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
September: The One With the Curse
October: The Other One With the Curse
November: The Curse, 3.0
I did, actually, consider writing a non-curse episode this month. (Last month.) Really I did. There was going to be Betrayal, and Daring Escapes, and Other Powers, and Exciting Magic Ice Communication, and all sorts of other exciting things, but I still need a little more time to work the details out on that one. Also, I like curses. Obviously.
So (as you might have guessed), Elsa was cursed as a child. A baby, to be precise. That's just how these things go sometimes.
The funny thing is that it isn't even about her, really. When she's just a baby, before Anna was even born, a sorceress came to the court of Arendelle. She'd been thrown out of her own country under pain of death for having magic, and she was seeking shelter, and she would help them however she could with her sorcery... and long story short, the King and Queen held a hurried conference with some of their councillors and then said no. (Either the trolls are there and are ignored, or they aren't there and one of the councillors makes some disdainful remark about how the trolls are enough.) They didn't need magic in Arendelle; it would alarm their subjects and their neighbors. She was a sorceress, she would be fine.
The sorceress, angry and frustrated by the way they talked about magic, said that you know what, if Arendelle didn't want magic then she was going to drop magic straight into the heart of the court — and because the heart of the court was so cold, then obviously the magic would have to be cold too.
She curses Elsa, who's sitting quietly on the Queen's lap with her toy polar bear. Elsa starts crying. Slowly, frost begins to spread.
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| Riven design |
These people include: the king; the queen; and Anna's useless boyfriend Hans.
These people do not include: Anna, who steps onto the ice, slides around a little while windmilling her arms, and then manages to catch her balance and go skating gleefully down the hallway. Anna is ON TOP OF THIS, Y'ALL.
"Anna," Hans complains, and she does a little spin and slides over to give him a little kiss on the cheek. Anna deserves so much better than Useless Hans, but useless Hans pays attention to her even when everyone else is distracted by the curse, and sure, he's pretty self-absorbed, but it could be worse, right? He's really cute, and he wants to kiss her, which is a nice feeling.
Then Anna skates off to go find Elsa, because she doesn't have time to just lie around all day in hallways rubbing her bruises, okay? Come on, guys. Get it together.
(This may not show up, but just for your edification, Anna and Elsa's parents frequently sigh, "Those girls will be the death of me.")
Anna switches to staircases, sliding down bannisters and swinging through doorways, and eventually runs smack into Elsa, who windmills a little for balance and then manages to catch both herself and Anna, keeping them upright. They're both pretty used to each other.
Elsa is obviously pretending pretty diligently that nothing's wrong, and Anna isn't buying it at all, because — "Mmhmm. So why is the East Hall an ice rink, then?"
Elsa freezes. (Pun!) "Oh no."
Anna nods solemnly. "Oh yes."
Elsa obviously takes this a lot more seriously than Anna, who tends to regard it all as A) a charming quirk of her sister's, and B) very useful in the summer. She mostly deals with her sister's moods by gently joking her out of it, which isn't always successful but ends up working in this particular case.
(These words probably come up:
"Where's Krista?"
"With the trolls. She does have a life, you know.")
Anyway. "I'll go get my pickaxe," Elsa sighs, turning and heading back towards her room.
Unfortunately, they run into Councillor Weselton, who makes some shitty commends about exactly how trustworthy he thinks Elsa isn't, and how a good Queen-to-be needs to be controlled and not let her emotions rule her, and — look, if you're a lady there is a greater than 90% chance you know what I'm talking about here.
Surprise surprise, Councillor Weselton was one of the guys who strongly suggested that our unnamed Sorceress should not remain in the kingdom.
Anna wants to pummel him, but Elsa doesn't let her. Councillor Weselton has been around for forever; he knows how to play this game. There's nothing that they could take to her parents that he wouldn't just spin into him trying to provide Elsa with words of wisdom.
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| Alia Khan in the New York Times |
(Also, a few more questions about where Krista is, and Elsa insisting yet again that she doesn't need Krista around all the time! Krista has other things to do!)
There may have been another "stage setting" song earlier — the "Circle of Life," "Honor to Us All," "Cinderella" ensemble song that comes before our protag sings "I Just Can't Wait to be King" or "Reflection" or "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" — or we could pull a Beauty and the Beast and just combine them into one, with the other people in the kingdom singing about how they feel about Elsa and her curse while Elsa sings about actually being cursed.
Elsa wants, to put it bluntly, to be normal. She's tried all the curse fixes her parents suggested, she's kissed boys and drank Essence of Dragon Fire, which made all her food taste like smoke for a week (just for, you know, background information for you), and she once accidentally caused a teeny tiny avalanche trying to see if she could overload her power (fun fact: turns out she can breathe snow if she needs to), and none of it has worked.
What Elsa worries is that Weselton is right — that she'll hurt someone or that she won't be able to become Queen one day if she's cursed. She just wants to be a good princess. She's also perpetually like half a heartbeat away from an anxiety attack. Fun stuff!
It would just be so much easier, if she'd never been cursed. And then she finishes her song, and she finishes clearing out her section of the East Hall (did the song involve awesome spins and twirls on the ice as well as her painstakingly chipping out ice? HELL YES IT DID), and the door opens, and —
Probably she's spent the last several lines of the song telling us that she's fine, or she's going to be fine, or she's not going to let anything be not fine, and then the door opens, and there's a girl, and they're hugging.
Like. NOT THAT ELSA WOULD ADMIT THIS, but there maaay be some desperate clutching going on.
But WHO IS THIS MYSTERIOUS HUGGING STRANGER? Don't be ridiculous, it's obviously Krista. God, you guys, it's like you can't read vague foreshadowing at all.
Speaking of which, Krista is PRETTY INTO Elsa but is distinctly not mentioning it because she thinks that Elsa probably has enough to deal with right now. Which Elsa does, because tonight she's getting invested as their heir or whatever it is that royalty does, and of course something goes wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
I don't actually know what, precisely, goes so very wrong, but A) it probably involves Weselton and probably their parents, and maybe a little bit of Hans being a dick, and B) ends in Elsa deciding that there's only one way to fix this: she has to go on a quest, find the sorceress who cursed her, and ask how to lift the curse.
She's all set to go alone — it's traditional! and what if she hurts someone? or they get hurt because quests are dangerous? Better to just go alone, but then Anna insists on tagging along, and with Anna comes Useless Boyfriend Hans, and Anna also drags Krista, who actually didn't so much need to be dragged, but she's kind of used to it with this family.
Also, Krista has a sleigh. Or a lot of camels. Or some other method of conveyance. But probably a sleigh-type thing, because then I can smush them all together.
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| Daily Mail/AFP/Getty |
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| Sergey Anisomov |
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| getty images |
So they set off. The king and queen are hella worried but a little proud of their girls, as well — they're being proactive! and bonding!
Weselton, on the other hand, is hella worried for entirely different reasons. If Elsa manages to get the curse off, then his main justification for why she shouldn't be on the throne is gone, and she's going to become queen and hate him. He wants Anna to become queen and marry Hans, because Hans is an idiot and Weselton thinks he can totally work that situation to his advantage — ignoring, of course, that Anna is just as capable and strong-willed as Elsa. Like many assholes in this world, Weselton is very... selective about the things he decides to notice.
Anyway, he decides to sneakily follow after them/send some minions to follow after them, pretending that he's trying to make sure they're safe when really he's trying to sabotage their quest. I don't know how he tries to sabotage them. A girl can only do so much at one time.
Anna and Elsa, still a little frustrated with each other — Anna because Elsa is trying to run off alone and take this too seriously, and Elsa because she doesn't think Anna is taking this seriously enough — decide that the most logical first step is to ask the trolls, who are a little weird but are often the repositories of magical wisdom in the mountains. Elsa is actually pretty psyched about this, because she hasn't seen the trolls in a while — every time she suggests to Krista that they could meet up in the mountains where the trolls are, Krista insists that it's not necessary and she can just meet Elsa in town. Elsa's been trying not to take it personally.
Krista is somewhat shifty about this.
(Hans probably asks, at some point, how Krista knows the trolls, and she tells him briefly that she ran away as a kid when her parents were still insisting that she was a boy, and Elsa and Anna insisted on coming with her, and then they ran into the trolls. More on this later.)
The real reason Krista has been avoiding having Anna or Elsa come hang out with the trolls, we quickly discover, is because they tease her about her crush ALL THE DAMN TIME. Elsa has barely gotten to the firepit before suddenly at least three trolls (trolls may look like yeti, who knows) are surrounding her like "Elsa! Been a while since we've seen you around, is Krista keeping you all to herself?" and Krista is blushing furiously.
If there's time, there may even be a song involved, who knows. (But, let me specify this, not a song where the trolls try to marry them off. Just one where they're talking about, I don't know, magic and also Krista is running around trying to keep them from asking Elsa whether she likes Krista back.)
Anyway, once we get all that out of the way, the trolls say that they can't be sure, but Anna and Elsa's second-hand description of the sorceress sounds a little like the Snow Queen? She's generally wandering around the mountains, but she doesn't stay in one place a lot, so they can't give any really definitive tips on where to find her.
What they can say is that Elsa might be able to find her — she's got the sorceress's magic on her, after all. It's a link. If Elsa can figure out how to follow that magic...
But Elsa has no idea how to do that. She's spent most of her life trying to suppress the curse — sure, she accidentally caused a magical snowstorm on the way here, but that's just the sort of thing that sort of... happened.
Speaking of, this is about the point the snowperson says "I do! I know where to go! ...I think."
YES, I'M PUTTING IN A FREAKING SNOWMAN.
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The snowperson — let's call her Bear, because why not — thinks she has a faint sense of where the sorceress or Mountain Witch or someone might be, so lacking all other options, and under the assumption that the Snow Queen created Bear in the first place, they follow her.
BLAH BLAH BLAH ROAD TRIP SHENANIGANS ENSUE. Krista and Elsa roll their eyes a lot over Hans' uselessness! Anna rolls her eyes a lot over how into each other Krista and Elsa are! Weselton's minions try to screw things up in various ways and are foiled! Elsa sighs a little over how cool it is that the Snow Queen could actually create something like Bear instead of just frustrating and scaring everyone by making sudden ice storms and blizzards! Anna sighs because she believes in her sister so much and she wants her sister to believe in herself as well, and also to believe Anna when she says that Elsa isn't being frustrating!
...Again, I find myself skipping the middle third-ish of the movie because I like set-up and conclusions so much more.
Basically they end up eventually finding the Snow Queen, who, indeed, is the sorceress who cursed Elsa as a wee child — except she doesn't remember cursing Elsa at all.
"I was a lot angrier then," she tells them mildly. She's pretty zen now. What, you thought she was going to sit around and stew in her rage for 18 years? Psh, she's got priorities. She doesn't do that curse stuff anymore, either. Too much effort. She checked in on the kingdom she got thrown out of, and the people responsible were punished and they ended up having a very peaceful revolution and becoming a democratic republic, and everyone involved seems very happy, so really that seems to have turned out okay in the end.
She also mentions that, yeah, she didn't actually make Bear. That was all Elsa.
When they're all reeling from all of these revelations in a very short period of time, Weselton's minions show up. In the chaos that ensues — mostly of the "hey, there are two magical people here and both of them are causing a snowstorm" variety — it turns out that they're actually very close to the palace after all, and they end up stumbling pretty much into their own front yard.
DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA. Weselton tries to blame everything on the Snow Queen and insist that he was just protecting Elsa, but Elsa and Anna are finally able to tell their parents that no, Weselton has been trying to undermine Elsa for years. The truth all comes out! Probably with the help of A) the trolls and B) the grumpy llamas. Weselton is a shitty, petty person who hates magic and is also totally a misogynist, unsurprisingly!
The Snow Queen is zen now, but she's not about to stand for Weselton destroying the life of another person who needs help, and she's about to whip up a snowstorm to throw him off the mountain when Elsa intervenes. Elsa's point is, basically: so Weselton wants her to be cold and logical and not use her emotions or magic? Fine. She will. And she proceeds to utterly destroy him for committing treason, and then sentence him to a million years in the dungeon.
EVERYONE IS HAPPY. The King and Queen apologize to the Snow Queen and ask if pretty please she'll remove the curse, and the Snow Queen has to admit that she actually can't; you don't just undo curses, you have to earn their antidote.
"It's not true love's kiss, is it?" Elsa asks, eyeing Krista.
The Snow Queen snorts. It is definitively not true love's kiss. That's for amateurs. No, it actually involves a giant series of required tasks that would be a pain in the ass to complete. She was... very cross, when she cast that spell.
Elsa thinks she might be starting to be a little okay with that. Maybe she doesn't have to spend her whole life trying to suppress her curse and her emotions. Maybe it's okay to be magical and emotional.
She and Krista definitely kiss and it's GREAT. Anna probably dumps Hans, who throughout this entire journey has not been nearly supportive enough of her or her sister, and who was not quite opposed enough to Weselton's plan to put him on the throne. The Snow Queen agrees to stay for a little while and teach Elsa how to control her powers.
Happily ever after, etc.
Oh! Also! Also! BONUS CONTENT.
So I was looking through my page of old ideas and I found the following notes, which seemed to fit QUITE WELL with this edition of 12MoF, what with the road trip themes and everything, but didn't really fit into this version, so I figured that I would just put it here and we could pretend that it's a short prequel film, kind of like How to Train Your Dragon has all those associated shorts.
This is the version where Kristoff actually feels very strongly that she is a Krista, and also she's like 9 years old and running away.
She's also arguing with her two best friends, who have stubbornly insisted on running away with her. Anna, a little younger, thinks it sounds like a grand adventure, and Elsa, a little older, just doesn't want to be left behind. They keep arguing about it while Anna is off poking trees and falling in snowbanks (while Elsa, with an older sister's sixth sense, keeps pulling her upright and keeping her from tripping over rocks); Krista insists that Elsa's a princess, she doesn't need to run away, she and Anna should go back to their parents, and Elsa protests that Krista doesn't know what Elsa needs. She doesn't tell Krista everything!
They get lost on the mountain. It starts snowing. Luckily, they stumble across the trolls.
The trolls are great —
("I'm Krista," Krista says. "I'm a girl."
"Nice to meet you, Krista."
"I'm a girl."
"Honey, I'm made of rock. What makes you think I care?")
— but worried.
I didn't actually have too much of a plot worked out at that point, but I figure that this is how Krista gets quasi-adopted by the trolls — her parents eventually get their shit together, but the trolls tell her to come back pretty much any time she wants. Meanwhile, there's bonding time for the three girls; more exploration of Krista's back story, since it's kind of glossed over in this one; mentions of Elsa's favorite stuffed animal bear; the beginnings of Krista's terrible horrible crush on Elsa; and precedent set for them forcing their way into each other's supposed-to-be-solo-running-away-time. SHORT CUTE FRIENDSHIP FILM.
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