We Gotta Start Accurately Calling Sly Cooper A Low Fantasy Universe At Some Point. Its Retrospectively

We gotta start accurately calling Sly Cooper a low fantasy universe at some point. It’s retrospectively wild how much supernatural shit is going on in front of your face that you don’t think about because it’s like… nothing to the characters that it’s happening to. People who have never played Sly Cooper have no clue how nonchalantly it grinds this rail between just “real world noire but furries” and straight up DC superpowers stuff.

• The surprising amount of undead, in hindsight

Black magic is just, you know, a thing…. and outside of when it’s the weapon of choice of the villain of the week, it’s not even really brought up. Tsao was building an army of honest to god vampires and Mz.Ruby has been fraternizing with homemade ghouls since she was a child. A second-game side quest involves descetrating a tomb, kidnapping a bunch of restless ghosts, and then unleashing them on the cops for a good prank. For Pete’s sake, Clockwerk, biggest bad of the franchise, is basically an eldritch machine possessed by the vengeful spirit of someone who became too petty and angry to die.

• There are people born with innate superpowers

So, there is no debate going on with the deal about Cooper abilities and this point, right? Sure, the Theivious Raccoonus has a lot of good pointers any thief worth their salt could gain from, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say somethings along the lines of gliding down lasers or turning invisible on command are a bit out of most readers’ capabilities. The 1st game’s humor in explaining off gameplay mechanics as in-universe phenomena had the unintended consequence of establishing that the Cooper clan members literally have a criminally inclined sort of spidey sense- literally hallucinating glowing auras and blue sparkles around anything both valuable and not nailed down. I think I also awkward appreciated the parallel to be spotted between the Cooper honer code and the self imposed limitations other media supers live by. That idea of “you have the gift of amazing power and you will choose to use it responsibly”, all the better here for the ways in which the clan’s premise subverts classic hero/villain dynamics.

• Ancient techniques of sorcery

run right alongside conventional weaponry

Some supers are born in this world, a lot of them are made. As if anyone with the time to practice and learn can just pick it up like karate. Religion has to be crazy in Sly Cooper considering there’s entire spiritualisms given demonstrable and epic power in what their followers are capable of. Murray literally can do some degree of magic from the third game and onward and there’s no telling what else he learned over the course of his Dreamtime training. Anyone with the wits and resources of the Contessa can figure out how to toy around with freaking mind controlling dark arts. Don’t get me started again on the whole “army of undead” thing which gets even weirder by the implication that the world does nothing to regulate these kind of abilities UP AND UNTIL the user starts to roleplay a cocky little warlord with their zombie friends. And Flame Fu is right there. A lot of what the panda king can do is closer to Bentley’s realm- very complicated and meticulous works of pyrotechnics, but Flame Fu is a whole something else that belongs in this discussion.

• Magical items and mythical beasts

The Mask of Dark Earth, the guru’s special stone, an entire kraken, a whole laundry list of things in The Contessa’s possession, an enormous swamp serpent, haunted trees, whatever the hell kind of ring Dimitri was wearing in the second game, a giant stone dragon statue that turns out to be AN ACTUAL FREAKING DRAGON in dormancy, a supercharged ancient bamboo forest, potentially the Cooper cane itself, and the not-to-be-overlooked every single piece of Clockwerk’s cursed body. I know I’m probably forgetting something because that was just off the cuff. It’s kind of wild that most of what we watch the Coopers focus on stealing can be stuff like museum paintings in a world where magic flying carpets are confirmed to exist. The hell. Why was I ever mocking the pirates in Bloodbath Bay for their paranoia and superstition?? Best part was always that basically none of it phased the resident smarty pants nerd character like it usually would anyone who fills that trope. Because of magic is just an accepted and normalized thing in the world, why WOULD Bentley talk about it any different than he would the history of lumberjacks or combustion physics? Instead of conflicting against his understanding of science, it just tacks onto it as more additional info, you know… the way it would if magic was just another set of rules to study and understand.

Now I don’t mind this established trope at all where people are basically ants in the minds of dragons, but then, just once in any fantasy media or campaign I want a dragon or other massive higher creature that responds to the existence to humans in the exact way that I do to bugs.

Dragon that stops flying because it saw someone sleeping in a field and pokes them with a branch out of sheer curiosity to check if they’re dead or not.

Dragon that watches goblins scurry into one of their little huts and just pries the roof off to stare at them and look at the inside of their little shelter before putting it back down with a satisfied grin and leaving.

Dragon that sees a person treading water in the middle of a lake or the ocean, carefully plucks them out, and sets them down on dry land. Maybe puts a goat’s leg in their lap in case they need a snack. Also calls them “Harold” for no apparent reason.

Very young dragon that screams and freaks out upon seeing a bearded man with brightly colored robes and a pointed hat until it realizes the guy isn’t casting any spells. “Ohhhh you’re a wizard mimic” and then proceeds to handle the guy for a few minutes, fascinated. It also addresses the dude as “Craig” the entire time.

Dragon grabs a wild boar and repeatedly starts placing it in front of a town because it wants to see some hunting behavior in action.

Thief gets caught sneaking into a dragon’s lair. Resident reptile roars and is seemingly about to obliterate them when its mate suddenly comes rushing in with a giant cup. They have a grumbly back and forth before the thief is scooped up and promptly brought to be dropped off at the nearest random village. Dragon’s mate refers to the thief as “Sullivan SillyMan” the whole way.

Dragon that encounters a member of a humanoid race it has never heard of or seen before, at least in this region. Stops everything it’s doing and immediately kidnaps the individual. Speeds back to its lair and keeps them imprisoned while trying to flip through some tomes. Eventually drags out a magical item that they use to open a communication with another dragon, describing the prisoner, showing them the prisoner, exchanging friendly banter. There’s a whole 30 minute to and hour convo and everything. Dragon refers to the captive as “Thaddeus” the whole time. Last thing it does is sketch out a drawing of the person before taking them back to where they found them and turning them loose again.

Dragon doing this to a gnome

I read one of your answers to a post where you mentioned that Skoodge is the ugly duckling who is being done dirty (I couldn't agree more). But what about Dib? Where does he stand? Is he one too?

Dib is literally just a post-March 15th Denzel Crocker that’s still a child.

He’s the larval form of this.

(Or, you could say this is his final Pokémon evolution)

And don’t tell me the warning signs aren’t already cracking through

That may paint a very tragic trajectory for Dib if he or his environment doesn’t fundamentally change in some way, but that was exactly what Denzel’s story was. This “creep” was the result of a genuine intellectual who fell deeper and deeper into a fixation towards a great secret that simply vexed his every attempt to possess and reveal. He’s a series antagonist whose days are spent like a frustrated cat twitching and chattering at birds beyond glass, made all the worse and more obsessive because of the actions (past and present) of the protagonist. The relationship between young Crocker and his mother is damn mirrored in lock step with that gaping, validation-shaped hole Dib is trying so hard to fill by proving something to Professor Membrane.

It’s an observation so ready to be talked about I’m far from the first person to even say so. I literally plucked these insights alone up just from the comment sections of the various videos I had to skim through for the Crocker screenshots.

Freaking seriously. Hats off to these accounts for saving me the time writing it myself.

Do you slander Dib out of spite, or because watching the little loser try to get his way and utterly failing is fascinating to document, or maybe because justice should be made to the idiocy and disfuncional braincells of his character? Or maybe all three of them? Perhaps a secret fourth thing, even?

I slander Dib because he slanders my peop- uh I mean, yes. You’re mostly right. He’s a great antiheroic antagonist, warts and all, and he deserves a fair slice of the justice pie in this post Florpus era now more than ever, me thinks. Don’t let the updated art style or the fandom blobofication fool any, especially the newer riders. This has always been a Vasquez setting and if there’s two beautiful things I’ve learned are true to Johnen’s work, it’s that his universe(s)

• are quite whacky

• refuse to leave room in the spotlight for Gary Sues and wee pwecious cinnamon rolls

And I respect the fuck out of both of these qualities. This isn’t “haha ESH” family guy kinda writing, it’s writing that doesn’t fear gritty textures or unsanded corners for its characters. It’s also I think a huge part of how they were able to stay so engaging and fascinating over so much content while having relatively minuscule serialized character development- Why Dib episodes work on their own even without Zim, why Zim episodes still work even when taking place completely off of Earth, and why we can’t ever stfu about either of them so many years later. They already came in with a full deck of dimensions, flaws, and personal conflicts that you can stretch out for an enormous amount of entertainment. If you make a character that I am just as happy to root for as I am giddy to laugh at their failures, I think you’ve done something neat.

I don’t think it comes out of spite, though. Judge it whatever you will, but I think I slander this boy for sake of tough love. Pretending it’s spite is just funnier (-᷅ w -᷄)

All the same, if you really want the tea on the not so secret fourth thing, Dib, for all his Dibness…. is frankly a notoriously relatable twerp. Out of the mainest main cast, I’ve at least found his deal the easiest to empathize with.

A final note, on the topic of my general regard toward Dib “Agent Mothman” Membrane:

Sometimes my genius is almost frightening

The real thing that messes my head up is how absurdly large Dimitri is.

Not in the 2D cutscenes, mind you, but that makes it even weirder somehow. His 3D character model is HUGE and for no reason like??? One second they imply he’s not much bigger than Sly which might actually make sense for a marine iguana and then there’s these times you’re just gawking at him like “wait what th-“

Sly is really just a little guy, isn't he?

Like, seriously, aren't there only like a handful of characters that are smaller than he is? Almost everyone else just kind of looms over him.