#hbau

Book 9: Minicup and the Pirate Training Program come of age to join Flashburn's School of Swordfighting. This is Elder's very first excursion representing his tribe as the Hooligan Chief, so this is a rite of passage for both of them.

They're attacked by the dragon rebellion, and Alvin and the Witch get all of the tribes in on making the winner of a swordfighting competition King of the Wilderwest

The Witch kidnaps Elder in order to get Minicup to find the crown of the Wilderwest. Even though Mini finds it, the Witch made it so that Elder still can't compete

Minicup wins the competition, but Adelaide throws the stone that reveals his Slavemark. Elder sends Big Toothless away with Minicup and his dragons to keep him safe while he's in exile.

Book 10: The tribes are all split up into slaves and Alvinsmen, with the Jorgensens being Alvinsmen. Snotlout is an inside man. Elder and the other riders are kept separate so they can't make a big escape plan. Valka is missing and Valhallarama is supposedly an Alvinsman.

Meanwhile, Alvin has sent Grimmel the Grisly to track Minicup through Big Toothless, and after nearly a year, Furious sends Luna the Light Fury to do the same thing. Toothless decides to split off from Minicup to lead both hunters away, and Minicup gets into the Amber Slavelands to look for Little Fishlegs.

Big Toothless nearly gets caught by Luna, but she sprains her wing and he ruins his tail fin, rendering them both flightless. They have to take care of each other (and eventually fall in love) to get away from Grimmel.

Minicup meanwhile sneaks around the Slavelands and finds Elder Hiccup, and gives him the Wodensfang. The rest of the book goes as usual before Valhallarama and Valka show up and reveal they formed the Dragonmarkers, freeing all the slaves and escaping. The book trio go into hiding.

While the trio are in hiding, Elder Hiccup and the Riders find and confront Grimmel the Grisly, working together with Toothless and Luna to kill him.

Book 11: After a few months of hiding, the book trio find Adelaide and she claims she can get them into Alvin's base. She betrays them, not realizing Snotlout is faking and has been trying to keep Alvin off of the book trio's scent.

Adelaide and Minicup have a swordfight and Snotlout intervenes, getting Minicup on the boat with the Lost Things. They sail away, and Snotlout pretends to be Minicup to lure Alvin away, getting shot down in the process.

Book 12 goes largely the same, with everyone ending up on Tomorrow for the final showdown and Minicup finally becoming King. The only real difference is that most the movie/show cast is there, too, and that Elder Hiccup doesn't get a say in sending the dragons away. We'll have the book's ending, where dragons gradually leave over the course of Hiccup and Minicup's lifetimes, and the Toothlesses are among the last to leave.

There a few things I didn't have room to get into— such as Elder Hiccup and the Wodensfang's relationship in book 10, the Deadly Shadow's arc, the Riders being present for Minicup's torture in book 11, what happens to Adelaide after she and Minicup swordfight, whether or not Snotlout survived getting shot down, Big Tooth's importance in book 12, etc etc, but know that there's SO much still here!!

My thoughts on HTTYD3 as a movie below: (feel free to ignore, just my own thoughts. Doesn't affect hbau. And I'm a little bit salty.)

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Honestly, my issue is that the third movie tried to stay faithful to the books' ending, but it fell flat because at their hearts, these are two vastly different stories with vastly different messages. In the books, dragons are sapient; they have complex opinions and philosophies, they have a kingdom, they have a language you can learn. You can't just have one human say "humans are bad for dragons" and shoo away the dragons all at once like they're a hivemind; there's so much more to it than that. In the books it was always about dragons liberating themselves from humans as a people, that each one chose to leave for themselves. You need dragons like One-Eye and the Deadly Shadow and the Wodensfang to give us different perspectives on this choice. You need Furious. Dragons like Furious were integral to the dragons going away, and the movies just... didn’t have that. It just puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Personally, if they really wanted the books' ending, they should have had the entirety of the Hidden World focus on mass amounts of dragons going 'extinct' and the Riders trying to find out why. Toothless would find the Light Fury and she'd eventually lead him to places like the Hidden World (but not exactly) where dragons are going to hibernate for centuries to hopefully outlive humans like Drago and Grimmel (who, mind you, single handedly drove night furies into extinction). The Light Fury in this case could be the Furious stand-in, hating all humans and trying to get Toothless to see her side while Toothless tries to get the Light Fury to see his. That way Toothless has more agency and a bigger role (and we can have a dragon antagonist and not a copycat Viggo lmao). And I think the dragons should have all left gradually like in the books, too. It would make them feel like they had more of a choice in the matter, and we could have a little montage of the older Riders saying goodbye to their dragons one by one over the course of many years. It'll be just as sad.

You can still have 'there were dragons when I was a boy'. But Hiccup in the books was an old, old man when he said that. Movie Hiccup has plenty of time.