Netflix's The Dragon Prince

Based on , I think I would want to see if Aaravos gets freed, that Sol Regem and team Sun Elf Pride team up with the heroes. Because even if Sol Regem hates hates humans, he probably hates Aaravos more. Plus if Team Sun Elf Pride does get Sol Regem back to fighting shape, he might be handy fighting a corrupted Zubeia.

Though tbh I don't see Sol Regem and the Sun Elf nationalists being part of the solution.

I'd like the explanation of why Aavaros gave humans magic.

Because that really was their lifeline when they were doomed to starvation and ruin but a crappy one.

If Aaravos gave them dark magic then I have to wonder if it was as a trojan horse?

Aaravos seems like a Prometheus figure just as much as a Satanic one. I don't have the belief in the writing team to think they're capable of making a nuanced conflict except unintentionally (because all the nuance they've written so far seems unintentional in interviews), but I have the tiniest shred of hope that they're setting up that the stars/Star Elves are extreme anti-human racists and for as bad as Aaravos is he's genuinely better than they are because he at least gave humans a shred of hope even if the consequences of doing so were dire.

I'd love to see Aaravos crush the nationalist Sun Elves even more. Most of the Sun Elves really are just the worst Hate Sink types.

Edited by PhiSat on Nov 30th 2023 at 9:19:36 AM

What nuance was unintentional?

There's nothing that says a Prometheus figure can't also be a jerk especially if his motives were spite, and the show runners have said that Lucifer's fall and Prometheus' are kinda the same story anyway.

Ngl seeing Aaravos as kinda a Samael (Gnostisicm) figure would be cool. Meant to help humanity rebel against its godly oppressors.

Edited by miraculous on Nov 30th 2023 at 9:38:25 AM

The writers did not mean to make Viren and humanity as a whole nearly as sympathetic as they are seen in the fandom, and they seem to be unaware as to why people hate the Elves (as a whole, not as individuals) so much.

Edited by PhiSat on Nov 30th 2023 at 12:39:41 PM

I feel Viren is meant to be quite sympathetic but there is a lot more people who will white wash him because you can see that he isn't just a mustache twirler.

I agree that a degree of sympathy was intended for Viren, especially as of late, but I don't think they expected people to call Harrow a total moron and/or a bad king.

EDIT: I want to clarify I'm hard on this show because I like a lot of things about it. I think it has a really solid foundation and could do some really good Grey-and-Gray Morality. The seeds were there. It just feels like they constantly fumble the ball.

Edited by PhiSat on Nov 30th 2023 at 12:49:54 PM

Viren is what he is as a result of taking a lot of short cuts and loans that backfired long term. Leading him to use more short cuts and loans. He acknowledges that for a lot of what he's done he's gone too far. I think the dark magic flashbacks showed how he wanted to keep his family safe and it lead him to be a court wizard with a son as a great knight and a loving daughter as an apprentice. But his son betrays him and his daughter is heading down the dark side. Dark Magic in this setting is very much in the Power at a Price, but the audience can disagree with the narrative of what the price is.

I feel a lot of people miss that while things can be complex that doesn't mean that good and evil don't exist. Viren did good things, like warm the land to feed people but only because it was beneficiary, and the way he went about it ended up costing the kingdoms three of their most noble queen's, and he was eventually too tunnel visioned about his goals to consider alternatives.

Meanwhile Callum who's also resorted to dark magic, twice, he always takes it as a personal failure and is troubled by what it might mean for him, even though he was left without any other option.

Motives and personal response are what define them as heroic and villainous,

Dark magic is a convenient tool to manipulate humans with. As long as it's around, he'll never run out of pawns.

Edited by Chaosjunction on Nov 30th 2023 at 3:32:38 PM

I mean, it's easy to look at confrontation between Sol Regem and Ziard and see why many would root for humans over Xadia. That scene almost feels like a black-and-white conflict.

Sure, there is this whole thing with unicorn murder and unicorns being sentient but narrative brings very little attention to it. It almost comes off as Author's Saving Throw.

Also, many fans just question if dark magic is that evil or if it is just more elven racism. People tend to question the narrative these days. Accepting that dark magic just must be evil feels almost like taking as face value that every Slytherin is an asshole.

Edited by Sunchet on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:08:51 AM

The problem is not dark magic per say, it's dark mages. When all your problems can be solved with better materials (harvested from living beings), it's easy to start thinking of life as transactional.

Claudia sacrificing a baby deer to save Soren is great, but the problem is that in her eyes, there is no appreciable difference between Zym and that deer other than their utility for dark magic.

On Harrow, how sure are you that the reaction to him is unexpected? Even without taking Viren's side some of Harrow's decisions come off as deliberately poorly timed or thought out.

I'm pretty sure we're supposed to see Harrow as in the right when Harrow wants to give Duren a bunch of food even though Katolis is also suffering from famine. But the whole thing comes off as a Senseless Sacrifice that Viren has to bail him out of by using dark magic when it comes out that just as many citizens of Katolis would die as a result. It comes off as Harrow trading his people's lives to play the hero. Just one example.

Dark magic is Power at a Price, but when it's shown that the human population was oppressed by their magical peers before using it and that the Elves immediately wanted to exterminate them after they used it it comes off as justified. It's definitely wrong when Claudia killed someone to bring Viren back (and even then only temporarily), but before that the response to dark magic seemed pretty overblown when Elves and humans alike kill animals for food.

I don't think it helps either that dark magic use seems pretty rare among humans, which makes the genocide approach seem even more overblown. We've only ever seen 3 dark mages.

Edited by PhiSat on Nov 30th 2023 at 4:42:17 AM

Heck there’s no difference between a human and a deer if that’s what it takes for Claudia to achieve what she wants. She had even made clear in the first episodes baby dragons were just parts in her eye as she explained it to Callum.

And I definitely believe sympathy for Viren was always intentional, that his issues and need to validate himself lead him to use dark magic as a means to get there lead him to lose his way to the point early on in the show he was pretty explicit in the fact he saw his son as disposable.

That’s a big part of why I was unsurprised where the show took him when he was revived(I even mentioned this at the end of season 3). That being revived would force Viren to confront his past actions since death changes a person, and he reflects on how he’s ended up screwing up his kids in his path to try to please the people he loves. Be it his King or his family, cause he loved Harrow just as much.

A big part of the problem is that what sparked the conflict was the genocide of the Unicorns, who were sapient and human sympathizers according to the lore. Why were they exterminated by humans? For dark magic body parts.

But since that’d make the humans using dark magic too obvious in it being unsympathetic, they left this as background lore.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Nov 30th 2023 at 3:45:48 AM

Yeah, the show itself is really bad at advocating for why using dark magic is bad. The unicorn lore really needed to be in the show, which I think is a writing team fumble.

And even then, that speaks more to the greed or desperation of the ancient dark mages, not that the method itself is bad.

Edited by PhiSat on Nov 30th 2023 at 4:50:44 AM

When I see the complex geopolitics of Dragon Prince, I more often see from the Xadian side faults that are accepted in our own society and then wonder what would be considered acceptable actions to seek reparations. The thing with the human oppression prior to the mage wars was that it wasn't an active oppression by the elves and dragons, it was a lack of care to use their powers to help a less able group, something we in Western society do regularly, both domestically and internationally (without getting into the actual active oppression we have wrought).

And then a group did decide to use their abilities to help, by offering primal magic to the humans, and were hunted in return as thanks, because they found a magic that was more powerful for less effort. That's the thing with dark magic, the best results come by killing the rarest people and if you base your economic or societal growth on it, those rare people are more like gold and jewels, than actual people.

Making the analogy that dark magic is like eating meat is very simplistic to me. It's more like being a poacher than eating meat. You poach one rare endangered animal, and you'll make millions, compared to slaughtering one cow. Someone poor or desperate theoretically could turn to poaching to care for themselves or their community, because the life of an elephant or a manatee to them is worth less than themselves or those around them. But it is still hunting a rare being to empower yourself. That the best spells require beings that are also sapient makes it a lot worse.

Edited by HeyMikey on Nov 30th 2023 at 5:49:02 AM

The show isn't bad at all about telling us that dark magic is bad; very early on you had Claudia being perfectly willing to take apart a sentient being, a baby, for parts and people were OK with it because Claudia was the cute, quirky girl Callum had a crush on.

Unlike the primal magics that require some level of spiritual introspection to use, dark magic only requires knowledge and amorality, in increasing amounts the better you get at it. From that perspective it is worse than the other magics and the fact that dark mages never bothered creating an ethical code to their craft only makes it worse.

Edited by Chaosjunction on Nov 30th 2023 at 8:58:10 AM

It doesn't help that Dark Magic can do all sorts of crazy shit as long as you fuel it with enough life. You can raise the dead with sacrifices. You can even take out one of the most powerful dragons to ever live with a single spear charged with Dark Magic. Even Aaravos was impressed by that second one.

Something that's more powerful, more accessible, and way easier to use than regular magic...and the only trade-off is that you have to be willing to kill others for it.

Edited by M84 on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:01:12 PM

Sol Regem makes it pretty clear there was some kind of systematic oppression of humans going on given his sheer disdain for them being beings that couldn't innately perform magic. And while this is post-banishing, Khessa enjoyed scorching humans to death as if they were ants under a magnifying glass. The weight of a human life is approximate to an insect's to many Xadians.

The poaching analogy you use to me doesn't work because most of the beings used for dark magic are not sapient and not uncommon. The unicorns were, yes, and I see the analogy working there, but the show itself doesn't really bring up the unicorn slaughter. Furthermore, dark magic use seems to be really rare. Not even the royalty besides Katolis' seem to have court mages and Viren's power level, let alone Claudia's, seems to be one in a million. Now maybe that's not the case, but if we're meant to think dark magic is really commonplace across the land then the show does a really bad job of conveying that. So banishing all humanity comes across even more as Disproportionate Retribution for the acts of a few trying to better their lot in life.

But that's not dark magic. That's Claudia, who obviously had a lot of loose screws even before she became desperate to protect her loved ones by any means necessary. Dark magic is a tool that is capable of a lot of good, like feeding hundreds of thousands of people and healing someone's spine. It's also capable of a lot of evil, but so is ice/water magic and no one universally condemns the Tidebound Elves for using it.

Edited by PhiSat on Nov 30th 2023 at 7:20:49 AM

The problem with Dark Magic is that it more or less encourages users to see other living things as fuel. Because it uses living things as fuel. While other magics can be used without killing anyone else since they are fueled by primal forces like the sun, Dark Magic requires the lives of others, preferably magical beings.

It's funny. If we were naming it with the naming scheme of Primal Magic — ie what fuels it — Dark Magic should probably be named Life Magic instead.

Edited by M84 on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:33:29 PM