Berk's Forumvine

Stoick's dragon is based partly on the design of a scarab beetle. Beautiful, and also interesting: How did the UAE audience take to that? Did you use a scarab beetle to relate to the people from that part of the world? Also, symbolic--Did you intend for the scarab to have some symbolic significance? For, I don't know, high-schoolers who will be writing papers next Fall and who need something fun to write about.

Does Toothless possess the ability to think in abstractions? When watching HTTYD2 (for the third time), I thought "Nah, they've gone and made him a pet" but then I realized that once again it was left up to interpretation. Toothless could be happily playing with a large icicle, or he could be drawing a flight path, as in "I've flown around here! And here!" Was that deliberate?

One of the reasons I'm so into the Dragons series is that as an autistic, I can study the facial expressions and the circumstances around their use, and get some insight into, and empathy with, some of the humans who are so mysterious to me. I'm serious when I said I'm going to take the "Forbidden Friendship" scene to an Autistic Studies professor. She studies autistic characters in literature and I want to get her take on Toothless as a metaphor for an autistic person.

This movie, I read that Cate Blanchett wanted to workshop Valka's character. After seeing HTTYD2, I realized that here is another character I can study, as a person who at least is out of practice with human communication. But then I remembered the piece of dialog indicating that Valka felt she was "different." Was the Valka character socially blind before, when she was on Berk? Is this another autistic-type? A reason I want to know is that the interactions between Valka and Stoick take on yet another dimension. And I can study these interactions keeping that dimension in mind.

Oh wait, this is supposed to be a question. Um, "What's my motivation"? Actually, any piece of information I can get about what's inside the character's heads will allow me to better read what's on the screen. So....um...how did the workshop go, eh?