The Stack

Now, I’ve compared the Assil/Thara relationship in Ankh to both Guybrush/Elaine and Prince/Farah. But on reflection, there’s one component of both of those that’s missing: male incompetence. In Secret of Monkey Island, Elaine has the whole LeChuck situation in hand until Guybrush shows up and, in his eagerness to rescue her when she doesn’t really need it, inadvertently wrecks her plan. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Prince unleashes the power of the Sands without meaning to, creating the conditions that he and Farah spend the entire rest of the game trying to reverse.

Nothing like that happens in Ankh. Yes, Assil sets his own misfortunes in motion through a moment of clumsiness, but this doesn’t affect Thara directly, and happens before he even meets her. If anything, Thara is the one who steps into this role, attracting the attention of the Pharaoh’s guards at one point by defacing some statuary while Assil is otherwise occupied.

The point is one of forgiveness. In Monkey Island, the male hero is forgiven instantly, once he’s cleared up the mess he caused. In Prince of Persia, he’s never really forgiven — once he rewrites history, his transgressions are forgotten, but that’s not the same thing. But in Ankh, there’s nothing for Thara to forgive. From her point of view, he’s been a perfect angel, and if her hostility toward him drops a few notches from when they first meet, it’s because that hostility was never warranted in the first place. It was just her lashing out because of her situation.

Instead, Assil’s ending reconciliation is with the Pharaoh — one of the story’s villains, whose dislike of Assil was basically a matter of whim, not based on anything Assil actually did. The more I think about this, the more I feel like the story is lacking something. Assil is just a little too abrasive for no one to ever be legitimately angry with him.