12MoF: The One Where Elsa and Anna Send A Lot of Letters

Previously on 12 Months of Frozen: Prologue, aka I talk about why I'm rewriting Frozen twelve times. Also, I accidentally deleted this entire post and now I have to rewrite it, so... Joy.

Setting: A fictional kingdom which we're going to continue to call Arendelle for the sake of simplicity, although as I previously mentioned, that doesn't mean it has to be Scandinavia Lite. It could be, say, Fake Japan. Doesn't matter. It's a fake country with a fictional history, so as long as we're not racist or appropriative (that is a VERY IMPORTANT CONDITION and one I honestly don't trust Disney with), we can give it the scenery and architecture we want. Feel free to insert your own.

Really the only relevant thing is that we're just going to go ahead and imagine that all of the characters are POC. Except Hans, I guess. Hans can be white. Either way.

Story: We skip the ice-logging scene and just go straight to Anna dragging Elsa out of bed to build a snowman. This goes about the same way it does in the movie — which is to say, initially awesome, subsequently less so — except that instead of running to the trolls, the king and queen go straight to the royal healer and their most trusted royal advisor guy. Cue all the same type of "oh dear, this is very dangerous, people will be scared, she needs to get that ish under control ASAP, blah blah blah" exposition, the only difference being that the king and queen decide to send Elsa away instead of, you know, everyone else in the castle. Because they don't want to be responsible for laying off hundreds of people, and also nobody wants to go down in history as a country's first Hermit King and Queen.

(Although, the advisor admits, magic isn't his speciality. Most knowledge of magic left the country when the trolls did. Ooh, I wonder if that'll come back to be important later?)

Almost Human's Identity Crisis

I've been enjoying Almost Human this season in the same way that I've enjoyed a vast number of entertaining-yet-average TV shows over the years: with amusement, a dash of fondness, and occasional cheering when the production team manages to turn out an episode that's more competent than usual. And yet with most of those other shows, I never finished up the first season with the sneaking suspicion that I had just been watching five different shows. 

I'm not even talking about the fact that the show was a mishmash of tropes I've seen a thousand times before, even though it was — the buddy cop aspects are pretty damn standard, and John's manpain and wobbly standing in the police department, and I can name at least three different movies/books/TV shows about a grumpy, robot-hating human cop who's forced to pair up with, surprise of surprises, a humanoid robot, and then they all end up learning valuable lessons about humanity. Sometimes the grumpy, robot-hating human cop is even cybernetically modified, too. We've all seen I, Robot, right? 

I will at least give Almost Human props for not being entirely about white dudes, which is more than I can say for a lot of sci-fi shows.

But anyway, that's not the point. This isn't just me having flashbacks to the ghosts of stories past; this is a narrative identity crisis. It's sort of like what I imagine would happen if identical quintuplets enrolled in high school under one name and all took turns pretending to be the same person. The superficial resemblance was there, but other concerns tended to vary wildly.

Okay guys, remember: we're in love with the quarterback, we hate science, and we have three things due in AP Lit. And I swear, Number 2, if you try and flirt with the TA one more time...