Hiccup and his village are Vikings - or so they repeatedly claim to be: “We’re Vikings. Two heads, twice the status” (Sanders and DeBlois). Ergo: Dragons are supposed to be primitive, savage and exotic to justify their murder: HICCUP (V.O.) (CONT’D) A Zippelback? Exotic, exciting. The differentiation between white people (and yes, every human in How to Train Your Dragon is white, which makes a black dragon sort of pop out) and non-white people in the real world too often leads to understanding the latter as threateningly primitive and barbaric, which sets an ideological basis for colonization and exploitation (Antor 35). An example would be when one of the youths of Berk, Snotlout, calls dragons “stuff”: “Why read words when you can just kill the stuff the words tell you stuff about?” (Sanders and DeBlois). Throughout the movie it becomes clear how hard the people of Berk try to contain the humanization of dragons. The first reference to dragons in this story is told with seeming irony: Hiccup compares the dragons to mice or mosquitoes, even though the dragons keep ravaging their livestock. As Hiccup himself describes it “the only problems are the pests” (Sanders and DeBlois). Despite being “twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death” (Sanders and DeBlois), it does seem quite nice. Hiccup, our main character, lives in the village of Berk. The mentions, however, have gone from academically acclaimed to dubiously religious, which is why I have decided to go over the topic once more, with feeling. ![]() Over the past couple years since How to Train Your Dragon first came out in 2010, there have been a handful of articles about its connection to postcolonialism. „Artwork from the Open Movie Workshop“ ‚Chaos&Evolutions‘ by David Revoy is licensed under CC BY 3.0 (we were not allowed to use pictures from the film without paying a lot of money to Universal Studios so bear with me)
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