(This is a cleaned-up repost of a series of essays I wrote in 2022)
Skylanders Ring of Heroes, the gacha game that was basically Skylanders’ lifeline at a time when everything else Skylanders related had been pushed to the side. Love it, hate it, feel neutral about it, but whatever your feelings are about it, it definitely housed a very important spot in the lore and roles of portal masters in Skylanders canon. After all, while Earth portal masters playing prominent roles is nothing new, as it’s been emphasized in staff interviews that the player or “main” Earth portal master is just as much of a character in the series as the actual characters themselves, nor was it the first to introduce Earth portal masters besides the player—that position would belong to Leo and Madeline from Trap Team’s reveal trailer—it was the first to not only give us playable portal masters, but it was also the first to have prominent Earth portal masters besides the player and ones that were proper in-game characters in their own right, rather than just some vaguely omnipotent force behind the controller or a few one-off characters for a trailer. As for how that happened, that requires a bit of backstory in and of itself.