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Email + IM: seven.agencies@gmail.com | sevenagencies
Characters Played at Ataraxion: L (ryuuzaki)

C H A R A C T E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Elsa, Queen of Arendelle
Canon: Disney's Frozen, plus the official tie-in picture book A Sister More Like Me
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: The end of the film.
Number: 006 (points/sides in a snowflake!), or 036 (6x6), or random.

Setting:

Frozen is a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Snow Queen". In terms of technology and dress, the film appears to be set sometime around 1845, the year of the story's publication, but the characters' speech patterns are similar to informal contemporary American speech. At one point, one character refers to "trust exercises" -- a very modern concept.

Arendelle is a small fairytale kingdom strongly influenced by Norwegian folklore, customs, and architecture. Elsa and Anna both wear variations on a traditional Norwegian folk costume called the bunad, trolls are important to the plot, Arendelle has fjords and stave churches, and Wandering Oaken throws in a free jar of lutefisk with some purchases.

Most international travel seems to be sea-based, and Arendelle itself is known to be a rich country that isn't trading as much as it could be. It appears to have a military, a nobility, and a religious hierarchy.


History:

Elsa and Anna are the daughters of the King and Queen of Arendelle. Until they were eight (Elsa) and five (Anna), they shared a bedroom in their family's castle. Elsa had been born with magical powers relating to ice and snow, which manifested more and more as she grew older. It was a family secret, one which her parents disapproved of.

One day, Anna woke Elsa up at dawn to play. Elsa wanted to go back to sleep, but she couldn't resist Anna's suggestion that they "build a snowman."

This involved sneaking into the castle's large, empty formal ballroom, where Elsa shaped a snowball from the air, then sent it up towards the ceiling, where it burst like a firework. As snow began to fall, Elsa stomped her foot on the wooden floor, causing ice to spread and cover the surface. The room was soon a winter wonderland, and the girls built a snowman together. Elsa mimicked the snowman saying, "Hi, I'm Olaf, and I like warm hugs!" She also used air currents to push Anna, Olaf, and herself around on the frozen surface of the floor.

The problem came when the sisters tried to play in hills of snow, with Elsa creating a new hill for Anna to leap onto just as Anna leapt off of the last one.

Anna had both natural exuberance (a trait she carried into adulthood) and childish carelessness. She didn't notice that Elsa had slipped and fallen onto the ice while trying to keep up with her leaps, and didn't hear Elsa begging her to slow down. The result was that the next snow pile wasn't ready for Anna to land in it, and in trying to create it, an alarmed Elsa accidentally shot a spark of her magic through Anna's head. Anna immediately developed a white streak in the hair that grew from the spot where she'd been hit. She fell unconscious, and thick frost began to form around Elsa.

When their parents burst into the ballroom, they found a terrified, regretful Elsa embracing Anna and crying. They chided Elsa for what had happened, telling her that the situation with her powers was getting out of hand.

On the advice of an old book from the royal library, the family rode out of the city into the forest to consult the trolls and ask them for help in healing Anna.

Pabbie, the leader of the trolls, answered the King's plea. He was able to heal Anna, but doing so required rewriting her memories so that she no longer had any knowledge of Elsa's abilities: while she could remember that they had played together, all her recollections were altered to have happened outdoors in natural snow. (Later, she also thought that she had been born with the white streak in her hair, but remembered dreaming that she had been kissed by a troll.) He commented that it was lucky that Anna's heart hadn't been hit. He then told Elsa that her power would grow, that there was both beauty and great danger in it, and that she needed to learn to control it, because fear would be her enemy. As he spoke to the family, they saw magical visions in the sky that depicted Elsa being attacked and obliterated by figures representing "fear."

Unfortunately, Pabbie's prophecies, while wise, were also vague and ambiguous, even to him. The "fear" that would have spelled disaster wasn't outside fear of Elsa's powers followed by violence against her (as the vision could have been interpreted to suggest), although that did turn out to be a factor. The greater danger came from Elsa's fears of herself, which included fears of hurting others and eventually fears of losing control of her powers if angry or physically or emotionally on the defensive. Her parents only grasped the first possible interpretation, that Elsa might be treated as a monster and killed if her powers were known to the outside world.

The King and Queen made the decision to limit Elsa's contact with others. The castle staff was reduced, the gates to the castle were closed, and Elsa was given her own bedroom and instructed to keep her distance from Anna.

Over the years, her emotional support came primarily from her parents, who were doting but worried. Her father instructed her to wear a pair of gloves at all times, as a barrier for her hands, and tried to train her to hide and repress her emotions. "Conceal, don't feel," became Elsa's mantra. It emerges through the course of the film that this was the wrong way to go about things, but it's indicated that her parents meant well and were doing the best they could.

A Sister More Like Me fills in some of the gaps of the girls' childhoods. Anna was boisterous and carefree, while Elsa was studious, refined, and mindful of her duties as a princess. Anna preferred picnics and had a messy room, while Elsa was fastidious in her personal habits and loved high tea. It wasn't that they never saw each other. It was that Elsa withdrew from Anna emotionally, and that their contact was rare and impersonal and never happened at important times. "I was still your older sister, but I couldn't be your friend." Both the book and the film indicate that Anna grew to think Elsa was uptight.

It seems unrealistic that a young girl could be raised to lead a country with no contact outside of her parents, nor is it stated that Elsa did, only that she didn't see many people outside of a few faithful servants and, presumably, a few tutors.

Much of this period is also covered in a different way in the film in Anna's song, "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", which shows her loneliness as she begs Elsa to be her friend again at what turns out to be several crisis moments for Elsa. The song is not from Elsa's point of view, although her reactions are shown: each time, she's as lonely as Anna is, but turns down Anna's entreaties due to her parents' orders and her own desperation at her inability to suppress her powers at will. It grows worse over the years, and by the time she hits puberty, Elsa will no longer even let her mother and father hug her, out of fear that she'll hurt them.

When Elsa was around 18, her parents went away on what was supposed to be a two-week journey. Instead, their ship sank in a storm and they were lost at sea.

Elsa's inability to control her powers at times of emotional stress meant that she couldn't attend their memorial service, and instead stayed locked in her bedroom, which frosted over as she wept. Anna went alone and didn't understand why she and Elsa couldn't grieve together: why Elsa seemed indifferent to her pleading. She couldn't see that Elsa was determined to spare others the potential consequences of her genuine heartbreak.

Three years passed, during which Arendelle probably had a trusted regent who didn't have designs on the throne.

Elsa's coronation came on a beautiful summer day when she turned 21. The castle gates were opened for a huge celebration, with guests from everywhere, both inside and outside of Arendelle. Anna thought mostly of her own excitement at being able to attend a party, one where she hoped that she might meet her true love. Elsa was more concerned with getting through the day without being overwhelmed with her emotions, looking forward to being able to close the gates and go back to a quiet, safe life the next day.

It was hard for Elsa to get through the ceremony. The part where she was forced to take off her gloves to hold the orb and scepter was the most daunting, but it had religious significance (royal orbs generally represent a monarch's ceremonial position as a guardian of their faith), so it had to be done. Because her private rehearsals hadn't gone well, she was relieved to make it through the real thing.

At the coronation ball, Elsa had Anna placed on the dais next to her, then tried to initiate friendly, awkward conversation with her. Anna appeared to appreciate the uncommon amount of attention from Elsa, and they began to discover some common ground in the form of their mutual love for chocolate.

The sisters were then approached by the Duke of Weselton, a foreigner with economic designs on Arendelle. He asked Elsa to dance, but she declined, and volunteered Anna in her place. The dance turned out to be as strange and silly as the Duke himself, amusing to watch, and when Anna came back, she told Elsa that she wished "it could be like this all the time." Elsa agreed, wistful and momentarily tempted, but then firmly told Anna that it couldn't be. Anna asked why not, and Elsa refused to provide any further reasons. Anna ran from the party in tears.

Elsa spent much of the rest of the evening at the party alone on or near her throne, watching her guests dance and have fun. Meanwhile, Anna bumped into Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, the youngest of thirteen sons, a charming young man she'd met briefly earlier in the day. They ran all over the castle environs, dancing and chatting, and came back to the party to ask Elsa's blessing for their impulsive engagement.

Elsa was blindsided by Anna's desire to marry a man she'd just met, but her resistance to the idea became stronger when Anna began to discuss the wedding, the idea of Hans moving into the castle at Arendelle, and the possibility that his twelve brothers might visit.

In spite of Elsa's request to talk to Anna in private, the discussion devolved quickly into a public confrontation between the sisters in front of a ballroom full of people.

Elsa firmly declared that there would be no weddings; Anna told her that she knew nothing about true love, because she only knew how to shut people out. Elsa was stunned and hurt, but held her ground and tried to excuse herself and end the party. Anna pursued her, yanking off one of her long gloves, which Elsa repeatedly asked for, holding her bare hand protectively against her body. Elsa moved towards the door, but Anna shouted after her, insisting that she, Anna, could no longer live such an isolated life. Elsa told her that she should leave. Anna, cut to the quick, tried to confront Elsa about her ongoing refusal to engage with her. "What did I ever do to you? Why do you shut me out? Why do you shut the world out? What are you so afraid of?"

Finally, Elsa lost her temper, whirling around just before leaving the room. As she said, "Enough!" to Anna, she gestured in frustration with her bare hand. A circle of spikes of ice around 4-5 feet high shot up from the floor, close enough to the guests and Anna that most of them had to pull back to avoid injury. The Duke of Weselton murmured an accusation of sorcery, and Elsa took off.

She ran from the castle out into the courtyard full of happy citizens who were thrilled to greet their new queen -- not something that Elsa could handle at that point, so she tried to dodge her well-wishers and get away however she could. Cornered and panicked, she was backed up against the edge of a fountain, and gripping its edge caused its central plume to freeze in mid-air. Even Elsa seemed startled by the extent of her powers.

The Duke pursued her from the party, calling for her to be stopped, and in begging him to stay away from her, she accidentally shot a wintery blast in his direction. It knocked him and his companions off their feet. He responded by pointing and calling her a monster.

The mood of the crowd turned to fear and confusion, but Elsa found a way out by running down to the banks of the fjord on which the castle was situated. If anything she touched turned to ice, including a fountain, it meant that she could escape over water. A solid path formed under her feet as she went, and she was able to create any bridges she needed as she ran off into the wilderness.

Elsa didn't stop to look behind her, so she didn't realize that the fjord never stopped freezing. Ships that were in the harbor for her coronation became locked into the ice, and it began to snow... and snow... and snow.

Anna told Hans that it was all her fault for pushing Elsa, and set out after her, leaving Hans in charge of Arendelle. She never questioned how agreeable he had been with her, how quickly he had proposed, and how readily he took on the responsibility of being the temporary regent.

Alone in the mountains, heading for the especially high North Mountain, a dejected Elsa began to reflect bitterly on her isolation, unhappiness, and failure. However, she also understood that she had tried as hard as she could to do what she was taught to do, and that it had ultimately been too much to ask of her. Once she was in a place where she could freely use her abilities without fear, where there was no one who could see her or be hurt, she began to revel in them, declaring that she no longer cared about anyone else's opinions and would leave the past behind her to live as she pleased. "The cold never bothered me anyway." A great weight had been lifted from her, and she was relieved.

Her powers were impressive when they were openly expressed, even to her. Over the course of just a few minutes, she created a snowman (more on him momentarily), a towering ice palace, and an entirely new look for herself. After discarding her cloak and remaining glove, she used her magic to change her practical, high-necked coronation dress into a beaded silken mesh gown in shades of pale blue with a sheer trailing cape decorated with snowflake motifs. Likewise, she changed her hairstyle from a refined low bun to a long, full braid decorated with snowflake-shaped crystals. She only had to run her hands through her hair to do this. For the first time in many years, Elsa was enjoying herself.

(The previous two paragraphs describe the "Let It Go" sequence. It's worth mentioning here that Elsa was originally intended to be the villain of Frozen, and "Let It Go" was going to mark the point where she turned fully evil; the plot of the film was changed relatively late in its development to make Elsa a sympathetic deuteragonist, but they kept the song. The result is that once reality breaks in, the next time she's onscreen, she can't maintain the happy confidence that she expresses in it. The palace she builds is almost literally a castle in the air.)

The film doesn't cover what Elsa did in her ice palace for the first few days she was there. Most likely, she spent the time learning to relax, coming to terms with her decisions, and enjoying the new expression of her powers. It doesn't appear that she needed to eat or drink anything, or sleep (to be honest, sleep doesn't seem to happen for most of the characters during the main events of the story). We never really see any furniture in the palace. We also never see anything that looks like a room Elsa is actually living in.

Because Anna traveled in Elsa's wake, and because she was unable to create convenient bridges for herself, she was forced to deal with extreme snow conditions and unfavorable terrain. This meant that it took her almost two days of travel to make the trip that Elsa had probably made in around six hours. Anna was assisted in her quest by Kristoff, an experienced young woodsman, mountaineer, and erstwhile ice salesman who she met at a trading post (and who eventually turned out to have been raised by Pabbie's troll family), and his reindeer, Sven.

They also met Olaf, the snowman Elsa created during her trip up the North Mountain. In personality, if not in age, he was the naive and good-natured Olaf of Elsa and Anna's childhood, the one who liked "warm hugs." He told Anna and Kristoff of his yearning for summer, without understanding that a snowman could never survive it (this has metaphorical significance and is discussed further in the Personality section). He also helped them find Elsa's ice palace.

Anna's plan, such as it was, involved having a heart-to-heart conversation with Elsa. She asked everyone else to wait outside. "Just... give us a minute." Olaf promptly began to count to 60.

Anna entered the palace and was stunned by its beauty and grandeur. The main hall incorporated a circular double staircase, and when Elsa appeared at the top, Anna complimented her on everything she had created, her new look and her new home. She also apologized for what had happened at the coronation.

Elsa tried to deflect the apologies and send her away, explaining that if she was alone, she could be who she was without hurting anyone. She was visibly physically uncomfortable with Anna's presence, wrapping her arms around herself to try to keep her hands covered.

Before Anna could explain the snowstorm conditions in Arendelle, Olaf's minute ended, and he burst through the double doors to introduce himself to Elsa. Elsa was momentarily enchanted, surprised that she had been able to create something that was both alive and so sweet. Reality broke in when Anna suggested that they could be close again. Elsa, remembering how she'd hurt Anna when they were young, rejected the idea and again asked Anna to leave for her own protection, then fled from the room.

Just like at the coronation, Anna refused to respect Elsa's desire to be left alone. Instead, she tried to follow her sister, earnestly begging her not to keep her distance, explaining that she now understood why Elsa had isolated herself, and pledging her support. The discussion went back and forth a few times, but Anna finally reluctantly admitted to the other issue: "You kind of set off an eternal winter? Everywhere."

Elsa was appalled by the situation and her inability to change it: there was no way for her to be free after all. She hadn't just hurt one or two people, she'd hurt the entire country for which she was raised to feel responsible, and she believed that any attempts to go down and reverse what she'd done would only make it even worse. Heavy snow began to fall in the room. Anna continued to pressure her. Elsa's distress and terror then caused her magic to run rampant, shooting in a circle around her as she shouted, "I can't." One of the "darts" of magic went straight through Anna's heart.

The walls around Elsa began to frost over even more heavily. Kristoff rushed in to help Anna, who appeared, at the time, to be shaken, but fine. While Elsa was initially confused by his appearance, she decided that she didn't care who he was: the most important thing was for Anna to leave, and for her to understand that there was little she could do against Elsa's powers when she had none of her own.

Anna continued to refuse to go, and Elsa, frustrated, created another snowman. This one was large, almost monstrous, so much that even Elsa seemed a little afraid of him (she cowered as he formed). He tossed the unwelcome guests out of the ice palace. After this, an annoyed Anna instigated a battle with him, but it doesn't seem that Elsa was aware of it.

After the battle, Kristoff noticed that Anna's hair had started to turn white. He took her to see the "love experts" who raised him, who turned out to be the trolls.

Back in her palace, Elsa paced in anguish, hands in her hair, telling herself to get it together, trying to return to her old "Conceal, don't feel" motto. It was worse for her than it ever had been before. The frost forming on the walls around her became thick enough to take the shape of spikes.

Down in Arendelle, Hans had been handling the crisis well, making sure the citizens had cloaks and a place to stay warm. This was over the greedy Duke of Weselton's protests.

Anna's horse, which had thrown her a day earlier, returned to town, and Hans decided to take a rescue party to find her. The Duke volunteered his henchmen as members, but privately told them that they should "end this winter" if they encountered the Queen. (By this point in the film, it's pretty clear that the Duke is out to turn the situation in Arendelle to his own economic benefit in one way or another: trade can't take place in eternal winter, and if it takes Elsa's assassination to end it, so be it.)

Hans and his party reached Elsa's palace on the North Mountain at least a few hours after Anna, Kristoff, and Olaf were thrown out of it. Most of the party was forced to fight the large guardian snowman she had created earlier that day; this eventually resulted in the snowman's apparent destruction.

As a result of the battle, the Duke's men were able to get into the palace before the others, and Elsa was forced to fight them. One shot a crossbow bolt at her; she was only shielded by a panel of ice that sprang up in front of her as an unconscious reflex. She began to win the fight, with one man pinned to a wall and the other disarmed and being pushed towards the edge of her balcony.

Hans burst in, distracting her. He implored her not to "be the monster they fear you are." Elsa's reaction was to second-guess herself: she was angry and frightened, but not ordinarily a cruel or violent person.

The man pinned to the wall had not been disarmed; he took the chance when Elsa wasn't paying attention to him to aim at her with his crossbolt. Hans noticed, so before the man could fire, Hans grabbed his arm and aimed the crossbow upward. There was a "chandelier" directly above where Elsa was standing. Its connection to the ceiling was broken by the bolt, and it came crashing down. While Elsa was able to move quickly enough that it didn't fall on her and kill her, it did catch up with her and knock her unconscious.

Hans and the rest of the party began the journey back to Arendelle, Elsa in tow.

(While the audience is not yet aware of it at this point in the film, Hans is the main villain, one whose entire motivation is a plan to marry Anna and murder Elsa so that he can seize the throne for himself. While his motion looks like quick thinking that saves Elsa's life but results in an accident that knocks her out, there's no way of knowing how well-aimed the bolt that shot down her chandelier actually was: it's possible that he meant for it to fall on her. In trying to prove how helpful he is and arrange the situation in a way that's favorable to him, he acts as a catalyst for events that ultimately foil his plans. Elsa would not have returned home on her own.)

All this happened around the same time that Anna and Kristoff consulted with Pabbie. He told them that he couldn't remove the ice that Elsa placed in Anna's heart, and that if it wasn't removed, Anna would eventually freeze to solid ice forever. The only way to reverse it would be an act of true love. Everyone jumped to the interpretation that it had to be a "true love's kiss," which meant that Anna would have to find Hans -- fast.

As Anna began to weaken and more of her hair turned white, Kristoff, Olaf, and Sven rode hell-for-leather to get her back to Arendelle.

When Elsa awoke, she was imprisoned in the castle, wearing a special kind of shackle that completely covered her hands. Hans came to see her. He told her that he couldn't just let "them" kill her, that Anna hadn't returned yet, and he asked her to bring summer back. She explained that she couldn't, and that it was important to get her away from Arendelle. He said he'd do what he could.

Kristoff dropped Anna at the castle gates with instructions to get her warm and find Hans. He then rode away.

The servants brought Anna to Hans, who showed tender concern for his fiancee... until everyone left the room. When Anna explained what was wrong and that she needed a "true love's kiss," Hans acted as though he was going to kiss her, then stopped at the last moment, saying with mock regret, "Oh, Anna. If only there were someone out there who actually loved you." He explained his plan to her as he doused the fire, making the room as cold as possible to hasten her death, and locking her in.

While Hans left Anna alive, he told the officials and visiting dignitaries that she'd died in his arms after they said their marriage vows. His coup complete, he sentenced Elsa to death on a charge of treason.

As the guards came to take her to be executed, Elsa was able to break out of her cell, not completely of her own volition. She froze the door shut, then pushed ice into the spaces between the stones until she was able to create a hole in the outer wall. Her shackles didn't last long after that. Escaping across the ice of the fjord, she did everything she could to try to get away from Arendelle, but the severity of the winter weather increased as she went.

In the meantime, Olaf freed Anna from the chilly room that Hans had locked her in and lit a fire to temporarily warm her. They were unable to leave through the door because too much ice had formed in the halls, trapping them, but they escaped through a window. Olaf had seen that Kristoff was on his way back to the city, and had suggested to Anna that this might be the "act of true love" that would save her.

The ice covering the fjord began to break up as Elsa crossed it, creating truly perilous conditions. The wind became so strong that it was hard for anyone to stay on their feet, and visibility was poor. Anna and Kristoff tried to reach each other. Anna's fingers turned blue, then snowflake patterns materialized on her hands, then her hands began to harden. Hans, not knowing that Anna had broken out of her death chamber, tried to find Elsa to kill her. When he caught up with Elsa, he told her that she had killed Anna.

When Elsa heard this, she collapsed on the ice with her back turned to Hans, and the storm immediately calmed. This allowed Anna to see what was about to happen: Hans was creeping towards Elsa with his sword drawn and raised, and Elsa, defeated, didn't seem to notice or care.

In placing herself between Hans and Elsa when Hans was about to strike a fatal blow, Anna not only saved Elsa, she also seemed to doom herself: she had a choice of whether to run to Kristoff for a kiss, or to defend her sister, but she couldn't do both in the time she had left. She ran away from Kristoff. Hans's sword struck her just after she transformed, shattering on solid ice.

Anna's choice was correct, though. Pabbie's second prophecy proved to be as ambiguous as his first one, and the "act of true love" turned out to be Anna's willingness to sacrifice herself for Elsa, not something as simple as a kiss from another guy she barely knew (even if he was a much better person than Hans, and someone who was probably actually right for Anna). In spite of everything Elsa had been forced to do to push Anna away for Anna's own protection, and in spite of how much that had hurt Anna since it started, Anna still loved her big sister more than anything.

Elsa, unaware of this, only thought that Anna had sacrificed herself. Anna had become an ice statue, and Elsa embraced her with her whole weight, unable to do anything but hang from her neck and weep.

At that point, Anna began to thaw from the heart outward. She returned to normal so fully that even the white streak that had been in her hair since childhood disappeared.

The situation was resolved quickly after this. Elsa was able to understand that love overcomes fear, and that it was the loving, benevolent, open side of her personality that would enable her to reverse the winter and control her powers. With a few moments' concentration on her part, the ice began to melt, flowers began to bloom again, and all the snow that was covering the city spiralled up into the sky. Elsa formed it into a huge snowflake, then exploded it into nothingness. (And when Olaf himself began to melt, she created a small winter cloud to ride over his head: his own "personal flurry" that would allow him to experience summer.)

An indeterminate amount of time, not more than a few days, passed before the movie's final scene. Arendelle's gates are open. Hans is shipped back to his brothers in the custody of one of Arendelle's allies, along with a letter explaining exactly what he did. The Duke of Weselton is also ejected from the country, and Elsa cuts off all business relations with his duchy in perpetuity. Kristoff's sled is replaced, Elsa names him Arendelle's Official Ice Master and Deliverer, and he and Anna kiss.

Elsa stands in the castle courtyard. For the excited populace, she does a more sophisticated version of the same routine she had done for Anna when they were small. She stomps her foot on the ground, and ice forms beneath everyone's feet. It travels up the walls, creating delicate decorative patterns. The fountains freeze again, but they freeze in an elegant curve that Elsa can control. Elsa makes it snow over the area, and people begin to skate. It seems that she is fully loved and accepted by her subjects.

Anna tells Elsa that she likes the open gates, and Elsa confirms that they'll never be closed again (a statement about Arendelle itself on the surface, but metaphorically about their relationship as sisters). Elsa creates a skating rink in the square/courtyard and causes a pair of fancy gold-embroidered white skates to appear on Anna's feet. Anna protests that she doesn't skate, yet the story ends with Elsa pulling Anna around on the ice while other citizens have fun around them.


Personality:

All of Frozen, not just the coronation scene, is the story of Elsa's "coming of age."

She begins as an incredibly insecure and frightened young woman who craves intimacy but feels too tainted to have close, affectionate relationships with other people. She is a public figure, but only reluctantly and out of a sense of duty.

Eventually, all her worst-case scenarios come to pass... and are reversed, so that everything is fine again. She learns to throw off tutored shame, to like and trust herself, and to trust the people around her to love her for who she is.

Much of the central conflict comes from the fact that Elsa has been forced to repress her true abilities and therefore her true personality, but the themes of familial love and accepting both oneself and others are hammered home over and over throughout the movie, sometimes in scenes that are only tangentially related to Elsa herself. For example, the trolls sing a song called "Fixer-Upper" to Kristoff and Anna, and while it appears on the surface to be encouraging them towards a romantic relationship, it contains the lines, People make bad choices if they're mad or scared or stressed/But throw a little love their way, and you'll bring out their best/True love brings out the best.

As a queen, Elsa's public personality would most likely always have been regal, reserved, dignified, and practical. However, she also displays an aloofness (mistaken for coldness and even unkindness) which would not be a significant factor if she were comfortable in her own skin and happy with her life. It's actually shyness, and it's a manifestation of intense anxiety and shame, and the sadness that comes from fifteen years of feeling that way with no hope for change in the future.

Elsa cares about others in a broad, abstracted way. She is also capable of deep love, but she expresses that love through learned avoidance, and believes that she's unloveable. She has not experienced physical affection ("warm hugs") since childhood. The loss of her parents meant, to her, the loss of the only people who knew what she was capable of and loved her anyway. Anna is initially ignorant of Elsa's powers, so she can't understand why Elsa seems to reject her, nor does she grasp that it's not truly a rejection.

It's very important to note that Elsa never needed to be taught to repress her powers to begin with. Anna was not injured because Elsa couldn't control her powers; Elsa's control of them was excellent. Anna was injured because Elsa slipped and fell and Anna was too excitable to pay attention. Her parents interpreted Pabbie's vague, well-intended prophecy in the best way they could, trying to protect both of their daughters, but it's obvious by the end of the film that encouraging Elsa to learn finer control of her abilities would have been better than treating them like a leak that needed to be completely blocked.

Privately, the true Elsa is still elegant, but she's also gentle, playful, kind-hearted, and proud of what makes her unique. She's a beautiful person, inside and out, who's capable of creating beautiful things. These aspects, hidden for most of her life, are reconciled with her public persona by the end of the film. She learns that in spite of her shame and the "eternal winter" incident, people love and accept her, and her shyness vanishes.

Sisterhood

Through everything that happens, from childhood on, Elsa adores Anna, even when she also finds her behavior profoundly frustrating. Shutting herself away from Anna wasn't easy for Elsa, whose teen years were lonely, especially after their parents died. It was done for Anna's protection.

Spending time with Anna seems to be what she looked forward to most at the coronation party. While Elsa is polite to the guests, charming in her diffident way, it comes off as professionalism. She shows little active interest in talking to anyone but Anna, insisting that Anna be placed on the dais next to her, and initiating friendly conversation.

Later, it's still all about Anna when it's not about Arendelle. She begs Anna to leave her ice palace, not wanting her to be hurt, but Anna is hurt anyway when she doesn't listen (a repetition of past events, with much higher stakes). When Anna turns to ice after shielding Elsa, Elsa collapses in devastation, embracing her younger sister. And when Elsa understands that Anna's sacrifice was the required "act of true love," she's touched in a way that enables her to regain control of her powers... the control that she'd had when they were close.

Learning Confidence

In spite of her outward composure, her beauty, her reserve, and her regal poise, Elsa lacks confidence in herself and trust in others. Most of the film depicts her developing it.

Some confidence in herself comes when she feels that she's able to fully use her powers without worrying about being judged or hurting anyone, but at that point, she still doesn't trust herself, because she doesn't understand how to restrain her abilities when she's upset, or how to reverse their effects. Her worst fear is still that she will fatally injure someone in some way in an unguarded moment; the nightmare scenario is that that person will be Anna.

Confidence in others starts when a combination of a lack of control of her emotions and bad circumstances causes Elsa to come close to losing her sister. Anna knows everything about Elsa, was hurt in the worst way possible by Elsa's fearful outburst... and still took a proverbial bullet for her. Anna's sacrifice forces Elsa to understand that Anna's love and support is unconditional. The worst thing happened, but it didn't make Anna love her any less.

Elsa learns to trust both herself and her sister. At the end, she acts with self-assurance and a much greater degree of openness, having Hans sent back to his brothers as a prisoner, severing trade ties with Weselton, and rewarding Kristoff for his help, then continuing to leave the castle gates open for the happier life that she's craved.

Duty

Elsa begins as a dutiful princess, trying her best to do what she believes she's supposed to do even though it comes at great personal cost, but she doesn't know how to fulfill that duty without fear, and she therefore feels that she's been forced into an impossible role. She is a public figure who's convinced that she needs the deepest privacy, due to her fear of hurting others with her powers and her fear of being exposed. If she's exposed, she expects to be rejected at best, murdered at worst. While this is resolved by the end of the story, it's still significant in terms of her development.

In "Let It Go", Elsa decides to abandon her duties both for pleasure and because she feels that it's best for everyone if she's on her own. While it's her big character song, it's not the final statement on her personality or growth, nor is the attitude she expresses in the song particularly mature: it partly comes from feeling like she's out of options. She has a basis for believing she no longer has any other choice and is making the best of it, but she's still running away instead of confronting her problems.

At that time, Elsa wasn't sure anymore about what "duty" meant. She'd gone from thinking it was her duty to be a perfect, controlled, emotionally even princess, then queen, to thinking that self-imposed exile was both her duty and a good solution to her problems. The one point in the past at which she'd seriously shirked her duty -- when she skipped her parents' memorial service -- was also attributable to her understanding that her emotions were too affected to allow her to suppress her powers.

The impulse to isolate herself when she feels crushed, and when she can't maintain her composure to the degree that she wants to, is tied into her strong sense of duty, but also trumps it. Her self-imposed exile might seem like the best thing for everyone, but it's also a rationalizaion, a way of metaphorically "hiding away in her room." She didn't even return from the mountain to the castle voluntarily.

It's suggested at the end of the movie that she's learned to change this behavioral pattern, that she's found a balance and can fulfill all her duties in an active way rather than just by giving up, but the audience has no way of knowing whether or not it will be tested in the future.

The Snowmen

A discussion of Elsa's personality would be incomplete without discussing the snowmen she creates, each of whom are imbued with important aspects of it.

While Olaf definitely has a separate existence, to the point of being an appable character in some games, it's worth noting that Elsa is Olaf: that is, she created him, and there's nothing in him that isn't in her. His yearning for "summer" is a yearning for "warmth" (greater emotional closeness with others, especially Anna), and everything about him is a reminder of the happier moments of Elsa's childhood. It's significant that he's the one to rescue Anna from the cold room that Hans locks her in.

At one point, he states that Elsa must be "the nicest, gentlest, warmest person ever." The line is played for a joke in context (Olaf's body is immediately impaled on a horizontal icicle that formed in Elsa's wake), but it's accurate about the bulk of Elsa's true personality. It represents what she would be without her fear and insecurity.

(Note: this isn't my observation. It's an intentional metaphor that people involved in the production of Frozen have mentioned in several places.)

Marshmallow, the guardian snowman, is large, imposing, and inarticulate. He behaves like a bouncer at Elsa's ice castle; his few lines are things like "Go away," and he roars when he's angry. He represents not only Elsa's fear and insecurity, but how predominant, simple, and primal they are at the point in the film when she creates him.


Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

The "rules" of Elsa's magic (and therefore the limits of her powers) are a little bit difficult to define, largely because the majority of Frozen is set over the course of a few days, and because a major point of the plot is that Elsa is running rampant.

She can:

- Freeze the surface of a body of water by stomping her foot, creating a frozen path that allows her to walk on the surface and that can quickly expand to cover the entire body. Shallow, confined, artificial bodies like fountains and pools may freeze solid, but natural flowing bodies like fjords or seas will only develop a solid ice surface a foot or two thick.
- Create an icy surface where there's no water to freeze. There is no indication that Elsa is only freezing atmospheric moisture; rather, it's suggested that the ice more or less comes from nowhere. There's far too much of it for her to merely be drawing and freezing water from the air. She can do this with hand gestures or with a stomp of her foot.
- Direct the icy surfaces that she's created so that they form stable structures. Elsa builds a multistorey hexagonal castle for herself in the film, and she's able to do it almost as quickly as she can imagine it.
- Create snow with gestures.
- Control air currents in a way that allows her to direct and move snow and ice. She can lose control of this at times of the highest emotional turmoil.
- Create snowmen that are imbued with aspects of her personality. She can only partly control this. Once created, they have an independent existence.
- Create fabric and possibly small amounts of metal: she's shown creating gold and white ice skates for Anna, and a silky, glittering gown with a long, sheer cape, shoes, and small crystals for her hair (as well as a new hairstyle) for herself. These items appear to be heat-resistant and made of real substances, so it seems to be a second form of "creation magic" rather than "items made of ice and snow." However, it's suggested that her creations will have dominant "ice" colors like pale blue or white. It also seems possible that she has to transform another item to do this, but that seems questionable, given that the items she creates involve substances that were not part of the items that disappear when she creates them.
- Shoot "ice magic" into the head or heart. Head shots seem to be curable if memories are manipulated. Heart shots are only curable with "an act of true love"; otherwise, the victim will eventually turn into a rock-hard ice statue. Any ice magic shots to the body cause the victim's hair to progressively turn white. Elsa has never done this voluntarily.
- Elsa is extremely cold-tolerant. The extent isn't explored in the movie, but she's comfortable in situations where a normal person would have died of hypothermia.
- There's no indication that her ice powers come with a corresponding elemental weakness: in other words, while heat can melt her ice the way it normally would, it doesn't seem that Elsa herself has any kind of abnormal intolerance to heat.
- To what extent she can create water is also not well-defined--that is, what would happen if she created ice chips for someone to suck on, or if her ice powers could be used to help circumvent a shortage of potable water. The fact that she has to "gather" all the snow and ice from Arendelle, send them it into the air, and "explode" it suggests that it would melt into water, but it's hard to say because the result of her action isn't rain.
- Weirdly, she doesn't seem to need food or water while she's fully using her magic (living in her ice castle): it's like she becomes a fully magical creature. This may just be an effect of the film's running time.

Snow and ice that Elsa creates does not form instantly; instead, it "branches and plates" (if it's more controlled and structured), or seems to be in motion as it forms, like waves of ice (if it's a fast or defensive action). Think of it as something that "grows" over a second or two, rather than as something that just materializes at full size. (This does not apply to the "magical darts" that injure Anna both in childhood and when she visits Elsa's palace.)

Most of these things form from Elsa's "signature snowflake," which can be seen in the movie's logo, every time she stomps her foot to create ice, in the motifs around her palace and on her sheer blue cape, and all over Anna as she begins to freeze over at the climax of the movie.

The creation of snow and ice is not always under Elsa's conscious control, specifically when it's a response to a physical threat. Her instincts throw up small ice walls to block arrows. Also, when she's upset, the area around her tends to crisp over with frost. As her emotions run out of control, the weather becomes increasingly bad: the climax of Frozen takes place in a blizzard, where a whirl of clouds rotate high above Elsa's head and the thick, stable ice in the bay begins to break up.

In the game, I would like the power limitations to go something like this:

- The most important limitation is that Elsa's ice won't last longer than 24 hours without being consciously renewed: yes, she can keep refreezing the door of her quarters closed if she feels she needs to, but no, it won't just stay that way indefinitely, and she won't be able to create a structure to live in.
- Nothing Elsa freezes will stay frozen when she's more than, say, 500 feet away from it.
- Her ability to manipulate ice and air currents during a fight (to create ice spikes and defensive walls) should be limited to a range of about 10 feet around her. A wall shouldn't spontaneously spring up 50 feet away to protect her.
- Elsa will not be able to create stable ice towers taller than two storeys. She can create a very temporary ice playhouse to express herself, or as a nice experience for friends, but she cannot create an enormous ice palace and move into it.
- Elsa can still zap-create snowdrifts, but these will only be used in a fun thread or as cushioning in a fight. Snow that falls will not be heavy snow.
- Clothes powers should be relatively unaffected. If we go with "she transforms the appearance of existing items," then she would be able to do that. If we go with "creates things out of thin air," she should not be able to create anything for anyone else that lasts longer than a day.
- She will mostly have good control over her powers. However, because she'll be separated from Anna for at least a while (i.e. unless someone apps), and because the situation is incredibly dangerous at times, she might backslide a little when under attack. As well as the involuntary defensive stuff I already mentioned, this would mean that her immediate area (like, no more than 10 feet around her in all directions) would get cold and frosty, with frost appearing on nearby surfaces. Even though it could be a fun player plot, I think her powers should be limited enough that she can't cast the ship or even the Oxygen Gardens into an eternal winter: she shouldn't backslide that much, and even if she did, it wouldn't be fair to other players.
- Can still withstand abnormally cold temperatures with no special equipment, but needs at least half as much food and water as a normal person would need (either in quantity or in frequency): cannot just survive indefinitely on air and magic, but can survive for a few days on nothing, or a week on very little.
- The most important things that I'd like her to be able to keep: the defensive, not-always-completely-voluntary ice wall panels and spikes, the ability to create a layer of ice by stomping onto a surface, the ability to occasionally create clothes for herself, the ability to create snow, and the inability to keep frost from forming on surfaces close to her when she's profoundly upset.
- If someone ever apps Anna and then kills her off instead of just dropping her, I'll have to talk to mods about how to deal with it. I would probably assume that the areas around Elsa would be frosted up for some time, and that she would isolate herself on an uninhabited floor for a while.

I'm cool with and will accept any further limitations to this that you dictate. I just wasn't sure of the game's precise limitations and thought these were a good place to start. I don't want her to be all-powerful by any means, but I'd like her to be able to use her powers for fun and for artistic expression around the ship as well as for defense.

Elsa comes from a Disney fairytale, but taking her out of that genre and putting her into a setting like Ataraxion's means that she will function a lot like a minor superhero who has ice powers.


Inventory:

Coronation outfit, including cloak, gloves, and small tiara
"Snow Queen" outfit
Small, round, decoratively painted trinket box (contains a few inexpensive personal jewelry items and a couple of hair ribbons)
Candlestick
A carrot

Appearance:





Elsa's height is hard to gauge, but seems to be on the tall side of average for Arendelle. She's slightly taller than Anna, who comes up to about Hans's nose, and both sisters are several inches taller than the Duke of Weselton. Disney Parks cast face character versions of Elsa at anywhere between 5'3" and 5'7" and describe her as slender, regal, and youthful. Anna is also cast within that height range, so a choice of 5'7" is probably good for Elsa. (My concern here is sticking any potential Anna appers with a height they don't want--I'm assuming Anna is around 5'5"ish.)

Elsa's bone structure is delicate, and her figure is well-developed without being voluptuous.

Elsa has cool coloring, with very pale skin. She has a heart-shaped face with darker blonde eyebrows, faint freckles, large blue eyes, dark eyelashes, purplish eyelids, a small nose, and somewhat thin berry-red lips. (The color of her eyelids and lips could be makeup or an artistic representation of her actual coloring, but it's a moot point, since Elsa is capable of magically controlling her own appearance to some extent, and intensifies the colors of her eyelids and lips when she changes her hair and gown in her ice palace.)

Elsa's hair is platinum blonde with a slight beige tone. Its texture is fine, but there's a lot of it--it's voluminous and creates a thick braid. (Seriously, Disney's animators wrote a new program just to handle Elsa's hair, which has almost 400,000 individual CGI strands. Rapunzel in Tangled had about 27,000.) If worn loose, it should hit somewhere around her lower back. She can magically change her own hairstyle but does not seem to be able to change the length significantly.

Age: 21

AU Clarification: n/a

S A M P L E S
Log Sample:

Elsa stands at the edge of the swimming pool, ready to walk on water.

So many other people here admit to having powers that she's satisfied that it's relatively safe to openly use her own. The events of the previous month have even convinced her that what she can do, what flows in her, can be useful. Her abilities are interesting, and she's discovered that they're fun for her, and she knows from painful experience that they can be destructive, but until she'd stopped the beast from attacking the child, she'd never known them to be life-saving. She liked the feeling.

Her plan today is only to make a place to skate and to invite people to join her so that she can get to know them a little better. Openness had been her new policy before she had been brought here, hadn't it? She has no responsibility now other than what she elects to take on, and no thoughts of ruling everyone, but on this ship or back at home, she doesn't want things to be like they were before. Being too lonely makes that seem like a valid concern.

As she steps onto the water, the ice forms beneath her. She walks to the center, then stands there, concentrating, until she's sure it's thick. Then she walks around again, testing the surface for stability. It's all as it should be.

She hopes that it will be fun for everyone... everyone who accepts her invitation, anyway... but it has a dual purpose, in that it will remind her of home. Arendelle seems impossibly distant now, and her situation impossibly magical. There was a time when she would have run this far away if she could have, racing like a frightened white hare past the northern lights and into the stars, but that time is over.

Now, she only misses it.


Comms Sample:

[This isn't Elsa's first appearance on the network, but her pale, heart-shaped face won't be familiar to everyone.

The expression she directs into the communicator is friendly and matter-of-fact: a small, bright, close-mouthed smile. Still, a practiced eye may be able to pick out a hint of shy uncertainty in it. When she speaks, her dry voice has a weird echo that indicates that she's in a large room.]

It's been stressful lately. Does anyone like to skate?

[She leans in towards the communicator, then lifts it and turns it so that the nearby swimming pool is visible in the shot. The water is covered with a thick layer of ice.]

At home, we do this for fun. You won't need skates... I can get them for you... and you don't have to worry about falling in.

[To demonstrate this, she sets the communicator down, positions it, walks out to the center of the pool, and stomps her foot on the surface. The shape of a snowflake several feet wide appears just under her toe, but fades almost immediately, as if the area around it has swallowed it up. Indeed, the ice is as solid as she's suggested.]

Please come! I'm on the 48th floor.