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.
Tag: violence
“genitalia associated with cis women are harshly stigmatized and policed as part of misogyny, which can lead to violence” and “not all women have vaginas and not everyone with a vagina is a woman” and “trans peoples’ bodies are harshly stigmatized and policed as part of transphobia, which can lead to violence” are not mutually exclusive factsx and in fact all of these things are very much interlinked, and should not be used as gotchas! against each other
“men are warmongers, women are peaceful” factoid actually just survivorship bias. patriarchy georg, who shuts women out of military power and erases them from history when they do achieve it, has skewed the data adn should not be trusted.
If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
[…]People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…]
That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
no really though, can anyone explain to me why fictional depictions of violence are only wrong when they’re sexual? why it’s universally understood that simulated violence can be consumed without danger of influencing society, but any depiction of any part of the sexual violence spectrum will inevitably contribute to real world sexual violence? have any antis made an attempt at really explaining that? I’d love to see it
Obviously I’m not an anti, but as someone who has always had an underlying reaction of ‘this comparison doesn’t feel right’ whenever someone calls hating fictional sex but not fictional murder hypocritical, I wanted to respond.
I think it’s a reflection of how society reacts to sexual assault victims differently from murder/attempted murder victims. Specifically: society behaves as if the thoughts and fantasies of a sexual assault victim have an effect on the severity of their rapist’s actions but does not do the same for murder victims.
in other words: in an anti’s eyes, it’s easy to see that only a murderer is responsible for murder. But rape culture (not the rapists) are responsible for sexual assault and anyone contributing to it (i.e. creators of dark fandom content) is/are responsible for cleaning up and ending rape.
*
Frank talk about about rl sexual assault and murder below.
Neutrally speaking, sex itself can be a good or a bad experience. murder or attempted murder can only ever be a bad experience.
When someone says they were sexually assaulted, society zeros in on whether or not the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about the sex instead of focusing on the being forced part. If we treated murder victims the same way we treat sexual assault victims, we’d concern ourselves with whether the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about being stabbed/choked/poisoned/etc to death instead of focusing on the being dead part.
This is a really good analysis, thanks!
Also, this deserves to be a pull quote:
“[A]s long as society pushes the blame for sexual violence off the abuser/rapist and onto the victim, or the state of society… antis will contribute to this mindset by demanding that the victims and society clean up their act first.”
This is good but I’d like to add: “antis”(or, well, their philosophical ancestors) TOTALLY tried to do this with violence.
For most of the 90s and early 00s, people with precisely this mindset fought HARD to ban or censor games and music(exclusively rap and other “deviant” genres) for violence(and, surely by coincidence, anti-establishment messages) with the same sorts of arguments and on the similar theory that violence in art caused violence in society. That violence and crime in US society during this period were persistently falling inspite of its, to their eyes, ever-increasing “deviance” never seemed to register with them, oddly enough. And before THAT -during the 70s, 80s, and 90s- the same folks campaigned against violence in films, tv, and music. Antis lost all those fights, eventually(well, TV censorship is more complex. The FCC was, and remains, very susceptible to their gaming, particularly on language and sex).
And during all these eras, mostly the same folks were caught up in the anti-porn fight as well. Which also failed. So why does this particular arm of the anti-porn campaign continue? Here’s one theory:
All of this -from slasher flicks to pornography- were normalized by society in the wake of their success; they became, or became part of, billion dollar industries and, in the US, how can something worth billions of dollars be deviant? Commodities are as American as Apple Pie. These are all also Industries controlled by, and profitable to, white men. Fanfic is (mostly)non-profit. It’s non-commoditized and, in fact, very difficult to commoditize due to IP laws. It’s primarily controlled by folks afab. Because it’s non-institutionalized, the sort of structural gatekeeping which keeps poc and non-men out of positions of influence and control aren’t as developed and established(racism and sexism are still social institutions that impact and exist in fandom, obvsl; upholding them is the point of the racist+sexist harassment which happens in it). Fanfic sex remains “deviant”, and thus an open target for christian moralizers(disguised, unaware, or otherwise), because Fanfic communities themselves are “deviant”; more open to those excluded by establishment society, and more difficult for capitalists to integrate into their system of profit-exploitation.
Hi friends. This is our new comics TEST. This one means a lot to us and we really hope you like it.
We put out a digital comic book today containing our stories TEST, ARK, and MIDNIGHT RADIO. It’s hi res, DRM free and pay what you want. You can download it at: Gum.co/theworld
If you would like to support us creating more stories like these, please consider buying a copy. If you can’t, no worries. Please download and enjoy the book!
Written by Ehud Lavski. Art by Yael Nathan. Contact: elavski@gmail.com
ooh, this is a really good subversion of that shitty ‘aliens judge us harshly and we deserve it’ trope.
just moving along like everyone else 