Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Nikolai Orelov a sympathetic defector of the Assassins who is unjustly persecuted or a paranoid man who selfishly takes a First Civilization artifact for personal use and receives a message from that he refuses to pass on to his brothers and whose subsequent self-destructive actions end up fracturing the very family he wanted to protect and likely inflicted a heap of psychological abuse to his son Innokenti?
The Assassins while harder edged and certainly a little Jerkish do keep their end of the bargain up. Nikolai tells Innokenti that they lie when they say that they have protected his wife and daughter while the Assassins say that "they protect their own" but we see Nadya at the end, still wearing that splinter of Rasputin that he tried to hide. In the end it's a massive Poor Communication Kills and Nikolai has his share of the blame.
The interpretation gets even more complicated with some details introduced during Assassin's Creed: Chronicles. While Nikolai has already decided to defect from the Assassins and leave the country after doing one last mission, their relationship is actually pushed to a point of violence when the Assassins try to experiment on and dissect Princess Anastasia's brain to study how it was altered by Pieces of Eden. As Nikolai had just spent days protecting the seventeen-year-old girl, and some of the Assassins show little remorse over the procedures which will either kill her or leave her in a semi-vegetative state due to her royal ties, he ends up burning the bridge by breaking her out and destroying their laboratory in the process. Their eventual violence as of The Fall makes a lot more sense following that reveal.
The Woobie: Daniel could qualify. First he gets kidnapped as a child from his adoptive family and subjected to all kinds of experiments. Then he gets thrown out into the wild, and even when he makes it back to civilization, his life isn't very pretty with his hallucinations that keep coming and going, not to mention his problem with drugs and alcohol. Then the Assassins take him in, and he makes it his life's mission to meet the Mentor. And when he does? The brainwashing inflicted on him long ago kicks in, forcing him to commit an act that irrevocably alienates him from his new family. He may be Desmond's Evil Counterpart, but not by his own choice, which makes it very hard not to feel sorry for him.
