Samurai is not a samurai, historian is not a historian: an edgy Assassin's Creed: Shadows scandal has erupted online

Gamers have long dreamed of a game of the Assassin's Creed series, the action of which will unfold in Japan. Finally, Ubisoft heard them and presented Assassin's Creed: Shadows.

However, the game caused a mixed reaction of the public, the reason for which was the choice of one of the main characters.

Here's What We Know

The thing is that the central character of Shadows will be a dark-skinned samurai Yasuke. This decision of the French developer is caused not only by the modern tendencies of tolerance and representation of all races, genders and physical features of people in games, but also by a historical fact. Most historians confirm that such a historical character really existed in feudal Japan of the 16th century. But gamers are not interested in historical accuracy and in their understanding African Samurai is something that can not be and such a choice of protagonist caused a storm of discontent.

The situation took a new turn when "Japanese historian from Tokyo University Kenji Yamamoto - a specialist in the Sengoku and Edo periods" joined the dispute. He began actively arguing in the comments under the Assassin's Creed public domain posts that although Yasuke was in the history of Japan, he was definitely not a samurai. As the main argument, the scholar cited the fact that when the powerful feudal lord and warlord Oda Nobunaga committed seppuku/harakiri and all his samurai, according to the Bushido Code, followed suit and voluntarily laid down their lives, Yasuke escaped this fate. Kenji Yamamoto insists, if Yasuke was indeed a samurai, he would not have been allowed to leave after Nobunaga's death. From this he concludes that Yasuke was not a samurai.

Yamamoto's posts quickly gained popularity, but in this situation Ubisoft did the most incorrect thing: blocked the user, which caused a negative reaction among gamers and the media, who thought that the company was afraid of the Japanese scientist's truth.

However, everything turned out to be even more interesting: it turned out that Kenji Yamamoto is not a Japanese scientist who spends his leisure time on Twitter, but an ordinary troll who introduced himself as a historian to give more weight to his words.

It cannot be overlooked that the theses of the "scholar" are indeed reasoned, but what does it matter when it comes to a series that never claimed to be historically accurate and combines a huge number of fantasy elements and rewritten events.

All in all, the story is interesting in every sense, and the truth, as always, is in the middle.