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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

RttE Rant: Quit Breaking the Fourth-Wall!


In all honesty, I usually try to stay positive on my blog. I think this is because I know what it is like to love something, and then to find posts on it, and then to sit there and watch the writer rip the thing you enjoyed to shreds. It’s not a good feeling. Sooooo… when I watch RttE, I usually don’t come away thinking, “wow, that was great”. My feelings are almost always mixed or negative towards the television show (with the occasional episode that really does get my attention and make me appreciate it), but that doesn’t mean I want to constantly blog negative things about the show. I understand that people put a lot of work into making it, and at the bare minimum it is nice for HTTYD to still be getting love and attention. However, today I’m gonna take a little dive into the valley of criticism. If you just adore Race To The Edge, and you think the series is perfect, you might just want to cruise on by and skip this post. However, if you want to see me nitpick, feel free to click the “read more”.



So, RttE gets a lot of stuff off. I think they make Hiccup arrogant, I think they leave Toothless in the background, I think they spend way too much time trying to make us care about comedic side characters who are in no way central to the original HTTYD, and I think the series as a whole has continued in RoB and DoB’s steps of getting Hiccstrid completely wrong. Sooooo… I could write full length posts about all of those problems, but in the end, I’ve gotten sort of used to them. I expect RttE Hiccup to moan and sigh and act like most everyone around him is too stupid for him to pay attention to. I expect them to make it a huge deal every time Astrid and Hiccup glance at one another. I expect to get maybe one episode that focuses on Toothless every season… along with four or five that focus on the twins or Fishlegs. But, this new grievance has caught me somewhat off guard. RttE has begun to break fourth-wall. And they don’t just do it occasionally, they do it a lot.

For those who might not be familiar with the terminology I’m using, breaking fourth-wall is when a piece of entertainment becomes aware that it is entertainment. It can be things like a character talking directly to the camera, or it can be a character making references that they should have no way of knowing. It is almost always used for humor, but it takes away a lot of the story’s credibility. After all, it’s hard to feel like events are real when the characters pause to make comedic references to real world events or places. This hits the world of HTTYD especially hard because the first and second movie strove really hard to be stand alone, timeless pieces of entertainment. They didn’t throw in the most current pop-song, they didn’t make culture references, and they didn’t make wisecracks directed at current persons of interest. You know when you watch a movie, and they make a reference to someone who was famous in the 70’s, and you’re like, “Wait, what?” (apologies in advance if any of my readers were watching 70’s television). That will never happen with the HTTYD films. They don’t have current products, people, or places. They stand alone, and they could certainly be just as entertaining and engaging to an audience twenty years down the line. They deal with themes that are classic and innate to being human… whether it be friendship, honor, conscience, family, love, or war. All these things have existed for ages, so HTTYD has successfully made itself feel pretty much timeless. It’s not tied to the years 2010-2017, and that’s a good thing. In doing this, HTTYD stays classy.

That brings me to the problems in RttE. The show consistently breaks fourth wall, and oftentimes it’s not even that funny. I’ll just go through a few examples I can remember off the top of my head:

Walmarket. Seriously? This joke was completely unnecessary, and unfunny. Plus, it basically pulled product placement in the middle of a show about Vikings. 

Snotlout the narrator. Perhaps the episodes were running out of story to tell, so they decided to just shake up their narrative style in order to try and keep things entertaining. This is probably one of the worst instances of fourth-wall breaking that I’ve seen in the HTTYD franchise. It was so tacky and awkward, and it draws so much attention to the fact that you are watching a show. When I first watched HTTYD and HTTYD2, I was totally immersed. I literally forgot everything around me and found myself pulled into these epic stories in a rich and amazing world. RttE may not have the budget needed to make incredible environments, but it could at least try to pull its viewers into the story rather than making them chuckle by realizing how ridiculous it is. 

Spanish twins. I honestly think this pulls the twins out of character just for the sake of humor. We never see the twins act even remotely intelligent in the films, and in the series they are usually pretty dumb. However, from time to time the writers will give the twins uncanny amounts of knowledge in areas they could have no access to. Whether it be modern science and physics or a language that couldn’t be further from the Nordic seas, the twins just do stuff for the sake of being unpredictable and “funny”. At first it was kinda entertaining, but the joke has gotten really old really fast.

Hiccstrid. I’ve already hit on this, but I find the use of this term in the series to be really, really tacky. I image some people were thrilled when they first saw it. It’s obviously fan service, so I can’t help but think people went nuts. “Whoa, look! They actually read all our tweets and tumblr posts! They acknowledge us as a fandom! That means by our discussion and feedback, we can actually change HTTYD! WOW!”. No, not wow. Granted, I love seeing story writers shape their tales to fit in a little fan-service. There’s a really, really epic example of that in the second film. Apparently, the scene where Valka notes that Toothless is Hiccup’s age after counting his new nubs was actually included because DreamWorks noted fans speculating about those new nubs as well as trying to guess Toothless’s age. Now THAT is fan service. That displayed that DreamWorks monitors deep within the fandom. They actually read thought out posts and in-depth discussions. Tossing in the term “Hiccstrid” took little more than looking at the most common hashtag found under most HTTYD online content. It’s tacky, it’s forced, and it doesn’t fit with the world of HTTYD. What happens years down the line when couple name-mashing isn’t a fad? Ughhh… yeah, so, as you can probably tell, I’m against this choice. I’m not against the use of the term “Hiccstrid”; I use it all the time, but I am against HTTYD being turned into an internet meme for the sake of fan-service. 

Whew, well… I think that is enough for now. There are more instances where the series breaks the fourth-wall, but I don’t want to dwell on them. After all… there is a LOT to love about HTTYD, so hopefully my next post will be more upbeat and positive!


What do you guys think? Am I completely out of line? Do these things irritate you, or do you think they are funny? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

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