For a very long time now Christmas has just been “another day” to me. It’s sad in a sense because there was once a time when this holiday was a big deal in my life and I’m not just saying that with rose-tinted glasses because I was young and I got presents or whatever. “I miss Christmas” is one of the facets of that “I resent being an adult” failure to grow-up thing that seems a little too common with people from my generation, but that’s not what I get choked up about. Yeah, the presents were nice and all, but more importantly I understand in hindsight that all those holidays that I spent with my family really did mean something. Perhaps I just did not fully grasp it at the time, but I understand it now and it’s the feeling of togetherness that I wish I could feel again, not the immature wonder of having no responsibilities for half a month and getting a new bike smack dab in the middle of it.
Throughout nearly my entire life my parents’ relationship has not exactly been a good one. Somehow they aren’t divorced, even after all this time, but honestly it probably would’ve been for the best if they split up 30+ years ago. For as long as I can recall it was just a downhill trend peppered with that desperately fruitless “stay together for the kids” sort of sentiment. I didn’t notice it when I was younger but around the time I was old enough to drive I guess I gradually became aware of it. As a result of their dysfunctional marriage they also just don’t really mesh all that well with extended family either. Over time, family gatherings just stopped happening. One year, we didn’t have one nor did we go to one. That continued in perpetuity. Christmas became a solitary thing that I wound up spending with my parents and my siblings.
And then, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this journal, my siblings grew apart from each other too to such a degree that they are no longer on speaking terms today. Christmas does not happen anymore. There isn’t one, and I failed to start a family of my own so it’s not like as the relationships between the people I grew up around soured that I was able to segue into new holiday traditions with my wife, her family, and our kids. There’s just… nothing. Christmas is a day that I generally don’t need to show up to work on. Sometimes I’ll put in the legwork and make a pot roast that I wind up throwing most of away because it goes bad before I can eat all of it. That’s really it. If I had to stick a pin in perhaps the most depressing experience of my life the first “Christmas” where it was just an informal gathering of people who could barely stand being in each other’s company with nary a decorated tree to be seen just might be it.
Once upon a time though things weren’t this way, and there was one Christmas that I believe set the wheels in motion that shaped the way I’d grow up and how I considered what I’d want in a partner.
It’s 1998, Christmas morning. As I leave my bedroom and make my way out into the living room I can hear my father in the kitchen making breakfast for everyone, which at this time consists of just me, my mom, and my younger brother. There are more presents under the tree today than there were the night before. I know where they came from, but my brother doesn’t so I just play along with the charade because that’s just part of growing up while being the older brother. At this point he’s still young enough that he’d fit on a Power Wheels truck, which is a good thing because that’s exactly what Santa brought him. There’s also something under the tree for me from Santa as well. It’s not as big as a child-sized Chevy Silverado but I can tell from the size of the box that it’s a Sony PlayStation.
By now the PlayStation had been available for a few years so I was a relatively late adopter of the console. I’d actually picked the Nintendo 64 over the PlayStation when that console launched in 1996; the 64 had all the games on it that I was already familiar with, like the new Super Mario game as well as Bomberman and Star Fox. That was a sure bet to me. The PlayStation was cool because it used CD’s, but most of the games on the system were ones I’d never heard of before so I stuck with what I knew. That was until the summer of 1998 when I saw a sales poster for a game set to be released later in the year: Spyro the Dragon. To me the game looked like Banjo-Kazooie, which had literally just come out at the time, and I absolutely loved that game; this one caught my attention however because of its main character, Spyro.
Throughout the nineties I was something of a dinosaur and dragon nerd predominately because of Jurassic Park and Dragonheart and as soon as I’d heard about this “Spyro the Dragon” game I did as much research on it as I could in gaming magazines and on the burgeoning internet. I made up my mind, I wanted that game. It looked like it was a lot of fun. I asked my parents for a PlayStation for Christmas and that specific game.
And I was correct, it was a PlayStation in the wrapped box with my name on it under the tree, and elsewhere under the tree was a small jewel case-sized gift that when I ripped off the paper I was met with the smirking visage of a familiar purple dragon.
That morning, much to the chagrin of my parents, I hooked the PlayStation up to the television in the living room and started playing my new game because I didn’t want to take the five extra minutes to bring it all back to my bedroom first. I loved it, absolutely. I was so enamored with the game that when my mom and dad rounded my brother and I up to go to our grandparents’ house for Christmas dinner I distinctly remember taking both my copy of Spyro the Dragon and my memory card with me because my uncle who was young enough to still be living there also owned a PlayStation and I booted him off of his own damn system so I could just keep playing my dumb dragon game. It was as endearing as it was anti-social.
I became enraptured with Spyro the Dragon, both the game and the character himself. I am fairly certain that before my Christmas break from school had ended I’d already beaten the game 100% and started a new file just so I could keep playing it. There was just something about this world of dragons that pulled me into it, so much that at the time I genuinely wished that was in the literal sense. I just wanted to be in that world and explore all the places and meet all the dragons and learn how to do the magic spells that some of them could do. And, through all of these hypothetical adventures of mine, Spyro could be my friend of course.
Or maybe something more than that, I don’t really know. When Spyro the Dragon released I was right at the age when you start to wake up to this idea of what a “relationship” is and all the things something like that would entail. I’ve already said this elsewhere on this website (further reading: The Dragon with No Name), but Spyro was genuinely my first crush. I mean that in a completely innocent and platonic way, too. At the time I did not have any sort of concept of sex or anything; I saw Spyro as some kind of weird hybrid of a best friend and a brother, but also someone that I wanted to be “close” to in the naive way someone who’s never kissed a girl (or guy) would picture it in their head. I was young enough to still play pretend in my head and imagine going through the entire events of Spyro’s game with him as his sidekick in a “Sonic and Tails” way, but also old enough to have this budding desire of wanting to be physically close with him too and do things like hugging as we laid under the stars atop the central Artisans castle.
Of course, once you reach the age when you start waking up to the possibilities of things like relationships and whatnot the rest of that development does eventually follow pretty soon thereafter. Yes, the feelings I had toward this make-believe dragon did gradually become more “intimate” as I progressed through the remainder of that awkward period of my adolescence. Yes, there was also a part of me that questioned what it was that apparently made me okay with a theoretical same-sex relationship as I had literally zero exposure to anyone in my day-to-day life that was homosexual. It just felt “fine” to me, for lack of a better explanation, and I don’t know where that justification came from.
Context for stuff like this is important so I’d like to reiterate that in the late 90’s pornography and the like wasn’t as pervasive and part & parcel in society like it is today which is why looking back it’s strange to think that I was fine with that kind of relationship and even found comfort in thinking about it. Obviously I don’t think “platonic” could continue to describe the way I felt about Spyro without that word doing a significant amount of legwork now, but all the little stories and scenes and things that I ran through in my head always settled around this desire to “love and be loved”. Even the more salacious ones. There was never an atmosphere of raunchiness that overshadowed how I saw things; as silly as it sounds I really just found peace in the thought of the most vanilla of intimacy and that was it. I guess a lot of that was fueled by the ambivalence of youth, though.
You might be thinking that my fascination with Spyro resulted in me becoming a lifelong fan of the series and while that’s a fair guess you’d actually be wrong. While I did very much enjoy Spyro the Dragon I found myself uninterested in the second game because of feature creep, there was just “too much to do”. The same thing happened to the Banjo-Kazooie sequel as well as Donkey Kong 64 and in both cases I’m also not fond of those games either. The original Spyro the Dragon game had you collect a bunch of gems on every stage and that was mostly it. There were about a dozen or so dragon eggs as bonus collectibles (and rescuing the dragons in each level too) but for the most part your goal for seeing everything the game had to offer was picking up every jewel. It was challenging, but also very easily communicated to the player. With the second (and third) game you still had gems to collect but there were also eggs and green orbs and all of these side missions and excursions to complete. There was a skateboard at one point? Because skateboarding had a resurgence in the late 90’s too and was cool again, so Spyro had to skateboard because he was cool.
But the thing that really turned me off of the later games and just the series in general were all of the new characters that were added. The thing that initially drew me into this world that Spyro lived in was that it was this mythical land populated entirely by dragons. There were some non-dragons there, like the balloonists and all the cattle and fodder creatures, but this was largely a world that was theirs and theirs alone. Archer, Elora, Moneybags, that penguin and monkey whose names I never committed to memory… genuinely, who the fuck are all these people? This ever-ballooning cast of non-dragon characters was the main reason behind my sudden and complete disinterest in the series from literally the second game on. I fell in love with Spyro and his world because it was a place that I wanted to be in myself, as a dragon too of course. I get why the designers of the game started bringing in new characters and places but I really didn’t have any interest in something that expanded the world of the game beyond its initial state.
I tuned out from the Spyro series and occasionally checked on it as time went on. There were some newer things about the series that I liked, however it has been restarted and rebooted so many times that I don’t even understand what is “canon” anymore in the universe. It’s a shame. Cynder is kind of a one-dimensional character but in hindsight I think she was well suited for the emo vibes of the decade that birthed her. I also did like Elijah Wood as the voice of Spyro as I felt up to that point he’d done the best job (and maybe I think his voice is kind of sexy, so shoot me okay). The less said about the Skylanders disaster the better as I’m pretty certain you can likely infer that me telling you that I was a huge fan of the original game also telegraphed that I was far outside of the target demographic that the toys-to-life slop pandered to.
It’s been over a quarter of a century since the morning I first met Spyro. Literally my entire life has happened since then, but I’m sure you’re aware of the old adage about first loves. In the 27 years that have passed there’s never been a time when I haven’t thought of that purple dragon fondly. As I’ve gotten older the burdens and trials of life have given me some time to reflect back on those days of innocence where I’d lay in bed with the game on just so I could listen to its music and picture in my head being in that world. I could be there too as a spry young dragon in the middle of my journey to save the dragon realms, and with me was my best friend. A partner if you will, and I guess in hindsight a lover too. My own strange little version of “Carolina in My Mind”.
I never forgot my first love.
Until next time.
