What?
I mean the idea that offends me about it is, like, couldn't a woman in that era like cut her hair short, drop her voice a few octaves, and pull a Mulan if she had to?
And if the entire idea is that she's supposed to be unseen and all stealthy, then why does gender matter anyway? She'll dress as a man or a woman to disguise herself according to the situation. And if she needs to kill a guy she can totally wing it as a prostitute / maid / nun / merchant / pose as a wife / pose as a daughter / etc. It's only a real problem when she's on a battlefield, and then she wears a uniform and pulls a Mulan.

It's not remotely impossible to write a woman as an assassin in that era if you dress her right, write her well and put a moment's worth of thought into it.
I will say this isn't overt sexism as much as it just laziness and a poor justification to stick with a male role because "most gamers are men" and some shit. It's still sexist in practice, but in a more institutional, patriarchal, subconscious the system is rigged sort of sense.

And there wouldn't be nearly as much controversy if they were just like "Yeah, we thought about writing a woman assassin and we knew we could do it well, but we ultimately decided to go in a different direction with Connor." There's no need to add the sexist "hurr durr writing a woman would be IMPOSSIBLE because womenz weren't strong then" bullshittery.

It's not even historically accurate! Some women were doing kickass stuff back then.
Like her.
Or her.
Or her.
Some of these women were like real life Assassins.
Here's your real life Revolutionary War Mulan.
Even Native American women!

God damn these women are awesome and it took me all of TWO SECONDS to look them up.

Maybe it's just because they already had the script written out and all the founding fathers were supposed to be absolutely friendly and supporting to the main character when somebody busts in and shouts "Wait! Because of a dissonance of moral values most founding fathers probably wouldn't have even taken a woman seriously as a combatant and it would probably piss our American audience off to have their folk hero founders berate and demean them!
ALSO BEN FRANKLIN WAS KIND OF A WOMANIZER SO WE'D NEED HIM TO HIT ON HER WHICH IS AWKWARD."

I mean I'd be all for it to be honest. Ever since I played Mass Effect I've tended to pick female characters anyway. But if your story involves interacting with the Founding Fathers you're in for trouble because they just had no idea about what equality and freedom actually meant.

Oh, shit. You know what would be interesting? If you played from the perspective of two characters, the assassin one female, with a partner or brother who was the "public" face of their team. You'd play missions to interact with the contacts and shit as him, and then he'd hand off all the information to his partner/sister who is actually the better assassin and fighter.

it would be a great setup for all sorts of shit where the a guard suspects you but then is smacked over the head by another guard who loudly proclaims the assassin they're looking for is a dude and they let you on your way.

...So it's somehow more believable that the Founding Fathers treat a Native American man with respect and hang out with him?
You know, those Native American guys who the Founding Fathers were totally like "Yeah they're not quite human we can totally take their land because they don't own none and lesser rules of civility apply to them or some shit."

You see, if the series is basically bending the rules of the era already by, you know, having Native Americans treated with that degree of respect, and having Assassins and Templars fight each other for world dominance, and having random artifacts bestow great power upon famous people, and having some no-name Italian single-handedly change the course of history, and having all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories be accurate, and having the world end in 2012, I don't think it's a huge stretch to say they can also write women in a slightly more progressive light than the period in question may have warranted.

I mean c'mon, do you think Ezio Auditore's Firenze sequences were actually authentic depictions of what life was like in that era? It's already utterly romanticized. Why accept some forms of romanticism and not others? Because some forms of escapist romanticism of past eras are "accepted" and others aren't?

Yeah this would be awesome.

Fuck wait I guess if they were brother and sister Desmond would only have one of their memories unless somewhere else down the line the family merges.
Or... you know, they really love each other.
I don't think America is ready for that though.



Whatever the case may be then you and your partner are wandering around the city having a day off, not even doing assassin shit and the guards show up and arrest him for being the Assassin and suddenly you realize that whats saved your life is about to doom him because no matter how the character pleads and tells them that she is the assassin and not him they just don't fucking buy it. So they kill him and let her go scott free ready to spend the latter half of the game enacting burning fucking revenge on all of them.

Which sets up a scene immediately afterward where she interacts with one of the founding fathers, who thinks that his friend and one of the best assassins he knows is dead and lashes out at the character for trying to be in a place she shouldn't and you'd get one of those quicktime prompts to slug him.

I would like to see a female Assassin, but she always uses a Bale Batman voice to help disguise her sex in public.

See the thing is after the first time they upped security so the guy who busted in to tell them why their story was dumb before didn't get the chance to do it again.

Not only that but imagine the stress and tension you can create by playing the guy in dangerous situations.

While his sister(acutally lets make that Wife so it works without the squik inducing thoughts) would be like Freerunning and fighting he would actually have to figure out ways around guards/templars other then being a monkey and staby staby time. Like manipulating the crowd, using gadgets and stuff, to get to contacts ETC.

You could generate alot of fear in those times where you're powerless and offer a nice way to both keep tension up and change up gameplay.

Fucking exactly what I was thinking.
This shit just writes itself.

Not only that but you can also cause more difficulty as the two are shoved into areas of the other's expertise! The husband is caught up in a big brawl (boston tea party? )and he is just trying to get out. while the wife has to move a crowd away from a explosive assassination before it goes bad.

My god it would be awesome!