#anywas all that stuff aside

[voidshrub]

"Follow me!"

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

the dragon prince has... a lot... of writing problems, but the easiest one to spot is probably the exposition the show has.

and it’s hard to succinctly explain why the exposition of the dragon prince so negatively impacts the show, because exposition by itself isn’t bad. the more complex your setting/plot is, the more of it you’ll need--sometimes, the audience needs stuff explained to them. normal.

but there are good ways and bad ways to deliver exposition, and tdp often exposits when it doesn’t really need to. these bits are very short--so they’re hard to spot--but it most often comes up when characters just explain what’s going on in their heads, even though it would be eminently clear with clever editing.

two easy examples that come to mind are a) when callum sees thunder’s corpse and just explains to rayla that he’s conflicted about it (in very uninspired words), and b) when soren explains to callum that the reason he bullied him about being a step-prince was because of his insecurity about his own father.

both were things that were particularly sour to me as a viewer, because a) real people don’t act like everything’s a 24/7 therapy session and b) you could easily use fairly typical cinematic language to convey both these ideas. in callum’s case, you can simply have a shot of him looking up to thunder and juxtaposing that with ezran, maybe even paste a bittersweet smile on his face and have him weakly hold rayla’s hand, whatever. in the second, all you needed to do was have soren apologize with an already-weird apology (”sorry for calling you the step-prince all these years, it was wrong.”) and maybe cut to viren and claudia. when people say “show, don’t tell,” this is the kind of thing they mean.

“it’s for kids.” yeah, kids don’t need this stuff. plus, the demographic that the dragon prince is ostensibly for has presumably grown up on a visual-media-heavy diet, and they understand better than perhaps any other generation the cues of editing.

but another bad piece of exposition is actually the very first scene of the show, where aaravos explains how the elves+dragons ethnically cleansed the humans. the problem with this scene is that i was immediately able to guess the logical course of events by the first two episodes of season 1:

1. humans were persecuted by the elves+dragons for not having magic

2. one guy “invented” dark magic

3. the elves and dragons don’t like that and wanted to exterminate the humans

4. for some reason, they just settled on relocating them instead.

all of this, by the way, turned out to be basically correct. season 3′s cold opener between ziard and sol regem confirms #1, aaravos is implied to be behind #2, and recent writing interviews basically confirm #3 and #4. basically, everything i ever wrote about the elves and dragons was... right?

this one exposition scene contains the entire meat of the conflict between the humans and the elves--and it communicates all this very well. maybe not well enough for some viewers, but i’m a fairly shallow media-consumer, so if it got the point across to me, it did good. so why am i saying that it’s bad exposition?

well, this one’s complicated. the main root of the problem is that the show proper (aside from another flashback in season 3) never addresses it. no character has any opinions on it, except viren, who vaguely references humanity needing to return to its ancestral homeland and wanting humanity to be free from chains. it’s a non-factor to literally everyone else--in three fucking seasons, not one character--not even a side character!--has any direct feelings or opinions re: the historical events that got them there.

And for a series that had “it’s not that simple, there are multiple atrocities from both sides!” in the first few episodes, you’d think that... part of the main conflict of the series... would be to grapple with the history... and move past it... instead of never looking at it, and naively ignoring history with nonspecific platitudes like “we can’t punish people for the crimes of their parents.”

and that last sentence makes sense only if tdp wants to ditch most of its backstory and keep it just between the royal families of katolis and xadia--but that’s not it, either. viren’s motivation has to do more with this history of dark magic and the results of the ethnic cleansing that followed than it does with punishing people for the crimes of their parents! which only works with the zym/ezran parallel and literally nothing else.

so as a viewer, knowing all this from the get go makes this series hard to watch. but i think there’s also a problem with the history being given to us as exposition the characters don’t interact with--and that’s the characters don’t interact with it. like imagine if this information was revealed to us at the same time it was brought up to the characters--it would mean that the audience would also be on a similar journey to the characters, and it would mean that the characters actually have to interact with that history.

like imagine if a human, instead of being a HUR DURR STUPID PEASANT WITH PITCHFORKS!!! actually said something like “the elves and dragons would have exterminated us, you think you can make peace with them?” or something like that, and that was the first hint of what would be going on. or maybe sol regem straight-up tells callum he’s a lesser being instead of that also being shoved into a flashback, maybe be like “ah, you remind me of the first of your kind!!! talk of peace but smells of death!!!” once he realizes callum has practiced dark magic before or... something!! then the show could actually grapple with what history means to the present instead of awkwardly handwaving it.

the fact that the history is more-or-less unimportant to the main characters also means that the setting and worldbuilding become less interesting and less relevant. aaravos, the Big Mystery Guy i’m supposed to care about, means jack shit to everybody except viren. and khessa, but she was racist and she died and she actually doesn’t matter. all the “ultimate villain” of the show has is... people being thirsty for him... and people who like making headcanons about him, which just isn’t really compelling plotting or writing.

anywas, imma end this tangent before it gets truly out of control. the more i think about it, the more i realize that front-loading such important aspects of tdp’s lore into the front was a mistake that let the writers be lazy with it and really... just throw most of the plot’s potential in the garbage. on a smaller level as well, the tendency to explain shit to the audience that doesn’t need to be explained kind of rips away the advantage of having a visual medium.

[lilacbreastedroller]

i think i’m gonna be aughra for halloween adn the best part will be i can just get a boho bigass dress and aside from a wig all the jewelry and costume pieces will be stuff i would wear anywa lmao