Spyro 2: Neoliberal (Sur)realism
Dragonsphere Report
Spyro 2 is a much different game from the original. It begins with the same innocence, perhaps even to a degree that feels forced, as Spyro and his dragonfly sidekick Sparx decide to go on a vacation. Unfortunately, at the same time a plucky collection of misfit furries decide they need to kidnap a dragon and shanghai him into service against Ripto, some sort of evil monster-sorcerer with dictatorial impulses who hails from another world. Hijinx ensue, treasures are collected, worlds are traversed, and Ripto is defeated, restoring the world of "Avalar". Pretty straightforward stuff on the surface.
Spyro 2 is markedly less masculinist and homosexual than the first game, but not to a degree that forces discontinuity with that interpretation. Spyro 2 is in fact a story about capitalism. It accomplishes this not just through the presence of the mercenary merchant Moneybags, a character who fleeces Spyro for a sizeable portion of the treasure he collects throughout the game, but through its entire structure as a game, both ludologically and narratively. There are many layers to this.
The first layer is the narrative. Spyro is brought into a world against his will where he is immediately subject to the needs and demands of a besieged foreign power. To achieve his own objective (a vacation, which we'll see is fitting enough later), he must satisfy these needs and demands by accumulating and expending various treasures and rare items. It is worth noting immediately that in the first Spyro game, treasure was not really a medium of exchange. It was a totemic or symbolic collective clan property of the dragons in totality, watched over faithfully by the Peacekeeper branch of the dragon world. It didn't do anything except increase the glory of the dragons as a whole, much as captured treasure left at a shrine to Jupiter did for the Romans in the early days of their empire. Even after it was stolen by the Gnorcs (or converted into Gnorcs, rather*), the closest we get to an exchange is when a balloonist asks to see the treasure, reinforcing the idea that it is valuable in a metaphysical rather than material, capitalist sense. This is very interesting, because it demonstrates that the dragons when left to their own devices have traditional, pre-capitalist ideas about property, or at least certain classes of property.
In Spyro 2, Spyro learns that treasure can be given to Moneybags in exchange for skills, assistance, and access in various senses that mostly just lead to the accumulation of more treasure in the typical circular pattern of capitalism. He learns that certain classes of treasure, namely orbs, can be given to a scientist/engineer to use for technical feats of various sorts, and he learns that the accumulation of talismans, essentially badges of respect or status from the various worlds he visits, allow him to unlock access to the major areas of the game. Thus Spyro learns about property in the unique sense of capital: he literally learns about capitalism. This much is utterly undeniable and not open to a converse interpretation of any sort. In addition to property as capital, he also learns about social capital through the objectified medium of the talismans.
Throughout the game Spyro enters a variety of worlds which are mostly primitive and pre-capitalist in a similar vein to the dragon world. However, an important point of distinction is that these worlds seem to lack the strong concept of communal property that the dragons have towards their treasure. Very close to none of the characters who give you orbs place any importance on them at all. I was worried this could be read as a metaphor for colonialist exploitation at first, but no harm seems to come from the deprivation of resources of the locals of each world. What happens instead is like a LARPers bowdlerized pastiche of colonialism: a children's interpretation. It almost seems as if each world is a capitalist facsimile of pre-capitalism in this respect**
Throughout the worlds, ethnic homogeneity is well established (albeit in terms of "ethnicity" like Seahorse, Bird, Worm, Caveman, and Satyr that blend disproportionately with furry subspecies), with fault lines in various conflicts typically occurring along these strange pseudo-ethnic lines. This again reads as imitative of a past that cannot be reclaimed within the framework of capitalism: each world has a sort of vacuum of property conceptions rather than a true pre-capitalist framework of alternate property conceptions. Even worlds that have strong concepts of work, territory, or occupation are kind of just going through the motions. Avalar is a collection of worlds that have forgotten capitalism, being subjected from the outside to capitalism.
Which brings us to our next layers: The characters of Hunter, Elora, the Professor, and Moneybags carry a lot of weight. There is their literal and their indirect significance, meaning in their characters they actually represent two or three layers rather than just one. These characters are somewhat free floating in their relationship to each other, which is what allows them to take on so much significance in so many different ways.
If treated as an organization, Elora would be the face, Hunter would be a stand-in for whatever the gamer views as the most useless element of the organization (either the CEO or the main workforce, presumably), and the Professor would be a one-person engineering department. It is not hard to read them as being equivalent to a corporation in this respect: Elora deals with Spyro, so she is the HR department, and so it all falls into place. Moneybags in this context is simply the Everything Else company. Sort of like Acme in Looney Tunes. In this reading, in addition to Spyro being a shanghaied soldier in Avalar's army (the only soldier in fact), he is also a contracted worker being paid on a gig-by-gig basis. The two merge pretty seamlessly in what amounts to a probably unintentionally Rothbardian symmetry of power and market.
This leads immediately to the next interpretation of their relationship: Hunter, being useless, could represent the state. Elora could represent woke or neoliberal capital. The Professor could represent STEM as an industry. Finally, Moneybags could represent mercenary or unwoke capital. The main argument for this reading is that Hunter expropriates Moneybag's legitimate earnings at the end of the game and gives them to Spyro. Hunter is seen throughout the game to be incapable of using force competently in any context except here, against the unwoke merchant class. Moneybags is also seen to be amoral, selling bombs to Ripto at one point and occasionally slipping up and calling Spyro a sucker after a purchase. But Elora does not care about the treasure or even the orbs, giving them all over to Spyro at the end of the game as a reward. This seems to reflect Neoliberal Capitalism's fixation on the maintenance of structures which produce perceived meaning and status even at the expense of the actual accumulation of capital.
In the end, Avalar becomes a kingdom that is hollowed out of all of its capital in the name of preserving its character from a foreign aggressor, when its character is a collection of hollow parodies of pre-capitalist societies embedded in a larger capitalist context. In turn, that context enters a kind of stasis in the absence of further possibilities of capitalist exchange: Avalar becomes frozen, incapable of further transformation or growth, and thus the de-facto authorities of Avalar maintain their authority indefinitely, defined primarily by their contrast to the unfettered (IE, substantive or even just "actual") capitalism of Moneybags, as well as the outside context threat of Ripto, who represents dictatorship, rule by force and so forth.
The three paradigms on display in Spyro are thus Authoritarianism, represented by Ripto, which is seen to be radically alien to Avalar and its subworlds, Neoliberalism, which in this context is best understood as a kind of superstructure formed in the crucible of capitalism which persists after the high waters of capitalism recede, and lastly, capitalism itself, the unfettered capitalism of Moneybags, without which the triumph of Spyro over Ripto and the liberation of Avalar is impossible but which represents a threat to the neoliberal regime even greater than Ripto by being indifferent to it, larger than it, and a force for change and growth rather than stability. In the end, Spyro is entrusted with the treasure while Moneybags is disallowed the treasure not because Spyro earned it (he may well have), but because Spyro is unthreatening.
* At the end of the game, when Spyro goes to Dragon shores, he encounters a Gnorc who asks for what amounts to most of the treasure of Avalar just to enter and play a few cheap (and sometimes unsafe) carnival games. Since Gnorcs are constituted of Gems according to the first game, the acquisition of Gems can be seen to aid Gnorc reproduction. Capitalism's indifference is thus shown again, but in a mixed context, establishing it as a force for cosmopolitanism, while at the same time showing that a traditional enemy of the dragons grows in population as a result of it and Spyro's naivety or need for entertainment. In the end it is his need for luxury which leads to this, for a break from the gig economy of capitalism, which originally was simply a need for novelty. Thus the need for novelty is seen as the Pandora's Box that opened the gate through which capitalism entered, which threatens to again undermine the traditionalism of the dragon culture by enabling its enemies. However, since Spyro self-actualized (masculinized) in the context of a war against dragon culture's enemies, the dragon culture is seen to be reasonably inoculated against this contingency by absorbing this into its symbolic and literal ecosystem.
** Having immersed myself in Landian theory-fiction and by extension Deleuzian ramblings about time, and having that strange disease of constant semiotic confusion, it is impossible not to comment that this reads to me as a tale about relative post-scarcity simulationism in the far future in which artificial cultures form along fault lines of politics, capitalism, and cargo-cult capitalism while attempting to reclaim ancestral meaning and merge it with modern sign and culture.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report