Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – Part 2-2
The plunder continues, as it must until we can make this a profitable day for piracy.
Streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud
Though I currently have no plans to tackle the Freedom Cry DLC for this game, I will be curious if either that or the main game tackle the topic of the slave trade in this time and place on any deeper level than “slavery is bad”. There’s nothing with that read, but there’s also not much to dig into with something so surface level. It may not always seem like it, but most people fundamentally understand that robbing their fellow human beings of autonomy and subjecting them to harsh labor and great suffering is morally reprehensible.
And if we’re willing to accept that, and play within that space, then we could expand on that idea. We could discuss what drives people to enact those cruelties, what systems are put in place to enforce them, and (most importantly) how both of those can be subverted for the greater project of human rights. The main conflict of a secret war of humanity’s collective free will would even serve as an excellent backdrop for just such a deep dive.
It’s been a long enough time since I last touched Black Flag. So I genuinely don’t remember how much the story delves into these details, if it does at all. That said, my educated guess is that, in classic Ubisoft fashion, they only thought of plantation slavery as a surface-level backdrop for justified robbery. While that would be disappointing, it would not be surprising.
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