The Dragon Prince and Suitor Armor : a comparison
I wanted to illustrate this but I no longer have Netflix and the Webtoon gigantic panels aren't easy to screenshot or overview on computer, so nevermind.
It's no secret that I've been talking about The Dragon Prince since the first season aired, back in 2018. I watched for its moral dilemmas and profound characters and interesting world building. But funnily enough, the show kept me obsessed because it somehow fueled a need ending frustration. For years and as it was airing, I struggled to articulate what I read as a mismatch between huge thematic and philosophical and political ambition, and constraints of a too short runtime underestimating its audience. A show claiming the legacy of the Last Airbender still had too many differences with it to understand what felt wrong. And plenty of stories have plot holes or uneven pacing without inspiring this level of fascination. Nor was it a matter of disagreeing with the show's values. A story about rejecting cycles of vengeance and imagining alternatives to sacrifice is what everyone needs to hear, especially in times so dreadful as the ones ahead of us. I like not dying in war. I looked into philosophy, history, literature, tropes, to try and articulate where the rub was (and that's even my academic research subject); but the illumination came from comparison, and as I was not looking for it.
It came from a Webtoon called Suitor Armor, by Purpah.
TDP has many debts : among the main , Lord of the Rings, Princess Mononoke, Disney, Game of Thrones, Avatar: the Last Airbender. But none of these works allow for the comparisons that would reveal TDP's flaws (not even Mononoke). Now, using several works instead of one allows for much, much richer thoughts, but also more scattered. Suitor Armor (by Purpah) on the other hand, is so similar in its premise and themes, but so different in execution, that it offered, at least to me, the perfect mirror to contrast to TDP.
Is it fair to compare the 200 episodes closed-doors Shakespearian political drama for adults and the 60 episodes of the action and adventure show for kids ? No.
It's not a trial in quality, I'm an adult, I'm not TDP's target audience. But I think Suitor Armor provides amazing contrast. What makes the comparison fascinating is that the two stories begin from the same premises and then arrive at completely different conclusions.
I won't be summarizing each story. To better understand my position, you ought to read Suitor Armor and then resume this essay. Frankly that's the best webtoon you'll ever read. Here is the link to episode one : https://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/suitor-armor/episode-1/viewer?title_no=2159&episode_no=1
Without further ado, let's begin.
Both works seem to be telling the same story. Very loose medievalism. A conflict between humans and magical creatures close to nature. Humans use sacrifice magic while creatures are born with power. Protagonists try to break a cycle of revenge that had been going on for generations. How to build peace in a world structured by prejudice, fear and past violence ? Is free will a thing ? Is sacrifice really the answer to all problems ? Can we forgive each other ?
Though, they give completely different answers.
I. Oppression
Right there from the get-go.
In SA, the power imbalance is crystal clear. Fairies were defeated. They are hunted down, mutilated, exploited for their wings. Fairies prefer to surgically cut their babies's wings so a human doesn't tear them, and they don't grow up missing them. Their oppression is legal, institutional, economic, cultural. Ricon parades two of them like sex slaves. The so-called "war" against fairies justifies everything the humans are doing, but is actually propaganda, there's never been a war, only oppression.
Lucia's existence, for example, rests on the lie that her adoptive family loves her unconditionally : their affection and care are real, but they only love her as long as she actively erases herself. Historians have been mad at popular culture for depicting corsets as a literal choking prison materializing patriarchy's control over women's bodies. Lucia's corset does exactly that, because it does not bind her waist, but her wings. And it chokes her.
A line I keep coming back to is her adopted dad, Goldborne, trying to reassure that he loves her "despite what she is." In order to protect her, he forces her to keep her nature a secret from his daughter Kirsi, who remains unaware of her sister's struggle for the entirety of the series. He thinks he's doing the right thing, but as in Wuthering Heights, in a poisoned system, even good will and empathy can carry harm and condescension.
Lucia puts it best when she finally confronts Kirsi at the end of season III : "No ! I won't be turned into a pet and called a friend again. You're so focused on your own grief that you can't possibly imagine what your subjects are put through. And I'm tired to pretend anything I will say can make a difference."
In TDP, it's much more ambiguous. Officially, the series starts with the nuanced premise that both sides are morally equal in their compromission.
But aesthetically, it puts humans in the role of oppressors, as dark magic represents the exploitation of living things and nature. Elves are the Native Americans in this analogy.
BUT the world's history tells completely otherwise : humans are left vulnerable to famine, they were ethnically cleansed through a Trail of Tears, they are bombed, they find themselves at the constant mercy of immensely powerful creatures who despise them. Dark magic seems like the awful, but only available answer, to that submission.
So TDP's situation is in theory much more messy and nuanced than SA's; but although SA plays oppression straight, TDP keeps contradicting its aesthetic with the power imbalance shown.
More interestingly, TDP never seems to realize it's portraying analogies to oppression.
For The Dragon Prince to actually resolve its own political premise, someone from the dominant side would have to say, plainly, that humans were not merely “one side” in a mutual cycle of hatred. "Humans, dragons, elves, we all made mistakes." I mean, yes, but also... no? They were displaced. They were denied access to primal magic. They were kept vulnerable under the authority of beings powerful enough to burn their cities from the sky. Dark magic may be evil but did not appear in a vacuum. It emerged from a world where humans were told they had no place in the cosmic order.
Neither Zubeia nor Janai ever admits this. Zubeia mourns, forgives, explains and blesses and is a mom for the whole Dragang, but she never names the historical violence of Xadia as structural domination. (As a side note, until Callum mentioned it extremely late in s7, I was certain she didn't have anything to do with the attempt on Ezran and Harrow's lives. But even if she didn't, she still should have apologized for the power imbalance. Anyway, I think we'll never know now.) Janai opposes Karim and Xadian tradition by choosing cooperation and love over racism, but she never turns that critique toward the human/Xadian hierarchy itself.
And as long as The Dragon Prince refuses to let a dragon or an elf acknowledge that asymmetry, the story will keep smelling at the root. Not because its ideas are wrong (I like not dying in war), but because it wants peace without anyone in power admitting what power did.
Now, let's dive into...
II. Human Magic
In SA, human magic can be powered by plants or animals, and no one seems to have a problem with that. The real issue, of course, is when it preys on people. Although both humans and fairies can be used as fuels, fairies are the obvious targets because of the power contained in their wings. Modeus is the product of that, being born of hundreds of human and fairies sacrifices. But fairies being the targets, this specific form of human magic reveals the material structure of a world where some thrive upon what's torn from a designated vulnerable people. Norrix is traumatized by magic, but not because magic is inherently evil. He is traumatized because he was forced to participate in industrial-scale human sacrifice as a child. As the story progresses, even killing animals becomes difficult for him, but the narrative frames this as a trauma response of the people sacrifice he was forced into. And specifically, the sacrifice of fairies.
By contrast, The Dragon Prince often treats dark magic as morally contaminating in itself. Even when it saves lives, even when its user has understandable reasons, even when the alternative is catastrophic, the narrative and aesthetic coding remains suspicious. Viren saves Soren, Claudia saves Viren, the titan's heart saves a hundred thousand people, yet dark magic remains associated with corruption, addiction, exploitation, spiritual degradation, the purple of arrogance and green of poison. Dark magic indeeds carries heavier symbolic weight. Although it's too powered by plants and animals, or even tears, it's vilified because it represents many forms of exploitation (environment, poaching, capitalism, emotional manipulation, drug abuse or even rape). Dark magic is a craft but it's also a way of seeing the world, its calculation and "I didn't have a choice". When Harrow and Viren use the titan's heart or kill Avizandum, when Viren demands Lissa's tears, when Claudia kills the dear to save Soren, that's what's they're doing. SA asks who pays the price; TDP too, but TDP also asks why people are so certain they have to pay a price.
I think the closest The Dragon Prince comes to Suitor Armor’s logic of limited violence under oppression is the titan dilemma. Harrow and Viren are both responding to scarcity, but they choose different ways of distributing harm. Harrow chooses to share the food, spreading the risk of famine across borders. Viren chooses to kill the titan, concentrating violence onto one body in order to save thousands. This resembles the bleak question raised by Suitor Armor's V, the fairy surgeon who painlessly removes the wings of willing fairies so humans will not tear them off through torture: Lucia is first horrified at this, but as V explains, catastrophe has already been produced by the system, so is the moral task to refuse violence entirely, or to limit, redirect, and contain it?
During the hunting subplot, Lucia and Modeus are horrified when they realize the deer is actually a fairy trapped in animal form. For different reasons, both react strongly to the idea of reducing a living being to something that can be hunted, used, or discarded. TDP does too. Dark magic is built on the transformation of living beings into resources.
A difference is that SA presents some exploitation as unnecessary (the dear is hunted for fun), while TDP repeatedly places its characters in situations where using organic matter actually works (killing the dear cures paralysis). The titan's heart saves a hundred thousand people. Dark magic saves Soren thrice, Rayla twice, three cities from dragons. This builds an artificial tension absent from SA. TDP keeps divorcing magic from politics and awkwardly moralizes it, while SA uses magic to reveal political tensions.
Lucia can protest against hunting and collecting fairy wings because it's not necessary. Viren looks at condamnation of dark magic and says "Okay, but people are dying". Until Callum's breakthrough (and frankly, even after that), that question, like many things in this comparison, is richer in theory but messier in practice.
TDP does ask why people are so certain they have to pay a price. But the answer they bring is all but satisfying.
"Humans are greedy, humans bed their land dry", but who decided to not teach them any better, bombed, deported and starved them in the first place, duh ?
III. Characters
Lucia, Modeus/Callum : free will and bridges between worlds
Callum and Lucia stand between two worlds. Both are uncomfortable with their status. Both challenge assumptions their societies take for granted. Both are associated with forms of magic considered inaccessible or dangerous. Yet the nature of their journeys differs significantly.
Lucia's story is one of identity. She reclaims fairy magic. The source of her suffering is not temptation but repression. Her powers manifest violently against her because she has spent her entire life denying what she is. The corset binding her wings becomes an obvious metaphor for this condition. As the story progresses, her magical outbursts increasingly reflect accumulated fear, shame and anger. Worst, her repressed magic is actively killing her.
Callum's relationship with magic follows the opposite direction. He begins by rejecting the sacrificial logic represented by dark magic and eventually discovers primal magic as an alternative. While Lucia reclaims magic, Callum discovers it.
Then, both series gradually shifts this conflict away from access to power and toward free will. Dark magic ceases to be merely a morally questionable tool and becomes a threat to his autonomy. Aaravos is the ultimate consequence of the worldview dark magic embodies: a world in which people become instruments. Lucia feels herself losing control of her impulses -and she may know she's only reacting to straws breaking her camel's back, but it doesn't make her any less frightened of herself. By the end of the series, Callum repeatedly asks Rayla to kill him if necessary. Like Lucia and Modeus, he fears becoming something he cannot control.
Modeus, though gentle and innocent, is originally created as a weapon. His entire arc revolves around the possibility of becoming a person despite that. When he finally kills someone, even if to protect someone else, the guilt is so overwhelming that he voluntarily asks Norrix to take away his free will. Callum, who cast dark magic to protect his friends, reaches the exact same conclusion. In both cases, death appears less frightening than becoming an instrument.
What fails, alas, is that Callum's primal magic never becomes a subject of conversation.
A human mastering primal magic should be equivalent to Lucia realizing she's the long lost fairy monarch. It should actually be even more ground-breaking than this. That revelation should shatter all political order. If a human can access primal magic, then the foundational assumptions of the conflict between humans and Xadia suddenly collapses. Centuries of history, exclusion, resentment, and dependence should be called into question. Humans should be begging Callum to be taught. Elves and dragons should fear him. Everyone should question everything. He learned not just one but two, while Xadians are limited to the one they're born with. If humans were indeed so dangerous, it explains why they were kept oppressed, and why dark magic became the perfect justification to this oppression, for that oppression was based on a lie.
But since TDP never realized it was talking of oppression in the first place, the story never asks such questions. Callum's breakthroughs are remain only personal and spiritual accomplishments of his own character arc. Callum's bridge thing only is a bridge between himself and himself. As far as everything else is concerned, he might sill be wielding Primal Stones.
Sorry, buddy, no one cares. Everyone should but no one does.
Lucia discovering she's the fae monarch, however, is political from the get-go. Although the public reveal is in the last episodes published so far, the personal impact immediately collapses into her potential role in ending oppression. She starts hating herself for being raised in luxury while her people was suffering. She understands why fairies and elves would hate monarchs. And as she considers leaving, Baynard and Peres, her human friends, bring to her attention that as the queen's sister, she actually is in a unique position, though precarious, placed perfectly to end hostilities.
Another problem I have with Callum's arc is that his guilt feels completely out-of-proportion. Unlike Modeus, he doesn't kill anyone. He crushes two bodies of already dead slugs. "I destroy everything I touch" come on, let Viren do the Byronic thing, you just ain't it.
There are parallels to Ezran, too, but I'll come back for him later. I promise it will make sense.
Norrix and Ricon: Splitting Viren in Two
That's his pyjamas. Yes, I know, it took me a while to realize.
At first glance, Norrix and Viren seem very similar. Both are powerful court mages originally from lower classes, haunted by atrocities committed in the name of necessity. Both are associated with forms of magic that require sacrifice. Both spend much of their stories carrying the weight of choices they cannot undo. Both desperately want to be loved. Yet, something that can't be overlooked :
Norrix is fundamentally a victim.
As a child, he was forced to participate in mass human sacrifice under threat of death or torture. The horror at the center of his character is not ambition but trauma. He knows what is right. He often wants to do what is right. He often tries to do what's right. He simply lacks the courage to oppose those who hold power over him. When he continues creating weapons for Ricon, the story frames this primarily as cowardice born from terror. He wants to love Lucia but he can't, not because she's a fairy but because his guilt obsesses him. And it's not like he's a coward by design : he had had the fight beaten and abused out of him, time and again. When he ends up forming a connexion to Modeus, like Viren to Soren (Oh, my. Turns out my idiot armored son has free will after all ?!), it's poisoned by the sacrifice Modeus and Soren's existence demanded.
Viren's fear exists too, but shares the rent with ego. He likes being useful, needed, having the solution no one thought of, being praised for his intelligence, power. When there's a vacuum, Viren steps in because he never considers that there may be other options -he's got a Messiah complex the size of his staff. As far as he's concerned, he should be in charge, and everyone disagreeing is at best an idiot, at worst a danger to everyone else.
But reducing Viren to that flaw, like the show does too often, is frustrating. His ego only explains part of his behaviour. Viren's reasoning is understandable even when he's wrong. When he says he has no choice, the viewer understands why he thinks that way. He's implied to have come from nothing and fought tooth and nail for his position. Like Norrix, his entire existence seems to have taught him the same thing : saving his child demands a sacrifice. Preventing a famine demands a sacrifice. Politics is compromise. So it becomes a tunnel vision... The realm's safety demands sacrifice. Humanity's sake demands sacrifice. Yadda, yada. You get it. Sacrifice stops being one option among others, it's a fundamental law. That's why despite his agency, Viren ironically feels just as trapped as Norrix.
I absolutely love this shot. He's contemplating the knife cutting through the screen like a border between life and death. He never thought he could outsmart Aaravos, he originally rolled with it because he thought it was the least worst option.
His ego makes him fancy carrying the cross. His experience taught him the cross must be carried. Norrix knows people will die if he obeys Ricon, but is terrified of confronting his trauma with abuse. Viren thinks egotistically people will die if he doesn't pay the price the world demands.
As a little note, I think Viren's overall character would have made much more sense with a past as traumatic as Norrix's. He has got a social revenge dimension to him, which also plays in oppression thing, and although the show borrows its heroisation of royals from the High Fantasy genre it's from, it weirdly makes him more legible.
Viren's ego half is undoubtedly found in Ricon.
They share a talent for manipulation, playing into people's traumas, a certain sadism when it comes to elves (they both have a collection of dead fairies and torture one in a dungeon), and their exploitation of the fay/human conflict to further their own power. Norrix is the court mage, Ricon is the evil uncle, Viren is both.
Though, Ricon never cares for guilt and remorse. Viren keeps justifying his actions, and often has actual points. But Ricon only ever cares for the pleasure he draws from controlling others. And unlike Viren, he's at the top of the oppression hierarchy. More on that below.
But I still have a point with Viren :
First, I get what they were trying to do with him. His cruelty, ambition, savior complex and genuine protective instincts grow from the same weakness: Viren cannot imagine value outside usefulness. Power becomes, in his mind, the only way to protect anything at all. Even his protective instincts curdle into domination, because everyone else appears too naive, too passive, too sentimental, or too privileged to understand what the world costs. Viren's worst crimes come from the same psychological structure as his noblest impulses. His desire to save people passes through control, substitution and sacrifice. His need for love turns love into debt. His defense of humanity becomes ownership because he loves to see himself as the only adult in the room.
HOWEVER, my first gripe with the way Viren's written is how inconsistent he is in his two halves (tragic/arse).
The example I always come back to is how he went from dying to protect Harrow to ordering the murder of Harrow's boys with a grin on his face in a day. There is also his treatment of Soren; while in Arc I he treated him with such contempt you could hardly tell if he ever saw him as more than a pawn, in Arc II it's suddenly revealed he actually adored him this whole time and he eventually sacrifices himself for him. Such inconsistency could never be found in Suitor Armor, and that's why I think Viren, alongside Ezran, is one of the characters who suffer most from the format imposed on The Dragon Prince, from being in a rushed, plot-driven narrative, while Suitor Armor can afford organic fears, decisions and inner conflict. You could have Viren trying and failing to show Soren affection. You could have Viren reviling himself for the prince's murder even if accepting it as a necessity. But could you, in such a short time?
You absolutely could, if only you dedicated less of it to jelly farts jokes, additional pets and pop cultures references. SA does even that better. The references are blink-and-you-miss-it. TDP's take whole minutes.
My other gripe with Viren's writing, and that ties in the oppression problem, how his ego is used as an excuse to dismiss all valid concerns he might have. Saving Harrow was just to make himself feel good apparently. He's only ever been blood thirsty and has only ever been in for himself. Yeah even when saving 100 000 thousand people with a magic that hurts him somehow. He always chose power whenever he had the chance only because he liked the feeling... which is a convenient excuse to swip his other points under the rug. Yes, he does horrible things and has an ego. Yes, he likes telling himself he doesn't have a choice. But punishing him does nothing to address the point he was addressing, the system he emerged from. Which is oppression, and again, the show never realized it was depicting oppression in the first place, so it blames all its problems on Viren's character flaws instead of acknowledging the bigger picture. As long as you don't address that you'll keep having more Virens -heck you even got a Karim, but more below on why he doesn't work.
The show individualizes crimes that only make full sense inside a hierarchy.
Viren tries to reunite two characters. In theory it should make him more organic and complex and compelling. In many ways he is. It's fun to try and untangle the mess. But the seams are too coarse and, moreover, do not hold. Too many transitions are lacking. He looks like writers were fighting over him like dogs a piece of meat, or were working without talking to each other.
Ironically for a show supposedly about misunderstandings.
Ricon and Aaravos : the sultry monster behind the scenes
Aaravos's character is closer to Ricon. Not only Ricon is a much better manipulator than Viren, whose bullshit practically everyone sees through except Claudia, he also has immense charm and a distance Viren doesn't have, but Aaravos's thousands of years have built. They both know exactly how to play with their victim's psychological flaws and trauma. He assumes a paternal role to Kirsi but he despises her, couldn't care less for her, and only is ever happy when he finds his match in intelligence and raw power (Lucia). Ricon says people are wrong when they compare politics to chess : it's more like gardening because people are more impredictable like plants, and you have to actually nurture them to hope see them grow useful. Aaravos plays it straight; the promotion art shows him using Callum, Viren and Claudia like puppets, and he even plays with figures of them.
However, Aaravos has something Ricon does not have : a wound. His war against the world is born from his little girl's completely unfair execution on the altar of the oppressive system she questioned. That's also why Aaravos's treatment of his protegee also differs from Ricon's treatment of his (poor Kirsi, please someone free her from him).
Ricon may or may not reveal such wound, but for the moment, he's just a monster whose thirst for power seems enough justification for his action. And even if he had been traumatized by a fairy, it would certainly not erase the fact that he's the top of the system -but more on that on the next comparison. Ricon is a cold, terrifying figure through and through, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
In other words, Aaravos addresses actual problems, while Ricon is just enforcing oppression.
Kirsi and Claudia : her daddy's little princess (oh and what's that annoying thing ? Oh well, there's Karim too I guess)
Both princesses radicalized by grief, of course. These women are deeply affectionate and gentle, and unable to think of themselves as the bad ones. Love is their motivator, not power or ambition. They organise their world around happy fews : Soren and Viren, then Terry and Aaravos; Kirsi around Goldborne, Lucia, Reimund, and later, Ricon. So questioning any of these figures threatens their psychological foundations, too. They have something infantile about them in that need for stability.
I know he looks like her dad but that's her husband
Their radicalisation comes from grief of a pivotal figure. On contrary to Claudia, Kirsi has no idea of the crime her dad accidentally committed. She never learns about his accidental role in the slaughter of Lucia's family. She never is even told Lucia is a fairy. She was raised by her dad who never bothered to tell her no or to teach her her actions have consequences. While Kirsi's privilege had her assume a condescending tone to people, and a terrified urge to keep people's affection and service to herself, Claudia's use of dark magic progressively used her to consider everything as potential component. Not to mention Claudians repeated abandonment trauma. Claudia, unlike Kirsi, was given responsibility pretty young, and knows her dad has a dark side, but she actively chooses to ignore it, because admitting that he's not perfect would threaten her psychic structure -he's the one who taught her magic and kept her and Soren when Lissa abandonned them. He can't be anything less than perfect. As long as he's alive, even when he's derailing, she has something to cling to.
When Goldborne dies, Kirsi is devastated of course, but Reimund and Lucia are still there to support her. Lucia is her sister, sharing giggles, clothes, lessons, sorrows. Reimund is her prince charming but especially a gravity center calming down her impulses and asking her to be a better version of herself. She's also been promised to him practically since birth, so her world pretty much revolves around these two. When Reimund dies, Kirsi loses much more touch with reality; pretty much like Claudia when Viren dies. They adopt a different persona, colder, too.
That loss creates a vacuum in which Aaravos and Ricon happily break through, exploiting their grief to replace their loss with a ... questionnable substitute, to say the least. Difference is, Ricon manipulates Kirsi, literally taking her dad's place after his death, but coudn't care less about her. Aaravos develops real attachment for Claudia, whom he grows considering like a second Leola. Ricon exploits a need for love, but Aaravos shares that need for Claudia.
"Aurora" and Terry fill similar roles to Claudia and Kirsi, as both from the other side and possibly softening their position even after trauma, but with completely different relationships, since "Aurora" is a mute slave. Kirsi names her, protects her, does her hair, asks her opinion, but this affection remains asymmetrical -she literally gives her the name of her doll. Terry keeps his voice, his agency and ability to oppose her. Claudia trusts his judgement, too : when he criticizes how cruel she was to Rayla or some of her decisions, she feels remorse, and changes her ways, even if this cruelty was to defend him. And most of Kirsi's impulsivity originate from misguided attempts to protect Lucia with the little information she has. Poor girl has been kept in the dark her entire life. And Kirsi herself recognizes she has lot to learn, has started spending days studying, formed a council where she included fairy sympathizers, chief among them Lucia, and always listens to all advice before making decisions. Something Karim, for all his book smarts, never does.
Now, comparing Kirsi with Karim may be surprising. They're from opposite sides after all. However, they surprisingly share the same political position within the scheme, because despite their trauma, both are from the dominant side.
SA, however, is aware of this. When Kirsi radicalises after Reimund's murder, the narrative never forgets she's part of a system oppressing fairies. Her grief explains her evolution but never erases the political context in which she is, the propaganda she's been spoon-fed. Lucia summarizes it best when she confronts her at the end of season 3 : "I won't be made a pet and called a friend again. You're so focused on your own grief you can't be bothered to imagine what your subjects are put through, humans and fairies alike. I'm tired of pretending anything I will say here will make a difference."
And this, even as the likely culprit of Reimund and Kirsi's death is not the fairies, but horrid Ricon.
The destruction of Lux Aurea is traumatc. But Karim seeks to restaure a privilege, and TDP keeps forgetting that by presenting him as just an Elf Viren.
That comparison doesn't work, for Viren's side has historically marginalized, starved, bombed for centuries. Karim keeps speaking of restoring the grandeur of Sun elves. Viren speaks of taking back stolen lands. Karim wants to work with Sol Regem, who tried to genocide humans, and they both call humans a lot of filthy words. Once again, not acknowledging the power imbalance, you get the idea.
Suitor Armor never loses sight of systemic oppression, even as the dominant side suffers trauma. TDP keeps oscillating between contradiction : humans are at a disadvantage, victims of power imbalance and ethnic cleansing, but the visual language relying on the larger architect of fantasy has them depicted as the colonizers. Karim is at the top of an assymetry, a system the show keeps forgetting.
You can't imagine Kirsi if SA forgets about what fairies are put through.
Harrow and Reimund : Good Kings in Bad Systems or Breaking the Cycle, Feeding the Machine
That comparison, surprisingly enough, is not a criticism of TDP. I consider Harrow the best written character (Viren is my favorite but he's written horribly, actually that's even why he's my favorite), followed by Rayla and probably Claudia.
Harrow and Reimund are placed at the center of a conflict that's much older than them, and which they more-less voluntarily feed into. They both serve as the good king to the evil advisor, or fun friend to the sad mage; and as foils to more instable characters - Harrow keeps "let's-kill-a-baby-to-solve-any-problem" Viren on a leash (though Viren also has more than legitimate reasons to think *he*'s the reasonable one in the marriage), Reimund tells Kirsi to go down and tries to encourage her to act with more maturity.
Both contrast a warrior persona with a surprising ability to take distance from their beliefs. For example, when Reimund learns Lucia visits Quin in the dungeon, he doesn't have her arrested but waits to see what happens. When Lucia shows him V operating a fairy, his first instinct is to punch V to protect the fairy, despite all the propaganda he was spoon-fed. When Lucia progressively shows him what his kingdom puts fairies through, he grows horrified at his own ignorance and passivity and pampering and privilege, and immediately punches and fires his evil uncle Ricon (most satisfying punch in the history of punches, maybe just behind these ones from One Piece and Game of Thrones). He promises Lucia to put an end to oppression, and to be right there with her when she tells Kirsi the truth.
"Adding more bodies to that count won't bring the others back", he tells his uncle rancid Ricon. "I want a real answer as to why we are fighting a war begun by people dead and long buried. Until I am sufficiently informed on the situation, our troops will be pulled back to defensive positions". That's word for word what Ezran says, but that's the reasoning Harrow died so that he could have.
His murder cuts poor Lucia from any real influence she might have, both via him and via Kirsi, lost in her grief of him. Harrow's empathy and morals have him refusing to leave soldiers die a fate he won't share (although he's not above letting them die for no reason, if he dies to repay his sins too). Both kings end their lives determined to break the cycle of revenge they fed into, Harrow actively, Reimund passively and by ignorance. Although Harrow dies on purpose in an attempt to end the cycle, his death, like Reimund's, sadly puts yet another HUGE coin in the machine.
Reimund is deprived of his future but Harrow renounces his. That decision is coherent but has strange effect, for by dying, Harrow has others (*cough* his eight year old kid who somehow is supposed to rule) dealing with the consequences. Reimund, however, gets murdered as he finally gets himself together. It's kept unclear on purpose, but like Kirsi, even if fairies were behind it, it still wouldn't erase the oppression they're coming from. Reimund's awakening just came too late.
"Even if the worse should happen and you lose a sister, rest assured that you will always find a brother in me, Lucia." I keep getting tearful every time I see this panel
No, I'm not over Reimund's death, he deserved so much better.
Ezran and Lucia : Heirs to peace and price to pay
As two royals and the most empathetic characters, seeing good in both sides, they're supposed to bridge the two. But the show treats them differently.
Ezran is constantly validated by the narrative. Even when he does the most stupid things, like giving his throne to a Viren who's clearly lost morals, or putting his entire team and the world in danger for tadpoles, no one ever blames him, and certainly not himself. His empathy is actually pretty much magic, he telepathically speaks to animals and can control dragon's bodies, but it's never explained how he can do that, so it comes across as an ass-pull. When he organises a ball of terrifying dragons on human graves, Opeli tells him that might not be a good idea, but the narrative turns it in an opportunity for his preaching, without giving a voice to the humans who feel wronged (and even if, they'd probably portrayed as fanatics). When he says everything Avizandum did was to protect Xadia, Callum never raises an eyebrow in shape of "Didn't our mom died to preen a famine he caused?"
Ezran only is given proper nuance is in season 3, where Ezran initially wants to establish peace but finds himself forced to choose which millions will die, and season 7 when Ezran arrests Runaan, when he's mad at Callum for betraying him, and searches for a weapon that could shield humans from dragons, because he finally understands that peace can't be a thing if only the weak side makes concessions. But that, all things that do make him fleshed out, come way too late. Or in side stories which, for all excellent they may be, 99% of the viewers have no idea they even exist.
Lucia is the opposite : just realizing she's the monarch has her crying uncontrollably in guilt. Plus, the situations she's in have no good solution. For example, she impulsively promises to free Quinn, but her friends call her out, saying she can't risk her life while so much depends on her. When Norrix proposes, she's forced to break his heart because she doesn't know what he'll do with her secret. When Kirsi gets colder and more radicalized after Reimund's death, Lucia wishes she could be the voice of fairies, but she can't be too loud, since Kirsi has been spoon fed propaganda from her birth (thanks to her fucking idiot dad)
And nowhere does this difference hurt more than in the finale of these works's respective third seasons.
What do you mean "laughing" you're waging a war. That's exactly what you were supposed to avoid. You're losing to tragedy.
Ezran is supposed to be the most pacifist character of TDP. He abdicates because he refuses to see soldiers as numbers. He's even the one who originally had the idea of bringing Zym back to Zubeia as to stop the bloodshed. Yet, the first arc ends with a war presented as heroic. Hundreds of soldiers are burned, stabbed or thrown off cliffs. The show kept repeating that life had inner value, even a lava monster whose death could feeds hundreds of thousands. Yet it ends its first part with a giant "kill them all", as human's appearance is altered. Although they are manipulated by Viren, and historical victims, at no moment the viewer is supposed to empathize with their deaths. He's just supposed to cheer for it. As far as the narrative is concerned, they're no better than LotR's orcs, but orcs speak at least. And, worse, Ezran himself never raises the question. He just burns them. Yes, he does look sad for a shot or two, but that's not enough to compensate the fact that this battle was shot to be a cathartic victory of good over evil, and that Ezran never protested or felt guilt at burning thousands alive.
Talk about an anti-war show.
*triumphant music* excuse me wtf
Of course, the contrast with Lucia couldn't be more apparent. She starts as the most conciliator character of the show. She believes in humans. She loves her adoptive family, she wants peace. But then everything keeps falling apart. She learns her people is oppressed, enslaved and exploited. She learns her adoptive dad is accidentally responsible for the murder of her family. She gathers enough courage to tell Reimund the truth, and everything seems to be like it's going to be all right and then he dies murdered. She learns that her repressed magic is killing her. Her identity is thrown out in the open. She gets stripped naked in front of the whole court. She almost gets executed. Modeus dies.
Yet when her rage collapses into magic and incontrollable flames of vengeance, when she burns dozens of courtiers -unclear if on purpose or not, the narrative never celebrates it. Her collapse is still terrifying. The viewer is meant to be horrified. Her friends are horrified. The failure of her policy of conciliation is actually portrayed as such, and as a tragedy.
Both stories begin by asking whether cycles of violence can be broken. But when their protagonists finally reach their breaking point, The Dragon Prince offers catharsis while Suitor Armor offers tragedy. One protects its idealists from the implications of its own themes while the other forces them to confront them.
IV. Overall thoughts
After writing all this, I do not think the difference between The Dragon Prince and Suitor Armor can be reduced to a question of quality. Some of the issues discussed throughout this essay are undoubtedly linked to format. Suitor Armor enjoys an enormous amount of narrative space. Purpah can spend dozens of episodes developing relationships, building political tensions, and allowing consequences to unfold slowly. It took two hundred episodes just to leave the castle. The Dragon Prince has to struggle with the constraints of a much, much shorter runtime and a younger target audience.
Yet these practical limitations do not fully explain the contrast.
What fascinated me while writing this comparison was how often both stories seemed to arrive at the same questions through remarkably similar premises. Yet they rarely arrive at the same destination. The reason, I think, lies in the way each story understands the world it has built.
Suitor Armor possesses a straightforward conflict. Its world is not necessarily more realistic, more nuanced, or more sophisticated. In many respects, it is simpler. But because it clearly understands who holds power, who suffers from that power, and how its institutions reproduce that inequality, the narrative remains coherent even when its characters become morally complicated. Lucia may love her adoptive family. Kirsi may suffer trauma. Goldborne may sincerely love the daughter he helped orphan. None of these truths erase the larger structure surrounding them.
The Dragon Prince attempts something far more ambitious. It wants to tell a story about exploitation and reconciliation, about oppression and coexistence, about the dangers of power and the necessity of survival. The difficulty is that the series often seems uncertain about how these ideas relate to one another. It wants to tell an ambitious story where both sides did awful things. But its visual language borrows heavily from stories in which humans occupy the role of colonisers and magical peoples embody harmony with nature. And yet the history it presents repeatedly depicts humans as displaced, vulnerable, starving, and excluded from power by flying nukes. The series frequently moves between them without fully reconciling their implications. Suitor Armor plays it straight and plays it well. The Dragon Prince tries to subvert and complicate and nuance and ends up biting way more than it can chew.
There's a leak in the foundations of the setting, and it just spreads. It affects the treatment of dark magic. It affects Callum, and Ezran, Viren, Rayla, Janai, everyone else. It affects the political meaning of primal magic. It affects the portrayal of violence. And it affects the ending of Book Three, where a story that spent years questioning cycles of vengeance arrives somehow at a cathartic killing from which its most idealistic protagonist emerges somehow untroubled.
Both stories ask whether people can escape the logic of sacrifice. Both ask whether peace is possible after generations of hatred. Both ask whether free will can survive systems built upon exploitation. But Suitor Armor generally follows the consequences wherever they lead, even when they become tragic. The Dragon Prince, by contrast, often seems reluctant to choose between all the different stories it wants to tell, and chooses the simplest way even as it attempted more complexity.
For all my criticisms, that reluctance may also help explain why the series continues to occupy my thoughts eight years in. Its contradictions are frustrating because the questions it raises are genuinely compelling. Suitor Armor gave me a language to describe that frustration. The Dragon Prince wouldn't fascinate me it it were good. And to be honest, it wouldn't if it were really bad either. A truly bad story would not leave this much to argue with. Somewhere within The Dragon Prince there is the shape of a sharper, stranger, more coherent story. But again and again, when it has to choose between the safer resolution and the more truthful one, it chooses safety.
Suitor Armor understands its world. The Dragon Prince somehow feels... haunted by the world it accidentally created.
