Ame雨

haytham kenway is autistic and there is nothing you can do about it

The autism rep we didn’t know we needed (I say this disregarding his horrible actions, he is my little meow meow your honor)

Ziio in the modern au around the time she met Haytham! (Which would maybe be,, mid nineties? I dunno but I’m settling for mid-nineties even though I like eighties era aesthetics more but hnnghngh gotta,,, adhere to the timeline)

She has a motorcycle and yeah I have a crush on her

I have other wardrobe ideas for her but!! Have this for now

Bitches only want two things and it's a sequel to AC:Rogue based on Shay searching for precursor box in Europe and new game based on Haytham's journey in AC:Forsaken...

It's me. I'm Bitches

I’m also bitches (except instead of a full AC: Rogue sequel I want a remake but it being a full length AC with the last few sequences being him searching for the precursor box and killing Charles Dorian)

Also a Shay centric book….

Connor really looked at Haytham and said 'I could fix him'

Narrator VO: He could not in fact, fix him.

Hope no one minds but I wanted to add on to this so I’ll RB for Op (I hope you see this) but here are some banger tracks:

Ac1-3: access the animus, dunes of death, the bureau, earth, Venice rooftops, Florence tarantella, Leonardo’s inventions, echoes of the Roman ruins, the road to masyaf, enough for one life, ac3 main theme, fight club, animus island, breaching the walls, Connor’s life

Ac 4-syndicate: black flag main theme,the fortune of Edward kenway, the parting glass, leave her Johnny, my name is Shay Patrick cormac, dangerous waters, David and Goliath, run Shay run, hood, unity, on fathers watch, Versailles for sore eyes, nothing is true, bloodlines, London is waiting, the dance begins, waltzing on rooftops and cobblestones, the assassin two-step, family, underground

This is a LOT though so if you’d rather just have a simple pre compiled (and beautifully preformed) option I can’t recommend the following recording of the live orchestra concert enough (it really packs in a lot of amazing tracks):

let it be known that i adore haytham but damn if i don't want to roll my eyes so fucking hard when he says the templars 'require no indoctrination by desperate old men'

likeeee. haytham. hayth. baby. sunshine. my sweet angel man. my favorite sassy oap. please read the room im begging you. how do you think you ended up here. what do you think birch did to you. :(

I left it in the tags because I can't fully articulate all of my thoughts about it ㅠㅠ But it's something I noticed and that Connor also points out in the game, where he says Haytham's been "talking a lot but has shown nothing".

Haytham talks like a Templar, there's no denying that, but his actions don't match his words like, at all. He claims to want "order, purpose and direction" but he's even more unpredictable than Edward was when he was younger. He always runs head first into danger without thinking (which always gets him in trouble and he has to be saved by someone else), killed a Templar grandmaster for personal revenge (revenge is an Assassins trope - see for instance Ezio, Connor, Arno, Kassandra, the beginning of Eivor's story, and most importantly Bayek and Aya), went against Lee's decision to have Connor executed at the last minute and saved him without anyone ever knowing, dropped off the face of the Earth to go on a camping trip with his girlfriend and had to be tracked down and pestered by Lee to focus on his damn job, heck even his endorsement of Lee is practically a whole façade. He says he supports him but in his journal he literally wrote that Charles doesn't have what it takes to be in Washington's place (he also says he's "too British to get the support of the American people" which is hilarious coming from him) and he honestly sounds so done with the Order as a whole. And one of the most un-Templar things he did was to drop the search for the Precursor site after he realized he didn't hold the right key, and literally no other Templar Grandmaster would've ever done that. The Borgias, Vidic, Germain, the Order members of Bayek's time, heck even Torres (who's the only grandmaster other than Haytham I actually like as a character) were ready to kill anyone standing in their way to access whatever precursor site / Isu artefact they were after. Haytham was sent to the Colonies to get to the Temple. He found it, realized he didn't have the key, and instead of causing unnecessary bloodshed trying to find whatever would open it, he dropped the whole thing and left the site untouched.

And oh, he's the one who had to tell Connor that the "freedom" Washington and the Founding Fathers were promising only concerned white men (or as he calls them, "privileged cowards") and not the natives, and he was mad that Connor couldn't see that. But the Templars are meant to operate in the exact same way, so why speak of the concept of oligarch government with so much bitterness and vitriol ? If his problem was with the Founding Fathers themselves, he would've said so, like he initially did with Washington and his lacklustre battle record. But he didn't. He talked about privilege. His issue was the fact that they didn't give a shit about anyone other than themselves. WHICH AGAIN, is literally Templar ideology, but apparently Haytham doesn't subscribe to that.

It's like everything inside of him is screaming that all of this is wrong but this way of thinking is basically all he's ever known. Haytham says he's a man with Templar ideals and Assassin roots but for real he acts like a man with Templar roots and Assassin ideals. But he's too far gone to see it that way. The damage Birch did is irreversible at this point. That's why I say Haytham isn't irredeemable because he's evil. I don't think he is. But he's past the point of no return, and not even Birch's death could save him.

literally all of this, omg. ^

haytham spent his entire life acting like a walking contradiction because that's exactly what he was. being bred for a certain future from a young age, only to be ripped from that and groomed for a very different kind of future. he was failed by his primary caregiver**, then deliberately isolated from anyone else who ever knew or genuinely cared about him. poor baby never had a chance in hell.

(**and i know there's the debate of 'did reginald threaten tessa into giving up haytham or was she genuinely traumatised by haytham taking someone's life in front of her' , but either way, to me it's a failure on her part)

haytham doesn't truly know who the real him is, and by the time he starts to realise that this is the case (ie, when he learns the truth about birch and kills him), he's much too old and alone and psychologically worn down to change it.

haytham holds on to the wrong and the bad, grips it with both hands and lives deeply in denial until the day he dies, because it's all he has.

Not to add onto this post again and make it endless but I'm not kidding when I say I have SO. MANY. THOUGHTS. About Haytham. And then you talked about his death and it made me have even more thoughts, lol.

There's a lot of talk going around about Haytham letting Connor kill him. Not only do I think it's 100% a fact, I think this is one of the reasons he did it. Not because he knew death was his only way out, but because he saw in Connor what he knows deep down he should've been. Connor is his legacy — not the American rite. I don't think Haytham sent Lee away to protect him. I think he sent him away to make sure Lee wouldn't kill Connor.

His last words to Connor are also telling. "I won't caress your cheek and tell you I was wrong, I'm sure you understand." I don't think Haytham is saying that to make Connor believe he has no regrets — if that was the case then he wouldn't have left him his journal, because that thing made it pretty clear that he's at the very least very unhappy with how his life turned out. Haytham can't bring himself to admit that his whole life was a lie. That's a reality he's just unable to face. It's too hard for him to admit that he's been the puppet of the man who killed his hero, his father, this entire time. I think he clings onto the Templar Order partly as a way to prove to himself that no, he wasn't manipulated — that he has made his own mind, that this is his own choice, that he's doing exactly what Edward taught him to do. That way it doesn't feel like he's failed his father by serving the monster who betrayed and killed him.

Denial is his only coping mechanism because facing the truth would probably break him apart. The void inside of him is already crushing as it is. So his only way to move forward is to stick to what he knows, even if his values are in complete opposition with it.

Again, I have so many things to say about this man that it's hard not to get tangled up in my own analysis, but I hope this at least makes *some* sense.

Adding on to the end of this, he literally attempted to try and shatter Connor’s world view after revealing that Washington was behind the attacks on his village. He literally says that if it had been him in Connor’s place it would have shattered him, but it doesn’t shatter Connor. Haytham and Connor are very different people, and while every time Connor was faced with the harsh reality he was able to weather that storm and make it out the other end, but if it were Haytham…. He wouldn’t be able to. The truth was too much for Haytham to face so he continually built up walls and defenses over years and years to protect himself from the truth he knew deep down….