Please note that these figures are very, very rough (due to the volume of the Red Death being rather difficult to figure out with accuracy) and only intended to give one a good idea of the absurdity of HTTYD.
Here I estimated the length of the Red Death, and found the official reference book figures to be accurate. I will, to simplify things, calculate the dragon's density from a box of 60 x 20 x 30 meters. That's 36,000 m^3.
According to HTTYD Wiki, two different reference books state that the Red Death weighs 10 tons (~9,072 kg).
Therefore, the density is ~3.9683 kg/m^3.
For reference, that's significantly less than the density of styrofoam! It's about 1/250 of the density of water, or 3 times that of air. (Remember that the actual volume of the dragon is higher, so the density would actually be much lower.)
The reference books, therefore, are contradicted by the scenes which show the Red Death sinking in lava and smashing through rock. The only reasonable answer I can think of is that the Red Death doesn't actually weigh so little. So we have to throw the reference books out the window in this case. (And my friends wonder why I don't take the books seriously.)
Part Two: Being less generous
I've often been accused of pro-LOTR bias. And of course I prefer Tolkien's work to HTTYD or Star Wars. But does that mean that you can dismiss any conclusion of mine that you don't like? I regularly shift values to the maximum when dealing with Toothless, and here I tried to minimize the moronity of whoever wrote the HTTYD reference books. So I am going to calculate the book-derived density of the Red Death with more accuracy and less generosity toward HTTYD.
(I'm using Imperial this time for some reason.)
From my Red Death size graphic I estimate the Red Death's legs as 25-by-25-by-120-foot cylinders. The head and neck are about 45 feet by 55 feet. The torso is about 50 by 50 by 220 feet. The tail is about 220 by 20 by 20 on average.
Volume = 300000 + 2475 + 550000 + 88000 = 940475 ft^3
...which yields a density of about 0.02 lb/ft^3. For comparison, helium's density at room temperature and normal pressure is 0.01114 lb/ft^3. So the Red Death is less than twice as dense as a helium balloon, not even counting the actual rubber of the balloon?
But remember, visuals and science trump all else. So the reference book figures are plain wrong.
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