the only thing I absolutely hate about the httyd movies is that every off screen woman is strong built, fat and muscular viking women, but every woman that is part of the main characters is skinny... & I see why Valka has to be thin (wouldn't make much sense for Hiccup to be a twig if both his parents were jacked) and Ruffnut and Tuffnut are twins. But Astrid?!
Both of Astrid's parents have been shown as broad shouldered warriors, but we couldn't possibly make the main characters love interest fat! Dear God no.
So they'd rather tell us that these
two Hoffersons (a renowned warrior family, so it's not like Astrid just dieted. The Hoffersons were literally known to go absolutely fucking feral on the battlefield) had THIS DAUGHTER?!
singlemindedly focuses on whatever his Thing is at the moment (making weapons, making a prosthetic/saddle/etc for toothless, the map)
often looks at the ground/to the side when talking to people
not much variation in his tone of voice
fidgets and uses repetitive body movements to enunciate his emotions
he and valka felt a connection with each other they hadn’t experienced before bc both of them are autistic!! they totally click with each other and you can tell they both Love It and this is a thing i have experienced before
May I have the Hiccup is autistic info dump please? As a treat?
OK OK LETS GO!!! I’m going to put this under the cut because it’s really long, and I’m not gonna apologize for that, since yall asked.
First off it’s like: everyone on the spectrum is different so I understand that another autistic person might have a completely different take here or not see what I see in how I relate to Hiccup. But that’s exactly why I think he’s neurodivergent !!! For the most part a lot of my headcanon comes down the the base text in the trilogy.
We’ve got the in canon, outright shit that is:
-He starts off as an outcast for explicitly being ‘different.’ All the other vikings are constantly talking about his different way of thinking and a different way of interacting to the world around him and their inability to understand them socially isolates Hiccup. He’s been noticeably the odd one out from day one, even if no one can name why!!! God!! Felt that little man!!!!!
-And Hiccup spends nearly every day focused on dragons, and consumes the handbook for it all in one sitting researching the night fury. Then when he’s not working on understanding the dragons and taking note of what Toothless reacts to, he’s engineering different mechanisms to fly with Toothless.
-He fidgets constantly, and seems to have a hard time looking at people when he’s talking. I love the gifsets where people are showcasing all of his hand flailing and talk about how endearing it is in the tags. It makes me feel better about my own stimming. There’s also like... the entire opening conversation w Astrid from 2 that’s like “I don’t move like that” “you just did!” and I love it so much. A lot of the mannerisms I know were probably thrown in as animation dramatics but they are *my* mannerisms on screen so autism be upon ye, Hiccup.
-and when he’s talking he’s mouthy and often doesn’t realize he’s said the wrong thing until it’s too late! one of my favorite parts of httyd2 is when Hiccup is going on a tangent to Valka about ‘hey everythings gonna be great you can come back home and drago’s a nonissue and and and!’ and its a bit overbearing and Stoick literally has to say “slow down” so Hiccup can give Valka some breathing room. It’s like oh hey I’ve done exactly that before. (and I also hc Astrid as having ASD bc to me it makes their initial conflict all that more interesting and funny to me. Astrid’s like ‘hey wait don’t go against the social rules I memorized i worked very hard to be this socially competent’ and Hiccup stomps on that and is like “what?” It’s why their bond throughout the trilogy gets me so hard like we love to see two trans autistic vikings in love and winning.)
-On the topic of his social skills, it’s the way he explains things to other people too that reads as autistic to me. He doesn’t go out of his way to verbalize most of his affection for dragons or why he thinks other people should understand. He just taps Toothless’ head and is like ‘I can show you’ through the act of riding itself. It’s either that or he goes on longwinded rants that he himself struggles to follow, so he relies on the former more frequently.
And guess what his pattern-tapping and his unique abilities end up setting him apart from others but it’s also what brings dragons and vikings together!! It is a good thing!!! No one else can think like he does and maybe they don’t have to but the world is better for him existing in it!! What a wonderful story!!! A story that becomes stronger for me when I put in the lense of “not only does this autistic character not have to grow out of his own skin to be accepted, his neurodivergent traits are what make him brilliant, what make him so in tune with dragons!” and not in the like. gross autistic savant or hollywood autism trope u see in shit like Hannibal or Sherlock. Hiccup is just some guy, but he’s just some autistic guy, who can do great things! don’t get why autistic cis men will tell u our only icons are like. Rorschach and Rick Sanchez when Hiccup is literally right there/hj.
This is more sub textual than the rest of my points but there’s the aspect of Hiccup’s focus on *specifically* animals. It’s a common early special interest for plenty of autistics. Fun fact is the creator of pokemon, Satoshi Tajiri, was autistic and had a special interest on bugs-his love for them is partly why Pokemon exists! And My own animal special interests were elephants, pandas, and cats. It was such a big thing for me that still, every year for my birthday people still get me plushies of them. I was 6 when Httyd1 came out, but I watched it like. Religiously. And less so for any of the characters or story but because I adored Toothless, who I knew was based off of a cat without having to be told. So Hiccup being so quickly dedicated to this dragon... :) yeah. He understands dragons so much more than he understands people and Toothless and the rest seem to comfort him because being with the dragons forgoes stressful human conversation for just being content to be!! what a story!! what a grand thing!!
tldr: hiccup stims a lot, has clear moments of hyper-focus and special interest, and his social skills are parallel to my own. To me, his most base story reads as an autistic story.
Bad caps because I didn’t want to crop most of them but! Light Fury and Night Light concept art from The Hidden World Art book! Also, the top-down view for the two Furies’ wings on the glow pic is not included. I don’t know why.
also this garbage. you made a DRAGON but didn’t want her to be REPTILIAN because she’s FEMALE? are you out of your MIND?
Well you see “for a female, any incorrect line and the shape could go wrong very quickly” because females are all super soft, super perfect, portraits of simplicity.
“Dean kept saying we should think more like a Planet Earth documentary”
Which is why she’s nothing but one big boring stereotype, and doesn’t resemble any large animal that could possibly survive in a harsh Icelandic environment.
If they wanted the more “streamlined” look, they could have moved back closer to Toothless’s original design in Httyd, but made her slightly more narrow than Toothless with a less wide head than him. Would’ve looked fierce and elegant at the same time, honestly a really cool idea for a Fury subspecies! Maybe Toothless’s spots faded because he’s male, but her’s are still pretty clear! Maybe she’s got wings where the longest “finger” is the second-to-last one, instead of the last one like Toothless, giving her wings a badass and beautiful shape! But instead she’s just. Bubbly curvy round shapes with an inbred-looking muzzle and skin that’s made of sparkly gel.
↳ Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (How to Train Your Dragon)
“Yes, the world believes the dragons are gone, if they ever existed at all. But we Berkians, we know otherwise. And we’ll guard the secret until the time comes when dragons can return in peace.”
This isn’t meant to be meanspirited!! i’m autistic and i think that hiccup is the most unintentionally Coded™ characters i have ever seen. If you ask me about it I WILL infodump about this headcanon
Even if you go along with THW’s narrative and think it’s a fine movie, how can a fan look at the art book and not feel even a little bit upset about the things written in it?
There are multiple quotes from the art book like >
“Hiccup thinks of Toothless as a human friend but has come to the realization that he’s not. Toothless is a wild animal.”
“Hiccup building the tail for Toothless so he can fly solo is slightly naive.” “It’s like when your kids get the keys to the car.”
These quotes just feel like they’re just simplifying Hiccup’s and Toothless’ friendship and portraying it like a person and their regular pet animal when their friendship has shown to be so much more than that and contridicts all of the human-like intelligence that Toothless has shown in understanding Hiccup in the past two movies.
There’s also stuff about Hiccup being possessive of Toothless and the dragons in general that annoy me >
“ Though Hiccup has the best intentions in creating a dragon utopia, Grimmel brings up some interesting contradictions to this effort. Is it really normal for Hiccup to keep all the dragons to himself? Is he trying to change their true nature? Shouldn’t they live in the wild?”
As if the dragons are being kept on Berk against their will and they can’t just leave the island whenever they feel like it, the only dragon that can’t is Toothless and he intentionally destroyed the tail fin that helped him do that before and has never shown an interest in flying solo.
There’s also the quotes about the Deathgrippers, portraying the entire species as “bad” but at the same time having all of the Deathgrippers being held hostage by Grimmel and drugged into submission by him >
“This is the first movie where we got to think about creating “bad dragons.”
“When a bad human comes into the picture- someone like Grimmel- he can turn evil dragons into something even worse.”
You can’t say an entire species is “evil” just because of their diet and because they’re more aggressive than other dragons (especially if they’re now saying that the dragons are all just wild animals), in real life we don’t say that the majority of predators are evil just because they hunt and eat meat.
And then there’s all of the quotes about the development of the light fury and how they had to “make her feel like a female” and for some reason it’s “more difficult to create a female character than it is to draw a male. For a female, any incorrect line and the shape can go wrong very quickly.” They also didn’t want her to “fall too much into the reptilian category” despite the fact that she is a winged reptile.
Sorry about the amount of writing I wrote in this, a lot of these quotes from the art book just don’t sit right with me.
titsay
gummygunk
janainaart
theartofmadeline
