How I was Radicalized by How To Train Your Dragon

Written by Bennett Short

Art By Hailey Kroll

My whole life, my older brother Samuel has been the smart one. It’s not to say anyone in my family is stupid, he’s just always been the cream of the crop. He’s fascinated by history and politics, and has been his whole life. From the minute Samuel could read, he was learning about warfare and statecraft, and when he wasn’t doing that he was calling our grandfather, a former Marine, to ask him questions about being a soldier. My grandmother kept every voicemail my brothers and I left her from when we were really little, and on one of them a six-year-old Samuel was whispering questions about ICMBs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) because he’s worried talking about missiles over the phone was illegal.

Most of the time, kids who are interested in the military from such a young age are right wing gun nuts, but it was the opposite for my brother. He developed a strong sense of anti-authoritarianism, and a healthy outrage towards the American military-industrial complex. When Samuel was seven and I was four, we were helping pack sandwiches for homeless people at church, and according to my mom we had to leave early because Samuel kept talking about how the government should be doing this instead of buying new battleships. He was right, but we’re from Norfolk, home of the largest naval base on the entire planet, so this was not exactly a popular opinion.

Once I started to read, my mother was anxious not to have a second kid with the same views, so she kept me away from the historical stuff. My mom inundated me with fantasy, and I became a Harry Potter/Percy Jackson kid. She also got me the How to Train Your Dragon books. For those who haven’t read them, the books are nothing like the movies. The key difference is that the Vikings already have dragons for hunting and riding at the start of the books. The dragons are captured as babies and raised to fear their masters, so that even when they grow up to be stronger and deadlier than the warriors that own them, they’re still afraid and won’t rise up.

The series is 12 books expounding on the profound immorality of such a system, as well as criticizing the defense of “this is how things have always been done.”

Hiccup has to fight against the established system of violence not with the iconic Toothless we know and love from the DreamWorks movies, but with an exceptionally disobedient dragon roughly the size of a Jack Russell Terrier.

These books, more than any experience in my life, shaped the way I see the world.

Not because they were the most impactful, but because they were the first. The very foundation of my belief system is a small boy with a small dragon, facing the enormity of the world’s injustices armed with his conviction that the way things are is wrong. There’s certainly a lot of that in Samuel, who took down a fence put up to stop homeless people from sleeping in the alcove of a building near our house when he was in high school. I didn’t quite have his nerve when I was 12, so I just stayed up late waiting for him to come home and making sure our parents didn’t find out. Then, after Samuel had moved up to Vermont for college, I staged protests at my high school over the lack of a gender neutral dress code and wore a dress to prom. Not as cool of a story, but I couldn’t find any fences.

Even though my brother and I don’t quite see eye to eye on politics these days, at the end of the day, my mom’s plan never ended up working out. She still ended up with two staunchly anti-authoritarian kids, who are less than satisfied with the amount of money spent devising new ways to blow people up. The irony of the situation is, even if I had read the same books as Samuel they would’ve been nonsense to me. Not to mention the fact that I probably never would’ve known there were How to Train Your Dragon books at all if not for my mom buying them. So I guess the thing that really radicalized me was my mother’s attempts to keep my political opinions from being like my big brother’s.