Last week, the Dissolve issued a widely-circulated takedown of what it called the "Trinity Syndrome," specifically in relationship to the main female character in DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2. According to Dissolve, the Trinity Syndrome, named after the iconic character from The Matrix series, manifests itself in Hiccup's mother Valka as follows:
The essay goes on to allege that Valka is weak at several crucialShe’s wise. She’s principled. She’s joyous. She’s divided. She’sToo bad the story gives her absolutely nothing to do. . . . Valka is
damaged. She’s vulnerable. She’s something female characters so often
aren’t in action/adventure films with male protagonists: She’s
interesting.
just the latest example of the Superfluous, Flimsy Character disguised
as a Strong Female Character.
moments in the plot. Specifically it paints her as a damsel who needs
rescuing in the third act. It also goes on to give a list of other
characters who fail by this standard, including the much-loved Pacific Rim character of Mako Mori. Tumblr user quigonejinn has a compelling post explaining how important Mako Mori is from a cultural perspective, written in response to the existence of the Mako Mori test.
In responding to the Dissolve essay specifically, Tumblr user apocalypsecanceled rephrased Dissolve's argument:
It's important to recognize the way the Dissolve has reframed the narrative of Pacific Rim in order to recognize that that's also what it has done to the narrative of How to Train Your Dragon 2. Ironically, it's HTTYD 2's reframing and rejection of die-hard sexist Hollywood tropes—specifically the one about "fridged women" being used as fodder for manpain and male-centered violence—that makes it unique in the pantheon of children's films.
how DARE this woman of color have the unmitigated gall to show
vulnerability and make mistakes and be supported by other people? . . . .
how dare she not be an invincible dragon lady who nevertheless sacrifices herself to rescue her white dude savior???
There are full spoilers for HTTYD 2 from this point on, so be warned.
Five minutes into this film, which opens with Hiccup rejecting his
father's wish for him to be the new village chief, I was muttering,
"Make Astrid the new chief, make Astrid the new chief," under my breath.
I mean obviously that would be the best possible solution to everyone's
lives, right?
But because this is Dragon Rider, not Whale Rider, we
got a standard narrative about Hiccup's expanding heroism—sort of. The
unique thing about Hiccup's character in this film is that it doesn't
actually undergo any, well, development. While the narrative stresses
that people can change, Hiccup himself doesn't actually change all that
much. But that works for this film, because How To Train Your Dragon 2
is less a traditional coming-of-age arc about a single character
learning to accept responsibility and find his place, and more a
collective arc about an entire community evolving and changing together.
As a character, Hiccup is, perhaps, one of the most feminist and
progressive male heroes in film history. He's a character who
consistently rejects, over and over again, the idea that violence is
ever a solution in situations of conflict. He's a character who actively
practices empathy and, of course, active conservationism. He's a
disabled character who not only adapts to his disability without ever
losing anything that makes him amazing, but sees it as a thing to be proud of, to celebrate as something that makes him special and gives him more in common with his best friend.
Meanwhile, while Hiccup is going on a discovery quest, his female
counterpart Astrid is busy rejecting orders and doing her own thing.
After Hiccup's failed first and second attempts to try to find
the villain Drago, he gets sidetracked by his encounter with his mother
and lapses into inaction. Meanwhile, Astrid makes the totally
independent decision to enlist the dragon trappers' help and/or follow
them to Drago. Without that action, Team Peace might never have actually
encountered Drago, the plot's third act might never have gotten
underway, and Eret would never have switched sides to help free the
dragon riders and defeat the bad guy.
As an aside: how much chemistry did Astrid and Hiccup have together?
When was the last time you saw a romantic couple in an animated film
have that much casual touching and body interaction that wasn't a
deliberate setup for a meet-cute? Maybe Shrek? Maybe never. It was great.
There's also the glorious casual onscreen display of Ruffnut's sexuality:
Female sexuality is never shamed or repressed in HTTYD 2. Additionally, as ladygeekgirl points out in her smart take on the film, the women of DreamWorks, unlike the women of Frozen, actually have faces that are different from one another.
The women of Frozen—mother and two supposedly non-identical daughters:
And the women of HTTYD, all unrelated:
Not only do each of these women have individual faces, they also each
get their own promotional movie poster for the film—another "when was
the last time...?" moment for DreamWorks.
This brings us to the film's treatment of Hiccup's mother.
In absolutely every other Hollywood version of the HTTYD 2
narrative, Hiccup's discovery of his mother's two-decade-long absence
would have resulted in an explicit shaming of her choices and a
prolonged "how could you abandon me?" confrontation that would probably
have ended with her breaking down in tears and Hiccup's eventual
acceptance and forgiveness of her inexplicable absence all this time.
Instead, Hiccup instantly and immediately recognized that his mom's choices were her own choices,
and that they were obviously valuable and important. At no point did
the narrative shame Valka for rejecting her role as a mother and a
housewife. Instead, she not only got to make the coolest entrance, but
basically was presented as the most unbelievably cool character we've
seen in an animated film in ages:
caretaker of the coolest free-range dragon park ever, and presenting
the choice to rejoin her family as a choice that would validate all of
her earlier choices to leave them behind.
In absolutely every other Hollywood version of the HTTYD 2
narrative, Hiccup's mother would have been briefly united with her
husband and son, only to die tragically in the next big battle, thereby
giving them extra manpain and creating more fuel for their ultimate
avenging of her death.
In absolutely every other Hollywood version of the HTTYD 2 narrative, it would have been Valka sacrificing her life for that of her son instead of Stoick. Let's call it the Lily Potter Syndrome.
But instead, the film actually showed how damaging the trope of killing
off the dead woman for more manpain really is, by using her earlier
presumed death as the catalyst for all Stoick's misplaced vengeance
against dragons. We know how wasteful and wrong that misplaced anger is because the first film worked through it at length.
Additionally, instead of going on a vengeance quest after Stoick's death, we see Valka and Hiccup
both rejecting the idea that such a motivation for violence would do
anything but bring them and their homeland of Berk more pain. To the
very last scene they're in together, Hiccup is trying to reason with
Drago; every one of his actions is done from a position of non-violent
communication.
That recognition is absolutely central to any kind of effective reading of How to Train Your Dragon. This
is literally a franchise which has taken the most notoriously
war-mongering stereotype in existence, Viking culture, and gradually
transformed it until the characters not only refuse to use violence as a
solution, but proudly proclaim that they are a "land of peace." That's
an unbelievably radical and transformative narrative for a Hollywood
film to deliver, much less a Hollywood children's film. The HTTYD franchise now joins Avatar: The Last Airbender as one of the only animated franchises to commit this deeply to such a polarizing political stance.
Dissolve's essay seems to completely overlook this aspect of HTTYD 2. At no point are
the male characters aggressors against Drago. Although they talk about
it, they never actually act violently except to defend their home from
capture. In fact, the only person to attack Drago first is Valka, who
hits him weakly out of anger after watching her giant bewilderbeast get
killed. And despite what the Dissolve essay speculates, it seems evident
that Valka has never really physically fought with Drago herself. When
the time comes to actually physically attack, she gets no further than
poking him with her stick a few times.
Valka was never intended to be a serious physical match for Drago, nor
should she have been, because the whole point of her character aligned
with her son's is to personify the Viking nation's progressive
anti-violence stance. Sorry that Valka was too busy
working as a zoologist to become the vaunted warrior-hero-soldier that
apparently makes a female character strong enough for you, Dissolve.
Instead, she spends years subversively rescuing dragons from capture
like a radical Greenpeace activist, and she is the one who leads the
enormous dragon army into battle against Drago.
And come to that, when was the last time you saw a mother and son
riding side-by-side into battle together? Another point for you,
DreamWorks.
While it's true that she gets rescued by her husband, so does everyone
else in her family. They spend the movie running around trying to
protect each other: Stoick saves Hiccup, Valka, and Hiccup again; Valka
saves Toothless, Toothless saves Hiccup, and then Hiccup and Toothless
save everyone.
Even more significantly, while it's true that she doesn't get to do
much in the third act, she doesn't have to. She doesn't have to because
unlike 90 percent of other Hollywood films, HTTYD is a universe
with more than one woman in it. And as a result, it gets to have a
variety of women who do a variety of different things. Valka doesn't have
to be an all-powerful warrior-soldier, because Astrid and Ruffnut are
out there dumping flaming sulfur on the enemy and generally proving that
women can be badasses on the battlefield. Valka proves that women can
be badasses as activists and scientists and even, yes, as moms, too.
Dissolve's reading of HTTYD 2 completely misses the multiple
ways in which the film is trying to avoid the reductive trope that the
only strong characters are the characters who fight. By insisting that
Valka is weak because she falls down and has to be rescued by her
husband, Dissolve is failing its own measurement of strength,
considering she's the only character who actually is the aggressor
against Drago at any point. But moreover, it's failing to consider the
film's entire point, which is that violence is not the way forward, and that humans and dragons need to rescue each other.
Ultimately, what expands in How to Train Your Dragon is not
the central character's growth and understanding, but that of the entire
world. Hiccup shifts from exploring and mapping out the physical world
of the film to actively uniting the people who live in it. His mother,
who by all narrative trope standards should have been killed off in an
act of self-sacrifice at the end of act two, instead finishes the film
seeing her life's work come to fruition in ways she never thought
possible.
As a narrative of female empowerment, we find this pretty damn satisfying.
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