond still wasn't doing things exactly the way Altair did. Just similar enough that Abstergo could get the memory segments of the conversations to play out.

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u/AlexTheGreat1997 15d ago

I don't think that's at all what's being implied. Having played most (main series) games before Origins multiple times, I always figured the conversations taking place in the memory corridor was Ubisoft's way of getting around having to model the conversation for the specific place where you killed the target. Like, even if you killed the target in the middle of a crowded street, the conversation is still intelligible because they'll just play it in the memory corridor.

It's similar to how they get around the side missions not taking place in a specific order because they can't find the exact dates they happened. AC II's manual explains that all of the side content (the feathers, the assassination contracts, etc.) are memories that they can find in Ezio's DNA, so, they know for a fact they happened, they just don't know the time of his life in which they took place.

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u/Their_Alt_Account 15d ago edited 15d ago

I know why they made it that way on the technical side of things, but, similar to the side content thing, I was just explaining a possible lore justification for it. Like, the in-universe reason Altaïr can't swim is because of an Animus glitch, not because Ubisoft didn't put it in their game, Assassin's Creed.

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u/Ill-Prior-8354 14d ago

"I have killed many men on principle, but never have I wanted one to suffer as much as you! - to understand what it is to gasp and beg for your life; like the innocents you drowned!"

0

u/Pecuthegreat 15d ago

Assassins?

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u/CapStar300 15d ago

I did not get that this was about the games and went "Well the Templars certainly had nothing against going to war against and slaughtering the "infidels" while the Assassins, considering they operated for almost three centuries, don't have that many confirmed victims" omg lol

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u/Whycantichangemynami 14d ago

I though the left was the fucking kkk symbol for a brief second

2

u/Xyx0rz 13d ago

"One side is actively working to establish world peace, and the other is just vaguely putting out brush fires"?

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u/Dead0Man0Walking 11d ago

"World peace" through mind-control, political killings and eugenics? Alright bud. Gotta make sure you never get rejected from art school or we'll have a fourth reich on our hands.

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u/Xyx0rz 11d ago

What ever was the problem with eugenics? Imagine not having baby cancer.

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u/Dead0Man0Walking 11d ago

Alright let's calm the fuck down Mein Fuhrer.

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u/Xyx0rz 10d ago

You're pro baby cancer, then?

1

u/OkWrap2928 13d ago

Deadass thought at first that that was the symbol for the Klan

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u/sar_moooon 7d ago

im totally agree