Could've just left his backstory at "been hunting Nightfuries for most of his life" instead of hunting them extinct. They tried to make him too grand for the amount of substance he had.

I find it more likely that he found a dead night fury, claimed he killed it, never saw another one again so he claimed to have hunted them to extinction

I just love the fact that Hiccup being able to train dragons was treated as beyond unthinkable in the first movie,  but in the sequels literally every villain is using dragons.
Like imagine if these guys pulled up any sooner

They have more information about the Skrill despite the fact that it's considered more elusive and more mysterious than the Night Fury

I always wished the movie leaned more into the deathgrippers as specifically bred night fury hunters. I don’t remember if the movie ever made this point, but it would be a lot more believable if deathgrippers were specifically bred as the perfect dragon to kill night furies. Also, night furies are clearly implied to be cave dragons, especially in the shows where they can use echolocation. I think it would’ve been cool if there were lots more night furies in the hidden world, and Grimmel’s motivation was more directly tied to finding it and killing them. His motivation for capturing toothless could be to lure them out and kill them- it would have really raised the stakes of the movie and also would’ve been a better explanation for why they’re so rare imo

Didn't he have a line where he said "Night Furies don't like the cold" or something?
Meanwhile toothless chilling on/around Berk where the climtae goes from winter to 'devestating winter' for six years.

I too call BS that he managed to kill every single night fury. The same way I refuse to believe that all the Jedi were wiped out by the time of a new hope. Both situations require a level of efficiency that no government or single human being could truly accomplish.

I think there is no way to know whether Grimmel actually killed all the night furies. Infering from the lack of info Berkians have on night furies, it suggests that they never were very common around the isle of Berk. To me it makes more sense that they simply live more south and Toothless somehow accidentally got north. And that Grimmel claims to have killed all of the night furies to look better when in fact he perhaps just killed them off in the vincinity of his home.

Grimmel always felt like he was tacked on for the third movie. Him being famous for killing Night Furies directly contradicts the first movie's detail of the Berkians thinking nobody has ever seen let alone killed a Night Fury before especially since Stoick knew Grimmel. It would've made more sense for Night Furies to just be a naturally rare species.

I feel like Viggo could be seen much more as a dark Hiccup. He is more practical and often gets others to do his dirty work for him.

My biggest complaint is that grimmel could’ve had a night fury army. He has mind control technology, why didn’t he make a night fury army? It’s such a missed chance for toothless to finally find his kind all controlled by this one man, and have a goal to free his kind and finally have the knowledge that he’s not the last one.

Grimmel is one of those villains where the movie clearly wants him to be this experienced strategic genius who's always a step ahead, but instead of making him smart, they just made all the other characters dumb.

So rather than feeling like an active threat, all his advantages just come from them making blatantly stupid mistakes (which they'd never make in the other films) that he doesn't have any control or even knowledge of. Yet the movie still acts like he's outsmarting them despite doing literally nothing.

Definitely agree. He is supposed to be so skillful and menacing without showing any convincing proof or logic behind it, that he comes across as pure plot convenience. And the fact that HE is the face of danger that pushes dragons to leave, while villains like Drago, Dagur or VIGGO didn't, is a joke.

The Stellar's sea cow, an animal that was native to one singular island in the entire world and which was extremely docile, took 26 years to go extinct, even with the magnitude and means in which they were hunted. For any who don't know: The Stellar's sea cow was hunted through extremely wasteful means. People would wade out into the shallows, stab them with iron poles, and let them swim back out to sea with the hope that they would die and wash back up on shore. And even though they only lived in one spot on the planet, didn't fight back, and were hunted in vast quantities using an extremely wasteful method, they survived for 26 years after they were discovered.

But the writers of The Hidden World want us to believe that Grimmel single-handedly killed off an ENTIRE SPECIES of possibly the most powerful dragons in the world in only about 40 years? I don't think so. I called bullsh*t when I first watched the movie and I call bullsh*t now. It makes no sense.

Yeah, i was never a fan of this character. There wasn't much development or arc to him. Viggo on the other hand was a more intriguing antagonist because we actually were given some proper context to him

It's funny to think that Grimmel might only THINK he wiped out the other night furies. It could be that as a species, they migrate over a long time or are even more reclusive than they've already been depicted to be -- it could be that Toothless is NOT an endling but an anomaly who got left behind in a migration or was unable to socialize (similar to the hybrid whales that sing on a unique frequency and can only contact each other), so was able to be found and picked off by Hiccup relatively easily. Could it be that the rest of the night furies have simply... gone away? They're clearly very intelligent, it's not out of the question they decided to leave as a colony if they don't hold individual territories.

Grimmel being from the continent could also suggest that he believes he wiped them out in his local region or regions he visited, and has missed wherever they moved to, never to be seen again by any of the cultures we've seen. In the time periods the world is styled after, many common people believed their local region encompassed the whole 'known world' and didn't consider beyond it.

I mean, dragons probably inhabit the entire globe. The nightfury alone probably has a global habitat. But then literally all of them just move into a gamer cave because some guy said so and vanish from the surface entirely.
All the species that are highly specialized to their habitats just said "aw shucks, guess I'll be a basement dweller now."
That is my personal biggest problem with the last movie

The reason Grimmel seemed so underwhelming to me is he never really did anything intellectually impressive. He kinda just spawned in Hiccup's house without any explanation, did some basic deduction to vaguely track where the Berkians where heading, set out a simple ambush trap to catch Roughnut and then got lucky in having her be stupid enough to lead him straight back to Hiccup. He obviously didn't have the same time be fleshed out as Viggo, but the things he did still weren't particularly impressive, and since they hyped him up to be an even bigger threat than Viggo, an actual mastermind who kept the whole gang busy for what were probably many, many months, he just couldn't live up to the expectations.

I really don't understand why they doubled down on Toothless being the only night fury in existence when there's so much they could have done otherwise. The first thing that comes to mind is turning that into some sort of character conflict, like maybe Hiccup starts doubting himself as he realizes that he's no longer the only one with a night fury, and that ties into the whole "relying too much on your dragons" motif. Or maybe you have it about Toothless trying to fit in with other night furies (and/or a potential love interest) and having a conflict there for whatever reason. For example, something I thought of was if the other night furies rejected Toothless because of his dependence on Hiccup with his tail, and the final battle had Toothless and Hiccup pulling off some unique winning maneuver that's only possible because of said mechanical tail.

I mean seriously the possibilities for this are endless and Dreamworks decided to just kill off (pun intended) any possibility of exploring them.

I call it bs that any character other than Hiccup and maybe Grimmel even got the opportunity to kill a single night fury. This franchise was active for 9 years straight and Toothless is the only night fury we’ve ever officially seen, even in expanded media. It’s my belief that Night Furies are naturally sparse, since they’re champions of speed and stealth and will not be seen if they don’t want to be seen. Even a night fury probably couldn’t find a night fury, that’s why night furies evidently mate for life.

A Viking in HTTYD can be many things; a dragon master, a dragon rider, a dragon trainer, a dragon hunter, a dragon trapper, a dragon thief, and a dragon killer. No one can be a night fury killer. If you down a night fury, gamble.