Photonic Cyclone

The reason this concept works in HTTYD though, is because in HTTYD the dragons are victims too! A pretty major plot point of that film was that dragons were pretty much enslaved by the red death, it's very much implied that they didn't even really want to attack villages, they were kinda forced to.

a la "See? Our ethnic cleansing was right because they totally destroyed the environment just like we said they would!" 😌

There's so much bullshit here I don't know where to start but let's go with:

1) The Dragon Prince is a fictional setting which means everything about it comes from the decisions of the writers.

So not only do they refuse to treat the Human Exile like a genocide, which it was that's not debatable, now they're justifying said genocide!

How many people died being forced to march from one side of Xadia to the other? No, seriously. How many old? How many children? How many sick? How many disabled?

Because apparently the writers think it's zero!

There's more sympathy aimed at animals than at the millions of humans who were forced to leave their homes. Like, the elves emptied whole cities into the Xadian wilderness and expected them not to starve? It doesn't matter how "abundant" the resources are if these people come from widely different ecosystems with no knowledge of the land.

And no agricultural infrastructure necessary to support millions of people.

3) Humans are not a monolith.

Surprising, I know, considering how much the writers want to ignore the existence of the other human nations whenever they're inconvenient. Like a certain Crown Prince they murdered in the third se-

I've talked before about how western fantasy writers use "human" when what they really mean is Western European Imperialism. Yes, powerful cultures can exploit the natural resources of their environment but they can also respect it more than any modern European nation.

So the Mage Wars are also Imperialist Propaganda

So the fact that literally every Dark Mage was all:

Yeah, that's bullshit.

Just because Medieval European Magicians were buying rhinoceros horns doesn't mean other cultures wouldn't have seen harming magical creatures as sacrilegious.

Also:

Wow, look at all those dirty disgusting humans abusing their godlike power. This is obviously because humans are a bunch of inherently evil parasites that destroy everything and not the actions of a few selfish individuals who monopolized power for themselves at the expense of the common people.

Oh, hello, Capitalism.

2)

Well, that's just bullshit.

First of all, that many extinctions would result in an environmental collapse of apocalyptic proportion.

Second, I don't care how powerful they are the population collapse would've rendered war unsustainable in a medieval environment long before this.

Third:

4) This makes the elves and dragons look even more incompetent and selfish.

They had a fit when humans killed one fucking rock monster. And they just stood by and let countless magical creatures go extinct? Stupid but okay let's roll with it.

That means they never really cared about protecting magic animals from humans. They just wanted to get rid of them. What do they care if the humans drain all magic from the west? Elves and dragons still have the east.

Sure, Dark Mages are an abomination to the natural order. But as long as they do it Over There they're no threat to draconic supremacy, I mean, elven lives.

Why waste time trying to find one Dark Mage when you can exile an entire city instead! What collective punishment?

If the humans are killing themselves that's no business of ours. Definitely don't have an entire order of Moonshadow Assassins trained specifically to destabilize foreign powers.

No, those are good assassins!

Yeah, because the writers have no sense of scale, or history, or non-western worldviews, or understanding of imperialist indoctrination, or-

But like, yeah, Xadia ethnically cleansed humans to the west, you better believe that’s going to de-stabilize the human population quite significantly and that instability can very easily lead to wars over resources and whatnot which is TRAGIC. However TDP never frames it like that. It never frames the wars as the tragic outcome of what happens when you do this to a group of people. Noo, the humans were just greedy, that’s all there is to it.

In a lot of media with a similar conflict, magical/supernatural beings are often posited as the minority, oppressed or otherwise disenfranchised group in comparison to regular humans. The Last Elf series by succesful Italian author and vicious homophobe Silvana de Mari comes to mind as one example. TDP seems to rely on this convention in order to make us feel like the Magical Creature/Human divide is more balanced than it actually is within the show.

Because like. Humans aren't allowed to do magic. And when they do find a way to do magic they are segregated to a part of the world in a manner that seems to reference the Trail of Tears (which like??? You can't reference the trail of tears for this type of story wtf man) and cut off from resources that could save and improve their lives. The Xadians have every advantage in the Human/Magic divide here.

This is not made better by the fact that the show shies away from even showing us why Dark Magic is bad. Like yes, it does use pieces of living creatures, but this is a weak argument when most of your characters still eat meats and wear furs.

Mind you, there are moments where the show almost (almost!) makes us understand why dark magic is bad. The reference to the idea that the Human half of the world was once just as magical as Xadia, but humans exploited it for dark magic is a great example of this. But very little is done with this idea and it is such a throwaway comment that the gravity of it is so hard to feel. Another is when the Magma Titan was killed by Harrow, Viren and Co. to harvest its heart. (however I also fear that this moral conundrum is more baby's first trolley problem rather than a discussion of whether Dark Magic is truly ethical or not.). I believe that what we are supposed to find bad in Dark Magic is along the lines of 'percieving other living beings, especially sentient ones as a bunch of materials to be harvested and used will likely lead you to normalising doing horrible things to others'.

However, this moral quandry does not sit nicely with the fact that Xadians access the privelege of magic, while humans have to accept their inferiority. Because evening the playing field/accesing priveleges basic to most Xadians requires humans to partake in the 'evil and forbidden' practice of dark magic. (Callum remaining an outlier for now. Whether or not more human mages are a possibility will likely change my stance on this)

The power-imbalance and the oppression that it caused is almost never brought up and when it is, it's usually by the villains like Claudia and Aaravos who then proceed to get shrugged off because "welp they're evil so why should we listen to them?" classic debate and switch.

Racism against elves from humans is treated with a lot more severity then racism against humans from elves in several instances. Rayla for example has several scenes where she's allowed to be basically racist as she wants toward humans with little to no pushback while Callum gets struck down verbally for even maybe saying anything remotely insensitive toward any elven group. Lujanne straight up says "You're only human" as a response to Callum not understanding her magic explanation, and while she does apologize later for doubting Callum can do magic, she never apologizes for her downright racist comments. Though you can maybe read between the lines and say that apology is bundled in with that, which sure, I won't fight you for that, that can be a reasonable assumption. But given that Callum has now had to directly apologize for what humans did to elves twice in the show, I would like something more explicit from the Xadian side. And then dark magic... I agree with everything you're saying here. The demonization of dark magic is just... crazy. Honestly, if they can't find a way to make dark magic evil, I would've ran with that and leaned in on it. Maybe it's a lesson that Xadia has to learn that the thing they condemned humans for doing because it was strange to them, wasn't that strange after all if it was used properly. Hell, Rayla almost comes to this realization in one of her reflections stories where she almost kills a dark mage, but the realization that all he was carrying was coral to heal sick children makes her hesitate long enough for him to get away. This could've been explored more in the show but we never see any impact this had on Rayla on screen. I also dislike that in their commitment to make dark magic evil they portray all of the cases of humans using it as evil and greedy, even when it could be understandable. You brought up the west being drained of magic which is a scene that frustrates me for several reasons. One, is of course, I probably wouldn't have done it that way because I'm mainly against the demonization of dark magic BUT they still could have made this work.

Additionally: I have this huge pet peeve that they all make it sound like almost all of their usage of magic is somehow justified. They use their magic for bad purposes too. Case in point: Blood Moon Huntress, Finnegrin, Sol Regem… I can go on.

But, like you said, when a human does dark magic for good purposes like healing someone or etc they immediately get labeled as evil. Claudia was portrayed as *turning evil* when she saved Soren from being paralyzed. Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the gore in it and I still think most of us support her in that decision but the *portrayal* of that didn’t give that feeling. It showed that she was getting desperate, which is good, but it focused a bit too much on *her turning evil* than how the things happened to her just kept cornering her.

Also somehow every single conversation goes to “Balance of the world” and how “humans have no connection to any primal so they should stay out of magic”.

In a lot of media with a similar conflict, magical/supernatural beings are often posited as the minority, oppressed or otherwise disenfranchised group in comparison to regular humans. The Last Elf series by succesful Italian author and vicious homophobe Silvana de Mari comes to mind as one example. TDP seems to rely on this convention in order to make us feel like the Magical Creature/Human divide is more balanced than it actually is within the show.

Because like. Humans aren't allowed to do magic. And when they do find a way to do magic they are segregated to a part of the world in a manner that seems to reference the Trail of Tears (which like??? You can't reference the trail of tears for this type of story wtf man) and cut off from resources that could save and improve their lives. The Xadians have every advantage in the Human/Magic divide here.

This is not made better by the fact that the show shies away from even showing us why Dark Magic is bad. Like yes, it does use pieces of living creatures, but this is a weak argument when most of your characters still eat meats and wear furs.

Mind you, there are moments where the show almost (almost!) makes us understand why dark magic is bad. The reference to the idea that the Human half of the world was once just as magical as Xadia, but humans exploited it for dark magic is a great example of this. But very little is done with this idea and it is such a throwaway comment that the gravity of it is so hard to feel. Another is when the Magma Titan was killed by Harrow, Viren and Co. to harvest its heart. (however I also fear that this moral conundrum is more baby's first trolley problem rather than a discussion of whether Dark Magic is truly ethical or not.). I believe that what we are supposed to find bad in Dark Magic is along the lines of 'percieving other living beings, especially sentient ones as a bunch of materials to be harvested and used will likely lead you to normalising doing horrible things to others'.

However, this moral quandry does not sit nicely with the fact that Xadians access the privelege of magic, while humans have to accept their inferiority. Because evening the playing field/accesing priveleges basic to most Xadians requires humans to partake in the 'evil and forbidden' practice of dark magic. (Callum remaining an outlier for now. Whether or not more human mages are a possibility will likely change my stance on this)

The power-imbalance and the oppression that it caused is almost never brought up and when it is, it's usually by the villains like Claudia and Aaravos who then proceed to get shrugged off because "welp they're evil so why should we listen to them?" classic debate and switch.

Racism against elves from humans is treated with a lot more severity then racism against humans from elves in several instances. Rayla for example has several scenes where she's allowed to be basically racist as she wants toward humans with little to no pushback while Callum gets struck down verbally for even maybe saying anything remotely insensitive toward any elven group. Lujanne straight up says "You're only human" as a response to Callum not understanding her magic explanation, and while she does apologize later for doubting Callum can do magic, she never apologizes for her downright racist comments. Though you can maybe read between the lines and say that apology is bundled in with that, which sure, I won't fight you for that, that can be a reasonable assumption. But given that Callum has now had to directly apologize for what humans did to elves twice in the show, I would like something more explicit from the Xadian side. And then dark magic... I agree with everything you're saying here. The demonization of dark magic is just... crazy. Honestly, if they can't find a way to make dark magic evil, I would've ran with that and leaned in on it. Maybe it's a lesson that Xadia has to learn that the thing they condemned humans for doing because it was strange to them, wasn't that strange after all if it was used properly. Hell, Rayla almost comes to this realization in one of her reflections stories where she almost kills a dark mage, but the realization that all he was carrying was coral to heal sick children makes her hesitate long enough for him to get away. This could've been explored more in the show but we never see any impact this had on Rayla on screen. I also dislike that in their commitment to make dark magic evil they portray all of the cases of humans using it as evil and greedy, even when it could be understandable. You brought up the west being drained of magic which is a scene that frustrates me for several reasons. One, is of course, I probably wouldn't have done it that way because I'm mainly against the demonization of dark magic BUT they still could have made this work.