Hello. I’m M.J. Piazza. As a longtime viewer of The Theorizer’s YouTube channel, a huge fan of How to Train Your Dragon, and a historical fiction author, I decided to try and tie one of my favorite films into the increasingly insane Mort Theory. To my regular readers, I’m mostly writing this as a letter to The Theorizer himself, but you’re more than welcome to read along. This is going to be an amazing post. For y’all normal people, the Mort Theory is essentially the theory that, in the DreamWorks universe, an organization based out of France is trying to stop intelligent animals from taking over the world. These intelligent animals are led by Mort from the Madagascar films, and the French organization is led by the “Sky Gods,” a pantheon worshipped by the lemurs from the Madagascar franchise.
How to Train Your Dragon is an excellent movie that warrants viewing even outside of its application to the Mort Theory. In it, a teenage Viking named Hiccup attempts to fit in with the rest of his tribe by killing an elusive Night Fury dragon. However, he merely wounds it. Instead of finishing the job, Hiccup decides to tame the dragon, whom he names Toothless. There are three movies, two TV shows (if you count Rides of Berk and Defenders of Berk as two seasons of the same show), and a handful of shorts. I will mainly be focusing on the TV shows and more specifically on two of the side characters: the twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut.
Ruffnut and Tuffnut are introduced in the first movie. They aren’t very well developed as characters, primarily existing for the sake of comic relief. They’re dumb and fearless. At one point, when they are told to study the Book of Dragons in order to become better at fighting dragons, Ruffnut (the girl twin) says, “Read? While we’re still alive?” However, at the end of the movie, the twins (along with the other teenage dragon hunters-in-training) learn how to train and ride dragons.
The first TV show, Riders of Berk, is where the twins get interesting and where they start to tie into the Mort Theory.
As I mentioned earlier, the twins are dumb. Their idiocy is played off for comic relief, and it works well. However, in an episode of Riders of Berk called “The Eel Effect,” the inhabitants of Berk become ill with a disease known as eel pox. This causes various characters to act in various unorthodox ways, and it causes Ruffnut and Tuffnut to start conducting scientific experiments. They study air resistance and talk to each other using a rather academic vocabulary. At the end of the episode, they announce to everyone that they have invented a new dessert, which is frozen yak milk flavored with coconut.
I have written three historical fiction novels about Vikings. I can say with 100% certainty that there is no reason why Ruffnut and Tuffnut should know what coconuts are. My theory thus far is that the Sky Gods of Madagascar somehow used the twins’ sickness to appear to them in the form of a coconut and grant them supernatural intelligence. And the evidence doesn’t stop there.
For the rest of Riders of Berk and its second season, confusingly titled Defenders of Berk, the twins go back to being dumb. However, the second How to Train Your Dragon TV series is set approximately four years after the first one, and in it, Ruffnut and Tuffnut have far more intellectual moments.
I watched the first two seasons of Race of the Edge in search of evidence, but my cat threw up on the notebook I was using for notes, so unfortunately I can’t give you specifics. I can, however, tell you that the twins act very differently in this series than they do in any of the movies or the other TV show—particularly Tuffnut, the boy twin. Tuffnut is the only person who is able to understand his friend Snotlout, whose speech is muffled after being struck by lightning. Tuffnut gets a pet chicken and, after he convinces himself he’s turned into a were-dragon, hallucinates that the chicken is speaking to him. More importantly, the twins speak random words and phrases of various languages, including French.
The twins should not know what French is.
Now, I could talk for ages and pages about whether or not Tuffnut should know what French is. Did the real-life Vikings have contact with France? Absolutely. However, Berk is based off Bear Island, Norway, which is well inside the Arctic Circle, and I think we can safely assume that most of the Vikings’ time and effort was put into fighting the dragons and the other tribes that live around them. There is a merchant, Trader Johann, who claims to have been to Papua New Guinea among other faraway places, so Tuffnut could have picked up some French from him. However, real-life Vikings never got farther south than the northern coast of Africa, and Trader Johann is revealed to be a villain in Race to the Edge, so I’m not sure we can trust him.
But whether or not Tuffnut should know French is a moot point considering that he only speaks it in Race to the Edge. And, in the pilot episode of Race to the Edge, it is revealed that Ruffnut and Tuffnut have dedicated their lives to serving Loki, the god of pranks.
The Norse gods do not factor heavily into the How to Train Your Dragon movies or TV shows. They are given the occasional offhand mention, and the only time the gods are important (outside of the twins saying “Loki!” after pranking someone) is in an episode of Riders of Berk entitled “When Lightning Strikes.” When the teenagers of Berk build metal dragon perches, lightning is understandably attracted to them and the Vikings assume that Thor is angry at the village for welcoming dragons into their daily lives. Hiccup eventually realizes that the lightning is attracted to metal, after a metal statue of Thor and the metal connecting rod of Toothless’s prosthetic tailfin are both struck by lightning. At the end of the episode, the blacksmith Gobber says that the villagers now believe Thor was angry at the metal. However, it is heavily implied in this episode that all actions attributed to the gods have natural explanations, and by extension, that the gods do not exist.
Here is my theory: First, we must assume that the Sky Gods of Madagascar are the only actual gods in the DreamWorks universe. These Sky Gods revealed themselves to Ruffnut and Tuffnut Thorston in the form of a coconut after an illness caused the twins to be more open than normal to the supernatural. Perhaps spurred by this encounter, the twins decide to dedicate themselves to Loki, but because Loki does not exist, they actually dedicate their lives to the Sky Gods. In return for their devotion, the Sky Gods grant the twins supernatural intelligence, including the ability to speak French.
What is the result of this devotion? I know I’ve mostly talked about Tuffnut in this blog post, but it’s actually Ruffnut who has the biggest moment overall. In the third movie (How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World), Ruffnut is captured by the forces of Grimmel the Grisly, who is trying to subdue dragons in order to make a dragon army and take over the world. Ruffnut escapes, but stupidly forgets to make sure she isn’t being followed. Her actions directly lead to Grimmel’s forces assaulting Berk, which causes Hiccup to realize that humans and dragons cannot coexist. He then tells Toothless to lead the dragons to a hidden underground world so that they can be safe from humans, a side effect of this being that humans can no longer train dragons and therefore help them become more intelligent.
That said, I’ve left two of my most important pieces of evidence for last.
Firstly: In an episode of Race to the Edge entitled “Defenders of the Wing: Part 2,” the dragon rider Snotlout almost marries Mala, the queen of another island. (This island’s inhabitants get along well with dragons, but that’s a topic for another day.) During the pre-wedding feast, Snotlout asks for more of a specific kind of meat, to which a servant calls out, “Bring out more hyena gizzards!” Snotlout is puzzled, to which Tuffnut of all people replies, “Yeah, it’s a delicacy. You should read more.”
If you think this is the only time when an African mammal (which there is absolutely ZERO reason Vikings should have access to, let alone as a food source) is referred to as sacrificial food, you’d be wrong. One of the largest pieces of evidence that I have been able to find, and a piece of trivia that’s relatively obscure even to the biggest HTTYD fans, is from the first movie. When Hiccup and Astrid are riding Toothless together for the first time, Toothless suddenly falls in line with a massive herd of dragons carrying various dead animals. These dead animals are dropped into a volcano (in a scene almost identical to the volcanic sacrifice scene from Madagascar 2) and eaten by a massive dragon known as the Red Death, the queen of the dragons. It is confirmed in the DVD extras that one of these animal sacrifices is none other than Gloria from Madagascar.
Oh, and you know that cookbook that’s found in the crashed plane entitled “To Serve Lemur”? It’s written in a runic font. More Vikings. There’s no reason for these connections to exist. It makes no sense. I am more convinced than ever that Mort Theory is real.
I hope your mind has been blown, Mr. Theorizer. I enjoyed writing all of this out. And to my regular readers—I hope you enjoyed this little peek into my personal viewing habits. What is your favorite movie theory? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!