Well do I remember my excitement when the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones was first announced. As a dyed-in-the-wool fantasy nerd and a reader of the series from its late ‘90s inception, I thought its translation to the screen was a no-brainer: With Martin’s iconic characters, vivid world, and film-ready dialogue, HBO was handed a cinematic gift on a platter. I went on to defend the show from the initial snobbery with which it was received by critics, most notably by Ginia Bellafante of The New York Times, in a Huffington Post essay that went viral. And for a while there I felt vindicated, as the first couple of seasons of the show did ample justice to the books.
It was sometime in the third season—maybe when Theon Greyjoy was being castrated and tortured for what felt like hours—that I turned to my husband and mused, “You know… I’m not enjoying this.” The castration scene, which is nowhere to be found in the books, was hardly the first of its kind: The showrunners seem to delight in presenting pain and suffering in graphic detail. The gleeful sadism of this particular scene—in which Theon is teased into an eager erection by a couple of temptresses as an unwitting prelude to his castration—was the straw that began to break me. I started to notice that more and more, the showrunners were eschewing Martin’s smart dialogue. I noticed that most scenes between two characters had a tendency to end with either a stabbing or a sex act, with numbing predictability. I noticed showrunner David Benioff’s comment in an interview: “Themes are for eighth grade book reports.” And I sure as hell noticed the choice of the showrunners, independent of George R.R. Martin, to depict the rape of Sansa Stark. I began to realize that for all the sex and torture in HBO’s Game of Thrones, its sensibility was that of a teenage sociopath. It had no maturity and no soul.
The realization was a crushing disappointment. I’m a sucker for everything epic fantasy aspires to do and be; I get chills during the Game of Thrones opening credits—easily the best part of the show—for the sheer intensity and scope they promise. If the show had delivered on that promise, no one would have been more delighted than me. But: “Themes are for eighth grade book reports.” OK, then. Message received.
Some time later, when a friend told me to watch Netflix’s The Dragon Prince, I thought it would be—I don’t know, cute; it’s a kids’ cartoon.
The Dragon Prince begins like a traditional fantasy narrative: a conflict between nations based on past wrongs, some scheming for the throne, and the numinous presence of a magic that can be used for good or ill. The primary protagonists are a couple of young princes, who become embroiled in a plot involving possible war after their father, the king, is murdered by the enemy nation.
Here’s what makes The Dragon Prince a show for kids: There is no sex, no graphic violence, and—so far, at least—nothing too terrible happens to the protagonists. There is an adorable animal companion. Oh, and no one says “fuck.”
Yet despite the show’s PG rating, it’s mature as hell. The hallmark of immaturity is a tendency to oversimplify. The Dragon Prince does the opposite with its characters, whose complexity can compete with the characterization of many adult television shows. Maybe it’s the consequence of not having the option to torture people horribly (or shoot nude prostitutes full of arrows—thanks for the memories, Joffrey!), but The Dragon Prince turns this seeming limitation to its advantage: No one is purely evil in this story. The characters that do terrible things contrive to justify themselves in ways that are almost convincing. We’re not talking about the villains of superhero shows who always have a “motive” that usually makes no sense. (How was the Daredevil villain going to “save Hell’s Kitchen” with human trafficking? Just kidding, I don’t want to know.) The people who commit villainous acts in The Dragon Prince contend with genuine inner conflict, and manage to do just as many good deeds to balance the bad to the point that it can all become… confusing, in the best possible way. Just when you think you know what to expect of a character, you’re introduced to a new angle, a new element of backstory.
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And a funny thing about themes in stories is this: They don’t exist simply to be unearthed by obedient students for book reports. They’re not the literary equivalent of eating your vegetables. A work that grapples with the hard truths that confront us on a daily basis tends to result in a more complex, unpredictable, emotionally hard-hitting story—because the truths about the world are inherently complex and often there’s no straightforward bromide that solves them. Now, take a fantasy that grapples with real questions, real challenges, and the potential for powerful storytelling is off the hook.
When The Dragon Prince takes on themes of power, identity, political complexity, and relationships, it’s with the accentuated impact of the fantastic. While there’s a pleasurable sense of wonder to exploring the magic as its layers are steadily revealed, magic fulfills a significant thematic purpose. Magic is presented as an unnatural act for humans, involving killing animals and succumbing to dark powers. It functions as a temptation both for the villain and the protagonist, but also a possible means of redemption and self-discovery. And as a series of wrenching scenes in the second season drive home, magic can present deceptively simple solutions to moral dilemmas.
What begins as a simple quest to prevent a war expands over time. We see that the stage for this story is vast; that past events have rendered the present more complicated than we recognized, at first . In that way, it’s like the world we live in. As in our world, it is perilous to forget history, but equally perilous to cling to it too much. As in our world, the people who believe in simple, easy solutions for the world’s ills are not only wrong, but dangerous.
In the second season I was moved to tears more than once by what is ostensibly a children’s TV show. The questions it poses have no easy answers. One clear value runs throughout—that of compassion. The only clear-cut wrong is to do harm to others. Everything else, from war to famine to the decisions of rulers, is presented in shades of grey. Watch to feel deeply, to wrestle with conflicting ideas, and be swept up in enchantment. In other words, watch The Dragon Prince to get the best of what epic fantasy can achieve.
Ilana C. Myer has worked as a journalist in Jerusalem and a cultural critic for various publications. As Ilana Teitelbaum she has written book reviews and critical essays for The Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and the Huffington Post. Last Song Before Night was her first novel, followed by Fire Dance. She lives in New York. Find her on Twitter @IlanaCT.
I watched the first season a while back and thought it was very meh. After finishing it, I still didn’t understand what the main plot was. It seemed very aimless. In fact, the final episode caught me off guard, as I thought there were more episodes. I was like, “That’s it?” I have no desire to watch the second season.
Hi Ilana,
My kids love this show. The fantasy cartoons seem to be better then the live action: She Ra, and Troll Hunter are also favorites.
I feel like you summed up my feelings on Game of Thrones pretty well. It seemed to transform from a show that sometimes used nudity and violence to advance its plot to a show that sometimes used a plot to advance its nudity and violence. I gave it up a few seasons ago because it just wasn’t for me any more.
I have friends who still love and follow the show, but I just haven’t been able to come back. Different strokes for different folks. Maybe I’ll give the Dragon Prince a look.
I absolutely agree with everything you say here. As a grown adult and fantasy lover who has never been able to get into GoT precisely because of the focus on sex and violence to the detriment of anything meaningful, I loved both series of The Dragon Prince and am looking forward to more. And although I know some people will groan at the comment, it’s so good to see truly diverse characters in a fantasy series like this. Not as the point of the series or as a message to hammer home; just because that’s how the world is. It supports what I’ve believed for some time: that some of the most important and ground-breaking work in fantasy is being done in work that’s ostensibly for children – whether that’s books or tv shows or anything else.
I really like Dragon Prince, but I feel like in trying to find a balance between dark and kid-friendly it hits an awkward note occasionally. There will be a really scary scene with someone’s soul being ripped from their body, followed up by a fart joke. The tone can be jarringly inconsistent.
I thought the second season of The Dragon Prince was much stronger than the first simply because the heavy lifting of character introduction has been done for the most part. (A huge round of applause for including a deaf character, General Amaya, without making her a saint or a martyr. Plus, she is 100% BADASS.) There are moments of comedy and terror. The complex characterization of Lord Virren stands out; he genuinely believes that what he is doing is right and proper. Most interesting to me is Claudia; she seems like an ordinary teenage girl, but she uses magic that is drained from living creatures and she’s ok with it. (“I just kind of…squeeze it out of them,” she says nonchalantly. Never mind that the animal in question dies as a result.)
I can see getting tired of Game Thrones and being drawn to something more light-hearted like Dragon Prince to counteract it . . . but favorite fantasy show? I mean it’s an opinion, I won’t say you’re wrong, but I feel there are objectively better fantasy series even in the space it occupies. Avatar: The Last Airbender being the obvious example.
@7: I’m assuming she means “fantasy show that’s actually on-air right now,” because otherwise the list of fantasy shows better than GoT could be much higher (Buffy, Angel, Xena, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Legend of Korra etc).
I too fell off GoT around season 3 and completely agree with your assessment. The Dragon Prince is much more fun to watch with the kids than witnessing my spouse’s reaction to The Red Wedding.
I do find Claudia fascinatingly ambiguous. She’s basically a well-meaning person; she just believes it’s legitimate to gain power from killing animals. Is that really any worse than humans who eat meat, or hunt for subsistence? It’s not good vs. evil, it’s a conflict of different definitions of what’s good. Although her father is somewhat more malevolent. He thinks he has good reasons for what he’s doing, but he’s led astray by ambition and resentment.
One of the things I like about The Dragon Prince is that it’s practically the only cel-shaded 3D-animated TV show I’ve seen that actually looks good. There are times when it almost succeeds at looking like really good traditional 2D animation, something that cel-shading aspires to but rarely approaches. TDP is certainly a damn sight better-looking than the other main cel-shaded show on today, Star Wars Resistance, which is really ugly due to stiff character models and overly garish colors and contrast settings that deprive the images of texture. TDP season 1 did have one main problem, in that it chose too low a frame rate in an attempt to mimic the look of hand animation, giving it an overly jerky look much of the time. It seems to have improved on that in season 2.
The Dragon Prince is indeed a wonderful show :)
GOT has many disturbing aspects even before Season 3. Don’t forget Daenerys was basically sold and raped. I have the DVD’s for the first 3 seasons but have not re-watched them. On to Dragon Prince, at times it does have the Avatar-adolescent feel, but the theme is great. Un-do a wrong and discover yourselves. The kids are doing the right thing and as always the adults do not help, nor really understand(aka Harry Potter). Throw in a dragon and you get me hooked!
I agree! My favourite part of Dragon Prince is the disability representation. It’s got some challenges (see: Treatment of Rayla’s hand), but it does such a good job with General Amaya and a number of other secondary characters of building a realistic yet inclusive world where everyone has their individual strengths and weaknesses regardless of perception.
What you say about TV Thrones is pretty darn close to how I feel about it too, although I still can’t help watching. Granted I don’t watch too closely when the torture and brobdingnagian servings of stupid over-the-top plot-unnecessary violence are being hurled around. Yes, we get it. Thoroughly bad. Very stupid. Insatiable sadism. Can we have some more story now? There are still some beautiful little moments that make it worth watching, especially when a glimpse of the coming story (the real, book, story) are given. Not that I really trust them, I’m considering anything post-Dragons that happens in the series just interesting rumor, to be confirmed by future writing. But I loved, loved Kit Harrington (spoiler) after being Melissandra-ed back to life and taking up the furry cloak and the leadership of the watch just long enough to get a thing done, handing it all to Dolorous Edd and walking off saying “My watch is ended”.
@@@@@ 12 Daniel Gish – The first deviation from the books that I hated was Daenerys’ and Khal Drogo’s wedding night. They went for the rape, and that hurt. Just more freaking barbarian brutality. The book scene, in contrast, was interesting and suspenseful, instead of being just another crushing moment of heartless violence. And, in the book, Khal Drogo is far more believable as someone whom a love-starved, abused, exiled, royal woman-child could come to love with – ahem – burning passion. I hate it that they went for the stupid and brutal when the book scene (already written, damn it!) was so much better. Much more likely to deepen your interest in Dany and Drogo, and making better sense in the context of the story, deepening Dany’s loss and grief.
Throw yourself on funeral pyre of someone who had raped you on wedding night? Not so much – more like get out the marshmallows.
This plot decision makes me mad the way the first Harry Potter movie made (makes) me mad by leaving out Hermione’s points at the final banquet. For the use of cool logic in the face of fire… They couldn’t have put that in? Bastards.
I’m going to go and start The Society Against the Character Diminishment of Khal Drogo and also The Society for the Recognition of Heroic Female Brains in Popular Culture, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be selling memberships later, anyone interested?
@6 or Toth in The Last Airbender!
After reading all the available books first, I could never get into the tv shows. The few rare moments I did catch were just like described above. Take nearly any UPN (late teen to early 20 somethings) show and you get the same thing, outside of Supernatural.
Will be checking out this series.
When I heard people effusing about Game of Thrones being made into a TV series I picked up the first book and tried to read it. Got about halfway through before giving up on the book. Going on the truism that a screen adaption was always worse than the book I haven’t bothered with the series.
Loved the Dragon Prince though. Comedy in places and heartrending in others with a complex story of betrayal, hope and how people, no matter who they are, can work together to achieve what is right.
@17/Draco T Bastard: There are some screen adaptations that notably improve on the books they’re based on. For instance, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is much better than the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Other movies that people often say are better than the original books include Psycho, Jaws, The Godfather, and Die Hard, though I’ve never read any of those books.
I have been tired of shows that promise to show mature subject matter and mean “Look how grown-up we are! We can show torture and gore and cruelty and grotesquerie and callousness and queasy prurience!” for years now. It’s just the grown-up version of drawing a penis on the wall outside the girls’ bathroom or singing that old kids’ song about shooting the teacher. I’ve been enjoying DP because it’s actually mature.
Thanks, Ilana. We couldn’t finish episode one of the first series of GOT due to the gratuitous violence. We have started The Dragon Prince and are enjoying it a lot already (2 episodes).
Because I am 16 I can’t watch GoT but, I think dragon prince will be a good alternative for now.
I watched this show after reading it – first season was light and fun. I enjoyed watching it even as an adult. Season two was even better in my opinion. It is starting to allow for some nice character and story development. Thanks for this recommendation! ;)
I think that the inclusive theme was cool at first but quickly turn it to 11. All couples are from different race or cultures or gay. Almost all supporting characters have some kind of disability… I mean, c’mon man…. It’s a bot with an agenda of manipulating children. I don’t like it at all.