Freya the Ice Queen

Freya the Ice Queen was the secondary antagonist and later anti-hero of The Huntsman: Winter's War and is based on the legendary Snow Queen. She is Queen Ravenna's younger sister.
She is played by British-American actress Emily Blunt, who also played Princess Mary in Gulliver's Travels, Juliet in Gnomeo and Juliet and its sequel, Tempest Shadow in My Little Pony: the Movie and Mary Poppins in the 2018 sequel of Mary Poppins Returns.
==Official overview==
Ravenna's little sister, Freya, is a good queen of snow and ice who has built her own frozen kingdom over the decades... quietly watching Ravenna's rise to power. No one can touch her, and by amassing an army of Huntsmen, she has ensured that she may protect herself - and that neither she nor her soldiers will find love again.
==History==
=== Early life and tragedy strikes===
While details of her past are unknown, Freya is the younger sister of the scheming Ravenna with whom she shared a brother, Finn. It can be assumed that she was orphaned by the same King who attacked the village where her siblings lived (although she was absent in Ravenna's flashback). It is also possible she inherited her powers from her mother, although they remained dormant until she reached adulthood.
In the beginning, Freya had a warm and loving relationship with her older sister, Ravenna, and served as her constant faithful companion as she conquered kingdom after kingdom. However, her relationship with their brother, Finn, was never revealed. Despite her seeming lack of magical powers, Freya harbored no jealousy of Ravenna over the matter and shrugged off her sister's assurance that she would, one day, come into her own as a powerful sorceress like her.
At some point, Freya fell in love with and had an affair with the Duke of Blackwood, which resulted in her becoming pregnant. Unfortunately for her, the Duke had already been engaged to another, and Ravenna herself confirmed that the engagement could not be broken. Ravenna also expressed her belief that the Duke did not truly love Freya and that he would deny her and their child.
The two sisters got into a quiet, short-lived argument over the matter, with Freya concluding that Ravenna might end up being surprised by the outcome, for she couldn't know all certainties. As she watched Freya leave, Ravenna ominously refuted Freya's last comment, and turned to look at the Magic Mirror.
Freya eventually became the mother of a beautiful little girl, whom she adored with all of her heart. Her great joy was to cradle her daughter in her arms and nurse her, and she held on to the hope that, somehow, she, her daughter, and her lover (the father of her child) could become a true family.
A few weeks after her daughter was born, Freya received a secret letter from her lover, which seemed to confirm that her hopes were fulfilled: through the letter, the Duke expressed his willingness to defy his family's wishes, and to have a secret wedding with Freya in the palace gardens during the night, after which they would elope with their daughter to start a fresh new life. That night, Freya went to the gardens to meet with the Duke but saw neither hide nor hair of him. Instead, she saw her daughter's room ablaze through the windows, and rushed as fast as she could to the room, but was too late: her daughter was dead, and from what it seemed to her, it was the Duke who had killed their child.
Stricken with the grief of a broken heart as well as the agony of betrayal, Freya unleashed her long-dormant power of cryokinesis, which hit her lover and killed him. Her grief also turned her hair completely white, and she collapsed into the arms of her sister, who gasped as she sensed the strength of her cryokinetic powers.
Consumed by her loss, Freya left Ravenna's domains and went far to the North, where she established a new kingdom. She turned the formerly green farmlands of the North into a frozen wasteland, had a new fortress-like palace built for herself, and became known as the Ice Queen. As the Ice Queen, Freya became infamous for two things: the first was her potent cryokinetic powers, which she employed to keep her kingdom in a state of perpetual winter as well as to turn whoever opposed her into ice statues.
The second was her habit of forcefully taking children from their parents and having them brought to her palace to be trained in the arts of combat as well as the ways of being indifferent to love. Freya's reasoning for this was that she was doing these children the ultimate favor - by attuning their bodies to war and teaching them how to harden their hearts forever to love, they would never know the pain of a broken heart like she had. In exchange for this, she claimed to ask only one thing of them: their loyalty to her as her Army of Huntsmen.
Freya kept a secret watchful eye on them all employing a magical eye mask that enabled her to project her consciousness out of her body in the form of a white owl. She took particular notice of Eric and Sara, who grew to become her two most formidable and dedicated warriors. As she had hoped, her Huntsmen proved to be an unstoppable force in battle, and with their help, she conquered numerous kingdoms, and her empire grew ever larger. However, she later found out that Eric and Sara had broken her cardinal rule: they had fallen in love and planned to elope. Just as the two were about to run away, Freya showed up with the other Huntsmen and, after seeing how Eric and Sara defeat all her other warriors, she conjured a wall of ice to separate them before forcing Eric to watch as Sara is killed by her fellow Huntsmen. Sara, meanwhile, is forced to watch as Eric leaves the palace before she is taken to the dungeons. Unbeknownst to either of the two, Freya has conjured visions of Sara dying and Eric running away to permanently harden their hearts.
=== Desire for the Magic Mirror ===
Seven years later after Ravenna's death, Freya learned through one of her owl spies that not only was Eric still alive, but her sister was dead, and her Magic Mirror was to be sent to the "Sanctuary" - the area where its powerful Dark magic could be contained. Believing that the Mirror would enhance her powers to epic proportions and enable her to conquer more kingdoms, Freya sent her Huntsmen to kill Eric and retrieve the Mirror. Among these Huntsmen was none other than Sara, who had been personally "groomed" by Freya throughout the years of her captivity to commit numerous atrocities to enable Freya's kingdom to expand.
=== Resurrecting Ravenna and Developing Rivalry ===
Guided by a strangely familiar voice within the Mirror, Freya chanted a spell that, to her astonishment and wonder, resurrected Ravenna. Ravenna reveals that, before she took her last breath, she sent her spirit into the Mirror, and waited for someone to free her. However, it soon became evident that whatever intimacy the two sisters once shared now utterly belonged in the past, for they were now utterly different people: though Freya had no objections to Ravenna's plans of avenging herself upon Snow White, she disapproved of the way Ravenna ordered her Huntsmen about, for she felt that it was an affront to her authority as the Queen of her kingdom. While Ravenna assured Freya that while she would never doubt her rule, she made it clear of her belief in her methods being the better ones, and reminded Freya of her position as a younger sister who owes the older sister not only her loyalty, but also her magical powers.
=== Confronting Eric and Sara ===
Freya was left with surprising doubts after her dispute with Ravenna, to the extent where she was not as eloquent as she always was in her speech to the Huntsmen over their waging war on Snow White's kingdom, Tabor. After Eric's and Sara's attempt to kill her was foiled by Ravenna, and the couple was subdued, though she raised no objections to Ravenna's order that they be executed, Freya appeared hesitant. As observed by Eric, she was even unable to look at him or Sara in the eye, as if starting to realise the error of her ways. When the other Huntsmen - spurred by the urging of Eric and Sara - turned against her and tried to fight back, not only did she not participate in the fight (which was mainly between them and Ravenna), but also appeared to be so appalled by the fight itself that she conjured a wall of ice to separate her sister and her Huntsmen.
=== Confronting Ravenna and Learning the Tragic Truth ===
Ravenna angrily accused Freya for being as weak and pathetic as she had been before her powers were released. But Ravenna's ranting aroused Freya's suspicions. In turn, Freya wonders out loud as to what her sister had done to unleash her powers. Though Ravenna tried to evade the question, Freya was able to force her to tell the truth. As Freya had summoned her sister from the mirror, Ravenna was bound to her. Therefore Freya grabbed Ravenna, and her very touch sent Ravenna into a trance which she could not break, and Freya demanded the truth: the Magic Mirror had prophesied that Freya's daughter would grow up to be even more beautiful than Ravenna, and should the child be harmed, Freya would unleash a power unlike any the world had ever seen.
The first part of the prophecy grieved and frightened Ravenna, for a rival to her beauty would break the spell of eternal youth that her mother had cast on her. In tears, she begged the Mirror for mercy, but the Mirror simply replied that Ravenna must make her own choices, and it knew that she already had. Hence, Ravenna forged the secret letter to lure Freya away from her daughter's side, and slipped into the Duke's room, where she cast a mind-control spell on him, handed him a flaming torch and ordered him to kill her niece.
=== Battle Against Ravenna and Death ===
Grief-stricken and horrified at this revelation, Freya broke down in tears for the first time since her daughter died, and vilified Ravenna for having ruined his life, who retorted that her ability to make such decisions was what made her stronger than Freya, and launched an attack at her through the dark fay. Despite Freya's attempt to shield herself by conjuring a tower of ice spike, she still received a small wound through the shoulder from the dark fay.
At this point, Eric, Sara, and the other Huntsman had scaled the ice wall, which collapsed due to Freya having been weakened by her injury, and engaged Ravenna in battle. Freya then joined the fight and launched a wave of ice at her sister, freezing her in place. As Ravenna began to break free, she repelled Eric and Sara, before being embraced by Freya, which sent her into a trance again. As Freya attempted to freeze her completely, Ravenna chose her only option and impaled Freya through her abdomen with the dark fay.
Horrified that she was forced to give her sister the death blow, Ravenna apologised repeatedly to Freya, but later screamed about how she did not understand her: she - Ravenna - had also wanted love and a child of her own, but she knew that such things were not for her, given how she had a higher calling. However, it was obvious that Freya's attack had still weakened her, for Ravenna's mouth started to bleed with dark liquid. As Eric again engaged Ravenna in battle, Freya froze the mirror, weakening Ravenna further and allowing Eric to beat her and hurl his axe into the mirror. The mirror started to break, and as Ravenna screamed, it shattered, causing her entire being to turn into gold and shatter in turn.
Before breathing her last breath, Freya saw a vision of the optimistic and hopeful young woman she once was before becoming a cryokinetic sorceress, cradling her daughter and smiling at her, and finally turned to look at Eric and Sara huddling together. With a sad relieved smile at them, she marvels at how lucky they were, and closed her eyes forever. With Freya's possibly death, all of the acts done by her powers were broken as well: the ice statues turned back into normal human beings, the kingdom of perpetual winter again bloomed into spring, and all the children who were captured to be trained were freed.
==Powers and Abilities==
Freya was shown to be a powerful and dangerous sorceress, very much like her older sister, Ravenna.
*Cryokinesis: Freya's special gift was the ability to manipulate ice and snow, including freezing water, creating towers of ice spikes, and conjuring ice walls.
**Cryokinetic Illusions: Freya was able to make Eric believe that his wife, Sara, died by showing a vision of her dying through the ice-wall she had conjured to separate them. She did the same thing to Sara, letting her believe that Eric abandoned her by showing her a vision of him running away.
**Cryokinetic Projection: By putting on an ice eye-mask shaped like owl feathers, Freya was able to project her consciousness in the form of a white owl, which she uses to spy on people.
*Knowledge of the Magic Mirror: Freya was shown to have an extensive, thorough knowledge of the Magic Mirror. She once said the Mirror would enhance her powers to greater proportions, implying that she knew well how to utilise it to her best advantage. Later on, she showed that she was able to read the writings - which, when coupled with the legendary question of who the fairest one was, functioned as a resurrection spell - engraved around the Mirror. Through the Mirror, she was even able to exert a level of control over Ravenna, given how Ravenna was actually bound to answer her since she was the one who had summoned her from the Mirror. During the final battle against Ravenna, Freya was the one who froze the Mirror so it could be properly destroyed by Eric's axe, which shows her knowledge of it being her sister's one true weakness. All these facts could be viewed as testaments of sorts to her extensive knowledge of the Mirror.
*Resurrection (possibly): Freya was shown using the Magic Mirror to bring her older sister, Ravenna, back to life. However, it was never confirmed as to whether she truly possessed the power of resurrection itself, for it is unknown as to whether or not she could have successfully accomplished Ravenna's resurrection if Ravenna's spirit had not possessed the Mirror to begin with. It should also be noted that Freya herself was shocked by how Ravenna came back to life, as if she had not been expecting it at all, and that Ravenna (a far more experienced and knowledgeable sorceress) herself did not possess the power of resurrection.
*Immortality (possibly): Though it was also never confirmed, it is possible that Freya is immortal, with youth and beauty that are preserved through subconscious magic. This theory is plausible, given how Ravenna preserved her own youth and beauty through magical means despite having lived many lifetimes, and that Freya - who did not appear to possess any magical powers before her daughter died - had served as her sister's companion for those numerous lifetimes, and yet had never aged beyond her prime.
==Trivia==
*She is portrayed by Emily Blunt.
*In the first film, Finn revealed that Ravenna could not resurrect the dead, but their sister, Freya, apparently was capable of it through the Magic Mirror.
*Freya's power of cryokinesis was apparently triggered after her infant daughter was killed. It caused her hair to turn completely white, her heart to harden when it came to matters of love, and appeared to be wholly dependent on her emotional state.
*In Northern mythology, Freya (Freyja) is the Goddess of Love, Beauty, Gold, and Sorcery. This is an irony, as the Freya of the film is very different: though she is a beautiful and powerful sorceress, she loathed love, and only realised her error at the very end.
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