I forgot to mention in my last post, the opening and ending monologues kind of bothered me. _Especially_ the ending one. The ending one just seemed kind of unnecessary. I suppose they have to go with the assumption that at least some people in the audience haven't seen the first movie and thus might not know that this is Berk, and the people here are friends with the dragons now. But really, is it _that_ hard to figure out?

The ending monologue was the one that really bugged me...

Vending Monologue and Alternate Ending (Spoilers):

The final monologue really awkward, forced, and out of tone to me. To paraphrase it, the ending one was "others might have their armies and their armadas, but we have... our DRAGONS!!!"

For one thing, the final face off between Hiccup and bloodyfist was all about Hiccup telling him that he wanted to use dragons to conquer people, but it didn't have to be that way, there was another way that involved living together peacefully with dragons.

And yes, it's true that they defeated bloodyfist and his alpha by having all their dragons team up together under the dominion leadership of Toothless to beat the crap out the alpha, and if anyone else ever attacks them the dragons will certainly help defend them. But even so, ending the movie by boasting about how they can kick the ass of anyone who comes calling seems a little off to me. More particularly, Hiccup won because he saw Toothless as a friend while bloodyfist only saw dragons as tools. So it seems odd for Hiccup to be boasting about them in the same manner as one would about the size of your army or armada.

I actually spent several seconds as he was going through the monologue thinking "please don't end with 'we've got dragons!'", and was hoping that he'd end with "but we have our friends!", which might not have seemed dramatic enough for some people, but would have fit the tone a lot better in my mind. But they went with "DRAGONS!" to be dramatic, and to top it off, it sounded like he was going hoarse or something when he tried to shout it. In addition to being out of tone IMHO, it also sounded like really shoddy voice acting.

But anyways, as long as we're on the subject of the ending, did anyone else think that given Hiccup's concerns about being the leader of the tribe that Astrid would actually end up taking over?

Worst of all, i suppose now that they've done opening and closing monologues for both of the first two movies, it's now a tradition and they're going to shoehorn in monologues in and any all future movies in the series.