Is Nindendo's Kirby an anti-capitalist icon? Well, no. I mean, it makes no sense that he would be, or that Sakurai and Hal have spent decades making entry-level games for children that indoctrinate them into agrarian Anarchism, but it's kind of hard to shake the idea once you see it. I covered this a little back in my Kirby Planet Robobot article, but I wanted to explore the idea more as it's just a bit of fun and very much in my wheelhouse. When not battling elder gods and manifestations of esoteric concepts, Kirby tends to find himself taking on petty dictators, mostly royalty or would-be conquerors, like King Dedede or Queen Sectonia. Now, there is more than one way to resist feudalism, but I don't see Kirby building industry and using economic power to force a governmental change to a capitalist model, so when he returns to a rural and naturalist existence, I'm thinking of the movements that inspired Bakunin more than anything.
As Kirby is, quite deliberately, something of a blank slate, we can never really know what he is thinking, beyond "I'm hungry", so any motivation to his actions has to be discerned in who he takes action against. In the original Kirby's Dream Land, King Dedede, an absolute monarch, has horded all of the food, and we have to assume the proletariat of Dream Land are left to starve whilst the King gorges himself. They work, he eats. Comrade Kirby defeats the King and redistributes the food while the credits roll. Of course, people will point out, not all of Kirby's enemies are royalty, there's Nightmare, Marx and Dark Matter, who are essentially eldritch gods, and, of course, Star Dream. Let's start with the godlings, who, aside from Marx (and that's just kind of an unfortunate coincidence on the name, really) are certainly not strictly Capitalist antagonists, but the extreme-Left does tend to be anti-religion, or at least anti-organised religion, so what's more radical than killing the gods? Outside of Kirby Right Back At Ya!, there is no demonstrated religion in Dream Land, though there is magic, so I wouldn't really assume anything more than a basic pantheism for most inhabitants. Trees have faces after all.
And Star Dream? Well, as I've said in regards to Planet Robobot before, I think it is one of the most blatantly anti-capitalist video games available, especially to children. Star Dream's plan is to monetise the entire universe so that it can control all wealth and capital, a universal monopoly controlled by one entity. If that's not capitalism as reductio ad absurdam, I don't know what is. What I didn't mention about Planet Robobot is that Susie, and later Star Dream itself, are modifying the landscapes and inhabitants of Dream Land in order to make them more "productive". Even King Dedede and Meta Knight are modified to be more efficient workers, losing their, for lack of a better word, "humanity" in the process. Susie offers Kirby several chances to join the corporation, which feature indoctrinating songs and propaganda, but as Kirby refuses (or perhaps simply fails to understand what is happening), Susie becomes increasingly frustrated and eventually decides to discard Kirby, as he won't fit into her profit-making machine. I'll say it again, I don't believe the Kirby games are anti-capitalist propaganda of any kind, but they can be read with that lens and I think doing so is an interesting thought experiment if you enjoy that kind of thing.
