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Wanna Build Another Snowman?!

 

D23 has finally given us our first real look at Frozen 3, and there is considerably more going on than just a royal wedding! (Is that Olaf with a girlfriend?!) Disney has confirmed that Anna and Kristoff are finally getting married, and we will get to see some new looks for our favorite residents of Arendelle. 

 

But before we dive any deeper into D23’s reveal, might I draw your attention to this conveniently located “hiring” sign? Yes, that’s right, Myths & Mischief is looking to welcome new faces to our crew of creatives. If you’re an artist, writer, social media maven, coding genius, or graphic designer who prefers to work remotely, we’d love to meet you! Now, where were we? Ah, yes, Arendelle.

According to the footage shown at D23, Elsa will be drawn into another supernatural event, this time involving the aurora borealis opening to an unfamiliar ice realm. Within this realm, she will encounter a mysterious new female character who appears to have ice-related abilities of her own. 

If that’s not enough to get the Frozen fandom wagging their tongues, these few tidbits are very interesting. Disney has stated that the unresolved questions from Frozen 2 are substantial enough to require two more movies; this story could turn out to be much bigger for the franchise than another self-contained adventure. (We just hope they leave the Once Upon a Time nonsense to ABC.)

Let’s talk about some of those unresolved questions.

We still don’t know a whole lot about Ahtohallan and the history of the Fifth Spirit, or even much about the traditions of the Northuldra. We don’t know what the parchment found on the ship actually means, though we can speculate. Some theorists believe there was a previous Fifth Spirit before Elsa, but there’s been no confirmation or denial. 

We do know that the story itself has been loosely inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Snow Queen, but the first two movies only showed us tidbits and rough analogies. Now, Disney is giving us an actual shard of ice and a powerful woman with apparent ice powers who bears the aura of an icy queen. 

 

There’s so much going on here that we need to backtrack a moment and figure out what all of these clues are potentially implying. Let’s go back to the beginning and see what Disney might be about to reveal.

 

Where We Started

The first Frozen movie introduced us to the royal family of Arendelle, where sisters Anna and Elsa grow up happily until tragedy forces Elsa into isolation. Throughout their childhood and adolescence, we watched these girls slowly drift away from each other. Elsa became trapped inside a cold world of fear, and when that fear overwhelms her, Anna follows her into the wilderness to bring her home.

For those who don’t know the original story, this relationship is very closely reminiscent of the main characters Gerda and Kay. In Andersen’s story, Kay is taken into the frozen realm, and Gerda crosses the northern wilderness to find him. 

The first movie also seems to adapt the concept of the magic mirror without using the actual device itself. In the story, a shard entering the eye causes a distortion of perception, but a shard in the heart makes the person go cold. In the movie, the mirror is replaced with an abstract concept; fear is what causes the distortion perception experienced by Elsa and the villagers. This fear overwhelms Elsa to the point that she accidentally strikes Anna in the heart with an icicle created by her magic. 

The second Frozen movie moved away from the personal conflict and expanded the overall mythology. Elsa learns that her powers are a gift from nature, and she is the Fifth Spirit, a bridge between humanity and the magic of nature. Within the second movie, Elsa goes through the stereotypical Hero’s Journey and discovers the truth of her people’s history. This part is incredibly interesting because Elsa freezes solid in the depths of Ahtohallan before being restored, and some fans interpret this as a phoenix-like death and rebirth associated with her transformation into the Fifth Spirit. With this in mind,  Elsa may not necessarily be wholly mortal anymore. In a sense, she crossed the tenuous boundary between worlds.

To fix the past and appease the spirits of nature, Anna had to lead the stone giants to destroy the dam that King Runeard built to weaken the Northuldra people. At the end of the movie, Elsa accepted her role and this gift she was given, and Anna accepted the throne of Arendelle. 

Fun fact: The political issue of the dam was actually a reference to the Alta conflict, a resistance effort led by the Sami people. It opposed the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Alta River in  northern Norway between 1978 and 1981.

Thankfully, Ahtohallan finally explained the origin of Elsa’s powers, which answered exactly one question that we’ve had since the beginning of the franchise. It does not, however, tell us anything about where that magic ultimately came from or what created it.

That’s where some heavy theorizing comes in.

 

What We’ve Learned

Back in November 2020, Mari Mancusi published a novel called Frozen 2: Dangerous Secrets: The Story of Iduna and Agnarr. This novel has been confirmed by Disney to be “soft canon,” as Mancusi collaborated with Disney creative teams and the filmmakers of Frozen during the writing process to ensure the characters’ backstories aligned with the film’s official lore. Within this story, Iduna is revealed to be secretly living in Arendelle while the Enchanted Forest remains enclosed by mist. 

 

 

When Iduna and Agnarr set off to find Ahtohallan, their ship was destroyed on the Dark Sea by the Nokk, a water spirit. According to the novel by Mancusi, Iduna’s knowledge of Ahtohallan came from her Northuldra upbringing. As a child, she was taught about the four elemental spirits and their relationship with Ahtohallan, which her mother described as the “mother” of the other spirits. She also grew up with the lullaby she taught her daughters, so the knowledge was already part of her family’s oral tradition long before Elsa was born. Iduna believed Ahtohallan might be able to explain what Elsa was and why she possessed such unusual powers. If Iduna had all of this information from her family’s traditions, then the Northuldra people had clearly preserved knowledge about the magical world long before Elsa was even born. 

All of which makes our theory about the parchment on Iduna’s ship so much more interesting. 

 

Where Are We Going Now?

This is where we have to stop treating speculation as fact. 

Disney hasn’t given us any clues to who the new character is or what her appearance means for the sisters. Somehow, she knows who Anna and Elsa are, and for reasons unknown to us, she confronts them within moments of their meeting. The footage, of course, ends before we learn anything. 

We see several possibilities.

Some theories floating around are that she could be connected to Iduna’s family somehow, she could be a Northuldra woman with a previously unknown connection to the spirits, she could be the previous Fifth Spirit who failed in her role, or she could be the Frozen franchise’s official appearance of the Snow Queen. 

Our favorite theory is that we’re finally going to meet the original Snow Queen, because poor Elsa doesn’t seem villainous enough for that title. It would be cool to learn why the trolls taught the people of Arendelle that magic is dangerous; could it be because they’ve dealt with ice magic like Elsa’s before? 

There are some very large gaps in the mythology of this franchise, but it looks like Disney has plans to fill some of those gaps moving forward. We just hope Kristoff learns what happened to his parents sometime in the next two movies.