Disney rules! note
This week we are still Frozen. Which came first: the lenses or the luge?
Episodes 5-7 of Film Reroll. Based on the 2013 Disney movie.
Thanks to her own clumsiness, Princess Anna of Arendelle has accidentally ruined her sister Elsa's coronation, causing her to reveal her long-hidden ice powers and flee to the mountains. Now Anna sets out on a quest to find her lost sister and end the eternal winter plauging their country. Can she evade the blade-armed snowmonsters and troll-burning princes who stand in her way? And will Elsa ever bring Anna's snowman to life?
Starring Jocelyn "Joz" Vammer as Anna, Kara Straitnote as Elsa, Paulo Quiros as Kristoff and Jon Miller as the Dungeon Master.
Followed by Speed.
Tropes:
- Abduction Is Love: A platonic example, but the other players point out that Anna's method of befriending Miriam was essentially a kidnapping.
- Adaptational Badass: Hans was pretty easy to take down in the actual film. Here, the entire party teams up to take him down.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: This happens with Hans. He is still trying to kill Elsa and take her throne, but he never tricks Anna into falling in love with him (and — by extension — never outright betrays her). It's possible that he — much like the Duke of Weselton — is a Well-Intentioned Extremist genuinely believing himself to be saving Arendelle from its evil witch queen, rather than the selfish, manipulative sociopath he was in the film.
- Adapted Out:
- Oaken (since Anna never visits his store).
- Olaf (since Elsa doesn't create him during the Let It Go scene. Anna does ask her sister to bring the snowman she made to life, but she doesn't).
- This also happens to the sisters' parents. The campaign skips over the movie's prologue in which they die, making them both Posthumous Characters here.
- Adaptational Name Change / Expy: Falgore, Elsa's ice golem, is pretty much Marshmallow from the real movie, except he's got swords for arms.
- Ambiguous Time Period: The players are a bit confused of when exactly the story is meant to be set — it's meant to be at some point in the mid-nineteenth century, but the film is enough of an Anachronism Stew that this isn't obvious — leading to discussions on whether the characters are Catholic or Protestant, and whether certain things have been invented or not.
- Outdated by Canon: Frozen II did later establish a timeline; Anna and Elsa's parents died in 1840, three years before the bulk of the film.
- Ascended Fridge Horror: It is acknowledged that Elsa's eternal winter would probably kill quite a few people, making it even more important for her to put an end to it.
- Author Appeal: Architecture. Jon explains building styles in depth and loves obscure architecture terms like "annulus" and "fumarole".
- Bowled Over: The Stone Trolls use this tactic on the guards of Arendelle during the climax.
- Burn the Witch!: Subverted. Hans tries to do this to the Trolls, only to realise that stone creatures are harder to light on fire than he thought.
- Canon Foreigner: Miriam the peasant girl and Bors the servant.
- Cross-Cast Role: Played With. Elsa was the first out of the many female characters Kara Strait — then going by “Pitr” — has played on the show, which anteceded other Rerollers being crosscast later on. However, she eventually came out as Transgender, changing her name not too long thereafter. (Though she also claimed to not consider her old name — which she had also chosen for herself — an outright deadname.) In hindsight, this campaign marks her first aversion of this trope in the podcast.
- Diagnosed by the Audience: The players suggest Autism as the cause of Anna's quirks. (There might be some Values Dissonance here, since they also keep mocking her for being stupid.)
- Dirty Coward: The Duke of Weselton, who spends the entire Final Battle as well as its aftermath hiding in a corner.
- Epic Fail: In reference to an earlier joke, Joz is jokingly told by another player for Anna to roll to resist taking her vagina out. Dice hit the table and screaming is heard.
- Fluffy Tamer: Anna manages to tame Elsa's ice golem by asking it if it wants to build a snowman. When Elsa comes rushing back, worried that her sister might be injured or dead, she finds them making ice sculptures and having a snowball fight.
- In Spite of a Nail: Despite the changes made to the plot in the campaign, it still loosely follows The Stations of the Canon. It even has more or less the same Happy Ending as the movie: Hans is defeated and Elsa has reconciled with her sister, taken back her throne, learned to control her powers and ended the curse plaguing her country. The biggest difference is that Elsa's subjects are still quite frightened of her, but our heroes are certain that she will gain their trust back in the future.
- Lighter and Softer: Compared to their earlier (and some later) campaigns, this one doesn't deconstruct the source material that much, and (as the players lampshade) plays more like a straight adaptation of the film. It was the first Rerolled film to not end in some kind of apocalypse, for one thing.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Anna is apparently considered this In-Universe, even being referred to as "manic" and "pixie-like." The players however, treat her more like The Load.
- The Mountains of Illinois : Kara insists that the story is set in Denmark, a country with nothing close to the high mountains shown in the film. Word of God has been pretty clear on the fact that Arendelle was based on Norway, which would make far more sense. (Hans Christian Andersen— the man who wrote the fairy tale the movie was based on — was Danish, but that's neither here nor there.) That said, depending on when exactly the film or the original story would be set (not really specified beyond "some point in the past") Norway might still be a part of Denmark.
- My Friends... and Zoidberg: Elsa says that in isolating herself at the top of the mountain she's trying to do what's best for the innocent people of Arendelle and Anna.
- No Social Skills: While it's understandable that a Sheltered Aristocrat like Anna would have these, the other players feel that Jocelyn takes it too far, portraying Anna as if she has never met another human being before. They even suggest having her play Mowgli if they ever make an RPG based on The Jungle Book (1967).
- Running Gag:
- Disney rules! Usually used as an excuse for any strange part of the campaign.
- Anna being clumsy.
- Characters "miraculously surviving" events which would be lethal in Real Life.
- The players singing/quoting different versions of Do You Want to Build a Snowman? and Let It Go. Especially "Do you want to X?" or "X never bothered me anyway."
- DM Jon Miller's weird obsession with obscure (and occasionally made-up) architectual terms.
- When Anna and Elsa are reunited at the ice castle, Jocelyn's description of Anna glomping Elsa reveals that she thinks a bear hug involves gripping with arms and legs like a bear climbing a tree. This gets multiple call-backs for the rest of the campaign.
- Ship Tease: Between Elsa and Kristoff, interestingly enough.
- Shout-Out:
- When travelling to Elsa's castle, Jocelyn starts singing "We're Off To See The Wizard." (This later became Hilarious in Hindsight when the team released a Wizard of Oz campaign... with Jocelyn as Dorothy, no less.)
- The players point out that having The Ice Golem form a bond with Anna and use his sword arms to make ice sculptures is very similar to the premise of Edward Scissorhands.
- At one point, they accidentally call Falgore "Falkor."
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: After his defeat, Hans starts ranting at Elsa from his prison cell... only to be knocked unconscious by a punch from Anna.
- Taking the Bullet: Subverted. Anna tries to save Elsa from Hans in this manner (similar to her Heroic Sacrifice in the movie), but she misses so Elsa gets hit by the arrow anyway. Good thing that there are stone trolls with healing powers nearby...
- Walking Disaster Area: Anna, partially due to some very unlucky rolls on Jocelyn's part. She ruins two dresses and the entire feast during Elsa's coronation (fortunately, the cooks have prepared a backup feast just in case something like this would happen). It gets worse when she fails to get a new dress and instead gets rolled up in a curtain like a mummy. Her Comedic Underwear Exposure is also caused by her falling over. During the Final Battle, she tries to shoot Hans with a crossbow, only for the arrow to miss and bounce around the courtyard until it hits Falgore in the eyes, blinding him.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Anna simply leaves Bors alone in a cave with a blanket. He never shows up again for the rest of the campaign. Lampshaded by the players, who immediately point out that he probably froze to death.
