When my son was a toddler, How to Train Your Dragon 3 came to theaters, and he was obsessed. Not so much with the plot (he was too young to follow it), but with the dragons! Those soaring, skimming, cloud-dancing creatures captured his imagination utterly and completely. We had Happy Meal toys from the movie scattered across the house, and we watched every installment multiple times. Now, I didn’t mind! There was—and still is—something stirring in the richly imagined, vividly colorful Viking world of Berk. And there’s something beautiful, too, about a boy named Hiccup, the star of all the films, who refuses to fight the monster he’s been told to fear and instead chooses to befriend it.
This week, my son—now eleven and now almost taller than me—asked to see the new live-action remake of the original How to Train Your Dragon. He didn’t even remember seeing any of the movies at all, apparently. On the drive home, he looked out the window for a while before saying, almost absently, “Wow, that was a really good movie.” There was a touch of surprise and some awe in his voice, the kind I suspect appears when a glimmer from your past nudges you, and you’re not quite sure why it matters, but it does.
I smiled and reminded him of his old obsession, teasing him about the way he used to say “Toofess” instead of “Toothless”—a mispronunciation of the starring dragon’s name that has become a cherished family memory. Watching the film again—now in a post-pandemic world, with the last Dragon movie we saw together dating back to 2019—I found myself seeing it through new eyes. My son now reads fantasy novels late into the night, still dreaming of dragons, and I no longer watch these films just as a parent, but also through the lens of the Catholic imagination.
If you haven’t seen this film—and you should!—it centers on a young protagonist named Hiccup, an outlier in a Viking culture that values brawn over brains and conformity over conscience. Hiccup is a dreamer who doesn’t see the world like everyone else and notices the quirks and details that others overlook. His father, Stoick, is the village chief and the image of traditional masculine idealism—fearless and convinced that dragons are the enemy. His name fits: Stoick is stoic in the classical sense—emotionally guarded, restrained, and proud.
But when Hiccup wounds one of the most feared dragons (Toothless)—and then finds himself unable to kill it because of his nagging conscience—everything begins to change in the village. That change doesn’t start with a bold plan or a grand speech. It begins with a single decision: one act of mercy in place of fear.
During the pandemic, my own faith deepened. I experienced what I can only describe as a kind of reconversion. Watching the film again—this time as a mother raising a boy who often sees the world a little differently, the story struck a new chord. Hiccup is set apart, marked by gentleness in a culture that prizes might, and destined—despite his awkwardness—for Viking kingship. As a mother trying to raise my son in the image of Christ the king, I saw something familiar in Hiccup’s journey. I, too, am trying to train my own version of a dragon, one who, by God’s grace, might one day soar on wings like eagles (Isaiah 40:31), even if, right now, he’s best described as a little tentative, more like Hiccup at the beginning of the tale rather than the end.
What I see as the most pivotal moment of the movie comes when Hiccup stares into the large, green eyes of Toothless—that creature he’s been taught to fear and hate—and loosens the ropes that bind his captive. He gives the dragon a choice, even if it means risking his own life. By all accounts, Toothless could have killed Hiccup. And earlier, Hiccup could have done the same when he had the upper hand. But neither acts on instinct or inherited fear. Instead, conscience, mercy, and a clear-sighted refusal to be ruled by violence or clouded judgment prevail.
The dragons may be fictional in the case of this particular movie, but the courage to face a broken world with wonder and mercy: that’s real. That’s the stuff of saints.
Later, when trying to explain his choice to his friend, Astrid, Hiccup offers a line that captures the soul of the film: “I wouldn’t kill him,” Hiccup explains, “Because he looked as frightened as I was. I looked at him . . . and I saw myself.” Ah! For Catholic viewers, this moment should speak volumes. Indeed, it’s one of the most profoundly Catholic lines I’ve heard in a children’s film recently. It echoes what Pope Francis calls a moment of encounter, not just recognition of the other but recognition of the self in the other. As he writes in Evangelii Gaudium:
Thanks solely to . . . encounter—or renewed encounter—with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.
Maybe you think I’m reading too much into this moment, but imagine being a child who believes dragons are real. For years, my toddler absolutely did. And even now, my summer-before-middle-school son stays up late reading stories where they just might be still—imagining fiercely into the wee hours of the morning.
Returning to the crucial moment in the film, Hiccup and Toothless also imagine something braver than the rest of the Viking world. They imagine differently. They see each other. They encounter each other.
How often do we assume we already know how someone will respond? I’ll admit a somewhat embarrassing truth here: Sometimes when I argue with my husband, I’ll say, “What’s the point? I already know what you’re going to say.” I’ve thought of this in other spaces too, moments where I’ve shut down the possibility of encounter before it even began. That’s not just impatience. That’s a failure of imagination, and it’s something I bring to confession.
Children, on the other hand, are primed to imagine because they lack the baggage we have as adults—and we as their elders should not foist our narrowness on them. They can still believe in dragons—and in mercy—without the inherited cynicism we so easily pass along. Hiccup reminds us what it means to live that way, not in delusion but in hopeful vision. He reminds us how we ought to live and how we ought to encounter one another. Even those we disagree with. Even those we fear. And we ought to form our children—especially our boys who are often taught to curtail their imaginations—and instead train them toward mercy, and their lives to follow. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls this work of formation “the education of the moral conscience,” a duty entrusted to parents, and one that “guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart” (CCC 1784).
That is the very heart of the Catholic imagination. It isn’t just about seeing what is. It’s about seeing what could be—when fear is beautified by love. It means looking past the surface, past the roles we’ve inherited from society’s scripts, and into the deeper truths written into creation by the hand of God.
Change doesn’t start with a bold plan or a grand speech. It begins with a single decision: one act of mercy in place of fear.
Near the end of the film, Astrid turns to Hiccup and asks, “Are you actually insane? Or do you just act that way?” He grins: “Is there a third option?” Yes, there is a third option, one that transcends fear, violence, and the limitations of the secular world’s imagined rules. I suggest, radically even, that that third option is sainthood.
After all, the saints, too, looked “insane” to their cultures. St. Francis talked to birds. St. Joan rode into battle. St. Joseph followed dreams. Each of them saw something more. And each had to decide whether to fit into the world as it is or help shape it into what it was meant to be.
Of course, that’s precisely what Hiccup does in the film. And it’s what I hope to nurture in my own son as I raise him toward the universal call we all share as Catholics: sainthood. It’s also what we should strive to encourage in every child entrusted to our care, whether in our families, classrooms, or parishes. Some of these children dream a little differently, see the world a bit sideways, or imagine possibilities others overlook. (And really, isn’t that true of all children, in their own way?) Each of those imaginations is worth nurturing—because every one of them is called to become a saint, to imagine themselves as such. And we are to imagine them in this way, too.
Importantly, choosing a “third option” like Hiccup isn’t daydreaming for its own sake, or rebellion disguised as virtue. It’s the ability to imagine rightly! To stay rooted in virtue and still reach for the sky. The dragons may be fictional in the case of this particular movie, but the courage to face a broken world with wonder and mercy: that’s real. That’s the stuff of saints. That’s the mark of a Catholic imagination fully embodied and sprung alive.
And when we share stories like this with our children, we’re not just passing the time. We’re forming their imaginations, priming them for virtue that might surpass even our own sometimes, especially if we talk to them afterward about what the story means. We’re reminding them that they are not bound by fear or by the secular world’s narrow vision of who they might become. Our Catholic children have loftier goals!
At the end of How to Train Your Dragon, the entire village is transformed. The people who once feared dragons now ride them. The skies are full. Children and dragons soar together. The world is not destroyed or replaced; it is renewed. A dragon once feared has become a companion. The virtues the Vikings once clung to so tightly—courage, honor, loyalty—had been warped by fear and, in the process, had placed the whole community in danger. But now, those same virtues are transfigured by love: father and son, parent and child, learning, healing, and growing together.
Ultimately, this is the gift of the Catholic imagination writ large. It is not an escape from the world but a deeper understanding of it. A world where dragons soar, would-be saints surprise us, and even the most unlikely child might help the rest of us take flight on a starry night—into the spiritual realms we are called to seek and to encounter together.