About

Toothless Presents Himself refers to a memorable scene from 2019 animated film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in which black dragon Toothless follows cues from his dragon-rider Hiccup to introduce himself to a white female dragon. Online, a three-panel image based on the scene has been used as an exploitable for object-labeling memes.

Origin

On February 3rd, 2019, DreamWorks Animation animated fim How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World premiered.^[1] In one scene of the fim, dragon Toothless meets a white female dragon (Light Fury). During the scene, Toothless follows cues from his dragon-rider Hiccup in order to present himself to Light Fury.

 

Spread

On June 5th, 2019, Redditor lil_zagawy posted a three-panel meme based on the scene to subreddit where it gained over 74,000 upvotes in two days (shown below, left).^[2] On the same day, lil_zagawy posted a template for the meme (shown below, right).^[3]

  

In the following days, multiple posts utilzing the format were posted to /r/dankmemes and other subreddits. For example, posts made by Redditor bigbo22 on June 5th in dankmemes^[4] and memes^[5] subreddits, gained over 20,800 and 23,200 upvotes in two days, respectively (shown below, left). A post made by Redditor Yacobbbb on June 6th received over 51,300 upvotes in two days (shown below, right).^[6]