Was Season 6 of The Dragon Prince good?
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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:
- 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.
- 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.
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