ki 🐇

"it may feel like it got used up, but there's an endless supply of it."

i personally love the integration of more background identity in the new season. kenji especially having his identity tied to his father and all of its associations like being forced to learn japanese, being put under the pressure of "the best" and rejecting any familial bonding because of their race says so much about his relationship with himself and his father. he's always been compared to his father but even more so because he's singled out for being japanese. kenji has matured so much since season 5 to chaos theory and im really proud of how they did justice to his character. we're finally seeing the consequences and development from learning to survive on his own and going against his father. its made him more reliant on himself and he's learning to trust himself first and foremost, taking his own morals and beliefs into consideration, like how he knows what he wants in a relationship, or how he's scared to trust again after being wronged (his skepticism towards darius). at the same time, he's become more humble and rebuilding his ideals from scratch. he's grateful, humble, and unsure, but learns to be confident when others around him provide him with everything he's lacked (darius' mom taking kenji in and kenji always checking up on her). im honestly not sure where they're going to take his character after his dad's death and i would be actually interested and happy if he descended into madness, guilt, regret, and grief. this series seems to be a lot darker than the first and i would be more interested to watch more difficult topics. he's been doing a lot on his own since camp cretaceous and maybe dealing with this grief (and brooklynn's death) on his own, we can see all that guilt and grief rise to the surface and he can reconnect with his friends in the later seasons as they reassure him that he's always supported and doesn't have to do it on his own. reasonably that won't happen over the period of time i'd like and im not sure i want it at all if they can't do it right. camp cretaceous couldn't seem to focus on the deeper problems, but i understand because it was aimed at kids. while chaos theory is still aimed for kids, its a little darker, and i hope they can learn from the flaws of cretaceous.

- "I love you more than I love myself."

in the dragon prince, the biggest conflict is family. everything viren does is for his family: to keep them safe, to give them what he never had. granted, many of virens actions are selfish and quite the opposite of helpful to his family, namely when he would continuously choose power (the egg) over his own son and lie about his loved ones' wishes to benefit himself. claudia too acts out of the love for her family: viren and soren. her first act into evil is to bring soren back to feeling and though not evil in nature, she goes beyond the natural and causes havoc in reversing natural events, giving her the first white streak of hair. the rest come from reviving her father. claudia acts entirely in love for her family and would cross the border of morals to keep them safe. up until season 4 (and maybe further), her acts can be justified by the trauma and conflicts of her childhood, constantly having to pick sides, beginning with her parents' divorce. she refuses to leave any of her remaining family behind and would do anything for them. she crosses the line into morally evil when terry points out how cruel it is that she tricked rayla with the gold coins, and it becomes clear that she does not carry any empathy for those outside of her immediate loved ones. this is where her actions can be compared to callum's in season 5. when faced with the danger that rayla will be fed to the ocean creatures, callum has no choice but to use dark magic to release himself from the chains and save her. in this situation, there really was no other option than for callum to release himself in order to save the others. dark magic has always been regarded as evil under any circumstance, yet this situation creates nuance between using dark magic for good, and what is considered "good." it could be argued that claudia is using her magic for good, to save the ones she loves, just as callum is saving the ones he loves. what makes one cause more justified than the other, and is there a situation where dark magic is considered good? it makes it difficult to understand where I stand on my opinions of claudia, especially after this recent season. this show makes me think about morals, my place in the world, and how these characters have guided me in my own philosophies. though it's become much darker in the recent seasons, one thing I do enjoy is how much it makes me think. when it comes to storytelling, the dragon prince is extremely open-world. even if unintentional, I'd like to think the vastness of the tdp world is supposed to make us question what is right and what is possible even moreso.