Prologue
March: The One Where Elsa and Anna Send a Lot of Letters
April: The One Where Elsa is the Snowman NO WAIT HEAR ME OUT
May: The One Where The Snow Queen Isn't Elsa. Also, Lesbians.
Short post this month, ducklings, because I am sick and don't want to think too much.
SOMEWHERE ELSE:
There is a village in the distance, and there is fire. "Witch!" we hear someone scream, and someone else takes up the call until we can barely distinguish one voice from another. They are a blur of silhouettes under orange smudges of flame. A blue streak darts in front of them and away, into the mountains, and is lost.
ARENDELLE, INSIDE:
An introductory scene. I tried to actually write this one out, but A) sick, B) don't want to think too much, and C) 1.5 hours left of June. It's a useful scene to establish the characters, but it's also the type of thing that could possibly be cut for time if necessary. Should we keep it, the important points are: Elsa is 14, Anna is 10, it's the middle of summer, and Anna is trying to talk her sister into using her powers.
("Elsaaaaaaaaaaaa," Anna groans again, "what's the point of being a witch if you won't even do anything with it?"
"I'm not a witch," Elsa whispers, alarmed.)
So in the scene I originally wrote, we get a brief expose of the reasons her parents don't want her using her powers — people are afraid of magic, they might not trust her as the heir to the throne, Elsa's freaked out by herself, so on and so forth — and Elsa accidentally uses her powers in a mild sister-fight, and the King and Queen come in. Probably at some point someone mentions that Elsa is into girls and the people of the kingdom will already have to get used to there being two queens instead of a king and a queen. But really, the key part of the scene is that a few flakes of snow drift through the open window. Elsa says, a little scared, "It's not me. I'm not doing that."
So they move to the window and its perfect view of a nearby green-forested mountain, and as they watch, snow slowly begins to cover the entire mountain from the peak down. After only a minute, the mountain — and only the mountain — has gone white.
ARENDELLE, SONG MONTAGE:
Elsa walks through the town as she grows older and the seasons change around her. She's having perfectly nice conversations with the townspeople, except that she keeps flinching as she overhears them making offhanded remarks. "Ugh, what a witch." "You know, I heard that [person's] son was trying a spell last night? That poor woman. It would kill me if I found my son doing that." Meanwhile, Elsa keeps accidentally sprouting snowflakes and trying hastily to cover it up. The snow-covered mountain, the only constant, is always there in the background.
She's singing about lying, and also about the fact that Anna doesn't really understand why she's lying, and also about the way for some reason, the mountain makes her feel less alone. There are levels.
ARENDELLE, OTHER SCENES:
- Anna wants Elsa (now about 19) to tell people, because she thinks Elsa's power is really cool. The King and Queen want Elsa to wait until she's crowned, or at least for a few more years, so that the people will love her and trust her as a ruler before they find out that she's magic. They're not bad parents; they want to protect their daughter and end magical discrimination. They just don't know how to do it without facing a massive shitstorm, which royalty generally tries to avoid. Elsa doesn't know what she wants, except maybe to have been born without magic in the first place.
- Weselton arrives. He comes across as small and obnoxious, but generally harmless, but don't be fooled. He clearly wants power, and has no scruples about getting it. Weselton is definitely a white dude.
- The King and Queen have to... go on a trip. For reasons. I guess.
- Weselton makes several shitty comments, including several comments about magic. Anna, always happy to be the valiant defender, take umbrage, but in her defense and how proud she is of Elsa's power, she accidentally outs Elsa as a witch.
- Elsa, who has spent the past 8 years trying to keep that information to herself while she deals with her own internalized issues, is horrified and runs off into the mountains.
A-PLOT:
Where does Elsa go? The mountains that she's always found so comforting and stable, obviously. Except when she gets up there she finds that someone else is already living up there, and that someone wants to see people just about as much as Elsa herself does, which is not at all. (Elsa is still trying to deal with the feeling that she is a monster, and being outed, and the horrified reactions of everyone to whom she was outed; we don't know what the other girl's problem is yet.)
"This mountain isn't big enough for the two of us," basically, except both of them refuse to leave. The other girl (let's call her Kai again) was on the mountain first, but Elsa lived in Arendelle first. They reluctantly agree to a truce, but of course it's a small mountain and they keep running into each other, and even though Kai has some company in the form of trolls and talking snowpeople, they're both a little lonely.
Anna does make it up there after her. Elsa, still justifiably raw, doesn't want to talk to her. Probably at some point — not necessarily now, but at some point — there is a song about how even the people who love you the most can still sometimes not get it.
So they start "reluctantly" hanging out under the guise of Kai teaching Elsa about magic, which turns into them talking through their very very deep-rooted issues — Elsa's, in hiding and being afraid of herself and the people around her (after her powers started appearing at age 11 or so), and Kai, in being heartbroken and furious that her family and village rejected her. Because that was her at the beginning, of course; like Elsa, she got her magic around age 11 or 12, and she managed to hide it from her parents, but they eventually found out. They wouldn't tell the village, they said, but they wouldn't protect her, either... So when the other villagers found out and chased her out of town, true to their word, they didn't do anything. Which really explains a lot about how much Kai hates everything.
In the course of all this accidental friendship, they start falling in love with each other, but just as they're about to kiss, they run into two dudes with swords and torches. Because....
B-PLOT:
Weselton, who has ensured that the king and queen won't be coming back from their trip yet (not killed them, but kept them locked up somewhere) is seeing his opportunity to seize power by playing on people's fear of magic. While Anna has run off in search of Elsa, he's busy convincing people that none of the royal family is fit to rule — after all, if they've been hiding Elsa's powers this whole time, who knows what else they've been hiding? And the fact that both Elsa and Anna have run off clearly means that they're both flighty.
So Anna, disheartened, returns from the mountain to discover that her kingdom is being sabotaged beneath her feet, and her impassioned attempts to defend her sister and the magic-users of the kingdom doesn't help. Actually, it does the opposite of help, in that it gets her thrown in jail.
Weselton sends two dudes to "take care of" Elsa to make sure she doesn't come back, but those guys don't bargain on the fact that...
A-PLOT
...there are two ice witches on the mountain, as well as some trolls and snowmen. Elsa and Kai defeat them without too much trouble, but when they interrogate the dudes, they realise just what's gone down in the kingdom. Elsa immediately knows she has to go home, but Kai isn't feeling it. She really doesn't want another confrontation with a group of magic-fearing pitchfork-wielding bigots.
So Elsa goes on her own, facing most of her fears in one fell swoop: having people stare at her and know that she's different, and her sister being hurt, and dealing with other people's fear and hatred.
She's sliding through the hallways, and she finally finds Anna and breaks her out, but when they try to escape the castle, Weselton and a lot of armed guards are blocking their way.
Elsa yells at the nobles and everyone because seriously, they're going to get pissed at her for lying to them when this is their reaction to finding out? They're going to trust this guy when they've watched her grow up? And right as the guards are moving closer with their swords, a spray of ice comes through the window, and Kai comes in.
It probably turns out that Weselton was from Kai's town. But anyway, with a combination of teamwork and love and the other inhabitant of the kingdom putting down their swords, and probably a fair dash of Weselton accidentally confessing to locking the King and Queen up, they finally manage to defeat Weselton and his army.
Blah blah blah. Cue them releasing the King and Queen, and Elsa realising that while part of her wants to just run away with Kai where it would be simpler, the rest of her wants to stay and use the fact that she's a princess and has power to make sure that no other kid with magic has to feel scared again. Kai stays too, which she insists is just because she's had enough of mountain life for a while, but she and Elsa kiss and the rest of us know the truth: Kai just doesn't want to be where Elsa isn't, right now.
Everyone lives happily ever after, except Weselton, and it's not as if he deserves to be happy anyway.
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