Astrid’s casting, however, is shifted from the original version of her.
She’s worked really hard for the attention that she gets.
Hiccup is never focused on this destiny.
His mind goes elsewhere.
He has the benefit of privilege.
In her mind, she’s going to be chief one day.
It excited me in that way.
It’s a better character to watch.
Then we found Nico Parker, who could actually play all of that with confidence.
The performance tells me [everything I need to know].
It’s also an expanded mythology, so not everyone needs to be white in this community.
They are a gathering of warriors from all of these different places, under the same Viking banner.
They’re now generations in, they’ve been mixing it all in.
All that sort of nonsense [surrounding the diverse casting], I just discount it.
They don’t know what they don’t know.
Once you see the movie, the things answer themselves.
They were on the Silk Road.
They’re in the Far East.
They’re in North Africa.
They even had a name for North Africa, which is called Blaland.
They interacted with all of these cultures and traded with all of these cultures.
So it makes sense.
[In this world], there are dragons.
It’s the truth.
Then it gives a sense of urgency and purpose to the start of the story in Berk.
In generations, they haven’t even found the nest, never mind actually killing off all the dragons.
They’re being beaten at their own game.
It puts Stoick under a lot of pressure, and it makes Hiccup’s screw-ups more consequential.
It ratcheted up the tension.
This is dueto the Vikings traveling via the Silk Road, which expanded to places including North Africa.
That said, it becomes more clear that this is not just a race-swapped character.
Some of these changes are already evident in the most recentHow to Train Your Dragontrailer.
