How to Train Your Dragon and It’s Reflection On Real-World Issues with Nature

How to Train Your Dragon; if you’re a fan, it’s either the beloved franchise that you enjoyed growing up or that franchise which completely ruined everything with the third movie. One of the things that really makes the series so incredible is that while the dragons are mythical creatures, their behavior in the films, TV shows, and even games are based on a variety of real-life animals. It makes the dragons feel less like fantastic magical creatures and more like something that might be living in your backyard or stalking around a forest somewhere. Since the dragons resemble real-world creatures, they offer a look at some real-world problems, specifically, how humans interact with nature. One particular plot point in all of the Dragons media is the threat of dragon hunting and trapping. Dragons are captured and then either put to work for labor or killed to use their hide and other body parts as resources. This sounds almost eerily similar to real-world issues of hunting and poaching, causing many animal populations to decline and even go extinct.

Throughout the many different types of media, we see dragon trapping is a horrendous process where dragons are abused and brutalized; the whole process mimicking the way that captive animals are treated by illegal hunters. Some dragons are even sold to “dragon fight” where they fight to the death, a clear nod to the real-world issue of cockfighting and illegal dogfights. This series portrays dragons as beautiful and unique creatures with amazing capabilities but by the end of the franchise, they’ve been completely driven off the face of the earth. Granted, they didn’t go extinct, but it was still due to humans selfishly hunting them down and wiping out so many of them. The protagonist of the movie outright says that “The world didn’t deserve them,” and this feels like a comment on humanity as a whole. We’ve hunted down a number of species to extinction, such as the dodo, and we continue to do the same today, making animals like the tiger endangered. The How To Train Your Dragon series acts almost as a cautionary tale about our abuses against nature. If we continue to take over habitats and wipe out the creatures that we share this earth with, we may one day wake up and find that they’re all gone; and it’ll be because of us.