Headscratchers / Frozen (2013)

WARNING: Headscratchers pages are for post-viewing discussions and thus have unmarked spoilers. Tread carefully!

Fridge Logic questions for Frozen Fever are here. The Olaf's Frozen Adventure page is here. And the Frozen II page is here.

Note: Headscratchers pages are for "sincere questions, and discussing Fridge Logic," not complaints.

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Why did Elsa let Hans and his group into the castle?

Couldn't she just block the bridge, the door or the staircase? Even if the bridge or the staircase ended up collapsing, she could easily build new ones. After she saw them (while they were dealing with Marshmallow, or even during the chase up the staircase), why didn't she simply block the bridge or the staircase?

• She panicked. There are better ways Elsa could have dealt with the situation, especially when we stop and think about it after we get back from the theater, but it's more difficult to think straight in the moment under that kind of stress. After all, people not always making the best choices in stressful situations is one of the themes of the film.
  Also, Rule of Drama.
  • Since writing the question I thought about it myself, and I suspect that Elsa knew the palace wasn't as sturdy as it looked, and that creating an ice block inside of it could make it collapse. It's also possible that she knew she didn't have full control over her powers at the moment, and was afraid to use them at all until she knew she had no choice.

It seems the perfect opportunity

• Why didn't Hans let the Duke's guard kill Elsa? He implied that he was going to do so anyways. If he didn't want to kill her unless there was no other choice, then why would he be willing to accelerate Anna's death? If he's worried that Anna would reject him, that doesn't make sense since he wasn't the one who killed her, and he could further manipulate her emotions. If he wanted to kill Elsa himself to get the glory, it wouldn't make sense since the executioner would have done so, and if the Guard killed Elsa for him, he would have gotten credit for leading the crew to her.
  • The objective of the mission was to find Anna, not to unfreeze Arendelle. Additionally, the Arendelle guards were probably loyal enough to Elsa (by virtue of her being their boss) to want to give her the benefit of the doubt, rather than assume she was cursing the kingdom on purpose. They are sworn servants of the crown and would not want to jump to that sort of conclusion about their monarch. Nor would they want to kill her to stop the winter if they knew she was causing it unintentionally. You speak of what is most logical, but their loyalty to the crown may trump any desire to ruthlessly solve the problem by any means necessary. Hans, since he wants to become Arendelle's next king, makes a priority of acting in a way that the Arendelle troops will see as heroic. It's not until after he could pin Anna's death on Elsa, that Hans feels he can finish Elsa off and have it accepted by the people he's hoping to rule. Prior to that, they would be less likely to agree with killing Elsa, and not trying to stop the Duke's men from doing it wouldn't have reflected well on him in their eyes. Although if his "accidental" hitting of the chandelier was on purpose, he could be trying to get the best of both worlds (look like a hero for trying to save the queen, but she dies anyway and is no longer an obstacle to his taking the throne.)
  • For what it's worth, in A Frozen Heart, Hans does not actually want to kill Elsa, at least at the time; his plan was to depose her without actually killing her, and he only resorts to an attempt on her life later. Sparing her life at the ice palace is perfectly in line with that plan.
  • Also, mourning was Serious Business at the time. Hans doesn't know Anna is dying until she tells him he needs to kiss her; he probably assumed she'd recover. In which case, she'd be expected to mourn her sister's death for months before even considering doing something as upbeat as getting married. In her mourning she might well want to respect her sister's last wish and get to know Hans better before the marriage, which was the last thing he wanted.
  • While it does make sense for him to avoid killing her while he still had to marry Anna to solidify his claim to power, the film devotes time to showing Hans looking up a the chandelier before very clearly redirecting the man's aim at it, rather than batting it away or aiming it in any direction other than up, which would have been much more logical choices if he was attempting to save her life. (It should be kept in mind that A Frozen Heart, as well as the other spin-off books, are not canon. There are other inconsistencies with the film in it as well.) He probably wanted to Make It Look Like an Accident and keep up his good publicity in front the witnessing guards, as discussed above.

Troll memory magic! How doth ye work?

• So to cure Anna, Grand Pabbie removed memories of Elsa's magic and told the parents not to reveal Elsa's powers. Therefore when Anna witnessed Elsa creating ice, how come she is not affected by it at all? Or is it because the curse had passed already?
  • Anna's first injury could have been a mind-based counterpart to the freezing of her heart later in the movie. The cure in the latter case was metaphorical, an act of true love, rather than some physical thing. Possibly it was the same the first time; Elsa's misaimed spell hurt Anna's mind, not her body, and removing her memories allowed the trolls to "change her mind," and heal the damage. Note the way Grand Pabbie said, "The heart is hard to change, but the head can be persuaded."
  • In fact that could be the reason why Grand Pabbie alters the memories to say that the snow was natural: if Anna's brain 'knows' that ice-magic is impossible, she won't be hurt by it, because the brain can be pretty stupid in some ways.
  • Grand Pabbie never actually said to not reveal Elsa's powers. The king decided to do that for the time Elsa is learning control after Pabbie warns about possible mobs if she doesn't learn control, frightening Elsa and prompting the king to hug her and say "No. We'll protect her. She can learn to control it. I'm sure. Until then, we'll lock the gates. We'll reduce the staff. We'll limit her contact with people and keep her powers hidden from everyone... including Anna." That implies continuing to keep Anna in the dark along with everyone else was supposed to be a temporary measure until Elsa's powers were controlled, with the goal of keeping Elsa safe. Maybe they were worried that Anna, who loved her sister but was also very young, might let something slip and then the Burn the Witch! treatment implied in the vision might ensue. Possibly overkill given the closed gates, but same could be said about their general efforts to protect Elsa with isolation, and that vision would be Nightmare Fuel for many parents. As for removing the memories, Pabbie probably wanted to remove all remaining traces of magic "to be safe," but never said anything about never creating new memories of magic.
    • Which in another world could mean that the best case scenario would be for Anna to be kept in the dark until it was decided Anna was responsible enough to be trusted with such a big secret, then they'd let her in, and maybe have Grand Pabbie restore her old memories of Elsa's magic (if that's even possible).

So who was running Arendelle?

• So who ran Arendelle during the time period in between the King and Queens' deaths and Elsa becoming eligible for regency? And how long was it? It looks like it might have been maybe 5 years tops. (Anna and Elsa didn't look very young when their parents left.) Is Arendelle a relatively small city-state that could run itself until they work with international trade?
  • Given Elsa's 21 years old when her coronation is held, she would have been 18 years old, a young adult, at the point when her parents died, so it's likely that the regent's functions would have been limited to running the kingdom. As for her behavior, that would definitely seem strange, but there are a lot of non-magical explanations that someone who was in contact with Elsa, like Kai or Gerda, could have given (including grieving for her dead parents).
• Based on her willingness to be coronated, Elsa was willing to interact with people when she deemed it necessary, even if she tried to mainly keep to herself. It's not out of the realm of possibility that she worked with a regent or council not seen on-screen, and Jen Lee has stated that a regent character who did not make it to the final script had been included in a previous draft.
• If there was a regent, why didn't Anna think to put them in charge instead of Hans? Or would they have left once the coronation ceremony was over? I know this is reaching into WMG, but it's a rather important plot point.
  • If there was a regent, the regent could have been either away from Arendelle, or passed away shortly before Elsa's coronation.
  • Regardless of the regent's situation, Anna putting Hans in charge is very much the kind of stupid thing that teens do when they fall in love, which is pretty much what Anna had just done. They are, yes, willing to trust that person and their love for that person above everything else, even people who have dealt with the kingdom's affairs for their entire lives. Anna definitely wanted to help her sister, but no doubt she also assumed that 'her' prince was quite obviously the right person to take over in her absence.
• Given that the time period the film is likely set in appears to be relatively modern (styles of clothing suggest a setting in roughly the 1840s), it's hard to say just what level of power the monarch really had in Arendelle. Most likely, it's similar to forms of constitutional monarchy where the ruler has real power, but there are other branches of government that can act on their own to carry out day to day political functions. The prime minister or equivalent would probably act as an elected regent until Elsa turned 21. As for why Anna wouldn't put him or her in control of the city state while she was gone...well, she really doesn't have the authority to appoint anyone as anything since she's just a member of the royal family and not even legally old enough to hold office. She likely doesn't care much about political nuance, and with the chaos in Arendelle because of her sister creating an eternal winter, it's likely that the power-hungry Hans is pretty much the only person who wants to be involved in running the state.
  • Indeed, Anna's snap decision to put Hans "in charge" when she left may not have been a transfer of power over the nation, at all. She may simply have been tasking him to manage things at the palace, which is something she'd have the authority to do as a member of the household whose palace it was. Anna wouldn't have been legally authorized to give him power over the entire country, as in the absence of a death or formal abdication on Elsa's part - and no, running off in tears without a word doesn't count as the latter - she's only the royal heir, not the sovereign.
  • According to both the script and A Frozen Heart, Elsa is 18 and Anna 15 when their parents die, and thus Elsa is old enough to handle things, well, somehow (take this with a grain of salt). Though as mentioned earlier, Jennifer Lee has said earlier drafts of the script had a regent who ruled Arendelle in Elsa’s name, who then got cut in the sake of story flow. (The regent probably exists offscreen in the musical's version of the story, since that version has Agnar and Iduna die while Anna and Elsa are still in their single digit years. Unless, maybe a council runs things until she came of age; this depends on whether or not you have a headcanon where Arendelle has succession laws designed to prevent the throne from being received by someone without the capacity to make rational decisions)
  • There's a line in the movie about Elsa getting coronated when she does because she's "come of age," so there are probably rules saying she isn't fully the ruler until she turns 21, although it's unknown what their exact restrictions are.
  • Coronation day is not the day a monarch officially becomes King or Queen. That actually happens on their "accession day," when the death of their predecessor is confirmed. The coronation always takes places a few months to a few years afterwards because they are supposed to be happy events for everyone. Best not to have them taking place during the period of mourning for the last monarch, not to mention the travel times for visiting dignitaries in an age when traveling from one kingdom to another could take several days. So, in other words, Princess Elsa became Queen Elsa as soon as her parents' deaths were confirmed, and Anna became a 15 year old Crown Princess. And so Elsa had been ruling Arendelle for three years when the movie's main events happened.
  • It's possible for a monarch to have a regent after becoming King or Queen and even after their coronation day. Mary, Queen of Scots became Queen when she wasn't even a week old and had her coronation before her first birthday (the crown had to be held over her head because it didn't fit her yet). Despite having the title and coronation, she was still too young to rule, so an aristocrat named James Hamilton served as her regent. Given Elsa's not nearly as young that, she still may have done some ruling despite not being of age yet, but how much is up to the audience's imagination.

Kristoff doesn't tell Anna about the earlier incident?

So Kristoff knew what happened with Elsa when she and Anna were kids. He was right there in the clearing. He saw the trolls talking to Agnarr and Iduna, and even if he couldn't hear their exchange with Grand Pabbie, he grew up with the trolls long enough for them to have told him what was said… and yet he never outright tells Anna what happened? At the very least, shouldn't he have said something more specific to Anna when he brought her to the trolls instead of some enigmatic “I’ve seen them do it before” remark?

• Maybe he didn't realize at the time that he was seeing the royal family of Arendelle.Kristoff was a little kid when he witnessed the healing and it appears that he was far enough away that it was difficult to hear (Bulda asks him to be quiet, so she can hear better.) Since he was viewing the process from a distance, he wouldn't have been close enough to see anyone's face in detail, and that's why he didn't recognize her right away when he encountered her at Oaken's. (And Anna had her pigtails in a bun, meaning that the skunk stripe is even less noticeable).
• However, he spent 13 years growing up with the trolls. In those 13 years, the chances are very strong that Kristoff asked about what he saw that night, and learned the truth. So he may have known all along that Elsa had ice powers, even if he himself thought it was a little far-fetched and out-there, and that Princess Anna was the girl healed. He does to know that Elsa was behind the Endless Winter without Anna telling him.
• Assuming Kristoff did know, Grand Pabbie probably told him, and emphasized how it was important for them to keep his knowledge of Elsa's powers a secret, because there is the potential that people might try to hurt Elsa if they found out about her powers. This wouldn't be much of a problem for Kristoff to do, because, as an ice harvester and mountain man, he doesn't spend a lot of time in the villages, so he wouldn't have had the occasions to talk to people a lot, and given he seems to mostly ever be with Sven, he's not the kind who likes to gossip.
• There is another reason Kristoff and the trolls never told Anna about this (since this was after the secret was out and so there was no need to keep her from knowing about Elsa): if Anna learned she had been struck once before by Elsa's powers, this would make her even more inclined to fear and doubt her sister, and thus she would hesitate to sacrifice herself for her. At the very least, it would make it harder for her to perform an act of true love for her—realizing Elsa blasted her at the ice castle was bad enough, but to know it had happened once before as well? Far better to let her remain in ignorance so she had a chance of saving everyone; afterward, assuming Elsa's powers didn't remove the memory loss along with the white lock, there would be time enough to restore the memories and explain what happened.
  • But Kristoff didn't know that the act of true love had to be a sacrifice, because he believed that she needed to go to Hans, and based on his reaction to Pabbie's proclamation and his interactions with Sven, he truly believed it. And he also didn't know that Elsa would be in danger, so why would he worry about affecting the likelihood of Anna making the choice to sacrifice her life for her? Besides, if Anna didn't hold the recent strike against Elsa, as was probably clear to Kristoff, why would she be angrier about a less serious accident from when they were children?
• Kristoff does seem to realize that they're the royal family. He acts unsurprised during the sled ride when Anna says she was raised in a castle and asks her "So tell me, what made the queen go all ice-crazy?" despite Anna not having told him (at least on-screen) that Elsa was the one behind the storm, suggesting he knew the girl with ice powers was Princess-turned-Queen Elsa and Anna was the younger princess he had seen that night. Pabbie also addresses the king as "Your Majesty" while Kristoff is eavesdropping.

• Jennifer Lee has said that Kristoff does know that Anna is the girl he saw Grand Pabbie heal and he didn't say so because he thought it was funny. (Keep in mind he does start off as kind of a jerk for a good chunk of the movie).
• Alternatively, we can go Death of the Author and say he doesn't remember enough to recognize her.

Freeze time you so wonky!

• This may be obvious, but if Anna's sacrifice is what broke her curse, shouldn't she have been healed before her whole body froze? Unless there's some Rule of Drama in effect...
  • I saw it as her making the sacrifice at just the right moment. Exactly as the freezing was complete, but at the point when the curse could still be broken. A perfect in-between. Which, yes, is Rule of Drama and Rule of Cool.
  • Another interpretation is that Anna started thawing from the inside (heart magic and all that) and it simply took a while for her body to thaw completely. If memory serves, in the opening scene, Anna wasn't instantly healed — it took a few seconds, which makes sense, since her chest was the first (external) part of her body to thaw.
  • Another thing to note is the shockwave which knocked back Hans after the freeze. None of Elsa's magic has had shockwaves included. Wind yes, shock, no. The shockwave was the beginning of Anna's thaw.
  • You can also see it as that, because it was actually Elsa's frozen heart that needed mending, it wasn't until Anna was frozen that Elsa realized how much Anna loved her and vice versa. So, it was only after Anna was frozen that the full magic could be completed when Elsa openly and fully expressed her love for Anna.
  • It does take a whole ton of mental devotion to willingly put oneself in front of an incoming sword and stay there. It was only when there was no longer a possibility for Anna to back away out of fear that it was truly an Act of True Love.

Why did Elsa build Olaf?

• Why did Elsa create Olaf during her musical number and then just leave him there? She was obviously surprised to see him walking and talking later when Anna brought him with her, so she didn't plan on bringing him to life. And why did he wander off instead of following her to the castle? Also, if he and Elsa never spoke until then, how did Olaf know who she was and what his name was supposed to be?
  • She was just playing around with her magic when she conjured him up and thought it would be fun to do. Since she didn't expect him to come to life, no reason to stick around in the same spot.
  • In the very beginning of the movie, when the two sisters were kids, there was a brief scene where we see them build Olaf on the ballroom floor. This was the same snowman that Elsa unconsciously brought to life later in the film. Anna was surprised when first encountering him because he was a long lost childhood memory suddenly brought to life, while Elsa was surprised to see him for the same reason plus the fact that was probably the moment she realized she has the power to bring life to snow. In "Let it Go", you can see her build Olaf, but he was just lifeless at the time and she just assumed she was building the same normal snowman just to test her powers again. Olaf probably came to life much later and was probably too far away from Elsa's castle to know anything about it. From being with Anna, Olaf knew about her sister Elsa before being formally introduced with her.
  • I assumed Olaf wanted to know what summer was like and knew about what it was because he was built in summer. I also thought that he was built totally subconsciously, since Olaf was one of the last things she built with her magic back when she obviously still felt comfortable with it.
  • Well, Olaf was given basic intelligence to speak so I would assume that includes other basic facts. He might know that a donkey is some sort of weird animal but he hasn't seen it so he doesn't know what it truly looks like.
  • Elsa builds Olaf when she's in a good mood for the first time in years, and since her powers seem to be enhanced and more controllable when she's in a better mood, it's good fairytale logic (this is a story about a magic witchy ice queen, remember) that the first thing she'd build with her new sense of power and freedom would be a snowman so perfect that he came to life.
  • Olaf represents the love and good times of her childhood with her sister, the last time she felt happy (he's the snowman they made at the time). It's not a coincidence that he's the first thing she created when feeling truly happy and free again.
  • Following the idea above, Olaf is the snowman Anna has begged Elsa to build over the past 13 years as seeing in "Do you want to build a snowman". Now without fear of using her powers, she builds Olaf, maybe thinking of Anna and the good old times they spend together.
• On another note, where did the coal and sticks come from? Elsa's ice/snow powers could create an inanimate Olaf of course, but where did she get the sticks and coal? When she builds him as a child, even a carrot appears.
  • Seeing as the little girls obviously do this regularly, they probably had the accessories stashed somewhere. Elsa makes the snow but the girls build Olaf by hand, and we see Elsa 'dressing' him with the coal buttons and little twigs for arms. So it's probably mundane coal and twigs that they found in a fireplace (and those will be literally everywhere in the castle; this is before modern air conditioning was invented), and for Olaf's nose, Elsa probably swipes it from the kitchen and hides it in the nearest coal bucket ready for use whenever she and Anna do create their late night winter playground (which as implied does appear to happen very often).
    • The carrot we can assume they swiped from the kitchen. That must have happened off-screen sometime during their “let’s have fun in the snow before everything goes to shit” montage. We can also assume that the stones used for Olaf’s eyes and buttons are likely lumps of coal, which could have also been found in the kitchen/staff quarters areas as there are probably coal-based furnaces around those areas. It’s possible they’re charred bits of logs from a fireplace, but coal is the more likely option.
    • And now we get to the twigs. Because that is an excellent question to be asking: just where did an eight year old and a five year old get twigs from in a large, ornately decorated castle? There aren’t many places I can think of that would have twigs just lying around. Maybe an old broom? But the sticks making up his arms don’t look like they’d be used in a broom. I also doubt this was the time period to be decorating interiors with random sticks. None of the pieces are big enough to be considered kindling, either, so they likely wouldn’t have even been brought inside with the other firewood. So, as a result we can assume they got them from outside. It might just be that wooded courtyard we saw in "For the First Time in Forever", but still…outside. Through several main corridors, past several large and heavy doors, and outside into a courtyard that is encompassed by either more castle or a wall (likely) patrolled by guards.
    • Which gets off topic, but how did these two giggling dorks sneak through the halls, gather up a carrot, several lumps of coal, and head outside to find the perfect sticks for snowmen hands/hair without getting caught? Seriously, if Anna had never been struck by Elsa’s magic the first thing I’d be thinking about if I was their mother and caught them in the act was ‘you got how far outside without a single person noticing???’ Where the hell were the guards? And servants working night shifts? We know the castle was fully staffed at this point, and unless the King and Queen sleep in their day clothes it probably wasn’t that late, so people should still have been up. So what gives? Are they ninjas or are the guards and servants complacent (which would come with guilt felt by all the members of the staff who had gotten complacent in allowing the princesses to play)?
    • If the girls had planned in advance to sneak outside and build a snowman that night, they could easily have saved back the carrot from a meal or begged one off a stable-worker to "feed the horses", as well as selecting twigs and coal from the fuel supplies at any fireplace in the palace. They hid these materials away until nightfall, then brought them outside for playtime.
  • When Elsa creates the living Olaf, it's likely there are sticks buried in the snow on the mountaintop. Doesn't explain the coal buttons, though. (Unless he wandered by a mine and some buttons flew out to attach themselves to him, which I doubt.)
    • Where Elsa is on the North Mountain at this point is way above the tree line. There are a few trees, but they’re further down. They all also appear to be pine trees, which would have a much coarser bark than the sticks that appear as Olaf’s arms and would also likely be covered in pine needles, even if they were already on the ground. When Elsa starts to create Olaf, in the flurry of magic two twigs just kinda come whizzing into the frame, which begs the question: just how far down the mountain did those sticks come from? Also…how did they get up there so fast? I’ve built snowmen before. Finding just the right sticks for hands is hard enough when you have a whole afternoon. Elsa got those sticks up from the forest below in, like, half a second. She seriously must have some kind of psychic ability to find only the best materials for snowmen.
    • The easiest explanation for the buttons is that they’re merely rocks - perfectly sized, round rocks that conveniently happened to get pulled out of the snow right where Elsa decided to build Olaf. It’s a mountain, even if it is covered in snow, so it’s not really a stretch to assume that there were rocks just underneath.
  • To answer the question of Olaf wandering off, the Fridge Brilliance page on Frozen Fever suggests that Elsa's unconscious creations seem to have homing mechanisms of their own. That supposedly explains how Olaf is able to find Anna so easily in the middle of the wilderness, or make his way through a large and unfamiliar palace to the room where Hans had locked her in to die: Elsa had created Olaf from the memory of her childhood playtime with Anna, and unknowingly granted him the ability to always find her little sister. (This later extends to the snowgies, and the giant snowball she sneezes out of the birthday bukkehorn and which flies across the sea to hit Hans in the Southern Isles)
• I also get that for animation appeal Olaf’s eyes aren’t rocks/coal anymore and appear more like actual eyes, but that only raises more questions. Are they, like, organic eyes now? Elsa can make organs out of rocks? The twig arms that can move even detached from Olaf’s body are one thing, but the eyes? Or do the eyes only look like eyes to us, but to the actual characters in the movie they’re still rocks? Dammit, it’s a cartoon snowman in a kids movie. Why am I thinking so much about this?

The exact source of Elsa's magic

• Why was Elsa born with magical powers? The promotional materials say something about a prophecy, but there's no explanation given in the movie. She was just born with them, and that was that.
  • She was born with magical powers because you wouldn't have much of a story if she hadn't been born with them.
  • It was said in an interview with Jennifer Lee that it was going to be explained by a troll narrator that every time there's a certain alignment of Saturn, a child is born with ice magic 1,000 years later, but she eventually decided to just say she was born with them and leave it at that to avoid it sounding too complicated. In a way, since Elsa was born on some alignment of Saturn, it actually makes a lot of sense. Why? Well, what are Saturn's rings made of? Rock and ice. Even more significant, what is one of Saturn's moons? Enceladus, a world covered entirely in ice◊. An example of a specific planetary alignment actually picked for a specific reason. (As for the "prophecy" thing mentioned in the original question, the prophecy was about the whole "A ruler with a frozen heart" thing and stuff about a "sword sacrifice", so I think this can still be stated as the confirmed circumstances.)
  • The movie is set in a world where this sort of thing happens. There doesn't have to be a reason why it happens to a particular person.
  • According to the sequel, it has something to do with a quintet of elemental spirits that Elsa and Anna were born into. It's specifically suggested that Elsa was given magic because her mother saved her father's life when the two were young, despite being from warring peoples.

Why did Anna tell Elsa about the Endless Winter?

• Okay, so even though Anna knows for a fact that Elsa's powers are triggered when she gets scared or stressed out, she decides that it would be a good idea to tell Elsa that she accidentally trapped her hometown in an eternal winter. What exactly did she expect that Elsa's emotional response to that news would be?
  • Actually Anna doesn't understand how Elsa's powers work, not in the slightest, because of the trolls erasing her memories. Though that doesn't explain why she thought it was a good idea to keep insisting she come home when snow started blowing around the room.
    • She saw Elsa's powers go off when she was freaked out at the castle, so she knows they respond to Elsa's emotions.
    • Not necessarily- Elsa's outburst in the ballroom looked like she'd done it because she lost her temper, not necessarily like it was totally involuntary. Elsa's horrified body language could have read as instant regret at what she'd done in anger, without anyone thinking that was total Power Incontinence (after all, getting so angry that you hit someone- even if you'd never normally be violent- doesn't mean you have no control of what your hands do).
  • Would it really be better to not tell Elsa about Arendelle's situation, whatever the risk? When Elsa is the only one who might be able to help?
  • Yeah, I pretty much agree with the above that Anna had to explain because it was a time-sensitive problem. Also, Anna clearly expected Elsa's emotional response to be exactly what it was. She's stalling and visibly cringing when she explains the eternal winter to Elsa. Pay attention to her facial expressions during that entire scene; she's very reluctant to actually tell Elsa what's going on in Arendelle once it becomes apparent that Elsa has no idea, keeps repeating the word "deep" while finding the strength to say "snow", and visibly winces as she finally says that word. She wanted to break it to her more gently, but Elsa kept playing the, "Everybody's safe and fine if you leave me alone, so I'm kicking you out of my ice palace and you will never get another chance at this if you don't blurt it out now!" card. She had to say it before Elsa slammed the door in her face, or nobody ever would. It seems like the issue was that Anna only realized Elsa didn't know about the eternal winter during their conversation in the castle (when Elsa said, "No, Anna, I belong here, alone, where I can be who I am, without hurting anyone". Anna's dialogue in the song that follows does seem like she initially assumed Elsa knows about the problem but is too scared to come back and/or fix it), so she had like thirty seconds to figure out how to explain it tactfully, and failed to do so before her mouth got ahead of her brain and she blurted it out.
  • Anna went up there assuming Elsa would be able to reverse the winter with a snap of her fingers. She thought Elsa could control her powers at that point. She didn't realize that Elsa had no idea how to thaw her own ice. Either she had thought Elsa already knew about the frozen kingdom or else she had to reluctantly break the news to her then and there.
  • Anna's motive is largely a selfish one. She finally knows what's wrong, and she thinks that means that now she can be in her sister's heart (and in her space, through the door) and that will fix everything, because for Anna, that WILL fix everything she thinks is wrong. But Elsa's problem is more complicated. Only Elsa can solve it, and Anna's *desire* for her to fix things isn't enough motive for Elsa to break through her fear. Desire still leaves room for Elsa's fear, fear of letting Anna and everyone down. It isn't until Anna unconditionally loves Elsa that Elsa has room to understand what she needs to do.
    • What's selfish about not wanting the entire country cursed? The selfish thing would have been not telling Elsa and letting everyone else suffer just because she didn't want to upset her big sister. Anna already loves Elsa unconditionally. She refused to join the crowd and turn on her when Elsa's powers were revealed, and she has more reason than anyone to distrust Elsa, since Elsa spent most of their lives up to that point ignoring Anna (the audience knows why Elsa did, but Anna's Locked Out of the Loop), Elsa just revealed those powers by throwing a bunch of ice spikes at her, nearly impaling Anna, in anger during a fight. Rather than letting the Duke, who clearly distrusted Elsa, send his own men, she stood up to him and volunteered to risk her life going through the blizzard herself to talk to Elsa. She also is perfectly willing to give Elsa space even when Anna wants to spend time with her, as we see in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" ("Go away Anna!" "Okay, bye") and during the coronation (trying to tell Kai she's not sure Elsa wants him to place them together). The difference is that during those times, Anna was the only one hurt by Elsa's reaction, but here there are other people who are in serious danger.
  • Anna's also very young and naive and doesn't know Elsa very well. When she first set out she didn't realize quite what a state of terror Elsa was in- when she's talking to Kristoff in the sled, she's under the impression that Elsa was mad at her, for her behavior with Hans and the ensuing argument. Perhaps only by the time she makes it to Elsa's balcony does Anna seem to get a bit more of an idea that Elsa's problems are a lot worse than she initially thought, but it seems to be what she thought when she first started looking for Elsa.
  • Anna's plan seems to consist of just calming Elsa down and reassuring her that she's still wanted by her people in Arendelle, on the assumption that she just needs to come home to get it all sorted out. Which isn't entirely stupid, and explains why Anna thought she was the best person to do it and should go up there without backup. It's not even like she was wholly wrong- being there for Elsa did turn out to be the solution, sorta.
  • Let's be fair to Anna here, because "you've completely frozen your entire kingdom to the point where people are in danger of freezing to death very very soon" is kind of an important element of this situation that has to be addressed at some point sooner rather than later. There's being tactful and walking on thin ice (no pun intended), and then there's ignoring the frozen Elephant in the Room.
• But why didn't she then shut up instead of continually talking when her sister is beginning to have a panic attack?
  • It would have been smarter to back off and let Elsa get over the initial rush of panic, yes, but there is no explanation required for why touchy-feely Anna wanted to be close to her panicking and vulnerable sister.
  • Anna's a teenager who barely has experience with human interaction in general, let alone training on how to help someone having a panic attack. Besides, she's under as much stress as Elsa right now, and if everyone reacted perfectly under that kind of pressure, Elsa wouldn't be panicking in the first place. Elsa even does know that makes things worse, but it's difficult to act rationally in those circumstances, even if you know better - which Anna doesn't. Heck, if we're classifying it as a "panic attack," then we're saying it's an expression of mental illness, and it's unfair to expect Anna to automatically know how to handle something like that any better than simply giving encouragement. Elsa's response is unhelpful yet natural under the stressful circumstances, and the same thing applies to Anna's.

Why did Grand Pabbie suggest hiding the magic?

• Why did the troll remove Anna's memories and tell Elsa's parents to hide her powers? If people around Elsa knew about her abilities, they would be more careful, they wouldn't force her to take off her gloves and would try to shield her from strong emotions. Yes, they would fear her, but at least chances of accidents (like the one that triggered the plot) would be reduced.
  • The "fear will be the enemy" line was followed by Grand Pabbie showing them an image of people fearing Elsa, causing her to be afraid, so it still fits — it's interesting because he's still not altogether that helpful, and in fact the King takes his advice in a much worse way than was probably intended. The Troll Chief recommends hiding the knowledge of her powers to prevent others from fearing her, but the King goes too far and hides the girl away from everyone. He also seems to not actually know the secret to controlling Elsa's powers, either, or else he'd have told them.
  • Grand Pabbie does also specifically say that Elsa needs to learn to control her abilities. He never says hide them. The problem is that Agdar takes that to mean suppressing them instead of how to use them. If we use a bomb analogy, he thought of it as a Dead Man's Switch that needed to always be pressed instead of Elsa learning about bombs to be able to make pyrotechnics instead of explosives.
  • If Word of God by Jennifer Lee is anything to go by, it has been a very long time—likely 1000 years, in fact, at the least.^note  Apparently a child would be born with ice magic 1000 years after Saturn was in alignment with something, which makes sense because, you know Saturn's rings are part ice and its moon Europa is an entire world made of ice (they just eventually decided to just say she was born with them and nothing else because, to quote Jennifer Lee, "the more you explained the more questions you had about magic and the rules"). And if we assume that that happens to only one child in the world and ice magic isn't genetic, the last one might not have even been anywhere near Arendelle. And according to the Essential Guide, Bulda (Kristoff's adoptive mother) is "700 years young". Assuming that the last child (maybe the original Snow Queen?) was born close to there and encountered the trolls as well, Grand Pabbie is likely the only one we see in the film who encountered the last one.
• This is something that How It Should've Ended pointed out: if the trolls are "love experts" as Kristoff calls them, why didn't they tell the King and Queen that the answer to controlling Elsa's powers was love instead of isolating her? It would've made sense if the King came up with the idea after they left the trolls...but he comes up with the idea and tells them this plan...right in front of them.
  • Agnarr also says the isolation was supposed to be a temporary measure while Elsa gets a handle on it. His response to the image is, "No. We'll protect her. She can learn to control it, I'm sure. Until then, we'll lock the gates, we'll reduce the staff, limit her contact with people, and keep her powers hidden from everyone." Given the risk that Elsa might herself be killed, or accidentally kill someone else (which also wouldn't be good for her, either, at least psychologically, and especially not if a scared and angry mob responds, not to mention for whichever poor souls were the people actually killed), and was very young at the time, that probably didn't sound so ridiculous - as a training period precaution, rather than a permanent solution. That bomb analogy was a good one and that's not even factoring the possibility of prejudice affecting how people outside of her family might react to an Ice Witch for a queen, let alone one with Power Incontinence. Try telling a scared seven-year-old Person of Mass Destruction that the key to avoiding Power Incontinence is simply "love" and expecting them to instantly gain a complete grasp of it. Adult audience members are still debating how it works five years after the film's release.
    • The isolation almost certainly became as drastic as it did because of Elsa's choices. Agnarr wanted to limit her contact, but the "She can learn to control it, I'm sure" suggests he only intended for this to be a short-term thing. He and his wife hadn’t figured out how to control Elsa’s magic, and it was getting more difficult to do so. After the gloves, and as Elsa got older, there would have been more reasons to start relaxing that initial rule (especially since this was when it would be time to consider finding prospective suitors for Elsa to marry). However, Elsa’s the one who started backing off even more. She’s the one who refused touch. She’s the one who continued to keep the gates closed after her parents’ deaths. It was Agnarr’s initial gut reaction that caused all of it, but Elsa drew it out longer than anyone probably wanted, because by the time it was clear to Agnarr that the isolation was only making things worse (which can be pegged around the time she scrambles back into a corner and begs him not to come any closer for his own protection), Elsa was already trapped in the mindset that she needed to keep distance between herself and others.
  • The big problem is that Pabbie had the answer Elsa had been searching for the whole time and they didn’t give it to her. They told her and her parents something completely misguiding. They told her fear would be her enemy, which was technically right, but instead of explaining how it was her own fear that would prove to be her biggest problem, what they showed her instead was a mob of other people reacting in fear before descending on her like a pack of rabid wolves. So if a magical being were to tell you that, but show you that, what would be your assumption?
  • Grand Pabbie might not have even realized that it would be Elsa's fear that would end up being the big problem. We don't know the extent of his knowledge of ice magic, and there's a good chance he really is thinking of other people's fear when he gives the warning, hence the image he conjures. After all, fear's not the only thing that can set off Elsa's Power Incontinence, as we see confirmed in Frozen Fever.
  • It's also established that "your own fear will be your enemy" is not the answer Elsa was searching for. Multiple characters do tell her not to panic, and she tries not to feel fear, but it doesn't stop her Power Incontinence or the Endless Winter.

Why doesn't it work every time?

• If True Love is supposedly what defrosts Elsa's ice, why didn't Anna get defrosted immediately after Elsa accidentally struck her in the beginning, and horrified, immediately rushed to her side? Clearly she showed deep concern and love for her sister (considering the song that they were best friends) and even at that young age, if she's powerful enough to create a ballroom flurry, why shouldn't the opposite be true? Furthermore, even though it was an Act of True Love^note if it's a semantics issue that ultimately caused the defrost, how did Elsa's love, by itself, defrost the world?
  • To be true love, it has to be reciprocated. Anna demonstrated her love for Elsa by sacrificing herself for her, and Elsa demonstrated her love for Anna by crying over her sacrifice. This was the Act of True Love required to thaw Anna's frozen heart. Their parents' love couldn't thaw Anna's brain because fixing the mind requires a different procedure than fixing the heart. Also, love isn't the key to controlling Elsa's powers, it's the key to thawing them. Elsa demonstrates plenty of control over her powers any time she's onscreen and not under the influence of fear.
  • Alternate interpretation: when Elsa's ice magic struck Anna, then for the first time (in Anna's memory), her sister had hurt her. The internal innocent trust melted into fear and doubt, and it accelerated when Grand Pabbie let her know that she had been put into mortal danger. "You have ice in your heart put there by your sister. Unless removed..." When Anna gave herself up for Elsa, she cast the ice out of her own heart by casting aside that doubt and treating Elsa as if, as she believed in the beginning of the conflict, that she and the world had nothing to fear from Elsa. Anna's sacrifice melted her own heart, and Elsa's reaction has very little to do with it; when Elsa grieved over Anna and then understood the way she felt about her sister, she was able to melt her own 'frozen heart' and bring back summer.

You go girl! Wait, Elsa, what are you gonna eat?

• Okay, so Elsa storms off into the wilderness, she feels free, she doesn't have to hide her powers, it's totally awesome, she's never going back, yadayada. But what exactly is she planning to eat out there?
  • She wasn't planning anything. She was throwing a tantrum, followed by a good long sulk. We've all done it.
  • MAGIC!
  • Use the creatures she creates to hunt food for her.
  • Or maybe she doesn't need to eat to begin with. She seemingly has no issue with endothermic taxing ("The cold never bothered me anyway"), so maybe she doesn't need energy or nutrients. She is probably like a zombie, only animated by ice magic rather than dark.
  • But she can eat and enjoy chocolate. So either she doesn't need to eat, but can do it, she would have had snow beast get food for her, or she planned to starve herself to death. Or you know, she's being irrational and panicked just a little to much, which she did, and didn't think things through. Several times in a row, in fact. Her happiness at being "free" was 1). very sudden, 2). seemly in denial (really, she had NO clue she froze the kingdom and thought no one would come for her), and 3). complete Mood Whiplash. It's not hard to say that she's depressed and sudden "high" periods can end up being temporary. She's happy to be free of the mental restraints, but she's deluding herself into thinking that she's found the perfect solution.
  • Maybe she took cooking lessons from Jessie's mom?
  • I'd say she just didn't think about it. She wanted to get as far away as possible from people she could hurt or be hurt by, as quickly as possible. I doubt she stopped to think about food, and then after that she's probably still riding the emotional rollercoaster for long enough that it doesn't occur to her before she's brought back to Arendelle. Despite the triumphant themes of Let It Go, Elsa's new life in the mountains is just as unsustainable as her attempts to bottle up her magic. The only way for her to move forward is to make peace with her powers and the people in her life, as she does by the end.
  • Elsa can move snow around as well as conjure it up. She shouldn't have much of a problem parting the snow over patches of berry bushes to collect whatever is there, or cracking the ice on a frozen lake and going fishing.

Anna, your hair is odd.

• Is Anna's hair color blonde or red? In the current profile pic here she looks blonde, but in the movie her hair was a really red-blonde?
  • In a novelization, Anna, describes her hair as strawberry blonde.
  • Scriptwriter/co-director Jen Lee said "it's light strawberry brown," but also responded to one fan who asked about the discrepancy between that and the books with "There's nothing official. It's just darker in the film than books. If it seems more strawberry blond that's fine."

How do magic dresses work?

• This has been bugging me: in "Let It Go", when Elsa undergoes her Evil Costume Switch, she forms her new dress using her powers, so it's covering her other dress...but her new one has a slit in the hem, showing her bare legs underneath. What the heck happened to her old dress?
  • A Wizard Did It.
  • Micro-crystals of ice, forming in the fabric to break the threads so her old dress disintegrated underneath the new one?
    • Then what happened to her hoses?

Let It Go! and explain!

• There is a theory that Elsa's powers represent homosexuality. What does "Let It Go" represent in this regard?
  • Her coming out of the closet presumably.
  • "Let It Go," is a song about rejecting what society might think about you and exalting yourself for what makes you, you. It really doesn't matter what Elsa's powers represent (sexuality, talents, personality), its meaning really doesn't change.
  • Think of it this way: Elsa is born with certain traits linked to her emotions that, while not inherently bad, are embarrassing to her parents. Her parents tell her to repress these feelings ("conceal, don't feel"), and this repression is linked to being a good member of the family ("be the good girl you've always had to be"). When her secret does come out, some people think she's dangerous and a monster. When she rejects society and decides to celebrate herself, she changes from a high-necked, long-sleeved dress into a low-cut shimmery thing with a slit down the leg. I definitely saw it as a metaphor for coming out of the closet.
  • Except for all LGBT people I know, "coming out" meant integrating into society with their secret revealed, not running into the wilderness to live as a hermit. If anything, Elsa is even worse off after being "outed" than she was in the palace, where she at least had books, servants, etc. She chose to isolate herself from society out of the fear of accidentally hurting someone with her powers, which is pretty much the opposite of coming out: she only dug herself deeper. To me, "Let It Go" is more of a Then Let Me Be Evil moment, minus her actually being evil.
  • No metaphor can be perfect, but that's a bit like splitting hairs. The key point is that Elsa is no longer ashamed of her inherent attributes and therefore no longer hides them, just like LGBT individuals should no longer be ashamed of their inherent attributes and therefore no longer hide them. In the real world, societal acceptance is a top priority in case you want a confortable, long life, but many LGBT citizens came out because it is the right thing to do, regardless of the consequence (i.e. Alan Turing). Elsa basically came out, she accepted herself for who she was and no longer cares if anyone has a dissenting opinion. She simply did them a little favour by residing in the mountains so that her powers would not affect anyone directly, but it's not like she's particularly concerned about whereas anyone is still a prick and goes after her (until she is informed that her carelessness doomed everyone that is).
  • I saw a great deal of honest joy in Elsa over actually using/embracing her power, but I agree that in the long term such isolation would not be the best goal. The true triumph was not the mountaintop keep, but the skating rink in the palace courtyard.
  • I thought that "Let it Go" was a moment of Elsa accepting herself, but not accepting her position in society. She only kinda somewhat accepts herself. It's like the moment where, if we're using homosexuality as an example, one realizes that one is gay and begins to celebrate that within yourself, while still being absolutely terrified of what everyone else around you will do when they find out. She has found freedom within herself... but she still needs to reconcile the fact that just because she's okay with herself, doesn't mean that others will be. So she runs off and hides in a tower that serves as a metaphorical prison. She's more free than before, but still trapped within her fear. She accepts herself, but not what accepting herself will mean for her life. It's a big, important step... but she's still got a ways to go, which is why the movie doesn't end there.
  • When you're from a particularly conservative community, you can only truly come out and be yourself after leaving it (and, worst case, breaking off all contact like Elsa meant to do). In a perfect world this wouldn't be necessary, but this ain't a perfect world. Reconnecting with your birth family after you've accepted yourself (and worn that shimmery ice dress at the Pride parade) is a nice bonus.
  • Perhaps this is way off, but I thought of it as very similar to the very blackest pit of depression, exactly as described in Hyperbole and a Half. This is the stage where she's eventually so tired of hurting, she...stops caring. About anything. Which gives her a giddy sort of courage, because it means nobody can do anything to hurt her anymore. This is Elsa saying "fuck it, I'm not playing anymore". The problem is that it is not freedom from depression, it is its heart. It is isolating, and dare I say, cold. However, when people reach this point, they don't even realize there's a problem. It feels good not to be afraid, right? The tone of the song is so upbeat because she thinks things are looking up, when nothing could be further from the truth.
  • In the context of the movie, I figured the scene was about not hiding behind the mask she had created anymore. Had it not been for the accident, she would probably be a lot more like Anna. I think one of the key things people seem to forget, even Elsa, is that her parents' original intent was not to hide her powers but to learn to control them. They just believed that controlling them meant her powers not seeping out when she didn't want them to. She had to become this prim and proper woman that had to be unemotional because they knew her strong emotions caused her powers to start flaring up. Unfortunately, the only strong emotions were from fear through an endless cycle of losing control of her powers scaring her, and being scared making her lose control more. It's the whole "world of cardboard" problem, but she went about learning to live in that world by staying in one place without touching anything instead of practicing with disposable items to understand her relation to everything.
  • You guys are also totally missing the "born with it or cursed" moment too, which echoes the whole "gays are born that way!!" "No they aren't!!!" Debate that once raged. Also "let it go" is about letting go of caring about what everyone thinks- which as a gay raised in conservative Texas, I understood. Because sure coming out is about integrating yourself as your true self into society... You're missing the really important fact that it MUST be a society that ACCEPTS you. And anybody who doesn't can quite frankly (expletive deleated) themselves. So yes the song and scene are quite accurate. As is pointing out the whole "conceal don't feel" part which many gays have had to deal with- myself included. So while Frozen may not have been created specifically as a gay allegory... It works surprisingly well. Well enough that I (and a few others I know) have shown it to our parents for that very reason.

Elsa, champion of the 4 mile Ice Sprint

• Ok, so how in the world did Elsa get up the north mountain so fast on foot when it took Anna and Kristoff at least 3/4th of a day to go the same distance on horse/reindeer back as well as walking? How did Elsa get up there with enough time to build her ice castle in 1/2 the time
  • Elsa didn't need to stop and dress for the cold. She didn't have to worry about normal clothes being frozen solid by either sweating or falling into water. She froze a path across a large lake, then made a staircase across a gaping chasm, so she wasn't weighed down by equipment. Elsa could take the most direct route up the North Mountain because she didn't need to take any precautions like Anna and Kristoff. Additionally, she's putting out enough cold magic that wolves would hesitate to attack her, and she's just going straight up the mountain in whatever direction the mood takes her rather than actually trying to follow someone.
  • We don’t see onscreen Elsa speeding across the mountains and climbing the highest one without needing to catch her breath. But, she’s magical. In fact, there could've been some flying involved since we know from Olaf's Frozen Adventure that she can make things fly, like Olaf himself. So perhaps she used some of that power to zoom herself up the mountains. She’s obviously unafraid of throwing herself over chasms while singing “Let It Go”. Elsa’s coronation dress seems hard to move in: While she breaks into a run a few times while wearing it, she has to lift the skirts a few times. And yet she makes it up the North Mountain in it, cape and all. So magical speed is almost a given, considering that’s a whole mountain range she’s crossed. That said, the clues are onscreen, though.
    • First, on the day after, Anna is struggling across snow, but falls into an ice-free stream. She’s far from the epicenter of Elsa’s storm, and is way off-track.
    • Second, when Anna encounters Kristoff, he reveals that the storm is on the North Mountain, and was indeed “magical”. Once over the ravine, and away from the wolves, the terrain gets stranger and more icy— Anna is finally following Elsa’s path into the mountains. The willows aren’t just covered in ice, but entire streams and waterfalls are frozen solid.
    • Finally, as they're closer to the North Mountain, they cross land where the icicles are huge and horizontal, enough to impale Olaf (and nearly impale Kristoff). We don’t really get to see the violent storm that caused that. Since Olaf is likely leading Anna in the same path taken by Elsa up the mountain, the evidence of Elsa passing earlier at high speed is right there.
    • Anna and Kristoff also don't set off in the direction of the North Mountain from the same place as Elsa. The path to the mountain from Oaken's may not be as quick as the path from the castle, especially without ice powers that let you freeze the fjord and walk on it. They're also probably more tired by the time they leave Oaken's than Elsa is when she sets off, or at least Anna is, because she's already had a day's travel behind her. (Reasonably, it's best to assume they probably found somewhere to sleep right after their escape from the wolves because of the amount of time that's passed by the time they establish the North Mountain as their destination, which would make the trip even longer.)
  • In the first two Frozen II trailers, Elsa seems pretty athletic herself. When we see Elsa on the waves prior to the underwater fight with the Nokk, we see her climbing over one rock rather gracefully, and swiftly, showing that she's fast and ingenious in climbing. If we assume that's something she had during the first movie and not developed in the three year timeskip, that could translate to her her ability to run from the castle all the way up to the North Mountain on the night of her coronation (that she managed to do so without her ceremonial train getting snagged on any trees along the way is another mystery entirely).
  • There are actually plenty of ways for Elsa to get fit in the castle, even if she's in isolation. It's reasonable to assume she and Anna had dance lessons - as princesses would be expected to learn how. Dance is extremely exerting, and active dancers tend to be very fit and agile. And actually, exercise is a good way to manage one's mental health, so perhaps Elsa had exercises she did every day as part of her routine to manage her stress.

Hans' gloves

• It just bugs me that they drew a lot of attention to Hans' gloves, almost daring the viewer to make a connection to Elsa's gloves, yet they never came into play. I expected him all along to also secretly have elemental powers, perhaps for a final battle against Elsa.
  • It helps if you think about it as a metaphor; both are characters hiding deep secrets from Anna (Elsa and her ice powers, Hans and his plan to take over Arendelle) but while one of them is hiding theirs to protect her, the other is hiding it in order to harm her. Besides, people are already complaining that his evil plot came out of nowhere; chances are people would be ESPECIALLY pissed if he also had fire powers out of nowhere as well.
  • In tandem with the above: think about it - "the gloves coming off" is a way of describing a person's true intentions being revealed. When did Hans take off his gloves? When he was detailing his plan to Anna!
  • Wait a second...watch that scene again. Hans put out a candle with his bare hand - explicitly after he removed the glove.◊ I'm willing to bet they originally meant for him to have fire powers, and eventually decided it would be too out of nowhere. They changed the part later - he puts out the fireplace with a jug of water - so it won't be obvious, but did they neglect to change that small bit and hope viewers wouldn't notice?
  • Nah, that's just the normal way people who know what they're doing put out candles. Noobs blow on them, which leaves the wick smoldering and producing smoke. Licking your fingers (which Hans does) and snuffing out the flame by gripping the wick, preferably without dipping your fingers into the hot wax, puts out those embers and leaves the candle smokeless (which the filmmakers kinda fumbled on).
  • Maybe Hans' gloves were a quirk similar to Elsa's in that they're to avoid skin-on-skin contact with other people, but while Elsa is afraid of hurting people, Hans is rather... ''different'' about how he sees other people. Maybe he truly does have a thing about dirt and is a bit sensitive to people touching his skin- other people are warm and usually greasy and sweaty, like, ew. The only time Hans actually touches another person's skin with no fabric in the way is when he does his No, You to Anna, who at that point probably doesn't feel much like a human being and anyway, it's worth it for the effect it has. YMMV, though.

No one suggests that perhaps Anna should take some guards or scouts with her on her journey?

• I know it was probably Rule of Drama and would've ruined the plot here, but.....Anna is a princess of Arendelle and, with Elsa missing, the acting Queen. She's also probably not been outside the castle grounds that often, if at all, since she was five years old. She doesn't have a clue where she's going (seeing how she had no idea where Elsa was until she overheard Kristoff's conversation with Oaken). And yet...no one suggests that maybe she should take a guard or two along? I mean, okay, Hans does volunteer to assist Anna ^sidenotethat would've made an interesting plot as far as, Hans's betrayal would've possibly been more interesting than what they actually did, even though what they did is equally good, but she turns him down because she wants him to keep the public in Arendelle calm. Still, you'd think Anna might want to have some form of backup on hand just in case she ran into any problems....
  • Besides a heavy helping of The Main Characters Do Everything, the most plausible reason is that Anna knew that Elsa was scared and would perceive any strangers as a threat and lash out (as was aptly demonstrated later - her golem was the first to attack the delegation at her gate). Anna had to approach her alone if she wanted to have a calm discussion with her and avoid putting others at risk. Add in a dash of Anna's usual impulsiveness and the general shock everybody was in, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
  • Arendelle doesn't seem to be a dangerous place to live in. Everyone's happy and the townspeople only showed fear and surprise against Elsa, not anger or anything else. The castle guard maybe don't feel like they need to defend Anna in that situation, and beside, maybe they don't know who they should protect between their Queen and Princess and the people.
    • Also, when Anna makes the choice to head out, there's only one guard near her, as well as Kai. Everyone else was probably too much in shock to think of that, since it's been two minutes since they found out their new queen was a witch.
  • And since the kingdom had just been plunged into a disaster, maybe Anna preferred that the guards remain there to manage problems in Arendelle. But I'd also lean towards Anna impulsively thinking she has to get Elsa back and not realising that she could have used assistance until she was already on the way. For what it's worth, once she finds Oaken's shop, she also gets Kristoff to be her guide.
  • What's more is that Anna probably didn't expect Elsa (who's running away on foot) would get very far before Anna (who's on a horse) caught up with her. Even taking into account the time it would take to find her, Anna was probably thinking less in terms of "This is a serious journey that's going to take a couple days or more," and more along the lines of "I'm just going out into the woods to convince Elsa to come back home, we'll probably be back by morning." There's another folder that discusses how Elsa couldn't have made it up the North Mountain so quickly unless we assume that her magic was at play, and as someone who just learned about her powers, Anna isn't really in a position to know that they would've helped Elsa outpace her.

The trade-off between primogeniture and the kingdom of Arendelle

• So, why exactly was the tradition/law of primogeniture more important than ensuring that the probably cursed daughter with magic powers that become hazardous to those around her when in distress didn't end up causing an icy apocalypse from the stress of ruling? Couldn't the king have declared that, for the safety of the kingdom, he would temporarily suspend primogeniture and name his younger child heir for the safety of both his children and the kingdom (and/or privately convince parliament or local equivalent to do so if that's how the local legal system works?
  • Somehow bending the rules to let Elsa keep wearing gloves seems a lot less complicated. Also, how does the Bishop not notice the orb and sceptre is partially iced over?
  • Given the time period the movie most likely takes place in, and the various delegates at Elsa's coronation (French, German-most likely Prussian or Austrian, Spanish etc), suddenly changing the line of succession without a good reason for why Elsa was unfit to rule would have invited interference from the European Great Powers.
  • Law of succession can be hard to change. When Emperor Charles VI tried to change the succession laws to allow Maria Theresa to ascend to the rule of the Hapsburg hereditary lands, not only did he have to spend significant portions of his reign convincing the other powers of Europe to allow for this 'Pragmatic Sanction' (which was basically what you were saying, "We're changing the laws of succession to deal with this situation"), but upon his death, a great number decided to ignore it, resulting in the War of the Austrian Succession. It wouldn't be easy to change the laws of succession, and doing so would likely result in bad things for Arendelle, like sanctions, maybe wars. We don't know. Because of that, it's probably in Arendelle's best interests to try to resolve Elsa's problems than risk a war as the great powers take advantage of your announcement to get their preferred heir in place, or even generate their own claim.
  • The whole Austrian Succession mess is not the best comparison, as Elsa was already considered an acceptable heir. However, shunting aside an heir apparent that has not actively made herself unpopular is a delicate matter at best.
  • Great idea, let's make the parents look bigoted in the eyes of the modern audience!
  • They already looked like that for their 'bottle it up' instructions. Making her not crown heiress would drastically reduce stress and pressures on her — requiring far less bottling it up and far less isolation, enabling her to be herself more. Remember, being the one in charge is a burden, not a privilege, heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that.
  • Except, "Remember, being the one in charge is a burden, not a privilege, heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that" is how that's seen from a modern adult perspective. Medieval heirs wouldn't have fought for thrones so much if they had shared that view. Besides, Frozen is in a fairy tale world. In fairy tales, inheriting the throne is usually an unambiguously good thing (look how badly Hans wants it), part of a traditional Happily Ever After ending, and kids are likely to think that it's awesome — and feel sorry for Elsa if she was denied the throne through no fault of her own.
  • There is a non-trivial possibility that Agnarr did not realize how fragile Elsa's control was by the time she was in her late teens, a larger possibility that he did not want to admit even to himself how badly he and his wife miscalculated in their efforts to get Elsa's powers reined in, and a near certainty in both cases that they had no idea how powerful Elsa actually was. In any case, Elsa's powers being a secret outside of the royal family (to everyone except the trolls and Kristoff^note who has no reason to talk anyway) means that they also would have to have some sort of legitimate explanation to the public about why they chose to cut her out of the line of succession (and given how much they cared for Elsa, one that would not slander her).
  • And to be fair to Agnar and Iduna, even the most grounded people often suffer badly after a sudden loss, such as the death of both of your parents. If they had been there to raise Elsa up into adulthood, maybe things would have turned out better. Then again, maybe not.
    • Realistically, Agnar and Iduna probably were not expecting to die young. In the prologue of the movie, both Agnarr and Iduna are still fairly young people in what seems to be their late 20s to late 30s (assuming Iduna gave birth to the girls while she was in her early 20s) who no doubt anticipated being alive for a good long while yet — and consequently, they anticipated having plenty of time being around to help Elsa come to terms with her powers so that she would be able to control them sufficiently come her elevation to the throne. No one was anticipating that they'd be lost in a freak storm at sea; for all they knew, Elsa wouldn't come to the throne for another twenty or thirty years. Not very forward-thinking of them, perhaps, but how many people throughout human history and their plans have been blindsided by sudden death?
  • Another point: Even if the laws of succession were all worked out and Anna ascended the throne, it would have finally confirmed to her that there was something physically and/or emotionally unstable in Elsa which made her unfit to rule, which would in turn have further prompted her into pushing Elsa to tell her the secret.
  • Also, what about Anna? Promoting her to heiress apparent (it appears that Arendelle's succession is gender neutral, hence why Agdar and Idun didn't appear to try and conceive a son after Anna was born^note though if a son were born, he would probably be first in the line of succession, with Elsa and Anna being bumped to second and third, but we don't know what exactly Arendelle's line of succession rules are) would not only put a strain on Anna, but would also, as stated above, possibly elevate her curiosity about Elsa. Agdar and Idun are shown to care about both of their daughters, and wouldn't want the risk of two emotionally unstable daughters (even if Elsa were "relieved" or her duties, she still is in need of a lot of support and care).
  • There is no reason why Elsa could not have abdicated in favor of Anna. Especially if Elsa was unsuited to the throne. There was a case where a Crown Prince of England abdicated in favor of his younger brother.
  • But Elsa is more grounded and savvy than Anna. It's clear who would be the better ruler. Yes, Anna is able to get serious and order people around, but it's more difficult for her because of her Adorkable personality. Anna's way of doing it also seems to cause disdain in people (look at how much effort it took her just to get Kristoff to provide her transportation) whereas Elsa is a more natural leader who people follow on the spot.
  • Although allowing Elsa to become the queen definitely presents some problems at the beginning of the movie, primogeniture was probably the best option available. Elsa is, for the most part, able to control her powers. Maybe her methods of doing so weren't the best methods, but they seem to work out for at least the time being. At any rate, her parents wouldn't have had any reason to suspect that the outburst that sets off the movie would happen. Besides, Anna is enormously emotionally immature and lacks sound judgment (rushing into an engagement, some of her actions on the journey, etc.). Would you really want to give whatever power the crown in Arendelle has to someone who wants to marry someone they just met?
  • But both sisters are pretty emotionally immature. (Elsa shutting down the whole event instead of practicing diplomacy the way a queen should, chasing after the disembodied voice she knows nothing about in the sequel, etc., and see above for Anna). It goes along with their childhoods. Anna's awkwardness does mean she has to put in effort, but when it comes down to it, she doesn't show any less competence than her sister. We know Kristoff was predisposed to be resistant to working with anyone because he sings a song about how much he hates people, right before the scene where Anna manages to convince him to work with her. The fact that she succeeded in doing so with someone as misanthropic as him speaks in favor of her people skills. It might take her some effort, but she's capable. The parents probably just didn't think Elsa's Power Incontinence would be so dangerous at the time she took the throne.
  • The Austrian Succession works perfectly here... If they had had gotten rid of a perfectly acceptable heir without a true reason and created their own version of the Pragmatic Sanction, the whole kingdom would have been ripe for interference. What if France (or any other Great Power for that matter) thinks, "Elsa has a better claim!! If we defend her claim and place her on the throne she'll be indebted to us!" You'd have a "War of the Arendelle Sucession" on your hands. And no it wouldn't matter that Elsa was against it, as the war could also be used as a convenient excuse to carve Arendelle up, take it over completely, or simply just neutralize it by smashing it's armies with a supposed "just cause." So the powers supposedly fighting for Elsa might not have even cared about her opinion in the matter, her stronger claim would have just been a tool used horrificly. And you're forgetting that nearly everyone who's renounced claims has had large reasons to do so, reasons which are normally overwhelmingly accepted. What would Elsa's have been? The only true reasons would have damaged her and her family's reputation- just like when that particular Prince of England damaged the Windsor's reputation when he resigned. Succession laws are also a huge Pandora's box that most intelligent dynasties don't like to screw with. Think about it, changing them- even temporarily sets a dangerous precedent. That the laws can be changed. This could prove dangerous in the future, with all the scheming and wheeling and dealing seen in royal courts it wouldn't be surprising if down the line someone else in the royal family (or maybe simply a noble family) attempted to change the laws to benefit themselves simply based on the fact that, "the laws have been changed before, why not again?" The easiest, simplest, least dangerous route is to simply let Elsa learn to handle herself and then rule as queen. Her parents obviously thought they'd have A LOT more time with her to iron out the kinks. They just died unexpectantly before it could happen.
  • So long as the line of succession is agnatic-cognatic or male-preference, then no, there is no evidence for pure primogeniture. The sisters have no brother to test this against. What the gates being closed means for governance is up for much interpretation, but Agnarr and Iduna clearly leave the castle on occasion, even taking an overseas trip. They are likely still performing their duties to a considerable degree. At that time, the general rule was male succession, but we know of many, many exceptions, also in Elsa's times (or her grandparents' times), that allowed women to be rulers. And we are not talking here about some backwood kingdom or dukedom nobody heard about, but about empires. Agnarr could totally pull off an Emperor Charles VI move and secure Elsa’s succession by sanction and political work. Elsa’s reign is at a time when many countries were transitioning from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy (including Norway). Queen Victoria, a peer to Elsa, was already a monarch who reigned but did not rule, so a gender of a monarch could be not a problem other than tradition. Moreover, female rulers, especially of empires, had a very good reputation, because their countries bloomed under their reign. Not only was Maria Theresa able to rebuild the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire was also made powerful by a torrent of successful female emperors (male form intended): Anna, Elizabeth and finally Katherine the Great. How efficient these girls were is seen in a fact that Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great were able to erase from European maps a big country with 800 years of tradition. Moreover, in general female rulers, even if just being ‘only’ wives, were much more liked than their husbands, both by their subjects and foreigner politicians. Let me mention here another almost peer to Elsa, the iconic Empress Elizabeth of Austria, called by her family and fans Sisi. I am sidetracking here, but Sisi might be an example of how Frozen creators were influenced by concrete people than general situations. Elsa (and Anna) shares with Sisi a lot of traits. Possibly a coincidence, but it looks like Elsa takes after Sisi not only character traits like depression, isolation but also “a queen aura” and looks: Sisi had a wasp figure and was quite proud of it.
  • And by the time of Agnarr and Iduna's deaths, the one scene we have between them and adult Elsa is that she's able to be around certain people without setting off her powers. So while she was having trouble in her early teens, she seemed to be managing the powers. Even at the coronation, the ceremony went off without a hitch, and only turned ugly when Anna announced she was marrying a man she just met and a blazing row escalated. That's not really a variable you can account for in the grand scheme of things.
  • Rows are a variable you can and should account for when deciding the head of government. Diplomatic challenges are not only par for the course for a monarch, but the basis of the job. A monarch who can't handle one is like a firefighter who can't handle a fire, but on a grander scale. The row didn't happen over the engagement, either; it happened over Elsa closing the gates without explanation, which was very forseeable in itself. That's not to say Anna would handle it any better, but neither sister demonstrated that they knew what they were doing. The biggest difference is that the likelihood of Anna's mistakes literally killing somone is lower than the likelihood of Elsa's.
  • Based on comments Agnarr makes throughout the film ("She can learn to control it, I'm sure" and "You'll be fine, Elsa"), the people who suggest he expected Elsa to have learned how to handle it by the time she took the throne are probably right. Unfortunately, it took a bit longer than that, but it seems to be what he expected.

Everybody's okay with a witch-ruled kingdom

• This is clearly some variant of Europe, the chapel makes it clear something like Christianity is a thing in Arendelle, and the dialog also makes it clear from uses of the word witchcraft with revulsion and horror that the popular and possibly religious concept of witch=bad in and of itself likely exists in-universe. Won't there be massive problems (possibly up to and including a crusade) relating to the fact that a country within Christendom is now openly ruled by a witch?
  • Elsa's powers aren't anything like the sort of witchcraft the real Church condemned. Witches were specifically people who were getting powers drawn from The Legions of Hell, and using them to harm their neighbors. The Church never tried to apply the same brush to, for example, the supernatural powers saints and kings were frequently believed to possess. Elsa's powers could be seen as beneficial, as they could confirm, or at least reinforce, the assumption that royalty are born inherently different from ordinary people, and perhaps are somehow invisibly superhuman. Neighboring monarchs would be finding or creating legends that suggest they have something like that in their own family history that might just show itself one day. However even if you presume a 17th century setting (there are enough muskets about to rule out any earlier time periods), the scope of Elsa's power would force a degree of realpolitik into the discussion. The wiser rulers would stand over the shoulder of their lands' ranking prelates as a letter is written to the Arch(?)bishop of Arendelle concerning the 'wild tales', a reply to the effect of "do not worry over Her Highness' Completely Non-Satanic Gifts From The Good Lord" will be duly accepted, and no more would be said. There's also the military and security benefits of having a Person of Mass Destruction running your country when everyone else only has, at best, black powder weapons; Elsa is essentially a war deterrent equal to nuclear weapons. Other nations would be lining up to make friends with Arendelle or shutting up and keeping their heads down.
    • What hypocrites! Poor people with witchcraft get their power from the devil, yet rich people with witchcraft get their powers from God!?
  • From Olaf's Frozen Adventure, I'd say Elsa’s magic is something the citizens of Arendelle treat with a sense of national pride. Like: “Fuck yeah our Queen is magic! Look at how awesome this is!” Every one of Elsa’s public displays of magic after the Endless Winter of the first movie have seemed to make her citizens happy, whether that be creating that communal ice rink in the castle courtyard to making this incredible ice Christmas tree.
  • Remember also that Elsa was charged by Hans with treason, not witchcraft. Considering that Hans would use any tools available to get the throne, it's unlikely he would pass off such a good and easy opportunity to get rid of her, especially when he'd have the sorcery-hating Duke of Weaseltown (WESELTON!) backing him if he went that route.
  • There doesn't seem to be so much prejudice against magic in Arendelle. Elsa's parents don't seem to consider her powers to be evil, simply dangerous.
  • Within Arendelle, everyone would likely turn a blind eye so that what happened in the movie doesn't repeat itself, especially now that she has control over her powers.
  • For those who still don't like being ruled over by a magical monarch, they can simply leave Arendelle. Given Elsa's powers, anyone who opposes Elsa would likely avoid confronting her for fear of what they think she'll do in response. When the witch in question is both (a) the Queen of the place where you live, with ultimate constitutional authority and power of life-and-death over you, (b) commander-in-chief of an army willing to obey her orders and (c) capable of flash-freezing you in an instant if you try anything, I'm guessing that most people weighed up the expected outcomes of trying to burn her to death (either being flash-frozen or arrested and executed for treason) and decided that actually, in this case they were pretty much okay with witchcraft, or at least okay enough to prevent themselves from getting needlessly flash-frozen or decapitated in the center of Arendelle as a warning to traitors.
  • First off, OP assumes that the culture is fully accurate to Europe at that time and not an Alternate History. Given the Church of Saint Genericus that Elsa was coronated in, that's probably not the case. The Duke of Weselton had prejudice against magical people, but the people of Arendelle, on the other hand, though they were quite startled by the sudden appearance of Elsa's powers, were not as quick to immediately share the judgment that their queen must be an evil monster. Note that Hans felt the best way to curry favor with the people of Arendelle that he hoped to rule was to avoid agreeing with the Duke and give Elsa the benefit of the doubt, and he didn't feel he could get away with openly killing her until he thought he could pin Anna's death on her as a justification.
  • Perhaps all the royal family is highly trusted and respected. Elsa and Anna also gained empathy since they are young and lost their parents. The eternal winter also only lasted for three days. Elsa didn't directly hurt any of her subjects aside from those who came after her, and that was mostly in self defense. In Arendelle, people seem to be aware of magic despite not having a full grasp of it. After demonstrating that she has control, the people are more in awe of their queen now than in fear. Other than that, the community as a whole seems to be quite warm and friendly as seen in Frozen Fever and Olaf's Frozen Adventure.
  • Elsa and Anna's parents seem to have been benevolent rulers who treated their subjects fairly and by many indications, Arendelle is a wealthy kingdom. Them being the princesses would be beloved and adored by extension, and this is the case in the Broadway version. When Elsa became overwhelmed by her suppressed emotions and magic she was visibly upset and panicked as she ran out of the castle. Notice the mother who asked with care and sincerity, “Your majesty. Are you alright?” Elsa was even being adored and showered with compliments up until she froze over the fountain. It's only natural the citizens would be taken aback.
    When Elsa finally witnessed that her own powers could be reversed when Anna thawed, she didn't simply proceed to dispel her cryokinetic influence over the land, she made a huge spectacle of it that could be seen by all — she cryokineticaly merged all the ice together and suspended it in the sky in the form of a snowflake before finally dispersing it.
    For many citizens, this would be all they would need to experience to have their confidence restored and given the general respect for the crown, I don't think it would have taken much explanation from Elsa and Anna what the problem was and that there would be little chance of another threat from Elsa's magic.
  • Note that in Scandinavian folklore, it's the use of magic by men that's generally considered malignant. A woman using magic would be far less alarming or unexpected.
    • So they're not afraid of witches; they're afraid of wizards.
  • If you see at the start of the second film, there's a sort of festival in the town where Elsa is seen using her powers to make ice sculptures for the children. So I imagine there was a lot of public activities like that in the initial months - Elsa going out of her way to show herself as a benevolent queen whose powers could be used for good.

Architecture and Engineering

• So, how did Elsa have the architectural skill to make a structurally sound castle on her first try, without any pretty-but-prone-to-collapse flourishes, particularly given she seems to have built it on a whim?
  • The book A Sister More Like Me establishes that Elsa had an interest in geometry since childhood, with the mention of fractals in her song confirming this (despite fractals not being invented until 1975). And then there's this quote from BioShock Infinite:
    Booker: Where did you learn to pick locks?
    Elizabeth: Trapped in a tower with nothing but books and spare time... You would be surprised what I know how to do.
  • The answer lies in Olaf and the ice stairway that Elsa builds shortly before constructing the castle. If you look a bit more closely at Olaf, you'll notice that his legs aren't actually connected to his body; they just shuffle along the ground while the body levitates above them, kinda like Rayman, and the same can be said for his chest and for his head. That actually is how he's able to come apart and yet get put back together so easily. The bridge is a similar case. It looks solid enough once built, but Elsa builds it by simply extending it from one edge of the chasm to the other *while walking on it*. Realistically, it should have just snapped off and fallen into the chasm. Clearly, Elsa's magical ice can defy the laws of gravity. I would imagine building a fanciful ice palace is a lot easier when all you need to do is give it form and you don't have to worry about the pesky laws of physics collapsing it on top of you.
  • But then again, the chandelier did fall from the ceiling.
  • With Olaf, Elsa's powers prove that they can create self-regulating items (notice Olaf's able to instantly repair his parts when skewered/disassembled). Her castle is likely held together entirely by her magic, especially since things start to fall apart when she gets upset with Anna's revelation that she sent the kingdom into a deep freeze.

Elsa's Room in "Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?"

• If Elsa didn't know how to thaw her ice, how did her room turn back to normal after the grieving scene in "Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?"
  • Elsa's ice seems to have ontological inertia. If she's not actively maintaining it, it has to sustain itself. Olaf demonstrates this when he starts to melt. Her room probably just thawed naturally. As for how this relates to the winter storm, we honestly don't know anything about the effects of the storm. We don't know how far it extended outside of Arendelle, or how cold she dropped the temperature. There is no way to be certain how long it would stay if left to its own devices. We can't even be sure it would end if she died; that might just cause it to stick around until it clears up naturally. Ultimately, it doesn't matter: a surprise blizzard in the middle of summer can be devastating to a country's economy, destroying crops, killing livestock, and also killing citizens who aren't prepared for it. Every day that the winter storm is still in Arendelle makes the kingdom less sustainable.
  • The kingdom probably wouldn't have thawed out if they just waited because it's clear from the scenes shown in the town that the temperature is remaining very low. Presumably after Elsa's outbursts at home she'd get back enough equilibrium for her powers to stop affecting the ambient temperature, so it would melt in summer and in winter she could light the fire to get rid of it. (I know princesses don't usually light their own fires but she wouldn't want anyone else to see the room.)
  • Elsa couldn't thaw the ice/snow she caused on her coronation day, but nothing indicates she wasn't able to thaw her ice/snow before that. The "eternal winter" she caused on her coronation day, and her not being able to thaw it, was caused by the extreme amount of emotional distress she underwent that day. During her childhood, she had never experienced this amount of distress, and she probably always was able to thaw her ice/snow up until coronation day OR it just went away by itself.
  • Elsa probably wouldn't have said "I don't know how!" when Anna suggested unfreezing the storm or "love will thaw... love... of course!" with such a wondering tone when she realized that she could if she had known all along how to thaw and it had just been a matter of her being in the wrong mood at the time. Previous ice manifestations simply being small enough to just melt on their own when exposed to heat, like Olaf did, seems more likely.

Anna's Memories

• Did Anna ever get her memories back of her and Elsa playing as children?
  • Well, Grand Pabbie did not remove her memories so much as alter them. The girls' location and clothes changed and possibly memories of a couple minutes prepping for wintry fun (assuming she would've remembered that at all), but other than that, she would have remembered those moments much the same way Elsa would. She just didn't know that Elsa was the source of the snow. While Anna now knows that many of her memories of having fun in the snow occurred indoors rather than outdoors, she still does not remember them that way.
  • For what it's worth, there is one book, Memory & Magic, where Anna tries to have her memories restored, but eventually decides against it.
  • Jennifer Lee's stance is that the memories didn't come back, but Elsa probably filled her in.

How does Elsa's hair work?

• Elsa's pre-Let It Go hair is a bun with a forehead braid. Then she takes it down and it turns into a French braid. How?
  • A Wizard Did It.
  • Elsa's pre-Let It Go hair is a braided bun with the larger bangs twisted into a 'rope' along the side of her head. She pulled out the pins holding the bun together, let the braid loose, and pulled her longer bangs out of the twist.

How did Olaf get into the castle?

• How did Olaf get past the gigantic castle wall, avoid detection, AND somehow conveniently find the room that Anna was locked in?
  • He is small and made out of snow. If he keeps his mouth shut remaining unnoticed in a snowstorm is not that hard. Depending on how much knowledge Elsa infused him at on his creation, maybe he even has a map of the castle already in his head (though that's probably more applicable to the Broadway version of Olaf).

Why keep both of them in the castle?

• Why is Anna stuck in the castle since childhood along with Elsa? It's pretty obvious she was bored and wanted company, so why not let her leave and meet other people?
  • She's a princess, she's not supposed to go out and meet those filthy commoners. She might have been offered servants or nobles for company, but knowing Anna, it's unlikely that any company without being able to leave the palace or see Elsa would be enough for her.
  • Perhaps to cut down on the rumors? I don't think Anna would be the kind to intentionally gossip, but it's not too far fetched to imagine her saying things like "yeah, my sister rarely leaves her room, even inside the castle" or "Sometimes, I see servants throwing out furniture from my sister's room that has water damage, what's up with that?" Or maybe Anna wouldn't spill, but someone else would tell her a story about someone cursed with uncontrollable ice powers, and it would be eerily familiar, enough for her to connect some dots. Elsa and their parents were paranoid, they wouldn't want even a chance that people would start to figure out her secret. And/or the above explanation also makes sense - whether or not the royal family is prejudiced or biased against commoners, it'd still be very weird for Anna to just... walk up to them. Imagine six- or twelve- or sixteen-year-old Anna leaving the castle with a royal escort (if the manpower could even be spared; they were running on a skeletal staff and, again, didn't want people going in and out to spread rumors about Elsa) and trying to wander around and make friends with random subjects. Alternately, she *did* try that, and found it so awkward and unsatisfying that she pinned her hopes on the coronation introducing her to peers of her social status (like Hans) and forcing Elsa out of hiding.
  • Also, their parents already feel horrible about having to keep Elsa unfairly confined for something that isn't her fault. Keeping Elsa locked up while letting her little sister roam about freely would seem even more unfair. Not to mention they're probably being rather overprotective of Anna's safety, given that she'd almost died and all.
    • Denying one child their freedom because another doesn't have it seems even more unfair. If one kid breaks their leg, you don't break another kid's in the name of "fairness," do you? Especially if that second kid already suffered a major injury recently. Overprotectiveness in the wake of that injury makes sense, though.
  • Anna isn’t locked in the castle. That’s Elsa’s fate. Anna is fifteen when her parents die, and turns eighteen shortly before Elsa’s coronation. So she’s been too young to set her own social calendar, even assuming Arendelle is large enough to have many high society functions. And Anna’s main complaint is that she’s not allowed to bring anyone into her home. Receiving guests at court is what passes for “normal” social life for royalty. Note that Anna's prepared for this; she's learned to ride and dance, and is able to show Hans around the sights of her town. But since the court is not receiving guests, partners of what was then considered suitable station would not sail to see the princess. For a real life example of this, Queen Victoria ceased court celebrations upon the death of Prince Albert. This disrupted British high society, as debutantes were supposed to be introduced at court. In this case, a king’s death must be mourned, but a coronation must follow. Nobility will arrive in droves, and this is what Anna eagerly anticipates; her ability to leave the castle walls never seems impaired.
  • "For the First Time in Forever" and "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" make it pretty clear that Anna's not allowed out with the gates closed. She talks to paintings specifically because no one else is interacting with her. "A chance to change my lonely world." "For the first time in forever / I could be noticed by someone." None of that would make any sense with the idea that the gates being closed just means she's not allowed to bring people home or that all the open gates mean is that she can find romance. Those lyrics don't indicate someone who's been allowed out to meet people; they inidcate soeone used to being ignored and unused to companionship, something bringing people home wouldn't change had she already been allowed out. It's not just about finding a partner — the possibility of romance doesn't even occur to her until about halfway through the song, when she sings "For the first time in forever / I won't be alone. / I can't wait to meet everyone. / [gasp] / What if I meet — the one?" She's excited about making any friend at all, and romance is a potential bonus.
    
    She and Hans also spend most of "Love is an Open Door" around the castle grounds, and although they go out to the clock tower, that doesn't mean that she knows the town well. It's in-character for her to go exploring, and that's assuming she doesn't remember the clock from her early childhood.
    
    However, the idea that her age and status as a princess played a role in her problems can help explain the isolation a bit. She may not have allowed out of the castle alone and/or without proper arrangements because of those things. And it's made clear she didn't get a lot of attention growing up. With the parents obviously busy, the staff running on a skeleton crew, and the gates closed, those arrangements probably weren't made, so she wasn't allowed out.
  • When Anna's allowed out on Coronation Day, she doesn't have an escort, so lack of proper arrangements probably wasn't the problem. The "cut down on rumors" theory seems more likely.

Why did it take Kristoff so long to get back to the castle?

• In the climax, after Kristoff drops Anna off at the castle, it seems to take him much longer to get back while galloping downhill at breakneck speed than he spent walking slowly and dejectedly uphill while leaving.
  • Maybe he had an initial burst of speed to leave the castle behind him as fast as possible, and then slowed down to give Sven a rest. Also, on the way back down into Arendelle, he and Sven were fighting through a blinding snowstorm and snow was blowing in their faces. As it would be for anyone who has tried to walk/ski/drive into a strong headwind, snow or no snow.

Inexplicable sword-shattering

• So why did striking the frozen Anna make Hans' sword shatter and produce a force wave knocking him back?
  • If you make iron or steel cold enough fast enough, it becomes extremely brittle (also explaining how Elsa got out of the shackles). The shockwave could have been caused by the magic that froze the sword as it struck Anna's hand, which might have been connected to the freezing-curse or an instinctive reaction from Elsa.
• One 'save scene' was actually going to include Hans getting back up with the remains of his sword and trying again, and the sisters were trying to protect each other when Kristoff would have stepped in and punched him down. And though I would sell a kidney to see that, the writers obviously didn't want to take away from Anna's rescue, or were worried about showing Kristoff hitting Hans after Hans mentioned having bullying brothers.
• Not that physics really applies to magic...but Anna freezing solid so quickly would have effectively released a significant amount of kinetic energy from arrested atomic motion. Normally that would be expressed as heat. But since her freezing coincided with Hans' sword striking her hand the kinetic energy may have transferred to the sword, and him, instead. That would further explain the sword shattering and the shockwave.

Gloves vs. Shackles

• How do Elsa's gloves work? They are not magical gloves made by the trolls or anything like this, they are ordinary gloves. And yet Elsa has much less trouble with controlling her magic when she has them on (or much more trouble without them). What's even more puzzling: the solid, metal cuffs Elsa was chained with turned to ice and broke quickly - and she was chained for a short while only. How come the gloves were not damaged in the slightest after so many years of wearing them day in, day out?
  • First off, metal is much more susceptible to cold than cloth is. The shackles Elsa was bound by were frozen over because she wanted them to be. Elsa was also gently assured by her father that the gloves would help keep her powers in check; thus, it was her trust in what he told her and her belief in herself that kept the ice from manifesting through them as well.
  • They're probably not the same exact pair of gloves all the time, either. Elsa surely outgrew the original pair she had as a child, after all. It's not that those gloves matter, it's that the simple act of wearing a pair of gloves has a psychosomatic effect on Elsa, due to learning at a young age to associate gloves with control.

Royal Recognition

• When the royal family first visits the trolls, the trolls apparently recognize the king on sight. Yet trolls are thought to be a myth by the people of Arendelle, so how do they have that kind of knowledge of what the king looks like? Further, when Kristoff brings Anna to their home, no mention is made of how she is a princess despite the aforementioned knowledge of the royalty of Arendelle. That their adopted son is in love with a princess is something you would think would at least be noticed.
  • Given that Agnarr has a reliable way of locating the trolls that is kept secret from everyone else, coupled with the fact that he thinks of the idea of going to them almost immediately, it's likely that the royal family has had dealings in the past with the trolls, who obviously view themselves as loyal subjects (given how quickly the Grand Pabbie acknowledges the King and how he immediately begins administering treatment to Anna), but they aren't supposed to call on them for every little thing (hence why Agdar can't remember on his own where the trolls live and has to consult a map). Odds are that maybe meeting the trolls is part of the coronation/rite of passage for monarchs in Arendelle, but Elsa missed it from a combination of her father being dead and her having her freak out before that could happen.
  • This is validated by the fact that Agdar apparently knew exactly which book to look for in the library, and didn't seem to bother to stop to read it, just to get the map hidden inside of it. It is worth noting that many ancient traditions hold to the idea of there being a special connection between a sovereign and their land. The trolls, being strongly associated with elemental earth, may share this view and regard the monarch as the metaphysical embodiment of the kingdom and not just a person in fancy dress clothes.
  • I like this, as the trolls' existence doesn't seem to be common knowledge. Anna's clearly totally unaware that such things were real.
    • Hard to say whether they're common knowledge or not. Oaken has statues of them outside his trading post, so clearly their existence is not something that only the monarchs know about. At the very least, the idea of trolls in concept exists as part of peoples' mythology, although whether or not it's common knowledge that they're real creatures is more unclear.
    • If it's not clear to the general populace that they're real creatures before, it is as of Frozen II, seeing as Oaken is part of this group of villagers and castle staff who go with Anna and Elsa to Grand Pabbie after "Into the Unknown".
    • According to the Tie-In Novel Frozen II: A Forest of Shadows, the trolls are generally considered a legend in Arendelle, although that takes place before the aforementioned Frozen II scene (and its canonicity is unclear).
  • Anna doesn't seem to be surprised by the reality of their existence, just that the seemingly-ordinary rocks turned out to be them in disguise. Although it could also be because she's seen too much weirdness already to be weirded out, or because she's good at prioritizing things.
  • As a side note, it's possible the trolls recognized the king not by his face, but by his clothing, livery, etc. Even if you don't know the king by sight, someone riding the king's horse, wearing fancy expensive clothing and a crown is probably gonna be the king. By contrast, Anna is wearing things she just bought in Wandering Oaken's Trading Post & Sauna — nothing that she has identifies her as the princess, except maybe the white streak in her hair (and even then, the trolls outside of Grand Pabbie might have some trouble remembering that that's a telltale clue of who Anna is, seeing as it's been 13 years and Anna has grown a lot since then).

Wait a minute Hans, where's your ring?

• How come not even one person asked Hans about the wedding vows? Not only there is no witness of such event, Hans doesn't have the wedding ring on his finger. Basically, he has NOTHING to prove his rights to the throne of Arendelle. Were they really going to accept that someone guy who came here just few days ago is their king because he claims he married a princess who died seconds later? Anyone could say that!
  • He and Anna asked Elsa for her blessing of their intended marriage at the coronation in the presence of multiple witnesses. Also, Anna previously left him in charge, and he proved himself caring about the people in their time of need. This should be enough proof not to question Hans' authority at the time of a succession crisis, not to mention the problem with eternal winter that still needs to be resolved.
  • A ring is not necessary, but two witnesses are, and Hans' account of their vows and Anna's death does not mention any witnesses.
  • Agreed with the above explanation, but would like to also add that many witnesses also witnessed Anna telling Hans to "kiss me right now" before giving them privacy. She clearly was into him. Also, a ring is not technically needed for a marriage.
  • Consider also that at the point this is all happening, Elsa is unknowingly destroying the kingdom with magic snow and has been imprisoned, her sister — who, the last anyone here saw or heard, was clearly not far from death — has apparently just died and they're all in imminent danger of freezing to death. At this point, they're probably just functioning in a crisis-mode state of thought where they want to get the immediately pressing we're-in-imminent-danger-of-freezing-to-death problem sorted out first and then address all the legal niceties.
  • It wouldn't be difficult in the slightest for Hans to bribe or pressure two servants into saying they were in the room, and heard the vows. That's a detail to be fussed out after the fact.
  • Hans' general MO is Bavarian Fire Drill now, while everyone's panicking, tie up the loose ends later (or not; he may show no sign of the explosive temper often associated with The Sociopath, but maybe 'impulsiveness' explains why not all of his schemes, on close inspection, are as thought-through as they seem.)

Was Anna neglected by her parents?

• Think about it. During "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", Anna is all alone. The only time she is seen with her parents is when she hugs them goodbye.
  • She's shown to be alone throughout part of the duration of a three and a half minute song — hardly enough time to cover the years and years she spent inside the castle. Especially since the song is all about how bored she feels when she is alone. There's no reason to take it to mean that her parents neglected her, just that they couldn't spend their every waking moment with her and she didn't have anyone else to spend time with when they were busy.
  • The song is about loneliness, not boredom. Issues that seem to imply boredom are quickly attributed to loneliness instead: "all these empty rooms" bother Anna because "it gets a little lonely," not because they're uninteresting; she starts "talking to the pictures on the walls" because "some company is overdue," not lack of other activity; she's sad playing with the dolls because she and her sister "used to be best buddies, and now we're not," not the quality of the toys.^note Compare with an example of a Disney Princess song that is about boredom, "When Will My Life Begin?" from Tangled. Rapunzel sings exclusively about all the activities she's going through and wants to do in the future. The length of the list, the repetition, and fast pace contribute to the message that she's running out of options. Throughout the song, Rapunzel never mentions loneliness. By contrast, Anna only brings up activities when she's talking about how she wants to connect with someone. When a character has a childhood montage song that revolves around their loneliness and only shows them interacting with their parents once (briefly, to say goodbye right before those parents die), with several breaks within the song cutting to scenes where the parents are busy with a sibling, there is a heavy implication that the character isn't getting to spend much time with them. Whether that can be classified as neglect under the relevant circumstances, though, is a question for another forum.

Ok, so why did Kristoff take her back?

• After we find out that only love can thaw Anna's frozen heart, the trolls suggest that perhaps True Love's Kiss would thaw her, and that makes Kristoff's mind cast immediately to Hans. Why did Kristoff agree to take her down to him? Didn't he say to her not a day before that "you can't marry someone you just met," and want to dissuade her from being with Hans? Why take her back, especially since he probably figured out by that time how much he cared about her?
  • I feel like Kristoff's self-esteem is on the low side, and it's combined with some denial. He doesn't really believe Anna could love him. Better that she get back to this prince who she does love and who loves her. The idea that Hans turns out to be... well... Hans, doesn't really occur to him (Kristoff suspected Hans might not be perfect but it wasn't like anyone could foresee him being like that). He's just too worried about Anna, to think about his own happiness. That's what Olaf meant.
  • In addition, while Kristoff did question Anna's judgement at first, at no point did he declare it his mission to dissuade her from being with Hans.
  • There is a definite difference between how Kristoff acts when he first finds out about the relationship and later on, which can be explained by Character Development and relationship development. Once he confirms that yes, Hans and Anna just met and are already engaged, he immediately does try to dissuade her from the engagement, insist that it "doesn't sound like True Love," and quickly declares that he has decided to not trust her judgment because of it. By the third act, however, he is referring to Hans as "her True Love" and seems to believe it. After spending some time getting to know her, he's come to trust her judgment more and respect her choices. As said above, no one in the story was able to see the plot twist about Hans. He doesn't have any reason to believe that he would be a better relationship fit with her than someone she's already engaged to would be. Self-esteem doesn't seem to have much to do with it, though. Respecting that someone you have a crush on is already in a committed relationship isn't indicative of what level of self-esteem you have.

Would killing Elsa have really solved the eternal winter?

• Do we have any proof that if the Duke of Weselton or Hans killed Elsa, the eternal winter would end? There were cases that the person responsible for a certain curse were the only one who could remove it, and killing her/him would mean that the curse were irreversible...
  • We have no proof one way or another, but when it turned out that Elsa didn't know how to lift the curse solo, then anything was worth a shot.
  • Probably not in the short term, but it would have at least stopped her powers from prolonging it. If she was dead and without her magic creating the winter, it probably would thaw in time.

How isolated was Elsa?

• It's made clear that growing up, Elsa was secluded in her room for a lot of the time, and that she did not interact with Anna they way she did when they were little. When they talk at the coronation, Anna is clearly nervous, uncomfortable, and unused to talking to Elsa. However, just how isolated was she? It seems unlikely that Elsa would have literally lived out her entire childhood and adolescence in her room, or that she never spoke to Anna at all in the years they grew up. After all, she does come out to say goodbye to her parents. Did Anna and Elsa ever pass in the hallways of the castle, or have meals together with their parents? Just how often did Anna and Elsa see each other after Elsa decided to shut herself away?
  • According to the picture books, Elsa did come out of her room but she wore gloves and didn't speak to Anna.
  • In particular it has Elsa knowing how Anna dresses, how messy Anna's room is; Anna knowing that Elsa liked proper tea, and was cooped up in the study (not bedroom) and enjoying it (the weirdo.) There's even a picture of Elsa watching (in a dressing room mirror) Anna run by, with a smile on both faces.
  • You don't have to never meet for your younger sibling to want to spend more time with you.
  • Elsa wasn't necessarily completely isolated. Do You Wanna Build a Snowman is mostly about wanting to play and be "best buddies" again, and only after their parents' death does Anna say "People are asking where you've been." (If Elsa had been completely shut up for ten years or so by that point, they would surely have ceased to bother.) Most likely Elsa moved about the castle freely and participated in family things, but avoided being alone with Anna, and especially playing with her. After all, it was in exactly that situation that she hurt Anna. Whenever Anna's nagging got to her, she shut herself in her room, to keep Anna away for both of their sakes (she thought).
  • Agreed, but I would still say that Elsa spent the better part of her time in her room.
  • Also, Elsa would probably have just been making excuses for various things of pressing time, like how she pawned Anna off on the Duke of Weaseltown (WESELTON!) because she doesn't dance. Especially after their parents died, Elsa probably had a lot of tutoring on her duties and international relations. Who knows how she would have handled any meetings.
  • I think Elsa is allowed to leave her own room, but her various 'issues'- shame, depression, generalised anxiety- mean that she starts to avoid doing so if she could.
  • A Sister More Like Me says that Elsa 'needed peace and quiet'. In other words, she's an introvert. Introverted people often need a certain amount of 'alone time' and it's not necessarily unhealthy for them.
  • While their talk at the coronation is awkward, it does not feel like it's the first time they see each other in years. And for Anna to have developed theories about why Elsa always wears Conspicuous Gloves, she would have to have seen her sporting them more than once before. So they probably saw each other occasionally. Also, they certainly received some tutoring befitting their status (although, given her condition, Elsa maybe got hers from her parents only). Finally, it's implied that both sisters are wearing a corset, and I don't think it's a garment you can put on by yourself.
  • They could have always had a servant, like Gerda, help them with the corset.
  • A number of fanfics go with the idea that Anna and Elsa did interact as much as they did before, just that Elsa couldn't be alone with Anna in the same room.
• I can't help wondering just how Elsa was going to keep herself occupied, cloistered away in her remote ice palace.
  • Considering Elsa's "flight or fight" state, she probably wasn't thinking much beyond "leave Arendelle".

Treason?

• I'm sorry, but this keeps bugging me. If Elsa was queen, how was killing Anna treason? She's the Queen, so her word is law, and besides, royalty kill siblings all the time, especially in ye olden days.
  • One, Frozen seems to take place in the Early Modern period rather than in the Middle Ages.^note The pendulum clock and bicycle appeared in Europe in the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries, respectively. And even if Arendelle is an absolute monarchy (depending on how you see it, it's entirely possible that Arendelle's government could just as easily be a constitutional monarchy, but that's not the point), it still doesn't give Elsa the right to murder people without reason, especially her own royal family. If Elsa really wanted to kill Anna (she didn't, but again, that's not the point), there should at least have been a trial and execution per due process, otherwise the indiscriminate spilling of royal blood could well provoke a revolt and/or foreign intervention from other kingdoms. Besides, by that point, Elsa had already been imprisoned for summoning the winter and it hadn't helped matters, so the nobles were probably just eager for any excuse to get rid of her. Killing the heir presumptive to the throne without proper legal process would be treason in many jurisdictions, even if the killer is the monarch.
• Royalty killing siblings isn't justifiable no matter how common it happened. Wasn't there a different Disney movie that demonized that?

Anna the Child Bride

• I just realized something that should be obvious: Elsa is the elder sibling who was crowned when she came of age. This makes Anna underage, so even if Elsa had been cool with her engagement with Hans, could they even get married? The way Anna talked about it made it sound like they were getting married next week.
  • By coronation day, Elsa is 21 and Anna is 18. Could be like drinking age. By 18 Anna is legally an adult, but is still too young to officially occupy the throne. That said, she's not too young to get engaged, since she's from royalty, and in the 19th century, princesses were betrothed all the time to prospective suitors beginning sometime around their 15th birthday or so.
  • The marrying age was twelve to fourteen in some parts of Europe. Given that Anna immediately accepts and doesn't think there will be a problem beyond asking permission from the queen, we can assume she is of the marrying age.

Elsa the queen.

• At the end of the movie, how did Elsa convince the people that she was still fit to rule after nearly destroying the kingdom, instead of abdicating the throne in favor of Anna?
  • Anna probably wouldn't have accepted the throne, even if everyone insisted she take it. And with Elsa having control over her powers, it would be very beneficial to have her as the queen. Not only is she basically a One-Woman Army (Enemy army on the way by land? Cue a blizzard that grinds them to a halt because they're not prepared! Enemy navy sailing in? Just re-freeze the fjord so they can't get within striking distance!), but she can ensure that there's no damage from cold or ice, stop freak snowstorms, and give everyone all the winter fun they could want (courtyard-wide ice rink, anyone?)
  • Seems like it would take a lot of courage to tell your home-grown Snow Queen who just froze the kingdom that you don't want her. This is probably not a person you want to make mad or angry.
  • Considering Elsa could hardly be described as malevolent, it's doubtful she'd purposefully freeze someone or the kingdom for telling her she's not wanted.
  • It doesn't matter what Elsa would do, all that matters in regards to that is what they think she'll do.
  • The people show every sign of loving their queen. They draw back when she's warning them all to stay away, but they seem glad and relieved when they're watching Anna thaw and Elsa hug her.
  • I imagine that, between Anna thawing and the epilogue, Elsa might have appeared on the castle balcony with Anna at her side, and made a speech begging the people's forgiveness for the misery she had put them all through, and vowing to use her powers only for good in the future. (There had to be a few days timeskip between the thaw and the scenes of Hans and the Duke being shipped out, enough for Elsa to work out a deal with the French ambassador to take Hans back to the Southern Isles and officially end trade with Weselton, and for Anna and Kristoff to get more properly acquainted with one another) If there was a speech, it probably paid off, since a lot of spin-off material suggests the townspeople are friendly towards the royals, such as how in Olaf's Frozen Adventure, the townspeople are willing to join Elsa and Anna in searching for Olaf without much question.
  • Basically Elsa would do the fairy tale version of a modern PR campaign. How many times do we see a celebrity mess up and then go on a massive apology tour to repair their public image?

Where are the Arendelle nobility when needed?

• The country enters crisis-mode, the royal family is disappeared ... and foreigners seem to take charge of the kingdom. I know that Anna left Hans in charge, but it seems he only discusses his decisions (including things like arresting, sentencing to death and killing the Queen) with foreign dignitaries. Where are the local noblemen, ministers of the government, judges, etc.? Don't they have anything to say?
  • Since Hans was (presumably) visiting Arendelle for the first time, he might not have been acquainted with officials other than the royals. Or, considering his plans to take over the throne, he might have disregarded any officials from Arendelle, as they might've just gotten in the way. This could also explain why he only seems to associate with the Duke of Weselton: since Weselton was Arendelle's biggest trading partner until Elsa makes an embargo with him, the Duke might have been the closest person Hans knew to an Arendelle official (as he would probably have some knowledge of and stake in the kingdom). Hans might have also only really associated with the Duke because he agreed with Hans' plans to kill Elsa.
  • So Hans, the scheming Chessmaster plotting to take over the kingdom, couldn't be bothered to suss out what the local power structure was. And then, when the kingdom is in crisis and a foreigner seizes power based on the vague, hasty decree of the heir-apparent (not the reigning monarch), that local power structure... saw that he was ignoring them, decided they weren't needed, and wandered off to watch Game of Thrones. That makes sense.
  • When Anna left to go find Elsa, she left Hans in charge. Anna's word might just be really important.
  • With Elsa AWOL and angsting, Anna was in charge. Leaving Hans in charge meant that he could hold his own council, and he chose to discuss it with those who had no real authority over the kingdom. Serves as a great Foreshadowing of his later betrayal, actually. Most likely, the Arendelle authorities were tasked with keeping everyone alive during the Freeze, while Hans covered it up by claiming that he was handling the foreign dignitaries.

Thirteenth In Line?

• So, we have two beautiful, wealthy, eligible young noblewomen, one about to become queen, and the Southern Isles sends the thirteenth in line for the throne to the coronation ceremony. It's implied that Arendelle is comparatively wealthy and economically stable, as local kingdoms/princedoms go. Hans's twelve brothers would be murdering each other (and quite possibly their wives!) for a chance at Elsa or Anna. How does Hans end up with the duty?
  • Hans' brothers might all be married already and if they are, they are most likely married to noblewomen who are socially equal to or just a bit lower than Elsa and Anna, so there is no need for them to rush off to marry. Hans, being the youngest and unmarried brother, was probably sent to A. be the Southern Isle's representative, and B. woo Elsa or Anna and marry one of them. If Hans and his brothers all married princesses from different kingdoms, that gives their family lots of political power. Think Queen Victoria and how her children married into royal families all across Europe. The line at the end saying that Hans will face his brothers' as punishment implies that they didn't expect him to go crazy and try to kill Elsa for the throne. The Doylist explanation for Hans' place in the succession is so that the audience will understand that Hans has no chance of ever being a king through inheritance.
  • Also, seeing as Hans is the youngest, it makes sense that he'd be forced to go to the kingdom where it'd be hardest to get hitched because it's likely that all his older brothers had snatched up all the "easy" princesses and noblewomen in the area, so Hans was forced to go to one of the few other places with sufficient nobility. And Arendelle was an obviously open choice - remember, Elsa had a reputation as an aloof shut-in whom no one had seen in years, so she probably didn't get many suitors. Hans mentions that he initially came for Elsa before he encountered Anna.
  • Arendelle is based on Norway, so it's pretty far north. The 'Southern' Isles might be pretty far away, too far for them to be all that concerned about it, but not too far for a jealous and desperate son to travel to for a chance to seize power.
  • The Southern Isles are based on Denmark, which isn't that far away from Norway.
  • Or, if the allegations that he was mistreated by his family are true, it's very possible that Hans' family was just trying to get rid of him, even temporarily. Perhaps they needed to send a representative but none of the other brothers felt inclined to attend. At that point Hans decided to try to make the best of the situation.
  • I assumed Hans's family hadn't sent him at all, that Hans was there of his own choosing to do his dastardly plan. It explains why it was just him and his horse, and no other assistants - plus at the end "We'll see what his brothers think of this" implies his home may be unawares.
  • Or he talked them into letting him go but they never for a moment took the idea seriously that he'd successfully woo one of the sisters. It doesn't sound like Hans' family think very much of him. Otherwise they'd make use of his abilities instead of letting him go rogue.
  • Since we never get to see the other representatives in detail, it's possible that there was an entire delegation from the Southern Isles, including some of his older brothers. It would be bad form of the highest caliber to send someone so unimportant to such a prestigous event, so it's likely that Hans either joined the delegation without telling anyone or was there as an underling to one of his older brothers and managed to (almost) score himself a princess in the process.
  • I always felt like the deal with Hans was basically, twelve brothers, and you're going to get a bit neglected. That doesn't mean you're abused. And he only mentioned three of his brothers mocking him. He had nine others we know even less about, remember? To make him feel important, he could have been sent to represent the kingdom and eye up either queen or princess. Except he took it as an opportunity to get his dastardly on.

Snowman Pain Perception

• During their quest to and from Elsa's Ice Palace, Olaf is knocked to pieces and look at that, he gets impaled, all without him feeling seriously hurt. However, it's the fireplace inside Arendelle's castle that causes him to show some intolerance for pain (albeit in a calm, Plucky Comic Relief kind of way). Why was it the fire that elicited a pain reaction from him, as opposed to all the instances of him being destroyed, decapitated, and impaled?
  • Maybe because heat and fire would render him a puddle, in the right temperatures, impalement and dismemberment don't actually harm him because he can just put himself back together.
  • Impalement and the like merely rearrange his molecules bit. His arm catching fire, on the other hand, could do some actual damage.
  • Could also be a sort of elemental ying-yang thing. He's made from ice magic, so it's only natural that fire is the one thing that causes him pain.

So Elsa has perfect control now?

• Okay, Elsa has been battling for control of her powers for 12-13 years by now, and all of a sudden she can control them perfectly after a single "Eureka!" Moment? I get that she now understands how to control her powers, but that's different from being able to actually control them all the time. She can still get upset or become afraid, and she's more used to trying to shut down those emotions rather than deal with them in a healthy way, even if she knows she should calm down. There are times when a person knows being upset or angry won't help a situation, but that doesn't mean they stop being angry because they decide to.
  • Look how quickly she masters her powers once she decides to "Let It Go." With absolutely zero practice in over a decade, she creates a castle, clothing, and sentient life. She just never made the connection before between emotional state and her ability to control her power, since she was actively trying to repress her powers rather than study them. Anna's comment about true love "thawing" a frozen heart makes the connection in her mind that by using her positive emotions, she can dispel as well as create the snow.
  • Even if she can control her powers, that doesn't meant she will be able to fully control her emotions.
  • When she tried to control her emotions, she bottled them up and lost control at incredibly awkward times. Now that she is in total control of her powers rather than trying to bury them, she won't feel the need to bury her emotions anymore for fear of lashing out. She can express her emotions, which will give her better understanding and control over the emotions that cause accidental ice ages.
  • Elsa spent most of her life in a downward spiral: the more she was afraid of her powers, the more they manifested without her intending them to, and the more she was afraid of them. It is similar to someone who begins hyperventilating because afraid of lacking air. Being able to thaw a whole kingdom probably restored faith in her abilities enough for them to be under control again.
  • She's not in perfect control. She just knows how to deal with slips better now than she did before. The Frozen Fever short shows Elsa can still lose control of her powers even when she's not necessarily afraid or feeling negative emotions. Also, the short novels 'Anna & Elsa: Sisterhood is the strongest magic' show Elsa still losing control over her powers when she is tired or upset.
  • Also, while Elsa's powers are tied to emotions, it's not enough for her to be focused in her actions. That may be why she wasn't quite able to beat the waves in that one shot in the Frozen II teaser: because her emotions were under control. She's really able to do amazing feats when she's angry, fearful, overjoyed, or otherwise upset. Being calm won't do her much good. If she's focused AND angry, she's an incredible force, which is why she's able to put up such a good fight against the Duke of Weselton's guys at the ice palace. She built her North Mountain ice castle in seconds just because she was happy, and even then she wasn't straining herself. The magic is even more potent when influenced by negative emotions.

Kristoff's Job

• Since at the end of the movie Elsa is the queen and seems completely in control of her powers. Does that put Kristoff out of a job? If the queen walks by a pool of water and touches it every day, you've effectively eliminated the ice business.
  • Since Kristoff is now Royal Ice Master and Deliverer, that means the Ice Harvesters will all be under his employ anyway and answer to him. Essentially the ice industry of Arendelle will become a government-owned monopoly. Clearly Elsa didn't put Kristoff out of a job because he now works for her.
  • However consider the consequences of doing something like that. If Elsa did walk by a lake or pond and froze it so that the harvesters could collect the ice, slowly but surely the lake would start to dry up. Also the constant shift in temperature caused by Elsa freezing the water and unfreezing it everyday could kill the wildlife in the area.
  • As evidenced by Olaf's personal snow cloud, Elsa has enough of a handle on her powers to create highly localized "endless winters" now.
  • She's the Queen. It's not unreasonable to suggest that she has other duties that will occupy her time other than making ice for Kristoff to move about the place. I strongly suspect that Arendelle's methods of procuring ice will take place the same way they did before she came along, and that now she has Elsa will more or less restrict using her ice powers to special occasions.
  • To add to everything else here, Arendelle's ice industry is probably primarily based on export. As strange as it sounds in the modern day, ice was actually harvested and sold from countries with large amounts of it (including Norway, Arendelle's obvious inspiration) as late as the 19th century (and to a degree, it still is done there, just on a significantly reduced scale). Assuming that Kristoff's position isn't just a titular one to make him nobility and legitimize his relationship with Anna, he probably mostly deals with trade on a governmental level. Having more ice to export would give him more to do. And it gives him an excuse to have a room at the castle and also be allowed to store Sven in the stables.
  • Besides, would Kristoff need a job anymore? He went from spending the night in random people's barns to living in a castle as a suitor to Arendelle's princess. Why would he need to do anything in order to earn a living? It seems like Anna and Elsa are both happy to let him hang out with them and everything.

Economic Damage to Arendelle.

• Hasn't Elsa done rather serious economic harm to her kingdom by cutting off all trade with Weselton, Arendelle's biggest trading partner? Granted, the ruler of Weselton had undoubtedly committed hostile acts against Arendelle, but isn't cutting ties with your biggest trading partner cutting off your nose to spite your face? Obviously, nations do from time to time impose economic sanctions on other nations, but usually that's to get the target country to change some specific policy or behavior that the sanctioning country doesn't like. In this case, Elsa seems to have sanctioned Weselton permanently, or at least indefinitely, over past behavior.
  • That depends on how many other prospective trade partners are available to take up the slack and how many of them are willing to give non-exploitative^note (or at least non-exploitative-of-Arendelle, as at least some would think in terms of bending over and spreading for the God-Queen) trade terms.
  • The Duke is lucky to simply being deported in disgrace: given that he tried to have his guards kill Elsa, and the considerable scope of her powers, Weselton would probably have acquiesced to whatever punishment Elsa felt was appropriate, up to and including execution for attempted regicide, which could even be treated as a hate crime.
  • There's economic damage, and there's political damage. After the Duke's actions, Elsa needs to do something to assert her authority and demonstrate to Weselton and Arendelle's other partners and neighbors that she will not tolerate representatives of a foreign power conspiring to assassinate her while a guest of Arendelle, crisis or not. Arendelle's economy might take a bit of a hit until relations are improved, but that's probably better than risk everyone taking advantage of Arendelle because they think Elsa's a push-over.
  • Still, arbitrary restraints on trade are what some people call “an opportunity”. If anybody wanted to write a series of low-tech thrillers about the smuggling trade between Arendelle and Weselton, there’d be a lot of material there. Weselton would surely wink at it, and is Elsa going to maintain a full-time naval patrol off the coast, hunting down every smalltime merchant who’s shipping in a few Weselton-made luxury goods?
  • The trading restraints were in no way arbitrary. They were a valid response to the Duke attempting to commit regicide of a friendly monarch. That's an act of war. Frankly, Weselton should probably count itself lucky she's not personally leading her navy to their ports and freezing them.
  • As for "is Elsa going to maintain a full-time naval patrol off the coast, hunting down every smalltime merchant who’s shipping in a few Weselton-made luxury goods?" If necessary, yes. Arendelle is a seafaring nation, it's hardly unheard of for a seafaring nation to operate a navy, and one of the roles of the navy has traditionally been to operate a coast guard to enforce their home nation's trading laws and police against smugglers. So yes, Elsa is almost certainly already operating a full-time naval patrol dedicated to guarding against smugglers of contraband and turning away unfriendly or unwelcome vessels.
  • Is it ever said whether the Duke answers to anyone in Weselton higher up than him? I have a certain suspicion that Elsa sent the servant bearing the message as a joke or a Take That! in his direction, and that she'd be willing to re-establish relations with Weselton once they learn of what happened and reach out to her to make amends.

Elsa's Isolation

• So if Elsa really wanted to be alone, why didn't she destroy the bridge that connected her ice castle to the other side of the cliff after she threw out Anna? It would be harder to get to her without climbing the mountain/crossing the cliff first. Doing so would've made her ice castle into a mountain fort, complete with giant snowlem bouncer.
  • Her efforts to rein in her powers seem a sufficient distraction at this point, and her difficulty consciously dismantling her constructs is an additional factor.
  • Well just look at Elsa during the "Let It Go" number. She doesn't seem to be thinking as she's using her powers. She's just having fun with them. She completely forgot about Olaf. She only built the staircase to help her cross the mountain and she probably forgot about it as soon as she'd finished building her castle. Alternately she secretly did want someone to come and find her - the way depressed people secretly want someone to notice their problems.
  • Elsa also didn't know at that point that she'd set an endless winter on Arendelle, so she probably thought that with the way everyone at the party saw her, no one (besides Anna, perhaps) would want to come looking for her. And she's not really scared of what Anna thinks of her.
  • And if Anna did come back, Elsa would want the bridge to be there so her sister wouldn't put herself in danger trying to climb in and out of the chasm. Even if they had disagreements, she certainly never wanted her dead.

How'd they escape?

• How did Anna and the Duke get out of the ballroom? I mean, the way Elsa accidentally flung them, they were all pointed inwards, with no way through, and yet 30 seconds later, have made it out to the courtyard and are there to witness Elsa fleeing the kingdom.
  • If you're referring to the spikes (and I'm almost certain you are), the Duke probably had his guards break them. Ice isn't that hard to break, you know.
  • Or maybe they melted it, and that's when they realised that the ice is created by magic but it's still just frozen water.
  • There's a lovely top-down shot of the semi-circle of ice spikes, showing a sizeable gap between either side of it and the doorway. Just go around.

Visible Breath Inconsistency

• Down in Arendelle, Hans and others are shown with visible exhalations. Up on the mountain, Kristoff, Anna, and even Sven don't have those little puffs of condensation despite all the running around they're doing, and even while standing in Elsa's ice palace. During the third act, however, Kristoff and Sven do have visible breath puffs down in Arendelle. Animation oversight, or is there a new level of Shown Their Work regarding atmospheric density or something of the sort at play here?
  • Probably just an animation slip. I know they were deliberately not doing Elsa's right (another Required Secondary Power?)
  • Witness the prison scene with Hans. His breath mists, hers doesn't. That can't be an accident.
  • It does seem consistent (it happens at and just above sea level, doesn't in the mountains) so there probably is a reason for it, real or magical.
  • It's a part of Elsa's Required Secondary Power- not only does she not perceive cold (that wouldn't in itself stop her getting hypothermia and frostbite) but she doesn't loose any body heat as normal human beings do, including not exhaling it.
  • That's all well and good, but the question isn't about Elsa. Of course Elsa's breath wouldn't frost over. The question is about Anna, Kristoff, and Sven. Up in the mountains their breath doesn't frost over, but down in Arendelle it does.
  • It's probably breezy enough at higher altitudes to disperse their breath to a non-visible density.

Thirteen sons?

• How the heck can the King and Queen of the Southern Isles have thirteen MALE children? That seems logically impossible in real life. I have no idea if they were lucky enough to get fraternal or identical twins or triplets multiple times, or the creators just threw in the twelve brothers thing at the last minute.
  • This is hardly out of the question, Sweyn II of Denmark had at least twenty children over the course of his long reign, eighteen of whom were male. And while that is a remarkable number, it shows that this kind of feat isn't impossible in a situation where a king has been alive long enough. Hell Sweyn's brood could very well be the inspiration for Hans' backstory given how the brothers never really got along.
  • It's more or less equivalent to flipping a coin and getting 13 heads in a row: the odds are something you wouldn't like to bet on, but the laws of physics allow for it just fine. (Come to that, we don't even know if Hans had sisters that he just didn't bother to mention for some reason.)
    • Given the time period of the film, it's entirely possible Hans had sisters who died in childhood.
  • If the Southern Isles practices male primogeniture, then any older sisters that Hans might have would be behind him in the line of succession despite their age. Until very recently, virtually all monarchies placed males ahead of females in the succession regardless of respective ages, with Queens regnant only occurring if there were no male heirs (as was the case in Arendelle actually).
  • It's possible he has at least one pair of twins too.
  • Several of them may actually be half-brothers, if the King of the Southern Islands is a remarried widower. That would be somewhat more likely than a single Queen bearing that many children, given the shoddy state of obstetrics in that era.
    • But A Frozen Heart reveals that the king and queen sired 13 sons, and none of them are half-brothers.
    • I am unsure whether A Frozen Heart is to be considered as canon or not. That may be more dependent on whether future movies decide to continue using Hans.
  • There's nothing logically, physically or biologically impossible about having thirteen children of the same sex - it's simply unlikely. (Logical impossibility is self-defeating things like a square triangle, biological impossibility is humans hatching from bird eggs, physical impossibility is a woman creating blizzards out of thin air... wait.)

How did Elsa not know she froze the kingdom?

• Sure, she was hiding in the mountains and likely wouldn't notice it was winter there. However, to get to the mountains she had to run through the countryside, which was covered in snow. Unless she was experiencing some kind of fugue state, Elsa should have realized what she did.
  • She had never used her powers on a large scale before. She'd managed to get through her life to-date without freezing Arendelle from inside of the castle, so she probably did not even know that she was capable of causing such far-reaching effects. By the time Arendelle was thoroughly snowed-in, Elsa was up on a glacier on a mountaintop in a palace which faced away from the kingdom.
  • A certain critic went into detail on how little sense this makes. I can buy Elsa choosing to ignore the winter weather in different areas as she passed through them, but Anna and Kristoff could see clear down to Arendelle on their trip into the mountains, and Elsa's palace was even higher up than they were, meaning she should've been able to see it if she'd just looked down from her balcony. And we can see the cliffs and hills surrounding Arendelle at the beginning of the film, very clearly devoid of the ice and snow that's seen later on. So the "She's on a snowy mountain" excuse doesn't really work, either, since the areas immediately surrounding Arendelle weren't snowy before the winter took hold.
  • Consider that from the point where Anna and Kristoff were standing when they saw the fjord, the North Mountain was at their nine o'clock position. As for the view from the balcony, well, there's a strong implication that perhaps Elsa wouldn't know that the lower parts of Arendelle had frozen over as well, because her ice palace was on the side of the mountain summit that faced away from the fjord.
  • Where does it say or show that Elsa's palace is built facing away from the fjord? In Let It Go, she climbs the mountain, runs up a small hill, creates an ice staircase, and proceeds to build the palace atop the cliff at the top. She's never shown moving around the mountain, especially enough to be on its opposite side, and when Anna and Kristoff are on their journey there, Anna turns away from Arendelle and points in the opposite direction, asking "This way to the North Mountain?", and then Kristoff adjusts her arm so it's pointing up, but still in about the opposite direction of Arendelle. (And, again, Elsa had to have had some view of a place that was frozen over that wasn't supposed to be, even if she couldn't see clear down to Arendelle - she's been into the mountains when her parents took her to see the trolls, and Anna and Kristoff both pass by a frozen waterfall before they meet Olaf, so something should've struck her as odd.)
  • By the time Elsa stops to build her castle, it's just before dawn, suggesting she's been traveling away from Arendelle all night long. She knew she was freezing the route immediate ahead of her as she began her flight, but given that she presumably didn't want to look back towards what she considered her "disgrace", Elsa probably didn't even glance behind her until it was too dark to see that the cold was spreading outward from her path, not thawing from the summer's warmth once she'd passed by. And when she does see the landscape by the dawn's light from her balcony, all that's visible over her shoulder as she emerges is mountains, suggesting she'd put at least a couple of peaks between herself and her kingdom during the night. As for Kristoff adjusting Anna's arm up, that's more likely to be indicating a high pass they need to traverse, not that the actual mountain is towering over them. If it was the actual mountain, why would Anna have missed seeing it in the first place?
    • That's further supported by these scenes from◊ Frozen II when the Frohana are headed to the enchanted forest, and you can clearly see a mountain range in front of the North Mountain.
    • The summit of the North Mountain was clearly visible at the point where Anna asked "This way to the North Mountain?", but it seemed there were low clouds obscuring the part of the mountain where Elsa's ice palace was located. Or, the aforementioned mountain pass that Anna and Kristoff may have had to cross first, meaning the North Mountain's distance from Arendelle is hard to decipher.

What did they tell her?

• Even with the constant knocking and pleas for Elsa to play with her, you cannot tell me Anna didn't ask her parents a few times why her big sister suddenly didn't want to play with her anymore. They had to tell her something to satisfy her, even for just a while, but since they didn't want her to know about Elsa's powers, what could they have possibly told her?
  • Perhaps Elsa's behaviour had become so odd generally they tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade her not to take it personally.
  • Since Elsa was first in line, an easy explanation would be that she was focusing on learning how to be a proper queen.

Why the hurry, Hans?

• Why does Hans decide to propose to her behind Elsa's back, when they need the Queen's agreement to marry, and the way he's gone about it would make any responsible guardian (let alone one who seems very uptight) suspicious and hostile? Even if he was courting her honestly, it was silly, albeit maybe in-character for the guy he was pretending to be. The way things actually are, why risk Elsa distrusting him from their first meeting? It's not like on paper he's that inappropriate a person for Anna to marry, if that's what she really wants.
  • Of course Hans is clearly naturally inclined to fly by the seat of his pants, although he usually seems to have thought things through a little better in fact if Hans is what most people assume he is, one of the usual defining traits is impulsiveness and grandiose over-confidence. But Hans doesn't usually seem to conform to those aspects of the definition.
  • Hans was running a gamble that just kept paying off. He tried to charm Anna - and succeeded. He got her alone at the ball and spun her a line - and that succeeded too. He brought the subject around to love at first sight, proposed marriage - and succeeded. Odds are that he hadn't expected things to be this easy and was too far along to back out with a "Well, ask the Queen to let me stay in the castle for a few weeks and then we'll talk about it." It would have broken character.
  • Hans was improvising. His original plan was to start a courtship with Elsa, not Anna. She was the Queen after all, and Hans didn't know about the ice powers thing. But Elsa was so incredibly reserved and distant at the coronation that he saw that she was not going to fall for the Prince Charming routine no matter how well he played it. Since he'd had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Anna earlier that day, he quickly switched to Plan B and romanced her instead. This plan would have required that he arrange Elsa's death sooner or later. If Elsa would not consent to the marriage, then it probably would have been sooner rather than later. Anna would then turn to him for emotional support and (as the new heir) would be in a position to consent to her own marriage. The major supporting evidence that Hans is The Sociopath is the way that he effortlessly switched from a plan that required nothing more than being charming (wooing the reigning Queen) to one that required murder by default (installing the Queen's younger sister on the throne and marrying her) without missing a beat.
  • If Hans tried to court Anna on a more traditional timescale, likely the first thing Elsa would do would be to have him investigated to see if he was suitable for her sister—and for that matter, if he would likely be a threat to her or her future children. Given what we know of him, it's entirely possible that there is something in his past he couldn't afford to have Elsa bring to light. Plus, Hans also has to be worried about keeping Anna's attention: right now, she thinks she's in love with him, but she's never met another man her age. If he allows her to slow down, think about it, maybe even be courted by rival suitors, she could easily change her mind about the marriage. Under the circumstances, Hans may feel his best choice is to push the engagement as fast as he can in hopes that the marriage is fait accompli by the time either sister develops buyer's remorse and has serious reason to object to it. As to whether marrying Anna against Elsa's wishes would cause her to be disinherited, maybe, maybe not. There doesn't seem to be a surplus of heirs, so he might figure that Elsa will just put up with whatever Anna does given the absence of any other clear choice as heir.

So where does Kristoff live?

• The movie seems to imply that Kristoff is homeless when Anna meets him (and probably lived with the trolls full time before), but where does he live now that he's Arendelle's official ice master? Is he still homeless? Does he live at the castle now? Or did Elsa arrange for him to live in the village?
  • My guess is Elsa arranged for him to live in Arendelle. It's obvious she approves of Kristoff, so she's not going to let him be homeless if she can do something, but at the same time, it probably wouldn't be appropriate for him to live in the palace with her and Anna, especially since their relationship (Anna and Elsa) is only beginning to be repaired.
  • I'm pretty sure that he'd move into the castle at least after the marriage. Whatever he's doing, Anna is needed there.
  • I'm not sure whether he's so much 'homeless' as itinerant: his job means he's constantly on the move, and sometimes he has to take whatever lodgings he can get.
  • I figured that during the summer months he worked as an ice harvester. During the winter, he would take on the tasks of a winter farm-hand.
  • Ice harvesting is still needed in winter. In an age without refrigerators, ice is shipped to hot countries all year round. (It doesn't melt as quickly as you'd think, especially if shipped in quantity. And I'm assuming the fjord doesn't freeze over in normal winters.)
  • As of the sequel, it's implied he has a room at the castle somewhere. He and Sven spend most of their time there with the two sisters, and when Anna bids him goodnight, she nonchalantly leaves him in an empty sitting room instead of seeing him out to the gates or something. Granted, she was preoccupied with what was wrong with Elsa at the time, but it still wasn't framed as though she had forgotten to escort him out.
  • Plus, the outfit he wears in that scene appears to be nightclothes, as if he's already dressed for bed. We know from the first movie that Anna's outfit there is definitely her nightgown, and Elsa is similarily dressed, further implying that Kristoff's stay is at least an overnight one.

The Troll's guide to raising humans

• At the beginning we see Bulda decide to adopt the orphaned Kristoff and Sven, but how would trolls know anything about caring for a small human boy? Or how to care for a reindeer calf for that matter?
  • Likely nothing. The troll only kept them because they were cute.
  • That's exactly the problem. The trolls know nothing about how to care for a human child, so how exactly did Kristoff survive to adulthood?
  • Well, the trolls might be...er, eccentric, but they're not stupid. As long as they had some common sense, they could figure out the basics. Plus, Kristoff wasn't an infant when they adopted him. He's supposed to be the same age as Elsa, according to supplementary material. He could tell them when he needed something, and what Sven needs, and the trolls would figure out how to get it and accommodate him.
  • Agreed: also they seem to have been more or less taking care of themselves at the time they met Bulda. Kristoff probably already has a good idea how to cover his own physical needs, but it's more his emotional upbringing that she takes over, something that she seems completely able to do.
  • Although... Sven, on the other hand, is very young, possibly young enough to still be suckling. I guess milk (even reindeer milk, if it's herding country) might not be that hard to acquire, and grazing animals are known to thrive after being bottle- or cup-fed.
  • The trolls seem like a soft-hearted bunch. Even if they've never reared a human child before, they've probably cared for orphaned wild animals and would know how to meet the needs of creatures that aren't made out of living rock.
  • In most Nordic countries Trolls were evildoers who eat humans, especially children, or tried to trick them. Across Europe, there were also stories of Changelings and Fetches - when Trolls steal a human child and replace them, sometimes with fairies, and sometimes a log of enchanted wood that becomes 'sick' and dies. But there are also stories where they are nothing more than magical neighbors who borrowed stuff from the farmers, and if the farmers treated them well, they were rewarded with gold or luck. They also loved children, so the easiest way to make friends with a troll was to be nice to their kids, and it was said that they took care of the human children that were abandoned in the woods. The stories include that the Trolls were particularly attracted to blond hair and beauty, and often treated the child as if it were truly one of their own. In return, they gave the child gifts such as strength, stamina, or an affinity for the wild.
    • This is even briefly hinted at by Bulda in the Broadway musical when she tells Queen Iduna to "Call on us anytime, we love children and even raise a few strays ourselves." Yes, in the musical, the trolls are replaced with the Fair Folk (for practical purposes^note Eliminating the need for a scene change as well as make casting easier), but the intended point stays the same.

What did the king tell them?

• At the beginning of the movie the king decides to limit Elsa's contact with people,this includes cutting down the number of servants and shutting the whole family in the castle. Thing is this also means he must have come up with a story for why he did so but what could he possibly say that would justify firing most of the servants and closing the court?
  • If we can use deleted material as evidence, the song We Know Better suggests that at least those servants who had most contact with the girls must have known something about Elsa's powers, as she wasn't above playing pranks on them.
  • One might just as easily ask why they didn't notice something weird when Elsa was little- she doesn't really seem to be secretive about her magic and if her parents know chances are the staff do. We also don't know when she first started showing it- if there's been something uncanny about her since infancy, presumably most of the servants who attended her would have noticed something (like if a toddler's tantrums were accompanied by cold winds indoors, say.)
  • Well, he is the king. While it would definitely raise suspicions if he fired most of the staff so abruptly, it's not like anyone could force him to provide an explanation for it. The Duke of Weselton was inquiring as to why the gates were closed during the ball, so if he did give an official explanation, truthful or otherwise, it probably did not spread very far.
  • He wouldn't necessarily have to fire the servants outright, which would be both callous and insulting to their skills. Many of them could have been assigned to duties outside the palace, or recommended for positions (with promotion!) at the estates of friendly nobles and crown officials.

"Get Anna!"

• Elsa has spent most of her life keeping Anna away, including having ejected her with some emphasis from the ice-tower. Yet when Hans has her in the cell, Anna is the first thing she asks for. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, but why?
  • Because even though her and Anna's last encounter may've ended badly, Anna still understands and empathizes with Elsa better than anyone else in Arendelle. Now that Elsa's being held captive by people who are terrified of her powers, it's understandable that she'd ask for the one person who's demonstrated already that she isn't afraid of her.
  • Keeping Anna away was never about disliking her company, it was Elsa's idea of sisterly love, i.e., the best thing for Anna is to stay away from me, even if Anna doesn't realize it. Once things got really desperate, Elsa's concern is the same as before: is Anna safe?
  • Anna is her sister. She loves Anna. Her key motivation throughout the movie is wanting to protect Anna, even if misguidedly. It's hardly a headscratcher that she wants to make sure that Anna is okay.

Elsa had suitors?

• Hans tells Anna, "As queen, Elsa was preferable, but no one was getting anywhere with her." So does that mean Elsa had suitors before? But how? She isolated herself up until her coronation and presumably would've done so after the day was over (if the lyric "It's only for today" is anything to go by). How was she getting suitors? Was Anna rejecting them for her?
  • Easily. I imagine it went something like:
    Letter: My lady Elsa, it would honor me if you would allow me to court—
    Reply Letter: NO.
  • Honestly, the fact that she had isolated herself in itself means that nobody is getting anywhere with her. It's pretty self evident. Plus she seems like she could take care of Arendelle by herself. Also, when Elsa's parents died, she was eighteen. Easily old enough - or at least Anna obviously thinks so - that other royal families might be suspicious about why Elsa's parents hadn't even been engaging with them on the subject of potential suitors for Elsa, something that Hans would almost certainly have heard remarked on, seeing as he and/or one or more of his brothers would have been on the list of acceptable bachelors, even if he was as low down as say, #45 on that list. This would be happening even if the marriage itself was months, if not years, off. One assumes they were avoiding the issue waiting for Elsa to get her powers controlled enough to be willing to physically touch other people. (Though Elsa probably also got very anxious at the issue, too, given her general manner at eighteen.)
  • It is entirely possible that during the years just before their deaths, Adgar and Idun were cordially but insistently denying all suitors, whether by letter or in person, on Elsa's behalf, since even though she would have been underage at that point, European monarchs were often betrothed before the age of consent. And once she was old enough, they could have found other reasons to delay (her not being queen yet, still needing training, being shy and introverted) while they were working on controlling her powers. After the deaths, if there was a regent this person could have rejected suitors by letter as well, for the very good reason of her grief. And if there wasn't, Elsa could have been sending letters herself to reject them. So she could easily have had suitors (albeit ones she never actually met) while still being isolated.

Social Status Strife

• By the end of the movie, Anna and Kristoff are in a relationship. Though Elsa has given them permission, wouldn't royals (many of whom placed high priority on social status and believed they were above everyone else) from other states take a dim view of Anna (a Princess) being in a relationship with Kristoff (a commoner)? They do love each other, it's just in those days marriages were viewed as a way to secure an alliance, not something done for love. If Elsa ended up with a commoner, as the reigning monarch, it would be harder to challenge given she's the reigning monarch and not wanting to cross her due to her powers (though it may cause an uproar still), but Anna is a Princess; would that cause strife? would certain types of suitors aspiring to marry Anna (since only one can marry Elsa) try and 'deal with' Kristoff. I don't oppose it, I'm wondering if that would cause problems.
  • The Anna/Kristoff situation can be compared to the modern day Princess Madeline of Sweden. Madeline is not the crown princess so marriage to a commoner, even a foreigner (Kristoff, technically, is a foreigner to Arendelle) won't trigger a strife given that Elsa gave her the blessing. Modern Swedish crown princess Victoria is married (also to a commoner) with a baby girl though, but Elsa can promise marriage and issue soon to compensate.
  • Bear in mind that as Queen, Elsa is legally allowed to bestow nobility on whoever she deems worthy of it. Given what Kristoff went through for her sister, I can only imagine that Elsa would very quickly have a few words to say on anyone saying that Kristoff wasn't a worthy suitor for her sister. On top of that, by making him the "Official Ice Master of Arendelle", she's effectively giving him a position within the Arendelle government, allowing him to reside in the castle like we see by Frozen II, and also make him eligible to marry Anna. Either that, or Elsa could just declare the marriage legal and binding and no one of the era would argue the fact without being turned into ice sculptures.
  • Since Kristoff helped save the kingdom, people would just as easily find Elsa ungrateful if she didn't offer Kristoff some magnificent reward, like letting him marry Anna. Dude, Where's My Respect?, anyone?
  • Even though this movie tries to take itself more realistically than most fairy tales, it seems a lot of people forget that it's still a Disney movie, at its heart. I really don't think the repercussions of Anna marrying an ice harvester are going to matter much, especially if this is the same universe in which Rapunzel was able to marry the thief who received a death sentence for stealing her crown.
  • In a deleted song sequence from the sequel, it's mentioned that Kristoff was made a lord at some point before getting engaged to Anna. No word on whether that's still the case in the finished product, but since he's implied to be living at the castle anyway, it would be odd for him not to have received some sort of promotion in social status.

This is not how to trick people

• Why would Hans even bother telling Anna about his own betrayal? If he really wants to kill Anna, he could have just kissed her anyway - since it would not have been true love's kiss it would not have healed her, but she wouldn't necessarily have realized that (it might take time to work) and only by her death can she get that final confirmation. If he actually succeeds in killing Elsa after telling Anna, he's now got an active queen who can tell everyone else about his betrayal. And why mention that he's going to kill Elsa? It's not as if Anna's going to help him do that..
  • Hans has no reason to believe that killing Elsa would save Anna, especially since she was minutes away from death.
  • Hans seems to have been fairly convinced that Anna wouldn't last more than a few minutes after he left her — otherwise, presumably, he wouldn't have told everyone she was already dead. Without Olaf breaking in, it's implied he would have been right. He also seems to have guessed that breaking Anna's spirit will speed up the process — putting out the fire is obvious but there's no other reason to darken the room as he mocks her.
  • Hans has no idea how the 'true love's kiss' actually works. For all he knows, it might have been enough that she loved him. (Which she probably doesn't, but that's the sort of emotional fine detail that Hans probably isn't good with himself.) In any case, Hans was probably just taking the chance to take out his sadistic impulses on someone who couldn't tell on him.
  • His real mistake is that when the door was opened Anna would be found collapsed on the floor near the door like she was trying to escape; if it was how he said she presumably would have been found laid out on the couch or somewhere more comfortable. (It would have been more practical to just smother her or bludgeon her to death, but the film would hardly have got away with that, and a bloody corpse would have discredited him.)
    • Ahh, but that's assuming Hans would've let anyone else in to see Anna before himself, when he had the key to that room. If Anna had been frozen solid in the position in which Olaf found her, Hans could simply lift her back onto the couch in order to corroborate his story, and no one else would've known.

Could Anna have lesser powers?

• It's commonly commented that Elsa got all the magic powers in the family, but could Anna reasonably have subtler ones too? This would explain her ability to walk through the frozen landscape and even have her clothes and legs soaked in freezing water without hypothermia, her ability to wear skates made of ice in the ending, and her turning to ice at exactly the right moment to save Elsa from Hans. Granted, her power isn't strong enough to stop her head or heart being frozen, but that's not due to outside cold but due to a direct hit from Elsa's magic, which is probably a whole new level (Elsa herself might have trouble with that, after all - we never see her blast herself!)
  • According to Frozen II, Anna is apparently half of one of the five elemental spirits, with Elsa being the other half. Besides them, the other four spirits represent the classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire. And while it's clarified that between the sisters, only Elsa was blessed with magic, it's still been suggested that she stands for the elements of wind and water while Anna represents earth and fire, in some capacity.

The ice blocks on Kristoff's sled

• When Kristoff first enters Wandering Oaken's Trading Post & Sauna and Oaken tries to rip him off by claiming that supply & demand is behind his outrageous price gouging, Kristoff replies, "You want to talk about a supply and demand problem? I sell ice for a living!" and we see his sled out front, with a bunch of ice blocks tied down on the back of the sled. Except, in the next scene, when Anna and Kristoff are riding in the sled, the ice blocks are gone. What did he do to the ice blocks? Did he untie them and leave them outside Oaken's place?
  • I see no reason why he'd keep them, especially if Anna wants them to go to the top of the mountain right away. They'd just slow them down.
  • Plus, as the original question points out, there's not exactly a shortage of ice for him to collect after he takes Anna to the North Mountain.

The lighting in Elsa's castle

• In the room that is the "heart" of Elsa's ice palace, the floor and walls change color to match Elsa's emotions, much like a mood ring: bright blue when happy, purplish-red when upset and/or frightened, and amber when angry. From the perspective of the characters, would Elsa be seeing the changes in color the same way the viewer sees them? Or could some of the colors be caused by natural light (when that particular room is seen with purple and red lighting, it appears to be sunset outside)?
  • I think what we're supposed to assume is that the colors were caused by outside factors, like the sunset, sunrise, and northern lights being reflected and refracted through the ice walls of the palace. They do seem to coincide with Elsa's emotional state, but that's just aesthetic choices on the part of the filmmakers.

Oaken's store hours

• Doesn't anyone think Oaken must have really weird store hours? When Anna enters the store, there's a clock on the wall behind Oaken's desk that clearly reads 10:30 p.m. Just seems odd that Oaken would even be open at 10:30 p.m. at night when his store is in the middle of nowhere and there aren't many people who would be passing through at that time of night.
  • It's a trading post, like the modern day 24 hour gas station, traders, wanderers, salesmen, hunters, and the sort that could come through at all hours of the day. And considering it's remote location in the woods, having him live inside either in the back, or in an unseen shelter like the barn is entirely possible.
  • Remember that, regardless of how Elsa's mucked with the weather, by the calendar it's summertime in a region not that far from the Arctic Circle. The sun is going to be out very late, allowing a much longer period each day for potential customers to go on shopping expeditions, so Oaken's business hours have been extended accordingly.
  • Speaking of which, Anna walks in the front door. Less than a minute later, Kristoff staggers in, covered in snow. Wouldn't Anna have seen his sled approaching? Granted, she'd probably think he was just another traveler passing through that neck of the forest, and the darkness may mean she very well didn't see him, but that does raise a question or two.
  • In the next scene, Kristoff tells Anna that he and Sven like to go fast, and he was probably coming in from a different direction than Anna had been.

Hans's first meeting with Anna

• What was Hans doing at the docks where Anna crashes into his horse? I don't think it's at all explained.
  • People are arriving from all over. He's at the docks because his ship came in.

Anna's "skunk" stripe

• Why didn't Anna and Elsa's parents consider trying to dye the platinum streak in Anna's hair, considering it seemed to serve as a constant reminder of what Elsa had done to her?
  • Anna was obviously told that her stripe was just a funny quirk that she'd been born with and she doesn't seem to give it much thought- going to the trouble of henna dye would have drawn her attention to it more. Young Anna doesn't go out much and the mundane explanation he gave her is probably good enough for most people anyway (being born with random patches of colorless hair is not unheard of).

Nobody's tired?

• I realize the movie isn't going to have time to show us everything, but...are Elsa and Anna good at running on little sleep? Elsa runs off at night. By the end of Let It Go, the sun is rising, which would mean it's morning, and we're also shown Anna riding on her horse. So were Elsa and Anna awake all night? I'll buy neither of them being hungry, but going 24 hours without sleep should've left them exhausted, especially Elsa since she climbed a huge mountain and built a palace. You'd think she would've collapsed.
  • Here's an explanation for "Let It Go:" night in the far north in summer is very short- it could well be about 3 or 4 in the morning, and we don't see Elsa for at least another 24 to 36 hours, she may have spent some of her offscreen time asleep.
  • As for Anna, there was a scene change in between when Kristoff's sled is chased by wolves and destroyed (which occurs at night) and when the two look down on a frozen Arendelle the next morning. Kristoff seems like the sort who would know how to set up camp in the wilderness, which would've allowed for him, Anna, and Sven to get some rest before resuming their journey.

Kissed by a Troll

• When I saw this movie in theatres, I thought I remembered hearing Anna telling Elsa when they were kids that she dreamed she got kissed by a troll, which I guess is supposed to reference her romance with Kristoff because he was raised by trolls. Whenever I watch Frozen on TV now, though, that part never actually plays, so I was wondering...Did I just imagine seeing it, or do they choose not to air it in non-theatre showings? And if it's the latter reasoning, why?
  • You've got some scenes mixed up. Anna tells Hans she dreamt she was kissed by a troll after he asks about the white streak in her hair. She was saying she dreamt the streak was caused by getting kissed by a troll. Elsa was completely absent during that scene.
  • D'oh...That would explain it. I usually skip over Anna's early interactions with Hans, but I still remembered the line about the troll from somewhere. I guess I assumed it must be from her childhood because it sounded like something little Anna would say.

How did Kristoff reach the mountains so quickly ?

• Kristoff is seen during the coronation sharing a carrot with Sven. The evening of the same day, he's deep in the mountains with his sled full of ice, and apparently out of carrots. I can understand that he did not care much about the coronation celebrations, being misanthropic and all that, but how did he manage to reach the mountain and harvest enough ice to fill his sled in such a short period of time ? And why did he not stock up on carrots while in the city?
  • Kristoff lived near the mountains at least for most of his life, so he would know the quickest and/or easiest routes compared to Anna who's most likely never been out in the mountains.
  • It wasn't actually the evening of the same day. Elsa runs off into the mountains and Anna goes after her late at night the day of her coronation, or extraordinarily early the next morning. In another scene, we see Anna looking for her sister in broad daylight the next day when her horse runs off on her - she wanders through the wilderness for the rest of the day and comes across Oaken's shop that evening, thus making it close to 24 hours between Elsa running off and Kristoff and Anna meeting. As for the ice in his sled...it could've been just stock he'd gathered when it was still summer and had been planning on selling in Arendelle, but when Elsa cast eternal winter over the kingdom, he went off into the mountains to maybe try to find some way to return things to normal.

Then leave...when?

• Anna's lines indicate that Coronation Day is her time limit for getting out of the castle. Then in the ice castle, Elsa tells Anna to enjoy the sun and open up the gates at home. When arguing, Elsa says to 'close the gates', then Anna says she 'can't live like this anymore' indicating Anna herself would be shut up again too. Elsa then tells Anna to 'just leave' if she disliked it. So Coronation Day on(or potentially earlier), Anna could have left the palace at any time if Elsa gave permission. Why did Elsa not have a courier sent to inform Anna of her freedom first thing, if that was the way it worked? Why didn't she try to find a workaround for the three years, such as sending out Anna but keeping the gates shut and only communicating via letters? Was Elsa so self absorbed she had no idea how miserable her sister was stuck in the castle?
  • I think one of the reasons Anna never left was because she was waiting for the day she could rekindle her relationship with her sister - when Elsa finally tells her to leave if she doesn't want to stay cooped up inside, you can tell how distraught Anna becomes at that moment as she realizes just how distant her once-pleasant and kind sister has become, though unbeknownst to her, of course, it's not without a pretty good reason. This is what led to her finally confronting Elsa up front about why she always shut herself away, leading to the main plot of the film.
  • I think that we can take it that in this canon sheltered teenage girls don't just strike out permanently to seek a new home in a world where they don't know anyone. (Anna's trip to find Elsa- which almost ended in disaster anyway the way she went about it- had a finite goal- find Elsa, placate Elsa, come home.) It's likely that they've got other family but that would be too confusing in the film and anyway it seems Anna doesn't know them.

Anna's not very adventurous, really

• Why does Anna never try to escape or sneak out, like Princess Jasmine tried? She's presented as an adventurous, spunky girl, but she just waited three years for someone else to open the gates for her. It seems a little odd.
  • Sneaking out of a castle and running away isn't something you're capable of just doing on a whim, and Anna's supreme specialty, as we all know, is acting on whims. Something like this requires planning, choosing the right time to go, and most of all, coming to terms with your decision and clarifying with yourself that it's what you want to do - none of these aspects of forethought are among anything Anna is familiar with performing.
    • Both sisters strike out on impulse during the course of the film, so that's not the issue here. And while Anna is definitely someone to act on whim, that doesn't mean that she's incapable of ever planning anything. Anna doesn't seem to be presented as someone who places adventure as her top priority in the first place. Her concerns mainly revolve around love and family. While she does set off on an adventure during the movie, she doesn't do it just for the sake of it, but because she wants to help people and that seems to be the best way to do it.
  • We also don't know that she didn't try off-screen to do what Jasmine does in Aladdin and, like Jasmine, not succeed. Jasmine didn't make it very far because as a princess who had been locked up her whole life, like Anna had been, she didn't know how to navigate the world outside. It's not unthinkable that sometime during the years passed during the growing up montage Anna tried the same thing and had a similar experience, especially since, as mentioned in the Fridge Logic entry above, there aren't a ton of options for isolated teenage girls who haven't been out of the house since they were five and are unlikely to have many contacts out there. On top of that, we also don't know how well the palace is guarded.

Scream, goddamnit!

• Why, in the climax, does Anna not try shouting or calling out to Elsa when she sees her, opting to utterly and blatantly sacrifice herself instead? Considering Kristoff was (somehow) able to hear her moments before when her voice was barely above a whisper, weren't there other ways that she could've alerted her sister to what Hans was doing? Like say, scream "ELSA! LOOK BEHIND YOU!"?
  • Anna was freezing up and could barely speak above a whisper. If she could have screamed for help when Hans left her to die, she would have.
  • Technically, on the fjord, if Anna was running to intercept the sword before it could hit Elsa, wouldn't she have enough adrenaline to shout to Elsa regardless of whether or not she was freezing to death?
  • That run happens in a (improbably) short time in which Anna has no time to cry out before she's already there and probably doesn't waste the breath. A second after she sees it she's standing there doing a Big "NO!" at Hans. If she'd stayed on the spot and shouted "LOOK BEHIND YOU!", Hans could easily have struck Elsa before she had time to react (unless she used her powers and Anna didn't actually see Elsa fighting with them so she'd never know that.) Really she only gets there because Hans takes a few seconds adjusting his grip to line up the blow.
  • Also, if Anna heard the sword being drawn from about 20 to 30 feet away, then presumably so did Elsa, and it's a distinctive noise. Elsa probably knew exactly what Hans was going to do and had reasons to sit on the ice and let him.
  • Obviously Anna had only seconds to react, but I'm to guess that her weakened condition is the reason why she chose to shield Elsa from the blade as opposed to say, attempt to disarm Hans. She's obviously in no condition to be putting up a fight against an able-bodied guy in his early 20s with a sword. He'd probably stab her too, and possibly Kristoff, just to get rid of a witness (and risk his story being thrown out since he'd now clearly be seen killing both sisters on the fjord in view of a number of dignitaries).
  • If there was ice in her diaphragm, restricting her ability to breath, her ability to scream would be severely hampered.
  • Except she quite loudly cries, "No!" when throwing herself between the two. Also, to the above poster, I wasn't suggesting that she try to disarm Hans. And even if Elsa HAD wanted to die at that point, it was due to her thinking that she'd been responsible for her sister's death - if she'd heard Anna scream, she would've probably snapped out of it in an instant upon realizing she was still alive. Hard to say what would've happened, but she'd likely turn and freeze Hans in an ice block before rushing to thaw Anna.
  • Anna was yards away from Elsa and Hans. If she could hear his sword unsheathing, then Elsa could definitely hear it too. Anna probably knew that. And in Anna's mind, she probably assumed that Elsa didn't care that Hans was about to kill her. Anna doesn't know that Elsa thinks she's dead, but she does know that Elsa doesn't seem to care whether Hans kills her or not. It makes sense that Elsa wouldn't care, too, because... well, she thinks she just killed her little sister, the one she'd tried to protect over the last thirteen years. Hard to say whether Elsa would've instantly reacted to Anna's voice or not if she'd screamed a warning of "ELSA DON'T LISTEN TO HIM!", considering Anna screamed "NO!" and it still took Elsa ten seconds to realize what happened. Elsa is visibly despairing in this scene; Anna saw that and probably didn't think her voice alone would compel Elsa to react quickly enough to save herself. Hans can move pretty quickly.

Turning down Anna's marriage proposal from Hans

• When Elsa refuses to bless the marriage proposal and firmly says, "Nobody's brothers are staying here, no one is getting married," was she more concerned about the fact that Anna had fallen so quickly for Hans or about the political implications that a marriage would half? Or was she concerned with both problems?
  • I think it's a very strange mix of both - she's upset that Anna has fallen for Hans so quickly, without taking politics and foreign relations into account, among other reasons, because the two of them basically talk about the whole thing almost as though they're planning a sleepover instead of an important union between two powerful dignitaries.
  • And if you want to take real life accuracy into account, there's no way a royal marriage would be arranged that quickly. A betrothal would first need to be discussed between parties from both nations, and even if it was arranged there probably would have to be a proper period of courtship before the actual wedding. A prince proposing to the princess the day they meet, when he's there as a guest and hasn't even asked the queen's permission is highly improper and suspicious. Elsa knows this but Anna doesn't.

Anna's knowledge of Elsa's powers before the movie

• Obviously, Anna's knowledge of Elsa's powers was wiped by Grand Pabbie to heal her head injury. But when Elsa's powers are exposed at the coronation, Anna doesn't seem at all freaked out about Elsa having powers and more concerned about apologizing to her and getting her to return to Arendelle. Obviously Elsa couldn't entirely hide her powers during those 13 years, so could there have been telltale clues Anna picked up over the years that in hindsight were staring her right in the face, that she just didn't put together until that one incident at the coronation? Like say, the temperature in a room dropping whenever Elsa got upset or angry? Or meltwater appearing outside Elsa's room after she'd frozen it over for whatever reason?
  • Probably because she 'knows' that that's impossible so more or less accepts explanations that there's a damp problem in Elsa's room or whatever. It's a bit hard with this universe to guess people's acceptance of the existence of magic- obviously it's real but sufficiently rare that nobody seems to expect it until they see it.
  • Anna does not seem very surprised either to discover that Kristoff's friends are trolls, so either people have some knowledge of magic in the Frozenverse, or Anna is the sort to take everything in stride and focus on the important part.
  • However, she doesn't find out about the trolls until after she's witnessed her sister use ice magic to cast an eternal winter over the kingdom and create a monstrous snowman - the reveal of a bunch of talking rocks probably wouldn't come as too much of a surprise at that point. Especially if she'd heard about them in stories before.
  • In the sequel, Agnarr tells the sisters about the Enchanted Forest and the spirits in it, including how the spirits sealed it off. While there's still room for interpretation (this doesn't rule out the possibility of the universe being one where magic is generally regarded as a myth and tales of it written off as embellished), it seems likely that magic isn't unheard of in Arendelle, although the sequel implies that Elsa's particular kind is. In the first movie, Pabbie also asks if Elsa was "born with the powers or cursed," suggesting that she's not the first person to be born with magic and that people have previously been cursed with (probably an uncontrollable sort of) magic.

Snow Anchor

• "There's 20 feet of fresh powder down there; it'll be like landing on a pillow...hopefully." So why did Kristoff create the snow anchor if they could've pretty much jumped and been fine? (And how did he know there was 20 feet of snow down below anyway?)
  • As to the first point: Kristoff was digging the snow anchor to secure his rope. He and Anna intended to scale their way down the cliff with the rope and climbing axe. It's just that Marshmallow then grabbed them so he could scream "DON'T COME BAAACKK!" in their face, and then Anna cut the rope with the knife. As to the other point (the "20 feet of fresh powder" bit), I would think that Kristoff was probably just guesstimating.
  • It's been magically snowing all day with no sign of stopping. He could easily deduce from that there must be tons of fresh snow below.
  • To slow the fall, hopefully, by abseiling (you can still fall quite hard when you abseil, especially if you're a first-timer and/or your equipment has been set up in a hurry, which would be most likely to happen given that this one is being set up during an impromptu escape from a giant snow rage monster) No harm in trying to make it doubly safe.
  • Realistically, given the length of that drop, I think Anna and Kristoff would probably be killed or at least break a lot of bones.
  • Fridge Brilliance: It's Elsa's snow that they land in. Elsa's power sometimes responds to her subconscious desires, not just her conscious ones, and occasionally does things (like animate a sentient goofy snowman) without her even being aware of it. Kristoff and Anna landed safely because the snowbank knew Elsa wouldn't want Anna to die that way.
  • Wanting Anna safe doesn't keep the ice Elsa makes in moments of fear from being dangerous to Anna, though, like when she freezes Anna's head and heart despite not wanting her hurt. It seems that Elsa's emotions have more influence on her powers than her desires do and that it's the form the power takes (spikes when scared v. Olaf when happy) that they influence, but that power doesn't seem to go so far as to mitigate the danger of those forms once they're established (blasts hurting Anna despite intention otherwise). I'd either take Kristoff's word for it or chalk it up to Artistic License.

"What's this swing attached to?"

• This only came up thanks to watching the Literal Music Video of "For the First Time in Forever": Anna sings the first running of the chorus while standing on some sort of swing. What is it attached to? In a related subject, why would the ballroom floor be so greased to the point that Anna can slide across it at running speed?
  • Ballroom floors were- and are- supposed to be slippery: they would actually be finely dusted with 'french chalk' (poor quality talc) for exactly this reason. If you have smooth-soled shoes you should be able to skid quite a long way on one.
  • It's not actually a swing, but a hoist- a common sight on old stately homes and in some parts of Europe they're often seen on even quite modest houses (like these in Holland. There will be a bracket at the top of the roof that we don't actually see. They're used for lifting any big, heavy object- new furniture, say- up the outside of the building where it can be pulled in through the same big window Anna climbs out of- both times it appears we see the sisters raising or lowering themselves on it.

Why give away free blankets and soup?

• When Anna is still in the north mountain Hans is very generous with the citizens of Arendelle. Why would he feel the need to make an impression on them when Anna is likely dead? Even he's surprised when Anna returns from the North Mountain.
  • If he makes a good impression on the commoners and on the palace staff, few will mind him staying on the throne if Anna and Elsa have died. He needs the people's approval so there won't be a succession crisis or a revolt. Surely they would be mad at first that some foreign prince is now ruling their nation, but not if they see him as the best alternative.
  • Hans understands the rules a lot better. If he wants to take the throne and have more support, he needs to do something to gain the public's trust so that they'll vouch for him.

Why didn’t the Princesses go, as well?

• Why didn’t Anna and Elsa accompany their parents on the voyage that ultimately cost them their lives? Coming from how people are thinking they were travelling overseas in order to attend the wedding of their niece, Rapunzel, wouldn’t Anna and Elsa have been expected at their ages to have made appearances as Princesses of Arendelle? Or were Agdar and Idun just seeking some sort of a vacation without having to look after their daughters? A king and queen going on a trip and leaving their two daughters behind for an unexplained reason comes off sounding... kind of mean.
  • Because they've already been isolating Elsa from the world until she can control her powers, which she hasn't. Elsa's practically under house arrest.
  • In addition, Anna might have been invited along, but declined because she wanted to stay with Elsa.
  • Two more reasons: 1) Someone has to hold the fort while they're gone. They could theoretically leave another noble in charge, but that takes more planning and they're already organizing a trip in state—a royal wedding is NOT your average one, and guests need to think about a lot of logistics besides "bring gifts and nice clothes." It's a lot easier for them to put Elsa in charge since she's their heir, and is intellectually if not emotionally equipped for the job. 2) If they HAD brought Anna and Elsa along, the ENTIRE ROYAL FAMILY would have died in a shipwreck.
  • According to the sequel, they weren't on their way to attend a wedding. They were on a journey to the north to try and learn more about Elsa's powers.
  • That adds another potential reason why they didn't bring Anna along — they didn't want her to know about Elsa's powers.
    • Indeed. It's also possible they expected the journey would be dangerous in some capacity, and didn't want to risk bringing their daughters along.

Elsa's reaction to Anna's "death."

• So Elsa's powers seem to run out of control and intensify based on her fears, stress, sadness and being overal upset. But at the climax of the movie Hans claims that Elsa had killed Anna when she had frozen her heart. This makes Elsa collapse to her knees in utter despair and causes the snowstorm to completely die down. But shouldn't the emotional impact of Anna's supposed death have caused the exact opposite effect and make Elsa's powers go completely haywire? If anything the news should have made the temperature plummet to absolute zero rather than dispel the snowstorm.
  • Theory: Elsa didn't quite realize yet, but since it takes love to fully control her powers, her grief that Anna had died let her unconsciously contain them while she mourned. Only after Anna dethawed did she put two and two together and figure out how she did that.
  • Sadness and grief probably have a different, much more dubdued, effect on her powers than anxiety, upset and stress. The latter three emotions are at play when she bickers with Anna at her coronation and accidentally reveals her powers, and later when Anna comes to her ice palace and she strikes Anna in the heart; clearly when she feels like that, she struggles most to control her powers. But note that the movie never shows her powers getting more out of control when she's mourning her parents who just died (even that one shot at the end of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" where she's sobbing in her ice-covered room, seems to be caused more by her being upset about shutting Anna out than about her grief over her parents).
  • Elsa’s powers were out of control earlier in the film due to her being not only upset, but also frantic, anxious, and in a panic as she struggled to restrain her feelings and fix things. When faced with a truly tragic event, however, such as the deaths of Anna and her parents, she comes to lose her grip on everything, even her own powers, due to finally allowing herself a chance to cry, and to grieve, and to reflect on the love she felt for her family. Much like in “Let It Go”, she manages to control her powers by just letting her feelings flow, be they happy or sad, in both cases due to believing that she has nothing else to lose, although for different reasons. Bottom line is, it was never about containing her powers by containing her emotions...All she needed was to release her emotions, to let them flow naturally, and her powers would eventually follow on their own.
  • Her powers run haywire when she feels negative emotions, but in different ways depending on which negative emotion. When she's feeling anxiety and turmoil, she gets a snowstorm swirling around her, but deep, numbing emotional shock from something like the death of a family member causes the weather to go very still to the point that the snowflakes actually hang immobile in midair.

No attempt to tackle Hans?

• From a writers' perspective, having Anna step in front of Hans just as he's swinging the sword, and thus 'sacrificing himself for her', constitutes the 'act of love ' clause. It's noted on Fridge Horror that if Anna had frozen a second too late she'd have been sliced to death. Logically speaking, wouldn't it have made more sense to try to push/tackle Hans so that he at least drops his sword?
  • Given that she can barely stand upright under her own power at that point and is using literally the last bit of energy she has, chances are a chance to push / tackle him would only be very easily brushed aside and next to useless. Even if she's killed, as far as she's concerned she's dead anyway, so she might as well go out in a last-ditch attempt to protect her sister.
  • Given that she is slowly freezing solid it is unlikely Anna is thinking clearly, or at all. It's pure protective instinct that causes her to throw herself between Hans and Elsa.

Frozen heart, freezing body

• How does the part about Anna's body freezing from getting hit with Elsa's ice work? Does ice travel through her bloodstream until her entire body freezes over?
  • It's magic.
  • Elsa's magic appears to emerge as energy of sorts before solidifying into ice form. Getting struck with that energy before it's turned into ice is what causes the problem. Perhaps it affects one on something of a "spiritual" level (for lack of a better word), causing your soul itself to freeze over and therefore your body.
  • I'm one to think that the freezing started in her heart, slowly freezing her bloodstream over. Eventually, it spread and turned to her skin, and, uh, her body started to be converted into ice on a molecular level.
  • In both cases that Anna was struck by magic, it was only a brief, small spike. Anna probably would've freezed instantly if Elsa directed a constant stream of magic at her heart, or maybe placed her hand over Anna's heart and forced a lot of ice inside her. At the same time, Anna's an emotional being, so maybe magic behaves differently inside her than it would with things like trees.
    • There's also some speculation that Anna might have some traces of ice magic that Grand Pabbie was unable to remove from her as a five-year old. Evidence people use to point towards this is that Anna pulls out of a wet, icy stream and her legs don't freeze over in the few minutes it took her to get from the creek to Oaken's, not to mention that even with the direct strike to her heart with some misfired ice magic, it still took about 18 hours or so for Anna to freeze over completely.

"Love, of course...Of course?"

• I'm not sure whether this has been brought up already, but at the end of the film, what is it that Elsa realizes that suddenly allows her to thaw the kingdom? She spends the entire movie denying that she knows anything about how to undo the curse, but then after Anna saves her, she just says "Love," waves her arms at the ground, and boom, the kingdom thaws.
  • She saw that Anna's freezing was undone by their mutual feelings of love. Before she had been trying to restrain her powers by repressing all feeling. But having seen now that happy emotions did the opposite, she tried invoking those instead. Pretty quickly indeed, but that's what she figured out.
  • But hadn't she felt similar positive feelings before, during "Let It Go"? Even if they weren't stimulated by love, the general optimism was still there. And I know that trying to keep from worrying about something, as Elsa did when she found out about the winter, can be very difficult, but this still begs questions like if love in itself is the only thing that can act as a cure for ice magic, does that mean different emotions can lead to many different outcomes? If so, why didn't the film seem to address this? And why didn't Grand Pabbie mention love acting as a cure to Elsa in the beginning?
  • Love may be not the only thing; it's not really clear how Pabbie heals Anna's head in the beginning, but we know that it's different from the way her heart heals. It may be a different form of love, or it may be something else entirely. But it seems what's enough for one kind of ice isn't always enough for another, and he probably can't tell them to just do an Act of True Love for every issue that arises, since a true one is almost impossible to create on purpose. He also may not have realized that they were missing a cure for the everyday issues, not just big ones like the frozen head.
  • There's a big difference between experiencing an emotion and focusing on that emotion. Elsa has had a lot of emotions over the years, but ever since she hurt Anna she's been focusing on her fear. It's not until she hears Olaf make the connection between love and thawing that she's able to actually focus on the feeling and how it affects her powers. Remember, she's spent twelve years trying to turn her powers off, not experimenting to see which emotions cause which reactions.
  • Moreover, ever since Anna's original injury, Elsa's feelings of love have always been tainted by fear of harming someone. When her parents were alive, she was afraid even to touch them, and she didn't dare even say "hello" to her sister for over a decade.^note At least, not onscreen It's only after Elsa's worst nightmare - accidentally freezing her sister, seemingly to death - had come true, only to reverse itself and bring Anna back, alive and well and still loving her, could Elsa move past that terror to embrace the love she felt for Anna, pure and uncontaminated by her old fears.

Olaf after the movie

• Olaf seems to stay and live with Anna and Elsa at the castle - how exactly would they have to accommodate him? Would magical snowman need to eat or sleep? And when Elsa grows old and dies, what will happen to him? Everyone seemed to think the winter would end in the movie if Elsa was killed, so would Olaf similarly melt if she passed away?
  • This was actually suggested on WMG that perhaps Olaf and Marshmallow were tied to Elsa's life force.
  • Frozen Fever shows he's capable of eating cake, though it doesn't appear he needs to eat to live.
  • This raises questions like, does Olaf have a digestive tract and whatnot?
  • Uh, no he doesn't. He doesn't have a skull. Or bones. Or any organs that can be damaged by being impaled on an icicle. In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, he can melt completely and bounce back with no damage, even if his parts aren't always in the right order. He's magic. And maybe his magic is tied to Elsa's life force, but if that's true he'll "live" far longer than an ordinary snowman, so why should he complain?
  • To answer the question of how exactly the castle accommodated Olaf, well, Elsa probably took some time to get all the maids and servants acquainted with him, and the same for all her subjects in Arendelle, in the time between Frozen and Olaf's Frozen Adventure. And as for where Olaf sleeps (if he ever does), he probably stays with Sven in the stables.

Do you want to build a snowman... Seriously?

• I mean, how could Anna keep asking Elsa to build a snowman after her memories about playing with snow coming from Elsa's powers were erased? Wasn't she supposed to forget that her sister had snow/ice powers?
  • She lost the memories of the powers, not the memories of playing with the snow. Grand Pabbie is explicit — and puts up a brief demonstration — that she's keeping her memories of the fun they had. Anna remembers making snowmen and sledding with Elsa just fine. She just doesn't remember Elsa using magic powers to do it.

Did Elsa realize what she'd done?

• After the reprise of For the First Time in Forever, does Elsa know that she struck Anna with her powers? She turns around, sees Anna hunched over and gripping her chest, and seems to appear distressed by this, but if she does know what she did, why doesn't she do anything like acknowledge it, apologize, or advise Anna to go to the trolls, and why did she seem surprised when Hans told her Anna had died from it? How had she expected her to survive without knowing the cure or who could help her find it?
  • Did she understand that to some extent, she had accidentally injured Anna with her powers? Yes. Did she understand that she had cursed Anna's heart and that Anna would be magically transformed into an ice sculpture without an "Act of True Love" to reverse the curse? Probably not. When Anna got up and seemed to be fine, Elsa's thought shifted from "Oh God what have I done?!" to "I need to get her out of here before I hurt her any worse". Thus, the appearance of Marshmallow to forcibly eject her from the building.
  • Fair enough. But even if she thought it was just a scrape or something, and was still very upset, why didn't she even consider telling her she should go see the trolls? Anna almost dying after being hit in the head is what led to Elsa's isolation when they were kids - you'd think she wouldn't want something like that to happen again, right?
  • She might not remember exactly what Grand Pabbie said, after all those years of isolation, fear, and her parents' deaths. And if she didn't realize she had struck the heart, then she wouldn't have any other reason to think there was a danger, let alone one that would require the trolls' help.
  • Well let's imagine that Elsa did see the impact. Assuming she remembers the trolls, she probably would've been insisting "Anna, you need to find the trolls."

Is Arendelle a city-state?

• There don't seem to be any heavily inhabited areas in the kingdom besides the capital city, and said capital doesn't seem to have a specific name unless it is Arendelle. It could be that the borders extend far beyond the area shown in the film, but then it doesn't make sense to equate freezing that area with freezing the entire kingdom, unless that area is the entire kingdom.
  • Yep, this troper basically assumed Arendelle was a city-state with a port. Even a small city-state of 10,000-20,000 would need at least 100,000-200,000 people in villages and towns to support it, and then there's the trade they get from neighboring places. The idea of a single unified kingdom for an entire country is a lot less common than people think, and it was more usual for a country to be split into a dozen or so petty-kingdoms.
  • From what we see in Olaf's Frozen Adventure, the town is a pretty decent size for a small town. Olaf went to a pretty wide range of homes during his little montage, from various houses in the village to a houseboat and even all the way out to Oaken’s. In the concept art◊, we get a pretty good sense of what the town centre looks like. Many of the houses are tall, at least two if not three floors, slender, and ornate. The colours as typical for a Scandinavian town, and it definitely appears like everyone who lives in the town at least is very comfortable, well-off, and open to express their own individual traditions.
    Semi-related, but everyone is free to celebrate the winter holidays how they want, suggesting Arendelle is way ahead of most of Europe when it comes to religious acceptance. (Let's assume that one woman is a baker by profession because no one would have had a personal oven big enough for that gingerbread Norway). So while it might be small, Arendelle has an insane amount of variety in its people if we consider time period and location.
    • As for size, well, this aerial shot◊ from the end of Frozen Fever seems to give a good impression of the town size. It’s not big, but it's likely that this town isn’t all of Arendelle. It’s just the capital.
    • The map gag◊ from Frozen Fever depicts two nations we know: Arendelle, and the Southern Isles. Both of these countries’ capitals are marked by a castle icon (at least, that’s what we can reasonably infer for the Southern Isles). Both countries’ territories are indicated by color: Arendelle in greenish-grey, the Southern Isles by purple. And because we don’t see an edge to that green, we can assume all that land is Arendelle’s territory. Which makes more sense as to why Hans would want to be king of Arendelle - it’s a larger swath of land for him to lord over his brothers, likely has more resources in the mountains, and, based on the castle icons, has the bigger castle and potentially more wealth. This is all speculation, of course, since the only part of the Southern Isles that we see is the manure pit, but it would make Hans’ actions at least a little more understandable. If the kingdom of Arendelle was only the town that we saw, and the entire kingdom was contained within that wall (which, in itself, doesn’t mean much because walled cities were definitely a thing and didn’t actually mean that the owned land stopped at the wall) then why Arendelle would even be considered relevant in 1840 when empires were all the rage and owning as much land as physically possible was all anyone was concerned about would be strange.
    • So going back to the town: the capital is small, yes, especially for a kingdom that does seem wealthier than at least the Southern Isles. So I’m going to propose something new that I don’t think many people have thought of yet: this is probably a new town. Not, like, within Anna and Elsa’s lifetime, or even their parents, but within the past 100-150 years. Capitals can move, as can towns. Perhaps the original capital was either deemed unfit or no longer as strategic as the current location. We don’t know much about Arendelle’s history, except for the fact that they’re a Nordic people living in the part of the world that can get very cold and they build primarily out of wood. So it’s not entirely out there to assume that a city-destroying fire occurred in the past. Take the real-life Norwegian town of Bergen, that has been destroyed and rebuilt due to large-scale fires over the course of its history. So it’s entirely possible that Arendelle’s capital was either moved here after the last capital burned to the ground or it suffered a devastating fire maybe 100 years ago and what we have now is what has been built up. The fire thing might also be why the royal castle, the home of the most important people in Arendelle and the seat of power, is separated from the town by a small inlet, and the only way to get to it is via a stone bridge. Secondarily, it might also explain why all the houses are built largely in the same architectural style. Typically, in older cities and towns there would be a mix of things built throughout history. Cities that are largely homogenous in their architecture are ones that witnessed mass-construction within a relatively short timeframe. So, town burns to the ground and then is rebuilt within a couple decades, resulting in all the houses looking similar.
    • As one Tumblr poster observed, there are 18 coats of arms on the castle walls. Likely, Arendelle is the name of both the capital (own province) and the entire kingdom, while the other coats of arms are corresponding to Norway’s 18 Fylker (= province) which are: Akershus, Aust-Agder, Buskerud, Finnmark, Hedmark, Hordaland, Møre og Romsdal, Nord-Trøndelag, Nordland, Oppland, Rogaland, Sogn og Fjordane, Sør-Trøndelag, Telemark, Troms, Vest-Agder, Vestfold, and Østfold. Under this interpretation, Arendelle covers the whole area of Norway, and the castle and surrounding part of the fjord corresponds to the capital and represents its own province. Both the kingdom and the capital share the name Arendelle, and residents likely use the terms interchangeably.

So Elsa's powers are getting out of control...

• Throughout the song Do You Wanna Build A Snowman? we see Elsa and her parents attempt to control her ice and snow power but it's progressively getting worse. The King and Queen are clearly at their wit's end...but don't bother going back to the trolls and asking for help (as they're clearly the only people who have some knowledge of snow magic). So why didn't they?
  • The Trolls would probably just repeat their original advice, which Agnarr and Iduna hadn't wanted to follow and clearly still didn't want to follow when the sisters got older, so going back to them wouldn't be of any use from their point of view. Of course, part of the issue was that Grand Pabbie gave them the extremely vague warning of "Fear will be your enemy," instead of going into more detail by telling her "Your powers will manifest differently based on your emotions. If you allow yourself to fear them instead of learning to control them, they'll only become more dangerous," or told Agnarr and Iduna something like, "It is your greatest duty to keep your daughters safe, but remember to still love them.” Because, y'know, Grand Pabbie's like most prophets in movies, where he gives very vague directions that lead the recipient to think he means a common interpretation most people will jump to, and not an alternate interpretation that not many think of (like the whole "act of true love will thaw a frozen heart"). That said, it's likely that if the parents had gone back to see them, the trolls would've pointed out the obvious flaws in their plan of firing most of the castle staff, locking Elsa away from everyone, and alienating her from her little sister over one childhood accident that was only a case of bad luck.
    • Agnarr does announce his plan while talking to the trolls, so it's probable that either the trolls didn't say anything against it, or they did and the parents didn't take the advice. Neither the trolls or the parents know how the accident actually happened and that it was just a case of Elsa misaiming. Look at it from the parents' perspective: they just walked in on their An Ice Person older daughter cradling their younger daughter, who's "ice-cold" and unconscious with a brand-new streak of white in her hair, in the middle of a room covered with ice. Elsa tells them "it was an accident," and they realize she's telling the truth, but have no idea how it was an accident because Elsa is too distressed to articulate exactly what she means, so it looks like a case of Power Incontinence rather than "Elsa slipped and misfired". The trolls know even less; no one even tells them it was an accident at all! That's why the focus is on getting Elsa to learn "control," rather than just telling both girls to use more caution. (There's a reason the accident happened when the girls were playing without any parental supervision. The whole thing would have been avoided if they'd just stuck to using the powers for snowmen and small ice slides, rather than Elsa making increasingly large hills for Anna to jump all over, or if Elsa had the wits about her to use her powers to make a large cushion on the ground rather than aiming a concentrated bolt of magic too high. They were just kids, after all, and pretty young ones, and that probably had more to do with the accident than the magic did.)
    • Based on their body language during that moment with Grand Pabbie, it's entirely possible the isolation had more been Elsa's idea than it'd been her parents' idea.
    • Agnarr is the first one to bring the idea up. When he announces they're going to close the gates, no one else has suggested it yet.
    • Though one has to remember, what we see onscreen is not necessarily the entirety of the exchange between the royal family and the trolls. For all we know, there were some other things that were said between the parties offscreen.

What if the trolls had handled things differently?

• Like, how would things have gone if they erased Anna's memories of the accident, but they kept her knowledge of Elsa's powers intact?
  • Taking away her recollection of the accident would seem like an even worse idea if you're going to keep her in the know about Elsa's magic. If she remembers the accident, at least she can use that experience as evidence to be more careful in the future, even as she helps Elsa come out of her shell and gain control over her magic.
  • Grand Pabbie said he recommended removing "all magic, even memories of magic, to be safe." It seemed to me that Anna's injury was a placebo effect. The damage was (idiomatically) all in her head, and so her mind could be "persuaded" to think differently if the evidence changed. If Elsa's magic is not known to exist, then an injury is impossible. A halfway measure could leave some lingering injury.
  • There probably was a way in which the damage to Anna's head could've been fixed without having to alter her memories. We don't know if such a method exists, though. But, assuming such a treatment option exists, we don't really have enough evidence to suggest one way or another if Grand Pabbie knew of such a method. Assuming he did, the most likely guess as to why he didn't go that route was that he decided the risk of something going wrong during the operation wasn't one that he really wanted to take his chances with.

No future for Anna?

• What exactly was Elsa's plan for her sister? We know why Elsa couldn't accept proposals, and Anna didn't seem to ever have suitors either. And we know she has the power to keep Anna secluded or let her get married as Anna's legal guardian and ruler. Did she honestly just not consider her sister's future? I find it a little hard to believe Elsa would be selfish enough to purposely let Anna stay locked up for the rest of her life like herself when she knows it's not a particularly enjoyable existence, or that she isn't aware it was uncommon for royalty to not marry.
  • It had been a tough day. Elsa's just gone through a very tense coronation ceremony and she can't wait for it to be over. Then her sister comes up with a handsome prince neither of them have met previously and asks to be blessed in marriage. I've no doubt Elsa would eventually have arranged for Anna to start dating eligible princes who of course, she would get to know before marrying, to ensure the future of the kingdom. But the last thing she wanted on that busy day was to have to start arranging a marriage as well.
  • Elsa probably didn't have the authority to start screening possible matches for Anna until she'd formally been crowned Queen. Yes, she's the rightful heir to their father's kingdom, but until Elsa had reached legal adulthood and her queenship could be validated with a proper coronation, both princesses' fate would have been subject to the decisions of whomever had been serving as regent(s) until that point. As to why the regent(s) hadn't been trying to fix Anna up with someone, they would've been more concerned with plans to set Elsa up with a suitable mate, not knowing that Elsa's fears of physical contact made it impossible for her to even consider such a thing.

Why not ask Kristoff to stay?

• Anna had promised Kristoff she'd replace his sled and everything in it after it went off the cliff. Once they got back into Arendelle, why didn't she insist that Kristoff at least stay at the castle long enough to collect payment (even if just the money for a new sled)?
  • By that point, the money was probably the last thing on Anna's mind, due to her freezing heart and whatnot. Also, if Kristoff stayed at the castle rather than going back into the hills on Sven, the situation might get complicated regarding Hans's betrayal. Most likely, Hans would have had to keep up the "loving worried fiance" act a lot longer. His kiss obviously wouldn't have worked. Eventually, Kristoff might have tried (either willingly or persuaded by Hans)...but Jennifer Lee has said that Kristoff's kiss wouldn't work either, and Anna would have frozen to death (and it'd be very awkward because Anna was asking Hans to kiss her, and that's not usually something you do with an audience, at least in the early 19th century Europe). The act of true love wasn't supposed to be a kiss given to Anna. It's Anna's heart that's frozen, so it's gotta be her act of true love, not self-preservation, that'll thaw her out. That's why it had to be self-sacrifice to protect Elsa, not demanding kisses from guys she likes because she doesn't want to die.
    It's possible Kristoff might have convinced the dignitaries that even though Anna claimed Elsa froze her heart and she was wrong when she said Elsa would never hurt her, Elsa freezing Anna to death was an accident, not sororicide. Nevertheless as Elsa couldn't stop the winter on her own and the situation was getting dire, they might have decided to try to kill her anyway. In any case news of Anna's death would have probably devastated Elsa to the point where she didn't care if she died as well, just like in the movie, and so the circumstances of what happens on the fjord would stay unchanged.
  • She wouldn't ever be able to arrange getting Kristoff a new sled or payment if she didn't quickly find an Act of True Love before the curse kills her, so that had to be taken care of first. If she focuses on the sled before getting better, there's a good chance she'd die before she'd be able to actually get it to him. It is true that Kristoff could have stuck around, though, and that would have made it easier to get him the sled once she was cured.
    
    The Doylist explanation why he doesn't is probably twofold: 1) The writers wanted to give Anna a chance to learn love could come in forms different from a Grand Romantic Gesture, like I Want My Beloved to Be Happy, (although really, Kristoff didn't actually have to leave "forever" if he wanted to help Anna like Olaf said he's doing and Anna surely would have preferred him to stay in her life as a friend had Hans turned out to be her True Love) 2) There needed to be a reason for Anna to be out on the fjord where she could see Hans about to kill Elsa, since she thinks Elsa is still on the North Mountain (which she also wouldn't be able to get to before dying if she doesn't first find a cure) and doesn't need Anna's help.
    
    The Watsonian explanation why he doesn't and why Anna doesn't ask is probably that Kristoff is still trying to convince himself that he doesn't care about Anna (see his later conversation with Sven) and that Anna believes it. He'd made it perfectly clear to her at Oaken's that he viewed it only worth doing because it benefited him personally, and she's shocked when Olaf suggests he loves her, so she doesn't know that's changed. And she knows he's a loner, too. It probably doesn't occur to her that he'd want to stick around more than he had to. It might make it easier to get him the sled if he did, but even without being in the middle of a life-or-death situation, it's not hard to see either of them not thinking it through that much.

No one recognizes the queen

• In the tie-in comics, isn’t it weird that Elsa can just....walk around? Nobody knows what she looks like. They’re just like. “Hey random girl” and she’s like “hi I’m Queen Elsa” and they’re like “oh the queen? Dope”. Surely you’ve seen a portrait of her in at least one book? Even if you’re two kingdoms away you surely heard about her, right?
  • It’s not helped by the fact that she’s always wearing an ice dress in the comics. Sure, it’s not like people had TVs and phones capable of spreading someone’s image around. Even a year after her coronation, I’d buy that there are people who wouldn’t recognize her, especially in other kingdoms. Except she wears that dress everywhere she goes. And while Elsa's image probably hasn’t spread that much, word of a magical ice queen most definitely would have. So just seeing this strange woman wearing a dress made entirely out of ice probably should be a dead giveaway. It is a little strange how surprised everyone she meets seems to be. Which would probably be the case... if Elsa actually dressed appropriately for long journeys through the forest to other kingdoms.
  • Canonically, Frozen and all related works are set around 1840, when information traveled a lot slower than it was today. It would take ages for information to spread at that time. In some villages the only way villagers received news was talking with travelers. So it wouldn't be too surprising if some people at the other end of Arendelle in some ordinary village didn't even get to know for their whole life what was the cause of small, freakish mid-July winter they probably got.
  • Some people might not immediately realize what the dress is made of. They're unlikely to have ever seen such an outfit before. Because no one really knows what an actual ice dress would look like, all versions of Frozen, especially live-action versions (such as Once Upon a Time and the Broadway musical), have to approximate what one would look like to the point that no one who didn't already know would be able to guess what material it's supposed to be. It's possible that the material's not obvious in-universe, either. Maybe some of them assume it's a fancy type of cloth they haven't seen before. Sure wouldn't be surprised if ice-themed and icelike material became all the rage after Elsa's coronation.

How quickly did Elsa freeze Arendelle?

• How long did it take all of Arendelle to get snowed over?
  • The fjord froze in a matter of seconds, but as for the land, it was covered in snow by the time Anna was in the wilderness the next day. Given that Anna and Hans were singing "Love Is an Open Door" at 10:15 that night when on the clock tower, and Elsa accidentally cursed Arendelle not long after, it's reasonable to say that it took twelve hours (at most) before everything was totally covered in snow. Probably between 9 and 12 hours.
  • With the fjord specifically, that took 40 seconds to be exact. Assuming it's got the same dimensions as its real-life inspiration, the Nærøyfjord, it contains about 1.14 trillion gallons of water. Also note that Elsa's ice didn't permeate the entire volume of the fjord, only several feet down (in the whiteout at the climax, a ship broke through the ice, while Sven fell into the water).

Hans's lucky shot at the chandelier

• Was that accidental or deliberate? There doesn't seem to be a straight answer.
  • Hans has his eyes trained on the chandelier before and while shooting, so he knows exactly what he is doing when he aims the Duke's guard's crossbow at the chandelier. That particular light fixture definitely looked like striking any part of it would cause a decent-sized chunk of ice to fall off it, let alone hitting the thin, single chain holding the whole thing up. So he probably wouldn't even need Improbable Aiming Skills, since he might not even have to be aiming at a specific spot on it to bring the whole thing down. And even if he missed, he’d still look like the hero attempting to save Queen Elsa from an assassination attempt. Whatever happened, it was a win for him. So, he was going for a strike on the chandelier, and it was a one in a million shot that the arrow ended up hitting the chain supporting it.

The origins of the shackles

• So who made those shackles in the dungeon? Elsa's parents or Hans? I don't think it was her parents, because if her parents had made the handcuffs, Elsa would have been less likely to break out. Her parents have seen what she was capable of, and must’ve known that she could freeze the chains and break out of them. An argument can also be made for Hans making them, because he knows Elsa is powerful, but he doesn’t know what the limits of her powers are, and he'd only have a few days to make the handcuffs.
  • It takes a while to forge something like those manacles, though. But that would also explain why Elsa was able to rip them apart. Yes, the ice weakened the metal, but it was also bent. They didn’t just come apart at the rivets where there would be structural weaknesses. If you look closely at them◊, a couple links in the chains are completely shattered. Iron doesn’t bend like that easily. Not without heat, anyway, and it’s pretty safe to say there was none of that in this scene. So while the idea that Elsa's parents created the cuffs as a “just in case” measure can't be ruled out, it would make just as much sense for Hans to be the originator here. Something as specific as cuffs like these would have taken time to make correctly, but if they were hastily slapped together, perhaps with a cheaper, more malleable material other than iron on top of that, it would explain why Elsa was able to rip these things off her hands.
  • For what it's worth, Jennifer Lee says she "personally" thinks of them as being made by Hans, although she worded it in such a way that implies that it's up to the fans to pick their favorite interpretations.
  • Maybe the shackles weren't designed for someone with ice magic. Cause if they were, Elsa probably wouldn't have been able to so easily break out. As was shown in the movie, she just had to freeze the metal until it was brittle enough to shatter. The design of the chains, and the way they're anchored to the floor, demonstrate that they're meant to tie down whoever is shackled in them. Trailer footage for Frozen II shows magic isn't unique to Elsa, and that air magic exists. On top of that, Agnarr and Iduna know very well that Elsa's powers don't just come from her hands, so it would be weird for them to make shackles that only prevent Elsa from emitting ice from her hands while she could still make ice perfectly well. She doesn't even need physical contact to do it. The parents may not have been alive when Elsa became powerful enough to create ice in rooms where she isn't even present, but they did witness her accidentally ice over walls without touching or aiming at them.
  • Revelations in Frozen II make it seem very likely that the shackles in question were left over from Runeard's reign.

Just erase the memories then have Anna re-learn that Elsa has powers

• So why don't Elsa and Anna's parents just.... tell Anna Elsa has powers after the accident? Like, seriously, why couldn't they have been up front about it and been like "Hey, Anna, Elsa has some magic snow powers, she accidentally hit you with them once, but she's working on controlling them, and you're completely healthy." Anna seems like a pretty loving girl especially involving her sister, so I really doubt she would've been upset about it at all. Also, it's not like she would tell the world, right? Hell, they can still close the gates and save the sisters' relationship. I doubt it'd have caused any issues regarding the existing injury to Anna's head.
  • Five-year-olds, even pretty loving ones, aren't known for their secret-keeping skills. Even if Anna didn't outright talk about Elsa's powers, it's unlikely she'd realize what kinds of things could raise suspicion if mentioned or what the stakes were. Still, it does seem like overkill to wait as long as they did when Anna was being kept inside the castle, anyway. You'd think it would be the sort of secret their parents would disclose to Anna around her 13th birthday or something.
  • At the risk of being cynical, there isn't a good reason for this decision in the context of what was good for Elsa and Anna. The fact that Elsa couldn't tell Anna was terrible for their relationship; this decision (1) made Elsa feel like she had to be dishonest with her sister, (2) made Elsa feel alone and isolated, because she couldn't tell her sibling about her problem and (3) kept Elsa and Anna from being close. Maybe it was sensible for Elsa and their parents not to tell Anna about her power when Anna was very young, but eventually it was a no-brainer that the family should have explained to Anna what was going on. Therefore, I conclude that the only possible reason for this decision is that it was necessary to set up the big reveal / surprise — where Elsa shows everyone (including Anna) her special power and then runs away. That Elsa needed to feel alone and isolated, and Anna needed to be surprised.
  • There are lots of reasons for Elsa not to tell Anna about the powers. Perhaps the parents did intend to tell Anna out of practicality once she was older and more responsible, but Elsa wanted it kept secret. The most obvious reason is that she's afraid of how Anna would react - given that one of the motivations behind keeping them hidden is fear of being demonized or rejected. And the longer it's kept secret, the harder it is for Elsa to be honest. The secret is first kept out of practicality, but then it evolves into fear - of anger, rejection, more fear and any number of possibilities that lead to real life people keeping big secrets for years.

Practicality of ice dress designs

• I get the point of continuing to have Elsa in the ice dress: it’s meant to be a representation of her throwing away the past and starting new. But, I’m not so sure having her always in that dress is the best way to go about it. A Queen capable of making her own clothes would still want to change things up, right? Does Elsa wear ice dresses like that every day or does she only reserve them for special occasions (while wearing conventional fabric dresses◊ at all other times)?
  • From a Doylist perspective, Limited Wardrobe is very common when the character has an Iconic Outfit and a lot of merchandise tie-ins, two conditions which definitely apply to Elsa, which means executives are likely also going to be wary of changing things up without going through a rigorous approval process that usually won't be deemed worth it for minor things like the tie-in comics or merchandise where they'll want her to be as recognizable as possible. From both a Doylist and Watsonian perspective, Elsa doesn't have to change that often, because the weather doesn't affect her. She probably does change more often than we see, because she doesn't seem like she would want to wear the same exact outfit every day, but this will likely only be shown in major franchise installments, where the sisters will be able to get brand-new outfits because Disney will assign a ton of people to deal with the changes and their potential reception.
    • Except Anna seems to have a new outfit every time it's indicated there’s been a day change. I don't understand instances where Elsa’s out in the woods and she’s doing so with a long, very delicate train of ice dragging after her (the comics are especially bad for that). Like, I can get in the context of the actual movie why she’d maybe be doing that, but for every other time now that she’s back home and has access to clothes better suited for hiking through the forest/walking around the castle, I refuse to believe she doesn't have something more practical. Don’t believe me? Even Georgina Haig, her actress in Once Upon a Time, can attest to the dress being bad for wandering through the woods.
    • The practicality of an actually magic ice dress being worn by an actual ice mage who can magically manipulate it is going to be significantly more than the practicality of a fabric dress designed to merely look like ice being worn by a non-superpowered human. For Elsa, a dress she can magically control isn't as impractical as a normal costume would be for people who don't have that advantage.
    • After the first movie, Anna only gets new outfits when Elsa does - in major installments (Frozen Fever, Olaf's Frozen Adventure, and Frozen II), and not even always then. And that first movie wardrobe is slightly larger, although barely so (three main outfits instead of two), because she needs to change more. Elsa can wear her ice dress in winter and summer because of her powers. Anna can't wear any outfit in both seasons because she doesn't have powers. Marketing executives also don't usually like to mess with an iconic look on a popular character even without a justification like that. Note that in some books, Elsa's given a new nightgown that's not in any of the movies, because wearing an ice dress to bed is a big stretch even for her, but she's still given an ice cape because Disney knows so much of the appeal of her character lies in her ice powers, especially among young children, who are probably the biggest market for most tie-in Disney material. Or from a Watsonian perspective, maybe because she really, really doesn't want herself or anyone else to forget how great her powers can be. It still might not be the most practical, but marketing likes to keep the appeal and minimize risk, and it's possible. Impractical, but possible.
  • As of the release of the second full Frozen II trailer, Elsa has more outfits than Anna. Her Iconic Outfit just gets a greater proportion of appearances than any other outfit in the franchise, which probably is because it's the most popular one by far.
  • As far as the ice cape is concerned, well, when Elsa first created her original ice dress, she wasn't intending to travel anywhere so "something I can run in" is at the bottom of her priorities list. This does seem to come back to bite her when the Duke's men show up, as she is shown having to pick up her train in order to sprint up the stairs. Her wearing long ice trains in Frozen Fever and Olaf's Frozen Adventure can be explained away by the fact that as those are special events, the former being Anna's birthday and the latter being the Yule Bell celebration. The shortened ice train that Elsa sports in Frozen II is probably what she's wearing whenever she's sporting an ice dress and there are no ceremonial duties going on. Given what is known from official materials, she knows in advance she's going to travel, so she obviously would want something that won't snag on trees.
  • Elsa doesn't wear ice dresses all the time. She gets a new one whenever there's an installment with the budget to give the main characters new outfits, with her wearing a new dress in Frozen Fever, the dark blue dress with fur collar she wears in Olaf's Frozen Adventure, and the red jacket ensemble also in Olaf's Frozen Adventure. Frozen II shows Elsa wearing several blue ensembles with varying degrees of ice added to them, a purple fabric dress in the beginning of the movie, and she wears a fabric violet nightgown to bed. Plus the spin-off and books give her another nightgown (which is possibly allowed because its design is close to another nightgown she wears in the original movie).

Can Elsa's ice melt?

• Does Elsa's ice melt? Like is it just ice or is it magic ice? She shoots ice from her hands and feet, but does her ice only melt when she wants it to or does it have to happen naturally?
  • Elsa’s ice does what she wants it to. That is, post-Thaw when she actually has control over it. It doesn’t operate exactly like ice does, anyway, and magic definitely is the reason why, since her ice far more structural integrity and durability than real ice would. (For example, the chandelier in the ice palace. Real ice would snap in an instant if so little was holding up so much weight. The fact that a crossbow bolt managed to break it is actually kind of surprising, but then maybe it was like the straw that broke the camel’s back or something…)
    • Besides the ice palace, Elsa’s used her magic to decorate the castle in Arendelle in the middle of summer, along with maintaining a large ice rink in the courtyard. All of which was done without a large cloud constantly producing a microwinter hanging over everything. So it’s probably safe to say that structural ice will stick around for as long as she wants it to stick around.
    • As for ice that was accidental, or anything done without intention, that might depend more on the scenario. But, in large part, the ice might actually melt on its own if the environmental conditions allow it. It would be pretty difficult for Elsa growing up if any ice she might have produced by accident just didn’t go away. So it’s possible that ice formed when she’s not really thinking about it will actually act like real ice. It might also have the same properties as real ice, too.
    • In fact, if you look closely, the ice that is formed when Elsa is not thinking about it does look less like strange, glowy magic ice and more like actual, real-life ice. It’s rough, it’s miscolored, it’s got snowy white outlines and details indicating its quality. It’s like real ice. Compare that to anything she’s made on purpose: smooth lines, crystal clear, often blue or purple in tint, already looking freshly sculpted, and often way too spindly and delicate for any real ice to be shaped in such a way. It's a clear difference.
    • So in conclusion, Elsa’s magic does what she wants. And as of now, there have been no limitations on what it can do for her. And Disney purposely didn’t draw the line about her powers, ostensibly for the sole reason that if they do say “Elsa can’t do [insert random thing] with her magic”, that opens the floodgates for hundreds of similar questions like "Can she also manipulate water, as ice technically is cold water?" or "Can she make ice explode?" Best to not lead to endless questions about the rules of magic.
  • We know that heat can melt Olaf. So maybe the rules are different when it comes to her sentient beings. Then again, Olaf isn't seen with his flurry at all when roaming around the castle in Olaf's Frozen Adventure, and it's nowhere to be seen in Frozen II.
  • It's possible that it has something to do with her powers growing stronger. The reason the snowgies and Olaf don't melt in Frozen Fever might be that Elsa's magic has strengthened since the end of Frozen, which isn't exactly too much of a surprise since now that she knows how to control her powers better. Olaf still melts in the sauna partially because the heat there is much stronger than summer heat, and also because Rule of Funny.
  • It's revealed in Frozen II that Olaf now has a layer of permafrost over his body, keeping him cold at all times without the need for a flurry. If one assumes that Frozen Fever took place only a few weeks after Frozen ended, then it's very likely Elsa figured out this permafrost solution sometime between Frozen Fever and Olaf's Frozen Adventure, perhaps after servants raised concern about the flurry leaving water everywhere Olaf goes.

Why not specify?

• When Grand Pabbie is telling Elsa and her parents "Fear will be your enemy," why doesn't he also add “Oh, and your own fear will also be an issue because it’ll make your powers harder to control”? Grand Pabbie did do a good job driving home the "other people's fear" side of “fear will be your enemy” with the image of the crowd, but why exactly did he ignore the other side of it?
  • And this isn't the only time, because after "Fixer Upper", Grand Pabbie also is really vague to Anna about what she had to do to save her life. Why in that situation didn't he clarify "An act of love directed towards your sister is the only thing that will thaw your heart" and maybe for that matter, explain what happened to her 13 years ago?
  • It's not established how much Pabbie knows about how Elsa's magic works. He might not have known how her emotions affect her powers. And even if he did, it is established later that simply telling Elsa "don't panic" isn't really helpful, as Anna finds out in the reprise of "For the First Time in Forever" - and that's with a grown Elsa and with Anna being generally encouraging and positive. A simple "don't panic" was unhelpful yet harmless - but it would be worse telling a kid who's already feeling scared and guilty that her fear could make things worse has a good chance of only making her panic more, as the king finds out in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" Fear is usually an involuntary reaction, and while it is possible to control it, young Elsa clearly found it difficult and probably would have reacted to such a warning from Pabbie by becoming afraid that her existing fear was going to make things worse and spiraled. So more specifics probably would not have helped, and probably would have even made the situation worse.
  • There's no reason to believe an act of true love directed toward someone other than her sister wouldn't have worked, so telling Anna that it had to be directed specifically at Elsa would have just limited her potential options unnecessarily, thus making her less likely to survive. In fact, it probably would have killed any chance of it, because then Anna would know it was an act of sacrifice that would save her. And if she knew that, any attempt she made to "sacrifice" herself would be with the knowledge that she could benefit from it, thus making it not really much of a sacrifice and less likely to qualify as an Act of True Love and save her. So more specifics very likely would have gotten her killed.
  • And he probably doesn't explain what happened thirteen years ago because the group rushes off to get Anna to Hans and try to save her life, so there really isn't time to chat.
  • Wouldn't knowing all the necessary information instead of just half of it would've helped in the long run? Elsa wouldn't have grown up so afraid of her powers if Grand Pabbie had told her "fear will be your enemy, and by that, I mean both other peoples' fear of you and also your own fears. If you let your fears get the better of you, you won't be able to control your powers". While likewise, if he'd been more specific with Anna, it's likely that Anna (provided she was in a slightly more lucid state) would've insisted Kristoff turn around and take her back to Elsa on the North Mountain, perhaps resulting in an altered confrontation between Elsa and the Duke's men where the "act of true love" to thaw Anna's heart would be her protecting Elsa from the thugs' arrows.
  • That probably would not have thawed Anna's heart, because if Pabbie told her performing a sacrifice could save her, then any attempt she made to "sacrifice" herself would be with the knowledge she needed it to save her life, and thus not really a sacrifice / Act of True Love. In this case, giving Anna more specifics actually would have likely gotten her killed.
    • Not necessarily. The thing about Grand Pabbie is that he's the mystical guide who gives his advice in riddles or vague terms that could be interpreted multiple ways. In the movie, he only said "an act of true love will thaw a frozen heart", but that doesn't necessarily mean Anna would have to perform a sacrifice for Elsa. Case in point: it wasn't Anna stepping in front of Hans's blade that counted, but rather, Elsa hugging Anna's frozen form afterwards, that caused Anna to thaw out. Grand Pabbie never said anything about Anna having to make a sacrifice. Elsa just showing any sort of physical affection to Anna would be what it took to do the trick, and nothing more. The hug was the "act of true love", not Anna sacrificing herself. So if Grand Pabbie had gone into more specifics with Anna, it's likely that what he'd say would be, "Your sister is the only one who can remove the ice from your heart, and you have to somehow convince her to show some sort of physical affection to you, like a warm hug or something."
    • It's heavily implied in the film that it's Anna's sacrifice that's the Act of True Love that saves her (the following dialogue has Olaf, who'd previously declared "love is putting someone else's needs before your own," exclaim "An act of true love will thaw a frozen heart!" immediately after Anna explains her Heroic Sacrifice to Elsa as "I love you."). Most supplemental materials (such as the books Anna's Act of True Love and A Frozen Heart), while secondary to the actual movie, also consistently say as much. Yeah, Pabbie didn't specify it had to be Anna sacrificing herself, but that doesn't rule it out - he also didn't say that it had to be a hug, so either way, the form of Act of True Love has to be something Pabbie did not specify.
    • And even if it was a physical display like hugging or kissing, Pabbie has no reason to believe Elsa is any better of an option to try such a a thing than Hans is.
  • It's also established that by the middle of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman," Elsa knows that her own fears make things worse, and that Elsa knowing that doesn't help her. She's trying not to feel fear, but knowing how fear affects her powers doesn't stop her from feeling it.

An act of true love will thaw a frozen heart

• If "an act of true love will thaw a frozen heart," Kristoff bringing Anna to Arendelle should've thawed her out because that was an act of true love. Elsa trying to get Anna to leave for her own safety was an act of true love. Kristoff showing her the way to the trolls, Kristoff returning, Elsa crying when she's tricked into thinking Anna's dead...all of those were acts of true love. Or were they? Because by the end it's implied that Anna performed the act of true love by self-sacrifice herself, suggesting that the person that's being frozen has to do the act to thaw their own heart. Something seemed to be lost along the way.
  • The crying probably isn't an Act of True Love by Frozen's definition since there's no sacrifice involved, but there is still the question of why other acts didn't qualify, regardless of whether or not it was a requirement that Anna perform it herself. Kristoff is even explicitly stated to have demonstrated love for Anna before the thaw. And if the act had to come from Anna, even then, we have her doing things after her heart was frozen but before the thaw that should qualify, like continuing to try to help Elsa at the ice palace even though it hurt her, or trying to get Olaf to safety when he tried to comfort her by the fire.
  • My take on things was that an “act of true love” has to involve a sacrifice of some sort, as a demonstration of that love. Olaf does say that love is putting someone else’s needs before yours, so I’d imagine putting someone else’s life before your own would be needed for it to qualify as being TRUE love. In that case, Kristoff charging into a deadly blizzard would have qualified if he’d made it to Anna, whereas him bringing her back to the castle to be with Hans wasn’t enough of a sacrifice to qualify, since all he’s giving up is his chance to be with her.
  • Maybe also the vagueness is supposed to be so in-universe. The trolls don't know what specific act will qualify - a True Love's Kiss is only a guess - just that an act of true love will work. You could suggest that Anna had to perform the act herself - as she was faced with a choice; go to Kristoff, who she thinks will be able to save her. Or else go to Elsa and sacrifice her own possible chance at salvation to protect her sister. This proved that she loved her sister far more; enough to give up a potential cure for her condition just to save Elsa.
  • This actually makes sense, in order to thaw her heart Anna had to experience an act of true love personally. Not just have it done for her, but do it herself to warm her heart. Her love drove her to sacrifice herself for Elsa and in doing so thawed her frozen heart.

What's going on with Kristoff at the beginning?

• The opening song "Frozen Heart" is a bit unclear as to what Kristoff's relation is to the other ice harvesters; not only do they not acknowledge him, but he seems to have his own sled being pulled by Sven to carry his ice. Later, he says it was just him and Sven before the trolls took them in...Does that mean he was just tagging along with the men at the beginning, and didn't actually know any of them? If so, why didn't they say anything about him?
  • They might have not noticed him while they were working. Or they might have noticed him and, for various reasons, not felt they should get involved. They could have assumed he was with one of them, maybe as some sort of apprentice, or they might have felt it better not to single him out. Or they might have known and interacted with him, but not taken him in the same way the trolls did.
  • It could be that Kristoff's father was an ice harvester and worked with them (and sometimes took his son with to work with him), but after he died or abandoned Kristoff, none of the ice harvesters wanted to take him in so they sent him to an orphanage, but as Word of God says, Kristoff couldn't be tied down, so he kept running back to them and they compromised that he could tag along to work with them so long as he was none of their responsibility, hence why they tolerate his presence while also ignoring him.

Surely Hans would need Anna alive?

• Hans' evil actions do not appear to make any sense, on multiple levels. Would the monarchy of Arendelle really allow an outsider to take the throne by marrying and outliving the reigning monarch (much less the monarch's non-reigning sibling?) In real-life monarchies such as that in England, being married to the king or queen regnant makes you the "royal consort", but it does not put you in line to inherit the throne outright if they die, and it does not change the order of succession. If Arendelle is anything like this, then Hans could only ever hope to be in power if Anna becomes queen, and even then, only for as long as Anna remains alive (should she die as queen, he would become a powerless "dowager prince" and the throne would go to whoever was originally next in line anyway, probably a relative of the royal family.) So how could he inherit any power whatsoever by leaving her to die (without her even having become queen) and pretending to have married her (with no witnesses to boot?)
  • As Terry Pratchett once pointed out, the "True King" is the one that gets crowned. Hans doesn't need a truly legitimate claim, he just needs an opportunity, and he has a power vacuum, support both local and international, and by virtue of Anna leaving him in charge, he is already the voice of authority. He's also relatively charming and handsome, always a bonus, but he is defacto the King right there and then. The people who matter are obeying him. With Anna dead, and Elsa villainised, the way is clear for him. Real life thrones have been won over dodgier claims. People get hung up on the rules and minutiae, but those are only important in peace time, non emergencies, and in the modern day when Monarchy doesn't really have any power. In times where the Crown and Throne had real power, as it appears to have in Arrendelle, things get a lot murkier, and Realpolitik takes precedent over monarchial minutiae.

If Love Will Thaw...

• If "love will thaw", does that mean that Elsa cannot use her powers while she's feeling affectionate, and would have to force herself not to feel affectionate if she wanted to use magic on purpose?

Elsa's worst fear has come true...

• During the climax of the reprise of "For The First Time in Forever", Elsa loses control of her powers and accidentally blasts Anna in the heart. Her reaction to seeing Anna collapsed and gripping her chest in pain shows that she knows what she did and is rightfully horrified. Her actions up to this point was to protect Anna from this very scenario. The thing is, Elsa knows who can help Anna...so why doesn't she tell Anna to find the trolls? Instead of trying to help her sister, she creates Marshmallow to throw her, Kristoff and Olaf out. I mean, I guess it's so Kristoff can have a point in the plot. But couldn't he have been like "Yeah, I know where they are" when Elsa tells them "Look, I don't know where the trolls are but they're the only ones who can help you"?

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