War in Pieces

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Petar Duric

The United States has a war canon. That’s a pretty uncontroversial statement. We can even populate this canon in a trivial way by just listing off war movies. American Sniper. Eye in the Sky. Zero Dark Thirty. The Green Zone. Saving Private Ryan. And the list goes on, with movies as well as written work from Tom Clancy to James Fenimore Cooper.

But there is not a whole lot of room in that canon for movies that make the audience really uncomfortable with war. Eye in the Sky is a major exception, but even that movie depicts war as the moral backdrop against which brave soldiers prove their dedication by making the difficult, but necessary decision to risk murdering a child. You know, to keep us safe
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Regardless, these movies, and many more, all depict war as the backdrop against which mere mortals become heroes. Almost always, they do this by demonstrating their masculine willingness to kill civilians (American Sniper, Eye in the Sky), or by demonstrating their masculine willingness to torture (Zero Dark Thirty). The Green Zone presents an exception in that Matt Damon spends the film invalidating the justification for going to war in Iraq. But it is still a story about a white guy demonstrating his heroism with the Middle East as the backdrop for his journey.

The American war canon is, therefore, largely designed to whet the audience’s appetite for war, as a system and an action. So what if you were to construct a war canon that dulled the audience’s war appetite, a war canon antithetical to the one we are saddled with now? Setting aside the fact that such war canons already exist in other nations, where would we start if we wanted to construct a new one?

I argue that the manga/anime (I discuss the anime) Attack on Titan, the comic Saga, and the webcomic Gone with the Blastwave form a solid base from which to start. Of the three, Attack on Titan is the most comprehensive and forcefully crafted, but all three depict war as a hellish landscape (metaphorically and literally) from which you escape only if you are lucky, whether you are a civilian or a combatant.
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The anime, Attack on Titan, provides an excellent position from which to start, as it directly confronts the subjects of trauma and class during wartime, and presents a direct challenge to the American notion of heroism in war. When substantiated by, and viewed in tandem with, Saga and Gone with the Blastwave, Attack on Titan forms the solid base for a new war canon that acknowledges war as a hellish landscape from which combatants and civilians alike escape only of they are lucky.

The most stark and obvious of the three is Gone with the Blastwave, which depicts a handful of soldiers navigating their way through a city that is so drenched in radioactive fallout that the soldiers only survive because they wear full-body protective gear and gas masks that obscure any identifying features. The only way to tell them apart as they traverse a gray, rubble-covered, otherwise featureless landscape is by tiny emblems on their helmets. In this way, the environment literally created and mirrored by war itself dehumanizes those involved, stripping them of their identities and forcing them to some disgusting lows to survive.

GWTB doesn’t even ennoble this struggle for survival with a reason for the war’s perpetuation. The faceless soldiers fight a meaningless conflict against equally faceless enemies, themselves having no ideology or allegiance accept to fight and to escape. Saga achieves the same fatalistic effect by relegating the origins of a galaxy-encompassing conflict to long-lost historical memory. The war goes on because those people over there shot me, so fuck them.

In this way, Saga’s depiction is equally bleak, despite its forcefully colorful artwork. The rationale for the persistence of this galaxy-spanning war is that it has always happened. An interplanetary system of violence naturally reproduces itself through hatred and trauma, and so the only response the average citizen can muster to the question, “Why do we fight?” is, “To win the war,” followed by a fatalistic shrug, “Meh…works for me.”

The conflict rages on, because fuck the enemy.

Of course, the central conceit at the heart of Saga is that two new parents from opposite sides of the conflict fall in love, and resolve to raise their child away from the war. The panel above represents the war as a literal barrier to parenthood, blocking the nascent parents’ path to safety, where they can raise their child. The whole thrust of the series is these parents, Alana and Marko, trying to escape the war, literally and figuratively, for the sake of their child. When they eventually find a safe place to settle down, away from combat, they are then faced with the demons they brought back with them. Alana is driven to narcotics in order to endure her trauma and the soul-crushing nature of the work she takes to make a living. Marko is haunted by the specter of his own history of violence, on and off the battlefield. In both cases, the parents are chased from the battlefield by demons that repeatedly threaten to endanger their family, as bodies and as a community. As their favorite author, Oswald Heist, notes in a kind and sagely voice, “In the end, nobody really escapes this thing.”

This truism makes Attack on Titan especially tragic, as the main character, Eren Jaeger, hinges his entire motivation on his desire for freedom. Eren lives in a society that is hemmed in by huge, 50-meter walls, which serve to protect the last vestiges of humanity from the Titans, bloodthirsty, man-eating giants. The Titans devour and crush humans, creating a literal embodiment for the way in which war figuratively devours and crushes humans. Eren becomes a soldier in order to slaughter the Titans and bring an end to the fear and captivity of living behind walls. He learns to use “omni-directional mobility gear,” designed with a grappling hook-and-gas power mechanism to allow humans to swing around vertical environments like Spiderman, enabling them to fight the Titans with some success. By any measure, these soldiers learn to move and fight in ways that are nigh superhuman. In the lead-up to Eren Jaeger’s first battle with the Titans, he and his fellow cadets talk trash to each other and boast about how they will beat the Titans back with ease. The bravado is so intoxicating that it is a genuine shock when Eren and his fellow cadets are almost immediately decimated by the Titans, eaten alive in a matter of minutes.

This turns out to be merely the beginning of the carnival funhouse of horrors that is the Battle of Trost District. A young woman tries to revive her clearly deceased sweetheart in the middle of an empty street. A central character wears a look of visceral shock as he stumbles around the city after watching his friends get eaten alive. A group of cadets cowers inside a building as the Titans roam outside, staring into the windows, while one calmly cleans a rifle and blows out the back of his head in front of them. And amidst all of this, vital officers and support personnel all lose the will to fight, leaving the majority of the cadets out in the cold against their monstrous adversaries. Where the arc starts with vibrant colors and blue skies, the main body of the arc paints the scenery in dull, muted grays, as the once cocky and macho cadets wear looks of fatalistic resignation. In short, this is not an environment that breeds heroes. It devours them whole.

So when one of the cadets, Jean Kirschtein, takes the lead, he makes ruthless decisions that prioritize the survival of the majority over heroism and nobility. As he watches a comrade get caught and eaten by Titans, he freezes in place, and when two more of his comrades heroically enter the fray to save the very same comrade, they get caught too. Jean can do nothing but watch his friends get devoured as he grows roots in a high place away from the Titans’ reach. That is, until he takes command and orders the remaining cadets to use the Titan feeding frenzy as a distraction in order to grapple past them to safety.

What follows is a high-octane, pell-mell sprint to safety through a mass of Titans that continue to swat and chomp Jean’s comrades, and he uses every death as an added distraction to aid his own flight and the flight of his remaining friends. Upon landing in a safe place, he kneels in shock and asks himself, “How many friend’s deaths did I use?” We never get an answer, but we do witness a later conversation between Jean and Marco Bodt, a talented and friendly comrade, who praises Jean’s ruthless decision. When Jean castigates himself for weakness, Marco says that he thinks the fact that Jean is not strong helps him appreciate how the weak feel in battle. Marco goes on to say that it is this “weakness” which led Jean to a decision that kept Marco, and many others, alive. The sweet, sensible, and affable Marco tells Jean that his outwardly ruthless and cowardly decision was actually the compassionate and brave response needed to save his friends.

But the escape that Jean engineered is only temporary and superficial. When the battle ends and the cadets are no longer in danger of outright death, they have to deal with the trauma of combat. A particularly illustrative scene shows Jean aiding in the triage and cleanup after the battle, and finding Marco’s body, cleaved in half as if by a giant maw, laid down in an isolated corner of the battlefield. Jean is visibly shaken and worn by the realization that the friend who praised his leadership and character suffered a lonely death at the hands of a monster, with no friends to aid him, or even witness his demise. It is a brutal and blunt reminder of the lingering effects of war.

However, the war lingers much further beyond the battlefield than the triage tent. Attack on Titan extensively demonstrates the effect the war against the Titans has on society, namely the class stratification aided and abetted by the military hierarchy. One scene has a member of the landed gentry, living near the center of human territory, far away from the danger of the Titans, attempting to brow-beat a high-ranking commander, Dot Pixys, into abandoning the perimeter towns to the Titans, instead pulling his forces back to protect the noble’s lands. While this effort fails, the landed gentry, the clergy, and the merchant class nonetheless form a powerful block that clearly benefits from a stratified society, with wealth clustering in the center of human territory, and the poor scattered about the fringes. This structure is aided by the military, which depends heavily on the patronage of the merchant class for its supplies and food. Moreover, military politics threaten to squander multiple strategic opportunities to fight back against the Titans, with the military police serving the interests of the merchants and the nobility by suggesting conservative strategies, which prioritize the wealth of that class. In the midst of all this, the military is the only way for the poor to access a comfortable life in the interior, with upward mobility by other means relegated to the dustbin of utopianism.

Guess where all the rich people live.

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples depict essentially the same scenario in Saga, except it is less symbolic and more concrete. Vaughan’s narrator, Hazel, goes on a lengthy aside to discuss the society in which her mother grew up, saying about military recruits, “Many of those who answered this call [for military service] did so out of a genuine sense of duty. Others were merely looking for adventure. Some were trying to escape a bad situation. Almost all of them were poor as shit.” When a poor man named Dengo kidnaps a royal heir of the Robot Kingdom, an ally of one of the warring sides, an intelligence operative tells the Prince that is the heir’s father, “If you’re lucky, he’s hiding. If you’re not, he’s trying to start a revolution. And trust me, that’s the last thing you poor bastards want. The whole point of having enemies abroad is getting to ignore the ones back home.” In these cases, and in Attack on Titan, constant warfare plays cover for class stratification, and the military serves to weaponize the poor against a foreign enemy in the interests of the political class and the wealthy.

Which brings us back to the original point of this piece, that being why these three works could form a fruitful basis for a new American war canon (in spite of the fact that two of the three works were not originally made by Americans). Saga and Attack on Titan both depict societies dominated and consumed by warfare, and GWTB mirrors this by crafting war into a literal, toxic environment against which the protagonists set themselves. In all three cases, the protagonists’ main concern and goal is survival, in the short and long term, actions can be judged as heroic only against that goal. In other words, all three works depict their protagonists struggling concretely and in the abstract against a totalizing militaristic system that presents itself as the main obstacle to their own safety and happiness. As Eren notes in a conversation with Dot Pixys, humankind has a common enemy in the Titans, and yet they still squabble over property and class. Ozymandias’ alien tentacle monster has descended from the sky, and humankind has decided to carry on as usual.

In all three works, participation in the war machine is a Pyrrhic venture at best, and a Sisyphean one at worst. In all three, the protagonists struggle against the totalizing militaristic system in which they live, as much as they do against, “the enemy”. Most importantly, in stark opposition to the predominant American war canon, all three aggressively ask the question, “Why do we fight?” and force the audience to acknowledge the unsettling, blindingly obvious answer, “I don’t know.”

Sly Cooper, Preserver of Caste Hierarchy

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Petar Duric

The titular protagonist, posing as the Bogeyman

The Sly Cooper series is one of the most beloved games of the PS2 era, one of the so-called “Holy Trinity” of PS2 platformers. The series features a world full of anthropomorphized animals, where Sly Cooper, a roguish raccoon, and his friends have a series of globetrotting adventures pulling off heists in all sorts of exotic locales. The series is lovable, charming, and exciting, and the news that it’s getting a CGI movie release for 2016 has me overjoyed.

Oh, and it really, REALLY hates poor people.

Maybe I should start from the beginning…

Intro: The Basics

The narrative of the game revolves around Sly Cooper and his allies fending off threats to his family legacy. It positions the protagonist as a rightfully privileged hero, and the antagonists as nefarious class usurpers. At every turn, the series reinforces the idea that the Bad Guys are bad guys because they challenge social hierarchy, directly or otherwise, and that the Good Guys are good guys because they are defending Sly’s bloodline, which is presented as inherently good for arbitrary and never-questioned reasons.

Sly 1: F@$! The Haters

The whole series starts with you learning about Sly’s central motivating tragedy. He’s descended from a long line of master thieves that aggregated all of their thieving knowledge into a single book that has been passed down through the generations. This clan takes pride in only stealing from other thieves, as they consider it the ultimate test of skill to rip off another larcenist. The very night Sly’s father was going to give him the book, five mysterious strangers invaded and ransacked their home. These strangers, known as the Fiendish Five, murder Sly’s father and tear the book into several pieces, retreating to the far reaches of the earth with their respective parts. This brutal and bizarre crime lands little Sly in an orphanage with nothing but his father’s cane, where he meets Bentley (a turtle, and the brains of their gang) and Murray (a hippo, and the brawn of their outfit). They quickly become fast friends and start stealing stuff, honing their skills for the inevitable day when they would embark to recover Sly’s inheritance.

Why do Bentley and Murray agree to dedicate their lives to Sly’s inherently selfish revenge scheme? How did they end up in the orphanage and what are their backstories? Who knows? The answers to these questions are never provided. In fact, Sly is the only character in the whole series with a self-contained backstory. Bentley and Murray (and every other character you meet) seem to exist for the sole purpose of aiding, validating, and/or antagonizing Sly throughout his journey.

The first antagonist and member of the Fiendish Five, Raleigh, seems to contradict the thesis proposed above. He is the aristocratic British heir of a sizable fortune, turning to modern piracy out of boredom. Frankly, he’s a pretty straightforward jerk.

Not so with the second, Muggshott (a bulldog), or the third, Miz Ruby (an alligator). Both are bullied and ostracized as children. Muggshott pursues control of his social circumstances through bodybuilding, and Miz Ruby pursues control over her environment through her magical voodoo powers. Both turn to crime because…the story needs Bad Guys. There is never any clear motivation given for their choice to enter high-stakes crime. Instead, you are left to believe that in the process of overcoming their marginalization, they simply became evil.

Fear the victims of bullying. Feeeeeaaar theeeeeeeem.

The story of the fourth member, the Panda King, is even more absurd. He was born and raised poor in China. In order to escape poverty and indulge his love of the art of fireworks, he put together a display for some noblemen, who ridiculed him for his poverty. In response, he swears revenge on his critics and uses fireworks to pursue crime. But not only is this runaway poor person thin-skinned and uppity, he’s also a sociopath. In the first level of his portion of the game, you see him bury a village under an avalanche. No reason for this action is ever given (except for some vague line about extortion), and you only see this incident from afar. In fact, you never see any bystanders harmed by Sly’s enemies, although you are frequently told he is helping innocents. You never see their faces, and Sly keeps everything he steals. He’s not Robin Hood. Instead, you are led to believe that a process of competitive larceny, whereby Sly ruins somebody and Inspector Fox rushes in to mop up, is a virtuous, populist societal good, without ever seeing the populations being “saved.”

The Panda King calls Sly on this when they finally meet, rumbling, “You are a thief, just like me.” Sly scoffs back, “No, that’s only half right. I am a thief…from a long line of master thieves. Whereas you…you’re just a frustrated firework artist turned homicidal pyromaniac!” Not only does Sly specifically cite his bloodline and inheritance as evidence of his moral superiority over the King, he explicitly links his enemy’s failed attempts as an artist, and by extension, his failed attempt to exercise upward mobility, to his violent, evil tendencies.

The Big Bad of the game, Clockwerk (an owl), further validates Sly’s bloodline through contrast. Clockwerk shows up in virtually every image of a Cooper clan member that you see, but only as a shadowy silhouette in the background. He is an ancient nemesis of the Cooper clan, so envious of the Coopers’ thieving abilities that he mechanized his body to live until the day he destroys the Cooper line. His stated goal is to end the Cooper lineage, steal their relics, and make their name fade into obscurity, and his stated motivation is envy. That’s it. No other plans. He just hates the Cooper bloodline and inheritance so much that he founded the Fiendish Five solely to kill them all. Here, you, the viewer, are asked to accept some dizzying circular logic: the Cooper legacy is worth protecting because Clockwerk hates it and is evil. But why does he hate the Cooper legacy? Because the Cooper legacy is good and he is evil. He is so evil, in fact, that the whole second game is largely about stealing and destroying his mechanized corpse…

Sly 2: Return of the Haters

After the events of the first game, you learn that Clockwerk’s mechanized body parts are in a museum, oddly enough. Sly and his Super Friends attempt to steal the parts, because they believe that Clockwerk could be revived and threaten the Cooper line once again. Unfortunately, a new set of villains in the form of the Klaww Gang, have stolen the parts first, for nebulous and nefarious purposes. In order to protect the Cooper line from future threats from Clockwerk, Cooper and Co must steal them back.

The game wastes no time explaining how evil the new guys are. The first couple of criminals you go after follow now-familiar templates. Dimitri (a…newt, I guess?) is a failed artist who turned to forgery and racketeering after being laughed at by the art world, and Rajan (a tiger) escaped poverty in New Delhi by using drug trafficking to build up enormous wealth. In both cases, you see these formerly marginalized individuals showing off ostentatious wealth in the form of Dimitri’s nightclub and Rajan’s “ancestral palace.” In both cases, that wealth is accumulated through work, not inheritance. In both cases, the game constantly ridicules these men for being so egotistical as to show off their earned wealth, as well as demonizing them for threatening Sly’s bloodline without knowing.

Here we witness the repulsive spectacle of a poor person making money.

It is worth noting that in the process of taking down Dimitri and Rajan, the Cooper Gang are aided by a mysterious colleague of Inspector Fox named Constable Neyla (a panther). At the moment they nail Rajan, the Cooper Gang are betrayed by Neyla, who imprisons them. From this moment on, Neyla is a recurring enemy, whereas before, she served largely as a plot spur providing periodic missions. This role is taken over by Inspector Fox, who Sly refers to as the biggest reason “this is all fun.” Law enforcement serves as a game mechanic, contributing to the global adventurism of the protagonists. The moment the law enforcement become characters with personal motivations outside of Sly’s adventures, they become evil.

To illustrate the point, Sly and Murray are thrown in a prison operated by the Contessa (a black widow spider), a warden affiliated with Interpol. Bentley seeks to rescue his friends, and learns in the process that the Contessa is an expert in hypnotherapy, which she uses to rehabilitate her inmates. But (gasp) there is a nefarious catch. Her hypnotherapy erases her inmates’ criminal tendencies, allowing them to reintegrate into society, but she also uses hypnosis to force inmates to tell her where they have stashed their criminal fortunes. Upon learning this, Bentley gasps, “That dishonors thieving and law enforcement at the same time!!”

To restate that differently, the Contessa steals the fortunes of other criminals…which is exactly what the Cooper Gang does. It’s the whole point of the series. It is extremely hard to discern what nuance makes the Contessa’s way of doing it so much worse than Cooper’s. If it’s the hypnosis, the Cooper gang have drugged, beaten, blown up, and otherwise brutalized their opponents on a regular basis. If it’s that she utilizes the aid of law enforcement, the Cooper Gang used Neyla’s help to take down two prior marks. If it’s that she is evading detection, Bentley is actively trying to break his friends out of prison. And yet, the narrative supports Bentley’s gasping assertion, despite its utter hypocrisy and self-righteousness.

Perhaps it has to do with the Contessa’s background. The Contessa is a black widow, both literally and figuratively. he came into her own astounding fortune, including her ostentatious Gothic castle, by marrying a wealthy Czech nobleman and then poisoning him. The explicit reason for her evilness is her murder and deception, but the narrative precedent suggests it’s her inheritance by marriage that is more offensive, as opposed to Sly’s virtuous inheritance by birthright.

After steamrolling the Contessa, the Gang target Jean Bison, a Gold Rush-era prospector who was frozen in ice for roughly 150 years before thawing out and building a freight-and-timber empire in Canada (it’s a weird game). Jean Bison aspires to “taming the Wild North, damming every river, and chopping down every tree, with progress delivered at the sharp end of an axe.” Jean Bison’s criminal enterprises exist to “bankroll his one-man war against Nature.” The Cooper Gang steps in, not just to steal from Bison, but to, “save the environment from his twisted sense of progress.” In other words, it’s not corporate entities, or societal consumption habits that are to blame for environmental destruction. It’s the backwards, anachronistic, white working class, and that bloc is so powerful and intimidating that only a royal heir like Sly Cooper is capable of stopping them.

All Hail the unstoppable lumberjack overlord!!

The equation of marginalization to evil becomes most blatant with the boss of the Klaww, Arpeggio (a parrot). Arpeggio is a bird whose species should be able to fly, but his wings are stunted, and therefore, useless for flight; he’s effectively disabled, but the game has absolutely no sympathy. He pursues an education in engineering, taking inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci in a quest to create prosthetic enhancements, which the game presents as a megalomaniacal pursuit that ultimately leads to his criminality. He also takes on Neyla as a protégé, who has been working with him under Interpol’s nose the whole time in an effort to reassemble Clockwerk’s body as an exoskeleton. Sly confronts them, Arpeggio rants, Neyla betrays them all and fuses with Clockwerk to become immortal, and the Gang has to stop her, or some such nonsense like that.

But if Neyla is a cop, an inherent authority figure and a powerful person in this world, isn’t the game saying that privilege and power are dangerous and corrupting? In answer, the game’s manual gives us Neyla’s backstory. She grew up poor in New Delhi and scammed her way into, and through, a prestigious British university. Interpol caught her, but was so impressed by her scam that they gave her a job (so she could “get into the criminal mind”). So the answer is that privilege and power do corrupt…if you weren’t born into them in the first place.

This monstrosity is what happens when you let poor people get an education.

After a big battle, the Cooper Gang takes down Clock-la, who now hates the Cooper lineage, despite a complete lack of narrative precedent. In the money-shot of the whole game, the Gang extract Clock-la’s “hate chip,” the source of Clockwerk’s immortality and power, and crush it underfoot, causing all the Clockwerk parts to rot. The triumphant finale of the whole game is Sly’s destruction of evil, which is almost exclusively a threat to his bloodline. Why should you want to save this bloodline? Because it’s the Good Guy’s bloodline and hating it is evil. Kumba-friggin’-ya.

Sly 3: In Defense of the Natural Hoarder of Things

It is a testament to human creativity that after all of the political mess in the first two games, the third game remixes the old garbage into something fresh. This time around, the Gang is on a mission to open the fabled Cooper Vault, a giant safe in the side of a mountain on an island in the South Pacific that stores the stolen riches accumulated by the Cooper Clan throughout history. The only obstacle is that the island in question is already inhabited by a madman, named Dr. M, who has built a well-staffed fortress in order to crack the impervious Cooper Vault. The Vault’s key is Sly’s cane, but the Cooper Gang need to go recruiting to assemble the talent necessary to infiltrate the fortress and get anywhere near the Vault. More globetrotting ensues.

The first two enemies Sly faces walk the trail blazed by Jean Bison in Sly 2, namely, that of the evil white working class.The first thug, Octavio, is an Italian opera singer who was rendered obsolete by the onset of rock ’n roll. He and all of his diehard Italian fans form a mafia that sets out on a dastardly plan to sink Venice into its own canals in a bid to get attention (seriously). In order to destabilize the Venetian foundations, Octavio pumps tar out from under the buildings and into the canals, which enrages Sly, Bentley, and Murray, as an example of environmental degradation. This absurd scenario uses vapid, misplaced environmentalism to laugh at a white working class losing cultural relevance and clout, setting up Octavio and his goons as a punch line, rather than real characters.

But if the game sneers at Octavio, it snarls at the Australian miners Sly goes up against next. Out in the Australian Outback, Sly and his friends decide that to recruit a local mystic, they must first help him drive off the miners ravaging the environment in search of precious gems. There are no corporate logos or managers anywhere, just a mass of wayward workers, and the game reserves particular viciousness for these nameless average Joes. In order to drive off the miners, the Gang incinerates them on electric fences, unleashes pickup truck-sized scorpions into their mineshafts to slaughter them, and feeds several of the miners to a local crocodile in an effort to get the croc to “develop a taste for miner.”

That miner is about to be fed to a crocodile…and he’s the bad guy.

All of this arbitrary retribution is exacted against the nameless working masses in the name of “the environment,” without ever showing the populations affected adversely by the miners. At the end of Sly’s conflict with the miners, a cut-scene shows the “rescued” Outback, an expansive open desert with little vegetation and no wildlife, for which you have slaughtered hundreds. But the game still presents this pointless violence as inherently good, for seemingly no other reason than that the protagonist “saved” something from the unwashed laborers.

But at this point, the game tires of pissing on labor, and instead pontificates on how terrible royal heirs who aren’t Sly can be. To illustrate, the narrative travels to China, where the Gang try to recruit the Panda King as a demolitions expert by agreeing to rescue his daughter from the ruthless General Tsao (a rooster). Tsao is the heir of a long royal line, and he kidnaps the Panda King’s daughter, Jing King, in order to marry her and augment his family line. Until the wedding, he imprisons Jing King and basks in his own image like a peacock. Like Rajan before him, he has the gall to show off his wealth in the form of an opulent mountain fortress/palace/monastery. But the way the game signals to you that he’s a Really Bad Dude is his insistence that his bloodline is better than Cooper’s. For some utterly unknown reason, Tsao is as obsessed with denigrating Sly as he is with preening himself.

While the game laughs at Tsao, it’s also desperately trying to convince you that bad guys can reform and become Good Guys by holding the Panda King up as an example. Sly is initially wary about the King (you know, because he helped murder Sly’s father). But the King slowly wins over various members of the team by helping them on missions. This all culminates in his mission helping Sly, before which he gives his reflection a pep talk. Here, the game sends you into a dialogue mini-game where the Panda King has to calm his fractured psyche by getting his Yin and Yang sides on the same page (it’s like the writers saw a NatGeo special on Taoism while high, and then insisted on plugging it here). Panda Yin wants to utilize Sly’s help to free their daughter, and thinks Sly is actually an ok dude. Panda Yang thinks Sly is an uppity jerk who disgraced them and that they don’t need his help. The game sides with Panda Yin, shockingly, and tasks you with convincing Panda Yang of Panda Yin’s point of view with preprogrammed options. The winning line of reasoning states that “Cooper is a teacher of humility” and that that quality is somehow spiritually useful to them for its own sake.

Just to recap, Sly is the kind of guy who cites his bloodline as evidence of his existential superiority over the Panda King, and pisses on him for being upwardly mobile. Sly is the kind of guy who routinely involves his best friends in harebrained schemes to achieve his inherently selfish ends, without ever really asking them how he could lend them a hand with their problems. Sly is the kind of guy who gets angry with cops when they put him in jail for breaking the law. If Sly taught anybody humility, it sure as hell wasn’t by example, and so Panda King’s insistence that he can learn humility from Sly reeks of kowtowing. The game says the Panda King can be a Good Guy…if only he learns his place and stays there, at the feet of Sly Cooper, thieving royalty.

All of this confused classist nonsense culminates in the heist, where the Gang not only rescue Jing King, but also seek to ruin Tsao by robbing him of his family treasures. In the process of doing this, the Gang destroy Tsao’s ancestral temple and take his most prized heirloom treasures, and the game portrays his justifiable outrage as evil and megalomaniacal. Remember, the first game had you traveling all over the globe to ruin and brutalize five people in order to recover one such prized heirloom of the Cooper family that was stolen. But doing the same thing to Tsao is all well and good, because he is a Bad Dude. In anger, he even yells at Cooper, “Hear me Cooper, my lineage surpasses yours in every way!” It is at this moment that the game, in an attempt to simultaneously erase and embrace its own blatant elitism, has its protagonist utter the single most inane line of the series, “It’s not about the family name pal…it’s what you do with it!”

Are you kidding me? That’s the best you can come up with?

What does Cooper mean by this statement, precisely? What should one do with his family name? How have Cooper and Tsao, respectively, measured up to that standard? Who knows? The game never answers any of these questions explicitly. In fact, there are only two explicit reasons we are given to hate Tsao, one of which is the kidnapping of women. But the reason that is placed front and center, that is repeated more often than anything else, is the fact that Tsao believes his lineage is superior to Cooper’s. It is this apparent megalomania that really shows that Tsao is evil. Tsao is a villain because he failed to learn his place, at Cooper’s feet, as the Panda King did.

All of the troubling politics thus far coalesce neatly into the final level of this game, when we return to Dr. M’s island. After many further hijinks, aimed at infiltrating M’s fortress, Cooper, Bentley, and Murray manage to crack open the heavily guarded door to the Cooper Vault, and Sly insists that the three enter the front door of the vault together, having gone on so many adventures. But the game treats this touching gesture of friendship with cold, hard cynicism. The very minute the three friends step into the Vault, there is another door that only Sly is agile enough to even access, and so he is rescued by circumstance from having to actually follow through on his offer to his friends. As if the narrative had to make it clearer that it didn’t think Sly’s friends are worth enough to access his heritage, Bentley voices the sentiment explicitly, “…this place was built for you [Sly]. We’ll hold down the fort here.”

While Sly is making his way through the caverns of the Cooper Vault, in which the Cooper Clan seems to have stored a non-negligible percentage of global GDP in the form of gold, jewels, and art, that second statement in the above quote proves prophetic. Bentley immediately doubles back on the sentiment he expressed by asking Murray, “Do you ever feel like you’re playing second fiddle to Sly? Like he treats us as sidekicks?” Murray doesn’t see it that way, responding, “…we’re all in it together!” And all at once, Bentley starts unraveling the games politics in one fell swoop, “Sure, we’re all here, but are we equal? Who went into the Vault? Sly. By himself.” But Bentley never gets to finish his point, because it is at that moment that the Vault, now opened, is invaded by Dr. M’s goons. Murray succinctly summarizes the situation and their options, “Think of it this way, Bentley. If it were you in that vault, and Sly and I were out here, what would he do?” Bentley responds with the only answer, “Stop these thugs and protect his friend.”

It’s as if the game only had Bentley raise these questions in order to swat them aside. The crushing thing is that Bentley had almost discerned the game’s politics from within the game itself. Bentley, the brains of the team, was approaching a fundamental truth in his world. Sly doesn’t treat Bentley and Murray as sidekicks…but the game sure does. The narrative certainly does not see Bentley and Murray, let alone any other characters, as equal to Sly. Sly went into the Vault, alone, because this is HIS story, and nobody else’s. And it’s the moment Bentley begins to realize and articulate this that the game puts him back in his place with a sentimental appeal to friendship. Besides, Bentley isn’t in the Vault to question the politics of the situation, he’s there to “hold down the fort.” This is Sly’s show after all, and Bentley’s not even on the fiddle. He’s on the drum set at the back of the stage.

You were SO CLOSE!!

And it turns out that the villainous Dr. M voices exactly the same critique Bentley just brushed up against. Dr. M follows his goons into the cave and reveals that he was the brains of Cooper’s father’s gang, much like Bentley is the brains for the modern Cooper Gang. Once you learn this information, Dr. M tries to build a bridge with Bentley, “…I know the pain you suffer working under your inferior.” The inferior in this sentence is Sly, and we know from Tsao’s example what that means about Dr. M’s character. Of course Bentley refutes this logic. It doesn’t matter that Bentley organizes the heists, does all the research, does his own R&D for the Gang, and in general vastly outstrips the rest of the Gang in terms of hours dedicated to the Gang’s success, because the Cooper Gang has one thing…”brotherhood.”

Dr. M scoffs at this, “Brotherhood? That’s just what he wants you to think. It’s a tool to keep you in line!” Dr. M is right about the nature of the tool, but he’s wrong about who’s holding it. It’s the narrative, not Sly, that insists on relegating Bentley to not-even-on-the-fiddle status. But Bentley has been blinded by his own vapid appeals to friendship. The game has decided he’s not worthy to bask in Sly’s heritage. Only His Highness the royal heir can do that. When Dr. M makes a move to enter the Vault proper, even Bentley says so, “That haul is for Coopers only!” Dr. M pragmatically replies, “Maybe it’s time for men such as you and I to change all that.” Dr. M insists that the work he put in as the brains of the old Cooper Gang make him worthy of the Cooper fortune his work contributed to…and the game, in it’s infinite wisdom, is absolutely certain that this basic act of self-respect makes him a megalomaniac. How dare he think he’s worthy of Sly’s fortune!? He’s not part of the bloodline!!

In the end, like every Big Bad before him, Dr. M tries to kill Sly because (SURPRISE!!) he hates Sly’s father, and by extension, Sly’s bloodline. After they fight, there’s a short scene where Sly and Dr. M discuss how, despite Sly’s maniacal obsession with his lineage, that he’s just an individual, and Dr. M can’t blame Sly for the fact that Sly’s father was, apparently, a dick. In the process of reminiscing, the comparisons between Dr. M/Sly’s father and Bentley/Sly come to a head, with Sly insisting that he would risk his life for his friends. The problem with that is that the game has rescued Sly from including his friends meaningfully as equal partners in the story. Saying he’d risk his life for them is just the game’s way of showing Sly is a good person without actually making him do anything to assert, by action, how much he values his friends.

And the game makes it known exactly how much Sly’s friends are worth without him after Dr. M is defeated. Sly manages, through faked amnesia (long story), to run away with Inspector Carmelita Fox, leaving his friends behind. In the aftermath of his escape, Bentley narrates the epilogue, explaining that, “Without Sly as our leader, for the first time we each had to step out on our own. A difficult thing, we’d been together ever since we met at the orphanage.” In other words, Bentley and Murray finally strike out on their own, as individuals separated from Sly’s legacy…except not at all. Murray goes into stocked-van racing, driving the Cooper van with Sly’s raccoon-faced logo on the side. The game refuses to let Murray have his own unique identity.

But what happens to Bentley is even more insulting. You see, Sly left Bentley and Murray an enormous trove of treasure he managed to evacuate from the Cooper Vault before leaving his friends behind. So what does Bentley do with their newfound wealth? Does he spend it on his own dreams? Not at all! Instead, he builds another, much higher tech Cooper Vault to bury the treasure in.

The treasure really only served to show how generous Sly was. The game never had any intention of validating Bentley’s worth by insisting he deserved a cut of Sly’s legacy. And the game makes this even clearer in the final frames of the epilogue, where you see Bentley writing his narrated words, “So while this might be the end of our adventures, it could be the start of something even bigger!” The hitch? He’s writing those words in Sly’s family book, from the first game! The game refuses to allow for any possibility that Sly’s friends might have any identity beyond upholding his royal legacy, or that they are worthy of being equal partners in that legacy. Even after Sly is gone, living his own life, his friends are not allowed to the same. The game won’t let them, because, as we’ve seen throughout this series, anybody who thinks they have an inherently meaningful identity outside of Cooper’s lineage, or who merely insists that they deserve more than they were born into, is a villain…and Sly Cooper will always be there to put them in their place.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Petar Duric

War in Pieces

Sly Cooper, Preserver of Caste Hierarchy