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, better: Whatever, Let's Just Talk About People's Feelings
I meant to start this one earlier, so I could actually finish in February instead of March. I didn't. (But I did start on the last day of February.) I would apologize, ducklings, but I can't actually bring myself to be sorry. There have been a lot more... ups and downs, I suppose, during the past few weeks, and the problem with the up bits is that you feel like you can do lots of things but only a few things seem important, and the problem with the down bits is that you feel like you can't do anything and nothing seems important.
So it's March, now. I think we'll all live.
For this month I wanted to bring us back around to the beginning; I've done a lot of experimenting over the past few months, straying further and further from the original movie, but there were some things in Frozen that I thought could've been more interesting, and I explored them a little in my original posts, but there was always a story it seemed like I had left too late to give the proper attention to. But this is the last month, and even if I've still left it too late, as per usual, this is really the last opportunity.
Also, sidenote, actress/musician Zendaya showed up at the Oscars looking stunning in a white dress and ever since, I keep visualizing her as Elsa, so here, have a pic:
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| AP Images |
Anyway.
This version, again, isn't a Disney musical. Probably it would be a book, for the sake of interiority; I guess it could be a movie, but not in a million years would Disney ever make a movie that's explicitly about two sisters with a healthy dash of anxiety/depression and abandonment complexes.
I mean, they did that implicitly, but then they just threw in a singing snowman and a double blind and a shit-ton of villains, and I'm not opposed to any of those things (even the goddamn snowman), but it all felt very... crowded.
So let's clear it out a little, ducklings.
We start with Anna and Elsa's parents dying.
Like, actually start that way. Cold open, someone comes running in to tell Anna and Elsa that their parents have disappeared in a storm, presumed dead.
We start to find out more about Elsa and Anna over the course of their reactions to this: Elsa doesn't want to believe that their parents could be dead, because she feels like her parents were shielding her from the world, or maybe shielding the world from her, and either way she doesn't really know what to do without it. Elsa knows — but Anna doesn't — that when she was young, she'd hurt Anna, and that's why her parents had tried to get her to control it.
I was considering having them be princesses again, but like a lot of other things right now, that doesn't really seem important. Anyway, if we're taking everything seriously, then we have to take the complications that come with being a princess seriously, and there are a lot of things that happen when you're royalty, probably: state business and state business and state business and state funerals and marriages and taxes and not shutting your palace up for fifteen years because that is actually the place where people gather to run the country.
If they were princesses, the King and Queen would have said that Elsa was sickly, that she couldn't be out in crowds for long; they would have taken her out to one a month, maybe one every three months, just to make a token appearance so people would know they had a crown princess, and Elsa would have clenched her hands in her skirt as she curtsied so nobody would see the frost creeping across her fingers, and she would have pled a headache and left as quickly as she was allowed, and everyone would wonder: how long will she live, once she is queen? How long will she spend ill in her room, instead of on the throne? Stewards would make sure the country ran smoothly, while the king and queen were trying to keep their elder daughter's powers secret.
Maybe they're princesses. Maybe they're not.
If they're not princesses, they're at least rich enough to hide away in their estate, for their parents to switch off traveling around with Elsa trying to find better ways for her to control it, and they're at least isolated enough that Anna hasn't spent her whole life sneaking out into a town that's literally right outside her doors.
But Anna, by 16, has found a way to sneak out. Poor Anna, so conflicted when their parents die; on the one hand she's deeply, terribly, grievously upset, because she has spent her entire life desperately craving her parents' attention and never getting enough of it, and hoping that maybe one day this could change, maybe one day she would be good enough or bad enough or something-else enough for the entire shape of their relationship to change. She knows they love her — loved her — because they would always find occasions to tell her so, would always look at her and see the shadow of a scar on her forehead and think thank god, thank god, thank god she's alive, would impose limits and tell her that they were to keep her safe and sound, but even love as a known quantity can seem insubstantial in someone's absence. So on the other hand, it might feel to Anna, a little, like her parents have always been leaving her behind; this is just a more final version.
Anna has found a way to sneak out. Anna has found Hans. Anna would like someone to love her.
Maybe they're princesses. If they're princesses, Elsa is crowned within a few days, because that's what you do when you don't have a king and queen anymore, and stewards and councillors run around taking care of the funeral, because that's what you do when you don't have bodies.
Maybe they're not princesses. Elsa doesn't have to become queen but her parents are well-known, her family has responsibilities, and she is abruptly more visible than she had ever wanted to be. Or maybe princess is an honorary title.
Magic isn't unknown, but it's not common, either. Nobody really knows anyone with magic, but of course, they all know enough to know, or think they know, that they only want to see it at a distance. If they do want to see it close up, they only want something that is impeccably controlled and so does not seem entirely real.
Elsa's magic is not controlled, because Elsa's emotions are not controlled, which doesn't have anything to do with Elsa's magic or even Anna's near-death experience as much as it has to do with Elsa's brain. Let's be real, though, Anna's near-death experience doesn't help. Elsa can barely look at her half the time without remembering how she looked, lying still on the floor.
This is an issue, of course. This has always been an issue, but it's even more of one now that they're officially in mourning and constantly thrust together. The latter might be more comforting to them in such a difficult time, if not for the fact that they have literally no idea how to be each other's support systems. When Anna tries to lean on Elsa, emotionally speaking, Elsa's so overwhelmed that she freezes (pun not intended); meanwhile, Anna is frustrated that Elsa is so closed-off emotionally when Anna could really use a sister. Both of them, though, are convinced that it's mostly their own fault that things are so weird.
Anna spends a lot of time trying to focus on other things, like Hans; Elsa spends a lot of time doing deep-breathing exercises and trying not to lock herself in her room for the rest of eternity. It's a struggle.
It all comes to a head with Hans, probably, when Elsa finds out about him and thinks he's bad news — but Anna feels like Hans is the only person who actually wants her around at this point, so. You know how this goes.
Anna probably has an inkling about Elsa's magic; I feel like it's the sort of thing you twig to a little bit, when your sister spends three-quarters of her life locked in her room with frost inching its way under the door. The house is always cool in the summer and freezing in the winter. Anna's had to take up knitting as a self-preservation thing.
She mentioned it to Hans at one point, just that she suspected it but didn't understand why nobody would tell her anything, if that was the case. She thought Hans forgot, or knew that he wasn't supposed to mention it, but — well, clearly not, because he busts in to mention it when the discussion between Anna and Elsa starts to get a little tense.
Elsa, who has kept such terrible, careful control of herself for the past few days, who has started maybe starting to think just a little positively about this whole thing, loses it a little bit. And she knows she's losing it, she can feel the ice coming; she keeps telling herself to be cool and think rationally and not to do this again, it's not rational, she knows it's not rational, she knows better, she needs to just calm down and of course, as ever, it doesn't work.
She sometimes wonders if the good days, the days where she's in control and she can make the ice dance on the walls or force it back underneath her skin if she wants, make everything worse, because they make her feel like everything is fixed until the next day, or the next week, or the next month, when someone tells her something that should be innocuous and ice crystals start forming on her palms.
She keeps telling herself to calm down, to take a breath, to be happy that Anna has found someone, and instead of doing all of those things, she panics and ice sprays everywhere.
Elsa is: facing curious and alarmed stares. Doing exactly what her parents — her parents who just died — told her never ever to do. Ruining her relationship with her sister. Ruining everything. Who is she to stick her nose in where it doesn't belong? Who is she to think she could just be normal, like she could put her powers behind her and just go on with her life?
She does what she did during a thousand fancy parties growing up: she disappoints herself and runs away. First to her room — her accustomed fleeing spot — but only to pace and freak out and pack a little and stop and stare and ask herself what she's doing until suddenly, it seems like the only decision she can make. People could be gathering their pitchforks right now. (They're not; there weren't that many people there to begin with, and some of them have gone home, because family arguments are awkward. Others, like Anna, are hacking through the ice in the hallways.) It's dangerous, and she could hurt someone or they could hurt her, and they're better off without her —
It turns out it's really easy to jump out of a 3 story window when you've accidentally made yourself a nice little ice slide down to the ground.
When Anna figures out that Elsa is gone, she immediately goes after her. Rational? Not so much, no, but both Anna and Elsa are operating more on feeling than anything else. Elsa is running on fear and self-loathing, and Anna is running on a sort of complicated anger and love: she wants to make sure that Elsa comes home, and she needs to know that Elsa loves her, but she's also angry at Elsa for running away, again, for hiding away through their shared childhood and trying to leave even now that she's the only family Anna has left.
(She's also a little pissed at Hans, for spilling something that Anna told him in confidence.)
So far, so much like Frozen. Maybe Anna even stumbles across a snowperson, or a real person — Kris, let's just call them Kris — and they help her get up the mountain and find Elsa.
Elsa doesn't have an ice palace; she has a storm, and when the storm dies down, she has everything that's left over, which is mostly snow and large, jagged chunks of ice. She's still working on getting up.
She doesn't feel free, exactly, or she does feel free, but it's the very particular liberation of knowing you've fucked up exactly as badly as you were worried you would. Hey, that thing you've been trying to avoid doing for at least twelve years? You've done it! Time to move on to a new worry!
Anna shows up, and Elsa can't get rid of her. She tries, but around the time that a chunk of ice erupts dangerously close to Anna, Elsa realizes that A) she can't take the chance that Anna will actually get hurt, and B) she doesn't have the energy for it, anyway. Nothing she says will convince Anna to go away, and eventually she gives up.
Eventually they go on a quest to find their parents' bodies. Which, okay, a little morbid? Sure, but part of Elsa just really needs to prove to herself that they're really gone, and she can't think up anything better. She doesn't think she can go home right now, even though part of her just wants to curl up in her room for the rest of her life. The other her can't stop moving right now; if she stops moving, then she's going to think too much.
Anna tags along because Anna's a little worried that if she doesn't keep an eye on Elsa, Elsa is going to bolt and they're never going to see her again. The snowman or Kris or whoever tags along because they were heading in that direction (towards the city of Whatever) anyway, and, to be honest, they don't really have anything better to do.
Kris ends up being a reasonably good buffer between Elsa and Anna through the journey, but also touching on some unexpected sore points, given that they're strangers and everything. Shit happens when you're sometimes the only one keeping the conversation going.
The problem that I've discovered over a year of writing these things is that it's hard to give an overview of relationship-building; what do you say to really encapsulate, "Well, they have some conversations about carefully polite topics that sort of spiral into past history, which it turns out that, unsurprisingly, they both remember really differently"? People connect and reconnect over a barrage of smaller things that are really mostly important as a unit rather than individual actions. I don't know. Maybe I'm just lazy.
Anyway, they have some conversations about carefully polite topics that sort of spiral into past history, which it turns out that, unsurprisingly, they both remember really differently. And they have some conversation about seemingly unrelated topics and spend a lot of time ruminating on their own internal monologue, and have to come to terms with — or decide to ignore, depending — a lot of things about their very complicated relationship with their parents.
Elsa eventually has to tell Anna that she doesn't have control over her powers, even though she's been trying for her entire life — that she hurt Anna, and none of them could deal with that.
Probably they end up having to find a sorcerer (a troll-sorcerer, maybe?! HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE) to help them locate where their parents' ship went down, and meeting an actual for real sorcerer helps clarify a lot of things, in a way, because it turns out that a lot of magicians generally do have their powers a little more under control by her age. On the other hand, most of them also aren't nearly as powerful as she is, by her age.
Their parents were in contact with one or two sorcerers over the years, but they weren't troll-sorcerers, as our helpful troll-sorcerer disdainfully points out. She's interested in Elsa; she keeps watching her and trying to provoke her into magic, and then making thoughtful noises. Elsa is a little unnerved by her, but also sort of fascinated. Anna's wary, but Kris likes her — Kris has known her for a little while, and has maybe run errands for her at one point or another.
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| The city of Dale, from The Hobbit (New Line Cinemas) |
They stay in TS's tower that night, at her insistence. It takes a day or two before Elsa starts thinking, "Well, what are we going to do now?" Because they found their parents; their quest is done. And it's that, of all possible things, that makes her break down sobbing.
It storms outside. TS makes an executive decision and moves her tower from the outskirts of the city to the middle of the wilderness (this is something that you can do when you're a powerful troll sorcerer). Anna freaks out a little bit and has to be force-fed tea by Kris, who is also trying not to freak out a little bit. TS has to talk Anna out of taking up residence outside Elsa's door. Eventually everything dies down enough for Elsa to emerge, feeling pretty ashamed of herself. She and TS talk a little after that; it turns out that the thing about magic — particularly mountain magic, like Elsa and TS have — is that it's affected by emotions. This wasn't a problem for TS, because she's pretty good at keeping her emotions under control and always has been, but Elsa clearly isn't. But TS thinks that maybe, with a few years of specific study, Elsa could learn how to separate her magic a little from her emotions. They can work on her emotional stuff as well, but this will give her a little more leeway to feel shit without destroying everything around her.
(Elsa has to deal, a little, with the fact that TS says what her parents were doing was the opposite of helpful, and wouldn't have been helpful even if Elsa's emotions weren't out of whack. It's worse because she can't even talk to her parents about it.)
But the question is, if she stays in the city with TS, what will Anna do? She doesn't want to drag Anna from her life, but they've only really just rediscovered their relationship. (Excavated it, if you will.)
And then what? Anna hasn't made a decision yet when — hmmm, maybe Hans shows up. He waited a few days and then took a slightly faster route than the one Anna and the gang took over the mountains. Hans is a little demanding; it was nice when he was the only one who seemed to pay attention to Anna, because he really paid attention to her and where she was and wanted to see her all the time, but now he doesn't seem to care about her internal conflict. He just wants her to leave her sister here and come home with him.
Anna figures that no matter what, someone is going to have to go home, just to straighten out all the details and make sure that the house is okay and nobody's making up wild stories. She doesn't have to stay permanently. So she heads home with Hans, with Kris escorting them; she really wants Elsa to come with them, just for a little bit, but Elsa is terrified of coming home and discovering that everyone in town is scared of her. And she's a little ambivalent about seeing the bedroom which, in hindsight, seems both like a comfort and a cage. They've all been through so much that Anna, even though she's upset, doesn't protest too much.
Hans clearly thinks that Anna is coming home permanently. Anna isn't so sure, but it's not worth the fight, and it's sort of nice that he wants her around, at least.
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| Chalet in Val D'Isere |
Anyway, Elsa arrives. Some people in town might be alarmed, but they don't say anything, and nobody busts out the pitchforks, so at least that's one worry assuaged.
Anna, is unsurprisingly, desperately relieved to see her. They figure shit out. Nothing's fixed, exactly, but Anna does eventually break it off with Hans and Anna and Elsa decide they're not going to split up. Not because they've magically become best friends, but they've learned to lean on each other a little more, and they both definitely want to keep working on learning how to stop hurting each other.
Plus, Anna eventually decides that, honestly, she spent 16 years cooped up in that house and only learned how to start sneaking out for the last two years of it. She's ready for a change of pace. They all end up moving in with TS over in the city of Whatever, and agreeing to spend summers back home.
They think their parents would be okay with that.
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