Chronicles of the Origins of the Rise!

So Assassin's Creed: The Chronicles of the Origins of the Rise of The Series (working title*) is happening. Netflix, drunk on the success of their Witcher and Castlevania video-game based shows, has announced a live-action adaptation of Assassin's Creed and I'd have some thoughts I'd like to share. Not because I have insight to share, but because I don't want to talk about the election for five minutes. Sound good? Super.

There's something very wrong with the world when not
even doge murder can take my mind off the news...

Witcher hipsters or Wipsters if you
will, (but please don't) are just the worst.

And yeah, I know The Witcher is based on the novels and not the games but seriously, nobody had heard about The Witcher until the video game came out, so while it may hew more closely to the books, its success is based on the games. And even then it was Witcher III before anyone noticed. That's not a criticism, I like the show, I'm just saying let's all stop pretending that we were into Andrej Sapkowski before he was cool.

Above: a child being left out of her friend's
conversation about the Red Wedding.

But we're not talking about Henry Cavill's chiseled jawline today, we're talking about streaming TV's latest attempt to do a thing like Game of Thrones Yeah, you heard me. But for real, whatever you thought of Game of Thrones-I cooled on it half way through but kept up with it out of some misguided need to be part of the conversations about which likable character was brutally murdered for no narrative reason this week. Anyway, what I'm saying is that GoT was super successful and that's what Netflix is almost certainly aiming for.

The absence of sexuality in the books and
 films left it open to fan speculation. And speculate
we do! I mean, they do...I mean, so I've heard...

And that means gratuitous sex and violence. Again, I'm not criticizing-I mean, that's fine and it's not like they're tacking it on for the show. Assassin's Creed certainly has both-well, mostly violence-I'm just predicting. Because that and a strong sense of what the kids call FOMO, is what got people to watch GoT. Amazon's recent hiring of an "intimacy coordinator" and a posting for actors "comfortable with nudity" suggests that their Lord of the Rings spin-off show will be going a similar, Thrones-y route. Which is surprising given how bereft of sex Tolkien's books and Peter Jackson's movies are.

Something tells me that the real Notre
Dame doesn't have this many evenly
spaced handholds for climbing...

There is absolutely no way that a streaming series about secret societies using genetic memory to make people relive their ancestor's murder sprees in Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt or wherever isn't going to include historical boot-knocking and wrist-mounted knife stabbings. And my issue isn't the inclusion of adult content in an Assassin's Creed show. That's part and parcel of the game series, and I like the series. Especially running around the painstakingly realistic recreations of historic cities full of surprisingly climbable landmarks.

Pictured: Catelyn Stark from GoT.
Not pictured: Zombie Catelyn Stark,
whom I guess the writers forgot about?

But I think it's the predictability of it that makes me roll my eyes a bit. I mean, they haven't even started filming it, so take this with all the salt, but I feel like we already know exactly what to expect: the first episode is going to dump some exposition on us up front and then move to a drip feed of story developments for the rest of the season before dropping some stunning reveals in the final ten minutes of the last episode of the first season but leaving lots of storylines unfinished only to be resolved (or not) later.

Pictured: basically me, but only
when it comes to streaming shows. 

We're also going to see slow-motion running and elaborate choreographed fight scenes compares of rapid jump cuts, the shocking death of a character we've grown fond of and assumed would be integral to the series but oh no! They're dead now. Oh, and the show is absolutely going to set up one of the assassin's targets in a brothel-probably in the first episode-so as to tell us early on that we can expect sexy times on Assassin's Creed. Fan reaction will be positive on the first episode and then peter out a bit as we get frustrated with the show's slow pace but then rebound when the finale gives up a bunch of secrets the writers have been sitting on. 

But predictable isn't bad, it's just predictable and as long as the show focuses on period appropriate costumes, sets, and parkour and instead of the boring modern day scenes with satchel wearing hipster guy and Atlantis conspiracies, I'll check it out.

"Something something Templars, blah blah Precursors.
Can we go back to shanking Redcoats and Venetians please?"

-Everyone sitting through AC's Desmond scenes

*no it's not.