#the wingmaidens httyd

[xstatic-12235]

Let's not forget the fact that they STAYED ON THAT ONE LITTLE ITTY BITTY BIT OF BERK??? THERE WAS A WHOLE ASS ISLAND THEY COULD EXPAND TO. WHY DIDN'T THEY???? Also, when they were getting attacked, WHY DIDN'T THEY SEND FOR THEIR ALLIES??? I'M SURE THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE THAN HAPPY TO HELP????

What things in HTTYD 3 do you feel like should have been different/fixed?

OH BOY DO I HAVE SOME OPINIONS ON THIS BRACE YOURSELVES

also thank you so much for asking me

let’s start off with the characterization. first, hiccup. where did that pathetic little freakazoid from httyd 1 go??? where did his sass go?? why is he just a cookie cutter stereotypical hero now?????? and i’ll talk about the fact that he just let toothless go later.

fishlegs- it’s been a while since i watched this movie, and if im being perfectly honest i don’t remember much about him in it. but im pretty sure he was kind of just there, yk? like he wasn’t as anxious or funny or nerdy or caring or sensible as he was before. he just seemed kind of bland to me.

snotlout. this fucker. this little bitchboy. he was done so fucking dirty in this movie. why was he so pathetic???? like yeah i get making him mess up occasionally cause haha funny comedic relief. but like. he’s not helpless???? like this is the kid who was literally trained to be the perfect picture of a viking his whole life. he’s the model viking. this is the kid who single handedly took down multiple full grown outcasts on their own island with nothing but a small metal rod and spite at the age of fifteen. he won every thawfest game for years! he’s a good fighter! he’s not useless. and his personality???? GOD. WHAT THE FUCK. why is he flirting with valka, someone who is much older than him and widely viewed (out of canon) to be his aunt??? why the fuck would he say “who died and made you chief?”????? he cried at stoicks funeral! yeah, maybe he would’ve been that much of a dick in the first movie, but there have been three shows, one movie, four(?) shorts, and multiple comics since then!! he’s has so much character growth that they just threw away because haha funny. also his beef with eret was completely unnecessary like even when he was beefing with dagur at least there was some previous thing that started it. his beef with eret just came out of nowhere??

and astrid. they just turned her into the stereotypical hero’s wife. where did her personality go???? and i get the symbolization of her hair progressively getting looser as she gets less uptight and chills out and matures but like… i miss her fuckass emo bangs. give them back. her whole character isn’t supposed to exist solely to support hiccup so why is that the only thing she does in the hidden world???? justice for my girl

now. the twins. oh boy do i have some opinions here.

they were done so fuckikg dirty i’m going to crash the fuck out like why. just why.

let’s start with tuffnut.

starting strong with the fact that he loses his own twin sister who shares a whole dragon with him. then there’s his whole beard thing, which like, isn’t entirely out of character but it sure as fuck wasn’t in character either. now let’s circle back to losing ruffnut. because WHAT THE FUCK TUFF. and then when he realizes she’s gone he just says he’s more worried about her captors?????? DUDE. BRO. MY MAN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TUFFNUT WHO FAKED HIS OWN DEATH JUST SO THAT HIS SISTER WOULDNT FEEL PRESSURED TO STAY FKR HIM. WHAT HAPLENED TO THE TUFFNUT WHO, WHILE STUCK IN A DRAGON TRAP IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, HAD AN ENTIRE IMPROMPTU CONVERSATION WITH BARF ABOUT HOW RUFFNHT MAY FEEL TRAPPED AS A WOMAN IN A MANS WORLD. WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THE TUFFNUT WHO LOST HIS GODDAMN MIND WHEN RUFFNUT GOT CAPTURED??? WHAT HAPLENED TO THE TUFFNUT WHO HAD WHOLE ASS HUNTERS RUNNING FROM HIM SCREAMING BECAUSE THEY CAPTURED HIS SISTER???? “that’s my sister out there, astrid. and if this goes wrong, and we don’t save her, i couldn’t live with myself” MY FUCKING ASS. just like snotlout, he was so uncharacteristically insensitive it was insane.

and RUFFNUT.

MY GIRL WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU????

they literally just made her a dumb blonde. she’s not that fucking DITZY. barring httyd 2, she had never previously been boy-crazy. she’s not a flirt, she’s not thirsty, she doesn’t care about romance. and the fact that she said she “never looks back”???? WHAT???? what happened to my girl who faked a breakdown to steal a key from a guard??? what happened to the ruffnut who is constantly giving hiccup inspiration for new inventions????? the fuck do you mean you never look back???? and the fact that she thought she annoyed grimmel into letting her go?? come on ruff. you’re better than that.

and speaking of grimmel. what was that weak ass villain???? dude was just a normal guy. even johann was more intimidating than him. you will never be viggo grimborn. bitch.

and toothless. TOOTHLESS. toothless.

first of all, they flattened his nose. he’s so squished now. on top of that, they rounded his head more, gave him much more prominent brow bones, and pushed his eyes entirely too close together and made them SO square. he’s supposed to look sleek and scary, not boxy and nonthreatening.

and why is he acting like a horny dog??? he’s literally never done that before. the slobbering, and dancing with his own shadow, and ditching hiccup without a second thought was so not like him, and not in a “he’s in love” way. it was in a “the writers don’t know the character” way.

and the fact that he left hiccup once he got his tail????? there was an entire short (gift of the night fury) dedicated to hiccup giving toothless an automatic tail and toothless saying he didn’t want it, he wanted hiccup. be so fucking for real rn dreamworks.

the whole ending was just stupid asf low key

[howtodrawyourdragon]

It will never stop being funny that Hiccup can be literally 6ft1 and still be considered a runt because both his parents are taller than him as are everyone he has beef with.

[dynamiilk]

A bunch of Snotlouts

[And a pair of kisses]

[zorosnavigator]

Live action Httyd but make it the animated serie Riders of Berk, Defenders of Berk and Race to the edge omg. all the characters we didnt see in the main movie trilogy. i have the vision okay.

[toasterdrake]

wingmaidens have entered the chat!! background characters will be as if in-game gerudo since it makes no difference (wingmaiden bg characters have no distinct personalities either way)

as the gerudo champion, i was originally going to make heather gerudo, but after thinking on it, i decided having her lose a set of parents and end up being taken in by someone else was more reflective of her canon story

to give minden relevancy (i love her) i thought it best that an actual gerudo be slated to inherit the throne from atali, rather than heather, who is hylian and has no blood claim

minden is a couple years older than heather, and they're super close. they're both warriors, but she held nothing against heather when the latter was chosen as champion. she's very proud of her cousin

[bi-bi-want-dragon]

11. What are your favourite locations in the Barbaric Archipelago?

I think I'd have to go with Vanaheim and Wingmaiden Island (yeah I cheated and picked two, it's my blog, deal with it lol) because I love that RTTE went so in depth with not only the characters, but also fleshing out literal culture and history for the dragons. The islands and their designs are so cool on their own, but the implications of what their functions are in dragon society are just so cool

[saturnniidae]

Dont get me wrong, I do love the twins but ngl it's kind of hard to like Tuff when he's got those rancid, unwashed white person dreads, and also when he's basically standing in the way of his sister getting virtually any development bc the constant prioritization of male characters and their inability to let women exist independently even for like one episode.

Like it's not as bad as some of the others, since they're siblings and are like a package deal, but it's weird to me how there's like several plotlines about how much Ruff loves her brother despite they say and such but all Tuff does is joke about how much he hates Ruff and it's weird there's never like an independent moment of him like actually reciprocating the care she has for him (no this isn't me saying they don't like each other, just that the writers are sexist).

Also rewatching rtte is so hard bc like the first episode Ruffnut has like no lines meanwhile Tuff is just cracking jokes every other minute and it's like rlly weird waiting for her to respond and like bounce off whatever he's just said but she's just silent like they fucking forgot she's there 😭

[westwiiind]

i love the Respect Women episode of race to the edge soooo much but WHY is atali australian

[autisticlittleman]

ONE of the Thorston twins is transgender and you cannot change my mind. Basically, there's a really common trope in Medias (especially animated ones) for there to be a set of twins who are incredibly similar in look, save for the fact that one is a girl and one is a boy. Ruff and Tuff fit this trope. every official source for HTTYD stuff refers to them as fraternal twins, but my brain refuses to see them as anything but identical.

however. identical twins are pretty much always the same sex. there are incredibly rare exceptions, but that's boring imo. so that brings up my point- in order for them to, realistically, exactly resemble one another and also be a girl and a boy, one of them is trans.

question is, which one? it could be either. my vote is for Ruff, but there's pretty much an equal amount of evidence for either. Ruff, at multiple points in RTTE gets mistaken for a man, which while that's not necessarily indicative of anything, it happens multiple times, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't happen to anyone else. in Tuff's case, throughout the latter two movies, he ties his hair in front of his face and insists that it's his beard, getting really upset when it's cut. damn near EVERY other viking man shown has some sort of facial hair, except for tuff. what're the odds that he just Happened not to inherit the gene?

anyways, I think it's Ruff for no reason other than that I don't usually headcanon many women as trans and I think they deserve this one.

[smallfrogpleasedtomeetyou]

So are razorwhips native to Australia orrrrrr

[cryptidstealingyourcreditcard]

i am a devout tufflout shipper but i gotta say in rtte season 6 ep 13 (king of dragons pt 2) snotlout saying “that’s my girl!” when minden shows up and starts kicking ass was so fucking cute

[howtodrawyourdragon]

I think the Wingmaidens are very underutilized in the Httyd fandom, like they could be so many things! A tribe of only women with a divine mission to take care of the Razorwhip population specifically with cool armor and bonded through some higher power to baby Razorwhips that can sense who the right person for them is and that have wings strong enough to carry a full-grown man?

They could be a safe haven, they could be a cult, they have a canonical connection to Valka, an accidental connection to Heather, there's an interesting aspect between them and the Dragon Riders as they're two groups with kind of the same goal, except the Dragon Riders fight for a wider range of dragons. Trans!Hiccup is a thing that I've been seeing (and exploring) a lot of as of late, what would the Wingmaidens view of him be? How do the Razorwhips know when their Wingmaiden wants to take flight and where? They can't even see and there is no obvious communication going on in the show itself, other than that whistling thing they do to call them.

So many possibilities!

[letstalkaboutit100]

HELP!

I NEED MORE SNOTLOUT AND MINDEN INCORRECT QUOTES! I LOVE THEM!

[revive-the-fandom]

Please tell us more about the dragon hunters idea as I have had several of my own thoughts about how to attempt to make them make sense and would love to hear someone else's :)

done! full thing here

after thinking about it they make a little more sense than i thought but Johann's twist still puts a spanner in the works sometimes. Edge of Disaster doesn't make sense if he only joined up between s4 and s5. but Dire Straits and Last Auction Heroes don't make sense if he joins up before that.

theres a couple of things that people have pointed out i didnt address, like there being no women. but i honestly think that's a sexism thing from the creators - they couldnt be bothered to go back and make new female models, then later realised that theyd made wayyy too many male ones so panicked and made the wingmaidens.

it's a problem thats existed since rob aired bc neither the Berserkers or the Outcasts have women among their ranks. (we see some women on Berserker Island in Somethings rotten on berserker island, but theyre not a part of the army).

berserkers, outcasts and hunters being all male ↑

this even extends into httyd 2 as there's no women in erets crew or drago's army

there are basically only npc women on Berk, the Defenders of the Wing (and thats only because they recycled the "hiccup and heather in disguise" models) and Wingmaiden Island lmao.

like i dont even count the warlord lady because wow we got 1 woman. like i dont even see other women in their armies

which is a weird fucking decision since there were warrior women on berk this whole time

like theres less than id like but they are there, its a trend not an exception.

but for the in canon explanation tho, i think that maybe Dagur attempted to take the Berserkers backwards a bit, and maybe put all their women on defense instead of aggressive positions. he undid 50 years worth of peace with Berk because he felt that the berserkers had lost their edge, so he probably reversed some of the laws his dad made too.

I guess since the Outcasts are all criminals or descendants of criminals they might have some kind of civil war between the genders? or civil agreement to not live together. because i imagine theres quite a few assholes living there and generally historically women have been the target of said assholes??

as for like eret and drago and the warlords i guess the Archipelago is more isolated and has more progressive rules about women than the rest of the world.

the Hunters might have a more traditional view on women. i think that they have various settlements (ports, farming villages, etc) and thats where their women are. one of the biggest jobs for viking women irl was making the sails of the ships, so i think that probably took up most of the Hunter women's time.

Heather joining them might have been forced by Dagur, who at least recognises that Berk has produced a lot of formidable women warriors and possibly had to reassess some views after getting his ass handed to him by Heather and Astrid.

but again, the more likely reason is that the creators are just sexist.

i hope that was interesting at least lol

[evilwriter37]

After looking at the Httyd Map, Dragon Hunter and Calder Island (Mala) seem to be very close. Both are up north of Berk. Correct me if I am wrong.

I searched this up because I saw an ask about it months ago in your ask hashtag and I rewatched some episodes such as the one where Throk wants to marry Ruffnut and Midnight Scrum. (I think we can agree that Midnight Scrum really traumatized us in some way)

Do you think, since Calder Island and Dragon Hunter island are so close together, their customs are similar about the whole Bride napping/ kidnapping?

They know the concept of Bride napping and bounty, I don’t doubt that. Calder Islander is filled with people that know how to be stealthy. Kidnapping their brides is their love language / custom.

Being kidnapped as a Bride in Calder Island is just said and done, no need of any dowry. Throk learns to give to Ruffnut instead of just “I will lift her from her feet, put her over my shoulder, and return with her to my island, where she will live out her days as my trustworthy wife.”

I’d imagine it’s the same for the Dragon Hunters, since they themselves kidnap beings (such as dragons) for a living. Again, no doubt they know what they are doing when it comes to kidnapping. So I guess it’s a headcanon to say I’d imagine Viggo doing it as well but since Hiccup is far, it’s a straight up bounty.

Throk does it traditionally to go himself to retrieve the bride. Viggo is unconventional, quite aware that the customs are different since he is a traveling business. Viggo is Viggo, he’ll ask someone to do it.

Also Mala and Throk knew immediately about the bounty since the proximity of their island. Their clothing is also similar, black leather, likely in a warmer climate because their island seems heated by the dragons that are living and forced to live there. Plus volcanoes.

Kidnapping seems like a whole other translation up in the north of the archipelago.

I’m likely just thinking out of my ass for fun. I’m just wrapping my head around that Bride napping is canon in this universe, holy crap. I know there are worse things, but this one is wild, I’ll believe that cannibalism is a thing in Wingmaiden even if Mala said no. Those eyes can tell. But what do you think?

Hm, you know, I never thought about the Dragon Hunters possibly having bride napping as a custom. I feel like it would make a lot of sense if they did. I'm under the impression that Viggo also deals in the slave trade, given some lines in Last Auction Heroes. So, for his customs, bride napping would not be out of the question.

As for the cannibalism thing, I really, really think the Wing Maidens were pretending just to scare Snotlout into respecting them, or just because they felt he deserved it. I highly doubt that the Wing Maidens actually do that.

And yesssss, Midnight Scrum. One of my favorite episodes. It just made me so happy. Love seeing Hiccup getting whumped. I know Ryker said Viggo wanted to kill Hiccup himself, but did he? Did he really? 😉

[violet-moonstone]

HTTYD Modern AU Ideas (Small Town + Cryptids)

I'm always a bit perplexed when the interpretation of modern day Hiccup is that he would be wealthy...yes his father is a chieftain, but he's the chieftain of a tiny, rugged island without luxuries, even for the ruling family. The Haddocks dress and live in the same quality of clothes/lodgings as everyone else, and Hiccup isn't treated better than his peers. In fact, I feel like him being Stoick's son only highlighted his inability to fit in during the first movie.

Anyway, there's very little status distinction going on in Berk past Stoick having more decision-making power. And pre-HTTYD 2, we don't see a large population on Berk or a focus on luxury or convenience (we can assume that this is because the period between HTTYD 1 and RTTE take place during and just after a state of constant war against the dragons.)

Keep in mind this is while there are contemporaneous cultures in the franchise (Like The Wingmaidens and the Defenders of the Wing) that make Berk look rustic and provincial in comparison. And for a real-life comparison, you can look at the wealthy kingdoms and empires that were flourishing elsewhere in the world at the same time as Europe's Viking Age/early middle ages.

Modern day Stoick to me is a community leader (frequently re-elected mayor, town manager, sheriff, etc) of a tiny middle-of-nowhere town. With the mayor option, Hiccup would certainly be well-off compared to many of his peers, but much closer to middle or upper-middle class. Apparently a mayor's salary can be dependent on how big the town/city is, so there's a good chance Stoick is making an average salary anyway. Either way, I think he would be so frugal that even if they had money, Hiccup wouldn't grow up knowing about it until his teens.

I'm thinking modern day Berk is either the Midwest (because a lot of people in the midwest have nordic ancestry and that would be a great way to represent the americanized viking vibe we get from the franchise) or the Northeast because those forests are haunted af and definitely where you'd find a downed dragon that is the offspring of lightning and death. Either way I'm putting it in the States, because the dragon riders are very clearly American teens (+1 Canadian) with a vaguely Viking aesthetic. Maybe the mascot of the local high school has something to do with Vikings (A Berserker? maybe Berk and Berserker Island are merged here so we can get the Berk Berserkers), so the town has a bit of a viking fascination.

also i think it would be fun if the dragons in the modern au were cryptids or aliens. Maybe instead of having a feud that lasted for several generations, it was more like a recent series of disturbances, which much of the town initially responds to with skepticism (like making fun of Hiccup for having a cyptid sighting and trying to catch them) and then ramps up to aggression when the cryptids/aliens make themselves unambiguously known. Bonus points if it takes place in the 80s. So not quite a modern AU I guess, but closer than the 800s.