Fanfic / What About Witch Queen?

The page contains unmarked spoilers for Frozen.

What about Witch Queen? is Frozen Continuation Fic by Mapograph with massive number of OCs and a complicated Gambit Pileup in place.

The story picks up two months after the end of the movie. Prince Hans arrives in the capital of the Southern Isles, arrested. His older brother, King Friedrich, is torn between punishing him as he should, and his fourteen very vocal siblings who demand justice to be served... to Elsa. Some of Hans and Friedrich's siblings decide to use the resulting chaos for their own schemes, and Hans has his own plans as well. Meanwhile, in Arendelle, there is a faction in the army that demands Elsa's powers to be put for a good use as a tool of war — and they don't feel like accepting "no" as an answer. And then there's mysterious smuggler Felix Drachner, who appears to have his hand everywhere, but how could he profit from the steadily growing chaos?

Has been a Dead Fic since 2015.

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This fanfic contains examples of:

• Adaptation Name Change: The royal family of the Isles is called "von Schwalbe", as opposed to "Westerguard". Westerguard, on the other hand, turns into an island that Hans rules for his brother.
• Alliterative Name: Andreas Andersen. Bjorn Berg. George Gardner.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: The Royal Council fears that this is what Drachner will do - that his takeover of Arendelle, Weselton and Corona will end up pissing off Tampere so much that the giant empire will steamroll them.
• Arranged Marriage: Played for laughs. Kai's father wants to arrange marrying Kai to Elsa. Kai is... less than thrilled. Rather terrified.
• Bad Guy Bar: The Red Boar, which, apart from being a bar where society's worst meet, also functions as Drachner's HQ in Weselton. Kristoff even outright calls it "a bad-guy bar".
• Balcony Escape: With window rather than balcony, but that's how Hans' escape starts.
• Bedroom Adultery Scene: Thrice.
  • In Diplomatic Espionage, we find out that Margaret and Hunter have an affair when Kristoff peeks into their room by accident when roaming around the castle.
  • Implied in The sides of conflict when half-asleep Eric (Margaret's husband) hears somebody walking around the room. He presumes it's a servant, but it's probably Hunter leaving.
  • Prince Eric finds out about Margaret and Hunter when he overhears it in Spying for dummies.
• Berserk Button: Both Friedrich and Anna are prone to outbursts of hate whenever they have some news about Hans, although it's more visible with Friedrich.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: It's implied that Von Schwalbe family is this. Among who we get to see of them, Hans attempted regicide, Michael considers killing his younger brother or seven-year-old niece to be par for the course, Margaret schemes to prolong a war and Friedrich has occasional attacks of Unstoppable Rage during which he can't even recognize whom he's attacking. When one of them has a mental breakdown, the others rush to him... because they want to grab the throne for themselves. Out of all of them, Ferdinand stands out like a White Sheep, and he considers his brother hugging him to be suspicious.
• The Chains of Commanding: Nexø feels deaths of his subordinates hard - perhaps too hard for his mental health. He certainly seems to be getting more and more depressed as the story goes on.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The stick that Ferdinand gives to Anna for self-defense may prove useful seeing how she managed to smuggle it to Westerguard keep.
  • Tampani Trail, used by Berg to sneak up on "Weasels", is used by Weseltonians to sneak up on Arendellans.
  • The pendulum ship that tried to escape the sequester is later used by Anna, Ferdinand and Seeker to escape Westerguard.
• Chekhov's Gunman: A few.
  • Prince Ferdinand is mentioned in passing in chapter two as being missing due to navy dragging him off for pirate hunt. Come Fit of rage, fourteen chapters later, and he saves Anna from smugglers who kidnapped her, and even becomes a POV.
  • Patrick Schneider appears briefly in chapter six, and reappears in chapter twenty six with important information.
  • Valdemar Schwalzmaar, the man who ferries Hans to Westerguard, appears some chapters later and tells Michael of Hans' whereabouts.
  • Felix Drachner is mentioned so many times it looks like he's everywhere. It turns out he's likely to have been orchestrating huge part of the plot.

• Continuation Fic: The story starts after the ending of Frozen.
• Continuity Nod:
  • When escaping from Koenigsberg castle, Hans muses that he used to climb around it as a child and that the skill came in handy when he met Anna. You know, when they sang Love is an Open Door.
  • Kai and King Charles both mention Elsa organizing weekly ice rinks in castle courtyard, like the one she made in the end of the film.
  • When Hans and Anna meet again, Hans admits that the past events might affect Anna's opinion about him.
• Convenient Escape Boat: Twice.
  • Lucky Zephyr leaves Koenigsberg just before Friedrich gives orders to close the port, taking Hans with it.
  • The smugglers' boat which Anna and Ferdinand use to escape the cave.
• Cool Ship: Northern Wind, Ferdinand's ship. It's freshly new, built specifically to deal with storm conditions, and kept in nigh-perfect state by Ferdinand's orders.
• Cryptic Background Reference: The Tampere Empire is apparently some neighbor to Arendelle and Corona and the biggest country in the region, but we never see a person from there. The same goes for Southernmost Lands, although they're somewhat further away.
• Darker and Edgier: Fanfic is quite darker and more serious than the film. Most notably, comic relief Olaf is nowhere to be seen.

• Dead Fic: Hasn't been updated since early 2015, and seeing how the author hasn't written anything since 2016, unlikely to ever be finished.
• Deadpan Snarker: Seeker, ever since she appears in the story.
  nameless guard: What's this 'it'?
  Seeker (in her head): A neutral pronoun. Of course, you probably don't know it, seeing how you are apparently ready to believe someone is making deliveries in the middle of the night.
  
  Ferdinand: He hugged me!
  Seeker:Truly, a mark of suspicious activity.
• Demoted to Extra: Elsa and Sven suffer from this, barely appearing in-story, and Olaf isn't even mentioned.
  • Subverted with Anna, who starts as Demoted to Extra, but turns into POV and one of main characters when she's kidnapped.
• Didn't Think This Through: Eric lampshades in his head that confronting Margaret about her plans when they're alone might not have been his smartest idea ever. The only thing to say in his defense was that he was mostly drunk at this moment.
• Establishing Character Moment: For Ferdinand, the moment he apologizes to Anna for his brother's actions sets him up as honorable man who's ready to take responsibility.

• Evil Prince: Michael, even more than Hans. He wants to take over the Isles and has no qualms about murdering his own brother or sending an eleven-year-own girl to almost certain death.
• Expansion Pack World: Tampere Empire and Confederacy appear on the world map. Southern Isles are also examined in much closer detail than in the film.
• Follow the Leader: in-universe, Kai mentions briefly that young ladies in Arendelle started to dress in the same style Elsa does (which is more than a bit revealing compared to their usual attire), to the men's considerable chagrin.
• From Bad to Worse: Ferdinand suffers from this to the point where it starts to look like Trauma Conga Line. First, he's saddled with responsibility over Anna, who clearly isn't very fond of him. Then his ship is shot into splinters, with entire crew apparently dead and he loses his sword hand. Then he's taken prisoner by Hans and the only person he sees is admiral Hauser, who hates him. And then it turns out that the stump of his hand is infected and Hauser refuses to call a doctor.
  • The entire Arendelle-Weselton situation, from a bunch of soldiers planning to start a war to an actual war nobody wanted.
  • Anna's and Ferdinand's escape from the palace is shaping up like this. From being held hostage with possibility of being killed in a few days to being trapped on pirate ship whose crew will murder them the moment Anna and Ferdinand reveal they know that the ship is a pirate one.
• Gambit Pileup: Oh, boy. It seems everybody has their plans, and then all those schemes start crashing into each other.
  • Olafsen, Krisitani and Berg scheme to remove the threat they believe Weselton to be by starting war with Weselton before Islands could be dragged in it as well.
  • Hunter (and probably Margaret as well) schemes to start war with Arendelle for his own reasons.
  • Michael schemes to take over the Isles and remove his brother from power.
  • Lisa and Braun scheme to remove Michael's threat.
  • Hans' overall goal seems to be collecting as much power as he can, and he schemes to make Arendelle and the Isles go to war.
  • Elsa, Eric and Kai with Kristoff, separately, scheme to end the war before Elsa has to use her power.
  • Drachner's goal so far seems to be to cause as much chaos as possible. He wants to take over Weselton, Arendelle and Corona so that he'd control the entire Inner Sea region.
• The Ghost: Felix Drachner has never been seen by any POV, only heard once. Baron Madsen outright says that when he was thirty six, he "dropped off the surface of Earth" - and Tamperan Secret Service has been searching for him for about a decade, implying he has been The Ghost for at least this long.
• Good is Not Nice: Baron Madsen is certainly on Arendelle side, but it's implied that the man doesn't shy away from political assassination or torture if he believes it to be for the kingdom's good.
• Gratuitous German: Ferdinand sometimes has outbursts of German (which in-story is Islander language), mostly when it's Anna's POV and he switches to his native tongue. He also rambles in Islander when he's raving and has no idea that the person he speaks to doesn't know the language.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: King Friedrich has... anger issues. Honestly, he bursts into Unstoppable Rage with barely any provocation.
• Handicapped Badass: Ferdinand loses his right hand to a cannonball, which doesn't stop him from surviving in icy cold water in the middle of the storm, finding a small cave where he can hide and climbing out of the water - all before he finds something he can stop bleeding with. Later, he deals with two men attacking him with little problem.

• Heroic Bastard: Word of God is that Friedrich isn't late king Klaus' son, but product of his mother's affair. He's easily the most likable (perhaps apart from Ferdinand) of von Schwalbes.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Meyer's captain sacrifices himself so that the scouts can escape.
• The High Queen: Both Lisa of Southern Isles and Elsa of Arendelle. Lisa appears to be the Only Sane Woman in Isles' court, and Elsa tries to save her kingdom without freezing all of her neighbors.
• Idiot Ball: Prince Charles of Weselton seems to have caught it when Kai and Kristoff arrived. Honestly. He's at war with the queen who can control ice, he knows what happened to Hans, and he knows that Elsa's patience has its limits. And he still prolongs the negotiations to get better terms and claims that Elsa's weak. His own son calls him out on this.
• In-Series Nickname: Arendellans call Weseltonians "Weasels" and Weseltonians call Arendellans "merchies".
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Oddly enough, used on a ship - Ferdinand refers to his Northern Wind as "she" while Hauser calls the ship "it", showing his contempt (or jealousy) for prince's shining command.
• Language Barrier: Author actually takes time to take care of it. There's Confederate language, which is lingua franca of the local world, Islander, which appears to be dialect of Confederate, Arendellan, which is different from those two but apparently the same as Weseltonian, and Weste tongue, which very few people other than Weste understand, causing some problems.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The Royal Council when they realize the full extent of Drachner's plans.
• Massively Numbered Siblings: It was present in the movie as well, but WAWQ amps it up a bit, adding two sisters to Hans' thirteen brothers.
• Mechanical Horse: Snow horses. They aren't real horses, but Snowlems made by Elsa.
• The Mole: Two heroic examples - Jeremiah Lee is Madsen's spy in Weselton court and Kristoff is Elsa's spy in Berg's army, at least until Dead man walking.
• Mood Whiplash: The shift between very dark Fighting the waves and adventurous, snarky Tourists in hiding is odd, to say the least.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Stormbringing Ocean, or Stormbringer for short. It's said the climate there matches the name and normal ships steer clear of it.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: As it turns out, Queen Elsa can survive strangling, spine-cutting, destroying the brain, decapitation and repetitive stabbing. Madsen and assassin sent to kill this person speculate that only stopping the heart would work.
• No Name Given: Weselton's scout captain and Meyer's superior is never named.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Hauser and most of the navy on Westerguard is in it because they want to stick it to the king.
• Oh, Crap!: Multiple times in "Steel and ice":
  • Hakan Madsen has this reaction when he realizes that the new guard posted by Elsa's door that night is most likely an assassin sent to kill the queen.
  • The assassin visibly starts to panic when Elsa refuses to die despite being decapitated and having her brain destroyed.
• Older Than They Look: Kai is mentioned to look much younger than his twenty five years.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Friedrich's daughter's name is Anna (although everybody calls her Annie), and Hans's late father shares the name with the very much alive Admiral Klaus Hauser.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Ferdinand figures out that Michael is up to something when the prince hugs him (Michael was pretending to be happy upon seeing him). Anna notices that it says something about von Schwalbes if Ferdinand considers a hug to be suspicious.
• Original Character: The story is full of new characters not in the source material.
  • In Arendelle, there are majors Madsen, Andersen and Lund, generals Madsen, Kristiani, Rasmus and Berg, colonel Dahl, captain Nexø and his team.
  • In Weselton, prince Eric, his parents, generals Windsor, Potter and Carter, colonel Hunter, mister Lee, corporal Meyers and his unnamed captain.
  • In the Southern Isles, there are the princes, Friedrich's wife and daughter, captain Braun, sergeant Schneider, Valdemar Schwalzmaar and his wife, Gunther, admiral Hauser and everybody on the island of Westerguard.
• Out of Character: Anna gets hit with it hard, with most of her dorky qualities disappearing.
• Overly Long Name: "Keisarillinen Vartiointipalvelut", the Imperial Secret Service of Tampere. The author notes that those are actual Finnish words.
• Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: For a soldier, Kai does very little soldiering. Probably justified, as he's Berg's aide and functionally his secretary.
• Playing Possum: Twice.
  • In more gory situation, Nexø crawls into pile of dead bodies so that advancing Weselton cavalry won't notice him.
  • There's a Weselton cavalier called Gardner who pretends to be dead so that Arendellans catching survivors would stop pursuing him. In the end, it works.
• Precision F-Strike: The first and only so far use of an F-word in story comes when a men sent to kill Elsa discovers he can't do this, despite his would-be victim already missing part of the brain, the spine and connection between head and the rest of the body.
  You don't have a spine, you don't have a brain, you don't have your throat and you're still goddamn moving?! What the fuck are you?!
• Pretext for War: For both Weselton and Arendelle armies, the shooting incident between scouts on the border. The entire situations that enabled it was engineered by two separate schemes.
  • Hans wants to engineer war between the Isles and Arendelle by killing Anna and make it look like it's Friedrich's fault.
• Rasputinian Death: Taken to the extreme and subverted in the last second for Elsa. First, the assassin tries to cut the spine. It doesn't work. Then he pushes the knife through the eye and destroys the brain. Somehow, to no effect. He then cuts the head off and the target is still alive. He smashes the skull and brain, which doesn't work either. Finally, he realizes that he has to destroy the heart, but then Elsa manages to kill him, impaling herself in the process. She survives this, too.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Elsa for Arendelle, Lisa for the Southern Isles, Meyer's captain for Weselton army.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Weselton duty in the eyes of Islander Navy. Not only is the place is a week's swim from the capital, it's full of Weste, most of whom don't know Islander language.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Generals Potter (red, with More Dakka approach) and Windsor (blue and sneaky), as well as their opponents, generals Kristiani (red and "let's strike now!") and Olafsen (blue, "this might be a trap"), although in latter case it's more underplayed.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Downplayed. Ugly parts of the secession of Westerguard are shown, with the ship sequester being more bloody than anticipated, and revolutionaries firing at once-friends, although only briefly visited, and the revolution is shown to have popular support.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Villified: Downplayed with the secession of Westerguard. It's oddly neat - it helps that the Weste are all with revolutionists, and they are 90% of local population. On the other hand, ship sequester proves to be more bloody than anticipated, and another ugly part of revolution - firing at once-friends - is shown, although only briefly visited.
• Seduction-Proof Marriage: Not marriage yet, but Anna is not even remotely interested in any man other than Kristoff.
• Ship Sinking: If anybody suspected that Mapograph plans to ship Anna and Ferdinand, the revelation that latter is gay certainly killed that.
• Snowlem:
  • Snow horses, made by Elsa. They look kind of like horses, but freeze the ground under them, need no rest, and are frighteningly fast.
  • Seeker, sometimes referred to as "snow greyhound". Like snow horses, she can freeze the ground under herself and needs no rest, but she can speak and has an attitude.

• Straight Gay: If he hadn't implied that, you wouldn't guess Ferdinand is gay. His surprised reaction to Anna being completely okay with his orientation implies that this might the safer way in this 'verse.
• Talking Animal: Seeker, although she's a Snowlem, so "animal" part is debatable.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: ...as the end of Kill it with fire proves. They were supposed to stop the Weselton attack. They blew up huge part of the trail and probably stopped Weselton advance.

• Uncanny Family Resemblance: Explicitly averted with Kai Madsen and his father. The former is mentioned to be Younger Than He Looks, while baron Madsen quite the opposite.

• Unstoppable Rage: King Friedrich's Hair-Trigger Temper manifests itself like that. It's so unstoppable, he has to lock himself in the room until it passes.
• War Is Hell: The war between Arendelle and Weselton is definitely shown this way, especially in Nexø's POV sequences. Casualties are horrible, people fight not only on swords and crossbows, but also with teeth and nails, The Chains of Commanding weight heavily on some characters and there are some gory moments.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Generals Potter and Windsor explain why you shouldn't have two generals commanding one army. Meyers and his captain lampshade the fact that with Arendelle army so close, the two commanders should probably focus more on fighting the enemy than each other.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Generals Kristiani, Berg and Olafsen. Despite what their plan looks like, they honestly believe that what they do is for the good of Arendelle.
• Wham Episode: Twice.
  • Dead man walking: We learn what the Berg's true plans are and Kai and Kristoff are just about to tell someone about it... and then the avalanche strikes.
  • Fighting the waves: Northern Wind is fighting a huge storm when Westerguard keep opens fire at it. Anna and Ferdinand appear to be the only survivors and are now stranded in the foreign land, with little hopes of survival.
• Xanatos Speed Chess:
  • Hans outright admits that he doesn't have any plan and just works with what he has.
    Hans: Planned? Dear Anna, I thought you'd know me better! There's no plan. I make it all up as I go along!
  • Michael appears to do the same. It seems he had an idea to take over the Isles for years, but now he's using all the opportunities he can get.
• Younger Than They Look: Kai's father, baron Hakan Madsen, is said to look like an elder statesman despite being in early forties, largely due to the fact that he grayed early.

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