HTTYD 2 is ten years old today, it was my first exposure to the franchise and despite its many glaring flaws i can't help but love it and hold it so close to my heart.
This scene is a great example of why.
I love it so much. It's a heart-wrenchingly beautiful reminder that as good as he is, Hiccup is not some perfect hero. He is still just a person, a flawed human being who has cracked under the pressure of his circumstances and is barely given time to grieve his fathers' death.
(I adore scenes like this — It humanizes characters so much more, and just adds to that layer of perceived realism.)
And you can see the regret on his face as soon as he says it. But in that moment he doesn't do anything about it; he's still processing Stoick's death, and he only snaps out of it when he sees Toothless is under the Bewilderbeast's control again and Valka has to hold him back from attempting to go after him.
What he said and did to Toothless there was a momentary lapse in judgment fueled by grief. And later, as he breaks Toothless out of the Alpha's control, you can see he feels terrible about it. About how, even if it was brief, he pushed away his best friend. And he loves Toothless so much.
The way he talks to him literally breaks me every time I rewatch it.
"It wasn't your fault, you'd never hurt him, you'd never hurt me."
"Please, you... are my best friend, bud. My best friend."
And when Toothless comes back he just looks so elated to see Hiccup.
Though, Something that's even crazier to me is the fact all this takes place over less than a week. Once he gets toothless back and Drago is defeated, he is immediately made chief. And with the state berk is in, he is given presumably no time to properly mourn Stoick, or to fully adjust to the presence of his mother.
(though I feel his and Valka's relationship will never be what it could've been. He knows she chose not to come back, and that is a blow to their newly formed and fragile bond that, as much as they love each other, is not something she can ever fully make up for.)
But at least through everything, since the beginning, the one real constant he's had has been Toothless.
They're friendship was built off a mutual feeling of out-of-placeness, then unconditional trust and unwavering loyalty.
they love each other so much it makes me wanna throw up
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Imagine looking at a character whose entire premise is that in every stage of his life, he's made every version of himself into someone that inspires people to such a degree that EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF HIM has people wanting to literally follow in his footsteps in some way or another.....
And coming to the conclusion that like.....the most important things about him are the sum of all his trappings. His entirely homemade developed from scratch could not exist if not for what he already was and brought with him BEFORE crafting this newest version of himself trappings, with his greatest trait throughout all of it being his adaptability; his ability and willingness to roll with the punches and not try to simply weather any opposition or changes to his life but instead reshape himself as needed to better fit INTO whatever new shape his life and the world around him takes. All while managing to carry the most innate, fundamental and necessary aspects of himself from one version to the next. Thus every single version of himself is different but simultaneously every single version of himself is also undeniably the same person.
The strength of this character, to me, will always be that he can be so many versions of himself, he can become so many things, all without ever actually losing or discarding any of the aspects of himself he considers most essential, the things he's not willing to lose or give up just to keep going. Finding that road not taken by most, usually because most never even think to look for it as an option. But one that he's always able to find because the one trick he's mastered in his tumultuous life is threading that needle of not just digging in his heels in an unproductive way but rather being selective about when and where he makes a stand and decides "this is not a thing I'm willing to compromise about" but here are places and ways I can and will change and evolve and adapt in order to make it possible for me to hold onto these parts and keep them as they are.
And that's why its always so mind-boggling to me that so many writers can't seem to think of anything else to do with Dick Grayson other than invent some new reason for him to just....not be that person, or to like just take the character whose most basic fundamental trait he's NOT about to compromise on is willingly giving up his spot in the driver's seat of his own life.....and make him just a passenger in his own life and stories.
Dick Grayson at age nine....at age nineteen...at age twenty nine....the one core thread running through all versions of him is the only way he's standing back and letting you call the shots for him or putting him on the sidelines in some way is over his dead body.
HOW he goes about that, what that looks like, who he becomes and what aspects of himself he plays up at some times and what traits he lets fall by the wayside at other times when they offer less in service to his primary goal here....that changes constantly. He changes constantly.
But those changes are almost always (or at least they used to be/should be IN MY OPINION) made with the intention of keeping certain things about him or his life as consistent as possible.
That's the duality of Dick Grayson that I'm here for. The inherent contradiction of him that COULD allow for endless conflict and breaking new narrative ground in all sorts of ways if mined properly:
His eternal willingness to compromise....but only ever in pursuit of doubling down on the ways he's not willing to compromise.
Forever walking that tightrope in ways that only a kid born and raised in a circus could ever hope to.
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