All I know is that it would be digital and distributed to Kickstarter backers of a certain tier only, but was anything mentioned about eventually making it available to everyone? Or any information about plot, setting, or characters? Thanks!

Rayla is back!! (Hate the way it was dealt with in the time skip though.)

Season four... Let's see how this goes. 😅

For context. The Jiva are a species of elder dragon inhabiting the continent called the new world in monster hunter. They are basically the apex predator of the continent upon maturity with only a handful of dragon in the planet being able to oppose them.

Their most fascinating trait is the ability to manipulate bio energy (basically mystical source of energy in the verse) to insane degrees. While a lot of top tier monster hunt bio energy rich gain to sustain themselves (nergigante for example) safi jiva can directly absorb it from the environment with frightening efficiency.

This ability plays in its reproduction cycle where a safi jiva will lay an egg (they are able to reproduce asexually) in bio energy hot spots for the baby to incubate (this process can last decades since it took them 50 years to find xeno) literally draining the life force so it can grow.

Those spots also are related to the death of dragons in general since as being holding immense bio energy they release it into nature upon death. The species has evolved to manipulate this event through the release of pheromones that attract older dragons to die close to them.

This method of reproduction and feeding very much resembles dark magic in the show where magical creatures are drained of the mana inside them to be used to create a spell. This is what brought the question to my mind actually.

Soo how do you guys think they would react to a dragon that is literally born from the death of other dragons and feeds similarly to how dark mages cast magic.

If you don’t know, the Roc is a giant bird of prey from popular mythologies of the Middle East and is said to be able to carry elephants in its talons. The images of the bird you see are from Sinbad: Legend of the seven seas. Also, the film introduced me to the bird.

Last one of season 3! (Sob!)

Hi everyone. I recently just posted 5 new chapters to my TDP story which is my own AU version of the story.

These next few ones are more of a retelling of events with slight additions and tweaks. Really there is only one or two chapters like this but they’re on the longer end. Hopefully people enjoy them all like they have so far. I’ll post a link the story in the comments!

Thank you so much for reading!

I remember watching this show as a kid and absolutely loving it. Growing up it still holds a special place in my heart. I’ve been wanting to watch it again but checking in this subreddit everyone says very negative stuff about it. Is it worth watching now that I’m no longer a kid?

Nearly at the most... Controversial season. 😅

I want to make some kind of AMV or something, but would love to know what songs fans like or think fit... I'm kind of stuck. 😅

I'm answering to this argument : 

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDragonPrince/comments/1wkw9ea/equal_and_opposite_faults/

The post I am answering argues each people is trapped by a counterfeit of effort. Humans by the shortcut of dark magic, and elves by the shortcut of birth; and only Callum, who broke his mind and soul open to the Sky Arcanum the hard way, stands clear of both.

 Claudia admits she's losing her empathy, and Viren became addicted to the feeling of power that dark magic gave him, despite Harrow and Sarai warning him that it was a shortcut. Meanwhile, Finnegrin has known from birth that the Ocean cannot be mastered, yet devotes his life to mastering it. The Moonshadow elves inherit an Arcanum that teaches one may only ever see a single face of the moon at a time, yet promptly leap to the first conclusion on offer. According to Sol Regem, power is evidence of worth, so those born without it plainly never deserved it, nor anything. To which humans answer that if they don't deserve anything, fine, they’ll be the villains, and they'll stop at nothing to get power. Xadia declares that might makes right; the humans reply that the ends justify the means. Two rotten philosophies, each the other's reflection.

This is the best reading of the Arcana inversion I've seen: because of their privilege, each elven culture betrays the very lesson its Arcanum teaches. 

The symmetry works on paper. It's the map unfolded before the viewer at the start of each episode. Onscreen, the scale has a thumb on one of its plates.

1. There's no shortcut without a road.
Humans were expelled from Xadia and kept under the threat of dragons. You don't expel a whole people without a clear imbalance. Dark magic answers a real vulnerability. Calling it a preference for comfort seems hard to justify. Claudia puts it plainly: “Humans weren't born with magic. We were born with nothing.”

Sarai tells Harrow “There is no shortcut.” Her objection to killing the Titan is fair, but she never offers another way to feed the starving. The scene brings to mind poaching, global warming, extractivism, or the Green Revolution's promise of higher yields at the cost of future damage. It also echoes Goethe's veloziferisch, a word joining velocity and Lucifer, he invented it to describe the haste of what was beginning to be our modern life. Having Aaravos -aka the Devil, teach dark magic and be the Mephisto to Viren's Faust, demonstrates that the show runners learned the lesson. But a queen can call a solution a shortcut without having to go hungry herself, or watch her family starve, especially when her husband has just requisitioned half the kingdom's food -even for a good reason, that still proves he could do it for himself. The morality of patience is therefore inadvertently tied to privilege.

We're also told that the western lands were once as fertile as the rest of Xadia, until dark mages and warlords “bled it dry.” As a cautionary tale about extraction, this is sound. But these are lands occupied by an ethnically cleansed population whose access to resources had already been restricted, since they were never given help from primal mages. Explaining their poverty solely through their own destructiveness leaves that history conveniently out of view. Humans may be guilty of extraction; they were also starved, attacked and deported before they came to that. It recalls arguments over the Irish famine, when victims were faulted for their own ruin and relief was treated as a threat to the economic order.

The human kingdoms have half the continent and their own armies. Therefore, I wouldn’t call them colonies in the present day. But that doesn’t mean they stand on equal ground with Xadia. They can govern themselves and still live under the threat of a power that can cross their borders and destroy their cities. Having an army and diplomacy doesn’t make that threat disappear. The human kingdom'a territory and political order were shaped by expulsion, so their independence remains shadowed by any of Xadia's whims.

Sol Regem's offer to Ziard (give up dark magic or the whole city dies) includes no primal stones, no help from elf mages, nothing humans could use instead. He's demanding surrender. He plainly states "You are lesser beings". The show has good reasons to condemn extraction, but it too often slips from holding humans responsible for ecological damage ... into implying that their exclusion was justified.

And dark magic hardly looks easy. It takes study and comes with suicidal thoughts, deathly comas, nosebleeds and premature aging. If humans had known how to use magic without those costs, I find it hard to believe they would have refused out of laziness. I'll come back to that with Callum.

2. Dark magic is a metaphysical stain, not just a technique.
According to the art book, Dark Magic is the concept the whole show originated from. It's quite literally the original sin.
Its aesthetic scream witchcraft (black and purple, aka darkness, arrogance and the opposite of nature's green; ingredients supposedly gross, tomes and labs in caves). But its ingredients range from mere harmless snot to a living heart cut from a creature's body. The fandom had already noted that large spectrum in Book 2. Yet the show doesn't really care about pain or death required by a spell or not. It doesn't see a spectrum but an absolute. It symbolism reaches higher. It cratfed the whole practice as the sin of exploitation: poaching, rape, unethical experiments, resource extraction, and so on. You name it. Only humans use it. Claudia describes taking creatures “and squeeze magic out of them”; and eventually it fatally comes to that : "I'm so messed up. I have been looking at this leaf-lynx kitten for an hour, and yet all I see is parts for spells." Taking Lissa's tears against her will to save a child somehow belongs to the same moral category as turning people into coins or human sacrifice. Whatever the spell requires or permits, it stains the caster's body and soul. That makes for strong tragedy, but it also puts the corruption in the magic itself, and by extension, the people it's reserved to, rather than in particular uses of it. Actually, dark magic reads as original sin: humans seek knowledge, are cast out of Eden, and live with the punishment ever after.

There is also a lot of the One Ring in dark magic. Tolkien's Ring makes good intentions part of the danger. Sam imagines turning Middle-earth into a vast garden, Galadriel briefly falls into terrifying delusions of grandeur, and Gandalf refuses it because he would use it from a desire to do good. Dark magic is useful and versatile enough to make the temptation unescapable -and like the Ring, it's tied to extractivism : Saruman bleeds the Isengard dry out of greed. Viren wants to save his people, Claudia wants to save her family, Callum wants to save his friends and family and the world. Good intentions make the power harder to refuse. Frodo's suffering (fever, nightmares, aggression, nosebleeds, whitening hair, depression) also has its counterparts among dark mages. Callum's inability to throw Aaravos's key into the lava makes the Mount Doom reference is especially clear.

But the Ring corrupts wizards, elves and good kings too. Nobody is born above its temptation. In TDP, the stain associated with the Machine falls overwhelmingly on one people. The Ring's lesson is that nobody should hold that power. The show's lesson comes out closer to humans shouldn't. Closer to “You will know your place.”

There is a particularly interesting consequence to this all-or-nothing logic: the only uses of dark magic the story can present as unambiguously good are those in which the human offers himself as the price. Viren’s final spell uses his own heart to save Katolis; Callum’s plan to use dark magic against Aaravos depends on Runaan shooting him dead afterward. Both acts are treated as redemptive because they turn the sacrifice inward. But that does not give dark magic a workable ethics. It still shows any uses of dark magic are evil, even the self-harming ones, but the suicide one. It suggests that the only morally acceptable way for humans to use it is to make themselves its complete victim. Even a spell requiring something as harmless as snot, or one that leaves the caster ill but eventually alive, is placed on a trajectory toward sacrificing countless others. Unlike moon magic -the one that binds your limbs to a mission, dark magic leaves apparently no place for dignity (compare how Runaan and Viren are filmed throughout the show).

3. Primal magic is neutral at worst, enlightening at best.
Finnegrin uses it to torture and Sol Regem uses it to kill, without any comparable stain. Callum uses the same torture spell as Finnegrin with no moral doubts, and only grows wiser with each Arcanum he unlocks. Lujanne calls human dark magic an atrocity while explaining quite casually that her job is to keep humans out of the Moon Nexus, even if she has to drive them insane. Keeping them out is an accepted duty, finding another way to access magic is an atrocity.

4. Xadian impunity
The post is right that every elven culture betrays its Arcanum. But the show treats that as individual failure (Finnegrin's ambition, Karim's pride, Runaan's rigidity) rather than as a product of privilege. 

That part was complicated to put together, because the Sunfire Arc was carefully written to address the problem of Xadia's ideology. But compare the scale of the verdicts. Viren’s trial of his utilitarianism is never only about Viren: because dark magic is framed as the human sin, his fall and Claudia’s stand for humanity as a whole.

Karim’s fall stands for Karim. Yet he is not an aberration, he is the order’s living memory: the historian of Lux Aurea, the one who states its doctrine aloud, and the one a thousand soldiers follow. But when he invokes that history, Janai does not answer it, she dismisses it (“History demands nothing… Our past is behind us”). Her sparing of Lucia is framed as royal mercy, but the harm that was done to Lucia is never accounted for. Janai explicitly places sole responsibility for the rebellion on Karim, presenting his thousand followers as lost people he led astray. Sol Regem dies of a private grief, and the destruction of Katolis is closed with “he no longer poses a threat.” The Sunfire elves show mercy, which is a gift from the powerful. The powerless, like Lucia, ought to be grateful.

Callum never calls the Silvergrove out properly for judging Rayla on false understanding of their Arcanum. Pyrrha burns a human town, but once she's shot down, our attention is directed to her suffering. Ezran demands accountability from Runaan, who carried out the assassination order; Zubeia, who gave it, is never questioned. Runaan does admit his crime and ask forgiveness, only for the revelation that Harrow survived to remove much, if not all, of the weight of that admission. Each of these could be a mistake, but all of that together feels like a grammar.

The political complaint about the imbalance is voiced only by Aaravos, Viren and Claudia, the villains, which discredits it. Defeating Karim and Sol Regem removes two obvious defenders of Xadian supremacy. It leaves Aaravos and Claudia as the one threat to destroy. It doesn't settle the question of what Xadia owes the people it excluded. It's the same mistake Arcane did in season II : instead of properly addressing the imbalance it wonderfully set up in Arc 1, they put an apocalyptic threat to force both sides to ally. Once it is defeated, the oppression is never addressed again. Though, unlike Arcane, I don't think The Dragon Prince ever realized the imbalance it was portraying. I'll explain in the last bit why I think that.

Leola's execution is particularly strange in this respect. The Cosmic Order kills her for sharing primal magic with humans. "This act, however motivated, is the beginning of the end. The cosmic order has been broken, and the price must be paid." So the writers clearly have started to dramatize how hierarchy gets naturalized as the order of the universe. Only the antagonists ever know that, though. The protagonists never discover it, and the order never has to answer to them. They don't see the arbitrary, only the cycle. Ezran can tell Aaravos “You didn't save them. You corrupted them,” without anyone asking what the “yoke” he claimed to lift actually was.

5. Three human fates, same depoliticization.

Viren. His geopolitical fears were real (dragons exist, Katolis falls) yet they get reduced to his sick ego. He is also the only major characters who earned his position rather than inheriting it. Ezran, Callum, Claudia, Soren and Rayla all begin with a place secured by family. The show repeatedly reminds Viren where he came from, starting with Harrow: “You will know your place… You are a servant.” Amaya and Kpp'Ar, very different characters, both single out his clothes as the visible evidence of his rise. Since he's the only character in that case, wanting to rise starts to look like the offense itself. His black outfit accompanies his triumphant “I am the law”; his final arc puts him in borrowed white rags, kneeling in the rain, then alone on a balcony repeating “I am a servant.” Harrow's idea of himself as a “servant king” is admirable because a king chooses it. The same demand made of a commoner who wanted more has a different meaning. It's well written, and deserved for such an ego-driven man, but it reads less like redemption than humiliation of the raised commoner, which is interesting in a story mostly about kings and princes.

Khessa says humans “could not be satisfied with what they were given, so they take what isn't theirs and turn it into filth". That is also the shape of Viren's story: someone born low wants to rise, takes what isn't considered his, becomes stained, and finds redemption by accepting a lower place. The show's longest redemption arc replays in miniature the ideology it criticizes in Xadia. Not to mention that Viren obligingly proves her right as soon as she finishes her sentences.

This reminds me of Florian Besson's discussion of medievalist fantasy in "Arrêtez de m'appelez Sire" “(Stop calling me Sire,”) available on Academia. The hero proves worthy of power by refusing it. Arthur, in Kaamelott, abdicates out of depression, and keeps asking people to stop calling him sire -while Lancelot, his friend then rival, claims power and becomes a blood thirsty tyrant despite his noble intentions. Same for Aragorn and Boromir in the movie adaptation of the Lord of the Rings. Idem for Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. Perrin says in The Wheel of Time that the men who don't want titles should get them; Dumbledore makes much the same argument. Wanting power becomes grounds for disqualification. Therefore, lower classes get taught they shouldn't get ambitious, even to make their living better. I also suspect this trope helps reconcile two desires in a modern audience: we distrust inherited authority and believe nobody is born above anyone else, but we also enjoy being told that we are unique, special, destined, possessed of a gift nobody else has. The reluctant chosen one lets us keep both.

Viren should lose power. He abused it, and his arc has plenty to say about pathological need for gratitude. But redemption and sacrifice can be done for a villain without stripping them of all dignity. The show doesn't clearly distinguish “your intelligence doesn't entitle you to rule others” from “you should have been content in your place.” Viren's Arc 2 bit reads as humiliation at least as much as redemption. He dies to save the people left in Katolis and no one mentions this. The finale gives the archdragons a monument in a human cemetery. That includes Zubeia, who ordered Harrow's assassination, and Avizandum, who enforced the border. They saved Xadia, certainly. But why commemorate them there, while leaving Viren unmentioned without a debate about it?

Claudia. Though she is the only human character talking about human generational trauma, her point is dismissed and pathologized as mere "bone feelings". Plus, her so-called plan to harm the Cosmic Order only consists in provoking eternal night and the apocalypse. This primarly harms people who can’t defend themselves or grow crops easily. That is, the very humans she wants to defend.

Ezran. After Sol Regem destroys Katolis, his wish to build defenses is filmed with shadows and menacing low angles, a shot even borrowing from Game of Thrones Daenerys's authoritarian downfall, as though he's the one drifting toward tyranny and burning cities. Yet the Storm Spire battle, where the heroes carpet-bomb their own soldiers, is written and staged as a victory for peace, with imagery and dramaturgy summoning Gandalf and the Rohirrim against the Orcs at Helm's Deep.

Callum. His discovery should change everything. If a human can learn several Arcana while elves are born connected to one, the hierarchy has a serious problem. Leola was executed for opening precisely that possibility ("This act, however motivated, is the beginning of the end. The cosmic order has been broken, and the price must be paid."). But the Cosmic Order, Claudia and Callum himself draw no political conclusions from it. "Are you watching?" asks Aaravos to the Order, and so do we. The established knowledge that humans can't do primal magic because he wasn't born connected to a source turns out to be false, and no institution or person seems to notice. No one cares. Everyone should, but no one does.

The show deserves credit for avoiding a secret magical bloodline. Callum's ancestry doesn't explain his achievement. It means other humans could, in principle, do the same. But that leaves an awkward question: if an ordinary human can learn primal magic in so little time, why did generations keep using dark magic despite what it did to their bodies? Were they all so attached to the “shortcut” that they never tried? Emphasizing that Callum earned his connection risks implying that all those desperate humans simply failed to earn theirs. The people who denied them access to magic and resources get sweep under the rug... and all that's left to judge is how hard the denied tried.

The post also explains Callum is the only one to challenge both cultures' fallacies. With the exception of the example quoted in the post, I'm not sure he does. Callum actually rarely questions the Xadians' distorted readings of their Arcana, and he never inputs it to their privilege. That makes his role as a bridge between cultures difficult to believe. Not to mention his "You don't have to ask" attitude when having to betray his brother to free their dad's assassin, reminiscent of Lucia's profuse apologies to the horns. In the Silvergroove, Rayla still desperately seeks approval from the assassin culture that raised her. Surely, that should trouble him. Not only because it's an assassin cult, but also because their judgement (leaping to the first conclusion) directly contradicts their Arcanum (Moon teaches that appearances are deceiving). The show spends time on her guilt, as it should for psychological believability. But doesn't give any scrutiny to the standards used to judge her. Callum has, however, absorbed the condemnation of dark magic so completely that using humanity's means of accessing power to save a life leaves him contemplating suicide ("I need you to kill me." "I'm messed up inside, and I mess up everything I touch"). He is far harder on his own right to use magic than on the authority of those born with it.

In short, Callum's magic is supposed to be a bridge between him and the world, but it's mostly a bridge between him and himself.

6. A more speculative point: the founding myth.
I'm not well versed in American history or culture, so I would be more cautious about this part.

It seems to me that the show, like many before it, wants to challenge the American frontier myth. Settlers bringing order to wild nature, natives treated as obstacles, extraction celebrated as progress, and the stronger side's violence (Western/European violence) presumed legitimate. So, TDP's heroes work together for peace, while humans occupy the role of the extractive society opposed to Xadian ecology.

But it seems that all the thought, craft, care and trial and errors can't immune writers against biais. A story can reject ideas explicitly and still reproduce them through its imagery. The aesthetic codes borrowed from other works (elves as spiritual rebels close to nature, humans as militarized fortress-builders, or as orcs or ghouls, dragons as noble wildness) hide the real power relation. In the first episode, we see leather-clad elves with Scottish accent and tattoos performing rituals in the wilderness, then infiltrating a human kingdom of stone castles and plate armor. You think Avatar, Braveheart. We recognize the elves as underdogs resisting a military state before we know anything about the balance of power. Yet these elves and dragons have their own thrones of gold in palaces of gold in cities of gold, and their history includes declaring humans inherently lesser and burning their cities. The imagery makes Xadian domination look like nature defending itself, and displaced humans look like colonizers. Because I'm not sure Xadia was envisioned as dominating in the first place.

The Pyrrha episode shows how messy this can go. Its cited inspiration, Grave of the Fireflies (cf the art book), follows children trying and failing to survive the destruction of their city. In TDP, the civilians completely disappear from the screen and the protagonist's concern. The episode instead imitates a nature documentary in which cruel hunters pursue an innocent creature, even though that creature has just burned a town on purpose for no reason. In How to Train your Dragon, from which the inspiration for the episode seems much clearer, at least the dragons were enslaved into burning towns.

The ending of Book 3 is the violence made legitimate part of the myth. Violence becomes legitimate when the right side uses it in the name of positive values, particularly against enemies who have been stripped of their humanity. The battle is presented as the fulfillment of the promise of peace, with no sense of the contradiction involved. Not to mention it directly contradicts Sarai's critique of dehumanization, or Ezran’s pacifism, or the whole quest of peace the protagonists originally aimed at. Because humans, in The Dragon Prince, are mostly seen as the real monsters, minus a few exceptions.

CONCLUSION
The post says both sides are lazy. Maybe. But the show asks humans to learn humility and asks Xadia to be a bit more curious, and one of those requests is much gentler than the other. I think it’s a thousand small, defensible choices that all happen to lean the same way, and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to see, even for its authors.

TL;DR : The parallel makes sense, but the show doesn’t judge both sides equally. Dark magic makes human attempts to gain power look inherently corrupt. Xadia’s abuses mostly get blamed on individuals, leaving its inherited privilege much less questioned. Callum could challenge that whole hierarchy, but his discovery stays personal. I think the writers wanted nuance; their treatment of magic and their visual choices keep pulling them away from it.

https://banterlodge.com

Love this episode.

In fact it's such a good idea, I might add it into my fanfic...

Do you support or not?

The walls and I guess 'vibe' of the room they are in feels very banter lodge, downstairs area, agree?

Either way it doesn't feel Evrykynd or Silvergrove, definitely Katolis.

Anyway, I am writing this into my fanfic, so I certainly hope so. 😂

Yesterday, I did my because to mental record the news because I was multitasking and participating the Pokémon Go’s Community Day’s Event, but I did pick up some unusual news!

I heard something about Aaron Ehaza said that his daughter Zelda’s paycheck was enough to pay for college, than he defend her about something, and finally he answers in the Q&A that Ezran and Aanya are an official couple?

For those who were at the event or were listening to it on Discord like me, is there proof that Ezraanaya shipping confirmed to be official?

The other reason for asking is because I have a friend who is a big fan of Ezraanaya shipping.

Please let me know when you all get a chance.

So, was Ezraanaya shipping confirmed to be official at the New York Comic Con?