(no subject)
It's that time again! Sera writes essays on childrens' movies instead of studying, mark II. This SHOULD cover some of my thoughts and feelings about Toothless's development over the course of the movie, as well as some dragon headcanon. We'll see how well I actually manage that. THERE ARE MAD SPOILERS.
The relationship between Toothless and Hiccup is obviously the most central one in the movie, but for all their beautiful bromance, I honestly don't feel that friendship was the main theme that the creators were shooting for. The thing that all the subplots of the movie came back to in the end is relatability; empathy, you could say, but I like "relatability" better for this. All of the conflicts revolve around this concept! Astrid can't understand Hiccup, can't see the Viking way of life in the way he acts, until he actively drags her into his world. Stoick specifically focuses on the way he can't find any working comparison between his own childhood experiences and Hiccup's, and Hiccup struggles with feeling that the whole Viking culture is something he can't relate to. And, of course, there's Hiccup and Toothless, and Toothless's issues with humanity. The dragonbro and vikingbro friendship is great, and everyone loves it! But the pivotal moment in the movie, what started everything, was when they somehow manage not to kill each other the first time they meet. And that moment was all about being able to relate to the other party, without anything of friendship in it yet. When asked what happened there, Hiccup says it flat out: "...he looked as frightened as I was. I looked at him, and I saw myself."
How To Train Your Dragon is at its heart a story about learning to see yourself reflected in other people, and their feelings reflected in you. Toothless's journey to relate to humans in general and Hiccup in particular follows this theme like everything else.
Anyways, I play Toothless with some assumptions about him and dragon society in general in place.
Things we know about dragons because we see them: they brought food to the Red Death or were eaten themselves, they lived communally in a crazed mountain honeycomb that gave the animators headaches, specific dragons had specific roles when raiding humans, individual dragons scuffle between themselves like any other animals (clear challenges and threat displays!), individuals are capable of and willing to fight the Red Death, and individuals can find their way back to the main nest by following some sort of (probably aural?) signaling.
Things that are SAID about the dragons: that they act like a swarm of bees with the Red Death as the "queen."
This makes no sense, and the people who made the movie admit that it's basically a shorthand, so that the audience will understand the general purpose of the Red Death without it being really explained. It's still stupid! Bees can't survive without a queen, workers banding together with outside forces to kill the queen is nonsensical, and bees don't even navigate the same way; they use the sun. A direct hive comparison the way it's usually handled in science fiction and fantasy does not have room for the amount of intelligence and autonomy individual dragons clearly show. I kind of have to gloss over this, since there's no way to make it work that doesn't make me twitch, but the best I can come up with is that the Red Death got introduced into the dragons' island and society at some point and a kind of worship thing got built up around it. Presumably, the dragons that didn't like this moved to start new colonies on other islands... until the Vikings moved in! Then they had to consolidate again, and turn to raiding to keep the Red Death satisfied and all of them alive.
Without the Red Death, the dragon colony struck me as more batlike than anything else: tons of dragons packed into a large communal space, hanging (sometimes actually upside down!), roughly grouped by breed, and willing to come chill somewhere else (like Berk) if invited to do so.
Night Furies in particular seem to have a pretty specific role in dragon society, at least in the attacking Vikings part of it! They are a terror weapon. It's explicitly stated multiple times that no recorded human has ever seen a Night Fury and lived to tell the tale. This is scary, but it's also an exaggeration of a simple fact that makes perfect sense: Night Furies don't come down where people can fight them directly. Right at the beginning, Hiccup says it: they don't steal food. What they do is fly overhead while it's still too dark for anyone to see them, make a terrible shrieking sound, and then rain explosive plasma death from above on the Vikings' fortifications while swooping past at very high speeds. "The unholy offspring of lightning and death itself"? Sure! Easy to go toe-to-toe with Viking style, or even see? Not so much! It's probably very rare for a Night Fury to actually get a good look at a human up close. The fact that they understand abstract concepts like "weapons are dangerous" is a testament to dragon intelligence and whatever communication they have between themselves. Among other dragons, Night Furies seem respected but not feared, which makes sense; they have less raw physical power and size than some of the other dragons, and no venom, though they do have aerial speed, heavy firepower, and an unusually high shot limit. Provoking them into trying to explode your face or fighting with them in the air is probably a bad idea, but fighting them on the ground when they're not trying to flame at you wouldn't be that scary for another dragon... so the Terrible Terrors are willing to stand up to a Night Fury in a good mood a little, and the Monstrous Nightmare in the ring keeps on going after Hiccup until Toothless makes it clear he's not going to back down from greater size. (I find it telling that something that sets itself on fire for fun decides to end the conflict before Toothless gets mad enough to decide to start throwing plasma around.) As a Night Fury, Toothless would thus be pretty aware of his own badassery without quite being obnoxious about it.
This background brings us almost to that key moment of relatability. Toothless has been shot out of the sky! For whatever reason, he can't flame; my thought is that he's used all his shots in the fight with the Vikings and in panic at falling, and is too hurt and exhausted to replenish his supply of flammable gas. Dragons have to know even more acutely than their enemies that "a downed dragon is a dead dragon." He's terrified and fully expecting to die, to the point where he copes by making an asshole melodramatic gesture out of it and laying his head down to be stabbed. And Hiccup shocks him by not going through with it and killing him.
This is what changes Toothless's whole perspective, in my reading of the scene. It opens a window onto humanity's motivations that he doesn't fully connect with till the end of the movie, and still isn't entirely comfortable with in camp. Because when he whips around, newly freed, to pin Hiccup down in turn, he gets how the situation is reversed! He looks at Hiccup and sees himself, and lets him go with nothing more than a scare, clearly confused and frustrated and angry. That inspiration of "oh, he's as scared as I was" is what he can never quite get out of his head in his dealing with humans, that sudden understanding that the two species feel the same feelings. He can also never forget that Hiccup is the one who opened that window first of the two of them; if Toothless had found Hiccup tied up and helpless in the woods, he'd have killed him. That potential for unsupported leaps of empathy is why it's Hiccup who's the hero of the story.
Obviously, that crazy emotional rollercoaster there was what made the shift in Toothless's views on humanity possible. They didn't change on their own! I don't think Toothless realized how much he cared about Hiccup till the scene where he clawed his way out of the cove to go fight the Monstrous Nightmare for his sake, and he still didn't manage to generalize his feelings about Hiccup to the rest of humanity until after he'd nearly drowned. Toothless is really goddamn tsundere, okay. His first reaction to Hiccup's continued existence is to glare at him; perfectly logical, since they'd both threatened each other with death at their last meeting. But even after they go through their process of being curious about each other and bonding, the end of the "forbidden friendship" scene is... Toothless being patted on the nose for the first time, and then narrowing his eyes in this clear "screw this HAVING A MOMENT thing" expression, and taking off again while Hiccup stares at his hand. When Hiccup puts the prosthetic tail on him for the first time and yells "I did it!," Toothless gives him an annoyed look and flicks him off into the water, not realizing that he's sabotaging the rest of his flight by doing so. He doesn't want Hiccup to be part of his success! ...then it turns out that Hiccup has to be, but fine, he'll still give the stupid Viking disgusted looks when he's trying to work stuff out and practice, or show off to his girlfriend. It seems like it's how he keeps his pride. When he realizes that Hiccup's in trouble in the training ring, he's upset and worried enough to get out of the cove when he couldn't do it before for himself, though he was more injured then - he's worried about him as a friend as well as his ticket to the sky, though he doesn't seem to acknowledge it till he backs down from Stoick for Hiccup's sake.
Stoick's a kind of important thing for Toothless too, because at first, he doesn't generalize his experience with Hiccup to the other Vikings. He doesn't get them at all! When they come rushing into the training ring to fight him, he's clearly keeping them away from Hiccup, not realizing right away that they're after him exclusively. He probably would've killed someone if it hadn't been for Hiccup's obvious anguish, there, and I'm pretty sure his resignation on the boat was only because he had a strap around his head to keep him from opening his mouth to flame, even if he might've spared their lives for Hiccup's sake. The second big moment of "oh, humans feel the same things I do" was when Stoick saved Hiccup from drowning and then went back under for Toothless. They had a moment! Toothless pulled Stoick out! Later, when everyone thought Hiccup was dead, they had another moment, because they both cared about Hiccup a lot and had been freaking out that he might die! Even though Stoick and Toothless would've previously killed one another without a second thought! Oh.
At the end of the movie Hiccup and Toothless can relate to one another even more, because of the mutual disability, and I liked the way that worked out. :|a I can't imagine that Toothless doesn't feel guilty about not being able to save Hiccup's leg, but Hiccup is responsible for and guilty about Toothless's tail being missing, and... yeah, they can relate to each other on every level of regret, in that. Toothless has obviously been holding a bedside vigil with the rest of the Vikings at that point for days, and is okay with them. THINGS ARE LOOKING UP IN THE CROSS-SPECIES EMPATHY DEPARTMENT.
In camp, Toothless does get that humans are creatures with emotional lives as complex as his own, he's just still very... :x about it all. It's honestly weird to be having "conversations" with other humans the way he would with Hiccup; the other Vikings don't strike me as terribly talky people. The presumptiousness of walking up and trying to pet him when they haven't earned that kind of trust bugs him, even though he's very into physical contact in general! And there's always that species barrier, and the fact that his feelings about humans are all mixed up with raiding them, and fighting them, and having other dragons killed and imprisoned by them, and losing his tail and the unassisted sky forever to the person who's become his best friend. But he loves Hiccup, and that makes it all :x instead of :E. MIXED FEELINGS, albeit mitigated by how vikingbro is always there for him. THEY WILL TAKE A WHILE TO WORK THROUGH.
I could talk a lot more about Hiccup here but I'm going to wait on that one because this is already over 2000 words.
The relationship between Toothless and Hiccup is obviously the most central one in the movie, but for all their beautiful bromance, I honestly don't feel that friendship was the main theme that the creators were shooting for. The thing that all the subplots of the movie came back to in the end is relatability; empathy, you could say, but I like "relatability" better for this. All of the conflicts revolve around this concept! Astrid can't understand Hiccup, can't see the Viking way of life in the way he acts, until he actively drags her into his world. Stoick specifically focuses on the way he can't find any working comparison between his own childhood experiences and Hiccup's, and Hiccup struggles with feeling that the whole Viking culture is something he can't relate to. And, of course, there's Hiccup and Toothless, and Toothless's issues with humanity. The dragonbro and vikingbro friendship is great, and everyone loves it! But the pivotal moment in the movie, what started everything, was when they somehow manage not to kill each other the first time they meet. And that moment was all about being able to relate to the other party, without anything of friendship in it yet. When asked what happened there, Hiccup says it flat out: "...he looked as frightened as I was. I looked at him, and I saw myself."
How To Train Your Dragon is at its heart a story about learning to see yourself reflected in other people, and their feelings reflected in you. Toothless's journey to relate to humans in general and Hiccup in particular follows this theme like everything else.
Anyways, I play Toothless with some assumptions about him and dragon society in general in place.
Things we know about dragons because we see them: they brought food to the Red Death or were eaten themselves, they lived communally in a crazed mountain honeycomb that gave the animators headaches, specific dragons had specific roles when raiding humans, individual dragons scuffle between themselves like any other animals (clear challenges and threat displays!), individuals are capable of and willing to fight the Red Death, and individuals can find their way back to the main nest by following some sort of (probably aural?) signaling.
Things that are SAID about the dragons: that they act like a swarm of bees with the Red Death as the "queen."
This makes no sense, and the people who made the movie admit that it's basically a shorthand, so that the audience will understand the general purpose of the Red Death without it being really explained. It's still stupid! Bees can't survive without a queen, workers banding together with outside forces to kill the queen is nonsensical, and bees don't even navigate the same way; they use the sun. A direct hive comparison the way it's usually handled in science fiction and fantasy does not have room for the amount of intelligence and autonomy individual dragons clearly show. I kind of have to gloss over this, since there's no way to make it work that doesn't make me twitch, but the best I can come up with is that the Red Death got introduced into the dragons' island and society at some point and a kind of worship thing got built up around it. Presumably, the dragons that didn't like this moved to start new colonies on other islands... until the Vikings moved in! Then they had to consolidate again, and turn to raiding to keep the Red Death satisfied and all of them alive.
Without the Red Death, the dragon colony struck me as more batlike than anything else: tons of dragons packed into a large communal space, hanging (sometimes actually upside down!), roughly grouped by breed, and willing to come chill somewhere else (like Berk) if invited to do so.
Night Furies in particular seem to have a pretty specific role in dragon society, at least in the attacking Vikings part of it! They are a terror weapon. It's explicitly stated multiple times that no recorded human has ever seen a Night Fury and lived to tell the tale. This is scary, but it's also an exaggeration of a simple fact that makes perfect sense: Night Furies don't come down where people can fight them directly. Right at the beginning, Hiccup says it: they don't steal food. What they do is fly overhead while it's still too dark for anyone to see them, make a terrible shrieking sound, and then rain explosive plasma death from above on the Vikings' fortifications while swooping past at very high speeds. "The unholy offspring of lightning and death itself"? Sure! Easy to go toe-to-toe with Viking style, or even see? Not so much! It's probably very rare for a Night Fury to actually get a good look at a human up close. The fact that they understand abstract concepts like "weapons are dangerous" is a testament to dragon intelligence and whatever communication they have between themselves. Among other dragons, Night Furies seem respected but not feared, which makes sense; they have less raw physical power and size than some of the other dragons, and no venom, though they do have aerial speed, heavy firepower, and an unusually high shot limit. Provoking them into trying to explode your face or fighting with them in the air is probably a bad idea, but fighting them on the ground when they're not trying to flame at you wouldn't be that scary for another dragon... so the Terrible Terrors are willing to stand up to a Night Fury in a good mood a little, and the Monstrous Nightmare in the ring keeps on going after Hiccup until Toothless makes it clear he's not going to back down from greater size. (I find it telling that something that sets itself on fire for fun decides to end the conflict before Toothless gets mad enough to decide to start throwing plasma around.) As a Night Fury, Toothless would thus be pretty aware of his own badassery without quite being obnoxious about it.
This background brings us almost to that key moment of relatability. Toothless has been shot out of the sky! For whatever reason, he can't flame; my thought is that he's used all his shots in the fight with the Vikings and in panic at falling, and is too hurt and exhausted to replenish his supply of flammable gas. Dragons have to know even more acutely than their enemies that "a downed dragon is a dead dragon." He's terrified and fully expecting to die, to the point where he copes by making an asshole melodramatic gesture out of it and laying his head down to be stabbed. And Hiccup shocks him by not going through with it and killing him.
This is what changes Toothless's whole perspective, in my reading of the scene. It opens a window onto humanity's motivations that he doesn't fully connect with till the end of the movie, and still isn't entirely comfortable with in camp. Because when he whips around, newly freed, to pin Hiccup down in turn, he gets how the situation is reversed! He looks at Hiccup and sees himself, and lets him go with nothing more than a scare, clearly confused and frustrated and angry. That inspiration of "oh, he's as scared as I was" is what he can never quite get out of his head in his dealing with humans, that sudden understanding that the two species feel the same feelings. He can also never forget that Hiccup is the one who opened that window first of the two of them; if Toothless had found Hiccup tied up and helpless in the woods, he'd have killed him. That potential for unsupported leaps of empathy is why it's Hiccup who's the hero of the story.
Obviously, that crazy emotional rollercoaster there was what made the shift in Toothless's views on humanity possible. They didn't change on their own! I don't think Toothless realized how much he cared about Hiccup till the scene where he clawed his way out of the cove to go fight the Monstrous Nightmare for his sake, and he still didn't manage to generalize his feelings about Hiccup to the rest of humanity until after he'd nearly drowned. Toothless is really goddamn tsundere, okay. His first reaction to Hiccup's continued existence is to glare at him; perfectly logical, since they'd both threatened each other with death at their last meeting. But even after they go through their process of being curious about each other and bonding, the end of the "forbidden friendship" scene is... Toothless being patted on the nose for the first time, and then narrowing his eyes in this clear "screw this HAVING A MOMENT thing" expression, and taking off again while Hiccup stares at his hand. When Hiccup puts the prosthetic tail on him for the first time and yells "I did it!," Toothless gives him an annoyed look and flicks him off into the water, not realizing that he's sabotaging the rest of his flight by doing so. He doesn't want Hiccup to be part of his success! ...then it turns out that Hiccup has to be, but fine, he'll still give the stupid Viking disgusted looks when he's trying to work stuff out and practice, or show off to his girlfriend. It seems like it's how he keeps his pride. When he realizes that Hiccup's in trouble in the training ring, he's upset and worried enough to get out of the cove when he couldn't do it before for himself, though he was more injured then - he's worried about him as a friend as well as his ticket to the sky, though he doesn't seem to acknowledge it till he backs down from Stoick for Hiccup's sake.
Stoick's a kind of important thing for Toothless too, because at first, he doesn't generalize his experience with Hiccup to the other Vikings. He doesn't get them at all! When they come rushing into the training ring to fight him, he's clearly keeping them away from Hiccup, not realizing right away that they're after him exclusively. He probably would've killed someone if it hadn't been for Hiccup's obvious anguish, there, and I'm pretty sure his resignation on the boat was only because he had a strap around his head to keep him from opening his mouth to flame, even if he might've spared their lives for Hiccup's sake. The second big moment of "oh, humans feel the same things I do" was when Stoick saved Hiccup from drowning and then went back under for Toothless. They had a moment! Toothless pulled Stoick out! Later, when everyone thought Hiccup was dead, they had another moment, because they both cared about Hiccup a lot and had been freaking out that he might die! Even though Stoick and Toothless would've previously killed one another without a second thought! Oh.
At the end of the movie Hiccup and Toothless can relate to one another even more, because of the mutual disability, and I liked the way that worked out. :|a I can't imagine that Toothless doesn't feel guilty about not being able to save Hiccup's leg, but Hiccup is responsible for and guilty about Toothless's tail being missing, and... yeah, they can relate to each other on every level of regret, in that. Toothless has obviously been holding a bedside vigil with the rest of the Vikings at that point for days, and is okay with them. THINGS ARE LOOKING UP IN THE CROSS-SPECIES EMPATHY DEPARTMENT.
In camp, Toothless does get that humans are creatures with emotional lives as complex as his own, he's just still very... :x about it all. It's honestly weird to be having "conversations" with other humans the way he would with Hiccup; the other Vikings don't strike me as terribly talky people. The presumptiousness of walking up and trying to pet him when they haven't earned that kind of trust bugs him, even though he's very into physical contact in general! And there's always that species barrier, and the fact that his feelings about humans are all mixed up with raiding them, and fighting them, and having other dragons killed and imprisoned by them, and losing his tail and the unassisted sky forever to the person who's become his best friend. But he loves Hiccup, and that makes it all :x instead of :E. MIXED FEELINGS, albeit mitigated by how vikingbro is always there for him. THEY WILL TAKE A WHILE TO WORK THROUGH.
I could talk a lot more about Hiccup here but I'm going to wait on that one because this is already over 2000 words.