probably a hot take but i don't really like ezran. i don't dislike him, he just feels like such a 2d character. maybe it's his voice acting (i'm sorry but it's so.. soulless?) or maybe it's the fact that his personality has no depth. like i get it, he's a child but i've seen a lot more interesting characters who were around the same age as him.
So, I've been able to spend some time recently rewatching TDP with my family, mostly in prep for season 6.
And because we're really on time we just started season 2 (sarcasm), but anyway. We just finished episode 3, and while we were watching it, my dad had a theory, and me being the nerd that I am asked what it was. The regret was immediate.
He was saying that it's a possibility that they could come back around to Callum/Claudia, if perhaps, he went too far into dark magic, driving everyone else away.
Now look, I'm a huge fan of ship and let ship, (I'm a fan of the canon crack quartet, I know) but like, as someone who's shipped Rayllum pretty early on, and doesn't ship either them with anybody else, I will admit I was kind of offended (Read: repulsed).
And especially during Rayllum month, like, dude
Anyway, and he was really passionate about it too, not that I don't like sharing the fandom with my family and we all enjoy it together, it was just a curve ball I was not expecting.
Like I said, ship whoever you want to ship, but in my personal opinion his idea is blasphemous.
Watching the dragon prince, you can really tell by their attitudes towards oppression that this is created by two Americans.
Like the message of creating peace between two warring groups is great! But it is also blindly optimistic as the humans (Callum and ezran) appear to be seem pretty content in their position despite losing their homeland Xadia and being kicked out of their lands. And this is portrayed as the right decision!
Like the attitude of just rolling over to make peace despite being oppressed really shows a kind of bias in the writer's room. They really be making heroes out of people who are complicit in the status quo of their own oppression huh.
I’m going to be honest with you guys: I legit don’t think that posthumous characters that are introduced AS BEING DEAD count when it comes to tropes like fridging or “bury your gays.” There is a WORLD of difference between “we’re killing off this character who people have grown attached to and identified with for the sake of drama” and “these characters died before the story started and were also gay/women/disabled/whatever”.
We knew that Aanya’s parents were dead before we even knew they were gay. They didn’t set up our expectations only to dash them, like so many other shows have done.
The whole point of the backlash towards the “bury your gays” trope is that it treats LGBT+ characters as disposable pawns to move the story forward. That’s not what is being done here in the slightest. I personally don’t think that just because a character is a minority that storytellers are obligated to make them immortal. I trust Ehasz when he says that they’re committed to giving actual representation in this show, and he’s given me no reason to doubt that. Now, if the entire series ends with the queens being the only queer characters, then I’ll be upset, but I find that extremely unlikely.
Going back on the Aaravos color scheme discourse I have finally come to the conclusion... that he is purple!
Buuuuuuuut he's also blue! Let me explain... Aaravos is a startouch elf and has the literal patterns of the sky on his skin. And skies change colors from dawn, dusk, twilight and midnight!
Dawn
Dusk
Twilight
Midnight
In conclusion, Aaravos skin changes color depending on the color of the night sky. Aaravos having admittedly purple skin could mean he was trapped inside the mirror at dusk which is why he has perpetually purple or indigo skin for the past thousand years!
During the waking hours, his hue is at it's weakest
I think this what he looks like because there are no stars during the day but at night he is absolutely radiant
This post got long, and got away from me, so I’ll tl;dr it
1. dark magic is a metaphor for consumption and materialism and is ultimately bad because it harms others unnecessarily and is not a sustainable resource
2. the elves were dicks for banishing humans but (especially if humans sucked all the magic out of the land themselves) they were kind of justified, even if it was an extreme measure
3. Eating meat is not the same as dark magic if you’re looking at things from an animistic point of view, which the elves likely do
4. it’s okay to like problematic characters and you don’t have to portray Ezran as a monstrous enfant terrible to feel okay about thinking Viren is justified in what he does. In fact, pretty please stop doing this, everyone in all fandoms. It’s fine if you don’t like the protags but that doesn’t mean you get to say Ezran or Rayla or whoever is EVIL. It’s called Ron the Death Eater and it’s a fandom trope that has pissed me off for going on fifteen years. Deliberately misreading the text isn’t cute. Stop doing it.
5. The show isn’t over, be patient, you’ll probably get to see some comeuppance for stuff anyway. And if you don’t, there’s always fanfiction.
6. For the love of baby adoraburrs please tag posts that go in the vein of “the writing is bad because Viren is portrayed as a classic villain/elves good humans bad/the protags aren’t held accountalbe” with “TDP CRITICAL” I would greatly appreciate it because I’m getting super annoyed with posts that deliberately misrepresent canon to uphold a favored side and it’s affecting my enjoyment of the show.
Now! Actual long and discourse-heavy post under the cut!
Ugh I don’t want to start a big ol’ argument with people because I’m still on vacation and don’t want to spend the rest of today arguing about cartoons on the internet, but this has been on the kettle for a while and I feel QUITE STRONGLY about some of these things, so just... let me express my views here and don’t come for me because I’m about to talk about religion and sociology.
Dark Magic is a metaphor for unchecked consumption and capitalism.
1. The theory i’m seeing floating around that got my dander up is that the elves and dragons drained the western half of the continent of magic to keep magic away from humans. I think that, based on what we’ve learned from canon, this is highly unlikely and would be weaker writing than what I think actually happened. Instead, Dark magic was going on for a good solid 800 years (Rise of Elarion is 2000 years before canon) before Sol Regem faced off with Viard (1200 years before canon). The division of Xadia was another 200 years after that. Humans had a solid honking millennium of unchecked dark magic. It is quite likely that the reason the west is entirely devoid of magic, and that humans were banished there, is because they sucked all the magic out of that half themselves. Poor innocent baby humans nothing. They got a taste of power and progress and, like real world humans, let that get WAY out of control.
2. “But Lujanne eats bugs, she’s a hypocrite for saying Claudia can’t squish bugs for pancakes” I want you to go down to your local new-age/witchy bookstore and find yourself an animist that eats meat. You are going to get glared at SO HARD if you whip out the “you think animals have souls but you eat meat!” chestnut. Because here’s the thing.
Eating meat/animal products is an act of life, necessary to sustain the life of someone else. We don’t vilify wolves for eating deer. You gotta eat to live your life, and the human (or, we can assume, bipedal humanoid) diet includes a need for complex protein chains, quite often found in animal meat.
But the reason that we find cannibalism repulsive in western society is because it’s eating another human, despite the fact that humans are made of meat. It’s eating something that we consider sentient, dignified and possessed of a soul. Of course, the taboo also derives from the fact that you can contract prion disease from consuming human meat, but people in 11th century Normandy didn’t know that.
It is quite likely, especially given what we’ve seen of magical creatures and Ezran’s ability to talk to animals, that elves view non-human/elf creatures as sentient and possessed of a soul. If that’s the case, then OF COURSE they would see dark magic as horrific.
But eating meat is not on the same level because, as we see from the assassins, death is a part of life, and sometimes necessary. I imagine that hunting and taking a creature’s life for food is an act that is done with respect. The creatures are honored or thanked before they’re eaten or turned into leather. Highly ritualized to dignify that creature’s life.
Dark magic doesn’t do that. Dark magic sucks the whole life out, without so much of a how do you do. It’s treating a person like a thing. It’s sucking all the life and essence out of someone so you can shoot fireballs or make fluffy pancakes. Lets be real - you don’t need to do either of those things, so the creature thus died in vain.
3. “The elves are selfish bastards for hogging all the magic.” I agree. Granted, their attitudes may have cooled in the ensuing centuries. It’s a new dawn, the era of Zubeia. We might see elves getting over their uppity selves and working to help teach humans magic.
We might also see the show explore that kind of prejudice as Callum learns more magic. In fact, I hope we do.
However, two wrongs dont make a right.
If Japan bombs the absolute fuckshit out of Hawaii, that does not make it okay to flash-fry Nagasaki with a weapon that blights the land and its people for years and years afterward.
To the elves (who are magical creatures and therefore totally usable as spell components), that’s what dark magic is. Suddenly, haha oh fuck, the humans have a fucking NUKE that every elf and dragon in Xadia is vulnerable to.
If a weapon was devised that ONLY a certain portion of the population was affected by, you better bet your sweet bippy that people would panic and make it forbidden and illegal, and severely punish the people who created it. ESPECIALLY if those people were already marginalized. Sucks, don’t it? Doesn’t mean the writing is bad for portraying people having a realistic reaction to something that is harmful to them.
The elves aren’t justified in hogging the magic, and I hope future chapters will explore that. But the elves ARE a liiiiiittle bit justified in freaking out. I hold they could’ve come up with a better solution than BANISH HUMANS, but they didn’t. Makes for interesting story conflict, doesn’t it?
4. “Humans NEED dark magic!” / “Calling dark magic a shortcut is dumb”
Did they tho? Did they really? Really really?
We, modern day humans, don’t NEED smart phones (which rely on several rare earth minerals and are causing untold ecological disaster in areas where they’re miend). We, modern day humans, don’t NEED coal power (which is controlled by coal companies, who keep telling us that we totally do, despite many scientists saying that renewable energy is ready to go whenever). We don’t NEED blackberries from Mexico year-round, or a whole hell of a lot of the things we have come to rely on and consider part of our every day lives. All of these things are unnecessary and shortcuts to progress.
The only - ONLY! - good, necessary thing we’ve seen in canon that dark magic was required for was using the magma titan’s heart for saving people from famine.
A lot of the complaints about sustainable energy and efforts to heal the planet as climate change become increasingly a crisis stem from the fact that doing things RIGHT, in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t strip every last resource out of our home, is that it takes time. It takes SO MUCH TIME to do things properly. Yeah, we can keep going with our coal and our gas-guzzler cars and our fracking and our rare-earth metals... but we ARE going to run out. And then what?
Dark magic is the same principle. Eventually, you’re going to run out of resources.
5. Where I think the show is going
My main beef with those (and there’s a lot of ya, so I’m not intending to single anyone out) who say that the writing is lazy for dark magic bad elfs good is that the show is not over. Wonderstorm is doing their damndest to give us the saga. And they’ve said, out right, that there WILL be books, if nothing else.
You can’t judge a story’s merits when it’s only been half told.
Right now, what the show has done is it has shown us the worst and best of the elves (for example, Khessa’s purity test vs Rayla refusing to kill Ez so she doesn’t perpetuate a cycle of violence) and the worst and best of the humans (ex: Viren forcibly turning thousands of people into monsters against their will vs Viren risking his life in order to save thousands of people from famine). The show has done well to demonstrate that there is good and bad in everyone, and it’s the choices you make and the respect you show others’ autonomy that makes you a good or bad person. The dominoes are in place. The saga has only begun. Being mad that Ezran burned an army (that he likely knew from Soren was invulnerable to fire) or that Aanya shot Kasef in the face (when Opeli would have told her that Kasef conspired behind Ezran’s back to usurp the throne, which is AN ACT OF WAR btw) means you aren’t looking at the big picture. There WILL be consequences for those actions in later seasons, mark my words.
I’m sorry if you’re a Viren or Claudia stan, but they have made choices that hurt other people, and it is in no way shape or form Ezran or Callum or Rayla or ANYONE ELSE’S fault that they made the choices they did. Instead of being mad at the show for not portraying your fav as an innocent victim, be glad that you got such a wonderfully complex set of villains who, quite likely, will get a bomb-ass redemption arc. In fact, I’ll bet you anything that Viren’s walk back from the edge has already begun. The dude fucking DIED, and he’s not going to be eager to get in there and get all grabby with the power any time soon.
That’s what good writing IS - conflict. Tension. People making morally questionable choices. We like it because every day people are hypocrites and morally questionable. You, and I, and everyone we know. Nobody’s perfect and getting cranky and painting the protagonists with the broad villain brush so you can feel good about liking a problematic fave is... some peak tumblr bullshit, tbh.
It’s okay to like characters who aren’t perfect. How fucking boring fiction would be if everyone was perfect.
Now if I can ask my mutuals to please tag their criticisms of the show that go in the vein of “the writing is bad because dark magic is portrayed so negatively/they don’t hold the protags accountable/elves good humans bad” with “TDP critical” I would greatly appreciate it. It’s getting to the degree where things are becoming very not fun and making me cranky.
Thank you, Renee out.
Rayllum is so cute and the dynamic has so much fun and fresh potential but ive started to dislike it because the fandom is so sexist and stupid about them
