How to Train Your Dragon is an excellent movie. It's cute and funny and action-packed and features Gerard Butler at about his hammiest. It also has Astrid, the lead female protagonist who is, for the first two-thirds of the movie, an awesome example of female asskickery in action. She enrolls in dragon-slaying school and is, by far, the most competent of all the students there.
Then the film's first major climax takes place (I shan't spoil any details for those among my unnumbered readers who have not seen yet seen it) and Astrid miraculously and instantly and surprisingly transforms from a cocky, smarmy badass to Generic Female Love Interest, and all of her previous skill is swept aside to make room for shoehorned “niceness” trying to pass itself off as character development, maybe. Designated Male Protagonist Hiccup (who I admit I found quite likeable, and whose character was never derailed) proceeds to carry the day and Gets the Girl at the end of it all. Oh, and there are totally cool dragons.
Now, people like happy endings; I certainly do provided it's genuinely earned and not some obvious legacy reward. But a happy ending does not necessitate having everything wrapped up in a nice, pretty bow and pairing off all the males and females into happily-ever-after couples. Why couldn't the movie have been about a guy, his dragon, and an awesome female lead who doesn't swoon for the guy?
How to Train Your Dragon is not a movie about the budding romantic relationship between two (or more) characters. It's not a movie asking the sorts of existential questions we all face in our own romantic endeavors and exploring the psychological intricacies of True Love. Can a movie that isn't a romance/romantic comedy have a little bit of lovey-dovey goo tossed in? Absolutely, if it allows the viewers to glean more depth in the characters in question, like in, say, Up. HtTYD just throws in the Astrid-Hiccup pairing and the verisimilitude of Astrid's motivations goes up in smoke. It doesn't provide any insight to her character; we know from the opening scene that Hiccup has the hots for her, and that she can't tolerate him in the slightest, and that she is impossibly irked as he consistently one-ups her in training. Then something happens and we get a girl who, while admittedly still Tsundere, finds herself d'awwwing at Hiccup and his spiffy dragon ride, their previous rivalry forgotten entirely. Oh, and the other (characterized far, far more one-dimensionally) students don't react to this sudden change at all.
Maybe I'm being a cynical hardass about all this (Ok, I am a cynical hardass about all this). How to Train Your Dragon is a fun, pretendland family film and (probably) shouldn't be torn to shreds because its writers decided to throw the protagonist a, heh, bone. The movie's main message is one of understanding the motivations behind actions, avoiding stereotyping, and being open to the possibility of questioning strongly-held traditional beliefs. It, however, could have done just fine without the apparently necessary romance. Toy Story did splendidly and is a timeless classic in the same genre, and it didn't need a love interest to achieve that.
Not every single story needs to provide True Love, people.
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