Warning #1: Tons of Frozen spoilers, if that’s a problem.
Warning #2: This is, I’ll admit, basically Frozen fanfic.
I really really liked Frozen. And to me, at its heart, Frozen was an origin story for an Ice Queen. That’s why “Let It Go” is a fantastic song. It’s why I loved Elsa creating the giant snow golem – she didn’t *want* to, but she *had* to – that’s the hallmark of a great villain’s back story. They didn’t *set out* to be evil and vicious. Events just progressed in such a way that, while in retrospect things might have gone differently, each step at the time seemed like the reasonable, necessary thing to do.
And Elsa is perfect. She has a strange gift through no fault of her own. She tries to control it, and can’t, so tries more desperate measures. And then the goddamn world interferes, and now, this is happening.
So here’s what I wanted to happen: The final scene. Elsa has accidentally cursed the one person she ever cared about to death. Anna is DYING. She’s frozen. People are trying to save her, and Elsa herself is trying to stop them, willingly or no.
And then, in the movie, good wins, Anna is saved, Elsa loves her sister, yay!
But I want a version where Anna stays frozen. I want Elsa to watch her sister freeze, watch everyone try to stop it, and watch it fail. And then know that the only person she’s loved, and who loves her, has just died because of her actions.
And then she goes back to her castle, resolved to once again never see anyone. She sings to herself. “Do you want to build a snowman?” And starts idly crafting herself minions. Olaf types at first. But the villagers, they just keep coming to her door, to fight, to steal, to ask for advice. Don’t they know that she’s dangerous? For their own good, more snow monsters. They scare them, chase them, drive them off. Then one of them gets killed. She told them it would happen! Why don’t they listen? So, now, even more snow monsters. And as she builds them, she’s singing, quietly to herself, “Do you want to build a snowman. It doesn’t have to be a snowman….” And slowly, she begins to shape more and more creatures. Moose. Deer. Bears. People. She sets them on patrol. They harass people, they terrorize some people to keep them out, to keep them safe, but no one dies. She gets better at making snow people, creating a whole … well, race, if you will. But she faces two problems. Her creations are attacked on sight now. People think they’re just mindless monsters, but by this point, Olaf is looking like a 5 year old, compared to her creations. They build, grow, love, hate – they’re people. People who are routinely slaughtered by humans. And further, they need room. And really, aren’t her people *better* than humans? She crafted them. She knows them. The cold doesn’t bother her any more – they’re her family. So really, why should stupid humans in Arrendale, who humiliated and cast out *their own princess*, get a city like that? It’s hardly right.
So she goes out to fix it. Marching her indomitable snow army over Arrendale, and the surroundings. A few people die, but only people who refused to go, who wouldn’t listen. Life’s too short to be wasted on the humans. And now that her army is growing, she *can’t* let the sun come back, even if she wanted to. Humans can bundle up. Snowizens can’t cool off in summer. They’d die. It would be genocide. Once again, her family, the people she loved, would be hurt because she couldn’t stop them. So when some brave and foolish heroic upjumped hedge mage starts to try to reverse the winter, she has no choice, does she? He had to be captured. And then he was spewing all that misguided rhetoric about her “evil” – HE’S evil! Thousands would die! He just wouldn’t see it. He was too blinded by the summer’s promise. She had to lock him away. And then he tried to escape, the tragic fall…. It couldn’t be helped.
And he’s not the last. More and more of them, seduced by the idea of summer (summer that some have never even seen!) are trying to destroy what she’s built. Sooner or later, one of them will succeed through sheer luck. So they had to be invaded, to save her Snowizens. They had to be conquered. She tried love. Let it go, she urged them! Be the good people you have to be! But they wouldn’t. Some more may have died. Some had to be tortured. She couldn’t do it, so she had to create a new type of Snowizen. They ran the darker parts of her growing empire, because someone had to.
And now, 40 years later, Elsa the White rules over a frozen kingdom where heat and warmth are synonymous with pain, betrayal, and death. Her sister Anna’s frozen body still sits in her throne room, and there are rumors that Elsa is preparing to unleash a storm of the sort never before seen….
