Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-18014300-20200504004330/@comment-4801149-20200504032138

A few thoughts, apologies for a long post, I've been typing this out while everyone else was making much more succinct points:

1. If They—capital T—the official lore documentarians of Ubisoft copy and paste from our wiki instead of doing their own due diligence on their own lore, that's their problem. We didn't ask for it, nor do we deserve any kind of blame for "causing" their own inconsistencies, if such blame has already been levied at us. Just a hot take I want to get off my chest, I've since had time to fully absorb Sol's initial post.
2. As to the matter of dating the beginnings of the organizations, with Sol's analogy regarding the French Fifth Republic, that's what nations boil down to—people (or simply well-placed power brokers) organizing lands into a country with borders and handing down laws for the citizenry based on which side of the line they live on. France is currently the Fifth French Republic because the previous four were constructed and dissolved for various reasons. I don't understand how it's "perplexing" for a French citizen to think of themselves as the Fifth French Republic rather than France, but that is the technical line in the sand for the sake of creating an objective historical record. It is all relative, and "France" as a concept can easily coexist with the more technical "Fifth French Republic". World War I was called the "Great War" until World War II happened. Only a true cynic would call it "World War I" in the time prior to II breaking out, like it was a certainty that II would happen. But II is named as such in historical records because a war of similar scale involving multiple nations occurred 20 years prior, and the Great War was re-named World War I. Similarly, the Hidden Ones were re-named the Assassins, the Order of Ancients was renamed the Templar Order, and those labels endured for longer than any name to date.

Moving on to the important stuff:

As for the Assassins and Templars as organizations, while labels are relative and often retroactive, a few things stand out to me in the lore that we can use to make more concrete assessments. The first is Values: I refer to a quote from the First Blade DLC, paraphrased: "There will always be tyrants, and there will always be those like us to stop them." Men like Darius, women like Iltani, upheld the values of Assassins before Assassins were even an organized force. We who have access to the entirety of their stories do not call them Assassins in the context of their "present" because they predate the Assassin Brotherhood, either in their time or the formal Brotherhood's expansion into the kingdom/nation/region of Earth they lived in. We call them Assassins because Assassins that came after acknowledged and characterized them as such, because they believed these men and women practiced the beliefs at the core of their Brotherhood, whether they played a major role or no role at all in its formal establishment. Through applying Assassin values retroactively, we might yet consider Eivor a proper Assassin, even if they weren't literally calling themselves "Assassins" at that point in time. However, I wouldn't consider Kassandra an Assassin, proto- or otherwise. To make a long tangent short, she seemed to disappear out of history entirely, only to reveal herself to Layla as a nigh-immortal NPC making the case for "balance" between Assassin chaos and Templar order. Novelization and in-game empty vessel for players' values aside, she didn't seem to uphold the tenets of the Creed, so calling her an Assassin just because she had a means of discreetly shivving enemies... well, we know how that worked out with Haytham. It would ultimately be up to the lore masters to decide if she qualifies.

The second point that stands out to me is Symbols: If we accept that the "Templars-as-an-organization" exist by the label of "Order", as we accept that "Assassin-as-an-organization" exist by the label of "Brotherhood, est. 47 BCE" we can then count the Order of Ancients as Templars. I would also argue that the usage of Cain's Cross as their sigil constitutes the Order's establishment, as Khemu's eagle skull became the sigil for the Brotherhood. A nation creates a flag and plants it within its borders to say "Let the record show that this land, named such-and-such in the native language of this point in time, begins and ends at this point." Of course, they're not literally saying it as such, but we take it with the context of succeeding events and changes to the symbol. I recall Cain's Cross being associated with the Roman Senate, so at the very least we could consider Caesar's Order of Ancients to be the Templar Order, under this logic, along with the first recorded use of the Father of Understanding, another Templar symbol. Although, was the Cross actually used in the Senate during Caesar's time, or was that just a matter of convenience in the Animus puzzles?

Lastly, we don't yet know enough about how AC: Valhalla will play out in establishing the lore of the two organizations. We've explored the Assassins at length, the progression from proto-Assassins to Brotherhood of the Hidden Ones to the Assassin Brotherhood, but haven't spent a lot of time on the transition between the Order of the Ancients and the Templars. If we see some definitive moment in Valhalla that establishes "English knights = Order", we can consider the Templars, in the context of values and symbols that endured to the modern day, to exist at that point. We can consider that to be the equivalent line in the sand that Origins drew for the Assassins.