#themistakehasarrived

[twiafom]

@themistakehasarrived totally! httyd 1 is fantastic overall and standalone, 2 has some issues but i love it dearly in spite of them, and then 3 is. definitely a movie! i'm sure we can all agree it's gorgeous but everything else is uhhh *handwaves* you know (i mean writing aside i think one of my biggest beefs is that valka looks like she got put through an insta filter HER FEATURES WERE SO INTERESTING IN 2!!)

totally agree with you about finding his footing, 3 was a year later and it felt like hiccup was still really struggling to balance things in exactly the same way he was in 2. i think the year long time jump was detrimental to hiccup's development in the sense that having that gap actually made it seem like he didn't grow at all. ahh man there's so much they could have done but i think they were very set on toothless leaving and everyone having funky dragon armour and everything else was supposed to support those two things haha

actually concept art had a pretty wide range of designs for people in eret's village, i would have looooved to see what they would have done with that, expanding the world in a geographic sense (excluding tv settings) more than just berk -> new berk would have been so cool. "we can never change people so all the dragons have to go" boooo make some allies! *throwing popcorn at screen*

[twiafom]

@themistakehasarrived yeah definitely a case of some really great visuals propping up a very weak story 😭 i can't complain too much about the peripheral characters because as much as i love the riders deeply, a movie only has so much time and they're gonna focus the most of it on the lead. the problem is they did that poorly 😖

absolutely! i know the tv shows have some fantastic additions to the world and setting, but i also get that they couldn't bring those into the movies because they need the audience to have the ability to parse the story without relying on supplementary material. however, having the ability to spend a whole movie increasing the scope of the world with hiccup forging dragon friendly alliances with other tribes, thus outsourcing the job of rehoming them to non-berk groups, and then NOT DOING THAT just seems criminal to me

i'll drop the pic of eret's village designs below, the time stamp in the corner says 2018 but valka's design looks pretty httyd2, so it could very well have been from 2 production because i think they did intend to show eret's village there. regardless, it would have been awesome to see in either

[twiafom]

@themistakehasarrived totally, i've only done 2d animation (badly) and was slow as hell the whole way through, plus my knowledge of 3d animation at all is limited. i think they might have been able to pull it off in a movie! maybe could have cut a few of the snotlout has a crush on valka jokes to make room and they'd be good. it does work and i get why they did it! not the ideal ending for me but eh that's why i write fic LMAO

@whaleshake for sure! i looove her spaghetti hair and crooked teeth, she definitely got smoothed out a lot in 2 which is disappointing. there was an almost claymation style to 1 that was a lot of fun!