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
December: One More Curse for the Road
January, part the first: The Eleventh Hour, or, The One Where Anna Has Powers Too
I did realise, somewhere in the middle of those last few paragraphs, that I had a better way to structure my 11th month plot (I would call it my January plot, but let's be real, that one was posted on Feb 1 and my ostensible December story was posted on January 3, so) and that was was as a YA novel.
As it happens, I'm a big fan of YA novels, so maybe that's partially my own comfort zones showing. It could be a miniseries/show, maybe, as long as that show is okay with having a ton of flashbacks. Lost and OUaT level flashbacks.
So this is a rewrite, basically, of eleven-point-zero, aka the mess that I posted on Sunday. I'm not always a perfectionist when it comes to this series, but I really couldn't let that one stand.
The thought: start in the present, with Krista at the palace and the entire kingdom in the grips of a heatwave the likes of which the kingdom hasn't seen for a hundred years. Meanwhile, barely a hundred miles away and a mountain range away, their neighboring kingdom is in the middle of a terrible cold snap.
This is, obviously, a situation which the king and queen do not particularly want to continue. Heat strokes, fires, and dehydration are a huge problem, it's been affecting the crops, blah blah blah other problems.
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| Heat wave and draught. Ilan Kelman, 2004. |
The court magicians have been trying to scry out the source of the problem for a while, and they think they might have figured it out: something out of place. Something that started about three or four years ago — which, coincidentally, was when the Ice Knight first started rising to prominence.
For Krista, though, it was also the time when something a little more personal happened: her girlfriend Elsa ran away to go find her fortune. This comes out when she goes to visit Anna and Krista delicately brings up the subject — clearly a sensitive but familiar one — of whether maybe they think the Ice Knight is Elsa? Maybe?
Anna reacts... badly.
If you read the mess that was eleven-point-zero, you'll know that Anna was really upset when Elsa left because A) Elsa didn't say goodbye, and B) it was always Anna's dream that they'd go run off and have adventures together when they were old enough. If you didn't read eleven-point-zero, you won't have known any of the above until just now, but you'll probably have a higher opinion of me than otherwise, so take that as you will.
Anna's cycled through a lot of different emotions over the past few years, but she hasn't entirely gotten all the way to forgiveness, and Krista has been left to try to keep her from going off the rails. Elsa asked her to, after all, in that note she left. A note was the only thing Elsa left.
Krista is 19 now; she'd been 16 when Elsa went away, and in 3 years the mess of confusion and heartache inside her hasn't really gone away so much as it's just been... quieted. It lurks in the dark corners of Krista's head, letting her think about other things until it can jump out and remind her all over again.
Somewhere around this point, we get our first flashback. The chapters alternate: present day with Krista and Anna going on their separate quests to find Elsa, and past, with Elsa's adventures from three years ago until today.
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| Storyboard 1, Sam Hurd |
And in a sense, part of her has always just wanted to feel comfortable, because she's spent so long feeling uncomfortable. Maybe there's some anxiety and depression issues, in addition to the fact that — well, ever since she came to a few important self-realisations, she's been worried about how her parents will take it.
There's a version of this story where Elsa is trans, and she wants to transition from... I don't know, "Ellis" to Elsa. In that version, there are a few other things to work out: her feelings about not being the "perfect" son she knows her parents always saw her as, and her trying to figure out if there needs to be a difference between a sister-brother relationship and a sister-sister relationship, among other things.
She told Krista first, because she rationalised that maybe if Krista didn't accept it, it would be easier for them to stop seeing each other than it would if, say, Anna didn't accept it. Krista just rolled with it, though; she took it in and thought about it for a while and didn't say anything, because that's Krista's way, quiet and solid and thoughtful (and dryly sarcastic under the right circumstances), and Elsa tried not to freak out too much but also freaked out a lot, and then Krista reached over and wrapped her hand around Elsa's arm and said, "Thanks for telling me." And then they talked a lot, and a few weeks later Elsa told Anna and Anna had about a zillion questions, because that's her way, but they eventually sorted themselves out in the end.
Whether she's telling her parents that she's trans or that she's dating a girl, though, they end up having a massive argument. The words "think of your sister" may get thrown into the mix, in addition to the assumption that because they're her parents they know Elsa better than she knows herself, and the implication that Elsa is only welcome in their house under a very specific set of behavioral conditions, and eventually Elsa decides that she just needs to... leave. She needs to not be here, she needs to be somewhere else as soon as possible.
She's not thinking entirely clearly, she's a little bit in the grips of a panic attack, but when she looks back on it later she can never tell herself it was the wrong decision.
She doesn't want to hurt Anna, or ruin Anna's relationship with their parents when Anna is only 13, so she writes two notes: one telling Anna that she's off to seek her fortune and she loves her and she'll be back when she can, and the other telling Krista that she loves her and asking her to take care of Anna.
(It's the first time either she or Krista have mentioned the l-word thing. Krista tries not to think about it.)
So she runs into the mountains with a snowstorm unfurling behind her. She didn't mean to do it; other people in their town have small magics, and until now, hers has barely been of note. It only started appearing in the past few months, anyway, in things like her never needing a coat or accidentally freezing drinks when she picks them up. Once, after a few minutes of effort, she coated the ground in a thin layer of ice so she and Anna could go sliding around. This is... bigger.
And then, when she's thoroughly lost and everything around her is covered in two feet of snow, but she's not at all cold, that voice asks her what the hell she's doing.
After that, she trains with the trolls on her powers. It's funny, because she's always been worried about those the least, but the trolls couldn't care less about gender or orientation. They're rocks. Their relationships and interpersonal schema work in an entirely different way, one completely unrelated to sex (either definition thereof). Relatedly, Elsa spends a lot of time learning about things like basalt and limestone.
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| geology.com |
It's not a bad way to pass the time, anyway. It's distracting. She likes helping people. She even makes a few hero-friends, and they swap stories and pass on references and tips.
And then Anna and Krista accidentally trip their idiot selves into her mountain range.
ON TO THE OTHER STORY LINE.
Blah blah blah, heat wave, cold snap, etc. Krista volunteers to go find out; maybe she's in the Royal Guard, maybe she works with the royal magicians, maybe she's the bastard niece of the king and queen, I don't know, but she does. She also has no idea that Anna has magic. Anna's been keeping it to herself, partially because her parents have begun associating magic with Elsa, maybe, and partially because she thinks that maybe if she'd had magic 3 years ago, Elsa would have taken her along.
Anna's 16 now; her magic has only been appearing for the past few months, but when she hears about the reason for the heat wave, she thinks maybe...
Some notes on the writing process: It's funny, but when I was originally thinking about this idea, it actually went completely differently. Their parents sent Elsa away because of her magic, and she ran away but managed to keep in touch with Anna via magic. When it turned out that Anna had magic too, their parents locked her up and tried to get her to make her magic go away, but she managed to contact Elsa and Elsa came back to rescue her.
I didn't stick with that one because I don't really like writing stories that come off as metaphors for ways that people are oppressed today when the main characters reflect all the ways in which people can be privileged today — that was a really clumsy way of articulating it, but you know what I mean. Stories that are really obviously about a fantasy form of racism, except all the main characters are white; stories that are a euphemism for homophobia where the main characters are straight.
In hindsight there are other ways I could have worked things in, but by the time I got to that point I was kind of frustrated, and then I got drawn in by the weird entangled relationships of Elsa, Anna, and Krista that ended up appearing — clumsily, but they're there in my mind, anyway — in eleven-point-zero. They've all got their own particular combination of nostalgia, frustration, repression, and insistence on moving on, and they're all simultaneously hoping to see each other and dreading the idea.
Which is why this plot isn't super action-heavy; I love plot and shenanigans as much as the next person, but honestly, other people can be as confusing and dangerous and full of pitfalls as your average quest, which is half the reason I enjoyed Maggie Stiefvatater's The Raven Boys so much; even the scenes where there's a gun and the woods and a potential murder don't feel quite as tense and high-stakes as the moments where characters have to carefully and subtly renegotiate their relationships.
Anyway. Basically the point is that even though I'm terrible at relationship-building, I'm super weak for it anyway. And also there isn't going to be a very climactic showdown at the end, and now you know why.
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| Glenorchy, Jack Brauer |
Anna thinks Krista should be angrier. Krista — quietly — thinks that Anna may not be noticing some things about her parents.
They're nominally in search of the Ice Knight, but they're always a step behind. Krista eventually decides to follow weather patterns, but Anna wants to keep looking for the Knight, because the knight is a hero and Anna still thinks it might be nice to be a hero, and she wants to see what an actual hero is like — are they what she thought they'd be three years ago, when she was dreaming up absent-minded glorious futures, or are they just people after all?
Anna feels guilty, a lot of the time. She's worried that the heat wave is her fault; she's worried that she's screwing up Krista's life; she's worried that Elsa left because she didn't want to have a future with Anna anymore, and all that guilt in her kind of comes out as frustration and impatience and an urge to go do things. She thinks — well, she's 16 now. Elsa left home when she was 16, and now she's having so many adventures that she can't come home anymore (...or she's not in a position to come home anymore). Maybe it's time for Anna to go have her own adventures.
So she sneaks off in the middle of the night, and leaves a note telling Krista not to follow her. And Krista — doesn't. For once.
She thinks about it. Krista's spent 3 years ignoring her own emotions by making sure she was taking care of everyone else, watching over everyone else, keeping Anna distracted and fed and present, and she's 19 and upset. She goes into the mountains, trying to find the answer that's actually going to help save the kingdom.
Maybe in a few days she would have sighed and changed her mind, turned around and gone back to find Anna, except, well. She finds Elsa instead.
And when she finds Elsa, it turns out that no matter how calm and collected she's been over the past few years, no matter how Elsa's leaving had hurt less and less until she could tell herself that it barely hurt at all, no matter how many times she laughed and smiled and acted like everything was normal, she hasn't actually forgiven Elsa for leaving.
She hadn't even known she was angry, but apparently all along, part of her has still been a heartbroken 16 year old whose girlfriend left her with nothing more than a note.
She has no idea how to deal with this.
Elsa takes her back to the trolls because Elsa has no idea what else to do — or maybe the trolls found Krista first, and that's how they ran into each other — but it's strange all around, sitting in the mountains with her ex-girlfriend and a group of trolls and not crying or yelling or kissing or anything.
They talk about the heat, and the cold, and Anna, and the Ice Knight, and either they avoid everything else or they end up arguing in the middle of Troll Commons.
I think what happens next is that the trolls realise that Anna and Elsa need to find each other again for the weather to stop being weird, and so Elsa and Krista set off.
After that... well, Anna probably gets in some sort of trouble, because Anna doesn't so much attract trouble as go out looking for it, but I suppose even with my "LOVE IS THE SCARIEST ADVENTURE" everything, having some sort of plot climax wouldn't be bad.
Maybe it really does happen the way I (vaguely) laid it out in eleven-point-zero — Anna and Elsa's parents put the word out among the hero network that Anna is missing, possibly kidnapped, and there will be a reward if she's returned. When Elsa and Krista return to the world at large, still trying to figure out where their own relationship stands, Elsa hears about it through her hero buddies, some of whom know that Elsa is from the Arendelle area.
They also hear through the grapevine that the girl in question let out a huge bolt of flame, almost accidentally. After that, the magical authorities in town got involved, helping the people who found Anna to get her under control so they could bring her back to her parents.
So Elsa and Krista rush off to the home that Elsa hasn't seen in 3 years. Along the way, they both finally give in and admit how miserable the past few years have been, in their own particular ways.
When Anna gets taken back to her parents, she's pissed, and they have a huge confrontation that results in a lot of dirty secrets being aired, including the truth of Elsa's disappearance. Elsa and Kristoff arrive during/after the fight, when it's clear that Anna doesn't really need any assistance, and the sisters are finally reunited as their chastened parents storm off, or stand nearby, or something.
It's not the most perfect reunion — they've both kind of gone through a lot and they're not sure where to go from here, but it's a start. Plus, as they reach out to hug each other, carefully and then less carefully, the heat starts to break.
And things get better from there. Maybe there's a sequel where they're still working things out, but at the very least there's an epilogue where we see that the trolls are training Anna to be a hero, and she and Elsa go around saving people sometimes, but Elsa also works with the court sorcerers and has a workshop where, everyone knows, runaway kids or people in need can come and hang out while Anna and Elsa and Krista figure out how to help them, together.
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| Stars Above the Clouds, Jack Brauer |
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