Spyro the Dragon is FUCKING CANCELLED

Section 1: Introduction

Spyro the Dragon is a late 90s and early 00s platforming collectathon, considered by many to be a childhood classic. Many of you watching will have this charming little purple man run around on your home TV screens in your youth, and some of you will even have welcomed him back last year when he was revived in the Spyro: Reignited trilogy.

We’ve come so far together with Spyro: we’ve seen things together, we’ve collected gems, and orbs, and orbs, and orbs. We’ve had adventures, we’ve had good times! Spyro is an iconic figure in the dream team of our collective childhood.

But I’ve got some bad news guys, because I’m here, and I’ve got the authority - I’m a real gamer, I definitely didn’t give up halfway through Ripto’s Rage because you have to collect 40 fucking orbs and that’s too many orbs. I’m here with some bad news.

A lot of you will be leaving here today, feeling differently about Spyronnicus T Dragon, because Spyro the Dragon, is fucking cancelled.

Section 2: Spyro, why are you like this?

In his debut appearance, Spyro is the youngest dragon of a proud nation of dragons. Gnasty Gnorc, a… Gnorc? Is it his name? His… species? Gnasty Gnorc, offended by comments made by a dragon on the television, decided to freeze all the dragons - turn them to stone. The player, as Spyro, must find the dragons and free them from the curse, collect gems, and progress through the worlds until they find Gnasty Gnorc and burn him to death. Hooray!
Along the way Spyro will be sidetracked with various collecting missions and occasionally saving dragon eggs from being kidnapped by shady characters who… love to egg… and run away?

In the game, we are introduced to a bright eyed, confident young dragon boy with the presence of mind to take on the perceived big bad completely on his own with no hesitation. Spyro is tough, spirited, and literally filled with the flames of youth. He witnesses a devastating change to his home and he charges into action to take it back. He's a fierce and immediate defender of liberty as he sees it. He cares about trapped dragons, those who are supposed to be his elders, and he cares about gems - restored stolen wealth to its rightful owners. Spyro's quest here is threefold: liberate his fellow man, take down the man redirecting wealth from the dragon lands, and regain those stolen funds for the good of the ...dragon country. Or island. All the worlds are islands... you gotta travel by balloon.

The core play loop in Spyro 1 puts you on a hub world from which you can travel to offshoot levels where you collect gems, rescue eggs and free dragons. When you have done enough of gems, eggs or dragons, you get to progress to the next hub world, until you finally reach the world containing Gnasty Gnorc. Also, hella lava…

In Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, Spyro is transported to a place? It’s a forest? I don’t really know the distinction between where Spyro lives and this new place? Anyway, there’s a fascist little lizard man called Ripto using violent tactics to terrorise and oppress the local population.

Obviously Spyro 2 uses a similar core play loop - progressing from one hub world to the next and travelling through portals to side levels, but in Ripto’s Rage it’s AATO: All About The ORBS. To progress through from one hub world to the next you need to collect enough orbs to power the portal. You also encounter a secondary set of hurdles in the shape of Moneybags the bear. What can I say about Moneybags? What’s not to say? He’s there, he’s a bear, and he’s charging you a fare… to teach you moves…

So here’s the thing about the worlds that you travel to for the side levels: each one is designed around a theme, and that theme, in a lot of instances, is a group of people, or a culture. It’s not just that the worlds Spyro visits are based around other cultures, it’s the designs of other cultures in these games seems to be preoccupied with depicting tribal societies, traditional foreign settings, and whacky characters with an exaggeratedly silly persona. In other words, the depiction of characters coded as foreign in this game usually correlates with a degradation, an implication of being lesser, a… in the simplest possible terms: have you ever noticed Spyro is a bit heckin’ racist?

Honestly, once you start to look at it like this, things look worse and worse. Spyro spends a lot of his time literally roasting tribal communities - look what he does to poor Doctor Shemp’s exposed and vulnerable buttocks! Shemp’s just minding his own business, standing on an empty stone platform on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, holding a stick, butt out, having a great time, and then BAM! Flamed right on the ass. R.I.P.

But wait, isn’t Spyro justified in his mission, and don’t the ends to some degree justify the means? Spyro is trying to take down Gnasty Gnorc, who is by definition, “Gnasty”. I think what we’ve gotta ask, really Spyro, who’s the “gnasty” one here?

Spyro the Dragon sees elderly dragons lose their squandered wealth to a foreign party who media have already popularised as "Gnasty", he sees a reclamation of a huge stockpile of gems held by those elderly dragons, possibly in offshore tax havens, he sees a man, Mr. Gnorc, apparently "legislating" that those elderly dragons be encased in crystal, and redistributing the acquired gems to invest in industry as we see clearly in the sheer number of dock workers [note: these are the official enemy names!] and engineers Mr Gnorc employs in the Gnorc Cove level. Spyro the Dragon sees these things and is convinced that so-called "Gnasty Gnorc" must be stopped.

Gnasty Gnorc is identified with a pejorative descriptor and then the name of his species… it’s not his real name, guys, his real name is Steve. Gnasty Gnorc is a nickname applied to him by the Dragon-biased media. So yeah, Gnorc retaliated to offensive comments against him and his people, and maybe he took it too far turning all the dragons to stone. Yes he’s a girl, yes he’s a gamer. So what? Does that justify Spyro burning him to death?

Spyro is emblematic of a generation who should be rebelling against a system that is exploiting them, but instead has turned their ire towards cultural outsiders - people from other societies and cultures. This is never more clear than in the second Spyro game: Ripto’s Rage, where Spyro repeatedly obliges Moneybags, the greedy capitalist bear, and pays his extortionate fees in exchange for in-game moves, even though Spyro has the power to just toast Moneybags on the spot and seize the moves immediately.

Spyro doesn’t have to pay rent, or power bills, or buy food. To him, the essentials are the moveset he needs to progress through the game, and at every point that Spyro pays Moneybags for knowledge, Moneybags sees an opportunity to charge him even more next time. Moneybags continually raises tuition fees, knowing that Spyro’s only way to progress is through his education, held behind a barrier of greed accessible only via increased gems, and this increased mindless violence. Moneybags’ regime is a constantly escalating cycle of indoctrination into violence, and as a result, blood money.

So when Ripto takes over, and shoves Moneybags from his balcony, the regime in the world of the game is showing us the evolution from capitalism to fascism. In many ways, Ripto’s Rage is the most politically nuanced game in the series. In Ripto’s Rage, Spyro plays both sides of a war between bug people and bird people, indiscriminately feeding his desire to kill; Syro is held back by the mercenary profit-driven Moneybags, but hates Ripto when Ripto deposes him; Ripto calls Spyro “dragon” in a derisive, practically derogatory sense, but Ripto honestly just appears to be some sort of dragon himself… why? Because he and Spyro are the same. They’re both fascist bastards.

Section 3: Who cares? Me!

It's no coincidence that Spyro himself is emblazoned in the colours purple and yellow. The same colour palette as the UK Independence Party. Yeah, that's right. Spyro is a chirpy little Nigel Farage.

Nigel... Spyrage.

Spyro more like Tommy SpyRobinson am I right?

Spyro... of Akkad...

Dragon Realms more like Football Lads Realms.. Alliance… I’m not sure… where this pun was going… 

Before we go any further, we should just talk about the in-universe logic of games, and why any of this matters. There is an in-world logic that needs to be examined for any game, whether it’s just a silly game for children, or Shadow the Hedgehog. Frankly, it just matters because it matters to me.

In Mario Odyssey, Nintendo added a new game mechanic, as Nintendo is wont to do. Using your hat, Cappy, you can “capture” creatures and inhabit them. In the game, “capturing” essentially seems to mean some sort of spiritual possession - Mario’s consciousness is transferred into the body that is captured. The first thing you capture is a frog, and the game shows us explicitly that Mario goes through a sort of out-of-body experience jumping into the frog’s mind. As you progress you will capture all sorts of things: a zip, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a Goomba, a tower of Goombas, this unholy creation of a disturbed mind.
Generally when you release the captured creature it de-spawns - gaming terminology for “it goes poof and disappears” - and can be found again where it was originally. This part of the capturing mechanic makes sense in Mario’s various cartoony whacky kingdoms, as it adds to the impression that all the enemies are also cartoons. Their sentience is no real issue or concern, because they are silly funny cartoons, and sometimes even inanimate objects.

But then, then, Mario reaches New Donk City. New Donk City is inhabited by real people - really real people. Really, unsettlingly real people. Respected art critic Harry Boomerboo made a video examining why real people existing in the same space as Mario triggers our awareness of the uncanny valley. It really gets worse than that, though, because when Mario reaches New Donk City there are side quests that involve him capturing real human people and possessing them for his own purposes.

There are moral and ethical implications to this that no ordinary Nintendo fan should rightly have to confront. Mario Odyssey is age-rated 10+. No ten year old should have to examine the nature of existence so deeply as to think about what happens WHEN MARIO JUMPS INTO YOUR BODY AND TAKES CONTROL OF YOUR VERY BEING. WORSE THAN THAT HE TAKES CONTROL OF THESE MEN - IF YOU CAN EVEN CALL THEM MEN ANY MORE AND NOT JUST EMPTY HUSKS - IN ORDER TO DRIVE A REMOTE CONTROL CAR. HE COULD JUST ASK FOR THE REMOTE. WHY DOESN’T HE JUST ASK FOR THE REMOTE?! DOES HE LIKE DOING THIS?! NO TEN YEAR OLD SHOULD BE MADE ACUTELY AWARE OF THE FACT THEY ARE A PERSON CONTROLLING A PERSON TAKING CONTROL OF A PERSON ONLY SO THAT THEY CAN CONTROL A TOY CAR.

Look, like I say: It matters because it matters to me, and that’s about as objective as I’m going to get over it. I care if Spyro is a racist, and I would like him to not be. You can decide to turn a blind eye to it, decide that it isn’t important but I just think it is.

So what’s the in-game logic that propels Spyro, and why is it racisms? Spyro’s a small boy with a big rage and sometimes excruciatingly inverted flying controls - clearly they’ve contributed to his inner turmoil and I think we can all sympathise. If suddenly your body’s controls were inverted but only for particular scenarios, you too might turn to fascism.

The point is, this cute and cheeky little dragon is hell bent on the terrorisation of indigenous peoples and minorities. He is hell bent on destruction. He will decimate his opponents no matter what.

Honestly, I’m just tired of explaining this. Look guys, this is one of the enemies in Ripto’s Rage.

The game genuinely has this like, atrocious blackface minstrel character in it. That’s just pretty racist. I don’t know what more there is to say. Spyro is cancelled...but here’s the thing: should Spyro be canceled?

The only way he can interact with the world is destructive. Look at the cute spherical lil sheep, but all you can ever do is burn them or ram them. Those tiny fluffy babies hop around happily and yet you cannot hold them in your arms and tell them you love them. You can only singe off their cloudy, adorable wool and watch as they stand there in shock for a moment before fuelling your ever-hungry dragonfly. Your never-satiated minion absorbing death in the form of the expunged moth.

Spyro rails against those who are different from him, and terrorises them, it’s clear, but why?

The system doesn’t allow him to do anything else. He doesn’t know any better because he just literally can’t. When Spyro was looking for orbs, maybe he should have been looking for human connection - maybe he should have been looking for a way to see past what makes Gnasty Gnorc different, and look at what makes them the same... Maybe, to quote the movie War Games, in Spyro’s case “the only way to win is not to play.”

So maybe we should talk about what this is really about?

There’s this guy called Tommy, no last name provided, and he’s being interviewed by Vice for something called Hate Thy Neighbour. Vice, if you don’t know, provided the most in depth coverage of the Charlottesville Trump-supporters White Supremacist rally in 2017 that saw many injured and one dead. Their coverage of fringe topics that other media companies don’t tackle as much is more or less their niche, which is why they’re here interviewing Tommy.

He is, what I can describe in simple terms as very racist. I mean, it’s no surprise really, he’s a chapter leader of the EDL (England Defence League), but at the same time, I think that it might be wrong to just look straight past him and say well he’s a racist. It might be missing a few things, and it might be willfully deciding that he can’t change, when maybe he can?

I’m saying this because when Tommy is talking to the Vice interviewer over the course of a couple of days he explains himself pretty thoroughly, and lets slip more and more extreme racist positions as the interview goes on - as he begins to trust the interviewer more. The interviewer doesn’t comment at the time and instead waits until the end of their time together to try to challenge his ideas. Tommy doesn’t use a very varied vocabulary and he talks about growing up in one of Leamington’s council estates. The statements he makes about the way the world works betray a naivety, a lack of information and education, besides the obvious kind of ignorance inherent in calling someone the n word, or other racist slurs, which he does, while insisting he isn’t racist.

It is fair to say that Tommy hasn’t had some advantages and opportunities available to him. You would have to be asleep to be on benefits, or in poverty, in the UK, as Tommy is, and not be aware that someone is holding you back, pushing you down. It might not be obvious who it is doing that, but it will be apparent that someone is.
Here is a good place to make a distinction: I think Tommy’s racism is pretty appalling, pretty repellent, and I don’t feel sorry for him. I am not trying to sympathise with him. I want to remind everyone that he is a human being, because I feel sad about him.

Tommy knows that he hasn’t had some advantages, and opportunities. He knows he perhaps isn’t as educated as other people. And, after two days of being listened to, without comment or criticism, he feels like the interviewer from Vice is on his side - and then they turn the tables, and confront him about his racism.

When this happens, Tommy becomes angry, aggressive, and even threatening, but what he keeps saying, or trying to say is that he feels like they’ve tricked him. He feels like he’s being laughed at. He feels like people who think they are smarter than him, are laughing at him.

When the media interact with Richard Spencer, or Nigel Farage, or Donald Trump, or any other notable white supremacist, they take an approach that suggests the person they are looking at is of an equal intelligence and is wrong about race. When the media interacts with people like Tommy, there is a lens which suggests he is stupid, not wrong. Uneducated, unintelligent. There is a dramatic irony, through the Vice video whereby we the audience know what the correct stance on race is, and we get to watch Tommy make himself look foolish.
And then, at the end, he gets challenged by the interviewer, and he becomes hostile to the point of physical aggression, because he feels like they are laughing at him, and let’s be fair here: on some level, they are laughing at him. 

There is a lot of talk about symptoms and causes, and maybe it is too simplistic to say that Tommy is just a symptom because I’m sure to the people around him, the ethnic minority people who live near him who get harassed, Tommy is more of a cause. So if Tommy is the cause and not the symptom let’s look at the solutions available.

Tommy expresses hurt and anger and feelings of betrayal and says that he doesn’t care if he gets arrested, which seems like a non-sequitur, until he starts actually getting aggressive and police, who have been just off-camera apparently, the whole time, intervene.

So here’s my point: If Tommy is calmed down and sent back home and nothing happens, will he get less racist? If Tommy is arrested and sent to prison, will he get less racist?

So if he is the cause, and none of the solutions available would help then…? What should we do, seriously? If he is the cause and not the symptom, but none of the solutions to him as a problem help, can we maybe look at the causes of why he is like this?

We get a huge amount of validation out of locating the bad guy and booing at them. It feels good, and it cements our identity as part of the in-group. I’ve seen clips from the vice interview shared in leftist spaces, attacking Tommy, calling him a brownshirt, a fascist, a racist. I’m not going to say he’s none of that, but what makes all of that different from Shamima Begum?
For those unfamiliar, Shamima Begum is a young woman who has been the focus of a media frenzy after she was radicalised and left the UK to join ISIS, but then realised that she and her newborn baby were unsafe and requested reentry into the UK. The debate around her request has been typified by one side, usually right wing, saying that she shouldn’t be allowed back into the country because she chose to leave and become an enemy of the state, and the other side, usually left wing, saying that it’s morally bankrupt to revoke her citizenship, and furthermore that she is being held to a standard that she wouldn’t be being held to if she were white. Shamima Begum's baby died of pneumonia in a refugee camp while her entry into the UK was being debated by the british media.

I don’t want to create a false equivalence between Shamima and Tommy, where I don’t think there is one. She is facing most likely one of two options: either she is allowed back and sent to prison, or she isn’t allowed back and her citizenship will be revoked. I don’t think her citizenship would be at risk if she were a white person who were trying to return from abroad after preaching white fascism. The move to invalidate her citizenship necessarily would create muslims as second-class citizens in the UK.   I also don’t want to make the impression that I think it is the responsibility of individuals to befriend Tommy, and make him less racist, to take on the emotional labour of deradicalizing him. I’m trying to say that we as a whole, that our society, should be focused on rehabilitation.

I’d say that Ms. Begum is a product of our society, and she was radicalised here, and we owe it to her to accept her and try to help her move past hateful ideas. And I’d say that Tommy is a product of our society, that he was radicalised here, and we owe it to him to accept him and try to help him move past hateful ideas.

So I guess basically fuck Spyro, right? He’s a racist and he should go to jail, right? But not as much as the filthy criminal who decided that orbs would be a good addition to the Spyro series. The sick individual that made me think about orbs until my brain was a sludge must be punished. I cannot continue to think about orbs. They haunt me in my dreams, they mock me as I try to sleep. They may be faceless spheres but I know that they have a darker energy and they seek to destroy me. “Orbs” they said “You’ve just gotta collect some orbs” Well I’ve collected some, I’ve collected more than some. I’m done with orbs. Please let me be done with orbs. When will this tyranny end? If I can’t orb a way to… orb? Orb didn’t mean to say orb. Orb is Orb Orb o r b ORB ORB O R B ORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORB ORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORBORB