The Bewilderbeast sure reminded me of my cat.
(Image cropped from an official webpage.)
Granted, a Godzilla-sized version of my cat, but my cat nonetheless.
(I'm shocked that picture turned out at all. Normally every picture I take is super blurry because my hands invisibly vibrate at incredible speeds.)
Said cat, Captain (yes, that's her full name), is probably the fluffiest animal I've ever known, and started life as the tiniest, most pathetic kitten in her litter, with an eye fused shut-we weren't even sure at first if she had an eye on that side. (This is part of where she got the name Captain-she looked a little bit like a pirate with only one eye, and that side of her face is still completely black, so she still looks a little lopsided and like she's wearing an eyepatch.)
Being smaller and weaker, she decided to make up for it with energy and ferocity, and there was a time when none of the other cats in the house would dare to pick a fight with her.
Once she got a little older (she's not yet two), she actually mellowed out rather a lot, and is mostly a very calm animal. She's also much bigger than she looks-all that fluff combined with the way she used to carry herself, it was ages before we realized that she's nearly the same size as my sister's cat (who's nearly too big to hold and also, despite being a much older and generally less-friendly-to-other-animals cat, my cat's best friend).
She's also unusually protective, though, and in ways one wouldn't expect: For one thing, she's actually picked fights with her own mother to protect other cats. Her mother was still bigger than her at the time, and, y'know, had instinctually generated bonds with her. But she didn't care about that.
She also growls like a dog at pedestrians on the sidewalk and the (admittedly creepy) local ice cream truck and actually sometimes completely ignores other cats when they attack** her, which unnerves them to no end. (Though lately she's been scuffling with one of our other cats and getting said cat's claws stuck in her fur, to their mutual confusion.)
Anyway, point is, this big, protective dragon oddly reminded me unusually strongly of my little, protective cat.
Captain is also an uncannily smart cat, but that's a subject for some other post.
*Biggest spoiler comment (followed, of course, by SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM): Stoick may have been my favorite character, and killing him off felt darned predictable and made me angry rather than sad. I had a good idea he was going to die when people talked about something tragic happening in vague, vague terms, and when I saw something somewhere that mentioned his name and was surrounded by comments along the lines of "Crying! Feels!," it was pretty much confirmed. (Guys, y'need to work harder on not being spoilery.)
When he got hit by that fireball, I was like "no, that can't be it, he just had a line like ten minutes ago about how a little fire wasn't going to finish him off! Wait, that was stupid foreshadowing, wasn't it? Bah, Drago is a dumb villain."
Second biggest spoiler comment: After watching the TV show that was based on the first movie, and getting to be familiar with the characters there, boy but Hiccup felt dumb in this movie. Put down the darned idiot ball, man!
It was a pretty decent movie and had some really good parts to it (I loved how low-key Hiccup and Astrid's relationship was-they pretty much felt exactly like real people) but unlike the first movie, it wasn't perfect.
And the first movie is, in essence, perfect. In honesty, it's one of my favorite movies of all time, with only a couple of others really being competition for it. ...And I just realized how similar it is to one of my other very favorite films, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
**In case you've never lived with cats, "attack" can mean "aggressively approach with hostile intent," "playfully pounce upon," or "actually savagely attack." Even cats themselves don't always know the difference between the three.
-Signing off.
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