The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Commander Gaia. She was only working with Grendel because she truly loved him...and then he goes and stabs her in the gut, telling her she has outlived her usefulness. She dies a sobbing, broken wreck muttering that she loved him.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced:
    • Quite a few reviewers were quite excited by Ember's characterization due to it subverting the Ron the Death Eater treatment she normally gets.
    • Readers were quite excited to hear there will be a sequel.
  • Complete Monster: The Warden, Empress Tyrania's Dragon. The guy is a sadistic prison master who rules over the Gargoyle slave mines. Unlike the rest of the Gargoyles, he's fully sentient and able to make his own choices. He's got a magic collar that causes anyone afflicted with a curse to experience horrible agony from so much as touching him or attacking him indirectly. He gleefully uses this to force the slaves to work themselves half to death and torture them For the Evulz. He's seen torturing a poor Cheetah just to unwind after his earlier encounter with Tyrania left him furious, outright saying the only thing the Cheetah did wrong was because the Warden said he did something wrong. Tyrania's attack on the Dragon Realms was also his idea to begin with. This all comes back to bite him, though, because the slaves brutally attack him once the curse is broken thanks to Sparx.
    • Empress Tyrania. Big time. She carried out three genocides, including her own species, just to make herself be worshipped as a god. She keeps a torture chamber with a window so she can watch and regularally blows up her own worshippers for kicks. She keeps slaves and made the slave master her sadistic Dragon just to make sure they're miserable as physically possible. She then invades the Dragon Realms, completely intent with the idea she'll need to perform a genocide or two to weed out those no good for slave labor, in fact, she relishes it! When the group finally confronts her, she taunts them over this and kills Ember's father in a slow and sadistic manner and enjoys every second of it. She's so evil that Kage believes that even absorbing her energy could have dire consequences. Ironically, her sadism leads to her demise, as she perposefully drew the battle out as long as she could just to enjoy their suffering, which allowed them to discover her weakness. Reader response pretty much universally dub her a monster. She was intentionally made an utterly irredeemable Complete Monster to be a Foil for the sympathetic Deadlock.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Ember has been quite well liked by reviewers for being a kindhearted version of the character as opposed to the normal Ron the Death Eater treatment.
  • Fridge Horror: Empress Tyrania tells one of her Gargoyle troops to clean the skeletons out of her torture chamber. While that's bad on it's own, it gets worse when you realize that Gargoyles don't leave skeletons behind, meaning she's not torturing Gargoyles to death there...
  • Jerkass Woobie: Cyros. She abuses her brother, is plotting to become queen of the Naga by any means, and is willing to do anything to get the power to do so...because she thinks Pyrus betrayed her after promising her to let her be the crown princess only to take it himself (though she only knows her side of the story and not his). Because of this, she no longer trusts anyone and just wants to get enough power that no one will ever be able hurt her like that again.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • The Warden brutally beating up a Cheetah slave for stealing food from him. The Cheetah says he didn't and the Warden replies by telling him it doesn't matter because the Warden said he stole from him. He then describes it as "unwinding" when Ember confronts him about it.
    • Boss Kaze crosses this by threatening to kill "have his way with" Delilah after she's captured.
    • Empress Tyrania probably crossed this eons ago when she commited genocide three times just to make herself the self proclaimed goddess of the Gargoyles. Onscreen, she crosses this by killing Ember's father Blaze slowly and painfully right in front of her...then laughs!
    • General Grendel's coldblooded murder of Commander Gaia after she had is no longer of use to him. He outright tells her that she meant nothing to him and he was only twisting her love to get her help.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Cynder's description of how she got her metal tail and wing blades. She had the bone ones torn out and the metal ones slowly forged into her bones while she was completely awake!
  • Ron the Death Eater: Averted. One of the reasons Ember is the Ensemble Darkhorse is just how different she is from the self-absorbed Clingy Jealous Girl she's often portrayed as. Instead of instantly becoming The Rival to Cynder, she and Cynder become best friends very quickly. In fact, her reaction to finding out she'd been hitting on Spyro when he's already mates with Cynder is to go into a Heroic BSOD over the fact she'd not figured it out sooner and feeling extremely guilty over the pain her flirting had caused them.
    • Word of God: One of the writer's main reasons for including her in the story in the first place was being sick and tired of her getting the Ron the Death Eater treatment and wanting to make a more complex and likeable version of the character that was still true to her original character from the classic games.
  • The Woobie: Cynder, big time. In addition to the stuff that already happened to her, she has to deal with having her child kidnapped, a psychotic dragoness tormenting her in her dreams, and discovering that while she was Brainwashed and Crazy, she killed her own mother! And then there's in "New Allies", where we discover just how she got her metal blades and the other, related parts of her past that are explored...
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Deadlock. The only reason she's doing any of this is because she's had a horrible life. Her own parents wanted nothing to do with her because she was born with three heads, and she suffered a great deal of bullying for being a "freak" for most of her life. Then she finally got a mate named Andreas who loved her for who she was and a job at the temple she loved and was respected for as a nursery dragoness. She had two clutches of eggs with him as well, which she loved with all her heart. Then it was all stolen from her in one night, Andreas and her second clutch of eggs destroyed the night of the raid along with the others (which destoys her job as well). The pain of this drove her insane and now she wants to take revenge on those she blames for it. Yeah, she's doing horrible things, but her past is so horrific it's hard not to feel bad for her.
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