The Infinite Fantasy of The Dragon Prince

Happy quarantine, everyone. I hope we’re all staying safe and healthy and managing to keep our sanity. It’s a strange and scary time but at least we still have comforts and escapes to get us through. I, for one, have been re-watching a bunch of shows on my various streaming services these last couple weeks. Shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth, and Better Call Saul; all great ways to find a laugh or at least get your mind off everything that’s been going on (or you just finished watching all the shows that start with ‘A’). And I know for a fact, that I am not the only one to turn to Comfort TV as a way to get through this crisis.

But while all those shows mentioned above are more than worthwhile ways to pass the time in self-isolation, whether or not you’ve seen them before; there was one that I couldn’t quite get out of my mind even after the re-watch. One that brought me genuine joy (something that feels needed now more than ever) both while I was watching it and even when I just idly thought about it later. Technically a kid’s show and yet easily as complex as anything else you could put on your screen. The Dragon Prince.

The Dragon Prince, an animated Netflix kid’s fantasy-adventure show, concerns the fantasy world of Xadia, a continent split between humanity on one side and elves, dragons, and other magical creatures on the other. War has, unsurprisingly, raged on and off between humans and elves and dragons for hundreds if not thousands of years. Born into this history and world are two human adolescents and one elf who must band together to keep the last egg of the fallen dragon king safe and deliver the egg back home.

If you read the above description and thought it sounded like a fun but perhaps not the most original setup for a kid’s fantasy show, you wouldn’t exactly be wrong. Not quite. But at the same time, you’d only be correct in the shallowest sense.

See, The Dragon Prince shares a lot of its DNA with two of the best kid’s shows and fantasy shows of the last twenty years. Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. The animation style on the Netflix show is a gorgeous evolution of the two earlier series, although some of the CGI in the first season can look a little clunky. And one of the two show-runners for The Dragon Prince (Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond) did important work for Last Airbender when it was on the air. None of these are shows that are content to simply follow the tropes of their genre. These are shows that want to explore all the unexpected and surprising intricacies of their worlds. That want to show you characters that can change those worlds and are changed by them in turn. The Dragon Prince is a proud continuation of that legacy. It creates a living, breathing, magical world. Inhabited by characters worth the time you spend with them. It does what I think fantasy is supposed to do.

It lets you get lost.

I can’t imagine that anyone reading this post will be too surprised to learn that I have loved fantasy fiction in all it’s forms (books, movies, television, and even occasionally music) for most of my life. I think that’s true of a lot of people in my generation (Millennials). We grew up with the constant wish that one day we’d receive an Owl telling we’d been accepted into Hogwarts. For a lot of us, some of the first and most important movie memories we made, those moments of pure unfiltered awe staring up at that giant screen, were created by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The only true mono-culture show of the last decade was Game of Thrones and George R. R. Martin himself has said he believes we are currently living through the “Golden Age of Fantasy“. Where before, fantasy was the realm of the losers and the nerds, and the only acceptable fantasy authors were Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and even they were just barely tolerated; our generation has managed in just two or three decades to lift fantasy fiction up from the garbage heap of disrespected genre and make it into a behemoth and one of the most loved strains of stories around today. And I haven’t even mentioned video games yet. Fucking Skyrim, man.

Now, while I believe I could write an entire book the size of The Way of Kings on all the reasons we Millennials have embraced fantasy in a way no previous generation did, today I’m only going to focus on the one mentioned above. You can lose yourself in a fantasy story in a way no other genre allows. Think about it. Think about how vast and complicated the world of Game of Thrones is (ignoring the 8th season, of course), think about the insatiable curiosity of every Witcher fan you know as they wait between seasons 1 and 2.

These shows (and books and video games) capture your imagination. No matter how long they go on, how much time you spend within their worlds, it always feels as though you’ve only explored a fraction of what they have to offer. In our real world the horizon feels limited, thoughts of magic or general goodness feel foolish, there is little left to explore in our lifetimes, and the hope for positive change we carried with us into adulthood diminishes more and more every year. Especially now in quarantine, but even without it, the world has grown increasingly narrow.

The best fantasy fiction saves you from that. The best fantasy you can read or watch or listen to will feel endless.

At its best, The Dragon Prince feels endless. Somehow, in only 27 episodes spread across three quick seasons (there are plans for 7 seasons in total, although fans are still waiting for Netflix to confirm season 4), the show manages to create a world worth losing yourself within. It does this using all the weapons in a TV show’s arsenal. As I mentioned above, the animation is gorgeous. With fluid, inventive fight scenes appearing regularly throughout the run so far, and the coolest and most unique looking fantasy creatures around (some are part of the normal fantasy canon and some, as far as I can tell, are completely unique); it is honestly one of the prettiest shows Netflix has on offer right now. The character writing and voice-acting are top notch, creating genuinely moving emotional drama among the players and even giving the fandom a couple different pairings to ship.

All of these are important parts of any good TV show, but only fantasy (and scifi) deal with world-building in any meaningful way; and this is where The Dragon Prince shines the brightest. Xadia is rich with life and history and magic. And, as in the best fantasy, the history matters. What came before will always play a part in what comes next. The Dragon Prince understands this instinctively and builds the show around it. The flashback episodes in each season are some of the show’s most interesting. There are wonderful, clever little touches of world-building throughout, like the Sun-Elves rituals of fire, like one of the main characters being made into a ‘ghost’ by her own community, the complex relations between humanity and dark magic and the rest of the world. From the strange impossible plants to a desert the size of an ocean and the odd and wonderful creatures the main characters must use to cross it.

And through it all, the viewer just knows that they are only scratching the surface. There is so much more waiting to be seen, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be felt. There always will be, whether or not Netflix does the right thing and lets The Dragon Prince finish out their planned run. Because that is the best thing truly good fantasy does. It creates a world that lives on within your imagination for as long as you want. You can return to Xadia at any time and lose yourself in a different and more colorful world. In the same way Hogwarts will always be there, and Middle Earth, and Roshar, and Westeros. The best fantasy lives in a space just outside of time. The Dragon Prince has earned its way into that space, at least for me.

But maybe give it a watch on Netflix if you haven’t already. Or give it another watch if you have. I’d like to have a few more seasons to fuel my imagination. Or just another reason to go back.