Torture in Fiction: The Dragon Prince

scripttorture:

The
Dragon Prince is a wonderfully written and beautifully animated
cartoon. I don’t usually take on a whole series but I was
interested in the pitch and have fond memories of Avatar: The Last
Airbender. I was curious to see
what the creators had come up with since.

And
overall I really enjoyed it. The characters are engaging and the plot
is an interesting twist on a lot of typical fantasy tropes. (It also
helped that this is the first time I’ve seen an animated character
sign.)

The
review contains spoilers for the entire season (1) of this cartoon.

After
humans started using dark magic, magic drawn from destroying
naturally magical creatures, an alliance of elves and dragons drove
them to the western side of the continent. In the war that follows
humans killed the dragon king and destroyed his egg.

Years
later a group of elves sneak into the human kingdom, determined to
assassinate the king and his son in revenge. Rayla, the youngest of
the assassins, discovers that the egg is intact and alive. With the
human princes, Ezran and Callum, she sets out to return the egg, the
titular Dragon Prince, to his home.

But
once again I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not
the story itself. I’m trying to take into account realism
(regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist
arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and
torturers.

Which means I’m not focusing on the main characters or their plot
line here. Instead this review is going to focus mostly on three side
characters: Runaan, the leader of the elven assassins who kills the
human king, Viren, a dark mage and the king’s advisor who takes
over the country on the king’s death and Gren a guardsman loyal to
Ezran and Callum’s Aunt.

Viren
chooses to have Runaan kept alive and imprisons him in a stone cell.
He’s chained in a seated position with his hands raised above his
head. Viren attempts to bribe and threaten Runaan into revealing
information about a magical artifact. Runaan refuses and in
retaliation Viren casts a spell imprisoning Runaan’s essence in a
coin.

As Viren tries to consolidate power he clashes with the princes’
aunt, a military commander who insists the boys are alive and should
be searched for. Viren manipulates her into returning to the front
lines but not before she leaves Gren in charge of searching for the
missing princes.

Viren has Gren imprisoned. He’s chained in a standing position with
his hands kept level with his head.

I’m giving it 2/10

The Good

1) Torture and the threat of torture is used in the context of
interrogation but the story shows it failing. Runaan rejects every
request for information Viren makes. He also rejects every ‘olive
branch’ Viren extends.

2) Torture isn’t shown changing or even mildly influencing Runaan’s
strongly held beliefs. If anything the story shows Runaan’s
anti-human stance becoming more entrenched in response to torture.

3) Viren’s motivation for imprisoning and torturing both Runaan and
Gren is quite in keeping with reality. Runaan is an enemy soldier.
Gren is loyal to the old regime that Viren is actively trying to
replace. This makes both of them political enemies, treated as
threats to the new regime’s security. That’s incredibly true to
life.

4) The timing of Viren’s bribes also felt like a good point to me.
Runaan is captured and abused and then
Viren attempts to bribe him into cooperation. First he uses food and
drink, then he uses the offer of freedom. I don’t know whether it
was intentional or not but I liked this element because it supports
the notion of Runaan’s opposition becoming firmer as he’s
mistreated.

5) I enjoyed Viren’s general
characterisation throughout this and the way he justifies his
actions. He presents himself as a ‘pragmatist’. He says he’s
willing to make the ‘tough choices’ for the good of others and
the Kingdom. That’s the
kind of torture apologia torturers often parrot.

6) And that view doesn’t go
unchallenged in the story. Other characters point out that Viren’s
actions mostly benefit himself. His cruelty and his so-called
‘pragmatic’ lack of morals are presented as causing bigger
problems than they solve. Together it creates a really good, succinct
and understandable portrait of a torturer. It shows him parroting
typical torture apologia and it shows why
those views are wrong.

The Bad

Both Runaan and Gren should be dead several times over.

The portrayal of stress positions here is frankly appalling. It’s
difficult to be exactly sure about the passage of time in the story
but Runaan is kept with his hands chained above his head for at least
a week. Gren is kept standing for days.

Stress positions kill after about 48 hours.

In this case, neither character is depicting as suffering due to the
way they’re restrained.

Runaan is shown suffering but this is visually and narrative linked
to other things. He’s bruised because he was beaten when he was
captured. His arm is withering due to a curse. He’s weak because he’s
refusing to eat and drink (which should also have killed him, however
I’m willing to give that more leeway in a non-human character). But
the stress position he’s kept in isn’t depicted as fundamentally
harmful.

This is more or less repeated with Gren. He isn’t shown refusing food
or drink and he wasn’t beaten when captured. His posture in his
chains is relaxed. He shows no signs of pain or discomfort. He leans
against the wall and whistles. His movement, colouration, coherency
and memory all seem to be completely unaffected.

Stress positions are incredibly harmful. They are painful. They cause
wide scale break down of muscles in the victim’s body. This
initially leads to a build up of fluid in the extremities. Which
causes painful, discoloured swelling in the limbs, sometimes to the
point that the skin ruptures into blisters. As more muscles are
destroyed the protein released into the bloodstream becomes too much
for the kidneys to handle and they fail. One description I read
described the kidney’s being turned into ‘swiss cheese’.

The result is a protracted, painful death that can occur a
significant period of time after the victim is released from the
stress position.

The fact that it’s a stress position singled out as a ‘harmless’
torture is extremely significant here.

This is a torture that generally doesn’t leave lasting marks. It’s
a torture that’s common in the modern world. And we unfortunately
live in a world where torture trials often hinge on the presence or
absence of ‘physical proof’.

Scars.

Survivors are regularly
dismissed and belittled because they were tortured in ways that
didn’t leave obvious marks on their skin. Because their torturers
used techniques like stress positions.

Showing these tortures as harmless
backs up the societal view that these tortures don’t ‘count’.
That the pain these victims experienced was not real and they don’t
deserve our help or compassion.

It backs up the notion that these
particular victims are to blame for what they suffered.

These aren’t obscure philosophical
notions or debates. These tropes, these patterns, these arguments
affect our treatment of torture and torture survivors now.

They are part of the social
structures that deny torture survivors asylum. They are part of the
reason it takes survivors an average of ten years to access
specialist treatment.

Presenting these apologist views
uncritically to young children isn’t neutral either.

Because even without taking into
account parental blockers on internet searches accurate information
on torture is incredibly difficult to find. Any curious viewer, of
any age, who watches these scenes and searches for more information
would come across more torture apologia long before they find
research on torture.

Especially as they may not even link
what they saw to torture.

A casual viewer would first need to
make that link. Then be aware of the term ‘stress position’. Then
be aware of the academic journals or niche authors who publish on
these topics. And then have access to enough money to pay for those
sources.

Some of the sources are not
available in translation.

The result is that the overwhelming
majority of viewers are likely to accept what they see: that stress
positions cause no harm.

These details are small. They don’t
get a lot of screen time. They’re unimportant to the plot.

But they are not neutral.
They matter.

The way the different ideas at play
here interact matters. As does their impact on the real world.

And as a result, despite many good
points in the portrayal of torture, I feel like I have to give The
Dragon Prince a low score.

Overall

Part of the reason I wanted to review this was to highlight how
prevalent torture is in children’s media and how cartoons are often
sending out the same misinformation as adult action movies.

The
Dragon Prince doesn’t suggest that torture works and it doesn’t
justify brutality. But at the same time it’s downplaying the damage
torture causes by treating some tortures as essentially harmless.
It’s telling that the tortures singled out this way are clean
tortures common in the modern day.

The
tortures that victims are commonly subject to now, the ones that
don’t leave lasting marks, are the ones being singled out as
harmless. As not ‘proper’ torture.

The
message that only some tortures and only some victims ‘count’
starts young. And the sad thing is the people creating this, writing
it and drawing it probably had no idea they were portraying torture
when they chose to have characters chained to the wall.

The
background knowledge most people have on torture is poor, made up of
apologist tropes and rumours and misinformation. But it is so widely
accepted that it probably doesn’t even occur to most creators to
fact-check what they write.

And
the result in this case is a wonderfully made cartoon, which includes
fantastic representation of disability, of racial diversity and
women. While parroting tropes about torture that are actively harmful
to victims.

Disclaimer