#that doesn’t mean I agree with every other tdp critical take I see

[luniviravosshipper]

You misinterpreted me. I’m not saying it’s not their actual opinion, obviously they’re not making up how they’re feeling lol. I’m saying the reaction they’re giving over a simple toy existing is exaggerated. It’s an overreaction. Like, they’re kind of purposefully reaching by using a toy as an excuse to dump all their other grievances on the show when it’s just not a good example of something the show actually did wrong.

You all are just trying to find reasons to whine about the Stella plush.

“Guess she was just a merch plug all along.” What? You know how long it’s been since she was first introduced as a character? You think the only real reason they did was to merchandise her? Like they were just secretly plotting and planning this entire time for her to be merchandised 3 years later and that was her entire purpose lol.

Like, I genuinely cannot fathom how people could seriously be so upset over this. I mean, I’ve even heard a lot of people say the complete opposite and how they really wish TDP had more merch. This reaction I’m seeing is so weird and I cannot imagine it being anything other than forced.

“Maybe it’s just me.” No, the problem is that it’s literally not just you. Literally every major TDP artist I’m seeing on Insta except for one is saying stuff like this, and that’s why I feel like this is a forced reaction.

Also why is it weird to get merch directly from the show? Do you think it’s weird… to support a show you like?

[uneryx]

Renee Gets Salty About Dark Magic

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. 

[beautifulterriblequeen]

Aaravos’s 7th Arcanum and the Concept of Consent

I’ve seen fun new ideas about the third spell that Aaravos casts in S2E9--the huge lightning one--being called a dark magic spell, that Aaravos can cast dark magic. I don’t think he can (or would), and I don’t think that’s what this is. But it is exciting! I’m always up for a new TDP brain teaser!

Buckle up, this one’s gonna be twisty!

So here is the spell Aaravos casts.

It’s clearly the same symbol as the one on Dark Callum’s Key.

But then, why does Aaravos’s look purple, and Dark Callum’s cube looks red? Is the color really that important?

Red is a pretty universal color for danger. Bugs, blood, poisonous plants, etc. We’re all hard-wired to be wary of the color red. We’re all really sure Callum should not repeat not take that Key cube.

But Aaravos’s spell isn’t red. It’s purple. (Yes, so is dark magic. I’ll get to that. I think there are two issues being conflated here, and I’m just tryna separate them and sort through what I see. Hold tight.) The red vs purple is a color difference that could mean nothing, but it was, at some point, chosen by the show for some purpose.

They are two versions of the same arcanum. The Humanity Arcanum. Aaravos’s is the pure version. The one that he did actually create and learn. He is--or was once--a friend to humans. On some level, at some time, he cared for them so much that he tried to give them a magic arcanum of their own, and its color was purple. The red version that Dark Callum is holding is... mostly the same thing. But without empathy. Dark Callum--Elarion--doesn’t understand empathy. It just wants you to say yes to its magic lures so it can eat you. Nothing personal.

Side note that the only red-colored magic Aaravos uses is the transporting of the Aarpod from his side of the mirror to Viren’s. 

And blood is spilled to prepare for it. But even then, the magic that wafts up from the pots is purple. No, this is a good thing. 

I think the red magic cost Aaravos something. Hurt him or drained him, perhaps. He doesn’t jam his whole hand into that pot. Sure, maybe he’s just being graceful and delicate. We all love that about him. But maybe he doesn’t want any more of himself touching the red spell than is necessary. I mean, we all saw where the Dark Cube went after Callum rejected it.

The worm spell--the purple part--had a physical price. But, unlike with dark magic, both sides agreed to pay that price. I think that is a critical difference between purple magic and dark magic. Aaravos waited patiently (or impatiently) for Viren to choose to participate and shed his own blood. He didn’t force him. He waited for Viren to consent.

The consent of a human--or another life form, if the human is the one casting--is required for purple magic. Viren consented to shedding his blood for the worm spell. Aaravos didn’t (couldn’t?) continue without him, didn’t cast it alone, didn’t force him to obey. There was nothing Aaravos could do to force Viren’s cooperation when Viren covered up the mirror and walked away. No spell to bend Viren’s will to his own, no charm of persuasion to yank him back and force his hand. Viren had to choose to participate willingly. And eventually, he did.

During the battle in S2E9, Viren consented to let Aaravos into his head.

Viren didn’t have to do either jack or squat. But he broke out his Aaravos-shaped staff and threw down. (I wonder if he’s seen the resemblance?)

Aaravos, for all his scheming, never forced his way into Viren’s head. He might have manipulated Viren’s opinion of him (like, really heavily), but like a charming vampire, he waited to be invited.

If you cast a spell without consent, it’s dark magic. It’s an assault. We already know creatures are dying left and right for this magic. Once you decide you don’t need anyone else’s consent, it’s no great leap from squishing grasshoppers to zapping Crownguards to burning a cohort of warrior elves where they stand and using their life force to slay Thunder and drop him from the sky in a smoking ruin.

Y’know, as a hypothetical example. But Viren totally did something monstrous out there that day.

Purple magic, and that specific rune, are humanity-arcanum based. That much seems clear. The critical difference, for me, is that Claudia and Viren don’t wait for consent, and their eyes blacken over after every spell. Aaravos has consent. His eyes remain glowing like an aurora.

The blackness, as I’ve suggested before, is what makes purple magic become dark magic. The blackness is Elarion, a dark force living inside the purple magic, and perhaps anchored to Viren’s staff. It’s a sentient empathy test, and it wants you to fail so it can basically consume you for energy to live on. It has to get your consent, first, though. Callum didn’t consent, so Dark Callum couldn’t have him. But once it does, it’s all over you with every spell you cast, devouring your life force and making you destroy life to gain power.

Seems logical to me that, if for some reason Viren had objected to the massive lightning spell, Aaravos would have chosen to cast something else through him. I think there might be room in the magical lore of this world for either that specific spell--or perhaps any purple rune Aaravos might choose to cast through Viren (or any human)--to be rejected and nullified by the human, if they know they can do that. The withdrawal of consent has power, too.

Just look at this, in the context of withdrawal of consent:

That’s a Hard No, Viren. 

And you notice, Viren honestly doesn’t know what to do with the concept of No, as it relates to magic. He literally freezes up in bafflement. He does not understand consent.

Ooh, I just got tingles! My intuition thinks that this is going to be related to how Claudia stops using dark magic. She will withdraw her consent from the dark magic, from Elarion, and reject it, and because the purple magic is humanity’s arcanum, it will have to let her go. Then she’ll have no magic, until they either cleanse the arcanum of Elarion or until she learns a different arcanum. Ooh.

The other magical beings only acknowledge six arcana, and call Aaravos a master of the six, because they haven’t understood what he created or how it got out into the world in the form it has now. They don’t call it primal, but an abomination. But they’re only seeing Elarion, dark magic. They’re not seeing Aaravos. They locked him away, and he’s the one with all the answers.

I’m really curious to know whether Aaravos consented to the Moon Portal prison. I feel like that’s gonna be important.