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
August: The One Where Elsa is an Accidental Kidnapper
Somewhere outside my room, Roommate A (as opposed to Roommate 1) is talking about falling down the rabbit hole that is the Mexican Revolution. I have no idea what that means.
Anyway! Hurry up and get beneath the cut tag, nerds; this month, we're talking curses.
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| Picture of ice crystals shamelessly yoinked from Steve Truett's website. But hey, I'm crediting. |
Start in the castle. It seems serene and peaceful, but hey, what are those noises? ...And hey, why are the pictures on the walls starting to shake a little? And — oh, wait, it's Elsa and Anna, circa about age 12 and 10 (respectively), running through the hallway. Anna is dragging Elsa along behind her, boots clomping, but Elsa is laughing and calling her a brat and telling her to put her coat on. They yell out to their parents that they're going sledding and then rush out the door before their amused-yet-beleaguered parents even have a chance to say anything, the sled flying along behind them. The castle doors slam shut, and their happy chatter disappears into the distance, leaving the castle quiet once more.
We keep focus on the castle as the day progresses, the sky getting darker and darker. And then, finally, Elsa and Anna come back, Elsa barely supporting Anna as the two far-more disheveled girls limp in through the door. Maybe Elsa is pulling Anna on the sled while she runs as fast as she can. Something has gone very, very, very wrong.
Their parents come to them at a run. Elsa turns wide, scared eyed up at them and says, almost sobbing, "It's my fault. It's all my fault." She's been crying, but her tears have frozen (...if that's not too complicated for the animators to draw). They manage to get Anna away and presumably to the doctors, but when they try to come near Elsa, she shrieks, "Don't touch me!" and ice spreads out abruptly in every direction.
When they ask Elsa what happened, she says, "I don't know," and bursts into tears.
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So obviously Elsa's been cursed. I mean, obvious to us and obvious to her parents, who fly in pretty much as many magical specialists as will fit within a montage scene. (Who doesn't love a montage, right? FOOLISH PEOPLE, THAT'S WHO.) They're rich. They can afford this stuff. This probably is a process of years, but, again: montage.
In the middle of this years-long montage, of course, we have Elsa getting more freaked and anxious and withdrawing from Anna more and more.
The magical specialists are all baffled about who could've cursed Elsa, why they cursed Elsa, what the loss of memory has to do with it, and how to end the curse — although of course they all have endless theories. Researchers; you know how it is. Eventually, most of them suggest the tried and true: true love's kiss.
Elsa isn't particularly impressed, because she's been spending a lot of time in the library and A) true love's kiss is usually used on more passive, or at least less harmful, magic. "You're asleep! You're turning back into a mermaid and can't talk! You suffocated on a poisoned apple!" B) what does true love even mean, anyway? Is there some sort of universal standard of "true" love as opposed to misleading love or slightly-exaggerated love? Is it based off of prior affection or does the magic somehow judge whether two random people are worthy of each other?
But her parents have been trying literally everything else, from strange liniments and potions to having Elsa run the entire length of the castle at midnight, and now that she's 18 it's probably time to try the whole love thing. So they hold a ball, which is (without much comment) filled with as many girls as it is boys, all of whom are here to see if Elsa will fall in true love with them.
It doesn't work, of course. What Elsa really wants, more than anything else, is for things to go back to normal, or at least the version of normal that they were when she was 12. No weird powers, no memory loss, no suitors fussing over her every move, just her and Anna being friends again.
Eventually we get to the point where Elsa tells her parents that she knows that, as it stands, her chances of becoming heir are... lower. The counselors aren't thrilled about someone with an uncontrolled curse taking the throne, Elsa's parents are more interested in hypothetical cures than dealing with the actual effects of the curse, and Elsa is freaked out by her own snowflakes. But really, she's frustrated — frustrated that she can't control herself or the situation, frustrated that nobody's listening to her, frustrated that she can't remember what happened all those years ago.
So when she accidentally ices over a ballroom because there are too many people fussing over her all at once and it's freaking her out, she decides to take matters into her own hands, and figure out what the hell happened when she got cursed.
Anna comes, of course. Anna lost her memory of that day too, and she kind of wants it back — plus, in the middle of the mountains, two is safer than one, and she wants Elsa to become the heir too.
So hey, roadtrip time. This is far from the most action-packed month of Frozen, because now our story kind of meanders for a while as Elsa and Anna go through the mountains. They bond, slowly. They both have the same dorky sense of humor and they're both really stubborn.
Slowly they both start remembering, in bits and pieces. This is helped along when Elsa makes a snowman duo of the two of them as kids and accidentally animates it, and snow!Anna and snow!Elsa start playing out some of the things that Anna and Elsa actually did that day when they were kids. It barely lasts for a minute, but it's a start.
Also, they begin to realize that maybe Anna's clumsiness isn't just clumsiness — maybe she's actually a little stronger than the usual 16-year-old would be. I'm not going to lie, that was shamelessly inspired by this series of tumblr comments [warning: linked tumblr autoplays music. Beware the autoplay].
So as they start figuring out how Anna can learn to deal with her strength, Anna's also helping Elsa figure out what she can do with her powers other than just locking them down as tightly as possible (which, obviously, isn't that tightly).
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| Hoar frost by East Gwillimbury CameraGirl. The internet makes citing people so much stranger. |
Eventually they meet the baby yeti. Well, she/he/ze's not a baby, but she/he/ze's definitely not full grown. More like their age. Teenage yeti!
Teenage yeti — let's call hir Sven, with female pronouns, because why not — tries to scare them out of her territory, but it doesn't really work. Elsa's scared of her powers and herself, but not random yetis in the middle of the woods, and both of them just think it's really cool to meet a yeti.
It turns out that Sven is off on a quest, of sorts, to "find herself" or help someone or do something that will mark her turning from a child into an adult and also possibly help predict the direction of her future life, and once they all explain, she figures helping Elsa and Anna get their memories back could fall under the boundaries of her quest. So they keep investigating, and Elsa keeps remembering more and more, in bits and pieces — sledding, falling, a stern voice telling her to be scared.
And then they meet Sven's parent, and everything falls into place.
Six years ago, Elsa and Anna were sledding in the mountains when they lost control of the sled. Anna pitched headfirst into the middle of the yeti's camp, and yetis aren't naturally hospitable towards strangers, particularly not when they come with such a violent entrance and are a threat to the yeti cubs. Being a yeti isn't easy; it often feels like people are just constantly attacking you, wandering onto your turf.
Big Yeti, protecting a much younger Sven, stormed into the middle of the mess and started yelling at Anna and how she ruined things, she needed to watch where she was going, etc. etc. When Elsa yelled back, telling her to leave Anna alone and thus striking off a massive argument, a dangerous glint came into Big Yeti's eye.
"You're not afraid of anything, are you?" she asked. "Not when you're protecting your sister."
"No," Elsa said, lifting her chin as defiantly as she could, which was pretty defiantly, since she was a princess and had all that carefully-trained wealthy entitlement.
So, of course, Big Yeti had turned this against her. Because Elsa wasn't scared of other people, she made Elsa scared of herself; because Elsa was so adamant about protecting her younger sister, she made sure that Elsa would hurt Anna at least once with her new powers. When Elsa accidentally started a mini-avalanche because she didn't know how to use her powers, Anna took the brunt of it, thus necessitating the sled rescue. But Anna also got the extra strength because of something Big Yeti said about her always destroying things.
Against Sven's hopes, Elsa, Anna, and Big Yeti end up fighting for a while, but we gradually come to realise that maybe Big Yeti's decision was pretty understandable. An overreaction, probably, but hey, they're both allowed to be a little defensive when it comes to loved ones.
So in the middle of this massive fight (Elsa is using her snow powers fluently, finally), Elsa yells out that she's sorry. She's sorry that they accidentally trespassed and that she couldn't hold her temper.
Eventually, the fight stops, and she and Big Yeti talk it over for a little while. The short version is that tempers are easily stoked and cooled. Elsa agrees to set up protection zones in the mountains so that the Yetis can feel safe and un-stared at.
Also, it turns out that the fear and the hurting Anna (who, by the way, is pretty hard to hurt, given her strength reports) were the only bad parts of the magic. The powers themselves are just.... powers. That's what the yeti's specific sphere of influence is over. And Elsa and Anna each had a grain of magic inside them anyway — this just sort of unlocked and shaped it.
Anyway. Anna and Elsa go back down the mountain, Elsa declares that she's going to be learning how to use her powers, and they both make sure to set up the protected safe zones.
And then they live happily ever after, probably.
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