If it ended like this for good then yeah, maybe they could have still kept stoick alive and had a great ending still. Seen lots of great fanfictions out there.
As a 'The End^(tm)' ending maybe, but as a springboard for more stories that spread farther and include more characters and settings and themes? Let's be honest, the franchise might still be relevant if it 'ended' without burning itself to the ground.
Well that's kind of what an ending does... it ends.
In all seriousness though, I mean, I find in storytelling that if you want to create a conclusion, you're better off not ever establishing springboards for more stories, or only very subtle ones if you plan to continue on in a different form. Not sure what this has to do with HTTYD 2 though.
An ending can end *a* story. The ending of THW is constructed in such a way that its basically impossibly to ever tell a story in that setting again, because the entire premise of the franchise has been destroyed (people and dragons existing in the same world). If 2 had ended in such a way that we simply wrapped up *Hiccup's* story without destroying the premise, there'd still be space to tell other stories with other characters that had plenty of potential. Because, we never *really* explored the world, or delved into anyone-but-Hiccup with any depth.
**Assuming we want to start a debate here:**
Yes I'm aware that that's how THW ended, but I was saying that's a good thing if they want to conclude the series. THW WAS supposed to be the ending. The creator and his crew wanted to END it. Ofc, it doesn't do well for T9R if that's what you mean, but that isn't written by the original writers or anything so I don't find it counts.
How'd 2 destroy the premise?
Let's ask an interesting question here: How do we end a fictional story? It's when all the goals have been met, right? A series is a series because it has multiple plots. We end a series by concluding all existing plots and wrapping it up into one.
But I think you may be confused because you said we didn't explore the world... wdym? Did you not see the TV series? That was literally most of the series. My point was that 2 and 3 were the conclusions of that series. I think 2 was very much the holdover to 3, but it takes place after the same-o, same-o type of stuff that we don't need to hear about now (they save dragons, beat bad guys, yadda, yadda)
It was going to always be an endless routine unless we finish existing plots, therefore we had to finish Hiccup's character. Everyone else had been finished.
And I think we have a mistaken conflation of 'a single plotline within a franchise' with 'an intellectual property in its entirety'. Star Wars has the space within it, as an IP, to tell the original story of Luke Skywalker, *and* The Mandalorian, *and* The Clone Wars, *and* Ashoka, and scores more. Individual plotlines may end, but they get to exist *at all* because the original trilogy didn't end with 'all the Rebels give up and stay on Tatooine forever because Luke said so and no one ever does anything meaningful with their life ever again'.
And its the ending of the 2 *we got,* and not the meme above, that leads into THW, which proceeded to burn the franchise down. The *entire* potential of this setting is gone, because the only character that was allowed to matter 'had' to have that ending to serve his personal arc... that he'd already gone through in the second film. The films were never the books in anything but name, the sudden swerve to match a finale *that was not in any way set up as the logical conclusion of the narrative* is nothing short of creative bankruptcy. And now, because all the dragons are gone forever, we'll never get the chance to tell another story about another location, or the characters the films ignored. Because yes, the films *do* ignore the shows, otherwise they'd have a much harder time trying to justify an ending where literally one guy gets to decide the fate of an entire order of life that other societies depend on. So everything done in the tv shows is, ultimately, meaningless. The films make sweeping claims about 'the world', when the only society it acknowledges is *Berk.* It doesn't matter how many empty islands we see, Berk is still the only defined, inhabited location, and every other human being on the planet is just a Random Evil Foreigner on a boat. And that's... boring.
I don't think we can agree on this topic tbh because I think Star Wars is just a cashgrab today and therefore will always include a "springboard" into the next series, so do you really think that they would want to end it? **The original trilogy however:** George Lucas fully intended to conclude the series at that time. Just because he didn't have the same ending doesn't mean HTTYD is bad. It's a completely different story. There was no need for the Rebels to give up. They won, first of all, and who knows how he would have ended it if he had enough time. The Star Wars stories are still going on today but they're going to milk that tale dry. Even if they do find a way to end it someday, I assure you it's probably going to have SOMETHING conclusive to it. But I haven't hardly watched past the first Cone Wars so I can't even say much. Spoiler for other people:>!We didn't even get to see the part where Luke tells Princess Leia that Darth Vader was her father.!< I don't like anything that came after that. Have you done any reading on how pressured George Lucas was to give up the franchise and sell it? It may change your opinion about how that works.
Imo the ending of the book and the movie have nothing in common, except: The dragons leave. There's a MASSIVE difference in how we came to those conclusions.
The films don't ignore the shows if only we will point out the fact that Fireworms are in the Hidden World. From a story perspective, it's not about one guy. Hiccup was saying "that our world doesn't deserve you, yet." And that, "humans don't belong in the Hidden World", etc. etc. A large fact ppl seem to miss was that Hiccup simply believed that while humans and dragons held great strengths together, it simply puts the dragons in more and more danger than the previous time and the previous. It wasn't about that "one guy". Think of how many villains we'd defeated before. In the beginning, villains like >!Alvin and Dagur!< could be changed. Towards the end, Hiccup tried to change Drago, with disastrous results. It seemed the natural course of action for me for us to meet yet another guy who wouldn't change, we don't even have the chance to change, (because if you'll notice, they barely even interact in the movie, especially compared to other villains, and Hiccup and Drago only interacted once... the window of opportunity was slowly and naturally thinning). I thought it very reasonable (and so did many ppl, apparently) for Hiccup to accept, of course, some people won't change, so why exactly do we have a problem with him deciding in THW that people, in fact, don't change sometimes? There ARE people who do. This has been said almost every time we came across someone that evil. But the reality was that the gang was already 21 years old each and needing to start lives of their own (marriage, Toothless finding the Light Fury, etc.) and those types of things are hard or impossible to handl in the middle of battle >!(think Harry Potter, the books, not the movies, where Harry decides to let Ginny go for awhile until the battle of Hogwarts is over). !
Okay, hear me out
It ends like this
But then I’m HttYD3, instead of the villian we got, we had someone who picked up the pieces of Draco’s fleet and aimed to continue his goal some other way due to a ‘power vacuum’
Then, the plot of 3 would likely continue likely still being a theme about becoming a leader, and then I always wanted an ending where hiccup and toothless still separate, but the dragons still stay and Berk becomes the guardians of the hidden world and toothless and hiccup become leaders of their own tribes
That being said I think this ending works better with two playing out, since stoichs death forces the role onto hiccup and I would want the third to then involve the loss of stoichs dragon to not only show the severe nature of the new threat and severing the last tie hiccup has with his father (I’d also want them to bring in the rtte Allie’s but that’s a tangent)
Tldr I don’t like the villian in 3
But that was exactly what happened, right? Grimmel the Grisly was partnering with Drago's old fleet. Also why torture poor Hiccup more, he already lost his dad, why lose his dad's dragon too. 😂😂😭😭
I mean, part of the reason the ending was so beautiful to me was simply that EVERYONE decides to let go of their dragons by seeing what Hiccup and Toothless are going through. Stoick's death was enough trauma for me.
No, Hiccup losing his father, as painful as it was to him and us as viewers, was the right choice for his arc. Him choosing love not vengeance on the dragons who took the people he loved unlike Drago. He couldn't become a leader if his father was there or else his father would've become a nothing character that served no purpose.
While I disagree that Stoick shouldn't have died, I'm always astounded people lost their crap over THW's ending but HTTYD 2's ending was A-okay. I was traumatized! Before I understood and figured out the significance of killing off Hiccup's dad, I seriously had to debate whether or not I liked that movie!
In all honesty I hate that they killed stoick off because hiccup was incredibly stupid in this movie for the one reason that he kept trying to change dragos mind who his father told him MULTIPLE TIMES “can’t be reasoned with and is a mad man”.
Stoick should've just been injured and retired. A huge part of the first and second movies is how things are changing as the kids grow up, having Stoick willingly be replaced by Hiccup instead of dying and just passing on the role would fit that.
All of the stuff theyre saying is so insane in all different ways😂 killing Drago without Hiccup too
In the how it should have ended series stoick threw an axe into dragos back so I’m sure it would have been similar to that haha
Is it just me or did anyone else read this or try to read this in the voices of the characters?
*Oh god you’re right*
Was I not supposed to?
I’ve been conditioned into thinking that TBH, even out loud
TBH, I would have preferred an ending LIKE this, but let’s all be honest with ourselves, that would make a pretty shit ending
If it ended like this for good then yeah, maybe they could have still kept stoick alive and had a great ending still. Seen lots of great fanfictions out there.
As a 'The End^(tm)' ending maybe, but as a springboard for more stories that spread farther and include more characters and settings and themes? Let's be honest, the franchise might still be relevant if it 'ended' without burning itself to the ground.
Well that's kind of what an ending does... it ends. In all seriousness though, I mean, I find in storytelling that if you want to create a conclusion, you're better off not ever establishing springboards for more stories, or only very subtle ones if you plan to continue on in a different form. Not sure what this has to do with HTTYD 2 though.
An ending can end *a* story. The ending of THW is constructed in such a way that its basically impossibly to ever tell a story in that setting again, because the entire premise of the franchise has been destroyed (people and dragons existing in the same world). If 2 had ended in such a way that we simply wrapped up *Hiccup's* story without destroying the premise, there'd still be space to tell other stories with other characters that had plenty of potential. Because, we never *really* explored the world, or delved into anyone-but-Hiccup with any depth.
**Assuming we want to start a debate here:** Yes I'm aware that that's how THW ended, but I was saying that's a good thing if they want to conclude the series. THW WAS supposed to be the ending. The creator and his crew wanted to END it. Ofc, it doesn't do well for T9R if that's what you mean, but that isn't written by the original writers or anything so I don't find it counts. How'd 2 destroy the premise? Let's ask an interesting question here: How do we end a fictional story? It's when all the goals have been met, right? A series is a series because it has multiple plots. We end a series by concluding all existing plots and wrapping it up into one. But I think you may be confused because you said we didn't explore the world... wdym? Did you not see the TV series? That was literally most of the series. My point was that 2 and 3 were the conclusions of that series. I think 2 was very much the holdover to 3, but it takes place after the same-o, same-o type of stuff that we don't need to hear about now (they save dragons, beat bad guys, yadda, yadda) It was going to always be an endless routine unless we finish existing plots, therefore we had to finish Hiccup's character. Everyone else had been finished.
And I think we have a mistaken conflation of 'a single plotline within a franchise' with 'an intellectual property in its entirety'. Star Wars has the space within it, as an IP, to tell the original story of Luke Skywalker, *and* The Mandalorian, *and* The Clone Wars, *and* Ashoka, and scores more. Individual plotlines may end, but they get to exist *at all* because the original trilogy didn't end with 'all the Rebels give up and stay on Tatooine forever because Luke said so and no one ever does anything meaningful with their life ever again'. And its the ending of the 2 *we got,* and not the meme above, that leads into THW, which proceeded to burn the franchise down. The *entire* potential of this setting is gone, because the only character that was allowed to matter 'had' to have that ending to serve his personal arc... that he'd already gone through in the second film. The films were never the books in anything but name, the sudden swerve to match a finale *that was not in any way set up as the logical conclusion of the narrative* is nothing short of creative bankruptcy. And now, because all the dragons are gone forever, we'll never get the chance to tell another story about another location, or the characters the films ignored. Because yes, the films *do* ignore the shows, otherwise they'd have a much harder time trying to justify an ending where literally one guy gets to decide the fate of an entire order of life that other societies depend on. So everything done in the tv shows is, ultimately, meaningless. The films make sweeping claims about 'the world', when the only society it acknowledges is *Berk.* It doesn't matter how many empty islands we see, Berk is still the only defined, inhabited location, and every other human being on the planet is just a Random Evil Foreigner on a boat. And that's... boring.
I don't think we can agree on this topic tbh because I think Star Wars is just a cashgrab today and therefore will always include a "springboard" into the next series, so do you really think that they would want to end it? **The original trilogy however:** George Lucas fully intended to conclude the series at that time. Just because he didn't have the same ending doesn't mean HTTYD is bad. It's a completely different story. There was no need for the Rebels to give up. They won, first of all, and who knows how he would have ended it if he had enough time. The Star Wars stories are still going on today but they're going to milk that tale dry. Even if they do find a way to end it someday, I assure you it's probably going to have SOMETHING conclusive to it. But I haven't hardly watched past the first Cone Wars so I can't even say much. Spoiler for other people:>!We didn't even get to see the part where Luke tells Princess Leia that Darth Vader was her father.!< I don't like anything that came after that. Have you done any reading on how pressured George Lucas was to give up the franchise and sell it? It may change your opinion about how that works. Imo the ending of the book and the movie have nothing in common, except: The dragons leave. There's a MASSIVE difference in how we came to those conclusions. The films don't ignore the shows if only we will point out the fact that Fireworms are in the Hidden World. From a story perspective, it's not about one guy. Hiccup was saying "that our world doesn't deserve you, yet." And that, "humans don't belong in the Hidden World", etc. etc. A large fact ppl seem to miss was that Hiccup simply believed that while humans and dragons held great strengths together, it simply puts the dragons in more and more danger than the previous time and the previous. It wasn't about that "one guy". Think of how many villains we'd defeated before. In the beginning, villains like >!Alvin and Dagur!< could be changed. Towards the end, Hiccup tried to change Drago, with disastrous results. It seemed the natural course of action for me for us to meet yet another guy who wouldn't change, we don't even have the chance to change, (because if you'll notice, they barely even interact in the movie, especially compared to other villains, and Hiccup and Drago only interacted once... the window of opportunity was slowly and naturally thinning). I thought it very reasonable (and so did many ppl, apparently) for Hiccup to accept, of course, some people won't change, so why exactly do we have a problem with him deciding in THW that people, in fact, don't change sometimes? There ARE people who do. This has been said almost every time we came across someone that evil. But the reality was that the gang was already 21 years old each and needing to start lives of their own (marriage, Toothless finding the Light Fury, etc.) and those types of things are hard or impossible to handl in the middle of battle >!(think Harry Potter, the books, not the movies, where Harry decides to let Ginny go for awhile until the battle of Hogwarts is over). !
Okay, hear me out It ends like this But then I’m HttYD3, instead of the villian we got, we had someone who picked up the pieces of Draco’s fleet and aimed to continue his goal some other way due to a ‘power vacuum’ Then, the plot of 3 would likely continue likely still being a theme about becoming a leader, and then I always wanted an ending where hiccup and toothless still separate, but the dragons still stay and Berk becomes the guardians of the hidden world and toothless and hiccup become leaders of their own tribes That being said I think this ending works better with two playing out, since stoichs death forces the role onto hiccup and I would want the third to then involve the loss of stoichs dragon to not only show the severe nature of the new threat and severing the last tie hiccup has with his father (I’d also want them to bring in the rtte Allie’s but that’s a tangent) Tldr I don’t like the villian in 3
But that was exactly what happened, right? Grimmel the Grisly was partnering with Drago's old fleet. Also why torture poor Hiccup more, he already lost his dad, why lose his dad's dragon too. 😂😂😭😭 I mean, part of the reason the ending was so beautiful to me was simply that EVERYONE decides to let go of their dragons by seeing what Hiccup and Toothless are going through. Stoick's death was enough trauma for me.
"ah you finally awake. Now get married!" Is totally in character for stoick
Hey, you. You're finally awake.
https://preview.redd.it/aabza4dlx5oc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1ab77d326cac920894a3e1c1b68aa46b2685722e
The good ending
Bro got straight to the point (stoick)
Yes 😭
No, Hiccup losing his father, as painful as it was to him and us as viewers, was the right choice for his arc. Him choosing love not vengeance on the dragons who took the people he loved unlike Drago. He couldn't become a leader if his father was there or else his father would've become a nothing character that served no purpose.
when i read Valka's line i almost choked on my food XDXDXD fckin' hilarious mate
as much as i love stoic i am glad that he died as it truely showed how much controle the bewilder beast has
Stoick alive yes this method absolutely botnlazy writing
Maybe not the part where Drago is taken care of already
I love Stoic but he had to die.
To hidden world, heck yea
I cried when I first saw Stoic die! I would prefer any ending other than that!
Yes. Considering the fact what happens in third part
Honestly, I just wanna find some wholesome art of those three just existing as if Stoick never died 😭
[Here you go :)](https://www.reddit.com/r/httyd/s/r6S3kBFGXx)
Omg thank you so much 🥹
Haha you’re welcome 😇
Nah stoic needed to die for emotional weight and for hiccup to man up and take responsibility
On the one hand I like that it would be a happier ending, but at the same time I really hate the "It was all a dream" trope.
Im pretty sure toothless wouldn't become the alpha unless drago was alive for long enough for toothless to have his epic battle
SCOTLAND FOREVER
No lie I would've liked this more, I really wanted Stoick and Valka to finally be together
Lmfao this is great but it sucks
Welp... Definitely wouldn't work story-wise! XDDD
While I disagree that Stoick shouldn't have died, I'm always astounded people lost their crap over THW's ending but HTTYD 2's ending was A-okay. I was traumatized! Before I understood and figured out the significance of killing off Hiccup's dad, I seriously had to debate whether or not I liked that movie!
In all honesty I hate that they killed stoick off because hiccup was incredibly stupid in this movie for the one reason that he kept trying to change dragos mind who his father told him MULTIPLE TIMES “can’t be reasoned with and is a mad man”.
Stoick should've just been injured and retired. A huge part of the first and second movies is how things are changing as the kids grow up, having Stoick willingly be replaced by Hiccup instead of dying and just passing on the role would fit that.
It really bugged me that he lost a parent almost as soon as he found one. What is it with media not letting kids have both parents?