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i'm under stars

peeling off my skin

to rid my scars

it's the first time

i am reborn,

but i am not me

no identity,

and i am finally free

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trying to find reference pictures of Viren and 90% of them he's in ominous lighting girl go stand in some direct light so i can check my colours

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🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼

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🪻send this to ten blogs you think are wonderful🪻

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💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

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i want you to know when i watch this show with my hater friend she apologizes to me for being such a hater because i'm the laidback one who gives the show a chance while we watch #FAIRANDBALANCED

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Ok I kind of hate the whole show giving the fandom too much fanservice like can the show please start to focus on important things like developing the characters instead of a cringe ship monologue?!?!?!

Okay, I don't know any C/R shippers personally but did they like that ship monologue? Surely not, right? I also thought it was cringe but more importantly mildly insulting. A real "Okay, time to calm down," moment. Shippers can be annoying but they're fired up about a ship YOU peddled to them and demanded they be invested in. You made your bed, stop with this tongue in cheek BS. Pandering, but in a very patronizing way.

Honestly, I have no idea if the creators actually like Callum and Rayla as a ship or if they just feel some imaginary obligation to give C/R a lot of screentime for reasons of pandering to their last large block of vocal fans of the show. My vibe is they do like them but they wanted to take it slower, but who knows.

Anyway, an unfortunate truth is that social media has dissolved the boundaries between creators and audience to an unhealthy degree. Either they're fighting with fans or they're pandering to them, but either way, it's embarrassing. You know, as wretched as Luke and Laura are, at least in the past responding to fans was like "People want this couple" ... now it's a lot more "Responding to everything our fans loudly say in our show." Shit's annoying. Just tell the story you want to tell without making me feel like the fourth wall's being broken. Whatever happened to being immersed in a story?

This is part of the show's overall problem with constantly pulling back from anything that feels very real, either because they're afraid of scaring the child audience or because they have a regrettable practise of trying to shove humour into every minute of screentime. This doesn't help our characters and their journeys at all.

Thank you for the ask! ♥ I hope that season 7 gives every main character a real episode to highlight their journey as it matters to them, and there's zero fan response, but we'll see!

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Season 4 ruined TDP for me and I haven't been able to drum up the interest to watch it since, so maybe this is an out of date take but...

Terry is kind of a pointless character. His role is sort of presented as being Claudia's last tether to her morality, but his actions are otherwise so ride-or-die it seems weird when he calls her out or gets upset about what's happening (especially since they've seemingly been together a while so he should be familiar with how Claudia operates). Plus there was already a character who could serve this role: Soren.

After season 3 I was excited to see their sibling bond evolve as their outlooks were beginning to diverge. And then with Viren resurrected I wanted to see how that affected things. I was deeply disappointed when the established familial relationships fell by the wayside in favor of a timeskip romantic one (and I usually LOVE romantic plotlines).

See, I get Soren leaving his family behind and hopping to Team Hero and thus becoming unavailable to Claudia as someone to bounce off of. I don't love the execution because I think he feels rootless and lacking in significant depth in his relationships with the main cast, but I think it works for his character. He's a prodigal young knight who swore vows to defend his king and his nation, and he's a very straightforward guy. He shares pragmatic qualities with his family, but at the same time, their pragmatism operates on an abstract level he doesn't exactly understand. Once he was forced to choose between family and what he's always known and how he's vowed to live his life, I can see him making the very hard choice to pull away from them. I think him staying as Claudia's morality pet would have been a disservice to his character, though he may have more interesting things to do just because Team Dark Magic are always doing interesting things ... but again, that's more to the execution than the conceit. I don't mind characters moving apart from people they were closest to at the start of the series, and like when they can bond with new people.

I think the limited number of episodes + breakneck pace of the plot does leave their lack of interactions more noticeable, but also more inevitable. Technically, we've seen all this: Soren and Claudia have met again and fought over their differences, and Soren and Viren got their chance to hash it out a little bit. We've been informed of the status of their relationships and their feelings for one another. For a nine episode twenty minute children's animated TV show, this is relatively decent screentime offered to their relationships considering they've been apart so long. I'm not necessarily defending it as 'good' because I'll gladly say this show has very weak screenwriting with my whole chest, but the Magefam would have to be proper protagonists and not just deuteragonists to the Main Three for the screentime to really shift in their favour. But they're not, and you can't even imagine stuff happening off screen because almost everything in the plot happens one after another barring the mid-season timeskip -- and not a whole lot of interesting things happened during that.

(Like, seriously, other than some romantic relationship statuses changing characters are basically the exact same post timeskip as they were before it. It's like ... okay!)

I hope this doesn't sound like I don't get your frustrations because I do; the Magefam are one of my favourite parts of the show and it's always better when some combination of them are on screen together. And it's like, sure Viren and Claudia were hanging out in the later seasons, but he was borderline comatose for most of that, so it doesn't feel like they were. The fracturing of a family is interesting, but you always hope for more of a resolution or at least a sense of poignancy this show is never quite going to master. I'll actually say that my feelings still hinge on season 7 or god forbid the final arc. If we see Soren and Claudia get more than one or two scenes as all our players move into place for the final confrontations -- if Soren were to learn what Viren wouldn't tell him -- if Claudia gets to have a properly satisfying confrontation with Aaravos about the death of her father if she learns the truth ... if Soren and Claudia get to mourn their father together, even if it's briefly -- if we have Claudia have complicated feelings if she were to learn about Soren asking Viren to do the spell -- of Soren offering his heart, but Viren sacrificing himself instead ... I mean, all of that could be really good, and for me it would serve as a kind of epilogue to tie together the seasons of separation and growing apart from each other.

How hopeful am I for any of this? Well, about as hopeful as I am for this show ever pleasing me. But hey! I do think it's possible, with the narrative they've already established.

Anyway, to get to the Terry of it all: I think he serves a purpose as not just Claudia's tether to morality but as someone to work off of, so I get why he's here. I also think Claudia getting a random elf boyfriend is still extremely funny and charmingly quirky of her. As I said in response to a previous ask I think Terry could use more personal development but I like his dynamic with Claudia. People call him an enabler but he does offer her some pushback, generally gently. He's just someone who loves Claudia enough to stick with her, and hey, I love Claudia too so that's nice to see. Honestly, even if Soren were around, you're obviously going to have a different relationship with a romantic partner than you would a sibling, so Terry could easily fit in the group that held Soren as well.

This season Karim (love him) was like "Janai is my sister! Of course I love her! But I'm still going to depose her violently!" and like that is great. That's siblingcore. That's I love you but I want to beat you up. That's no matter how far apart we drift you're still bound to me. Soren and Claudia are this. Meanwhile Terry and Claudia are your first serious relationship. They're young and passionate and desperate to make it work because who else would match their freak quite this way? But if they fall out there's nothing to keep them together anymore. They'll just be forced to move on. Soren can walk away from Claudia and know that on some level they are always close; if Terry walks away from Claudia he may end up meaning nothing to her. So, just like real life, there's a lot of stuff they're willing to overlook and rationalize because they WANT to keep wanting each other ... and Claudia can use someone like that on her side, as we see Soren and Viren both leave her in time.

I think Terry being down to clown but taking issues with some things is fine; he often frames his objections around the harm they will cause Claudia, and that's nice. The one thing I still don't get is his reaction to Claudia threatening the coins. I will preface this by saying I can believe he's more sensitive to elf death after he murked Ibis, and doesn't like reminders of the differences between him and Claudia when it feels very her, a human, against an elf. Yet whenever I rewatch it, I still find his censure unusually stern for him, and it's hard to shake the feeling that this is the writer's doing as they do best, that is not knowing how to write from their own established lore and character motivations.

Like, in-show it says, Claudia was cruel to mockingly threaten the lives of Rayla's loved ones, and trick her into thinking they nearly burned in agony, not offering her the real coins. Is that cruel? Sure, sure. What's the context? Oh? Rayla was THREATENING TO SLIT TERRY'S THROAT? Rayla, the Moonshadow elf ASSASSIN they have every reason to think would go through it, even if we the viewer know Rayla probably wouldn't? Hmm! If Claudia is cruel, Rayla is a monster. Rayla, who was offered the coins in fair trade as she THREATENED TO SLIT TERRY'S THROAT, but refused. Like, Terry? Are you this mad at Claudia because she did an actually extremely reasonable thing to save your life (+ her father's life) in as pacifist a way as possible, or are you mad because the writers need to tell the audience This Was Bad and ensure Rayla gets the real coins while not having to change that emotionally charged sequence they were probably really proud of writing? I still think this was Terry's characterization faltering just so they could get the outcome they wanted.

Ultimately, I see Terry as someone who is lacking in prejudice, maybe due to his own presumed desire to be taken at face value. He can date a human and not have a kneejerk reaction to dark magic, but he isn't amoral. Nothing he's really seen has been enough to push him away but he is cautious that Claudia may stop walking the knife's edge and fall off of it. He's realized even he can do terrible things out of love and this has bound him more tightly to Claudia. He's someone who is CHOOSING to join this life, and wasn't just pre-built loyal as a sibling would be. All of this does give him a role in the narrative that's pretty unique to him and their dynamic, and I like that. Again, I hope he gets more to do beyond just being Claudia's partner, but I really don't mind him existing.

Thank you very much for the ask! ♥ Really don't blame you for dropping the show post season 4 .... if I wasn't Virenpilled I would have dropped it after season 1 I think.

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reading any interview for the dragon prince always gets me like

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and you know what.....................................IT WAS GOOD!!!!!!!

when some combination of viren claudia and/or aaravos kill sol regem it's gonna be sooooooooooo

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reading this made me break out in hives as 1,000 snakes manifested in my house

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problematic sky people is my post-punk electronica band's name

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yeah as a natural outcome of the story they've told it does make perfect sense! unfortunately they've been so reluctant to actually to actually explore systems and their destructive effects. like, I do think they introduced the Startouch elves to deflect from the dragons and Xadian culpability, but I can't even say the Startouch elves are not going to be given some kind of sympathetic treatment because we know how they get about their elves ... or they'll be blamed and the matter will be resolved, as this show likes to do with its 'few bad apples' storytelling.

like, what gets me is they have technically addressed issues like the dragons. Ezran had a whole speech about how yes, there's been hate from both sides, but now we have to choose peace. this is the thesis of the show and I don't even mind this in essence but A) Ezran kills his own people so I'm not listening to him on anything and B) the show has never given humans the space to grieve or express anger for their unjust treatment without vilifying them -- how can you ask people to heal if you don't even acknowledge their hurt? and C) there has never been any effort to improve the status of humans as a whole in Xadian eyes.

there is a lot of "destiny is a book you write yourself" to this story -- allegedly -- and how Callum is "choosing to walk a different path" (x) and paired with this Cosmic Order that ordains Humans Get No Magic, Or Else we get a narrative that's a little less "Cosmic Order self-fulfilled its prophecy and created a world that would create harmful humans" and a little more "Cosmic Order is right, but Callum can prove them wrong only by being better and nobler than his peers." so ... defying the Cosmic Order .... is this going to about Callum's exceptionalism, him proving himself worthy, or is it going to be about how fundamentally evil it was to begin with and so everyone who upheld it is wrong? and like ... i don't know. i just don't know if i see them going there, of acknowledging that the Cosmic Order isn't just a group of problematic sky people but a systematic issue.

the idea of TDP being renewed for another arc is both unbelievable and frightening, but also confusing, because if they roadmapped for seven seasons we can assume aaravos will be dealt with come december, so like ... what next? would aaravos lead to an even greater evil? are they gonna metatron it? is it going to be SimCity 3000 gameplay as they rebuild homes for humans and sun elves? just ... like .... magic for people? idk. i definitely can't imagine the show being interested in overwhelming change to the status quo, either in-universe or in the show's conceit.

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if i were to compose a final arc for The Dragon Prince it would be a coda which deconstructed the previous 7 seasons, a metatextual analysis of its own assumptions that introduces baby's first postcolonial concepts into the writer's room. it would be about the destigmatizing of human identity and making Xadians put in way ore effort to maintain peace by sacrificing some things; magic would be discussed as a resource not as something humans have tried to exploit, but as something that has been withheld from them, and i would validate the message of generational trauma. and yes, it would be about building cities because i happen to really enjoy a 'building a safe haven' type stories and through the development of the city we would see the development of cultural identity and the healing of severe collective and generational trauma.

the idea of TDP being renewed for another arc is both unbelievable and frightening, but also confusing, because if they roadmapped for seven seasons we can assume aaravos will be dealt with come december, so like ... what next? would aaravos lead to an even greater evil? are they gonna metatron it? is it going to be SimCity 3000 gameplay as they rebuild homes for humans and sun elves? just ... like .... magic for people? idk. i definitely can't imagine the show being interested in overwhelming change to the status quo, either in-universe or in the show's conceit.

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much love to people who want the show renewed btw but (gamemill the walking dead game character panic voice) I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!

the idea of TDP being renewed for another arc is both unbelievable and frightening, but also confusing, because if they roadmapped for seven seasons we can assume aaravos will be dealt with come december, so like ... what next? would aaravos lead to an even greater evil? are they gonna metatron it? is it going to be SimCity 3000 gameplay as they rebuild homes for humans and sun elves? just ... like .... magic for people? idk. i definitely can't imagine the show being interested in overwhelming change to the status quo, either in-universe or in the show's conceit.

[bittrlys]

the idea of TDP being renewed for another arc is both unbelievable and frightening, but also confusing, because if they roadmapped for seven seasons we can assume aaravos will be dealt with come december, so like ... what next? would aaravos lead to an even greater evil? are they gonna metatron it? is it going to be SimCity 3000 gameplay as they rebuild homes for humans and sun elves? just ... like .... magic for people? idk. i definitely can't imagine the show being interested in overwhelming change to the status quo, either in-universe or in the show's conceit.

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Yessss I love kind of groundhog-day-esque misery loops where they keep trying, they can't stop trying, surely if they just keep trying, this time, this time, they can make it better ... and they never can. To be torn between two potential truths -- "either my first life was the best it will ever be" or "I am so fundamentally flawed as a person that, even if there is a better outcome, I cannot find it" .... maybe there's a point of acceptance and peace between them or maybe there's a breakthrough or maybe it's soulcrushing but any way you slice it it's tasty. I fully support this fic idea!

I'm writing a self-indulgent time-travel AU where a dying Viren's consciousness is sent back to inhabit his younger body (right when they're set to help Duren) ... he's coming from a hypothetical non-canon future where he and Aaravos are a dysfunctional but intense couple who boldly strode into a Darkest Timeline in pursuit of their ambitions ... and now, he's back with his children, happy and whole, in a home he never thought he'd see again. his old friends are alive and he has the power to change things -- but he never had a "I need to redeem myself" plotline so how much does he want to change?

Viren's pretty lonely in the series; Harrow was his last adult friend and their relationship was strained, so that leaves him with his kids, who are his kids, so even if he's at least close to Claudia it's still not the same. Even though he never really trusted Aaravos, at least that was someone he could talk to ... but it's fun to take Viren back to a time where people care about him and want to talk to him and he just like. Can't compute it.

But at the same time they don't know him anymore, not really, don't know the things he'll do they won't approve of, and he can't let himself relax and the hope of it all is just so dangerous for him ... ehe you can definitely take that somewhere interesting. He's such a conflicted guy ...........♥