That's more than double the amount The Dragon Prince has to work with, which explains why the latter doesn't have the time to devote to anything that isn't driving the plot forward. For example, Avatar: The Last Airbender seasons each ran for 20-21 episodes a piece. Sure, this gave us a lot of cheap cartoons with recycled animation and filler episodes, but it also gave writers a large canvas upon which to do something deep and fulfilling. Back in ye olden days, animated shows for kids were ordered in bulk. Let me be clear: I do not blame the creators of The Dragon Prince for this Yakety-Sax pace. Feel like Ezran ( Sasha Rojen) needed more time to process his grief? No time, gotta go fast! Weirded out by how fast that paralysis subplot got resolved? No time. That cool fight between General Amaya and the Sunfire elf? No time to expand, gotta go fast. The first three episodes of Season 2 feel well-paced, balancing plot with character development, but by the fourth episode, it's as if the show suddenly realized it only has a handful of episodes left to cram in the rest of the narrative, and so the sprint begins.
There are so many moving pieces that it feels like the audience doesn't get enough time with any one plot. The Dragon Prince’s second season - which dropped on Netflix in February - shows the strain of a lore-dense show operating under false time constraints.
That it is doing so while laboring under Netflix's hard rules about season length is damn near a Peak TV miracle, one that I'm not sure The Dragon Prince can maintain. The fact that The Dragon Prince deals with deep themes on the nature of war, sacrifice, and family in family-friendly 26-minute chunks would be impressive for any animated show. Making new cultures out of thin air is no small feat, especially in a genre that consistently puts out stories with lore books dense enough to collapse matter. The meat of the story is much more morally grey than A:TLA.Įhasz's experience is crucial to The Dragon Prince’s high fantasy world. And, of course, there's a ton of freakishly adorable animals created by mashing together different Earth animals. The heroes and villains are not as cut-and-dry as they first appear. It takes place on a continent torn asunder by war where each faction draws magical power from a different element. Fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender will recognize some of the narrative devices utilized in The Dragon Prince.