We Have Much to Discuss, Though We Understand None of It

Feminina O'Ladybrain

Dec 1

Significant spoilers for the end of Assassin's Creed: Mirage

Butch:

Well. Then. That was....a thing. Many things.

I have questions.

So, Nehal wasn't in this world all along? That was a hell of a twist. She was Loki? He was Loki all along? I guess it wasn't the djinn that was Loki. Nice twist.

What's up with Roshan? We met Roshan in ACV! She didn't quit! I'm confused.

But I have to go to hockey.

I have questions.

[later]

OK, I'll keep going.

Where were his wife and kid? We've been thinking a long time that Loki's motivation was his wife and kid. We know Basim had a wife and kid as he told Eivor, it would make sense re: the Loki myth, we thought maybe Nehal would be that, but no. So what's with that?

All through this game, you've mentioned potential Basim/Loki revenge, and I've said "But he didn't seem that mad in ACV," and here we are again. "To those that kept me in bondage, I look forward to our reunion." All menacing. And yet, that's not how he treated Eivor or Sigurd. I'm confused.

But the big one (well, a big one): Why did the Brotherhood OR the Order care about this cave? This all seemed rather personal to Basim. Only he can get in, it's his old memories, it's his old cell.....so what? The Brotherhood was worried that the Order would use him to get in so they could......what? What was in there that was worth all of this? At first I thought "an actual Isu," as I thought Nehal/whatever was still in there, but that can't be right because we see Isu Basim in the video fragments in ACV. If he ever was in there, he got out before the events of said video, which leads me to WILD INTERNET SPECULATION!!!!!!

Basim is misreading the djinn. The djinn was not his captor and tormentor, or, at least, not someone who wanted to let him rot there forever. I think what we saw there with gold transparent dudes was the "djinn" FREEING Isu Loki. Now, they certainly didn't look like friends, and the "djinn" didn't look like he was doing this to be kind, but my SPECULATION is that someone back in Isu times freed Loki/Nehal/whatever with the knowledge that a) s/he would secretly upload his/herself to the whatever...baby jars and b) would continue to raise the holy hell that Basim has been raising in these games. Basim isn't free of the djinn. Basim is doing exactly what the "djinn" freed Isu Loki to do, even if Isu Loki, Basim, Nehal, none of them know it or even what "it" is.

However, my WILD INTERNET SPECULATION does not answer my initial question of why on earth the Order or the Brotherhood gave two shits about this cave. It didn't even have Voltron armor!

And again, Roshad. What did she leave behind in the fire, there? DID she quit? Was all that with Eivor a ruse and she's not really an assassin anymore? I'm confused.

Ah, this game answered so many questions.

[later]

And another thing....

(You know I just finished an AC game when you have at least three question laced emails before you even get to work)

.....has the Brotherhood ever been portrayed as so anti-learning before? I thought the assassins were thinkers and learners. Wasn't DaVinci Brotherhood adjacent? Here, house of wisdom? Bad guys. Roshad? She is, in the end, a champion of ignorance. She doesn't know what's in the cave because only Basim can open it. That mentor even said that he looked for a way in and there wasn't one. Roshad could've said "Oh, hey! I can get in now! Let's explore!" but no, she said "If you open the door I'll kill you." She didn't even WANT to know what was on the other side of the door!

Unless....and here we go.....

Roshan is actually Order. Hear me out.

Let's go with the fact that Basim is Loki, because a) Loki is easier to type and b) Loki makes sense here. Loki was the trickster, an agent of chaos. What doesn't the Order like? Chaos. The Order would WANT Loki to stay a simple person. As Roshad put it "You'd be just a man, but our Brother." Just a man. The other mentor WANTED TO GET INTO THE CAVE. He wasn't all "I'll kill anyone who tries to get in."

OK, OK, OK, I hear you. "But Butch," you'll say, "The Order wanted to get in!" Sure. To investigate and, if need be, to destroy it.

OK, OK, OK, I hear you. "But Butch," you'll say, "Roshan showed up in ACV and was all assassin," to which I will say "Was she? We never really knew why she was there. She wanted Eivor's help stealing a book or something, but was very cagey as to what was in the book or why she needed it. We assumed it was Brotherhood stuff, but we could be wrong.

OK, OK, OK, I hear you. "But Butch," you'll say, "Roshan had us kill, like, every Order member in Baghdad. She even killed the head of it herself!" to which I say....uh, not much because I haven't figured out a good answer to that one yet. But the day is young!

Feminina:

Oh man, right? That was such a thing, and really didn't answer...anything. Nothing is clear! Nothing!

Classic Assassin's Creed.

Why was Basim so nice(ish) to Eivor and Sigurd instead of taking revenge on them as he seemed to say he planned? (Maybe he had time to think about it and decided to instead use them to locate the world tree cave...that's the best I've got. I mean, one can certainly be filled with thoughts of vengeance first thing after waking up, and then later decide on another path.)

Where the hell were his wife and son in all this? We never saw a hint of either of them! If all we had was Mirage, we would basically say Loki was just irritated about being held prisoner for a long time, and that was it. But all the stuff in Valhalla didn't say anything about that!

I would ALMOST suspect that Nehal/Basim isn't Loki at all, they're actually Loki's son the giant wolf Fenrir (hey, all we have is legends to say he was a literal wolf, he might easily have actually been human), since the voices in Valhalla were interested in freeing someone and we don't know for sure who the voices were...but the explanatory information provided online, presumably in consultation with Ubisoft itself, has clearly stated that Basim is Loki. That was also definitely the conclusion we reached at the end of Valhalla, based on the evidence there. Ubisoft could be playing us all, but perhaps more likely they're just being really vague about exactly why Loki is upset. I suppose there's also no reason he can't be upset about more than one thing.

Maybe he didn't even know, when he first woke up, that his wife and son are...wherever they are. Maybe he does some research we haven't seen, learns that they're imprisoned or whatever, records those conversations with his wife and plants them as bait for Layla hundreds of years in the future, and then tracks down Eivor and Sigurd?

And as you say, what the heck was the 'djinni's' deal -- why did it let Loki out of the cell at all and how did he then end up loading his DNA into the world tree...we know nothing about this. I kind of like your idea that whatever Isu became the djinni in Basim's nightmares was actually planning for him to do that, although the fact that he (let's say, although for all we know it was a woman) is memorialized only as a figure of terror suggests that it didn't work out for him personally, since the most likely thing is that Loki killed whoever it was and then headed for the control room and the baby jars...right? But maybe he was already in the baby jars himself, or was just prepared to die for his grand plan of whatever it was or...man, who the hell knows.

And, also as you say, why on earth was protecting this site the Brotherhood's job for, apparently, thousands of years, and why did the Order also care about it? I mean, I think the Order's deal has always been "find out everything we can about the ones who came before," so it makes sense that they wanted to get in just because they figured there was information there. (Although, in fact, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot...)

The fact that the Brotherhood was sworn to prevent anyone from going inside is weirder. It really kind of makes it seem like they're the descendants of prison guards who were supposed to keep Loki from escaping way back in the day, and who have passed down this sacred tradition for millennia even though he's actually not even in there. Ooops. Presumably they didn't know he was gone. Maybe the guy who let him out founded this brotherhood to conceal the fact that he let him out? Maybe his whole plan rested on...someone...thinking Loki was still in there? Damn it, I don't know.

As for Roshan being secretly in the Order...sure, why not, I don't have any solid reason to argue with that possibility. She totally could have been! Or not! We don't know!

Butch:

We know nothing!

What I have about the revenge thing is that Basim is playing the VERY long game. If you think about it, killing Eivor/Odin wouldn't have accomplished all that much, seeing as they keep being reborn. One gets the sense that, to Odin et al., dying is a mere nuisance. If you really want revenge, you have to break that cycle, do something that involves world trees and solar flares. Of course, if ending the world is your thing, then you aren't just a bad guy, you're THE bad guy, and I don't see Basim doing that.

One thing I can think of that makes Basim not bad, and even helps the Brotherhood sort of, is managing to imprison all these Isu remnants forever. If it happened to Loki, and sort of happened to Layla and glowing guy, it can happen to anyone, right? Then Basim has his revenge, the Brotherhood can worry a lot less about Isu shit going to the Order, and we can relax. Until the next game comes out. I can also see why that would require some research on Basim's part, like several centuries studying alternate timelines.

Interesting that you say that maybe the Brotherhood were the original jailers. I kind of like that.

As for the wife, there is some lag time between this and ACV, indeed, twelve years, I just checked. That's long enough to find a wife and have a kid! It's not like Basim ended this game and got on a boat for Norway. Twelve years is a long time for Basim to get up to all sorts of stuff, which is rather disappointing because that stuff is stuff I want to know about.

I grumbled about Siege of Dragonspear going up to the literal moment BG2 started, as that was unnecessary. That said, maybe get closer than TWELVE YEARS if you're trying to establish some sort of timeline for a major character.

It's cool. I'm sure they'll sort out everything in the next game.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Feminina:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course they will, everything is going to be clearly and thoroughly explained.

That's an interesting point that maybe the wife and kid are from Basim's 'current' time rather than dating from the Isu days. Although that would raise all kinds of additional questions, like were they (reborn versions of) Isu, or were they humans he came to care about who were then imprisoned? And if they were imprisoned in the 9^th century, were they imprisoned by reborn Isu, or the Order, or who-knows-who-else that's wandering around at the time?

I feel like it might make more sense (hahahahahaha--'sense'!) if they, like Loki, were imprisoned as Isu. Maybe in similar cells scattered in other locations around the world? In which case, maybe they're still in there, since unlike Loki they may not have had a 'djinni' to free them and thus been able to upload their DNA into the world tree...maybe freeing them from cells like his is what he's ultimately after, but for some reason he couldn't do it in Basim's time, so he had to put himself in storage for 1000+ years and hope someone would eventually come free him at a time when humans had developed better technology, and that would allow him to do it? He made some snide comment about the computers when he was poking around the Concord cabin in Valhalla, but even our pathetic gear is worlds better than what he was going to find in Viking Britain. And he did seem to want SOMETHING from the Assassins. Something he's willing to trade Basim's memories for.

In terms of technology, the Order was working on some interesting things in Baghdad, but the Assassins killed most of them, and maybe Loki could see from Basim's memories that it wasn't good enough to get to where he needed it in a time frame that would be useful to him. As far as we know, Isu awakened in human bodies are still mortal, so he might just not have wanted to risk dying of old age.

As you say, the Isu can be reborn over and over so it's kind of just an inconvenience, but I get the sense it's also a bigger deal than that for them to actually 'wake up' in a human. It didn't seem to happen for Sigurd without a lot of unpleasant prompting from Fulke, Loki gave Basim nightmares and appeared to him as Nehal but didn't really wake up until they went into that cell (which was a pretty major process), and Eivor had visions for years but then ended up denying control to Odin. We don't know how complicated it is for other Isu, but assuming there are more potentials than there are actually awake versions of them, they might want to hang onto a body for as long as possible when they get one.

Which reminds me that another purpose for the Assassins guarding that place for so long might have been specifically to PREVENT Loki from coming back in human form, getting in, and waking up completely: maybe someone said, basically, "we know he's out there, and we want to make sure he doesn't get this." In which case Roshan's taking Basim in might have been a kind of "keep your enemies closer" approach -- she could tell he was possibly something, and wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. If so, that's awfully generous of her, considering it would also have made a lot of sense for her to have just killed him and saved everyone some trouble, especially since killing people for the greater good is their whole deal.

Qabiha's talk about the Order having looked and waited so long for him could support the idea that the Assassins are guarding against him, although I think it's not clear whether she meant that they had been waiting for Loki specifically, or just waiting for any Isu. Logically, it would seem that any Isu could probably get into the cell, since the djinni obviously did back in the day, and it also doesn't seem rational to lock someone in a cell that only they can open.

Weirdly poetic, if they're inside and only they can open it, but it can only be opened from the outside -- but not very practical.

And also, what the heck is the explanation for how Nehal is Loki and a figment of Basim's imagination but also was at one point actually locked in that cell? It seemed like she genuinely didn't know all the answers early on, right? She couldn't have just said "hey, I'm an ancient godlike being trapped in your brain, let's merge consciousness and do some super cool stuff" or whatever. It seemed like maybe she needed to get Basim's physical body into the cell in order to jog Loki's memories enough that he could wake up all the way...?

As an aside, I would not be remotely concerned about the fact that Nehal—and the Loki who presumably who was originally imprisoned in the cell, since we saw her face when Basim opened that little casket-thing--was female, since the legends say Loki changed sex on occasion and female Eivor was Odin, so obviously it just happens that way sometimes and whatever. EXCEPT that the Loki we saw in the Isu videos in Valhalla was clearly Basim, who is male...right? If Nehal-Loki is the one who was imprisoned, and was then freed by the djinni and went to the control room, why was Basim-Loki the one who was in the control room loading DNA into the world tree?

Maybe (male) Loki never really looked like Nehal, but that was a form that resonated with Basim, so he just appeared like that? And then Basim saw Nehal when he opened the casket because he was used to seeing Loki in that form, but the Loki who was actually imprisoned there did look more like Basim?

I guess I'm going to have to go with that in the absence of a better explanation.

Whew.

Butch:

I think Nehal and seeing Nehal was, as you say, seeing something that resonated, not an actual representation of what the Isu actually looked like. We've talked before about how Loki, as we know the myth, was Norse, Basim is not Norse, yet Loki looked like Basim in the video clips (forget for now that Odin did not look like Eivor). I think people see the Isu as they "want" to see the Isu.

Hmm. Good point about it being complex to have real world Basim meet a wife, having her be an Isu, quite a coincidence. Never occurred to me that his real Isu wife is still somewhere. Hmm. I like that. Makes more (ha) sense. It would also explain why he wasn't so into just revenge. He needs to know more. I guess I assumed that his wife and kid were Isu/human was because of all the parallels to Norse gods we saw in ACV. There seemed to be a human for everyone, so I assumed there would be a human for Loki's mythic wife and kid. I may be wrong. I probably am.

But more things bug me: Why would the Order, who is into, well, Order, want to free a trickster god? Basim is not exactly about law and order, despite his sneering "justice."

Also, I keep talking on Isu being reborn, but am I right? Odin, at the end of ACV, still seemed to be chilling with Eivor despite Eivor being quite dead. It didn't seem as if he was all "Oh, hey Eivor, thanks for all the loot, but now I'm off to find another body in another game." He was there, all Obi wan Kenobi, talking to Eivor, saying "we have all the time in the world."

Which is weird.

Another thing I wish they had shown in those twelve years: Loki, in ACV, seems to be firmly in control of the body, right? There sure doesn't seem to be the same fighting between souls that Eivor and Odin were doing. Hell, he rather willingly merged with Nehal. So, in ACV, where is the Basim we've been playing? Dead? In there somewhere?

We do not know.

Feminina:

We do not know what became of Basim.

We also do not know to what extent being 'reborn' for the Isu is transferrable from one human body to the next down the line. Are they a continuous series of the same person, or are they more like mental clones of one original, who might take very different paths? Especially if they aren't direct descendants of one another?

Their DNA is in the world tree/animus and since DNA carries memories, we accept that individual Isu can 'wake up' inside individual humans. I think it's questionable whether the Loki who's in Basim right now, or the Odin who was in Eivor, is philosophically the same person as the originals, who presumably died in the solar flare/Ragnarok, whatever. If you make a perfect copy of someone but the original still exists, arguably they are one person up until the moment of copying, but their experiences will begin to diverge immediately after, and they will be different people from then on -- and how much more so if you make an imperfect copy of someone generations after the original died?

So the Loki who's awake right now, since he remembers being Loki before Ragnarok, is 'really' Loki, but he is not in fact the SAME Loki. He's a copy, right?

And while we can probably assume using the game's logic that Basim/Loki's memories would be incorporated into the Loki DNA line to be carried down to any descendants he has in their body, we DON'T know if only Basim's descendants will then be capable of 'awakening' as Loki. And if he has no descendants, is Loki then dead?

Presumably there are a lot of people with some bits of different Isu DNA, right? People tend to have multiple children, who might have multiple children, etc. The line becomes diffuse. Maybe dozens of people who are descended from Loki have imaginary friends and terrifying dreams about djinni and will never know why...but maybe under the right circumstances they could. Maybe there could be multiple Lokis awake and running around at once...or in different times and places throughout history. And if they're adding their own memories of whatever they do after they wake up to Loki's DNA and passing on those memories to their children but not to children from other Loki lines...we could end up with multiple quite different Loki characters if their lives went in different directions after they woke up.

Now, if it's extremely difficult and unlikely that an Isu will successfully wake up, then we won't really have this issue -- BUT that also means that it's highly unlikely many Isu have made it back to life over the course of history, and dying in their human bodies would be a pretty big deal rather than a minor inconvenience. "I'm awake, but anything I achieve in this body will die with me, and later versions of me who awaken will have no idea what I did."

But if it's not quite that difficult for Isu to wake up in human bodies, so that it could happen frequently enough that they wouldn't worry that much about dying, then I think there's not really any way there haven't been a bunch of different versions of different Isu over the years.

Which just makes everything that much more confusing, obviously.

But I'm kind of thinking that Eivor's Odin was a product of the Odin DNA in Eivor's specific body, and so he didn't have the option to say "so long, I'm off to find another body." He's not actually a disembodied spirit who can leap from person to person at will: he's tied to physical DNA. I imagine he's hoping/assuming there will be another Odin in another body somewhere, sometime, and that Odin will carry out his goals, or the one after that will, so Odin as DNA has all the time in the world... but it won't be this version of Odin right here, so once he finds out he can't control Eivor, he makes his peace with living a mortal life and exploring the world or whatever.

But that's just my speculation -- Ubisoft could easily say there's some Isu-DNA-quantum physics that means all Isu DNA is one and there can be only one at a time, or something. Maybe we will someday have an answer.

Butch:

Well, if there were all these people carrying Isu DNA (and there would be if, as you say, people had been having all these kids for thousands of years), and all you needed was some Isu DNA to be able to be special, then the Order wouldn't have been all "We've been waiting for you forever" because, odds are, there would've been someone in the Order, or, at least someone the Order had found, long ago. Hell, humans are all walking around with Neanderthal DNA, all of us. If that's the case with Isu, every other Kevin would have some and Basim wouldn't matter to the Order at all.

If the deal is waiting until someone gets born who's genetically identical to someone else, well, that's suspending disbelief even in AC land. I mean, copies of people don't just happen. There has to be more to it than that.

Someday we'll have an answer. You're funny.

Feminina:

Agreed, it can't just be genetically identical, because not only does that not happen, but Havi was (as far as we could tell) male, and our Eivor was female, which is a slight but noticable genetic difference.

If one played male Eivor, he did look pretty much exactly like Havi in the Valka's-potion memories of Valhalla, but as we've discussed, it's probable those visions were heavily influenced by what one expected to see, so it was probably more that male Eivor's Odin DNA would lead to him seeing himself-as-Havi looking about the way he looked when gazing into a pool or however they could see their reflections. Which is convoluted, but I think no more improbable than any of the rest of this.

Maybe you have to have a certain percentage of Isu DNA (like, from more than one parent? cousin marriage for the win?), as well as something in your circumstances? I feel like it can't be practically impossible, or there's barely any point in doing it at all (although I suppose if it was the only thing they could think of, practically impossible is better than completely impossible!), but it also can't be totally simple, or there'd be too many of them running around all the time.

One would imagine they'd have it set up so there was some kind of middle ground, but who knows what that would be, or whether we shall ever know.

Butch:

Well, at least we established one thing beyond a doubt about AC games:

They do lead to some epic bloggage.

I wonder if Ghostwire finished downloading.

Feminina:

That they do. And will continue to when we instantly grab whatever they come up with next as long as they don't skimp on the bananas.

I mean, if we're through with BG2 while waiting for our BG3 discs to be remastered...