Worst Mom Ever

Today is Mother's day, a day I don't care about because my mother never cared about it. You see, we don't really celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day or Valentine's Day in my family.

Other than Christmas and Easter we don't celebrate other festivities. However, the presence of mother's day is ubitiquous, so I might as well talk about it. 

The purpose of mother's day is to glorify and perpetuate the ideal of motherhood: women are encouraged to be the best version of themselves while taking care of their children. Therefore, it is significantly cumbersome to see bad mothers  getting away with being publicly bad mothers. 

The same applies, albeit in a different way, to family movie characters. 

While I am yet to see a film glorifying the evil step mothers of fairy tales, there are other bad mothers whose presence is more insidious since the movie doesn't pay attention to their incompetence. 

Today, in the Pasture of Knowledge, I will rant against the worst Mom ever: Valka from How To Train Your Dragon.  

Valka 

The story of Valka is not for the weak. 

This woman lived with her child Hiccup and her husband Stoik in the viking village of Berk. She never really fitted in. Which means she was really sad. 

One day, the dragons attacked Berk (again) and one of them sneaked into Valka's house. The frightened woman stormed into the room, willing to risk her life to protect her child. 

What she didn't know is that her maternal instincts would die just as she acted upon them. 

The dragon didn't attack Hiccup. It's gruesome features stared with curiosity and admiration at the little 3D animated white baby. It wasn't a monster. It was an intelligent, gentle beast, who acted out of curiosity and not viciousness. 

And so, Valka stared back. What she didn't realize in this moment of tension, is that the dragon unwittingly destroyed something in her. Her motherhood instincts. 

When Stoick and his fellow warriors stormed in the scene, the dragon snatched her for no reason as the desperate vikings looked hopelessly. 

The movie then tells us that Valka and the dragon became friends. She learned to read the character and instincts of the fearsome beasts. She found a massive cave where dragons lived in peace. She named her friend "Cloud-Jumper" which is probably the worst name in the entire franchise. She and the owl-faced Cloud-Jumper would pierce the skies, striking upon those who dared to hunt the winged serpents. 

But Valka never looked back upon her infant child. 

Yes, that's right. Valka abandoned her family to be a hippy dragon-loving environmentalist activist. Despite the dragon's ability to fly significant distances, Valka never returned to Berk to check on her infant child or her husband. Never let a child without a mother get in the way of animal activism! 

What makes it even more infuriating is that when Hiccup reunites with her, he never questions her choice to be a bad mother. They play around with Toothless and Cloud-Jumper but no one ever asks Valka why she never came back. 

At the end of the movie, Valka is still a dragon-loving activist, but she never says sorry even when her husband dies. 

Incompetent At Animal Welfare 

Upon further examination, I noticed that even though Valka did became an animal rights activist, she never did something that could have protected dragon's lives: She never actually *explained* to the Vikings why dragons should be spared from cages and swords. 

The characters in How to Train Your Dragon are remarkably bad at communication, but this woman definitely takes the cake. 

Nothing prevented Valka from returning to Berk and showing herself to the stunned vikings. She could have then presented Cloud-Jumper and explain that dragons were trainable, noble creatures that made  awesome pets. 

I mean, it's almost like if her maternal instincts were so obliterated by the encounter with Cloud-Jumper that she couldn't even pass them on to her new animal welfare enterprise. 

Of course, that would have meant the plot of the first film would never happen in the first place; but then that is why we have writing manuals. Had the movie-makers actually written a competent excuse as to why Valka never came back, they would have preserved the integrity of the entire franchise.

What we got instead is a woman that became both a species-traitor and the dumbest animal activist in the entirety of fiction, only to suddenly spring out of nowhere and pretend that she was a good mother all along. 

Wasted Opportunity: She Could have been Better 

However, why did this happen? Did Dreamworks had the nefarious intention of telling young girls that they should drop their babes and go free geese from Foie-Gras farms?  

Such a scenario is more than possible, however, I think this character was most likely a victim of re-writes and possibly corporate meddling. 

You see, Valka was supposed to be the villain of How to Train Your Dragon. She wasn't supposed to be "friendly". She was supposed to be  harsh and unforgiving, a threatening force of destruction in the name of dragon-hood. 

This in my opinion would have changed the entirety of the movie (both in therms of quality and in therms of messaging) for the better. 

Out plucky vikings would be confronted with someone who loves dragons way too much. It's always interesting when the antagonist is just a corrupted version of our protagonist. It makes the character confront their personal values and realize that they too can become evil. When the character overcomes their tricks and challenges we see how strong their values actually are, and the character has grown as a result of resisting the temptations. 

Instead we got a generic dreadlock-haired guy who wants to conquer the world. And a mother who abandoned her child but that's okay because she loves dragons. 

Fortunately, we got women who aren't like this, and that's why we got Mother's Day - a useless, corny and overtly consumeristic festivity that nevertheless reminds us that unlike Valka, all the good mothers on our planet aren't such a catastrophic wasted opportunity.