A Whole Year of Winter: Twelve Months of Frozen Rewrites

I’ve been meaning to write this post pretty much since I first saw Frozen (...a month ago? Yeah, sounds about right), and just never got around to it because I’m lazy and, you know, lazy. I think it’s time, though, particularly because I can’t step out of my apartment without tripping over a pile composed half of ice and half of very dirty slush. Anyway, I’m trying to work on my follow-through.

[Sidenote: the prevalence of blogs on the internet is weirdly reassuring in terms of opinion posts. I’d normally worry about people reading the things I think, but seriously, who but my friends is going to read this? More importantly, who the hell is going to care? Much like Elsa fucking off to be alone in the middle of the mountains, it’s sort of liberating.]

[Not-a-sidenote: This post is definitely going to have spoilers for Frozen. Like, a lot of them. Almost immediately.]

So, Frozen was okay.

I mean, I enjoyed it! Well, parts of it. Like “Let It Go”! That was a great song. Also Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel have excellent voices, and “Love Is An Open Door” was also pretty fun. And Elsa made a snow golem! And the bait-and-switch with Hans was awesomely sneaky, as was the eventual acknowledgement that there are other types of love than romantic — although I was spoiled beforehand and thus had no “gasp!!!” moment — and I do appreciate attempts to subvert tropes. A lot. Trope subversion is my jam.

But. (Oh, come on, you knew there was a "but" coming.)

But, here’s the thing: I liked the possibilities of Frozen far more than their actual execution, which meant that by the end of the movie I felt a bit like I’d just gone through a 2-hour crash course in missed opportunities. A less than ideal feeling! But, alas, not unfamiliar. I felt the same way about Once Upon A Time and the non-awful seasons of Glee. (Cue Tyra Banks yelling, “I WAS ROOTING FOR YOU! WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU.”)

But that is, I think, why I haven’t been able to write a proper critique of Frozen, despite the fact that I’ve been sitting at my computer all day trying to do that exact thing. I can’t critique Frozen because I find it really hard to think about it on its own terms — as a movie about Anna and meta trope subversion — rather than as what I desperately wanted it to be, which was a movie about sisters (SISTERS!!!!!) and what happens when you grow up afraid of yourself.

[Sidenote: If you want to watch a movie about sisters, watch Lilo & Stitch. Actually, watch Lilo & Stitch anyway, because it’s an awesome movie about awesome sisters and also one of the best movies Disney ever made. Just a fact.]

And I still want that movie. A lot. Anna was cute, even if I do feel like the "naive, neglected/sheltered, enthusiastic princess goes on a life-changing journey while bantering adorably with a frequently exasperated dude that she ropes into it" is a variant of the story we already saw in Tangled, but I’m always pro-sister stories, and that other story, that one about being scared? That’s not just an interesting story, it’s a FUCKING IMPORTANT story.

I can think up a ton of reasons off the top of my head why kids would grow up afraid of themselves for something that’s not always externally visible — would grow up feeling like they had to control something that was part of them, being told to control it for fear of horrible consequences, and then feeling like a failure when they couldn’t. Most of those reasons have to deal with being LGBTQI or neuroatypical (in this case bipolar, anxious, depressed, etc.). And it’s shitty that it’s probably going to take decades, at least, before Disney even considers giving us a non-straight princess, and that their idea of a neuroatypical princess involves making it a metaphor and then not really dealing with it, but.

Don’t we deserve stories that tell us that we’re allowed to love ourselves, even the parts that seem frightening?

Also, did we really need the freaking snowman?*

Couldn't this guy have been the adorable tagalong buddy instead?

So I wanted that, and I wanted way more sister time and parallel arc development, and I wanted a song that Disney would never in a million years write about how the people who love you, and whom you love, can fuck you up irrevocably**, and I wanted actual characters of color***, and I wouldn’t have minded having some more background logic... and as is frequently my wont, I started to think of how I would have remixed the elements of the existing movie in order to better make it work for me.

(As I have done, again, for Once Upon a Time and the non-awful seasons of Glee, among other things. At some point I'll actually write down the Dollhouse and Star Trek Into Darkness remixes.)

At which point Lovely Sister challenged me to write them up. She may have been joking, I'm not sure. But, long story short, we eventually decided the most reasonable idea would be to do twelve plot summaries — one every month for a year. Which means that everyone will be super bored with this and have totally forgotten about this movie but me by the time I’m done, if I don’t end up getting distracted halfway through. WHAT CAN YOU DO.

*Or the trolls. Man, the trolls bugged me. We've just been talking about how getting engaged to a guy you've known for all of five hours is completely absurd, and then suddenly they're trying to marry Anna and Kristoff? And these are the guys who are supposedly love experts? Um, no.

**I am assuming that Disney would never do this because it would probably foment some sort of insurrection.

*** So I had this whole big other post that I was starting to write that was just distinctly Not Working, so I scrapped most of it, but I figured that the stuff about race and Frozen was worth saying, so here it is:

I knew going in that I was going to be annoyed by the lack of characters of color. I felt it about Tangled, too — blah blah blah, “it’s a German fairy tale,” blah blah blah, but A) people of color have lived in Europe for quite some time, B) according to the literally 30-second google search I just did, there’s a Persian story from the 10th century AD about a woman named Rudaba who lets down her hair from her tower so this guy Zal can climb up and they fall in love, and C) the whole festival of lanterns thing is deeeeefinitely an Asian thing. Definitely. I’ve seen it mostly connected to East Asian and Southeast Asian cultures. Taking that as a plot point and then making all of the characters white and Western smacks of cultural appropriation.

A lot of people much smarter and more well-versed on the subject than I have talked about race, ethnicity, and Frozen — for a tiny sampling, see medievalpoc and a few other tumblr users discussing the presence of POC in Scandinavia; selchieproductions criticizing the way Kristoff’s costume was a mishmash of vague Saami signifiers with no understanding of the actual cultural context, and why that and other things are problematic; also just read thiscouldhavebeenfrozen. Start with the FAQ.

Okay, that was just a lot of links, all at once. Go read! Come back whenever, I’ll still be here.

Anyway, the thing that bothers me about the “but of course it’s about white people, it’s set in fake-magical-Scandinavia!” is that it’s not only racist, it’s unimaginative. Even if you can’t stretch your brain around the image of people of color wearing pretty dresses and living in a European-looking castle, even in a fake magical kingdom, then, um. Why does Arandelle have to be fake-magical-Scandinavia?

Sure, The Snow Queen is a Danish fairy tale, but it’s not like Frozen is particularly faithful to the source material. Or at all faithful. It could have been about the Inuit, or set in fake-magical-Mongolia. Or, hell, it didn’t even have to be in a super northern country at all. A friend and I were talking about how cool it would have been to set the story in Japan (which does, in fact, have mountains and snow). Or the mountains of New Zealand. And hey, considering the fact that Elsa is creating weather that’s dramatically out of the ordinary, you could even set it in a warmer country. Imagine how surprised those guys would be by having three feet of snow dropped on their heads.