In How To Train Your Dragon
At
Hiccup freeing Toothless.
the start of the film, Hiccup is an embarrassment to his father, Stoick the Vast, the chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe. Too small to wield traditional Viking weapons and therefore unable to kill a Dragon like the rest of his village, he works as an assistant to Gobber the Belch, the village Blacksmith. One night during a dragon raid, Hiccup leaves his indoor work post and, with a bola sling named "The Mangler," manages to shoot down one of the deadliest and most feared dragons in the skies: the Night Fury. When
Hiccup "forced" into Dragon Training
he goes to find his kill, after what appears to be many failed attempts, he finds the Dragon and discovers that it's still alive. Despite his determination to prove himself to the community as a great Dragon killer, Hiccup is unable to kill it after seeing the fear in its eyes, and instead frees it. Meanwhile,
Hiccup and Toothless's Test Drive
as he's looking for the Night Fury, Hiccup is enrolled into Viking training, where he's expected to learn to fight and kill Dragons. At first, he struggles to complete the simplest tasks and hold his own against even the most (relatively) benign Dragons, earning the usual mockery of his fellow teenagers. However, after managing to get close enough to bond with the Night Fury he shot down, which he names Toothless after its retractable fangs, he builds him a prosthetic tail-fin to replace the one his Mangler injured, helps Toothless regain the ability to fly with Hiccup's assistance, and jump-starts their friendship. He gains valuable experience and a deeper insight into the mannerisms of most Dragons, such as the fact that it's possible to scratch a Dragon into submission if it's scratched gently in a certain spot under the chin. He's soon hailed as a Viking prodigy, with the time he spends with Toothless allowing him to ultimately "defeat" every Dragon he encounters during training.
The stress of living this double life is hard on Hiccup, however. The other Vikings, particularly Astrid, take notice of his unexplained absences after Dragon Training sessions, although no one really comments on it. Eventually, after Hiccup places the top in training, Astrid manages to follow him and discovers Toothless. She runs off to tell the other Vikings, but Hiccup and Toothless stop her. They take her on a romantic flight around the area on Toothless to calm Astrid down. It's during this ride that Hiccup sees the Red Death in the veryDragons' Nest his father has been trying to find and destroy. When they land, Hiccup manages to convince Astrid not to tell anyone about anything that happened by showing how loyal he is to his dragon. After their conversation, Astrid kisses Hiccup on the cheek after punching him in the shoulder, seeming to admire his loyalty.
The next day, Hiccup is required to fight and kill a Monstrous Nightmare as part of his final exam during Dragon Training. The task goes horribly wrong, however: when Stoick swings his hammer against the Dragon training cage in response to Hiccup's blasphemous claims that dragons "aren't what we think they are" and that "we
Hiccup pinned down by the Monstrous Nightmare
don't have to kill them", Hiccup's methods of Dragon appeasement no longer work and the Nightmare moves in for the kill. Toothless, hearing Hiccup's scream in fear, tries again to get out of the cove alone, and, succeeding for the first time, rushes to the scene and beats the other Dragon back while at the same time revealing himself to all the Vikings. Though Hiccup attempts to explain why he went against the Viking way of life and befriended a Dragon, his father refuses to listen, and denounces him as his son, and instead takes advantage of Toothless, chaining him to a ship and using him to reach the Dragons' Nest. As the adult Vikings leave in search of the Nest, Astrid talks to Hiccup about the entire situation, trying to comfort him, showing him that his refusal to kill a Dragon was a strength and not a weakness as he believed and asks him what he's going to do about it, which leads him to say "something crazy." He goes off to do his 'crazy' plan, while Astrid apparently gathers the other Viking teenagers. Hiccup brings out the now docile Monstrous Nightmare, and teaches them how to ride on the back of a Dragon.
While the Vikings try to fight a losing fight, the teens fly into the scene, with Gobber commenting that Hiccup is, "Every bit the boar-headed, stubborn Viking you ever were," to Stoick, who nods humbly. Hiccup goes onto the burning ship where Toothless is, and tries to free him, but soon the ship broke apart, pulling Toothless down to the seafloor. Hiccup still fails, however, and goes limp after a only few moments of trying, only to be saved by his father, who also frees Toothless from his chains. After Toothless pulls him up to land again, Stoick tells his son that he doesn't have to do this, to which Hiccup replies by quoting his father's catchphrase, "We're Vikings. It's an occupational hazard."
In response to the familiar words, Stoick tells Hiccup how proud he is to call him as his son, just before Hiccup and Toothless fly off to confront the Red Death themselves. Hiccup manages to kill the Red Death by having Toothless shoot holes into its wings, and then diving towards the Nest at a high speed, so that after Toothless blasts a fire bolt into its mouth, it cannot pull up in time. During the fight, though, Toothless' prosthetic tail caught on fire, so as they are pulling out the last part of the plan (blasting fire into its mouth), they're running out of time. The Red Death crashes into the ground, triggering an explosion on impact. Hiccup and Toothless fly through its various spines and the flame; however, they run into the Red Death's tail at the last moment as they attempt to escape the resulting blast. The tail having fallen off, the two fall thousands of feet into the blaze below. As the village approaches the site of the explosion and finds that Hiccup is nowhere to be found, Stoick soon discovers that, even without his makeshift tail, Toothless protected the future chief from the fire by folding him in his wings. Stoick wholeheartedly apologizes to Toothless, and is deeply thankful to the dragon for bringing his son back to him alive.
Hiccup's prosthetic foot.
When he wakes up after an unknown amount of time, Hiccup is heralded as a hero in the tribe. Although he lost his left foot and lower shin when he and Toothless fell into the fiery cloud, he was fitted with a prosthetic that Gobber designed and fabricated, "With a little Hiccup flair thrown in." This new prosthetic matches Toothless' new left control stirrup which Gobber redesigned, and clips right into place, as if he and Toothless were one. At the very end of the film, Astrid kisses Hiccup on the lips, this time seemingly as boyfriend and girlfriend, as the rest of the village accepts Dragons into the island as companions.
