Elsa

**Elsa** is the deuteragonist of Disney's 2013 animated feature film, *Frozen*, and the protagonist of its 2019 sequel. Born with the power of ice and snow, Elsa is the firstborn daughter of King Agnarr and Queen Iduna, older sister of Queen Anna, and the former queen of Arendelle.

Throughout most of her young life, Elsa feared that her powers were monstrous. Therefore, she isolated herself from the world as a means of protecting her family and kingdom. Elsa's anxieties would eventually trigger a curse that plunged Arendelle into an eternal winter. Through Anna's love, however, Elsa is able to control her powers and live peacefully amongst her people with newfound self-confidence.

Elsa is loosely based on the titular character of "The Snow Queen", a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, and to a greater extent in terms of characterization, Kai from the same story. While the character from the original fairy tale was a neutral character, Elsa was rewritten as a tragic heroine whose personality and role was more closely modeled after her counterpart of Kai.

## Background

### Appearance

At 21 years of age in the original film[11] and 24 in the sequel,[12] Elsa has a tall and slender build, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, thin pink lips, a small nose, long platinum-blonde hair, and pale skin with a light dusting of freckles (a trait she shares with her sister Anna, though less prominent). During her coronation, she bore a striking resemblance to her mother, only with platinum-blonde hair, unlike her mother who is a brunette. Before her coronation, Elsa's casual outfits consisted of a dress with a long-sleeved vest over a blouse and bodice favoring a blue-black color scheme. Ever since the accident with Anna at the age of eight, Elsa has worn white gloves to contain her powers. As she grows older, she starts wearing darker clothes with purple colors thrown in.

For the coronation, Elsa wears a teal dress with a sweetheart bodice with bronze trim and dark teal, maroon and purple rosemaling on the skirt and bodice, a black long-sleeved turtleneck blouse with red and teal crystal-shaped prints on it, a long, magenta cape, a small, gold tiara, dark brown flats with gold outlines and teal tights (which disappear after her transformation) underneath, and her hair woven in a French braided crown twist bun held together with a blue ribbon. For her gloves, she wears longer, light turquoise gloves with teal prints on, that go with her outfit. Her eyelids have a dusting of purple eye shadow, and she wears magenta lipstick.

Following the song "Let It Go", Elsa begins to wear her hair in a loose French braid that's swept over her left shoulder, tied with a hairband with a crystal-like snowflake on it. It is woven with snowflake incrustations, and wisps of her bangs slicked back on top of her head with a smaller piece resting down on her forehead. Her hair appears to be thick, although this may be so because she has much more hair (roughly 400,000 strands) than the average human (100,000 strands). She wears a crystal-blue off-the-shoulder dress made out of ice with a right knee-high slit, a crystallized bodice, and translucent powder blue sleeves. She also wears ice-made kitten heels and a long transparent floor-sweeping cape of sheer ice decorated with large snowflakes attached to the back of her bodice. Elsa still wears the same makeup as at the coronation, however, due to the change in lighting, the magenta lipstick becomes a dark pink, and her lavender eye shadow becomes a shiny purplish-pink.

## Personality

As the queen regnant of the kingdom of Arendelle, Elsa appears calm, reserved, regal and - unlike her sister - graceful and poised. Beneath this cool and collected appearance, however, Elsa is quite turbulent; in truth, the Snow Queen was, for a majority of her young life, troubled by her abilities, a feeling which stems from a traumatic incident as a child. When she was younger, she had cared strongly for Anna and, despite being the more mature and cautious of the two sisters, Elsa was still quite playful and used her magic to have fun and goof off. However, after witnessing her magic cause her sister harm, Elsa lived in fear and trauma for a great amount of her life as she became too terrified to let her powers overdevelop. She consequently chose isolation from everyone she cared for, including Anna, out of the presumption that her isolation would protect them from her power. This would eventually result in years of loneliness, misery, bitterness, and grief. Regret would gradually take its toll on her as well when tragedies struck throughout her life from the accident with her sister to the death of her parents, leaving them both to mourn and grieve alone.

Elsa's damaging experience through the crucial stages from childhood to adulthood caused her personality to shift. She became reclusive, insecure, emotionally unstable, anxious, and depressed. For Elsa, her powers and nature grew more restrained as the years passed, slowly molding her into the cold-hearted queen others saw her to be. When given the chance to rest and relent, however, Elsa's true, warm, kind, fun-loving, and innocently mischievous personality came about - but only briefly, and with restriction, as seen on the night of her coronation.

Elsa also has an altruistic disposition that contributes to her compassion towards her people. Throughout the entirety of the film, the Snow Queen's actions are driven by the desire to protect her kingdom, and more intimately, Anna. Unfortunately, that comes with a price, as Elsa's upbringing would lead her to believe that, for the safety of her loved ones, and for the sake of remaining true to who she is as a gifted person, she is a living disaster that must be removed from society. Even with Anna's persistence to help end the curse, Elsa's method of solving the problem - enforced isolation - would remain prevalent. Her determination to solve her problems through singularity is Elsa's greatest flaw, driven by her anxiety and traumatic childhood experiences.

Though a benevolent and giving person, Elsa suffers from emotional instability due to years of keeping her emotions bottled up. When her strong emotions are triggered, Elsa often loses control over her emotions which can create dangerous situations for herself and others around her. An example of this is when Anna informed her that she had unknowingly plunged Arendelle into an "eternal winter", she began panicking as she realized she had brought harm upon her kingdom, which made her lose control of both her emotions and powers, resulting in ice bursting from her chest and striking Anna in the heart. But perhaps the prime example of this was when the Duke of Weselton's guards attempted to assassinate her and Elsa realizes she has no choice but to fight back, and, unable to control her fury, goes from self-defense to fighting back more aggressively, nearly pushing a man off the edge of her ice palace and pinning another to the wall with icicles, ready to kill him before Hans intervened and talked her down from committing cold-blooded murder to protect herself.

During "Let It Go", however, Elsa reveals a liberated side to her personality. Without stress, responsibilities, or the fear of hurting others, the queen is strong and unafraid, yet with an air of elegance still surrounding her. Based on this fact, she has confidence in her abilities and accepts them as a part of her, no longer worried or daunted by her restraints. In the segment, which was entirely about letting go of her fear of using her powers and embracing herself, Elsa decides to abandon what she was made to be so that she can be free to be herself. While expressing this, Elsa proves that she is notably creative and strong in geometry (her ice palace is made entirely out of geometric figures), and a daring young woman willing to reject her own fate as Arendelle's queen for the choice of her own personal freedom as well as to protect the people in Arendelle from her powers.

## Role in the Ed-Chronicles

### *Ed, Edd n Eddy's Frozen Adventure*

She appears as the anti-heroine in Ed, Edd n Eddy's Frozen Adventure.

## Trivia

* In Frozen Adventure, as one of the elements from Transformers 3, Elsa, along with Diana, corresponds to Carly Spencer, due to their blonde hairs and both are from rich families.