Doctor M(andril), A Villainous Demonstration Of Crafting The Perfect Sequel

Doctor M(andril), A Villainous Demonstration of Crafting the Perfect Sequel

I’ll cut right to the chase, there is no baddie in the Sly franchise (to me) that has before and will ever again top the writing of this monke right here. That’s not to put down Clockwerk in any capacity. In fact, the majority of what makes M so amazing is not what he is in a vacuum, but what he serves to build upon the events that preceded him. Clockwerk is the giant who’s shoulders he stands on, the two games before him the backdrop that makes him shine so brightly. I’ve always been a strong believer that stories are in large part only as good as their antagonists, and this is what Dr.M has contributed to make Honor Among Thieves the narrative peak of the Sly Cooper franchise.

For minor starters, everything about this freak is downright unsettling.

A mandrill monkey was a great pick for a scary looking, vicious little mastermind. Even with a fresh coat of purple and his short stature, he looks about as repulsive and menacing as he is on the inside. He’s completely obsessed to the point of being consumed metaphorically by his envy and resentment of Connor. He gave us a lot of interesting insight into the life and relationships of Sly’s father while leaving us with even more mystery and questions to ponder. He’s meticulous and intellectually gifted in his ways, but it doesn’t do anything to overshadow the fact that he’s also an utterly deranged madman.

Clockwerk’s hatred for the cooper line, as genuine and strong as it was, had this almost detached element to it, being more like a means to an end and fueled by superiority and rivalry competition. It was kinda hard to get your head around it, and the second game keeps him in your thoughts more like a slumbering eldritch horror waiting to rise again or a pure, immortal force of evil itself, rather than a person. He isn’t even really “anthro” in his design. Clockwerk is a monster, a robotic husk of a former individual.

Dr.M’s hatred for the Coopers on the other hand is… uncomfortably humanized. He’s narcissistic, yet he’s also paranoid and motivated by a rage that’s responding to his sense of inferiority and victimhood. He’ll use his warped justifications to stoop to the most heinous acts- not just because he wants to prove himself better- but because he wants to destroy/take everything Conner loves and accomplished. Clockwerk’s hate was cold and mechanic. M’s hatred is personal and boiling over with venom. Both of them were defined by little more than their loathing of Coopers, but while Clockwerk kept himself alive with his vendetta, M’s was the very thing that led to his demise.

Clockwork was “the enemy of all Coopers”, but he left the final member of the bloodline to wither and then bloom more vibrantly than ever to return and defeat him. He underestimated Sly, and was content to live on and continue his own work with the overconfidence that he had already won. I wonder in my head sometimes if maybe his power was actually starting to fade in the light of seeing that vendetta finally resolved. Or if that time-worn weariness and frustration was part of why Sly, barely an adult, was able to accomplish what generations of his most skilled family had failed to. He never knew Clockwerk during his prime, the great monstrous owl that his clan used to live in constant terror of.

Doctor M feels like he was really Sly’s own Clockwerk. A fresh and unfamiliar threat to truly test every skill he had spent a whole career of thieving to master, and someone who’s own history was far more entangled with Sly’s blood than he could have imagined. Clockwerk condemned him to death (or destitution) for no other reason than being a Cooper, but Dr.M actually wanted to watch the life leave his eyes because he was Sly Cooper, son of Connor.

And he’s not just fitting to compare to the old bird, but he’s more overtly a direct foil to Bentley’s character too. He’s a dark prophecy of the worst possible result of what would happen if the Cooper gang fell out with each other in a similar manner, or if some of Bentley’s foreshadowed insecurities (that started presenting after he became wheelchair bound) were allowed to fester instead of him finding support from others. That turtle is also the only character that Dr.M is able to speak to like an equal, because he sees himself in Bentley despite being on opposite sides.

He’s a really, really well-written main antagonist that does not try to take a whole new direction like Neyla; instead, he’s like a revamped version of Clockwerk’s “idea” done without milking out any more references or revivals of the bird and his role, which by this point was well-concluded and moved on from… The past of Sly’s family coming back to haunt him, the weight of honoring the legacy of his ancestors, and the struggle of exploring who he is both as a Cooper and the leader of his own found family, and Honor Among Thieves checked those boxes without ruining the closure he got back in Paris. Band of Theives will always be my personal favorite to return to, but all of what M represents, along with many other reasons, is why I consider the third to narratively be the best game out of the series.

Obsessed with this little gag in “Backseat Drivers From Beyond the Stars” when, as the Resisty approach The Massive, the Tallest drop the donuts they were excitedly mowing though beforehand.

And then after like one second of pause, all of the navigators on the bridge (who, mind you, are almost always portrayed as some of the most mature and rational irkens of the whole species) all freaking swarm forward and start fighting each other for those pastries like a pack of starving rats.

The way they all begin the shot not even doing their jobs, too. Just gathered up to watch Red and Purple eat those donuts and quietly pray for scraps like this lmfao. I assume away from post just because the Massive was parked for a break. AND the fact that not one of them hesitates for even a second before basically stealing food from their distracted, but still almighty leaders. Either those were just some particularly good donuts, or Irkens act like greedy cat/dogs whenever they get the chance around someone who currently has food they don’t.

Pilot Dib once said ✨

So there was a note under my post about Zim hovering a finger over the self destruct switch on his first day on Earth that just cracked open something in my mind.

Cause…Oh. Oh hecc you, @murhuedur. You actually touched on like, my favorite thing about this character, period. I really like this take, I do. It’s a good one. I ponder, still,

In my own opinion, it’s actually genuine confidence and arrogance, but Zim’s delusions of grandeur are as a thin rubber band. They can stretch out to wild lengths and remain malleable enough to bend around truth as he wills,

But there’s a hard limit out there eventually, and should reality require him to stretch his cognitive dissonance just too far, it’s a violent snap-back to full clarity. I don’t think he’s faking it or always lying to everyone else about what hot shit he is, because I think he fully believes those lies about as fast as he can speak them, even if he will later realize he was wrong after a cosmic punch to the face.

Like, Zim’s smart, but smart people aren’t inherently rational ones. Within Zim, the tallest, hell, maybe even Skoodge, there’s sometimes this very short-sighted flippancy about what is objectively true/false that peeks out every now and again in their psychology. I mean, humans sometimes do this too when it’s convenient to their interests, just, obviously not to goofy cartoon character levels if they want to function in society.

Zim has whatever this flaw is and cranked up to 11, maybe as a side effect of his PAK defects. Sometimes it gets him into DEEP shit, but it’s also his biggest mental shield. Zim has like no fortitude against spiraling into a full on depression or a justifiable panic attack over the smallest concession of being an absolute failure to his race. That weaponized denial that makes him so dangerous to himself and others also keeps him together and motivated forward. But it’s not largely a conscious lie he’s telling himself. It’s genuine faith he’s trying to manifest into matter through sheer force of his will.

His dogmatic mantra, “I am Zim” and what it means to him is a statement he holds on such conviction it overpowered and hijacked the ego of 3 control brains at once.

If I were inserting him into DnD he’d have the wisdom stat of a stale poptart and a 20+ thrown into charisma. He’s faking it without even understanding he’s faking it.

But were he completely detached from reality, he’d be WAY more likely than even now to accidentally get himself killed. While a narcissistic level of self esteem is what lets him ignore and selectively unhear inconvenient truths, the adrenaline of immediate life or death danger is what grounds him back in the real world. You notice over time that as self-sabotaging as he normally is, he seems to act his most rational and competent when he’s suddenly put against the grindstone and self preservation HAS to jump into the driver’s seat. He basically survives his day to day on a tightrope between a falsely glorious narrative of himself, and his perceptive anxiety both tugging him to land on either side of the fence when something big happens.

In “The Trial”, he wastes very little time on his expected bullshit or his confidence in being able to just win over the approval of his judges.. by virtue of being his awesome self. He spent most of that ordeal on the verge of a heart attack, squirmed to find an escape, and actually tried to DENY causing the death of two Almighty Tallests (reminder that he usually owns up to his atrocities with downright offensive pride). He understood the full gravity of an existence evaluation and how cooked his goose was. As soon as the situation resolves and he’s no longer in that danger, it’s right back to full trust of his status as an invader, and in Red and Purple as his biggest fans. When his disguise starts to slip in front of Skool kids he knows are dumb as a bag of rocks, he can silver tongue his way around that without skipping a beat. Losing his disguise in front of a bunch of alien-obsessed adults? Uh oh, pants-shitting terror, this is potentially game-over levels of bad, immediately gtfo of here. Stand there, chest beat, and scold the obviously rogue duty-mode Gir all day until the second it actually tries to kill you and you suddenly have to realize you’re not the one holding the cards anymore to save your own life.

The other way this quirk of his really shows through is in his selective memory. Zim has this skill to repress down and push away unpleasant experiences that I think some of us can only dream we had. I love it because it’s equal parts a comedic and analytical goldmine.

Tak, who actually posed a legit threat to his entire mission and tried herself to chip through that massive wall of denial he’s shielded in- same Tak who’s powerful af ship was stolen and desecrated by Zim’s arch nemesis… she’s not just an afterthought in his mind after that mess. He’s literally pushed that one out of his thoughts altogether in the comics. Like she, and Skoodge, who he can’t fucking stand, might as well have never even existed, even while GIR’s trying to remind him. That time he played around with time travel and it was one of the biggest clusterfucks he quickly lost control of? The bologna incident he stooped so low as to ask dib to help him with? You must be thinking of someone else. Nope. Not a thing. Lalala, can’t even hear you. This is also what makes it no wonder he deeply struggles with actually learning from certain mistakes.

From an outsider’s eye this behavior of his is baffling. It makes him look actually insane or at least obnoxiously obstinate. And I think both assumptions are half right, because this is clearly not the result of mere stupidity. Those truths are simply wayyyy too discordant with his view of himself to devote surface memory to, or too uncomfortable, unless and until, of course, you confront him with them in a fashion where that rubber band has to snap, that bubble pops, and he instantly sobers out of that complacency.

Literally god forbid he ever stops being defective in this way or is given the ability to reckon with the reality of his situation and his history all at once. I’m not even just talking about his job or banishment. I’m talking about his entire life. This chaotic, flexible, incoherent mindstate is the only branch he’s holding onto from dropping into a much more horrifying chasm beneath himself, the depth of which we can only guess. I straight up have no idea what he would do or what could happen to him if he could, even for a moment, rationally comprehend his every action, memory, and empirical truth all at the same time. Seriously, leave that Pak’s Gordian Knot be, or I imagine there could be an HP Lovecraft type of breakdown in the making.

#By the way this is probably one of the most important differences between him and Dib, and what makes Zib so… way he is.

oldie but a goodie

So I discovered Made in Abyss and uh oh I found a new nomination for the Bad Dad Awards

Well no joke, hecc you too. I literally had to stop myself short from finishing a sentence during drafting this that started off “the closest we ever did get to see to what that ability to introspect would do to him was Zib because-“

And I stopped because I realized that Zib is really squirmy and hard to use as an example for much on this front, because Dib’s still the dominant majority of that fusion. But damn you this is such a delicious tangent. The most I brought myself to speak of it without poking was this here in the tags

Like they’re literally mirrors of the worst in each other in a lot of ways but the bit that distinguishes them the MOST to me is that Zim is the sorest loser and Dib is a sore fucking winner. Zim could never cope with being in Dib’s position and knowing it. That selective mental blindness to failure is all he has because whenever he DOES have to accept defeat, at best he throws a screaming, rampaging tantrum.

At worst, he can’t go on if he can’t see a way to bounce back, or if he loses his faith in that glorified version of himself. That’s why his crash in Enter the Florpus Happens. That’s why “Mopiness of Doom” happens. Dib, the arch nemesis, is necessary for that inner narrative to not expire. Zim knows he’s the main character, and protagonists, especially those of legends are only as compelling as the monsters they slay. He needs his antagonist to validate his invasion, because Red/Purple’s half-hearted humoring can only give him so much juice when he’s witnessing his own stagnation in the field and every other invader speeding past him in their progress. Everyone else on Earth is either pathetically unthreatening, or they don’t give him the time of day.

Dib’s the godsend excuse he needs to explain why the he’s not living up to his expectations- Someone else to be “the problem” so he doesn’t have to have that band snap (spiral into an introspective depression or meltdown). He’s not even aware that this is the nature of their symbiosis. I fully believe he would kill Dib again, just as remorselessly as in “Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy” if given the chance. And he would celebrate… until it dawns on him that he still can’t conquer the earth and that Dib’s defeat actually didn’t slay the dragon. Zim is freaking pitiful to me in how jacked up and kind of destined for self implosion he is. He only thrives and feels his self worth in a constant state of conflict and chaos, neither winning or losing.

In other words, he’s a perfect war machine. An enthusiastic tool of perpetual conflict and mass destruction,

if only he could actually be controlled. Then he’d be the best thing to happen to Irkens since nachos. Sucks for them, though, he’s designed not to be.

However, I digress. As for Dib, there’s no effing way that twerp has any clue either about what’s going on in Zim’s head/back. He doesn’t even have enough of the full picture to guess at it, and besides, he has his own priorities and his own savior of the world complex he needs Zim for in just a similar fashion. But while Zim is teetering on the edge of that aforementioned lovecraftian brand of melodramatic darkness, Dib can actually take a narrative punch.

This kid doesn’t have the luxury of a malfunctioning neurology that auto-slaps down offense or uncomfortable information. Neither does he have decades of military propaganda that propped him up as the universe’s pinnacle species since birth. He’s a freaking 12 year old human boy. He for a decent part, at least much better than Zim, knows his own size and position in the galaxy. This alien is the invader, and he’s playing home team on defense. In fact, Dib has seemingly lived most of his damn life so far on defense. He doesn’t have a lot of victories he can hold onto for a boost and he doesn’t forget it. He doesn’t have reliable allies or servants. He has ONE human being he somewhat gets along with and can have occasionally positive interactions with. Yeah, it’s sad to see that it’s led to him developing a remarkably negative self image and some amount of self loathing, but Dib has actually, somehow, managed himself pretty well under that. He gets up after falls fine, he shrugs off near-death close calls, and he looks this overpowered, lunatic bug freak right in the spider eyes and says to himself “Yeah. This is the fight I’m choosing, and I’m going to win because I have to.” Zim’s bubble wrapped. Dib is tempered in flame, with a self image that has nowhere to go but up.

And he actually still has a hobby or two outside of Zim. He’s arrogant in his own way, but not to the point of inhumanity. He’s an antagonist, but Zim is a villain. If Zim wins, there’s a timer ticking to some point where he still comes freaking undone and is unsatisfied. If Dib wins, really wins, that fixes Dib. And that’s a perfectly logical narrative to weave, given the facts. But goddamn is dib really awful at taking a W without being really overcompensative about it.

Yet…the Zib case.

Your question, right.

My answer, at least under the web I’ve weaved, is definitely the latter option. Where I considered some fear I had of the idea of Dib’s ability to put together and not sugarcoat shit with Zim’s whole life story, banishment and fake invasion and sabotaging his own leaders and all… you’d especially worry for that seeing that Dib’s seemingly conquered the PAK in some fashion, given that it hasn’t killed him and Zim’s personality is either erased or dormant…

but that’s not what actually happened. Instead, we actually did see Dib being the one who survived, but not untainted by the merge. He was just the next host for the PAK’s double edged sword- superior intellect at the cost of bearing the involuntary madness, warts and all. If that sickness could overcome the collective control brains, how tf was a single human’s mind supposed to stand a chance against the same corruption?

Potential spoiler for anyone who never caught up on og Adventure time, but in other words, Dib basically did the equivalent of murdering the ice king, and then slapping the cursed crown onto his own big fat head in a reckless grasp for power. Which, in adventure time, messing with the ice crown does not go well. For anyone. Ever. It’s the classic folly of he who fucks around with things beyond his limited understanding, in his ignorance, isn’t ready to contend with the consequences.

Fuck around, the universe lets you find out, no matter who or what you think you are.

And the funny thing is, if you actually read Lovecraft, that’s the real core soul of his horror, not repulsion of the spooky scary monsters just because they’re out of this world.

But the horror of Zib is that he smoothly rose up to both embrace and embody the paradox that keeps Zim going, but with Dib’s sense to competently see a plan through setbacks. Zib is the brutality of the invader, given the humanity to empathize with others well enough to make them believe his lies too. He’s Zim’s ferocity and Dib’s cynical bitterness given control back, and that’s what makes him the most dangerous entity in the entire franchise.

So there was a note under my post about Zim hovering a finger over the self destruct switch on his first day on Earth that just cracked open something in my mind.

Cause…Oh. Oh hecc you, @murhuedur. You actually touched on like, my favorite thing about this character, period. I really like this take, I do. It’s a good one. I ponder, still,

In my own opinion, it’s actually genuine confidence and arrogance, but Zim’s delusions of grandeur are as a thin rubber band. They can stretch out to wild lengths and remain malleable enough to bend around truth as he wills,

But there’s a hard limit out there eventually, and should reality require him to stretch his cognitive dissonance just too far, it’s a violent snap-back to full clarity. I don’t think he’s faking it or always lying to everyone else about what hot shit he is, because I think he fully believes those lies about as fast as he can speak them, even if he will later realize he was wrong after a cosmic punch to the face.

Like, Zim’s smart, but smart people aren’t inherently rational ones. Within Zim, the tallest, hell, maybe even Skoodge, there’s sometimes this very short-sighted flippancy about what is objectively true/false that peeks out every now and again in their psychology. I mean, humans sometimes do this too when it’s convenient to their interests, just, obviously not to goofy cartoon character levels if they want to function in society.

Zim has whatever this flaw is and cranked up to 11, maybe as a side effect of his PAK defects. Sometimes it gets him into DEEP shit, but it’s also his biggest mental shield. Zim has like no fortitude against spiraling into a full on depression or a justifiable panic attack over the smallest concession of being an absolute failure to his race. That weaponized denial that makes him so dangerous to himself and others also keeps him together and motivated forward. But it’s not largely a conscious lie he’s telling himself. It’s genuine faith he’s trying to manifest into matter through sheer force of his will.

His dogmatic mantra, “I am Zim” and what it means to him is a statement he holds on such conviction it overpowered and hijacked the ego of 3 control brains at once.

If I were inserting him into DnD he’d have the wisdom stat of a stale poptart and a 20+ thrown into charisma. He’s faking it without even understanding he’s faking it.

But were he completely detached from reality, he’d be WAY more likely than even now to accidentally get himself killed. While a narcissistic level of self esteem is what lets him ignore and selectively unhear inconvenient truths, the adrenaline of immediate life or death danger is what grounds him back in the real world. You notice over time that as self-sabotaging as he normally is, he seems to act his most rational and competent when he’s suddenly put against the grindstone and self preservation HAS to jump into the driver’s seat. He basically survives his day to day on a tightrope between a falsely glorious narrative of himself, and his perceptive anxiety both tugging him to land on either side of the fence when something big happens.

In “The Trial”, he wastes very little time on his expected bullshit or his confidence in being able to just win over the approval of his judges.. by virtue of being his awesome self. He spent most of that ordeal on the verge of a heart attack, squirmed to find an escape, and actually tried to DENY causing the death of two Almighty Tallests (reminder that he usually owns up to his atrocities with downright offensive pride). He understood the full gravity of an existence evaluation and how cooked his goose was. As soon as the situation resolves and he’s no longer in that danger, it’s right back to full trust of his status as an invader, and in Red and Purple as his biggest fans. When his disguise starts to slip in front of Skool kids he knows are dumb as a bag of rocks, he can silver tongue his way around that without skipping a beat. Losing his disguise in front of a bunch of alien-obsessed adults? Uh oh, pants-shitting terror, this is potentially game-over levels of bad, immediately gtfo of here. Stand there, chest beat, and scold the obviously rogue duty-mode Gir all day until the second it actually tries to kill you and you suddenly have to realize you’re not the one holding the cards anymore to save your own life.

The other way this quirk of his really shows through is in his selective memory. Zim has this skill to repress down and push away unpleasant experiences that I think some of us can only dream we had. I love it because it’s equal parts a comedic and analytical goldmine.

Tak, who actually posed a legit threat to his entire mission and tried herself to chip through that massive wall of denial he’s shielded in- same Tak who’s powerful af ship was stolen and desecrated by Zim’s arch nemesis… she’s not just an afterthought in his mind after that mess. He’s literally pushed that one out of his thoughts altogether in the comics. Like she, and Skoodge, who he can’t fucking stand, might as well have never even existed, even while GIR’s trying to remind him. That time he played around with time travel and it was one of the biggest clusterfucks he quickly lost control of? The bologna incident he stooped so low as to ask dib to help him with? You must be thinking of someone else. Nope. Not a thing. Lalala, can’t even hear you. This is also what makes it no wonder he deeply struggles with actually learning from certain mistakes.

From an outsider’s eye this behavior of his is baffling. It makes him look actually insane or at least obnoxiously obstinate. And I think both assumptions are half right, because this is clearly not the result of mere stupidity. Those truths are simply wayyyy too discordant with his view of himself to devote surface memory to, or too uncomfortable, unless and until, of course, you confront him with them in a fashion where that rubber band has to snap, that bubble pops, and he instantly sobers out of that complacency.

Literally god forbid he ever stops being defective in this way or is given the ability to reckon with the reality of his situation and his history all at once. I’m not even just talking about his job or banishment. I’m talking about his entire life. This chaotic, flexible, incoherent mindstate is the only branch he’s holding onto from dropping into a much more horrifying chasm beneath himself, the depth of which we can only guess. I straight up have no idea what he would do or what could happen to him if he could, even for a moment, rationally comprehend his every action, memory, and empirical truth all at the same time. Seriously, leave that Pak’s Gordian Knot be, or I imagine there could be an HP Lovecraft type of breakdown in the making.