12MoF: The One Where Elsa is the Snowman NO WAIT HEAR ME OUT

Previously on 12 Months of Frozen: 

Prologue 

1stMoF: The One Where Elsa and Anna Send a Lot of Letters

I'm not going to lie: this idea came out on the spur of the moment, as part of an instinctive reaction of "You want Anna to be the main character? Fine, I'll GIVE you Anna as the main character, and it'll STILL have more Anna&Elsa interaction. Because I can."

Just so you know where this is coming from.

As mentioned previously: Anna and Elsa are still ladies of color. Just in case you forgot. Also, for the sake of having some variety between the Disney princesses, I'm going to go ahead and say that they're both short and have waists larger than an inch.

(Also you should go check out this redesign of them as Inuit, because it's really cute.)

Because this is now officially Anna's Movie, we don't see Elsa at the beginning — instead it's like the beginning of, say, How To Train Your Dragon, where we frontload some of the important info right off the bat in a voiceover or song. Key points: Anna's parents died a few years ago, her sister was lost, and their land was cursed with perpetual ice and snow, which understandably has been not so great for things like inter-kingdom trade. Not that we're really going to get into how the import/export business suffers when your major travel routes are prone to avalanches, but we get the idea that Arendelle, which used to be a thriving hub of people, has suddenly been thrust into a forced, and painful, isolation.

The song/voiceover is Anna's way of making all this into a sort of story, something she could be telling to one of the paintings — a form of abstraction to help her think about it without breaking down. Not a fairytale, because she's ambivalent about fairytales, but a history, because she loves history. 

This Week In TV: 6 April - 12 April

Yeah, I'm a little late. Sue me. This week's crop: Cosmos, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Mindy Project, and Community — vague spoilers for all, but mostly for TMP.

Sunday, April 6:

Cosmos, "Hiding in the Light": We come to the subject of light! Neil deGrasse Tyson gave us possibly the best Cosmos episode yet this week, by which I mean that I spent the first half having awesome flashbacks to high school physics — flashbacks that were actually significantly more awesome than the physics classes themselves — and then the second half staring in wide-eyed awe at the screen, saying, "WHAT THE HELL," over and over again. I distantly knew that you can use light to find out the chemical composition of something, and I knew that our perceptions of what's going on in the world around us weren't objective, but it goes so far beyond that. (Developing a theory: gravity rules our universe, light defines it.) I think I'd have to study physics for at least two years before I even started to comprehend just how little about this subject I comprehend. Also, NdGT getting choked up about Joseph von Fraunhofer's experiments, the forerunners of astrophysics, was wonderful.

What I love about Cosmos is that it reminds me every week just how awesome science and the universe are. If this show had been around when I was a kid I probably would've wanted to be an astrophysicist when I grew up.