Pacifist characters are so compelling in a barren world, and I can think of no better example than Daniel Larcher, from the show A French Village.
Servier (the French prefect) : "... I'll try to negociate with the Germans. If I belly dance, we should be able to get down to fifteen Jews, or maybe even ten...
Daniel Larcher : "Negociate ? Do you hear yourself talking ? You can't bargain human life !"
Servier : "Listen. Do you want to save people or make nice speeches ?"
This show takes place during the occupation of France by the Nazis. And it would be so easy to turn it into a simple tale of good versus evil -they are fighting literal Nazis. But the show takes place in the grey area.
Daniel : People will never forgive us for what we are doing.
Servier : We are saving ten lives, Larcher.
Daniel Larcher is a doctor so people are used to rely on him. He wants to help people and is shown repeatedly to go out of his way to do so, but then he is put in charge by the Nazis. He is an idealist but constantly forced to compromise to save as many lives as possible.
Judge : Did Daniel Larcher work for you as a spy ?
Heinrich Müller : Heavens, no ! As spy, we try to use competent people. Mister Larcher was just a nice guy, who, in the middle of a war, was trying to be at peace with everyone. The epitome of the martyr, suffering, useless humanist.
As a result, everyone hates him, the Nazis find him too soft and the resistants (among which his little brother) deem him as a traitor. He tried to give his own life more than once but was always denied. He gets captured and beaten up by the resistants, tortured by the Nazis. By the end of the war, everyone hates him and he hates himself the most. When this character was on-screen (at every episode basically) you knew you were in for a cry.
Concentration camp survivor : Do you remember I asked you to make us leave this place ?
Daniel : Yes, I do. You offered me money. And I refused.
Survivor : As a result, my wife and children are dead !
Daniel : ... I take the jury as witness. Would it have been fair to let the Golmuntz family go because they had money and not the others ?
Survivor : And ?
Daniel : Would it have been moral ?
Survivor : They all died. 140 men, women and children killed the very day they arrived in the camp ! You're the one to talk about morals !
Daniel : I did not know they were sent to die !
Survivor : That's not true ! Saying this, you're killing them for the second time !
Daniel : I did not know !
But if we want to go for something closer to TDP, we have its big brother, the series TDP constantly avails itself of through its elemental magic system, its books and pointless references breaking the immersion : Avatar, The Last Airbender.
I feel like TDP tried to replicate what Aang was with Ezran : the carefree yet compassionate child who is suddenly forced into immense responsibilities and horrible choices. Aang's struggle with deciding to kill the Fire Lord is a moral one, but there is more to it than that. If he kills Ozai, it means forsaking the principles of the Air Nomads, and as the last survivor of their genocide, Aang simply can't do that.
Ezran fails as a pacifist character because there are no such consequences.
The closest was in arc in the first half of season 3, which was very compelling but was completely butchered by the end of season 3, where we switched from this :
Each one of these pieces is 500 people. Five hundred men and women. Some are moms and dads, and have kids waiting for them at home. All of these are sons and daughters. Sisters, brothers, friends. They're real people, Bait. And after the battle... How can I let this happen?
And these people's deaths were never mentioned again.
When a character breaks his principles, it should break him. Just like Callum is when he uses dark magic. Just like Harrow when he killed Zym.
Harrow, contrary to Ezran, gets consequences. He loses his wife, he relinquishes his sense of morals, loses his self-esteem and he eventually commits suicide over remorse.
It makes him likeable, which Ezran is not.
The absence of consequences, gods....
When Ezran makes mistakes, such as abdicating in Viren's favour, we are given contradictory messages : he is a child so he makes mistakes (Opeli), but he is the bravest and wisest king Katolis has known in centuries (Corvus). Before the final battle, Ezran was characterized as a pacifist through and through : he finds the egg, he has the idea of returning the egg (so he does consider it as a person) to its mother to end the war; and once he is king and forced to choose between horrible outcomes where many people die, he hates it, he is disgusted with himself and the very idea that there even is a winning side in a war. He gives up the throne hoping to save lives.
But when he is told that all of these people have been transformed and that they have no choice but to kill them all... he doesn't argue. He doesn't bring up that these people may be detransformed, that they still have a family, nothing. He just does it. It's completely out-of-character. And it's never brought up again. He doesn't hate himself for being forced to do it. No one reproaches anything to him. It has no consequences. On contrary, it's a victory through and through, a triumph of the good side over the evil side. So much for pacificism and the inherent value of all lives.
And Ezran continues to escape consequences as the show progresses.
The Council Meeting, the perfect opportunity to show us how the world has evolved, how Ezran deals with all the trauma and events, is just a succession of cringe jokes.
When the painting is torn, (by whom and why ? No one cares) he gets away with a cute speech, and then leaves to his fun adventure; while the absence of the king has been established in the previous seasons as a catastrophe... but this time it's not. Somehow.
When he stays behind to try to talk to Rex Igneus despite the Earth Archdragon being obviously in so state to hear him, he forces the group to stay with him and look for him even though the entire place is crumbling on them, it's a miracle they didn't all die.
When he endangers the whole group again in order to save three tadpoles, which has all of them (Callum, Rayla, Soren) but him tortured, no one calls him out. He does not feel bad either. We just deal with the situation but no one holds him accountable, not even a reproaching glance, nothing. He just gets away with it.
Callum, Rayla and Soren were tortured, for God's sake, could he at least look guilty ?
Worst of all, his accommodating principles are affecting the entire show's message.
Ezran is characterized as an empathetic person. He has a hard time making friends because he's sheltered but understands animals and is deeply forgiving. But the problem is that this empathy just stops sometimes even though his characterisation is still superficially present. When he is forced to kill thousands, he somehow just does it without trying to argue. But when it's about saving three tadpoles, he endangers the whole party and the whole world with it. And both are framed as the right thing to do. The killing of all these humans is even framed as a triumph : blasting music, funny gags, Aanya's heroic cavalry charge saves the day, all the monsters are getting killed -so much for the inherent value of all lives or the "does it think, feel, have a family?". Idem when Ezran straight-up justifies everything Avizandum did, including killing their mom, right in front of Callum, Callum doesn't react as if it were a normal thing to say. Same with the Pyrrah situation, he rushes to help the poor creature who has just burned a village of his people, innocent human civilians, right in front of him.
What lesson are we supposed to learn here ?
That all lives are important except human lives ?
Does it feel ? Does it think ? Does it have a family ?
?????????????????????????????
So the show doesn't actually even have the excuse of these soldiers being transformed beyond redemption. What happened here was mass murder.
But it's either a triumph or not acknowledged at all.
And since Ezran never gets consequences, it feels like he has no flaws, that he doesn't need to grow, that the show completely agrees with his vision.
And I think it has to do with a certain vision of high fantasy and the representation of dragons, not just as fantastical creatures, but the very forces of nature itself. We humans have vilified them -St George, forgotten them -industrialisation and exploitation (not just of nature but each other, exactly the way Viren does with dark magic and his manipulative behaviour). We try to fight them, to win over them. So it's up to the heroes to realize that this is a false vision and that the real monsters are the humans who are unable to learn.
Problem is, that vision just does not align with the ... gritty fantasy The Dragon Prince has started as.
To speak again of ATLA, the latter starts as an extremely simple situation. Jesus must save the world from the Nazis. But as the show progresses, we have this :
Meanwhile, The Dragon Prince :
At the beginning we were told that things were not that simple, and we were shown it as we followed the perspectives of both sides. It was dragons and elves and knights and mages but it could as well have been steam, gaslight, goggles and zepplins. It was a story about how bloody history is, about how prejudice is difficult to overcome, about how all lives are inherently valuable in themselves.
And at the end, we have this.
It just doesn't align with a this vision of high fantasy that has the humans responsible for everything that ever went wrong. As it it, Ezran never demands that Xadia aplogises. Zubeia sent the assassins who killed Harrow and almost killed Ezran and it's never brought up. Never.
But humans do apologize. Soren takes Pyrrha down because she was terrorizing and killing innocents, but he is the one who somehow has to apologise to her, not the other way around... Which means now he is part of the good guys who get to threaten civilians to be eaten by a dragon for contesting the king as all good guys do. Claudia talks of generational trauma but it's not like we can take her seriously after she spent two years alone between her dad's rotting corpse and Satan whispering in her ear, especially since she displays massive hypocrisy right afterwards.
And Ezran says that they have to solve all this without violence; but it's contradicted by what we are shown, his absolute absence of remorse or doubt over Claudia's leg. His childhood friend's leg was cut off and they left her to bleed out at the bottom of the ocean and none of the protagonist even care and I am still supposed to think of them as pacifist main characters I should root for.
And it's because the story is not about prejudice and generational trauma, but actually about how humans are accountable for what has become of nature.
The real important bit of the Magma Titan thing is not the oppression of humans by Xadia, it's Viren saying that he will be able to artificially warm the earth so humans thrive, and Sarai objecting that the Titan may be the last of its kind. We are not meant to read "a desperate mage finds a way to save his starving people that has been oppressed for centuries." We are meant to read "the dark lord provokes global warming by killing the last member of an endangered species because humans are just unable to be reasonable. They are not satisfied with what they were given, so they take what doesn't belong to them, kill it and transform it into filth."
So yes, it is inherently evil to use organic dead matter (we still eat meat and wear fur though because it's medieval fantasy), and three tadpoles are more valuable and worthy of screentime than hundreds of thousands of human lives.
Meanwhile, Rayla struggles with her dead family as she bears the burden of saving them, she struggles with being rejected by everyone she ever loved even though their ideology was wrong, and her self-destructive tendancies end up hurting the love of her life, Callum; and her only way to save her family is that Callum agrees to do what terrifiies him the most. Callum struggles with his temptation to use dark magic, even if it's to save people, he is terrified to end up like Viren. Viren struggles as his entire world view was shattered, as he realises all the sacrifices he made only led to bad outcomes, and now he helplessly witnesses his daughter doing the same mistakes he did so he can live, while all he wants is to just die. Claudia is willing to go to any lengths to get her family back, but everyone she ever loved keeps abandoning her over and over while she did nothing to deserve this (her mom left, Callum and Ezran switched sides, Soren switches sides too, Viren dies twice, one killed and the other one by choice), which leaves her to lose her sanity.
Ezran... is just there. He tells us he is angry but we are not shown it. The only time he has had inner conflict since season three episode 5 is in a side story.
An excellent one, by the way.
“It belongs here,” rumbled Pyrrah in his mind. “Do you think all pretty things are free of pain?”
Ezran frowned as the cerulean glow of the aquamarine caught in her eyes.
“I can smell the blood upon your pretty crown. Was it not once a blade? Perhaps you should leave it here, too, with all these terrible things.”
It's exactly what the show should be about instead of cute animals and demonstrating that using dead organic matter automatically changes you into a monster and justifies everything bad that ever happened to you. Ezran is confronted with how recent and ancient and still festering the wounds of the world are. He is confronted with his own grief, he realises he actually struggles to let go. He misses his dad. He is confronted with the fact that he owes his throne to violence -his crown, which he had reforged from his dad's sword as a symbol of the war being over, still reeks of blood. And he hates it.
But it's a side story. Not the show.
In the show, Ezran is an empty shell.
So, no, Ezran doesn't need to grow up because The Dragon Prince is validating his vision through and through. He has no inner conflict since everything he does is either right or not his fault actually because he's just a child. He has no consequences because the story's vision is built around his. The events and messages bend around him. On contrary to Viren, who is wrong no matter what he tries, CF @kradogsrats 's post about how his attempts at following Harrow's logic by privileging either the individual or the collective keep backfiring : https://www.tumblr.com/kradogsrats/747310241889337344/i-accidentally-like-a-thousand-words-of-a?source=share
So all Ezran has left to do is to preach to the audience that it's not very nice to be mean.
Which is why he is insufferable.
