tentacledicks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tentacledicks) wrote2018-12-10 08:14 pm
tentacledicks) wrote2018-12-10 08:14 pm
Entry tags:
Aiden Is Gay And You Can't Stop Me
Or, to be slightly less confrontational, "Ubisoft in writing a reclusive but family-focused man who almost exclusively has close male relationships and views women as sources of emotional support (but not necessarily romantic support) has unintentionally recreated some of the Confirmed Bachelor stereotypes and I've got fucking proof to back up my claims"* but, y'know, less pithy.
Anyways.
The first time I played through the game, I thought 'wow Aiden is a dick.' The second time I played through the game, I thought 'wow Aiden is a dick why am I still replaying this.' The third time I played through the game, I thought 'is there a reason why Damien and Aiden's final confrontation is like the dramatic Betrayed By My Ex scenes in a lot of action movies when Clara's final scene wasn't?'
So, like almost everything in Watch_Dogs, this begins with Damien, and Aiden, and their relationship together. The fact that Damien is a driving factor in almost the entire game—behind the ways the Merlaut job went wrong, behind Nicky's kidnapping, behind Aiden's discovery of Rose Washington, behind Clara's death and the blackout and the push Aiden needs to be a constantly running Bad Decision Machine—is significant. When Damien gets in contact with Aiden again, it's all smug insinuations about being partners, and when Aiden doesn't immediately come back into the fold, he falls into emotional and psychological abuse tactics. There's something very rote in how it happens too; for all that Aiden claims that he's the best at social engineering and manipulating people, he's also an unreliable narrator. Damien's voice logs all but confirm that he's got Aiden's number down by heart, and he knows exactly which buttons to push.
(The fact that he knows these buttons, knows what Aiden does to people who pushes those buttons, and then slams them anyways is sure... a thing. By god, Damien had some confidence that Aiden would be reluctant to kill him at first, and it hold true too—it isn't until Damien makes the attempt on Aiden that he finally retaliates in that good ol' Vigilante murderous fashion.)
Which could all just be the signs of a business partner and friend that was toxic from the start, but here's the thing: Damien, like Lucky Quinn, is effete, fashionable (if you can call sequined vests fashionable), and obsessed with Aiden beyond that base level of friendship. WD1 has a really bad tendency to fall into villainous queercoding with Quinn and Damien both, barely salvaging it by confirming both to have had wives and children. But Damien's the one that gets a speech on the lighthouse, Damien's the one that keeps pleading for Aiden to come back because they were amazing together, Damien's the one that brings champagne to their first meeting in years and knows all about Aiden's life and used to be the closest person to him. There's a particular hint of despair in Aiden when he talks about his time with Damien, and that makes me think that there could have been something deeper there.
And Damien's not the only one. Aiden bonds with T-Bone hard and fast, shifts his attitude towards BadBoy17 when he discovers he's a she, seems to fall into banter with Jordi more easily than we see Marcus do so in WD2. (That's actually an essay for another time, which is the hypermasculine violence of WD1 being viewed through the lens of WD2's more canonically nonviolent protagonist.)
But with women? Well, he relies on women. He bonds to them, emotionally, and then dumps all of his emotional issues on them with none of the context. Aiden plays shit close to the chest with everyone, but with his sister and Clara, he plays it closer still. There's hints of romantic overtones with him and Clara—but those hints are uncomfortably close to the same ones he displays with his sister. The thing is, this isn't uncommon with deeply closeted gay men; within the structures of American patriarchal systems, men are taught to turn to women first for emotional support and to turn to men never. In gay men, who also battle with how the heteronormative systems dictate their sexual partners, it means that sometimes the desire for emotional support and platonic relationships ends up taking on shades of romance, not because they feel romantic inclinations towards the women in their lives, but because those are the only close, supportive relationships that are dictated to them in media and social conditioning.
And Aiden does firmly slot the women in his life into strictly platonic, familial positions, despite his close connections with them. Lena is his niece. Nicky is his sister. Clara, once he gets a chance to truly talk and bond with her in person, becomes a surrogate daughter, a replacement Lena that Aiden doesn't realize he's making—it's not a coincidence that our Bonding Moment with Clara involves her telling Aiden a story about finding treasures and secrets with her father and then turning around and finding the Bunker, a secret treasure for hackers, with Aiden.
But like, hey, it's 2013 in game time, gay rights and all that. Why stay closeted?
Haha. Ha. Ha. Well.
There's a couple interesting tidbits we get for Aiden growing up:
Aiden was born in Belfast in 1974
Nicky was also born in Belfast in 1979
Nicky is old enough to remember bits about their father, but only the good ones; she talks about him like he's an old story she's heard or dreamed of, and less like a memory—if she was older than 10 when they left Ireland, I'd be surprised
Aiden and his mother have much less rosy views of his father, and Aiden makes a point of saying when he was younger, he was proud of it (with the implication being that he isn't proud of it anymore)
Aiden's father was always fighting for 'something'
Aiden immediately fell into the business of crime when they got to American 'so [his] family didn't have to'
So here's what I take from that:
Northern Ireland was embroiled in the Troubles from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The majority of the Irish population in America is Irish-Catholic, and if Aiden's father was a violent man always fighting for something, it's not unreasonable to think that he was a member of the IRA or another paramilitary group; if Aiden's family were Catholic, there would be more reasons to run from Ireland than just his father, and it would give them an instant tie into the immigrant community they were joining. That Lucky Quinn and the South Chicago Club are notably Irish in this timeline and came out on top of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre rather than the Italians is another tie into Aiden and his history—that puts the Club solidly at the top of the pile, and therefore in a position to offer resources to scared immigrant families... for a price.
Aiden is involved in violent work for monetary ends from a young age. He was good at hiding it too, because Nicky remembers him primarily for playing hockey and hanging out with his friends, not for the violence he was engaged in, though his mother must have seen it. It's not unreasonable to assume that he paid off his mother's debt to the Club with his own skills, and that might explain part of why he knows of Lucky Quinn and loathes him in a way beyond his opinion on the Viceroys or the Pawnee Militia.
Catholicism hasn't been friendly to gay men. Organized crime is even less so; like many institutions based around close, intimate relationships between men, straying beyond the platonic is enough to put a price on your head. If Aiden were involved with organized crime, he'd have learned fast to bury anything that even hinted at his own queer identity, and he is good at reading people. And if all that weren't bad enough, Aiden's not just hitting his teen years in a morass of Irish-Catholicism and organized crime, he's hitting his teen years in the midst of the AIDS crisis. And that did a lot to hurt the growth of the community at the time; some of the ground was regained in the 90s, and even more caught up in the 00s, but the impact of that can't be ignored, especially the kind of impact that would have on a young gay man already hitting a wall in two other directions.
So Aiden has a lot of pressure to remain closeted. And I think that the pressure of staying closeted would end up putting him where he is at the beginning of the game: unable to reach out for help, unable to properly process his niece's death, and falling back on old, unhealthy coping mechanisms to try and deal with it. It's not that his fatal flaw is Being Gay (tm), it's that he bottles shit up and always has—a learned coping mechanism from when he had to compartmentalize being a killer and a learned behavior from hiding his sexuality from the people closest to him growing up.
(Also, like, as a side note, Aiden Has A Secret Life Filled With Men He Can Never Let His Family See is very. Hm. I mean, yes, it's because he's a fixer, but the fact that he's desperate to hide his relationship with Damien is just, so, so fucking gay-coded, I'm sorry, WD1 is 100% Damien and Aiden's horrible no good very bad break up.)
*I'm aware that this was pretty much 100% unintentional, but I also would dearly love to see the writer's wall for the first game. Aiden was originally two characters that got mashed together, and I want to know what Tanner was supposed to be; if the Loving Husband archetype got adapted into Aiden as the loving uncle, was Tanner the one that had all these ties to Damien? How did all of this get incorporated together? Was there originally meant to be gay overtones in that? Did those get brought in as a fluke or what?
Anyways.
The first time I played through the game, I thought 'wow Aiden is a dick.' The second time I played through the game, I thought 'wow Aiden is a dick why am I still replaying this.' The third time I played through the game, I thought 'is there a reason why Damien and Aiden's final confrontation is like the dramatic Betrayed By My Ex scenes in a lot of action movies when Clara's final scene wasn't?'
So, like almost everything in Watch_Dogs, this begins with Damien, and Aiden, and their relationship together. The fact that Damien is a driving factor in almost the entire game—behind the ways the Merlaut job went wrong, behind Nicky's kidnapping, behind Aiden's discovery of Rose Washington, behind Clara's death and the blackout and the push Aiden needs to be a constantly running Bad Decision Machine—is significant. When Damien gets in contact with Aiden again, it's all smug insinuations about being partners, and when Aiden doesn't immediately come back into the fold, he falls into emotional and psychological abuse tactics. There's something very rote in how it happens too; for all that Aiden claims that he's the best at social engineering and manipulating people, he's also an unreliable narrator. Damien's voice logs all but confirm that he's got Aiden's number down by heart, and he knows exactly which buttons to push.
(The fact that he knows these buttons, knows what Aiden does to people who pushes those buttons, and then slams them anyways is sure... a thing. By god, Damien had some confidence that Aiden would be reluctant to kill him at first, and it hold true too—it isn't until Damien makes the attempt on Aiden that he finally retaliates in that good ol' Vigilante murderous fashion.)
Which could all just be the signs of a business partner and friend that was toxic from the start, but here's the thing: Damien, like Lucky Quinn, is effete, fashionable (if you can call sequined vests fashionable), and obsessed with Aiden beyond that base level of friendship. WD1 has a really bad tendency to fall into villainous queercoding with Quinn and Damien both, barely salvaging it by confirming both to have had wives and children. But Damien's the one that gets a speech on the lighthouse, Damien's the one that keeps pleading for Aiden to come back because they were amazing together, Damien's the one that brings champagne to their first meeting in years and knows all about Aiden's life and used to be the closest person to him. There's a particular hint of despair in Aiden when he talks about his time with Damien, and that makes me think that there could have been something deeper there.
And Damien's not the only one. Aiden bonds with T-Bone hard and fast, shifts his attitude towards BadBoy17 when he discovers he's a she, seems to fall into banter with Jordi more easily than we see Marcus do so in WD2. (That's actually an essay for another time, which is the hypermasculine violence of WD1 being viewed through the lens of WD2's more canonically nonviolent protagonist.)
But with women? Well, he relies on women. He bonds to them, emotionally, and then dumps all of his emotional issues on them with none of the context. Aiden plays shit close to the chest with everyone, but with his sister and Clara, he plays it closer still. There's hints of romantic overtones with him and Clara—but those hints are uncomfortably close to the same ones he displays with his sister. The thing is, this isn't uncommon with deeply closeted gay men; within the structures of American patriarchal systems, men are taught to turn to women first for emotional support and to turn to men never. In gay men, who also battle with how the heteronormative systems dictate their sexual partners, it means that sometimes the desire for emotional support and platonic relationships ends up taking on shades of romance, not because they feel romantic inclinations towards the women in their lives, but because those are the only close, supportive relationships that are dictated to them in media and social conditioning.
And Aiden does firmly slot the women in his life into strictly platonic, familial positions, despite his close connections with them. Lena is his niece. Nicky is his sister. Clara, once he gets a chance to truly talk and bond with her in person, becomes a surrogate daughter, a replacement Lena that Aiden doesn't realize he's making—it's not a coincidence that our Bonding Moment with Clara involves her telling Aiden a story about finding treasures and secrets with her father and then turning around and finding the Bunker, a secret treasure for hackers, with Aiden.
But like, hey, it's 2013 in game time, gay rights and all that. Why stay closeted?
Haha. Ha. Ha. Well.
There's a couple interesting tidbits we get for Aiden growing up:
Aiden was born in Belfast in 1974
Nicky was also born in Belfast in 1979
Nicky is old enough to remember bits about their father, but only the good ones; she talks about him like he's an old story she's heard or dreamed of, and less like a memory—if she was older than 10 when they left Ireland, I'd be surprised
Aiden and his mother have much less rosy views of his father, and Aiden makes a point of saying when he was younger, he was proud of it (with the implication being that he isn't proud of it anymore)
Aiden's father was always fighting for 'something'
Aiden immediately fell into the business of crime when they got to American 'so [his] family didn't have to'
So here's what I take from that:
Northern Ireland was embroiled in the Troubles from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The majority of the Irish population in America is Irish-Catholic, and if Aiden's father was a violent man always fighting for something, it's not unreasonable to think that he was a member of the IRA or another paramilitary group; if Aiden's family were Catholic, there would be more reasons to run from Ireland than just his father, and it would give them an instant tie into the immigrant community they were joining. That Lucky Quinn and the South Chicago Club are notably Irish in this timeline and came out on top of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre rather than the Italians is another tie into Aiden and his history—that puts the Club solidly at the top of the pile, and therefore in a position to offer resources to scared immigrant families... for a price.
Aiden is involved in violent work for monetary ends from a young age. He was good at hiding it too, because Nicky remembers him primarily for playing hockey and hanging out with his friends, not for the violence he was engaged in, though his mother must have seen it. It's not unreasonable to assume that he paid off his mother's debt to the Club with his own skills, and that might explain part of why he knows of Lucky Quinn and loathes him in a way beyond his opinion on the Viceroys or the Pawnee Militia.
Catholicism hasn't been friendly to gay men. Organized crime is even less so; like many institutions based around close, intimate relationships between men, straying beyond the platonic is enough to put a price on your head. If Aiden were involved with organized crime, he'd have learned fast to bury anything that even hinted at his own queer identity, and he is good at reading people. And if all that weren't bad enough, Aiden's not just hitting his teen years in a morass of Irish-Catholicism and organized crime, he's hitting his teen years in the midst of the AIDS crisis. And that did a lot to hurt the growth of the community at the time; some of the ground was regained in the 90s, and even more caught up in the 00s, but the impact of that can't be ignored, especially the kind of impact that would have on a young gay man already hitting a wall in two other directions.
So Aiden has a lot of pressure to remain closeted. And I think that the pressure of staying closeted would end up putting him where he is at the beginning of the game: unable to reach out for help, unable to properly process his niece's death, and falling back on old, unhealthy coping mechanisms to try and deal with it. It's not that his fatal flaw is Being Gay (tm), it's that he bottles shit up and always has—a learned coping mechanism from when he had to compartmentalize being a killer and a learned behavior from hiding his sexuality from the people closest to him growing up.
(Also, like, as a side note, Aiden Has A Secret Life Filled With Men He Can Never Let His Family See is very. Hm. I mean, yes, it's because he's a fixer, but the fact that he's desperate to hide his relationship with Damien is just, so, so fucking gay-coded, I'm sorry, WD1 is 100% Damien and Aiden's horrible no good very bad break up.)
*I'm aware that this was pretty much 100% unintentional, but I also would dearly love to see the writer's wall for the first game. Aiden was originally two characters that got mashed together, and I want to know what Tanner was supposed to be; if the Loving Husband archetype got adapted into Aiden as the loving uncle, was Tanner the one that had all these ties to Damien? How did all of this get incorporated together? Was there originally meant to be gay overtones in that? Did those get brought in as a fluke or what?
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