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.
June: I Go It Old School, Take Two
July: A Wild Kristoff Appears
I am a little late on August. So it goes. In life, we must accept the things we cannot change, ducklings.
Anyway, happy halfway-point to all of us! You for sticking with me, me for... only posting these a little late, I guess. To celebrate, we're going to shake things up. I get bored astonishingly easily for someone who hates change so much. So today, ducklings, we get to talk about how I would write Frozen as a webcomic. With illustrations, even! Well, okay, one illustration and one set of stick figures, but whatever, good enough.
What I love about webcomics — well, okay, there are a lot of things I love about webcomics, but one of the things is the pacing. It's simultaneously so compressed and so leisurely. You can only say so much on one page, but you can use those little bits to build something much larger. Every piece is part of a whole, but it still has to be moderately self-contained. You can have a lot of panels about characters having inconsequential adventures and still have it add to the worldbuilding.
Also, it's a great excuse to just revel in the absolute silliness of Elsa being an accidental kidnapper.
Look, I CANNOT LIE: this particular idea was created for one purpose and one purpose alone, and that was to have Elsa accidentally kidnap Kristoff. "You need to leave!" she protests, upset, as the wind completely coincidentally beats so viciously against the cabin walls that the entire house actually shakes. "I want to be alone!" she adds, while the snow piles up so high that it's literally impossible to push open the door.
Which is, honestly, too lighthearted for a Disney movie. There's no dramatic plot keeping the characters hurrying onwards! It's just silly and accidentally domestic! So... webcomic.
Unfortunately I've sort of got myself stuck in a corner with this whole "write an actual viable story with characterization and everything!" thing, which means I can't exactly just toss that one into the universe and expect it to count. I mean, sure, I don't have to write anything more, but then my sister would shake her head at me and I would feel horribly disappointed in myself for cheating.
Self-creating guilt is the worst thing that ever happened to me.
In this universe, Elsa and Anna have been friends with Kristoff ever since they were all kids; we can get some flashbacks at various points about how they met, and the games they used to play, and how they all grew up. Kristoff, for the record, was born "Krista" but is trying his best to live as "Kristoff," even if his family don't always seem to listen. Elsa and Anna have always known him as Kristoff, ever since they first met, when the trolls deposited him with the nearest humans they could find.
Kristoff ran away once as a kid. That's how he met the trolls. He ran away, and the trolls found him and they liked him, but they weren't exactly prepared to raise a whole human child all on their lonesome. Trolls are super-friendly, but they don't eat people food. (Thankfully, unlike Tolkien trolls, these guys also don't eat people as food.) So they let Kristoff hang out for a little while and then escorted him back to the village, as close as they dared. And since Elsa and Anna were hanging out on the lake ice skating, well. That was where he went.
So apparently it's Kristoff's turn to be the lead character this month. Go figure.
But Kristoff's having some frustrations at home; his parents are okay with calling him Kris, but they're still resisting when he tries to help with the ice mining, and there are some hints that he thinks he's getting above his station by hanging out with Anna, who's a princess/duchess/general rich person. There's definitely at least one set of panels where Kristoff wordlessly avoids his parents every time they step into the same room, and then quietly slips out of the house and goes to meet Anna.
We start to get a little bit of mystery, here: there were two princesses in the flashback sequences, but everyone talks about Anna like she's the only one. Her parents are super protective; she has bodyguards! The servants are supposed to keep her from leaving the castle! For someone as energetic as Anna, it's like torture!
But recently, at least, Anna's apparently been distracted by some wandering knight who ended up at the castle.
"He's finding his fortune," Anna says, dreamy-eyed.
"Uh huh," Kristoff says.
"My parents won't let me find my fortune," Anna says, slightly less dreamy-eyed.
Kristoff, who is a sweetheart and pretty good at being patient and calm, takes a long, thoughtful walk back to his house. And then, after maybe a week, and after he and his parents have a fight about whether Kristoff should just go find a nice husband and have babies, Kristoff patiently and calmly starts packing his bag, and goes to find his fortune. Or the trolls. Whichever comes first.
As it turns out, first he finds the snowstorm, and then he finds Elsa.
I drew them wearing PJs because if I were in an ice palace in the middle of the mountains after not having had very much to eat and also dealing with the stress of running away from my family, and if I were capable of magicking up warm clothing, I would definitely go for that over fancy-dress-and-spike-heels. I don't know where Kristoff got his PJs, but presumably he packed them
So, exciting times: Kristoff thought Elsa was dead, because she disappeared and then Anna and her parents stopped talking about her! He sort of assumed it was just too painful of a subject to bring up. Elsa seems a little confused on the subject, as well as how much time she's spent up in the mountains, but is very certain about the fact that A) they're better off without her and B) the idea of having another human being around is very alarming to her.
THIS IS WHERE THE ACCIDENTAL KIDNAPPING COMES IN. Elsa doesn't want Kristoff to be hanging around her! She wants him to go home and go hang out with Anna! She definitely wants that despite the fact that her snug little igloo is almost literally buried in the snow and she, really coincidentally, happens to have emotion-related magic over frosty weather. Really. These two things are not related at all.
Kristoff hadn't really been planning on going home for a while, and he's definitely not going back when everything is so confusing and he doesn't understand any of it yet. Also, Elsa is living in an igloo, and Kristoff really appreciates a good igloo.
Meanwhile, although we see Anna with her wandering knight boyfriend-person, we also see her practically ripping her hair out at Kristoff being gone, presumed question mark, while all sorts of dangers untold could be lurking in the mountains and she's still not allowed to go anywhere.
"IT'S DANGEROUS," she shouts, as we come up on the scene this entire story was written for. "ANYTHING COULD BE HAPPENING."
Cue the next panel:
Alternate dialogue: "And I have a royal flush, which means... checkmate." "Awww, you've sunk my battleship," Elsa says.
END COMIC. WHAT MORE DO I EVEN NEED OUT OF MY LIFE THAN ANNA PANICKING LIKE A DRAMA LLAMA WHILE KRISTOFF AND ELSA CHILLAX IN THEIR PJS PLAYING A BOARD GAME. WHAT COULD BE BETTER THAN A BAJILLION PANELS OF KRISTOFF AND ELSA BEING ACCIDENTALLY DOMESTIC AND TALKING ABOUT HOW MUCH THEY LOVE ICE AND KRISTOFF SNEAKILY DARING ELSA TO BUILD FANCY THINGS WITH HER ICE POWER AND ELSA ONLY REALISING AFTERWARDS THAT SHE'S BEEN CLEVERLY TRICKED INTO IT.
I did bother setting up the mystery, though, so I guess I should keep going. Anna's wandering knight boyfriend-person eventually agrees to come up the mountain with her so she can search for her kidnapped friend, in true Snow Queen fashion. (Will Anna's wandering knight boyfriend-person turn out to be a wandering knight girlfriend-person? MAYBE. WHO CAN TELL THESE THINGS.)
The board games and accidental domesticity relax Elsa enough that they can eventually leave the igloo to do things like get food. They also meet the trolls, who had no idea who Elsa was but have been keeping an eye on her, in the way that one keeps an eye on a young neighbor who has no idea what she's doing but also in the way that one keeps an eye on a volcano that may or may not be dormant. They didn't know who she was — trolls don't pay much attention to people-rulers; they have their own society and rules and aren't really affected by the actions of valley-dwelling meat-based lifeforms — but they knew there was some heavy magic going on around her, and nobody wanted to exacerbate it.
Eventually Anna and WKP make it out into the middle of the mountains, where they stumble around an adventure or two before stumbling upon Elsa and Kristoff, and this whole entire burning fuse starts to get... well, a little close to exploding. Maybe it can explode in stages.
Because obviously Anna has been cursed to not remember Elsa, and some sort of magic has rebounded badly on Elsa so that the only thing she really knows about Anna is that she needs to stay away from her. Which leads to, you know, some hilarity and also internal turbulence, since it's pretty much agreed on all fronts that they have to stick together until this is figured out.
When Elsa gets startled by Anna being too close to her, too quickly, she ends up accidentally in trees. It just keeps happening.
Elsa gradually starts to be able to talk about always being cooped up, trying to control her powers. Mostly to Kristoff; talking about it to Anna is a little too weird, even though she does manage to spill some, but Anna is also occasionally determinedly oblivious in the same way that Elsa is a little too over-paranoid. (Elsa tries to say at one point that she doesn't think Kristoff would get it, always feeling like you're too wrong for your parents to want you, and Kristoff just kind of stares at her and says, "Elsa. Do you remember what my parents used to call me?" Having magic powers isn't the only reason to feel estranged from people.)
Eventually they realise that Elsa's powers can kind of... jump start Anna's memory a little bit. When Elsa is happy, and when she's using her magic because she wants to and not because she's upset, Anna starts to remember bits and pieces. WKP is the one who figures that out; apparently his/her home kingdom was pretty magic-heavy (Arendelle is very confusing to them), and figuring out curse symptoms and remedies became a little bit of a game.
The four of them start trying to figure out who might have cursed the kingdom; Anna thinks very vehemently that it was the Chief Advisor, because everyone knows Chief Advisors and Grand Viziers and High Priests and their ilk are evil, but it's not as if the Chief Advisor would gain the throne if Elsa was gone. Kristoff is a little worried
They have a few more adventures, and then they go home. And okay, clearly I'm more interested in the "middle" part than the "end" part of this, but here's what the deal ends up being: it isn't the Advisor, and it wasn't (as Kristoff was secretly worried) their parents. At least, not entirely. They didn't knowingly curse their own daughter. But they were getting increasingly more scared by Elsa's powers, and they were looking in a book for banishing spells, and they found one — and Elsa's power was uncontrolled, and bouncing around everywhere, and she was scared of it — and there was this one time, where Anna slipped off an ice structure and fell — and all of a sudden these things combined so that Anna and their parents couldn't remember, and Elsa's terror got even worse, and it was all a huge mess. None of it would've happened, really, without the fear of Elsa and fear for Anna.
It's a pretty big revelation, all things considered, but it means that the last of the block is finally gone and Elsa and Anna can start to make up for lost time. There are still a few loose ends dangling, though: how Arendelle ended up as a magic-free zone in the first place, what's going on with the increasing influx of magical creatures into the mountains, where Elsa is going to go to learn how to control her power, and why Kristoff was the only person not affected by the backfiring spell curse thing.
Also, where Elsa has gone when she runs away again. End volume 1, I guess.
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