#i haven't talked at all about rayla but they also really made her sound like a total ditz with her dialogue

[kradogsrats]

went back and finished leveling Janai to max because I somehow wasn't as bothered by her voice after listening to Runaan broodingly grunt "mercy is never an option" approximately one bajillion times like he's the goddamn batman or something idek

now I've just got Callum at like 16 and Viren, Karim, and Amaya all at around 10 so I guess we're gonna find out once and for all whether I hate playing Callum or Karim more?

like Karim is incredibly tedious to play but then Callum is literally just easy-mode Viren so it's probably down to whether I continue to find the pompousness of Karim's dialogue kind of eye-rollingly charming like Runaan's versus how much I fucking loathe just how unbelievably inane every single line coming out of Callum's mouth is, like I get that Rayla and Ezran share custody of his one, lonely brain cell but for the love of god just shut the fuck up

[dicecast]

How're you finding The Dragon Prince? I saw you mentioned that you find it frustrating. I've watched some of it, but I haven't had time to get very far.

Hey thanks a lot.  Yeah mean and @afriendtokilltime are watching it while in quarantine and....it is kind of a mess.  As of this writing I am 2 episodes away from finishing season 3 and its kind has been a whole mess of complaining around the apartment for the last few days.  This show fails in so many different ways but its like...really close to being absolutely amazing.   I have complicated feels

First off a Disclaimer 

 I thought Avatar was mostly great, though it had a lot of problems which I think its overall success and enthusiastic fan base kinda clouded, which are mostly found in the first half of season 1 and the last half of Season 3.  Mostly that any time the show attempts simplicity, it does it badly.  I thought Legend of Korra had some of the best moments in both shows, but also some of the worse, often seconds away from each other, but it at least tried some new things.  WE talk about the problems with Avatar here 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/11553648 

And Legend of Korra here 

https://soundcloud.com/randomshoes/fatal-flaw-legend-of-korra

So Dragon Prince has the components to be in my mind, even better than Avatar and there is a ton of stuff i like.  

The Animation is amazing and unique

Some really cool fantasy vistas and locations 

Cool distinct types of elves with cool unique magic and powers and cultures 

Some great efforts towards increasing diversity in terms of race, and sexuality.  Ironically it is actually less diverse in some ways than Avatar/Korra 100% non white cast, but it is very nice to have a fantasy world that is inclusive in regards to race and sexuality.  Sadly it actually has a lot of problem with gender which i could talk about in a whole post another time if you are interested. (Dead Moms, so many dead moms)

I like both of the main characters, which is unusual for a fantasy series.  Callum is fantastic, Rayla is great, and of course Claudia is by far the best character in the series.  All of them have interesting motives, characterizations, dynamics and I enjoy seeing them on screen.  The problem is that the show rarely uses them well 

Magic looks awesome in this series, especially Dark Magic 

The Show wants to delve into more complicated themes than most fantasy, and attempts to get at moral ambiguity, pacifism, questions of monarchy, the nature of villainy, racism, and pulling away from fantasy cliches, and it is really admirable.  Unfortunately the show is really bad at actually delivering on any of these interesting themes, which makes the show a colossal mess 

This show has a lot going for it.  Except it...kinda fails on so many different levels.  Each one of these could be a whole detailed post, so if you are interested let me know, but i’ll try to be brief on what doesn't work 

The Role of Dark Magic.

  Dark Magic is the core of the show’s plot and conflict.  So its pretty frustrating about how the show completely fails to actually use this plot element correctly, because in contrast to like Maho from Legend of the Five Rings, or Mages from Dragon Age, its never really established why Dark Magic is evil.  Like Claudia kills a deer in order to cure her brother of total paralysis, which...yeah that sounds like a good deal to me.  Some of the characters get angry at Claudia for killing butterflies to make really good pancakes but like...pancakes are made with eggs.   Which I suppose could be acceptable if the show as embracing a Jainism style world view, but it never bothers to deliver on that perspective or makes an argument for it, it just expects you to accept Dark Magic is wrong because Viren is a bit of a dick.  And honestly, since humans are born without magic and Dark magic is a way for them to have a home, the opposition to Dark Magic frankly just feels...conservative.  Like for all its inclusive casting the show really has an anti progress traditional feel to it which rubs me the wrong way.  Which directly leads into

Problems with Themes.  Fantasy stories usually are about moral themes, and Dragon Prince is no exception, a lot of scenes are delivered with a strong moral overtone.  The problem is that it is utterly confused and inconsistent, usually approach the topic of Dark Magic.  In the first 2 seasons, Viren is chided for “doing things the easy way” and even if ignore the libertarian undertones of that, most of the time, there isn’t really a hard way solution, and a ton of situations have Viren just being correct and characters ignoring him, or treating him like his ideas are far more nasty than they really are.  This gets even more confusing when it comes to the shows attempts to address racism, because it keeps treating humans like they are the group with privilege, but according to the opening narration, the entire human population were basically forcibly located to the Western continent, which is often considered a genocide) and Rayla is casually racist to Callum regularly.  More importantly, the show seems to want to do a Princess Mononoke pacifist argument, but keeps messing it up by its desire to simplify the conflicts it sets up. This gets worse when the show doubles down on the pro monarchist sentiments that underlie almost all fantasy. Which leads to

Being unwilling to commit to flawed characters.  Dragon Prince seems to not want to just be another cliche fantasy story and keeps trying to add details to prevent the characters from just being cliches.  however it doesn’t seem to want to commit to this, and keeps reverting to simplistic morality.  Again going off the racism angle, Callum has comments which imply Elves are seen as like Demons to the humans, and its implied that propaganda is regularly spread concerning them.  And it seems like Dark Magic is just normal in the human kingdoms, that is why they were kicked out after all.  But any time we have a “good” character, they just...don’t have that Bias.  King Harrow is just inexplicably good when it comes to certain issues, which basically means in a story about racism and people learning to look past stereotypes, all of the good guys are already doing that from the start.  This is at its most frustrating with the 5 kings council scene, where despite the fact that it is 100% true that moonshadow elves did in fact assassinate a monarch, the most annoying character in the series is like “Well I read the script and I know this is a wrong action so screw you”.  In a story about overcoming racism and nationalism, there is a is a total unwillingness to have characters have real flaws in that direciton, Verin starts out as a sympathetic villain but then basically turns into Jafar in the 4th episode and it just goes down hill from there 

There are some really bad characters in this, Ezran is intolerable, Bate just wastes screen time, Queen Aanya is the worse thing in the show, and i’m not even getting into the minor characters.  the show also really has some problems with certain female tropes, I don’t think it passes the Bechtel test until season 3 and the writers continue their “Saintly missing mom trope” from season 1 even more so here.  

(remove these two and the show is just massively improved) 

The human kingdoms are boring and we spend 2 whole seasons there.  The appeal of this show is Xadia and the elves, having to deal with discount children’s version of Game of Thrones is just frustrating.  

But everything above are problems with the story and the characters, and that isn’t actually what makes this show so goddamn frustrating.  This show has some of the worse examples of storyboarding, editing, pacing, and just basic narrative structure I’ve seen from actually competent people.  LIke its on Netflix, a company that doesn’t seem to understand what pacing is, and these are the guys who made legend of Korra which was more montage than show at times, but nothing prepared me for this nightmare.  A lot of it comes down to it being 9 episodes per season, which is even worse than Korra, which was rushed at 12 episodes per season, but even within that, every single episode is just a glut of content jumping from story beat to story beat without taking a breath.  Most of the story elements have no set up, let alone build up, the editing constantly takes you out of emotional moments to deal with a totally different subplot, sometimes entire necessary scenes are literally just...not there and we keep missing establishment shots. 

This show is just screaming for self contained one shot episodes, where the characters can have mini arch within the episode and just kinda chill out.  Despite the fact that I like Rayla and Callum, I actually don’t know them all that well because most of their screen time is running from one plot event to the next, rather than the smaller moments between scenes that really grow the character.  Just some episodes to breath, watching this show is exhausting because you spend most of it utterly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of plot happening.  Maybe season 3 will surprise me, but each one of the seasons thus far have ended on a narrative dissonant note and I’m sure this one will follow suit.  I think the reason why this show is weirdly addcitive is the same reason why Baby shark gets stuck in your head so easily, its a bunch of leading tones.  Like the editor in my just wants to hack this show to pieces and recreate it where characters, themes and tones can evolve organically.  

In short, a show with a lot of good in it, but I kinda of hate it, but I can’t stop watching it.