originally posted on tumblr, Mar 19th 2023
i can and will complain about the horrid treatment Desmond and Clay got in the games, but i certainly will NEVER forgive ubisoft for how dirty they did Daniel.
that man is brimming with potential. we had two comics showing how he was used as a tool by the templars, how all of his life was informed and affected by what they did to him as a child. how he was left on the side of the road without clothes or a name to him, bereft of support and answers to his hallucinations, which led him down a turbulent and traumatic life. how the one community and support he found, the same one that gave him a direction and goals and a sense of belonging was violently ripped away from him because in the end, even that was just a lie, another illusion. everything he worked for for years in the brotherhood, meant nothing, was nothing, because the templars caused him to burn that bridge and the moat and the castle all in one stab of a blade. and now, he has no choice but to throw it in with the people who ruined any and all chances he ever had of a normal or stable life. they are the ones with the animus and the drugs that he needs to continue to exist, much less function somewhat normally. he has no other choice but to surrender himself as a tool, and he's always desperate to prove himself useful because he knows that once he's not, he'll be discarded again, and that will be a fate worse than death for him. if the brotherhood doesn't get him, then the drugs and the violent outbursts caused by the hallucinations will.
he was - is - a perfect foil for Desmond, who has been treated as a pawn, by the assassins and the templars and the isu, he's just the right person to be at the right place at the right time, thanks to a sprawling line of causality that leads him solely to it. he was a tool before he was even born, the community he was born in treated him as such too and so he left. he condemned himself to an isolated and dangerous life to attempt to be a person and find self-actualization, and look how that turned out. sure he chose to stay with the brotherhood and help, but in the end was that really his choice or did the calculations just compute his willingness to it? did he ever have a choice at all or was it all just numbers on a tally of probability?
Daniel is the worst case scenario Desmond could have ended up as. A man used and abused to the point where he has no choice but to make his peace with the role that was decided for him. he's Desmond's shadow of the soul as it were. they are both just playing their roles and they both are more aware of it than most people could ever be. Desmond said it himself.
"It just keeps happening over and over."
"What does?"
"Everything..."
and to further expand on on the narrative foils, Daniel and Clay also are mirrors of each other. Both stepping stones on the grand scheme of things, ultimately disposable but never dismissable. But while Daniel became a victim of the Animus and his need for it to function, wanting to ditch it but unable to, Clay had no choice but to surrender himself to it in order to see his duty to the bitter end. Daniel can barely handle existing in the real world anymore, and Clay had to leave it to continue existing in the simulation. Neither ever wanted his, but they both needed to do it to make something, anything, of themselves and the pain that was inflicted upon them.
worst of all, the game seems aware of all that!! even setting the last mission's confrontation in the Animus chamber in Italy, the place and machine connecting the three men together. Desmond having to use the Animus as a barrier between himself and Daniel, the thing that doomed both Daniel and Clay being his one protection at the time... it was all setup so beautifully for a poignant meaningful scene between those two, maybe even a proper boss fight--!
but what do we get? an absurdly deus ex machina bleeding effect that turns Daniel into another chase assassination. No fighting back, no words, no discussion or debate. Not even a fucking confession cutscene. It's disgraceful, it's pathetic, and it's so, so offensive to your audience and the story you're writing.
