So here I am, gathering references for my Desmond study, as one does, and I reach AC3. I brace myself for impact because I have the original un-mastered version, and I find the remaster flattens the models too much and kinda, plastifies them?? which makes figuring out dimensions hard. So I gotta deal with, a lot of lighting and rendering bullshit instead. Fun all around.
I start the game and get to screenshooting, and I notice Desmond has some drastic pale palms going on. Like, oddly so. I shrug it off for now, but then I notice that Bill Miles also has them. And, Shaun? Some more gameplay in and we reach Haytham and, he has the same stark pale palms situation going on. Ngl, I'm baffled.
Speaking of averages and my own observations, people with pale skin don't get that stark pale palms even when they tan. They get some faint distinction, but it's mostly from a tanning gradient, the undersides of your arms don't get as exposed to sunlight so less tan. Meanwhile people with naturally brown skin do have distinct pale palms that clashes even with their own tanning gradient.
Now, I know for a fact Haytham doesn't have enough melanin in him to have naturally brown skin, that's a white man. He might not burn in the sun but c'mon, this feels too stark. Not only that, but the skintone just, don't match? Their hands are too red undertoned while Haytham's and Desmond's faces are much less so.
So I decide to do some digging. Now, I have no know-how on how to rip assets in games and god forbid, translate them to something like Blender. But I do know that machinimas were big back in the day, and that includes a lot of AC character models being used for gifs and videos and such, so I delve into DA for some model refs. And indeed, I find them, and...
Yeah, that's not the same skintone. And after looking at some other screenshots online, even in game the skintone is very much not a match. So what's up with that?
It turns out that as far as I can tell, Ubi did about three skintones (pale, brown and dark) for each gender, by modifying a base skin texture's levels or smth, thus why the palms are so stark. They used the same skintone for the native npcs, Connor, Haytham, Bill, and Desmond. Likewise, Ziio and Prudence share the same skin texture. Which, royally sucks for reference taking, despite being a fairly common game dev trick to shrink asset production.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere really, I'm simply annoyed. ACR very much whitewashed Desmond, but AC3 did um... something alright.
this is it. this is what you're about to read, yipee hurray! i'm about to rawdog this pustule of a man on a table, and i'm dissecting why he's such a tentative yet counterproductive evolutionary reaction to a shitty situation that ends up causing more problems than it fixes. yknow, like a pustule.
this is gonna be long and rough (honestly the innuendos just write themselves don't they), about 3.7k words long to be precise. this thing needed headings ffs. so take your time with it is what i’m saying xvx
also if you haven't already, I'd recommend checking out my previous Daniel and Lucy posts for further context as i'll bring back stuff from them in here. call it a series what the heck.
now, onto the Billiam
I could do a whole thing here where i explain and contextualize where he's coming from, and how the way he's worked for the brotherhood and later raised his son ultimately made sense from his point of view, etc etc. but i think we're all familiar with that exercise. 'Understandable' doesn't make it right or even smart, and anyone with some understanding of generational trauma and dealing with an emotionally stunted parent already knows the drill here. I'm not gonna break any new ground delving into it so i won't bother. We got bigger fish to fry here.
I will establish though, Bill is a man of action, few words and even fewer expression of emotions. I can draw a direct parallel to the Levantine brotherhood and their strict hierarchy and the ultimate authority of their grandmaster. Not mentor mind you, that's a title for later in the brotherhood's history. Al Mualim is the master, the leader, the head of the order, and his word is law and the tenets and maxim are sacred. If he tells you you should die for his will, then you will do it and gladly, because you're serving the brotherhood's higher purpose. I'm not here to argue the morals and ethics of that, just saying it like it is.
Bill may not be as strict as all that, in fact he's very much not and he couldn't if he tried (and i gotta say, i don't think he would try), but he certainly reflects that resolute certainty in the brotherhood's beliefs and what is needed to face their enemy. The templars are everywhere, they have their grasp in everything, and so you must be willing to give everything to push them back.
In his eyes, all the hardships that he put Desmond through in his youth were necessities. For the brotherhood, they are at war, and as such he saw it as an act of love and care to prepare Desmond for the worst. But he was so lost in a world of casualties and soldiers that he forgets all too often that people are, people.
Soldiers are human beings first and foremost, and to strip them of humanity may be argued as a necessity of war but it strips the brotherhood of its most fundamental goals. Human lives, human worth, humanity itself, are worth preserving and protecting in all its forms, that's the freedom they fight for. It's messy and complicated but it's beautiful and it's to be celebrated, not suppressed. To deny humanity for the sake of neat and clean order and hierarchy is what the templars want, and you can't fight that by becoming it. You fight it by opposing it. That's why Al Mualim turned, and that's why Altair had to kill him and rework the brotherhood from the ground up, even if he hadn't been twisted by the Apple. And that's why I wanna draw out the parallel between Al Mualim to Bill first.
BILL HAD A FARM EEAH EEAH YOH
In AC1 we're served a narrative that the templars and the brotherhood are not so different and they both want the same thing, "peace, in all things", but they have opposing views on how to achieve it and that's where their conflcit lies. Simple enough premise, and they do a pretty good job of showing how those two militaristic orders view the world and how to achieve their goals, and in what form those orders now exist in the modern world. Back then it made sense for the Farm to be an isolationist cult, it was a perfect mirror for the isolated Masyaf fortress and their secretive nature, but as the narrative developed in the next games, that contextualization just grew more and more flawed. The brotherhood had grown, branched out, coexisted in various time periods and cultural contexts, and it no longer made sense for them to be a remote cultish commune in the middle of nowhere.
Which leads me to believe that it was pretty much Bill's idea from the start. If you'll allow me to extrapolate some character beats, it's no secret that he's got a deep respect for the brotherhood, and I'd assume that includes Altair and Ezio given how their mentorship stirred the entire brotherhood into new eras. They are legendary figures in their history, they got statues of them in the brotherhood headquarters, it's really not subtle.
As such, one can see him trying his best to lean on their teachings, if not try to emulate them a bit. He's secretive, resolute, stubborn, all qualities we see of Altair and Ezio in the Animus and were likely exagerated over the centuries. In The Fall (comic), we see that the brotherhood had a whole secret library worth of knowledge before it was ransacked during the Great Purge, and it's not too far to assume that Bill spent some time digging through those archives in his youth. He was born in the brotherhood after all.
Grueling training, blind trust in your betters and the creed, secretiveness, emotional distance. All things we see in both the Farm and the Levantine brotherhood, a holdover from the smaller scope of AC1 that leads me to think this was a bit of Bill's bout of hero worshipping to maybe recreate the conditions that created the assassins of old. We don't know what the rest of the brotherhood thought of the Farm exactly, i can't find or recall any particular bit of lore that addresses it except from an outside perspective; all we get is Desmond's own comments on his experience based on his memories in ACR. Even when he speaks of it to others, they give no opinion of their own on the matter.
Bill might be so focused on the environment that created an assassin like Altair, that he forgets that the man then went over to rework the brotherhood to keep what happened to him from happening again. He fostered curiosity and understanding in his order, leading to many changes that carried on through the ages to the modern day. It was Altair learning to question and doubt his master, the man he'd follow blindly and without question once, that led to the survival and growth of the order. In fact, Altair puts his trust blindly in his assassins to protect him when he goes to confront Abbas, to keep him safe and help restore the order once again. Not the other way around. And when he saw that same curiosity and doubts in his son, he sought to stamp it out instead of seeing it for what it was.
Desmond left not just because he was terrified (his words not mine) of the training, the harshness, and the bland food. If we're being honest, he's found that in spades in the outside world too. No, he left because the Farm asked for blind trust and respect that was not shown to him in return. When he asked questions, they ignored or waved him away, and so as they dismissed his interest in truly understanding what was being taught, he gave them the same.
I'll give credit where it's due, he does apologize and offers a truce to Desmond. Grated, he doesn't get much of a chance to show how much he's changed exactly, especially in the minutiae of daily life with the team, and it's a rather wishy-washy apology overall. But it's something and more than most people get in real life. Desmond is gracious enough to take it and even does his best to give him a chance, which is more than most anyone would, and that says more about him than Bill.
Regardless, I want to chalk up this apology as rushed writing rather than Bill being actively manipulative by saying what Desmond would like to hear. I don't want to give the writers credit for writing some 4D chess mind game powers onto him. I'm not even a fan of the "two Bills on Lucy's emails" thing, that's just poor retcon to fit the "Lucy is a templar" plotline.
the tangent - YOU GOT MAIL
Speaking of, i wanna get into that for a moment. As far as i could dig up, we had no confirmation of why Lucy had to die besides fan theories, and then the ACR dlc dropped. It was further commented on AC3 and most importantly, several retcons that included Lucy being a sneaky templar were released in the Initiates web project. That included much of the Project Siren lore, reactions to her death among the templars, her leaving the memory core for Vidic's goons to find, and of course the retcon that she was in contact with two separate Williams. All this to say, we can't say for sure if the writers knew how they wanted to handle her cliffhanger death in ACB even when ACB itself came out. So this?
That was meant to be our introduction to Bill's character. Those are the words of a man who sent a 16yo girl into the world to fully fend for herself on her own against a corporation so powerful it's almost impossible to comprehend. And now that she's back among the community that dropped her into such a grueling situation, this is his reaction to her showing care and concern for another human being, who by the way is his own son?? Holding up all that she's suffered through over her head like compassion would invalidate all that?? I sincerely lack the words.
Well, actually Desmond said it best.
Right then, Bill really isn't better than them. He's just another cold calculating asshole who's so set on a nebulous future victory that he refuses to see the lives he's trampling on to get there. He's done it to Lucy, to Clay, to Desmond, and even to Shaun and Rebecca to an extent, and they are just the ones we know of. The Great Purge is no excuse for this behavior, that's not the time to grow apart, but closer and show sympathy and kindness to his fellow assassins. Some distant war general figure moving faceless pieces on the board is the last thing they want right then, or might even need.
We can see in this one email just how dire the situation is with how Rebecca even refuses to put a subject on the email. Opening up and being vulnerable is something to be done in quiet and secret, almost like it's a burden to show how much things are affecting you, and that's so messed up. Even in the army, you can see gallows humor and dark jokes to cope with the horrors soldiers go through, but we don't even get that amongst the team. When you approach Lucy as Desmond, it's often him showing her kindness and comfort and reassuring her through her doubts and fears, and she doesn't hesitate to share them with him and I think it has a lot to do with how they are both apart from Bill's influence. Lucy has her own cans of worms to deal with, but between her and Desmond, there's a measure of closeness and trust you don't see with the others.
I know, your boss is not exactly the person you might want to pour your heart out to, but come on! How powerful and rallying would it be to see your leader across the room and feel comfortable and safe enough to just sit together and talk?? It can't be overstated how much it matters that any movement that places itself against the current system must prove itself as... different from that system. It's the literal bare minimum here. If you say you care about humanity but you won't care for the humanity of your members, then... what are you even doing?
tangent done - BACK TO THE BIG PICTURE
I wanna take a quick step back for a bit. AC3 portrays Bill as a man who sees his actions as justified, who sees that his ends justify the means. It leads us down a doomed horseshoe theory that coupled with the deeply complicated historical time in the ancestral plotline, makes for a very murky and confusing narrative. The more you look at it, the less clear or discernible the themes get. It raises a lot of complex points but never closes or even shows where they are going with them.
Now, horseshoe theory is an erroneous concept that has been critiqued to hell and back, and to use it as a way to tie the modern and ancestral timelines in an attempt to create a "'we're all the same" theme is... the worst possible way to go about it. Doubly so when it’s often appropriated by right-wing pundits to vilify their political opponents. You can't make the protagonists ponder on how to hold hands and sing kumbaya with a death cult to avoid Armageddon while the writers are going "bUt ThEy ArE bAd ToO" because of one guy (who you're also attempting to redeem) who deems the inherent human need for connection as "being too weak". Even that is enough of a mess, but add to it the whole deconstruction of the war of independence and the sheer horror that the colonies were for the indigenous people back then and all the way up to this day... Where are the writers even going here??
We get more conversations about how allying with the templars is not a possibility than any proper address on Lucy or the entire situation that led to her turning, much less who's to blame, how can they avoid this in the future, how the protagonists even feel about all this. Just excuses for why it had to happen, there was no other way, let’s move along now, nothing to see here. In AC2 and ACB we got some neat and tidy convos that made sense to be bite-sized, concise little bits of characterization and presenting themes and concepts for the worldbuilding. But in AC3, we get convos that could have been entire cutscenes, whole dialogues amongst the characters to reckon with all that's been happening. Instead we waste cutscene time with fucking Juno and the Isu failed attempts that don't fucking matter to the story they should be focused on telling.
Which is why I want to talk about Haytham.
THE HUMAN PROBLEM
I bring him up because AC3 clearly wants to parallel his and Connor's relationship with Bill's and Desmond's. Which, personally i think it gives off the feeling that it's supposed to be a "hey it could be worse" at Desmond. I think we can agree that's a sucky attitude to have towards anyone who's suffered family trauma like Desmond did, and it also kind of diminishes the weight of the colonial era storyline. But since the game wants to talk about it, then let's talk about it.
Haytham is one more indoctrinated assassin-to-templar character, which is it's own mirror to Daniel and Lucy, but this is not about them. Haytham is cold, pragmatic, relentless and so calculating. He was warmer and kinder when he was younger, even a rather gray character, but all that is lost the longer he spends as the templar grandmaster. He did care for Connor in his own way and wanted to bring him to their side if only so that he wouldn't have to kill him, but if it came to it, he would have as we see in the game multiple times.
And as far as the game is concerned, that's also Bill. They are both two men who got worn down into their respective roles and lost sight of what's truly important. Except, we don't know that. We see it with Haytham plain as day in the prologue, but we don't know how Bill was in his younger years. We know about a few missions he took that involved the Animus project, but besides that we don't know what kind of man or even child he was. We don't even know what his dynamic with other people is, how he is with his wife, does he have family? Siblings, parents, cousins, anything? Does he even care? What about friends and colleagues? Hell, we don't even know what he's like in action, the Cairo mission happens off-screen and Desmond handles their escape with the Apple. All we see of him in AC3 is how he's an emotionally stunted bossy guy, and anything else is told, never shown.
Haytham however, gets a prologue and several missions in-game, and even a whole side novel from his point of view.
As such, I'm reluctant to extrapolate the kind of man Bill is based off of Haytham alone, because again they not only exist in very different times and contexts, but there's a severe imbalance in screentime. What I can do however, is compare their "ending" as it were.
Haytham dies by the hands of his own son. He had the chance to put his ego aside and listen to his son, maybe put his cards on the table and explain the misunderstanding about the attack on Connor's village, but he didn't. He decided to hold that information until it was the most convenient to him, and then try to use it to manipulate Connor into switching sides. He refused to put aside the grandmaster role and step up as a father, or even as a man who cared about someone else's feelings. Whatever his feelings for Ziio and his son, they came second to the templars and their goals, and that was his death sentence. To his dying breath, he held true to that mentality.
Bill however, despite apologizing, hasn't shown much of the work to change. He and the brotherhood remains stagnant and withering, and in the face of the person he's hurt the most and is still alive to make amends to, he remains distant and reticent. All the efforts to connect and deepen whatever there is between them needs to come from Desmond, and every attempt to reach out to the outside gets shut down. It's Desmond refusing to give up on him that saves his ass even! Given the state of their relationship, that fucking SUCKS.
It shouldn't be up to Desmond to fix what Bill wrecked back at the Farm, and portraying otherwise, like Desmond is the one who messed everything up, is ass backwards. The brotherhood and Bill should be bending into knots to convince him to stay and that things aren't as they were once, but Desmond decided to stay long before. Because one the templars suck, two Desmond got the proof he always had asked for as a child and three, Lucy showed him kindness and understanding. One might even go so far as to say that it was living Altair's own rebirth period is what reassured those questions he had and gave him true understanding, but Lucy gave him hope in a hopeless situation.
That's powerful not just as a narrative point but as a theme for the assassins as a whole. The games continue to portray the brotherhood as a beacon of hope against the oppression and tyranny of the templars (even for the modern days through the glyph puzzles in AC2 and ACB) but Bill, the face of the brotherhood as the de-facto mentor, is himself as a tyrant.
One would expect AC3 to show him either follow Haytham's fate or change himself to avoid it, but we're denied that kind of development. Even in the Initiates web project and subsequent games, Bill's change is kind of handwaved. He lost the will to fight and vanished but then he saw the desecration of his son he barely showed to give much of a shit for, and now he's back and Mentor again? He's awkward and trying to be approachable in Origins but he's still rather overconfident and posturing too much for his own good.
(I mean, sitting within range of Layla's blade before she's even out of the Animus? Bold fucker.)
If they truly wanted to grapple with Bill and his place and role in the story they spun us, which I assume they do since he's the one who does the intro to the AC3 game, then they should have DONE THAT. Make him face the consequences of his choices and actions, and make the team hold him responsible for it. Make him soften and change, not just give us a pitiable hug and a meek little "Son..." just before Desmond sacrifices himself. Seriously, what gives?
One of the biggest failures in AC3 is their horrid sense of narrative prioritizing with the modern timeline. They tried to close too many threads at once with not nearly enough screentime, and wasted time on needless fluff. But most importantly, I think that the games after ACB have a human problem, in that they refuse to acknowledge the humanity in the modern timeline.
Bill could have been an incredible display of change, that the templars aren't the superior mentality that can turn anyone who spends long enough around them like some brain-corroding virus. Show that the brotherhood still has a chance and that no one is above humbling themselves or beyond bettering themselves, and most of all that the brotherhood can indeed bring hope in a hopeless situation, and community and understanding can make a difference. And since they are so touchy about murder all of a sudden, also show that the assassins are capable of doing more than just killing people.
But we don’t. We don’t get any of that. We’re once again denied of any development that would make any kind of statement that would shift the status quo and make them pay attention to the modern timeline and what they’re doing with it. And worst of all, we're denied any development that would bring us closer emotionally to these characters and make us ponder our place in the world and in history. Cus god forbid the series that has “history as its playground” learn anything from it.
Oops I accidentally started arguing with someone on twitter who was saying playable female characters wasn't important so now I'm running away here again before it gets bad
