I thoroughly enjoyed season 3 as well. Showrunners, please continue with the Sailor Moon references.
For those worried about watching a story that gets cancelled before its conclusion, seasons 1-3 follow a pretty complete narrative arc.
I get what you mean. Where do some of these characters go from here? I’m pretty confident the writers will come up with something.
Should I jump into this series?
YES! It’s amazingly well done, and often goes against typical TV tropes. You’ll be watching, expecting something to happen, because that’s what always happens, and they go against that.
The Comic Con presentation showed a like 3 + 2 + 2 season structure, so 3 seasons in this story arc, and then another story arc in the same world for 2 seasons (with a different name, Dragon Prince: Some Subtitle), and then another with maybe some other branding.
Each season has an element subtitle, so I’ve seen speculation about maybe some flashback seasons on the history of the elves, or the discovery of dark magic, etc.
It might be a little too high-brow for someone who doesn’t appreciate Conquest of Elysium. :D :D
Agreeing with the other posters here, each season has gotten better and better. It’s a bit of a kids show, but it does so many things well that I can overlook those parts.
Well, I watched it. Getting past the first season was a but tough, but it got rolling in the second and third in a good way.
The fact that it was a kid show was obviously. It dealt with harsh things in a bit too kid friendly way in the first season. And then, in the third season, the deer creature didn’t die. It got it’s soul eaten. How is that not totally worse?
But, what I really liked about it was that it is totally better then Conquest of Elysium.
Weirdly, the last episode has some, like, wholesale slaughter. They left a teeny bit of wiggle room with
people turning into monsters, and giving the “innocent” soldiers an out in a previous episode. But, definitely, like, a lot of people dying. And one person getting clearly shot with an arrow through the forehead.
Having finished the 3rd season, I thought it was…kind of fine. It continued to have the same pacing and time-dilation problems that the first two seasons did, but this was made slightly worse by the time dilation having actual dramatic stakes and not just personal-growth stakes so it’s harder to hand-wave away with head-canon. By the middle of the season, the show had fully given up on surprising me with anybody’s actions. Basically just hewing cleanly to archetypes and basic hero-plotting. Which isn’t a problem per se, but disappointing.
One thing about the short seasons is that not only is there the time dilation thing, but the whole experience feels rushed. For instance, there are frequently things that would have been clearly improved with, like, a line of exposition here and there, that they could have gotten with half again as many episodes to let scenes breathe a bit (or just cutting like, 10% of the dad-jokes).
Off the top of my head:
The Sun Elves weird staff thing was a direct conduit to their source of power, which isn’t revealed until after Viren corrupts it. What does it even mean for their people that the power source was corrupted?
Amaya says the monster army is disorganized and sloppy, despite never having encountered them that we see.
Callum’s final wing-summoning comes after he “gets something off his chest” by telling Rayla he loves her. This could have been linked with him talking about shortness of breath, or more clearly having something “that needs to come out”, with words = breath = wind arcana. Similar to Aang’s Chakra meditation in Avatar. Instead, it kinda comes out of nowhere.
Not necessarily a criticism, but there’s a theme about the sins of the fathers, that’s very clearly a through-line, but they don’t put a pin in in as such. I kind of expected it to be stated a bit more clearly.
The final kingdom’s Deus Ex Machina was…fine. But also hurt by the lack of sense of time, or even much of an acknowledgement of what was going on in recruiting them.
Final spoiler tag for when I think the season really lost me:
I have no clue what Ezran was expecting to accomplish by abdicating. That plan made no sense, because he apparently explicitly handed the crown over to Viren (they literally traded the same jail cell), and all he got from it was a promise that people who didn’t want to be in the army could leave? He didn’t even give that order himself? He didn’t consider that the people who didn’t want to leave were also sons and daughters? Idealism is one thing, and he’s a kid, so I don’t expect him to fully think through all the angles, but his answer seemed to be “well, somebody is going to murder lots of people, but at least it won’t be me, personally, who does it!”
Its implied that there are some “machinations” between Viren and that one advisor, but it hand-waved away way too much for me to grant them.
I found out yesterday that this is a Netflix show! Yay! I don’t have to subscribe to Nick Hits to watch. Sweet.
It gets better the second season.
My two girls love this - I only watched part of the 1st season so am sorely behind.
Wow, what happened in Season 3??
It started out great. I felt like the show was really getting that Avatar magic going. The world was getting fleshed out, there were always surprising things to see, some profound plot points, characters’ arcs were starting to develop. Then they all hopped on a cliched bullet train to climax-town! Were they told they had to wrap everything up in that season? If so, it’s weird that they’re now talking about a S4…
Apparently this was renewed at Comic-Con…for 4 “seasons” of 9 episodes each.
I suppose that four seasons sounds more impressive than 36 episodes. I assume they have 4 independent stories to tell, kind of, but positioning them as separate seasons makes me very skeptical of their ability to address any of the pacing issues I had with season 3.
I can’t find a source now that I’m trying to cite it, but I read somewhere that they have two 18-episode arcs in mind.
I do agree with you on the pacing, though. TDP doesn’t have a great sense of time, scale, or distance.
Wrapped this up this morning instead of doing my job. As is my way.
Definitely a rocky start. As always, I find silly kiddie antics a little tiresome, but mercifully, Callum straddles the line and Ezran spends a lot of time backgrounded. But the combination of terrible accents, eerie animation choices (the artificially lowered framerate made zoomed-in conversations creepily stilted), and what felt like might develop into an aimless plot turned me off a couple of years ago when I gave this a try for the first time, but on recommendation from many and having run through a bunch of similar shows recently, I decided to try to push through and made it to The Good Bits™.
I’ll say first and foremost that I’m a sucker for sappy love-y bits in my YA fantasy, so the various relationships that burgeon throughout were great. I also adore wacked-out bizarre twists on fantasy tropes and mind-bending visuals, and the series delivers pretty well there, too. The #WholesomeContent rating was high, too, even if Callum could be a little too cheeseball in his absurd sincerity. And the plot train eventually left the station, with a notable swiftness. (It was easier for me to ignore the in-universe pacing issues others above caught; those aren’t the details that usually draw my notice)
The show wound up surprising me with Soren’s arc, even though I knew it was coming from one of the architects of ATLA. I was a little saddened by the fairly absolute turn Viren took and the complete abandonment of subtlety by the end of S3 with his plotline, and I’ll admit I was disappointed by where Claudia wound up, just because I’m terribly fond of her and had hoped for better.
Rayla was a great female lead and a ton of fun throughout (the actress’s Magically Disappearing Accent notwithstanding) – “Human Rayla” was always hilarious, in particulary – but the Best Lady award goes to Amaya by a country mile. Her wry smirk and age-rating-skirting ASL antics were a constant highlight, and she was an absolute badass in every fight scene she had. If Ehasz and co announced tomorrow they were premiering a spinoff entitled Amaya: Shieldmaiden of the Breach, I’d be in for 20 seasons in a heartbeat.
The little twists on standard fantasy, like the myriad elemental flavors of Elves, the divided world, the wildly different spellcasting for humans, etc., were nice. I dunno if any of it was fully original, but there were enough little novel bits stuck together that the setting felt well-defined and unique enough to enchant.
The ending felt like it wobbled a little off the tracks as stakes and pacing mounted to unsupportable levels and the plot’s demands kept increasing the speed (the absurd “get help!” style gag Claudia and Viren pull in the last ep out on the battlefield to capture Ezran is especially painful), and the show definitely tried a little hard to recapture some of the various bottled flavors of lightning ATLA quaffed so well before it, e.g., Adorable and Lovable Magical Critters, but all in all, it was a good journey, and I’m excited to see where we’ll go next with the vastly different political state of the world and the evolving threat posed by Aravos.
edit: Also, if Harrow’s soul doesn’t wind up being in that fucking bird, I’m going to riot.
Yeah, that’s telegraphed pretty heavily, but I think that the creators have said that Harrow is dead-dead.
Man, every time I think about Callum’s entirely unearned “I guess humans can do magic if they’re the main character”, it annoys me.
Okay, but look, he tried really hard to understand and empathize with natural forces and open himself to new experiences and knowledge, and based off of 100% of my interactions with actual real humans who also can’t cast magic, that does indeed seem to be a unique ability! ;-)
Honestly, I’m just surprised they resisted having him learn all forms of magic and becoming the Avatar or whatever.
Hey baby we got four more seasons!
@legowarrior I wish the tabletop game team had had the resources to at least get their narrator a better mic while cutting together their information-free trailer, but, for what it’s worth, I’m a quasi-fan of the Cortex system. Hate playing RPGs in established universes, though, but still, glad it’ll exist!