INFOPOST! The Pirate, the Newbie
Apr. 20th, 2014 03:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doesnotkneelOr, 'let's just post it before I spend another five hours tweaking it'...
He wore him two pistols,
then he wore him two more,
And two swords of such measure,
they dragged on the floor!
Two brace and two blades,
and one unearthly roar!
Oh, that'd be Edward Kenway!
Blackbeard can vouch him,
they drunk themselves blind!
He has a knife in his tongue,
and one in his mind!
And another one secret,
that no one can find!
Yes, that's our Edward Kenway!
When old King George told us 'Men, stow yer guns,
and give up the pirating life and be done!'
And Kenway said 'Boys, we've only began!'
Let's drink to Edward Kenway!
'The Ballad of Edward Kenway', the Dread Crew of Oddwood
Edward Kenway is the star of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which, confusingly, is the sixth entry in the main series and one of sixteen Assassin's Creed games overall. He's a pirate from the last stage of the Golden Age of Piracy, when the likes of Blackbeard and Mary Read roamed the seas in search of treasure.
Well, he will be a pirate, anyway. At the time of his arrival at Fandom, he'll be little more than a sixteen year old Welsh boy from Swansea with an accent, a freewheeling attitude, and the first seeds of an all-consuming ambition that'll come to define his adult life.
The Canon
But let's back up and give you a little primer on the Assassin's Creed series. Since at least the time of old Rome, there has been a secret war waged between two human factions: the Templar Order, which believes in order and security, and the Assassin Brotherhood, which believes in the rightful freedom of all men and defends it by assassinating would-be dictators and their ilk. Assassins relate to the eagle in a myriad of Oh So Symbolic ways, the Templars are more Illuminati types who relate to the Knights Templar.
In our time, the Templars are represented by the large multinational Abstergo. At the start of the series, Abstergo has developed a technology that allows people to go back through their genetic memory to find the experiences of their ancestors. Being an Evil Corporation Hellbent on Dominating Humanity, they decide to use this to their advantage by unearthing Assassin secrets, specifically ones pointing to a set of artifacts called the Pieces of Eden. Of course, in order to do so, they need people with Assassin ancestry.
Enter Desmond Miles, a college student slash bartender. Desmond has the bad luck of being the product of an abnormally large variety of Very Important Assassin bloodlines, which all converge in him. Funnily enough, the Templars find little problem in kidnapping Desmond and making him pour through various ancestral memories.
The tale of Desmond and his struggles against Abstergo and eventual exploration of his Assassin heritage form the grand framing device of the series for a time. But Desmond dies during the third game, fighting off a deadly solar flare by releasing a maybe not entirely benevolent member of a great previous civilization back into the world. Of course, this being AssCreed, it doesn't stop Abstergo from just ganking DNA from his corpse and digitizing all of his ancestral memories. Just roll with that.
By Black Flag, we're playing a nameless researcher picking through Desmond's digitized ancestral memories, ostensibly to create a 'virtual pirate experience' for Abstergo Entertainment. This nameless researcher winds up getting contacted by Assassins who want them to start hacking Abstergo computers for them. Naturally, this goes Terribly Wrong, and the researcher has to face off against a reincarnation of Black Bart and the First Civilization Goddess he worships. ... Yep.
Ignore all that, though. The real core of the games lies within those ancestral memories, the stories of Desmond's ancestors: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Ratonhnhaké:ton... and Ratonhnhaké:ton's grandfather, Edward Kenway.
Hallmarks of the Assassin's Creed series are parkour ('freerunning') and stealth, two aspects Edward will surely be training in while he's at Fandom. Story-wise, the games are famous for playing like history itself was trotted out to vomit all over them. Black Flag is no different in that sense - in his upcoming lifetime, Edward will encounter, among other things, Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Calico Jack, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the Spanish Treasure Fleet, Benjamin Hornigold, Stede Bonnet... well, you get the gist. (I think being present at major historical events and around major historical figures is some kind of Desmond Miles-ancestor curse. I mean, Ezio killed the Borgias, Ratonhnhaké:ton managed to be there for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, for god's sake...)
Gameplay is justified by the idea of 'synchronizing' with memories - anyone connected to the Animus has actual agency in the historical world within - they don't just get to see video of what their ancestor did - but they can only keep their link to the Animus if they stay within reasonable bounds of what that ancestor might have done. In practice, that means you don't die in these games, you just desynchronize. Your major goals are memory and sequence synchronization points (ie, the big thing the ancestor did) and your optional goals increase your synchronization percentage (they're minor things your ancestors did).
Which leads to some hilarity, at least on my part, when you realize that the ancestors did do all of those optional goals and thus Edward Kenway totally robbed a Templar Grand Master and several major Templars of everything in their pockets while they were rambling about world domination over a map of the West Indies together.
More specific hallmarks of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag are the naval combat (oh god, the amazing naval combat), the lovely sunny Caribbean setting, and making me bawl like a little girl at a video game for the first time since Mass Effect 3, courtesy of Edward's BFF Anne Bonny's rendition of The Parting Glass during the ending sequence of the game.
Waaaah.
The game has one major piece of DLC which can also be downloaded as a standalone, Assassin's Creed IV: Freedom Cry, which chronicles the life of Edward's former quartermaster/second-in-command, Adéwalé, and his battle against the slave trade.
Edward
An Eagle made a stoop and a Lamb; truss’d it, and took it cleverly away with her.
A mimical Daw, that saw this Exploit, would needs try the same Experiment upon a Ram:
But his claws were so shackled in the Fleece with lugging to get him up,
the Shepherd came in, and caught him, before he could clear himself;
he clipt his Wings, and carried him home to his Children to play withal.
They came gaping about him, and ask’d their Father what strange Bird that was?
Why, says he, he’ll tell you himself that he’s an Eagle;
but if you’ll take my word for’t; I know him to be a Daw.
Aesop's Fables
or
how Edward thinks of himself when his fear and despair are at their greatest
How does Edward fit into all of this? Well, he'll become the original patriarch of an important Assassin dynasty which helps determine the future of the North American Colonies, especially through the actions of Ratonhnhaké:ton, his half-Mohawk grandson (who takes on the alias Connor Kenway) and which will eventually join the bloodline of Ezio Auditore to produce Desmond Miles' father, William Miles. His son and grandson both speak very fondly of him.
Born in 1693 to a set of poor farmers who moved from Swansea to Bristol to improve their fortune, Edward's the first working-class protagonist the Assassin's Creed series has ever had. He's a Welshman with a heavy accent and a predisposition to getting into fights. At the time he's arriving to Fandom, he can't read, he can't do numbers, but he already knows he wants to grow up to become 'a Man of Quality'. A troublesome aim, considering that upward mobility isn't exactly a big thing in his time; it'll one day drive him to piracy in the only place he feels men can be equal and free.
In his universe, he's going to go down in history along the likes of Anne Bonny and Black Bart: a terrifying pirate who terrorized the Caribbean aboard his ship the Jackdaw (yep...) until he somehow vanished without a trace. (And popped up as a nobleman in England, but apparently nobody looked too closely into that...) Blackbeard himself says that he 'fights like the devil, dressed as a man', and Mary Read sees both great promise and great stupidity in him. His enemies, the Templars trying to put an end to piracy in the area, see him as a loose cannon, as likely to interrupt Assassin plans as their own.
Which is true, by the way. Edward does his own thing, pursues his own interests, and kneels for no man. No matter how noble or rich or righteous. Even as a young man, he's a troublemaker and a scoundrel who considers himself fully Welsh in spite of having one English parent and having moved to Bristol. He's charismatic and has an easy laugh, though he's sometimes prone to fits of temper or at least extreme determination. He makes friends easily - which is a tragedy for the friends in question. The lucky ones realize, with time, that he'll never put their needs before his and that his only grand pursuit is one to increase his own station in life.
The unlucky ones wind up very, very dead. Sometimes as a consequence of the get-rich-quick schemes Edward enjoys, sometimes because he's enabled their own reckless impulses to a stupid degree. Sometimes they're just in the way. And sometimes - but that's not likely in Fandom yet - because they happen to be standing with the wrong faction when Edward has some epiphany about who he really wants to be.
In the end, he'll learn that he does have principles. That he is a man who loves freedom and desires self-determination for all to be as they wish and rise or fall to whatever station they want. But for the time being, he's not there yet. Hell, it won't be until he meets and marries Caroline Scott, a woman from a more well-to-do family than his own, that the urge to run off to the Indies to get really rich and Prove Something really kick in. (Caroline and Edward's relationship, had it been a modern-day one, would be a long-distance one where the dude keeps promising he'll come back 'as soon as I earn us enough money' while sending the girl like fifteen mix tapes featuring versions of P!nk's 'Try' in envelopes with no return address, I swear to god.)
Doesn't mean it's not in there already, but it does lessen the chances of him running off to be a privateer under Benjamin Hornigold some. For now.
Unlike the other major Assassins of the series, Edward has no particular Assassin or Templar ancestry of his own, but he is related to the First Civilization (to whom humanity were handy slaves) which means he's got some nifty powers I'll talk about later. But yes: no noble Assassin background for Edward. He steals a turncoat Assassin's robes at the start of the game so he can impersonate the guy and net the money on the documents the guy was about to sell out to the Templars. The Assassins are very pissed off about this, but who's going to stop Edward? Nobody, that's what.
...Well, they would've killed him if Mary Read - an Assassin in this continuity, yay! - hadn't stopped them, but, y'know. They wind up spending a lot of time ineffectually yelling at him to take the damn outfit off he's embarrassing them god, at least until Edward finally declares his fealty to the Assassin cause near the end of the game.
Buuut that hasn't happened yet so moving on.
Edward's intensely clever and can pick up on a lot of skills by watching them in action or getting minimal instruction. This will one day make him a great helmsman and assassin; he'll also become a reasonably decent tactician. A good captain -- sometimes. His obsessive personality leads his crew to mutiny twice, both times because Edward endangers their lives beyond the point of sense in his quest to obtain an artifact called the Observatory. (It's a skull that gives you the superpower of becoming the NSA. It's, obviously, what Abstergo's hunting in rifling through Edward's memories.)
While he's fully aware of the evils and troubles surrounding classism, he's got a bad case of the liberal white boy about every other -ism, aka 'I'm against them but I don't see how it's my problem!!1' that'll last at least until near the end of his game. He gambles, he drinks, he makes merry, he... doesn't sleep around. Canonically he remains faithful to his estranged-and-separated wife, though he occasionally has women over in order to keep up appearances, since he believes pirates won't follow the kind of dude who'd be all nice and faithful to his wife. Not that he's married yet, but considering this and his aforementioned obsessive personality I really can't see him as more than a serial monogamist at best. Sorry, random tavern wenches!
Finally, he's tall, strapping, well-muscled, blonde, blue-eyed, a tattoo addict to be, and the first of my characters who canonically has an awesome singing voice. You'll be grateful come Once More With Feeling.
Powers
Okay! First off, Edward is a descendant of the First Civilization. (Oooh.) That means he has some First Civilization blood in him still, which makes him instinctively capable of accessing a wide range of senses normal humans need years upon years of training to figure out. If he concentrates, he can detect items or places that are relevant, spot hidden things and other secrets and determine which people are hostile to him or have the potential to become hostile to him very soon. He can also 'tag' people in his mind and track them, even through walls, and when concentrating he'll spot places to hide much more easily.
Does that make him a potential walking FH plot MacGuffin? Yep, at least to a point. But it helps if it's in his self-interest.
He's also got a weird knack for finding haystacks and piles of leaves to leap into from high altitude. Much like the other major Assassin ancestors, actually, so hell, maybe that's genetic.
Also, I'm not kidding about the games' insane focus on crazy parkour and I'm definitely going to be running with that in Fandom. Because, y'know, character from a canon in which most people think rooftops are a much more expedient form of travel than roads plus island that looks like Mont St. Michel... well.
While Edward won't be as every-finger-a-fishhook as he is in the game, he's definitely going to be climbing, crawling, and swinging his way across and onto buildings when he gets the chance. Just for the lulz. Adrenaline freak. Let this amazing Edward cosplayer show you what Fandomites will probably be seeing a lot of after the welcome picnic...
He wore him two pistols,
then he wore him two more,
And two swords of such measure,
they dragged on the floor!
Two brace and two blades,
and one unearthly roar!
Oh, that'd be Edward Kenway!
Blackbeard can vouch him,
they drunk themselves blind!
He has a knife in his tongue,
and one in his mind!
And another one secret,
that no one can find!
Yes, that's our Edward Kenway!
When old King George told us 'Men, stow yer guns,
and give up the pirating life and be done!'
And Kenway said 'Boys, we've only began!'
Let's drink to Edward Kenway!
'The Ballad of Edward Kenway', the Dread Crew of Oddwood
Edward Kenway is the star of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which, confusingly, is the sixth entry in the main series and one of sixteen Assassin's Creed games overall. He's a pirate from the last stage of the Golden Age of Piracy, when the likes of Blackbeard and Mary Read roamed the seas in search of treasure.
Well, he will be a pirate, anyway. At the time of his arrival at Fandom, he'll be little more than a sixteen year old Welsh boy from Swansea with an accent, a freewheeling attitude, and the first seeds of an all-consuming ambition that'll come to define his adult life.
But let's back up and give you a little primer on the Assassin's Creed series. Since at least the time of old Rome, there has been a secret war waged between two human factions: the Templar Order, which believes in order and security, and the Assassin Brotherhood, which believes in the rightful freedom of all men and defends it by assassinating would-be dictators and their ilk. Assassins relate to the eagle in a myriad of Oh So Symbolic ways, the Templars are more Illuminati types who relate to the Knights Templar.
In our time, the Templars are represented by the large multinational Abstergo. At the start of the series, Abstergo has developed a technology that allows people to go back through their genetic memory to find the experiences of their ancestors. Being an Evil Corporation Hellbent on Dominating Humanity, they decide to use this to their advantage by unearthing Assassin secrets, specifically ones pointing to a set of artifacts called the Pieces of Eden. Of course, in order to do so, they need people with Assassin ancestry.
Enter Desmond Miles, a college student slash bartender. Desmond has the bad luck of being the product of an abnormally large variety of Very Important Assassin bloodlines, which all converge in him. Funnily enough, the Templars find little problem in kidnapping Desmond and making him pour through various ancestral memories.
The tale of Desmond and his struggles against Abstergo and eventual exploration of his Assassin heritage form the grand framing device of the series for a time. But Desmond dies during the third game, fighting off a deadly solar flare by releasing a maybe not entirely benevolent member of a great previous civilization back into the world. Of course, this being AssCreed, it doesn't stop Abstergo from just ganking DNA from his corpse and digitizing all of his ancestral memories. Just roll with that.
By Black Flag, we're playing a nameless researcher picking through Desmond's digitized ancestral memories, ostensibly to create a 'virtual pirate experience' for Abstergo Entertainment. This nameless researcher winds up getting contacted by Assassins who want them to start hacking Abstergo computers for them. Naturally, this goes Terribly Wrong, and the researcher has to face off against a reincarnation of Black Bart and the First Civilization Goddess he worships. ... Yep.
Ignore all that, though. The real core of the games lies within those ancestral memories, the stories of Desmond's ancestors: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Ratonhnhaké:ton... and Ratonhnhaké:ton's grandfather, Edward Kenway.
Hallmarks of the Assassin's Creed series are parkour ('freerunning') and stealth, two aspects Edward will surely be training in while he's at Fandom. Story-wise, the games are famous for playing like history itself was trotted out to vomit all over them. Black Flag is no different in that sense - in his upcoming lifetime, Edward will encounter, among other things, Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Calico Jack, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the Spanish Treasure Fleet, Benjamin Hornigold, Stede Bonnet... well, you get the gist. (I think being present at major historical events and around major historical figures is some kind of Desmond Miles-ancestor curse. I mean, Ezio killed the Borgias, Ratonhnhaké:ton managed to be there for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, for god's sake...)
Gameplay is justified by the idea of 'synchronizing' with memories - anyone connected to the Animus has actual agency in the historical world within - they don't just get to see video of what their ancestor did - but they can only keep their link to the Animus if they stay within reasonable bounds of what that ancestor might have done. In practice, that means you don't die in these games, you just desynchronize. Your major goals are memory and sequence synchronization points (ie, the big thing the ancestor did) and your optional goals increase your synchronization percentage (they're minor things your ancestors did).
Which leads to some hilarity, at least on my part, when you realize that the ancestors did do all of those optional goals and thus Edward Kenway totally robbed a Templar Grand Master and several major Templars of everything in their pockets while they were rambling about world domination over a map of the West Indies together.
More specific hallmarks of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag are the naval combat (oh god, the amazing naval combat), the lovely sunny Caribbean setting, and making me bawl like a little girl at a video game for the first time since Mass Effect 3, courtesy of Edward's BFF Anne Bonny's rendition of The Parting Glass during the ending sequence of the game.
Waaaah.
The game has one major piece of DLC which can also be downloaded as a standalone, Assassin's Creed IV: Freedom Cry, which chronicles the life of Edward's former quartermaster/second-in-command, Adéwalé, and his battle against the slave trade.
A mimical Daw, that saw this Exploit, would needs try the same Experiment upon a Ram:
But his claws were so shackled in the Fleece with lugging to get him up,
the Shepherd came in, and caught him, before he could clear himself;
he clipt his Wings, and carried him home to his Children to play withal.
They came gaping about him, and ask’d their Father what strange Bird that was?
Why, says he, he’ll tell you himself that he’s an Eagle;
but if you’ll take my word for’t; I know him to be a Daw.
Aesop's Fables
or
how Edward thinks of himself when his fear and despair are at their greatest
How does Edward fit into all of this? Well, he'll become the original patriarch of an important Assassin dynasty which helps determine the future of the North American Colonies, especially through the actions of Ratonhnhaké:ton, his half-Mohawk grandson (who takes on the alias Connor Kenway) and which will eventually join the bloodline of Ezio Auditore to produce Desmond Miles' father, William Miles. His son and grandson both speak very fondly of him.
Born in 1693 to a set of poor farmers who moved from Swansea to Bristol to improve their fortune, Edward's the first working-class protagonist the Assassin's Creed series has ever had. He's a Welshman with a heavy accent and a predisposition to getting into fights. At the time he's arriving to Fandom, he can't read, he can't do numbers, but he already knows he wants to grow up to become 'a Man of Quality'. A troublesome aim, considering that upward mobility isn't exactly a big thing in his time; it'll one day drive him to piracy in the only place he feels men can be equal and free.
In his universe, he's going to go down in history along the likes of Anne Bonny and Black Bart: a terrifying pirate who terrorized the Caribbean aboard his ship the Jackdaw (yep...) until he somehow vanished without a trace. (And popped up as a nobleman in England, but apparently nobody looked too closely into that...) Blackbeard himself says that he 'fights like the devil, dressed as a man', and Mary Read sees both great promise and great stupidity in him. His enemies, the Templars trying to put an end to piracy in the area, see him as a loose cannon, as likely to interrupt Assassin plans as their own.
Which is true, by the way. Edward does his own thing, pursues his own interests, and kneels for no man. No matter how noble or rich or righteous. Even as a young man, he's a troublemaker and a scoundrel who considers himself fully Welsh in spite of having one English parent and having moved to Bristol. He's charismatic and has an easy laugh, though he's sometimes prone to fits of temper or at least extreme determination. He makes friends easily - which is a tragedy for the friends in question. The lucky ones realize, with time, that he'll never put their needs before his and that his only grand pursuit is one to increase his own station in life.
The unlucky ones wind up very, very dead. Sometimes as a consequence of the get-rich-quick schemes Edward enjoys, sometimes because he's enabled their own reckless impulses to a stupid degree. Sometimes they're just in the way. And sometimes - but that's not likely in Fandom yet - because they happen to be standing with the wrong faction when Edward has some epiphany about who he really wants to be.
In the end, he'll learn that he does have principles. That he is a man who loves freedom and desires self-determination for all to be as they wish and rise or fall to whatever station they want. But for the time being, he's not there yet. Hell, it won't be until he meets and marries Caroline Scott, a woman from a more well-to-do family than his own, that the urge to run off to the Indies to get really rich and Prove Something really kick in. (Caroline and Edward's relationship, had it been a modern-day one, would be a long-distance one where the dude keeps promising he'll come back 'as soon as I earn us enough money' while sending the girl like fifteen mix tapes featuring versions of P!nk's 'Try' in envelopes with no return address, I swear to god.)
Doesn't mean it's not in there already, but it does lessen the chances of him running off to be a privateer under Benjamin Hornigold some. For now.
Unlike the other major Assassins of the series, Edward has no particular Assassin or Templar ancestry of his own, but he is related to the First Civilization (to whom humanity were handy slaves) which means he's got some nifty powers I'll talk about later. But yes: no noble Assassin background for Edward. He steals a turncoat Assassin's robes at the start of the game so he can impersonate the guy and net the money on the documents the guy was about to sell out to the Templars. The Assassins are very pissed off about this, but who's going to stop Edward? Nobody, that's what.
...Well, they would've killed him if Mary Read - an Assassin in this continuity, yay! - hadn't stopped them, but, y'know. They wind up spending a lot of time ineffectually yelling at him to take the damn outfit off he's embarrassing them god, at least until Edward finally declares his fealty to the Assassin cause near the end of the game.
Buuut that hasn't happened yet so moving on.
Edward's intensely clever and can pick up on a lot of skills by watching them in action or getting minimal instruction. This will one day make him a great helmsman and assassin; he'll also become a reasonably decent tactician. A good captain -- sometimes. His obsessive personality leads his crew to mutiny twice, both times because Edward endangers their lives beyond the point of sense in his quest to obtain an artifact called the Observatory. (It's a skull that gives you the superpower of becoming the NSA. It's, obviously, what Abstergo's hunting in rifling through Edward's memories.)
While he's fully aware of the evils and troubles surrounding classism, he's got a bad case of the liberal white boy about every other -ism, aka 'I'm against them but I don't see how it's my problem!!1' that'll last at least until near the end of his game. He gambles, he drinks, he makes merry, he... doesn't sleep around. Canonically he remains faithful to his estranged-and-separated wife, though he occasionally has women over in order to keep up appearances, since he believes pirates won't follow the kind of dude who'd be all nice and faithful to his wife. Not that he's married yet, but considering this and his aforementioned obsessive personality I really can't see him as more than a serial monogamist at best. Sorry, random tavern wenches!
Finally, he's tall, strapping, well-muscled, blonde, blue-eyed, a tattoo addict to be, and the first of my characters who canonically has an awesome singing voice. You'll be grateful come Once More With Feeling.
Okay! First off, Edward is a descendant of the First Civilization. (Oooh.) That means he has some First Civilization blood in him still, which makes him instinctively capable of accessing a wide range of senses normal humans need years upon years of training to figure out. If he concentrates, he can detect items or places that are relevant, spot hidden things and other secrets and determine which people are hostile to him or have the potential to become hostile to him very soon. He can also 'tag' people in his mind and track them, even through walls, and when concentrating he'll spot places to hide much more easily.
Does that make him a potential walking FH plot MacGuffin? Yep, at least to a point. But it helps if it's in his self-interest.
He's also got a weird knack for finding haystacks and piles of leaves to leap into from high altitude. Much like the other major Assassin ancestors, actually, so hell, maybe that's genetic.
Also, I'm not kidding about the games' insane focus on crazy parkour and I'm definitely going to be running with that in Fandom. Because, y'know, character from a canon in which most people think rooftops are a much more expedient form of travel than roads plus island that looks like Mont St. Michel... well.
While Edward won't be as every-finger-a-fishhook as he is in the game, he's definitely going to be climbing, crawling, and swinging his way across and onto buildings when he gets the chance. Just for the lulz. Adrenaline freak. Let this amazing Edward cosplayer show you what Fandomites will probably be seeing a lot of after the welcome picnic...
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Date: 2014-04-20 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-20 04:00 am (UTC)