How To Train Your Dragon: An Ad-Lib Made Gobber A Rare Gay Animated Hero
Here’s how an ad-libbed line in the How To Train Your Dragon franchise made Gobber the Belch a rare LGBT animated hero. How To Train Your Dragon came out in 2010 and was the start of a charming show trilogy that told the coming-of-age tale of young Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his adventures as a dragon rider. Alongside American Ferrera as Hiccup’s love interest Astrid and Gerard Butler as his dad Stoick the Expansive, the cast also included Scottish star, comedian, and TV host Craig Ferguson, who voiced Gobber the Belch.
As the resident blacksmith in How To Coach Your Dragon, Gobber is a esteemed member of his Viking community. A long time companion and trusted adviser to village head Stoick, Gobber is an uncle figure, comic sidekick and dedicated mentor to Hiccup and the other dragon riders. Although his sexuality wasn’t addressed in the first film, an improvised line in the sequel offered some clues.
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There’s a scene in 2014's How To Train Your Dragon 2 in which Stoick and his long-lost wife Valka (Cate Blanchett) are reunited and im
How to Train Your Dragon 3 Confirms [SPOILER] Is Gay, and It's Great
Gobber (Craig Ferguson) has been a constant presence in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, a goofy but dedicated mentor to Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and the other young dragon riders. He's a strong version of a stock character, but manages to be unique in his have right.
One way the franchise's creators added dimensions to Gobber was to subtly imply that he was gay in previous films. How to Train Your Dragon: The Concealed Worldactually makes that more overt than ever, and it's a nice touch for the franchise to explore in a way that most family franchises wouldn't ever consider.
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The first concrete hint at the character's sexuality came during the second entry in the series, How to Prepare Your Dragon 2. The moment comes during a dinner between Gobber, Hiccup and the newly reunited Stoick (Gerard Butler) and Valka (Cate Blanchett), Stoick's long mind dead wife. Gobber tells Hiccup that the kind of tension between the pair is why he didn't get married, adding: "That, and one other reason."
The line was an ab lib by Ferguson, but it resona
So, how gay isHow to Train Your Dragon?
Voiced by Craig Ferguson, Gobber — the tough vintage trainer with a peg leg and interchangeable prosthetic arm devices — was one of the leading characters in the authentic How to Train Your Dragon.
In a standard-issue “Junior Knows Best” plot with an imperious, disapproving authoritarian father — Stoick the Vast — who didn’t understand his scrawny but thoughtful offspring Hiccup, Gobber was a sympathetic rule figure who gratifyingly didn’t fit the anti-patriarchal narrative. As I wrote in my 2010 review…
[Hiccup’s] chieftain father, Stoick the Wide-ranging (Gerard Butler in full-on Beowulf/Attila mode), is an unreconstructed exemplar of that tiredest of negative parental stereotypes: the overbearing patriarch who doesn’t understand his offspring and regards him with nothing but disappointment. I admit the inevitable third-act rapprochement had me misty-eyed, but can’t the father be a tiny humanized before the very end?
Happily, Stoick is somewhat offset by Gobber the Belch (Craig Ferguson), the peg-legged, one-handed old tough who trains young Vikings in the ways of
Nick Frost Gets Actual About Rumors Surrounding How To Instruct Your Dragon's Gobber Being Gay: 'I Think He'd Contain A Lovely Homosexual Dragon As Well'
For years, there hold been theories and speculation about Gobber, the beloved How to Train Your Dragonblacksmith, being male lover. Moments in the second and third animated movies allude to the thought, however it’s never directly confirmed or denied. So, with the live-action motion picture being on the 2025 movie schedule, we asked Nick Frost about this ongoing conversation.
During CinemaBlend’s interviews with How to Train Your Dragon’s cast, Jeff McCobb asked Gobber actor Nick Frost about this progressing discourse. Noting that the actor, who is “something of an unexpected same-sex attracted icon a la Golden Girls or The Babadook," he brought up the theories regarding his character's sexuality. In response, the Hot Fuzz star said:
I think it’s genuine. I don’t believe it’s a theory, right? Has it been? I don’t think [Dean DeBlois] has confirmed, but, yeah, I consider potentially Gobber is gay. Which is great, because I think he’d possess a lovely queer dragon as successfully.