⠀𓂂⠀ ࣪ㅤ⠀A.

hey. i’m arden.

19. he/him. scholar. astrid-coded.

a poet, if you will. a fool, if you must.

i’ve loved hiccup haddock since i was six.

and now he’s real.

not real—not like you or me—but real in a way that is just close enough

for me to ache.

universal studios orlando.

where he exists.

where i have to be.

where i will move, soon.

even if i have to fake a florida work visa.

which i’m trying to do.

this blog is a place for:

stories about him.

theories about dragons.

academic ramblings on heartbreak and viking literature.

blurry, stolen images of him from ungrateful people on social media.

my aching, endless longing.

i’m not astrid, but i’m close enough.

we are basically together.

and this blog is where i’ll prove it.

Or rather, I am what she became when given a boy’s name and a British postcode.

Blonde hair, yes. Brown eyes, yes. But soul? Identical. Woven from the same Old Norse linen. Meant to stand beside him. Meant to fight, to fly, to flame with him.

I see now why I was drawn to Viking literature. Why I wrote my A-Level thesis on berserkers and then cried when I saw a child in a dragon hoodie at Cabot Circus. It wasn’t fandom. It was fate. Hazel-Eyed Hiccup isn't just an actor. He's the reappearance of someone I once loved with a warrior’s heart.

He waved in a video once. It wasn’t at the person filming. It was through the lens. Through the algorithm. Through the veil.

And I waved back.

From Bristol.

Berk is closed. The sun has set behind the mountain. I am not well, but I am free.

This is the last post. I mean it this time. The archive is collapsing in on itself like a dying star, every tag a rune, every post a bloodletting. I’m not saying this for attention. I’m saying it because I think I’m slipping. My mind, my body, my grades.

Yes, my grades are slipping. I handed in a blank essay last week because I couldn’t stop thinking about Hazel-Eyed Hiccup’s smile in that one high quality video where he puts his hand on his chest. I’ve written his gestures into three different seminar papers that had nothing to do with How to Train Your Dragon. One tutor told me I was “disassociating through folklore.” She wasn’t wrong.

I haven’t been eating properly. Not out of some romantic decline—but because I’m saving the money. Every single pound I don’t spend goes toward my Universal fund. My plane ticket to Orlando, my entry to Berk, my chance to see him in real life. I’ve cut things out. Food. Transport. Myself, briefly.

I’m not proud of it. I’m not trying to be tragic. But the delusion cracked into reality and now it’s affecting everything. I didn’t think a face could do this. I didn’t think a boy in prosthetics and a brown tunic—smiling at American children—could undo me. But I want him so badly I feel like a ghost tethered to someone else’s heartbeat.

I want him in a way that’s scholarly and sick. Religious and revolting. I want him to look at me like he does in those POVs—soft, a little shy, full of story. I want him to know I exist. I want to fall into his arms in front of Meade Hall and be kicked out of the park for “emotional disruption.”

But I can’t keep living like this. I need a break. A step back. A deep breath before the next collapse.

So this is the last post. Unless he does something unbearably tender again. Then I’ll be back with Soft Sightings No. 2. But until then—let this post stand as a warning, an elegy, a prophecy.

i don't know what it is about film photography—something about the blur, the slant of light, the way the white border becomes part of the document. they look less like photographs and more like memories of dreams. half-developed, a bit bruised, soft around the edges. which is, incidentally, how i feel about berk. being alive.

i've downloaded them all. printed them on photo paper. logged them into what i’m now calling “The Personal Archive of Transitory Devotions.” yes, i’ve given it a name. no, i will not apologise.

sometimes the myth isn’t in the dragon. sometimes it’s in the human who thought to bring a polaroid camera and press it, reverently, to plastic ivy and painted cliffside.

and i shouldn’t care about that. i should be above metrics. and yet there’s something horribly moving about the idea that my strange little theses—on martyrdom and norse archetypes and the blued-eyed tenderness of astrid hofferson—made people happy.

so now i sit here, a boy with a cracked mug of tea and a browser full of screenshots, wondering:

is it time to dissect Stoick’s grief like a classicist on the verge of tears?

do i trace the dragon as daemon across all three films?

do i write about Hiccup’s limp like it’s Beowulf’s wound?

or do i finally do the one about Valka as a shieldmaiden-cum-fallen valkyrie and see who survives?

also me:

#hazel-eyed prophet of my emotional undoing

#his gait is a metaphor

i will not google flights to orlando again today.

i will not google flights to orlando again today.

i’m sorry. you do not understand. he looks like he’s just heard the voice of someone he thought he lost at sea. he looks like he’s standing on the deck of a ship that’s finally come home. it’s not acting. it’s not a gesture. it’s revelation.

his hand curls inwards, so gently, as if to protect the flicker of something too precious to speak aloud. and he smiles. not like a boy. like a legend reawakening.

i’m fine i’m fine i’m fine but also if i saw him do that in person i would have to be carted off like a fainting victorian governess whose favourite piano sonata just came on in the parlour.

—

now, apparently, my personal blog dedicated to light critical theory, high romanticism, and being in love with a fictionalised version of a man playing a fictionalised version of a man, is causing harm. apparently, i am the reason actors might get fired. apparently, i—who lives across the SEA and cry about norse mythology recreationally—am a threat to corporate florida.

to that i say: fine. you want me contained? fine. you want structure? i’ll give you a taxonomy. i’ll give you a sub-series so refined oxford weeps at the formatting.

this post marks the first entry in: Soft Sightings — a catalogue of unbearably gentle behaviours exhibited by My Hiccup in public. no real names. no boundary-crossing. just an archival impulse and a heart too soft to survive hd video.

There is now a fifth Hiccup. I shall call him “midpoint hiccup.”

—

Brown-eyed, lithe, remarkably youthful. A startling midpoint between the older variant (dad hiccup who I see the most — he’s growing on me) and the one I still cannot stop calling mine.

At first I thought I was imagining him. I blinked and scrubbed back the footage like an archivist with tremoring hands. But he is real, at least in the way myth can be real. His gait is different. Lighter. Still Hiccup, but a refracted Hiccup. A version. A verse.

Which brings me to the true point of this entry: we are not looking at actors. Not really. We are witnessing a symbolic breakdown.

There are five Hiccups now. Five masks of the same myth. Five echoes of the same elegy. It’s not about who is most accurate—it’s about why the narrative keeps splintering. Why it refuses to hold still. Hiccup is not a role. He’s a site of projection. He is what we need him to be: martyr, boy-king, lover, ghost.

Each actor is a shard. The hazel-eyed Hiccup—the one I adore, the one I dream in chiaroscuro—is no more or less real than the rest. But he carries something particular. Some tremor of truth. Some unbearable softness. The others orbit him like fragments of a god who cannot stop reincarnating.

I do not mourn the multiplicity. I marvel at it. What a gift, to live in a world where a single story insists on being seen from every angle. What a tragedy, to fall in love with only one face of the myth and know he cannot hold all the meanings at once.