Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-18014300-20170112113427/@comment-18014300-20170119074616

73.70.13.201 wrote: Him being a Templar also make sense that the PRC also revere him as well. Mao was a student of his and Templar puppet. Hence why the Templar order choose him after Chang betrayed the Templar Order. It also contributes to why the US never really supported Chang later on. Now this is actually a good point. Since both the Communists and the Nationalists continued to respect Sun Yat-sen all this time and both Mao and Chiang are Templars, it might actually make more sense for Sun Yat-sen to be a Templar too, as why would they revere an Assassin so much?

I personally think that at some point Ubisoft should really be more nuanced about which side a historical character is on. Like maybe Mao and Chiang became Templars after seeing the failures of Sun Yat-sen as an Assassin. Maybe Sun Yat-Sen was simultaneously influenced directly by both factions. Maybe Sun Yat-sen was an Assassin who began to see merits to the Templars, or maybe Mao and Chiang were Templars all along but begrudgingly saw a pragmatic purpose to keeping up a façade of reverence towards an Assassin Sun Yat-sen.

But to answer the question of "why not?" which I think is the only thing relevant to my point, it's because even though it's not impossible for Sun Yat-sen to have been a Templar, I strongly believe that the other options they could've taken with his character would have been better. You can explain him as a Grand Master that gets killed by Assassins, but I just think that opens up more room for plot holes, which you can patch but would need patching, and even though you can try to argue that not all Templars are pro-dictatorship, you stlll have to argue it, and it still ends up being a plot that's more forced than the other options.