Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla has a massive problem with its story, and what’s worse it kind of refuses to address it. I really like the mythology parts of the story, and the additions to the ongoing lore of the history of Assassins and Templars. But the historical story that makes up the main part of the game’s narrative is… I mean it’s about colonialism. And it doesn’t seem to know it?
I have been a BUSY BEE this Labor Day weekend because here’s a new Impish article.
Part two! Characters. Hopefully, I'll have the last part out before the week's up.
CHARACTERS
Atticus
Unsurprisingly, Atticus is still a garbage man. As I explained in the Plot section, he really has little reason to be invested in the story. You would think if he really was a guy who spent thousands of years traveling from place to place, avoiding attention, he’d be more willing to pack up and move, but that requires more effort on his/Hearne’s part, so we can’t have that.
This book has Hearne try a little harder to make us think he’s sympathetic, but those attempts all fall flat. When Atticus finds out that Perry the Goth has died, he seems very upset, to the point that he briefly drops his cover as a stupid stoner in front of a detective; but we’ve never seen them as being particularly close to each other, he hardly ever spared a thought towards Perry when the man was alive, and we only have a basic idea of his personality: he was a cheerful Goth, a nerd who likes Monty Python, and he is apparently easily distracted by attractive women (that last trait is only mentioned after he died)
Speaking of which, and getting back to Atticus: the man remains a massive pervert. There’s a scene in which he’s putting a protective amulet on Granuaile’s neck and he keeps getting distracted by her collarbone of all things, and has to work to try to keep his mind off of sex. The man is apparently thousands of years old, and yet seeing bare skin on a woman’s collar, with nothing else–that is enough to make him aroused and distracted. No one is saying or doing anything sexual in that scene, but the millenia-old man is just so turned on by the barest of skin. I know that Granuaile is the Love Interest, but we can’t chalk this up to, “He’s so in love with her, he gets turned on by every little thing”, because their relationship is nowhere near that developed yet. At this point, I can’t imagine his attachment to her is particularly deep.
I once again want to emphasize that this man does not care about anyone but himself. Atticus seems shocked that the leader of the local werewolf pack doesn’t want anything to do with him when he got a couple of the werewolves killed in the last book. He doesn’t actually care about people in or around his town getting killed by supernatural beings if it doesn’t affect him–he has to be threatened into killing the demon that’s been munching on teenagers at a local school.
And he’s still dumb–really, really dumb. Atticus acts like he’s manipulated whenever someone makes him do something. He constantly makes half-baked plans, or forgets that his cut-through-anything sword can cut through anything. He blows his cover in front of the police repeatedly, because he loses his temper over something or another. And yet throughout, we’re constantly meant to think that Atticus is the peak of human brilliance, because he knows all of Shakespeare’s plays by heart.
So instead of having Atticus actually do clever or sympathetic things on the page, Hearne just has other characters tell us how brilliant he is, have him be immune to everyone else’s magic, or just tell the audience about cool things he did in the past. For instance, in explaining his backstory with the Nazi witches, he tells everyone that he met them while escorting Jewish refugees away from the Nazis, which he was much better at than anyone else doing it, and he did it because his conscience didn’t let him sit out this conflict–despite apparently never caring about or interfering in the pogroms against Jewish people during any other part of history, or heck, any other historical atrocity or genocide.
I’m sorry, but while I’m glad your protagonist didn’t sympathize with the Nazis, writing your protagonist to be the BEST, MOST AMAZING and TALENTED of the Righteous Among Nations feels really tacky.
One of the most frustrating things that proves how little he cares about anyone but himself is that at the end of the last book, Aenghus Og blighted a spot of land by summoning demons, and Atticus declares it his sacred duty as a Druid to heal that land. Except he doesn’t–and it clearly doesn’t bother him at all throughout the book. He doesn’t do anything about it until the epilogue. He mentions it a fair number of times, but he has no explanation as to why he hasn’t fixed it other than vague notions that he hasn’t gotten around to it. If this really was his sacred duty, wouldn’t it be more of a priority than things like hiring a new person for his store, or buying a harem of poodles for his dog?
Speaking of his dog…
Oberon
Oberon remains a stupid dog.
He has the same role as the last book: a stupid dog to make stupid quips that aren’t funny, often padding out scenes with “jokes” that throw off the momentum of dialogue and scenes. In the last book, he actually had some involvement in the Plot; here, he’s just there. He doesn’t do anything. He exists to have Hearne insert the dialogue that he wish he could say in those scenes, but can’t think of anyone else saying because it wouldn’t make sense.
Granuaile
Granuaile (or “Granny/Grannie” as I like to call her) is Atticus’s apprentice Druid. In the previous book, she was the host for the ghost of Laksha, an Indian witch. That doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not–she only really does anything towards the end, where she says she wants to be a Druid, and Laksha goes and finds a new body. In this book, Granuaile acts as Atticus’s alibi for the most part–Atticus can say he was with his girlfriend, and Granuaile will cover for him if she’s questioned by the police.
Occasionally, she acts as a sounding board for Atticus to explain things to. Which isn’t bad in theory, I suppose, but it leads to moments like Granny suggesting that the maenads can be reasoned with because “they make love, not war”, when she’s supposed to be an intelligent, well-educated person. This just makes her come across as very stupid, thinking that if they leave the insane drunken nymphs alone, they’ll just mind their own business?
And so Granuaile exists to be ogled at and have things explained to her, as well as provide an alibi for Atticus. That’s not a great recipe for a character.
Malina
As in the first book, the problem with Malina is that she’s supposed to come across as a character that we don’t know if we can trust, but in reality for the most part she doesn’t act in any way that comes across as suspicious. So the entire story has Atticus telling us that he doesn’t know if he can trust her (while trusting her anyway, because he’s an idiot), and talking as if she’s going to betray him at the drop of a hat, when she does nothing the audience finds unreasonable.
Like, okay, there’s the fact that her apartment automatically takes hair samples from anyone who enters–which is pretty sketchy even if you’re not a witch, but Atticus doesn’t care because his magic blocks it from happening to him. And keep in mind that this is a world in which Nazi witches exist, so that she has some precautions to protect herself doesn’t seem so bad in context.
A character who is nothing but helpful to Atticus, and yet we’re meant to find her unsavory and sketch because… reasons. Go figure.
Coyote
So Coyote was mentioned in the previous novel as basically the only god in the American southwest (which is stupid, but that’s what Hearne wrote). Here he actually appears as a character, in which he has an overdone accent, and threatens Atticus into killing a demon. We’re supposed to think he’s a clever trickster who ‘manipulates’ Atticus, while ultimately being benevolent, but it doesn’t really add up. The only thing he lies about is why he wants Atticus to kill the demon: he tells him that the demon is eating kids from his tribe (the Navajo), when in reality he only realizes that it’s a matter of time before the demon does that, and so he wants to stop it now.
Both Coyote and Atticus act like this is trickery somehow.
I don’t get it.
I strongly suspect that this subplot is meant to set up something later on, though I haven’t the slightest idea what.
Leif
Yes, Atticus’s literal bloodsucking lawyer is more prominent in this one. He’s got a major grudge against Thor, which will be explained in the next book, and basically cuts off his friendship with Atticus until he agrees to help him kill the Norse thunder god. We’re supposed to think of him as incredibly old-fashioned and out-of-touch with the modern world, but considering that Hearne seems so disconnected from how actual people act, it doesn’t really work.
Also, he apparently hates Thor so much that he sometimes kills carpenters for using hammers, as explained in the last book. Somehow, we’re supposed to overlook this.
He’s also horribly overpowered–nothing really threatens him, not even hellfire–yeah, it can burn him, but evidently not anymore than normal fire does?
The Widow McDonagh
I still call her the Leprechaun because of her stupid accent. She’s not in this book that much, except to give stupid jokes and for Atticus to save her from evil witches. She still openly lusts after Atticus, and rather inconsistently, other characters can’t decide if it’s funny or gross.
I hate this character.
Laksha
The Indian witch who used to be in Granny’s head! Now she has another body. Atticus acts like she’s super sketchy, as he does with all witches, but she’s willing to fly across the country to talk to Atticus, and decide whether or not she wants to help him with the maenad problem. Laksha actually feels like a character, unlike most of the others, in that she has her own motivations that make sense. She also is another character who manages to sort of “get one over” on Atticus, but that’s only because he (predictably) did not think about the implications of his specific terms for her helping him.
I suppose I also like that she’s competent–when Atticus is getting overwhelmed by lust in the maenad’s presence, Laksha calls him out on it and makes him wait outside while she deals with the problem.
What’s weird is that we’re definitely supposed to view her as someone lesser than Atticus: she follows her terms to the letter, which is what you’d expect from a witch that Atticus tells us repeatedly not to trust, but he still acts offended when it happens and he has to finish cleaning up the mess. When she makes a crude joke and laughs about it, Atticus acts stony-faced, as if this was an inappropriate time–which is downright weird because he cracks those sorts of jokes all the time.
In short, she’s fine as a character, but it’s obvious that Hearne doesn’t like her, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she turns out to be omnicidal down the line somewhere.
Perry the Goth
Lo, poor Perry. The guy never had much character, but in this book he is murdered by the evil witches in this book. It’s meant to be a sad moment when Atticus finds out and mourns for him, though Atticus never seemed particularly attached to him before this point, and we still don’t know much about him other than that he was cheerful, friendly, evidently easily distracted by beautiful women, and a Goth.
Why Hearne thought ‘Goth’, the subculture, was supposed to be capitalized, I don’t know? So on the sporking, we all imagine him as one of the Goths, the Germanic folk who pillaged Rome. Which makes his scenes much more fun to picture. But woe is we, for he shall no longer grace this story with his pillaging ways.
Goodbye, Perry. You will be missed.
The Nazi Witches
Or, as they’re officially called: “Die Tochter des dritten Hauses”.
The good coven explains that they’re not *technically* Nazis, they’re just a German coven of witches that manipulated Nazi Germany to their own ends and have a fanatical hatred of Jewish wizards, but, uh… I feel like that’s splitting hairs, so I’m calling them Nazis. They’re Nazis.
Now it’s not that I want the Nazi witches to have complex character development–Nazis are bastards, that’s kind of all you need in terms of characterization for them. But they come right the fudge out of nowhere to be antagonists in this book. They do have a longstanding enmity with the good coven in Tempe, sure, but why they think coming to Tempe and killing the people there will do anything for them? Why do supernatural factions want this territory?
Also, I kept changing the German name throughout the sporking, and no one mentioned that in the comments, which is a bit disappointing.
Morrigan
Atticus’s vicious patron in the Irish pantheon graduates to a rapist in this book! She heals Atticus’s ear by raping him. Which, narratively, isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it’s not treated as rape, it’s treated as, “Well, it’s rough, uncomfortable sex, I’ll get over it”, despite him saying he doesn’t want to, he just can’t say ‘no’ to the Morrigan. If the narrative actually acted like it was rape, or even that Atticus was in denial about it, I wouldn’t like it, though I’d understand what we’re going for. As it is, it feels like Hearne just didn’t realize that it was rape, because it was a woman doing it to a man.
This whole thing also doesn’t make much sense–as someone pointed out in the context, the Morrigan isn’t a healing goddess, and being with her is more a rite of kingship than of healing? In mythology, I believe Dagda, the king of the Irish gods, had a thing with her? It’s just an odd sequence, and I strongly suspect that it’s Hearne’s attempt to copy a similar scene from American Gods in which Shadow has rough, questionably consenting dream sex with the Egyptian goddess Bast, and wakes up healed.
Unlike the previous book, in which Morrigan repeatedly appears to help fix Atticus’s problems, here she’s only in one sequence, really.
Brighid
The queen of the Irish gods also has one notable scene here–and it’s to demand Atticus marry her. When Atticus doesn’t, and he realizes that he’s been with Morrigan, she tries to burninate him. Luckily, Atticus is able to get around her attack, immobilize her, and then lecture her about how she’s being entitled and selfish.
Atticus does this to the queen of a pantheon. Supposedly the one he worships, but that feels impossible.
Also, the reason Atticus turns her down is because “he’s just so interested in the mortal world,” which is a BS explanation considering what he does with his immortality: hang out in a college town and live a boring routine.
Mr. Semerdjian
Mr. Semerdjian is Atticus’s nosy, elderly, Lebanese neighbor, who he’s always screwing with because the man doesn’t like Atticus, so I say he has good taste. Because Reasons (a demon fighting a giant cactus, the coolest thing to happen in the book), early on it’s revealed that he has an RPG in his garage? Later in the book the “heroes” raid his supplies and find out that he has a ton of military-grade weapons. Why, you may ask? Well, because he sells weapons to gangsters going across the border with Mexico!
I’m not kidding.
It’s just a bizarre character trait for the man who was previously established to hate Atticus because he suspected he was an illegal immigrant? And it felt like a weird anti-immigrant screed. It’s more transparently a method to give our heroes some guns for the final confrontation with the Nazi witches.
Russian Rabbi Fanatic Guy
Fudge, I don’t even remember this guy’s name. He’s a religious zealot douchebag that Atticus hates because he hates Atticus and witches and all supernatural creatures, declaring them abominations. Which is a really weird direction to take the one explicitly Jewish character in the canon? As far as I know, the “fanatical witch hunter” stereotype is generally Christian, and this doesn’t conform to any antisemitic stereotypes, so credit for that, I guess? But it’s still just bizarre, especially as he has a Catholic priest companion that’s depicted as the voice of reason, before he disappears entirely.
Also, his beard can strangle people??
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So as you can tell--not a great cast of characters, eh? But how do the worldbuilding and themes hold up? We'll look at those in the final part.
WOOOOOOO! We are DONE with Hexed, it’s over! I am sorry that it took so long, but also not too sorry because it wasn’t my fault the site went down. Like with Hounded, we’re going to take a look at the elements of the book, why I don’t think it works, and dip into what we can look forward to if this sporking lasts long enough for me to spork the next book, Hammered.
PLOT
Alright, the story wanders around a lot, so it might be difficult to track, but the actual Plot of Hexed is this:
Some witches come to Tempe and try to kill Atticus. He and his witch allies want to kill them first.
That’s it.
There are some weird complications, such as his side quest to go kill a demon, the maenads in Scottsdale, but those aren’t the actual Main Plot; those exist to set up things that will be relevant in later books. The main storyline of this book is so weirdly done, it’s easy to forget that it’s there, and so it’s especially jarring when Atticus awkwardly declares to the reader that he’s encountered this coven of witches before during World War II, in an incident we’ve never been told about in any capacity until a few chapters after this realization.
It’s horribly put together! The entire Plot occurs because a random thing happens to Atticus, and he just reacts to it. Once again, he rarely goes out of his way to do anything unless someone makes him, until we get to the end because Hearne wanted there to be a big battle with the witches as a climax. And it’s super weird that basically right before the final battle, when things should be ramping up, the momentum halts so that we can get a lengthy explanation as to how Atticus knows the evil witches.
And I should probably point out that these witches can’t even really kill him. Even if we move past how in the second chapter of the previous book, Atticus becomes essentially immune to death, in every confrontation with them, he always has the upper hand. His magic amulet blocks most of their hexes; if Atticus skipped town, he’d be fine. It’s not that he is so attached to Tempe that he feels he must protect the place from the witches, it’s that he can’t be bothered to move.
Once again, Atticus is not fighting because he wants or needs something, it’s because he gets inconvenienced enough to go fight evil.
Yeah, that makes a great Plot. Not urgency, but convenience.
I said for the first book, Hounded, that the way to fix things would have been to make it into something like an urban fantasy take on John Wick. This one? Fudge, I don’t know. If Hearne absolutely had to make it so that the evil coven of Nazi witches and Atticus had history, that should be established as early as you can possibly do so, not right before the final confrontation. Maybe make it so that the Nazi witches had been trying to find him since World War II, and only now picked up his trail because his killing Aenghus Og and Bres sent up flares in the supernatural community? And then they actually pose a threat to him somehow, so he has to deal with it.
But nope! Once again, it’s Atticus fighting to avoid any inconveniences.
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[Next part is characters. I wanted to do this all in one go, but the site isn't working with us, and I'm going to be busy, so I hoped to at least give you guys something to read.]
So I didn’t actually do any drafting but I read through the next couple of chapters, and it looks like Chapters 6&7 will be combined into one sporking entry because Chapter 6 is just... Atticus giving Oberon a bath and telling him about 60′s counterculture.
WHAT THE FUDGE IS THIS?!? Anything else? Are we going to learn that Leif was one of the raiders at Lindisfarne? That the bartender at the Irish pub had family in the Twin Towers? The Atlantic Slave Trade? The Armenian Genocide? The Tiananmen Square protests? All of these are sitting right there if Hearne wants to use them for cheap backstories.
