This page is specifically for YMMV concerning the first How to Train Your Dragon movie released in 2010. For the franchise in general, click here.
- Adaptation Displacement: Due to the film's enormous popularity, the book isn't very well-known about in comparison. note
- Award Snub:
- It came out the same year as Toy Story 3 and got overshadowed come award season. At least, it did come out on top for the Annie Awards.
- Losing the Academy Award for Best Original Score to The Social Network.
- Complete Monster: The Red Death is the dragon "Hive Queen" of the archipelago, and is perhaps single-handedly responsible for all hatred of dragons throughout the archipelago. Enslaving countless dragons to its will, the Red Death has forced them to raid villages, kill hundreds of humans, and sacrifice thousands of their own kind to satisfy the Red Death's gluttonous desires, promoting bloody war between humans and dragons for centuries. The Red Death is quick to punish any dragons that do not properly serve it by eating them alive, and when the army of Berk arrives to stop its evil, the Red Death strands them on its island so it can slaughter them all in a flaming frenzy.
- Fan Nickname: At the Sticks and Stones forum, the posters there have nicknamed the Red/Green Death the "Christmas" Death since no one really knows whether it is "Red" or "Green" since both movie and book disagree on that issue.
- Fandom-Specific Plot:
- People like to speculate what exactly would have happened if Hiccup and Toothless actually left without Astrid there to interrupt that plan, both seeing what Hiccup and Toothless are up to in the wider world in that allotted time and seeing what would happen to Berk without Hiccup there.
- What would happen if Stoick had not interrupted when Hiccup was close to taming the Monstrous Nightmare?
- Dark Fics prefer to have Hiccup treated as a traitor by the Hooligan Tribe shortly after being outed as a Dragon Rider and being made an outcast, Hiccup Jumping Off the Slippery Slope from the Trauma Conga Line.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- During Hiccup's sarcastic imitation of Stoick he complains that his father always wanted "An extra large boy with beefy arms, extra guts and glory on the side. This here — This is a talking fishbone". It seems hilarious at first, until you watch one episode in TV series and then near the end of the sequel. First, in the Riders of Berk episode, "Portrait of Hiccup as a Buff Young Man", Stoick thinking the painting of his son as bigger and buffer than he is better than how Hiccup really looks sadly confirms Hiccup's rant, and it just crushes Hiccup, who's already a major "Well Done, Son" Guy. Second, the sequel reveals that Hiccup was born prematurely and it looked like he wasn't going to survive.
- The Training Montage can be rough too after the sequels, since the captured training dragons become the students' beloved mounts. It's jarring seeing Astrid inches from putting an axe in Stormfly.
- Toothless is captured in the first film after Hiccup stops him from firing at Stoick. The second film has a distressingly similar moment, though this time Stoick doesn't get out unscathed.
- Stoick angrily disowning Hiccup after finding out about Toothless suddenly makes more sense after the revelations in the second film. Seeing him tame dragons likely made Stoick think that Hiccup would turn out like his mother, or even become another Drago Bludvist.
- Inferred Holocaust: While there are no onscreen deaths, it's stated outright that there have been countless casualties on both sides from the war between Vikings and dragons, which is hardly surprising seeing that it's lasted for centuries before the film even begins.Stoick: They've killed hundreds of us!
Hiccup: And we've killed THOUSANDS of them!- While the Red Death didn't get the chance to wipe the Vikings out, we see many of them are very close to the ships as it sets them on fire, which should have killed a number of them, but all we see are some falling into the water.
- Memetic Mutation: An alteration of the Jurassic Park logo featuring Toothless and the phrase "USELESS REPTILE."
- Moral Event Horizon: The Red Death shows itself to be the vilest dragon to have appeared in the DreamWorks franchise when it's revealed to have enslaved countless dragons and sent them off to war against the Hairy Hooligan Tribe for centuries, resulting in thousands of its own dragons and hundreds of Vikings dead, all because it refuses to get its own food.
- Narm Charm: According to the DVD commentary, the scene where Astrid interrogates Hiccup about his Level Grinding before finding Toothless was supposed to be funny. The writers found the scene hilarious, but test audiences found Astrid showing up a few feet from where the dragon was hidden, about to discover Hiccup's secret, agonizingly suspenseful (which, the writers admit, was a good thing).
- Signature Scene: The first time Hiccup flies with Toothless. 10 out of 10 fans will agree, the most legendary moment in the entire film.
- Strangled by the Red String: Astrid's feelings towards Hiccup can come off looking like a complete 180, going from a jealous training rival to showing romantic interest after sharing just one flight together on the back of a dragon.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: This film has been hailed as one of the finest creations of a 3-D Movie ever made, with the visual enhancement making the flying (and falling!) scenes all the more enthralling, on top of the conventional cinematic artistry.
