Gender and Sexuality in Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Earlier this year I replayed Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015) live on stream with one particular question in mind: How bi is Jacob Frye?

I decided to do this for a lot of reasons, like just having the urge to play this game again. But this lens through which I wanted to look at the game came out the knowledge that people involved in its creation have explicitly said outside of it that Jacob is bi (I believe the first example of this being over TUMBLR). With the prevalence of bisexual-erasure in media and vague memories of Jacob’s sexuality not being quite as explained within the game itself, what will I see when I go in specifically looking for the evidence?

I went in with this notion, not to quantify his bi-ness (after all, if the lead writer of the game says it is true, why argue?), but to attempt to quantify the degree to which the game relays this fact to us.

As my new playthrough began, I started to notice more. How Jacob isn’t the only character within this game that falls into this same potentially ambiguously LGBTQ+ light. Though, even early on, potential issues started to appear…

But let’s jump in and start with the question that I went in trying to answer:

How Bi is Jacob Frye?

When talking about how evident it is that Jacob Frye is bi, a lot of the focus is going to be put into Sequence 8 and his relationship with Maxwell Roth.

For Jacob’s side of things, about half of the sequences (4-8) in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate boil down to Jacob finding a new contact who somehow aids him with information on how to destroy Starrick’s control of the city, one mission at a time. But these people are generally just mission-giver type NPCs who spend most of the missions existing more in cut scenes than during the gameplay itself. This isn’t the case for Roth.

Maxwell Roth goes on the missions with Jacob. He may not get into the combat and really fight with him, but he’s always coming into the carriage to journey to where the action will take place and just being chatty and excited over what they’re doing. While the actions taking place are theft, kidnapping, and murder, the tone of it all is that they’re going on dates. And by the time the third mission comes around and Roth says they’re getting in the carriage, Jacob’s smiling, he’s excited for his time with this man.

This third mission with Roth, “Fun and Games”, ends with essentially their breakup. Roth is more than fine with killing kids, and that’s a big no for Jacob. But even with them going their separate ways and Jacob needing to kill him in the next mission, we do get another hint toward their connection.

For completing “Fun and Games” the player is awarded brass knuckles named “Copper Love”. While there is very strong subtext of these missions being played like dates and their growing fondness for each other, this mission reward is one of only two times that even comes close to making their feelings explicit.

The fourth and final mission involving Roth is “Final Act”, the mission in which Jacob must assassinate him. After striking the killing blow, Jacob and Roth get a moment to chat, as the assassin’s always to after taking out their major targets. During this chat, Roth kisses Jacob. This fact taken in isolation could say a lot, but the context muddies these waters.

But let’s work through this cutscene one moment at a time.

Jacob is asking, pleading, with Roth for answers, “Why did you do it?”, referring to Roth’s attempt to burn children alive. Jacob’s face is pained, this is all personal for him. But how much of it is because he is upset for the children? And how much of it is feeling personally betrayed by this man he has feelings for?

Roth begins listing his crimes and how he chooses to “keep the world its divine, manic state”. He ends this by claiming it’s “for the same reason I do anything.” This is the moment, this is where he kisses Jacob, but Jacob pulls away with arguably a look of disgust. And Roth finishes this thought with, “Why not?”.

Is Jacob pulling away because he doesn’t want a man kissing him? Or is he pulling away because this man he has feelings for has betrayed him so deeply and is now dying by Jacob’s own blade? And from the Roth side of it, is he kissing Jacob because he has feelings for him, or just because of this reasoning he gives for everything else he does, just, “why not?”.

I think this cutscene, and all the context around the kiss, is built in such a way where a player can read into it whichever outcome they believe going into it.

The Assassin’s Den had a long interview with Jeffrey Yohalem (the lead writer on Assassin’s Creed Syndicate), and they talk about this moment. Yohalem says, “Maxwell is in love with Jacob, and Jacob may have reciprocated. The goal was to make that moment ambiguous.” While this reinforces my point on the context making it difficult to read one thing over the other, it’s actually what the host says next that I want to highlight.

“See, I didn’t really see it quite like that. Because of the lines that preceded it and follow it, you know, he’s talking about the same reason, like, I do anything else, […] sorry. I forget the exact line, and then he kisses him, and then he says, why not? And so, that almost, to me, indicates that the kiss is just like, some people have made comparisons of Maxwell Roth to the Joker.”

- Loomer

Yohalem goes on to explain that everything from the prior missions, to him, sets up that Roth’s feelings and the kiss are real, and only Jacob’s are in question. But even in this interview, we’re seeing how much the context of the moment really take away from its impact and calls it all into question.

With Roth being the only point in which Jacob appears to potentially be into a man, or anyone at all romantically, it’s worth getting into how this sequence is structured into the story. Unlike most sequences, which require you to play the all the sequences prior to it first, the missions for Sequence 8 are accessible as early as Sequence 4. The trigger to the start of this sequence is to conquer three boroughs around London, after having completed Sequence 3. Accessing these missions doesn’t even mean needing to play through it entirely before going back to Sequence 4, it remains active while other sequences are being played.

Because of the subtext of these missions creating a sense that they’re like dates, the idea that you can begin them much earlier in the game and play it over an extended period of time instead of all at once, can heavily affect how this relationship feels. Theoretically, depending on how the player does things, it could make it a slow burn romance through a decent chunk of the game rather than something that begins and ends within a less than two hours of play time.  

So, in the end, just like how Roth’s kiss can completely change depending on what the player’s mindset is going into it, their relationship as a whole can change depending on how the player structures their own time in the game.

This section has so far been devoted to looking at the one instance in the game in which it can be read into that Jacob has romantic interest in a man. But this whole topic is about him being bisexual, not gay, so, let’s get into the other side of this, which will be fast and far more concrete.

When the player reaches the World War I section of the game, they play as Lydia Frye. Within the game’s database entry on her, we learn that she is Jacob’s granddaughter. Are there gay men in real life who have had children, either through adoption or through sexual relations that happened for various reason outside of their preference? Yes. But in a case like this, with no other information given, or even relationship cited for whoever Jacob may have had a child with, the least complicated has to be assumed.

This fact of Lydia Frye as Jacob’s granddaughter has both a positive and negative aspect to any queer reading of Jacob as a character.

The positive here, is that Jacob being hinted at having a relationship with a woman, paired with the fact of him having a relationship with Roth through the sequence 8 missions, is showing him with both genders in a way that don’t overlap or play into the “greedy” stereotypes around bi people.

But then, the negative… We go back to the fact that Jacob and Roth’s relationship is entirely subtextual, and how the kiss is specifically done in such a way that whether you want it to be Jacob has feelings for Roth or doesn’t, you can see evidence there. Which means the fact that they are never explicit about anything in terms of Jacob and Roth, can have Lydia used as evidence of Jacob being straight.

This is a problem of bisexual erasure, where more definite evidence of a character in media being either straight or gay will be taken more seriously than subtext around them being attracted to multiple genders.

In the end, looking at Jacob as a bi character while only looking at the primary source of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate itself, there is enough that it is possible to see this fact, but not enough to say it is the only way to read the situation.

There is a legitimate argument to be made that the word “bisexual” did not exist in 1868 (when Assassin’s Creed Syndicate takes place). Or at least, not in the same way we know it today. “Bisexual” was first used in 1859 to describe someone in a way that is closer to what we would now say “intersex” for. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that bisexuality came to more commonly be used as a term for sexual interest in two or more genders (“A Short History of the Word ‘Bisexuality’”).

While this is an argument for Jacob not self identifying in dialogue specifically with the word “bisexual”, there are other ways this could have been done. For one thing, he could have just expressed verbal interest in multiple genders without using the exact word (not perfect, but it’s something). Or there is the game’s database system.

Diegetic to the game, this database is written by the characters Rebecca and Shaun in the present day. Because of this, not only do they have all our same vocabulary, but they also know at least all at least the major moments in Jacob’s entire history. While hiding the explicit reference in one of these entries would again not be perfect, at least it would put it in the primary source of the game itself.

And this subtext rather than explicit text situation with Jacob’s bisexuality, and Roth’s bisexuality/pansexuality/(???) continues deeper into the game than just these characters. So, let’s look at the rest of the Syndicate.

Queerness In the Syndicate

Before specific characters or details, I think it is at least worth looking at the mechanical and narrative conceit that is inherent to this game’s two protagonist system.

At any time during free roaming exploration, the player can choose between playing as either Jacob or Evie Frye. While side missions can be played as either a character as well, key story missions are assigned to one character or the other. By the very nature of this two-protagonist system and who these protagonists are, the player is in a position where the game has them swapping between male and female characters throughout the entirety of the game.

While not necessarily the strongest point on its own, I do think this fluidity in the gender of who the player controls is at least a topic worth acknowledging in this kind of reading. Whether or not you believe the gender of the player character is always connected to the player embodying that gender, the mechanical necessity of not consistently maintaining a single option is noteworthy.

Continuing along the lines of gender presentation, I want to talk about Agnes MacBean, the woman who keeps the Frye twins’ train running. If you go into the database, it says, “[Agnes] took her father’s place inside his locomotive. More unusually, however, and to speed the transition, she took on his identity, as well.” It goes on to say she spent two years in her father’s identity before being discovered a year ago.

I don’t think there is enough to make any definite claims about Agnes’s own identity here but given Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s interest in hinting at things without explicit terms being used, the final say may be up to the interpreter. It is written as though she may have done this for an entirely practical reason, so she might not attach any meaning or title to it herself (especially in the 1800s), but the concept of what she is doing feels very genderqueer as a concept (I’d say the same about Mulan’s story).

But we’re sticking with the allies and the concept of gender a little longer as we dive into Ned Wynert. And this is going to be the biggest example outside of Jacob and Roth that we can find within the game.

Ned is a trans character. That said, no variations of the word “trans” or “transexual” or any such identifier are ever used within the game itself, but it is described to a degree, and confirmed explicitly outside of the game (and mentioned in many press articles before the game’s release). Ned’s being trans is put in a very similar place to Jacob’s bisexuality. Only… maybe worse.

Let’s get into how Ned being trans is described…

In the database, it says that Ned used to go by Netta when playing the part of a “respectable little girl”. He used his female presenting identity during the day, but at night, “he was a boy and, disguised, found a home on the streets among petty thieves and darker influences.”  With this small bit I already want to stop and examine what is being said. First of all, connecting the identity of Ned to a “disguise” already feels bad. It’s implying “Ned” is the less real identity. And then, the idea that the trans character having their identity forged around “darker influences” is another rough one.

On one hand, the good guys in Assassin’s Creed are the assassins, thieves, mercenaries, sex workers, etc. The heroes Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in particular are building a gang to take control of London by force. So, while Ned is just fitting the Assassin’s Creed mold here, it feels like it is leaning into problematic stereotypes. It all becomes an entangled matter of what this game specifically says about these things versus the potentially harmful tropes, and where your personal thoughts have you land on all this, and honestly becomes more complex than the scope of this is going to be able to address.  

And honestly, the reason I am dwelling on this, is because it gets worse…

The end of the second paragraph in Ned’s entry talks about Ned abandoning the Netta identity. And the final sentence for this is, “Which seems a shame, because she sounded fun.” Honestly, if you have read this far into a post looking at a game from a queer lens, I don’t think I need to explain why this is bad. It’s such a nothing line too, there was no reason to add this in.

If not for the fact that secondary sources reveal the intention that Ned is trans, from this whole write up in the database, I honestly thought Ned was potentially genderfluid and taking on different identities depending on how they want to be perceived. And the concept of a genderfluid character who spends day in “polite society” as one identity and takes on the role of a jewel thief of the opposite gender at night, sounds badass. But even with this reading, that final line I mentioned just feels bad.

Let’s jump back to that interview with Yohalem one last time, because I think it helps explain with the implicit nature of Ned’s identity:

“But I actually think that the lack of focus on Ned is a good thing. You know? Because it’s not that, here’s this special character that should be made incredibly present in order to point out that the character exists. The point is that this is just a person in London at that time period and we’re not dwelling on the fact that Ned is transexual is significant. You know, it’s old fashioned to say because we’re going to have this kind of character, we have to make a storyline about that character’s difference.”

– Jeffrey Yohalem (Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate’s lead writer)

In a way, this mindset feels like it should be the end goal of representation. That seeing every kind of person should be so normal and reoccurring that they don’t need to be specifically called out and have spotlight put on them. But that said, we’re not there yet. And especially when you look at identities that aren’t obvious on the surface, if people can easily miss that they exist at all, can they full count as representation?

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate has some very obvious interest in gender, be it gender identity, gender presentation, or a non-gendered sexuality. But through everything it does to express this interest, it never goes far enough to make anything truly explicit and use terms that would properly define the characters outside of subtext.

I’ve brought up the interview with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s lead writer multiple times to reinforce that these character choices were intentional, both in what the subtext tells us, and the choice to be so ambiguous. But this might not really be the whole story.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room.   

The Ubisoft Problem

In a 2020 Bloomberg article, “Ubisoft Family Accused of Mishandling Sexual Misconduct Claims”, written by Jason Schreier, many horrible things come out about the way the video game developer runs internally, with emphasis on the sexist work environment and mentality toward the games.

Examples of how this has affected Assassin’s Creed games include: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate originally pitched with both twins having equal screen time, rather than focusing more on Jacob; In Assassin’s Creed Origins, Bayek was to be killed off early in the game and have Aya be the player’s character for the bulk of it (rather than only the couple missions in the final game); And Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was to have Kassandra as the only playable character rather than have Alexios as an option.

This all came out of a belief held by at least one higher up in the company that female protagonists don’t sell video games. One of the Ubisoft CCO’s, Serge Hascoët (who resigned soon after this article came out), is named in the article in connection to these decisions, but the marketing department comes into play as well.

This article was just the start, soon after it was published, more came out about the environment within Ubisoft.

And this is where I am going to move from discussing proven problems with the developer, to a realm of something closer to an educated guess. I will not have evidence for this next statement, so it should be taken with a grain of salt as to how it applies to Ubisoft in particular, but I think it is one worth day regardless:

A company culture so against having a lone female protagonist because they believe it will affect their sales, is more than likely going to have similar beliefs in terms of other representation.

The reason I bring this up, is because it complicates judgement on the queer representation in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, or at least, complicates where the blame should lie where it falls short. I think I have made a lot of points in here in which, I hope, I have shown that the game has a degree of interest in this kind of representation, but veers away before turning the subtext explicit. And with this workplace culture in mind, with the way the developer has affected gender representation even in this specific game, I think it at least needs to be taken into account.

Looking at this game through a queer lens, and wanting to find the most positive outlook available, I think it possible to read into this game a real attempt at queer representation within a developer that wants to minimize these attempts.

I can’t help but think of the ending of Legend of Korra, where the creators wanted Korra and Asami to be to romantically together in the end of the series, but this relationship is forced to live only in subtext. The show ends with them looking at each other, hand in hand, about to begin a journey together in the spirit world. Does it look romantic? Yes. Do they ever kiss or show any explicit romantic interest in each other? No…

In an article in Newsweek, co-creator Bryan Koneitzko speaks on the matter: "We approached the network [Nickelodeon] and while they were supportive there was a limit to how far we could go with it."

This is a case of creatives trying to their best to show queer representation in their works and only being able to go so far. And because of network restriction, Korra is another bisexual character who is never allowed to be explicitly said to be bi in the primary text of their story.  

Now is this exactly what happened with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate? I don’t think we can say for sure. The information we have is enough to say it is possible, but not enough to say it is definite. It’s also completely possible that the game is exactly what it set out to be in terms of LGBTQ+ inclusion. Because we don’t know exactly what may have happened internally in making the game, what may have been forced to change, the intention behind the game is just as muddied by context as the kiss between Maxwell Roth and Jacob Frye.

Of course, regardless of how this could have gone down, regardless of what may have been forced to change because of a toxic work environment, intentionality is only one way to look at a work. I think it is important context for this discussion, but in the end, the final result is what it is. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is the game that was released and not the ideal of what they may have wanted to make. How much these “what ifs” affect your view is up to you.

Conclusion

Where does all of this leave us? How bi is Jacob Frye? How queer is Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in general?

Unfortunately, the answer to both of these questions is: as much as you want to read into the game, while leaving room for plausible deniability for those who don’t.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is a game with clear intention and interest in gender and sexuality, but a complete refusal to ever make these things explicit. This may have been totally by design, or a forced decision due to the environment in which it was created.

There is arguable LGBTQ+ representation in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate when looking only at the primary source. Representation that is only concrete, only explicit, if we bring in interviews and writeups from secondary sources discussing the game.

When the game is created in such a way as to seemingly aim for ambiguity in these matters, what can we take away from it? One takeaway, outside of any personal interpretation or reading, is that this game is perfect example to point to when looking at the importance of explicit terms in representation.

With how much Assassin’s Creed Syndicate appears to be trying in terms of representation, I do love it. For me personally, everywhere it fumbles feels to me like real attempts that are foiled by either being products of their time (seven years is a shockingly big gap for this kind of thing), and potentially the result of Ubisoft itself fighting against being more inclusive.  

As much as I set out to answer a question, this is one area where personal interpretation is always going to supersede anything that could be said here.