YMMV / Sly Cooper: Thief of Virtue

• Anvilicious: Jack Lupus became a mouthpiece for the self-determination aesop of the story halfway through the chapters “Welcome to the Jungle” and "Wrath of the Wolf King" and starts hammering it in, especially during scenes at Interpol HQ and at a diner he brought Drake in to the point that it comes off as objectivist, even reactionary, depending on how it's interpreted.
• Ass Pull:
  • How the ending of Thieves in Time was resolved and why Sly and Carmelita suddenly grew distant. The fact that the series never got a canon resolution didn't help this at all.
  • How Clockwerk and the Necklace are connected; the author really didn't elaborate much on it aside from the fact that it was given to Drake and the crystals came from Krakarov Volcano.
  • Torus' character development; suddenly everyone dislikes him and he's seen as a tyrant because of arresting Sly Cooper and other criminals. The way people react to Torus' actions don't even remotely make sense. Despite Sly and the cameos he arrested were criminals, he's still ostracized by the public.
  • Ned becoming the Chief Director of Interpol; while this was popular with the author's fans, it doesn't exactly make sense in-universe given that he is only an inspector and doesn't actually have any leadership experience.
• Designated Hero: Sly tends to act rather selfish in this comic and almost kills Kevin Turbo by threatening to tip his car into water. In the chapter "Welcome to the Jungle", Sly neglects to mention that there were warlords who Zahn had sold weapons to that planned to terrorize the Congo.
• Designated Love Interest: Ned is presented as a rival with Sly for Carmelita's affections but he doesn't do anything to win her over or deepen their relationship; it doesn't help that Sly and Carmelita have known each other much longer.
• Designated Villain: Torus is seen as a tyrannical director who oversteps his bounds and abuses his power by everyone in the comic and often written to seem like it for the sake of making a political statement, but his actions and veiled ideals are actually rather justifiable from a realistic standpoint and even in the Sly universe considering how incompetent Interpol is in the game.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Lady Venom and Colonel Zahn are freed despite their crimes and the latter has clear intentions of settling the score with Sly one day, along with the fact that Vick ends up taking over Drake's Criminal empire which is portrayed sympathetically. Torus, whom arguably had a more hands-on and more effective way of dealing with things as shown in "Welcome to the Jungle", is arbitrarily replaced by Eddard "Ned" Grey who lacks his experience and did very little to actually warrant his promotion to Director, who will probably approach the position with Jack's mindset and in a way that meets Bubo's approval, essentially becoming his puppet (and "The New Director" confirms all that and more). Despite this, the ending is weirdly upbeat like Thieves in Time was on the basis of the Cooper Gang getting back together and Sly's rekindled relationship with Carmelita.
• Fan Nickname: Sly's father is frequently called "Dad Cooper" by the critics of the comic, such as in this review by The Bad Webcomics Wiki.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Thanks to scenes involving Lady Venom and Ned, the author would end up getting commissions that had to do with vore and snakes among other things after the conclusion of his comic.
• Ho Yay: Sly and Drake's fathers were very close friends with their wives completely out of the picture (Jack's wife left him for unknown reasons and Dad Cooper's wife isn't seen or mentioned).
• I Knew It!: It was speculated that Torus had been responsible for Jack's death and the events of the comic after the last few pages of "Welcome to the Jungle". When the second side story "To Protect and Serve" was released, its confirmed that Torus ratted out Jack Lupus' affiliation with Sly's father, which lead to Clockwerk hunting down Jack in the flashback during "Wrath of the Wolf King".
• Informed Wrongness: Alot of what Torus does inside the comic is portrayed negatively despite being a member of law enforcement, with his most notable ones being jailing the Cooper Gang and "bypassing" Bubo's obstruction through Shelby to save innocents in the Congo.
• Iron Woobie: Jack Lupus; His wife divorced him for reasons unknown, he's been criticized by media, he's criticized by Torus for being a Republican and being too soft on criminals, he gets yelled at for having his son open the door for a woman, and but he's still calm and kind.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Most of the fans of this work read this comic simply for the fact that it (somewhat) resolves Thieves in Time's reviled ending, or just simply for the sake of having a new Sly Cooper adventure following it.
• Misaimed Fandom: Despite the author clearly trying to make a political point with his comic and trying to sway people with negative subtext through character's like Torus and Shelby, most of the audience read it as a plain Sly fan-comic and only disliked Torus for being against Sly Cooper and coming off as arrogant, with only a select few in his fanbase and critics outside of it catching onto the author's intent.
• One-Scene Wonder: There was a nameless female mouse whom Drake opened the door for in one of his flashbacks whom has essentially become a target for the vocal part of the author's fanbase, and a blatant attempt at a Straw Feminist noticed by critics of the comic.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • While the author tries to portray her as nasty and condescending in "Winter Storm", Ice does inadvertently make a good point in her speech with Ned given that some "nice guys" selfishly expect women to flock to them simply for being nice or giving disingenuous compliments, rather than their character, and in Ned's case its implied that he expected her to pick him over Sly given his tone-deaf inquisition over Torus' claims regarding Carmelita and Sly. Given that Ned's almost oblivious to her feelings for Sly and doesn't really have much character, Ice did make a very good case in her brutally honest lecture to him, however harsh it was.
  • We're supposed to believe Torus is wrong in saying that change must be forced where its denied, but he's actually right in a sense given that not everyone wants be taught to change for the better, and that ultimately its necessary to force them to whether people think they're in a position to or not for the sake of everyone else.
• Squick: The shot of Lady Venom's mouth as she was about to swallow Ned whole, and then the page that showed her finishing him up can be difficult to look at without feeling sick, and lets not even get started about Inigo....
• Tough Act to Follow: Most of the author's vore, transformation drawings, and mini-comics don't garner him nearly as much praise from his fanbase as Thief of Virtue once did.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: It's very easy to dislike Torus and dismiss him as a powermonger at first simply because he's against Sly and the Cooper Gang, but if you take into account certain aspects of the series, it becomes harder to hate him given that he's had more success than anyone else in Interpol in stopping crime and yet he still gets nothing but flak from everyone, including the pretentious Judge Bubo; his willingness to bypass his red tape helped him save innocents being terrorized by the Congo's warlords that Sly nor Bubo ever gave a second thought about. Ironically enough, the anti-liberal/progressive sentiment the author had in creating this character actually made Torus even more likeable than he intended.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Bubo is meant to be a benevolent reasonable authority figure to call out Torus who's supposed to be seen as overstepping lines and taking things too far, but more often than not the owl comes across as a patronizing and arrogant obstructionist who's more concerned about bureaucracy and protocol instead of stopping crime who, as director, had ran Interpol irresponsibly with a hands-off approach that allowed Jack to get away with affiliating himself with Sly's Father and Torus to go corrupt with a gambling addiction, both which lead to the tragedies that kickstarted the plot. He also criticizes Shelby for having bias in a ruling, but also does the same in a case he's presiding over during "Welcome to the Jungle" and is still portrayed sympathetically despite the fact, which he tries to pass off to Torus as "perspective on civil cases" in the next chapter. It's also mentioned he has bank accounts that Torus apparently criticized in "Wrath of the Wolf King" raising speculation on what sort of dealings he had going on behind the scenes when he was Director and the kind of corruption he dabbled in/allowed, making him seem corrupt.
  • Jack Lupus is supposedly a upstanding, chivalrous Cowboy Cop...yet, aside from having killed someone in the past because he thought they were armed instead of maiming them, he claims his wife left him for reasons he says were based on choice without even the slightest indication of why she left; given his reactionism lampshaded by Torus, however, there's alot of things that can put Jack in a negative light because of that which could justify his wife's actions, and the objectivism he displays at the diner he brought Drake to for his Birthday doesn't help his case either. Add onto the fact that he's extremely preachy in general, gets away with working with a thief, and essentially kickstarted Drake Lupus' plans in destroying Interpol by recklessly giving him the medallion that contained the 3 crystals...his kindness and civility ends up just coming off as a disingenuous façade for being a bad person deep down.
  • As of "Winter Storm", Eddard "Ned" Gray was supposed to be a Dogged Nice Guy who we're all supposed to feel bad for because he didn't get Carmelita and wish nothing but the best for, but more often than not he seems more like an obnoxiously flat character who's constantly feeling sorry for himself to the point of being obnoxious; His behavior demonstrated through "Serpents Kiss" as well as at the midpoint of "Welcome to the Jungle" with his conversation with Carmelita only exacerbates the incel-like feel to his character. Ontop of that, he's demonstrated little to show that he's grown as a person aside from a preachy Sudden Principled Stand against Torus in "Wrath of the Wolf King", which ended up with him becoming the Director of Interpol and a implied girlfriend, which comes off as undeserved to some.
    • The negative aspects of Ned being Interpol's new Chief Director becomes emphasized in "The New Director" given how much Ascended Fridge Horror it's loaded with when he begins to reveal his originalist-like, hands-off intent during a press conference as the new Chief Director. Essentially he becomes an Foil to Torus at the end of the story and runs Interpol exactly in the way Bubo would have wanted it; with the same conservative hands-off mindset Bubo had that lead to the mess with Drake Lupus and with lots of red tape, essentially making him Bubo's puppet, which "Welcome to the Jungle" already showed why that is an awful thing to do in the Sly-fanverse. The fact that it's thanks to Sly that the fact that the warlords were threatening innocents in the Congo went over his head contributes to Ned and Bubo's kind of mindset, and it just solidifies how unqualified Ned is and only ends up making him seem as detestable as Torus was intended to be.
• Unpopular Popular Character: All the characters in the comic, except for Ice, butt heads with the water buffalo, Torus. Despite that, he is popular with a little more than half of the fanbase while being disliked by the other half. Critics of the comic, however, are very fond of Torus due to his actions making sense in context due to the fact that he is a member of a international organization.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Some believe that Sly Cooper and Carmelita got turned into this so that more focus and emphasis was put into the Author's own characters.
• Wangst: There was alot of this after the chapter "Winter Storm", especially with Sly Cooper, Drake Lupus, and Ned; moreso with Ned than any of them, given his constant sulking.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Despite this fancomic and its later side stories being based on an apolitical series about thieves stealing from other criminals, the development of Director Dominic Torus and Judge Shelby seems to turn the story into one big jab at leftism and judicial activism. Torus' implied "liberalism" (which is more akin to conservatism) and Shelby's activism are meant to be what accelerates Drake Lupus' plans and allows him to cause chaos. There are also other aspects of the story that support this:
  • Jack Lupus and Bubo are explicitly stated to be a Republican and conservative respectively in Torus' dialogue, and are portrayed sympathetically compared to Torus and his affiliates.
  • Gun control is pushed as a plot point at the end of "Welcome to the Jungle" and is done in an exaggerated manner that conservatives frequently expect would happen.
  • Bubo's criticism of the "Judiciary council" that voted 5-4 on letting Torus invade Switzerland not being a "decisive majority" alludes to the outcomes of specific supreme court rulings during the early and mid 2010s which happened to be considered unfavorable to conservatives, which Wrath of the Wolf King wasn't written too far after.
  • Torus' ordering Ice to attack Ned and then Vick calling him out for "silencing someone for standing up for their beliefs" basically mirroring the conservative narrative that liberals "silence anyone who they disagree with".
  • In "The New Director", Ned's answers are akin to that of an originalist and ultraconservative politician, and he's portrayed sympathetically unlike the reporters in his story (one of whom the author insinuates was a part of a social movement similar to Black Lives Matter). The author even uses Ned to dogwhistle the All Lives Matter slogan in that same line. Unlike with Jack or Bubo, the author intentionally hid Ned's politics and got his fanbase to sympathize with him first, then revealed his politics after the comic ended.
  • In general, the fact that Interpol operates like the US government in this comic and mirrored controversial issues in the USA during the mid 2010s makes it even harder to ignore the conservative subtext.

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