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?)


So Elsa heads off to a quiet house in the mountains with one of her parents (and presumably a guardian for when her parents don't want to switch off, but this is still prologue, I don't know if we want to get bogged down with that sort of thing at this point), where a little extra snow now and then won't go amiss. Anna, meanwhile, is still a little fuzzy from the head injury, and her parents tell her that the stuff she remembers, about her sister making sparkling palaces out of ice? Yeah, that was just a dream.

She's a little kid. Eventually, she believes them.

Buuuuuuut Anna and Elsa are still sisters who love each other, and the king and queen are still pretending that Elsa is only going away to study statecraft in peace, so they write letters! Which would be a really great point for a SONG MONTAGE.

I've been calling it "Dear Elsa/Dear Anna" in my head, because one of the most important things is that we get Elsa's POV in a much larger quantity than we do in "Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?" The stuff Anna says is largely the same — the castle isn't abandoned, but her best friend is gone, and she knows that Elsa is pulling back from her, and one of her parents is always gone, and she can't leave the castle, and everyone treats her as a princess and not a person, and her parents are always worried and will never tell her why, and at this point she's so lonely that she's making friends with the weird cat who lives on the third floor and hates everyone, and...

And even though we know what Elsa is going through — she's scared literally all the time, and she's convinced that she's a failure because she can't get herself under control, and she's alone, and she never gets to see her sister, and she's trapped in these unending spirals of her own anxiety and depression — Anna has no idea, because Elsa throws away or freezes all these letters before anyone else can see them. The only letters she actually sends are self-censored like nobody's business, because A) she doesn't want to worry Anna and B) she's not supposed to tell Anna about her powers (because the idea is that she'll get the magic under control and get rid of it), which nixes like 85% of her subjects of conversation straight off the bat.

Then their parents die.

SO NOW WE HAVE TWO OPTIONS. Option A, we pull a Disney (and, in fact, pull precisely what Disney did in this movie) by having the parents death happen years before the bulk of the action, letting everyone have time to recover before the story begins. Option B, we have the parents die immediately before the rest of the story happens, leaving everyone grief-stricken and even more screwed up than before.

[ETA: My friend Gabriel and I were discussing this, and although I originally chose Option B upon the offhanded suggestion of Flatmate Christina, I think he's right in that I don't actually deal with the full ramifications of having the parents' death be so recent. I'm not going to rewrite this entirely, because I'm lazy and also because I feel in a certain sense like that would be cheating, but for my own personal satisfaction, I'm going to add in Option A, to mark out the different points where A and B would have fit.]

Option A 

Their parents die. As in the movie, we see Anna reaching out again, while Elsa remains in the mountains, stuck in a miasma of grief while ice shards swirl around her. Maybe Elsa even learns about the death from Anna's letter? But she stays in the mountains while RAP acts as regent until her coronation in a few years.

 Anna meets Hans!

Option B 

Hans has been sent as an envoy to discuss trade arrangements with the king and queen of Arendelle, who are supposed to be returning from an overseas voyage. Maybe Anna can even sing a song about wanting to fall in love, similar to "For the First Time In Forever" — she's built up her idea of what it means to be a princess by reading storybooks, and she's lonely, and princesses fall in love with princes. Falling in love seems right. (Because, of course, despite the fact that she hasn't been locked in an empty castle for the last umpteen-million years, Anna is still starved for love and eager to fling it every which way.) 

"Can we make that song a duet where Elsa sings about wanting to be normal so that someone can love her?" you ask. I DON'T KNOW, CAN WE? The only limits to this story are the limits of your imagination! You go ahead and make that song a duet! Let's give ourselves allllllll the character exposition we can fit into a single musical number! 

And then Anna meets Hans, they fall in love, presumably they sing about being in love, etc. etc.

BUT THEN we get the horrible news that the king and queen's boat has sunk! Cue the misery! Also, cue the focus jumping away from Anna and back to Elsa!

Messengers go to the mountain home to tell Elsa and bring her back to Arendelle to be crowned, or at least to bring the family back together for the funeral, and Elsa, um. "Flips out" would kind of be an understatement. Which is kind of reasonable, given that she's been isolated for like 2/3 of her life, her main connections to the real world are gone, she's in shock and grieving, she still thinks she's the most dangerous person she knows, and now she has to go and run a goddamn country.

Thus, in the midst of her biggest anxiety/panic attack ever, she ends up accidentally destroying the entire building and making the messengers very very scared for their lives. They respond badly. Elsa responds by running away even more. The weather responds by dropping approximately three billion feet of snow down on the entire country. 

I always think of this bit from Jeff Smith's comic Bone. They don't faff around with this "winter is coming" ominous bull in the Valley! Winter comes, and you know that winter comes because three seconds later you're covered in snow!

The messengers manage to make it back to the castle, where they tell the Royal Advisor Person (see, I didn't just invent a random character for absolutely no reason!) that hey, they're sure Princess Elsa is great, and sure, she did really well in her correspondence courses in Ruling A Kingdom 101, but they're probably sort of better off without her. 

This is approximately when Anna shows up and asks, "Hey, so where's my sister? Literally the only spot of light in this shitty situation is the fact that she is going to be coming back!" 

Royal Advisor Person: "Um. ABOUT THAT." 

The Royal Advisor Person, knowing that Anna's parents didn't want her to know about Elsa's powers, makes up some shit about how Elsa's been cursed, and she's dangerous, and she's probably not going to be coming back for the funeral. Or her coronation. Or Anna's wedding. And they should just give it some time, let her sort herself out! 

At which point, Anna basically goes, "Oh, heck no." Because there have been a hell of a lot of changes over the past day. Her parents are gone, so now she's clinging to her old family (Elsa) and her new family (Hans). Her sister is going to come home, they're going to be a family, and Anna is going to get married and live happily ever after.

Option A 

Hans is there for the coronation. And actually, now that I'm typing this, maybe Option A really does make the most sense, because "For The First Time In Forever" and "Love Is An Open Door" become about how lonely she's been without her parents and without her sister, and there's the very strong implication that she wants to fall in love because she wants to have someone, preferably someone who won't leave. Anna has a lot of abandonment issues.  

...And we can probably still make "For The First Time In Forever" a duet where Elsa sings about wanting to be normal so that someone can love her/she can feel like she has some modicum of control over her life, as she's getting ready to journey down the mountain to go to the coronation she really, really, really doesn't feel like she's ready for, because if she can't even control her own powers how can she rule an entire kingdom?

So Elsa, freaking out almost as hardcore as I describe her in Option B, comes back to the castle for the coronation, where she and Anna have a reunion that is waaaaaay more awkward and uncomfortable than it was in the movie. It's like the first half-hour of your first RL meeting with someone you know from the internet, except about 100x worse, because Anna's dealing with her abandonment issues and Elsa's dealing with her everything else issues. Also their feelings of loss at the other growing up without them. Eventually they sort of manage to talk about the letters they sent back and forth?

At some point, Anna falls in love with Hans over the course of a song. This might be before Elsa's back, or after Elsa is crowned, or whatever; the timing there will add some details — does she glomp on to Hans partially because things are so awkward with Elsa and so easy with him? do they fall in love beforehand and she's really excited to introduce him to Elsa? — but in the grand scheme of things, it's not super important. The point is that she tells Elsa about him and Elsa is less than enthusiastic, and also significantly more freaked and flustered than in the movie. 

This just compounds with their awkwardness and the conversational subjects they were avoiding, until everything comes out — "You barely know him! And you can't just invite people to live with us without even asking!" leads to "I barely know you! You went off to spend your whole life in the mountains! You didn't even come back for the funeral!" leads to "Do you think I wanted to be up there? I did that for you!" There's probably also a smattering of "Maybe I should never have come back" on Elsa's part. All this leads to... well, a whole lot of confusion on Anna's part, followed by a lot of ice and snow, followed by Elsa running away. 

Anna goes to RAP for an explanation on what on earth Elsa meant, and also what was up with all that ice, and RAP gives her the curse story. As in Option B, Anna refuses to allow this to stand, partially because she refuses to not have her sister in her life again, and partially because the thought of her sister running around, cursed and alone and thinking that Anna is mad at her, makes her feel kind of sick inside.

So she immediately decides that she's going to go find her sister and make this right, because Anna is nothing if not willfully optimistic. Hans and RAP are, you know, less enthusiastic about Anna charging off into the wilderness to find her dangerously magical sister, and not just because if Anna dies, the royal succession goes *poof* and disappears. But they agree that they'll take a night and discuss it again the next day, like rational people who don't want to make any hasty decisions...

Which is why Anna sneaks out in the middle of the night, with her horse. The cat from the third floor who hates everything comes along, because hey, it's a Disney movie, let's throw in the weird animal friends.

Somewhere in all of this, we jump back to Elsa, who has cried herself out and is at the "FUCK EVERYTHING" stage right now. We have two options here for a song: we can either turn "Let It Go" into a song of sadness and despair (the storm is a metaphor! a metaphor for her turbulent internal emotions and crushing grief because her life sucks and her parents are dead) or — and I am leaning slightly more towards this option — we can have her sing a different song about how she wants to do something to change the mess of her life but she doesn't know what, precisely, to do. Maybe she'll go away even farther and try to sort this shit out. 

So she's got her song, except then boom, there is Anna! The cat from the third floor who hates everything has accurately led her to Elsa's location, because weird animal friends have that sort of power in Disney movies. Probably s/he gave Anna a disdainful look, clawed her thigh a little bit, and stalked off, and Anna followed because it was sort of in the direction of "exactly towards the middle of the storm," which seems like as good a place to start as any.

At this point, "FUCK EVERYTHING" becomes "HOLY SHIT GOD WHY ARE YOU HERE," except with less cursing, because this is (nominally) a children's movie. Even with the crushing grief. Bambi made me cry and everyone I know is still working through their trauma over Mufasa's death in The Lion King, so really, we're about due for a person-shaped tragedy. (Also, a lot of shitty stuff happens to kids, and we can't always shy away from that in our media, but that's a subject for another time.)

Anyway! Elsa Does Not Want Anna there, because the whole reason she let herself get shunted off to the mountains in the first place was out of fear that she'd hurt Anna. But Anna is like "It's okay, I know that you're cursed!" and Elsa is like, "...Yes. Cursed. That is exactly what I am. I AM DANGER GO AWAY NOW."

Option B: The Delayed Awkward Reunion 

Anna: "Haha, nope, we're getting you uncursed and you're coming to my wedding also HI??? IT HAS BEEN LIKE TWELVE YEARS??? AND OUR PARENTS ARE DEAD AND DIDN'T YOU MISS ME??" 

Elsa: "Um. Hi! I don't — [cue awkward misery about missing each other growing up, except neither of them know how to articulate this because both of them have kind of awful social skills] — wait, sorry, what is this about a wedding?!"

Eventually they both realise that Elsa's desire to do something about herself and Anna's desire to break the "curse" are sort of complementary. Elsa remembers faintly that comment that RAP made about the trolls and their knowledge of magic, and they decide to go search out the trolls, going back to the ruin of the mountain house to dig into Elsa's books and old maps.

Then it's time for AWKWARD SISTER ROADTRIP. Reconnecting after so many years apart! Not knowing what the hell to say to each other! Grieving silently for their parents! Anna worrying that Elsa hates her because Elsa is far more reserved than Anna and Anna doesn't really understand that, and Elsa worrying that Anna finds her boring/awful/resents her for being gone. Which Anna might, a little, just like Elsa might resent Anna a little for not being born with powers, but that's really something that would get more delved into in a novel, so we're going to leave that aside for now.

Option A 

Given that they fought about it, we would probably have to delve into it at least a little.

Meanwhile, the dudes back at the castle have discovered that Anna is gone, and have set out in search of her. And... other people do too? Maybe some guys have decided that hey, being cursed sucks, but nobody knows how to break curses anymore and they would really like to get all this snow out of the way, or maybe the news have spread that she has magic and they think she's doing it on purpose, or maybe RAP is secretly evil. In this, you can choose your own adventure. (I bet someone makes a shitty comment about the king and queen, though.) The point is that there's a lot of chaos and confusion between Elsa's accidental ice-making and dudes trying to kill her.

Is it snow golem time??? It might be snow golem time.

Who's a cute little snow golem??? You are! You are!

This time, though, Elsa didn't mean to make the snow golem — didn't even know she could — and this just freaks her out even more, which is where we get to her accidentally whapping Anna in the heart.

This is when the cat from the third floor who hates everything sighs grumpily, grows about 15x larger, yanks Elsa and Anna onto its back, and runs off, with Marshmallow the snow golem hanging on for the ride. Where is Grumpy Cat taking our heroes? To the trolls! Because as we find out when we get there, Grumpy Cat is actually a troll cat who wandered off a while back and ended up in the Arendelle palace, where s/he remained for approximately twenty years because s/he was lazy. This is why Grumpy Cat happens to be so... uniquely helpful.

Anyway, they hash things out with the trolls. Elsa's secret is out, and she wants to know if the trolls can make her powers go away, which makes them pretty much blink at her and go, "...This is you, babe. This is part of you. We can give you better ways of handling it it, but we can't just zap it off like we'd zap a wart." Also, they basically say that the king and queen, no matter how much they loved their daughters, were kind of shitty parents for making Elsa afraid of herself. 

They try to tell Elsa that she should love herself, and let other people love her, but Elsa is just like "I'M SORRY, DO YOU SEE MY SISTER?? How can I love myself when I don't trust myself? How can I let other people love me if whenever I let my guard down, something like this happens?"

Which is not meant to suggest that Elsa shouldn't love herself, just that sometimes it's really hard to. And it's hard to accept that you actually deserve love when, to your mind, it feels like you're fucking up left and right.

...The trolls maaaaaay sing a song about how things like laughter and trust are good medicines but love (in many forms) is also important. That, um. May be what happens in my head. 

Then we deal with what's going on with Anna. I've developed a semi-elaborate headcanon about why Elsa's magic screwed Anna up, involving various factors such as intent and location — Elsa basically produces magical snow, and the reason it was okay when Anna was a kid was because A) the magic was made in joy and B) the brain can stand being metaphorically cold for a little while; it affects the way you think for a little while, maybe cools you down if you've got a bad temper, but it's not a big deal. Unfortunately, the magic that Anna just got hit with was A) magic born of fear, and B) hit the heart, which tends to get uncomfortable if it's too chilly for too long.

But, what has a warming effect on the heart? Love! Specifically, reciprocated love, because in general there's a nicely warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from loving someone who loves you back. 

"True love," Anna murmurs groggily, because lest anyone forget, she was raised by fairytales. "Hans..."

Elsa is basically just like, "SURE, OKAY. HANS. LET'S GO TAKE YOU TO HANS," because she knows pretty much nothing else about who her sister could love that would love her back? BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS ARE DEAD. And obviously, she thinks, Anna wouldn't love her after this exciting little escapade of near-death, and also as a culture we're a little too predisposed to thinking that romantic love solves everything, which was one of the nice things that the actual movie implied. (Despite all that randomness of Kristoff and Anna running towards each other over a frozen lake.)

Grumpy Cat refuses to take them back to the castle, so Elsa has Marshmallow grab her and Anna and gallop off before the trolls can say, "Wait, that's... not what we meant?"

They send Grumpy Cat down ahead of them to keep an eye on the situation, just in case.

So Elsa gets Anna back to the castle and to Hans, who takes Anna and leaves. RAP, who has basically been acting as regent, is all sad and paternal and exiles Elsa, laying on a massive guilt trip about how this is what her parents were always afraid of, and they tried so hard to "help" her, and it's all her fault, and so on and so forth, and she should just go away and never come back so they don't have to execute her, and why couldn't she just keep trying to make all this go away?

Elsa leaves, and I think this is where Let It Go comes in? Let It Go is a beautiful song, and I really like the idea of it as this climactic cathartic experience for Elsa, where she finally gets sick of trying to be what everyone else keeps telling her she has to be. The fuck you moment, as it were. I'm still struggling with the timing a little bit, though; it doesn't entirely make sense here, but it also didn't entirely make sense where it was in the movie, so.

Anyway, Elsa runs away after being rejected by everyone she ever cared for who's still alive, hits rock bottom and rebounds, and then runs into Grumpy Cat, who manages to express to her that hey, remember how they don't actually know anything about Hans? And Elsa is just like, "Oh, fuck, now it's my turn to go save my sister," and surfs back to the castle as soon as she can.

Elsa and Frozone could be ice-surfing buddies.

Which is good, because it turns out that Hans and RAP are in cahoots! RAP is probably Hans's uncle or something, because nepotism. RAP convinced the king of Hans's kingdom to send Hans as an envoy so that he could marry Anna and they could eventually become king and queen; he never really thought Elsa was going to get her powers under control enough to get crowned. And hey, who would the citizens want more as queen, a girl they've barely seen since she was 8 or a girl who's grown up in the castle?

Another choose your own adventure moment: we can either have Hans being more or less of an asshole. I don't really care, because either way, it serves the "romantic love is not everything/a dance, a song, and some prolonged eye contact do not equal true love forever and ever amen" storyline. 

If he's more of an asshole, he laughs as Anna is dying (because now RAP will go from regent to king, and as Anna's bereaved fiancé, Hans will become his heir) and mentions ominously that having Elsa alive is a loose end that he's going to wrap up. 

If he's less of an asshole, he hopes that their tentative connection will be enough to fix Anna... but when it doesn't work, he really can't do anything about it.

EXCEPT THEN ELSA COMES BACK WITH GRUMPY CAT AND THEY BREAK ANNA OUT AND IT TURNS OUT THAT SISTERLY LOVE WARMS ANNA'S HEART UP ENOUGH TO MELT THE MAGICAL SNOW. Wow, talk about sentences that I never thought that I'd write.

But yes, she breaks Anna out, and subsequently is like, "Wait, you're okay! Does this — you love me?!"

To which Anna is like, "Of course I love you! I have spent approximately half my life writing you letters and waiting frantically for your responses! You've always been my best friend, even when we never got to see each other! I thought you didn't love me!"

And Elsa is like, "Of course I love you! I lived alone in the mountains for half my life because I was so devastated when I hurt you! You're the most important person in my life!"

And RAP (and less-of-an-asshole!Hans, if we're going that route) is like, "Hey, that's great, but that doesn't change the fact that she's Needs To Go. How can you love her? She's dangerous! There's still ice everywhere! It's still snowing!"

But Anna likes Elsa's ice, because it's part of Elsa and Elsa is her favorite person ever. So let me talk about this for a moment: I'm not saying any of this to suggest that we can only be validated as people by other people's love, because that's obviously not true, but I've been thinking a lot about some things my friend Julia has said about being capital-D Depressed — about continually being told that nobody will love her for her depression, and that other people loving her is conditional on her being able to love herself first, even though sometimes it's hard to love yourself when you feel like nobody will ever love you. And, also, I kind of wanted something about how Anna doesn't need to "fix" Elsa, and she's learning to live with not pushing Elsa for what Elsa isn't really prepared to give her, like letting her in all the way; she just needs to know that Elsa loves her, and then together they can figure out compromises for the rest of it.

And the magic doesn't have to be completely a metaphor, because looking at things completely on a metaphorical level is boring, but you know what, sometimes it's really important to have other people remind you that you're worth something. It can be a cornerstone to prop yourself up on even when you're having a hard time believing it yourself. 

So in some of the other 12MoFs, I'll try and explore how much of a personal journey self-validation can be, but this version is going to be about how, after being so isolated and feeling so worthless for her whole life, realizing that Anna loves her and is willing to go to bat for the part of Elsa that Elsa has tried so hard to repress is kind of a revelatory moment.

This moment could also be where Let It Go comes in: not a perfect triumph, but Elsa saying "Fuck you" to RAP, who's judging her for not being able to be the perfect girl her parents wanted her to be, and rejecting the idea that she has to hide herself away because she's different. And as she continues the process of accepting herself via musical number (a process that has been going on in fits and spurts for like half of the movie so far), the ice all around them stops spinning and settles down — it's still there, but she can get kind of a handle on it and start figuring out how to move it where she wants, and she manages to banish most of the snow blanketing the kingdom.

Anyway, they banish Hans and RAP, and Elsa becomes queen, and Anna stays princess but also becomes chief party-planner, and the trolls move into the castle and help Elsa handle her powers, and Grumpy Cat still spends a lot of time on the third floor but also spends a lot of time sleeping on people's heads and sitting on their newspapers and getting fur everywhere and basically being a nuisance in all the best cat-like ways. Also, sometimes s/he grows huge and s/he and Marshmallow chase each other all over the mountains playing tag, because I really like that mental image.

Basically, everyone lives more-or-less-happily ever after.

Like this, except they're still not white. In case you forgot.