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This Netflix series has beautiful graphics. And:
BREAKING NEWS: for once, a white male was depicted as a villain with little to no "if, ands, or buts" about it.
Now that I've said the two things I liked about this show, let's get into the 3 main things I disliked:
1. The Use Of The 'Admixed' Black Aesthetic For One Of Their Main Characters
Why Couldn't Erzan Have Had Brown Eyes??? | On other blog posts, I've talked about how, in the west, giving Black people phenotypes linked with otherness, especially whiteness, is normally alienating for Black show/movie-watchers. This has been written about all over the internet. Yet, these producers and animators just keep stuffing blue, green, and yellow eyes into Black faces as if they took an oath against allowing characters to have 'the triple threat': brown skin, black hair, AND brown eyes.
It's SO annoying.
The way they wrote the two brothers was also icky: Callum has an "ugly guy, hot wife" thing going on with an elf named Rayla. Ezran has that whole TIRED "talks to animals" thing, which takes on a bit of a sinister overtone because he is Black. (Remember, in the West, Black people are often linked with animals, and have historically been described as just a step up from them...)
And so much for the hybrid fAmIlY: The two brothers look absolutely nothing alike. They were two strangers, running around playing at being related. They didn't even have any continuity of character as relatives normally do (for example, how did Callum turn out to be a narcissist, and Ezran an empath???).
2. The Freaky Friday Vibe in the Debate About the Efficacy of Dark Magic
This will sound silly: but to sit there and watch a white man argue for dark magic while a Black man argued against it was BIZARRE to say the least. It was a super-strange rendition of the white-savior complex.
Why?
Well, I'd chalk it up to dramatic, or even situational irony. Historically, white people have been vehemently against dark magic. Their disdain appears not only as essentialist and virtue-signaling within their own arenas, but as afrophobic outside them. (Just consider the international fear that whites have manufactured of Voodoo through the vehicle of Christianity.)
3. The "Rebellious White Person Under Black Authority" Trope (popular in many law enforcement shows and movies in which the militia is involved)
This was the thing I disliked most about the show. This troupe commonly presents Black people as authoritarians or symbolic oppressors who follow rules to a "t". The white people in this dynamic are normally rebellious because they're standing up for the civil rights marginalized group or advocating for morality.
Yay: more bloody irony.
Anyway.
You might be wondering how this fits in with the show The Dragon Prince.
Here's how: This dynamic is the crux of the plot.
Most of the problems that King Harrow and his people encountered could have been solved safely and constructively if he had just put that hokus-pokus little upstart (Viren) TO DEATH.
Yeah, I said it!
Yet, they subjected us to an entire series of buck-breaking, and frequent usurpation of King Harrow's authority. In fact, I can only remember one time when Harrow didn't put up with it:
Never mind the fact that Harrow dog-walked Viren here. Did you see the insolence with which Viren behaved???
And what, pray tell, was the reason that Virulent Viren was allowed to carry on in the shamelessly treasonous way he did over the course of the series???
It was: his lOnG tImE fRiEnDsHiP with Harrow.
Honestly, it got to a point where I wanted to ask the people of Katolis:
Or is Viren???
*Sigh*
Even if the people can't answer, we all know what Viren thinks the answer to that question is. He contradicted Harrow constantly. He stole Harrow's seal for his own purposes. He usurped the throne in Harrow and Erzan's absence. ECETERA. Check out the crown on this pompous man's
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