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
It's the eleventh month, guys. Just one more month to go. Lord knows what I'll do after this is done.
Fun fact, guys: this month is a mess. Just. A mess. I don't recommend it. The best I can say is that it has interesting moments and I could probably tighten it up into slightly less of a mess? Maybe I'll try that sometime later.
Before I start:
I've been asked, once or twice, why "so many" of these stories feature LGBT characters and romances. (And yes, "LGBT" is only a short version of an endless acronym, but in this case it's accurate, since I haven't written any characters who are intersex, genderqueer, etc yet.) It wasn't a very serious question, I don't think, but it's been roiling around in me for a little while, so if at any point you've asked the same question, then I'm just going to briefly ask:
If all of these stories were about cis, straight (white) people, would you be asking the same question?
I would be asking myself that question, if I had written those stories. Why, in a situation where I am literally the only person in charge of these narratives, would I choose to write twelve cishet romances? Disney doesn't need any more cishet romances. Disney is chock full of cishet romances. So are TV shows and movie theaters and libraries. And the problem is that we start to think of that as the default; that sort of prevalence is normal, and when you stray from that default for however many stories in a row, then it becomes a question. This is why authors get asked why they chose to write about a female character, but no author has ever been asked, "Why are all your books about men?" Nobody asks, "Why did you choose to make this character white?" But all of those things — choosing to write white, straight, cis, male characters — they're still a choice.
(Just like I made a choice to have the setting of these involve a traditional western-fairy-tale-style castle and monarchy, which was probably something of a lazy choice on my part, let's be real here.)
With every Disney princess movie that comes out, Disney is telling little girls, "This can be your dream," and it's showing them stories of beautiful, primarily white, cis women falling in love with cis men. Where's the fantasy for boys who want to be princesses, or girls who want to be princes, girls who want to explore magical worlds and kiss other girls under fireworks and the night sky? When do we get to see ourselves up there on the screen?
So there's that, anyway.
Onwards.
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| Air New Zealand |
(Helpful reminder that, relevant to the above few paragraphs, none of the characters in any of these versions of the story are white.)
Here's the deal: Elsa is 15 or 16 — some nebulous teenager-y age — and up until about two years ago, she thought she was normal. Or, at least, she didn't think she was magic. The ice came about when the indignities of puberty really hit their full stride.
But because of this, there's no strain in Elsa and Anna's relationship the way there has been in some of my other incarnations of the story. They've both had a fairly charmed life and a good relationship, and they've told each other everything, even if there have been the tiny arguments that come with even excellent relationships. Still, Anna was the first one that Elsa told about the ice, and she was the first one to reach past it and grab Elsa's hand, even when Elsa protested; they watched as the ice retracted from Elsa's fingers, leaving only a frosty trace on her forearms.
(Who even knows if that would end up in the final story or not, but I like the image.)
They're not princesses — that's another source of stress off this Elsa — but they're pretty well-off and they live in a fancy house and their parents know the king and queen, so. Maybe it's a duchy or an earldom or something.
In any case, they're close enough that when they imagine the future, it's always with each other. Anna daydreams that she and Elsa will go off and become a HEROIC DUO and rescue children and small animals and do valorous deeds and fight injustice everywhere; Elsa is like "Orrrrr we could go be artists! Or you could go out and do brave deeds and I will chill on the couch reading a book and pack you a lunch before you go and also try and keep people from killing you dead! Sidenote, did you know that being a hero is kind of dangerous? Just saying."
Elsa likes thinking about adventures, but she sometimes gets nervous and she also likes being something of a homebody. But whatever they do, they'll do it together.
Of course, if everything stayed quite so perfect, we wouldn't have a story at all.
The rest of it, in my head, is a little more sketchy, possibly because it keeps trying to be so much bigger than I expected; I keep trying to cram it into the length of a movie and it keeps making itself into a miniseries, all "end episode 1" and then "open episode 3 with Elsa in full armor," so.
So we have two options here, I guess, although they both lead to the same place. In one, we start the entire movie/series/whatever with a shot of Elsa running into the mountains, a snowstorm brewing behind her, while down in the warm valleys below, Anna finds a note saying that Elsa, despite her previous lack of interest in hero-ing, has run off to "seek her fortune" without their parents' permission.
The second option is to show the entire lead-up to this: Anna and Elsa's relationship, the beginning of Elsa's magic, their friend Krista who works at the palace, their parents.
Yeah, so. Their parents. I was considering having their parents have a not-great reaction to the magic and try to send Elsa away, which I've done before, but it was all starting to seem like such an on-the-nose "fear of magic = homophobia" metaphor thing that I figured, screw it, why not just ditch the metaphor?
So their friend Krista who works at the palace? Is actually Elsa's girlfriend. Their parents can stand the magic, if they need to — it's nothing big, anyway, and it can be very useful in the summers — but they can't deal with Elsa not marrying a man and having kids to inherit the duchy, and their simmering displeasure is making life hard for Elsa. She'd been trying to keep things quiet with Krista, but they'd found out anyway.
(Sorry, Mom. I know you hate it when I make the parents shitty.)
Eventually they have an argument — a really, really big, screaming argument, in which her parents express their feeling that Elsa shouldn't see Anna, for Anna's sake — and Elsa snaps, leaves her comfort zone, and runs away.
But because she doesn't want Anna to worry, and she thinks Anna, at 13, is too young to come with her, she leaves a note saying that despite her previous lack of desire to be a hero, she's going to seek her fortune. She leaves another note telling Krista to please, please, please look after Anna; we know about both these notes because Anna is reading them when Krista comes to the house on her day off from training or whatever it is she's doing at the palace (Royal Guard? librarian? who knows). When Krista asks where Elsa is, Anna bursts into tears.
Cut to the image from the first option: Elsa running into the mountains with a storm chasing her.
It starts to snow, harder and harder, and she gets buffeted around more and more, and then in the midst of that we hear a voice asking, "What in the Stone King's name are you doing?"
End episode one, or whatever.
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| Tutoko, by Jack Brauer |
Elsa ends up with the trolls in the mountains, getting a TRAINING MONTAGE of how to control her powers. Given how out of control her emotions are right now, it's somewhat turbulent going, to say the least.
Down in the valley, we have a variation on a scene that I actually wrote months ago and then ditched because it didn't fit the particular plot I was working on:
The takeaway is that Elsa apparently left to "find her fortune", although to be fair she didn't tell Anna that in so many words, mostly because she didn't actually say goodbye to Anna before leaving.
"Like a quest?" Krista asks thoughtfully.
"Who cares!" Anna capslocks while throwing herself backwards onto a comfy chair, because she is a drama princess and it is great. "Why does she even need a fortune? We live in a castle!!"
"A metaphorical fortune?" Krista suggests.
Anna glares. "We have a library."
But Anna's getting worried because Elsa hasn't written, and the storms in the mountains are getting worse, and there are monsters out there, and the note Elsa left seemed upset, and nobody will tell her what's going on or why her parents seem so weirdly unconcerned. And they won't let her go do anything, either, because they're super protective of Anna for two people who spend so little time with her. 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 Anna is mostly upset because it feels like Elsa committed two betrayals: she left without saying goodbye, and she's going and doing the things that Anna always dreamed of, but she's doing them without Anna.
What we slowly start to discover over the course of these storylines is that both Elsa and Anna have magic; Elsa has ice powers, and Anna has heat magic, which is why the frost receded when she took Elsa's hand and also coincidentally is why she runs hotter than a furnace. Elsa's power is a little more noticeable because she's older, but Anna, at 13, is just about to start coming into her own.
Additional thing: when they're together, their powers mostly balance themselves out. When they're not together, and they're both pretty upset? Let's just say that while the mountains are experiencing a sudden cold snap, there's starting to be a heat wave in the valleys and beaches. And Elsa's getting training in her newly-strengthened powers, but Anna isn't, which means that things are way more likely to accidentally get set on fire.
BUT, on the bright side, the trolls do eventually figure out how to teach Elsa some cool tricks like ice communication. (Look, they don't exactly specialize in ice magic, they're figuring this stuff out as they go.) So Elsa figures out how to draw pictures in the frost on Anna and Krista's windows, and stuff.
The question, for her, is where she goes from here. Does she stay up in the mountains, training and perpetually thinking about what she had to leave behind? Or does she go somewhere else and do something else?
Eventually, she really does decide to become a hero, because she wants to try and keep shitty things from happening to other people, and this seems like the best way to do it; she's not entirely sure what else to do with the ice that always sweeps behind her like a cloak, and it turns out that there's something satisfying, if lonely, about defeating villains. One or two other girls kiss her, but they're not Krista.
Anna and Krista are trying to go on with their lives, too; Krista tried to go after Elsa that day, but the snow was too thick, and Elsa's trail was lost. Now she makes sure Anna is okay and tries not to worry too much, both of which are incredibly difficult tasks when Anna is so angry and upset that Elsa is gone.
I was debating what I wanted to happen, for a while; do Anna's parents twig that she's the source of the heat wave and try to lock her up until her powers are under control? Do they try to bring in an endless succession of magic tutors? Does Elsa come riding in, wearing full ice armor, to save her?
Maybe in the short version, that's what happens.
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| Wanaka Sunrise, Jack Brauer |
(OH HEY do you think we can have a moment where one of them writes out "Elsa" in the frost on their windows and then puts their hand on the window, and then carefully, the frost creates a handprint on the opposite side of the glass? Too much?)
Their parents have been saying for like two or three years that Elsa went out "adventuring" without their permission, and they're very upset at her. Adventuring is very dangerous, you know; she might never be coming back. But when Anna mentions the ice pictures, they freak at the idea that she might have been in contact with Elsa, which they've been trying to avoid all along.
Maybe Anna, impetuous as ever, decides that if Elsa went out to find her fortune then she deserves to go too, and runs out in a burst of light and fire and heat, melting her own trail into the mountains. I like the idea of Anna running off, but this is half the reason why it would need to be longer than just a movie — because when you get Anna running into the mountains, of course Krista would go and run after her, and of course Anna's parents also call in, I don't know, the Royal Guard or something, under the excuse that Elsa has kidnapped Anna. We'd need enough time to really do justice to that ridiculous set of people running all over the mountains looking for each other and yet completely missing each other.
The Royal Guard gets lost. Krista gets lost. Anna gets lost. Elsa isn't even in the mountains to begin with; she's sorting out an evil uncle somewhere in a neighboring country.
Anna finds the trolls, who tell her the whole magic/balance thing. Krista finds Elsa and finally gets to actually deal with her own emotions instead of keeping it together for Anna's sake, which means that she gets, unexpectedly, really upset at Elsa for leaving without saying goodbye. But then Elsa explains, and Krista is still upset because if Elsa had told her maybe she could have helped. How she could've done that goes unaddressed, because Elsa gets a message from the trolls saying that Anna's there! So they run over but the Royal Guard gets there first? And then Elsa has to go sweeping in to save Anna in full ice armor.
Then together they fix the heatwave and the king and queen yell at Anna and Elsa's parents and Krista turns out to be the princess, and they make Anna and Elsa the champions of the kingdom and Elsa ends up running a nice store where runaway kids can go and Anna trains with the trolls to have lots of adventures.
If you got this far, I apologize.
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