Yeah, so why *isn’t* Charlotte Corday in the new Assassin’s Creed?

Charlotte-Corday-Paul-Jacques-Aime-Baudry-1860Look, I’ve never played any Assassin’s Creed games, and I’m not the first to say this, but how stupid do you have to be to make a French Revolution assassins game with no female character and then act like it’s because there weren’t any female assassins?

I also realize the games aren’t intended to be “historically accurate” by any stretch but there’s taking creative liberties with history to tell a story and then there’s just straight-up erasing history outside the context of the story, solely to justify bad decisions. And that would include making an outrageous claim like that.

Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination in 1793 by Charlotte Corday was a major trigger for the start of the Reign of Terror. I know I’m more in the French Revolution history than most — I believe I had a little copy of David’s The Death of Marat over my desk for about eight years for some unintentionally creepy reason — but Corday is, like, French Revolution 101. It had to have come up during the research for the game.

Moreover, French women in general played a huge role in the Revolutionary period, while radical women also played key roles. This reality has been repeatedly depicted in just about every other fictional or semi-historical version of the time period. Charles Dickens, way back in the Victorian Age when everyone was really giving women the short end of the stick, put a very important female character in a leadership role in his version of Revolutionary France in A Tale of Two Cities. So there’s really no excuse. Stop being lazy, Ubisoft.