How to Re-evaluate Your Dragon
Spoilers, obviously. This post is (almost) exactly what you're expecting.
“This is Berk,” I mindlessly mumble aloud as I scrub lemon juice and garlic off my plastic cutting board. The garbage is full; I should take out the trash soon. I return to my desk to watch the movie with my salad in tow. “Something, something,” I say, pulling out the chair to sit on, “Meridian of Misery.” I lick lemon pulp off my fingertips, but they’re still sticky, so I stand back up to wash my hands. I leave the room without bothering to pause the video; I hum the music to the bathroom sink. Just as I re-enter my room, I hear familiar, dramatic silence from my laptop and smile. I love this part. “Dragons.”
How To Train Your Dragon has been my favorite movie since age seven. I’m not sure how I first came to view the film— I definitely didn’t see it in theaters, so we must’ve gotten the DVD from the local Redbox or from Netflix’s renting program— but it was instant adoration from day one. I was, as I have detailed upon extensively on this platform, a very particular kid; it was a shock for me to find any media at all that resonated with me. I liked to feel dignified in my interests. This is why I preferred books, especially those above the school-sanctioned reading levels of my peers. For me to enjoy a movie made for children? Astounding.
Except it wasn’t astounding. How to Train Your Dragon is a movie written for me specifically.
I was a daydreamer as a kid, and not just because I liked to imagine stories; I kind of didn’t have another option. Something about me— probably the neurodivergence, but I didn’t know that then— set me apart from the people with whom I went to school. I spoke flatly and too often. I didn’t look at people in the eyes. I refused to brush my hair and bathed as infrequently as I could manage; I couldn’t wear fashionable clothes because they just weren’t comfortable enough. At school, I was made fun of or avoided entirely, with very few exceptions.1 I didn’t understand how the people around me worked. So, even as a really little kid, I just… withdrew.
I really wanted someone who got me. I’d lay awake at night imagining life in distant, magical lands where everyone did. I wandered around outside with the neighborhood cats, pretending we were best friends on an adventure. I created imaginary people with whom I could play at recess— I thought up stories about ghosts who haunted the kindergarten playground. I thought I was the only person in the world who had ever felt this way; sometimes I didn’t feel like a person at all, rather some sort of changeling or fairy who was meant for a different life than the one I was given.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the third: the son of a chief with a very clear vision in mind of what a viking’s life should be, perpetual outcast and awkward know-it-all loser. His schemes to fit in work only on accident and never as intended. No one ever laughs at his jokes; he is the joke.
And, however odd Hiccup is, he still makes a true friend.
Watching How To Train Your Dragon, I saw myself achieving my greatest wish. I was the same breed of oddball that Hiccup is; Toothless was the same breed of bestie I so desperately wanted as a kid. How To Train Your Dragon was, for me, hope. So, immediately, I was obsessed.
I watched it every night, sometimes twice or even three times in a row.2 I had a CD of the entire soundtrack and I’d play it on loop to fall asleep. My daydreams soared through the forests of Berk, over treetops, breaking clouds, cresting over stone pillars and dark ocean. I memorized all the movie’s dialogue completely subconsciously. I read all the books it was based on. I laid in the grass at recess and looked for huge reptilian shapes in the sky; I drifted away staring out car windows, imagining my very own dragon3 flying alongside me.
I was eleven when How To Train Your Dragon 2 made its way into my household. My twin and my dad sat down on the living room couch to watch it together on the new TV; I sat at the family computer, half-listening. Every so often, I turned around to look at the screen, then turned around again when I saw Hiccup, my guy, my me, looking unfamiliar. Astrid, too. They were just different. Something was off. I wasn’t engaged even for the big dramatic death scene with Toothless and Stoick. I shook it off like rainwater from an umbrella and went back to playing Animal Jam.4
So, for years, I haven’t liked How To Train Your Dragon 2. I know this is a controversial take; almost everyone to whom I’ve spoken about the series has expressed their belief that the second movie is undeniably the best, the most hard-hitting, the most powerful. My adoration for the first has never left me, not even for a second—I am the proud owner of a worn Toothless Pillow Pet who’s stuck with me through four years of high school and two of college. But I just did not connect with the sequel.5
Until this Sunday.
It had been a busy week, and a busier weekend. Homework, friends, homework, cleaning, homework, you know the drill. While making dinner that Saturday night, I indulged in my tri-annual HTTYD rewatch as a refuge from what I’ve just been calling “the everything,” and for the first time I thought I should give its sequel another shot.
I dusted off the old full-series-special-deal-Walmart-bargain-bin DVD case— which I of course had ready to go in case they ever removed the first film from streaming— and popped the second disc into my cheap little USB DVD reader. I expected disappointment from the very moment I pressed play, cynically setting up my scrapbook and collage materials just so I’d have something to do other than focus on the movie.
And I have never been happier to be wrong. It started out as a begrudging admittance. Okay, yeah, I thought as Jónsi’s “Where No One Goes” played over the title sequence, the music is pretty good. And the animation is a little better than the first one. But pretty quickly, the good became easier to find. Oh, I wouldn’t know what to say to that either. I wouldn’t want to be chief. I’d work it out peacefully with the poachers. I’d come up with a plan like this. I’d say the same things. I’d do that, too. I’d do that. I’d do that.
I sat and stared in shock at my laptop screen when the credits rolled. How To Train Your Dragon 2 is a damn good film. Why didn’t I care about it as a kid? Why didn’t it matter to me?
My best guess is just… I was eleven.
I know that’s kind of a simple answer, but I mean it. I was eleven. I was still the same kid who’d found solace in First Movie Hiccup— I was still lonely and alien and awkward. I loved How To Train Your Dragon because it gave me hope, but that hope wasn’t fulfilled for me. I was still waiting on my Toothless. Growing, but waiting.
Second Movie Hiccup had left me behind. He was older, but that wasn’t the only thing. He’d found his footing with a solid group of people. He wasn’t an outcast anymore. His problems were less concrete than mine: nuanced and weird and human in ways I didn’t quite understand yet. I still didn’t feel human at all, much less adult, much less mature. Hiccup had been thrust into a world of responsibilities and duties and business I wasn’t privy to yet. I was stuck on the very first step. Second Movie Hiccup was beyond me.
I’m twenty now. That was one of the first things I noticed watching How To Train Your Dragon 2: that I was the same age as its protagonist. At first it was just a fun little coincidence, but its novelty wore off as the movie went on. Because I realized that somewhere along the line, somehow, I’d grown up, too.
I have lovely friends— people I genuinely cannot imagine my life without. I’m still a little shaky on how I managed that, but regardless of the how, it’s here, and I have it, and it’s good. My problems have evolved beyond schoolyard isolation; now I’m worried about burnout and what’ll happen to the community I’ve built after college and getting all the things done that I need to get done and managing to live in a world where now I know I belong, but still don’t feel exactly like that. I’m an adult. There are expectations upon me. It’s easy to forget how tough that is to navigate; we push through and we deal and we move on and we try not to recognize the toll it’s taking on us to do so, or we avoid the problem entirely, or we try to do both.
That’s what I think Hiccup— Second Movie Hiccup— is doing. Both. And so am I.
Next week I’ll be twenty one. I don’t think I’ll be too different, just on principle. I have the same messy hair and green eyes as ever. I freckle in the sun. I am obsessed with dragons. But I do think life gets more complex as we go, and I think I will, too. Look at how much more complicated I’ve already become. I am a long way from the friendless kid watching How To Train Your Dragon past her bedtime on a school night just to have something familiar to focus on; now my world is so full the seams are ripping.
I have to navigate that, but I don’t have to do it alone. It might sound silly, I know, to say that a decade old kids’ movie could be a balm upon my troubled, busy, college student mind. But I don’t know. I still see myself in Hiccup, like a boneache that returns with every storm— from the awkward village kid longing for a friend to the soon-to-be viking chief struggling to balance his duties, I’ve been him. How could I stop now?
Those who were kind to me made less sense than the ones who weren’t! I was so unused to it.
I am not exaggerating. That’s actually how I know we must’ve gotten it on DVD rather than taped it on the DirecTV— if it had been taped, there would’ve been commercials, and I would’ve had them memorized, too. This is what happened with my other favorite movie, Disney’s Avalon High.
Her name was Leafy and she was Toothless but deep, forest green. I can still imagine her sitting on her haunches up in the rafters of my elementary school gym.
On an alternate account than my usual one, with the quite apt username toothlessthedragon56. I’m predictable.
You’ll notice I’ve avoided making any mention of the third How To Train Your Dragon film, The Hidden World. This is intentional. I have seen this movie once, in theaters, on its release day. It was fantastic and devastating and I am not ready to watch it again, much less write a whole blog post about it. That’s a story for another time.
good post 👍