jeongyeon @rheaterra - Tumblr Blog

your astrid headcanons omg YES!!! the thing about astrid being mean i agree 100% because it's so weird to see people trying to switch it up by saying she was not. She was and THATS OKAY it makes her more of a person in httyd 1 (which is why i lowkey have beef with rtte because they stripped my girl of her personality 😭)

your headcanons were super entertaining! i'd love to hear if you have more headcanons about her!!

the thing abt ppl saying Astrid was never mean that rlly floors me is that it’s literally her arc in httyd1???? Like she hates and disbelieves hiccup & also changes her mind - and that was rlly the point? that hiccup’s empathy could move even the most stubborn parts of Berk & to act like she was never mean to hiccup or that she was just ambivalent or even nice to him the whole time undermines the story they were telling! she has to be mean for the story To make sense!! idk why ppl keep insisting she wasn’t or that she always liked hiccup it doesn’t make ur ship look better & anyone who actually watches httyd knows otherwise??

i actually had a whole bit abt Astrid, her meanness & rtte before i lost the original reply. i think rtte‘s problem regarding this topic is that it does let Astrid be mean but then also acts as if she’s correct for it (the way it does for hiccup too) and it’s so ???? she’s so needlessly cruel following hiccup’s lead, and never learns from it and rtte acts like it’s actually good she’s that way. its like god please challenge her. and when ruff does Astrid doesn’t rlly learn anything?????? it’s so frustrating. It’s abt the only emotion she’s allowed in the whole show cause otherwise she’s just hiccup’s arm candy with the personality of a plank of wood and it’s !!!!!!!!! fuck. when she gets to interact with the others she’s way more interesting & starts to develop some semblance of a personality.

ppl honestly need to let Astrid suck a little bit. Be a bit of a cringe awkward weirdo. she’s mean and she’s not got very good interpersonal skills. the scraps of a backstory we get for her point to something so interesting and complex & are so compelling and then nothing gets done with them and it breaks my heart. i know she’s not the main character but like that’s what the tv series sequels is for - exploring other characters!! instead we get whatever rtte is

i think astrid isnt Good with kids. theres been no evidence before that she is, in fact she’s shown at being terrible at dealing with kids (Gustav) so like why would anyone think she just magically would? astrid is capable of compassion and empathy, but she struggles with it & she struggles with understanding how to appropriately moderate herself for people around her (you see it all the time with hiccup - she’s always hitting him too hard, or pushing. She doesn’t pick up on his cues or try to moderate herself for him, and she’s never shown to have consideration for the rest of the gang). i think in the end she is a good parent, but she struggles with it a lot and that’s okay! she spends a lot of time asking her mama questions

i don’t think she’d get along with valka at all actually. Astrid values loyalty & Berk and valka fucked off for twenty years so I rlly think Astrid has thinly veiled dislike for Valka. Valka should be oblivious to it. I rlly like the made up Valka I have in my head who’s got no social skills from living by herself for 20 years. we deserved that instead of “guys stop relying on your dragons“ like what

I rlly like Astrid & snotlout being bros and calling each other by their surnames.

kingofthewilderwest

Your tags on the 'whose smarter' poll made me flashback to that episode of DoB. Final ep, I think, Cast Out prt 2? And anyway it literally ends with Snotlout (disobeying Hiccup) and acting recklessly with his plan. Hiccup tells him "You proved sometimes recklessness can be courageous" and I just remember being like "THIS from the kid who took on the Red Death on one dragon with a flammable tail fin. Like the similarity/hypocrisy got me--when Hiccup went after the Red Death he was a hero.

I love this. It's really about framing. The HTTYD series provides us certain narrative perceptions, lenses, by which they have us view the characters. Going outside the lenses to look at characters's actions more objectively, and there's that... bias... haha, yeah!

Hiccup constantly doing reckless things is treated as more permissible by the show's framework. His reckless and/or impulsive decisions are treated as gutsy, genius solutions rather than haybrained schemes. And Hiccup tends to be rewarded for those wild plans narratively by having those succeed.

Even though Hiccup gets semi-called out on unnecessary recklessness in RTTE - like testing a flight suit - it's portrayed narratively to viewers as humorous rather than flaws to learn from (as per Snotlout). And when Hiccup makes mistakes, the narrative treats feedback from "equals" like Astrid or people in greater authority like Stoick as what we viewers should care most about. It's not that Ruffnut, Tuffnut, or Snotlout lack feedback about Hiccup's decisions, but it's not treated as criticially. We're not "meant" to reflect on it, most of the time.

"You just proved sometimes recklessness can be courageous" is so much a part of Hiccup's choices that the phrase could be etched on his tombstone. But it's Snotlout taking a moment of gumption that's called out as so risky it's potentially "dumb." And frankly, across the entirety of DreamWorks Dragons, Snotlout brings up many points of prudent caution.

There's a hierarchy the narrative gives us - Hiccup the leader, Astrid and Fishlegs as "more competent" members of the group, and the twins and Snotlout as "less competent" members of the group (our comedic relief). The narrative wants us to sometimes treat this as a gang of equals, especially by RTTE, but the way conversations and situations get presented, solved, and saved means that this internalized hierarchy never leaves. That means that who the audience members take most seriously gets impacted.

I mean, as you said yourself, it's Snotlout disobeying Hiccup - a word that carries authority, as Hiccup is the leader of the Dragon Club during the early DreamWorks Dragons series. In HTTYD and HTTYD 2, Hiccup disobeying Stoick, while ultimately resulting in good ends, also carries consequences. Hiccup disobeying Stoick resulted in the village nearly getting killed. Hiccup disobeying Stoick brought Drago's attention onto them. But by the TV series, I think Hiccup's disobedience is usually seen as a good (by my shoddy memory), but Snotlout's disobedience is seen as him not being "as good as" Hiccup - but is that actually, objectively the case, outside the show's framing?

I don't have the Freaktastic Knowledge I did in ye olde days of analysis where I could list off three hundred specific examples to prove my points, but this is my memory impressions of the series. Snotlout balks at Hiccup's plans lots of the time - and he doesn't not have a point. In another series, Snotlout would be correctly identifying three hundred things that could go wrong, might have gone wrong, or will actually, in fact, go wrong. But Snotlout as a comedic relief character, and then a defiant character opposing Hiccup the Hero who comes up with the correct plan because he's got protagonist armor... means sometimes Snotlout's legitimate points get lost to viewers.

There's a reason why, even now, ROB's Defiant One's conversation between Hiccup and Snotlout still resonates clearly in my memories.

Snotlout: Oh, you are so smug! Hiccup: Me? Snotlout: Hiccup's so smart! Hiccup's so brave! He killed the Red Death! He trained the dragons! He's got the metal leg! Hiccup: Metal leg? That's what's bothering you? That's where you're going? Metal leg? Snotlout: No! It's everything the leg is attached to!

Snotlout made mistakes in Defiant One. Let's not forget that context. But while Snotlout yelling at Hiccup can be read as Snotlout not being "as good as" our hero Hiccup who saves the day... it strikes me because it shows the imbalance of treatment between Snotlout and Hiccup. "Everything the leg is attached to" is the prioritization of Hiccup and - by this point - Hiccup expecting to be prioritized.

Actually listening to Snotlout is a fantastic way to experience the TV series. He's bitter. He's grumpy. He's defiant. He's downer. But that's because he sees holes. He has a **PRACTICAL** side that butts heads with Hiccup. I'm someone whose thinking processes are similar to Snotlout - it's easier to shoot down a solution for its mistakes than come up with a new one - but it's an important role to have. In an actually existing friendship group, you need someone who's down to earth enough to make sure your out-of-the-box thinking friend (Hiccup) doesn't come up with something so wild it's not really going to work. We need an intelligence that sees holes. Otherwise, we start floating off into things that won't work as we expect them to, or adopting ideas that haven't been tested with robustness.

Snotlout's a legitimately smart guy. The fact that Astrid and the others shoot him down is partially because of his character, partially because sometimes he can be a dummy (as can we all), but partially because of their own flaws. Listen more to Snotlout, y'all. Some of Hiccup's plans work because Luck.

Similarly, we can talk about the framing of Fishlegs spewing facts (treated as providing information) versus the Thorstons spewing facts (treated as a novelty quirk rather than intelligence). Just because the Thorstons do it in a dorkier, more trollish matter does not negate the fact that they are BRIMMING, purely BRIMMING, with an ENORMOUS amount of factual knowledge! Does Fishlegs actually have more factual knowledge than them? No, it's just a different area. He's got concentrated knowledge on dragons. They've got in depth, niche knowledge of a large variety of topics. Fishlegs, Ruff, and Tuff are all dang smart.

From a meta standpoint, the twins's intelligence is treated inconsistently. But I prefer me my smart Thorstons who just have spacey heads, trollish senses of humor, and thrillseeking behavior.

saturnniidae

I love the idea of Berk being the closest inhabited island to Helheim's Gate/Dragon Island. Like while other islands in the archipelago certainly had their issues with dragon attacks, Berk got the absolute worst of it. Idk I was just thinking about when Hiccup says to Ryker in rtte: "if you leave now, you and your men won't have to learn what burning flesh smells like." And while I'm sure he does know, you couldn't really work in dragon hunting without witnessing casualties, he didn't grow up surrounded by the kind of constant violence the kids on Berk did.

The way it's implied they get such frequent raids I'm sure they've seen so many people they know die and had to wake up everyday knowing that it could be their last if there was even one slip up in their routines during the raids

Like the raids were so consistent and eventually predictable they must have some kind of routine for handling them but of course, human error, especially when it comes to literal kids being involved.

narrativecontradictions

Getting a collection going of snotlout being in absolute despair

neytui

Alright! probably some last redraw from the serie (maybe) but I really needed to get this image out of my head

Ep 5, Big man on Berk, when Fishlegs gets hypnotized and shows an escene where the rest of the gang all look like scared puppies and I love it cuz it's so out of character

the scene in question

glam-bam-thankyou-maam

Can we talk about how genius the Horrible Histories songs were. It’s a show for kids and they’re out there making parodies of Adam and the Ants, The Smiths, Eminem, David Bowie, Take That, ABBA… and they made them SO catchy and put in so much effort and for what?? The videos too?? I’m specifically thinking of the music video they made for The Thinkers, which they edited to make it look like a music video for a Monkees song… and the lyrics. Don’t even get me started on the lyrics.

“Can you imagine it? I’m the last Plantagenet!”

“More than fifty words to leave your lingo…” (in a simon and garfunkel parody)

“Roundheads, soundheads, witches-should-be-drowned-heads…”

“thanks to us, Rage Against the Machine…” (whilst singing a song about the Industrial Revolution and the peasants who revolted against it)

just to name a few examples.

those songs are my roman empire.

ghostpidgeon

Mikes ghost chart

kal8elle

By @ smallstarrrr on xTwitter

beyonce-knowles-carter

82 YEARS AGO - BATMAN DEBUTED FOR THE FIRST TIME Eighty-two years ago on March 30, 1939, Detective Comics #27 hit newsstands, introducing the Caped Crusader for the very first time in a featured story called “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.”

“And for all that fierce exterior, I’ve never met anyone who cared as deeply about his fellow man as Bruce Wayne.” - Amanda Waller, Justice League Unlimited, Season 2 Episode 13 (2005)