Berk's Forumvine

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Meanwhile, while Hiccup is going on a discovery quest, his female counterpart Astrid is busy rejecting orders and doing her own thing. After Hiccup's failed first and second attempts to try to find the villain Drago, he gets sidetracked by his encounter with his mother and lapses into inaction. Meanwhile, Astrid makes the totally independent decision to enlist the dragon trappers' help and/or follow them to Drago. Without that action, Team Peace might never have actually encountered Drago, the plot's third act might never have gotten underway, and Eret would never have switched sides to help free the dragon riders and defeat the bad guy.


As an aside: how much chemistry did Astrid and Hiccup have together? When was the last time you saw a romantic couple in an animated film have that much casual touching and body interaction that wasn't a deliberate setup for a meet-cute? Maybe Shrek? Maybe never. It was great.


Female sexuality is never shamed or repressed in HTTYD 2. Additionally, as ladygeekgirl points out in her smart take on the film, the women of DreamWorks, unlike the women of Frozen, actually have faces that are different from one another.

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In absolutely every other Hollywood version of the HTTYD 2 narrative, Hiccup's discovery of his mother's two-decade-long absence would have resulted in an explicit shaming of her choices and a prolonged "how could you abandon me?" confrontation that would probably have ended with her breaking down in tears and Hiccup's eventual acceptance and forgiveness of her inexplicable absence all this time.

Instead, Hiccup instantly and immediately recognized that his mom's choices were her own choices, and that they were obviously valuable and important. At no point did the narrative shame Valka for rejecting her role as a mother and a housewife. Instead, she not only got to make the coolest entrance, but basically was presented as the most unbelievably cool character we've seen in an animated film in ages

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Valka was never intended to be a serious physical match for Drago, nor should she have been, because the whole point of her character aligned with her son's is to personify the Viking nation's progressive anti-violence stance. Sorry that Valka was too busy working as a zoologist to become the vaunted warrior-hero-soldier that apparently makes a female character strong enough for you, Dissolve. Instead, she spends years subversively rescuing dragons from capture like a radical Greenpeace activist, and she is the one who leads the enormous dragon army into battle against Drago.

While it's true that she gets rescued by her husband, so does everyone else in her family. They spend the movie running around trying to protect each other: Stoick saves Hiccup, Valka, and Hiccup again; Valka saves Toothless, Toothless saves Hiccup, and then Hiccup and Toothless save everyone.

KentuckyWildcat

23 Jun 2014, 18:06

I guess it makes some good counter-points to that other article in places. Where I strongly disagree here is the portrayal of a mother abandoning her child as an unequivocally positive thing so long as the choice was her own. If criticizing that choice is considered "shaming", then maybe some choices deserve to be shamed.