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That was the moment Hiccup took on his destiny.

He lifted his drooping head.

'I will NEVER give up fighting you, witch, even though it is too late... Even though all is lost... Even though it is impossible... Never never never...'

The witch had failed again.

The mind is a strange universe.

Who says stories cannot bring things to life?

 'I wish I could offer you a King who is greater than I am. I can't turn into someone else, I can only be me. But I have discovered that I too, am stronger than I thought I was. I think I can do this. I think I can be this King that the Dragonmarkers want me to be.'

"[...] And even though I am a Viking...

"I confess, I am afraid

 "Are dragons never to sail through the skies again, on jewel-colored, airy wings, or light up world once more with the glory of their fiery breath?

"Are we to say good-bye forever to the magic, and the dreaming and the flying of our childhoods?

"I say NO!" cried Hiccup.

"There are some dragons that are monsters," admitted Valhallarama.

"But then there are also some humans who are monsters." (And at this point she paused and looked significantly at Alvin the Treacherous and the witch.)

Sometimes it is only a true friend who knows what we mean when we try to speak.

"Do not think that just because I have the soul of a soldier and cannot speak soft words that it was not hard for me or that because I left, I did not love." said Valhallarama.

When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When Sonia Sanchez makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?

This is the story of becoming a Hero the Hard way.

Although this is the part of the story that the bards tend to focus on as the bit where Hiccup was particularly heroic, I do not agree. It is a lot easier to be brave when you know you have no alternative. Hiccup knew in his heart of hearts that the Monster intended to kill them all anyway. So he didn't have a lot to lose.