Minor spoiler warning for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
New on Twitter. , as reported by GameRant, and were met with a pretty swift negative reaction for not including a female Eivor. Of course, with those being leaks, I withheld judgment on💎 the news until we got some sort of official confirmation.
Now that we have that confirmation, ꧒t𒈔hough? Yeah, this is a bad look. The two Valhalla figures, , are both of male Eivor. There's a vanilla version with one axe, and an extra-spicy GameStop Exclusive variant with two (!) axes. A cursory search reveals that these are the only two Pop figures from Valhalla announced and put into production so far.
This choice feels bizarre, to say the least. First off, why release two different Eivor figures if they're both dudes? Valhalla gives players the choice to pick between masc Eivor or femme Eivor right up front, so it feels strange to not give potential cu💟stomers that same decision. There are a fair number of players who have no attachment🌜 to or interest in the male version whatsoever, so it feels a bit weird to make two of him. Plus, there's nothing there for Ubisoft to animate, .
There's also the canon issue, which is admit🀅tedly minor but still funny to think on. See, if you pick "Let The Animus Decide" for Eivor's gender at the top of the game, you'll freely switch between male and female throughout your time in England. However, , female Eivor is the canon choice - . Male Ei🌊vor technically doesn't exist in the larger AC continuity, meaning that Ubisoft greenlit two Funko Pops of an AU Gary Stu over their actual canon protagonist.
So, why make this decision? Easy: sexism. This was a choice made at an executive level, and at some point, somebody suggested two male Eivor figures and ignored the character many people would spent 100+ hours of their life with. , so maybe this choice is based around that on some level. I don't know. I don't know the ex✅act corporate structures of Funko, GameStop, or Ubisoft, but I think it's fair to say ignoring the canon female character for two figures of the non-canon male character is pretty fucking sexist.
Now, look: was I ever going to actually buy an Assassin's Creed Funko Pop? No, probably not - unless they make one of Shao Jun, or reissue that Aveline one. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that this is another example in a long, l🌠ong series of sexist decisions made around this f﷽ranchise. Despite this being a franchise that has a very vocal and very visible female fanbase, Ubisoft continues to make decisions t🍒hat ignore and disrespect that fanbဣase - even at the risk of going against their own canon.