My review for season 2 is finally complete! Watch at this link: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jPh4KZlzMTI.html&ab_channel=AudrieGreywind Also, my dumbass combined Jeremy Shada and Marcus Scribner's surnames to create 'Jeremy Shrader' at 9:31 (I was still referring to Jeremy being the best of the voice actors). But considering how melted my brain was after sitting through the whole first season multiple times, I'm surprised it wasn't something much worse.
this show is so bad i haven't even heard of it, and i'm a massive httyd fan. but even with this new series, the real biggest travesty is that the most obvious ship, toothcup, didn't happen. like, how dare they :c
One thing you missed. Icarus is a greek name. Why would HTTYD, a series that blatantly focuses on Norse Mythology, use a greek name, even if it takes place in "modern" times??
I would have loved to see a Night Light with an orca pattern! Just have it like playing in the water with that design and I'm sold! (Also while we're at it, give the poor thing it's wing membrane back. Having such a tiny amount to support a giant wing like that doesn't work on a dragon that size, plus Fury dragons have always had a lot of it, so why cut it down? It just looks dumb.) Heck, the new Night Light's tail fins look similar to that of a shark or whale, so why the heck not? Such a wasted opportunity...
so, when Barf and Belch carried one person, the person was riding on their back. When the twins are on the dragon, they are on their necks. The reason I think the action figure looking girl looked so awkward riding her dragon was she was ONE PERSON riding a single neck. Why not on their back? it always looks awkward because she isn't centered on the dragon.
Dont forget the fact that if one person is riding barf and belch it doesnt really work since it puts the balance of the dragon.. they say it in one of the episodes of race to the edge when gruffnut tried to steal the twins dragons
And, in School of Dragons (the really buggy online game) you ride on a zippleback on its back. It's really dumb that the show never took all these examples for the mist twister
When I first saw pictures of this show, I thought its one of those horrible rip off movies. Knowing its actually from the Dreamworks hurts more than it being an bad rip off.
@@jonathandias1741 And even that isn't always true. Skilled people sometimes just really drop the ball. I'd be fascinated learning the 'whys' of this show. Because it's almost never purely laziness.
@@Bustermachine I know, and I grew up with the original HTTYD Movies and Tv shows from Cartoon Network and Netflix, and now this new show Ruin The Name of HTTYD and the Creation from Dean Dubois, Cressida Cowell and Chris Sanders that DreamWorks have made this Trilogy of an Masterpiece, and now the New Director, producer and Writer named John "Fucking" Tellegen, who ruin and stab the heart of the Franchise and turn HTTYD into a shitty reboot. So spread the word by using this Hashtag. ⬇ ⬇ #notmyHTTYD #notmyhttyd
I don't think the black and white sopts are what made Thunder look stupid. I saw many fanarts of the nightlights as adults retaining their pattern and they look absolutely fine. It's the messed-up proportions that really made Thunder look like some genetic failure. Overly-large and widespread eyes, a more angular head, a less muscular and aerodynamic body and a mechanical movement. What really made Toothless likeable is how his movements and expressions worked, borrowing behaviors from well-known pet animals. It was visible that the creators spent a lot of time studying dog, cat, bird and horse movements, cause all these can be found in Toothless that make him feel like a real animal. Thunder just kinda walks around like a robot. Also, I think the black pattern in him is a huge desing flaw. Pulling a huge white stripe through his face makes him look like paint dripped onto him, it breaks up his facial outlines and overall does this weird optical effect that creates an uncanny feeling. Toothless' kids did have black/white markings, but they were all done extremely realistically - like only having the tip of the nose or scales white, while most of the body has a dominant color without breaking apart with unnecessary stripes. This also sounds like nitpicking, but again, it just shows how much the creators of the movies cared about details and consistency. The nightlights are pretty accurate representation of how genetics work in differently colored members of the same species - like snakes. Toothless' dark genes were dominant in two of the kids, while their third one carries more features of their mom. Breeding pythons with different coloration usually has similar results in their offspring, depending on which genes are dominant and which are recessive. That, of course, also implies that Thunder is in fact extremely inbred. Toothless was the last night fury, so even if the genes for his coloration are dominant, they should fade with every generation since his kids only have lightfuries to mate with - resulting in lighfury genes becoming more and more dominant with every generation passing. If the show really takes place 3000 years after the Hidden World, Thunder should be almost completely like a lightfury with onyl a few black patches on the ears and tail. But he resembles Toothless mostly, implying that the kids just made the hidden world into dragon Alabama.
There was a video somewhere where this girl pretty much did this whole genetic and inbreeding thing. I watched it like months ago but I think that toothless pretty much mated with his daughters, and to keep the black in the genes that strong he must've also mated with granddaughters. It's pretty gross. Also in the book I believe it says toothless can live to be thousands of years old so it's not exactly a fact that he's dead in this series. Although I think the series and movies he can live up to 150 years old, which still gives him plenty of time to breed with his future generations to keep his dominant genes in place.
Seems like the designers gave him a pattern like a cat or something without taking lizard/dragon genetics into consideration. If Thunder had a white tip on his left ear, he'd pretty much have the same pattern as my rabbit.
One thing I don't see many people bring up is how fast these kids got the dragons to comply. It took Hiccup probably a few weeks to fine tune his training with Toothless so he in turn could teach others so they would get it faster. These kids took a few hours maybe minutes at best
I would argue that since this bonding practice helped between then and now, especially with more dragons breeding, hatching, and growing up alongside humans that the potential of more domesticated traits is possible. But on the other hand, at least 1000 years of genetic drift since being released back to the wild makes the chance of this extremely unlikely unless the showrunners are gonna pull a surprise surprise Toothless is still alive and alpha despite being old as heck. Long lived dragons I can believe but something tells me I'm glad I did not know this show existed until now.
They put in real time and effort into actually training the dragons, even throughout the second movie, he's continuing to learn alongside toothless, there's no real lesson in this, no effort, just what the hell.
@@Lightna isnt the MAIN premise of the show that the dragons were hidden underground, you know, AWAY FROM HUMANS? They wouldnt have thousands of years of domestication and growing with humans if that was the case, it would mean they're even more wild, even more so than Toothless because they never even SAW humans like the dragons on berk who at best saw them like food makers (with farming sheep). I just highly doubt these dragons would have taken this little time to train, hell i'd say it should have been even harder, especially with how careless and stupid they acted around full blown wild element breathing reptiles... hell, Hiccup was the highest degree of careful, these guys basically went "here, help, now friends?"
It's crazy how just slightly altering the shape of Toothless' head makes it so much uglier. I really, _really_ hate Thunder's design and his stupid permanent smirk.
It would look better if his mouth wasn't white. Instead of having the stupid lightning mark coming up from his nose. Have it come down from his forehead and end somewhere between his eyes. Than have the white on his underside be like a tuxedo cats markings. Night furries where based of cats and a mixture of other animals. So having a patter like a cats makes sense.
That smirk is annoying as heck. Toothless tried to mimic Hiccup’s smile which was cute, but in Thunder’s (bullshit name) case, it makes him look like a clown. The colours of Thunder was crap.. black and white usually looks sharp but because of the markings on Thunder makes him look pretty ugly.
What they could have done was given him a “lightning” design all over his body. Black being the main color, with a lightning crackle pattern in white down the body, to signify his new electrical powers. And say, I dunno, the white glows whenever the actual lightning manifests? It’d really benefit from a bigger budget to do that, especially in 2D. They decided to stray this far, having a mix of stylistic 2D and 3D scenes would have worked if it made the stuff on screen look good.
For me one of the biggest failings is Jun, she's basically a walking stereotype that feels incredibly out of place with the others. She's an Asian girl who has purple eyes (the only unnatural color we've seen so far), believes heavily in mysticism and is the only one with a dragon that looks like it was based on her specific racial culture. Also her dragon looks terrible, I adore creature design and the fact that it was a red-blue split was really interesting, but the way it then faded into gold but the wings were still red and blue with this lazy golden pattern that was vaguely asian inspired was such a weird choice. There are plenty of ways to create a unique dragon with subtle nods to another culture without just slapping things together into some ugly chimera.
@@gorbachevspizzahut While I agree I see the novelty of it, we've never seen a dragon spew straight ice before. One of my issues with it is the fact that previous dragons have breath weapons that sort of fit their lifestyle, and having a fire and ice dragon that Says it combines elements but never actually shows that it does is irksome.
While I don't think it would save the design, they needed to have zero hair on it. That's SO obvious it's exactly what's wrong with the lack of subtlety in the show. You can keep the catfish whiskers, and without the eyebrows & goatees, the dragon is...all right, still on the nose, but not so ridiculously so.
@@ralpbeez8414 agreed, I wonder if the reason they added the eyebrows and goatee was because the dragon didn't look as great otherwise and they were too lazy to come up with a better design (not that the design is great now). Maybe if they had added some sort of mane or something it'd have paid tribute to the concept without looking terrible
I realized one thing that disturbed me a lot when it came to Thunder vs Toothless... Thunder smiles... You could see whenever Toothless was happy, he didn't have to actively smile to show happiness (he couldn't really, his face wasn't made for it). Yet, there thunder is, smiling without a care in the world like it was the most natural thing ever... I could see in body language, in the glint of his eyes, and whatever sounds Toothless made what he was feeling or whatever message he wanted to convey to Hiccup or anyone else, I didn't need the mouth to react like that. If Toothless was angry, he made a sound expressing his displeasure and narrowed his eyes, his posture looked sharp and ready to attack, maybe showing his teeth or no teeth. Clear anger or displeasure. If Toothless was happy then his eyes were wide open, his posture relaxed, and the sounds he made were higher pitched and sounded- well, happier. Thunder-... it was as if the team was told: "The kids won't realize if Thunder is happy if he doesn't smile." Toothless is like a cat; careful and cautious, dangerous when angry, but soft and playful if he trusts you. Thunder is like a dog: just straight up dog... I'm a cat person, and I have no hatred towards dogs, but Thunder is the most obvious that a dog could be. A cartoonish dog. "LET'S PLAY!" "I love you!" "I will follow you!" I don't know much about dogs, but Thunder feels like a stereotypical stupid cartoon dog, the cartoon dog that is played for comic relief. Edit: I just realized that Thunders ability to smile might be because he's the x'th generation of inbreeding...
That constant smirk makes me want to punch him in the face. They made him too... humanized. Like yes, Toothless (and other dragons) were very smart and emotionally rich and mimicked some human stuff but they still were clearly animals with distinctive animal behaviors (also always loved how different dragon breeds had different body languages reminding me of different rl animals). Thunder looks like he could start talking any minute and nobody would even be surprised.
I honestly didn’t mind Grimmel as a villain but there’s just no getting around the fact that he’s basically Viggo 2.0. Viggo’s my absolute favorite animation villain by the way.
Can I just add onto the point you made at 48:59 about how there's only one character riding the two headed dragon in Nine realms, while Barf and Belch were almost always seen ridden by both twins? In the few scenes where someone other than the twins ride them solo, they sit on the dragon's torso, not on one of their necks like Ruf and Tuf did. WHY didn't they do that so it wouldn't look as weird?
THIS. I always assumed they needed two riders for control AND balance, hence why one rider would sit in the middle to at least make sure the dragon could fly right. Choosing to have the rider sit on one neck seems like it would be really impractical, especially if they kept switching.
Well, the 3rd movie shows tuff riding beltch by himself when they leave Ruff behind soooo...., i like to think that they can only ride them if both of them were on because thats what they're used to and therefor didn't know how to ride them by themselves due to the weight changes and stuff, but even thats a strech, although Ruff might of just said that because there attached to doing everthing together and therefor felt it didn't feel right ridding them alone.
I know this has nothing to do with Jun riding Wu and Wei, but to add insult to injury, the Mist Twister is a Tidal class dragon and thus should not be able to live outside of water without frequent hydration. However, Wu and Wei are almost never shown to be near water besides their debut nor are they ever seen drinking water to my knowledge.
I'm still extremely mad at dragons being so friendly in this show. Even in the end of Hidden World Toothless, cute dragon buddy viewers spend a lot of time together, was protective of his family and territory, not stupid and puppy-like. In other dragons series all new dragons were dangerous and riders had to deserve their trust. And what we got here....
Tbh in THW Toothless and Hiccup weren't in top form... The Hiccup and Toothless from around the end of RTTE would have defeated Grimmel in like ten minutes and the movie would've been over, in THW they were pretty dumb with no strategic abilities whatsoever. And you could argue that the dragons were tamer than in the viking era because they didn't have any prior bad experiences with humans. Still, the bonding felt really unnatural, like, irl it would take more time and effort to tame a domesticated animal like a dog than they needed for big, undomesticated apex predator that would very much have strong instincts telling it to be wary of everything unknown (aka humans)
I think that the movies are to blame. I mean, since the second movie, Toothless has shown more human traits and personality, and in the third one, he enjoys playing fetch. He even does the puppy dog-eyes! And being protective of family and territory is something quite a few dogs do, depending on the breed, training and personality. So I would argue that even Toothless, who started as feral and dangerous (okay, still dangerous when threatened), became more and more like a big cuddly pet. Thus I guess that the producers went along with that regarding Thunder, though they accelerated the whole process here. And... yeah, admittedly, Thunder might just as well be a lonely dog/cat only wanting someone to play with given how quickly he warms up to Tom and his friends.
@@DatScharger64 the second movie did not humanize toothless. Yes they made him more playful but he was still wild and less tamed than the third movie. The third movie was plain shit. They made him have no more wild traits whatsoever. He didn't do shit that speaked "territorial trained wild dragon"
@@alduinsvoice Now, I would call it humanizing if he understands the concepts of art, being made fun of (and talking back in a mocking manner), throwing a pebble in annoyance, apologies and laughing. The third movie might be shit, but is, unfortunately (depending on who you ask), still part of the canon. So maybe yes, Hiccup did manage to train all wild traits out of him (except desperately wanting to mate), so he essentially became a fully domesticated dog/cat by then.
Another thing I realised with the dragon designs: the scales are all very prominent and consistent compared to the original designs, which were much more slick and used the more diverse scale sizes and patterns to bring out features and fill empty areas
My biggest issue with the show is that aside from the dragons, it doesn't feel like a 'Modern day HTTYD show'. You know what I would do if I was in charge of this show? I'd actually have it take place in modern day Scandinavia and use that region's locations and scenery as settings for episodes intead of some BORING ASS RESEARCH FACILITY IN BUMBLEFUCK NOWHERE. As somebody who has a whole part of my family tree connected to Norway, I'm _sorely disappointed_ Nine Realms didn't even bother linking its setting, the EASIEST and also MOST IMPORTANT thing to consider when writing a story, to the original movies' European location. The generic setting just makes it feel so samey and BORING, which just amplifies the other problems the show has its just *UUUGGHHHH*
It really doesn't feel like a real place in modern day, does it? If anything, the whole thing gives my Paw Patrol vibes. But at least that show's animation and style fit with its intended audience.
Or literally any other place. There are so many interesting places. Since the plot isn't connetcted to movie it doesn't have to be Scandinavia, but from what I seen they doesn't explore anything, this whole series is contained in a very small area. Also modern people think differently, if I ever saw a dragon my first thouht would be "That's fucking awesome"
Yeah I'm Norwegian myself and to say I was dissapointed that it didn't take place in Scandinavia is an understatement. It would be so cool if they found the hidden realm in the North Sea like maybe some fishers came across it, but nooo it's gonna be in this random place that doesn't really indicate where we are. There's so much missed potential I swear to God.
@@DrinzenDrawz Agreed. The hidden world was in the middle of the ocean so...WHY IS IT NOW IN A CASM THAT'S NOWHERE NEAR THE SEA? "MaYbE tEh OcEaN dRiEd Up" NO NO NO NO! I'm fully behind the idea of sea people like fishermen or sea researchers finding it over this wanna be grand canyon. What also should have been the show's plot is a look at different eras experience interacting/finding dragons. Dragons are in so many myths around the world. It would have been cool to see how people in medieval times reacted to dragons or people in China etc. To see and explore how dragons are basically in myths everywhere. Would make for cool dragon designs too. HELL THE LOCK NESS MONSTER!!! Make that a sea dragon that was spotted and run with that. GOD LOST POTENTIAL
This is just a personal pet peeve but i find it dumb that they try to sell these dragons as "descendants" of the old species. A few thousand years is not a lot of time for dragons to branch off and have evolved into using new abilities (like the nightlight) or develop stark physical differences.
personally i think Thunder shouldnt look so much like a night furry, because, lets say they get approximatively a hundred of years of lifespan, and knowing toothless was the last night frry, it should have more light furry genes... so more white overall and light furry charestics
@@lalyoral5088 they clearly made thunder a nightlight for the sake of marketing. realisticly speaking , thunder would have to completely look like a light fury. Dreamworks should have thought twice about making Toothless the last nightfury XD
Actually rapid evolution is possible to this extent not so much color changes or slight increases in size is probable the night light is pretty believable especially since it's a hybrid so evolution would be rapid seeing how it would have 2 very defrent genes working together so some things are believable some minor ability changes or appearance is understandable look at the pug but being unreasonable is far fetched
@@katzske ya they should've looked much closer to a light fury with minor night fury appearances however dark colors are dominant so it' might've been more likely they'd be a solid black instead of patchwork however there abilities and appearance should mimic the light fury otherwise maybe a slightly stronger plasma blast then a light fury but weaker then a night fury
@@idiotgaming6376 Rapid evolution is possible in animals that have high rates of fecundity. We see in HTTYD 3 that Toothless and the Lightfury have, what, 3 children? And it takes them YEARS? With that slow of a fertility rate, they'd be evolving around about the same speed we are - which is to say, not fast enough to gain entirely new abilities in 1300 years.
So asked my geological engineer of a roommate about the earthquake part. 1.Dragon is not big or fast enough to cause the earthquakes. 2. They build a lab on a cliff in a known earthquake zone which would never happen 3.The changes put in the pod would need to be secured into the cliff face to do any damage, hanging them on a rope would just cause the pod to swing
I don’t know if I’m the only one but I would love to see a series connecting Httyd 2 to Httyd 3 like rtte. Not only could it add more lore to the Httyd universe but we could see how Hiccup deals with the death of Stoick.
Here's my thought on why the nightlight looks so weird. It's a distant descendant of Toothless' immediate children. If they were to breed with other lightfuries, eventually they'd have no more black coloration left since the night fury bloodlines are so watered down. The nightlight shown here has HEAVY black coloration. What does this mean? Inbreeding. This nightlight looks so ugly and weird because it is the product of extremely tight inbreeding.b
@@quicksilveryt4000 Well, the only reason why the night fury and light fury were able to hybridize was because they were related as a species. Think of it like grizzly bears and polae bears. A Skrill would be like a wolf. They're not even close to being related or in the same species genus, therefore they couldn't be mixed :(
@@quicksilveryt4000 Poor writing and people that aren't familiar with the original material. They're confusing plasma blasts with lightning, or they just think lightning looks cooler.
@@goathead5073 that's not actually true. Dragon hybrids are canon and any dragon can mate with any other dragon even though they're not the same species
I’m surprised no one’s brought this up yet, but why was the series specifically called “The Nine Realms”? When I saw the title I thought the characters were going to nine different specific locations like islands to uncover the mystery of reappearing dragons or something(and maybe last 9 seasons with 10-13 episodes each). But nope. It’s just kids staying in one place. In 6 episodes no less. 6 EPISODES! Not only is the world building shallow and linear but the name makes no sense in anyway shape or form. Edit: Since the show finished I do know why it’s called The Nine Realms and there are more places to go but the pacing was either too slow or way WAY too fast and the inconsistency in the world building still doesn’t make any area stand on its own so my point still stands.
Apparently, the legend of the nine realms is something that came from old norse mythology. I think they're probably going to speak about that in later episodes but at this point I would be surprised if they actually remembered that.
@@barelyrayssa9808 it's a reference to the nine worlds of norse mythology, an idea that nine separate realms were connected by Yggdrasil (aka the World Tree), those being: Asgard, Midgard, Alfheim, Svartalfaheimr, Jotunheimr, Vanaheim, Niflheim, Muspelheim, and Hel
@@azurai3934 I've more often seen the full "Helheim" name, some people can get confused if you just say "Hel", not only because of Abrahamic religions Hell but also because the goddess Hel
28:27 the fact tht hiccup was doing it for personal gain as well makes him more human, and less "likeable" in a way that makes him more likeable. I hate when characters are perfect saints who only do things for the sake of others. Hiccup is just human.
dumb bitch neither the main character is perfect and yet y'all expect him to be? like literally hiccup killed dragons and tortured dragons while the main character in dragons the nine realms isn't a complete fuckin idiot who hates dragons for no fuckin reason at all.
As a teenager, my dad took me to a friend of his, who owned a big dog. I'm afraid of dogs and the only reason I was putting up with it was, because I didn't want to look like a coward. That dog was constantly circling me and sniffing my butt, which was highly uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure it knew I was scared and that was why it didn't go away. So yeah, I pulled an Alex and tried to pet it, probably to make it leave me alone. It jumped at me and grabbed my hand with its teeth. Thankfully it didn't bite, because it was actually a very friendly dog and just wanted to greet me. But still, I was scared shitless and hid in my dad's car for the entire time of the visit. That's why I can relate to Alex. Her story is something you can actually encounter in real life. Instead of, for example, climbing into a polar bear exhibit, because no person with a functional brain would do that. Also what kind of zoo is that, where a kid is able to sneak his way into a predator enclosure?
I once fell of a cliff and managed to ram a climbing pick into dirt and roots like the main character managed to do in that seen 22:08, and it tore my arm out of the socket and cracked several bones, and as such these scenes always seem way too ... shrugged off. That is a serious action that can rip arms off and cripple people and it seems that such an action should come at physical cost to give weight to such an action.
I would have called "Feathers" "Banshee". While the Banshee can't mimic human voices (as far as I know), it does have an ear splitting screech just like the feather hide. I think it's better than "Feathers" Also, I hated that they were using the same sounds that they used in in the original shows and movies. That's also pretty lazy
@@nasnadine3131 There's one called "different face, same heart", which is about why Hiccup change his look from riders of Berk for the RTTE one, as well as another another one called "I couldn't help falling in love, which is a Hiccstrid storie with a new dragon a funny scene where Snotlout wears a wedding dress in order to survive (It has an explanation, trust me XD). Sadly, I only found it in Spanish, but both are quite interesting for a fanfic. However, be careful when you look for them, cause there are also some weird and creepy stuff in other stories on the same web pages .
Speaking of wondering what happened to the Fault Ripper, I did always wonder what they did with the Red Death after they died. Like, did they cook it up and have a giant BBQ or did they just leave a gigantic corpse laying around in the middle of nowhere?
@@addison_v_ertisement1678to be fair though, the Red death destroyed several of their longboats, meaning the remaining longboats would be crowded with the survivors, not much room left over for any sort of trophy or something.
It's not even Dreamworks at fault, it's universal. Dean already explained that the third movie was difficult with Universal putting so many restrictions on what he was allowed to do with the story and mature elements.
SO once again the bean counters ruined a franchise... perfect! Just why does stuff like this keep happening? Everytime the higher ups, who often have ZERO idea about what they are producing, get the idea to micro manage their employes, stuff like this happens.
i have only seen the movies, but from the footage of this series alone i feel a strong case of "everything's a dog". the main dragons in the movies were friendly, but i would compare Toothless to a wolfish cat, Stormfly seemed bird-like and Belch and Barf gave me a snake vibe. also while Toothless showed a broad range of emotions, he still seemed animalistic. Thunder just looks ... so smug. doesn't help Thunder's case that he looks like a border collie/tuxedo cat with those markings. inverted colors would've likely looked better. and it's kinda offputting that the dragons' skin has this level of detail while the human characters seem fairly smooth.
i definitely agree with this! and all the dragons have a similar relationship to their rider, unlike in httyd where for example, the way stormfly and astrid treat eachother is different than how snotlout and hookfang treat eachother. obviously you can tell both pairs care about eachother but in their own unique way. sometimes the riders argue with their dragons and the dragons sass their riders which is realistic, they're bound to have differences but in the nine realms every dragon acts the same towards their rider, like a big dog that does whatever they want.
Season 2 introduced a derpy looking unicorn, a spider, and a pig. So I guess they listened to the "everything's a dog" criticism and were super lazy about fixing it.
I am convinced that Thunder has Skrill in his DNA. Only reason his lighting breath makes sense. I have no idea where that weird tail came from though, looks it's something from the tidal class
Okay once I get in dreamworks I will make thunder look like the night lights from how to train your dragon hidden world but like the teenage night lights from the games and make the dragons in dragons the nine realms look cool like the ones from the movies and shows and I might introduce the dragons from the older movies and shows
@@clayharris7740 you’d be better to officially introduce the sexual dimorphism between Toothless and Moon(sorry, my name for the light fury) that SHOULD have been there from the beginning. It’s abundantly clear that the night and light furies are the same species, with little differences between genders, and the fact that their kids are apparently hybrids is one of the most aggravating things ever to me.
@@Tabi-Kun ugh I had a feeling they called her Luna. I only skipped that one because it’s SUCH an overused name. Pretty, but overused, especially for such a fascinating character. I like Moon, because she’s pure white and was first seen at night. It’s also a pretty basic name, which kind of implies that it’s only a passing nickname that declares we don’t have the right to give her an official name.
Alex's way of telling her story about the dog just hits different than any other part of the show so far. "This one time, this really big dog followed me home. And everyone was saying, 'It likes you! It likes you! You should pet it!' So, I did pet it, and it bit me. It bit me so hard." I can feel all the emotion in that, the actual fear because that is something that happens, and people don't care enough about how dangerous wandering pets can be in real life. People tell us as kids that dogs are friendly, even the ones that aren't, because they don't want us to be afraid of being outside, or to be afraid of those animals. They want us to get used to it so we don't get stuck afraid as adults. But that can really cause even more fear that sticks with you for life. I wish more people understood how terrifying big dogs (rightfully) are. And this is coming from someone with a BIG dog.
As someone who was chased by a large dog as a 7 year old and has a relative who broke their hand after being bitten while petting a dog, I agree. I still love dogs but I won't lie, I still flinch a bit around them. It's a well-meaning method, but if it fails it can cause more harm.
Yeah, but does that really indicate you should never go outside?? Like, interacting with dogs again, sure. But just being afraid of the outdoors? Period? Just felt like a sob story that wasn't very written out. Then again, this is for small children so what do we expect.
@@adriannaa545 Oh it was just an excuse for literally never going outside?? I didn't know that tbf. I thought she was just explaining why she was afraid of like. Animals. And interacting with animals. In which case her sob story makes total selse.
I cant and its the stupidest reason to be afraid, I hate when people go like When I was 2 a dog bit me so now I am 20 and im still afraid like shut the f up sensitive ass IT WAS YEARS AGO being afraid of the whole thing when one thing scares you is ridiculous and embarrassing
You know I get what your saying but I suffer from the stupid reaction of I want to hug it with most large furry things from dogs to bears, the curse of being dumb
Personally, I would imagine that the Toothless and the Lightfury's babies would slowly go towards either black or white as they aged. Would look less stupid that whatever the designers came up with now.
They should definately resemble lightfuries more. That's genetics. Toothless was the last night fury, so their kids could only mate with other lightfuries. That'd mean significantly more genes for their characteristics, meaning Toothless' signature look and dark scales would disappear more and more with every passing generation. The fact that Thunder is spotted really just implies that he's extremely inbred.
Exactly what I was thinking lol, their scales could over time start to peel off in a way similar to molting to reveal the color that covers the most of their body.
Imagine instead of jumping from literal vikings to the modern era, do it in medieval times, I think it would add to a more familiar sense to the original movie
Honestly a time period in the early 1800s I feel would have offered a much more creative aspect, considering stigmas and events at the time. But medieval period would also have had a lot of potential with actual constant conflicts in the plot such as the kids being forced into their roles in society and anyone mentioning or being seen with the dragons-especially the girls-would be put on trial for consorting with what would be considered of the devil.
As a very “nostalgic” person I found it hard to accept the franchise ending with the third movie, and this new series honestly just feels like a punch to the face.. I would personally had loved for the creators to make a series taking place between the second and third movie, where we could watch the characters grow up, hiccups journey as chief, how they developed their cool armor, etc. That would also feel less,, disoriented from what the nine realms is. Plus.. I get to keep watching my favorite characters do their things a little longer TT
It's like "Transformers: Prime" and "Transformers: Robots in Disguise" all over again. TF P: An absolute gem, awesome character models, engaging characters, the villains are hilarious and terrifying at the same time, the humans had at least some amount of purpose. TF RID: Really bad character models, the humans are USELESS, everyone forgets the lesson they learned before the next episode, forgettable villains, stupid jokes etc.
@@HexenkoeniginVonAngmar Oh man don't remind me of those 2, I loved TF P. Then hated the "Sequel" with a passion. How they can go from something so good, to something so bad, is amazing. And yet here we are, with Nine Realms, a universally hated series from a usually universally liked series.
As much I would love that idea come to life ..i just know they'll milk that sweet cash cow dry and beat it into oblivion and even after it's beaten down still keep it up way past it's due date so letting go of the franchise was actually the smartest thing they ever did besides are we really letting it go? when you can always go back to watch the films and the spin off series riders of berk,i mean look at the Simpsons,ppg (Power Puff girls),Teen Titans ect it's better to let things lie down.
When I was a young kid, I had a fascination with dragons, and I would spend days browsing the library at my elementary school for books about dragons. One day I saw an advertisement for a movie called How to Train Your Dragon, and I begged my parents to go and see it. I absolutely loved it. That Christmas, I got the first 7 books in the How to Train Your Dragon series and something about them ensnared me. I read them again and again my admiration and love for these stories and characters grew and grew. Then we got the DvD for the movie, and we watched it again. I realized while watching HtTYD at home, that it was an In Name Only adaptation of the books and my love of the movie became scorn. I loathed how almost everyone (aside from Hiccup) was either gone or fundamentally changed, even Toothless, who is a mighty Nightfury in the movies, was a massacre of the "lame" common/garden dragon Toothless is in the books. This scorn only deepened when I watched the second movie, to the point where I refused to see the third and would openly retaliate against those who said they like the movies without reading the books. As I have grow older (now being 21) I have let go of my past feelings, and now see the movies as a separate entity, one that I can appreciate the artistry that went into it but I hold no love or care for. I mostly decided to watch the video because tenor.com/view/baby-yoda-the-mandalorian-haha-yes-yeah-gif-16042124 , but when I saw 1:06:48 - 1:06:58, I regretted hating on the movie, as I was filled with pity. Pity that a movie that I had loved so dearly, and had scorned me so badly had it's legacy *tainted* by this wretched scene. I think I will binge all three movies this weekend as a way to apologize for all the venom and flames I spoke of them in my youth.
They did exact same thing to my favorite movie "Spirit stallion of the cimarron"(2002) and turned it into a Netflix episodes called "Spirit Riding Free"(2017) where a young girl domesticated him. I was so angry, they ruined it! I'm pretty sure everyone who watched "Spirit" agrees with me.
took me a minute to come up with a different plot: keep the modern time, keep the scientists exploring a mysterious fault that shouldn’t exist (and drive home more on that), keep them having to have their kids around and then have faultripper attack the outpost in the first episode (though you wouldn’t actually show it in full at that point) have the kids try to help, and then end up falling into the fault the entire rest of the season takes place in the fault (and eventually the hidden world?) while the kids try to find a way out and avoid getting killed by dragons and eventually bonding with them maybe the kids manage to hurt a dragon in defence, and then feel bad and try to help it, if they really want the call-back but this would be way more interesting than just copying the old plot in a new setting
Honestly looking back they should've given Tom a tiny dragon more like book Toothless, and have him follow the little guy around avoiding the bigger more aggressive dragons (have a scene where Tom is learning about the local wildlife in school and how to avoid the dangerous ones like bears, and help injured ones) and connect that to this little injured dragon he finds, then bam blam show off thunder acting as the little guys guardian and boom special boy Tom shows off dragon taming skills and gets 2 dragons
It really feels off place. i mean reusing the same movements would be much better than the many times i see the thunder (toothless-like one, sry don't know the english race) moving only 5% of his body while everything froze like at 10:53 (seeing this one directly and by rewatch 3 more)
fun fact: in race to the edge, there is a episode where the dragons get infected with grimora, and in one scene, the riders are surrouned and it shows the camera angle spinning around all of them and in the back grounds the dragons were stuck in one pose-
There's also another scene in the episode "not lout" I think, where the vikings were cheering for spitelout (snoutlout's dad), they were all frozen in a cheering pose that looked creepy
This is the same feeling when I first heard that Spirit (the horse movie), another classic dream work movie, was gonna get a spin off. The movie was literally focused on freedom but guess the spin-off: GIRLS RIDING ON HORSES ALL THROUGHOUT THE SEASON. It never focused on the horse. I didn’t get why they didn’t brought back horse land (even though it’s not dreamwork) since the horses are brighter and colorful making much more marketable toward kids
Oh god don't remind me of that trainwreck. Httyd and Spirit shaped me as a person, and these spinoffs hurt my soul on a level I cannot even describe. I don't even know which one is worse, the Spirit spinoff or this one XD
I thought the spin off was decent. It was a spin off not really in the same vein as the actual movie there. And again it was a spin off not part of the main cannon really. It’s like saying something like Paper Mario is bad for not being a platformer and Mario Kart as well too for being a racer. Granted the spin off has it’s problem it was not bad at all. It was great but it has its problems as a spinoff.
I like a show being inclusive but you know they are shouting "inclusivity" to your face when the Asian kid rides an Asiatic dragon, even though Asia is supposed to be on the other side of the glove. Like, do Asian dragons travel around the world to get to the hidden world? If so then why so far? Haven't they made a different nest for dragons living on that side of the planet?? I have so many questions.
I thought it was something like in school of dragons where it spans across the world but is so deep it is nearly imposible to find without going to the "end of the world" or destroying the floor of an extinct volcano.
It's funny, they're trying _so hard_ to make these dragons "Chinese" that it comes across as gross orientalism. They've even got those gold patterns on the back of their wings.
I fully agree with this take away from the series. When you pointed out the glitchy hair and the pause between each character talking I started wheezing with laughter. One thing that you didn't mention that has always bugged me is how most of the dragon's roars are re-used roars from the old "somewhat" unique dragon roars from the httyd shows. From the big blind dragon, the roar is literally the red death's. And Wu and Wei's Roar is just a zippleback, when it should be more creative and new since the dragon is A NEW SPECIES. That's my add-on rant. hope ya like it!
Something that would have been interesting if done: toothless and the unnamed lightfury bring back the fury species and there is a huge colony of furies living somewhere relatively near where berk was. Depending on the lifespan of dragons in the HTTYD universe either toothless or one of his children (or grandchildren or great grandchildren) was the leader, and it would be extremely cool toothless again, even if it was just as some wall carving or picture of some kind. The scientists are here because of strange activity and weird fossils (dragon bones/scales/teeth) near archeology sites which are actually on the land that used to be berk. The main character needs to convince the fury colony to leave this area to not be experimented on and hunted to extinction. The only reason the leader actually trusted the main character is because he reminds them of hiccup himself or the stories of hiccup.
Thunder looks weird because they gave his forehead an indentation like some weird snub-nosed dog, instead of the nice smooth profile that Toothless and the Light Fury have. Also, if it's 1300 years later and he STILL looks like a nightlight and not more of an offshoot of the light furies, the night lights would have had to inbreed a LOT over the limited generations that Toothless and LF produced; otherwise, his features should be much closer to a light fury if the designers had any idea about how genetics actually work (but they don't care because it's a cash grab and everybody likes Toothless), though I suppose the genes are buried in there somewhere and there's a small chance he's some weird mutation.
This show actually highlighted my issue with the end of the last Dragons movie, that being that hiding the dragons away until humans were 'ready' or whatever is freakin stupid. And this show proved that point precisely. It's also annoying in that it's a continued trend of series that treat hiding/killing magic as a good thing to do. Which is also how Star vs the Forces of Evil ended, and how the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie ended
Its more of keeping them safe. Instead of keeping them on their island, where people know they exist and can come from nowhere to attack or try to steal them, they decided to let them be free on their own because they frankly can take care of themselves. The dragons just kinda chosethat place though since its safe and they obviously vibe everywhere around land and ocean. They dont just crawl down and hide lmao. I think it makes sense because the people should also learn to take care of themselves without dragons. They clearly can exist beside them, they dont have to live WITH or against them. Hiccup basically chose to let Toothless go off on his own journey and take care of his own pride, just like how Hiccup accepted to be the chief and to finally marry Astrid. They clearly still have the special bond. Its not like Hiccup said "fuck off dont ever come back" so that Toothless thought he hated him and then stayed away forever. LMAO It was hella peaceful and they basically let the dragons choose for themselves.
It ties back to the books, where Hiccup makes peace with the dragons. But as he gets older, the dragons retreat into the sea, because they know the peace can't last without him. And that was the deal he made with the dragon Furious (a dragon who had belonged to Hiccup the Second). It was actually a running theme in the story. Hiccup was kidnapped and sailed to America in one book, and he dreamed about returning there once his people had moved past their squabbles and flaws. Only to realize at the end of his life that they would probably never be ready. A lot of people dismiss the books, since the first few were very dumb, with a juvenile sense of humor. But they absolutely earned the serious ending that the movies tried to earn, but failed to achieve.
they execute this idea MUCH better in the books, yeah. in the books they don't just all go hide in one single hole forever, it's a slow, gradual retreat, and they make a point that toothless NEVER leaves hiccup for all of hiccup's lifetime, even as many other dragons slowly went into hiding.
Ironically, back when HTTYD first came out, I wrote a began writing a story where monsters were an everyday thing and the main cast even built a THEME PARK showcasing the monsters in order to fund for their perservation and studies. It was even going to be addressed in a chapter about the decision to let the public know about them versus keeping them secret.
They love the concept of connecting these things to “our” un magical world like that and I hate it let magic live why is magic dying in every single modern series
Wouldn't it have been better if this series still took place in Hiccups time but instead its his kids riding the nightlights? I mean c'mon I want to see Nuffink and Zephir flying dragons!
They released all dragons to the hidden world so that they can be safe until the time is right for them to return, so they couldn’t ride just go back and forth just to ride on them when they choose to. Besides I think the present time for the setting of this show is pretty good since I think it’s a start for dragons to safely return to the surface world.
For the fire and ice dragon, you can still keep the Eastern style motif without making look bad or even it having two heads. A lot of eastern Dragons are depicted with either fur or hair and antlers. What I suggest is a bipedal, wyvern-like dragon with a mane of fur from its neck, down its spine, and adorning its tail. Give it a long, flat face mimicking predators like polar bears, and add on the antlers on top. To give the idea of fire and ice, you give it scales that are vibrant reds, yellows, or orange (or even a blend of the three) and the fur+antlers should give off the ice side of it on their own with nothing additional needed since thick fur and antlers are associated with cold environments. Idk how something like this would look in a httyd art style, but I'd doubt they'd add anything like that since it'd easily outclass Thunder's design. Also, if you wanna keep the two projectiles from two areas, slap an over and under double mouth like slifer the sky dragon from yugioh. It'd be way different from anything seen before in httyd but I can easily see it looking like some eldrich abomination if rendered in 3d. Especially since httyd loves to give their Dragons underbites, but I still think it would work.
And most important: Hiccup and the other had at least something similar to a saddle. The kids didn't. How the heck were they able to stay on the dragons without falling?
Most likely a mix of fantasy and the leg technique someone would use to ride a horse bareback. It’s all about moving with the animal and the thigh muscles holding one in place. But most likely cus it’s a kids show and nothing has to make since anymore unfortunately 😞
Not to mention... riding dragons can’t be smooth... it would be like riding a horse. How do they not need saddles and how tf do they hold on? Hiccup and Astrid almost fell off and Hiccup did fall off Toothless. In the Nine Realm I find it bullsht
I think they saw "Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous", and thought (while on some seriously off-brand shrooms) "let's do that, but like, for HTTYD". The main problem with that is...well, CC is actually GOOD. Sure, it has its faults, it has issues with pacing in some spots and sometimes random or repetitive plot points, but most of it was good. There are moments there like the one where Kenji gets mad at Darius for being willing to risk Brooklyn's life just to prevent the bad guys of season 3 from achieving their goals, and it doesn't just get fixed with a "we're cool bro", because Kenji is still mad next season and it's a plot point for like...10 minutes or so in episode 1 of season 4. Compare that to Nine realms. Tom will literally save a person's life and should be *praised* for it, but instead the next moment he's being shitted on for literally no reason other than that he's not supposed to be there. The dude just saved somebody's ass, show him some respect maybe? This was just a failure in pacing and characterization.
yea camp cretacious is great. as a huge JP fan i thought this show would be dogshit when it was first anounced. i decided to watch it because i thought "well, lets see how they ruin and childify another one of my favorite franchises. BOY WAS I WRONG. i went in with super low expectations and by the end of season 1 i actualy cared about the humans just as much as the dinosaurs. season 4 was great and bring back the spino from JP3 made me so happy. the only downside to season 4 is that the main villain is a Discord moderator
Continueing to live in a world of denial where the only httyd content that exists in the world is the original books, the original trilogy and the original 3 shows. I will continue to live in this world, until the day I die
My husband and I both love the original series and movies. Now my four year old son is absolutely in love with them as well. He has rewatched race to the edge multiple times, wants his room decorated to reflect the dragons and will be his birthday theme. Thought he might be interested in this as I was myself. We didn’t make it through the first episode. He told me it wasn’t the same and it was fake.. so there’s that. Lol Oh and a big complaint for me that you touched on was how ridiculous the adults were. Something I liked about the original was the adults were more than just “parents to avoid and that are overly dumb”. But here we are with them being so useless.
Listen, the whole lightning with Thunder could *maybe* work, but it was executed so. Dang. Poorly. Because it would make sense that the dragons evolved specifically to hide from people since they were forced to leave the Hidden World because it grew unstable to house so many massive creatures, so some left and evolved. perhaps the nightlight thing evolved to sort of draw power from electronics to power its lighting attack, and it just stores the energy, but the attack uses A LOT of energy, so they use it sparingly and they evolved to disable technology to give themselves time to hide and since humans almost always have technology so the nightlight things could draw more energy for themselves. But I'm guessing there's absolutely no cannon explanation
There’s a saying that I like to use when discussing the relationship between animation and storytelling. “A good story can carry bad animation, but the best animation cannot carry a bad story.” This show, however, seems to have neither good animation or good writing. I’m just trying to say that they could have gotten away with the lower animation quality if they only spent more time thinking the story through.
I think the show (featuring Hiccup and crew) and the movies show how animation can slack a bit if the story is really good. I found it so enjoyable I never really considered the animation isn't the best. The tangled show is a similar idea, it's not like the movies in terms of quality, story included, but it was so enjoyable to watch regardless and quite budget friendly. Having a good story to build on, that already has a fanbase, it's hard to fuck up, yet they did... so easily.
I don't think a good story can carry bad animation. I think A good story can carry a show with bad animation, but i do also believe really good animation can carry media with a bad story, well a meh story. Also I dont think any story can carry bad animation even. Like seriously, I don't care if its a really good plot if its animation is like 2 fps and children doodles that can't be carried. Mostly: Good animation can carry media with a meh plot and a good story can carry media with meh animation. Edit: if you want an example of a meh story carried by everything else look to makoto shinkai works, the animation and music are absolutely godlike and help to carry the plot that oftentimes isn't that great if I am being honest.
The argument against Demon Slayer haters. Also, we're generally willing to watch terrible animations or even animatics of good stories. There is no _requirement_ for animation level, it's just a nice add-on.
to be fair, modern kids are usually treated like incompetent's regardless of actual ability or capability. Berk kids were basically made to work where possible as soon as possible. Hiccup was fully fledged as a Blacksmiths apprentice and in that role was remarkably skilled. its a pretty common trope of shows set in the modern age that younger main characters who are even as old as 18 are still treated like toddlers who should not be allowed near anything of importance, and that eventually said "kid" proves themselves.
The amount of disappointment that I felt after seeing the nine realms was core shivering. Rather give us another race to the age type of series with the characters we already know and love or their kids or grandkids, it would still be in a time period that is not basic as hell nowadays and would probably bring a lot of fans back to the fandom.
Alright, I’m back and here to say that I’m so glad this video exists. I’m a huge fan of HTTYD and have been since I was 10, but I just knew that watching this series would be a fucking pain. The fact that you sat through literal hours of this just so we wouldn’t have to is commendable. This show does such a disservice to the original franchise and I really hope it either has a massive positive jump in quality or it just gets canceled to save the rest of us the agony. Thank you for making this video and I hope you have a great day!!
they could've just made thunder silver colored. or! patterned in different grey shades to look like a thundercloud! that would've been much cooler, more logical (with like, the blending of the black and the white over time) AND very on-par with the electricity theme bc guess what conducts electricity like a boss?? SILVER
That silver and grey coloration also would have helped with Thunder's identity of being Toothless' descendant. With the Night Fury bloodline so small, it would actually make sense that as his lineage integrated into the light fury lineage, that black coloration would eventually turn into a silver or grey color.
I get the feeling that with Thunder's design, they were going for a more horse-like thing. With a blaze between the eyes, four white socks, and a much more upright/tall stance than Toothless, who usually crouched low like a stalking predator. Thunder actually quite closely resembles a black version of my horse, who is chestnut, with a white nose and blaze, four white socks, and some white on his neck. I think it could have been really cool to have a dragon that leaned more into that. Instead of using the Nightlight, they could have used another type of dragon. Something taller, faster, and more skittish. Make it a common prey for the FaultRipper even. It would have meant introducing it as a threat much earlier, which would have been good. Tom could have had to teach his dragon to be more adventurous, while Thunder taught him to be more cautious. That's always a beautiful arc. Predictable? Yes. Cliche? Yes. Fun? Absolutely. Just imagine, Instead of this dumb wanna-be cat thing, we had a tall, sturdy dragon, faster and more nimble than any other its size, to make up for the fact that it has no special powers and is the bottom of the food chain. It's timid, and defensive, likely herbivorous, but is extremely loyal once you're part of its herd. I think it would have been great to go for that, instead of trying to mimic toothless' cat appeal, with none of the charm. You could even try to argue that it was descended from the nightlights, because Toothless was always shown to be one of the fastest dragons around. So if you take that, and put it in an environment where it can't take advantage of skills like the plasma blast, like underground in a very crowded part of the cave, and give it a predator like the Fault Ripper, you could argue the Nightlights evolved to become more defensive. A taller stance to look more intimidating, eyes on the side of its head to see better, thinner legs and stronger wings to both fly and run faster, and all the other things that can come with the evolution of a creature in an enclosed habitat. But no, we just got a nightlight.
49:25 I will say that for the zippleback, I think it was only the twins that couldn't ride THEIR dragon without both because the dragon itself was out of sync. (Also so the twins wouldn't have to be animated with separate dragons.) But in the httyd rpg game, I was a rider with a purplish zippleback and the saddle was on its upper back between the two heads exactly the way you showed the clip of Hiccup riding Barf and Belch. Why this new show didn't just have the girl doing THAT instead of placing her on one of the necks (to make it look like she's one of the twins) I'll never know.
45:46 another thing to add: a lot of big name corporations avoid simple animations like the plague because they all associate simple models with cheap looks, whereas independent creators' projects like Wothikid's Bigtop Burger shows that simple models can work extremely well and not cheap at all with the right filters and the right techniques, to the point where it barely even looks 3d at all anymore. The main issue is probs because many big companies avoid risks like a vampire does sunlight.
maybe big companies are used to add more detailed desgings in cause they normally have bigger budget that when they dont have the option the product ends up looking really bad cause they're not used to working within those confines.
I still stand by the fact that if Toothless found nightfury babies or eggs, realized that he needed to take them away to care for them, would've been just as cliche but not as CREEPY as introducing a whole girl character just to leave her boring and vapid.
YES! Exactly! I hate the light fury so much. Not only her design is terrible, but her design and her looks make her more of an overgrown hatchling in my eyes. There was just so many problems with the third movie in my eyes. :'(
@@FranktheSkeleton yeah me too, like, what happened to the night fury being one of a kind? They are black because they are not visible during the night.. and light fury? You could argue that it's the same for them but during the day but.. during the day the sky is mostly blue? So a white dragon would be EXTREMELY visible especially that it's brighter than the clouds? But I think the worst thing I hate about her is the fact she could just be black.. she could just be black with slight differences to tail and wingshape for example to make her design stricking and recognisable enough along with following the night fury formula But no, they had to make her glittery white because SHE IS A GIRL, SHE HAS TO LOOK LIKE A GIRL, which is the dumbest thing of all time, no animal looks "girly" so why would dragons? (Especially that reptiles usually don't even possess sexual dymorphism.. )
@@billcipher8645 yepp, i always think about it as well. I even have a female nightfury character in my fanfic. My friend painted her. Looks exactly like Toothless, except with blue eyes. Still can tell that it is a female.
My dad used to work at dreamworks and as soon as pixar took over, EVERYTHING was ruined. The amazing offices were absolutely ripped of personality, aka all hidy holes were flagged as "fire hazards", every original project was canceled and replaced with prequels and sequels. I doubt anyone will read this but its so so sad to see an amazing company and amazing franchise milked to death. Pixar FUCKINg SUCKS.
Dreaworks was taken over by Universal/Illumination though. Pixar had nothing to do with it, but yeah, I understand where you're coming from. It's not the greatest of changes that the man who's responsible for the minions is now the CEO of Dreamworks too.
I'm not an animator and even I can pick up what's so wrong with the way this show looks: Honestly, the worst part of the visuals isn't even the lack of character design or interesting rendering and perspectives, although all of those are inconsistent and sucky. It's the lack of depth. Every time a dragon overlaps with another dragon it looks like a green-screen. There is no effort put into shadows or fading out the objects in the background. The flames and electricity give off very odd amounts of light, if any at all, and almost nothing interacts with other objects as they should. watching Thunder get licked by Feathers took me out, it was so awkward and looked like they hadn't actually touched. There is almost no subtle movements at all, and nothing is slowed properly. The terrible rehash of the bonding scene looks bad because Thunder's eyes never seem to fall or open at anything other than breakneck speed, and they have, like, 3 positions total. It's like they it's still a storyboard, with vague ideas of interactions and shots, but they never bothered to make it work. There's also never any interesting reflective lighting, and the colors and patters are all extremely jarring, it's so disconnected from the original even in the palates they chose. All of the patterns are high contrast, so everything is either smooth or extremely ridged. Except the viking helmet? maybe? The only gradients are within similar color groups (except, like, one dragon) and everything is highly saturated. SO SATURATED. Seriously, beyond the big bad (s?) there is no cohesive palette, even the poster you show is struggling to reign them in. The original dragons were mostly grey or brown, with pops of color, they were meant to stand out against the dull viking background but still look like they fit. These dragons fit with their rider's outfits, because they're all hella ugly and high contrast. You're telling me that not a single one of these kids can coordinate an outfit? NOT EVEN THE ARMY BRAT CAN WEAR DE-SATURATED COLORS??? Like, the main character wears bright yellow and red, with a blue-grey jacket, the girl wears bright purple with a bright green necklace, like??? even their eyes are so overly saturated, Hiccup's eyes can blend with his pupils under the correct lighting, and his green shirt is the same de-saturated green as toothless' eyes, but since the new show lacks subtlety, I shouldn't be surprised that their eyes all look like they were ripped from someone's deviant art oc. LIKE, Thunder's eyes literally go from blue to white, with white rimming his pupils... And the blue is so high saturation it hurts. It's also almost never changed by the level of lighting? Basic color rules, when it's dark, no only are all the colors darker, but they also lose saturation. Same with distance, lighter and desaturated. Neither of which are rules the characters seem to follow. Ever. Who's surprised that the only one with mediocre coloring is the only one with motivation? In terms of cinematography, I think the big failure is in not letting the characters come towards the camera at any point. They basically all slide in at a perpendicular or diagonal angle. The never brush by the camera, they never enter walking away from it, it basically feels like they're stage acting, turning towards the audience but unable to interact with them. This is a Bad Sign for a show. The shots all appear to be the same length (disclaimer I have not watched and will not watch this show, so from here it gets a bit guess-y), and relatively similar heights. ALL OF THIS IS FOR WHEN THE CHARACTERS ARE ON SOLID GROUND. The flights only marginally do better on that front though... Not once is there an interesting angle from hip height or straight above, except maybe to show off the canyon??? Also, the cave becomes crystals instead of mushrooms, and feel so much smaller??? Like, I'm sure there were cheap ways to render that. It's also a great example of a wtf moment for lighting every time they're there. The lighting also completely fails Thunder. I saw some people talking about the black and white being an opportunity to make him shark-like and intimidating, but if they can't fix that dopey perma-smile and the stupid coloration of his eyes, what can I expect... (seriously how did they uncanny valley a dragon??) I could go on, but these were the biggest details that really stopped this from being salvageable visually. I could rant another five paragraphs about character writing.
I agree, plus with the saturation proper shadows are impossible [im teaching myself animation and art but anyways] with shadows you want to make it darker and a bit more saturated other wise to doesn’t look right but the main flaw is thunders design by now there wouldn’t be very much black it’d be mostly white unless… [cursed warning] dart and ruff runner had children do you see how this is cursed now, now if it was mostly white then this would be fine, BUT THIS!? THIS IS UNFORGIVABLE!
If they were making it for young children, it would not make sense as my young siblings actually enjoy all the httyd series and all. But get this A 7 year old says that this series is rubbish. Like this just goes to show how crap this show is
what really made me mad about the bonding scene is that thunder and E-boy instantly do the hand head thing but in an actual good show/movie like HTTYD 1 you can see hiccup is afraid and you can see toothless hesitance.
……I’m about to rage by the very idea ALONE that a bonding scene being instant because it was NEVER instant in this franchise. It was always with some kind of build up if it’s shown.
@@starrsmith3810 not to mention it had no where near the sane feel the original was in a beautiful cove with a sun set and toothless was originally hostile knowing humans thunder has never seen humans and he just allows tom to pet him all over
28:12 As a Scandinavan myself (Danish) This scene just makes me angry. The accent was so off and sounded russian. And this is not how we think. Yes vikings did go on adventures but we did not do it just for adventure sake. We had goals, (That were mostly loot-grape-burn but sometimes to mess with christan monks) or to conduct trade with others. We did care what people thought of us because we knew that we could not survive without the trade from the rest of the world. Vikings were raiders yes. But we also traded and fought as merchenaries. Because if we just pissed off all of europe then we would have died out real quick. Sorry for bad grammer.
33:45 ‘Because lightnings too on the nose?’ Thunder has a semi lightning bolt pattern on his nose, it’s makes me thing Lightning was his original name haha
13:58 There is actually pretty good cannon for this as well, in HTTYD 1 Hiccup says ''300 years and I'm the first viking to not kill a dragon'' (or something to that effect) And the Viking age lasted from about 800 To 1100 (Its rather fuzzy as too the exact timing) with the first viking raid in 783, I would say dreamworks did elude to the very end of the viking age as the time point.
Exactly I only heard about it a month ago through an add on tv.I looked at the trailer and was hooked.Turns out it was released 3 months prior. Like wth. You would hear about it before it is released not after. After watching the first episode I realised it was combination of Kong king of the apes Camp cretacous Rescue riders And the one and only 'httyd Such a disappointment. The idea of modern era is good, but some aspects are downright stupid.
Imagine instead of the "Why am I asking questions?", the line was "Right, you're an animal, you can't talk...can you?". It would honestly add so much more character to a 'curious' character
One thing I noticed while watching this is it takes place in Berk. You can tell by the landscaping it's not perfectly the same but similar enough. We know the neighboring islands didn't look the same as Berk. It's shown multiple times in the shows. But this adds another layer of flaw and imperfection as the hidden world, where the dragons live was far away from Berk. I think there would be hope if they give the characters more unique attributes and story lines, not taking directly from the original, whilst throwing in a main plot of discovering lore and having the new characters meet older dragon types, perhaps a stormfly descendant or Hookfang descendant, hell they could even make it better by perhaps the 3rd or 4th season adding time travel but naturally not the main duo (Hiccup and Astrid) but maybe Snoutlout, Ruffnut or Tuffnut, or Fishlegs. So all of these direct rehashing's by the new season make sense. Or even bringing back Toothless, as there isn't any age limit for dragons and since he is the king he could have unnatural long life, but he is weathered , hard, covered in more scarring, a bit more cruel and cold. But softens when his descendant shows that these humans are similar to Toothless' old family of people and dragons.
Trans and yeah. The amount of times I've been told to watch x show because it has an LGBT character and for no other reasons, can't be counted on one hand. Does a show have representation? Yea? Good. Is said show... Good, fun, and enjoyable to watch? No? Then fuck off.
Same. It's sad there are people who feel like diversity comes before overall quality. Sure i understand how it's a plus and i like seeing different perspectives but most times it just creates tokenism.
One thing I find problematic is when people complain that there's no diversity, then once shows and movies start to try to have diversity, people complain it's too much, pandering to certain groups, and crap. Pick a side! The part where she mentioned The Dragon Prince also ticked me off. It's not screaming in your face that it has people of color, and the little inclusivity of background / supporting characters being LGBTQ+ is fine. It's a freaking fantasy world. You can have your characters look however you want. Just let them exist, like they exist in real life. And Dreamworks is known now to be supportive of POC, disabled people, and LGBTQ+. Their heart is in the right place, trying to be varied. It's not too strange that the cast of this are varied, since it's a modern era it takes place in. However, it's the idea of this mini show that sucked.
As a fan of the books I've always be wary of bad adaptions. The movies were a blessing and incredibly enjoyable to watch alongside reading the book series. It's sad that how to train your dragon has been reduced to this
I had problems with Hidden World but I was able to get past that Homecoming was where the franchise officially died in my eyes. Then we got Rescue Riders, WHY THE FUCK DO THE DRAGONS TALK?? Then we got the Nine Realms. This is not HTTYD. it's Camp Cretaceous with dragons. You can not convince me otherwise.
Absolutely. The moment I saw it, I was thinking "...discount Camp Cretaceous?". The stakes feel so much lower here, and CC functioned as a bridge series like Race To The Edge did for HTTYD, and you could actually see for once how characters grew and changed. I hated Kenji at first, rooted for him to get eaten, but when he started to grow as a character, he quickly started to grow on me too. I have a little bit of hope that Nine Realms figures out how to do character development, but they seem to already be going down the route of, oh, I don't know, EVERY SINGLE SHOW ABOUT MYTHICAL CREATURES HIDING FROM THE GOVERNMENT? There's so many of them already, and I'd hope at least some form of twist was put on them! Also, CC did the Scorpius Rex really well I feel, building up with solid foreshadowing and kept the stakes genuinely high, and through the entire franchise, was the only dinosaur to actually unsettle me to look at. The Fault Ripper, while "implied"... did not feel the same at all. I'm glad to see someone else felt the same way about it.
@@absolutefoot4594 I'm genuinely curious what you didn't like about the show, how far you watched, and why you felt like it's annoying. Not even trying to change your mind, everyone's different after all, but rather learn what specifically didn't appeal to you and what you feel could have been done better in CC.
@@AvalonAnthros Thank you for not instantly rebuking with “you suck.” But, I’m sure I’m not the only one that has spinoff bias. I just think they’re a bit pretentious and such. However, I like to shove that aside when watching things to let my own opinion develop, but I’d finished season 4 and it just didn’t change for me.
Hi Audrie, My son has put me on to your channel, we are having a great time discussing your videos. Just looking at the character models, my first thought is Paw patrol...
now with the whole nightlight being a descendant thing and it's design, we could have it to where there are markings of their secondary color, like how the one baby had like mostly white with black tips on the ears. Or potentially instead having the black and white try to in a way become a natural camouflage other than their ability to make themselves invisible for a bit, maybe they evolved to where there is greys amongst their pattern and it helps break up the silhoutte of their figure and help camouflage within the deep underground. Aaand with the whole lightning thing, there could be a nice alternative. They would have their original plasma blasts, but when they are in a lightning/thunderstorm or in a area that has a large amount of electricity in the air (say maybe nearly extremely large generators and such), could cause them to be able to use lightning for however long it is there or by how much electricity they absorb, but once the concentration or the thunderstorm goes away, so does the lightning abilities the nightlight had.
46:28 I should add here that going 2D with HTTYD is something that Dreamworks ALREADY DID A DECADE AGO. Book of Dragons was a mostly 2D animated special focused on Bork the Bold discovering and mostly getting wrecked by various dragons while the main characters narrate everything. This is a 15 minute 2D animated special that is tied to the franchise and still managed to work given the circumstances behind it. The Nine Realms is a 6 episode tv series that is 3D, looks worse than the Boss Baby, fails in every aspect, and only managed to get a 2nd season out of nostalgia pandering.
@@hamishstewart5324 Yeah. Good point. Legend of the Boneknapper is another good example of a mostly 2D HTTYD special being better than 2 seasons of the Nine Realms
Hey, Audrie! Mechanical engineering student here. The whole "blow up the crack to stop the rock from crumbling" thing does have some merit to it because the larger hole from the explosive would lower the chance of the crack growing. Basically, it follows the same logic as why it is easier to tear a cloth that has a nick in it than one that has a large circle cut out of it.
23:00 As an addition, Hiccup is also Stoick's son, and regardless of what a beanpole he looks, I have no doubt the man trained his son as best he could through the years, and even after the first movie to be at least fit, or defend himself. (Not even just as Stoick's son, the future Chief, but because of dragons too) 1:07:30 To give the show...devil's advocate, I guess? The Faultripper wasn't a cannibal dragon that was going to intentionally kill everyone like Red Death. Although, if the dragon is "okay," wouldn't that leave them back at square one with it continuing to tunnel through the rock face? 1:08:10 ...wow. That was....well, to quote Nostalgia Critic, "that was a Magical kind of dumb." They couldn't even leave off on, Thunder can just use lightning to perfectly mark himself on rock, no, we had to go for the extra mile of connecting it back to the viking helmet.
I didn't even know this show came out. Nor did I know there was such a big fan base for HTTYD. Really entertained to hear a review of this show from a super fan XD
My kids love the HTTYD franchise. They're 4. They love The Nine Realms. I wasn't really aware people were so up in arms about the show. It's cute 🤷🏻♀️
@@mcd08 the reason your kids love the 9 realms is specifically because they’re too young to understand how terrible it is, a lot of us grew up with these movies, and it sucks to see dreamworks massacre a show they deem as canon to the universe, of course it’ll upset people, wouldn’t you feel the same way if a corporation destroyed the legacy of something you loved?
Okay also can I just point out The name "night light" is too inconsistent for me. It isnt as annoying as most of the mistakes, but Twilight Fury or something like that would be MUCH more fitting.
This is the only thing i disagree with. I really love the name nightlight I feel like it’s really cute. Maybe they could’ve come up with something better but I love nightlight personally.
Nightlight feels like purely kiddie naming, which it was. Look at Toothless’ kids, they’re kiddie dragons for toddlers to go, “ooh pretty,” while the adult fans go, “ooh, a really cool film with great writing, attention to detail, and world building.”
I like night light, I feel twighlight fury would've been too many syllables. I don't know, it doesn't roll off the tongue like night fury and light fury. Just my opinion though
I mean I would be a bit concerned if Hiccup ended up living for 1,300 years ^^'' (and I mean I guess Toothless too but we don't really have an established age limit on dragons I don't think)
It would be cool to see a prequel of baby toothless and the night fury's going extinct but they made a sequel in the modern era and that just does not make sense when the movies are about dragons and vikings
I couldn't even make it through the second episode... and I sat through "The Room", _twice._ And you know something? I noticed NO ONE talked about this; what is going on with the environments in this show? I do 3D modelling as a hobby, and something about the... WORLD they're shown in, doesn't fit. It's like... It's like the backgrounds were painted AFTER the rendering was finished. I kid you not, it ...looks... _wrong._ It's so jarring as an artist to look at this show and see the world and just... everything around the models and foreground props just... doesn't fit. And the animations. Oh my god, the _animations drive me to drink!_ It looks like they animated everything and the higher ups didn't like how slow they were moving, so they just increased the framerate but still recorded at 14 frames per second! It's god awful!
D'Angelo's voice kept reminding me of another character I couldn't place for ages until I looked it up a second ago and realised he was voiced by Marcus Scribner, the same person who does Bow in She-ra and the Princesses of Power. So I got curious and decided to have a look at the other voice actors and as you'd expect, most of them don't have any prominent roles in any other big shows though there are a few like D'Angelo's case. There's Keston John (who plays D'Angelo's dad, the big buff guy in the red outfit) is in She-Ra too as Hordak - the main villain of the show for most of its run - and The Owl House. Lauren Tom, playing Jun's mother/the short woman, has been in quite a lot but no massive roles and mostly as reoccuring or one-off characters in shows like Futurama, Rick & Morty and Young Justice for awhile. So to put it simply, the show did have some good talent when it came to the voice acting: it was just the writing that was terrible - which anyone can tell just by watching the first minutes of the first episode - and not every good voice actor can make good work out of the poor lines and directions they were given.
3D animation is actually cheaper than 2D cuz 2D you have to keep redrawing the models over and over again and the more lines you out of detail the more expensive the animation budget gets 3D if you make a model once you can use it throughout the whole series
Also, 2d doesn't have to mean "hand-drawn",... by that I mean to say, you wouldn't have to churn out page after page like they did in ye old days of Disney. Just save multiple layers on a tablet. Much less expensive than the thousands of trees sacrificed to give birth to Bambi.
A huge part of the problem with the characters isn't just the models, it's the animation itself. I listened to this originally in the background while I was at work, with no experience with the show and only glancing down occasionally, and the animation is *stiff*. To get a little technical, there's no sense of anticipation or follow-through. Every movement more or less snaps from one pose to the next, individual limbs don't have a significant impact on the rest of the body or pose, and a lot of the talking scenes I'm seeing here are basically a character moving from static post to static pose, which stands out massively when their mouths and constantly moving while the rest of the post is largely unmoving. Just having a look at some of the clips from Race to the Edge you can see how natural the movement is when Hiccup makes the Black Plague Friday joke, as he eases into the pose and through it, still settling his weight after he folds his arms. You say the other characters look half-rendered, and to go with that, all of the animation looks like it's a first pass. There are some films that get away with this kind of animation (I'm thinking about strict authority figures that usually have comically over-emphasized stiff, snappy movements, but it also works stylistically for something like The LEGO Movie where, you know... LEGO) but obviously this isn't the intent here. I wonder how limited a budget -- financial and temporal -- the team had, because the footage of the final battle also has cuts where the Fault Ripper goes from key frame to key frame with no tweens at all. It's wild.
This also reminds me of Spirit Stallion of the Cimarron that Dreamworks also made, one of my favorite movie of all time and I wanted like a squeal to it, fast forward a couple of years and I get Spirit Riding Free (Series) and Untamed (Movie) which in my opinion was bad. The new ones was CG made when the original was hand drawn
Oh my god, don't even get me started on Riding Free and Untamed. I ride horses. I love horses. Stallion of the Cimarron was a beautifully realistic portrayal of the developing bond between a horse and rider. It showed the intelligence and wit that horses have once they're comfortable. Anyone who tells me otherwise has clearly never seen my horse open his own gate to get to the neighbour's horses. It's a lift gate. You need to lift it up and push it simultaneously to open it, and this mf did it WITH HIS FACE. It was also a very smart way of teaching children about the American colonisation, and the cruelty that Indigenous Americans faced on a daily basis, through the eyes of a horse. Taken from their homes, enslaved, ridiculed, domesticated into white culture, all faced by both Spirit and Little Creek. Then you get the sequel. I cried. Honestly, I did. I've only seen clips, but shows like that are why so many children get hurt riding horses. They think it's so easy to bond with a horse over a single afternoon. They think riding is easy, and doesn't requires years of training, and working out to build the required muscle to be able to jump bareback, and all the other things that devil child pulls off. They think horses are friendly and gentle, and not a 300+kg beast with hooves and teeth that will not hesitate to put your mother in hospital on Christmas Eve! (true story. Worst Christmas ever) At least Dragons aren't real. At least this show isn't really doing anything harmful. It's just an insult. Riding Free is actively teaching children to do incredibly dangerous things, and giving them the false confidence to just walk up to a horse when their parents aren't looking, and then get surprised when they get their fingers bitten off! I just thank the universe that most kids that watch that show live in the city, and will likely never see a horse. So yeah, both are insulting, both are a major disservice to everything the original stood for. But I will rank Riding Free and Untamed as SIGNIFICANTLY worse, because they actively promote such dangerous behaviours. I constantly have the kids of coworkers, or kids of my mum's coworkers even, like 7 to 10 years old, ask if they can ride my horse, claim they know what they're doing, say they don't need a helmet because no one ever wears one in the shows they watch, and then have the GAUL to get mad at my horse when them running up to him and jerking on the reigns doesn't make him love them. They're the sort of kids I can't trust to just stand in my paddock without me holding their hand, because they're going to try and run around, and play with my horse, like people do in these shows. I can do that, but I'm a lot taller, and my horse has to respect for me to stop when I tell him, if he gets too excited and tries to run me over. Which he often does. It took me years to form the relationship I have with my horse, and riding other horses is really hard because we don't know each other. This is long, but I had to get it out somewhere. I've hated those shows for years. If it's fantasy, it's just insulting. When it pretends to be real, that's when kids take it seriously, and when it becomes a danger. I'm sorry. Had to vent. I'm sick of kids thinking they know how to bond with my horse and crying because he doesn't love them after one carrot and prefers the person that's been taking care of him for 5 years, or because he doesn't do everything they want, because he's an intelligent creature with a mind of his own, and will not just walk blindly wherever you point him. I hate that fricking show.
14:23 Correction: While the famous (and most deadly) outbreak of the black death was in the 1300s, the first outbreak of the Bubonic plague was in the mid-500s in the Byzantine Empire. (This is a minor issue, though; I am just re-watching these videos and remembering them as being entertaining.) Also, I'm just copying all this info from Wikipedia.
While true (And earlier plagues might also have been Bubonic) the name 'The Black Plague' is as far as I know coined with the 'big one' everyone has heard about: (Also, I am mostly writing this comment to add a comment to the channel, interactions for the Algorithm, comments for the RU-vid throne and all that)
For the timeline problem (when how to train your dragon happened in our universe), I always thought, even as a kid mind you, that since it wasn’t real the producers didn’t need to be really consistent with dates, allowing for jokes like Black Death Friday to be made or something else. At the time I always thought that the events in the show and movies were in a completely different universe unbound by real world history Edit : also am I the only one that thought that the dragon design fucking sucks ? I mean before how to train your dragon, how a dragon looked liked in mind were wyverns and classique four leg, 2 wing dragon. The movies and series showed that you could change the shape of dragons and make it cool and interesting. And this is a bit of pet peeve of mine but a thing I really liked was that the dragons felt like actual animals in a ecosystem. Exemple the gronckle, by looking at its appearance wings, skin and color you could tell that it was an animal that lived in a rock environment. And the show acknowledges it with the introduction of dragon root. Of course not every dragon is like this, green death, but they tried and it works. When I saw the crystal breaker or what ever it’s called and the hideous zippelback rejects I just thought ‘’are you fucking serious !?’’ And honestly it doesn’t make sense. The hideous zippelback is a sneak type dragon not a stocker class, the whole premise is that dragons in that class use smells and unique mechanismes to catche their prey, how is firing fire and ice fucking sneaky !? Sigh, sorry to go an a rant here. It’s just no one around me at school and at home give a shit about this and I finally have a chance to talk about it. Sorry if I annoyed/ bored you wasn’t my intention 😅 Edit 2: holy shit on a podium, 191 likes ?! Thank you so much 😊
I'd like to correct your statement about the class hideous zipplebacks belong to. They are classifies as mystery class dragons, stealth class is not a class name they use. As you said, mystery dragons are generally stealthy and/or have unique traits no other dragon has.
@@crashsparrow6943 so I did some research and you are right but apparently the hideous zippleback, flightmare and the snapetrapper belonged to the Fear class but were then moved to the mystery class for Somme reason. Somehow I missed that. Thank you for telling me this.
I think one of the things that makes me disinterested in the show is it is basically us as an audience going through something we already went through in a better version. We already went through the finding of dragons, finding the hidden world, riding dragons, etc. with Hiccup and his gang that going through the same stuff again with a different crew is tedious. Like they are probably going to try to pull a "dragons and people live together now" except we already lived through it with the movies and we have seen how it plays out. Unlike the other shows, there is no lore for us to find cause it is just a story of people forgetting that dragons existed while each world grows and changes on its own. It is literally, Hiccup and gang say goodbye to dragons, time skip of 1300 years and dragons are reintroduced to a world that is basically our world. There is no need to figure out the in-between as we can probably guess what happened, so the lore hook is thrown out of the window. It is a carbon copy of what we already went through except it is now in "modern" times, that to me doesn't scream fantasy. Why couldn't they just show a modern berk? Have what happened in the last movie become kind of like a tradition, so that the stories of berk don't fade away. Like, have them have some sort of secret society that works towards making sure that dragons aren't found or disturbed until the world is ready for it. Where once a "Berkian" reaches a certain age, they travel to the hidden world to look at dragons with their own two eyes, learn the importance firsthand about why the dragons should be protected, maybe have them make a semi-bond with their own dragons (where they can go visit them every 1-10 years or so) thus making it more important to not let the wartorn world relearn the existence of dragons. Then flash-forward to a more "modern" berk where the world kind of resembles our world but is completely different as the existence of dragons changed some things in the world, where there is more lore about dragons than our world. All these stories inspire many throughout the years, but not to the level of some generic eccentric person with lots of money. They not only want to find dragons and prove that they are not insane but monopolize dragons as weapons and objects of mass destruction not to take over the world but to make them more money. This conflicts with New Berk's beliefs and we follow generic hero and crew in stopping/delaying the rediscovery of dragons long enough to where the leaders of New Berk can find a solution. Is it generic and not well written? Heck yes, cause I am not an author and this is something I came up with on the fly. Heck, you can even add some of the plot already present in the show (like a generic hero comes with eccentric rich person as mom works for them only to learn that what they are doing isn't right or what started off as research then became corrupted with corporate greed or something). But at least it is something other than a carbon copy of the franchise thus far in a new setting that adds no new information.
My thing with diversity is that it needs to be presented organically and the *diversity* needs to be in their personality and not just physical traits. I feel when you said race was just another physical trait like hair while it was technically true it was worded in a way that can come across as offensive without context to those who are very fixated on integrating inclusive diversity into media and equal rights etc. (This isn't a dig on you because as an autistic person I often make the mistake of upsetting people with my wording when I don't mean to come across as offensive at all. I very much enjoyed your critique!) Inclusivity is very important because there's not enough of it, however race alone is not enough. That's the crux of the things franchises don't grasp. You can't just take a character and slap whatever race on them and call it a day. They need personality traits, they need dimension. They need to be REAL FUCKING PEOPLE. Race isn't a personality trait. Sexuality isn't a personality trait. Gender identity isn't a personality trait. *NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE PERSONALITY TRAITS, AND THEY CANNOT REPLACE PERSONALITIES* I feel like these corporations know minorities are desperately grasping for scraps so they'll just toss out whatever half-assed steaming hot trash they feel like throwing out, putting in minimal effort so they can snatch up the profits from us and claim they gave us what we wanted when we really did not. The slogan seems to be that we need more diversity in media, more POC, more LGBTQ+, more minorities, but what we really need is more REAL PEOPLE. We need people with flaws, we need people with talents. We need people who contribute to the story and who have importance, who have families and friends and people they care about. We need POC and LGBTQ+ folks, and disabled folks who have more traits than just "related to main character in this way". Kind of like the whole lamp test with female characters; can you replace this character with a lamp and the story won't change at all? Then you need to improve your character. Same concept with adding minorities. If you can just replace them with a miscellaneous inanimate object and still have the same plot then you've made a pointless character. These characters need to not only be diverse and refreshing, but bring more substance to the story. They need to be interesting, they need to draw people in, and make people *want* to feel invested in their stories. And one more thing: quite fucking making caricatures of races. To add to what you said about only the MC having realistic proportions and all the other characters looking fake and plastic like concept art, what really stuck out to me was that the supporting main characters all looked like caricatures of stereotypical race traits. They just looked like Default Character, a generic model of a race with absolutely no other substance to their character. It's just... black character, hispanic character, Asian character. Nothing interesting about their designs, no rhyme or reason. Some advice I received about character designs: you shouldn't focus so much on how your character should look in the sense that you want them to be aesthetically pleasing or random, but *why* they look that way. They have a scar? Why? How'd they get it, did they run into the counter as a child and somehow manage to cut their brow because they're super clumsy and had a disorder that messed with their depth perception? They have white hair even though their parents don't? Do they have some rare disease, do they have albinism? She wears a lot of purple? Why? Is it her favorite color? Does she have a closet full of purple clothing she obsessively collects, and her mother begs her to get at least one shirt that *isn't* purple?? It's so important to address when or why they got various traits. Your characters need to be interesting with *purpose* even if you never tell the story of how or why they got it in the story. Even if you don't show why or how they got that way, just the fact there *is* reason for this or that aesthetic and trait helps your character to make more sense, be more cohesive. You're more likely to discard traits if you can't come up with a good reason for them so they aren't too cluttered or basic/generic.
I actually ended up coming back to this first video now that she made her season 2 review and actually addresses the matter. She just came of as more condescending and her wording was poor, but honestly the comment you made makes me understand why she feels the way she does now.
Of course it comes off as offensive to someone who is fixated on intergrating diversity and inclusivity; because people who don't see it as "just a character trait" would find it offensive. That doesn't make it anymore than a character trait tho. What makes a person strong and cool are their experiences and their reaction to those experiences. No matter the actions they do, or the discrimination they go through, they can still become just as bad as those who hurt them or as good as those who loved them. They may abuse or love in different cultural or societal ways, but it's the same reaction. If anything, it's the culture or cultural/societal situation/problem that can be properly represented, as there are way too many individuals to truly represent fully anyway. Discrimination and feelings doesn't make being disabled or trans or poc or whatever anymore effective when focused on that alone. It gives more power to who you are as a person, but nothing more really to the skin color, because I can easily revert to being like my abuser and none of that will stop me. Personality, at least,effects how we think and are, but no matter how much diversity and inclusivity we need, skin, gender, and sexuality are still just character traits, which is WHY diversity and inclusivity is important to do well and right. Because it's just a trait, and everyone is more than their skin color, sexuality and etc Optional to read Examples: No amount of blackness, transness, or autisticness or etc., (or the opposite of all of these) makes anyone anymore braver, stronger, or greater. I could call myself a strong black autistic woman and still abuse my power the same way my parents did: why? Because I chose to not develop my character and use race as a reason to refuse to, but nothing changes. A trans person can feel brave after surgery, but still be too scared to do certain important things unless they've had a certain experience or epiphany that helps them. Being a straight white male (alone) doesn't even save people as much as understanding one's own humanity and their purpose, because as much as people are stupid enough to believe they have an easier life- many go through lots of abuse and traumatic incidents that could change them to be their worse selves if they don't get past their egos (if the specific straight white male even HAS an ego, because they're not all stereotypical terrible terrible racists (this anger comes from Twitter)).
Yeah, I have to agree with how weird Thunder's design turned out. I have seen some awesome fanart of the Nightlights all grown up, and they look amazing and badass. Honestly, I don't think the creators really cared when they made this.
This is your first video that I've seen, but I really enjoyed it! You definitely deserve more subscribers. Thank you for sacrificing your eyeballs just to watch this show and talk about it.
