So, I recently re-read Obsidian & Blood by Aliette de Bodard. It’s a historical fantasy murder mystery trilogy set in the days of the Aztec Triple Alliance. I don’t think it’s a series that’s going to challenge your understanding of the world in any meaningful way, but it’s fun and with a surprisingly deep world, built on tons of research and mythology. I’m very fond of the trilogy, in part because I love Nahuatl mythology and I take whatever bits of representation I can find.
[Disclaimer: the series is not written by an indigenous Mexican, nor by someone who is a scholar in the field. The author stressed repeatedly that despite the research she did, her books are not reference texts, as she took certain liberties, and she cites on her website and in the novels what sources she used for further research.]
I thought about something, though. The culture of Obsidian & Blood is an imperial power, one that practices brutal colonialism, human sacrifice, and slavery. No one in the story apologizes for it; almost no one sees it as a bad thing, except for a couple of people who are victims to that imperial power. The narrative doesn’t do much to frame this as a bad thing.
Why did this not bother me much in these books, and I have a whole thing on why it bothers me in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla?Hm.
Let’s start with this: Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is a game, an interactive medium of storytelling, while Obsidian & Blood is a book series. One has you taking an active role to push the story forward. So it’s more frustrating that in order to move the story forward, you have to not only witness, but take part in, colonialism and pillaging to experience what the story has to say. There’s a difference between reading or watching something taking place, and a game telling you, “Raid this monastery to get supplies to build your village,” or “Burn this village, because the locals have been helping resist our efforts to conquer their land.”
Yes, this is an actual mission in the game.
More frustratingly, though, is how the game frames these actions. As put by Brett Devereaux, in comparing the game with another, Expeditions: Viking:
It even presents you with a choice in the end of focusing more on integration with your neighbors in England or taking a more violent path, as opposed to Valhalla, which pretends that those two routes are effectively the same – that you can improve and integrate with this society by conquering them.
The game repeatedly tries to have the Norse protagonists depicted as, aside from a few exceptions, generally wise, gracious, and generous folk who have nothing against the people around them. They’re completely tolerant of different cultures and religions! If only those pesky English would stop bothering them. Except the reason the Norse characters arrived in England was conquest, and one of the first things they do is burn a monastery and use its spoils to help build their town. But never mind that! Many of the story moments that involve negotiations have the Norse explaining that they only came invading because they want to live peacefully, and the English need to stop being so prejudiced against people not of their religion or nationality. If only they let the Norse and their puppets rule, there’d be peace.
Late in the game’s release cycle, they added a free DLC story in which your character finds that someone has been dressing in your clan’s colors and raiding around England, framing them for pillaging the local settlements. Eivor has to go find the real perpetrators and eliminate them to clear the Raven Clan’s name. Except this is a thing you’re already doing, and there’s no indication as to why this act is a stain on their honor. They’re doing the same thing, but it’s bad raiding because the Bad Guys are doing it.
Obsidian & Blood makes no such pretensions in the morality of its protagonist. The viewpoint characters are enthusiastic about sacrifice and war, but the text does not try to tell you it’s a good thing in modern terms. It does not frame Tenochtitlan as a multicultural society accepting of outsiders–it’s not. Foreigners are viewed with suspicion or disdain. There are no assurances to the audience that the culture’s faults are actually good, like that they only do violence to those that deserve it or are dishonorable. Nope, to them, honoring the gods means a good blood sacrifice, and if people don’t like that, they’re subverting the will of the gods. The books don’t try to draw parallels to modern day issues like immigration or intolerance, because these are things that the people of the Mexica at this time would not comprehend in the way that we talk about them today. That’s not saying that they were primitive or backwards, only that it’s a culture completely different from our own, with different concerns.
There’s a scene in Master of the House of Darts in which our lead, Acatl, meets a merchant who absolutely despises the gods and refuses to worship them. Acatl is both horrified and flummoxed by this: even if you don’t like the gods, he reasons, that doesn’t change their status in the order of the world, and you must worship them and recognize their power. That this merchant he’s talking to lost quite a lot when his city was sacked, and that he saw one of the gods laughing at it, doesn’t mean much to Acatl. The gods must be honored.
The biggest issue in this comparison, though, is the modern perspective. One of the defenses I’ve seen for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is that, “This is the Norse invasion from their perspective. Of course it’s sympathetic to their point of view!” Except it’s kind of not; the framing device of almost every Assassin’s Creed is modern characters reliving people’s memories in history through a machine called an Animus. And it’s incredibly noticeable that absolutely no one in the modern day framing story of the game has anything to say about living through the memories of someone trying to conquer and colonize another country by burning their holy places, raiding their settlements, and slaughtering their leaders. The modern characters are apparently completely fine with this; worrying when you consider in-universe problems like the Bleeding Effect, where people using an Animus have trouble distinguishing the thoughts and memories of people they’ve lived as in the machine and their own.
Obsidian & Blood does not have that in it. There is no flash-forward to modern day. There is no framing device that has modern characters looking back. The story is entirely in the past in the Mexica Empire1. And that works better for the story, because a modern character would not get beyond a lot of the things that happen as part of everyday life. Some of the readers can’t get past the stuff that happens in the books. There are a surprising number of Goodreads reviews by users who are shocked by the amount of human and animal sacrifices in the story, even when the author admitted she toned it down from what would realistically be going on. Even toned down, it’s still there because it has to be–removing it all from the story would be dishonest.
You’ve heard the expression, “Warts and all”? Obsidian & Blood is like… “Warts and all, but the warts are a smaller. They’re still there, but they’re smaller.” Whereas Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in its approach to Norse society and conquest is, “Warts? What warts? Oh, that’s just a few bad actors–other than that, there are no warts!”
Maybe I’m overreacting, but I think this is a dangerous thing to do with a real-life society, especially with societies that are outwardly built on conquest and colonialism. We have way too many people in the world today who look up to historical societies as models of how the world should be, when those cultures acted in ways that are monstrous to others. Like, yeah, sure we can admire things like Norse or Aztec mythology, or art, or literature. And we can find interest in these cultures. But if we paint them as being flawless paragons of morality as a contrast to our modern world, then we run into lots of problems. We don’t grow as people if we don’t recognize the faults of people in the past. Understand those cultures in context, of course, and comprehend that they don’t have a modern mindset; still, understand that it’s a different culture.
That’s what Aliette de Bodard set out to do with Obsidian & Blood. Instead of saying, “These are just like the people of today! You could hang out with them, no problem!” she said, “No, this is a different culture, with wildly different customs; now let me show you how.” She probably figures that you can see the differences in morality from our society by yourself, without highlighting, nor does she feel the need to scrub them away completely and paint an idealized picture of the past.
And in most cases, I think that’s what historical fiction should be doing.
1 Although the series using actual historical figures makes the reader raise the weird question of how this world even works. We’re told, and we SEE in the books, that the world works according to Aztec mythology. There needs to be a Reverend Speaker (read: Emperor) to maintain the power of their patron god and prevent the world from being invaded by star demons. How this works when we know a hundred years from the events of this book there won’t be one, or any of the other rituals necessary to keep the world from being invaded by monsters and ghosts, is never really explained.
Brooklyn on 1 February 2024, 23:21 said:
Good points. There’s another point to be had (from a random white girl) that sometimes Native cultures are treated as living in some great utopia where nothing bad EVER happens and everyone gets along great. But the Mexica happily sacrificed people, and part of the reason (aside from smallpox and horses and guns; the Mexica pretty much had numbers going for them) Cortes could succeed was because other tribes decided to take the weirdo with weird animals over the human sacrificers. I’m not sure which was better, but neither was good. It’s not like killing someone is any less bad if they’re from the same area.
Also, video games are usually told in second or third person, which allows for a separate narrator who can say something about what you’re doing, but Obsidean, it sounds like, has no one who could do the caling-out.
Juracan on 9 March 2024, 21:38 said:
Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer this!
Yeah, one of the many issues I had with Castlevania: Nocturne is that the indigenous character, himself meant to be Mexica, talks about the Spanish Conquest of Mexico as if the idea of people killing in the name of religion was a foreign concept to him? Like, my dude, the Mexica Empire was ALL ABOUT that going to war to capture prisoners to sacrifice thing. Relatively few pieces of fiction actually want to grapple with the fact that the Aztec Triple Alliance fell in part because all of their neighbors hated their guts.
Heck, you’re lucky if you find people who remember that indigenous people who weren’t the Mexica existed in Mexico before the Conquest.
I have a lot of Opinions on Cortes, too, but that would take much too long and veer too far off topic, I think.
Right! One of the fascinating things about Obsidian & Blood is that so much of this is just… normal to the characters in it. The protagonist actually feels bad about not having enough prisoners to sacrifice after the coronation war. It’s not even questioned.
Whereas Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla explicitly has characters in modern day reliving/monitoring the events of the historical sections, and none of them comment on the colonialism, pillaging, or conquest depicted in the events of the story. Apparently living through these memories are just… fine, I guess.
Brooklyn on 14 March 2024, 22:05 said:
“Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer this!”
I’m not known for being on time, so I have no ground. Also, and I think I said this earlier, you don’t seem to be getting paid for any of this. I can’t really complain someone wasn’t being super prompt in replying to a comment on a site they happen to write for for free. That’s absurd (which I somehow typed as abaurs).
“The indigenous character, himself meant to be Mexica, talks about the Spanish conquest of Mexico as if people killing in the nam of religion was a foreign concept to him”
No, this actually could make some sense. From his perspective, they had a reason to kill people. It wasn’t killing people in the name of what he would consider a pretend god. It wasn’tnecessary killing, just killing.
“Relatively few pieces of fiction actually want to grapple with the fact that the Aztec Triple Alliance fell in part because all of their neighbors hated their guts.”
What do they think the neighbors did? Cheer as they were killed?
“You’re lucky if you find people who remember that Indigenous people who weren’t the Mexica existed in Mexico before the Conquest.”
Huh, I generally see the Maya and Aztec lumped together when being taught, and I see no reason why one should be remembered more.
“veer too far off topic”
No such thing. I hope, because I do that a lot.
Also, I really want to stay away from the societies in both. Especially the “modern” part of Assassin’s Creed.