Okay so I just wanted to write a friendly reply with my take about Jenny and Edward in this book, but it ended up being a lot longer than I thought. So sorry (not sorry):
My take is that I don't think a lot of what's told to us in Forsaken is hard fact. Which isn't the way most video game narratives work-- information is spoon-fed to you, you know things the main character doesn't, and you can safely assume it's all true and unbiased because you're the all-seeing god player. But I think the author of the book (Oliver Bowden, though that's a pseudonym) was really playing a lot with unreliable narration, especially with Haytham. It might not seem that deep because it's just a video game novel, but after rereading it as an adult there's a lot more going on in here than I picked up on 10+ years ago.
Haytham definitely has a biased perspective of Edward, and the world in general. He doesn't tell us the full truth of things because he doesn't even see it sometimes. We only get his version of the events, until Jenny comes along and completely contradicts everything he thought he knew. That creates a ton of cognitive dissonance for him, because to believe anything she says he would have to accept that his entire worldview is wrong and he was brainwashed-- which he can't do because he's Haytham, and he physically cannot handle the idea that he might be wrong about anything. That's not my opinion, that's literally who he is in the book.
He pretty much spends the rest of the 1757-1758 section gaslighting himself. He thinks about Jenny in increasingly belittling ways (she's old, she's ugly, she's a drunk, she's a damsel in distress, etc.) so it's easier for him to believe that she doesn't know what she's talking about and dismiss the deeper implications. Everything she tells him, he ends up convincing himself that he figured it out on his own and she had nothing to do with it. But Jenny sees through it and keeps calling him out on his bullshit, even if he never actually hears what she's saying.
Jenny is fantastic for that. I adore her for being the only person who can hold her own against Haytham and make him truly uncomfortable, because she's the only person who can actually contradict his version of the truth. She's just as shrewd and unforgiving as he is, and is definitely carrying decades of her own trauma after being trafficked.
But at the same time, it's also possible she also has her own unreliable narration going on. Her perspective is only other we get of Edward as a parent. She was also a child, and had plenty of reason to be critical of her father even before Haytham came along. So she's probably not an objective source either, even if her feelings about what Edward did are completely valid. I'd be eternally pissed at him too, if I was her.
We don't actually know what Edward was trying to do or why. Hearing from him directly would've been helpful, or even someone like Tessa, who understood him better as an adult. But in the book, we never get a real sense of what was going on with him. We only hear what Haytham and Jenny have to say, and neither of them had a very complete perspective of their father. What child does, honestly?
And just to gush for a minute, I just want to say that it's so hard to find female characters, especially in Assassin's Creed, and especially who show up for so short a time, that are as complex and imperfect as Jenny. In almost any media, women like this immediately framed as dislikable in some way, but she's not. She's so realistic and human, and I would kill to hear a conversation between her and Ratonhnhaké:ton. They're so similar, and would be a powerhouse together. Ugh <3
I feel like should probably also talk about the behind-the-scenes of this book, because it's good context, and also just fun trivia. So,
When authors are commissioned to do video game novels like this, they typically only get the game script (in this case AC3) and some other small bits of context to work with. None of it is completely finalized because the game itself is still in development, and they're not really updating the author about every little change that's made. There are a few parts in Forsaken where you can spot where devs tweaked a line or an idea in the actual game, probably after giving Bowden his material and sending him off. So it's not like he had perfect clarity.
Edward existed in name when this book was written, but not really as a full character. Black Flag would've been many years from release at the time and in a more unfinished state than AC3. Bowden definitely wouldn't have gotten an actual script for it. He was probably only told that Edward was a pirate, how the Kenway family tree was set up, and perhaps given a short character summary. Maybe Ubisoft was planning for Edward to be more of an asshole in the beginning and changed it later, I don't know. Edward in Forsaken is definitely vague and uncharacterized on purpose, and I don't really see his character here as fully canon because the canon didn't even exist yet. It might've been written differently if it did.
But just saying that it was a development plothole is boring. Unreliable narration is way more interesting, and it's definitely a major theme in book even outside of Edward.
I'd honestly like to see what Bowden would've done if he got to write Forsaken after both Black Flag and Rogue were released (if that's something he would even want to do, because who knows how much he personally cared about this project). I think most of the characters would be more or less the same-- Bowden's take on Haytham having a massive god complex was very good, and makes it so easy to understand him as a character. He was doomed from the start and I love that. Extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable to read that man's delusional thought process, the things Haytham notices or doesn't notice is borderline horrific at certain points. 10/10
But maybe a few lines would've been slightly different to better align with canon. Edward might've been less of a dickwad, and Shay might've been mentioned more. I would kill to know what Haytham actually thinks about Shay. It's such a mystery.
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