okay so my biggest issue with the new httyd live action worldbuilding is the whole "best of the tribes from around the world" justification for. having poc in berk??? which. i get there are racists being pissy about poc vikings ( cmon guys there are literal fucking dragons but poc are too unrealistic???) but the way they talk about them in the movie (astrid, a visibly black character, references coming from a different tribe, stoick specifies an east asian woman's tribe is "from the far east") makes the tribes element very clearly about the characters of color and not a general kind of thing that explains why all these dragon fighters are in berk in the first place. and all of that just kind of feels like all the tribes are just different races, which adds this coding of race as a biological construct and not a social one and also kind of excludes all the poc characters from the whole berk tradition themes because they get implied to all be immigrants. and i just found that kind of weird??
like my friend pointed out that he liked it being explained why there is this settlement in berk in the first place (all the best dragon fighters come to berk) and i agree but i just think it was racialized in an unnecessary way? like this is a fantasy world; i don't think the movie needs to "justify" there being poc there. we readily accept the dragons and all the viking stuff, so why not just have poc and not draw attention to it or insert real world racial geography in (like the far east comment is still so unnecessary to me. who wrote that and why).
i also didn't love the way they portrayed the village elder with kind of indigenous vibes and all these "mystical things" she is doing like with the abacus that never get explained--that kind of seemed off to me but i'm not native or any kind of indigenous so i'll defer to those folks when talking about that as i shouldn't be a gauge for what's respectful or not.
