Was Season 6 of The Dragon Prince good?
New video out now!
I got a really nice comment about my Dragon Prince videos and I’m gonna reward it. Keep ’em coming.
I had oddly weak feelings about season 6 of The Dragon Prince, and that’s unfortunate.
There was stuff I enjoyed. The Rallum slow-reburn; the blindfolded psychonauts in the Star Scraper; Kareem being a Black Nazi, that was fun. These siblings were adorable. I liked the wedding. I liked the Soren/Corvus/Zubeia love triangle.
It’s happening.
Don’t argue with me.
It’s happening.
And yet, I can’t help but feel as though the gears of this story are getting gunked up. I really disliked the first full scene where it’s revealed that Claudia killed Sir Sparklepuff. Mainly because I had felt so smart for thinking that Claudia losing her leg would constitute the whole “blood of child” thing and now that just seems like a horrific thing that happened to her body for no reason other than to make me feel stupid. And I hate feeling stupid. I tried to warn you.
This scene kicked off my viewing experience with a particular bad taste in my mouth. In my video series on the antagonists of the Dragon Prince, I said that Viren choosing to die was both a selfless act of love and a destructive, idiotic, and profoundly unhelpful thing to do to his daughter. He claims to have misled her all her life and then he chooses to die, leaving her without any leadership. It was a terrible decision, but I kinda liked it. It was tragic, it felt dramatically right, and it was slightly funny to me because Viren was trying to do something good but was too dumb to learn from his mistakes. That’s great! It was complicated, it felt good to watch.
Viren was never going to redeem himself, I don’t think, because his fatal flaw was loving people and wanting to be loved by them. But he did resolve his own internal conflict by choosing to die: he let go of his need to protect his children through force, and gave them freedom from his influence, trusting them to find the right path on their own.
But, in season 6, this resolution is denied, delayed, and then redone far less effectively later on.
So, Viren wakes up and has an uncomfortable cuddly moment with Terry. I don’t know why this makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t like it. Terry, he hasn’t brushed his teeth in two years, back away.
Viren then awkwardly exposits that he is, in fact, alive, thanks for that. And that he is free… free from dark magic, I suppose, though I don’t totally understand why, and having a character simply announce where they are in their internal journey makes me feel like I’m being beaten in the head with a cast iron pan, but okay. And then it’s revealed that Claudia has killed Sir Sparklepuff and done the blood ritual to bring Viren to life and this means he isn’t as free as he’d have liked. There’s two reasons for this:
1. He was counting on the fact that Aaravos had lied to him about needing the blood of his child to bind him back to life. It sure would make it easy to put all the moral blame for his actions onto Aaravos, wouldn’t it? (which is a criticism I made in my Aaravos video, btw) It would be great if Viren could simply say Aaravos was a liar and move on. But Aaravos wasn’t lying. He made a fair bargain with Claudia and he held up his end. Viren isn’t free because he cannot shift the moral burden onto another.
2. Viren can’t choose whether he will be brought back to life by dark magic or not, because he’s already made his bed on that front. He’s taught Claudia to serve his needs without question, he’s put her in direct contact with Aaravos, and he has given her the education to bring him back to life with dark magic whether or not he consents. He was free: now, he’s chained to the consequences of his own actions.
So, Viren is all happy and then he gets slapped in the face with the reality of the situation. He laments that he has lead Claudia down a dark path, proclaims that he should set a new example for her, and then fucking abandons her as she screams and cries. Goddamn it. This is just a worse version of him abandoning her by choosing to die. Here he’s just like: “Imma leave and go prison, and you can’t stop me because you can’t even walk. Lmao. Peace.” She’s like “dad, you’re triggering my abandonment issues right now” and he’s like “bye pumkin”.
Oh, you want a family? You want a compassionate father figure? Does that sound like something you want? Well let me tell you, you’ll never get it.
Viren, fuck you dude.
Sooooo, Viren did not redeem himself to me personally. I don’t understand what Viren thinks he’s learned.
I never particularly hated Viren. He was always a bastard, but he was complex enough to make me think I should generally give him the benefit of the doubt in terms of his intentions, at least. But this is truly horrible. He’s once again convinced himself he is doing the right thing while hurting his kid and completely outsources his responsibility for atoning for his crimes to Ezran. He winds up sitting in a dungeon and waiting for someone else to force him to redeem himself.
Which brings us to the long awaited reunion of Soren and Viren. I mean, I was waiting for it. For a long time.
I liked watching Soren deal with Viren. He felt both in-character and also appropriately out of character in a good way. On the one hand, bringing him his meals feels very nurturing and loving. If you’ve seen the first half of Avatar season 3, Soren could have been much crueler in the way he did this. This stands in contrast to that pretty fantastic moment where Soren blows up at Viren: Jesse Inocalla does a fantastic job bridging together the confusion and the anguish, and the quick shot of Soren turning and grabbing the bars was really nicely animated.
The sequence where Viren is writing Soren a letter uhhh, I kinda found it bizarre. So, Viren recalls a moment where he told Harrow “If it’s love, nothing else matters.” And this is what sent Viren into his downward spiral. And, yes, this is in accordance with my reading of the text: seems like a decent line to put here.
So we get the back story that readers of the novels were already aware of, Soren was a sick child and Viren was willing to kill for him, so he does (sort of). And he gathers all the ingredients to save Soren’s life… and his wife, Soren’s mother, is like… ‘no.’
Huh?
He has everything there. He literally needs her to cry, and then she can prevent her toddler son from fucking dying.
And she’s like, ‘ew, you’re all wrinkly’… get away.
Speechless. I’m… I don’t…. Ahh.
He recounts doing domestic violence against her, holding her hair and forcing her to cry into a vial. And that’s bad. But not as bad as NOT CRYING INTO A VIAL TO STOP YOUR SON FROM DYING.
Like, you can’t make me viscerally identify with Soren’s mother here, right? Like, she’s objectively in the wrong. Like, imagine if she was a christian scientist and she was refusing to get her son a blood transfusion. That’s where my mind goes. I’m thinking: this weird, spiritual belief that I don’t agree with, is gonna prevent you from doing your most fundemental job as a parent which is to keep your children alive. The show is trying to spell out the immorality of Viren’s actions, and I am somehow left with the conclusion that everyone but Viren is just an obstinate asshole and Viren genuinely has to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the correct way of doing things. Before this moment, I was sufficiently convinced that Viren was a villain with some redemptive qualities, but this story is the thing that’s making me rethink that. Which is insane, because it comes off the heels of this scene, where he’s abandoning his daughter, where I realized I fucking hate this guy. So, I hate him, and he’s the only one capable of doing the right thing. What is happening? How is this happening? How have you done this? What is this? Help me, my brain is bleeding.
He then writes that while he was able to save his son, “the cost [of this act] was… devastating.” And it’s implied that the cost was his wife leaving the family. The fuck? The cost of his child getting to live into adulthood is that the parent who wasn’t willing to give her tears to save said child fucking abandons her kids. Honestly, Viren, you made out like a bandit. You won. Claudia, sorry it was traumatic for you, Soren, sorry your dad is a blue-balled loser… but yeah, parents should stop their children from dying. Hot take.
I’ve been talking about this for too long.
That all said, I kinda liked how Viren actually died. I wished he died in the season 5 finale, that would have been better to me. But whatever, it was dramatic; well-animated; well-acted; Jason Simpson has made the best out of some pretty rough dialogue this season, and I think this scene gave him a chance to shine.
However, I gotta say, it was weird that his death scene, where he presumably redeems himself in the eyes of the writers, is an allusion both to the death of Ziard and also to Viren’s own violence in order to save his son’s life. So, (1) he dies in the exact same way as Ziard dies, a dark mage doing dark magic for an altruistic, self-sacrificing reason. And (2) he dies suffering in the place of his son, which he did all those years ago when his dark magic journey began.
And yet, this is a redemptive act? Soren is the one that tells him to do it, right?
It’s weird, I just saw the ending of umbrella academy. Uh, if you don’t want literally the last thing that happens in that show spoiled for you, skip to this timecode.
In Umbrella Academy, the kids should never have been born, they all have to sacrifice themselves and die. They got to live for a bit, it was miserable, and now they die. According to that logic, Soren should have died here rather than Viren dying in his place. He was never supposed to make it to adulthood, Viren was… I guess… supposed to let him die, and therefore he needs to die now as an act of self-sacrifice. Paying it forward, Yue style.
I’m glad Soren didn’t die. He shouldn’t. Parents should sacrifice for their kids. But I gotta ask again, what has Viren learned? How is he meaningfully different now than he was in the beginning? He’s certainly more fragile: he’s begging for love, while he used to simply demand it of those he felt were beneath him. Does acting out of character count as character development?
Dark magic has always been symbolically tied to self-sacrifice. It harms the body of the user, Viren tries to offer to die in Harrow’s place. On a subtextual level, this doesn’t feel meaningfully different from his other uses of dark magic.
So, with Viren out of the way, Aaravos is officially the main antagonist of the show. Karim may or may not be dead, but his army seems to have been handly taken out of commission, and Claudia’s goals seem to have been subsumed by Aaravos’.
So, let’s check in on Aaravos. The most immediate of his goals has been accomplished: he’s out of prison. What remains to be determined is how the heroes will react to his freedom and what he intends to do with it.
Mystery of Aaravos has been preoccupied with the question of whether or not Aaravos should be murdered before he can break out of prison.
[Soren] “Oh, oh, how about this? We form a fellowship of the Pearl, take a long journey across the world together, and throw it into a volcano.”
Stop. no no look at me. stop. referencing. other stories. It fucks with the tone of the scene, it reminds me I’m watching a high fantasy show for children, and they are not funny.
Why is episode 7 called the Red Wedding???
Whatever.
So, Aaravos poses a challenge to the main characters: how should they respond now that he’s out? Well, hopefully before they do anything else, they learn a bit more about his goals. Because I got to say, I think I might just be rooting for Aaravos now, like, for real.
The protection of children is a big part of this season, as we’ve discussed. It ties together the motifs of childhood and fear we’ve spoken about throughout the show.
I’ve gone on and on about how the tone of Viren’s recollection of holding down his ex-wife and forcefully collecting her tears is undercut by the fact that she is refusing to save her son’s life. I can understand the visceral aversion to dark magic, but the idea that it’s so horrible you aren’t willing to cry to save your son’s life is sooo alien to me.
As for Aaravos, now that we know his story, I don’t even know how I’m not supposed to get behind him. Like, honey, you better kill everybody that fucks with you. He cried a lake of tears after his daughter was murdered for doing the same shit I defended Aaravos for in my video on him. Like, I think I’m just fully on his side now.
Let’s dive into this scene where this little girl is on trial for helping humans… not die. So firstly, her father wasn’t even told where was. She was essentially kidnapped while playing with another kid and then she was swooped up without her parent being told. Aaravos chases them down in time to speak for her, but is told that she isn’t innocent… because she stands accused– okay, stop there. Maybe I’m just Red, White, and Blue-pilled, but why does being accused of something make her not-innocent? The fact that one witness saw her do something is sufficient for executing a child on-sight?
By the way, you know what I learned on the Dragon Prince wiki? So, you know how there’s this huge skeleton surrounding the area where Aaravos’ prison is kept? Those are the bodily remains of Leola. They imprisoned Aaravos… in the skeleton… of his dead child… Am I in hell?
This is so poetically cruel, it’s honestly perverse.
So here’s the effect this cumulitatively has on me. When Terry says this:
[Terry] “The story we just heard… maybe it started as a story of love. But along the way, it got twisted. He isn’t doing anything for love, he’s doing it for revenge.”
Terry, I love you, but at a certain point, revenge has a social utility. Remember, Leola violated the cosmic order. There was no greater authority for Aaravos to appeal to stop this injustice. In the absence of there being literally no correct way of dealing with it, it’s a foregone conclusion that this system will be inviting retribution. Like, at a certain point, the question of “is Aaravos justified in his actions” just dissolves. He’s doing the thing a living being does when all other options are taken from them. There was nothing else to do except to do nothing. And prescribing that he do nothing means this bullshit can happen again. What’s the alternative, bro?
There’s an unexpected scene at the other end of the story that really frustrates me when in contrast with the story of Aarovos and his kid.
Rayla and Callum are about to kiss, but they interrupt themselves to promise each other that they will each let the other die rather than allow them to serve a “dark” purpose. If Callum has to choose between dark magic and letting Rayla die, he is to let Rayla die. If Callum is taken over by Aaravos, Rayla is to let him die. This is the closest affirmation we ever get by the characters that love is a direct catalyst for violence and evil and death.
And yet.
The climactic moment of Callum’s arc is refilling his darkened heart with light. Remember, his heart is darkened after doing dark magic twice to save Rayla. So, how does he fix himself?
You’re gonna have a stroke.
It’s literally Rayla, the one he loves. The reason he did dark magic, both times. Am I stupid?
I meant what I said in the beginning, I’m rooting for these two, they’re very cute. I love love. However, why is love the ultimate anchor for goodness in Callum’s arc yet the root of all evil for the three main antagonists? Do we expect Callum to let Rayla die after this scene? It’s not impossible, maybe they’re really burying the lead and Callum will genuinely have to sacrifice her. But what would a satisfying sacrificial death even look like?
The final season comes out on December 19th, so I will try to reserve judgement for two more months. In the meantime, petition for Aarstin to prematurely redo the final two seasons of Dragon Prince?
