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00:00Oh, Jack.
00:02You were an assassin, yes, but we are not the same.
00:06And that is why your memory must be erased for all time.
00:10Welcome to Mojo Plays, and today we're counting down our picks for the historical figures where Ubisoft
00:16clearly didn't do enough research.
00:18If you were to meet with an accident,
00:20few in France would suffer.
00:23My career certainly wouldn't.
00:25Before we begin, we publish new content all week long.
00:29So, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.
00:34Christopher Columbus.
00:35Assassin's Creed 2 Discovery.
00:37Oh, I've been waiting for this moment, Luis. Do you feel it? The tide shifting beneath us?
00:44While a lot of people likely missed Assassin's Creed 2 Discovery on the DS, if you did play it,
00:50you may have been baffled at the way Christopher Columbus is handled.
00:54No longer is he the man who wrought so much suffering in the Americas,
00:58but he's a friendly ally of the Assassins. He ends up being a target of the Borges,
01:04so Ezio rescues him.
01:06But, as with many other figures, being against the Borges doesn't make someone a moral person.
01:12Ezio actually ends up helping Columbus put his expedition together,
01:16even though the brutality Columbus would perpetrate later in his life is surely against everything the Assassins stand for.
01:22The same Assassins who would go on to try and end the slave trade.
01:26Do not interfere, Ezio. I've had quite enough counseling from your quarter.
01:32Charles Lee.
01:34Assassin's Creed 3.
01:35Benjamin Churchwell. He's a finder and a fixer. He's also on your list.
01:40Lee and Washington did disagree extensively about Washington's military choices,
01:45though Lee didn't initially have strong objections to Washington becoming Commander-in-Chief instead.
01:51After a chaotic retreat during the Battle of Monmouth, Lee's vendetta against Washington grew,
01:57but he did not, as far as anybody knows,
02:00join a secret society devoted to destroying Washington and other enemies within the Continental Army.
02:06His public disdain of Washington eventually got him dismissed from the army entirely,
02:11after which point he stopped his machinations and bred dogs until his death.
02:16There was no last-minute chase through a burning ship in Boston,
02:19nor was he executed in a pub in Philadelphia.
02:23Yet you fight. You resist.
02:27Why?
02:29Because no one else will.
02:31Mary Reed.
02:32Assassin's Creed 4. Black Flag.
02:34Fancy seeing you here, Kenway.
02:37Still looking sleek and mean.
02:39It's well known that notorious pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Reed
02:44did dress as men, with both of them doing so while serving on the ship of Jack Rackham,
02:50aka Calico Jack, who also appears in Black Flag.
02:54However, not only does Anne Bonny not dress as a man in the game,
02:58but Mary Reed is disguised as James Kidd, the alleged son of Captain William Kidd.
03:04This part of history is not true. Reed never pretended to be Kidd's son that we know of.
03:12Interestingly, some historical sources suggest that the two weren't trying to disguise themselves as men,
03:17but were simply wearing more comfortable men's clothes, though other sources dispute this.
03:23We'll likely never know.
03:25No one honest has an easy life, Edward.
03:29And it's aching for one that causes the most pain.
03:33Niccolo Machiavelli. Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.
03:38Ezio, what a surprise to see you here.
03:41I thought you had sent for me.
03:43Would Machiavelli have been an assassin if the assassins were real?
03:47Probably not, and for one reason and one reason alone.
03:51He was a huge admirer of Cesare Borgia.
03:54It's widely believed that his most famous work, The Prince,
03:58which explores treachery in political life, is about Cesare.
04:02Brotherhood does suggest that Machiavelli can't be trusted,
04:05with Lavolpe falling for evidence that suggests he's a traitor.
04:09Ezio finds out that Machiavelli is innocent and saves his life.
04:13Machiavelli also continued to live and work in Florence after the Medici's were finally exiled,
04:19which is also in opposition to the games since the Medici's are key allies of the assassins,
04:25and the Auditore's in particular.
04:27We must not allow him to assemble his remaining supporters.
04:30The coming weeks are critical.
04:32The Marquis de Sade. Assassin's Creed Unity.
04:35Now you can charge in there, cause great disturbance,
04:40and send all the rats scurrying back to their holes.
04:44The less you know about the crimes the Marquis de Sade were imprisoned for, the better.
04:48But among them were the performance of obscene acts using a crucifix and dozens of assaults,
04:54ending up arrested or imprisoned half a dozen times.
04:58Arno meets Sade early in the game, though he doesn't know it's him,
05:02during the storming of the Bastille.
05:04But in real life, though Sade was imprisoned there,
05:07he'd already been transferred away ten days previously.
05:11It's also hard to believe that despite Sade's political connections,
05:15Arno would ever work with him.
05:18Sade asks Arno to assassinate a brothel owner who's been mistreating his girls too,
05:23which hardly tracks with the crimes he was found guilty of or his philosophies.
05:28To your health, Arno.
05:32Carl Marx, Assassin's Creed Syndicate.
05:35We're at a disadvantage, sir.
05:37Carl Marx? Much like you, I am an activist of sorts.
05:40You've got the look of a man who wants something.
05:42Ubisoft is infamous for claiming its complex, historical epics are divorced from politics.
05:47So, what happens when a company with that kind of ethos decides to put Carl Marx in one of its games?
05:54Well, it's bizarre.
05:57Marx appears in a few side missions in Syndicate, some of the glitchiest in the whole game,
06:02and talks to the Fries extensively about how he believes the true right to socialism is via democracy,
06:08disagreeing with the violent tactics of some of his followers.
06:11This isn't exactly accurate, though.
06:14Marx generally believed that only through revolution could true democracy be achieved.
06:19True democracy in this case meant the right to vote for all men, at least.
06:23So, they were planning to revolt to gain the vote, which they still didn't get in Britain until 1918.
06:30Killing people and destroying property solves nothing.
06:33Democracy is the only road to socialism.
06:36Cesare Borgia, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.
06:39The Pope told me to do this.
06:42All of the Borgias are likely to be very inaccurate,
06:45since all the negative stories about them come from slanderous accusations
06:49made by other Italian nobles who didn't like them.
06:52Cesare, though, may be the worst affected.
06:55There's no evidence that he and Lucrezia had an incestuous relationship, for instance,
07:00but it's possible that he and Lucrezia had an affair.
07:03In fact, it's possible that he and Lucrezia had an affair,
07:06but it's possible that he and Lucrezia had an affair.
07:09Lucrezia had an incestuous relationship, for instance,
07:12and he was also a highly effective military leader.
07:16By the end of his life, though, he always wore a leather mask in public,
07:20almost certainly to hide the symptoms of syphilis.
07:23He also didn't die nobly in battle.
07:26He was ambushed alone by enemy soldiers and stabbed to death by spears before being stripped.
07:33Ezio would never dishonor an opponent by doing that, though.
07:37How did you find me?
07:39The apple you stole from Mario Alvitore led me here.
07:45Julius Caesar, Assassin's Creed Origins
07:48Out, all.
07:50You will each be sent for when our congress is concluded.
07:55I wish to hear both Ptolemies' side of the story.
07:59By the end of Origins, Caesar has arrived and become a puppet of the Order of the Ancients,
08:04essentially doing everything Septimus and Flavius tell him.
08:08His death on the Ides of March, orchestrated by assassins including Brutus,
08:13is betrayed as a victory for the people.
08:16But how accurate is this to Caesar in real life?
08:19Well, not very, as in reality, Caesar remained extremely popular in Rome.
08:25His military campaigns were brutal and devastating, even by contemporary standards.
08:31But in Rome, he enacted populist policies and oversaw many reforms to the Roman Republic
08:37that would have helped ordinary people.
08:39Because of this, some have argued that it makes more sense in reality for Caesar to be aligned with the Assassins, not Brutus.
08:47She will never fall to you or your kind.
08:50Freedom is not given, Caesar.
08:53Napoleon Bonaparte, Assassin's Creed Unity
08:56Oh, I'm not here at all. Not officially, anyway.
09:00But how often does one find the opportunity to poke about in a king's private study?
09:05One of the early contradictions between Napoleon in real life versus in Unity is, as with many of the characters, his accent.
09:13Like the rest of the Frenchmen, he speaks with an English accent.
09:17In reality, Napoleon was from Corsica and routinely mocked by the French for his rough way of speaking,
09:24until he eventually won them over with his charm.
09:27So it would have made more sense to give him a different accent from all other characters.
09:32The Dead Kings DLC gets stranger, though, by having him be a villain with an apple of Eden.
09:39We already knew that he had one thanks to Assassin's Creed 2,
09:42but he turns into a monster too soon than reasonably makes sense, since Dead Kings is set in the 1790s.
09:51I wanted him assigned to some out-of-the-way garrison.
09:54But the man redefines the term friends in high places. He's untouchable.
10:00Jack the Ripper, Assassin's Creed Syndicate.
10:03Help me. Miss, please, why am I here? No one will tell me.
10:09It's Jack! Jack the Ripper, I say! He's the one who abducted us!
10:15You could argue that since Jack the Ripper was never caught, it's hard to dispute much of what Syndicate says.
10:21But the Jack the Ripper DLC is so beyond the realm of possibility that it's hard to believe that any of it could be accurate.
10:29In-game, Jack the Ripper is a former assassin,
10:32whose motivation for killing women is that those women were actually assassins themselves.
10:37That makes sense as a premise, but what about Jack the Ripper's personal prison he's running in to decay in prison hulks?
10:45That's just baffling.
10:47As well as that, by 1888, there were no more prison hulks in Britain, left to rot or otherwise.
10:54And all the ones in Deptford specifically had sunk or been broken up as early as the 1840s.
11:01Rest in peace now, Jack. You and your twisted acolytes.
11:06Let us know in the comments which historical figures you think needed some more research.