Talk:Scholar

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Need update

This article is written exclusively from the gameplay perspective of the very first Assassin's Creed and desperately needs an update. I also noticed recently that the page "Priest (disambiguation)" treats scholars as synonymous with priests while the page "Priest" itself redirects to that disambiguation page. This is a natural result of the usage of scholar in AC1 to refer to an archetype of civilian who appear to be priests for all intents and purposes. I was always confused whether these medieval scholars necessarily were priests or if priests were necessarily scholars.

However, "scholar" in other social and cultural contexts obviously doesn't refer to clergymen. In China and Japan, for example, a scholar was more synonymous with the status of a European knight in the social hierarchy. In Chinese and Japanese, the word for knight literally translates to 'mounted scholar' while mousi or bushi, an everyday word for the samurai (though not the word samurai itself) literally means 'warrior scholar'. Scholars in Chinese society were members of the literary class seeking to enter into the civil bureaucracy or become officials and statesmen. Yan Jiming is a notable example of a scholar who is a main character in the work he appears in. With works set in China and Japan like Dynasty and The Blade of Aizu now having been released, there's more a reason to take into account these different meanings of scholar. And of course, scholars today are typically academicians and researchers, not priests.

What I have always been at a loss for is whether this article should remain titled "Scholar" and rewritten to describe scholars across all historical and societal contexts, be they priests, civil servants, warriors, or modern researchers or should it instead remain solely about priests, in which case it certainly must be moved to the title "Priest" and be updated with information about priests from all other Assassin's Creed media. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 16:27, 12 November 2021 (UTC)